Barry Rubin: Ahmadinejad's Wager, the World's Peril

Ahmadinejad's Wager, the World's Peril

By Barry Rubin

Why Iran's president has the cojones to take on the West

Why did Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the full backing of Iran's regime, behave as he did at the Durban-2 conference?

One reason, of course, is that he believed every word he said, and much of the Iranian Islamist regime thinks the same way. This factor should always be remembered, lest people think this was only some cynical ploy.

As the Iranian Islamist regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, once said, the revolution was not just about lowering the price of watermelons. That is, this was not merely a movement for materialist reasons but one that believes it was executing G-d's will on earth. Ideology was central.

To explain this properly, permit me to digress a moment. People often ask: why did Jews under Nazi rule in Eastern Europe not flee or do more to escape the Shoah (Holocaust). After extensive research and interviewing, it is clear to me that while there were a number of factors but foremost was the disbelief that the Germans would murder them all.

Remember that these Jews were forced into slave labor. They produced goods, farmed crops, and repaired roads. In effect, they were helping the German war effort. These laborers were paid nothing and fed barely enough to stay alive. Why, then, would the Germans destroy, so to speak, a goose that was laying eggs if not necessarily golden ones, possibly losing the war in the process?

The answer is: because they believed in their own ideology they would not act pragmatically but rather make their own defeat-and own deaths-more likely...

Read the whole thing.

Islam Will Not Agree to a Jewish State -- Ever

This is one of the best descriptions written of how Islamic militants view Israel and Jews. It shows how they will only conscent to limited agreements because they cannot stand the existence of Jews and a Jewish state. Jeffrey Goldberg writing in the NYT.

Anyone who believes the disagreement is over land or borders is completely blind and naive, perhaps on purpose.

In the summer of 2006, at a moment when Hezbollah rockets were falling virtually without pause on northern Israel, Nizar Rayyan, husband of four, father of 12, scholar of Islam and unblushing executioner, confessed to me one of his frustrations.

We were meeting in a concrete mosque in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Mr. Rayyan, who was a member of the Hamas ruling elite, and an important recruiter of suicide bombers until Israel killed him two weeks ago (along with several of his wives and children), arrived late to our meeting from parts unknown.

He was watchful for assassins even then, and when I asked him to describe his typical day, he suggested that I might be a spy for Fatah. Not the Mossad, mind you, not the C.I.A., but Fatah.

What a phantasmagorically strange conflict the Arab-Israeli war had become! Here was a Saudi-educated, anti-Shiite (but nevertheless Iranian-backed) Hamas theologian accusing a one-time Israeli Army prison official-turned-reporter of spying for Yasir Arafat's Fatah, an organization that had once been the foremost innovator of anti-Israeli terrorism but was now, in Mr. Rayyan's view, indefensibly, unforgivably moderate.

In the Palestinian civil war, Fatah, which today controls much of the West Bank and is engaged in intermittent negotiations with Israel, had become Mr. Rayyan's direst enemy, a party of apostates and quislings. "First we must deal with the Muslims who speak of a peace process and then we will deal with you," he declared.

But we spoke that day mainly about the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, that specifically concerned Jews and their diverse and apparently limitless character failings. This sort of conversation, while illuminating, can become wearying over time, at least for the Jewish participant, and so I was happy to learn that Mr. Rayyan had his own sore points.

"Hezbollah is doing very well against Israel, don't you think?" I asked. His face darkened, suggesting that he understood the implication of my question. At the time, Hamas, too, was firing rockets into Israel, though irregularly and without much effect.

"We support our brothers in the resistance," he said. But then he added, "I think each situation is different."

How so?

"They have advantages that we in Gaza don't have," he said. "They have excellent weapons. Hezbollah moves freely in Lebanon. We are trapped in the Israeli cage. So I don't like to hear the sentence, 'Hezbollah is the leader of the resistance.' It's a very annoying sentence. They are heroes to us. But we are the ones fighting in Palestine."

"And they're Shia," I said. Mr. Rayyan, who was educated by Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, was known in Gaza as a firm defender of Sunni theology and privilege, and sometimes lectured at the Islamic University of Gaza on the danger of Shiite "infiltration."

"Yes! There are many different secret agendas," he said. "We have to be aware of this."

Hamas men across Gaza were of two minds on the subject of Hezbollah: One night, I met the members of a Hamas rocket team in the town of Beit Hanoun, on Gaza's northern border with Israel. The group's leader, who went by the name of Abu Obeidah, said that he, too, was frustrated by Hezbollah's success against Israel; he even asked if Hamas's rocket attacks that summer were featured on television in America, and seemed to deflate physically when I told him no.

"Everyone, all the media, says that Hezbollah is wonderful," he complained. "We stand with our brothers of Hezbollah, of course, but, really, look at the advantages they have. They get all the rockets they will ever need from Iran."

Hamas is not a monolith, and opinions inside the group differ about many things, including engagement with the Shiites of Hezbollah and Iran. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi told me shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 2004 that it would be "uncharitable" to find fault with Iran.

"What do the Arab states do for us?" he asked. "Iran is steadfast against the Jews."

Today, there is no doubt that Rantisi's view holds sway inside the organization, and many in Hamas wish for even closer ties with Tehran, particularly over the past month as they have absorbed a battering from Israel. Even those who believe that Iran is secretly trying to bring Sunni Palestinians to Shiism acknowledge anti-Israel Shiites as ideals of resistance.

As the Gaza war moves to a cease-fire, a crucial question will inevitably arise, as it has before: Should Israel (and by extension, the United States) try to engage Hamas in a substantive and sustained manner?

It is a fair question, one worth debating, but it is unmoored from certain political and theological realities. One irresistible reality grows from Hamas's complicated, competitive relationship with Hezbollah. For Hamas, Hezbollah is not only a source of weapons and instruction, it is a mentor and role model.

Hamas's desire to best Hezbollah's achievements is natural, of course, but, more to the point, it is radicalizing. One of the reasons, among many, that Hamas felt compelled to break its cease-fire with Israel last month was to prove its potency to Muslims impressed with Hezbollah.

Another reality worth considering concerns theology. Hamas and Hezbollah emerged from very different streams of Islam: Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood; Hezbollah is an outright Iranian proxy that takes its inspiration from the radical Shiite politics of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But the groups share a common belief that Jews are a cosmological evil, enemies of Islam since Muhammad sought refuge in Medina.

Periodically, advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of listening, I haven't heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is insincere. Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Both groups are rhetorically pitiless, though, again, Hamas sometimes appears to follow the lead of Hezbollah.

I once asked Abdel Aziz Rantisi where he learned what he called "the truth" of the Holocaust — that it didn't happen — and he referred me to books published by Hezbollah. Hamas and Hezbollah also share the view that the solution for Palestine lies in Europe. A spokesman for Hezbollah, Hassan Izzedine, once told me that the Jews who survive the Muslim "liberation" of Palestine "can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from." He went on to argue that the Jews are a "curse to anyone who lives near them."

Nizar Rayyan expressed much the same sentiment the night we spoke in 2006. We had been discussing a passage of the Koran that suggests that God turns a group of impious Jews into apes and pigs. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, among others, has deployed this passage in his speeches. Once, at a rally in Beirut, he said: "We shout in the face of the killers of prophets and the descendants of the apes and pigs: We hope we will not see you next year. The shout remains, ‘Death to Israel!'"

Mr. Rayyan said that, technically, Mr. Nasrallah was mistaken. "Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce," Mr. Rayyan said. "So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people."

I asked him the question I always ask of Hamas leaders: Could you agree to anything more than a tactical cease-fire with Israel? I felt slightly ridiculous asking: A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks at Camp David. Mr. Rayyan answered the question as I thought he would, saying that a long-term cease-fire would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of Islam to eradicate Israel.

There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.

The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation. Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness.

The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas's enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

QOTD: Moshe Arens -- Defeat, Not Deter Terrorists

Moshe Arens in the Ha'Aretz.

It does not seem likely that a terrorist organization could be deterred from pursuing its aims, which include terrorizing civilians. Terrorist organizations do not generally own substantial assets that are vulnerable to attack, and striking them seems to increase their support from their fanatical fans. Their leaders, if killed, are quickly replaced by others. No, Al Qaida cannot be deterred; it has to be defeated. The claim that Hezbollah has been deterred from using its massive rocket arsenal on Israel is based on the fact that since the cease-fire, their rockets have not struck Israel (except for the recent attack in the north). But it is far more likely that rather than being deterred by Israel, Hezbollah intends to move at the time and place of its choosing. The capability to strike is there, and the proverbial pistol in the first act will go off before the play is over.

Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, cannot be deterred. As the organization is struck, its support among the local population grows, and its popularity among fundamentalist Muslims around the world increases. It attaches no value to life, whether Muslim or Jewish. Israel is concerned over the loss of life in the Gaza Strip during the current round of fighting, but Hamas is not. The infrastructure in Gaza, if destroyed or damaged, will quickly be rebuilt with foreign donations after the fighting is over. If a cease-fire is established before Hamas' rocket capability has been eliminated, the group will be seen as the victor.

The idea of deterring Hamas is a fantasy. Hamas has to be defeated. Defeating it means eliminating its ability to launch rockets at Israel, and that means that the IDF has to reach the areas where the rockets are being launched. When the rockets cease falling on Israel, it will be clear who won this conflict, and from that point all other issues regarding the presence of Hamas in the Gaza Strip can be dealt with.

It Really is a Wonderful Life

Don Feder has a great article contrasting the real message of the movie It's A Wonderful Life with the New York Times vision of it.

A friend told me: "Show me a list of a person's favorite movies and I'll tell you what he believes — including his politics." Another said he could pretty much tell how someone felt about America by his reaction to John Wayne movies.

I'm inclined to think that cinema shapes reality far more than reflects it. But the type of movies we are drawn to reveals our worldview — provides a map of our inner selves.

The left adores films that are anti-American, anti-faith, politically correct, paranoid, cynical and nihilistic. In the past few years, the critics have salivated over trash like, "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood," "Million Dollar Baby," "The Departed," "Atonement," and - most recently - "Batman: the Dark Knight."

Movies that reflect middle-class norms and Judeo-Christian values are derided as dull, cliched, unrealistic, simplistic and saccharine.

An over-the-top example of the left's disdain for normalcy is the piece by City Editor Wendell Jamieson in the December 19 New York Times ("Wonderful? Sorry, George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life") in which the writer takes a sledge hammer, a chainsaw and a flame-thrower to "It's a Wonderful Life."

The Capra classic is #11 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American movies -- just behind "Singin' in the Rain" and ahead of "Sunset Boulevard." It was Frank Capra's favorite film and Jimmy Stewart's favorite role.

Movie maven Roger Ebert observes: "What is remarkable about 'It's a Wonderful Life' is how well it holds up over the years. It's one of those ageless movies, like 'Casablanca' or 'The Third Man' that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should be seen only once. When we know how they turn out, they've surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. 'It's a Wonderful Life' falls in the second category." ...

Generations of fans have been charmed and inspired by its gentle humor, pathos, humanity and life-affirming story...

Jamieson -- and, presumably, The Times — finds "It's a Wonderful Life," "a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife."

In other words -- follow your dream, even if it leads you to a life filled with material success that's spiritually impoverished, and others suffer in the process?

The elite thinks bitterness and narrowness are the defining characteristics of small-town America.

If the hicks are mean-spirited and all that, why do the cities have much higher rates of homicide, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse and other social pathologies than the sticks?

For George Bailey, Jamieson tells us, "disappointments pile up." He's the "pathetic older sibling," who's "emasculated when his bad hearing keeps him out of World War II." Finally, "all the decades of anger boil to the surface" and George "explodes" with justifiable rage. Liberals are big on rage - anger being a sign of authenticity.

Jamieson would probably look at "Casablanca" and say, "It's a story about a disillusioned drunk who's manipulated by his ex-girlfriend, in the midst of municipal corruption."

According to Jamieson, Bailey's also a chump for sacrificing his happiness for those around him.

Not that the left is opposed to sacrifice in all cases. When it's for "racial justice," the downtrodden, spotted owls, the planet, the Kennedys — liberals are very much in favor of self-abnegation. It's sacrifice for family, friends, community and country that it finds incomprehensible.

Two things are worth noting about the way Jamieson sees Stewart's alternate reality - when George Bailey glimpses a world without him, and Bedford Falls transmogrifies into Pottersville.

The fate of George's family and friends is meant to show his positive impact on the lives of those around him. Instead, Jamieson draws a negative lesson.

The writer condescendingly observes: "Now as for that famous alternate reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare." Thus "flirty Violet" becomes a tart, gruff but loveable Bert is maniac cop, and Ernie the cabbie is lonely and chronically depressed. How liberals love to psychoanalyze.

The Talmud tells us we all have two natures (the good inclination and the evil inclination) struggling for dominance. Sometimes all it takes is an act of kindness, or a good example, to push us in the right direction.

Jamieson's other bit of brilliance is when he smugly admits that he prefers Pottersville (a honky-tonk hell) to prosaic Bedford Falls.

Pottersville "looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls - the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the sort of excitement George had long been seeking." Why then is he horrified by this vision? Our hero wanted to see the world and design buildings, not wallow in the gutter.

Apparently, it's irrelevant that George's wife becomes a mousey, spinster librarian, his mother is a bitter, dried-up hag who runs a dilapidated boarding house, Uncle Billy loses his marbles when the Building and Loan fails and ends up in the loony bin, the pharmacist, Mr. Gower, goes to prison for accidentally poisoning a child, and all of the men on a transport ship die in a kamikaze attack because brother Harry wasn't there to save them (because George wasn't there to save him when he fell through the ice as a child), and so on.

But then, what are a score of ruined lives compared to the babes and rock-around-the-clock action of Pottersville? By the way, it's interesting that a sophisticate like Jamieson finds gambling, fast women, bright lights and blaring music among life's most delightful experiences.

The great lesson of "It's a Wonderful Life": Each life is special. Be we ever so humble, there's no one like us. We actually can make the world a better place — or, in the words of the angel Clarence: "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

The great lesson of liberalism: There are no great lessons — no absolutes. Life is meaningless. Other than self-gratification and various causes (anodynes to make us forget our hopelessness) our lives serve no purpose...

This courageous, ultimately optimistic, little gem of a movie is a ray of light trying to penetrate the shriveled soul of modern liberalism.

Read the whole thing at JWR.

Movies Can Alter Perceptions of Romance

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.

They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.

Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.

Psychologists at the family and personal relationships laboratory at the university studied 40 top box office hits between 1995 and 2005, and identified common themes which they believed were unrealistic.

The movies included You've Got Mail, Maid In Manhattan, The Wedding Planner and While You Were Sleeping.

The university's Dr Bjarne Holmes said: "Marriage counsellors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it.

"We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people's minds.

"The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals than we realise."

As part of the project, 100 student volunteers were asked to watch the 2001 romantic comedy Serendipity, while a further 100 watched a David Lynch drama.

Students watching the romantic film were later found to be more likely to believe in fate and destiny. A further study found that fans of romantic comedies had a stronger belief in predestined love.

Kimberly Johnson, who also worked on the study, said: "Films do capture the excitement of new relationships but they also wrongly suggest that trust and committed love exist from the moment people meet, whereas these are qualities that normally take years to develop."

QOTD: Bret Stephens -- 'Tolerance' Is Not the Lesson of Kristallnacht

Bret Stephens in the WSJ:

So here we are, 70 years after Kristallnacht, as good an example as any of what happens when the evil of the few (or, perhaps, not-so-few) takes advantage of the cowardice of the many. [He mentions European capitulation to Islamo-fascism.] If there's a lesson here, it's in the need not for "tolerance," but for moral courage. Now as before, Europe finds it in short supply.

QOTD Followup: The Dark Knight

Following up from the previous quote, here is how they had to deal with evil.

Bruce Wayne: The bandit in Burma, did you catch him?
Alfred Pennyworth: Yes.

Bruce Wayne: How?

Alfred Pennyworth: We burned the forest down.

Fighting evil isn't always pretty.

QOTD: The Dark Knight

Love this quote from The Dark Knight about trying to understand why some truly evil people do bad things.

Alfred Pennyworth: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred Pennyworth: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Redistributing Wealth

Insightful letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune yesterday. It's easier to identify the problem when it is happening to you.

On my way to lunch recently, I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama; I need the money." I laughed. In a restaurant my server had on an "Obama 08" tie. Again I laughed. Just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came, I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Barack-Obama-redistribution-of-wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need—the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful. At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment, I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more. I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.

—A. Hart, Forest Park

Gore Urges Civil Disobedience But Emits Lots of Hot Air

Is anything on earth as gaseous as Al Gore blathering?

Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.

The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis."

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.

"I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact," he said. "I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that."

The government says about 28 coal plants are under construction in the United States. Another 20 projects have permits or are near the start of construction.

Scientists say carbon gases from burning fossil fuel for power and transport are a key factor in global warming.

Carbon capture and storage could give coal power an extended lease on life by keeping power plants' greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere and easing climate change.

But no commercial-scale project exists anywhere to demonstrate the technology, partly because it is expected to increase up-front capital costs by an additional 50 percent.

So-called geo-sequestration of carbon sees carbon dioxide liquefied and pumped into underground rock layers for long term storage.

(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Christine Kearney and Xavier Briand)
© Thomson Reuters 2008

Green Hypocrites Fail to Make Grade

The Guardian has an article on the hypocritical behavior of rich greenies.

People who believe they have the greenest lifestyles can be seen as some of the main culprits behind global warming, says a team of researchers, who claim that many ideas about sustainable living are a myth.

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: "Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights."

Some people even said they deserved such flights as a reward for their green efforts, he added.

Only a very small number of citizens matched their eco-friendly behaviour at home by refusing to fly abroad, Barr told a climate change conference at Exeter University yesterday.

The research team questioned 200 people on their environmental attitudes and split them into three groups, based on a commitment to green living.

They found the longest and the most frequent flights were taken by those who were most aware of environmental issues, including the threat posed by climate change.

Questioned on their heavy use of flying, one respondent said: "I recycle 100% of what I can, there's not one piece of paper goes in my bin, so that makes me feel less guilty about flying as much as I do."

Barr said "green" lifestyles at home and frequent flying were linked to income, with wealthier people more likely to be engaged in both activities.

He said: "The findings indicate that even those people who appear to be very committed to environmental action find it difficult to transfer these behaviours into more problematic contexts."

The team says the research is one of the first attempts to analyse how green intentions alter depending on context. It says the results reveal the scale of the challenge faced by policymakers who are trying to alter public behaviour to help tackle global warming.

The study concludes: "The notion that we can treat what we do in the home differently from what we do on holiday denies the existence of clearly related and complex lifestyle choices and practices. Yet even a focus on lifestyle groups who may be most likely to change their views will require both time and political will. The addiction to cheap flights and holidays will be very difficult to break."

The frequent flyers said they expected new technology to make aviation greener, echoing comments made by Tony Blair last year, who said it was "impractical" to expect people to take holidays closer to home. He said the solution was "to look at how you make air travel more energy-efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Acceleration of Islamization Post-9/11

Diane West has an excellent article on the West's sleep post-9/11 on the gathering storm.

As a society, we appear to have decided to remember 9/11 as something akin to a natural disaster that came and went rather than as a part of a diffuse but discernable push to advance the law of Islam.

Hypocrisy of financial patriotism

Patriotism Starts at the Top, Sen. Biden
By Arnold Ahlert

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden thinks paying more taxes is "patriotic." You wanna talk patriotism, Mr. Biden? Here we go…

First and foremost, let's talk about why Joe thinks people should pay more taxes: to fund a government run with no concept of fiscal responsibility. Zero. This year's budget is close to three trillion dollars. That’s a number so large it's almost meaningless, so let me put some meaning behind it: Since the population of the entire country is 300 million, every single American is getting charged an average of TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS apiece by our "patriots" in Congress.

Here's some of the things those patriots get just for themselves: staffs of 14 assistants for each member of the House and 34 for each Senator, on average. Top-notch health care and insurance plans. Pension benefits two to three times more than those paid in the private sector on similar incomes. Limousines, and special parking spaces on Capitol Hill and at Washington's two major airports. First-class travel all over the world. Their own private health clubs, one for the House, one for the Senate. Their own doctor's office on premises. And last, but not least, a work schedule with numerous holidays and a full month off in August.

All of it paid for by us.

You wanna be a patriot, Joe? Here's a few suggestions: Get you and your colleagues to stop taking earmarks. Cut down on your staffs. Pay for your own health and life insurance. Travel coach. Stop pretending you're "one of us" when nothing could be further from the truth. Oh, and one more thing:

Stop spending us into economic ruin–even as you have the gall to tell us it's for our own good!

Spending other peoples' hard-earned money isn't patriotic, Joe, especially when most Americans know that billions of dollars are wasted on out-of-date and ineffective programs. Programs whose primary functions are to bribe certain constituencies–or to make guys like you look good. Take a gander at Congressional poll numbers, Joe. Most of us don't think you guys look good at all. Most of us think Congress stinks to high heaven.

I do want to thank you for one thing however, and that's letting the cat out of the bag on what you and Barack Obama consider "change." Who could imagine such "revolutionary" ideas as taking even more money out the private sector and giving it to government to "redistribute"–in the middle of an economic downturn, no less? Higher taxes on the "rich," aka small business owners, is also pure genius. Why? They'll fire "little people" employees to make up the difference. And what can possibly compare with the "brilliance" of putting us all in even deeper hock than the NINE TRILLION DOLLARS of debt that you and your cronies have already amassed with years of irresponsible spending?

That's 35 years in the Senate just for you, Joe. 35 years of insinuating government deeper and deeper into the lives of every American. 35 years of ever-increasing amounts of waste, fraud, corruption and out-of-control spending by a bunch of self-interested, self-aggrandizing egotists.

Egotists whose concept of patriotism begins and ends with one idea: getting re-elected.

And you have the nerve to tell us WE should be more patriotic?

Take your "patriotism" and shove it, Senator Biden.

atahlert@comcast.net

(for the record: my annual income isn’t even sniffing $250K)

Want real change? Quit nominating lawyers!

Victor Davis Hanson on how to have real change in politics. Pebble to JWR.

The 2008 presidential campaign is supposed to be a referendum on "change" — who brings it and who doesn't.

Real change, however, hasn't yet proven to mean new politics.

The "hope and change" Barack Obama sounds like a traditional Northern liberal who always wants to raise taxes on the upper classes and businesses, expand government services and provide more state assistance to the middle class and poor.

"Maverick" John McCain talks like a conventional Western or Southern conservative in favor of spending cuts, across-the-board lower taxes and smaller government.

This year the media seem to think change means race and sex — whether Barack Obama's background of mixed racial ancestry or the gender of Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

It's certainly true that either the next president or next vice president will not be a white male. But does that mean de facto that the country will be run any differently?

There is, however, one area where we might have seen real change. The Democrats could have not nominated another lawyer. This may partly explain why former military officer John McCain and working-mom Sarah Palin are polling near even with Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, in a year that otherwise favors the Democrats.

A snowmobiling, fishing and hunting mom of five who was trained as a journalist seems like a breath of fresh air — and accentuates the nontraditional background of former naval officer John McCain. If the Republicans win, it may well be that, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, or Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, they weren't members of the legal culture.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama got out of Harvard Law School, worked for a firm, offered his legal expertise as a community organizer and went into politics. Joe Biden graduated from law school and almost immediately ran for office.

In the Democratic primary, winner Obama, runner-up Hillary Clinton and third-place finisher John Edwards were all lawyers. In 2004, both Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Edwards, were lawyers. Al Gore, who ran in 2000, left law school without a degree and went into politics. His running mate, Joe Lieberman, was a Yale-trained lawyer. Mike Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, was a Harvard-trained lawyer and ran with lawyer Lloyd Bentsen.

In fact, every Democratic presidential nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections — except Gore who dropped out of law school to run for Congress — has been a lawyer.

What saved Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 was the presence in the race of third-party conservative candidate Ross Perot — and the image of Clinton as a Southern moderate, which seemed to reassure voters that this particular Yale-trained lawyer was nevertheless not quite another Democratic nominee like Walter Mondale or Dukakis.

Of course, there have been Republican nominees and presidents who were lawyers — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Bob Dole — but recently far less so than the Democrats, as the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes attest.

So, what's wrong with the Democratic nominee once again being a lawyer? After all, legal minds are trained to think precisely and evaluate both sides of an issue.

The problem is that lawyers usually do not run companies, defend the country, lead people, build things, grow food or create capital.

If this year Democrats were looking for populist candidates from diverse backgrounds and training who talked and thought differently from those of the past, then why didn't they nominate someone who was not trained in writing legalese and working the government legal labyrinth?

Instead, they needed different sorts, candidates who might have sounded a little rougher, a little less condescending and a little more like most voters. Most Americans have never been in — and never want to be in — a courtroom.

In the past, law school has not necessarily been considered ideal presidential training. Harry Truman was audacious perhaps because he had tried and failed as a haberdasher. Dwight Eisenhower learned about leadership from his years as a general. George H.W. Bush was a businessman and Ronald Reagan an actor. Even unpopular presidents like Jimmy Carter (farmer) and George W. Bush (businessman) brought different perspectives to the job.

Change for Democrats this year was not a new strain of liberal politics or a different race or gender. Instead, they needed to have run candidates who talked, thought and acted differently from their usual run-of-the-mill sorts.

And that meant someone other than the same old, same old legal eagles who appear glib — but so often manage to lose in November.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

Religion of Peace?

From the Assyrian International News Agency

West Bengal, India (AINA) -- A mob of nearly 7000 Muslims attacked a group of Hindu pilgrims in West Bengal, a state in Eastern India that borders Bangladesh on the west. According to a Hindu blog, a sacred Hindu site frequented by Hindu pilgrims, including women and children, has experienced a sustained attack since Thursday evening. Muslims have thrown gas cylinders and Molotov cocktails at the pilgrims, burning down the camp building and trapping 180 men, women and children, along with fifteen police officers, within the confines of the compound.

The Muslims attempted to breach the wall of the compound by exploding gas cylinders against it. The fifteen police officers have not been able to disperse the mob, even afer firing several rounds.

Fifteen people have been injured; seven of them are not critically injured and are not expected to survive. The names of the critically wounded include are Subodh Kundu, Bivas Mondal, Gopinath Biswas, Prasenjit Sardar and Gautam Halder. Two victims could not be identified because of serious facial burns. Nine victims are missing and are believed to have been kidnapped by the Muslims. Their names are: Gautam Mondal, Kartick Biswas, Ram Shil, Palash Roy, Gopal Dolui, Piyush Senapati, Ashok Das, Shankar Nandi and Subhash Roy.

Two police officers have been injured.

The police have issued an arrest warrant against the Hindu leader, Sri Tapan Kumar Ghosh, and 15 other Hindus. They are charged with "Incitement and Instigation for Rioting" and "Disruption of Communal Harmony."

No arrest warrants have been issued against Muslims.

This is the "Religion of Peace"? This is it.

Don't Know Much About Their Own Religion

It seems that Christian students at universities do not know a lot about how Christianity developed as well as Christian beliefs and church history. The Christian Century has an article by Barbara Brown Taylor who teaches a class on world religions at Piedmont College.

Students who complete the class say they feel more at home in the world. They are less easily frightened by religious difference. They are more informed neighbors, better equipped to wage peace instead of war.

The only place the course backfires is in the unit on Christianity. Students who have spent every Sunday of their lives in church may be able to name the books of the Bible in order, but they rarely have any idea how those books were assembled. They know they belong to Victory Baptist Church, but they do not know that this makes them Protestants, or that the Christian tree has two other major branches more ancient than their own. Very few have heard of the Nicene Creed. Most are surprised to learn that baptism is supposed to be a one-time thing.

With only five class sessions for each religion, I cover the basics quickly: early Christian history, composition and content of the New Testament, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation, central Christian doctrines and common religious practices. Faced with so much new information, students often have a hard time formulating their questions.

“If Paul wasn’t one of the 12 disciples, where did he get his stuff?”

“Do Catholics really think saints answer their prayers?”

As often as I have answered such questions, my sinking feeling never goes away. The things I tell students are so different from the things they have heard in church that I can hear their brains straining against the waves. They never noticed that Matthew and Luke tell different stories of Jesus’ birth, or that Mark and John tell no such stories at all. They never imagined that the first Christians did not walk around with New Testaments in their pockets. No one ever told them about Constantine, Augustine, Benedict or Martin Luther. They never thought about what happened during the centuries between Jesus’ resurrection and their own professions of faith. In their minds, they fell in line behind the disciples, picking up the proclamation of the gospel where those simple fishermen left off.

Even as they are turning in their quizzes, the students know that something has just gone badly wrong. “I think I just did the worst on my own religion,” one says.

They also find it difficult to reconcile the knowledge they gain with their pre-class beliefs.

"I couldn't hold onto what I was learning," one capable student said. "I loved it, but I couldn't make it stay in my head. It was too different from what I had already learned, so my brain just kept switching back to default."

I am not surprised to learn this, nor would I be surprised to read the same thing regarding non-observant Jews. But in this case, the Christians are actually the involved church-goers.

George Will on Colbert: Conservatives versus Liberals

Colbert: What do you think are the differences between conservatives and liberals?

Will: The difference between truth and confusion, basically... A slightly longer answer is that the competing values are freedom and equality at all times. Conservatives tend to favor freedom and are willing to accept inequalities of outcome in the free market. Liberals tend to favor equality of outcome and are willing to sacrifice and circumscribe freedom in order to get it.

QOTD: Motti Berger and Henry Kissinger

One of my favorites: Rabbi Motti Berger roughly quoted Kissinger on hearing about the 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

"People that have been spending the last 50 years trying to kill you -- don't you think they'd lie to you, also?"

QOTD: Victor Davis Hansen

Is merely talking with our enemies appeasement? Not necessarily, but we need a good definition of appeasement to avoid it. My emphasis below.

Most define appeasement not by the mere willingness on occasion to negotiate with enemies (i.e., the heads of nation states rather than criminal terrorist cliques). Rather, appeasement is an overriding desire to avoid war or confrontation to such a degree so as to engage in a serial pattern of behavior that results in an accommodation of an enemy's demands — and ultimately the inadvertent enhancement of its agendas...

Talking with an Iranian theocrat like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad per se might not necessarily constitute appeasement. But continuing such talks without preconditions that made no progress in curbing Iranian nuclear agendas, or support for Hezbollah terrorists and Shiite militias in Iraq would not only be futile, but encourage further Iranian adventurism — by the assurance that negotiations were infinite and there would be few lines in the sand and little chance of military opposition to follow...

Bush in his Knesset address may have acknowledged that expansive notion of appeasement when he elaborated on his "negotiate with terrorists and radicals" line, with the proviso of futility — namely that such talking assumed an "ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." In addition, Bush's example — that when "Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided' — suggests that his reference to appeasement meant not just one-time talking, but delusional and persistent engagement that is oblivious to facts on the ground.

Medved: Declaration Against Islam Would Be Counterproductive

Michael Medved asks in his article Is Islam Itself the Enemy?, "Is America’s 'war on terror' in reality a war on Islam itself?".

He seems to analyze the impact of making such a declaration but not look at the veracity of the statement itself. As a quick analysis of the impact of announcing a war with Islam, he has a very good analysis.

Nevertheless, any public proclamation of overall enmity toward Islam would harm America’s cause in the world at large and undermine our security at home. This approach damages our interest in five ways--

1) It confirms the anti-American propaganda of terrorist leaders.
Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and their associates have argued for years that the United States, "the Great Satan," is the leader of a global conspiracy to destroy Islam and oppress Muslims...

2) It alienates our allies.
Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations may be far from perfect as allies, but they would each be profoundly dangerous as adversaries...

3) It puts the societies of Western Europe at profound risk.
With growing and powerful Muslim populations in France, the United Kingdom, Germany and most other European powers, an American declaration of hostility to Islam would force those societies into an impossible choice: either disassociate yourself completely from your necessary American ally, or prepare to suppress the well-established Islamic communities in your midst...

4) It destroys our tradition of religious pluralism. If we proclaim Islam (or any other religion) as an "enemy of the state," then we’ve clearly abandoned our cherished First Amendment tradition of neutrality among religious faiths...

5) It pushes us toward a never-ending war with no exit strategy.
Even those of us who have always supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars wish that the government had learned one of the key lessons of Vietnam which once comprised a key element of the "Powell Doctrine": never go to war without a clear, practical plan for victory and a reliable exit strategy. If we define Islam as our enemy, then what, exactly, is our feasible strategy for wiping out a resilient religious faith that’s proven disturbingly durable for more than 1,400 years?

As can be read in his insightful article, he never addresses whether Islam itself is the source of the problem, whether Jihad is so deeply rooted in Islam it can never be removed. He solely addresses the perception issue.

I will need to read more...

I wonder if we should have refrained from saying anything about the philosophy of Communism for the same reason?