Goodbye, Jerry Falwell

Ze'ev Chafets on the life, death, and legacy of Jerry Falwell.

In the main building of the Liberty University campus in Lynchburg, Va., there is a Jerry Falwell museum.

The first exhibit you see when you walk through the door is devoted to Falwell's father. Carey Falwell was a nonbeliever, a successful entrepreneur, a hoodlum, bootlegger and gunman who shot his own brother dead two years before the end of Prohibition — not the kind of family skeleton usually put on public display by a university founder.

But the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who started Liberty University in 1971 and grew it into the largest evangelical institution of higher learning in the land, was not an ordinary college president. He was, first and foremost, a Baptist minister, and his Corey Falwell exhibit was meant to convey that even the son of a sinner can become a man of God.

It was also a not very subtle reminder that Falwell came from tough stock. He was a Christian who couldn't be counted on to turn the other cheek.

When I mentioned this to Falwell, whom I met a number of times while writing my last book, he readily agreed. Falwell gloried in his common-man persona, and he viewed himself as a roughneck compared with his lifelong rival, the Rev. Pat Robertson. Known to his friends as "Doc," he was a man who didn't mind laughing at himself — or at his fellow evangelicals. (One of the country's leading Pentecostal figures broke off relations after Falwell publicly sneered at her effort to heal a chicken through faith. "We Baptists don't save chickens, we eat them," he told her.)

No chicken was safe within Falwell's grasp, and he liked them deep-fried. I dined with him several times, and he ate with the aplomb of a fellow whose cardiologist was Jesus. A pre-millennial Baptist, he believed that God sorted things out in God's own time. He also expected to go to heaven.

Falwell was a theological fatalist but a political activist. If this seems like a common combination today, that is largely due to Falwell himself. Before he came along, evangelical Christianity was inward looking. The Baptists, especially, had been badly burned by the failure of Prohibition and the mockery of the Scopes trial and turned away from politics during the first half of the 20th century. As a young preacher, Falwell asserted that the church had no business getting involved in such issues.

"I meant well, but I was wrong," he wrote in his autobiography. This change of heart was one of the many unintended consequences of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which galvanized Falwell. He got into politics not out of love but out of hatred for "abortion, the drug traffic, pornography, child abuse and immorality in all its ugly, life-destroying forms."

Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 with a four-point program: "Pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American." The movement's domestic conservatism transformed the Republican Party for a generation (today, Rudy Giuliani seems to be the un-Falwell), but Falwell had no illusions about the nature of his victories. "Look at the culture overall, and secular progressives are winning," he told me. "They have been for 50 years, and they probably will until Jesus gets here and sorts things out."

Falwell had a similar view of international relations. He believed that God had a plan for the United States and that its enemies were evil. He referred to Muslim radicals as "barbarians" and advocated taking out Iran's nuclear capacity by force. "Bush is probably too weak politically to do it," he told me over barbecue one afternoon. "It will be up to Israel. And we'll be at the White House, cheering."

Falwell's Zionism was by no means inevitable. Before him, evangelicals reluctantly acknowledged that the Jews were God's chosen people, but many didn't quite agree with the choice. Falwell embraced the Jews of Israel (who appreciated his friendship) just as he embraced American Jews (who, by and large, spurned it). He could be acerbic about Jewish leaders — he called Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League a "damn fool" and pointedly told me that the comment was on the record — but he never let Jewish hostility shake his philo-Semitism. American Jews who now take evangelical friendship for granted need to know that it is, to a large extent, a grant from Jerry Falwell.

Falwell was always aware that he was under scrutiny. He hated crooked TV preachers like Jim Bakker, and he didn't have much use for hypocrites like Ted Haggard either. He was married to the same woman for nearly 50 years. He took in millions of dollars during his lifetime without a scandal — not bad for a televangelist.

Not everything Falwell said and did was commendable. He sometimes said stupid things, like his famous crack that 9/11 was the product of American immorality. He knew he was wrong, and he said so (just as he apologized for the segregationist views of his youth). Not every man of God has "I'm sorry" in his vocabulary. He never apologized for his beliefs, though, or his tough partisanship. He was a born-again Christian, an American and a Republican, in that order, and if you didn't like it, well, there were plenty of other places you could spend Sunday morning.

I once asked Falwell about his legacy. We were, naturally, having lunch, in a Liberty University dining room. "This university has 10,000 graduates in pulpits and church boards all over the country," he said. "There will be more every year. They'll carry on."

Amen.

Under Construction

I am switching to the new blogger template system, so pardon the dust as the transition continues...

All modern humans descended from the same small group of people

Physorg notes this new research breakthrough. Apparently, we are all descended from the same people and lived among and replaced homo erectus, similar to Bible and other stories.

Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry.

The genetic survey, produced by a collaborative team led by scholars at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities, shows that Australia's aboriginal population sprang from the same tiny group of colonists, along with their New Guinean neighbours.

The research confirms the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis that all modern humans stem from a single group of Homo sapiens who emigrated from Africa 2,000 generations ago and spread throughout Eurasia over thousands of years. These settlers replaced other early humans (such as Neanderthals), rather than interbreeding with them.

Now, can we all just get along? Kumbaya?

Internet Autobahn

From Ars Technica. Emphasis mine. Whoo-hoo!

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association is holding its annual convention in Las Vegas ... and this year, super-high-speed cable service is finally moving into the limelight. Announcements from hardware providers like Motorola and Texas Instruments suggest that we're finally moving closer to the promised land of DOCSIS 3.0.

DOCSIS 3.0 offers two immediate benefits over what cable ISP subscribers are currently stuck with (DOCSIS 1.1): faster speeds and support for IPv6. The technology has the potential to bump download speeds to 160Mbps and upload speeds to 120Mbps, although that bandwidth will be divided up between households attached to a single node.

QOTD: Mitt Romney

Pebble to Hugh Hewitt

"'What Jimmy Carter fails to understand is what so many fail to understand: Whether it is Hamas or Hezbollah or al Qaeda, there is an overarching goal among the violent jihadists that transcends borders and boundaries. That goal is to replace all modern Islamic states with a caliphate, to destroy Israel, to cause the collapse of the West and the United States, and to conquer the world.'"

Kollel by the Numbers

Joe Settler provides some numeric analysis of the "cost" of kollel and the benefit. Good work as it presents the issue from a perspective I had not thought of.

Today is Yom HaShoah in Israel – the day we remember the massacre and attempted genocide of our nation a mere 60 years ago by Germany and her allies. Not so different than today when Iran wants to wipe us out while Germany supplies them with the tools and means to build nuclear weapons.

On the jblogsphere we often see a lot of riling against full time Yeshiva/Kollel students who sit and learn all day instead of working.

I won’t deny that I too see a problem with it, particularly when after having a discussion with some of these full-time learners, I sometimes walk away unimpressed or uninspired by the limited scope of their learning or knowledge.

On the other hand there are others who impress me highly with their learning and acumen.

Over Shabbat someone (whose sons all decided to "turn black" and become full time learners) put it into perspective for me (not her first choice for their lifetime profession, but she is proud that they are serious and real learners).

6 million Jews were wiped out.

We have perhaps 14 million Jews left in the world.

In the US, of the ~6 million Jews around 7% are Orthodox (400,000). In Israel of the ~6 million Jews, around 20% are Orthodox (1,200,000). Let’s throw in another 100,000 for the rest of the world. That gives us 1,700,000 Orthodox Jews in the world to carry on our heritage and message. (If someone thinks they have better numbers I’d love to hear them).

Of that 1.7 million let’s say nearly 10% learn (at whatever level) full time at any given time (150,000) (and that doesn’t mean that their wives don’t work).

(We know that 50,000 in Israel receive draft exemptions for full-time Torah learning, so I tripled that number to account for those that aren’t affected by the draft exemption and for those living in Chul – perhaps far too large a number, but let’s go with it for the sake of the discussion.)

So out of 14 million Jews in the world, just 150,000 Jews learn Torah full time – that’s a mere 1% of our nation ensuring that Torah is studied full time.

And (I’m just guessing), perhaps from those 150,000 perhaps 1% (1500) produces truly unique geniuses and outstanding Torah scholars that advance us (while the rest provide a solid base of continuity).

So let’s think about it, is the production of 1500 exceptional scholars really such a large number and huge drain for our nation of 14 million Jews. Is 1% of our nation learning full time such a drag on our national resources?

Is Kollel then really such a bad thing in the larger perspective?

I might ask at first, "Is that not worth the price?", but the real question is, "Is this not the minimum we should be doing as a Holy Nation of Priests, and not to mention, to reverse the destruction the Shoah and the Assimilation has and is doing to our nation?"

QOTD: James Lileks on Appeasers

QOTD:James Lileks

That's the predictable thing about appeasers: They're so intent on moving forward they don't care which body they have to step over.

Islamic View of the West

James Lileks puts it very succinctly.

Iran ... thinks the West is weak and exhausted, that Europe is a continent full of sixth-century Roman sodomy-besotted elites dining on larks' brains while its civilization rots from within.

Are they really that far off?

An iPod for every kid? Are they !#$!ing idiots?

The Detroit News carries a great editorial. Even liberals can get fed up...

We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark, House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every school child in Michigan.

No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to "invest" in education. Details, we are promised, will follow.

The Democrats, led by their increasingly erratic speaker Andy Dillon of Redford Township, also pledge $100 million to make better downtowns.

Their plan goes beyond cluelessness. Democrats are either entirely indifferent to the idea that extreme hard times demand extreme belt tightening, or they are bone stupid. We lean toward the latter.

We say that because the House plan also keeps alive, again without specifics, the promise of tax hikes.

The range of options, according to Rep. Steve Tobocman, D-Detroit, includes raising the income tax, levying a 6 percent tax on some services, and taxing junk food and soda.

We wonder how financially strained Michigan residents will feel about paying higher taxes to buy someone else's kid an iPod.

That they would include such frivolity in a crisis budget plan indicates how tough it will be to bring real spending reform to Michigan.

Senate Republicans issued a plan a week ago that eliminates the deficit with hard spending cuts. Now their leader, Mike Bishop of Rochester Hills, is sounding wobbly, suggesting he might compromise on a tax hike.

We hope Bishop is reading the polls that say three-quarters of Michigan residents oppose higher taxes.

There are few things in the House budget outline from which to forge a compromise.

For example, Dillon says he would shift the burden of business taxes to companies that operate in Michigan, but don't have a facility here. The certain outcome of that plan is to drive even more businesses out of Michigan.

About all we see of merit is a call for government consolidation and a demand that state employees contribute more to their retirement benefits -- which is no more than House Democrats suggested for future state lawmakers a few weeks ago.

We find it ironic that the Democrats are proposing floating $5 billion in revenue bonds to pay for retiree health care, when Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed a nearly identical plan by Oakland County because it would cost the state money.

Instead of advocating cost-saving changes in public school teacher pension and health plans, Dillon suggests more study. There have been plenty of studies of the issue, with the conclusion being that hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved through reforms. Michigan needs action, not more study committees.

Dillon also proposes that the state cover 50 percent of the cost of catastrophic health insurance for everyone in the place, but once again doesn't specify a funding source.

Stop the stupidity. Michigan can't tax or spend its way out of this economic catastrophe.

The only responsible option is to bring spending in line with current revenues. The mission must be to expand the tax base, rather than to expand taxes, by crafting a budget that encourages growth.

We won't get there by wasting money on early Christmas presents for Michigan kids.

A War of Narratives

Emphasis all mine...

A War of Narratives
By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
April 8, 2007

On the Dead Sea, Jordan

I just attended a conference that was both illuminating and depressing. It was co-sponsored by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the American Enterprise Institute, and the idea was to get Americans and moderate Arab reformers together to talk about Iraq, Iran, and any remaining prospects for democracy in the Middle East.

As it happened, though, the Arab speakers mainly wanted to talk about the Israel lobby. One described a book edited in the mid-1990s by the Jewish policy analyst David Wurmser as the secret blueprint for American foreign policy over the past decade. A pollster showed that large majorities in Arab countries believe that the Israel lobby has more influence over American policy than the Bush administration. Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter [Gee, Thanks Mr. Worst Ex-President Ever] as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government.

The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies.

As for problems in the Middle East itself, these speakers added, they have a common source, Israel. One elderly statesman noted that the four most pressing issues in the Middle East are the Arab-Israeli dispute, instability in Lebanon, chaos in Iraq and the confrontation with Iran. They are all interconnected, he said, and Israel is at the root of each of them.

We Americans tried to press our Arab friends to talk more about the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran, but they seemed uninterested. They mimicked a speech King Abdullah of Jordan recently delivered before Congress, in which he scarcely mentioned the Iraqi chaos on his border. It was all Israel, all the time.

The Americans, needless to say, had a different narrative. We tended to argue that problems like Muslim fundamentalism, extremism and autocracy could not be blamed on Israel or Paul Wolfowitz but had deeper historical roots. We tended to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue not as the root of all fundamentalism, but as a problem made intractable by fundamentalism.

In other words, they had their narrative and we had ours, and the two passed each other without touching. But the striking thing about this meeting was the emotional tone. There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization.

But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis’s question, “What Went Wrong?” their answer seemed to be: Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?

The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in AIPAC. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.

And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives. The Arabs will nurture this Zionist-centric mythology, which is as self-flattering as it is self-destructive. They will demand that the U.S. and Israel adopt their narrative and admit historical guilt. Failing politically, militarily and economically, they will fight a battle for moral superiority, the kind of battle that does not allow for compromises or truces.

Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the U.S. to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. Faced with an arc of conspiracy-mongering, most Americans will get sick of the whole cesspool, and will support any energy policy or anything else that will enable them to cut ties with the region.

What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.

QOTD: On Elitists

Bob Murray, founder and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation

Some wealthy elitists in our country who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived "global goofiness" campaigns.

QOTD: Steyn

QOTD: Mark Steyn

Ask the folks in Darfur what they've got to show for years of the U.N.'s "grave concerns" — heavy on the graves, less so on the concern.

Needed: More Churchills, Less Chamberlains

Pebble to Jeff Jacoby:

Bernard Lewis, the renowned scholar of Islam and the Middle East, was recently quoted as saying that too many political leaders today exemplify "the spirit of Munich — a refusal to acknowledge the danger we face and a belief that through accommodation we can avoid conflict." He added, sadly: "I look around and I see more Chamberlains than Churchills."

But that may be unfair to the British prime minister whose name is a synonym for 1930s-era appeasement. Once Neville Chamberlain realized that Adolf Hitler was unappeasable, he declared war on Nazi Germany.

The Essence of the French and Norwegians

I had to record the old but best description of the French from The Simpsons via Wikipedia as spoken by Willie the groundskeeper.

cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys

I found it because I thought he was the one that called the Norwegians

salmon-eating, international busybodies

but apparently it was an aide to the president of Sri Lanka Chandrika Kumaratunga, a Mr. Samaraweera. See here and here.

Just as apropos.

Irish Eddie versus Benny Leonard

A story of old Jewish boxers. Pebble to Small Beer blog.

Boxing was also the first sport to give Jews an equal chance to compete (if not dominate): between 1910 and 1940, there were 26 Jewish world boxing champions. Some of these fighters fought under non-Jewish names, often Irish. This was partly because Irish boxers were very popular with the public, and partly because their families disapproved of their career choice. (It was said that, "They fear no man in the ring, but they're scared of their mothers.") An oft-told story concerned Benny Leonard (real name: Benjamin Leiner), one great Jewish fighter who never masked his heritage. Leonard was touring, and in a grimy Pennsylvania mill/mining town was matched up against the local pride and joy, one Irish Eddie Finnegan. The crowd was out for blood, and even before the fight started was chanting, "Kill the Jew. Kill the Jew." This so infuriated Leonard that he let out all the stops and pounded his opponent mercilessly. He might actually have killed him, except at one point "Irish Eddie" was able to engage Leonard in a clinch and gasp, in Yiddish, that his name was really Seymour Rosenbaum.

Newsweek's America's Top 50 Rabbis

America's Top 50 Rabbis

Compilers:
Sony Pictures CEO and Chairman Michael Lynton
Gary Ginsberg, Newscorp
Jay Sanderson, JTN Productions

Scoring:
Are the rabbis known nationally/internationally? (20 points.)
Do they have a media presence? (10 points.)
Are they leaders within their communities? (10 points.)
Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements? (10 points.)
Size of their constituency? (10 points.) Do they have political/social influence? (20 points.)
Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career? (10 points.) Have they made a "greater" impact? (10 points.)

Of Special Note
36. Nachum Braverman (Orthordox)
Braverman is Aish Hatorah’s leading American leader.

Orthodox: 15
Chassidic: 1
Lubavitch: 1
Total: 17

Others:
Conservative: 10
Reconstructionist: 3
Reform: 18
Renewal: 2

Israeli-Arab opinion statistics

Israeli-Arab opinion statistics -- where should this lead Israeli planning?!

University of Haifa poll showing that 76 percent of Arab Israelis believe that Zionism of a form of racism and that 28 percent of Arab Israelis deny the Holocaust.

George Soros: Nazi Collaborator

Carolyn Glick tells something about George Soros I hadn't heard before.

...by his own admission in interviews with 60 Minutes in 1998 and PBS in 1993, [the anti-Zionist (but Jewish) George]Soros collaborated with the Nazis in seizing Jewish property in Budapest in 1944.

Author Serge Trifkovic, who is currently researching a biography of Soros tells of a Holocaust survivor in Hungary who claims that the reason Soros was allowed to remain free was "the boy's special knowledge of the Jewish community and its attempts to protect its property from confiscation."

Limousine Liberal Hypocrisy

Charles Krauthammer reveals the hypocrisy of the "Limosine" liberal left. [Hypocrisy means that they don't believe that the rules should actually apply to themselves, not that they made a mistake.]

Goldman Sachs has been one of the most aggressive firms on Wall Street about taking action on climate change; the company sends its bankers home at night in hybrid limousines.

--The New York Times, Feb. 25

Written without a hint of irony--if only your neighborhood dry cleaner sent his employees home by hybrid limousine--this front-page dispatch captured perfectly the eco-pretensions of the rich and the stupefying gullibility with which they are received.

Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore global-warming pitch at the Academy Awards? Before they spoke, the screen at the back of the stage flashed not-so-subliminal messages about how to save the planet. My personal favorite was "Ride mass transit." This to a conclave of Hollywood plutocrats who have not seen the inside of a subway since the moon landing and for whom mass transit means a stretch limo seating no fewer than 10.

Leo and Al then portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening's "carbon footprint" by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a "carbon broker," who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

A very few of the very rich have some awareness of the emptiness--if not the medieval corruption--of ransoming one's sins. Sergey Brin, zillionaire founder of Google, buys carbon credits to offset the ghastly amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Google's private Boeing 767 but confesses he's not sure if it really does anything.

Which puts him one step ahead of most other eco-preeners who actually pretend that it does--the Goracle himself, for example. His Tennessee mansion consumes 20 times the electricity used by the average American home. Last August alone it consumed twice as much power as the average home consumes in a year. Gore buys absolution, however. He spends pocket change on carbon credits, which then allow him to pollute conscience-free.

What is wrong with this scam? First, purchasing carbon credits is an incentive to burn even more fossil fuels, since now it is done under the illusion that it's really cost-free to the atmosphere.

Second, it is a way for the rich to export the real costs and sacrifices of pollution control to the poorer segments of humanity in the Third World. (Apparently, Hollywood's plan is to make up for that by adopting every last one of their children.) For example, GreenSeat, a Dutch carbon-trading outfit, buys offsets from a foundation that plants trees in Uganda's Mount Elgon National Park to soak up the carbon emissions of its rich Western patrons. Small problem: expanding the park encroaches on land traditionally used by local farmers. As a result, reports the New York Times, "villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, and their livestock has been confiscated by armed park rangers." All this so that swimming pools can be heated and Maseratis driven with a clear conscience in the fattest parts of the world.

The other form of carbon trading is to get Third World companies to cut their emissions to offset Western pollution. The reason this doesn't work--and why the carbon racket is a farce--is that you need a cap for cap-and-trade to work. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S. were capped, and the trading system succeeded in reducing acid rain by half. But even the Kyoto treaty doesn't put any cap on greenhouse gases in China and India, where billions of these carbon credits are traded. Sure, you can pretend you're offsetting Western greenhouse pollution by supposedly cleaning up a dirty coal plant in China. But China is adding a new coal plant every week. You could build a particularly dirty "uncapped" power plant, then sell hundreds of millions in carbon credits to reduce it to a normal rate of pollution. The result? The polluter gets very rich. The planet continues to cook. And the Gores of the world can feel virtuous as they burn up the local power grid.

If Gore really wants to save the planet, he can try this: Turn off the lights. Ditch the heated pool. Ride the subway. And spare us the carbon-trading piety.

QOTD: Mean Mister Mustard

Mean Mister Mustard on the limits of waiting for Islamic reform.

If you listen to [Dennis] Prager on the radio with any frequency, the tone and general thrust of his remarks would be fairly familiar to you: Israel cannot make peace with a population that is so overwhelmingly focused on death in general and Israel's destruction in particular.

Which is certainly true enough, but Prager, though I respect him, is constantly frustrating on questions like these in that he seems to refuse following the implications of his beliefs to their logical conclusions. [Michael] Berenbaum [in a debate with Prager] actually went farther in explicitly advocating separation between Israel and the Palestinians. Prager's rhetoric is still useful as a corrective to the vague and unreal suggestions about the peace process and moral equivalence that still litter the media landscape, but the fact that he doesn't speak beyond the present means that he can't offer any strategy or goal beyond an aggressive holding pattern modeled on the current situation, wherein Israel will presumably continue to kill Palestinians it considers threatening, but not do anything more ambitious or long-term. The underlying assumption that makes this at all tenable is that the Palestinians will eventually change and become acceptable neighbors.

This goes to the more basic problem that liberals like Prager have in discussing the wider problem of Islam: they are, for ideological reasons, unable to extrapolate a conclusion that Islam is inevitably (or nearly so) unreconcilable to the western world, no matter what the evidence says. On this point, Prager likes to say, "I don't judge religions, I judge practitioners," and he's quite willing to say that a huge proportion of Muslims are actively dangerous or at least hostile to us. But he categorically will not say that the belief system of Islam itself is such, holding always to the assumption that anything can happen in the future and that Islam will be whatever Muslims want it to be.

Which is true, up to a limited point. I suppose Muslims could tomorrow decide that the mandatory imposition of Sharia over the world is not one of Allah's commandments. But it fails to take Islam seriously as a religion. Indeed, it fails to take the entire idea of religion seriously. Either the Koran is the words of an all-powerful Creator or it itsn't. If it is, then by its own clear and unambiguous terms, it's impossible for a sincere Muslim to not "fight those who do not believe in Allah ... until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection." It would be like telling a Christian that they can continue to be Christians, just so long as they drop this whole "Jesus is the son of God" stuff. I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility that you could convince Christians to do that, but let's at least be honest enough to say that what you're really asking is for them to stop being Christians and become something else.

One of Prager's more frequent complaints about Jews is that most of them are only Jews in the ethnic sense, including those who profess to be believers. It's difficult, for instance, to find a (non-Orthodox) Jew who will express agreement with the statement that homosexual sex is an abomination. But he's essentially asking the same thing of Muslims, and in an even more egregious way, since there are some creative (but unconvincing) ways that one could try to abrogate Leviticus' banning of homosexual acts, but the Koran's orders to spread Sharia and politically subvert the non-Muslim world seem obvious and unquestionable in comparison.

QOTD: The New Math of Alternative Energy

The New Math of Alternative Energy - WSJ.com

One reason there's relatively little solar electricity is that traditional solar panels aren't very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. So most solar electricity is made and consumed at a single site -- and in many cases isn't even enough to meet the needs of a single house. A recent study by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities found that it cost about $77,500 to install a 10 kilowatt-capacity system on a house. Without subsidies, it would take 50 years to pay for itself [emphasis mine]. With subsidies, it dropped to 9.6 years.

In all, the cost of generating electricity with solar panels is 35 cents to 45 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the International Energy Agency. In the U.S., costs are typically less -- 26 cents to 35 cents -- because there's better sun, says the U.S. Solar Energy Industry Association.

QOTD: Mark Steyn

QOTD:Mark Steyn

...one should never underestimate the seductiveness of complacency.

QOTD: Daniel Pipes - Islamic Capabilities

Daniel Pipes

Islamists deploy formidable capabilities, however, that go far beyond small-scale terrorism:

A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

An impressively conceptualized, funded, and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill, and electoral success.

An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians. The movement almost defies sociological definition.

A non-violent approach -- what I call 'lawful Islamism' -- that pursues Islamification through educational, political, and religious means, without recourse to illegality or terrorism. Lawful Islamism is proving successful in Muslim-majority countries like Algeria and Muslim-minority ones like the United Kingdom.

A huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10% to 15% of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.

QOTD: Dennis Prager

QOTD: Dennis Prager on the cultural divide in America.

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? ("Divinity" does not necessarily mean "literalism.")

I do not ask this about "the Bible" as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the Christian Bible and generally confine divine revelation even within the Hebrew Bible to the Torah and to verses where G-d is cited by the prophets, for example. But "Bible-believing" Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

Name the issue: same-sex marriage; the morality of medically unnecessary abortions; capital punishment for murder; the willingness to label certain actions, regimes, even people "evil"; skepticism regarding the United Nations and the World Court; strong support for Israel. While there are exceptions — there are, for example, secular conservatives who share the Bible-believers' social views — belief in a G-d-based authority of the Torah is as close to a predictable dividing line as exists.

QOTD:Kenneth R. Timmerman

Kenneth R. Timmerman

Suppose for a moment that Iran has acquired a nuclear weapon – either on the black market, as many sources believe; or through a clandestine uranium enrichment program, which the CIA discounts (because they have no spies in Iran who might detect such a program).

Iran could send a heavily-shielded nuclear warhead to Venezuela, where it would be fitted to a short-range missile and stowed on board a U.S.-bound cargo ship.

That cargo ship would not be owned by Iranians or by Venezuelans, but perhaps by some Qatari millionaire through a front company in the British Virgin Islands. The deadly ship would then depart Venezuela carrying perfectly legitimate, declared cargo for the port of Newark, New Jersey.

Perhaps the ship might not even be bound for the United States at all, but for Halifax, Nova Scotia, further up the Atlantic seaboard. Either way, the likelihood it would be inspected on the high seas are very low.

Steaming along in commercial shipping lanes one hundred miles off the coast of Washington, DC, the ship’s international crew brings the missile launcher up from the hold and prepares it for launch. Under the cover of darkness, they fire their weapon, then stow the launcher and continue on their way. Two minutes later, Washington, DC is hit with a fireball that obliterates the White House, the Capitol Building, and the national monuments in seconds. And no signature links this act of war back to Iran.

This, of course, is just fiction. But the technology is known and available. Iran has been testing sea-launched ballistic missiles since 1998.

QOTD: Media Shows Irrational Hysteria on Global Warming

David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

QOTD: Zev Chafets

Zev Chafets

I'm supposed to add The Caveat: Most American Muslims are peaceable, law-abiding, terror-hating folks. Islam itself is a "religion of peace."

Sorry, but I'm no longer convinced. It may be that Islam in its true form is as gentle as a lamb. But in the real world, it is an aggressive, violent political ideology. It may also be that a majority of U.S. Muslims object to the jihad being waged against infidel Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, agnostics and democrats of all denominations. But if so, they are keeping it to themselves.

QOTD: Mullah Mohammed Amin

Sky News carries an article that again reinforces how terrorists can justify killing civilians.

Referring to Tony Blair and George Bush, Mullah [Mohammed] Amin [from the Taliban in Afghanistan] said: "It's acceptable to kill ordinary people in Europe because these are the people who have voted in the Government.

"They came to our home and attacked our women and children.

"The ordinary people of these countries are behind this -- so we will not spare them. We will kill them and laugh over them like they are killing us and laughing at us."

Islamic History Expert: Moslem Peace with Israel? Never!

Professor Moshe Sharon on the dangers of a nuclear Iran and their real intentions. The West has forgotten that you cannot buy off religious convictions.

by Ezra HaLevi
Islam History Professor Moshe Sharon of Hebrew University told a counter-terrorism conference Thursday, "There is no possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians whatsoever - ever."

Sharon, speaking at the annual conference of Herzliya’s Counter Terrorism Institute, said that Iran is dead serious about obtaining and using nuclear weapons in order to bring about its vision of an Islamic End of Days.

The veteran expert on Islam says that Western officials fail to grasp that the Arab and Islamic world truly see Israel’s establishment as a "reversal of history" and are therefore unable to ever accept peaceful relations with it. From Moslems' perspective, "Islamic territory was taken away from Islam by Jews. You know by now that this can never be accepted, not even one meter. So everyone who thinks Tel Aviv is safe is making a grave mistake. Territory which at one time was dominated by Islamic rule, now has become non-Moslem. Non-Moslems are independent of Islamic rule and Jews have created their own independent state. It is anathema. Worse, Israel, a non-Moslem state, is ruling over Moslems. It is unthinkable that non-Moslems should rule over Moslems."

Sharon dismissed various peace treaties signed by Moslem and Arab officials over the years as "pieces of paper, parts of tactics and strategies… with no meaning."

Sharon’s assessment focused on the danger posed by Iran. From studying Iranian culture, literature, newspapers, broadcasts and interviews with major players in the Islamic regime, Sharon concludes that a deep belief in a Shiite messiah is at the root of Iran’s nuclear project. "They truly believe that the Shiite messiah, the 12th Imam (also known as the Mahdi), is here, and that he will reveal himself... What moves the Iranian government and leadership today is first and foremost the wish to bring about the 12th Imam."

Addressing the theological doctrine of how exactly the this Messiah will be revealed, Sharon explained: "How will they bring him? Through an apocalypse. He (the Mahdi) needs a war. He cannot come into this world without an Armageddon. He wants an Armageddon. The earlier we understand this the better. Ahmadinejad wants nuclear weapons for this!"

Sharon has in the past insisted that the Western world was engaging in great folly by differentiating between radical and peaceful Islam. "All of a sudden we see that the greatest interpreters of Islam are politicians in the Western world," he wrote sarcastically. "They know better than all the speakers in the mosques, all those who deliver terrible sermons against anything that is either Christian or Jewish. These Western politicians know that there is good Islam and bad Islam. They know even how to differentiate between the two - except that none of them know how to read a word of Arabic."

"The difference between Judaism, Christianity and Islam is as follows: Judaism speaks about national salvation - namely, that at the end of the story, when the world becomes a better place, Israel will be in its own land, ruled by its own king and serving G-d. Christianity speaks about the idea that every single person in the world can be saved from his sins, while Islam speaks about ruling the world. I can quote here in Arabic, but there is no point in quoting Arabic, so let me quote a verse in English: 'Allah sent Mohammed with the true religion so that it should rule over all the religions.'

"The idea, then, is not that the whole world would necessarily become Moslem at this time, but that the whole world would be subdued under the rule of Islam."

That, Sharon insists, is the plan, in black-and-white, of the Iranian regime.

"This is why [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad seeks nuclear weapons," he emphasized. "The faster we realize this, the better."

List of Islamic attacks on America

Islam’s War With America
By Greg Crosby

President Bush finally, actually used the correct term, "Islamo-facist" in a speech last month and all hell broke loose. Arab groups screamed "racism." Liberals were apalled. And because of the uproar instigated by terrorist front groups like CAIR, the Bush administration caved under political correctness once again. No matter what you call the war we are engaged in, the truth is we are at war with radical Islam. Or more to the point, they are at war with us. They started it more than 30 years ago. Now, as we appoach the 5th anniversary of 9/11, let us once again review who it is that we are at war with and why — just in case some of us don’t know or have forgotten. The following represents just a sample of what the Arab and Islamic militants have done to Americans for over three decades.

March 2, 1973: U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Assassinated by Palestinian militants

Nov. 4, 1979: to Jan. 20, 198: Iran Hostage Crisis

April 18, 1983: Islamic Jihad Bombs the US Embassy in Beirut and kills 63 people

Oct. 23, 1983: Islamic Jihad bombs the Marine Barracks in Beirut and kills 242 Americans, while 58 French troops were killed in a separate attack

March 16, 1984: Islamic Jihad kidnaps and later murders U.S. Embassy official William Buckley in Beirut, Lebanon

April 12, 1984: Hezbollah bombs a restaurant in Spain killing 18 US servicemen

June 14, 1985: Hezbollah hijacks a TWA flight murdering a US Navy sailor

Oct. 7, 1985: Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacked by Palestinians, a wheelchair bound U.S. passenger is murdered and dumped overboard

Nov. 23, 1985: An EgyptAir airplane is hijacked by the Abu Nidal group with several US citizens aboard

March 30, 1986: Palestinians bomb TWA Flight 840 killing four US citizens

April 5, 1986: Libyans bomb a discotheque in Berlin killing 2 US soldiers and wounding 79

Feb. 17, 1988: Hezbollah kidnaps and murders US Marine Corps Lt. Col. W. Higgins while he was serving with the UN Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO) in southern Lebanon

Dec. 21, 1988: Libyans blow up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 259 people

Feb. 26, 1993: first World Trade Center Bombing by Islamic terrorists kills 6 people and injures 1,000

Nov. 13, 1995: The Islamic Movement of Change plants a bomb in a Riyadh military compound that kills one US citizen and more than 40 others

June 25, 1996: Islamic terrorists attack the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 US military personnel and wounding 515 persons

Feb. 23, 1997: a Palestinian gunman opens fire at the Empire State Building killing a Danish national and wounding visitors from the US, Argentina, Switzerland, and France; his handwritten note claimed this was punishment against the “enemies of Palestine”

Aug. 7, 1998: Osama bin Laden carries out the attacks on the US Embassies in East Africa. The attack at Nairobi, Kenya, kills 12 US citizens and 279 others, injuring about 5,000 Kenyans and six US citizens. The attack on the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kills 10 Tanzanian citizens and injures one US citizen and 76 Tanzanians.

Oct. 12, 2000: al-Qaeda attacks the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen killing 17 sailors and injuring 39 others

Sept. 11, 2001: al-Qaeda attacks US Homeland killing thousands

Jan 23, 2002: Islamic militants kidnap US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and slit his throat a week later

May 7, 2004: al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally saws the head off of US citizen Nick Berg and distributes the video

What is the Definition of Innocent Civilians?

This ABC News interviewtranscript shows that we also need to understand why Islam and the terrorists do not have the same definition of "innocent civilians" as those in the West.

ANDREI BABITSKY
And you mean to say that now their children are to be responsible?
SHAMIL BASAYEV
It's not the children who are responsible. Responsibility is with the whole Russian nation, which with silent approval gives a yes. A nation that feeds their grasses who ravaged Chechnya . They collect food, things for them, they supply them. They pay taxes. They give approval in word and in deed. They are all responsible.

What is the Definition of "Forced"?

Robert Spencer explains that the West and Islam have two completely different definitions of "forced" conversions.

Islamic law forbids forced conversion, but as Andrew Bostom documented in a FrontPage article yesterday, this is a law that throughout Islamic history has all too often been honored in the breach. Nor is this yet another case of a "twisting" or "hijacking" of Islam; in fact, Islamic law regarding the presentation of Islam to non-Muslims manifests a quite different understanding of what constitutes freedom from coercion and freedom of conscience from that which prevails among non-Muslims.

Muhammad instructed his followers to call people to Islam before waging war against them – the warfare would follow from their refusal to accept Islam or to enter the Islamic social order as inferiors, required to pay a special tax:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the tax on non-Muslims specified in Qur’an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)

There is therefore an inescapable threat in this "invitation" to accept Islam. Would one who converted to Islam under the threat of war be considered to have converted under duress? By non-Muslim standards, yes, but not according to the view of this Islamic tradition. From the standpoint of the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence such a conversion would have resulted from "no compulsion."

How to Contain Hezbollah

Robert Locke has a new idea.

I propose a radical change in Israeli policy:
Israel should stop waging war on all of Lebanon. It should unilaterally declare that the Hezbollah-controlled areas constitute a state under the sovereignty of Hezbollah, invade these areas, and drive out the entire population until the attacks cease.

QOTD:Robert Locke

QOTD:Robert Locke

The core premise of the establishment is that there is a "peace process" and that if only this process could be gotten right, peace would result. Unfortunately, this is bald nonsense, and it is only believed because it enables that establishment to stage a pantomime in which it is both the audience and the hero. The myth of the peace process enables it to go to sleep every night confident that they are on the side of justice, reconciliation between peoples, international understanding, anti-terrorism, fairness, and democracy.

The fundamental problem is this: peace is not a process. Either both sides are willing to strike a deal and stop fighting, or they are not. Spewing out paper deals and nominal arrangements means nothing. In fact, it tends to make things worse, by creating confusion about the bald fact that peace is when people aren't shooting at each other, and nothing else.

Who won, who lost in Lebanon...

Ralph Peters on who really won the war

HEZBOLLAH 3, ISRAEL 0
By RALPH PETERS

August 17, 2006 -- ISRAEL'S rep for toughness in tatters. Hezbollah triumphant. Iran cockier than ever. Syria untouched. Lebanon's government crippled. An orgy of anti-Semitism in the global media. Anti-Americanism exploding among Iraqi Shi'as inspired by Hezbollah.

Thanks, Prime Minister Olmert. Great job, guy.

The debacle in Lebanon wasn't even a war. It was only round one of a war. And Israel's back in its corner, dazed and punch-drunk.

Israel got in a gut jab, but Hezbollah landed three ferocious haymakers:

* Despite the physical damage the Israeli Defense Forces inflicted, Hezbollah's terror-troops were still standing (and firing rockets) when the bell rang.

* At the strategic level, Hezbollah's masterful manipulation of the seduce-me-please media convinced the region's Shi'a and Sunni spectators alike that Hassan Nasrallah is the new Great Arab Hope. He's got a powerful Persian cheering section, too.

* While Israel couldn't plan or execute a winning campaign, it also failed to think beyond the inevitable cease-fire. But Hezbollah did. The terrorists had mapped out precisely what they had to do the moment the shooting stopped: Hand out Iranian money, promise they'll rebuild what Israel destroyed - and simply refuse to honor the terms of the U.N. resolution.

Israel couldn't wait to throw in the towel and start pulling out troops. Then Hezbollah's fighters emerged from the rubble of towns Israeli leaders lacked the courage to conquer - and the number of terror-soldiers who survived shocked the Israelis.

Politicians and generals everywhere, repeat after me: "Air power alone can't win wars; you can't defeat terror on the cheap with technology; and (in the timeless words of Nathan Bedford Forrest) War means fighting, and fighting means killing."

The U.N. resolution called for Hezbollah to disarm - a fantasy only a diplomat could believe. As soon as the refugees began flowing southward and packing the battlefield, Nasrallah told the international community to take a hike. He knows that U.N. peacekeepers won't try to disarm his forces - if they ever show up - and the Lebanese military not only won't try, but couldn't do it.

The world's response? The French (who talked so boldly) took a cold swig of Vichy water: Now they say they won't send in their peacekeepers until Hezbollah is completely disarmed - which isn't going to happen. And Lebanese leaders stated openly that not only wouldn't the Lebanese army attempt to take away the terrorists' weapons, it wouldn't even confiscate caches it stumbled on.

Sucker-punched (well, don't fight with your eyes closed), Israel's complaining to the ref. While staring around in bewilderment.

Want more good news? After finally calling our enemies by the accurate name of "Islamo-fascists," President Bush backtracked so fast the White House lawn was smoking. Then he declared that Israel had won.

That's about as credible as insisting the Titanic docked safe and sound.

And that ain't all, folks. If you're an Israel supporter - as I proudly admit to being - get ready for some tough love: Not only did Israel's abysmally incompetent government start a war impulsively and prosecute it half-heartedly, the country's military leadership failed, too. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who was going to destroy Hezbollah from the skies, reportedly put his main effort on the eve of war into selling off his stock holdings before his bombs could weigh down the market. Now that's insider trading!

But that was just one jerk-general dishonoring his uniform. The serious news is that the IDF's reserve forces were a shambles when they mobilized. Information from an inside source reveals that, when the reserves' warehouses and depots were opened, key stocks were missing - stolen.

What was gone? Fuel, weapons, ammunition, food, spare parts - all that a modern military needs to go to war. And I doubt it ended up in Iceland.

The IDF has great combat leaders and brave soldiers. But Hezbollah's boys proved tougher - and we can't pretty it up. The terrorists were willing - even eager - to die for their cause. Israeli leaders dreaded friendly casualties. And IDF troops - except in elite units - lacked the will to close with the enemy and defeat him at close quarters.

Israel tried to fight humanely. Hezbollah was out to win at any cost. The result was inevitable.

On the ground in southern Lebanon, the IDF was able to muster a ten-to-one advantage around contested villages. But its leaders lacked the guts to do what needed to be done. And Hezbollah's frontline fighters survived.

You can't win if you won't fight.

The IDF needs pervasive reform. Still structured to defeat the conventional militaries of Syria and Egypt, it faced an enemy tailored specifically to take on the IDF. Historical reputation isn't enough - the IDF must rebuild itself to take on post-modern threats. As one senior American general put it, "The IDF's been living on fumes since 1967."

Hezbollah cleared the air.

All this is heartbreaking. I wish it were otherwise. I wish I could back up our president's surreal claim that Israel won. I wish Israel had won. I wish it had the leadership the Israeli people deserve.

And that's what's tragic: Israel's politicians turned out to be even more profoundly out of touch with their people than the pols in Washington. Israelis were willing to fight. They wanted to win. The rank and file of the IDF would have done what needed to be done. And their leaders failed them.

There will be consequences. Iran's convinced it's on a winning course. Syria got away with murder (literally). And Hezbollah will come back more determined than ever.

Oh, I almost forgot those two IDF soldiers whose kidnapping triggered all this. But I can be forgiven, since Israel's leaders forgot about them long before I did: The U.N. resolution Olmert welcomed makes no binding and immediate demand for their return.

And the world is going to let Iran build nuclear weapons.

Get ready for Round Two.

Copyright 2006 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

QOTD:Abba Eban

QOTD:Abba Eban, Israel's first Ambassador to the United Nations

Arabs could kill Israeli citizens across the border, blockade our port of Eilat, close the Suez Canal to our shipping, send armed groups into our territory for murder and havoc, and decline to carry out stipulated clauses of the armistice agreement in the complete certainty that the Security Council would not adopt even the mildest resolution of criticism....On the other hand, there was no inhibition to resolutions criticizing Israel for retaliating against attacks. Thus the doctrine of the United Nations came to imply that Arab governments could conduct warfare and maintain belligerency against Israel while Israel could offer no response.

Reality Hits Jewish Liberal Upside the Head

Thane Rosenbaum

This is a soul-searching moment for the Jewish left. Actually, for many Jewish liberals, navigating the gloomy politics of the Middle East is like walking with two left feet.

I would know. For six years I was the literary editor of Tikkun magazine, a leading voice for progressive Jewish politics that never avoided subjecting Israel to moral scrutiny. I also teach human rights at a Jesuit university, imparting the lessons of reciprocal grievances and the moral necessity to regard all people with dignity and mutual respect. And I am deeply sensitive to Palestinian pain, and mortified when innocent civilians are used as human shields and then cynically martyred as casualties of war.

Yet, since 9/11 and the second intifada, where suicide bombings and beheadings have become the calling cards of Arab diplomacy, and with Hamas and Hezbollah emerging as elected entities that, paradoxically, reject the first principles of liberal democracy, I feel a great deal of moral anguish. Perhaps I have been naive all along.

And I am not alone. Many Jews are in my position -- the children and grandchildren of labor leaders, socialists, pacifists, humanitarians, antiwar protestors -- instinctively leaning left, rejecting war, unwilling to demonize, and insisting that violence only breeds more violence. Most of all we share the profound belief that killing, humiliation and the infliction of unnecessary pain are not Jewish attributes.

However, the world as we know it today -- post-Holocaust, post-9/11, post-sanity -- is not cooperating. Given the realities of the new Middle East, perhaps it is time for a reality check. For this reason, many Jewish liberals are surrendering to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself -- with whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitability of Israel coincides with the inevitability of anti-Semitism.

This is what more politically conservative Jews and hardcore Zionists maintained from the outset. And it was this nightmare that the Jewish left always refused to imagine. So we lay awake at night, afraid to sleep. Surely the Arabs were tired, too. Surely they would want to improve their societies and educate their children rather than strap bombs on to them.

If the Palestinians didn't want that for themselves, if building a nation was not their priority, then peace in exchange for territories was nothing but a pipe dream. It was all wish-fulfillment, morally and practically necessary, yet ultimately motivated by a weary Israeli society -- the harsh reality of Arab animus, the spiritual toll that the occupation had taken on a Jewish state battered by negative world opinion.

Despite the deep cynicism, however, Israel knew that it must try. It would have to set aside nearly 60 years of hard-won experience, starting from the very first days of its independence, and believe that the Arab world had softened, would become more welcoming neighbors, and would stop chanting: "Not in our backyard -- the Middle East is for Arabs only."

It is true that Israel has entered into peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan that have brought some measure of historic stability to the region. But with Israel having withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza, and with Israeli public opinion virtually united in favor of near-total withdrawal from the West Bank, why are rockets being launched at Israel now, why are their soldiers being kidnapped if the aspirations of the Palestinian people, and the intentions of Hamas and Hezbollah, stand for something other than the total destruction of Israel? And if Palestinians and the Lebanese are electing terrorists and giving them the portfolio of statesmen, then what message is being sent to moderate voices, what incentives are there to negotiate, and how can any of this sobering news be recast in a more favorable light?

The Jewish left is now in shambles. Peace Now advocates have lost their momentum, and, in some sense, their moral clarity. Opinion polls in Israel are showing near unanimous support for stronger incursions into Lebanon. And until kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror curtailed, any further conversations about the future of the West Bank have been set aside.

Not unlike the deep divisions between the values of red- and blue-state America, world Jewry is being forced to reconsider all of its underlying assumptions about peace in the Middle East. The recent disastrous events in Lebanon and Gaza have inadvertently created a newly united Jewish consciousness -- bringing right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.

Mr. Rosenbaum, a novelist and professor at Fordham Law School, is author, most recently, of "The Myth of Moral Justice" (HarperCollins, 2004).

Are Democrats really patriotic?

Ann Coulter reports on a recent study of Republican and Democratic attitudes towards the United States of America.

To give you a snapshot of today's Democratic Party, in 2004, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked likely voters if they believed America was generally a fair and decent country and whether they believed the world would be a better place if more countries were like America.

Republicans agreed that America is generally fair and decent, 83 percent to 7 percent. Eighty-one percent agreed that the world would be a better place if more countries were like the United States.

By contrast, Democrats were nearly split, with only 46 percent agreeing that America is generally a fair and decent country, and with 37 percent saying America is not a generally fair and decent country. Only 48 percent of Democrats said they thought that the world would be a better place if more countries were like the United States.

Wear that kippa

Wear that kippa

"The first time I interviewed Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Zahar," says [WND's Aaron] Klein, "I did not bring my yarmulke. I wanted to get out alive. But during the course of our conversation I ended up talking about my Orthodox Judaism. Al-Zahar asked why I didn't wear a yarmulke to meet him. I told him I'd been afraid to. He said he was insulted. He claimed he was a religious Muslim who only had a problem with the state of Israel and not with Judaism. He lectured me about not forsaking my religion or denying my Jewish identity. He said the next time we meet I had better be wearing my yarmulke. Since then I have interviewed him a number of times. Whenever we speak by phone or when he joins me on the radio, he first jokingly inquires as to whether I am wearing my yarmulke."

QOTD: Jack Kelly

QOTD:Jack Kelly

Advocates of a "diplomatic solution" whatever the circumstances tend to believe (a) that nothing is worse than war; (b) that everybody agrees with (a), and (c) that there is no problem that can't be solved if people talk about it long enough.

But most people who aren't liberals think submission to tyranny is worse than war, and tyrants tend not to bargain in good faith for part of what they want if they think they can get it all by force.

When acts of aggression are met with gestures of appeasement, the aggressors (not unreasonably) assume the appeasers are afraid of them.

And since it was bad behavior that brought forth the gestures of appeasement, the aggressors are encouraged to behave worse, not better. Diplomacy based on hubris and cowardice inevitably leads to failure.

But that's a lesson some people never learn.

Are we too nice?

John Pohoretz asks the questions that I have been asking for a long time. The West has the military might to beat the Islamic terrorists, but does it have the philosophical makeup to decide to do just that? And pay whatever cost is necessary?

Could Israel - even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel - possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?

If Lebanon's 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah? Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon - not because of world opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding of the value of every human life?

QOTD: Hussein Massawi

Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the slaughter of U.S. and French forces 20 years ago. (via Mark Steyn)

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.

This is why you cannot buy off Hezbollah, Iran, or Hamas.

Mark Steyn

The forces at play in the Middle East are beyond the Geopolitical Friars' Club. The median age in Gaza is 15.8 years old. How likely is it that any of those bespoke Palestinian 'moderates' who've been permanent fixtures on CNN and BBC Middle East discussion panels for 30 years have any meaningful sway over a population of unemployed uneducated teenage boys raised by a death cult?

QOTD: Ephraim Sneh

Deputy Minister Defense Ephraim Sneh at the time of the 1992 Lebanon pullout:

We are leaving because of problems with the ability of the Israeli public to stand firm. That is the whole truth. There is no point in pretending.

Being British for 350 Years

Ashley Perry on British anti-semitism:

I have my own personal opinions as to why British mistrust and suspicion of the Jews is so different and perhaps at a higher social level than most other forms of world-wide anti-Semitism. The British consider themselves the height of civilization, the founder of democracy and the force that brought culture to much of the world. However, there is one people that has lived with the British for many years which reminds them that their "civilization" is relatively new.

A good example of this was a retort by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to an anti-Semitic remark aimed at him in the House of Commons, "When the right honorable gentlemen's ancestors were savages on an unknown Island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon," Disraeli responded.

Interesting voting pattern

Lowell Ponte

Since 1984 even the Communist Party USA has officially directed its members to vote for the Democratic candidate -- although neither the CPUSA nor the establishment media call public attention to this.

QOTD: Caroline B. Glick

QOTD:Caroline B. Glick

It is not a lack of reform at the UN that stymies the US. It is the UN itself. An overwhelming majority of UN member states believe that their national interest is served by weakening and humiliating the US. Given this, the US has no chance of ever getting its reforms passed or its policy initiatives supported. By continuing to attempt to work within the UN rather than effectively abandoning it and establishing new organizations capable of contending with current threats, the US has entrapped itself, empowered its rivals and diminished its chances of leading effective multilateral initiatives against the forces of global jihad.

Fantasies About Jihad

Robert Spencer discusses how Europe can willfully blind itself from what is happening in its midst. When the absolute truth is too horrifying to contemplate, it is better not to ask to many questions which will force these realities into the open.

[Deputy Chief of Mission in Holland Chat] Blakeman introduced me to an official of the Dutch Ministry of Integration, who spends her days in dialogue with Dutch imams and other Muslim leaders. We began a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of the jihad threat and the proper response to it. In the course of this I asked her how many Muslim leaders she encountered who were ready to lay aside attachment to the Sharia, accept the Dutch governmental and societal structure and the parameters of Dutch pluralism, and be willing to live in Dutch society as equals to, not superiors of, non-Muslims indefinitely. She told me that there were only very few, but insisted that we had to work with those few, and indeed had to place our faith and hope in them, for otherwise the future was impossibly bleak. I asked her if she had read the Quran. She told me no, she hadn't, and wouldn't, because she didn't want to lose all hope -- and because whatever was in it, she still had to work to find some accord with the Muslim leaders, no matter what.

I urged her to ask the imams with whom she spoke questions that made their loyalties clear, insofar as they would answer them honestly. I urged her to ask them whether they would like to see Sharia implemented in the Netherlands at any time in the future, and whether they were working toward that end in any way, peaceful as well as violent. I asked her to ask them whether they would be content to live as equals with non-Muslims indefinitely in a Dutch pluralistic society, or whether they would ultimately hope to institute Islamic supremacy and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

She couldn’t ask them those questions, she told me. Such questions would immediately put their relationship on a confrontational plane, when cooperation was what they wanted, not confrontation. But, I sputtered, you’re not getting cooperation as it is. The confrontation is already upon us. What is to be gained by pretending that it isn’t happening?

The Rise of Hamas and Decline of Israeli Determination

The Jewish Press has an excellent commentary by Steven Plaut on Israeli leaders needing backbone transplants. He wonderfully relates the PA Nazi demand for a corridor linking Gaza to the West Bank to Hitler's similar demand from Poland prior to WWII.
The Rise of Hamas and Decline of Israeli Determination
By Steven Plaut

In the biblical saga of the exodus from Egypt, there is a great military mystery. We are told that when the Israelites left Goshen in Egypt, they had 600,000 men of fighting age in their ranks, and – at least according to one reading of the text – they were well armed (hamushim). That being the case, why did they behave in such a cowardly manner, shuddering as Pharaoh's army approached?

True, comments the great sage Ibn Ezra, the Egyptians had 600 chariots, but what are those when up against 600,000 fighting men? The medieval French rabbi Chezkuni makes the same point.

The mystery gets more mysterious just a few lines later. After crossing into the Sinai wilderness, a handful of Amalekite terrorists harass the Israelites. But how many Amalekites could there have been, given that they were living off roots and bugs in the desert with no manna? Yet even then, the Jews were unable to fight off the Amalekites without Divine intervention and supernatural assistance.

One explanation of why the Israelites had to spend 40 years in the desert is that they needed to be cured of their cowardice and defeatism. Military challenges and powerful Canaanite kingdoms awaited them in the campaign to conquer the Promised Land. The generation that had known exile and slavery was unable to cope with that. It was necessary to wait for the next generation, born in freedom, to tackle the task.

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The generational changing of the guard we read about in the Bible has been recreated in modern Israel, but in the reverse direction.

The generation that had been raised in exile, suffering persecution and massacre, entered the Promised Land as military heroes, brilliant tacticians, and determined fighters. Yet within a short time they had been replaced with a new generation, one raised in freedom in their own sovereign state. This new generation lost the determination and courage of their fathers and grandfathers. It became infected with defeatism and cowardice; increasingly, it lost its willingness to resist and even to survive as a nation.

This generational change was not apparent until the emergence of the Oslo peace process. In Israel's early years, Israelis manifested the courage and valor of the Israelites of the Book of Joshua. Small militias of Jews defeated the combined military forces of the invading Arab armies in the 1948-9 War of Independence. Modern Israel fought terrorism with a policy of "Zero Tolerance" and in the Sinai campaign of 1956 easily defeated Egyptian forces.

A decade later Israelis crushed the combined military might of the Arab world and liberated Jerusalem. They again defeated those same forces in 1973, despite being caught in a surprise attack on Yom Kippur. And Israelis continued to demonstrate courage and resourcefulness in the war against Arab terror, most dramatically with the dramatic rescue at Entebbe.

But some time between 1978 and 1992 a great transformation took place. Despite the long track record of military successes, the new generation of Israelis lost its willingness to fight and resist. It convinced itself that capitulation and appeasement are the only paths to peace. It decided that self-abasement is the key ingredient to good reations with its neighbors.

Israelis elected leaders who hectored the new generation over their selfishness and bigotry, who insisted that the only reason peace had not yet emerged was that Israelis did not desire it enough.

In a Middle East in which the Arabs control territory nearly twice the size of the Unites States (including Alaska), the new breed of Israeli leaders insisted that the war was still going on because Israelis held too much land – almost the size of New Jersey in total.

In a Middle East already containing 22 sovereign Arab states – one of those states already controlling two-thirds of the land of Mandatory Palestine – the new breed of political leader in Israel maintained that creation of a 23rd Arab state could solve the whole conflict.

Back when Israel was behind its 1949 "Green Line" borders, it was repeatedly attacked by Arab armies seeking its annihilation. But returning to those same borders (or something close to them), insist Israel's new leaders, will result in peace and tranquility.

From 1992 onward, Israeli leaders insisted that peace could be achieved by pretending that war did not exist. And the greatest need of all, urgent and important above all else, was that the new generation of Israelis forget all of human and Jewish history, lest they infer from history that the policy of Oslo appeasement would not work.

In many ways, the Hamas Putsch is the natural and inevitable outcome of 14 years of Israeli policy. It is not at all an exaggeration to say that Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin installed the Hamas Amalekites in power when they shook Arafat's hand on the White House lawn in 1993. It was there and then that they welcomed a Hamas army into the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. East Jerusalem was turned over to Hamas for all intents and purposes when Peres and Yossi Beilin sent their representatives (illegally) to meet with PLO terrorists in Oslo in the late1980's.

The Hamas Putsch was not a surprise development but rather the inevitable fruition of the doctrine of appeasement and capitulation that has been embraced by an entire generation of Israelis. The "Oslo approach" has failed at each and every step of the way, producing the opposite of the results its apologists insisted they would deliver.

Israeli goodwill measures produced escalated terrorism and suicide bombings. Israeli niceness was interpreted as weakness, and strengthened the most xenophobic forces and open Islamofascists among the Palestinians. Israeli flexibility and concessions triggered a worldwide campaign of anti-Semitism and demonization of Israel, especially in Europe. The Palestinians did not respond with flexibility and moderation, as the Oslo Camp had promised, but rather with open preparation for war. Israel has demonstrated since 1993 that the Jews are on the run, that the Jews have lost their will to survive. Palestinian Arabs drew the logical conclusion.

With each failure of the "Oslo approach," with each manifestation that Israel's appeasement was resulting in inflated Palestinian expectations from armed conflict with Israel and escalating Palestinian intransigence, Oslo defeatism metastasized further throughout the political system of Israel.

In the early 1980's, only the Israeli Communist party and its front groups were advocating an armed sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. By the late 1990's, this had become not only the platform of the Israeli Labor Party but also of the Likud. Even the "hawkish" wing of the Likud, led by Ariel Sharon, adopted what had been the Communist position.

The unilateral Israeli eviction of the settlers from Gaza resulted in a massive escalation in the firing of rockets and mortars into Jewish civilian areas in the Negev. Yet the lesson that Israel's political leaders have drawn from this is that more evictions of Jews, this time from the West Bank, are what is needed to restore calm.

And in spite of hopes that the Hamas Putsch might at long last wake Israelis up to the folly of their overnment's policies these past 13 years, acting Prime Minister Olmert's first two responses to the Hamas victory were to turn over 200 million shekels in tax revenues to the Hamas and then to send mounted police in to evict Jews from their homes in the settlement of Amona.

In the coming Knesset elections in Israel, all three major parties are advocating the same basic strategic position: eviction of Jewish settlers from most of the West Bank without Arab quid pro quo, turning the other cheek when rockets land in Jewish areas, and continued support for a Palestinian state.

Indeed, buried in the Israeli election news is the fact that Israeli voters have just lost their only ballot option to vote against the Oslo "peace process" and against the pursuit of peace through appeasement and self-abasement. The last holdout, the only party in the last parliament not promoting peace through appeasement, had been the Ichud Leumi party, itself a coalition of several smaller factions.

The National Religious Party (NRP) or MAFDAL had been paying rhetorical lip service to opposing Oslo, although few believe it was really opposed. After all, the NRP had sat in Israeli government coalitions of both Labor and Likud that implemented earlier Oslo appeasements without batting an eyelash. One wag suggested that if Israel's government finally decided to move Israel back to its 1949 borders, the only concern of the NRP would be that the withdrawal not take place on the Sabbath.

As a coalition partner, the NRP never had any problem abandoning its nominal opposition to Oslo in exchange for fiscal handouts to its party institutions and schools. The merging of Ichud Leumi with the NRP means, first of all, that the new party is abandoning the chance of retaining the votes of secularist Israeli voters opposed to Oslo – people repulsed by the NRP. In addition, any voter, of any level of religiosity, who casts a vote for this new party out of anti-Oslo conviction must know that there is a distinct chance of seeing his own vote perverted. How long will it take for the new party to sell out and cash in its Knesset support for some funds (dare I say pork?) handed over to NRP institutions?

The worse the failures of the Oslo process, the fewer the electoral possibilities for Israelis to oppose it.

One fundamental plank in the Oslo peace process is to provide the Hamas entity with a "safe corridor" that links the Gaza Strip with the West Bank. Israel would be prohibited from stopping the movement of weapons, explosives, and terrorists along this "safe corridor." The Americans and the EU have been pressuring Israel to allow the operations of the "safe corridor" to begin immediately.

Now that there is no Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip, there are also no obstacles to the massive importing of state-of-the-art advanced weapons into the area via Egypt. These likely include shoulder-fired missiles. There will be no more Kassams for Hamas, those pieces of junk held together by chewing gum and glue.

The emerging Hamas terrorist army will have 21st-century hi-tech weapons. And the "safe corridor" will ensure that these also reach the West Bank. Shoulder missiles that can knock down civilian planes will be in the hands of Hamas terrorists positioned in areas over which planes fly when landing at and taking off from Ben Gurion Airport.

The most amazing thing is that the Israeli political establishment has learned absolutely nothing from previous cases of implementation of "safe corridors." Israel's will not be the first. The most infamous is probably the"Polish Corridor" that Hitler demanded in 1939.

When Poland was reconstituted after World War I, Danzig remained a free city and parts of East Prussia remained under German rule. After Hitler took power, ethnic Germans in Danzig formed a Nazi party and took control of the city. Following Hitler's success in cowing the West, winning all his demands at Munich, and then destroying Czechoslovakia, the next item on the Nazi agenda was a "safe corridor" between Germany proper and Danzig/East Prussia through Poland. Hitler was sure the West would again acquiesce and appease.

But Poland dug in its heels and refused the demand for a safe corridor. Poland understood that the notion of a safe corridor represented the end of Polish sovereignty on its own territory – that it was little more than a tactic to divide Poland and make it more vulnerable to invasion. With Hitler's forces grouping in the West and the Red Army poised to conquer Poland from the East, Poland, friendless and poorly armed, still chose war rather than surrender to the demand for a "Polish Corridor."

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, with the Red Army following. After Poland's defeat, Danzig and the Polish Corridor, as well as much other territory in western Poland, were annexed to Germany. (After World War II, the entire German population of East Prussia and Danzig was expelled by Poland.)

In recent years we have been hearing cries from the Israeli Left that the forthcoming "Palestinian state" must be provided with territorial "continuity." The only problem is that one look at the map shows that if a Palestinian state were to have territorial continuity, the Jewish state would lose its territorial continuity.

This in fact is the point of the demand for a "safe corridor," which would simply be the first step toward constraining Israeli sovereignty, armed aggression against Israel, and territorial dismemberment. The Polish government of 1939 understood that the "Polish Corridor" would amount to a first step on the path to self-annihilation and refused German demands. The Israeli political establishment has far less backbone and common sense.

The "corridor" is not the only manifestation of the refusal of the Israeli elite to learn from history. Since the Hamas Putsch, we have been hearing arguments about how Abu Mazen will stay on as Palestinian president while Hamas "only" controls the Palestinian parliament. Supposedly this could mean that Abu Mazen will keep Hamas restrained.

Speaking of historical precedents, this strongly resembles similar predictions made when Hitler took power and Paul von Hindenberg was Reich president. Von Hindenberg will keep Hitler restrained, was the accepted wisdom and media spin of that day.

Of course, within a year von Hindenberg was dead and Hitler had seized all presidential powers.

But don't bother telling any of that to Israel's leaders. They still prefer life in a fantasy bubble to learning from history.

Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com.

QOTD:Martin Kramer

QOTD:Martin Kramer

The present Muslim campaign has its share of opportunists. But it is also driven by a religious fervor. At some point, a Muslim equivalent of Pope Urban II could appear. This time, the crusade would be a Muslim one. Its advance scouts are already at work in Europe.

The West (and Israel) have mocked the prophet--not Muhammad, but Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. Our elites have spent a decade denying the truth at the core of his thesis: that the Islamic world and the West are bound to collide. Even now, we glibly predict that possession of political power and nuclear weapons will make Islamists act predictably. It all makes perfect sense?to us. But the cartoon affair and the Hamas elections are timely reminders that our perfect sense isn't theirs.

Fortunately, it isn't too late. There is a clash of civilizations, but there isn't yet a war of the worlds. "You do not have God," they say. "God is with us." That is their prayer. But they lack power, resources and weapons. Today they burn flags; a united West can still deny them the means to burn more. It can do so if it acts swiftly and resolutely, to keep nuclear fire out of Iran's hands, and to assure that Hamas fails.

QOTD:Jerusalem Post

QOTD:The Jerusalem Post

It's January 30, 1933, and here's what the Cleveland Press reports from Washington under the headline, US Unruffled by Hitler Rise.
"High authorities here regard with complacence Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany... They [express] faith that Hitler would act with moderation... Experts based this belief on past events showing that so-called radical groups usually moderated, once in power."

QOTD:Motley Fool

QOTD: Richard Gibbons in Motley Fool

America is arguably the most resilient country on the planet. Last century, we faced two World Wars, the Cold War, communism, a depression, the failure of numerous banks, the impeachment of a president, an oil shock, interest rates rising from 2% to 15%, several stock market crashes, and disco. We didn't just survive; we overcame these challenges and prospered.

QOTD: Jonathan Rosenblum

QOTD:Jonathan Rosenblum

Why do so many Moslems naturally respond to insult with threats of murder and why is democratic tolerance so foreign to them?

From the moment Islam swept out of the Arabian peninsula, it was a religion of conquest. Military success became associated with divine favor, and the expansion of Islamic rule a religious imperative. The reversal of those early triumphs over the last five hundred years is thus a continual affront not only to Moslems but to their god.

Traditionally, most Moslems have had little experience living with people of other creeds, except as rulers, and thus little interest in rules that allow people of different views and faiths to dwell together in relative harmony.

QOTD: Dave Barry on Red States and Blue States

QOTD: Dave Barry on Red State residents versus Blue State residents as retold by James Q. Wilson

As summed up by the distinguished social scientist who writes humor columns under the name of Dave Barry, residents of Red states are "ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks," while Blue-state residents are "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

QOTD: Professor Paul Eidelberg

QOTD: Professor Paul Eidelberg on America's War Aims (what they should be rather than what they are)

The U.S. should issue a declaratory policy having the following elements:
(1) The U.S. will regard as a belligerent any Islamic state that supports or harbors terrorists.
(2) The U.S. will regard as racist any Islamic state that encourages its people to hate and kill non-Muslims, and will take action to have that state banned from the United Nations.
(3) The U.S. will proclaim that the bellicose concept of jihad contradicts the UN Charter as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which prescribes “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial, or religious groups.” Accordingly, the U.S will take action to terminate the UN membership of any Islamic state that does not renounce that concept.
(4) The U.S. will regard public renunciation of jihad as the litmus test of whether a Muslim state is sincerely committed to peace and worthy of diplomatic relations.

The war aims of the United States should not include wholesale democratization of Islamdom—an impractical and, in many countries, an undesirable objective. In such countries, constitutional monarchy is preferable. The political objective is to rid Islam of tyranny. The moral objective is to rid Islam of its jihadic ethos.

QOTD: Melanie Phillips

QOTD:Melanie Phillips

The West shows daily that it will go to extraordinary lengths to deny the screamingly obvious and take refuge in its lethal fantasies of rational actors prosecuting irrational conflicts. Thus Hamas is guaranteed to sow terminal confusion by engaging in precisely the same kind of lies and mind-twisting manipulation that has brought such success for the Palestinian cause among the dupes of the West.