...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

 

Bad idea: Forbes headline—Bush looks to UN for Mideast solution.

 

Given its record, including its woeful inaction in Darfur where thousands upon thousands of people have been hacked to death by machete-wielding Arab militias, I wouldn’t look to the UN to solve a parking ticket dispute. No doubt they’d bung it up in traffic court, set up an agency designed to keep people who’ve been given tickets stewing about it for decades after the original ticket was written, attempt to bribe the police with promises of lucrative and oily pay-offs, or send in Angelina Jolie for a pointless (but mighty fetching) photo-op with traffic control officers.

 

Bush needs to be reminded that the UN hasn’t been part of the solution for a long time now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:00 | link | comments (3)

 

Losing the war: Whether or not it turns out that some of the photos from Qana have been deliberately staged for the benefit of gullible and easily manipulated Western media outlets, one thing is eminently clear: There is no way Israel can win this P.R. war. Israel’s enemies have become so adept at pushing the “Arabs are the victims, Israel is the brutal aggressor” line—first in the Palestinians territories and now in Lebanon, that truth and reality no longer matter; indeed, they seem quaint relics of a time long past. What matters is that the media and a large portion of the world, including the EU (which sold its soul to become part of larger Eurabia) and the Muslim-enthralled U.N. are predisposed to think ill of Israel—even if it’s fighting for its life against avowed genocidal fascists who are deranged religious fanatics sponsored by a genocidal fascist Shia republic, and even if these genocidal Shia fascists have cynically put people, including women and children, in harm’s way. Hezbollah uses kiddies as human shields? Ho hum. Israel fights back and, in the course of doing so kills some of the kiddies Hezbollah is cynically using as juvenile cannon fodder? Apologies from Israel. Howls of outrage from all quarters. Human rights organizations slamming Israel for war crimes. Sob stories by Mark MacKinnon. Und so weiter. (See, who says High School German doesn’t come in handy sometimes?)

 

In fact, there is really only one way for Israel to win the P.R. war: by losing the war. By lying down and allowing the jihad juggernaut to roll over it. By permitting the Islamic Nazis to do the Jews of Israel what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe—that is, to turn them into ashes.

 

The hell with that. This time around, the Jews won’t even be able to count on the world’s crocodile tears and monuments to those murdered. This time around (God forbid) the world will say the Jews of Israel had it coming, because of all the nasty things they did to those nice Palestinians, to those helpless, innocent Lebanese.

 

Even with the jihad raging all over the world, and even with the threat it poses to civilization as a whole, that’s the only narrative the mainstream media and most people seem willing to accept.

 

How to account for this wilful blindness, a calamitous failing that may well spell our doom? My mother always used to tell me to not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. In this instance at least, I’d say both malice AND stupidity (along with a heaping helping of Jew-hatred, a dementia known to corrode the grey matter--just look at Mel) are to blame.

 

Update: Mark Steyn on today’s naked Jew-hatred, which is manifested as naked hatred for the Jewish state:

One of the curious side-effects of the jihad is that it’s liberated among non-Muslims in the west an amazing resurgence in old-school Jew-hatred. I don’t just mean the coded stuff – “Oh, those Jews are so clever” – or the casual prejudices of the schoolyard – “He Jewed me out of two shillings for a Mars Bar” -  but just plain naked virulent hatred. Right now I’m getting a ton of mail like this:

Israelis are the pigs of planet earth: butchering Arab babies, polluting the sea, the land, and the very air we breathe with the the stench of their inhumanity. Israel is a collection of the scum of earth and should be destroyed.

That’s from Nica Campbell, and her opening sentences are only the warm-up. For centuries, Jews were viewed as sinister wandering rootless cosmopolitan figures of no national allegiance. So they became a conventional sovereign state and now they’re hated for that. The standard defense is that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israeli policies, but, as Miss Campbell’s letter suggests, what’s being questioned is not Israel’s policies but the right of Israel to have policies, especially on national security. If, say, some fellows in Mexico had kidnapped California State Troopers and were lobbing rockets randomly into residential areas of San Diego and Los Angeles, even La-La-Land libs would be demanding the US respond. It’s only the Israelis the world wishes to deny the conventional rights of sovereignty. In other words, it’s the legitimacy of the state that’s at issue. In effect, Israel has become the geopolitical version of the European Jew who’s allowed to operate a store in the town but not to exercise full ownership rights: in the old days, Jews faced property restrictions; now they face sovereignty restrictions…

 

Update: Truer words were never spoken: These days, only terrorists are allowed to wage war. From the Conservative Voice:

…The conflicts begun by both Hezbollah and Hamas started with invasions of Israel, the killing of Israeli soldiers, kidnappings of other Israeli soldiers—followed by immediate rocket launches (from both entities) into Israel. Certainly sounds coordinated to me. But, it is Israel who is condemned by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for killing ostensible civilians in Qana. People die in war. That’s why the phrase “war is hell” came into being. But, when one’s country is attacked, there is only one option for survival—fight back. Israel, however, is being condemned for fighting back in any way that might actually destroy the terrorist organizations that started the conflict in the first place.

It is clear that the increasingly useless United Nations does not want terrorist organizations to be destroyed. It actually wants to send “diplomatic envoys” to “discuss the situation” with these terrorist bodies. And the UN expects, nee demands that the civilized world agree to its madness. The predominant reason the UN has used is that Israel is employing “disproportionate force” against the terrorists. Should Israel be throwing rocks at Hezbollah and Hamas? The UN apparently thinks so.

There is no disproportionate force in existence, when fighting for survival against enemies who have vowed to wipe you and your country from the map—as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has commanded. There is no disproportionate force in existence, when fighting against enemies who purposefully target civilians. There is no disproportionate force that exists or that will ever exist, when people are fighting for their lives and the lives of their families and loved ones—against enemies who are hell-bent upon killing them. There are, also, few-to-no diplomatic channels that can be employed against pure and unadulterated evil; an evil that is determined to destroy you and your seed—forever. But, it seems that the UN and the leftist world press has a solution. In their ever-quickening attempts toward suicide, they have decided that the victims of violence should be hamstrung. And they have decreed that the Islamo-fascist perpetrators of said violence and avowed-genocide should be rewarded.

The bottom line? Only the terrorists should be allowed to fight. Yeah. That should do it!

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:03 | link | comments

 

Tories stand with Israel: When I saw the title of this piece by Larry Zolf on the Ceeb website—“Harper’s Israel policy has deep roots”—I cringed. I thought it was going to be a typical “bash Israel” piece, the kind that has become standard issue at Canada’s publicly-funded broadcaster. (As a taxpayer and a dissatisfied consumer, I’d like to know who to phone to get a rebate for my share of the funding? I’m tired of paying for a broadcaster that has more in common with al Jazeera than it does with Fox.) But when I read the piece, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise:

The standard charge against Stephen Harper's foreign policy is that it's a clone of the policies of U.S. President George Bush.

Harper, his critics say, has gutted the image of Canada as a neutral middle power and peacemaker, a nation with a pragmatic foreign policy. He has, they say, a foreign policy that is brand new for Canada: a one-sided defence of Israel.

These critics all focus on the so-called "golden age of diplomacy" as practiced by the Liberals under Lester Pearson: a tradition of studied neutrality in the Middle East that has been embraced in Canadian foreign policy under the Liberals ever since.

It's this foreign policy that Harper has scuttled. Harper is pro-Israel and has kept a close lid on the Foreign Affairs Department, lest it stray too far from his line on the Mideast.

The historically challenged small 'l' liberal media sees Harper as an unbalanced supporter of Israel and sees Israel as the aggressor in the present crisis in Lebanon.

The real model for Harper's stance

But a closer look at history shows that Harper's stance on the Middle East is not aping Bush and the Americans. A careful look shows that the real model for Harper's present foreign policy and stand on Israel is John Diefenbaker.

In 1956, Britain, France and Israel went to war with Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. Pearson and Louis St. Laurent condemned the European powers and Israel.

In 1957, the Diefenbaker Tories upset the Pearson Liberals in an election that directly challenged the traditional Liberal Pearson view of foreign policy and the Middle East.

Diefenbaker sharply attacked the St. Laurent-Pearson Liberals for their Suez policy. He dumped the idea of a moderate, neutral and pragmatic Canada in favour of taking a stand with the defence of Britain, France and Israel. And he won the election.

As prime minister, he created a pro-Israel, anti-Pearson and anti-External Affairs policy.

He was convinced that External Affairs (as Foreign Affairs was called at the time) was against both Israel and his government's foreign policy and he viewed the department with suspicion.

Mulroney echoed Diefenbaker's views

From the mid-1980s to the early '90s, another Tory prime minister, Brian Mulroney, echoed Diefenbaker in his distrust of Foreign Affairs and in his pro-Israel stance.

That's the tradition Harper is following.

His hands-on policy — and his one-man rule on foreign affairs and anything the Foreign Affairs Department does — is reminiscent of Dief's distrust of the department and bitter dislike of Pearson. Diefenbaker was convinced that External Affairs was anti-Israel and against the foreign policy of his government.

Harper, like Diefenbaker, also distrusts the media's stance on Israel.

Diefenbaker, a lifelong supporter of Israel, did not like the position the Kennedys and the American liberal media took on Israel and the Mideast. Harper is a disciple of William Buckley Jr., whose contempt of American liberals' and the media's stand on Israel is well known.

The liberal media argument that Harper is too pro-Israel and too pro-Bush is simplistic. And its criticism of Harper as a blundering, wrongheaded, rookie simpleton in the Middle East does not square with history.

Harper is not George Bush's toadie. His policy on Israel and the Mideast is part of a long Tory tradition.

To review: Diefenbaker, Mulroney, Harper—friends of Israel. Trudeau, Chretien, Martin and the new Liberal leader, whoever he or she may be—not.

Something for Jews who would support Israel and would like to see it (and Canada) survive the jihad to bear in mind come election time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:36 | link | comments (1)

 

Pessimistic forecast: In Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz warns that the “United States, Israel, and every sentient being in the path of the Islamist crusade are teetering on the brink of a massive defeat in Lebanon and thus in the war on terror.”

 

Read it and weep.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:47 | link | comments

 

Jew-haters round-up:

 

• In Sydney, Australia, a synagogue was attacked.
• In Berlin, a Holocaust memorial was defaced. 
• In Canada, the Mideast conflict is blames for a dizzying rise in anti-Jewish incidents, including one where a Jewish family was sent a decapitated pig.
• In Miami, two synagogues and two businesses with a largely Jewish clientele are vandalized.
• And let’s not forget Seattle, and whatever horrible things are going on—but are being covered up—in Europe.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:19 | link | comments

 

Chutzpah!: Iran, the Shia dystopia that’s rushing to complete its nuclear project, the better to be and display the biggest Muslim dick in the neighbourhood; the nation led by genocidal Islamo-Nazis who vow to eliminate the Jewish “cancer”; the state sponsor of Hezbollah, which greenlighted the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in order to divert the attention away from Iran's nuclear schemes—must I go on? Those guys are saying that “peace” hinges on divesting Israel (that Jewish blot on the impeccable Muslim map) of its nuclear weapons.

 

Count on Kofi and the gang to see that as a not unreasonable request.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:07 | link | comments

 

Mel-t down: I don’t know about you, but the news that Mel Gibson has exposed himself to be an insane Jew-hater is about as shocking as the news that the newly reconstituted UN Human Rights Council is just as pointless and Jew-hating as the old UN body it replaced. That is, not at all shocking.

 

Oh, sure, hearing Mel utter the actual words—that “the Jews” (booga booga) are responsible for all the wars in the world—is a bit startling, but only when you consider that they’re coming out of the mouth of the man once identified by People magazine as the sexiest man alive. But when you remember that this is the same guy who adorned his Jesus movie with some particularly gruesome and extra-textual touches—like that scene where the Jewish children turn into demons—it all falls into place.

 

Word is that Hollywood is divided about Mel’s melee with the L.A. policeman (who Mel queried about his possible Semitic-ness—at least he didn’t ask him to drop his pants). Some say it’s proof that, despite previous denials that he harboured any anti-Jewish animus, Mel is a more dashing but somewhat less Teutonic version of egregious Jew-hater Ernst Zundel. Others are saying, hey, give the guy a break: He’s under a lot of pressure; he hasn’t been able to lick a stubborn drinking problem; and don’t forget he’s made a crap-load of money, and odds are he can do it again. 

 

Me? I’ve always believed in vino veritas, and much as my heart went pitta-pat for Mel back in day (especially his turn as the outrageously attractive reporter in The Year of Living Dangerously—ayzeh chatichah, as they say in Hebrew), I can’t help but think that the booze loosened his tongue and allowed him to speak from his heart.

 

Which, we can now say with more certainly, is a cold-blooded, Jews-are-Christ-killers, antisemitic organ.

 

Much like his hate-corroded, delusional brain.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:51 | link | comments

 

No win situation: Don’t worry about Israel. She’ll survive—just as long as no more Hezbollah supporters and their children, who’ve been content to live amongst their heroes and champions—are killed. Because unless Israel can turn back the tide of the jihad in a bloodless manner and keep all the little Lebanese Hezbollah supporters alive and in one piece (certainly, a demand that isn’t made of the jihadis, who are way behind in the casualty sweepstakes and haven’t yet killed enough Jews to make the war “proportionate”), it will continue to be pilloried in the clueless mainstream media by the likes of the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon.

 

Here’s how MacKinnon begins today’s emotionally manipulative account of the Israeli reprisal than resulted in civilian casualties:

QANA, LEBANON -- A baby's diaper, a child's colouring book and a woman's dress lying grotesquely beside the rubble. This is what remained yesterday after Israel bombed a residential building where 63 people from two families had huddled together for 16 straight nights, hoping the air raids would leave the unfinished structure alone.

At least 55 people, 34 or more of them children, were crushed to death in the Israeli attack. More bodies were still believed to be buried inside yesterday as night fell.

Brothers Abbas and Haider Hashem had worked for four years to build the home, which was envisioned to house their large extended family. Yesterday, it was reduced to a pile of shattered concrete and twisted metal that collapsed on and suffocated those who had been hiding in the basement when the Israeli bomb hit.

All around lay suggestions of the humble life the Hashems and the neighbouring Shalhoub clan lived during their time inside the simple shelter. The colouring book was filled with pictures of a girl and her dog shaded yellow and green. There were soccer trading cards, track pants, a mismatched collection of sandals and a plastic bottle of cooking oil.

There's little question that this was a town that supported Hezbollah, the Shia militia that provoked war by capturing two Israeli soldiers almost three weeks ago. A giant photograph of Iran's deceased Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini glares at drivers from one of the main roads leading into town.

Residents speak admiringly of what they call "the resistance."

But as a front-end loader clawed through the rubble last night -- the work occasionally pausing as United Nations and Red Cross staff carefully extracted another body part from the wreckage -- there were no obvious signs of Hezbollah's presence.

Israel has acknowledged targeting the building between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. yesterday morning, saying the attack was a response to Hezbollah fire from the area. That charge will likely never be proved or disproved. There was no destroyed truck at the site that might have been a mobile missile launcher; no mangled military equipment...

Now, don’t you hate those brutal Israelis for what they’ve done to this idyllic Islamo-Nazi village?

 

Bravo, MacKinnon, for a job well done.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:54 | link | comments

 

Down time:

 

A blogging break

Is what I’ll take.

Sat. and Sun., and then,

Back on Monday again.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:01 | link | comments

 

Where’s Nasty: Hiding out at the Iranian embassy. Where else would he be? (link via Drudge)

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:15 | link | comments

 

The ties that (don’t) bind: A group I’m involved in was brainstorming (or spit-balling, in current parlance) the other day about the most effective ways to dispel Jew-hatred. During the discussion, the leader of the group mentioned that she had spoken to someone who thinks the best way to do that is to “build bridges” between Jews and Muslims—individuals, groups and communities—hoping that in times of crisis these bridges will hold.

 

I strongly disagreed. While I see nothing wrong with maintaining friendly relationships, (“it couldn’t hurt,” as the old punchline goes) I said that it’s dangerous to think see such “friendships” as operating on anything more than the most superficial level, to expect to maintain them when the chips are down, so to speak.

 

That’s the same point I tried to make to Bernie Farber, back when we exchanged e-mails regarding the CJC’s condemnation of the Danish newspaper that had published the Mo ‘toons. At the time, Farber was extremely pleased that Muslim organizations had commended the CJC’s stance (quel surprise!) and insisted that these ties would stand us in good stead when the CJC marched arm-in-arm with Muslim groups to lobby the provincial government to fund our religious schools.

 

An article in the New York-based Jewish weekly, Forward, proves my point (and shows how naïve and short-sighted the CJC was). The piece is written by a Jew who lives in Detroit and thought he had built solid relationships with local Muslims. (Detroit and nearby Dearborn are home to a large population of Muslims.) It took the current war between Israel and the jihadis to show him how flimsy these bonds really were:

Here in the metro Detroit area, we have been fortunate when it comes to inter-group and inter-religious relations. Civility between diverse ethnic and interfaith groups, including members of the large local Arab American community, has largely been maintained throughout the most difficult of times, even when ethnic, religious and cultural conflicts flare in other parts of the world.

That is, until recent days. What I heard and saw at recent anti-war rallies in Detroit and Dearborn went far beyond the pale.

I was among the thousands who attended a rally in Dearborn on July 18, and I never felt so alone in my life. I understand tensions are high in the Arab-American community. I sincerely sympathize with the deep concern for family and friends in Lebanon; I, too, worry about family and friends in Israel. Yet it is one thing to criticize Israeli policy, and quite another to compare Israeli actions to Nazi Germany's final solution that exterminated 6 million Jews.

As I walked among the rally participants, several thoughts rushed through my mind. The first was how young many of them were. A whole generation of metro Detroiters — our future neighbors, schoolmates, co-workers and leaders — will remember this day forever.

Second, I struggled to come to grips with how Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah could be so glorified. Nasrallah heads an extremist terrorist group that frequently calls not only for "death to Israel," but also "death to America." Hezbollah is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Lebanon, and hundreds of innocent civilians. As an American and a Jew, it is difficult for me to understand why so many Arab Americans in my community venerate him and others of his ilk.

Finally, the antisemitic placards at the rally were a horrendous display of Israel as Nazi obsession. Signs compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler and equated Stars of David with Nazi swastikas; one sign read, "Israel Nazi Are the Same Thing." This ugly comparison demeans the victims, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, of Nazi genocide, demonizes Israelis, and dehumanizes those who support Israel. Had the July 18 rally been held in Europe instead of Dearborn, it would likely have been officially classified as an antisemitic event.

After so many years promoting tolerance and the need for understanding among Detroit's rich mosaic of ethnic, racial and religious groups — and it pains me to say this — the Jewish community here should be alarmed about what the future will be like for our children, and their children, in metro Detroit. The Arab Americans' youthfulness and sheer numbers must be noted. They are learning quickly about political activism in America, and have connections with activist groups throughout the world.

We cannot afford to ignore their anger and misguided messages. We need to think long and hard about future interactions…

An object lesson for us all, including those of us who are proud to call one of the world’s most multicultural cities our home.

 

Update: And speaking of Detroit and Dearborn…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments

 

1984 today: Charles Krauthammer on our Orwellian times. From JWR:

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history that flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.

On Wednesday, CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead, it attacked dual-use infrastructure — bridges, roads, airport runways — and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten-thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

I’m pretty sure that last question was rhetorical.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:44 | link | comments

 

A tale of two papers: There’s a disconnect (a chasm, really) between the Globe and Mail’s news coverage of the current phase of the jihad against Israel and the paper’s editorial position. News-wise, the Globe’s husband and wife team of MacKinnon and Wheeler have been writing stories in which Israel is the brutal aggressor and the Lebanese their hapless and innocent victims; Hezbollah is bad too, but not as bad as the Zionists. Editorial-wise, the Globe has been much more balanced and perceptive about the situation, and willing to shoot down some of the nonsense that been flying around.

 

Case in point: today’s lead editorial which examines--and torpedoes--Canada’s “mythical status as honest broker in the Middle East”:

 

…The awkward truth is that Canada has done little to advance Middle East peace. Our last big contribution occurred when Lester Pearson helped negotiate an end to the Suez crisis in 1956, half a century ago. Our only significant role in the Oslo peace process that began in the 1990s was to head a committee on the fate of refugees, an issue that has yet to be solved. No recent Canadian prime minister has been even a bit player in settling the region’s quarrels. When a crisis erupts, as it has this month, no on in the Middle East asks: What does Canada think?

 

The reputation that Mr. Harper is supposed to be squandering exists mainly in the minds of Canadians like Mr. Axworthy and Mr. Graham. We are not abandoning our role as honest broker in the Middle East because we never were one.

 

In any case, it is hard to see exactly what even the most honest broker could do in the present situation. The Oslo process is dead. The “road map” to peace is in tatters. The current Palestinian government, led by Hamas, a terrorist group, refuses even to acknowledge Israel’s right exist. Hezbollah, which started the current conflict by kidnapping and killing Israel’s soldiers, and then firing rockets at Israeli cities, is devoted to Israel’s destruction.

 

To take a neutral stand between terrorist militias fuelled by radical Islam and a democratic country defending itself from attack would have been a perversion of our traditions…

 

Hear, hear.

 

There’s no disconnect between the National Post’s news coverage and its editorial position re the current crisis. The two are in complete harmony. Here’s part of the Post’s excellent editorial explaining the connection between Hezbollah and its puppet master, Iran, and the central but behind-the-scenes role the dystopia is playing in this war:

For the last two weeks, innocent Israelis have been killed in missile barrages from Lebanese-based Hezbollah terrorists and militia. On the other side of the border, more than 300 Lebanese civilians have been accidentally killed by Israeli bombs aimed at Hezbollah assets. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have engaged with Hezbollah gunmen in ground combat, with both sides taking heavy casualties. All this loss of life was caused by Hezbollah's decision to stage an unprovoked act of war on uncontested, sovereign Israeli soil two weeks ago.

But why did Hezbollah do it? Since the government of Lebanon and most ordinary Lebanese people plainly didn't want this war, who did? Who is pulling Hezbollah's strings?

HERE ARE A FEW CLUES:

- The Shiite terrorist group receives US$120-million in annual financing from Tehran, where it operates an office on a central downtown street.

- Hezbollah was created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Several hundred IRGC officers are operating in Lebanon to this day, assisting Hezbollah's war effort.

- According to Western intelligence sources, over the last six months, the IRGC has been teaching Hezbollah how to operate its massive stock of rockets, many of which are from Iran. These include Zelzal missiles, which can reach Tel Aviv and beyond.

- On Wednesday, more than 60 Iranian self-declared suicide bombers, bedecked in Hezbollah paraphernalia, set off from Tehran in a "holy war" against Israeli forces in Lebanon.

- Yesterday, a Kuwaiti newspaper broke the news that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is travelling to Damascus for secret meetings with Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani.

- During fighting in Lebanon, Israeli soldiers have seized weaponry marked with the logo of Iranian military manufacturers, such as the grenade launcher featured in the photo below.

- Earlier this month, Iranian troops assisted Hezbollah in firing a C-802 radar-guided missile at an Israeli warship, killing several crew members and nearly sinking the craft.

- Iranian officials met with Hezbollah leaders in Damascus on July 12, the very day this conflict started and -- as David Frum has noted on these pages -- the same day Western nations announced a threat of economic sanctions against Iran if the Islamic Republic refused to curtail its nuclear program.

Get the picture? As despicable and murderous as Hezbollah's own jihadist ideology may be, the group is very much a creature of Iran, which is seeking to flex its muscle against the West without actually attacking Western targets directly. Whether or not one thinks Israel is exercising "disproportionate" force in the prosecution of this war, there is no doubt about who is behind it: The people dying in Haifa and Beirut are the victims of a proxy conflict funded and planned by warmongers in Tehran…

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:04 | link | comments

 

Inappropriate funding: Islam Online, a Wahabist-funded website which propogandizes on behalf of the one true faith and often has scathing things to say about America and Israel, is sponsoring a program, based in Munich, to help train science journalists in the Middle East. And by the Middle East, of course, they mean the Arab Middle East. (Not that science journalists in the tiny Jewish sector need any special training, living as they do in a democracy that’s in the forefront of science and technology.)

 

And you’ll never guess who’s coughing up some of the cash to pay for the program:

 

...Dr. Magdy Said, former head of IslamOnline.net's science and cultural departments, commented on the website's participation in the program. "It's been one of our goals as a science department at IslamOnline.net to build our skills in a step-by-step process in order to play a role in the science and technology system in the Arab and developing worlds," he said. "If there are calls for reform in the Arab and developing worlds, part of these reforms must be in the science and technology sector. And we at IslamOnline.net believe that we must play a role in the popularization of science as part of these reforms," added Said. "By participating in the World Federation of Science Journalists' two-year mentoring program, we are partaking in the reform of science journalism in our part of the world. We also benefit ourselves by learning more skills and gaining more knowledge in our field of work. We are taking one more large step ahead in fulfilling some of our goals at IslamOnline.net," he concluded. 

The 20 experienced science journalists in the Munich training workshop have jointly accumulated more than 300 years of accumulated experience in science journalism, establishing science beats, and creating associations. They come from Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South and North America, as well as Europe.

Dr. Kathryn O'Hara, who holds the Chair in Science Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, structured the Munich session. "Thinking like a mentor is not necessarily the same as thinking like a journalist," she explained. "There is a huge wealth of expertise in this group."

The session was organized in collaboration with Technisch-Literarische Gesellschaft (TELI) and the Wissenschafts-Pressekonferenz (WPK), the two German science journalist associations.  Regional co-ordinators are Diran Onifade, a Nigerian television reporter, for English-speaking Africa; Nadia El-Awady, science editor of the Cairo-based IslamOnline.net internet service for the Arabic-speaking world, and science journalism professor Gervais Mbarga of the University of Yaounde in Cameroon for Francophone Africa.

The mentoring scheme is funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DfID).

Um, why is Canada paying to train Arab journalists in Munich with the aim of furthering the goals of Islam Online? Surely our tax dollars could be put to much better use—say, like helping resettle all those Hezbollah supporters, er, Lebanese-Canadians, fleeing the war.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:56 | link | comments

No escape: Interim Liberal leader Bill Graham is shooting off his mouth again. Bill, like the rest of the clueless left, is displeased with Canada’s so-called “new direction”—you know, how it’s “tilting” toward Israel and George W. Bush’s America and tilting away from its mythical fence-sitting, er, peace-keeping position. From the Toronto Star:

MONTREAL — Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s reaction to the death of a Canadian peacekeeper in Lebanon was irresponsible and risks making Canada irrelevant in the region, interim Liberal leader Bill Graham said Thursday.

“Everybody watching Canada at this time is concerned about whether or not Canada is, by its actions, making itself irrelevant in terms of being able to contribute to the possibility of a long-term peace in the Middle East,” Graham said.

 

The former Liberal foreign affairs and defence minister said Harper has signalled a shift in Canadian policy by strongly backing Israel in the conflict.

In the wake of the presumed death of Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener of Kingston, Harper questioned why the UN remained in the lookout post along the Israeli-Lebanese border two weeks after Israel’s military offensive began.

“It is essentially a war zone,” the prime minister said after saying the death of the Canadian was a “great tragedy.”

 

“I found Mr. Harper’s reaction . . . completely unacceptable,” Graham said after a meeting with an environmental group.

 

Canada has been sending peacekeepers to the Middle East since former Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson first sent them there in the 1960s, Graham said.

 

The Canadian peacekeeper died Tuesday along with three other unarmed observers at a clearly marked UN post.

 

“Mr. Harper showed irresponsibility by putting into question Canada’s traditional position contributing to peace,” Graham said.

 

While noting that Israel has the right to defend itself against a terrorist organization like Hezbollah, which the Liberals previously banned in Canada, Graham said Canada has always stressed long-term peace rather than an immediate military solution.

 

He said Canada must retain its independence in the face of views from the United States and others.

 

“Harper shouldn’t simply repeat what (U.S. President George W.) Bush or (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice have said.”

 

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Tuesday the Israeli attack on the UN post appeared to be deliberate. Harper responded that the facts suggested otherwise, noting the Jewish state has co-operated with Canada over the evacuation of its citizens from Lebanon.

 

Graham didn’t address the pertinence of the presence of the observation post. But he recalled that the Israelis invited the UN to watch the Hezbollah, which controls the area…

 

I have the sense that Bill and the gang think they can somehow isolate Canada from the current war—not unlike the isolationists who encouraged Americans to sit out WWII. Like them, Bill is under the impression—misimpression, actually—that this isn’t our fight, and that we can avoid being pulled into it as long as we don’t “take sides.”

 

Silly Billy. You can’t sit out the jihad. Not when you’re squatting on a choice piece of real estate in Dar al Harb and the jihadis think the folks next door are Great Satan.

 

Of course, by the time Bill et al figure this out—that’s assuming they ever do—it’ll probably be too late.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:27 | link | comments

 

Fascist parallels: Here's a chart of some of the striking--and terrifying--points of comparison between the Nazis of yore and the Islamo-Nazis of today:

	The Nazis	Iran/Hezbollah and other jiahdists
Primary focus of rage:	The Jews of Europe	the Jews of Israel
Preferred antisemitic metaphor:	Jews are “a vermin” that must be “exterminated"	Jews are “a blot” that must be “wiped off the map; a “cancer” that must be erradicated
Alleged “grievance” designed to boost allegiance and membership:	After WWI (a war they believed they could have and should have won) Germany was forced to sign an onerous armistice agreement after WWI that unfairly punished them and benefited—who else?—the Jews. And, oh, yeah--the Jews were also responsible for facilitating the German defeat and for starting the entire war, the greedy, underhanded buggers.	Muslims around the world are being unfairly treated by infidels and three (now four, with Lebanon) of their nations are under “occupation,” two of them by—who else?—the Jews.
Inspirational document/author:	Mein Kampf, literally “my struggle,” by Adolf Hitler	The Koran, by Allah as revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. One of the book’s core tenets is “jihad,” literally, “a struggle."
Marching style:	Goose-stepping soldiers who offer a straight-armed salute	Ditto
Opportunities for young people?	Yes, “Hitlerjungen,” brainwashed to become martyrs for the German Reich—the greatest glory possible.	Yes, young shahids-to-be, brainwashed to become martyrs for Islam—the greatest glory possible.
Goals:	“Lebensram”; a Judenrein Europe (to start); a 1000 year Reich; world conquest.	A Judenrein Middle East (to start); Shia domination of the Muslim world (to start; world conquest.
Philosophy toward women:	“Kinder, kuchen, kirche”	Ditto, only substitute “mosque” for the last item.
Great moments in appeasement:	Too many to list here, among them: Germany asks for and gets the Ruhr valley; Germany asks for and gets the Sudentenland; British P.M. Nigel Chamberlain announces “peace in our time.”	Too many to list here, among them: the “road map” to “peace in our time”; the failure to sanction Iran or do anything substantive to put the brakes on its nuclear program; the framing of Lebanon as the “good guy” and Israel as the “bad guy” in its existential war with Hezbollah, so the world won’t feel too bad should the Jews of Israel be slaughtered in a second Holocaust.
Number of Jews murdered (est.)	Six million Jews on the continent of Europe	TBA, but a pool of close to six million are avaible for genocide in Israel.  Add to that the small number of Jews who remain in Iran, Syia and the rest of the Muslim world (for a start).
Deranged leader(s)	Adolf Hitler, “Der Fuhrer.”	Mahmoud Ahmajinejad, Sheikh Nasrallah, frontmen for Iran’s mad mullahs.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:11 | link | comments

 

Kind-hearted refugees: My nominee for the day’s most egregious piece of anti-Israel propaganda in a mainstream newspaper (admittedly, an extremely crowded field): this article by the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon. MacKinnon and his wife, Caroline Wheeler, also a Globe reporter on the scene, have been the paper’s tag-team of Israel-bashers before and during the recent conflict. In this piece, MacKinnon hits all the usual notes designed to make you root for the poor dispossessed and despise their cruel displacers (boo, hiss, Israel), including my "favourite" image—desperate  “refugees” clutching beloved keys to doors they will never re-open.

 

I’d advise you to grab a hankie before plowing ahead. This one’s a real sob-fest:

Lebanese refugees bond with their Palestinian hosts

MARK MACKINNON

AL-BAS REFUGEE CAMP, LEBANON -- There are few places in the world where the anger at Israel, both age-old and freshly stirred, runs as deep as on these streets, where images of Yasser Arafat stare at you from nearly every wall.

Established in 1948 as Palestinians fled north during the war that gave birth to the Jewish state, al-Bas is a place where residents still clutch keys and ownership documents to places in Israel that they likely will never see again.

Today this refugee camp, on the edge of the hard-hit port city of Tyre, has seen its population of 5,000 swell by 500 families who have arrived from across southern Lebanon, in a fashion similar to the Palestinian exodus of 58 years ago -- abandoning their homes as they fled an advancing Israeli army.

The Palestinians have suddenly gone from being beggars to gracious hosts, opening their doors and sharing their food with the new arrivals. They intrinsically understand what their guests are going through better than anyone else could.The al-Bas elementary school, where hundreds of men, women and children spent last night lying on the cold floor with pillows but no blankets, has become a uniquely Lebanese place of compounded misery and shared anger, a refugee camp within a refugee camp.

"There's a closeness. They took us in, and now it's our turn to take them in," said Mohammed Atiyeh, an official from the Palestinian Fatah faction who is running the makeshift camp. "We're used to being targeted by Israel. . . . To Israel, there's no difference between Palestinians and Lebanese."

The feeling of togetherness in this conflict has been deepened by the fact that Israel's two-week-old assault on southern Lebanon has coincided with a three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip. Israel has linked its attacks on the Lebanese Hezbollah militia and the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority as part of the same "war on terror," and the two Islamic groups have repeatedly expressed solidarity with each other since the fighting began.

"We have the same feeling right now. We are protesting what the Israelis are doing in both places," Mr. Atiyeh said. "It's really one people who are suffering together.”

Huda Diab, a 35-year-old mother of six who spent most of the last two weeks living in the al-Bas elementary school, says she felt a kinship with the Palestinians as soon as she arrived. "The Palestinian people welcomed us. The government didn't help us. The Palestinians are sharing their own things with us," she said, lying on the floor with her children near the school's entrance. "We're refugees staying in refugees' homes. We understand each other."...

So if I understand things correctly, people from Lebanon, a country which refused to absorb and grant citizenship to Palestinians who have been “refugees” lo these many countless years, are now refugees themselves because of a crisis which stems from the refusal of Israel’s Arab neighbours to absorb the original Arab refugees from that almost six decades-old Arab war with Israel. And many of these same Lebanese were granted citizenship in a flash from Canada, a nation which opened its doors to them after a much more recent civil war in Lebanon, and which was forced to rescue a slew of them when the war that stems from the refusal of Israel’s Arab neighbours to absorb the original Arab refugees from that almost six decades-old war heated up.

 

To state it more plainly: three years in Canada, and you can become a Canadian citizen. Fifty-eight years in Lebanon, and you're still a Palestinian "refugee."

 

There’s a bitter irony there, one which the ever-oblivious MacKinnon fails to notice. How can he, when he’s so busy tugging furiously at our heart-strings?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:51 | link | comments

 

A picture worth a thousand words:

 

 

The flags of kindred spirits, the UN and

Hezbollah, waving side by side at a UN outpost

in southern Lebanon.( Ain’t that sweet?)

(link via the Herald Sun)

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:01 | link | comments

 

Unconnected dot: The inestimable Hugh Fitzgerald on the media’s dangerous fixation on the minutia of Israel’s counter-attacks in Lebanon (a fixation he calls “a rich harvest of nonsense). The real danger is that it’s preventing people from seeing the “bigger picture.”

…But we are carefully to keep our gaze not on Islam worldwide, not on all the instruments of Jihad. We are carefully to pretend that the war against the Infidel state of Israel has nothing to do with Islam, when it is all about Islam. Hamas and Hizballah are nothing but Islam. Al Qaeda is nothing but Islam. The war in 1948 was about removing the Jews from Dar al-Islam. Nasser presented this theme more in terms of pan-Arabism -- but what was pan-Arabism itself except a subset of Islam? It was the initial expression of Muslim pan-Islamic sentiment before the bonanza of the oil wealth (ten trillion dollars since 1973), which paid for mosques, madrasas, and worldwide propaganda and Da'wa, not to mention armaments galore. Then the nearly-simultaneous entry into Western Europe of large numbers of Muslims from different countries was accompanied by smug assumptions that Islam was just a different religion, rather than a complete politico-theological system. No one understood that its basis, its beating heart, was the duty of Jihad and the clear division of the world between Believer and Infidel, between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet had this been properly understood, and had the older generation of Western experts on Islam been heeded, this would have led to a much more circumspect policy regarding the dangerous Muslim entry deep within, and deep behind, what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines…

You can understand why CNN and the rest are so caught up in the scenes of destruction: Great visuals, clear-cut bad guy (Israel), and an excuse to ignore the angry (and scary) jihadi elephant running riot and crapping all over the living room.

 

Update: Duh!

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:42 | link | comments

 

Annan’s efforts: In a headline that made me laugh out loud this morning (my best laugh of the day, so far), the Toronto Star insists that Israel’s inadvertent hit on a UN outpost was “A double blow” for Kofi Annan because he’s “worked hard to boost Israel at the UN.”

 

(Please, take a moment or three to release any pent-up chortles…There, doesn’t that feel better?)

 

The New York Daily News unpacks the reason for my mirth:

...It defies reason and humanity to believe Israel determined to launch a lethal attack against the world body, but that was Annan's impulse, one obviously rooted in the animus that informs virtually all he says and does regarding Israel. He is among the leading voices calling on a country besieged by terrorism to lay down its arms before those who would destroy it. And he is among those who, unbelievably, charge Israel with disproportionate use of force.

Since Hezbollah provoked the fight with a bloody cross-border kidnapping, Israel has dropped 40,000 shells on Lebanon, killing roughly 400 people - a figure that testifies to Israeli restraint. Yet Annan is appalled, putting him in the same camp as the top Hezbollah man who admitted he never expected such Israeli fury.

Annan's accusations against Israel are all the more odious because he is the chief of an organization that failed to implement Security Council Resolution 1559, which passed three years ago demanding the disbanding and disarmament of all militias in Lebanon and the control of the Lebanese government over all territory. If the UN had carried through, Hezbollah attacks would have long ended…

Hate to have to break it to you Kofi, but your so-called (and completely fictitious) “boost” is a bust.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:09 | link | comments

 

An idea whose time will never come, one can only hope and pray: From the New York Post:

 

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is floating a two-step plan for "enduring peace" on the Israel-Lebanon border as she meets with world leaders in Rome today, officials say.

 

The huddle is aimed at ending the warfare triggered two weeks ago when Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorists crossed the border to kidnap two Israeli soldiers.

 

The first step in Rice's plan could be an interim international force of 10,000 troops - perhaps from Muslim nations such as Egypt and Turkey - to stay for 90 days or so once there's a cease-fire.

They could be replaced by a bigger international force of up to 30,000 troops to create a buffer zone protecting Israel and help Lebanon establish control over areas now run by Hezbollah…

 

More of that “creative” thinking we’ve come to know and loathe, courtesy the muddle-headed folks as Foggy Bottom.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:08 | link | comments (1)

 

Survivors: A Professor Emeritus at Ryerson University (my alma mater) calls for “peace with justice.” Here’s his letter in the Toronto Star:

 

As a survivor of the Holocaust against Jews, I am deeply influenced by my Jewish community's prophetic tradition that teaches: "Justice, justice shall you pursue." Your editorial expresses an important step toward peace with justice in the Middle East: sending United Nations troops to Lebanon.

 

But for justice to be achieved, it is not enough for a United Nations military force to be mandated to stop all violent attacks against Israel by Hezbollah, Hamas and other extremists. This new UN force must also be mandated to end Israeli control and Jewish settlements in territories outside of Israel, that is, all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

 

For such a UN force to be successful, it must have the capacity to exclude certain nations from participation when those nations are in conflict of interest with its mission. Any nation dedicated to destroying Israel (e.g. Iran), or any major arms supplier to the region (e.g. United States) must be excluded from a UN force in the Middle East.

 

At the same time as this new international force works to secure Israel's right to exist, and to support a viable Palestinian state, diplomacy by world leaders must broker negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians leading to binding international arbitration of all their outstanding disputes.

 

"Unrealistic: It's never been done before." If we had allowed cynics and people stuck in the past to veto progress, there would be no social or scientific advances. For the sake of peace with justice in the Middle East, and also for the future survival of human life on this planet, it is high time to achieve progress in effective enforcement of justice in the international arena.

Ben Carniol, Professor Emeritus, Ryerson University, Toronto

 

And here’s the letter I sent in response:

 

As a survivor of the Holocaust, Ben Carniol has firsthand experience of the kind of horrors that can be unleashed when fascists with a deep-seated and irrational hatred of Jews are allowed to pursue their agenda of genocide. Yet, at a time when the Jews of Israel are facing the same kind of threat that the Jews of Europe faced during the Nazi era, Carniol prefers to avert his eyes to this reality and asks us to link the Hezbollah/Hamas effort to wipe Jews off the map to Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

 

Carniol insists that “justice” will be served once these Israeli misdeeds have been redressed, and that it is not “unrealistic” to expect a diplomatic solution to the seemingly intractable problems in the region. I’d like to be hopeful, too. However, recent events argue against him. The last two times Israel has withdrawn from “occupied” territory—in Lebanon and Gaza—the genocidal Islamists, Hezbollah and Hamas, gained control. From Israel’s perspective, the only item these terrorists might be willing to discuss is the timing and manner of Israel’s demise—let’s call it Holocaust, part II. For obvious reasons, that’s a discussion Israel is unwilling to have. Nor is it willing to put its fate in the hands of the UN, an organization which continues to favour Israel’s enemies, and has never been effective in the region.

 

No, unlike Ben Carniol, Israel has assimilated the most important lesson of the Holocaust—the lesson which led directly to the establishment of a Jewish state: When Jew-hating fascists want to kill you en masse, you cannot count on anyone to rescue you; you have to rescue yourselves.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:13 | link | comments (4)

 

Who should pay?: Dan Kelly of Halifax poses an interesting question in a letter to the Globe and Mail’s editor this morning (link available by subscription): “Why doesn’t Canada ask Israel to cover the evacuation costs [of Lebanese-Canadian]?”

 

Why, indeed.

 

Well, Dan, let’s start with the fact that Israel is fighting back against genocidal Islamist terrorists who have been firing thousands of missiles at it. Add to that the reality that these terrorists plunked themselves down smack in the middle of the Lebanese locals, the better to use them as human shields so that when Israel tries to take out military targets, they are bound to hit civilians and raise a hue and cry (like yours) against the Jewish state. And how’s this? The Lebanese, who, I know, I know, have been trying to get their nascent democracy in gear despite being in the grip of the Syria and Hezbollah, have watched this immense build-up of missiles, shipped in courtesy the mad mullahs of the Islamist dysptopia, and, rather than make a fuss, have been content to live cheek by jowl with the terrorists and their weapons and pretend, like happy, clueless little Candides, that all was hunky-dory in what they thought was the best of all possible worlds. And anyway, many of these folks had a “get out of Lebanon free” card—the Canadian passport they’d managed to score by living in Canada for three years (the minimum time required to qualify for citizenship) and then decamping to their real home and native land, Lebanon. But, hey, you can’t blame them. They’re only taking advantage of the rope we gave them to hang us with, the rope which tells people (if rope could talk), “if you want to collect an array of passports and be a Canadian-Lebanese-Uzbekistani-Tahitian, no problemo.”

 

So you see, Dan, asking Israel to pay the costs of evacuation is kind of cheeky and rather sad. It’s a sign that you don’t really have a clear picture of what’s going on here, and that you're unable to tell the good guys from the bad guys—and no wonder, considering that much of the media you're exposed to is in the dark like you.

 

Finally, to return to your query: Who should pay? Here’s my list: Lebanon, Iran, Syria, the UN. And don't forget Hezbollah.

 

I think that about covers it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:33 | link | comments (1)

 

Heavy metal thunder: Nasty Nasrallah and his group, Hellsbollocks, have reworked that old Steppenwolf favourite, “Born to be Wild”:

 

Get yer missiles launchin’,

Heading on to Haifa,

Lookin’ for explosions,

We’ll blast all the Jews away.

Yeah, world we’re gonna make it happen.

Wipe the map clean, make it Judenrein.

Fire all of our ammo at ‘em.

Give ‘em a deadline.

 

We like bombs and weapons,

Smuggled in from Eye-ran.

Mullahs are our masters.

Crazy fascists just like us.

Yeah, world we’re gonna run you over.

Make ev’ryone fall into line.

And soon when Iran goes fission

It will be sublime.

 

And you thought Nazis were bad

We were born, born to jihad.

We’ll make you submit.

It won’t hurt a bit.

 

Born to jiha-a-ad.

Born to jiha-a-ad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:48 | link | comments

 

Our own worst enemies: As Israel faces off against genocidal Islamists in the fight of its life, American Jews can’t seem can’t seem to get past their traditional political orientation and their hatred for George Bush.

 

As David Gelernter explains in Front Page Magazine, this is hardly the first time American Jews have worked against their own interests:

 

American Jews (especially the intellectual leadership) have a tragic history of acting against their own professed interests. In the years before Pearl Harbour, U.S. intellectuals on the whole (especially New York intellectuals) vehemently opposed American entry alongside Britain into the war against Nazi Germany. Of course many New York intellectuals were not Jews, and many American Jews didn’t care for New York intellectuals. But journals like Partisan Review helped shape the cultural climate—and were fiercely antiwar until Pearl Harbor—and were shaped, themselves, by Jewish intellectuals. Leading Jewish intellectuals signed a Partisan Review statement explaining that “Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here…The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.”…

 

Read that ancient Partisan Review statement and the truth hits home.  The problem with the American Jewish left, from 1940 through 2996 is not malevolence but naivete—naivete so great, it is the next best thing to stupidity. Naivete is an occupational hazard among all intellectuals. But American Jews at large respect their intellectuals as much as any group does, and more than most—and way too much for common sense.

 

The Palestinian Arabs who cheer terrorists on do so out of hate, which is far stronger than intelligent self-interest (or any other emotion). American Jews used to act out of very different motives; used to vote left our of idealism. But that is starting to change. As the left-wing agenda dries up, nothing remains to feed on (if you are used to getting your nourishment left of center) but the bitter weeds of hate. And thus the tragic, pathetic surge of hatred for George Bush on the left, including among left-wing Jews. As I heard someone say last week, “I think Bush is doing great on Israel. Naturally, I still hate his guts.”

 

The paragraph that follows is my favourite part of Gelernter’s piece because of how he deftly eviscerates Washington Post columnist Richard “Hunker” Cohen:

 

For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen—who explains that the “greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake.” Who advises Israel to “hunker down,” while “waiting (and hoping that history will get distracted and move on to something else.” It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn’t—or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that someone else could be using, and maybe wants to. The Earth’s surface did not expand to make room for him. Births have outstripped deaths on this planet for many generations. But we are not in the habit of demanding human beings justify their existence or be mowed down, and the idea is equally bad in the case of nations…

 

Actually, I’d like to read the column in which Richard Cohen justifies his existence. It would no doubt be vastly more compelling that his usual drivel.

 

Update: Caroline Glick on the left’s pathologies. From JWR:

…THE CURRENT campaign in northern Israel and Lebanon has brought into sharp focus the major pathologies and strengths of the West in fighting the Iranian-led jihadist axis. The British government's push for a cease-fire, together with the enthusiasm of the UN and France for sending their own troops to Lebanon to protect the Lebanese from the "disproportionate" Israelis; the demand of Israel's radical Left that a deal be made with Syria; and the demands of leftist ideologues in the US that an artificial deadline be set for the conclusion of Israel's operations in Lebanon all point to a similar pathology.

As a group, the ideological Left rejects the notion of victory in war for Western forces (although it is fine for jihadists); rejects the notion that there are enemies that are impossible to appease; and specifically rejects the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself against its enemies, let alone vanquish its foes…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:31 | link | comments

 

Taking sides: The Globe and Mail has another in its unofficial series of opinion pieces by notable Canadians counselling a return to "the good old days" when we sat on the fence and played “honest broker.” On Saturday, the Globe printed an  article in that vein by former Liberal mucky-muck, Lloyd Axworthy. Today’s comment is by Paul Heinbecker, a former Canadian ambassador to the UN (so you know where his head is at). Heinbecker insists that Israel and the Palestinians bear equal blame for the failure to come to terms at the peace table—Israel for building settlements in the West Bank; the Palestinians for “resorting to terrorism” in response. He makes absolutely no distinction between Israel, fighting for its life against genocidal Islamists who want to obliterate it, and the genocidal Islamists. As far as Heinbecker is concerned, both should carry equal weight with Canada, otherwise our reputation for fence-sitting, er, honest brokering, will be impaired and Canada’s the “peace” component of our motto “peace, order and good government” motto will be put at risk.

 

Heinbecker once served as Canada’s ambassador to Germany, so I’m sure he’s well-apprised of that nation's wretched history vis a vis the Jews. In a different era, no doubt, he would have had no difficulty distinguishing “the Jewish side” from “the Nazi side." Perhaps he could gain some moral clarity on the current issue if he took off his diplomatic blinkers and saw Hezbollah for what it is: the return of the Nazis in Islamic garb.

 

Alan Dershowitz is under no illusions about Hezbollah or the perils of the UN’s (and the Globe’s) much-vaunted even-handedness. Here he is in the Chicago Tribune (link via Real Clear Politics):

 

If anyone wonders why the UN has rendered itself worse than irrelevant in the Arab-Israeli conflict, all he or she need do is read UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's July 20 statement. Annan goes to great pains to suggest equal fault and moral equivalence between the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas that specifically target innocent civilians and the self-defense efforts by Israel, which tries desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid causing civilian casualties. In his statement, Annan never condemns, or even mentions, terrorism, which is a root cause and precipitator of the conflict.

Even Annan was forced to acknowledge that "Hezbollah's provocative attack on July 12 was the trigger of this particular crisis"; that Hezbollah is "deliberate[ly] targeting ... Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons"; and that Israel has the "right to defend itself under Article 51 of the UN charter." But he doesn't stop there. He goes out of his way to insist on equating Hezbollah's terrorists with Israeli military response, which he labels "disproportionate" and "collective punishment." He condemns both Hezbollah and Israel. He also criticizes Israel for its efforts at preventing Qassam rocket attacks against its civilian populations, noting that the Hamas rockets have produced no "casualties in the past month." (This, of course, is not for lack of trying.) He ignores Hamas' long history of terrorism against innocent civilians.

Annan then calls for an "immediate cessation of indiscriminate and disproportionate violence" on both sides, again suggesting a moral equivalence. Among the most immoral positions anyone can take is to suggest a moral equivalence between morally different actions.

Part of the goal of organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas is to gain moral legitimacy for their terrorist tactics by having them equated with the conventional military tactics used by democratic regimes. Only the morally obtuse--or perverse--cannot recognize the difference between a terrorist group that targets civilian population centers with anti-personnel weapons designed to maximize civilian casualties and a democracy that seeks to prevent terrorism by employing smart bombs designed to minimize civilian casualties.

Annan knows better than to suggest a moral equivalence. He is fully aware of the tactic employed by terrorists of launching their rockets from, and hiding behind, civilian shields, so as to make democracies have to kill some civilians to get at the terrorists.

But Annan heads an organization that is so anti-Israel that as the late Abba Eban, the early Israeli ambassador to the UN, once put it: "If Algeria proposed a resolution that the Earth was flat and that Israel has flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 120 to 3, with 27 abstentions."…

 

The point must be made here: Not taking sides is taking sides, because it accords Israel's enemies a legitimacy they don’t deserve, one which makes them even stronger and more dangerous--to Israel and to us. In so doing,  the “dishonest brokers”—the UN and internationalists like Axworthy and Heinbecker—only hasten the day when our enemies are finally able to achieve their goals.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:31 | link | comments

 

Nasty speaks out: MEMRI has a translation of Nasty Nasrallah’s interview the other day on al Jazeera TV. The gist of his comments: Hellsbollocks won’t rest while there’s a single Jew left in Israel, Iran is neck deep in the do-do, Iran and Hellsbollocks are using the “Palestinians” (about who they don't really couldn’t give a hoot) as cover, and the government of Lebanon seems awfully palsy-walsy with Nasrallah and his genocidal crew, which tends to cast doubt on Lebanon's whole "helpless victim" routine. Here’s a portion of Nasty’s remarks:

…"Hizbullah has always placed Lebanese national interests above any other interest. During the national dialogue, I said to them: You have known us for 23-24 years. I am ready to tell each and every one of them which battles he has fought - some of them, not all of them... I am ready to tell some of them which battles they have fought for the sake of foreign, rather than Lebanese, interests. Tell me when we, Hizbullah, did anything to Lebanon, or led it into war, for the sake of foreign, rather than Lebanese, interests. They could not give me a single example."

[...]

"Victory in this case does not mean that I will enter and conquer the north of Palestine, and liberate Nahariya, Haifa, and Tiberias. This is not one of our slogans. This is a long process, which pertains to the Palestinians and to the nation. This is another issue. The victory that we are talking about - If the resistance survives, this will be a victory. If its determination is not broken, this will be a victory. If Lebanon is not humiliated, if its honor and dignity remain intact, if Lebanon continues to face all alone the strongest military force in the region, and if it perseveres and refuses to accept any humiliating terms in the settlement of this issue - this will be a victory. If we are not militarily defeated, this will be a victory. As long as a single missile is launched from Lebanon to target the Zionists, as long as a single fighter fires his gun, as long as someone plants an explosive device for the Israelis, this means that the resistance still exists."

[...]

"Today, we Shi'ites are fighting Israel. Our fighting and perseverance ultimately serve our brothers in Palestine, who are Sunni, not Shi'ite. In other words, we, Shi'ites and Sunnis, fight side by side against Israel, which is supported and strengthened by America. I'm telling you that if [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert reaches a point at which he says to the Americans, 'I cannot complete this,' Bush will say to him, 'You go on, and if you encounter a problem, I will resolve it for you.' This is what I meant when I talked about 'a battle of the nation,' and I saw [on TV] that you commented on this. I am not fighting on behalf of the nation. But I say that the outcome of the battle that Hizbullah is fighting in Lebanon, for better or worse, is an outcome for the nation. Defeat in Lebanon is defeat for the nation, and victory in Lebanon is victory for the nation, just like in 2000."

[...]

"For 23 years, we have been talking to our people, motivating them, talking about martyrdom, the honor of martyrdom, and the place of the martyrs. Do the Zionists, or those who encourage them, believe that I, or anyone in the Hizbullah leadership, fears martyrdom? We love martyrdom. We take precautions in order to prevent Israel from making any gains. But on the personal level, and as a personal aspiration, each and every one of us hopes to be destined to martyrdom at the hands of those people, the killers of the prophets and the messengers, and most hostile to the believers, as it says in the Koran."

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:58 | link | comments

 

Hardee-har-har: The other Trudeau (who in his own way is just as clueless and misguided as our late, revered Canadian Prime Minister) has a high-larious cartoon about the President and how he’s so discombobulated that he mixes up—get this—Hezbollah, ebola and stem cell research.

 

It’s about as amusing as the prospect of genocidal Islamists effecting a second Holocaust while the world, once again, stands idly by. (I say that as someone who disagrees with Bush’s stance on stem-cell research, but who knows that the U.S. is the primary impediment to Dar es Salaam—the peace that is promised once all the world is under Islam’s thumb.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:37 | link | comments (1)

 

A love song from Nasty Nasrallah to Moo Jihad:

 

Du bist mein.

Ich bin dein.

Let’s make the Mideast

Judenrein.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:20 | link | comments

 

A bad move: An interesting take on the Iran and Hezbollah from iranian.com:

The current conflict, which almost certainly took part with Iran's agreement, is not wielding many positive results for Iran.

Iran intended to use the current conflict as a tool to bolster its deterrence image. The kidnappings which were followed by Katyusha missile attacks were meant to send a message to Jerusalem. This message meant to say “stop threatening us, and forget about attacking our nuclear installations, because we could cause you severe pain”. Instead, by initiating the attack, Iran gave Israel a pretext to attack its military capability in Lebanon, and to cause damage to it. This bolstered Israel's deterrence at the expense of Iran and Hezbollah's.

Furthermore, Israel used this opportunity to send its own message to Tehran. Through its tough response, Israel military informed Iran that “We are ready to respond very harshly to any kind of threat. Bear that in mind before you attack us again”.

The Iranian government was also hoping that it could use the current conflict as a tool to show the UN and the international community that it is Israel who is a bigger and more immediate danger to the stability of the region, and not Iran.

However to Iran's disappointment, Hezbollah is being seen as the perpetrator instead. This was shown by Koffi Annan's statement, which said that Hezbollah is holding Lebanon hostage by its acts. Although the statement also condemned Israel, its hostility towards Hezbollah could not be ignored.

Meanwhile, no body is knocking on Iran's door, so that it mediates with Hezbollah, like they did with Syria's President Hafez Assad in 1996, during operation Grapes of Wrath. Assad used the opportunity to elevate his status in the Middle East and the world as a regional playmaker. This earned him many visits by the then US Secretary of state, Warren Christopher.

The same is not happening with Ahmadinejad or any other senior Iranian dignitary. Javier Solana did not include Iran is his recent peace making trip to the region. Meanwhile it is impossible to even think that Condoleezza Rice will go to Tehran when she embarks on her mission to the region next Sunday.

If anything, the Middle East is shutting its doors in the face of Iran. This was shown on Saturday 15th of July when the Arab Foreign Ministers held a meeting to discuss the current crisis. Iran wanted to attend. Its request was politely but firmly turned down. The Saudis, Egyptians and the Jordanians are in no mood to include Iran in regional matters. As far as they are concerned, the recent Hezbollah operation was for the benefit of Tehran, at their expense.

Implications
Increasing number of civilian casualties in Lebanon may assist Hezbollah's claims that it is the victim of Israel's aggression. Despite that, the results so far show that a number of long term damages have been caused against Iran's position and its Hezbollah allies.

First and foremost, the fact that the recent conflict has led to further isolation of Iran in the region and the UN is likely to damage Iran's diplomatic stance in the nuclear negotiations.

The situation is likely to become worse for Tehran, as the international community is in almost unison agreement that Hezbollah will have to be removed from the Israel - Lebanon border, to enable an international force to take their place. The loss of its positions on the border will dent Hezbollah's image. Just imagine for a moment. Hezbollah fighters, armed to the teeth, standing 30 kilometres away from the front line. Not a very convenient image for an organisation which prides itself on being on the front line of the fight against Israel. This will put Hezbollah's claims that it needs an armed wing to defend Lebanon under a question mark, which in the long term could damage Iran's ambitions to use Lebanon as a military base…

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:21 | link | comments

 

The full Monty: According to this article from The American Thinker, Israel is employing the strategic approach of WWII British Field Marshall Montgomery’s, i.e. go-slow and live to fight another day. James Lewis says that, given Israel’s size and strength, is far better to go that route than to try to emulate American General George S. Patton’s lightning-speed tactics:

While General George S. Patton was winning public laurels for fast armored strikes against German forces in WWII, Field Marshall Montgomery ran a parallel British army that made haste slowly. Patton is often considered the most brilliant US Army commander of the time, but Monty had his reasons. Today, the Israelis may be using a Monty strategy, because it makes more sense.

One difference between Patton and Montgomery is obvious: Patton was an American, backed with the limitless resources of the US homeland. The United States came into the war in 1942, while the Brits had barely managed to save their army at Dunkirk, retreating from continental Europe.  Throughout the war Britain was in desperate straits militarily and economically. Moreover the British armed forces had fought for two generations, barely surviving World War I. The British Empire was clearly breaking apart. They could not afford high-risk gambles.

Forget more sophisticated arguments. Doing high-risk armored thrusts made sense for Patton (though Eisenhower kept him on a short leash). It never made any sense for Monty. Nobody at Whitehall was going to thank him for winning a battle and losing his army.

Israel is in a Montgomery position today. For sixty years, they have been fighting ever new ranks of deadly enemies. Israel is not a culture that celebrates death in battle. Yet they have won, time and again, by being smarter and tougher than the opposition, finding weak spots in enemy tactics and strategy, and only then hitting with local superiority until the enemy finally broke and fled. That is why they are now safe from attack from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon. But they are not safe from Iran, which has never been bloodied in battle with  Israel.

Today the IDF is facing an Iranian proxy guerrila army that is very well trained, supplied, and dug in. They are clever enough, and ruthless, and bloodthirsty.  They know how to play the media for maximum propaganda advantage.

Iran’s martyrdom cult is the first one faced by Western armed forces since Imperial Japan. For Khomeiniacs, dying in battle is celebrated as a path to Paradise, while on the Hamas side, the family sometimes performs a joyful wedding when their shahid succeeds in suicide-murder against Jews.

Meanwhile, the international media are tilting the playing field so that mere survival for Hezbollah will be counted as a victory for the suiciders, and a major defeat for Israel.

Israelis are therefore in the position of sane soldiers fighting crazies on a tilted playing field. But unlike the heroic US Marines against the Japanese at Iwo Jima, this is not a one-time battle with a lot of resources on the side of sanity and civilization. It is an ongoing generational war of attrition, in which the sheer capacity to sustain morale counts as much as anything else.

So a Field-Marshall Montgomery strategy makes a lot of sense. Never give the enemy the initiative, even tactically. Bring all your strengths to bear, and none of the enemy’s. Don’t treat this as a football game; it’s better to survive and fight again than to look good to the media.

What we are seeing today looks like constant probing. Every other day we hear that yes, the IDF will attack on the ground, in strength, or no, they won’t. The IDF command may not know yet. There is a lot of tactical fighting going on, with special ops (five of whom just lost their lives), a lot of probing behind enemy lines, massive artillery and air strikes, and attempts to drive away civilians, so Hezbollah won’t have children to hide behind and turn into involuntary martyrs. A lot more is going on behind the scenes than we will ever know.

The international Left is therefore trying to rush the endgame, with slanted horror stories. In some cases even friendly commentators are insisting that the IDF has to fight this battle in their way. But if the Israels are smart and self-confident they will take their time. They are unbelievably lucky to have George Bush in the White House and Condi Rice at State, with a real and sympathetic understanding of the Israeli position. They are playing for time and giving sustained diplomatic support. That’s the only thing the civilized world can do right now...

And here’s one of the international leftists who’s trying to rush the endgame—the New Yorker's editor, David Remnick. Remnick miscomprehends and misexplains virtually the entire situation, from soup to nuts (to employ a gastronomical archaism from the 1930s):

 

Just four months ago, following the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert was elected Prime Minister of Israel. The hopeful narrative of his campaign was that of a career hard-liner who, like the great majority of Israelis, had finally come to believe that his country’s occupation of the more than three and a half million Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank was morally untenable, spiritually corrosive, and politically senseless. Olmert comes from an activist family that believed in the Greater Israel ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was a “Likud prince,” a champion of the mass-settlement project. But, in the footsteps of Sharon, who had closed the settlements of Gaza, Olmert declared his intention to extend the process known as “disengagement” to most (if not enough) of the West Bank. In the early weeks of his premiership, his greatest concern seemed to be how best to time the withdrawals and avoid any clashes between his own police and the most zealous of the settlers. Because the process lacked a Palestinian partner, the disengagement plan was too peremptory to promise a final settlement, but at least it suggested progress toward the sole mutually acceptable resolution of the historic conflict—two viable states, side by side, in a lasting, if uneasy, peace.

That strand of Middle Eastern optimism is now a memory. Olmert is fighting a war on two fronts—in Gaza against Hamas and in Lebanon against a large and sophisticated Hezbollah militia—and it is entirely possible, if sense and diplomacy do not quickly intercede, that the region, already inflamed by the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and the murderous insurgency that has followed, will face a danger level not seen in decades. By the end of last week, a ground war seemed imminent. Some observers speak forebodingly of 1914, but the most immediate result of this war will likely be to undermine the Israeli consensus for territorial compromise with the Palestinians, shatter the fragile Lebanese polity, and radicalize more Muslims in the region and beyond.

Much of the Israeli public has concluded that a policy of territorial retreat only emboldened the militias on their borders. After the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, many had hoped that Hezbollah, which was born in reaction to the Israeli invasion in 1982, would transform itself into a conventional political party, a peaceful champion of the Shiite underclass. Instead, it built up its arsenal and accelerated its attacks across Israel’s northern border. Similarly, after Israel withdrew from Gaza last year, Palestinian fighters, with the encouragement of the new Hamas government, lobbed more than seven hundred rockets into Sderot and other towns in southwest Israel.

Olmert had to respond. But he has done so in a way that pleases his enemies while bringing despair to countless innocents. Israel’s intention is to disarm the militias, to protect the citizens of Haifa, Afula, and Safed, but its attacks have killed hundreds of Lebanese, many of them civilians. Hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in fear. Israeli bombs have also demolished significant parts of the Lebanese infrastructure: the landing strips of Beirut, grain silos, roads, fuel storage, apartment buildings. Food and medical supplies are running short. Such is the vanity—and the inevitable result—of “surgical” strikes. Israel can neither morally nor politically finish this mission on its own. The Party of God, for its part, uses civilians as both shields and targets, and boasts of its own escape.

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, has denounced the scale of the Israeli counterattack, saying that he will ask for compensation for his country’s losses, and has rightly appealed to the United Nations, Europe, and the United States to broker a ceasefire. He has also described the powerlessness of his national government before Hezbollah in the most plaintive terms. Hezbollah, he told an interviewer for Milan’s Corriere della Sera last week, had created a “state within a state,” adding, “It’s not a mystery that Hezbollah answers to the political agendas of Tehran and Damascus.” The Lebanese government has been simply too weak to deal with it, much less to fulfill the section of Resolution 1559 of the U.N. Security Council which calls for the mandatory disarmament of all militias in Lebanon.

When the conflict first erupted, the governments of Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were only mildly critical of Israel’s response. More surprising, they denounced Hezbollah for its cross-border raids, its rocket fire, and its kidnappings of Israeli soldiers. The Sunni Arab states fear the rise of a “Shiite crescent” from Iran through Iraq and on to Bekaa. But, as the body count mounts and the destruction in Lebanon increases, that political balancing act will collapse, and the very sort of anti-Israeli fury that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been counting on will surely grow.

Among the more vexing questions of this war is what to do about its likely instigator: the government in Tehran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards first came to Lebanon in 1982 to help arm and train Hezbollah, which then, according to its foes, carried out a string of horrific attacks, including the killing of two hundred and forty-one American servicemen in Beirut and the bombing of the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Hamas has benefitted from similar assistance. Both groups have lately gained a large measure of power at the ballot box even as they receive military and strategic support from a country that is defiantly developing a nuclear weapon and openly advertises its hopes for the destruction of Israel. “The final point of liberal civilization is the false and corrupt state that has occupied Jerusalem,” the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on Iranian television last week. “That’s what all those who talk about liberalism and support it have in common.” Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of Kayhan, a newspaper affiliated with the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, recently wrote that the annihilation of Israel “is not only a religious and national duty, but also a universal human duty, from which no Muslim or free human being can be exempt.”

So far, the performance of the Western diplomatic world has been bewildering. Kofi Annan has been slow to act and his warnings have been ineffectual. President Bush flashed Israel a rhetorical green light and then, after a cringe-making performance at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, where he deflected a reporter’s serious question about Lebanon with frat-boy joshing, flew home to veto a stem-cell-research bill. It was left to the French President, Jacques Chirac, to call most clearly for a ceasefire, a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and the implementation of Resolution 1559, “on the clear understanding—and all the Lebanese have to understand and recognize this—that there cannot be a politically stable Lebanon shouldering her responsibilities and pursuing her development, a democratic Lebanon, if part of her territory is occupied by militia who do not obey the central Lebanese government.”

To distract the world from its nuclear ambitions and to keep conflict alive in the Middle East, Iran, through its client militia in Lebanon, has indulged in a provocation of the most dangerous kind. Now its opponents face a challenge that demands endurance and strategic calculation, an unwillingness to fall further into a trap where politics ends and the forces of chaos inevitably triumph.

  

Well, at least he got that part about Iran right.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:04 | link | comments

 

“Restraint” and survival: Last week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen urged the Jews of Israel to “hunker down.” This week, various leaders continue to implore the Jewish state to “exercise restraint.” Suzanne Fields, taking in the long view of the longest hatred (historian Robert Wistrich’s term for antisemitism), explains that “hunkering” and “restraint” are the most effective ways to bring about Holocaust, the sequel. From JWR:

They're caricatured with hooknoses and humpbacks, as sucking up a sow's excrement, murdering children for their blood in a recipe for matzoh. They're scorned for being weak and sneered at for being strong, for passivity and aggression, for segregating themselves and for assimilating to disappear among their secular neighbors. They're too studious or merely stupid, obsessed with cleanliness or living in filth, hated for their industry and reviled for their sloth. They're condemned as greedy capitalists and naive communists, as reactionaries and radicals, patriotic nationalists and secular internationalists, for being stateless and for building a thriving state.

Jews are persecuted when they don't convert and persecuted when they do. The converted are accused of hating themselves, and the unconverted are accused of hating everybody else. Seneca, the Roman tragedian, expressed annoyance at Roman Jews for their observance of a ritual Sabbath: "This meant that Jews were wasting one-seventh of their lives doing nothing."

Now the Jews of Israel, doing what they have to do to survive, are accused of "acting out of proportion" to the daily assault of Iranian rockets fired by Hezbollah to kill Jews in their homes. The Jews should show restraint. Restraint was what the Jews in Germany showed when the Nazis were organizing the Holocaust and the world wouldn't believe that what was happening was happening. Restraint is what the rest of the world showed when they dismissed a crazy Austrian paperhanger and his nutty book, "Mein Kampf." If the rest of the world was willing to ignore Hitler and his boasting and bloviating, why couldn't the Jews?

Restraint is what you show in disputes with rational people who are willing to compromise, who will give up something in return for something. But restraint can buy time for your uncompromising enemies to enable them to plot the ambush to kill you later. During the Holocaust, certain Jewish leaders, eager to show restraint by trusting their enemies, gave up lists of Jews, a few at a time, to save others a little while longer.

Ariel Sharon, showing restraint, organized the withdrawal from Gaza as a way to achieve peace through strength, a controversial idea but nevertheless credible. You could call it aggressive restraint. All that was wrong with it was that it didn't work and was perceived as weakness by the enemies of Israel. The only thing Israel got was more rockets on its cities, the elevation of Hamas to power and the kidnapping of its soldiers standing duty in Israeli territory. "When you keep pinching a lion," Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, writes in Die Welt, the German daily, "sooner or later he'll clobber you with his paw." Throughout history, others have had a lot of advice for the Jews, cheap at the price. America aside, there was not much else. Anti-Semitism is often personal, and always political. The anti-Semites get away with acting on their prejudice because there's a political environment where spin is appreciated. Anti-Zionism, the legitimate criticism of Israel politics and policy, is not always anti-Semitism. But it usually is. Once upon a time, the world's sympathy rested with the Jews. The United Nations approved the creation of Israel; the Jews had suffered so much in the early decades of the 20th century. Israel gave the Jews a new identity, an opportunity to create a country by working the land, bringing it to flower and training men (and women) to fight back when attacked. They succeeded beyond their dreams, beyond the nightmares of their critics. When Israelis survived in the wars of 1948, 1964 and 1967, no thanks to restraint, their global supporters began to fall away. Jews were easier to feel sorry for when they couldn't fight back.

"Nathan the Wise," an 18th-century German play by Gotthold Lessing, depicts a flattering portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, the playwright's famous Jewish friend. When the Sultan Saladin asks Nathan, the Moses figure, to explain his identity, Nathan replies simply: Ich bin ein Mensch — "I am a man." This line infuriated Hannah Arendt, writing about it after the Holocaust. It characterized the Jew in a private, personal way, she said, ignoring his specific identity subject to political vulnerability. She knew what the Israelis have had to learn the hard way. For a Jew, being a man is not good enough unless it's backed up by the power to survive.

It’s ironic that Fields would mention Hannah Arendt in this context. Though a brilliant scholar with a towering intellect, Arendt, a life-long defender of Nazi-supporter, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (her mentor and former lover) was an avowed anti-Zionist who often got things wrong and wrote scathingly about Israel's decision to apprehend Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:03 | link | comments

 

Innocent bystander or receptive host?: The media would have you believe that Lebanon is the former. In Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz advances arguments for the former:

 

…Critics of Israel’s defensive war against Islamic terrorists are busily wringing their hands over the destruction that has been wreaked on Lebanon, which is portrayed as innocent. They invoke these tragedies while calling on Israel to cease its fire and leave the Hezbollah aggressors intact. Since Israel had no role in starting this war, this is like blaming the Allies for the damage inflicted on Germany in World War II—and doing so in the midst of the war. Critics who make such charges and demands in the midst of a war are aiding and abetting the aggressors.

 

But the very idea that Lebanon is an innocent bystander in the war against Israel won’t wash. Lebanon is host to the terrorist aggressor which has sworn to eliminate Israel and its Jews from the face of the earth. This is the explicit creed of both Hezbollah and its sponsor Iran. And not just in their charter of in statements made months or years ago. Iran’s little dictator reiterated this threat yesterday in the midst of Islam’s aggressive war against the Jews: “Israel has pushed the button of its own destruction. The Zionists made their worst decision and triggered their extinction by attacking Lebanon.” Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, occupying two cabinet positions and seats in its parliament. The Lebanese government agreed to enforce UN Resolution 1559 which calls on it to disarm all militias on its territory, namely Hezbollah. If the Lebanese Government had performed this obligation, there would be no war, and there would be no Lebanese civilian casualties…

 

Update: Jihad/Dhimmi Watch’s eloquent eminence grise, Hugh Fitzgerald, on Lebanon’s complicity. Fitzgerald is discussing it in the context of NRP’s seemingly endless coverage of departing “refugees” whose harrowing stories are designed to evoke maximum empathy from the broadcaster’s soft-hearted/headed listeners:

…And why was it, in the course of this interview, and in all of the coverage, there is never a discussion of the obvious. What is the obvious? The obvious are those 12,000-15,000 missiles. What are they doing in Lebanon? Where did they come from? Who supplied them? Who brought them into Lebanon? Did no one notice them? What did the "Lebanese" think was going to happen with those missiles and all their other military equipment? What did they think those goosestepping black-balaclaved Kalashnikov-clutching bezonians of beetle-browed Nasrallah, he of the Nazi rhetoric, and the fascist blackshirts, were going to do? Just squirrel them away for the hell of it?

Whenever I hear anyone from Lebanon say that "everything was fine, it was all so wonderful" and now "everything is destroyed," I want to ask them how they can say with a straight face that "everything was fine" when, step by careful step, more arms and missiles were being brought in from Iran, and Syria, than are in the armories of even some European countries? How dare they say that up until now "everything was fine"? And how dare they pretend, as the Shi'a and other Muslims do, that everything was okay up to now, when the Christians have been under threat, steadily menaced and undermined, for the past half-century? How can they say this with poker faces when the undermining of what had once been a Christian-majority refuge in the heart of unpleasant Dar al-Islam has continued right through to today?...  

 

Update: I am reminded of an anecdote my brother recounted the other day. He was recalling his visit to Dachau some years ago, and said he was shocked to discover it was a mere subway stop away from Munich. When he arrived at the Concentration Camp, which has been preserved as a memorial, he was handed a piece of paper written on behalf of the town of Dachau. It was a disclaimer which insisted that the people of the town had now idea of what was happening there during the war, and they wanted everyone to know that they bore absolutely no responsibility for it.

 

Nice try. The people of Dachau may not have known for sure what was going on behind the camp’s closed doors, but could see for themselves that lots of Jews were being transported in but none were going out, so their protestations are at the very least, disingenuous. In the same way, the people of Southern Lebanon freely chose to live in the midst of terrorists who were basically calling the shots in the region. They knew that what these terrorists hoped to achieve, i.e. the total destruction of Israel, and they could see thousands of missiles being amassed in their neigbourhood for that precise purpose. The Lebanese people as a whole may not be responsible for Hezbollah’s actions, but they must bear some responsibility for legitimizing a party of terrorists, for turning a blind eye as Iran, via Syria, smuggled thousands of missiles into their country, and for failing to lift a finger to halt this build-up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:04 | link | comments

 

Ma nishtanah: Why is this war different from all other wars? Michael Barone elaborates. From Real Clear Politics:

This Middle East crisis is different from all other Middle East crises. Over the years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, the United States and other onlookers have gotten used to a certain kind of Middle East crisis. Palestinians or their sympathizers would threaten and wreak violence against Israel. Israel would respond, sometimes locally, sometimes by major actions like the defensive War of 1973 or the occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982. The cry would go up: Let the cycle of violence end, let Israel give up land that it has occupied in return for peace.

On occasion, with established states whose leaders decided they had no interest in continuing violence, the recommended solution would work. Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the one nation whose giant demographic size made it an existential threat to Israel, decided to go to Jerusalem and then to Camp David where, under the tutelage of Jimmy Carter, he and Israel's Menachem Begin made what has turned out to be a cold peace. The late King Hussein of Jordan, threatened by Palestinian terrorists himself, dealt quietly with Israel and, in time, made a formal peace as well. Sadat and Hussein, and their successors, never really wanted to destroy Israel. So they made peace.

The formula of land for peace has not worked as well with others. Bill Clinton devoted much of his vast psychic energy and negotiating skill to making a land-for-peace deal between first Yitzhak Rabin and then Ehud Barak of Israel, and Yasir Arafat of the PLO. In 2000, he got Barak to offer Arafat the lion's share of the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace. Arafat refused and launched the Second Intifada instead. Rabin and Barak, both distinguished military leaders, imagined that Arafat wanted land enough to make peace. But Arafat preferred the armed struggle that left him in control of Palestinian Authority funds. He encouraged the Palestinian people to continue to lust after the destruction of Israel.

Today, almost no one is demanding a land-for-peace deal. The reason is obvious. Israel left the Gaza strip last year, and the Palestinians there, instead of observing a cold peace, began launching missiles into Israel and elected a Hamas government that seeks Israel's destruction. Now, Hamas forces have killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Similarly, Israel left southern Lebanon to the tender mercies of Iran-supported Hezbollah fully six years ago. But Hezbollah, urged on by the Iranian mullahs who want to deflect attention from their nuclear program, has lobbed missiles into Haifa and attacked Israeli soldiers.

No government can be expected to ignore such armed attacks on its people and its military forces. Land-for-peace is a non-starter. Hamas and Hezbollah already have land. And they have made it clear that they will never willingly make peace…

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:42 | link | comments

 

Backlash in Britain: Folks in the U.K. are starting to feel mighty uncomfortable about letting hoardes of “undesirable” immigrants flood into the country—“undesirables” from Bulgaria and Romania, that is. From the Times Online:

 

THE Home Office is privately warning that 45,000 “undesirable” migrants from Romania and Bulgaria could legally be allowed to live in Britain when the two countries join the European Union next year.

It has drawn up a confidential “warnings index” of people from the two states, most of whom are suspected of having criminal associations or posing a security risk.

According to a paper circulated in Whitehall last week, ministers fear they may be unable to stop these people settling in Britain and claiming state benefits when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU.

The paper reveals that the government privately estimates between 60,000 and 140,000 Romanians and Bulgarians will arrive in Britain in the first year after accession.

Ministers were criticised for underestimating the number of migrants from the eight eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004. Experts last week revealed that 600,000 had come to Britain since 2004, compared with the government’s estimate of between 5,000 and 13,000 a year.

The Home Office paper, from Joan Ryan, the Home Office minister, reveals deep concerns in government that a new wave of immigration may provoke a public backlash.

It warns of EU “enlargement fatigue” and that the “enough is enough” argument is winning…

I can understand the “fatigue” they feel for these “threatening” outsiders. You never know when one of those Bulgarians is going to fall prey to a religious motivational speaker who’ll convince the “disaffected” lad to stow a bomb in his rucksack and blow himself up on a public conveyance in the name of, um, Bulgaria.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:07 | link | comments

 

In a fog: Condi Rice is calling upon the genocidal Islamists to, er, rein in the genocidal Islamists.

 

I’m told people over at Foggy Bottom get paid big bucks to come up with such lamebrain schemes.

 

Update: Does anyone at Foggy Bottom read MEMRI? Do they even know what it is? From an article posted today (which compares and contrasts the Saudi-Taliban relationship with the Iran-Hezbollah one):

 

…However, the Hizbullah model differs from the Afghanistan model in one important respect: the depth of the ties between the "client" militia and the "sponsor" country. While the ties between the Afghani mujahideen and Saudi Arabia were basically ephemeral ties of religious affiliation, the ties between Iran and Hizbullah are an open-ended religious and strategic symbiosis.

Hizbullah is not an independent Lebanese organization. It is part and parcel of the Iranian state, and Iran sees in Hizbullah "one of the mainstays of its strategic security." Hizbullah is "Iran's first line of defense against Israel" and the West.(1) One of Hizbullah's founders, Subhi Al-Tufeili, stated in an interview that "Hizbullah's leadership is Velayat-e-Faqih – that is, Ali Khamenei."(2)

For these reasons, Iran was even willing to commit itself to a joint military pact with Syria in order to assure the steady flow of weapons to Hizbullah. The agreement was signed one month before the outbreak of the war, and the Iranian and Syrian defense ministers announced on the occasion of the signing that "Iran sees Syria's security as its own."(3)…

 

Update: And here’s something the Taliban and Hezbollah have in common. I’ll give you a hint. It’s starts with a “j” and rhymes with “we mad.”

 

From Monsters & Critics:

Kabul - Taliban rebels in Afghanistan on Sunday called on Muslims of the world to support the Hezbollah 'mujaheddin' in their fight against Israeli forces, calling the conflict in Lebanon an American plot to bring the Arab world under Israeli control.

'We call on all Muslims in the world, especially Arabs, to unite against the Zionist and American oppressors and to stand behind the mujaheddin in their fight,' said a purported statement by the Taliban's high council, a copy of which was sent to Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa's Kabul office.

The statement was issued against the backdrop of increased Taliban-led militancy, mainly in Afghanistan's southern provinces.

Its authors said 'the cruel air and ground assaults' being conducted by Israel in Lebanon were an American attempt 'to bring the Arab world under the control of Israel.' .

The statement alleged that Israel's attacks on Gaza and Lebanon had been planned after consultations with the United States and its allies.

Taliban insurgents have been waging war against US-backed Afghan government and multinational forces in the country since their fundamentalist Islamic regime was toppled in a US-led campaign in late 2001.

The call for a unified Muslim position on the Middle East crisis comes two days after an influential hardline Islamic leader in Pakistan called on Muslim countries to send troops to Lebanon to defend civilians there, news reports said.

'Armies of the Muslim countries should jointly respond to the Israeli attack on innocent citizens of Lebanon,' said Maulana Fazal- ur-Rehman, a central figure in the six-party Islamic alliance of Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and leader of the opposition in the national assembly.

Rehman's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam has been sympathetic to the Taliban and spearheaded huge anti-American protests during the US-led strikes on Kabul in 2001.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:00 | link | comments

 

Upholding Islamism: Tell me again why Canadians are putting their lives on the line for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? From the Times Online:

 

AFGHANISTAN’S notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was set up by the Taliban to enforce bans on women doing anything from working to wearing nail varnish or laughing out loud, is to be re-created by the government in Kabul.

The decision has provoked an outcry among women and human rights activists who fear a return to the days when religious police patrolled the streets, beating or arresting any woman who was not properly covered by a burqa or accompanied by a male relative.

“This is a very bad idea at a bad time,” said Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Asia research director of Human Rights Watch. “We’re close to the edge in Afghanistan. It really could all go wrong and it is alarming that the United Nations and western governments are not speaking out on this issue.”

President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet has approved the proposal to re-establish the department, and the measure will go to Afghanistan’s parliament when it reconvenes later this summer. The conservative complexion of the assembly makes it likely to be passed.

“When we talk of ‘vice and virtue’ . . . the one introduced by the Taliban comes to our minds. But it won’t be like that,” insisted Mohammad Karim Rahimi, a spokesman for the president. “It will be an organisation which will work on promoting morality in society as exists in any other Islamic country.”

Nematullah Shahrani, the religious affairs minister who will oversee the department, claims it will focus on alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption. But critics point out that Afghanistan’s criminal laws already address these issues and say that once the department has been re-established, it will be easy to misuse.

“We are worried that there are no clear terms of reference for this body,” said Nader Nadery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “It will remind people of the Taliban.”

“They haven’t even bothered to change the name,” said Malalai Joya, a courageous female MP whose outspokenness means she has to travel with bodyguards and move every day because of threats to her life. Joya, 28, was physically attacked in parliament in May after she criticised warlords.

“The situation for women in Afghanistan has not improved,” she said. “People in the outside world say Afghan women don’t have to wear burqas any more and yes, it’s true that in some provinces like Kabul, Jalalabad and Herat, women can go outside without a burqa.

“They can go and work in offices, and we have 68 women MPs. But more and more women are wearing burqas because of the lack of security. Look at the high rate of suicide among our women — Afghan women prefer to die than live because there is no security.

“In my opinion what we have in power under the mask of democracy are the brothers of Taliban — fundamentalists, warlords and drug lords,” she added. “Our country is under the shadow of their black hands. They are against women and re-creating the [department] is proof of this.”…

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:23 | link | comments

 

A no brainer: Chechnya, Darfur, Somalia, Beirut: Guess which arena of conflict, in the UN’s estimation violates “humanitarian law”?

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:13 | link | comments

 

Dead wood: The Seattle (thick as a) Post-(un)Intelligencer would have us believe, among other balderdash, that:

 

• The Iran-Hezbollah arrangement is a “marriage of convenience”;
• Saudia Arabia is a “moderate” nation;
• Syria poses no military threat to Israel.

 

Incisive analysis there, Starbuckians. That and about $4.00 will get you a grande Mochaccino.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:06 | link | comments

 

Monster on the loose: Mark Steyn describes how “the Palestine question” has morphed into Godzilla (or to be more accurate, Allahzilla), and now threatens the entire world. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

…Suppose this were true -- that terrorists blew up Oz honeymooners and Scandinavian stoners in Balinese nightclubs because of "the Palestinian question." Doesn't this suggest that these people are, at a certain level, nuts? After all, there are plenty of IRA sympathizers around the world (try making the Ulster Unionist case in a Boston bar) and yet they never thought to protest British rule in Northern Ireland by blowing up, say, German tourists in Thailand. Yet the more the thin skein of Palestinian grievance was stretched to justify atrocities halfway around the world, the more the Arab League big-shot emirs and European Union foreign ministers looked down from their windows and cooed, "See my parade passing!"

They've now belatedly realized they're at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved -- Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.

But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.

Meanwhile, Kofi Annan in a remarkable display of urgency (at least when compared with Sudan, Rwanda, Congo et al.) is proposing apropos Israel and Hezbollah that U.N. peacekeepers go in, not to keep the "peace" between two sovereign states but rather between a sovereign state and a usurper terrorist gang. Contemptible as he is, the secretary-general shows a shrewd understanding of the way the world is heading: Already "non-state actors" have more sophisticated rocketry than many EU nations; if Iran has its way, its proxies will be implied nuclear powers. Maybe we should put them on the U.N. Security Council.

So what is in reality Israel's first non-Arab war is a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow: The EU and Arab League won't quite spell it out, but, to modify that Le Monde headline, they are all Jews now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:19 | link | comments

 

Old news: Ceeb headline: Saddam hospitabled, ‘unstable’ due to hunger strike.

 

I’d say he was ‘unstable’ long before any hunger strike.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:30 | link | comments

 

An amorality tale: There is something comical, something pathetic, about Harpoon Siddiqui’s latest diatribe wherein he marshals the “moral authoritiy” of such amoral figures as Louise Arbour and Bill Graham to make his case (yet again) against Israel and America. Read it and weep:

T he voluminous coverage and commentary on Stephen Harper's stand on the Middle East hasn't quite conveyed the full extent of his Americanized and Israelized foreign policy.

 

The Israeli military offensive on Lebanon that he considered "measured" has been condemned by no less a moral authority than Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, as a possible war crime, a violation of international humanitarian as well as criminal law.

 

When was the last time a sitting prime minister was so thoroughly contradicted on the international stage by another Canadian — in this case, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, who indicted Slobodan Milosevic?

 

Bill Graham has also raised the illegality of killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure. More than opposition leader and former foreign minister, he is one of Canada's leading experts on international law.

 

The leaders of the European Union, Russia and Japan, as well as the International Red Cross, have said that Israel has a right to defend itself but that it may be violating the principle of proportionality provided for under the Geneva Conventions.

 

Yet here's Harper in the logically lopsided and morally obtuse position of defending the foreign aggression that killed eight Canadians and destroyed the airport, roads and major exit routes in a country from which Canada is trying to rescue thousands of its stranded citizens.

 

He has joined Israel and the United States in resisting worldwide calls for a ceasefire that would facilitate that rescue.

 

Israel wants to continue the war until it has eliminated or weakened Hezbollah. If there's more civilian carnage and the country continues to be "torn to shreds," as the Lebanese prime minister put it, so be it. The U.S. concurs. So does Harper.

 

He has also balked at the G-8 idea, advocated by Tony Blair and Angela Merkel, of a beefed-up UN force in southern Lebanon. Like George W. Bush and Ehud Olmert, Harper would rather have the Lebanese army there.

 

A 2004 UN resolution did call for just that and the dismantling of Hezbollah. But the Lebanese government has been too weak to implement it and is now destabilized by the Israeli siege…

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:10 | link | comments

 

Protest in T.O.: Thousands of people turned out in Toronto yesterday to show their support for Nasty Nasrallah and his Heavy Metal group, Hellsbollocks. A sea of pro-Islamo-fascists, snillingers, “moderate” Muslims, and assorted stoopy-dupes marched down University Avenue from the Israeli consulate to the American consulate, raising their fists, screaming invective and carrying signs in support of the jihadis. Here’s how the Toronto Star describes it in today’s paper (with the most egregious portions bolded by moi):

 

Hundreds of red and white Lebanese flags waved on Toronto's downtown streets as thousands of protestors called for an end to the violence in Lebanon.

 

To the beat of drums, the demonstrators yesterday gathered first at the Israeli consulate on Bloor St. W. before marching to the United States consulate on University Ave.

 

The horde chanted slogans condemning Israel for the deaths of Lebanese civilians and slammed Prime Minister Stephen Harper's comments calling Israel's response "measured."

 

Many also called for sanctions and a boycott of Israeli goods and businesses. The chants that rang out included "Shame, Shame, Shame," "The people united will never be defeated," "Shame on you Mr. Harper" and "Arab lives have value too."

 

Organizers estimated more than 10,000 people participated in the protest, but Toronto police would only say thousands of people took part.

 

"It is important for everyone regardless of religion or ethnicity, who believes in human rights and dignity, to call for an end to Israel's brutal actions," said Nadia Daar, a spokesperson for the Coalition Against Israel Apartheid, one of the groups which organized the rally.

 

Other organizers included the Canadian Peace Alliance, Canadian Arab Federation, Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, and the Muslim United group.

Though the crowd included Christians and Jews, the majority were from Muslim groups.

The demonstrators also waved Palestinian flags and called on Israel to respect the rights of Palestinians.

 

Judith Weisman, a member of the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, said: "I am Jewish and I am against Israel's actions."

 

Several protestors carried placards featuring photos of wounded Lebanese children and of Israeli children writing on missiles. Some protestors also hoisted pictures of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

 

The march began in front of the Israeli consulate under rain and ended at the U.S. Consulate under semi-clear skies. Peggy Nash, a member of Parliament for Parkdale-High Park, said the violence must stop.

 

"We are the voices of sanity, calling for peace," Nash, a New Democrat said…

 

When the inmates of the asylum assert that they’re the ones who are sane, you know the world’s in big trouble.

 

Update: When I read the idiotic comments of a Jewish woman protesting on behalf of Islamic-fascism, I can’t help but think how fortunate she is to live in a country where she is free to be an idiot. Unlike the Jews of the Islamic dystopia, who, to placate their Muslim overlords, have no choice but to support their murderous policies

 

From a report in the Jerusalem Post about Moo Jihad's latest threats:

 

In Teheran, the government has sanctioned billboards showing Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and a message that it is the duty of Muslims to "wipe out" Israel. Officials also organized a demonstration in the southern city of Shiraz by Iran's small Jewish community calling for Israel's destruction and praising Hizbullah.

 

I guess the real difference here is between those who freely choose to behave like dhimmis and those poor souls who have no other option.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:00 | link | comments

 

Netanyahu’s prescience: One of my least favourite sayings in the English language is, “ I told you so.” Too whiny. Too self-satisfied. Too “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah” for my taste. So instead of saying, well, you know, I’ll merely cite the title of this NRO piece—Bibi was right:

 

“Our security problems are not about to go away with the withdrawal; they will only begin.”

 

The prophecies of Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have come to fruition, and proponents of the Gaza Strip pullout have a lot to answer for.

Written off as a reactionary right-winger by those who think that militant Palestinian minds can be swayed from the goal of the destruction of Israel, one can take note today of why Netanyahu so fervently opposed Israel’s Gaza pullout — and why he was right to do so.

“Gaza will be transformed into a base for Islamic terrorism adjacent to the coast of the State of Israel,” Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post days before the withdrawal.

The Post reported last October that al Qaeda may have moved in as soon as Israel moved o”ut. “Our efforts are now focused on establishing a strong and unified Muslim nation where love prevails among all its members,” read a leaflet distributed in Khan Younis. The al Qaeda group also claimed in a video that it had fired rockets into Israeli settlements on the eve of disengagement. In March, two West Bank Palestinians allegedly plotting a large-scale attack were charged with membership in al Qaeda.

In addition to physical presence, al Qaeda has stepped up propaganda in the region. Their online “Voice of the Caliphate” news show has accused Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas of collaborating with Israel against Hamas, and in June al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri called on Palestinians to reject a two-state referendum proposed by Abbas. A pamphlet circulated in Gaza by the Army of Jihad in February and obtained by World Net Daily claimed that al Qaeda had a leader in the region, to appear “very soon.”

Gaza, post-pullout, has provided a safe haven in a pitifully weak security situation, with a government sympathetic to jihad.

This has also inspired terrorist groups to get more ambitious. Hamas’s military wing scored distance records with its upgraded Qassam rockets, striking deeper than previous Palestinian rockets have ever reached into Israeli territory. Hezbollah has also achieved its deepest strikes into northern Israel.

THE FURY OF MUSLIM NATIONS
“This it isn’t just our problem,” Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post back at the pullout. “It’s the West’s problem as well because forces that are controlled, deployed and cooperate with Iran—and today Hezbollah and Hamas are controlled in a significant way by Iran—will receive an additional base of operations not only in close proximity to Israel’s cities but also on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea not far from Europe.”

Now Israel is simultaneously under attack from both terrorist groups—receiving vociferous backing in recent days from none other than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…

 

If Israel (and for that matter, Western civilization) is to survive, it will be because of “right-wing reactionaries” like Netanyahu. The clueless, defeatist, feckless Left will lead us to our doom.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:54 | link | comments

 

Mental case: One of my theories as to why mankind continues to get itself in such messes is that far too many people in this world are ignorance, irrational or stupid, or some combination thereof. True, some of them are also flaming bananas (bananas flambé?), but I’m not sure if I put Iran’s Mahdi-wannabe, Moo Jihad in this category, as James Lewis on the The American Thinker site does. Lewis says that Moo’s latest missive, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel proves that he’s insane because only someone completely out of his gourd would invite a German leader to help him complete Hitler’s Final Solution.

 

Maybe so. But if he’s nuts, he’s nuts in that cold, calculating, Hitler-like way that tries to figure out all the angles and has conceived grandiose plans for conquest predicated on a genocide of the Jews.

 

So at the end of the day, it doesn’t much matter if he’s genuinely nuts or not. All that matters is that Iran and its flying monkeys, Hezbollah, must be stopped before they wipe out the Jews of Israel.

 

If you want to hold onto the hope that such a catastrophe—Hitler’s last laugh—won’t be allowed to happen, that, at the eleventh hour, the U.S. will ride to the rescue, I suggest you not read this piece by Ralph Peters in the New York Daily News.

 

Instead, read this one by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s much more optimistic.

 

Update: Merkel has filed Moo’s missive in the appropriate place--the trash bin--refusing to even dignify it with a response. From Der Spiegel:

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has dismissed a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The missive contains no references to Tehran's nuclear program or the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. But there are "unacceptable" remarks about Israel's and the Holocaust.

Iran's leader had sent a 10-page letter to the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday. It contains "many claims that are not acceptable to us, in particular about Israel, the state of Israel's right to exist and the Holocaust," government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said on Friday in Berlin. In the past, Ahmadinejad has made comments in which he labelled the Nazi Holocaust a myth and called for the destruction of the state of Israel. "Our position on these questions is known," Wilhelm said, noting that Merkel has repeatedly identified Israel's right to exist as a cornerstone of German policy and that "it is in no way acceptable to us to question it."…

 

Update: These folks prove my theory. They are ignorant, irrational and stupid.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:57 | link | comments

 

Oh, behave Iran: In his weekly conversation with Hugh Hewitt, Mark Steyn says that Syria is Mini-Me to Iran’s Dr. Evil.

 

Perfect!

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:33 | link | comments

 

Firmez la bouche, Ms. Arbour: Louise Arbour is the former Quebec judge who now sits atop one of most reprehensible of UN agencies—and, as we all know, that’s saying something. However, because this laughingstock is supposedly concerned with “human rights,” she feels she has the human right to sit on her high horse and lob ridiculous threats at the state that occupies “most loathed nation” status in the UN pantheon.

 

Israel’s ambassador to Canada knocks the puffed-up pigeon off her “exalted” perch. From the CBC:

Israel's ambassador to Canada has dismissed a warning from Canadian jurist Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, that war crimes charges may be warranted against Israel and Hezbollah if measures aren't taken to protect civilians.

Alan Baker says that Arbour, who has been an international war crimes prosecutor and a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, doesn't understand the situation.

He says his country is attacking legitimate Hezbollah military targets and she should be careful with her language.

"I completely reject Louise Arbour's warning. Israel doesn't target civilian concentrations, and I think that by merely giving such a warning she's jumping to conclusions and as a judge she should know better," he says.

With Hezbollah launching rockets into Israeli cities and Israel bombing densely populated areas in southern Lebanon, hundreds of civilians are dead on the Lebanese side and more than a dozen in Israel.

Arbour issued a statement on Wednesday saying that indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians and that bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians, is unjustifiable.

She has the support of her boss, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has condemned both parties for killing civilians at an alarming rate.

The Israeli ambassador isn't apologizing for his country's strategy. He says Arbour fails to grasp the nature of the conflict.

"The Hezbollah are using schools and clinics and the back gardens of houses to put their missile placements there, and they are turning these civilian establishments and civilian areas into legitimate targets."

He says Israel won't entertain the idea of a ceasefire until Hezbollah has been pushed from its border.

On Friday, thousands of people were fleeing Lebanese border villages after a new Israeli warning of a possible attack. There was no indication that Arbour's warning or Annan's plea for civilians would stop either the attack or the rockets falling on Israel.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:23 | link | comments

  

The “ceders” of Lebanon: Fouad Ajami has a superb, must-read analysis of the situation in Lebanon. He says the Lebanese have been unable to steer their own ship of state for some time, which is why they’ve been plunged into war yet again. From Opinion Journal:

 

…In an earlier time, three decades ago, Lebanon was made to pay for the legends of Arabism, and for the false glamour of the Palestinian "revolutionary" experiment. The country lost well over a quarter-century of its history--its best people quit it, and its modernist inheritance was brutally and steadily undermined.

 

Now comes this new push by Damascus and Tehran. It promises nothing save sterility and ruin. It will throw the Lebanese back onto a history whose terrible harvest is well known to them. The military performance of Hezbollah, it should be apparent by now, is not a performance of a militia; nor are unmanned drones and missiles of long range the weapons of boys of the alleyways. A formidable military structure has been put together by the Iranians in Lebanon. In a small, densely populated country that keeps and knows no secrets, Hezbollah and its Iranian handlers have been at work on this military undertaking for quite some time, under the gaze of Lebanese authorities too frightened to raise questions.

The Mediterranean vocation of Lebanon as a land of enlightenment and commerce may have had its exaggerations and pretense. But set it against the future offered Lebanon by Syria, and by Tehran's theocrats seeking a diplomatic reprieve for themselves by setting Lebanon on fire, and Lebanon's choice should be easy to see.

 

The Lebanese, though, are not masters of their own domain. They will need protection and political support; they will need to see the will and the designs of the radical axis contested by resolute American power, and by an Arab constellation of states that can convince the Shiites of Lebanon that there is a place for them in the Arab scheme of things. For a long time, the Arab states have worked through and favored the Sunni middle classes of Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli. This has made it easy for Iran--overcoming barriers of language and distance--to make its inroads into a large Shiite community awakening to a sense of power and violation. To truly turn Iran back from the Mediterranean, to check its reach into Beirut, the Arab world needs to rethink the basic compact of its communities, and those Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world will have to be brought into the fold.

 

Lebanon's strength lies in its weakness, went an old maxim. And the Arab states themselves were for decades egregious in the way they treated Lebanon, shifting onto it the burden of the Palestinian fight with Israel, acquiescing in the encroachments on its sovereignty by the Palestinians and the Syrians--encroachments often subsidized with Arab money. Iran then picked up where the Arab states left off. Now that weakness of the Lebanese state has become a source of great menace to the Lebanese, and to their neighbors as well.

No one can say with confidence how this crisis will play out. There are limits on what Israel can do in Lebanon. The Israelis will not be pulled deeper into Lebanon and its villages and urban alleyways, and Israel can't be expected to disarm Hezbollah or to find its missiles in Lebanon's crannies. Finding the political way out, and working out a decent security arrangement on the border, will require a serious international effort and active American diplomacy. International peacekeeping forces have had a bad name, and they often deserve it. But they may be inevitable on Lebanon's border with Israel; they may be needed to buy time for the Lebanese government to come into full sovereignty over its soil.

 

The Europeans claim a special affinity for Lebanon, a country of the eastern Mediterranean. This is their chance to help redeem that land, and to come to its rescue by strengthening its national army and its bureaucratic institutions. We have already seen order's enemies play their hand. We now await the forces of order and rescue, and by all appearances a long, big struggle is playing out in Lebanon. This is from the Book of Habakkuk: "The violence done to Lebanon shall overwhelm you" (2:17). The struggles of the mighty forces of the region yet again converge on a small country that has seen more than its share of history's heartbreak and history's follies.

 

Update: A rebuttal to Ajami’s call for an international force of peacekeepers. From The American Thinker:

The United Nations wants to deploy an international peace keeping force in the region but Israeli leaders are opposed to this idea, based on what they believe has been a less than satisfactory role played by UNIFIL already.  Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni see no reason to add another force, especially one that would become problematic if it ended up in the crossfire between Hezbollah and Israel.  Historically, peace keeping forces in this part of the world end up with heavy losses, as happened in Lebanon in the early 1980’s. During the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, two truck bombs struck buildings in Beirut where U.S. and French Multinational Forces were stationed killing hundreds of soldiers.  That led to the withdrawal of international peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. Why consider putting an additional force now in this volatile region? 

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:59 | link | comments

 

Survivor, Israel: Kofi Annan wants “hostilities” between Israel and Hezbollah to cease. David Warren explains why, in the interest of its own survival, Israel must decline to comply with that request:

Traditionally, at this point in her response to terror attacks, the world diplomatic community persuades Israel to agree a ceasefire, and the terrorists are saved to fight another day. This is what happened in 1982. The Israelis were in a position to annihilate Yasser Arafat’s PLO, whom they had surrounded in Beirut. Instead, they agreed to let them escape to Tunisia. The rest is history: recurring again and again.

Kofi Annan is trying to do the same thing over: to save Hezbollah (this time) with a ceasefire, by promising Israel that a large force of international “peacekeepers” will take their place. But a U.N. force is no likelier to disarm Hezbollah than the Lebanese army was (when Lebanon agreed to disarm Hezbollah, most recently in 2004). After a brief lull in the shooting, and a chance to regroup and rebuild, Hezbollah would be back at Israel’s throat.

The Israelis know this, now, from hard experience. There is overwhelming popular support for the course Prime Minister Olmert has set out. The Israelis will not be taking advice, from such as Russia and France. The Americans, even the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, show signs of having seriously absorbed their own lessons from recent history. John Bolton is sitting squarely in the Security Council, prepared to veto every effort to force the Israelis to desist. This time -- with or without the world’s permission -- the Israelis are going to finish the job…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:33 | link | comments

 

Beware of the “experts”: They can really screw things up. By Edward Alexander in the Seattle Times (link via RealClear Politics):

…For nearly 40 years, academic Middle East experts and State Department inventors of quixotic "peace plans" have insisted that Israeli occupation of "Arab lands" causes Arab hatred and terror and is the "root cause" of the conflict; end the occupation, they have always said, and all will be well.

How, then, is it that, starting the very day after its withdrawal from Gaza last year and six years after its unilateral retreat from Lebanon, Israel is under attack from both those places?

Would it not be closer to the truth to say that terror is caused far less by Israeli military occupation than by the removal of that occupation?

Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish residents from an area achieves nothing except to invite greater terror and aggression from people who use every meter of land they control not to build their own state but to destroy an existing state.

This is why the idea — promoted by virtually every recent American (and Israeli) administration — of two sovereign entities, Jewish and Arab, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is dangerous fantasy.

What, except historical amnesia, could have made the experts forget that it was Arab hatred and aggression that led, in 1967, to occupation, and not occupation that led to Arab hatred and violence? For 19 years, starting in 1948, the Arabs had full possession of the "West Bank," theirs to do with whatever they chose, and — as always — what they chose was not an independent Palestinian state but incessant terrorist attacks on Israel.

Fences afford Israel only temporary and partial protection; they cannot keep out rockets and missiles, such as have been raining down on Israeli towns in the south of the country ever since Hamas won the election in Gaza (a voting result that could have come as a surprise only to the experts, including Condoleezza Rice). Unless Israel controls both sides of its borders, it can have no security against invaders bent on raw murder.

Can anything positive emerge from the current carnage? Perhaps. Since Hezbollah has over the years killed hundreds of Americans (most notably the Marines in Lebanon) without ever paying a price, its destruction by Israel would constitute a major American victory; the same may be said of Hamas, whose agents of mass murder are already operating in America.

Perhaps the incessant nattering about "the occupation" will finally give way to a recognition that the real "root cause" of Middle Eastern wars is a genocidal Islamicist culture, which must be uprooted by a process roughly akin to the denazification of Germany after World War II…

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:45 | link | comments

 

Trouble in the ummah: It must be tough to be a Suni Muslim these days. On the one hand, you’re probably inclined to root for the Muslims over the Jews. On the other hand, the Muslims you’re rooting for are Shias. And furthermore, they’re the proxies of a Shia Republic that seeks to terminate, once and for all, the traditional dominance of the Sunis.

 

Quel quandary!

 

NPR has more on the subject:

 

Syria joined Jordan in appealing for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas. The escalating violence has divided the Arab world, opening a rift between the rulers and the ruled. Although some Arab leaders have been unusually critical of Hezbollah, Lebanon's militant Islamist group is gaining popularity on what's known as the Arab Street.

In Damascus, where the government is a strong backer of Hezbollah, a recent demonstration in the streets had emotions running high. But demonstrations in Damascus are carefully controlled; security police cleared demonstrators from the streets within an hour.

Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is considered a nationalist hero not just in Syria, but across the Arab world. Therefore, Nasrallah's challenge to Israel is also a challenge to the region's rulers. Conservative Arab leaders are on the defensive, criticizing Israel's forceful response in Lebanon and publicly criticizing Hezbollah.

Saudi Arabia has been the most outspoken -- charging that Hezbollah has engaged in adventurism through its incursion into Israel and capture of two Israeli soldiers.

"When you hear terms like adventurism…," says Middle East analyst Roger Hardy, "This is strong language. I think it reflects the extent of their [Saudis'] alarm at the current crisis in the Middle East."

For the Saudis and the Arab world's Sunni Muslim leaders, the current crisis is part of a larger concern. Sunni Muslims have been the traditional ruling class in the Middle East for generations.

For the Saudi rulers, Hezbollah represents the growing power of Shiite Muslims, says Gary Sick, professor Middle East politics.

"I believe this grows out of a burgeoning fear from the Saudis, but also from the Jordanians and the Egyptians," says Sick, "that there is a Shia threat emerging in the Middle East."…

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:01 | link | comments

 

Blahs blah blahs: I’ve been feeling rather blah today. Melanie Phillips saves me the trouble of articulating what it was all about:

It was said by Holocaust survivors that what provoked in them the most intense despair, to the point where some attempted suicide, was not the infernal depredations to which they had been subject by their Nazi exterminators but the subsequent indifference and rank disbelief of a world which refused to face up to the enormity of what had happened and, in varying ways, sought to deny it. The survivors bore witness to a terrible truth, but no-one believed them. They spoke, but no-one heard.

This weekend, as rockets continue to rain down on northern Israel, there is a rash of demonstrations around Britain against Israel. Not against the genocidal warmongers of Syria and Iran, but against their victim, Israel. Not against Hezbollah, whose rockets are tipped with ball bearings in order to murder and maim as many innocents as possible, but against Israel for waging a war of self defence in which, as in all wars, civilians tragically will lose their lives. Even though Israel, unlike Hezbollah, is delivering repeated warnings to those civilians in advance of its attacks in order to minimise the loss of innocent life whereas the aim of Hezbollah and Hamas is to maximise their murder rate, it is Israel, not Hamas and Hezbollah, which stands condemned in too much of Britain — and as this war grinds on and the casualty rate in Lebanon mounts, such condemnation will surely only increase.

It is Israel, the target of annihilatory attack, which is seen as the guilty party. It is Israel, struggling to defend itself — which it may well not succeed in doing — (so much for its supposedly mythic power, one of the principal motifs of anti-Israel feeling) which is being demonised as brutal and violent, overreacting and at fault. It is Hezbollah which has hidden its rockets in the basements of Lebanon’s apartment buildings, thus using the population of Lebanon as a collective human shield (as Hamas has done in Gaza) behind which it can pursue its murderous purpose against Israel. But it is Israel which is blamed for razing the ‘Paris of the Levant’.

Much has been made of the loss of Lebanon’s tourism industry. The loss of Israel’s tourism industry is not even mentioned. Israelis across the north of the country — some quarter of the population — are virtually living in bomb shelters and their casualty count is rising. No-one cares because all eyes are fixed on the suffering of the Lebanese – real and terrible as that is — and so the impression is created that Lebanon, not Israel, is the victim of this war. Yes, the suffering of the Lebanese deserves compassion. But Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, which has done nothing whatsoever to disarm it in defiance of the UN. Israel, by contrast, has done nothing to attract such violence except exist…

Blah, blah, blah, Israel bad. Blah, blah, blah, disproportionate response. Blah blah blah, poor Lebanese. Blah, blah, blah, Kofi Annan. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah….

 

Blah!

 

Update: Blah, blah, blah, make the Jews suffer. Blah, blah, blah, woe is us. Blah, blah, blah, yet another solipsism. Blah, blah, blah, more delusional blather. Blah, blah, blah, jihad.

 

From News 24:

Dheisheh - "I want the Israelis to suffer like us," said Palestinian refugee Khalil Abulaban, his eyes ablaze as northern Israel cowered under a deadly hail of Hezbollah rocket attacks.

"We have been suffering for 50 years, they for just two weeks," said the 58-year-old, whose teenage daughter was killed by Israeli fire in a first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which raged between 1987 and 1993.

Exhausted by years of Israeli domination and bloody incursions, few in the Dheisheh refugee camp of Bethlehem, one of 19 camps dotting the Palestinian territories and home to 12 000 people, were moved by the Israelis' plight.

No empathy

"People are ashamed to say it, but some of us feel happy to see the Jews suffering," under the Lebanese militia's rockets, admitted Fuad Sbaih, 45, who fixes cars in a local workshop.

"I'm 53 years old and I've never seen any kind of empathy from the Israelis towards me," said Hassan Najjar, an employee of the UN refugee agency UNRWA.

"For years they've been killing us, demolishing our homes, they are stopping us from feeding our families," said Najjar, whose two teenage sons were jailed by Israel two and four years ago for membership of a Palestinian militant group.

"They treat us like that all the time," agreed 25-year-old Ketaya Ibrahim.

"Our neighbours' house was demolished by the Israeli army at the beginning of the second intifada in 2000 because they wanted access to the building next door.

"I feel afraid all the time," she said.

Sharpening rage against Israel

Almost 100 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched a fierce campaign in the Gaza Strip to secure the release of a soldier captured three weeks ago and stop rocket attacks into Israel.

Looking north to Lebanon - where more than 320 people have been killed in over a week of relentless strikes by Israeli aircraft, artillery and warships - only sharpens the Palestinians' rage against Israel.

"The Israeli children are in their shelters drinking milk - they are safe. But then you see that Lebanese children are bleeding, who should you be assisting?" asked Abulaban.

"Can't the world see what they are doing in Lebanon? They're turning the world upside down for three soldiers," charged Najjar.

Israel dealing with 'terrorist' threats

Israel has vowed to pursue its deadly twin offensive - sparked by the capture of one soldier by Palestinian militants and two by Hezbollah guerrillas - with no time-limit until it has dealt with both "terrorist" threats.

"Israel is not threatened with destruction, today or before," Najjar charged.

"This could have been solved around a cup of coffee - there's no need to destroy Beirut."

"The leaders of Israel should be wise men, but those we see now in power are tough people," agreed 60-year-old Abu Fuad, taking shelter from the midday sun outside a convenience store.

"If they were wise they would sit down and negotiate with the Arabs."

'We are with Hezbollah, Osama bin Laden

Incensed by the heavy death toll in Gaza and Lebanon, Abulaban described a single struggle against the "Zionist" enemy, linking Palestinian militants with the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon and even the al-Qaeda network.

"Everybody who supports Zionists is my enemy. We are with Hezbollah, (Hezbollah head Hassan) Nasrallah, (al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden - it's the same fight."…

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:44 | link | comments

 

Dershowitz disses “disproportionate”: Alan Dershowitz notes that it’s hard to mount a “proportionate” response when your enemies situate their civilians in the same place as their missiles. From JWR:

There is no democracy in the world that should tolerate missiles being fired at its cities without taking every reasonable step to stop the attacks. The big question raised by Israel's military actions in Lebanon is what is "reasonable." The answer, according to the laws of war, is that it is reasonable to attack military targets, so long as every effort is made to reduce civilian casualties. If the objectives cannot be achieved without some civilian casualties, these must be "proportional" to the civilian casualties that would be prevented by the military action.

This is all well and good for democratic nations that deliberately locate their military bases away from civilian population centers. Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population. Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast, deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas.

There is no democracy in the world that should tolerate missiles being fired at its cities without taking every reasonable step to stop the attacks. The big question raised by Israel's military actions in Lebanon is what is "reasonable." The answer, according to the laws of war, is that it is reasonable to attack military targets, so long as every effort is made to reduce civilian casualties. If the objectives cannot be achieved without some civilian casualties, these must be "proportional" to the civilian casualties that would be prevented by the military action.

This is all well and good for democratic nations that deliberately locate their military bases away from civilian population centers. Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population. Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast, deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas…

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:07 | link | comments

 

Another Siddiqui heard from: Tarik Ali, a Siddiqui from across the pond (those Siddiquis sure get around) offers his thoughts as to what’s behind the Lebanon crisis. Shockingly, he says it’s all about Iran and its designs on the region and how it’s been using Islamist terror outfits Hamas and Hezbollah as its attack dogs in the jihad to excise what the deranged Nazi-esqe mullahs like to call “the Jewish cancer.”

 

Gotcha!

 

Actually, being a Siddiqui, he said nothing of the kind. In fact, he says that Israel’s wars of self preservation are really a demonstration of its colonial asperations and “imperial arrogance” (In Siddiquiworld, apparently, it’s “arrogant” for a Jewish nations to insist on its right to exist.) And when Israelis fight back, writes Ali, they’re acting exactly like Nazis. Just ask “the historian Isaac Deutscher”—whoever he is.

 

From Al Guardian:

 

In his last interview - after the 1967 six-day war - the historian Isaac Deutscher, whose next-of-kin had died in the Nazi camps and whose surviving relations lived in Israel, said: "To justify or condone Israel's wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and harm its own long-term interest." Comparing Israel to Prussia, he issued a sombre warning: "The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase 'Man kann sich totseigen!' ‘You can triumph yourself to death.’

 

In Israel's actions today we can detect many of the elements of hubris: an imperial arrogance, a distortion of reality, an awareness of its military superiority, the self-righteousness with which it wrecks the social infrastructure of weaker states, and a belief in its racial superiority. The loss of many civilian lives in Gaza and Lebanon matters less than the capture or death of a single Israeli soldier. In this, Israeli actions are validated by the US.

 

The offensive against Gaza is designed to destroy Hamas for daring to win an election. The "international community" stood by as Gaza suffered collective punishment. Dozens of innocents continue to die. This meant nothing to the G8 leaders. Nothing was done.

 

Israeli recklessness is always green-lighted by Washington. In this case, their interests coincide. They want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model. They argue this was the original design of the country. Contemporary Lebanon, it is true, still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset - a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority…

 

‘You can triumph yourself to death.’ So profound, especially when intoned in the original German. On the other hand, if you let the ‘Slamists roll over you, it’s a given that you will ‘defeat yourself to death.’

 

For Israel, a classic lose-lose situation, I’d say.

 

Update: Isaac Deutscher: heavy duty Commie.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:18 | link | comments

 

Harpoon’s threats: Stephen Harper won’t budge from his pro-Israel position, and Harpoon Siddiqui threatens that it’s going to cost him at the polls—big time. (Toward the end of the piece, Harpoon even crunches the numbers: 350,000 Canadian Jews to 650,000 Canadian Muslims, plus all their countless non-Muslim supporters; as always, the numbers don't favour God's Chosen.) Accustomed to amoral Liberal governments that often cut their policies, like sails, according the direction of the wind, Siddiqui is disturbed by why he calls Harper’s “immoral,” American-like stance. (Because in Siddiquiworld, if you stand up for Western civilization against Islamists, you must be a lackey of Bush):

 

Stephen Harper reminds me of the late King Fahd, of the American puppet state of Saudi Arabia, who was said to be more American than the American president.

 

By falling in lockstep with George W. Bush, the Prime Minister is either displaying his ideological commitment to the president or trying to please him, at any cost — from Afghanistan to Israel. Either way, he is compromising Canadian sovereignty and our reputation for even-handedness, as well as exposing our soldiers to grave risk in the questionable Afghan mission.

 

To be fair, Ottawa's pro-American tilt began under Paul Martin. But Harper is "out-bushing Bush," as Opposition Leader Bill Graham says.

 

Whereas several G8 leaders thought of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon as outrageously disproportionate, Harper found it "measured."

 

A Canadian prime minister thus did not utter a word of protest against the killing of eight Canadians, let alone of nearly 300 other people and the displacement of about 500,000 civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

 

It's a line of thinking in which the only lives that matter, and the only territories worthy of immunity from violence, are American and Israeli.

 

This is the immoral calculus that's at the heart of so much havoc in the world today. And it is this that Harper has committed Canada to, with little or no debate in Parliament or anywhere else.

 

Harper also parrots the line that the crisis emanates solely from "the actions of Hamas and the actions of Hezbollah." It does, but not completely...

 

Okay, enough of that. Me, I happen to think Harper is aces, a man of principle and guts who is willing to stand up for what’s right, even if it costs him some votes, and who refuses to be railroaded by the likes of an odious apologist like Harpoon.

 

So there.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:54 | link | comments (1)

 

You’re in good hands with Canada: As Canadians by the thousands are still waiting to be airlifted out of war-torn Lebanon, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente notes that for dual citizens caught up in strife back home (because for some of them, home isn’t Canada; it’s the place they came from and returned to), a Canadian passport is the “World’s best insurance policy”:

…Once upon a time, immigrants set sail across the ocean and never went back. Gradually, they lost touch with their relatives, their homelands and their original identities. That's all changed now. Cheap air travel, e-mail and cellphones mean you can go home again, as often and as long as you want. The world is full of dual citizens who shuttle back and forth between Vancouver and Hong Kong, Lebanon and Montreal, Toronto and Seoul. Some acquired their citizenship strictly as a hedge. Before the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, there were perhaps half a million newly minted Chinese Canadians living there, far more than in Vancouver. Not for nothing did novelist Yann Martel call Canada the world's finest hotel.

With dual nationalities come dual sets of loyalties. That's not entirely bad. Canada is now intimately connected to every corner of Earth. But what happens to our own national identity? “No country, and especially no democracy, can afford to have large numbers of citizens with shallow civic and national attachments,” says U.S. political scientist Stanley Renshon.

Of course we should do whatever we can to extract innocents from the war zone. (We don't even charge them.) But it's worth noting that Lebanon has been an iffy neighbourhood for quite a while. Everyone knows that Hezbollah controls the towns in the south, including the town where eight members of a Lebanese-Canadian family lost their lives. That's a tragedy. But that's what Hezbollah does. It keeps its rockets stashed in civilian neighbourhoods and uses civilians as human shields.

“My family are all martyrs,” said one of the relatives in Canada, as he condemned our foreign policy. But it's not Hezbollah that will protect the Lebanese-Canadian kids cowering in the cellars. It's us — because when Canada takes you in, we look after you forever.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:08 | link | comments (4)

 

Saying no to craven appeasers: A colleague just sent me the following. It’s a condemnation of European cowardice that was written by Mathias Dapfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, a large German corporation. The piece appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt (sorry, no link):

 

EUROPE - THY NAME IS COWARDICE

 

A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe, your family name is appeasement." It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true. Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives, as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.

 

Appeasement legitimized and stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe, where for decades, inhuman suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.

 

Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and

even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, we Europeans

debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the

Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again,

and do our work for us.

 

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European Appeasement,

camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.

 

Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program.

 

And now we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement.

 

How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic Fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere? By suggesting that we really should have a "Muslim Holiday" in Germany?

 

I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of our (German) Government, and if the polls are to be believed, the German people, actually believe that creating an Official State "Muslim Holiday" will somehow spare us from the wrath of the fanatical Islamists. One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain waving the laughable treaty signed by Adolph Hitler and declaring European "Peace in our time".

 

What else has to happen before the European public and its political

leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open Western societies, and intent upon Western Civilization's utter destruction.

 

It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than any of the great military conflicts of the last century - a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by "tolerance" and "accommodation" but is actually spurred on by such gestures, which have proven to be, and will always be taken by the Islamists for signs of weakness.

 

Only two recent American Presidents had the courage needed for Anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush.

 

His American critics may quibble over the details, but we Europeans know the truth. We saw it first hand: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, freeing half of

the German people from nearly 50 years of terror and virtual slavery. And Bush, supported only by the Social Democrat Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic War against Democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.

 

In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner, instead of defending liberal society's values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China.

 

On the contrary - we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to those "arrogant Americans", as the World Champions of "tolerance", which even Germany's Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we're so moral? I fear it's more because we're so materialistic, so devoid of a

moral compass.

 

For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt, and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy - because unlike almost all of Europe, Bush realizes what is at stake - literally everything.

 

While we criticize the "capitalistic robber barons" of America because they seem too sure of their priorities, we timidly defend our Social Welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive!

 

We'd rather discuss reducing our 35-hour workweek or our dental coverage, or our 4 weeks of paid vacation... Or listen to TV pastors preach about the need to "reach" out to terrorists. To understand and forgive".

 

These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewelry when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbor's house.

 

Appeasement?

 

Europe, thy name is Cowardice.

 

God Bless America.

 

I bet, given how popular the above comments are likely to be in his native land, Mathias is feeling a bit lonely these days.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:31 | link | comments (1)

 

A reminiscence: Something I haven’t thought of in years: When I was growing up, my grandparents on my mother’s side lived in a handsome house on a shady street in Ottawa. Across the road was a much larger house—the embassy of Lebanon. Word was that it was so large inside that that it had an elevator, and looking at it from the outside, as I was wont to do, since it was hard to miss right there directly across the road, I didn’t find it hard to believe.

 

My grandfather, a stocky fire-plug of a man with a very short fuse, was a successful businessman. He had come from Poland and had tried his first tried his luck in Western Canada; there’s a photo of him in the family album wearing a Stetson hat and chaps which attests to his short-lived career as a cowboy, perhaps the only Jewish-Polish cowboy in Canadian history.

 

The cowboy life was not to his taste, and, for a brief time he returned to Poland. (Had he remained, he would likely have perished in the Holocaust, and I would not be writing these words). He was a scholar, a learned man, who had studied at Yeshiva and knew his teachings inside out. Growing up, I marvelled at his library of immense, leather-bound books full of tiny script, slabs of wisdom which he studied every morning after he had put on his phylacteries and completed his morning prayers.

 

My grandfather, whom I called “Zaida,” was famous for taking very long walks, this at a time when there was next to no awareness of physical fitness. Thus, the sight of a solitary man, a businessman, who regularly and voluntarily took long walks was so novel that an Ottawa newspaper was prompted to write an article about my grandfather and take a photo of him engaging in this unusual pastime.

 

In all the time I spent at my grandparents’ home—and I used to go twice a year, during summer and winter holidays—I never saw anyone ever enter or leave the Lebanese embassy. But my grandfather did, and he used to tell me that, when he was on one of his walks, he’d bump into the ambassador and have an amiable chat with him. Nothing deep, of course, just a “hello, how ya doing, nice to see you” conversation, the sort of pleasantries that friendly neighbours often exchange.

 

Why dredge up these ancient memories today? Mostly because, at a time of recrimination and war, it is comforting to recall a period when a Jew and a Lebanese had kind words for each other. I pray the day will come when the Islamist scourge had been eliminated, and such amiable conversations will be possible once again.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:38 | link | comments

 

Bad dream: After taking my pooch for a walk in the heat of the day, I came home and lapsed into a brief slumber. During my snooze, I had a brief, intense, and very disturbing dream. It was this: I dreamt that Israel was at war on two fronts with genocidal jihadi terrorists at a time when the Democrats occupied the White House and a Liberal Prime Minister was in residence at 24 Sussex Drive.

 

Fortunately, I woke up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:00 | link | comments (2)

 

Bill gets a clue (at last): Bill Maher, an alleged comedian and political observer, is someone I haven’t paid any attention to since the time soon after 9/11 when he insisted on his then-TV show, Politically Incorrect, that Mo Atta and crew were “brave” when they crashed some hijacked airplanes into American landmark. He almost redeems himself for those wretched comments with the following.  From the H.R. Puffenstuff, er, the Huffington Post (link via Ringo the Gringo on LGF):

…I have to say, watching George Bush talk about Israel the last week has reminded me of a feeling that I hadn't felt in so long I forgot what it felt like: the feeling of pride when your president says what you want your president to say, especially in a matter that chokes you up a bit. I surrender my credentials as Bush exposer - from the very beginning - to no man, but on Israel, I love it that a U.S. president doesn't pretend Arab-Israeli conflict is an even-steven proposition. Lots of ethnic peoples, probably most, have at one time or another lost some territory; nobody's ever completely happy with their borders; people move and get moved, which is why the 20th century saw the movement of tens if not hundreds of millions of refugees in countries around the world. There was no entity of Arabs called "Palestine" before Israel made the desert bloom. If those 600,000 original Palestinian refugees had been handled with maturity by their Arab brethren, who had nothing but space to put them, they could have moved on -- the way Germans, Czechs, Poles, Chinese and everybody else has, including, of course, the Jews.

But I digress. I really wanted to say that, for all those who accuse the likes of myself and the birthday girl of being unpatriotic, or hating America first, the feeling I've had watching Israel defend herself and a US president defend Israel (a country that is held to a standard for "restraint" that no other country ever is asked to meet, but that's another story) just reminds me how wrong that is. I LOVE being on the side of my president, and mouthing "You go, boy" when he gets it right. He just, outside of this, almost never does…

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:43 | link | comments (2)

 

Buzz off: The Israel-Arab conflict has been plagued with a number of pesky buzz words and phrases over the years. Most of them—“the occupation," “the apartheid wall,” “the cycle of violence,” etc.—serve to undermine Israel and bolster the Arabs. The latest buzz phrase to join this ignominious group: “disproportionate response.” A piece on The American Thinker site picks apart this latest meme and explains that, like it or not, a “disproportionate response,” i.e. permanently hobbling your fascist, supremacist enemy, is the best way, the only way, for freedom to prevail:

 

Buzzwords plague discussion of the Middle East conflict. For too long the buzzword phrase was the so-called “occupied territories.” But today the new buzzword is “disproportionate response,” meaning that Israel is being admonished to not overreact to an act of war by her enemies.

How bitterly ironic considering that Israel’s critics choose to forget how America fought WWII with its own “disproportionate response.” The Allies that fought Hitler had no fear that Hitler’s Jewish victims would overreact with a “disproportionate response.” The only thing that was truly “disproportionate” at that time was the allies’ disproportionate failure to respond in opposing ongoing genocide against helpless civilians.

Today the buzzword crowd seems more concerned about restraining Israel than in defeating the Islamic terrorists that want to complete Hitler’s goal of exterminating all Jews. How times have changed. Then, the survival of millions of Jews was of little concern to the nations. Today the same powers fear that the Jews are defending themselves too vigorously.

During WWII the two principal allied governments seemed more concerned that Jews might survive than that they would perish. The Roosevelt Administration played down news of the Holocaust lest the American people learn the magnitude of the ongoing genocide and demand U.S. intervention to save Jews from extermination. This is documented in the book The Abandonment of the Jews – America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, by historian David S. Wyman. The British blocked escape routes from Europe so that Jewish refugees could not reach the land of Israel in Jewish Palestine. Their concern was to appease the Arabs, prevent the establishment of a democratic Jewish state in the ancient Jewish homeland and assure their access to Arab oil. We now hear much about Israel acting with “disproportionate” force. Among Israel’s critics are administration officials such as Secretary of State Rice who makes the perfunctory verbal nod that Israel has a right to self-defense. How generous! But her statement is immediately coupled with the admonition to refrain from using “disproportionate” force, to “exercise restraint” and not to destabilize the Lebanese government.

One would think that that people who live in glass houses would not be so cavalier in ‘casting stones’ with such warnings. One could make a powerful case against American conduct in WWII regarding the use of “disproportionate force.”

It could be argued theoretically that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did not really rise to the level requiring all-out war as an immediate response. The Japanese had their own complaints against American actions to deprive them of vital oil sources. Their attack was against American military forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, located far from the U.S. mainland. No Japanese bombed the American continent or targeted American civilians. They were not preparing to invade nor did they ever threaten to exterminate the U.S. populace.

There was a U.S. option to first try diplomacy before immediately rushing into war. Things moved slowly enough in those days to allow some time to first try for a peaceful resolution before taking precipitous and unilateral action. There were no U.S. diplomatic consultations to first gain international support before going to war. It was only after President Roosevelt declared war on Japan the day after Pearl Harbor that Germany, Japan’s ally, declared war on the U.S. America then fought against Germany even though Germany had not invaded America nor bombed our cities and was far from ever doing so.

Both Germany and Japan were attacked on their home territories, killing millions, while America lost thousands. America lost combatants. They lost combatants plus millions of civilians; men, women and children. America deliberately attacked cities having little military value to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. The rationale was to ‘demoralize’ (terrorize?) the enemy populations into submission. That tactic may have just increased enemy resolve to fight on, or so some claim.

America did not consult the international community but instead acted unilaterally. Offers by both the Japanese and German governments to end the war via negotiations were rejected. Instead unconditional surrender was demanded. In early 1945 Japan was clearly on the road to defeat but America still insisted on unconditional surrender and used the atomic bomb twice to bring this about.

Japan and the Allied zones of Germany were occupied for years to impose our form of government on the conquered peoples. WW II cost an estimated fifty million lives. Was it really worth it? Shouldn’t diplomacy have been tried first? If that failed, a policy of containment then could have then applied over the long haul. That was American policy for the Soviet Union over many decades, and it worked.

By now readers should realize that this writer is obviously playing the ‘devil’s advocate’ to show how easily American actions in WWII could be cast in a highly unfavorable light. The above argument was deliberately skewed to be unfair to America to demonstrate a point. By telling the truth in a selective manner one can put a very different spin on the morality of American and Israeli actions…

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:43 | link | comments

 

Role playing: I don’t know about you, but the news that Kofi cutie and serial adopter, Angelina Jolie, has been tapped to play the role of Marianne Pearl, wife of slain Jew Daniel Pearl in an upcoming movie totally creeps me out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:01 | link | comments

 

Isn’t that “special”?: Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a man who definitely understands what’s at stake here, is standing resolute in his support of Israel. This despite the slings and arrows of clueless, craven Libs and NDP’s who want Canada to slink back to its traditional "neutral" role of playing the “honest broker.”

 

The P.M. is also facing criticism about Canada’s supposedly tardy response in evacuating its citizens from the area of conflict in Lebanon. And if, like me, you’ve been wondering what the heck up to 50,000 Canadians are doing in Lebanon, the Ceeb has anticipated our bewilderment and posted the following explanation:

Why so many Canadians?

That's a good question. The answer seems to be that Canada has had something of a special relationship when it comes to Lebanon and Lebanese immigration over the last hundred years or so. And that this has been bolstered on at least two occasions in recent years.

In the mid-1970s, during the height of the Lebanese civil war, Canada was one of the very few western countries to adopt special immigration measures to assist those Lebanese fleeing the conflict. It later even set up emergency visa offices in Cyprus to help with family reunification and refugee applications.

That was in 1989 and the result was a spectacular increase in Lebanese immigration in the early 1990s. The 1991 census records only 54,605 Canadians of Lebanese extraction. A decade later there would be 144,000, according to the 2001 census. But in a 2002 report to La Francophonie, the federal government said there were over 250,000 Lebanese in Canada, not all of whom, of course, would be French speaking.

·        Many of these newcomers, French-speaking Arabs, ended up in Montreal, which boasts Canada's largest Lebanese community. This helps explain the huge outpouring earlier this week when seven members of the el-Akhras family, a Montreal family with four small children, were killed by Israeli bombs while vacationing with relatives in Aitaroun, a village near the Israel border. Ali el-Akhras, the 36-year-old father, ran a pharmacy in the Montreal neighbourhood of Snowdon.

Interesting. That explains why so many Lebanese hold Canadian passports, but why are so many of them living back in Lebanon? And how many of them live there more or less on a full-time basis but return to Canada to take advantage of Canadian health care and other perks attached to citizenship?

 

In other words, how many of these people are Canadian in name only? And it that “special relationship” the Ceeb speaks so highly of really a matter of Canada allowing itself to be used by a lot of people who don’t live here, and aside from holding a Canadian passport, feel no allegiance to the country (but who want Canada to come rescue them when Hezbollah-fomented violence flares up at home)?

 

Are we patsies, or what?

 

A letter in the Toronto Star puts it very well:

 

Are these people really Canadians?

 

Over the last 40 years we have had thousands of refugees from Lebanon. We offered them Canadian status and passports. With fighting flaring up again in Lebanon we are expected to come to the rescue of 40,000 alleged Canadians.

 

In my mind, a Canadian is a person who lives, works and pays taxes here, not a person who comes for a short time in order to get a passport that makes international travel easier and then heads elsewhere.

 

I would be curious to see the tax records for some of those who expect Canada to come to their aid to see if they have been living and working in Canada or if they obtained Canadian passports as flags of convenience.

Dave Smith, Fenwick, Ont.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:43 | link | comments (3)

 

Standing with Israel: Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee urges the free world to stand with Israel. Otherwise, the unfree genocidal Islamists will be emboldened to turn the entire world into one big Islamist dystopia, Iran on a global scale:

…It is not just the G8 and the Israelis who see the dark forces behind this dispute. Conservative Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have (cautiously) denounced Hezbollah for what the Saudis call its "irresponsible adventurism." Jordan's King Abdullah II, echoing Mr. Blair, warns of a "Shiite arc" sweeping from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon.

The leading role of Iran and its militant proxies make this Middle East conflict different from those that have gone before. When Israel was up against Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the old anti-Zionist axis, there was at least a hope that the conflict could be defused by settling the Palestinian issue, trading occupied Palestinian land for Arab recognition of Israel.

What chance is there that Iran, which wants Israel wiped off the map, would go for that? Notice that both recent attacks on Israel have come from land that Israel has already handed over: southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza last year. The message from the militant powers could not be clearer: Go ahead, give us back our land. We will still attack and we will keep attacking till you are finished. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah calls Palestine an "occupied land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River" -- a span that includes all of Israel.

Now that the extremists have hijacked the dispute with Israel, it is futile to rattle on, as outside powers used to do, about the "peace process" and the "road map" and "land for peace." As much as Palestinians deserve a country of their own, these are useless antiques in today's struggle. What the world needs to do is recognize the new reality and stand with Israel as it combats this remorseless enemy -- a threat not just to the Jewish state but to the whole democratic world.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:32 | link | comments (3)

 

A simple man: The lead story on the front page of the Toronto Star is about Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of genocidal terrorist organization, Hezbollah, Iran's dog in this fight. The headline reads "Israel’s top enemy,” and the subhead queries “ANOTHER OSAMA?” Beside that, the Star’s man on the war scene, Mitch Potter, whose recent articles have been fairly well-balanced, writes “Nasrallah is considered one of the most complex and effective adversaries of the Jewish state—which is why it wants him dead.”

                   

I sent the following letter to the editor in response:

 

Mitch Potter writes that Israel wants to get rid of Hezbollah chief, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, because he’s such a “complex and effective” adversary.

 

Effective he may be; complex he is not. The Sheik’s motivations are dead simple. He wants to obliterate Israel because it is occupied—by Jews—and because his understanding of his religion does not allow for a sovereign Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world.

 

And if that’s too “complex,” all you have to do is look at the front page photo of Nasrallah’s picture juxtaposed with a Koran and a gun. That image says it all.

 

Update:

 

A terrorist leader, Nasrallah,

Helmed a terrorist outfit, Hezbollah.

It’s sole rationale:

Send the Jews all to Hell,

In tribute to head Moon Dude, Allah.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:40 | link | comments

 

Terminate the spin cycle: Thomas Sowell says it’s way past time to retire that tired and woefully inaccurate phrase, “cycle of violence.”

 

Hear, hear.

 

From RealClear Politics:

 

Now that Israel has responded to rocket attacks and the abduction of its soldiers by terrorists by making military strikes into areas controlled by those terrorists, much of our media are deploring another "cycle of violence" in the Middle East.

For reasons unknown, some people seem to regard verbal equivalence as moral equivalence -- and the latter as some kind of badge of broadmindedness, if not intellectual superiority.

Therefore, when Palestinian terrorists ("militants" in politically correct Newspeak) attack Israel and then Israel responds with military force, that is just another "cycle of violence" in the Middle East to some people.

The "cycle" notion suggests that each side is just responding to what the other side does. But just what had Israel done to set off these latest terrorist acts? It voluntarily pulled out of Gaza, after evacuating its own settlers, and left the land to the Palestinian authorities.

Terrorists then used the newly acquired land to launch rockets into Israel and then seized an Israeli soldier. Other terrorists in Lebanon followed suit. The great mantra of the past, "trading land for peace," is now thoroughly discredited, or should be.

But facts mean nothing to people who are determined to find equivalence, whether today in the Middle East or yesterday in the Cold War.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, nothing is easier than to create verbal parallels and moral equivalence, though some people seem to pride themselves on their ability to do such verbal tricks.

Centuries ago, Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men's counters but that they are the money of fools.

Regardless of fashionable rhetoric, there is no Middle East "peace process" any more than trading "land for peace" has been a viable option. Nor is a Palestinian "homeland" a key to peace.

During all the years when Arab countries controlled the land now proposed for a Palestinian homeland, there was no talk about any such homeland. Only after Israel took control of that territory as a result of the 1967 war was it suddenly sacred as a Palestinian homeland.

There is no concession that will bring lasting peace to the Middle East because the terrorists and their supporters are not going to be satisfied by concessions. The only thing that will satisfy them is the destruction of Israel…

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:50 | link | comments (1)

 

The same war: Andrew McCarthy, as wise as ever, sums it up in no time flat. From NRO:

 

Israel’s war against Hezbollah is a watershed in the war on terror. As long as we understand that it’s not just Israel’s war. And it’s not just against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is Iran. It is Iran’s wholly owned proxy warrior. It is fighting Israel. It is an enemy of the United States, because its master, Iran, is an enemy of the United States. This is our war. The same war we finally engaged five years ago. That, it is worth remembering, was the war on terror — World War IV, as Norman Podhoretz aptly dubbed it. Democracy promotion is a worthy long-term aim, but the immediate imperative of this war is to defeat America-hating jihadists.

As far as Iran is concerned, we have disserved that imperative from the beginning of our response to the 9/11 attacks. One is tempted to say, “from the beginning of the war on terror,” but that would be wrong. There is a big difference between the beginning of the war on terror and the point in time when the United States finally conceded it was at war with Islamic extremists and responded accordingly. Iran has been at war with the United States from the beginning. And it has principally fought the war through its proxy warrior. Hezbollah…

 

So how long do we have to wait until the Globe and Mail and the Ceeb clue in and stop framing it as something bad and "disproportionate" that Israel is doing to Lebanon?

 

(No need to answer my purely rhetoric query. I know that, given their Weltaushauung, by the time they “get it”—if they ever do—it’ll probably be too late.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:34 | link | comments

 

The weasels crawl out of their holes: And the biggest weasel of all, as reported by our weaselly national broadcaster, that Liberal blowhard, Bill Graham:

Ottawa's strong support of Israeli actions against Hezbollah could damage Canada's credibility as a future peacemaker in the region, interim Liberal Leader Bill Graham said Tuesday.

"It's a Canadian tradition to work in the Middle East for long-term peace by being able to work with all sides of the conflict," said Graham.

To be in a stabilization force, you have to have credibility among all sides in the region, he said.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have called for an international security force to be deployed to the Israel-Lebanon border to help end the violence.

"If our credibility as a potential peacemaker in the region has been destroyed, we won't have the credibility to participate," he said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sided firmly with Israel since it began military air strikes against the Lebanese-based Hezbollah militant organization.

The operation was triggered by a July 12 Hezbollah raid, in which the militant organization killed eight Israeli soldiers and seized two soldiers.

Israeli planes have hit targets in southern Lebanon and Beirut, while Hezbollah has fired volleys of rockets at northern Israeli communities. 

As many as 230 Lebanese and 24 Israelis have been killed.

Harper calls on prisoners' release

Last week, Harper called Israel's response "measured," saying the Jewish state had a right to defend itself.

Harper called on Hezbollah and Hamas to release Israeli prisoners and recognize Israel's right to exist.

Graham, who spoke from Vancouver, said Harper's public support for one side is a change to traditional Canadian foreign policy.

"We strongly urge the prime minister to reconsider some of his rhetoric and his language, to look at the G8 communique he signed and see what's in there," said Graham.

Graham defended Israel's right to defend itself following a "vicious" attack from Hezbollah, but said its response has consequences throughout the region.

"There's a geopolitical issue at risk here in the Middle East," said Graham.

"Canadians want their government to offer a balanced response to the crisis," he said. "Canadians want us to help everyone in the region come together."

Because you know, when one side is a Western democracy whose very existence is threatened by genocidal Islamists (whose ideology also poses a threat to the West at large) and the other side are the genocidal Islamists, you want to make sure that the see-saw is dead centre. Otherwise, people might think you approve of the Zionists, and you won’t get to play with the “cool kids” in the G8, the EU and the UN.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:31 | link | comments (5)

 

Hunker bunkum: Washington Post columnist Richard  Cohen says that, given the over-the-top enmity Hamas and Hezbollah have for Israel, it would be best if it “hunkered down” and didn’t try to fight back:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself…

In his forthcoming book, "The War of the World," the admirably readable British historian Niall Ferguson devotes considerable space to the horrific history of the Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Never mind the Holocaust. In 1905 there were pogroms in 660 different places in Russia, and more than 800 Jews were killed -- all this in a period of less than two weeks. This was the reality of life for many of Europe's Jews.

Little wonder so many of them emigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina or South Africa. Little wonder others embraced the dream of Zionism and went to Palestine, first a colony of Turkey and later of Britain. They were in effect running for their lives. Most of those who remained -- 97.5 percent of Poland's Jews, for instance -- were murdered in the Holocaust.

Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book "Postwar" with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.

Thanks for the advice, Richard. (May I can you “Dick”?) The Jews tried that “hunker down” approach during their last go-round with genocidal fascists. All it got them was six million corpses and lots of Europeans crying rivers of crocodile tears and erecting monuments to dead Jews. This time around, if the Jews go down, at least they’ll go down fighting. Which is more than I can say for Europe, which has already embraced its fascist Eurabian future without kicking up any fuss.

 

Oh, and that “gifted British historian” you mention—he’s already called for the dismantling of the Zionist experiment, so I’d discount anything he has to say on the subject.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:03 | link | comments

 

And the winner by a nose…: The prize for more biased anti-Israel news coverage has been a real horse race, what with the CBC and the Globe and Mail more or less running neck and neck. The Ceeb has been specializing in those stories that push all the right emotional buttons—Lebanese-Canadians glancing at wedding photos of loved ones back home, uncertain as to when or whether they’ll see them again. The Globe has also been pushing these buttons, but since it no longer even seems capable of paying lip service to fairness, at this time I am compelled to declare it the official winner of the Bash Israel Derby.

 

The article that pushed the Globe over the finish line: this front page story. I post it as it appears so as to diminish none of its malign impact:

 

THE MIDEAST CONFLICT: THE CANADIAN DEBATE

Harper refuses to budge

PM unwavering in support for Israel despite appeals to moderate stand

JANE TABER

SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER; With a report from Canadian Press

ST. PETERSBURG -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper refused yesterday to budge in his support for Israel and its response to the deepening crisis in the Middle East, despite criticism from opposition MPs and Lebanese Canadians that he should have appealed for restraint and moved faster to evacuate Canadians from Lebanon.

Mr. Harper said the conflict is the result of the fact that there is no Middle East peace process because "the current Palestinian government is not committed to a peace process.

"Secondly, there is an immediate crisis because of the actions of Hamas and the actions of Hezbollah," he said, referring to the radical Islamic movement that controls the Palestinian Authority and the Shia Muslim group that controls much of southern Lebanon.

He said the key to ending the crisis is not an immediate ceasefire, as has been advocated by some members of the Group of Eight industrialized countries at their annual summit here, but rather the safe return of three kidnapped Israeli soldiers and the end of "Hezbollah attacks on Israel."

These were Mr. Harper's first comments on the violence in the Middle East since eight Canadians, seven from a Montreal family, were killed Sunday in an Israeli air raid on Lebanon. Relatives of the Al-Akhrass family appealed to the government to act swiftly to evacuate other Canadians.

Canada has chartered six ships that it says will begin evacuating Canadians to Cyprus starting midweek. Nearly 25,000 Canadians are registered with the embassy in Beirut, but the total has been estimated to be as high as 40,000.

Liberal leadership hopeful Scott Brison complained yesterday that those who want out should have received Canadian aid sooner.

"We will not be there to help our citizens escape danger until Wednesday," said Mr. Brison. "Our government is dawdling and the fact is that minutes and hours count in a situation as dangerous as this."

The Canadian Arab Federation condemned Mr. Harper for describing Israel's actions last week as "measured."

The federation issued a statement saying it held him "responsible for the death of eight Canadians in Lebanon" because of his failure to urge Israel to be restrained.

Mr. Harper dismissed the federation's characterization of his remarks as "bizarre."

"We are not going into the temptation of some to single out Israel, which was the victim of the initial attack," he said.

Mr. Harper said neither he nor his officials have contacted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for an explanation of the air strike on Sunday that killed a Montreal pharmacist, his wife, their four young children and others. He offered his condolences to the victims' families at the start of his news conference.

"The onus remains on the parties that caused the conflict to take steps to end the conflict," he said. "But obviously we urge Israel and others to minimize civilian damage. It is difficult, though, we recognize it is difficult when you're fighting a non-governmental organization that's embedded in a civilian population."

Former Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy said Mr. Harper was abandoning Canada's traditional role of honest broker in the Middle East.

"He's almost at the forefront of a very small group of nations who say whatever Israel does is right. . . . We're becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution," Mr. Axworthy said…

…

This article suggests that:

·       The Prime Minister’s support for Israel is immoderate;

·       Lots of Canadians concur that it’s immoderate, and want him to moderate it;

·       It’s time to return to “good old days” when Liberals like Lloyd Axworthy were in power and the government took an even-handed approach to events in the Middle East.

The truth is:

·       Stephen Harper isn’t looking to see how many Muslim votes he can garner, but, as a man of principle is taking a principled stance in support of Israel, a Western democracy in a sea of despots that finds itself in the crosshairs of genocidal Islamists. This is an eminently “moderate” position for a leader of a Western democracy to take

·       Under the Liberals, Canada never acted as “an honest broker” in the Middle East. It invariably favoured the Arabs over the Israelis, and could be counted on to support those endless, ridiculous anti-Israel resolutions put forward by Israel’s enemies whenever they arose with sickening but predictable regularity at the UN.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:03 | link | comments (2)

 

To sum it up: Here’s the essential difference between Israel and its enemies. Israel expresses regret when it accidentally kills civilians, like the Canadians who were killed in Lebanon. Israel’s enemies purposely target civilians, and gloat when they succeed and civilians are killed.

 

In essence: Israel is civilized. Israel’s enemies are barbaric terrorists.

 

Any questions?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:30 | link | comments

 

The tie that binds: Ever notice that Moo Jihad never wears a necktie?

 

No? Me neither.

 

But for those who want to know why the unoccluded Mahdi-wannabe eschews that particular strip of fabric, here’s why. From George Ajjan.com (link via the New York Observer):

 

This issue goes back to the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. Before the revolution, all public figures in Iran and all officials wore ties, both domestically and when on visits abroad. Shortly after the revolution however, the tie itself began being associated with "Western imperialism", especially after
Ayatollah Khomeini branded a large group of intellectuals (who were less religiously zealous than he would have liked) as "tie-wearing cronies of the West" and essentially branded anyone wearing a tie as being Western influenced. As such, no Iranian official since that time wears a tie, whether in Iran or when on official trips abroad. In fact, for many years after the revolution, the site of a regular person wearing a tie in Iran was so rare that heads would turn on the street and funny comments would be made if someone wore a tie outside. Many people still wore them to parties and weddings and things, but it was very "taboo" during the 1980s.

Gradually, as Khomeini's legacy became a bit less overbearing, regular people stopped caring and the rhetorical plays on people who wear ties as "imperialist cronies" were no longer made, meaning that at least ordinary people now wore ties on a regular basis. I myself for example, always wore tie at work in Tehran, as did many of my colleagues. I would actually make a point of wearing a tie outside as much as possible, to do my bit in making sure that people got used to seeing other people in ties.

On the official side however, wearing a tie is still a no-no and it would be unthinkable for Ahmadinejad, who claims to be one of the "true disciples of Khomeini" to sport a neck-tie under any circumstances.

Interestingly however, many of the children of regime officials wear ties in addition to having outlandish dress and hairstyles in general (which are often criticised by the hardliner newspapers), without their parents having any real control over it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:17 | link | comments

 

Lots of dots: In my previous life, before 9/11, when I was cluelesss and existed in a comforting Liberal bubble, Newt Gingrich was a politician who I absolutely abhored. He represented everything I thought was wrong with America—he was smug, full of himself, had helmet hair and, worst of all, was a Republican, which at time, I considered on par with being a fascist.

 

How dumb was I?

 

Now that my bubble has burst, Newt sounds a lot smarter than he used to (and, conversely, the CBC and the New York Times sound a lot stupider).

Amazing how that happened.

 

Here's Newt explaining that the Israel-Hezbollah imbroglio is merely one of dots in a much larger picture. It's only when you connect the dots—much as in those kiddie activity books—that the entire picture is revealed. In this case, the picture revealed is WW3—Islamism vs. the West (and others). From Human Events (link via Drudge):

...It is necessary to connect the dots to understand the scale of the challenge we face. These are not isolated events: Whether operationally connected or not, these attackers and plotters are connected in their ultimate aim to destroy the values of freedom, security and religious liberty that sustain civilization in the modern age.

Here's a list of the attacks, provocative acts and uncovered plots that have occurred in just the past seven weeks:

·        An Iran-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas terrorist alliance is waging war against Israel in both southern Lebanon and Gaza. Hezbollah has launched more than 1,000 rockets into northern Israel in the past few days alone.

·        Seven bombings in Mumbai, India, killed more than 200 people.

·        North Korea, which is in public contact with Iran, launched seven missiles, including an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the West coast of the continental United States, in deliberate contempt of repeated warnings from the American and Japanese governments and the United Nations Security Council.

·        Seven Americans were seen on video tape in Miami pledging allegiance to al Qaeda.

·        A plot to bomb New York City subways and tunnels was discovered.

·        Eighteen Canadians, plotting terror, were arrested with twice the explosive force used in the Oklahoma City bombing and a plan to blow up the Canadian parliament.

·        The British government reported that it has uncovered more than 20 "major conspiracies" by Islamic terrorists, and as many as 1,200 potential terrorists now live in the United Kingdom.

This is only a recent list. It is in addition to the deadly bombings we witness on an almost daily basis in Baghdad, and previous attacks in New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Bali, Beslan, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Sharm-el-Sheikh, New Delhi, Amman and many other cities...

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:37 | link | comments (1)

 

Text messaging (and massaging): One of my “favourite” guys named Mo—Dr. Mo Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress—has some interesting musings on the people of the book's books. He gives the Christian dhimmi text a hearty thumbs up but as for that Jewish one…mmmm, not so much:

 

Last month Israel was - and still is - bringing death, destruction and misery to millions of Palestinians under her occupation in both Gaza and the West Bank using its military might; bombing civilians, starving them to death and cutting off supply of water and electricity and detaining thousands.

While Israel was doing this to the Palestinians, most Christian Western leaders were saying and doing nothing to stop Israeli aggression but cheering and saying "the Jewish state has the right to defend itself."

The exception came from the Toronto Conference of the United Church of Canada which reissued last week its three-year-old motion calling for ending to investment in Israeli companies with dealings in the occupied Palestine in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The move of the Toronto’s United Church is a moral one. But is it true to its Holy Book; the New Testament as much as Israel’s campaign of death, destruction and misery against the Palestinians under its occupation is true to its Holy Book; the Old Testament?

To answer this question we must turn to one of the best books written on the subject; Jean Lasserre’s War and the Gospel.

Dr. Lasserre was born in Switzerland and has written his book in 1953 in French La Guerre et L’Evangile and then in German Der Krieg und das Evangelium. He was a minister of the Reformed Church in France. His wife and his three sons all are professors of theology and one of them taught in Canada. His book was translated into English in 1962.

Lasserre says that "[O]ne can say by and large that the Old Testament ignores that respect for human life, that unconditional love, that non- violence, which [is] the general climate of the New Testament. There is a striking contrast here between the two parts of our Bible."

"It is remarkable to find, for instance, that the three great personalities of the Old Testament most often mentioned in the Gospels and to some extent associated with Jesus’ ministry, of whom He often spoke and who have been seen as His remote forerunners, are all three of them men who never hesitated to shed blood, often in a most brutal manner."

"Moses had three thousand men slaughtered for having worshipped the golden calf (Exod. 32:28). David spent a large part of his existence making war, and killed almost the whole household of Nabal because the latter had doubted his Messianic royalty (I Sam. 25). As to Elijah, we know that he had four hundred prophets of Baal all massacred together after their spectacular defeat (I Kings 18). Such is the contrast between these three men, the spiritual elite of the Old Covenant, and Jesus, gentle and meek of heart, who was concerned to spare the life even of the adulterous woman."

"Everywhere in the Old Testament human life is cheap, and the best believers have scarcely felt any scruples about shedding blood. This is one of the reasons why some Christians find it so disheartening to read the Old Testament: its believers are almost all warriors; only Jeremiah is a non- violent in the manner of Jesus and the apostles."

"Neither Christ nor the apostles ever recommended lethal violence. They did not justify it nor sanction it. The only text which might be invoked as exception to this rule is Romans 13, where Paul seems to be sanctioning the use of violence, even of a lethal kind, on the part of the magistrate, that is to say the pagan judge, charged with the punishments of common law criminals."

"The Christian ethic is a morality of /gratitude/. The expression of gratitude is at once its end, it motive, its content, and its standard. For the Christian lives from the grace of Jesus Christ. For him, to live is joyfully to count God’s blessings. But how can he give thanks when destroying God’s creatures, when shattering the grace which is at work in his neighbour’s life? He cannot thank God while at the same time despising His mercy and His patience: the two attitudes are irreconcilable. The ‘Christian soldier’, once the lies of war’s mystique have been strained off, can neither express nor excite praise but only bitterness and blasphemy."

It seems that many political leaders in the Christian West are not living the teaching of their Holy Book while Israel is living its own.

 

Funny, I don’t recall reading anything about the jihad in the Torah. Must have missed that part.

 

Update: In case you were wondering why Mo is so anti-Torah, a piece on the American Thinker site clues us in as to the true source of his animus. Guess what? It has a lot to do with his holy book and its insistence that “the Jews,” by virtue of being the first monetheists,  are—what’s that supercessionist phrase I’m groping for?—oh yeah—like the anti-Christ:

Georges Vajda —in a seminal 1937 essay [1] (long before the establishment of the State of Israel)—provides an overall assessment of the portrayal of the Jews in the hadith collections (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters), complemented by Koranic verses, and observations from the earliest Muslim biographies [or “sira”] of Muhammad.

Vajda’s research demonstrates how Muslim eschatology emphasizes the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjāl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—and as per another tradition, the Dajjāl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the  Dajjāl  will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil.  When the Dajjāl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to a canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985), if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”

As Vajda observes,

Not only are the Jews vanquished in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains, but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the Jews.

But it is the Jews stubborn malevolence, Vajda further notes, that is their defining worldly characteristic:

Jews are represented in the darkest colors [i.e., in the Koran, hadith, and sira].  Convinced by the clear testimony of their books that Mohammed was the true prophet, they refused to convert, out of envy, jealousy and national particularism, even out of private interest.  They have falsified their sacred books and do not apply the laws of God; nevertheless, they pursued Mohammed with their raillery and their oaths, and harassed him with questions, an enterprise that turned to their own confusion and merely corroborated the authenticity of the supernatural science of the prophet.  From words they moved to action: sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them. 

Examples of this archetypal Jew hatred from the sacred Islamic texts, sira, and main early Sunni historiographical accounts, include:

- Koranic verses labeling Jews as malevolent enemies of Islam (5:82);

- disobedient slayers of their own prophets who suffered justifiable abasement (2:61), including, for some, transformation into apes and swine (5:60);

- the more profoundly hateful narratives (in the hadith, sira, and early histories, for example by Tabari) which maintain that the perfidious Jews fomented sectarian strife in early Islam by promoting heresies—including Shi’ism itself—that threatened the unity of the Muslim community (umma);

- and the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim Book 026, Number 5431) that the Jews caused Muhammad’s protracted, excruciating death  from poisoning:

“The Jews discussed about poisons and became united in one poison. She [a Khaybar Jewess, Zaynab Bint al-Harith] poisoned the goat putting more poison in the forelegs..The Apostle of Allah took the foreleg, a piece of which he put into his mouth…The Apostle of Allah sent for Zaynab Bint al-Harith [and]…handed her over to [those] who put her to death…The Apostle of Allah lived after this three years, till in consequence of his pain he passed away. During his illness he used to say: I did not cease to find the effect of the poisoned morsel I took at Khaybar…” [2].

Vajda’s analysis indicates that all these archetypes in turn justify Muslim animus towards the Jews, and the admonition to, at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination”, as dhimmis,  treated “with contempt”, under “humiliating arrangements”.

Hizbollah and Hamas have constructed core ideologies based upon this Islamic theology of Jew hatred, which one can glean readily from their foundational documents, and subsequent pronouncements, made ad nauseum.

Ad nauseum is right.

 

And here’s my tip of the day for all you Jews out there: stay away from gharkad trees.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:05 | link | comments

 

And speaking of the Western Standard…: The periodical edited by Ezra Levant has a good overview of the type of thinking that motivates young Muslims to become jihadi terrorists:

…Terrorism in our post-9/11 world has become predominantly, though not entirely, linked with Muslims. The inescapable fact is that while all Muslims are not terrorists (a ridiculous proposition in any case), most terrorists suspected or apprehended are Muslims.

Muslim is not an ethnic concept, any more than Christian is an ethnic concept. The Muslim world is not monolithic or homogeneous; it is diverse ethnically and culturally. Islam unifies this world of more than a billion people, geographically stretched out from Morocco on the Atlantic coast to the island archipelago of Indonesia in the Pacific Ocean, and from the inner deserts of Asia to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and the inner reaches of Africa, where the river Nile originates. Muslims share a faith tradition founded on a simple message Islam reiterates: God is one, incomparable, unique, and everything found in the universe is His creation, bears His mark, and will return to Him; man is part of this creation, but also endowed with free will, a gift and a responsibility, that makes him accountable for his conduct.

Islam's message is revealed in the Koran. And this message unembellished is as stark and unadorned as the desert surroundings where it was revealed to Mohammed, and subsequently spread forth to adjacent lands and peoples. Koran is the oyster containing this message as a pearl. In time, the people who took this message as the defining element of their lives constructed around it a complex civilization reflecting the immense variety of local and regional cultures of the Muslim world. This Islamic civilization once, during the early centuries of the second millennium, was vibrant, creative and in some measure wealthier and militarily stronger than Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and Europe's emergence as the cradle of modern civilization based on science and democracy.

But there was a dark toxic element present right at the outset of Islam's history. Muslims of the first generation took the Koran and converted it from an oyster containing a pearl into an instrument for power and its glorification. The civilization that since was fashioned as Islamic eventually divested itself of the Koran's pearl by glorifying power. In time, the civilization crumbled, as have others in history. The question whether Islam as civilization, not as personal faith, can be repaired, has gripped the minds of many Muslims over the past century and more. This effort does and will continue, for the future cannot be entirely severed from the past. And for Muslims, their past is a haunting reminder of their much diminished present.

The contrast between the present and the past troubles most Muslims. What to do about it remains for them a bewildering challenge. It also provides for the making of a psychology of resentment, anger and shame among a segment of Muslims who hold others responsible for their civilization's breakdown. Those most engaged in thinking about such matters have been exposed to the wider non-Muslim world, and by the nature of their work are intellectuals of some kind or other…

On second thought, I’m not so sure about that oyster analogy, especially since the writer, Salim Mansur, fails to mention that the “pearl” it contains is the jihad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:29 | link | comments

 

And speaking of Ezra Levant…: The editor of The Western Standard has a good overview of the current Mideast crisis. In a column in the Calgary Sun, Levant insists that, for the sake of its own self-preservation, the West must stand with Israel:

Don't mistake Israel's attacks on Lebanon as a battle between those two states. Israel and Lebanon were actually friendly neighbours for many years. It was only when terrorist groups undermined Lebanon -- first the PLO, now Hezbollah -- did war become the norm. Israel's attacks on Lebanon are an attack on Hezbollah terrorists who use Lebanon as their launch-pad for attacks on Israel.

It is also an indirect attack on Syria, Hezbollah's logistical base, and Iran, Hezbollah's financier.

And don't mistake Hezbollah's attacks on Israel from Lebanon, and Hamas's attacks on Israel from Gaza, as independent acts either. Like Hezbollah, Hamas is controlled and financed by Iran. Both groups are stateless tentacles controlled by the octopus in Tehran. Like Iran's "spontaneous" rallies against the Danish cartoons, this is an attempt to provoke a distraction while Iran feverishly finishes its nuclear bomb.

Hamas and Hezbollah launched nearly simultaneous rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, and they kidnapped Israeli soldiers at the same time, too.

Israel responded by re-entering Gaza and with more than 1,000 air strikes against Lebanon in 48 hours.

If Syria and Iran would not restrain the terrorist militias, Israel would destroy them. The attacks on Lebanon are more than just degrading Hezbollah's military power; they are a pressure tactic on Lebanon to expel Hezbollah from its borders, much as mass Lebanese political pressure forced Syrian troops to leave last year.

Kicking out Syrian troops half-freed Lebanon. Driving out Syrian spies and Hezbollah terrorists is the second half of Lebanon's liberation.

This isn't just Israel defending itself; this is Israel doing Lebanon's heavy lifting for it -- thus saving the U.S. (and perhaps even France, which has a colonial tie to Lebanon) from paying the price of blood and treasure.

Israel's attacks on Lebanon have been strategic: Blockading ports and the main highway from Syria to stop reinforcements from coming to Hezbollah; hitting strategic targets like cellphone towers and targeting offices and barracks of Hezbollah. It's doing what Lebanon doesn't have the muscle to do -- and trying to avoid civilian casualties along the way.

Unfortunately, as with most terrorists, Hezbollah locates in civilian areas because they know democracies are skittish about shooting at someone surrounded by human shields.

Canada, thankfully, has come down on the correct side, supporting Israel's right to exist and denouncing the terrorist groups as such.

The Middle East has always been a theatre in a larger global war.

During the Cold War, it was a proxy fight between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with the U.S. backing Israel, and the Soviet Union backing the Arabs. Israel is still the standard-bearer of Western democracies (joined now by Iraq's fragile new country) and militant Islam, led by Iran, is now commander of the West's opponents, namely Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and much of the insurgency in Iraq.

That's why the West's support for Israel is so vital: Not only so Israel wins militarily, which it surely will.

But that it wins with the moral backing of the West.

Iran must know it will not be allowed to master the region. It is bad enough Iran's nuclear ambitions have not been wiped out yet. For the West to countenance the terrorist barbarity against Israel would be tantamount to surrender.

Hear, hear. I’m not sure I can get onside with his conclusion, though:

We're actually winning this new world war.

Afghanistan was freed, then Iraq. Let's finish the job in Lebanon, and take the flag of freedom to Syria and Iran -- then on to Saudi Arabia.

How can we be winning the war—or encouraged to “take the flag of freedom” to other places—when “free” Afghanistan and “free” Iraq both have constitutions grounded in sharia law, and when both nations are still being contended for by the Islamists?

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:21 | link | comments (1)

 

Union goals: Ofer Eini, the chairman of Histadrut, Israel’s federation of labour unions (which in Israel, as he points out, is comprised of Jews and Arabs who have equal and identical rights) has a superb rebuttal to the CUPE boycott. Eini says that if labour movements truly want to help Palestinians, there are far more effective ways to do so than by punishing Israel. From the Toronto Star:

 

…No friend of the Palestinians or supporter of true Palestinian-Israeli peace can afford to ignore the harsh realities of recent months and years.

 

Unfortunately, Palestinians have not capitalized upon Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and its announced withdrawal from significant portions of the West Bank — moves so long demanded by many voices in the international community — for positive momentum toward the establishment of a peaceful Palestinian state.

 

Instead, the Palestinians have elected a radical Islamic government whose raison d'etre is the destruction of Israel, which has continued to promote terrorism against Israel, and which has mired Palestinians in internal chaos.

 

They also continue to waste the billions of dollars invested in their economy by the international community on a wildly bloated public sector and on massive corruption, substituting aid for the development of an authentic domestic economy.

 

This is not to diminish current Palestinian suffering. But to become a strong and independent force for positive change in civil society, those who support the Palestinian cause must place Palestinian suffering in its proper perspective.

 

Specifically, they must acknowledge that many social injustices experienced by Palestinians cannot be blamed on external factors such as Israeli occupation. This is especially true when Israel is withdrawing from the disputed territories.

 

Israelis, and the Israeli labour movement, stand in support of those in Canada who are prepared to act in a positive and constructive manner to help create the conditions that will allow Palestinians to live in prosperity, dignity and freedom side by side with Israel. Let's see CUPE Ontario act concretely and responsibly in this regard.

 

They also continue to waste the billions of dollars invested in their economy by the international community on a wildly bloated public sector and on massive corruption, substituting aid for the development of an authentic domestic economy.

 

This is not to diminish current Palestinian suffering. But to become a strong and independent force for positive change in civil society, those who support the Palestinian cause must place Palestinian suffering in its proper perspective.

 

Specifically, they must acknowledge that many social injustices experienced by Palestinians cannot be blamed on external factors such as Israeli occupation. This is especially true when Israel is withdrawing from the disputed territories.

 

Of course, anyone with a clue knows that the boycott is merely a smokescreen, and that much as Sid Ryan and his minions say they want to help the Palestinians, what they really want is to see Israel’s demise (hence their insistence on the “right of return”).

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:00 | link | comments

 

No holds barred: Today’s weasel word: “restraint.” It’s what President Bush and other leaders are calling both sides to exercise during the current war, a.k.a. the battle against the jihad.

 

Here’s the thing: “restraint” is exactly what landed Israel in this pickle in the first place. The world community convinced Israel that the cause of peace would be served if Israel exercised restraint and left Southern Lebanon to Hezbollah. Israelis were then told the same about Gaza, whereupon Hamas moved in. When Hamas hurled rocket after rocket into Israel for almost a year, Israel restrained itself from responding. In every case, Israel’s restraint backfired. Instead of fostering peace and moving the peace process forward, it served to strengthen and embolden the jihadis and their state sponsors in Iran and Syria. And now, to our horror, we see the result: unrestrained warfare with jihadis targeting Israeli civilians in cities and towns inside Israel.

 

The time for “restraint” is over. The time to blast the Isamo-Nazis to Kingdom Come--a destination they’re all dying to get to anyway--is now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:18 | link | comments (1)

 

Holocaust affirmation: I don’t know how it happened, but "Muslims Holocaust and Genocides Remembrance Day"—the day Muslims set aside to remember all the Final Solutions they’ve been subjected to—came and went without any mention in the mainstream media. Guess they were too busy reporting on the crisis in the Mideast.

 

If the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (a name, yes, but also an ambition) has anything to say about it, the same oversight won’t occur again next year.

 

Here’s the ISCC's press release on the subject:

 

On July 15, 1099 the first Holocaust of more than half million Muslims took place right in the holy land, Al Quds (Jerusalem). Since then, Muslims have been subject to many Holocausts and genocides. Millions of Muslims have been slaughtered, displaced or sent to concentration camps by the anti-Muslim fanatics. Today, again the cheapest blood is of Muslims.  They have been killed daily in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, etc. In the Western world, Muslims have been discriminated, harassed, bullied and intimidated by the fellow citizens because of their beliefs and / or looks.   In Muslim countries, Muslims are being killed or put into jails by the governments because of their opposition to corruption and dictatorships.  All Muslims are being blamed and made responsible for the crime of few.  Muslims are being paint brushed and stereotyped because of ignorance, extremism, racism and discrimination that exist in North America, Australia and Europe.

 

Currently, Muslims are the most oppressed humans on earth but most of the people do not realize this.  It is a duty of every Muslim to let the world know their side of the story.

 

July 15 marks an important day for Muslims. It is called “Muslims Holocaust and Genocides Remembrance Day”. Please organize rallies, programs, seminars, conferences, etc. to remember the victims of Muslim Holocaust.  Please write articles, letters and emails to create awareness about the Holocaust and Genocides of Muslims. Please discuss with your friends the issues and problems faced by the current Muslims.

 

Islamic Supreme Council of Canada will be organizing following programs in Canada to mark July 15 as the Muslim Holocaust and Genocides Remembrance Day.

 

Oh, brother. They have got to get over themselves.

 

Incidentally, the Islamic Supreme Council is the organization that complained to the Alberta Human Rights Council when Ezra Levant published the Danish Mo ‘toons in The Western Standard.

 

Bet old Ez forgot to mark the date on his calendar, too

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:54 | link | comments (4)

 

The new Islamic republic of Afghanistan: It’s sounding an awful lot like the old Taliban theocracy of Afghanistan. Except, of course, under the “new” system, Afghans get to vote.

 

Democracy in action.

 

From the CBC:

A council of Islamic clerics is pressing the Afghan government to re-establish a religious police force to make sure Shariah law is obeyed.

The proposal will be referred to parliament for consideration, government spokesman Mohammad Asif Nang said on Saturday.

The Department of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was disbanded after the toppling of the Taliban in 2001.

Previously, its officers patrolled the streets, punishing men for not sporting beards and women for not wearing the burqa, an all-concealing traditional robe with built-in mesh over the eyes.

The religious police also punished anyone caught listening to music or drinking alcohol. They were allowed to detain without trial Afghans considered to be flouting the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islam.

The parliament elected in Afghanistan last year is a mixture of religious conservatives, old political and faction leaders, and younger independents.

Tell me again why Canadians are risking their lives for this place?

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:22 | link | comments

Good news/bad news: There’s good news and bad news about the latest Mideast conflagration. The good news is that we don’t have to pretend anymore that, given the right formula, the Palestinians will agree to co-exist with the Jewish state.

That’s also the bad news.

By Mort Zuckerman in the New York Daily News:

…The Palestinians have given the lie to virtually all the scenarios so hopefully envisaged by their friends. They did not construct schools, roads and hospitals; they made no effort to turn Gaza into a thriving state. They elected a radical Islamic Hamas government. They permitted the smuggling of huge quantities of weapons and terrorists while creating new bases for terror. Palestinian society has descended ever more into advanced anarchy.

At first, the Israelis tried nonlethal deterrence - diplomatic warnings, then sonic booms from jets. They failed. It was a sad demonstration of the truth in the metaphor that in the Middle East, the law of wild nature applies: An animal that is perceived as weak invites attack. The Israelis fell back on targeted assassinations against terrorist leadership, despite the unavoidable risk that nonterrorists might be killed since the terrorists - cynically and callously - hide among civilians.

Some suggest Israel should ignore the Hamas and Hezbollah rockets because they are puny and erratic. That's easy to say from an armchair, but every one of the rockets is intended to kill or maim as many Israeli civilians as possible. The Israeli town of Sderot lost 13 people from rocket fire. That city is now living under siege, and now the Palestinians have begun firing longer-range rockets that have reached larger cities.

The last thing Israel wanted to do was get involved again in Gaza, much less in Lebanon, but Hamas and Hezbollah gave them no choice. Who would doubt the U.S. response if rockets were raining from across the Mexican border into neighboring American cities or Canadian forces simultaneously killed and kidnapped Americans on U.S. soil? And who but Israel would be shipping basic foodstuffs, medicines and chlorine containers for purifying drinking water to avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza?

And what about Mahmoud Abbas, the hope of the West? Sadly, what we have witnessed is the failure of Abbas to pressure the Hamas government. He did not meet the commitment he gave to Israeli officials to muster the forces for a house-to-house search to locate the abducted soldier. And he agreed to a version of Hamas' so-called prisoners' document - which reopens the most vital questions about Israel's right to exist and endorses terrorism and violence that should have been eliminated by now.

The Oslo agreement called for an end to terror. The prisoners' document is a manifesto for terror. It calls for continuing violence and for "popular resistance" against the occupation "in all its forms, places and policies," and "by all means," language long recognized as code for legitimizing the murder of Israelis.

Most critically, it advocates the right of return for some 4 million Palestinian refugees, the descendants of the 700,000 Arabs who fled during the 1948 War, primarily at the behest of their own leaders. These refugees are now proposed to be returned to pre-1967 Israel, virtually putting the Jews into a minority in their own country - the very situation that the UN ruled out in deciding the original partition of Palestine.

It is clear again that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute stems not from Israel's unwillingness to compromise but from the nature of its adversary. Most fair-minded observers share the Israeli conclusion that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. The Middle East equation could not be starker or more depressing. It reveals once again that Hamas and the Palestinians, now joined by Hezbollah, their partners in terrorism and murder, both armed and financed by Iran, wish to get rid of Israel...

And will, if given the chance.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:07 | link | comments

Land for peace?: I liked this editorial in the Toronto Sun, even if its conclusion is somewhat naïve:

Those describing the subsequent Israeli assaults on Lebanon and Gaza as "disproportionate" either ignore or refuse to acknowledge the facts on the ground.

That is, that experience shows giving up land does not bring Israel peace. Worse, the land that it gives up is then used as forward staging posts for continued attacks against it.

This negates any point to Israel giving up more land for peace -- most notably the West Bank -- until it is guaranteed, either by the United Nations, the G8, the Arab League or some other body that, in future, when it gives up land for peace, it will receive peace -- not more rockets and attacks -- for land.

If the world community -- and we applaud Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support of Israel in the latest crisis -- wants to stop the ongoing confrontation in the Mideast, the way to do so is not complicated at all. It must force Israel's enemies to abide by the principle of peace for land. Otherwise, the Palestinians will never get the land they deserve for peace, and Israel will never get the peace it deserves for land.

It’s time for the Sun and everyone else who’s concerned about Western civilization to step out of the “trading-land-for-peace/peace-in-our time” box. It’s time to realize that here can be no “peace” anywhere while there’s still a jihad. It’s time to acknowledge that the only “peace” the jihad can accept is Dar es Salaam—the peace that is promised once all lands everywhere are under the thumb of the one true faith.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:51 | link | comments

 

The will and the wisdom: As Israel’s latest war against Islamic fascism continues, Washington Times columnist Diana West reminds us that the jihad has effectively transformed the entire world—and not in a good way.  It we hope to preserve Western civilization from the jihad’s encroachments (which may already be a vain hope in Europe), it will require two crucial elements: the will to defeat the threat, and knowledge of what exactly it is we’re confronting. From Town Hall (via Jihad Watch):

…[Robert] Spencer [of Jihad Watch] continued: "Of course, from the infidels' standpoint all anti-terror measures must be undertaken. But they should be accompanied by a strength of will that realizes that it is precisely fear and the loss of the will to resist that the jihadists are ultimately hoping to bring about."

He's right. The will to resist is indeed the target of jihadists from India to Israel, from New York City to London. But, as Spencer would undoubtedly agree, security measures alone -- walking through metal detectors (in our socks), submitting our belongings to random searches -- don't constitute policy. They don't solve the problem of global jihad: the war of terrorism. At best, security measures thwart acts of terrorism -- and thank goodness -- but only for another day, another trip, another short hop home.

Besides the will to resist, then, we need the knowledge to resist -- the knowledge that there is in the religion of Islam itself the historical, inexorable and driving force behind what the entire non-Muslim world is now experiencing as jihad terror. Whether most Muslims wouldn't hurt a fly is an increasingly irrelevant footnote to the hostile aggression of other Muslims who, in a very short time, have actually transformed civilization as we used to know it.

If the will to resist allows us to manage the threat of violence, the will to connect the dots would compel us to eliminate it. How? By carefully examining and, I would hope, reconsidering and reversing, through foreign, domestic and immigration initiatives, what should now be seen, gimlet-eyed, as the Islamization of the non-Islamic world. Such an assessment, however, is all too vulnerable to catcall-attacks of "bigotry," even "Nazism" -- a deceptively inverted assault given the doctrinal bigotry and similarities to Nazism historically promulgated by the Islamic creed.

Hitler’s biggest mistake (aside from invading Russia): he should have declared Nazism a religion. That way anyone who slammed him (like, say, Winston Churchill) could have been labeled “Naziphobic” and dismissed as a bigot.

Update: David Horowitz nails it when he says that what’s at stake here is nothing less than Western civilization itself. From Front Page Magazine:

Americans need to take a hard look at what is going on in the Middle East, because it provides the clearest picture possible of the war we are in. On one side are al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbollah, Syria and their allies: Russian, France, Greece and the UN majority. On the other is the only democracy in the land of Muslim and Arab terror. The origins of this front in the war on terror are crystal clear: the desire of Muslim terrorists—the elected majority among Palestinian Arabs and the occupying Shi-ite army in Lebanon, backed by Syria and Iran—to destroy Israel and push the Jews into the sea.

The war reveals the impossibility of a Palestinians state and the necessity of a civilized occupying force in a region populated by a people who have been terminally brainwashed into an ideology of hate, which makes their self-government a crime waiting to happen…

I think the crime has aleady happened. It occurred when Israel disengaged from Gaza and left the Palestinians to their own devices. And by “devices” I mean Qassam rockets and copies of Mein Kampf.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:16 | link | comments

 

Confidence game: For decades now we’ve been told that it’s all about “the occupation,” that once Israel ends “the occupation” and allows the Palestinians to establish their own nation, the “cycle of violence” will be derailed and peace will finally descend. As Charles Krauthammer explains, that was an out-and-out con, designed to keep Israel spinning its wheels in a futile peace process and to disguise (although not very well) the Arabs’ true goal: ending “the occupation” of Israel by the Jews. From JWR:

Next June will mark the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. For four decades we have been told that the cause of the anger, violence and terror against Israel is its occupation of the territories seized in that war. End the occupation and the "cycle of violence" ceases.

The problem with this claim was that before Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War, every Arab state had rejected Israel's right to exist and declared Israel's pre-1967 borders — now deemed sacred — to be nothing more than the armistice lines suspending, and not ending, the 1948-49 war to exterminate Israel.

But you don't have to be a historian to understand the intention of Israel's enemies. You only have to read today's newspapers.

 

§        Exhibit A: Gaza. Just last September, Israel evacuated Gaza completely. It declared the border between Israel and Gaza an international frontier, renouncing any claim to the territory. Gaza became the first independent Palestinian territory in history. Yet the Gazans continued the war. They turned Gaza into a base for launching rocket attacks against Israel and for digging tunnels under the border to conduct attacks such as the one that killed two Israeli soldiers on June 25 and yielded a wounded hostage brought back to Gaza. Israeli tanks have now had to return to Gaza to try to rescue the hostage and suppress the rocket fire.

§        Exhibit B: South Lebanon. Two weeks later, the Lebanese terror organization, Hezbollah, which has representation in the Lebanese parliament and in the cabinet, launched an attack into Israel on Wednesday that resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers and the wounding of two others, who were brought back to Lebanon as hostages.

What's the grievance here? Israel withdrew from Lebanon completely in 2000. It was so scrupulous in making sure that not one square inch of Lebanon was left inadvertently occupied that it asked the United Nations to verify the exact frontier defining Lebanon's southern border and retreated behind it. This "blue line" was approved by the Security Council, which declared that Israel had fully complied with resolutions demanding its withdrawal from Lebanon.

Grievance satisfied. Yet what happens? Hezbollah has done to South Lebanon exactly what Hamas has done to Gaza: turned it into a military base and terrorist operations center from which to continue the war against Israel. South Lebanon bristles with Hezbollah's 10,000 Katyusha rockets that put northern Israel under the gun. Fired in the first hours of fighting, just 85 of these killed two Israelis and wounded 120 in Israel's northern towns.

Over the past six years, Hezbollah has launched periodic raids and rocket attacks into Israel. Israeli retaliation has led to the cessation of these provocations — until the next time convenient for Hezbollah. Wednesday was such a time. One terror base located in fully unoccupied Arab territory (South Lebanon) attacks Israel in support of another terror base in another fully unoccupied Arab territory (Gaza).

Why? Because occupation was a mere excuse to persuade gullible and historically ignorant Westerners to support the Arab cause against Israel. The issue is, and has always been, Israel's existence. That is what is at stake…

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:13 | link | comments

 

Tolerating intolerance: Looks like the Brits have decided to cry “uncle!” and let slip the dogs of jihad. From the Times Online: 

 

A HARDLINE Islamist cleric who government advisers wanted banned from Britain is scheduled to fly to London this weekend to attend events alongside Muslim community leaders.

The Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office considered excluding Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, an MP in Bangladesh who preaches violent hatred against the West and is accused of war crimes, last year. But despite a series of e-mail exchanges in September, his visa was never revoked and the Home Office issued no exclusion order.

The Foreign Office’s Islamic issues adviser accused Mr Sayeedi’s detractors of being politically biased and said that his exclusion could jeopardise support from mainstream Muslims for the Government’s anti-terrorism agenda.

Mr Sayeedi was last in Britain weeks after the July 7 bombings. Tomorrow he is scheduled to visit a housing fair at the London Muslim Centre, part of the East London Mosque. The mosque’s chairman, Muhammad Abdul Bari, is the newly elected leader of the Muslim Council of Britain. Mr Sayeedi is then due to attend a rally in a nearby park alongside the MP George Galloway.

In leaked e-mails seen by The Times, the Home Office sought advice from research analysts in the Foreign Office while considering the case for excluding Mr Sayeedi.

Internal messages between advisers discussed the threat that he allegedly posed, and one attached a report from a Bangladeshi human rights organisation. The report quotes Mr Sayeedi as saying that Britain and the US “deserve all that is coming to them” for overturning the Taleban in Afghanistan.

The e-mail from one adviser, Eric Taylor, continues: “He [Mr Sayeedi] has made a particularly offensive comment about Bangladeshi Hindus, comparing them to excrement. He also appears to defend attacks against the Ahmadiya (Islamist) community…

Sounds like a charming guy. Maybe he, George and Ken can all get together at that gibungouos Muslim tent and discuss how beautiful and peaceful Islam is. And maybe they could also invite an F.O. flunky to explain the point of having an anti-terrorism agenda if jihad-preaching-people-haters are allowed into the country to poison young minds.

 

Seems a bit counter-productive, if you ask me.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:39 | link | comments

 

Mole man: Last fall I attended the anti-sharia rally in Toronto. The protesters who had gathered in front of Queen’s Park seemed to be comprised mostly of Muslim women (a Muslim woman from Iran had organized the rally) and non-Muslim women of “a certain age” who may have been on the ramparts of the feminist movement back in the day, and who didn’t want to see the clock turned back to the 1950s, much less the 950s. (There was also a smallish pro-sharia group, mostly male university students, who were there to carry placards and lob catcalls.) 

 

The most conspicuous people there were a man who looked to be in his 30s and who, from his dress and beard, was obviously an extremely religious Muslim, and his wife, who was wearing a naqib that covered everything but her hands and eyes, one which she had perched a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. The couple, who were carrying signs supporting the government’s then-plan to allow Muslims to resolve family and some other civil disputes using sharia law, were engaged in a loud, heated discussion with some women who clearly didn’t think bringing sharia to Ontario was a very good idea.

 

I watched the debate for a minute or so and then settled myself under the statue of (19th Century Ontario statesman) Oliver Mowat. Soon after, one of the women who’d been talking to the couple sat down beside me. We introduced ourselves and struck up a conversation. “Can you believe those two?” she said. “He wants to bring those backward laws here. And his wife—she’s even worse. She’s a convert. She told me she’s Polish.”

 

We both agreed that granting official sanction to a repressive, inequitable, misogynistic system of laws wasn’t likely to advance the cause of women—or anyone else—and that the government had to be convinced to drop the idea before this law gained a toehold in Ontario, and maybe even spread to other provinces.

 

Fast forward months later to this morning when I opened my Globe and Mail and, lo and behold, there’s a picture of these two devout Muslims—the man and his Polish revert wife. And, knock me down with a feather, it turns out that he’s the mole who’s been working for CSIS, and who gave the intelligence service a head’s up about the 17 alleged fertilizer-of-peace bombers and their ambitious scheme.

 

If you told me that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was working for the Mossad, I couldn’t have been more surprised. And apparently I’m not the only one. In a box below the main story, Tarek Fatah, spokesman for the Canadian Muslim Congress and well-known secular Muslim-about-town (who gave an impassioned anti-sharia speech at the rally) says the man, Mubin Shaikh, “was the embodiment of extremism in the city” and doubts his sincerity  because a sharia-law advocate who informs on sharia-law adherents is “like the pot calling the kettle black.” 

 

Aly Hindi, a “controversial” local imam (“controversial” being the adjective of choice for media outlets who don’t want to describe someone as an “extremist”), is just as furious—not only at Shaikh but at CSIS, too. His addled take on the revelation: CSIS is fomenting jihad:

 

 “The government and the people keep saying that we should not make our young people radical. CSIS is the one radicalizing the youth. I call him CSIS Shaikh.”

 

Hey, that’s pretty catchy, imam. If preaching about Islamic supremacy doesn't work out for you, you might consider a career in advertising

 

Hindy is p.o’d because he says Shaikh used his knowledge of Islam and sharia law to gain the respect of these young men, and then ended up ratting them out. Again, however, his perception is a bit, shall we say, askew:

 

“This is not an informer…An informer is a good citizen who finds information and tells the law something is about to happen. This is dirty.”

 

And Shaikh would differ from that definition…how?

I sure hope CSIS pays for one of those burly bodyguards--the kind that always accompanies other unpopular Muslims, like Irshad Manji. I have a feeling one of the angry faithful may try to avenge the "betrayed" 17.

 

Update: The CBC site has an interview with the mole. The most startling revelation, at least for me (although apparently not for Linden MacIntyre, the interviewer): that even if these young men are exposed to an imam preaching a non-violent message, if that’s not the one they want to hear, they will find one whose message is more “congenial”, i.e., one that urges jihad. This flies in the face of what we’ve been told—that the solution is to steer these young’uns in the right direction.

 

As always, it’s a little more complicated than that.

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments (2)

 

Another country heard from: The land that gave the world canned sardines and Vidkun Quisling (and on the plus side, the insightful essayist whose Web moniker is “fjordman”) knows who to blame for current crisis in the Middle East—and it sure ain’t the Muslims. From Aftenposten:

"I am deeply worried over the developments we're now seeing in the Middle East," said Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in a statement released Thursday afternoon. "We must avoid a situation that will turn into an international crisis."

Støre said the Norwegian government condemned both the militant group Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday and the Israeli reaction to it.

"We also condemn the Israeli attacks against Lebanon, including the bombing of the airport in Beirut and the naval blockade of Lebanese waters," Støre said. "This is completely unacceptable, and amounts to a dangerous escalation of the situation."

Another foreign ministry official initially had said the Norwegian government merely was distancing itself from the Israeli actions. Gahr Støre's language was much stronger.

Norway's Foreign Ministry also is calling on the UN Security Council to intervene.

"There is a danger that the conflict will spread to other areas of the Middle East," said Svein Sevje, who's been a Norwegian envoy to the Middle East. He said Norway, which has been active in Middle East peace efforts for years, therefore is supporting calls for the UN Security Council "to evaluate the situation."

Sevje said Israel's military response wasn't in line with its right to defend itself. Støre said Israel was on the verge of violating international law by lashing out at Lebanon's civilian population to retaliate for the abductions

"To punish Lebanon for that means that they haven't understood Lebanon's situation," Støre told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK). "It's not the state of Lebanon that's behind (the abductions)."

He’s right about that, at least. What’s behind them is the stateless jihad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:24 | link | comments (1)

Prospects for peace: In the wake of the bombings, India is pointing a finger at Pakistan. From the Boston Globe: 

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Deadly bombings in Mumbai and rising violence in Kashmir show Islamist militants continue to have bases in Pakistan and this could hurt a peace process with New Delhi, India's junior foreign minister said on Thursday.

 

The comments by Anand Sharma came as officials in Mumbai named Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba as prime suspect for Tuesday's wave of blasts in India's commercial hub in which 186 people were killed.

 

Although there has been no breakthrough in investigations into the bombings on crowded commuter trains, Indian security officials have said that only Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups had the capability to carry out such attacks.

 

While India remained committed to making peace with Pakistan, the peace process was not a one-way street and Islamabad had to fulfil its part of the deal and curb militants, Sharma said.

 

"The recent incidents have caused shock and concern," he told Reuters in an interview.

 

"It once again underscores the threat of terrorism and the fact that the infrastructure remains intact, some of the banned outfits remain operational, and they have the resources," he said.

 

"It is equally important that Pakistan pro-actively joins in this fight against terrorism and demonstrates through action what Pakistani leadership, President Musharraf and others have committed themselves to," Sharma said.

 

The minister, however, said he would not name any militant group for the Mumbai blasts as investigations were under way.

 

"What I would like to say is they surely should do more. In particular with regard to the leaders of the banned outfits," Sharma said referring to militant groups outlawed by Pakistan which continue to operate under new names.

 

India accuses Pakistan of arming and sending Islamist guerrillas into Indian Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since an insurgency erupted in 1989.

 

Islamist guerrillas have also been blamed for several attacks elsewhere across India.

 

Like Israel, India needs to realize that there can never be actual peace (as opposed to a “peace process”—which can go on indefinitely) until there’s no more jihad. Which either means there can never be peace, or that there can only be peace once the jihadis have been defeated,  or, in the shorter term, have been weakened to the extent that they’ll bide their time until the next opportunity to press their claims presents itself (as they did while communism was still a factor). All things considered, one has the sense that, whatever happens, the jihad, like Jew-hate, is forever.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:35 | link | comments

 

A common cause: An Indian friend sent me this piece last month. It’s written by a Jewish writer who specializes in Indian affairs, and decries the close association that’s developed recently between Israel and India (and India and the U.S.). He says the relationship is a betrayal of both India’s stance as a “non-alligned nation” as well as of the Palestinians.

 

Given that both nations share a common enemy, and considering what’s been happening lately in Mumbai and on Israel’s borders, his words ring even more hollow and fraudulent than they did they first time I read them:

 

…In many respects, Hindutva and Zionism are natural bedfellows. Both depict the entities they claim to represent as simultaneously national and religious. Both claim to be the sole authentic spokespersons for these entities (Hindu and Jewish). Both share an ambivalent (to say the least) historic relationship with British colonialism. Both appeal to an affluent diaspora. And, most importantly at the moment, both share a designated enemy (‘Muslim terrorism’).
 
During the Kargil War of 1999 (in which India and Pakistani troops clashed in Kashmir), Israel supplied India, at 24 hours notice, with high altitude surveillance vehicles and laser-guided systems. In the wake of 9/11, the alliance was deepened, with Hindutva and Zionist world-views dovetailing snugly with the US war on terror. In May 2003, India’s then National Security Adviser Brajesh Misra spelled out the strategy in an address to the American Jewish Congress, in which he pleaded for a “Tel Aviv-New Delhi-Washington” axis. A few months later, Ariel Sharon arrived in India as an hounoured guest.
 
When a Congress-led coalition replaced the BJP after the 2004 elections, its left supporters urged it to abandon the previous government’s foreign policy, notably the embrace of Israel and the USA. They have been ignored. The government has signed deals with the US for military purchases, joint military exercises and most recently, in the course of Bush’s state visit, nuclear collaboration. In February, India abandoned Iran at the IAEA, voting with the US to refer the country – usually considered one of India’s major strategic allies - to the Security Council.
 
At the same time, the link with Israel has been consolidated. In the course of 2005, India’s Ministers of Science and Technology, Commerce and Industry, and Agriculture and Food all visited Israel, holding high-level meetings with political and business leaders. In February 2006, Israel’s National Security Council Chairman Giora Eiland was welcomed in Delhi.
 
Israel is now the second largest supplier of arms to India (after Russia). It provides India with missile radar, border monitoring equipment, night vision devices, the new Phalcon reconnaissance aircraft, among other items. India, in turn, is the biggest purchaser of high-tech Israeli weapons and accounts for almost half of Israel’s arms exports. In addition, several thousand Indian soldiers have received “anti-insurgency training” in Israel.
 
In a speech at Tel Aviv University in March, the Indian Ambassador described India and Israel as “heirs to great and ancient civilizations” which “emerged from foreign domination as independent nations around the middle of the last century” and whose “historical interaction... is vividly embodied in the presence of Judaism in India for over 1600 years.”
 
While the ambassador was speaking in Tel Aviv, the Jewish-Indian reception was being held in New York, knitting together the same alliance and using the same themes. The Indian presence in the USA is highly diverse (many are Muslims), but an affluent, suburban constituency within it identifies with the Indian right and more broadly with Indian elite aspirations for economic and military status. Many see American Jews as the “model minority” and seek to emulate their political clout. A number have openly declared their intention of constructing a lobby similar to the Israel lobby. The attraction has been reciprocal. The American Jewish Committee is soon to open an office in New Delhi.
 
It’s ironic that Indian Jews should find themselves used as a lynch-pin in this marriage of convenience. Of course, India’s population is so diverse, its diaspora so far flung, that it can claim some kind of relationship with almost anyone anywhere. India’s small Jewish communities were themselves highly diverse – in language, ritual, origin - but today they number merely 6000 (out of a population of one billion). During the 50s and 60s, most Indian Jews went to Israel, many to the US. The motives were mainly economic. The niche they had occupied collapsed after independence.
 
Although there’s no history of anti-semitism in India, it’s striking that one of the country’s best-selling books is Mein Kampf, openly available at bookshops, stationers and street stalls. One young man pursuing a degree in business administration explained that the book was popular because it was “an excellent management text”. Ironically, the aspirant bourgeoisie buying Mein Kampf is precisely that section of Indian society most keen on the alliance with Israel. The mentality is summed up by a catchphrase currently favoured by India’s foreign policy-makers: “Non-alignment is for losers.”
 
Manmohan Singh described India’s deal with the US and its vote against Iran as acts of “enlightened self-interest”. The same excuse is applied to the link with Israel. The reality is that India’s betrayal of the Palestinians, however profitable for a few, is not remotely in the interest of the vast Indian majority. It certainly diminishes India’s status and influence in the developing world. What price favor in Washington?

 

I’d turn that question around and ask what price status and influence in the developing word and say that it comes at the cost of protecting one’s sovereignty against the jihadis—far too high a price for any democracy to have to pay.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:31 | link | comments (3)

 

Mubai and Geneva: David Warren explains that extending the Geneva Conventions to cover those stateless, international soldiers--the jihadis--confers upon them a legitimacy they don’t merit and puts their enemies (that’s us) at even greater risk. From the Ottawa Citizen (via Real Clear Politics):

…The attack on Mumbai is thus a useful reminder that we are not the only targets of Islamic fanaticism; and that in India we have a crucial Western ally, not only against Islamism, but against the growing military aspirations of China. Under present circumstances, we cannot cultivate the friendship of India too assiduously.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the Bush administration announced that the Jihadis it is holding around the world at such facilities as Guantanamo, will now be entitled to Geneva Convention privileges, as if they had been legitimate soldiers.

It is hard for me to fathom an act so irresponsible, though I perfectly understand the political and legal pressures (an obtuse recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court) to which the administration capitulated. These, in turn, were accentuated by its failure to make its own case effectively, in international propaganda. Too many outrageous lies and misrepresentations about Bush policies have been allowed to stand; and the validity of too much of the administration's moral reasoning has been left to speak for itself.

The whole point of the Geneva Conventions is to encourage legitimate soldiering, even under the pressures of war. It was written intentionally to exclude terrorists and other "informal" fighters, who do not wear uniforms or other clear markings, who arm themselves in exceptionally vicious ways, who target non-combatants as a matter of course, and whose behaviour is in every other way unanswerable to civilized norms.

The U.S. capitulation confers legitimacy upon people like the perpetrators of yesterday's blasts in Mumbai. It gives them encouragement, together with the reasonable assurance that nothing bad will happen to them if they are captured. It announces to all the enemies of the West -- internal and external -- that not even the Bush administration has the guts to be ruthless with its mortal enemies.

In the larger view, no civilization can survive treating violent savages as if they were conventional soldiers. For that is to declare that the destruction of our civilization is a legitimate end.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:06 | link | comments

 

It’s the occupation, dumbkopf: Some months ago I saw an interview with Tarek Fatah, spokesman for the Muslim Canadian Congress, on local TV. Fatah styles himself as a “secular” Muslim and often rails against the repressive, anti-modern aspects of Islam, which often puts him at odds with many within the Muslim community but makes him very popular outside it. He’s the go-to “moderate” when events make non-believers nervous, like, say, when 17 locals are alleged to have been plotting to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange and decapitate the Prime Minister—just a portion of their lengthy wish list. Fatah, so suave, so well-dressed, so articulate, so Western, is the kind of Muslim we like to see at trying times—the kind who hates terrorism as much as we do; the kind we can trust.

 

Even so, Fatah’s modern, secular, rational outlook doesn’t extend to the Jewish state. In fact, his attitude is more or less the same as that of more devout believers, and when CUPE Ontario voted to boycott Israel, he sent a “way to go” letter to odious union boss Sid Ryan.

 

Anyway, back to that TV interview. I don’t recall the particular context—it was a few months before the Toronto terror arrest—but I do remember Fatah criticising terrorism. The interviewer asked Fatah to account for terrorism, and explain why some Muslims are drawn to it. “Well, you have to realize,” said Fatah, looking very sad indeed, “three of their countries are under occupation.”

 

Ah, yes, the occupation. The reason even modern, secular, rational Muslims give for all the agita; the impetus for youthful rage which expresses itself in violent, terrible acts. The occupation by Western forces of Iraq and Afghanistan. The occupation of Palestine by Jews.

 

But wait. Doesn’t terrorism predate the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? And haven’t the Jews disengaged from Gaza and Southern Lebanon, and instead of pacifying the jihadis and the regimes that sponsor them (Syria, Lebanon, Iran), hasn’t that empowered them and made them even more determined to obliterate Israel? What gives?

 

Well, in a way, Fatah was right. It is about the occupation, but not in the sense he meant. It’s about the occupation of Israel—by the Jews. It’s about the occupation of India—by the Hindus. It’s about the occupation of Spain—by Spaniards. It’s about the occupation of France—by Frenchmen. It’s about the occupation of the U.K.—by the British. It’s about the occupation of the Netherlands—by the Dutch.

 

In sum, it’s about the occupation by infidels of Dar al-Harb—that part of the world earmarked for perpetual war until it bows to the inevitable and accepts the Divinely-ordained primacy of the one true faith.

 

As such, it’s not, as Samuel Huntington described it, a “clash of civilizations.” It is, in the words of H.G. Welles, “the war of the worlds”—Dar al-Islam vs. Dar al-Harb. And right now, I’m not at all sure that the good guys have the will or the cunning to win.

 

Update: Re the Hindu occupation of India: Officials have announced the names of two suspects in the Mumbai bombings; they may or may not be officially connected to al Qaeda. Not that it much matters these days whether terrorists are freelance Osamists or official Osamists. At the end of the day, it’s the same jihad, and the same number of innocents will have been injured and killed.

 

According to the report on the Ceeb site, someone phoned in to gloat about the successful mission, but again, the identity of the caller has yet to be verified:

India's anti-terror squad released pictures Thursday of two suspects wanted in connection with the bomb attacks on Mumbai commuter trains that killed at least 200 people this week.

The two men were identified as Sayyad Zabiuddin and Zulfeqar Fayyaz. No other details were immediately available. 

Earlier Thursday, a group calling itself al-Qaeda in Kashmir welcomed Tuesday's bombings, which wounded at least 700 people.

A man, who identified himself as Abu al-Hadeed, called a news service in Kashmir and said that "whosoever has carried out the attacks in Bombay, we express our gratitude and happiness." Mumbai was formerly known as Bombay.

The statement cannot be authenticated and does not identify any group behind Tuesday's attacks.

The group did claim to be a new al-Qaeda cell and called on Indian Muslims "to fight for freedom and Islam and choose jihad as their way to achieve freedom and establishing Islamic ways."…

Freedom and Islam? I can’t think of any two concepts that are more incompatible.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:50 | link | comments (2)

 

The truth about terrorism: A must-read paper on terrorism and counter-terrorism from the American Enterprise Institute. It’s too long to post in its entirety so here’s my executive summary: 

 

• The “root causes” of terrorism aren’t counter-terrorism or the Israel-Palestine conflict. The “root cause” is a toxic, religiously-based ideology extracted chapter and verse from the Koran.
• There is no point in being obsessed by faux-root causes. There is no point in trying to “engage” Islamists. There is no point trying to win their hearts and minds.
• The terrorists love an audience and know easily we quickly we become inured to their acts (another suicide bombing—ho hum), so to get out attention they try to ratchet up the horror by, say, slaughtering school children (or blowing up a commuter train in the heart of Mumbai’s financial district).
• Political correctness will be the death of Western civilization.

 

It’s worth reading—and bookmarking—the whole thing.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:22 | link | comments (2)

 

Prescient words: From an interview with former Israeli defence minister, Moshe Arens, on the ABC (the Australian one) show Lateline, broadcast August 15, 2005:

 

TONY JONES: So how do you, finally, how do you see this [Israeli disengagement from Gaza] playing out, not only over the next 48 hours, but in the next months after this?

MOSHE ARENS: As I'm sure you have seen, it is not only the people to be evicted from their homes, and that's about 10,000 people, all in all, including their families, but hundreds of thousands of Israelis who disagree with this move. They are doing whatever they can to make their voice heard, to make it clear that they protest this move, that they consider it to be not correct, not proper, not in the best interests of the State of Israel. I think that that is being made clear, that will be clear, even after the government has completed this disengagement plan. Unfortunately, I think it will leave a very serious rift behind in Israeli society, with a very significant segment of Israel's population, an important segment of Israel's population, people who fill important positions in Israeli society, in the army, in the academic world, in business, so it's not going to be good for Israel.

TONY JONES: Alright. One last question, if I can. Can you imagine a scenario where Hamas takes over the Gaza Strip, Israel decides that they appear to be a threat, and sends in the military to reoccupy the Gaza?

MOSHE ARENS: Well, that is not an impossible situation to envisage, because as a result of this disengagement, Hamas, Islamic jihad, whatever other militants or terrorist groups there are in Gaza will be that much closer to Israeli towns and villages, especially to the city of Ashkelon, which is one Israel's major cities. If it turns out once the disengagement has been completed they will resume rocketing Israeli settlements and now maybe an Israeli city, the Israeli government, the Israeli army, will be up against a very serious problem as to what to do about it. One of the options obviously would be to go back in.

TONY JONES: On that note, Moshe Arens, I guess we'll have to wait and see for a very long time, to see what happens there, but we thank you very much for taking the time to join us tonight.

MOSHE ARENS: Thank you.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:14 | link | comments

 

A “statesman” speaks: Ismail Haniyah, terrorist/thug-in-chief of the Palestinian terrorities, has a plan for a real and lasting “peace” among the contentious “semites” of his region.

 

Well, maybe not “peace” so much as a “hudna”—a pause that refreshes—until he can figure out how to facilitate the Hamas Charter which calls to the elimination of Jewish sovereignty, an abomination to a devout gentleman like himself.

 

Of course, you won’t read that last bit in his “opinion” piece in the Washington Post. No, Haniyah, a regular Rico Swave, has mastered the gentle art of taquiyah, and the clueless dhimmis of the WaPo are more than willing to do their part to foster harmony between this sweet-talkin’ guy and the ham-fisted Jews now leaving their muddy footprints all over Haniyah’s “fledgling” (Toronto Star correspondent Mitch Potter’s baby-bird-like adjective) state.

 

Here’s a taste. (I suggest a chaser of Gravol):

…But there is a remedy, and while it is not easy it is consistent with our long-held beliefs. Palestinian priorities include recognition of the core dispute over the land of historical Palestine and the rights of all its people; resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks, assassinations and military expansion. Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media, the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank; it is a wider national conflict that can be resolved only by addressing the full dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner. This means statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law. Meaningful negotiations with a non-expansionist, law-abiding Israel can proceed only after this tremendous labor has begun. (“Reclaiming” his land by inches, first by rolling the borders back to 1967, then to ’48 and then, because such borders are simply unfeasible and indefensible, rolling back the entire entity. Good plan, Hani.)

Surely the American people grow weary of this folly, after 50 years and $160 billion in taxpayer support for Israel's war-making capacity -- its "defense." Some Americans, I believe, must be asking themselves if all this blood and treasure could not have bought more tangible results for Palestine if only U.S. policies had been predicated from the start on historical truth, equity and justice. (Best not to mention the real folly—the U.S. pouring gazillions into the P.A., most of which ended up in Yasser’s numbered accounts and keeping Mrs. Yasser in couture. And how about trying to broker all those pointless peace projects which devolved into intifadi and frenzied Jew-hatred. And really—a Hamas terrorist talking about truth, equity and justice on same day Islamofascist jihadis murdered and maimed scores of infidels in Mumbai has got to be considered the most unfortunate timing. One can only hope and pray that enough dhimmis wake up in time to realize that a jihadi is a jihadi is a jihadi, no matter where his home base is, and none of you will be satisfied until there’s an end to the “occupation”—of Dar al-Harb by infidels.)

However, we do not want to live on international welfare and American handouts. We want what Americans enjoy -- democratic rights, economic sovereignty and justice. We thought our pride in conducting the fairest elections in the Arab world might resonate with the United States and its citizens. Instead, our new government was met from the very beginning by acts of explicit, declared sabotage by the White House. Now this aggression continues against 3.9 million civilians living in the world's largest prison camps. America's complacency in the face of these war crimes is, as usual, embedded in the coded rhetorical green light: "Israel has a right to defend itself." Was Israel defending itself when it killed eight family members on a Gaza beach last month or three members of the Hajjaj family on Saturday, among them 6-year-old Rawan? I refuse to believe that such inhumanity sits well with the American public. (Um, does the name Mohammed al-Dura ring a bell, Hani? No? I didn’t think so.)

We present this clear message: If Israel will not allow Palestinians to live in peace, dignity and national integrity, Israelis themselves will not be able to enjoy those same rights. Meanwhile, our right to defend ourselves from occupying soldiers and aggression is a matter of law, as settled in the Fourth Geneva Convention. If Israel is prepared to negotiate seriously and fairly, and resolve the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967, a fair and permanent peace is possible. Based on a hudna (comprehensive cessation of hostilities for an agreed time), the Holy Land still has an opportunity to be a peaceful and stable economic powerhouse for all the Semitic people of the region. If Americans only knew the truth, possibility might become reality. (Sorry, Hani, this one will only fly for those who haven’t read your charter. Those who have know that a hudna is just a delaying tactic until you can fulfill your ulimate goal: the stability and peace that will descend once you’ve eradicated the Jews. It’s not like we can’t read it between the lines since you only talk about borders and resolving the “core” 1948 issue—i.e. Israel’s existence—and can’t even bring yourself to mention the concept of two separate sovereign states. One more thing: a terrorist citing the Geneva Convention. Nice touch. I haven’t examined the whole document, but I’m pretty sure the convention doesn’t cover human bombs and slicing off the heads of non-believers. However, that’s definitely part of what you might call the Sharia Convention.)

 

I’m not sure which is more revolting, Haniyah’s honeyed insincerity and outright lies, or the Post’s giving him a forum in which to express them, thus endowing this Islamo-Nazi with a legitimacy he neither deserves nor has earned. For someone who cares about the survival of the Jewish state, reading this by the “Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority” is like reading an op-ed piece by Josef Goebbels

 

Shame on the Post for publishing this drek.

 

Update: I’ve revised the most excruciatingly maudlin song ever written for the most egregiously awful “political leader” on the planet (although Moo and that North Korean nutter could certainly give him a run for his money—if he had any, that is):

 

See the thug

How sweet he talks

You’d never know

He really balks

At sharing space

With dhimmis who are uppity

And lord it over Arabs. See,

That’s a disgrace.

And there he is in the WaPo

The perfect kind of place to go

If you want cred.

And, statesman-like,

He bloviates,

When all the while

He really longs

To see Jews dead.

 

And Hani I diss you,

You Hitler manqué.

You’re a perfect example

Of how crime can pay.

 

A leopard doesn’t change its spots,

That’s how we know your schemes and plots

Are for one aim.

No matter what you try to say

Your charter is a click away—

It shows your game.

So, please, spare us the “woe is me.”

It ill-becomes a jihadi

To cry like that.

 ‘Cuz we all know

Had you the chance

You’d happily kill all the Jews

In no time flat.

 

And Hani I diss you,

You Hitler manqué.

You’re a perfect example

Of how crime can pay…

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:17 | link | comments (2)

 

Dar al-Salon: Online magazine Salon offers up a Sid Ryanesque version of history, complete with embattled Palestinians stripped of their land and brutal, occupying, colonial Jewish interlopers who have been harassing them for going on sixty years out of sheer bloody-mindedness. (I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the most egregious parts of the excerpt in bold, and my comments following):

Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier "kidnapped by terrorists" (or, if you prefer, "captured by the resistance"), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders of the IDF" (Israel Defense Forces); loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans. (No mention of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Or the Palestinians voting in an Islamist terror regime committed to Israel’s destruction. Or t the constant barrage of Qassam missiles into Israeli territory ever since the Jews left. Of the tunnels the Palestinians have built to smuggle in missiles from Gaza. Or the tunnel that ended inside Israel, which allowed Palestinians to kill two Israelis, wound several others, and kidnap Corp. Shalit, that “single soldier.”)

Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to "collateral damage" in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants. (What, no mention of the sacred keys?)

"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!" (Those dastardly Jews. It’s all their fault that the Palestinians elected terrorist to infill pot-holes and people are not “starving” as a result. One question: How many pitas can you buy for the price of one Qassam rocket?)

For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than that of an Israeli; that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home again and again through decades of shellings, wars and uprisings past. Indeed Omer's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews, and especially to five searing mid-July days 58 years ago. (Yeah, the world has been unfairly favouring the Jews over the Palestinians for a long time now. That’s why there are all those anti-Palestinian resolutions in the UN every year, and why Sid Ryan and the United Church want to boycott Palestine.)

"The Catastrophe"

The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba or the Catastrophe by Palestinians. For generations of Americans raised on the heroic story of Israel's birth, especially as written by Leon Uris in "Exodus," there is no place for al-Nakba. Yet this fundamental Palestinian wound, and the power of its memory today, cannot simply be wished away.

The obscure anniversary in question, July 11-15, is little known outside of Palestinian memory. Yet it helped forge the fury, militancy and Palestinian longing for land in exile that helps drive the conflict today. In fact, it's not possible to understand today's firefights without first understanding the Nakba, and especially what transpired under the brutal sun just east of Tel Aviv in the midsummer of 1948…(Actually, you have to go a lot farther back than that. All the way back to a certain Messanger of God who told his people that the Jews are lowly, despicable apes, and that Muslims have been commanded to lord it over them forever more, and who cannot stomach the sight of these lowly dhimmis exercising sovereignty in the heart of Dar al-Islam. For true believers, both Arab and leftist, that’s the real naqba.)

Okay, that’s about all the Salon piffle I can stomach for now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:31 | link | comments (1)

 

Coke and Islam: According to Somalia’s “enlightened” conquerors, the two don’t mix. From the New York Times:

MOGADISHU, Somalia — When a Coca-Cola bottling plant opened here two years ago, the 400-plus investors invited to finance the project were carefully chosen by clan.

There were Abgal investors and Habar Gedir investors, and representatives of other clans around Somalia as well. All kicked in a minimum of $300 to help start the United Bottling Company, Somalia’s only Coca-Cola maker. It was a deliberate effort to create a feeling of communal ownership for the factory in a place where clan-based conflict has long been the rule.

It was a bold business venture, building a sparkling, $8.3 million facility in such a tumultuous capital. The thinking was that Somalia had huge business potential and that the anarchy that erupted after its last government collapsed in 1991 would give way to economic recovery.

But Somalia is a difficult place to read, and now, two years after the plant went up, the Coke brand faces a much changed business environment, one with both opportunity and peril. Islamic militias took over the capital in June and brought stability to the city, so much so that the Coke bottler here predicts its sky-high security costs will soon plummet.

“Before, we had gunmen accompanying our distributors,” Mohammed Hassan Awale, the sales manager and acting general manager of the plant, said in an interview. “Now, no guns are needed.”

There is another benefit to peace, he said. “If there is peace, there is opportunity for work, for business, and people will have money to buy Coke,” he said.

The new political reality in Mogadishu has also taken a bite out of business, as some imams have begun railing against Coke, calling it an un-Islamic beverage that should not go down a proper Muslim’s throat.

Nur Barud Gurhan, a hard-line sheik in Mogadishu, raised the issue in January during a protest against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were published first in Denmark and then in other countries. He declared that Westerners were enemies of Islam and that their products, anything from milk that originates in Denmark to Atlanta’s most famous carbonated export, should not be consumed by Somalis…

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:56 | link | comments (2)

 

Buddhists? Wiccans? Seventh Day Adventists?: Breaking news: Someone has set off bombs in the heart of Mubai’s financial district.

 

Hmmm. I wonder who it could be.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:08 | link | comments

 

Bovine-coraller-phobia: In the U.S. and the EU, the easiest way to discredit a Republican president is to call him a “cowboy.” Apparently, the mere mention of a Stetson-wearer on horseback is enough to cast doubt on the competence of the man in the saddle, and imply that, with his simple-minded cowboy ways, he doesn’t get the “nuances” of our complicated modern world.

 

Daniel McKivergan of The Weekly Standard has researched the phenomenon and come up with the following:

 

Considering the cover of this week's Time magazine, President Bush is in good company on the “cowboy” front. The media and the Democrats used all sorts of “cowboy” combinations to lampoon President Reagan and the conduct of his foreign policy -- from nuclear arms control and S.D.I. to Central America. Here are just a few examples I found doing a quick Nexis search of newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad:

 

Trigger-happy cowboy

Dangerous cowboy