VDH Rocks On Israel

"We are witnessing strange things about Israel. Columnists this year wrote about it being a “mistake.” And for the first time emboldened Islamic leaders talk seriously not about restoring lost land on the West Bank and the Golan Heights, but of “wiping” it off the map entirely.

The Lebanon war saw not just slanted coverage, but outright falsification and lying from the major Western new servers—many of them served by local stringers who provide on the ground propaganda and faked photos. And now the Holocaust has been reinvented, as the old idea of a safe haven for the survivors of the Third Reich has been transmogrified into “a one bomb state.” Mein Kampf is translated as “Jihadi” on the West Bank and sells briskly. We are seeing a venomous anti-Semitic hatred in the Arab-supported state papers that the world has not witnessed since the 1930s and 1940s.

Back home, the Left/Right split on Israel has also been turned upside down. If you wish to read sick hatred about the Jewish state go to the leftist blogs or the campuses, not the Montana badlands. Somehow the Palestinians have reinvented themselves as liberal victims of Western, white male imperialists. Thus, in the manner of Blacks, Chicanos, Gays, and Women they are deserving of the usually accorded sympathy for their oppressed status—never mind the Islamists’ gender apartheid, religious intolerance, homophobia, and fundamentalism that should be so repugnant to the liberal mind.

Now more than ever Israel is nearly all alone—and so serves as a barometer in the West of true liberal courage of conscious. It has no oil, no international terrorists, no large population, no real material advantages and no threats to be made in the most crass sense.

Instead, it is a humane liberal society, an atoll of reason in a surrounding sea of autocracy. So it is the perfect litmus test for the Westerner: on the one hand is principled support for an embattled democracy; on the other, is easy appeasement that wins applause from millions, eases concerns about oil and terrorism, and offers cheap relief of elite guilt by trashing the very Western culture that rewards us all. Tragically, most leftist elites these days fail the test. Somehow, especially in Britain, they put themselves on the side of illiberal groups like Hamas or the Palestinian Authority whose history is antithetical to very notion of tolerance.

Now we have yet again the ubiquitous Jimmy Carter. Not content with a failed Presidency, he is determined to turn his legacy into even a greater failure, lecturing us in his new book about an apartheid Israel.

Unlike blacks in his own Georgia of the 1950s, Israeli Arabs vote and enjoy civil liberties, perhaps a million of them, with another 100,000 plus as illegal aliens. In fact, they enjoy rights not found in other Arab countries, inasmuch as Jews treat Arabs inside their own country not just better than Arabs treat Jews (they ethnically cleansed 500,000 from the major Arab capitals in the 1960s), but in the sense of civil liberties better than Arabs treat Arabs.

Carterism is a new postmodern pathology in which smug piety, dressed up in evangelical new-age Christianity, pronounces from afar moral censure on the more righteous party—on the theory that acting well but not perfect is worse than acting badly. Carter reminds me of the timid parent who spanks hard the good son for the rare misdemeanor because he takes it with silence while giving a pass to the wayward son for the daily felony because he would throw a public fit if corrected."

Clueless? Or Cluelesscide?

"In all this Whodunnit the reader is led around circles. Bodies fall out of closets. Cars blow up. Missiles rain down from the sky. And the trail leads everywhere but where it directly goes. Perhaps readers in the far future will understand how two countries, Syria and Iran could conduct a war against its neighbors without the Mainstream Media noticing. But we have a clue. The most interesting point -- in case you missed it -- about the Lancet study alleging that 650,000 people have died in Iraq, is that it is all America's fault. Well, maybe it is."

"November 19, 2006 -- MUSLIMS are often accused of not speaking out sufficiently against terrorism. Nonie Darwish knows one reason why: Their fellow Muslims won't let them. "

"The Republicans can watch this spectacle from the sidelines. They should also realize that they had plenty of opportunity to do exactly what Pelosi and Reid have planned, but left that particular play in the locker room. The GOP may have a long time for regrets on that decision."

"Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide. [ Spengler channels Steyn... RTWT. -ed. ] "

Today's Gliberal Innumeracy Update

"As things stand, the conflict with Islamic radicalism involves the lowest average daily military fatality rate of any long run national security era. It may worsen, it may improve. If Congress had been asked on September 12, 2001, to endorse a national defense posture against Islamic radicalism that traded up to 2 military fatalities per day over the subsequent five years in return for no additional homeland attacks, the deposing of terror friendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ending of Libya's nuclear program, what would they have done? Would Congress accept that bargain today?"

"Where is the Line in the Sand? If anything, the Horn of Africa is strategically more expendable than Iraq. One of the really pernicious things about the lack of substantive bipartisan debate on the War on Terror is that there is no clear consensus on what will be defended and to what extent. The question of what signal a "responsible redeployment" sends is not entirely an idle one. For the ICU it may have been like ringing the dinner bell. Did they misunderstand? Or did they understand all too well?"

And The Blood Drenched Thugs Know It...

"But the Iranians can hardly contain their glee. They know what last elections meant; and so do Iraq and Syria. There may be no need to wait for the Baker report. It is being overtaken by events."

"What we have to do to influence Iran is explain that if Iran does not begin to cooperate with the international community, we will substantially isolate Iran and destroy its means of supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear weapons. This can be done incrementally, to give the Iranians an opportunity to reconsider their policy. Our Navy, not hyper-extended in Iraq, can blockade their ports. Our Air Force, also not hyper-extended in Iraq, can begin reducing their terrorist-support infrastructure. Things like oil fields, refineries and roads leading toward Syria and suspected nuclear sites. This can continue ... pretty much as long as the Iranians want it too.

If in fact we find an actual nuclear weapon, or one explodes anywhere in the world, the Iranians -- and the North Koreans as well -- need to know that we will assume it was theirs, and act accordingly. This may encourage them to turn their intelligence agencies and terrorist networks to better use."

"The world is going through a major paradigm shift and while it is fully adrift on the tides of the 21st century, nearly all the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are stuck firmly in the past. We are entering a dark wood without a compass, and not even the realization of the need for one. Back to Murtha and Alcee Hastings."

"It's amazing what trouble some countries will go through for absolutely nothing. We can all rest easy now that Seymour Hersh has set the record straight, can't we. Or can we?"

"The real answer is that America cannot afford chaos in Iraq because it would represent a victory for Iran and a humiliation for the US. Any conference aimed at effectively handing a victory to the Iranians would be as pointless as putting out a fire in your hair with a hammer in order to feel better. Some gain, at least, must be in view.

Therefore any regional conference must contain elements which can dissuade Damascus and Teheran from their campaign of subversion that do not include mere appeals to their "fear of unrest" in Iraq. If the "fear of unrest" in Iraq holds as much terror to Damascus as "fear of unrest" in Lebanon it will be slim reed indeed upon which to base the conference."

"So apparently this race to be the dumbest leaders in Congress will be longer than I thought. Just when I was ready to declare the Republicans as the winner, we enter turn 2 and see the Dems about to retake the lead.

How will it all end? [ Ummm. Not well? Looks like time to start campaigning for a referendum to get NOTA on my state ballot to me. -ed. ] "

""This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist."

"This deepens suspicions about the United Nations that will lead many to conclude that the organization is incapable of playing a helpful role in the region," Bolton continued.

"In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States," he said.

"The Human Rights Council has quickly fallen into the same trap and de-legitimized itself by focusing attention exclusively on Israel. Meanwhile, it has failed to address real human rights abuses in Burma, Darfur, the DPRK, and other countries," Bolton charged.

"The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies," he continued. [ Well. Speaking truth to insanity. If that doesn't put the nail in the coffin of his UN nomination with the Victicrats I don't know what will. -ed. ] "

"The Sauds hit the roof when their Swiss bankers told them of the investigation, according to the Times of London source. They sent an emissary to 10 Downing Street, making it clear that the entire British-Saudi relationship hinged on getting their gold Rolls Royces supplied by British contractors, and that the entire war on terror depended on whether royals could still sun themselves on exclusive beaches. [ Why how shocking! I never would have guessed anything like this in a million years! Not. -ed. ]

This should be a warning to the West as to the fragility of Saudi support on the efforts to stop radical Islamism ... such as it is. They appear to only support the war as long as their endless supply of luxury items, supplied by fraud and corruption, continues without interruption. Counting on their efforts in the long run is a bad strategy. We need to do what we can to avoid antagonizing them, but we had better start working on alternate strategies to work around their petulant obstructionism. [ We have violated the Prime Directive folks. We can get busy and work on oil shale but it just means that we'll still have energy to fight with when they get though with their Eurabian project. -ed. ] "