Political Mavens » Islam=La Ism

Something to think about from Julia Gorin regarding Islam:

More and more people — at least in Europe, which is more intimately acquainted with Islam than Americans are — have been calling a spade a spade, and figuring out that Islam is not a religion, but an alternative political ideology and system that uses religion as a cover while it spreads. In short, they've figured out that Islam is just like any other "ism".

She brings in this quote from Europe:

"Unlike other religions," [Swiss People’s party MP Ulrich Schluer] argues, "Islam is not only a religion. It's an ideology aiming to create a different legal system. That's sharia. That's a big problem and in a proper democracy it has to be tackled. If the politicians don't, the people will."

The Real Meaning of Chanukah

Michael Medved on Chanukah:

The brutal truth about the holiday of Hanukah, which begins this year on December 5th, is that it is intensely and incurably politically incorrect. The heroes of the Hanukah story—the Maccabees—were uncompromising zealots and fundamentalists, vigorous representatives of the Judean "religious right" of the Second Century B.C.

There was nothing tolerant or relativistic about them: they risked their lives to take back the Holy Temple in Jerusalem from the Hellenistic multi-culturalists who had installed a variety of idols and pagan gods to provide worship alternatives. The very name Hanukah comes from the Hebrew for "dedication" or "consecration": it's about purification and re-commitment on a national and personal level, and standing up to misguided alien cultures, no matter how popular, seductive and powerful.

This year, when the Jewish holiday arrives nearly three weeks before Christmas, there’s a good chance to keep its bracing and challenging themes appropriately distinct from the generalized seasonal cheer.

How many people actually know this?!

The Great American Jewish Placebo

George D. Hanus, the chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, admits that Reform and Conservative Judaism have only contributed to the assimilation and intermarriage of a huge swath of America's Jews.

The word "placebo" is derived from the Latin for "I shall please" and denotes a medical treatment whose only benefit is in the mind of the patient.

Throughout medical history and even as late as the late 1940's, sugar pills were prescribed by physicians in the hope that taking a pill would mobilize patients' internal powers to combat illness. It is the nature of a placebo that it works better for minor maladies than terminal diseases. A competent doctor would never administer an inert placebo when a genuine treatment was available.

The United States, as we all know, is a country of immigrants. For centuries, wave after wave arrived on these shores, fleeing persecution, hoping to better their economic condition and merge into the mainstream of American society

Jews are no exception to this pattern. Immigrant Jews rapidly learned English, adopted American dress styles and sent their children to colleges and graduate schools as they became respectable members of society. It is no accident that American Jews quickly moved out of poor urban neighborhoods into the suburbs and have become the most successful ethnic group in the United States.

Even while we were moving up the ladder, most Jews did not forget the Torah injunctions to remember our heritage. So we Jews set up neighborhood synagogues, spent our free time involved with Federations and Jewish fraternal organizations and built museums to remember destroyed Jewish communities. We collected money, attended meetings and ate chicken at fundraising dinners. And to religiously educate our children, we invented the Great American Jewish Placebo: Hebrew and Sunday school.

Imagine our surprise and shock, several generations later, when the placebo turned out to be a sugar pill. Our grown children did not follow in our Jewish footsteps. Today, a majority are intermarrying and assimilating. They are walking away from 4,000 years of Jewish history and we are shocked. After all, didn’t we do everything that our rabbinic and philanthropic leadership told us to do?

We provided good homes, sent them to top colleges, gave our annual charity pledges and even ensured their Jewish education in Hebrew and Sunday schools until bar mitzvah. When our children bitterly complained that they hated Hebrew school, while their friends were having fun in other after-school activities, we told them to hush because it was a rite of passage to suffer through Hebrew school just as we parents did. When they didn’t want to continue Hebrew school after the age of 13, we didn’t insist.

But we never imagined we would end up having grandchildren who have abandoned their heritage, know very little about Judaism and don’t believe in God. We never expected to visit their homes in December only to see a giant Christmas tree in the living room.

We are fortunate to live in a country that has allowed us to excel in every field of American endeavor without fear of persecution. But why have we not been equally successful at preserving our Jewish identity?

Part of the problem is the failed model of Hebrew and Sunday school. We delude ourselves that it will ensure the next generation of committed Jews. The great tragedy is that, by now, everybody knows it doesn’t work, yet we continue to go about business as usual. It is the Great American Jewish Placebo.

As documented by WJD's Mindy Schiller in last month’s cover story, "What’s Wrong With Hebrew School?" according to a new study by noted Jewish American sociologist Steven M. Cohen, the likelihood of intermarriage actually increases among students who attend once-a-week Sunday schools, and attending congregational school—two or more times a week, for less than seven years— hardly decreases that percentage. [Emphasis mine.]

"A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote the poet Alexander Pope in the 18th century, and this seems to apply to Hebrew and Sunday schools today. In fact, at a recent conference of Jewish educators, Joel Hoffman, a language expert and congregational teacher, told The Jerusalem Post, "Our Hebrew schools aren't teaching Hebrew, the kids are miserable and are making the teachers miserable in the process."

So why do Hebrew schools still exist? Because they are funding mechanisms for synagogues, which depend on the dues of families paying for their children's bar/bat mitzvah and confirmation ceremonies to survive. If it weren't for Hebrew and Sunday schools, synagogues would have a lot of families show up from time to time without becoming members. The discontinuation of the Hebrew school model would disrupt the financial structure of congregational Jewish life in this country.

So if the dismal performance of Hebrew schools is one of the biggest open secrets in the Jewish world, why do they remain in place? Like all placebos, Jewish leaders and parents believe they have a benefit. Also, they are relatively inexpensive to administer. We have treated Jewish education as a communal joke by allocating laughable, paltry financial resources to our children's spiritual development.

It is time to declare Hebrew and Sunday school a placebo that is failing our community. After many decades of experience, few academics or rabbis would assert that our current Hebrew school structure is generating spiritually engaged, Torah knowledgeable and truly happy children, who are proud of being Jewish.

It is very troubling that American rabbis and Federation leadership seem oblivious to the obvious. In the United States, there are approximately 1.2 million Jewish children between the ages of 4 and 19. If the current trajectory continues, approximately 55 percent of these children will intermarry over the next 17 years and create 660,000 intermarried units. The 540,000 remaining Jewish children will marry other Jews and create 270,000 Jewish homes. The enormity of this trend is devastating.

Just as no doctor would prescribe a placebo when a truly effective remedy was available, so too our Jewish leadership is aware that there is a potent way of keeping kids Jewish. If day school were free and available to all Jewish children regardless of their stream of affiliation or family finances, the problems of intermarriage and assimilation in America would be significantly diminished. If our children felt connected spiritually with God and our heritage, they would become enthusiastic links for the next 4,000 years.

Can anyone imagine the outrage that would occur if a doctor administered a placebo to a patient, while an effective but more expensive treatment was available?

All parents must decide for their families how they want to Jewishly educate their children. It is a very personal decision. However, there are tens of thousands of young Jewish families who want to attend Jewish day schools, but the tuition costs are economic barriers to entry. This is outrageous. Torah education was never meant to be only for the rich.

It is time that the Jewish community demand an adoption of policies that constitute an effective resolution of the crisis. We must clearly articulate that it is each Jewish community's absolute responsibility to fund universal Jewish day school education for all of our children, irrespective of a child's stream of religious affiliation or family's financial resources. If the existing Federations are unable or unwilling to adopt and implement this policy, then it is incumbent on each Jewish community to start independent fundraising initiatives that focus entirely on Jewish day school education.

We are the guardians of our children's Jewish identity and the custodians of the Jewish future. We are failing miserably in both areas. Massive funding of Jewish education is the remedy required to strengthen and heal our American Jewish community. Everything else is a placebo.

George D. Hanus is chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, the Jewish Broadcasting Network and the World Jewish Digest.

It's the Irreconcilable Differences, Stupid

Hillel Halkin in the New York Sun makes the case that the wishful thinking and self-delusion of Rice, the US State Department, and other peaceniks will not change the basic facts on the ground. [Emphasis mine]:

The once much-vaunted Annapolis conference has been reduced, a few days before its convening, to the dimensions of a birthday party for an unpopular child at school.

Everyone now agrees that the parents were foolish to think they could improve their child's social standing by staging an event in its honor with lots of food, fun, games, and a special magic show, but the invitations have already gone out and it's too late to call the party off.

All that can be hoped for now is that enough children will turn up to prevent a fiasco and that the party will be gotten through quickly without fights, broken dishes, or other embarrassments.

The day after Annapolis there will be a post-mortem. It will not tell us anything that a pre-mortem could not have told us just as well, which is that this Annapolis represented the kind of mistaken thinking that has characterized every American or international attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 1991 Madrid Conference: Namely, the belief that there is something in the world of diplomacy called "process" that has an intrinsically positive momentum of its own capable of overcoming deep disagreements on substance between two sides to a dispute.

Just get these two sides to sit down and start talking, the reasoning goes, and little by little they will find points of agreement that will increase trust between them and lead to an overall settlement.

This is of course nonsense. There is nothing intrinsically positive about any diplomatic process. Such processes work when potential points of agreement already exist and can be focused on. When they don't exist, all the processes in the world can't conjure them up. On the contrary, they simply create frustration, disappointment, and rancor.

And in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, such points of agreement do not exist. This is not, as international diplomacy and public opinion go on wishfully thinking, because the two sides are behaving like stubborn children who need to have some common sense cajoled or spanked into them rather than like rational adults.

It is because each side has perfectly rational interests and ambitions that are not compatible with the rational interests and ambitions of the other side. The only way to achieve an agreement between them, paradoxically, would be for one of them to start behaving irrationally.

What are Israel's interests and ambitions? They are to emerge from the conflict as a state that is military secure; that has a safe Jewish majority that will be maintainable in the future; and that is not asked to uproot more settlers from their homes than can be politically or economically managed.

Military security means expanding the 1967 borders in key sectors and ensuring that any Palestinian state will be demilitarized. A safe Jewish majority means that no Palestinian refugee families will be readmitted to Israel. A manageable settler policy means that Israel will retain the large "settlement blocs" near and around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

And what are the Palestinians' interests and ambitions? They are to create a state for themselves that, however tiny and unsatisfactory, will in its initial stage be as large and territorially contiguous as possible; that will have half of Jerusalem as its capital; and that can dream of eventually regaining more or all of historic Palestine by pressing irredentist claims as the Arab population of Israel grows and destabilizes Israel's demographic status quo. A maximally large and territorially contiguous state means near total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. A capital in Jerusalem means Israel's yielding much of that city. An irredentist dream means standing firm on the refugee's "right of return" while refusing to accept Israel's definition of itself as a Jewish state – a definition, among other things, that includes Israel's right to have an immigration policy that favor Jews over non-Jews.

These interests and ambitions are not mutually compatible. No amount of diplomatic "process" will make them so. Nor is it the case, as the conventional wisdom has it, that the problem in Palestinian-Israeli relations is that both peoples currently have weak governments that makes it impossible for them to compromise. Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon ran stronger governments and did not make peace either. The strength or weakness of a people's government has nothing to do with its strategic interests.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may not be exactly a zero-sum game, but neither is it a potentially win-win situation. If one side wins by achieving its goals, the other side will have lost. If neither side achieves its goals, both will have lost. At this point, either's capacity to compromise is extremely limited.

Like many conflicts in history, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not come to an end by means of a negotiated settlement. A viable Jewish state and a viable Palestinian state west of the Jordan River are not both possible.

The conflict will come to an end because the case for a viable Jewish state is the stronger of the two, the Jewish people having no other country and the Palestinians having Jordan, which will sooner or later re-unite with the 90% of the West Bank that Israel will withdraw from. How and when this will happen is impossible to predict. That it will happen is a near certainty. Annapolis will be quickly forgotten, even quicker than the Madrid Conference was. The dire prophecies of what will happen if it fails ("A catastrophe!" Israel's president Shimon Peres, the chief engineer of the catastrophic Oslo Agreement, has predicted) will not come true.

The Palestinian people is not in the mood for a new intifada and Hamas is not on the verge of taking over the West Bank. The broken dishes, if there are any, will be cleaned up and the real processes in the Middle East, which are not the diplomatic ones, will continue to take place.

QOTD: Henry Kissinger

Bret Stevens in the WSJ:

Henry Kissinger once observed that "when enough prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than abandon it."

QOTD: Funding Alternative Energy

From a WSJ editorial, Global Warming, Inc.:

The Manhattan Institute's Peter Huber, a former engineering professor at MIT, exaggerates only slightly when he says that "Basically, 'alternative' [energy] means stuff that nobody actually uses."

Three Golden Threads of Western Civilization

Bruce S. Thornton in his article Golden Threads shows what Ibn Warraq offers as the keys to Western advancement and freedom.

[In his book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Ibn Warraq identifies] what he calls the "three golden threads" woven through Western culture since the time of the Greeks: rationalism, universalism, and self-criticism. As Warraq argues, Western intellectual curiosity has driven an interest in other cultures and peoples and created a magnificent edifice of scholarship formalizing that interest. The Western notion of a universal human nature reinforced this intellectual openness to other cultures. And self-criticism has been the engine of the West’s improvement, leading to the rejection of traditional practices that were unjust or inefficient, as Warraq shows with his discussion of the British Empire’s war on slavery. In fact, the West’s most trenchant critics, [Edward] Said included, have always been Westerners.

It is the absence of these golden threads, Warraq believes, not Western crimes abetted by "Orientalism," that accounts for the backwardness and stagnation of the Muslim Middle East—a region that with few exceptions lacks interest in other peoples, adheres unthinkingly to fossilized traditions, and is unable to look critically at its failures. These characteristics have fostered a paranoid cult of victimhood that blames the West for the failures of Middle Eastern regimes...

Warraq, however, is honest enough to accept that his three golden threads have a tendency to degenerate into dangerous weaknesses. Rationalism becomes scientism, universalism becomes a flabby tolerance that disguises a lack of conviction, and self-criticism becomes an irrational self-hatred. Add multiculturalism’s sentimental adulation of a non-Western "Other," superior to the money-grubbing Westerner, and the self-loathing West has essentially validated the jihadists’ reasons for wanting to destroy it. Yet despite these developments, the great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience and thought, human rights, and liberal democracy—remain the best means for all people, no matter what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom.

The rules of Palestinian politics ...

The rules of Palestinian politics ...
By Barry Rubin

Because of the rules of Palestinian politics which are absolutely fatal to the hope of getting a Palestinian state, becoming more moderate, ending terrorism, or stopping even officially sponsored PA incitement to commit terrorism. Palestinians know these rules well though outsiders seem largely unaware of them. Exceptions can be found but few and since these are considered shameful they go unpublicized and thus form no precedent for changing the rules, which are:

1. Palestinians cannot stop other Palestinians from attacking Israel. To do so would be betraying the cause, becoming Israel's lackey. This applies even if the Israelis are bringing in supplies or providing jobs to Palestinians, or if the attack damages Palestinian interests. If the victims are schoolchildren or shoppers or people riding on a bus, of course, is irrelevant in this world view.

2. He who is most militant is always right. Extremism equals heroism. This is one reason why Fatah has such a difficult time competing with Hamas. It cannot denounce these rivals for being too hardline and intransigent. Suicide bombers along with those who incite and manage them are role models, not misled individuals, much less evil ones.

3. More violence is good and a victory if it inflicts casualties or damage on Israel. Other than ritual denunciations for the foreign media, these are matters for pride, with the implication being that they advance the cause rather than sabotage it.

4. No Israeli government can do anything good. Thus, Olmert is no better than anyone else even as he withdraws from the Gaza Strip, offers to accept a Palestinian state, and is ready to give up east Jerusalem. Some Palestinian leaders can talk privately to Israeli counterparts about cooperation and even their dream of peace but don't tell this to their own people.

5. Since Palestinians are the perpetual victim they are entitled to everything they want and never need to give anything in exchange for Israeli concessions. Thus, the preferred PA diplomatic option is that Israel withdraws from the West Bank and east Jerusalem, recognizes an independent Palestinian state, releases all Palestinian prisoners, and then talks can begin. (Note: I thought of this as a satire but a high-ranking Syrian official just proposed the equivalent on that front.)

6. No Palestinian should be imprisoned for attacks on Israel one minute longer than required by international public relations' needs. After all, if they are doing heroic deeds against an evil enemy — even by murdering civilians on purpose — why should they be punished?

7. Fatah won't discipline or expel anyone for launching attacks.

8. Wiping Israel off the map is morally correct. If anyone says anything different they will be scared or ashamed, justifying their lapse as a temporary tactical measure or way to fool enemies.

9. While pretending to be nationalist, the movement sets as top priority the so-called "right of return," the demand that all Palestinian refugees or their descendents — several million people — must be allowed to live in Israel. It is better not to get a state than to give up this demand. Even though having many Palestinians go live in Israel would make Palestine weaker and poorer it is better to focus on destroying Israel from within.

10. It is more important to be steadfast and patient with a terrible status quo than to make big gains by ending the conflict forever. To do so would give up future Palestinians' chance to seek total victory. Their right to all of the land cannot be given away.

11. No speeches, no foreign aid, and no international plans or meetings have altered these basic rules. Palestinian leaders may sincerely voice their dismay with this problem privately but won't fight to smash them. If they ever really do change we'll know. But until then, these are the reasons why the Palestinian side cannot and will not reach for peace or keep existing commitments very well. Even if a handful of top Palestinians want to reach agreement with Israel, they cannot — and even worse, dare not — violate these commandments.

QOTD: John Adams

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
— John Adams

How Liberals Build the Welfare State

William Voegeli via Jonah Goldberg

"Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they're building," writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, "The Trouble with Limited Government," in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Right On: Evil and the passage of time

Michael Freund, THE JERUSALEM POST.

In the heart of Brussels, capital of the new and enlightened Europe, stands a large and imposing monument that shamelessly commemorates a mass murderer of Jews.

Sitting atop his horse, his sword raised triumphantly in the air, the figure of the medieval knight Godfrey of Bouillon dominates the city's Place Royale.

The jubilant statue, adjacent to a grand structure still in use by Belgium's royal family, depicts the Belgian-born nobleman as he embarked on his way to the Holy Land at the start of the infamous First Crusade.

Godfrey has long been revered by Europeans as the liberator of Jerusalem, the man who helped free the city from the hands of the Muslim "infidels" more than nine centuries ago. He has been the subject of epic poems and operas, as well as a topic of literary tribute, and was once even selected to appear on a list of the "greatest Belgians."

But Jews remember Godfrey quite differently. Far from being a gallant personality, he was ruthlessly cruel and unforgiving, and spurred the men under his command to commit one ghastly anti-Semitic atrocity after another.

The statue in his memory has been in place for more than a century, and it remains a blight on the city and the nation that serve as its host. And with the tides of Jew-hatred on the rise across Europe, now more than ever is the time for Israel and the Jewish people to demand that this moral eyesore be summarily torn down.

GODFREY entered the pages of infamy in 1096, after Pope Urban II's call to arms the previous year to reverse the Muslim occupation of the Land of Israel. After putting together a rag-tag army of thousands, Godfrey is reported to have said to his recruits: "In this, our Holy War, we shall slay all the children of Israel wherever we shall find them. I shall not rest content until I have exterminated the Jews."

Fearful of what the marauding band would do to them, the Jews of Cologne and Mainz each raised the enormous sum of 500 silver marks, which they paid as tribute to Godfrey in a medieval version of "protection money." The noble knight was only too happy to pocket the funds, and then renege on his promise.

As they made their war across France and Germany 911 years ago this month, the Crusaders left a path of death and destruction in their wake, terrorizing the Jews and massacring tens of thousands of innocents.

Entire communities were wiped out in a frenzy of hate and bloodletting, as the Jews of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were destroyed. A quarter to a third of European Jewry, and possibly more, was annihilated as armies of rabble led by men such as Godfrey, Peter the Hermit, Count Emicho and others swept across the continent on their way to Jerusalem.

So great was the disaster that befell the Jews during the First Crusade that a special prayer known as Av Harachamim ("O Merciful Father") was composed lamenting "the pious, the upright and the blameless, the holy communities who laid down their lives for the sanctification of His name." It is still recited each week in synagogues around the world as part of the regular Sabbath service.

Three years later, in July 1099, Godfrey and his men broke through the walls of the Holy City and proceeded to slaughter Muslims and Jews alike.

It is said that many Jews were driven into a synagogue by the Crusaders, who then set the building alight as Godfrey marched around the structure and engaged in song.

IS THIS really the kind of person who should be celebrated in the center of Europe? Sure, you might be wondering, that may very well be correct. But who really cares? After all, it was a long time ago, so why bother dredging up the distant past?

But the fact is that it does matter. As various historians have noted, the Crusades were, in effect, "the first Holocaust," the opening foray of Europe's millennial-old attempt in the modern era to eradicate the Jewish people. It paved the way for later expulsions, persecutions and forced conversions, all of which culminated in the German Holocaust six decades ago.

The passage of time does not dilute or diminish the evil done by Godfrey and his ilk. If, several centuries from now, someone wished to erect a monument in memory of one of Hitler's henchmen, we would surely not remain silent in the face of such offense.

And, deep down, we know it to be true that the people whom a nation chooses to honor and commemorate say a great deal about the values they embrace and wish to uphold.

Hence, it sends a stark and terrible message when men such as Godfrey receive acclaim, and it is therefore incumbent upon Israel and the Jewish people to protest this affront to the Belgian government.

Who knows? Perhaps, on their way to work, European Union officials in Brussels might just feel a slight pang of guilt and realize the weight of their historical and moral responsibility to act against those who seek to destroy Israel, such as our foes in Gaza and Teheran.

So let's raise our voices loud and clear, and send a firm but clear message to the mayor of Brussels and the Belgian leadership: Tear down that obscene statue of Godfrey of Bouillon.

Deflating the organic mythology

Deflating the organic mythology
By Betsy Hart

Occasionally, I will buy "organic" fruits and vegetables or other food, supposedly meaning food grown without pesticides or fertilizers or other chemicals.

But when I buy the stuff, it's always by accident.

(Ditto for "fat-free" foods, like ice cream or half-and-half or cookies. Once in a while I'll buy the "fat-free" varieties without realizing what I've done, only to gag when I put it in my mouth. I mean, if I want to eat a goodie, I want the satisfaction of the real thing.)

Other people feel virtuous when they buy expensive organics. I feel I've been had.

A recent piece in Time magazine backs me up. In "Rethinking Organics" by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the doctor writes that while few things make people feel more "virtuous" than eating organic food, there's little evidence that they are either more nutritious or any safer for our bodies than traditionally grown produce with their fertilizers and pesticides.

Gee, you mean "organics" won't save the world after all?

For starters, the doctor notes, correctly, that researchers just haven't made any connection between our ongoing trace-pesticide consumption from food and a long-term negative effect on our health. In fact, given that life expectancy is up by decades in the United States from the turn of the last century, and that cancer rates (not just death rates) have been dropping across the board since the early 1990s, one has to say that that just makes sense on the face of it. Could it be that since now fruits and vegetables are cheap, luscious-looking and available year-round (Strawberries in January? Once unthinkable!) thanks largely to chemicals and fertilizers, it means people are eating more of them with incumbent health benefits? Answer: yes.

Ah, but aren't organics, grown in the heart of the earth Mother Nature's way, just loaded with extra vitamins and nutrients? Think again, says Gupta. Studies have shown no or sometimes a very tiny difference between organics and conventionally farmed produce when it comes to nutrients. There may be one exception. Tomatoes. The problem there is that while organically grown tomatoes were shown to be higher in anti-oxidants than traditionally grown tomatoes in one study, the organics in the study were grown in highly controlled settings that might not be replicated at all in the real world.

(By the way, here's a little health nugget that may also seem counterintuitive: Frozen vegetables — yikes — will typically preserve their nutrients more than fresh ones, of whatever organic or non-organic stripe. Like any living thing, vegetables start to break down once they are no longer living.)

It's true one objection I have to organics is that they are typically more expensive, sometimes far more expensive, than traditionally grown produce. They even appear in processed foods like spaghetti sauce, which is completely ridiculous. (Gupta says processing takes away (begin italic) any (end italic) benefit of organics.) But if a family is so convinced by the organic crowd that they offer such amazing health benefits that the family has to splurge on organics, even including organic milk and eggs, well, they might be eating fewer fruits and vegetables and dairy overall, and that does have negative health consequences.

But what most bothers me is that some of the claims of organic advocates almost resemble a crusade about saving family farms, and the environment and maybe next our souls by eating organic. Hence the slogan, "Think locally, act globally, buy organic."

But it seems it's actually thoughtlessness that's so typically involved, in what has become a sort of feel-good moral crusade for organic foods. It's so easy to think of organics — or, rather, feel about organics — as some kind of cure-all and inherently virtuous along with things like recycling. (Never mind if the newspapers we self-righteously lug to the bottom of the driveway typically sit in huge warehouses before they're finally burned or buried.) It's no fun to have to think through a cost-benefit analysis. That requires, well, thinking.

And in our culture, it's just easy, it just feels good ... to feel good.

Well, this is one gal who "thinks" it's just fine to buy lots of cheap, luscious-looking produce from the conventionally-farmed-food aisles at the grocery. I'm thinking locally, all right. About what's best for my family.

Moral Paralysis of the West

Thomas Sowell describes exactly why I think the West is in serious trouble in confronting evil. Pebble to JWR.

"Moral paralysis" is a term that has been used to describe the inaction of France, England and other European democracies in the 1930s, as they watched Hitler build up the military forces that he later used to attack them.

It is a term that may be painfully relevant to our own times.

Back in the 1930s, the governments of the democratic countries knew what Hitler was doing — and they knew that they had enough military superiority at that point to stop his military buildup in its tracks. But they did nothing to stop him.

Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today — "negotiations."

No leader of a democratic nation was ever more popular than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — wildly cheered in the House of Commons by opposition parties as well as his own — when he returned from negotiations in Munich in 1938, waving an agreement and declaring that it meant "peace in our time."

We know now how short that time was. Less than a year later, World War II began in Europe and spread across the planet, killing tens of millions of people and reducing many cities to rubble in Europe and Asia.

Looking back after that war, Winston Churchill said, "There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action." The earlier it was done, the less it would have cost.

At one point, Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks "without the firing of a single shot," Churchill said.

That point came in 1936 — three years before World War II began — when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, in violation of two international treaties.

At that point, France alone was so much more powerful than Germany that the German generals had secret orders to retreat immediately at the first sign of French intervention.

As Hitler himself confided, the Germans would have had to retreat "with our tail between our legs," because they did not yet have enough military force to put up even a token resistance.

Why did the French not act and spare themselves and the world the years of horror that Hitler's aggressions would bring? The French had the means but not the will.

"Moral paralysis" came from many things. The death of a million French soldiers in the First World War and disillusionment with the peace that followed cast a pall over a whole generation.

Pacifism became vogue among the intelligentsia and spread into educational institutions. As early as 1932, Winston Churchill said: "France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core."

It was morally paralyzed.

History may be interesting but it is the present and the future that pose the crucial question: Is America today the France of yesterday?

We know that Iran is moving swiftly toward nuclear weapons while the United Nations is moving slowly — or not at all — toward doing anything to stop them.

It is a sign of our irresponsible Utopianism that anyone would even expect the UN to do anything that would make any real difference.

Not only the history of the UN, but the history of the League of Nations before it, demonstrates again and again that going to such places is a way for weak-kneed leaders of democracies to look like they are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing.

The Iranian leaders are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And, like Hitler, they don't think we have the guts to stop them.

Incidentally, Hitler made some of the best anti-war statements of the 1930s. He knew that this was what the Western democracies wanted to hear — and that it would keep them morally paralyzed while he continued building up his military machine to attack them.

Iranian leaders today make only the most token and transparent claims that they are building "peaceful" nuclear facilities — in one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, which has no need for nuclear power to generate electricity.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and its international terrorist allies will be a worst threat than Hitler ever was. But, before that happens, the big question is: Are we France? Are we morally paralyzed, perhaps fatally?

QOTD: Gates of Vienna on Islam

QOTD:Gates of Vienna on Islam:

Islam is a political ideology with the trappings of a religion, and adherents who are zealous in their practice of Islam are engaging in political activism, often of the most radical and violent form.

"Customary International Humanitarian Law" Is Neither Customary, Nor Law, Nor Humanitarian

Pebble to Daled Amos

The law is an ass

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
July 12, 2007

The term "collective punishment" conjures up images of Nazis executing entire villages in retaliation for a partisan ambush. No wonder Jews are acutely sensitive to charges of imposing collective punishment or targeting civilians.

And we hear those charges a lot: last summer in Lebanon; every time Israeli artillery hit back at the source of Kassam fire from Gaza. Were Syria to fire missiles at Israeli cities, and Israel to strike back at Syrian cities with even greater force, the international community would undoubtedly condemn Israel.

Accusations of war crimes by states attempting to defend against terrorist attacks have become a major weapon in the terrorist arsenal. In the words of Boaz Ganor of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, so-called customary international humanitarian law (CIHL) is a "force multiplier" for terrorist groups, who think nothing of putting civilians in the line of fire.

That requires some serious rethinking of the laws of war predicated on an outdated model of opposing armies facing off on an open field far removed from civilian populations. Modern warfare inevitably implicates civilian populations.
The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which protected against nuclear conflagration during the Cold War, for instance, is predicated on the threat of collective punishment on a massive scale. Few citizens of the Soviet Union would have had any input into the decision to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. But they would nevertheless have been incinerated by the American retaliation. Similarly, Israel's survival today depends on the credibility of our willingness to respond in kind to any attack on Israeli civilians by Iran or Syria.

One might distinguish Soviet citizens from residents of Gaza or southern Lebanon on the grounds that the former were part of a hierarchical governmental structure. But the distinction is far from clear. Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in southern Lebanon essentially function as autonomous governments. And they are far more representative of the populations they rule than the government of the Soviet Union ever was. Hamas was popularly elected, and Palestinian polls show widespread support for the ongoing Kassam attacks on Israel. And residents of southern Lebanon have more to say about Hizbullah rocket launchers in their backyard and weapons stored in their basements than Soviet citizens had about the actions of their regime.

IT IS TIME we recognize, to paraphrase Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire, that "customary international humanitarian law" is neither customary, nor law, nor humanitarian. It is not customary because it is not based on the actual behavior of nations past or present. When the Southern states began executing captured former slaves fighting in the Union Army, president Lincoln announced that the Union would execute captured Confederate soldiers in reprisal. The executions stopped. (In the same vein, denying Palestinians access to security prisoners held by Israel would be far more effective in securing access to our captive soldiers than beseeching the international community to intervene.)

During World War I, the Allies blockaded the Central Powers to force them into submission via starvation. And in 1943, Churchill ordered 1,000 British bombers to hammer Hamburg. (For good reason did the British omit the bombing of civilian populations from the Nuremberg indictments.) The firebombing of Dresden in the waning days of World War II killed tens of thousands of German civilians. Was that firebombing, however, self-evidently immoral if it also saved thousands of far more innocent Jews in the death camps by hastening the end of the war?

Yet if Israel engaged in any of these actions, it would be roundly condemned by the international community.

NOR IS customary international humanitarian law law in any meaningful sense. Its "rules" were not enacted by any international governmental body to which sovereign nation-states ceded the right to legislate. Nor are they even embodied in reciprocal treaty obligations entered into by sovereign states. They are nothing more than "rules" derived from declarative statements made by any and everybody - from various tinpot dictators and tyrants to Human Rights Watch - on what they think international law should be; and presto, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), it is.

Nor are the "rules" humanitarian. As Ganor points out, they render civilian populations more vulnerable by creating incentives for terrorists to operate from their midst.

And notes Jeremy Rabkin, an incisive academic critic of the inanities of CIHL, the rules are designed to favor guerrilla and terrorist fighters. In particular, they sever the obligations on states trying to defend themselves against terrorism from any reciprocal obligations on the part of terrorists.

Those "rules" are the outgrowth of a Geneva Conference convened by the ICRC in 1975, at which Third World countries outnumbered Western powers. And they form a pattern with UN General Assembly resolutions of the period demanding a New World Economic Order. In effect, they have redistributed military power to terrorist groups.

In responding to claims that Israel has violated CIHL, our recourse must be to elementary logic and an examination of the actual conduct of nations. Just as the US Constitution is not a "suicide pact," neither is international law. Until human rights advocates tell us what we can do to protect our cities from missiles and our citizens from suicide bombers, CIHL has no claim on our attention.

In the meantime, let Israel begin to place the lives of its citizens first, as has every other nation in history. We have no wish to see the people of Gaza starve, but unless the Hamas government stops the Kassams, closes the tunnels bringing in lethal weapons and returns Gilad Schalit, neither does Israel have any obligation to supply food, water and electricity to a quasi-state that has declared war on its existence.

China Mine Fires Cause More Greenhouse Gases Than All US Emissions

The New York Sun has a proposal for reducing greenhouse gases. Apparently, China mine fires cause more greenhouse gases than all US emissions. And that does not even count India.

It is astounding that with all the expensive proposals to combat global warming no one is discussing reducing global carbon emissions by putting out mine fires. Although putting out fires in America would not have a significant effect, putting out fires in China and India would.

...China loses between 100 and 200 million tons of coal a year — a significant fraction of its production of 2.26 billion tons — to mine fires, according to Holland's International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation. This results in carbon dioxide emissions in a range of between 560 and 1,120 million metric tons, equaling 50% to 100% of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline.

It may well be less costly for us to put out the Chinese mine fires than to cut emissions at home.

Second to China is India, where mine fires burn between 3 and 10 million tons of coal annually, with emissions of 15 to 51 million metric tons. Emissions will only grow in the future as China and India expand production of coal to fuel their thriving economies.

We should destroy our economy with inane green laws while leftists like Gore exempt themselves with offsets and other shams? Put out the fires, first, Al.

An Indictment of the Anti-War Left

James Webb reveals a damning indictment of the anti-war left during the Vietnam War. It is same song, different verse today.

Few, if any, of the old anti-war luminaries, Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, George McGovern, Peter Arnett, 'Tom Harkin, Bill or Hillary Clinton--the list could fill the page--could find it in themselves to conjure up an apology, or admit they were wrong in judging a communist apparatus that brought Southeast Asia's strongest and most pro-Western culture [Vietnam] back into the dark ages, only to haltingly emerge fifteen years later reeking of torture, prison camps, Stalinism and corruption.

The reason, which remained either unspoken or unreported during the anniversary coverage, was stated most honestly and directly to me by George McGovern, who unfortunately was off-camera at the time. During a break while taping the CNN Crossfire show, after I had made a comment regarding the ability of the U.S. under the right leadership to have adjusted its strategy early on and prevailed in the war, the antiwar candidate who had once promised to go to Hanoi on his knees if he were elected President turned to me and announced in his emotionless monotone, "What you don't understand is that I didn't want us to win that war."

The people who directed the antiwar movement did not care whether McNamara had a workable strategy, or whether it could have been adapted to circumstances. They did not care whether Nixon's Vietnamization program might have worked. They did not care whether the South Vietnamese should have been given an adequate chance to adjust their strategy after the American withdrawal. And they did not care whether the communists signed a pledge guaranteeing free elections and a peaceful reunification of the country. Quite simply, they wanted the communists to win.

Knowledge from the East

Abraham sent his other sons to the East. Pebble to Michael Gros from Jewish Press.

For [Rabbi] Shlomo Aharon[Fenster] it was a time of great soul searching as he was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

While sitting together with his host father Mitsuo Kiyosu in the kitchen sipping green tea, Shlomo Aharon unburdened the challenges he was facing. The conversation turned from his job search to his larger search for direction in his life.

"My host father realized that I was searching not only for a job, but for spirituality," Shlomo Aharon said. "He told me that when he dies 'there will be such and such spirit in the next world who will save me. I live this life with confidence because I know I will be saved when I die. On the other hand, a Christian person has Jesus. A Christian person has Jesus, who is a bridge to the Jewish G-d. That’s how he will be saved when he dies.'"

"'But you, you are a Jew. You have a direct connection to the Jewish G-d. What more are you searching for?'"

That comment opened Shlomo Aharon’s eyes. He grew up hearing about G-d as the Judeo-Christian G-d, but he had only ever heard Christians speak about G-d. His host father said No! It is not Christianity that has a direct connection to G-d, and not even Buddhism. It is the Jewish people who have a direct conduit to G-d.

"He woke me up to the fact that I have a unique place in this world as a Jew and an intrinsic relationship to G-d," Shlomo Aharon said. "G-d had been just a philosophical concept to me and the last thing I was searching for."

...(published in The Jewish Press July 6, 2007)

What's Next, Then?

Jihad Denial
By Bruce Thornton [but emphasis mine]

The New York Times's Thomas Friedman is right on the mark most of the time in his analysis of the dysfunctions troubling the Muslim world and of our own failures in confronting them. Particularly important is his frequent criticism of our feckless disregard of our dependence on fossil fuels. As Friedman argues, we should all be doing more about the fact that our oil consumption subsidizes the terrorists who want to blow us up.

But even Friedman has a blind spot that compromises his otherwise sensible analyses. His July 4 column is a perfect example. It accurately links global Muslim terrorist attacks to the intolerant chauvinism inherent in Islam, which to its adherents is "the most perfect and complete expression of God's monotheistic message, and the Koran is God's last and most perfect word." Yet this spiritual perfection collides with a world dominated by the same West that for nearly a thousand years quailed at the armies of Allah. "This creates," Friedman writes, "a real dissonance and humiliation. How could this be? Who did this to us? The Crusaders! The Jews! The West! It can never be something that they failed to learn, adapt to or build. This humiliation produces a lashing out."

That last sentence, redolent of middle-class parents trying to figure out why their geeky kid vandalized the neighbor's SUV, is where Friedman loses it by indulging a reductive psychology that locates behavior not in the spiritual imperative he himself identifies, but in a neurotic reaction to environmental pressures. By the end of the piece this misstep has become a pratfall: "Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor."

Notice that metaphor: jihad––for that is what the terrorists are engaged in, as they repeatedly tell us––is a cultic deformation of otherwise healthy cells in the body of Islam, an alien growth that needs to be excised so health returns. Yet this received wisdom, repeated over and over, even by the Bush administration, is simply false to Islamic history, theology, and jurisprudence. If one attends carefully to that record, it is obvious that jihad is not an alien "tumor" but a vital organ of Islam.

Of course, one can try to avoid this unpleasant fact by denying that what the terrorists are engaged in is jihad. One can indulge the laughable rationalization that jihad is really "inward striving" to be a better Muslim. This minority interpretation of jihad appears late in Islamic history, and is looked on with scorn by many Muslims themselves. Listen to the Ayatollah Khomeini, creator of the first modern Islamic nation, writing in 1942: "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and the shadow of the sword." And again in 1979, from a speech delivered at the Feyziyeh Theological School: "Islam grew with blood . . . . The great prophet of Islam in one hand carried the Koran and in the other a sword . . . . Islam is religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people."

Some Westerners, following duplicitous Muslim apologists, no doubt would argue that Khomeini, a revered Muslim theologian, is distorting the traditions of his faith. But given that the 1979 speech was delivered at a theological school, where the audience is knowledgeable about their faith and so could identify distortions of its tenets, this rationalization is incredible. Common sense tells us that Khomeini and the other modern jihadists know their own faith and its doctrines, and are speaking squarely in that tradition, as can be documented from the Koran, Hadiths, and subsequent Muslim theologians, jurists, and other commentators (see Andrew Bostom's invaluable anthology, The Legacy of Jihad). All these sources tell us that jihad indeed is the imperative to follow the example of the prophet Mohammed, who said in his farewell address: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.'"

Modern jihadists, then, aren't "heretics" or "fanatics" who have "highjacked" the "religion of peace" in order to compensate for their neurotic "humiliation" at Muslim backwardness. Bin Laden and his lieutenant Aymin Al Zawahiri have issued many writings that define their terrorist war as a traditional jihad, backing up their argument with numerous references to Islamic theology and jurisprudence. In a few weeks The Al Qaeda Reader will be published, Library of Congress researcher Raymond Ibrahim's translation of the most significant Al Qaeda treatises, many of which have not appeared before in English. This promises to be one of the most important books since 9/11, a critical resource for accurately understanding the motives of Al Qaeda. These writings, especially those intended for Muslims, ground the war against the West squarely in the Islamic tradition of jihad: "Zawahiri's writings," Ibrahim notes, "especially are grounded in Islam's roots of jurisprudence; in fact, of the many thousands of words translated here from his three treatises, well more than half are direct quotations from the Koran, the Sunna of Muhammad, and the consensus and conclusions of the Ulema [past and present commentators and interpreters of Islamic belief and practice]."

Even the killing of women and children is argued for on the basis of that same tradition, which provides traction for rationalizations based on Islamic military weakness, sophistic definitions of "innocence," and the oft-repeated injunction to kill all infidels. This interpretation may be erroneous, but the mere fact that it can be argued for at all, and accepted by many Muslims, is itself significant. And such an interpretation is possible because there already exists the doctrine of jihad, which glorifies and justifies violence against non-believers. This helps to answer the obvious question why other ex-colonial peoples supposedly "humiliated" by their failure to keep up with the powerful West have not resorted to terrorist violence.

Again, it beggars belief that a Zawahiri or a Khomeini is distorting his faith's traditions and dogmas, particularly when millions of Muslims world-wide agree with those traditional interpretations. Are we to think those millions don't know their own religion? That they are dupes of manipulators and distorters? Or is it rather the case that they know very well their faith and see Bin Laden et al. as traditionalists attempting to restore to Islam the doctrinal purity that fueled Islam's remarkable conquests? Perhaps this agreement with the so-called "Islamists" explains the dearth of protests against these presumed "distortions" on the part of all those "moderate" Muslims we keep hearing about.

No, it is we who are the dupes of distorters, all those apologists, propagandists, and Western useful idiots who obscure the truth of Islam and its history. And they are successful: Washington Times columnist Diana West, writing on July 6 about Robert Spencer's important web-site jihadwatch.org, reports that "very ominously, Mr. Spencer's Web site is being blocked by assorted organizations which, according to his readers, continue to provide access to assorted pro-jihad sites. Mr. Spencer reports he's 'never received word of so many organizations banning this site all at once.' These include the City of Chicago, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, GE IT, JPMorgan Chase, Defense Finance and Accounting Services and now, a federal employee in Dallas informs him, the federal government." Why? "Some Internet providers deem the factually based, meticulous analysis on display at jihadwatch.org to be 'hate speech.'"

This is the pass that we have come to: facts about the motives of an enemy sworn to our destruction are censored as "hate speech." This betrayal of the truth demonstrates perfectly the West's self-loathing failure of nerve that confirms the enemy's belief in his spiritual superiority–– and his ultimate victory.

QOTD:Nasser

Pebble to Jonah Goldberg

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing," former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser once said.