Jeremayakovka

Kafir Caveat Again

David Solway again on Tariq Ramadan, whose memoir could justly be titled Dreams From My Grandfather.

Kafir Caveat

David Solway on Tariq Ramadan.

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.

* * *

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....

Former Hamas Member Sees The Light

Mosab Hassan Yousef, former Hamas "militant," now evangelical Christian convert, speaks about Hamas's culpability for fueling violence between Palestinian Arabs and Israel:

The Hamas leadership, including my father, they're responsible; they're responsible for all the violence that happened from the organization. I know they describe it as reaction to Israeli aggression, but still, they are part of it and they had to make decisions in those operations against Israel (for) which there was the killing of many civilians.

Mosab is profiled in "Escape From Hamas," which airs TONIGHT, Saturday, January 3 on Fox at 10:00PM. It will be rebroadcast Sunday at 1:00AM, 4:00AM, 9:00PM, and Midnight, and Monday at 2:00AM (EST).

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
.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, Part II
.
* * *
 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....

# # #

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)

* * *

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.

.
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)

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

.
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.
.
.
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.
.
.
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.
.
.
* * *

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

"They Are Ruining My Life"

Palestinian-born Nonie Darwish came to Berkeley, California to tell the truth about the blight of Islamofascism (click link for video). The only visual media organizations which covered her appearance were Incorrect University and Al-Jazeera.

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.

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!

Hit Iran and Gaza Now

Two recent articles about the two most critical theaters in the Middle East:

* Stefania Lapenna's summary statement on reoccupying Gaza:

Mainstream media and world political leaders failed to consider the fighting among terrorist factions in Gaza as "civil war"-- though they are more than willing to use it in reference to Iraq. Notwithstanding, Western nations -- Europe (and Italy) on the forefront -- are urging an international 'peacekeeping' force. This proposal would put Israeli soldiers' lives at risk only to protect a death cult society who voted for its own disgrace.
.
* Norman Podhoretz's methodical case for bombing Iran:

[T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.

Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs.

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.
.

* * *
.

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....
.

"A Pedagogy of Hatred"
.

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.

* * *

["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.]

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)
.
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.
.
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.

.
* * *

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.

.
* * *

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'" (since effaced from the Internet, smart move for a corporate lawyer btw) and "A Fighting Cry From Under the Boot" who turned her 2000 UC Berkeley valedictorian speech into a most egregious breach of academic decorum by speaking off the cuff with (not about) her "comrades" (protesting students) who defied commencement speaker, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright over the issue of sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, turning herself into the face of mass campus protest.
.

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.

* * *

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.

.
* * *
.
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.

.
* * *

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

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.

.
* * *

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.

"Palestine Is For Lovers"!?

Bite me.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
..
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Lovers perhaps, but ... of what?
.

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.)

Ungovernable, Unconscionable, Unspeakable (Almost)

* Updated *

Israelis accidentally kill children whereas Palestinians deliberately kill children. This time -- Palestinians kill Palestinian children. Specifically, Hamastanis kill Fateh children. Ed Morrissey re-reports:

In a region supposedly inured to bloodshed, the unprecedented assassination of children caused widespread shock. There can be no doubt that the children were the target as the car that was attacked was only ever used to drive them to and from the Greek Orthodox School in Gaza City and was never used to drive their father. (emphases added) (see also Webloggin)

.
This is a reminder of why the Middle East is run by mafia rules x100, why what's "over there" is nearly ungovernable except through strong-arm tactics, why over there any representative democracy is as precious as a flower in the desert -- and why Israel, more than any other nation between the Azores and India, is the Middle East's model, its flower in the desert. Also, perhaps lost in the scuffle: if those children were being schooled where their faith resided, then it seems they were Christian.

But it's Arabs killing Arabs, some will say, What does that have to do with us? Still others will say, It's Muslims killing Christians. What does that have to do with us?

Yes, What...?

* * *

My first thought upon reading the news item was: Now that's what I call revenge: you don't hurt them, you hurt what's dearest to them.

However, my second thought was, Maybe I overestimate the religious fanatics' motivations? For can killing in-the-name-of-Allah truly be as sweet (and as savory and as bitter -- all of it) as that revenge which we in the West not only take up but sometimes relish and cherish? Do Muslim fanatics, at least in part, experience revenge as we Westerners do? I do not know, Gentle Reader, I do not know. Nor do I require you to know. But I wonder. I ask myself and I task myself....
.

The fanatic would, I bet, insist that killing in-the-name-of-Allah is sweeter, so incalculably sweeter. And he would not stop there: behind his short-sighted haughtiness, behind his bravado born of surrender, he would contemn in-the-name-of- Allah our incapacity to shoulder jihad and, if he is conversant in our Western ways, he would contemn our flagging incapacity to shoulder our own inherited and -- don't deceive yourself -- by no means outmoded virtues.
.

These include, naturally, the capacity for revenge: revenge in its simultaneously volcanic and consuming outbursts, including as we well (or should) know the capacity to kill children. And not necessarily random children. Just ask him or her. Woe to those who ignore the subterranean motivations! Woe to those who ignore them in others! Woe to those who ignore them in themselves!

.
What, about the subterranean motivations, do our Islamist adversaries understand? What might they -- and certainly their masterminds -- understand that we might not?

.
Vae victis!
Vae morituris!
Vae victuris!

And one day, children, when you are older (and when your mother's not around) JMK will tell you how he came to know revenge....

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 1) - "Jews Item"

Jews Item

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear bomb belts.
.
.
.
.
If you were raised in or around a left-leaning intellectual ilieu, as I was back in Manhattan, then you were raised around The Nation magazine. For years my mother subscribed to what is plainly the American Left's flagship publication. It has been published continuously since 1865, outstripping in longevity Mother Jones (1976), Dissent (1954), and even the truly erudite The New Republic (1917). As David judges summarily, The Nation is "a left-wing propaganda mill whose efforts to promote socialism in America and abroad have everywhere failed." To my mother, however, a woman not actively engaged in politics but who in her psychic and temperamental way felt in excess, The Nation was a primary source for synthesizing current events and sympathizing with much of its sorrow and some of its socializing hope. During the years of my first formation it was, then, one of my primary sources as well.

I remember that floppy, gray rag arriving in the mail each week. This was before it caught up with 20th Century publishing standards, when (at the dawn of the 21st) it finally decided to go with a four-color cover. How I wormed my way through its articles, same as I did with the Village Voice, absorbing in chunks the latest received wisdom about, say, Ortega's Nicaragua or Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. Such soft piety left its mark: in the 1988 New York Democratic primary I cast my first ever presidential vote for Jesse Jackson. Later than year I went on to defy Democratic (and probably The Nation's) logic by writing in Jackson's name on the November ballot. Alreadyy I was showing signs - as former Nation-columnist Chris Hitchens would say - a young contrarian: a young contrarian among (and already contrary to) other contrarians. I'm still the contrarian I once was, if not more so.

Which brings us back to The Nation.

* * *

If you know anything about The Nation, then you know the weekly, wee too witty rhymes penned by- quirky in-house bard, its left-wing limericist, its "deadline poet" Calvin Trillin.

.
Typical Trillin:

Cheney's "Last Throes"

When rockets fly and battle smoke is thick,
It's good to hear from "Four Deferments Dick."
He's always sure. He knows what warfare is--
Enough to know it's not for him or his.
Insurgents somehow, though they're in the throes,
Kill more GIs-- but no one Cheney knows.
.

Here are two recent impressions of the man (like Philip Roth minus the moxie, no?):

Calvin Trillin is not a physically imposing man. He is short, maybe 5’6” or 5’7”, with a slight build. But when he begins to speak, Trillin’s low monotone voice is transfixing. He rambles and reminisces and digresses freely, his speech broken by the words “uh” and “sort of.”
.

You know, I read this and think Lenny Bruce would wipe his ass with Calvin Trillin. Even as The Nation, and every foul-mouthed comic, milk Bruce's misfit martyrdom to demonstrate how much they extol (i.e., the Left extols) "free speech" ("freedom," which the Left often conflates with "license") there's just no way Bruce would let himself be caught -- dead or alive -- with Calvin Trillin. No way. Not if I have my way, that is.

I think it's time to get in touch with and purge my "inner Trillin."So  I pledge, Gentle Reader, for your consumption and amusement to start coming up with nifty "neoconservative" limericks. Hey, if you can't join 'em, beat 'em. And what better way than at their own game? Do I have the right stuff to be the War on Terror's "deadline poet"? With Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom single-handedly redefining the post-9/11 haiku, maybe I can turn a trick with the limerick.

* * *

The two-line ditty that started off this post is an homage to "News Item" by Dottie Parker (to whom JMK recently paid affectionate tribute). Like Trillin, Parker was an Smart Assimilated Jew who did well in New York magazine publishing. Like some SAJ's, though, she may have been too smart for her own good. For Judaism, perhaps, and in some ways even that of the reading public.

.
More to come. Many thanks to all of JMK's amazing, amusing friends, friendly, main muses, and the Blogfather, who, in their own priceless ways, have  made "Chillin', Not Trillin" -- and the entire Jeremayakovka project -- possible.

Goodbye, Neocon Jeane

Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

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.

.
Pamela says she died of a broken heart.

Jeane Kirkpatrick on the tyrannous mainstream media.

.
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.

.
Related: "See Jeane Buy A Thesaurus"

Brokeback Dirtpile - The Life and Death of Rachel Corrie

She came, she saw, she was conquered -- by her own delusions of progressivism.

Cynthia Ozick reviews the book version of a stage script constructed from Corrie's own words (H/T Robert). An excerpt:

There is an old-fashioned word for this mentality, the kind of earnest temporary do-goodism that is likely to do harm: the word is slumming. For a sheltered young woman from Olympia, Washington, the intifada, as furiously enacted by Palestinians in Gaza, and the deterring Israeli response, are a shocking and often frightening experience. In Olympia there are no guns and gunmen occupying households, and no rocket launchers concealed in the forsythia bushes. "This is another place," she describes it, "where progressive white people escaped a few decades ago -- a place where hippie kids come after touring with jam bands." The salient term is "progressive." Long out of use because of its Stalinist taint, it has reverted to the common idiom, frequently in its newest anti-Zionist clothing.

As it turned out, Rachel Corrie did not travel elsewhere. A tragic casualty of the war she chose to join, she was cut down -- horribly -- by an Israeli army bulldozer. Contrary to the reports of journalists, the house she was attempting to shield was not a target. The bulldozer was clearing brush to thwart cover for launchers, explosives, and ambush. A photo taken minutes before the event tells what happened: the big growling machine is perched on a great mound of earth; well below it, shut off from the driver's vision and hearing, stands a tiny figure with a bullhorn. A piteous, pointless, heartbreaking death.

JMK sometimes extends a hand to "the other side" of the spectrum, but does not do so in the case of this poster child for Palestinian "solidarity." Rachel Corrie, your name is mud.

See also: when Judith engaged the Corrie parents.

Costume Jihad and Costume Counter-Jihad

* Updated *

The Halloween party may be over during which University of Pennsylvania student Saad Saadi wore a suicide bomber outfit to the home of University President Amy Gutmann, but the controversy surrounding this "costume jihad" incident is not. Following tepid apologies offered by the student and the president, Winfield Myers and Michelle Malkin remain hot on their trail. So does JMK. Other cutting commentary includes that of Hugh Hewitt and Victor Hanson, plus my own counter-jihad Halloween costume, a Homeless Suicide Bomber, all linked in a previous post. Update (11/5): The Jerusalem Post on the controversy.

.
Ms. Gutmann's concise statement (as of 7:58PM PST):

Each year, the president hosts a Halloween party for Penn students. More than 700 students attend. They all crowd around to have their picture taken with me in costume. This year, one student who had a toy gun in hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber. He posted the photo on a website and it was picked up on several other websites.

The costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it. As soon as I realized what his costume was, I refused to take any more pictures with him, as he requested. The student had the right to wear the costume just as I, and others, have a right to criticize his wearing of it.

.
My thoughts:

In her "statement" (which in no way pretends to be an apology), Ms. Gutmann appears only to have changed costume rather than show up dressed for work as an Ivy League president. Her new costume is that of a traffic cop waving the public past an accident, declaring, "Move along, folks, nothing to see here."  Her summary statement refuses to directly address the many concerns bloggers and other critics have raised regarding Mr. Saadi's "costume jihad": in sum, What are the moral limits to Halloween attire during wartime?  This would require Ms. Gutmann a) to take a stance on what is morally acceptable in terms of society (not merely in terms of her personal sense of the suicide bomber costume) and b) to recognize that the United States and/or its strategic Middle Eastern ally, Israel, are at war with Hamas, Fateh, and Hezbollah (whose martyrs and/or soldiers Mr. Saadi's costume most closely resembled). That she shies away from asserting either of these is not becoming of her office. A concerned public has a right and an obligation to press her for clarification.

While I sympathize that Ms. Gutmann may have been caught on camera in an unguarded moment, here are two anecdotes that inform how I judge her statement. The first comes from being a tourist in France shortly after a terrorist bombing there. Riding the Metro alongside policemen who toted automatic rifles instilled in me pretty quickly the respect that that kind of weapon demands. And that's without having handled one myself. I suspect that only someone without any firsthand experience of weapons would dimunitively characterize a plastic replica of an AK-47 as a "toy gun." The other anecdote is the shock I received a few years ago during another American holiday, a Thanksgiving dinner I shared with a Palestinian-American family. After the meal, we were relaxing around the apartment when a two-year old came toddling into the living room with a keffiyeh-style headband wrapped around his forehead. (This is nearly identical to the costume prop Mr. Saadi wore; someone had just dressed the little boy up in it, obviously.)  Perhaps there's a debate to be had about how one man's mark of a terrorist-in-training is another man's symbol of national pride. As with the submachine guns on the French subway, however, when you get even a glimpse of the real implements of the real War on Terror you start to consider both the implements and their symbols with unprecedented gravity. I suspect that Ms. Gutmann (as well as Mr. Saadi) have been largely sheltered from the implements of this war, and hence are significantly challenged when it comes to responding to concerns about the "costume jihad" with the gravity those concerns deserve.

.
(Note: Mr. Saadi's apology, posted late last night on one of his own web sites, has been removed as of this evening. The full text of it appears at Ms. Malkin's original post this matter.)

Related: Judith asks, "Who Gets the Last Laugh?" Indeed. Plus, a comment I left at Never Yet Melted.

Spare Change To Help Me Get To The U.N.?

*** Updated ***
[See also: "Costume Jihad and Costume Counter-Jihad"]

One fatwa-worthy Halloween costume:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.

.

.

.
.

.
.
.
.
(The smaller script reads, "(Allah bless)" and "STATELESS BUT NOT HELPLESS! ")

.
*** Updates (11/2, 11/3)  ***

Praise:
* Asher calls it "The Best Halloween Costume of the Year"!
* Cinnamon gushes, "Homeless/terrorist chic has never looked so good!"

Vindication, or why it's never "too soon" to dress up as a Homeless Suicide Bomber:
* A University of Pennsylvania undergraduate struts suicide bomber chic alongside the university's president.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

.

.

.

.

.
.

The difference? What he struts and the university president abets, I subvert.
Hugh Hewitt says he should have been ejected from the party.
The bigger picture, from Victor Hanson:

[T]his is what we, in America, collectively, have to guard against, that we don't allow these people, these affluent elites, who are cynical, skeptical, nihilistic [to] adjudicate what America is about.

.
From earlier this year, how a Homeless Suicide Bomber trained for his mission:

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

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

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)

The International Solidarity Movement - No Peace, No Love, No Understanding

Lee Kaplan's latest in-depth coverage of the West's leading antisemitic shock troops, the International Solidarity Movement, takes you inside the "geek chic" world of 20-somethings posing as Third World radicals.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Despite its slant, I recommend this informative article for an in-depth look at Lee Kaplan.

Update (9/14): Michelle Malkin has these poseurs in her sights, too. Heh.

Europeans for Terror Gather in Italy

"To Revolt is Necessary" screams the slogan atop the Anti-Imperialist Camp's web site.  This site is an informational, tactical, financial, and logistical crossroads for European terrorist enablers and their international allies.  Even more than most extreme Left sites, AIC is laden with articles, pictures, and links to other organizations.  It is professionally designed and quite interactive.

Currently near the top of the right sidebar is a thumbnail link to the six-day conference, "Resistance (and Intelligence)." Kicking off today, it looks to be not just a Who's Who of every major terrorist, anti-Western, Islamic and anti-semitic war but also a How and a Why to support them.

Just look at certain offerings:

"Palestine: The Liberation Movement Since Hamas's Victory"
"Chavez's Proposal"
"Lebanon: Theory and Practice of Hezbollah"
"The Holocaust Industry: How it Justifies the Zionist Genocide in Palestine"
"Afghanistan: Roots, Dynamics, and Perspectives of the Guerilla War"

If any international visitors have opinions and impressions to contribute, I would appreciate them.

(H/T: Stefania)

Lesbollah

For several years, the misfit outfits "Queers for Palestine" and "Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism" (QUIT) have militated for the destruction of Israel under the banner of agitating for Palestinian rights. They have done so since the 2000 resumption of the Arab war-by-Palestinian-proxy against the Jews (also known as "the al-Aqsa Intifada"), and maybe since before that. If you live in the real world you probably have never heard of "Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT," but the sad fact is that they are a freak-show fixture of the lib/rad "scene" in and around the San Francisco intergalactic zip code and beyond.

"Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT" consistently:

* oppose Israeli anti-terrorist operations in the Palestinian territories;
* endorse divestment from the region's most thriving economy (and most thriving democracy); and, most notoriously . . .
* endorse (click for image) the Arab demographic atom bomb aimed at the heart of Israeli civil society, the so-called "right of return"

Someone should spell out for these people that the very territories they purport to support are among the most dangerous places on Earth for any gay or lesbian person. But it's difficult to believe they're anything but a pathologically self-hating, morally fractured sect when their latest fundraiser is held at a bar called "DeBasement" and when their current organizing effort is to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference for gays and lesbians because it's being held in . . . Jerusalem!

With the outbreak this month of the Israel-Hezbollah War (or, War of Tammuz; or, as JMK called it from the start, "a defensive counter-attack in the longer war against jihad"), a brand new jihadist rallying cry is being raised in the battle to shape public opinion over it. This cry has begun circulating on the Left faster than a fast-tracked fatwa: "We are all Hizbullah."

Well, JMK has learned through its intelligence channels that the "We are all Hizbullah" meme is spreading like wildfire through the "hearts and minds" of some of the western Left. Its success stems from exploiting an already-existing split among the the "queer" pro-Palestine crowd.  The exact repercussions remain to be seen, but we can state with some certainty that a militant feminist faction has burst forth from "Queers for Palestine" and "QUIT" and is seizing this historical moment to assert itself with unprecedented and shocking force.

The faction is "Lesbians in Solidarity with Hezbollah," more commonly known by its quasi-acronym, Lesbollah.

Unfortunately, little is known about the exact numbers and locations of Lesbollah's sleeper cells, except that they are believed to have formed in large cities in the United States, Western Europe and Israel (including on large college campuses), but nowhere near southern Lebanon.  Lesbollah may, or may not, be affiliated with "Terrorist Dykes," which formed autonomously in Greenwich Village, New York in 2003, but which appears to have links to a militant feminist socialist group in Michigan, a known hotspot of Hezbollah organizing in the United States. Most of JMK's intelligence on Lesbollah, however, comes from the interception of propaganda communiques (stapled prominently on many college campuses' announcement kiosks), which lead with one of the following phrases:

Lesbollah: Wymyn killin' wymyn 4 Allah
Lesbollah: Puttin' the "she" back in "shiite"
Lesbollah: "I am jihad. Hear me roar."
Lesbollah: Sporting the longest shoulder-fired rockets and the shortest fingernails in "the resistance"

If you, Gentle Reader, come across any further Lesbollah communiques -- including print, video, or other media formats -- JMK urges you to email them to us or list them in the Comments section without delay so that other concerned readers may learn more about this stealthy, determined, and implacable enemy of Western civilization.

.
Breaking Update (7/25): Thanks to inside sources -- including at least one member of Congress and a writer for the recently-cancelled TV series West Fling -- JMK has reason to believe that one or both of the women featured in the following photograph may have sensitive information about Lesbollah activities:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

What I want answered, JMK, is what the American people -- and what I think all decent Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese people -- want answered.  And that is: What, if any, knowledge is Mrs. Clinton or Mrs. Arafat privy to that will lead to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of Lesbollah operatives, whether in the United States or in the Middle East? In other words, what are either of these women hiding that is endangering American, Israeli, Palestinian, or Lebanese lives?

-- Sen. Hattrick Layshe, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (speaking off the record)

.
Further Update (7/27): More (and related) stuff you can't make up: Hillary Clinton is busted! That is, a bust of her is to be enshrined in the Museum of Sex(?). Talk about Expose the Left .  And how better to do so than with an edition of Vent at Hot Air.

Super Duper Further Update (3/30/2007): Arab Lesbians gather publicly in Israel.

Quote of the Day

The last stand of Western imperialism is the patronizing attitude displayed by Western radicals and liberals toward Third World Muslims and Arabs.

-- David Horowitz, from his tonic of a war commentary, "Lebanon Is Not Innocent"

Who Are the Terrorist Sympathizers in Your Neighborhood?

Study the map, watch the clips, listen to the comments, and the skanky chants.  It only takes 3-minutes to watch, "The Jihadis In Your Neighborhood."

And some of them do live in my area.

Deadly Skirmish in West Bank

JMK's eyes and ears in the West Bank Judea and Samaria, West Bank Mama, reports that the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade wants in on the kill-Israeli-action:

9:11 am Israel time: IDF radio is now reporting that one soldier killed, another two wounded seriously in Schem (Nablus). The soldiers were going after terrorists and a bomb was thrown at them in the casbah. Shimrit Meir reports that Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade took responsibility for this attack and they say that it was under orders to heat up the situation in Israel in order to make it difficult for the IDF to fight in Lebanon.

.
Now, wouldn't they love to create a third front during Israel's defensive counterattack.  This way Fateh would have a shot at reclaiming "strongman" status on the the Palestinian "street."  If Fateh could parlay such street cred into at least being perceived as -- let alone actually being -- able to broker a cease fire between Palestinians and Israel, then it might even muscle its way back into position as the internationally recognized (and funded) Palestinian leadership.

How does Fateh kick-start this pipe dream? By brazenly going after Jews. For killing Jews is one thing Arabs enjoy more than killing each other. Let's make sure their efforts remain isolated and futile.

(From Carl in Jerusalem, citing the Jerusalem Post and Ynet: five, not two IDF soldiers, were wounded; Palestinians swarm around the fallen soldier with "celebratory chants" and refuse to render body parts for burial. Also: "Jerusalem Terror Attack Foiled")

(David Yeagley's reading the same between different lines.  After commenting on Iran's regional aspirations and its latest implacable, antisemitic rhetoric, he continues, "[The Arabs] can momentarily unite only in hatred of Israel.")

Victor Davis Hanson, Friend of Israel

As demonstrated in today's op-ed, "The Israeli Enigma," in which he punctures the double-standards by which peoples of other nations routinely judge the State of Israel whenever she defends herself against terrorism:

To this day, no one knows the horrific body count from the Islamic insurrection in Algeria. Darfur finally earns occasional airtime, but only after tens of thousands have perished.

But Israel's 2002 "siege" of the West Bank town Jenin, where less than 80 died on both sides, was evoked as "genocide" by those in the Middle East who often deny the real one that took 6 million Jewish lives. When Israel retaliates by air to terrorism, it is dubbed a "blitz" by the press - as if it were akin to the Nazis carpet-bombing London.
.

It's no doubt because he comes from a farming family with distinguished wartime veterans that, more than most intellectuals, Hanson appreciates Israel's virtues and accomplishments, both recent and of old.  And he does so with neither a grandstanding philosemitism nor with grudging (and jealous) acknowledgement.

I've personally taken a measure of him, having shook his hand, looked into his eyes, and exchanged a few thoughts. With a lean frame and an even keener mind, he's someone you definitely want to have on your side in a fight -- could be a barfight or the global war on Islamofascism.

Victor Davis Hanson: friend of Israel.

He Was Without Honor In His Countries

Q: Who said the following, and when?

Never, ever deal with terrorists. Hunt them down and, more important, mercilessly punish those states and groups that fund, arm, support, or simply allow their territories to be used by the terrorists with impunity. It is abundantly clear that if Syria wished to, terrorists would be deprived of huge areas of haven in Lebanon. But why should Syria want to? Or Iran? They're happily enjoying Western agony without suffering one bit. And that is the key: Make them suffer.

Hint: It wasn't George W. Bush or anyone in his administration.

Few will dare say he was a prophet.  Most will agree he was without honor in his countries (both of them).

Still wondering ... ?

A: Rabbi Meir Kahane

"USA Must Have Guts To Terrorize Terrorists"
USA Today (February 12, 1987)

What to Aim for in Gaza

With all the steel rolling and flying through Gaza in Israel's effort to recover the remaining living hostages from Palestinian punks, and my own sense of baffled cynicism about what outcome to hope for, I appreciate the analysis from former George (Herbert Walker) Bush Administration official Jed Babbin.  He writes:

Shalit's kidnapping can be turned into a strategic defeat for the Palestinians. It should be used to destabilize the relationship between the Palestinians and the nations that use them as cannon fodder in a perpetual war against Israel.

Read the rest to find out why.

Update: NRO solicits several expert opinions, all so erudite, from: Michael Freund, Dore Gold, Emmanuele Ottolenghi, Daniel Pipes, Danielle Pletka, Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, Saul Singer. Don't forget Caroline Glick on "Israel's Rude Awakening."

How's He Doin'?

Former New York City mayor Ed Koch is doin' a whole lot better than the Mainstream Media when it comes to Israel, that's for sure.  I quote at length his op-ed today which upbraids the New York Times on its appeasement of Hamas:

The U.S., European Union, the U.N. and Russia, known as the Quartet, have demanded of the Palestinian Authority under the terms of the agreement known as "The Roadmap" two separate states in the area west of the Jordan River that was part of historic Palestine. The agreement, which has been accepted by Israel, calls for the Palestinian Authority to dismantle and disarm the infrastructure of terrorism within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. That never occurred under Yassir Arafat or his successor as President of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Abbas. To the contrary, the terrorists under the banner of Hamas were elected in an election declared fairly conducted by former president Jimmy Carter and the U.N. Having been elected in a democratic election held in Gaza and the West Bank, no one has the right, states The Times, to "punish the Palestinian people by endorsing any unilateral proposal (a reference to President Bush's support of a land exchange of about eight percent of the West Bank containing Jewish settlements) - doing that would punish them for exercising their democratic right to vote."

What idiocy on the part of  The Times.  Of course, the Palestinian people should be punished for their election decision.

That same view - not to criticize or take action - was in vogue in 1932 and thereafter following Hitler's democratic victory in Germany when he became the lawful Chancellor of the German government and began his war against the Jews and later the nations of Europe. Had the German nation been criticized and punished for electing Hitler in 1932, the world may have been spared the slaughter by the Nazis of 50 million people including six million Jews. All of this historical background was ignored by The Times and it was ignored by the BBC anchor in his commentary when he simply stated, "Israel has not recognized the new Hamas government and Hamas does not recognize the existence of Israel."

In the 1930s and '40s, the critical failure of The Times, reported on and acknowledged by The Times after World War II, was its omission to adequately report on the murderous war against the Jews undertaken by Hitler and his Nazi government.

Appeasement of Hamas, appeasement of Hitler.  Same schmutz, different century.

Jihad Stream Media

An indispensable web site, Justify This!, makes available several truth-telling, streaming clips of fanatic, racist, violent, terrorist, jihadist Muslims -- in Arab and Western countries alike -- and is asking for your valued input on how to make the site better. 

For starters, consider the "London Cartoon Protest" (click for the clip): 11 minutes not of free speech but of incitement to terrorism against what most of the West has taken for granted ever since VE Day and VJ Day 1945.  Namely, its security against totalitarian enemies.  "London Cartoon Protest" shows what it's like when the barbarians are inside the gates.  That is, it shows our current reality.

For any Gentle Readers with propensities for waxing sentimental over old spirituals, consider this clip to be one raw introduction to the Islamic version of "We Shall Overcome."  But pay special attention, in their chants, to who exactly is the "we" and what exactly they rabidly intend to "overcome":
.

.
Allahu akbar!
Jihad in the name of Allah!
May Osama bin Laden bomb you!
Denmark, you will pay!
Burn, burn, Denmark!  Bomb, bomb France!  Bomb, bomb Spain!
Bin Laden's coming back! Denmark, watch your back!
Kill, kill Denmark!
Mujahideen are on their way!
UK, you will pay! 7/7 on its way! Jihad is on its way!
We want Danish blood!
.
.
Think about it, what these men are doing should be legally actionable: not with the threat of prison sentences (which would merely provide all-expenses-paid training camp), but rather with draconian, Guantanamesque national security incarceration.  That, and/or complete revocation of their legal immigration status (if they are immigrants) or of their citizenship status (if they are citizens).
.
In closing, I leave you with two thoughts.  First, take a minute and give the blogger at Justify This! your feedback.  (Also, pay a visit to the intelligent and informative European blog Roncesvalles, through whom I heard of JT!) And two, keep in mind something I first saw inscribed on a plaque mounted on a wall in my chiropractor's office:

Five Dangerous Words: Maybe It Will Go Away