A Jew Who Says Merry Christmas

Note:

This will be the third time I have edited and posted this little essay. I feel the need to change it a little every year but this one is changed a bit more than usual. I am posting it before Thanksgiving this year and you'll have to read it to find out why:

A Jew for "Merry Christmas"

I am a Jew and I have to tell you, no one is going to discourage me from celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. No, I am not loosing my Jewish identity; on the contrary, I am very sure that it is stronger than ever.

I grew up in an observant Jewish home ( I am observant still) in which we greeted Christmas with a mixture of fascination, respect and a little irritation. At some point I became fond of expressing my ambivalence by quoting Jackie Mason, who once said:

“I don’t understand something about Christmas; maybe you can explain this to me? Why is it that this time of year you Christian people bring all of the trees inside the house and take all the lights and put them outside”

That line, for many years summed up the bemusement that I affected about the whole public Christmas celebration.

My feelings were mixed for a variety of reasons. My Dad had a retail store so the weeks leading up to Christmas were always a time of tension and brutally long hours of work. The traffic on the roads, crowds in the stores, and the saturation of television (especially in those pre- cable times) and radio airwaves with Christmas programs and music were overwhelming. I found the frenzy mentally punishing, the free-floating goodwill unsettling and the talk about Jesus (in whose divinity I was not supposed to believe) uncomfortable.

It left me very glad to have it over on December 26th.

And I was always just a little unsure of how to respond when some well meaning person would wish me a Merry Christmas. I was often caught between wanting to thank him noncomittaly, try to summon a convincing Merry Christmas in return or to say,” Thanks Very much but I don’t celebrate Christmas and then have to deal with the uncomfortable silence or explanations and apologies.

I am ashamed to admit it today but I was, at first, pleased when I saw, over the years, the ACLU and Multi-culti types pushing “Merry Christmas” out of the vocabulary of cultural discourse in favor of the more generic “Happy Holidays”.

I’ve grownup, though, and I’ve grown into a new perspective on this whole question and, today, when someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I have a new response. It’s really simple-

I stop what I am doing

I don’t have any hesitation or second thoughts.

I wish them a great big “Merry Christmas” in return.

I would like to encourage all my fellow Jews to join me in this. Here’s why:

I have come to see quite clearly that even if there are politically correct, multi-cultural, morally relativistic, post modern progressive busybodies who would like us to believe that our Christian friends’ and Neighbors’ spontaneous Christmas wishes are somehow injurious to us and our culture, they are nothing of the kind. A sincere “Merry Christmas is more American and better for the republic and her people than the blandest, most guarded “Happy Holidays”

You see, the U.S. was founded by Christians. Not just any Christians. The early colonists were both devout and independent. They were fervent Protestants whose purpose in coming here was to leave the Kings, Priests, state religions and archaic laws of the Old World behind.

Even if some of them were supersessionists and dogmatic, they were also egalitarian and self-reliant. They came here to build a country where every man could read scripture for himself and be his own priest- where he could be free to elect political leadership that he could follow gladly. Ultimately, that experiment gave rise to the constitution and form of government we have today. At over two hundred years old, it is still the one in the entire world that best honors the individual and guarantees most rights to any individual who accepts the constitutional responsibilities of a citizen.

It was those fiercely independent Protestants who set the tone for the nation in which we now live. Their fierce spiritual presumption of the liberty of the human soul is, still today, the great central mast that lifts the canopy of democracy and holds it above us as a sanctuary from the despotism and effete decay that afflicts most of the rest of the world.

Crystallized in the constitution, the devotion of deeply religious people and spiritually awakened souls like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams are what have made it the highest standard of self rule and freedom in the history of the human race.

Among all their other unique achievements the fact that they decided that there could be no Official Religion in a country that aimed not just at physical or intellectual freedom shows that they understood that full human freedom means spiritual freedom too- Freedom of Religion.

To honor their genius fully we have to understand that Freedom of Religion must never be allowed to be a mandate for Freedom from Religion. As a Jew, I am exquisitely aware that freedom to practice my form of religion exists in this country because of those Christians and their vision of what a Christian country should stand for.

This uniquely Christian openness is why America has become the destination of choice for any one wishing to escape repression or lack of opportunity elsewhere in the world. That's why Jews have gravitated here for two hundred years. But we all (Christians, Jews, Muslims and Atheists) are in danger of forgetting how this all works and I think this whole “anti-Merry Christmas” thing is a symptom of that amnesia.

Fortunately, though, Jews do have a collective memory of stories if we just listen to them. My grandfather told me stories about life in turn-of-the(last)–century Eastern Europe so I have some idea of what he escaped by coming here. And its not just that he was not in Zhitomir, his Ukrainian home town, thirty years after he left for America, when the Waffen SS slaughtered thirty six thousand Jews there in one day! That is a gift indeed but it is in and of the past. No, it is the gift of equality and the opportunity to prosper that still lives on. It is that continuing gift that sustains the American dream and should call upon our constant love and loyalty.

The United States of America, as conceived by her Protestant founders, has been a miracle and a blessing to the entire human race. It has been especially important to the Jewish people.

We Jews are barely over one percent of the population here. We (a lot of us anyway) take pride in our contribution to America’s dynamism. We point with satisfaction to the fact that the founding fathers of this country were inspired and informed by our holy book which they called The Old Testament. Many of them read it in the original Hebrew, something few of us “modern” Jews can do.

But why do I need to explain this? Why don’t we all understand the centrality of the Protestant ethic to the goodness of America? Partly, it’s because of a lack in the educational program. But it’s also because our media, whose responsibility it should be to make us aware of the important ideas, events and issues has other agendas. Our “Mainstream” media is often found to be doing just the opposite.

In the media, America is assailed daily for her imperfections; and if not assailed, then damned by the faintest of praise. The media emphasizes the imperfections instead of the achievements- the discords not the harmony.

Historical revisionism has been used by the joyless progressives, secular humanists and multiculturalists to sap the joy and meaning out of Thanksgiving and the goodwill out of Christmas.

It has even come to pass that our President goes abroad and cannot seem to visit another country without some pathetic apology for America’s past- as if there is any country on earth whose history is so pristine that they are in a position to judge.

I am only one Jew- not a Rabbi and not a spokesman for a community organization, just a simple Jew. Nevertheless, I would like to call on all Jews, indeed, all Christians, Muslims and whoever else will standup with me and celebrate the blessing that The United States of America is to us and to the human family. Let us bow our heads together this Thanksgiving and resolve that instead of fretting about how saying “Merry Christmas” might make us an overly Christian country, we will thank our own, private God that we live in this country where “Happy Thanksgiving” and “Merry Christmas” mean what they mean here.

We need to loosen up and get a perspective on this “Merry Christmas” thing. It is not the people who say “Merry Christmas” and mean it that we need to be discouraging in America at this time. It is the people who find something wrong and suspect in the energy, enthusiasm and good-will that animates that “Merry Christmas” that we need to discourage.

We must side with our fellow Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are warm-hearted friends with morals and ethics or we will have become unwitting dupes to heartless enemies with no moral compass who think they can rationalize almost anything and undermine our great civilization with reasonable sounding, non-judgmental sophistry. Do you need a moment to think about that?

By saying “Merry Christmas” in public we are not necessarily agreeing that Jesus was the son of God, we are just acknowledging that some very good people believe it. When we say it, that does not constitute accepting Jesus as our personal savior; it does show his followers that we see them as fellow countrymen, friends and brothers-in-arms in the defense of the highest ideals of our civil society and Judeo-Christian culture. What is the problem with that?

The first four words of this essay “I am a Jew”, are exactly the words that Daniel Pearl was forced to say on camera just before he was pinned down and his head was sawn off. I'd like you to try a little thought experiment simulating a better world here- Pretend that the next sentence that I write followed that first one and I had no need for the rest of the explanation in between...

"Have a Merry Christmas"

Progressives for Breast Cancer: A Preview of the Medical Gulag

Here is a little thought experiment for you. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force has made a new set of recommendations for the diagnosis of breast cancer that have implied that breast self-examinations are of limited value and that women should begin getting a regular mammography at 50 years of age (rather than the old recommendation of 40) and then only every two years instead of every year.

Their report states that screenings between 40 and 49 years of age only turn up one cancer for every 1900 or so women. They express concern that “false positives” and unnecessary tests are a cruel source of anxiety and mental suffering for many women and that women would be much better off if they waited another ten years before they put themselves through all that turmoil. Oh, yes, they added that hat a great deal of money would be saved along with the angst of all those hysterical ladies.

Well, ok, false positives are a problem when you do screenings but what about the non-false positives that don’t get diagnosed? If you take their number of 1900 to 1 it doesn’t sound so bad, really. Until you think a little more about it…

Just consider that detected early, the five year survival rate for breast cancer victims is in the neighborhood of 98%. Detected late, that rate falls to about 26% a decrease in survival of 72%. And that doesn’t begin to cover the additional suffering from the treatments and dislocation of families when diagnosis is delayed.

But how bad is the problem? Let’s take Gillette Stadium for an example.

Gillette is where the New England Patriots play. Like a lot of stadiums, it has been used as a venue for all kinds of events, soccer games, rock concerts- all kinds of things. So let’s make up a hypothetical event to fill the stadium. Let’s just say that in the run-up to the last presidential election, candidate Obama wanted to solidify his support among one of his best “demographics”, younger women. His staff planed a big rally to which only women 49 and under are invited.

Now, Gillette’s official capacity is 68,756 people. So at a diagnosis rate of 1900 to 1 that means that 36 women there at the rally already have breast cancer. President Obama was a great draw in 2008 lets assume he would have filled the whole stadium so we can assume that there are 68,756 women in the seats.

Ok now picture a stage in the middle of the field. As the lights dim and the applause fades, a spotlight beam centers on the thin, serious figure of the future President of the United States and he lifts the microphone and pronounces his words very carefully.

“Ok, now, I have something to tell you that is very upsetting and I don’t want you to panic or get hysterical. Thirty-six of you women here tonight, and we don’t know who you are yet, are going to agree to reduce your chance of living for another five years by 72%. That means instead of 33 of you living at least five more years, only 9 of you will live. Not only that, you are going to give your consent to putting your self through a comparable amount more suffering and pain than you would otherwise have to endure. Also you will be saddling your husbands, parents, friends and children with infinitely more sorrow and desolation than they would have had to bear if you had not come to support my presidency tonight.”

In his usual style, the President is actually understating the case by a factor of ten. An astute friend of mine has pointed out that the 1900 to one ratio is a "yearly" crop of diagnoses based on yearly screening. so the actual loss of early diagnosis will be multiplied by the ten years of delay in receiving mammograms. This makes the actual death toll from that fateful rally more like 270 women.

It sounds like a non-starter doesn’t it? Do you think he would have gotten any of those women's votes that night? But the fact is that those 68,756 women (including the 36 doomed ones) have already been hoodwinked in to agreeing to that deal. Because, if Obama has his way and forces the single payer system down our throats, government then recommendations like these will assume the force of law for all but those are so wealthy that they can pay for medical services out of pocket.

These new recommendations are draconian, not just because it reminds us of how cold and callous a bureaucracy can be in its disregard for medical prudence and the value of an individual’s life but (even more) because it has given us an ominous forewarning of what the Medical Gulag of single payer, government run health care system would look like if the Blue Dogs and Republicans in congress don’t come to their senses soon and stop Obama’s high-pressure sales blitz for his “health care reform package”.

Just to put a human face on it, I have Googled "died of breast cancer", clicked on "Images" and selected a somewhat random sampling of the resulting pictures. I have posted 27 of them below to represent the first year's (remember there are another nine years worth of death, sorrow and suffering involved!) 27 extra deaths among the 68,756 rally attendee at that imaginary rally. Imagine that they are the ones upon whose bodies and families, Obama's health care reform would save all that money.

They are all kinds of women who have one infinitely sad thing in common:

Some are mysterious and exotic.
A Daughter who Died before her mother...
Sisters who lost a mother and a sister to breast cancer
A Champion marathon runner
A newscaster
A sister who inspired a movement
A coach
Some you might think you recognize
All will be missed

They will not see their children grow
They are remembered for all kinds of things
They leave holes that cannot be filled
Some were accomplished and famous
Others never got to fulfill their dreams
Some changed whole industries
Some inspired good works in their names
Their music is stilled forever...
..never to be heard again

They are fading into memory

If only we had taken more pictures...

Their laughter still echoes

Their courage still inspires
We still smile when we remember
They are gone
No matter how alive they once seemed
They live now only for those who remember
Reminder: this represents the first year's "beneficiaries" of the Obama "adjustment" to the mammogram regime. What other horrors will they come up with to make their takeover seem affordable?

And what is the money being saved for?

Incredibly, this is little more than part of a naked attempt to make it look "budget neutral" to take some of the excellent health care away from citizens who work, pay taxes and earn the right to have their own insurance and choose their own doctors and redistribute it to people many of whom are not even legal residents of our country. It is intended to rationalize the degradation of medical service for families that struggle to pay their own way in order to give an inferior but equal care to people who don't even value enough to work for it. It has even been proposed in the Health reform bill that the savings be used to increase the linguistic and cultural "sensitivity" of health care delivery in border regions to ease the lives of illegal aliens as they resist acculturation and assimilation.

If you are a woman, or care about women at all, picture that pro-Obama rally in Gillette stadium. Look at these pictures above and imagine these wonderful, unique, and irreplaceable people sitting side by side. They would occupy a little more that one row in an average section. Imagine them all dead within five years just because they voted for Obama. Then imagine ten more deadly swaths just like that over the next ten years. And that is just from the rally In Foxboro, Massachusetts. Fill all the football stadiums in the country and imagine eleven rows of breast cancer victims whose life is unnecessarily shortened because they invited government bureaucrats to decide on their cancer screening schedule. And even that would not approximate the real toll. Whose picture do you want in that group?

Important Update:

The reader who corrected my numbers on the toll from the rally also stated this in relation to cutting the screenings down from every year to every two years:

It gets worse than that.

Half of all screenings post-age-50 would be eliminated, meaning that half of all cancers discovered post-age-50 would have been incubating one extra year (and half of all cancers would post-age-50 would be detected as early as before).

How many women post-age-50 get breast cancer and by how much would the death rate increase for that half of them with one extra year of incubation pre-treatment?

Please correct your post accordingly.

Best,

(I do not have permission to use his name yet)

Iain Levine and HRW, In Deep and Still Digging

Apparently, no one ever told Iain Levine at Human Rights watch that when you are in a hole that you are having a hard time getting out of, the first thing you must do is to stop digging and he is doing his best to bring The Goldstone Report down the mine with him. It is the hallmark of poor salesmen and those who feel superior to other people that they do not know when to Shut Up. Levine, keen to discredit the storm of criticism of HRM that has been gathering force for years is running off at the mouth.

He is is trying to paint criticism of HRW as a new and sinister coordinated attack even though it has been building up for years as they have published report after prejudicial report damning Israel not just with sly, morally corrupt but superficially “even-handed” equivocation of Israeli self defense with Arabian genocidal aggression, but with the simply inaccurate and patently sloppy work of the now suspended Military “expert” Marc Garlasco. (You may remember that it was Garlasco who, back in 2006 stated publicly that it was an Israeli artillery shell that killed a family on an outing on a beach in Gaza. The accusation was picked up and touted by Israel’s detractors world wide before it was finally proven wrong- with nary a retraction or apology from HRW) .

Not content to let make arguments and try to prove his points, Levine has talked to The Guardian newspaper in England and is quoted as alleging that there is a coordinated attack being orchestrated by NGO Monitor, right wing bloggers and others, named and unnamed. He whines that those bad people are saying mean things “personally” about HRW. Here is an excerpt from the article”

Iain Levine, HRW's programme director, said that while the organisation had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it.

"I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organised campaign, and we're seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks ... from some of the language and arguments used it would seem as if there has been discussion," he said."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation."

He goes on to say that he believes that the purpose of the attacks is to distract attention from the Goldstone report:

Levine said he believes many of the attacks were aimed at distracting attention from the report of the UN investigator, Richard Goldstone, which was highly critical of Israel's killing of civilians in its three-week attack on Gaza that started last December. Goldstone is a former member of the HRW board and the group has strongly backed his report.

"We have been under enormous pressure and tremendous attacks, some of them very personal, as have been the attacks against Richard Goldstone with really vituperative language used to describe him: obsequious Jew, self-loathing Jew and all the rest of it," said Levine.

Poor thing, its odd that a guy who works for an organization that has made quite a good living out of trying to tie Israel’s hands behind her back while she is being attacked by other nations, professional terrorists, permanent refugees and proxy armies all of whom have publicly and unequivocally stated their intention to annihilate, destroy or “push her into the sea” might have a thicker skin than that. But, then, that is not the really pathetic thing about Levine.

Nor is the most pathetic thing about him that he says that because people are making similar arguments and using the same words about him and HRW that he thinks they all must be in cahoots in an organized way to attack them. Yes, it makes him sound like a kid who feels picked on by the math teachers in school because every year a different one tells him the “same thing” when he says that “one and one is three” but there is worse here.

No, the most pathetic thing is that he thinks that the fact that a number of people are alarmed enough about the damage that he and his fellow “holier than thou” protectors of the weak and defenseless at HRW have been doing to talk with each other and amass evidence and formulate logical arguments against them that that invalidates that evidence and those arguments.

Interestingly, Goldstone (don’t blame me, Levine brought him up!) has responded in much the same way, he has alleged that those who impugn his report have only attacked him personally and not made factual or logical arguments to the substance of the report. Apparently, neither Mr, Levine nor Judge Goldstone know about Google because if you google “Goldstone Report” you come up with lots of results with two of the first three being this and this, both compendiously factual, highly logical and almost strictly "not personal" in nature.

Yes, this is all quite pathetic in many ways but when Levine is quoted as saying, ."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation." It is so very telling.

A word to Iain Levine: Think about it, Iain, your own words betray you. Facts and logic cannot be “repudiated” by honest men. To repudiate is to deny the validity or the reality of something. It may seem a small slip of the tongue but it reveals a truth. When you call what right-wing bloggers say about you, “lies, falsehoods and misinformation” it does not to prove that they are not true- Actually it is exactly what you call it- a repudiation.

“Repudiation” is empty. It is done by those who cannot refute or disprove. Much as you would like to repudiate what is being said about HRW and Goldstone, the desire to repudiate and the inability to refute is proof that a lot of it is accurate and deserved.

Heros and Civilization

Kate at Small Dead Animals has posted an extraordinary piece of writing. I will only excerpt it here and you should read the whole thing. I’ll provide the link at the bottom of this post.

It is a terrifyingly real, plainly truthful and starkly beautiful account by a friend of Kate’s who was in the first wave of emergency personnel to arrive at the the scene of the Fort Hood Jihad. Here is the piece of it that hit me the hardest:

A young man walked up to me and asked if I could help him, I asked him, "where are you shot?", he told me in the chest...I directed him to go sit in my ambulance and an army medic sat with him and started oxygen and bandaging on him; in the mist of the madness I was trying to determine who would be the first to be transported still waiting on the helicopters to land so I could fly out the worst.

While getting more bandaging material off my ambulance several bystanders carried a soldier to my truck that had been shot in the head, he was conscious and breathing, he kept asking me "am I gonna die?", I told him I was doing the best I could, knowing from experience his situation appeared bleak.

Behind my ambulance several bystanders were doing CPR on a lady that had obviously been fatally shot, in a mas-cal situation you do "the most good for the most people"...that means save the ones you can and black tag the un-salvageable...it's a harsh truth but effective in this type of situation.

Amidst the horror spawned by Jihad, Kate’s friend was able to use her training, rely on her experience, maintain her presence of mind and contain her emotional response in order to play her part in the miracle of Western Civilization.

Her cool-headedness and bravery (along, of course, with that of Officer Munley and all of the bystanders whom she also praises) is the very kind of expression of the Western style of thought and values in action that has brought us to the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not the phony "selflessness" of the progressive left. It is a world removed from the human cog-in-the-machine of communism. And it is from an entirely different universe from the self-surrendered slave of Allah whom she so pointedly refers to as “the shooter”.

If the woman who wrote this account seems like a normal, everyday person to you, it is because we share with her the prototypical Western values of human life, empirical utility and intellectual honesty that she unselfconsciously embodies. If she seems like a heroine, it is because she is.

If only our leaders could summon the courage, intelligence and common sense to meet the threats of creeping socialism and the aggressively expanding Caliphate with such a cool head and clear vision.

Read the whole thing!

An Horrific Outbreak of Stupidity

When it happened yesterday, we all thought the same thing. Many of us could not (or would not) speak it. Some could not even admit it to themselves that they thought it.

Hello, world, his name is Nidal Malik Hasan.

Today, in the aftermath, the news media is avoiding saying it with affected contortions of logic, pompous intentional ignorance of recent history and a bland stupidity that make “Sir Arthur” in this classic Beyond the Fringe sketch look like a forensic genius.

(There is a better, full motion version of this at YouTube that does not allow embedding)

How stupid do the media and our leaders think we are? If you are not simultaneously laughing at them and choking in outrage, you are pretty damned stupid…

Well, here, compare and contrast:

Today’s Boston Globe Headlines about the Fort Hood Sudden Jihad (FHSJ)

“Soldier kills 12, hurts 31 in Fort Hood rampage -

Military psychiatrist facing deployment abroad is accused”

Sir Arthur about the Great Train Robbery

“We believe this to be the work of thieves”

Barak Hussein Obama’s take on FHSJ,

“A horrific outbreak of violence"

Sir Arthur,

“There is the telltale disappearance of property, the snatching away of money substances. It all points to thieves.”

And why don’t they talk about Jihad and Islam and the fact that we all had, whether we admit it or not, the same thought when we heard about Fort Hood? Well no one talks about what they will not talk about but sir Arthur is not so constrained, when asked what a mindermast is, he admits,

"We don’t like to use the word Mastermind- it depresses the men."

We don’t want to think about the fact that the billions of Muslims all over the world belong to a religion and a culture that harbors and in many cases nurtures the seeds of blind hatred and coldblooded murder. We can't contemplate the implications of a guy that is described by his cousin as "a good American", a mental health professional, a physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath could end up shouting Allah Akbar with guns blazing at unarmed by-standers. It might dishearten us. Think then, of Israel, who only wants to live in peace and is faced on all sides with the Muslim world that only wants to annihilate her.

Sir Arthur has one last caution for us, when asked by his interviewer

"Who do you think is behind the criminals?"

He answers:

"We are - considerably."

At least he knows he is losing and perhaps doomed by his ignorance. If we do not wake up and stop pretending that we are not facing a threat that we refuse to understand, we will be just as lost and possibly even more doomed.

History is NOT Religious Fanaticism

Post Removed at author's request

Jews are Always Settlers

There is yet another example of an ordinarily pretty good news organization (The Washington Times) going brain dead and printing verbatim a terrible, biased, anti-Zionist slur from the AP. I wasn’t going to bother posting about it because I am so tired of having to exhaust myself on this stuff and I have come to the conclusion that the newspapers are just too short-handed to read this stuff carefully before they call is “content” and give it space. As I posted a comment on the article and began to move on, though, I could not get over the use of the words “settler”. It is a pejorative now, used to paint Jews as aliens and outsiders, but I have a different emotional attachment to the word.

Whether he was placidly agreeing with my mother during one of her extended tirades (he called them lectures) or concluding a business deal, my dad would often say, “I’ll settle for that. I’m one of the early settlers.” He was a very gentle but effective negotiator. He always did his best to make every situation a “win-win”. I have always thought that this was not just his way but the Jewish way. After all, when the Romans destroyed our temple and we began our two millennia of wanderings, expulsions and holocausts, we had to get into the habit of settling. In all that time there was only one place on earth we were not settlers, Jerusalem. We were beleaguered there, by the Romans Arabs and Turks, persecuted and often murdered but it was always our home. That is why the use of the word “settler” bothered me so much. The Washington Times article is here.

Here is my comment as I posted it at the Washington Times web site:

This is so obviously badly slanted as to be almost unbelievable. Even so, there is enough information in the article to get to the truth. Key Phrase: "Mr. Grenimann said 29 members of the al-Kurd family lived in the house evicted on Tuesday. Some of them had settled there after they were evicted from another house in the same neighborhood, following the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to uphold the settlers' claim to the ownership of that building." Translation: They are illegal squatters that the Israeli government is unable to screw up the nerve to deal with directly, nearly forcing the legal owners to do stupid stuff like this. The pathetic case went all they way to the SUPREME COURT OF THE LAND and the so called journalist who wrote the article still calls it a "claim." The truth is that the Israeli courts bend over backwards to uphold "Palestinian rights". Would a squatter case ever get argued in front of the US Supreme Court? When the Jordanians overran West Jerusalem in the 1948 war for independence, they massacred a Jewish population that had inhabited the Jewish quarter continuously for more than three thousand years and blew up ancient Synagogues and community buildings in order to expunge all trace of Jewish life there. Now Jewish people are referred to as "settlers" and Arab squatters are portrayed as "Palestinians". They are not "Palestinians", they are Arabs. They are of the same Arab tribes that compose a majority of Jordan. There was never such a thing as a "Palestinian" until 1968 - the name is the single biggest triumphant lie foisted by Arafat on the conscience of the world. When Israel left Gaza, all Jewish "settlers" had to leave because to stay would have been a death sentence. If East Jerusalem ever does become the capital of a previously fictitious state, all Jews will be forced out by violence and/or death. The Arabs living in Israel are the most secure, wealthiest and healthiest in the world and all the Washington Times can do is run obviously scurrilous trash like this. The great injustice here is not that the Jewish people who did this are not being “nice people”, it is that the very fact that they stand up for their property rights makes them villains.

It goes on and on. German Jews in the 1930’s refused to believe that they were not Germans, just as the Spanish Jews before them they learned that they were all too easily turned on as “settlers”. But, it is always easy to call Jews settlers. We are. We lived in Germany for four hundred years among settled Germanic tribes that had lived there for a thousand years- making them the early settlers. In that sense, very human being on earth is a settler. But in Jerusalem, in Judea, Samaria, Tel Aviv and Sderot we are the Early Settlers. This was recognized in modern times by the creation of the modern state of Israel. If we allow the world to forget our place and our rights, if we allow the newly invented Palestine to squat on our property, who will find a place for us?

Israel has proved time and time again that she will “settle” for peace with a Palestinian state that does not pose a mortal threat. Israel is, in that sense too, an early settler. Over and over the so-called “Palestinains” have proven (Fatah, Hizballah and Hamas even publish it in their charters) that they are not going to settle for anything less than the annihilation of Israel. That makes them very late settlers indeed- maybe even squatters.

Nobel Prize? Why?

There could be no better proof that the left is racist. The guy who was elected President of the United States because he was articulate and available while black has now been given a Nobel Peace Prize for being the first apologetic, bereft of statecraft and black President of the United States.

He was nominated for the prize less than two weeks after his inauguration. You simply can't tell me that it was anything other than his race that was behind that. Now after only 9 months in office , without any actual results, how could he deserve so much as a Kewpie Doll at the state fair?

The Senator who voted present (although infrequently) is now the peacemaker who has not made anything. Why don't they wait a year or two to see if anything works out? Maybe they don't any faith in him either...

It is true that alienating your allies and laying down your defenses to your enemies will lead surely to peace, but I fear it is likely to be the kind of peace the peoples of the Soviet Union had for all those blissful Communist years- or even worse a millennium or two of Pax Islamica under the promised Caliphate.

Richard Goldstone- Don't call him "Justice"

Even as I am working on a more in-depth piece on him, "Justice" Richard Goldstone has been fighting back against the rage of Israelis, Jews and moral people everywhere. As often happens when the ethically blind and the morally crippled try to dance around the havoc they create, Goldstone has stepped right in a big smelly one.

The tip-off line in Goldstone's statement is: "The lack of justice for victims was "undermining" chances for peace in the region, he said." This guy thinks it is about justice!?!?! Or at least that is how he couches it. Jews are not asking for justice- just the permission to defend ourselves against terror. The Palestinians are not looking for justice- How many times do they have to tell the world that all they desire is the annihilation of Jews?

Who does Goldstone think he is talking to with this "justice" fetish? Only guilty westerners who lack the moral compass to see that true justice is harsh and that "they" do not "want what we want." This guy is the quintessential useful idiot. The lack of justice is not undermining anything, It is lack of moral fiber and ethical balance on his part that will destroy any chance of peace.

In most cases, peace only comes after a defeat of some kind. Granting justice to the unjust insures that defeat will never happen- at least not to the ones who deserve it!

Goldstone apparently thinks that because he uses "Justice" as his title, that he knows what it is. Perhaps he fails to see the irony- Its kind of like calling the tin-pot idiot leader of Korea who bears the blood of millions, "Dear Leader".

Who is Watching the Human Rights Watchers?

Omri Ceren at Mere Rhetoric is. It seems as though Human Rights Watch, an organization that makes it their business to scold Israel's Defense Forces have been relying on the judgement of someone who appears to have some very dark ulterior motives. NGOs like Human Rights Watch make a very rich living out of clucking in disapproval from self-appointed perches. They trade upon the widely held perception that they are "impartial and non-political". So what are they going to do now that it is coming to light that a very prominent staff member has a major-league fascination and a personal identification with the erstwhile Nazi war machine.

Ceren, using only public material, easily available through Google searches, has turned over a rock and found a very slimy side of the self-promoting, widely quoted, media trollop Marc Garlasco. Garlasco has worked on many projects in which he has presumed to call Israelis to task for the ways in which they defend themselves from the new genocidal threat and has appeared as a military expert on many of the anti-zionist media (CNN, ABC, BBC, etc..) networks.

All the while he has, rather openly, been a well known nazi-phile and collector of Nazi paraphernalia. Of course, he has been careful not to publish anything that identifies him with Nazi ideology per-se. He fawns and giggles in his posts on Nazi memorabilia web sites about historical value, elegance, design and manufacturing expertise but I, for one, don't buy it. Even if some one who collected child pornography covered the obsession with self-serving obfuscation about the "beauty of the human form" and "the ancient heritage of love between mature adults and pubescent children" does it make the obsession less dark and abusive? I think not.

Garlasco uses the moniker Flak 88 on his favorite Nazi memorabilia website and as a vanity plate on his (German made) car.

Flak 88 (pictured at the top of this post, above), for those of you who do not know the literature of World War II was the designation of a German artillery piece that was dreaded by allied soldiers on the battlefield and aircrews in their warplanes. The story he tells is that his grandfather was on a Flak88 crew during the war and that his choice of hobby and nickname is a result of this personal history. That would all bel very well for someone who makes his living judging cabbages in a sauerkraut factory but this person is actively engaged in limiting the ability of Jews to protect themselves from an incipient new holocaust while he is still venerating (at the very least) the symbolism of the last one. The icing on the cake to me is that online moniker and the license plate on the car. What would we feel if sixty years from now, Mohamed Atta's nephew was found driving around lower Manhattan with the license plate "Boeing 767"? Would he be considered impartial and non-political?

What is going on at Human Rights Watch? Who is watching the human rights watchers?

Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation- Scotland Knuckles Under

Only a few days ago I posted about a thing I call savage compassion. And now Kenneth MacAskill is rationalizing the release of the convicted terrorist Libyan Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi with a new wrinkle on the concept. MacAskell, to the eternal dishonor of the Scottish people and Great Briton has said, "Our justice system demands that justice be imposed but compassion be available. Our beliefs dictate that justice be shown and mercy be served."

And here is yet another perfect illustration of how “compassion” in politics is the anathema of justice.

Last year I wrote about a lone memorial not 100 yards from my house. This memorial was placed in the Newton Centre Park by the friends of a college student who grew up here. That original post was titled “A Birthday Gift for a Dead Girl!” a commemoration of her fortieth birthday. The forty-first birthday of Sarah S. B. Philipps who was murdered on flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland twenty and a half years ago was just five days ago and now her murderer is being released.

Where is the compassion for the families of the flight 103 victims?

Where is the concern for the hope that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi might be squeezed for more information about the plot and its origin in exchange for this “compassion”?

Nobody believes he did this alone- Where is the justice for the other plotters with whom Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi worked?

Where is the justice for the Libyan government for which he worked?

Where is the compassion for the victims of other terror attacks that are encouraged and validated by this travesty of compassion?

The truth is, Britain is swamped by internal Islamists and greedy for oil deals with Qaddaffi’s Libya. But instead of admitting their cowardly and selfish motivations for not just rehabilitating Qaddafi, but positively fawning and cringing over him, they couch in the deadly language of "compassion". It puts me in mind of a Robert Burns Poem (made into a great song by Steeleye Span) about Scottish dishonor in another century. Here is my updated version of the original.


A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation

Farewell to all our Scottish fame,

Farewell our ancient glory!

Farewell even to the Scottish name.

So famed in martial story!

Now Islam runs over
Salway sands,
And terror runs to the ocean,

To mark where Mohammed's province stands -

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!



What force or guile could not subdue

Through many warlike ages

Is wrought now by a coward few

For hireling traitor's wages.

The Islamist terror we could disdain,

Secure in valour's station;

But Lybian Oil has been our bane -

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!



O, would, or I had seen the day

That Treason thus could sell us,

My old grey head had lain in clay
With Bruce and loyal Wallace!

But pith and power, till my last hour

I will make this declaration :

'Our honor is soiled by Libyan Oil'-

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Warning to Republicans- We are Not Doing This for You!

Not so fast, Republican scum. This is not just about how the American public is discovering that the Democrats have deceived them. We are looking at you too.

We hate the greed, the lies, and the naked hypocrisy. Most of all though, it is that arrogant, self-congratulatory air of moral, social and intellectual superiority we can’t abide. There isn’t a tenth of the senators or congressmen on either side of the aisle, in Washington, who I don’t hate. Yes, I mean hate. I loathe those politicians. I despise the president. I think a lot of people are feeling the same way.

I especially despise the knee-jerk partisans who publicly display their ignorance by lowering the general level of discourse with snide and derisive comments about those with whom they disagree. Don’t call us “a mob” just because you’ve been ignoring us so effectively that we have to shout to be heard. We will not silence ourselves. And don’t think, just because you may be against the health care bill, that we are going to give you a pass. That sound you hear in the town hall meetings about health care is not the agitation of a partisan mob and it is not (at least not yet) the howl of a revolutionary rabble. If you look closely, you will see that it is every day people who are realizing and beginning to articulate that they are feeling betrayed.

I have been sitting and holding my tongue since the election of Barack Obama. I have been praying that our well-intentioned friends on the left were right and that I was wrong about the dangerous nature of the Obama victory. Now I find that there are many things worse than discovering you were wrong about the candidate you didn’t support and one of the very worst of them is happening right now.

The realization has been creeping in on me that not only had I been right to fear calamity in an Obama Presidency, but I was also wrong about the possibility that there might arise, in Washington, an honorable, intelligent and respectable opposition to the dreadful policies, empty rhetoric, pseudo-intellectual post-modernism, reckless “change-aholism” and idolatrous personality worship.

No, that sound that the Mainstream News Media is doing its best to filter out and cast in a prejudicial light is the sound of people waking up from the dream of being held in the warm embrace of a motherly and progressive government that wants to make everything “all right” and realizing that they have been encircled in the cold embrace of the mother of all boa constrictors- The Progressive Left. It is the cry of people who have finally found their resistance to the personal charm and political capital of the new administration and realized that if there is any hope of stopping the slow but inexorable strangulation that is already under way, they must act with passion and urgency. Like me, they are not just disappointed; they are in despair and futile rage.

Let me be perfectly clear:
I don’t just hate the stupid arrogance and messianic self-satisfaction of the Obama presidency; I hate the sickeningly ineffective and concupiscent faux conservatives on the other side even more. Both sides have betrayed their voters, their own natures and the promise of the American experiment in self-government.

Our President, charming, slick, loquacious and calculating though he is, could not help, in a few obvious gaffes, giving us enough unguarded moments through which to glimpse the size and darkness of the betrayal.
It was not, for example, just his initial knee-jerk, Community Organizer reaction in which he famously said that the "police had acted stupidly". That was bad enough. The smarmy "beer summit" with officer Crowley was, to me, even more of a symptom of his sub-rosa contempt for the middle class values and general class prejudice.

It amazes me, in retrospect, that no one that I am aware of has yet observed that inviting an Irish cop over to your formal rose garden, when you are accustomed to $100.00-a-pound steak, is the nearest thing in America today to the insensitivity of inviting a black guy over and serving him Fried Chicken and Watermelon. It is the way in which insufferable elites treat those they hold in amused contempt.

Likewise, the example he used earlier in that same verbose, slow-motion train-wreck of a press conference, in which he attempted to create the impression that family physicians are liable to drum up extra revenues by doing unnecessary tonsillectomies to the detriment of their patients and the economy. Leaving aside my original reaction to this, which is that I suspected that this might be a veiled reference to the heavy Jewish representation in the medical profession. I have come to realize, though, that it is not the anti-Semitic caricature of Jewish doctors doing unnecessary tonsillectomies that The President was after here, it’s actually a kind of classism.

This has not happened overnight. There are those who have written about this time in American history as class warfare but it is subtler than that. In today’s America, the class system has been twisted and spliced into a kind of Mobius Strip in which what we used to think of as the Upper Class has joined in common cause with what used to be referred to as The Poor. The confederation of these two constituencies, that used to occupy the polar extremes of the class spectrum, has warped the socio-economic plane on which America has always provided the most equal opportunity and freest marketplace of ideas in the world.

The public (the real people) has been slow catching on. Affirmative Action did not sufficiently alarm the working people and middle class. They allowed themselves to be lulled and co-opted when money market and mutual funds gave them the impression that, someday, they might live without actual labor and creativity in the style of the moneyed, coupon-clipping upper class. The nationalization of the Automobile Industry was slipped by them in a fog of urgency. They saw the value of their homes degraded by a crisis in mortgages that were intentionally sold without the time-honored requirements and caution so that “those less fortunate” could also have homes of their own.

The feelings and “dignity” of The Poor, in fact, supply the muscular grip for The Progressive Movement which has always been a cause born of privilege and upper class pretension. The chief distinction of the upper class is that they do not “need” to work. They can live their accustomed lifestyle merely by looking after their interests. As witnessed by the make up of the houses of congress and the Whitehouse which have come to resemble nothing so much as Ivy league clubhouses for those born to the upper class and the few fortunate tokens who they have raised up by affirmative action and so fully indoctrinated into the progressive fraternity that they cannot see that they are dupes. They are so progressive that they believe that self-defeating, divisive dogmas like the Black Value System vaunted by Barack Obama’s Chicago Church are positive and constructive not poison pills that will only perpetuate the racial divide and defeat successive generations of young black people. The alliance between the two great occupationless classes one living off the efforts (and sometimes crimes- as in the Kennedys) of earlier generations and the other swilling at the public trough (welfare recipients, political appointees, most of the news media, much of academia) has combined many disparate groups and turned them into a many-headed serpent that knows only to squeeze harder on the diminishing majority of people who work, create and earn livings in spite of the mounting pressure.

It would not be accurate to call the insidious, snide, condescending negation of middle class values a war on the middle class. It is almost never a warlike state. Only the occasional savagery (like the assault on Sarah Palin) rises to anything akin to war. There is just the constant tightening of the counter-cultural squeeze that mocks ambition, sneers at business acumen, recoils from value judgments and belittles even the healthiest of self-interest.

There is a deep prejudice in liberal circles against those who "sully their hands" with trade, profit and useful functions. The taxonomy of what makes a member of this new hybrid “occupationless” class needs to be worked out but it appears to have a great deal to do with those who spend the majority of their (working) time doing things that “look after their interests”, denying reality and jockeying for position than coming up with original ideas, making (verifiable) scientific discoveries, moving objects from one place to another, making anything useful, protecting society from itself or creating value of any kind.

I remember the horror amongst the room full of anthropology students I was asked to address a few years after I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree. A professor with whom I had maintained a relationship had asked me to come to a career night and tell them about my path after graduation. I told them about my experience with Affirmative Action and how I had found interest and satisfaction outside of academia. I spoke of how, having studied Anthropology, I felt that my understanding of people and life was enhanced and that whatever career they chose (or chose them) they would be well served by the education in humanity they were receiving. Looking at people Anthropologically was a great tool, not just for understanding the human condition but for understanding and serving people’s needs.
There were several graduate students in the room who were outraged by my tale.

In the ensuing rant, I was all but driven from the room. I don’t recall the exact words but, thirty years later I still feel the emotional temperature. I was informed that no one there had any interest in any career other than study, teaching and research and that the proper uses of Anthropology did not include anything remotely to do with making money in a direct way. They did not use the words “middle class” or “bourgeois” but they hung heavy in the air nonetheless. It was my first direct experience with this particular kind of class consciousness which I will call “occupationalism”. The bottom line is that if you work for a living, you are not one of us.

So now the actual workers, thinkers and producers are on the verge of realizing that The Democrat Party (that they used to think of as the working-man’s party) has become the party where the Upper Class and The Poor have come together under the progressive banner to squeeze them within an inch of their lives and that The Republican Party (that they used to think of as the party of the rich) has lost its way among the debris of the Bush years of “Compassionate Conservatism”- essentially a defenseless wreckage. If we are going to avoid a class war, it is up to one of these parties to come to its senses and re-adopt real values and actual work.

The first step is to recognize and reaffirm the dignity of real work and actual values, to stop worrying about what the rest of the world thinks and begin behaving like America again. Get out of the boardroom and the examining room. To hell with compassion! Let’s create opportunity. Forget the opinion poll results, lead with conviction and reason. Tell the government to provide us with law, order and safety and stay out of the way- we will do the rest. We are the ones who never stopped working and all we want is the chance to continue unobstructed.

Hey, Tovarish! Turn Yourself in for Re-education!

The Obama administration shows its true colors more each day. Now they are asking their dwindling cadre of cultists to report back to the mother ship on any independent (or as they call it “fishy”) opposition. It may seem unbelievable but here is a link to the actual White House Blog http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/ that calls for informers to turn in their email buddies and randomly visited bloggers.

Well, last night I posted a link to my essay on Blame, Virtue and Evil at Victor Davis Hanson’s blog at PJM and while reading through the other comments there I ran across one that had an idea I think we should all help out with. Commenter TLM wrote:
“…Don’t bother forwarding this to . I have already reported myself and plan to do so every day until the government takes down that ridiculous un-American site. You would do better to inform your masters that Americans are angry regarding this legislation because they no longer trust their government…”

I am doing the same. I think anyone who believes in free speech and a government that governs openly and without intimidating citizens who disagree with the executive branch, should do the same. We do not yet have a Gulag in America but reporting each other to the government for unclean thoughts is the first step in the process.

Where are all the progressives who called George W. Bush Bushitler Now?
Here is the email address to turn yourself in: flag@whitehouse.gov

Blame, Virtue and Evil

In my recent post, entitled A Most Savage Compassion, I compared Classical Liberalism with Progressive Liberalism. Citing my personal experience with affirmative action, I worked at showing how the “new” “progressive” values of Compassion, Selflessness and “the Good of Mankind” and a systematic effort ot increase the size and power of government have been advanced by The Progressive movement to undermine and replace the founding American value of each person taking personal responsibility for the individual pursuit happiness within a system that set out to guarantee only life and liberty. Progressives advocate incrementally replacing the responsibility and discretion of individuals with a manipulative, centralized authority of “experts” and “agencies” to manipulate and coerce individual behavior. I think I made it clear that I believe this is a very bad bargain.

It is manifest, though, that American liberals have been shifting from the classical toward the progressive viewpoint for many years. Ronald Reagan observed this shift more than thirty years ago. Regan, when asked why he left the Democratic Party and became a Republican was heard more than once to say, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; my party left me".

Which posses an interesting question. Since, America was founded on the idea that individuals, given the safety and opportunity, will make choices and live lives that perpetuate the common sense and enlightened self-interest that were the guiding principals of the founders how is it that Classical Liberalism is so easily giving way to Progressivism even as they claim to represent “American values”?

It is vital to understand how this shift is being achieved. First, let us remember why they call themselves “progressive”.

The sort of “progress” that is implied in the name Progressivism is actually a very un-American elitist fantasy in which The Progressive imagines that all people are equally ethical, trustworthy and basically good and that all cultures are likewise equally good and moral and that given the right information and presentation would agree with and submit to the Progressive agenda. As we have seen, this is opposed to and incompatible with the founding assumptions of the American republic.

That agenda assumes that normal human ambition, lust, acquisitiveness, anger and violence, either do not really exist or can be talked, legislated, educated or punished out of existence- not just subjugated or tamed, mind you, but eliminated entirely. The deepest and most redeeming wisdom of the founding fathers of America is that they had the spiritual depth and political intelligence to understand that those dark urges are every bit as universal in the human heart as are the selflessness, reason, empathy and light on which the progressives pin their hopes and it is no good getting rid of old tyrannies unless checks and balances are built into the political structure that guard against new ones arising.

The idea of progressivism, however well intentioned and idealistic, is dangerous. It would require an entire civilization of lobotomized and neutered drones, to bring about that end stage progressive society, in which human evil is expunged, into being. And yet, somehow, the progressive agenda is making real headway in America. The fulcrum of the progressive movement is the universal human need to blame and the lever is our need to think of ourselves as virtuous.

The progressive attack on the status quo begins with an emotional attack in which perceived cultural ills and social suffering are blamed on classical liberal institutions. The blame might attempt a specific causal connection such as the progressive attack on corporate greed, blaming capitalism for poverty and suffering or the Progressive’s support for the undemocratic Arab Jihad against Israel in which they accuse her of being the sole barrier to peace because of oppressive behavior and/or stealing Arab land by building the anti-terror wall. Or it might be more diffuse and inexact, like the accusations against the Bush administration for “fascist” intentions and thuggish behavior (see “BushHitler”) or the bland and nonsensical assertion that nobody should lack health care in the richest nation on earth. However the attack is couched, it is mostly done without any analysis on or respect paid to the actual cause of the suffering or ills.

In the world according to progressivism, blame, divorced from understanding or causality always trumps reason and evidence. The emotional content behind fixing blame for an event or condition works against the ability to observe and analyze the facts of the situation dispassionately and determine the cause with accuracy. Without understanding blame is a lie and a danger. The progressive agenda is based on one of the oldest and most destructive lies known to the human race. Last fall, in my post Who is to Blame for Evil, I quoted René Girard from his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World:
"When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion." In these two short sentences Girard has pointed out the most important mistake of progressivism.

In the citadels of the progressive elites in America where Postmodernism has the most sway (Academia, The Mainstream Media the Liberal Political Elite) it has become standard practice to blame the capitalism, the military, the police, religion, the constitutional guarantees that insure the sanctity of the individual (free speech and the right to bear arms) and other social and cultural institutions for fuzzy edged but emotionally charged ills like “poverty”, “racism”, “sexism” “suffering” and “inequality” in order to distract attention from the “competitive and war-like” nature of human relations and thus maintain and perpetuate the lie of “normal goodness”. They do this because they know that without the lie of ‘normal goodness” the acid bath of relativism (and the anomie it causes) that has corroded the confidence, self-reliance, responsibility and individualism of the enlightenment quest for objectivity and knowledge looses its strength.

The problem is that capitalism, the military, the police, religion and the constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to bear arms are the very things that best protect and relieve us from those ills and dangers. It is like the man who only sees a physician when he is sick and so comes to blame doctors and hospitals for his illness. Which came first, the doctor or the illness? If there were no disease, there would be no doctors. If human relationships were devoid of competition and violence there would be no such thing as government, police, military or philosophy.

The progressive left blames our government for any deficit of human rights or for civil disorder- both of which are reflections of the very things they were created to prevent- or at least manage. While all governments, economic systems and religions are blame worthy, only the anarchist will find satisfaction in stopping there- and relativism is the avatar of anarchy. If no system is any better than any other system and no cultural mores more civilized than any other, then what is the use of defending any standard of behavior at all?

All forms of government put their trust in one or another way of neutralizing or channeling the best and the worst of the individual. Monarchy depends upon the purity of “The Good King” to decree peace and order while winning the love of his subjects. Theocracy looks to one man (or group of men) who claim to deliver the edict of God on earth. In a totalitarian regime, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “everyone, including (in theory, anyway) the dictator, can be sacrificed in the name of a superhuman law, a law of nature or a law of history…Totalitarianism (and there was never a totalitarian state that was not socialist) strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous.” Only republican democracy grants the individual the freedom to assume responsibility for his own actions and only capitalism gives the individual the opportunity to play an active role in determining his own stake in society and worth in the marketplace.

So why do the progressive accusations of blame against America seem valid? In fact many of them are, but only in a superficial way. It is quite true, for instance, that there are egregious abuses of the capitalist economy. Bankers take advantage of their power, stock brokers manipulate information, CEO’s bilk stockholders and companies abuse their workers. But these are less failures of the capitalist system than they are proof that people are not all good and will never behave perfectly no matter how perfect the system they live within.

This is the devastating power behind Rule 4 in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:
“Make opponents live up to their own book of rules… You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Alinsky was right, he was a radical and had no progressive illusions. He knew that using this tactic ruthlessly is the gateway to nihilism and anarchy. Progressives are far more dangerous because they have the illusion that by offering un-researched theory and unproven but “compassionate” policies to replace proven policies that have been circumvented makes them liberal.

Alinsky’s Rule Number 10 (The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”) limited his appeal to American Liberals who, at least, understood that you cannot tear down the existing structures of life without an alternative structure to propose without declaring yourself an anarchist.

And the Progressive alternative is the combination of Compassion, Selflessness and “The Good of Mankind” http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/07/most-savage-compassion.html armed with these three virtues, even the most pathetic socialist panderings can be made to look like real policies. Here is the argument for implementing a sweeping change and authorizing massive and detailed government intervention is health care:

Health care reform may or may not be a good idea but what “nice person” could possibly stand up to this emotional extortion? This is exactly the formula that brought us the welfare system that destroyed so many American families. It created (with a huge assist from venal bankers and brokers) the mortgage disaster of 2008. It was the irresistible force behind the passage of the grotesquely bloated stimulus package even though no single human being had ever read all of it or understood much of it. And it is now fueling the pressure being applied for the healthcare reform bill that President Obama tells us “must be passed”.

Or else what? Or else we will still have the best health care in the world but we will feel less virtuous and compassionate. The bind the progressive wants us to believe that to be opposed to the Progressive agenda, is to be without virtue, that by asking questions or making observations, you stand in the way of a more compassionate, selfless and better future for all of mankind. It puts you just a short step away from inhumanity and justifiable homicide. Just think about the vilification and character assassination of BushHitler, Cheney and Palin.

If you want to be counted as a good person, or a moral nation, everything you do has to fit the template of Compassion, Selflessness and “the good of mankind”. But the aggression and anger does not go away it just sublimates and gets expressed in other ways. As I pointed out in A Most Savage Compassion, “Virtue is more than a sham- it is the prim, ruthless face of coercion. It is aimed outward, at others, as a self-justification; an accusation and, above all, a yearning for Utopia.” Small wonder that progressives exhibit such self destructive, and cultural deconstructive rage against their own culture and people- they can’t express rage outward so it turns inward.

"Virtue" acts as an autoimmune disorder in which the body politick’s defenses are destroyed by progressivism which eats away the natural defenses from the inside while it encourages the external enemies to feast on the outside.

Progressive cant has it that the murderous stories of the bible, the piles of skeletal bodies of concentration camp victims, the American slave trade, The Inquisition and The Crusades, The 1,500 year Jihad of world conquest by Islam with its forced conversions, massacres, beheadings, stonings and honor killings are proof that the most hideous atrocities of human history have been committed because of Nation, Business or Religion that without those institutions, those things would never have happened. The truth is that evil things happen in spite of whatever Government, Business and Religion is in charge; evil happens because, as it is written in the bible, “the inclination in man's heart is evil from his youth.”

The heart of evil may be man’s, the blind assertion that people (humanity) are basically good may be the soul of evil but the progressive presumption that the pretense to Compassion, Selflessness and “the good of mankind” is by itself virtuous and the ultimate answer to evil, in the face of three and a half millennia of evidence to the contrary, is the strong right arm of evil. This is not even the deadly subterfuge of a Trojan Horse, it is the cowardly traitor who lets down the castle’s drawbridge in the dead of night and delivers his slumbering fellows into the hands of the enemy. And the enemy (whether in the form of Jihadist, moral disintegration or cultural decline) is not restrained by any such virtue.

Barack Hits the Nail on the Head

Barack Obama said it. He didn’t mean it the way I do but all the same…
“I have to say, I am surprised by the controversy…”

What did America expect?
When your only tool is a hammer everything in the world looks like a nail-
So, if a white policeman, in the course of making sure lives and property are protected, happens to have to ask a man who has made a very good living and a personal vendetta out of blaming America and white people, would you expect him not to make the most of an opportunity to prove himself right and secure days, weeks, maybe even months of media attention?

And if you elect a “community organizer” President of the United States he will use every trick in the book to divert the attention from facts (of which there were not many) and logic (if wind were logic this news conference would have been the general theory of relativity- but alas…) including using a media stooge to creat a diversion. After using a great many words and a tremendous amount of time to say very little about the great white elephant of a Health Reform Bill that he is trying to shove down our throats, He made sure that the last question came from a friendly face from a Chicago paper. The following clip shows him completing the final maneuver to get his media toady the microphone.

Right out of the Savage Compassion handbook. Take an emotionally stinky topic put it in a paper bag, light it on fire, throw it onto the porch, ring the doorbell then hide in the bushes and watch the fun. Who cares if you admit that you know nothing about what happened you can still blacken America’s name and accuse a police officer because “everybody knows” that this is the way it is.

So, yeah, Barak I am surprised by the controversy too. I have been expecting it. The only surprise on my part is that it is happening so soon, before the end of your year in office. I thought it might have taken longer for you to squander all that marvelous political capital that swept you into office. I surely expected that you would be politically savvy enough not to say a thing like that or to defend it a day later. But, then, when you are used to hammering the police as a community organizer they must all get to look like nails after a while…

A Most Savage Compassion

The doctor looked me in the eye and said, “Are you Mr. ben Moshe?”

“Yes” I said, barely able to hold my head up.”

“You poor bastard.” He said, with a slight smile.

It was a dreary morning in the spring of 1974, I was sitting in the waiting room at a hospital in Boston feeling as if I were going to die. I was 24 years old and had been, until the day before very healthy and strong. Even so, it was a shock to hear a doctor cal me a “poor bastard” even if he did say it with a touch of irony. It turns out that I would live but I had the worst case of Mononucleosis that he had ever diagnosed and he was sure I would have a very long and difficult recovery.

Judge Sotomayor has me thinking about that time in my life for a few reasons. For one thing, her handling of the New Haven Firefighters case brings back painful memories of that time for me.

Back then I was waiting for word from the one and only graduate school I wanted to attend. I had applied to University of California, Davis to do a PhD in Developmental Psychology. I had worked doggedly toward my dream goal for almost five years- three years of undergraduate study and a year and a half long master’s degree program. All that time I was focused on preparing myself for the program at UC Davis.

I was the son of a lower middle class family whose mother only graduated high school and whose father had gone to a technical school to learn a trade after high school. My family did not understand what I was doing or why and could not afford to support me in any case. So, that whole five years, I supported myself with a menial but meaningful job. I worked 36 hours per week at the Harvard University School of Public Health as an Animal Technician. I cleaned up monkey, rat and dog feces and fed them their food and assisted the researchers in the lab twelve hours a day, three days a week. I did this year-round while maintaining a full course load and dean’s list grades.

Even though it meant a transcontinental trip, which I could not afford, I had visited the Davis campus the year before, had extremely cordial meetings with both the head of the department and the guy (William Mason) with whom I most wanted to work.

My grades were excellent, my test scores were even better and my interests and Master’s Degree training matched up exactly with the work that was going on there. I had been told that UC Davis would be admitting three candidates for the PhD program that year and that I was sure to be in the top three, if not the best of all of them. I had pinned my hopes and focused all my energy on doing my PhD at U Cal Davis and I had earned my advancement.

In March, just before the acceptances were to be announced, the five years of full-time work and full course loads had taken their toll on my body and I came down with Mononucleosis. I was still in bed suffering the effects when the head of the department called me to tell me that, in the opinion of the committee, I was the second most qualified candidate, my heart leapt with excitement. I will never forget the cold, sickening feeling that washed over me as he continued with a “but”.

He didn’t say “You poor bastard” but he might as well have. “Ordinarily,” he said, “that would be good news.” It seemed as though the first candidate was a white male, as I am, and they was going to have to offer the other two places to a woman and a black man.

That all happened, by the way, the same year that Allen Bakke was turned down by the U Cal Davis medical school. I can only assume that Mr Bakke had more resources than I did and was able to harass U Cal with laws suits so that they finally did let him in and he got his MD.

I was rather more of a progressive liberal in 1974 than I am today. Unlike Bakke, I took "no" for an answer. I buried my disappointment and rage, telling myself that it wasan unlucky thing for me but that I had to understand the compassionate goals behind it. I was torn between outrage and selfless acquiescence. I found some sympathy from my friends and family but most did not want to talk through with me why something so compassionate ad selfless, something so obviously for the “good of mankind” could feel so hard and unfair to me. Who was I, after all, to insist on my right to achieve my dream when so many black scholars in the past had gone without their dreams? I was, in the end, able to move on, make a new plan, get a good job and build a career that, I dare say, has been more challenging and interesting than most, so I have rarely thought of this in the thirty odd years that have come and gone since.

I do not write this merely as a complaint. It is not just about the personal blow that it represented for me. I have, as I said before, gotten on with my life. No, what concerns me here is what it represents for the future of our nation. It has become more evident with the passage of 35 years that Affirmative Action, with its tinge of identity politics and frank quota policy was one in a (now long) series of strategic victories of the progressive movement.
The stated intentions of Progressivism are good, even noble, but there has always been something impersonal and intellectual about them that disturbs me. The goodness and nobility actually feel coercive and absolute. and it is often responsible for things that do not reflect the compassion to which it lays claim. This is because it is a kind of savage compassion that cares more about the collective idea that it has about “humanity” than it does about human beings. As Edna St Vincent Millay said, “I love humanity, but I hate people.”

In fact, Postmodernism, Communism, Socialism, Islam and Progressive Liberalism find their only common cause in their shared dread of The Individual. They share a fear, even unto loathing, no, even worse, unto denial, of the wants, the ambitions, the independence and the self-reliance of The Individual. When the culturally backward Arabs join the effete, postmodern/postchristian/postselfdefense/post good and evil Europeans in mocking Americans (at least before the election of Obama) as “arrogant” or “unilateral” or the ever-popular “cowboys” they are (were?) simply betraying the mixture of fear, fascination and envy they harbor for the first and only nation that was ever expressly “of the people, by the people and for the people”. It is true that we grew out of the proud tradition of English common law and the enlightenment “rights of man” thinkers, but only the American Experiment, created by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, et al, had the freedom from historic burdens, openness of space and isolation from continental intrigue to bring it to its truest fruition. America was and has, for most of her history been, the land in which The Individual has been most in control of his own destiny and most involved in the running of his government.

I need to pause here in order to draw some distinctions about a word that has lost its true original meaning. It is a word that is so central to the American spirit of liberty, fairness and openness that I cannot imagine recovering the momentum and purpose of America until it is reclaimed. There has developed a schism in the heart of America about the word liberal. I will not here try to expose the history and context of the schism, It is enough to say that there are two main camps of political liberals on the American stage today, the progressive liberals and the classical liberals.

Many analysts hold that personal property is the fault line that best defines the difference between the two. It is true that while, to a Classical Liberal, the right to own and dispose of his own legally obtained personal property is nearly absolute and for Progressives there are important and sweeping exceptions, this difference is really just a superficial trace of a deeper difference. The chief difference between progressive liberalism and classical liberalism is that progressives hold sacred, above all, the collective ( as in “The People” or “Humanity”) and the classical liberal holds The individual to be the salient, transcendent unit of value around whom the nation’s laws and practices are constructed.

Affirmative Action in, placing a fungible value like “diversity” and attempting to redress individual wrongs of the past by legalizing and committing institutionalized wrongs in the present, places itself and its proponents at the leading edge of the movement to deconstruct our culture of individual responsibility and self-reliance and replace it with the politics of compassion, selflessness and the collective good.

In their collectivist vision, Progressive Liberals believe in the “perfectibility” of human life and society by political means- that through legislation and social engineering, people can be molded into a society of peace, equality compassion. Whereas, a Classical Liberal understands that perfectibility is not and never will be the question, that the individual, flawed and unruly as he might be, is the elemental actor in “humanity” and no government that denies his evil tendencies and fails to balance them not just with laws and penalties but with incentives and goals will ultimately fail.

The progressive professes faith in the essential “goodness” of humanity and declares the confidence that given a “good” government and the necessary resources “the people” will be happy and good; peace, equality and contentment will reign. The problem for progressives is the same one that bedeviled Lenin when hr came to power in the Russian empire and renamed it The Soviet Union: that “humanity” is made up of people and people often disappoint those who put too much faith in their essential goodness.

But then, goodness is often defined according to the assumptions of the prevailing political system. For the Communist, goodness is someone who buys into the warped and bloated logic of the commissars and will work to exhaustion regardless of the proportion of his rewards. For the framers of The Constitution of the United States, goodness was an honest yeoman farmer or merchant who managed his affairs intelligently, dealt with his fellows fairly and stood ready to defend his own freedom.

Ask anyone who has been in business, observed arraignments in criminal courts or otherwise had to decide whom to trust and whom not to: people can be wonderful but they are not exclusively good- no matter what your definition of good is and no matter how you distort the definition.

I would make the argument that although the Progressive Liberal makes the claim that he “cares” more about humanity, the Classical liberal cares enough about people to understand and accept them with all of their faults and failings. Classical Liberalism is the only political movement that does this and has a form of government that works in harmony with the diversity of people.

The argument is often made that the intellectual elite in academia and the mainstream media largely belong to the progressive movement. Many of the most brilliant minds of the last two centuries have been progressives. So, how can so many of the finest minds be mistaken about something so basic as human nature? My answer would be that it is not a matter of pure brain power. It is my experience that I would rather trust people of average to very good mental ability in matters of ethics and morality than someone whose powers of intellect, persuasion and rationalizing are so great that they have been able to avoid confronting the bankruptcy of their creed. Their glibness and facility with abstracts may have made it possible for them to cover moral and ethical shortcomings in their lives with reasons and rationalizations. For diagnosing a disease, designing a bridge or solving the puzzle of DNA, give me someone with the most complex neurons and the fastest synapses. For an appreciation of what is good in life and timeless in humanity, however, give me an honest man or woman who has had to work for their self-respect and feeling of personal worth.

The Progressive movement takes as its touchstones of goodness these three ideas: compassion, selflessness and “the good of mankind”- Compassion because it reassures The Individual that his needs and feelings will be taken into account and cared for, Selflessness in order to nullify the privacy and personal property rights, and “The Good of Mankind” to replace religion with humanism. If you accept these three virtues uncritically you have accepted the primacy of the collective over your identity.

Since the evidence is everywhere that the basic assumption of “the goodness of man” is mistaken, however, The Progressive often takes it as a personal and overriding mission to portray himself and all other progressives as perfect paragons and embodiments of the essentially god man that proves the evidence wrong. There is no way a human being can actually live up to that kind of standard- so he adopts a “virtuous” persona or mask behind which he hides all his thoughts and actions that are not good.

Virtue, though, is a one-dimensional imitation of true goodness and requires an intricate network of exceptions and excuses to maintain the illusion that it is equal to goodness. Certain things must be ignored (as in the fact that Islam, not some limited subset of it, is to blame for much violence and evil and will not be absolved until it acknowledges guilt and repents for it) many facts must be distorted (as in moral relativism and multiculturalism) and others must be overblown (The greatness and goodness of Obama). These omissions and distortions are resistant of any form of logical of reality-based test. They only have to keep the winds of reality from blowing over the hollow façade of virtue. This we call political correctness.

The progressive demands that we believe his claim that he serves a higher truth and a loftier goal. He tries to force us to accept the idea that his ideas are unassailably good. And, even if they fail to be good, his virtuous pretentions are supposed to indemnify him from guilt or shame. Even if he make mistakes, behaves badly or cause harm, virtue will save him from blame. His “caring and good intentions” are supposed to trump the fact that he cares about the wrong things in the wrong way and his intentions are a humbug. Virtue is more than a sham- it is the prim, ruthless face of coercion. It is aimed outward, at others, as a self-justification; an accusation and, above all, a yearning for Utopia.

Utopia is an attack on the individual. There has never been a Utopia that could survive for long without crushing the individual. That is why “selflessness” is considered a key element of virtue. Hannah Arendt foresaw the destructiveness of progressive virtue many years ago. In her work On Revolution she wrote:
“Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau, and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp on the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and against his own will.”

All utopias are inspired by the well-intentioned hope that there is a way to defeat evil and “make people happy”. Communism was supposed to be a compassionate and selfless way to improve the lot of humanity. When the benevolent and compassionate communists took control of Russia, however, they found that when they tried to get people to understand that communism was a foolproof plan to eliminate hunger, unhappiness and inequality, there were many people who found that the plan really didn’t work for them.

These enemies of the “workers paradise” were denounced as counterrevolutionaries and portrayed as so decadent and corrupt that the most selfless and compassionate government ever conceived had to eliminate them. It took several decades, innumerable political murders, millions dead by government induced famine, the largest system of concentration camps in the history of the world and a demoralization of the population so deep that the Russians have a fertility rate below replacement levels, but the individuals of the Soviet Republics finally proved to be “unworthy” of the communist utopia on earth.

To the classical liberal, the goodness of humanity is not the question so there is no need for denial and pretense. He is for the Individual, and he understands that his happiness, his life and his prosperity is his own responsibility- subject to the choices that he himself makes. The proper function of politics and government for the Classical Liberal is to provide checks and balances on the destructive imperfections and temptations of human nature and, as far as is possible, to provide the opportunity to pursue those responsibilities in safety and security.

Thomas Paine wrote, “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence”. The notion that the flaws of the human vessel could be managed and even harnessed to create a self-regulating social organism inspired the framers of the constitution of The United States. The checks and balances built into the interplay of the three branches of government were designed precisely to mitigate the tyrannical impulses of human nature. They knew that the impulse to power and domination grows out of the natural and necessary human need for security and cannot (and should not!) be removed from or educated out of any human being. They understood that the most just society and the freest populace would be the one where the human spirit is accepted not solely for its grandeur or its squalor but for its potential for both. In the healthiest society everyone understands the limits of power and pains are taken so that no one is in a position to wield enough power to dominate all others.

Since the beginning of the Obama administration I have been reminded over and over of the words of advice offered to me by a ski instructor many years ago I was one of a class of intermediate skiers, all of us trying to break through our individual cycles of fear and doubt and learn to commit ourselves to the gravity and terrain- to lean forward downhill and take charge of our momentum rather than let it paralyze us with fear and send us tumbling. “The mountain is like a jealous mother.” He had told us, “If you lean back toward her instead of forward into the pull of gravity, she will reach out for you and pull you down into her arms.” Of course he was only trying to improve my skiing but the elemental wisdom of his words revealed a very basic truth: The sense of virtue or security derived from not committing whole heartedly (literally, throwing yourself into it) to the challenge of self-reliance, personal responsibility and critical thinking is dangerous - a sure guarantee that you will be drawn backwards and held fast b y the snares of dependancy, victimization and identity politics which are the other side of the "compassion equation".

The compassion of the Progressive Liberal is like the pull of the mountain. Welfare has destroyed the work ethic and family structure of most of the people who it calls “beneficiaries”. Affirmative action has done nothing so much as take very smart and motivated black and Hispanic young people like Sotomayor and the man who appointed her and, along with the education for which they were unprepared, also indoctrinated them into the deathly virtue of savage compassion that will continue to eat away at the vitality of the nation that made it possible for them to rise the way they did.

Sonia Sotomayor is not a friend of the common man and woman and she is not the wise Latina that she would like us to believe she is. Like the President who appointed her, she is a postmodern progressive, a dupe of the Progressive Liberal Elite Establishment that has shifted the political spectrum to the left by appropriating the name liberal and virtually prohibited honest debate by proscribing any speech and ideas that it labels as uncompassionate.

I look at my fellow classical liberals and say, “you poor bastards”. It is time to break the strangle hold of compassion by showing how savage and deadly it has become in service of a theory of humanity as opposed to a real understanding of and empathy for human beings.

Before There Was Pallywood...

There were the Blues Brothers of Moscow... This is not a Belushi and Akroyd spoof!
This picture shows two KGB guys stroking the tumescent egos of "progressive intellectuals and media people" back in the 1970's. It is from the first of these two clips from a 1984 interview with Yuri Bezmenov. Bezmenov was one of the KGB men and a former Novosti employee who later defected. He is interviewed here by the author and political lecturer G. Edward Griffin. These two clips are part of a complete set of a long interview that is on YouTube and well worth the time. I post these two parts here because they are priceless.

Keep in mind that Mahmoud Abbas and many other Palestinian leaders studied these techniques and philosophies at the very Patrice Lumumba University that Bezmenov reveals as a training center for "international terrorist groups".




Bezmenov could just as easily be speaking of today's media and "leaders". His characterizations are pungent and accurate. Here are two of my favorites:

On the media: "Most of these shmucks were afraid to loose their jobs...If you tell the truth about my country you will not last long as a correspondant at the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times...They are dishonest people who lack integrity… intellectual honesty."

On Senator Edward M. Kennedy (could apply to BHO et al just as well): "He thinks he is very smart…he is narrow minded egocentrical idiot who tries to earn his own popularity through participation in propaganda farces."

Iran: Where the Blood is real and "The World is Watching"

The crowds in Tehran and other major cities of Iran are no longer chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Jews”. It is exciting and even hopeful that there is, at least, a sizable element of the Iranian population that seems to want freedom from the Mullahs. The attention of much of the world is riveted on the events in Iran and rightly so. For the first time since 2001 it is possible for the world to imagine that the tidal wave of Islamic fascism that has ravaged the Islamic world and killed so many in the free world might someday soon begin to recede.

The courage of the Iranian people who are today facing riot batons, Kalashnikovs and tanks with their massive crowds and rocks cannot be ignored. There are many lessons they can teach us. Some are obvious- That freedom is worth fighting for- is the most obvious.

There are a lot of other lessons here that may not be so obvious. This blog was started because the screaming mobs and incessant chants of the Iranian street mobs of the early 1980’s brought a dark presence into the life of my daughter who was then only five years old. Because she is Jewish and American the chants of Death to America; Death to the Jews” had inspired one of her little school chums to threaten kill her. So I have been very interested to hear that the crowds are now reportedly shouting out: “Death to the dictator; Down with this falsified, populist government; People why are sitting aside, Iran has turned into Palestine”.

Palestine? Now, I know that for most of the protesters it is just a simple rhetorical device in which the Iranian mob is now equating the rulers under which they have lived for thirty years with the Israeli government and comparing themselves with the Palestinian refugees. It is a sad reminder that the complicity of the pusillanimous western media and the ineffectual Israeli public relations apparatus have allowed Israel to be maligned and used as a symbol of oppression. But there are also subtle resonances and cruel ironies in that chant.

The first and most stark of these ironies is that, in course of a week’s protests, in a country where western media has been largely deported and universally intimidated there has been more convincing evidence of brutality and bloodshed of innocent people by the government than in the entire sixty years of Israeli history.

Compare, if you will, the world famous bloodless blood libel of the al Durah incident with the heart breaking video of Neda, the young woman deliberately shot by government militia in Iran. Note: Before you click on the video from Iran, be advised, it is very disturbing.

The world was so very eager to be shocked by the al Durah incident in which there is never any blood visible either on the boy or the father who were both alleged to have been riddled with bullets:

al Durah


Yet that same world is oddly mute before the real blood pouring out of the Iranian girl from a single wound.


Or compare this photo of a young Iranian man who was shot in the leg
from Gaza.
with an example from Gaza I have already exposed:

Real blood and real pain in the body language of the Iranian makes stark contrast with the smirk on the face of the unbloodied Palestinian actor.

Why was al Durah such a "game breaker" against Israel, a country whose only sin was not defending herself from the libel intelligently enough, and the obviously real bloody murder of this girl is not stirring a tenth of the moral outrage against Iran? Picture an Obama reaction against Israel, had he been president at the time and than think about his treacly "The World is Watching" caution to the mullahs.

The ultimate irony, though, lies in the reports (verification needed) that among the government militias and police that are beating and shooting protesters there are cadres of Arabic speaking fighters. These are widely presumed to be Hamas and Hezbollah militants. It is not so much, then, that Iran has become Palestine. It is more that the morbid Islamist obsession with the destruction of Israel (based, of course, in their fear and loathing of the west) has, ironically, turned the tiny scapegoat into a real threat.

The Iranian people are suffering the result of thirty years of allowing themselves to be tricked into shouting “Death to America; Death to the Jews”. Many Iranians will tell you that they never supported the Islamist regime. But you never heard them complaining very much about the proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah that the mullahs trained and financed to surround and threaten Israel. Israel was always the “safety valve” the one thing that, even if they did not agree on it totally, they could find some neutral common ground in deploring “The Zionist Entity”. So, now those proxy armies are in the vanguard against the protesters. Being used to provide brutality against Iranians that fellow Iranians may be finding difficult to apply in the streets of their own cities.
So, yes, in a way, Iran has become Palestine: a place where violence and brutality is committed by Palestinians against people they have no real reason to hate under the mistaken impression that it will solve a problem that they have created for themselves. And they insist on turning their cultural problems into our security problems.

It is, at bottom, a cultural problem and unless we in The West break down our self-imposed prohibition against discussing cultural differences in a critical way, we will never be able to figure out how to protect ourselves. As Richard Landes ( in an excerpt from his forthcoming book now up at Augean Stables) wrote,"One of the more important dimensions of honor-shame self-help justice is the negative premium it places on self-criticism. The tendency of those who have been shamed by others is to blame the other for the insult." We shame them by our sucess and our liberty- they have a deep need to punish us for it.

President Obama told the Iranians "The World is Watching", but is he and "the world" really learning anything? Let's hope we can learn something from the Iranians this time...

Why We Must Fight

This is a mugshot of Nour Hadid. Nour lives near Chicago. She is a muslim woman who has confessed to beating her two-year-old niece, Bhia Hadid, to death over a four day period of torture.
Nour's husband, Alaeddin Hadid, who surely must have been away on a business trip or was so deeply immersed in the study of islamic texts that he did not notice the "head to toe"bruises, screams and what must (at least by the third day of beatings!) have been severely altered behavior, is very upset. Is he upset by the death of little Bhia? Is he devastated that his wife has confessed to this brutal, extended torture and murder?

No, actually, Alaeddin seems to be most upset by the photograph above. He prefers focussing and raging on the fact that his wife's mug shot was released by the police and published in the press. He is upset because the mug shot shows her without her Hijab and with her shoulders exposed by the tank top she was wearing. He has been quoted as saying that the police are "really going to be in big trouble" because this is against their religion. He's going to sue. Oh, really?

I want to make sure that I am not misunderstood. I have no doubt that there are many abusers and scumbags of Judeo-Christian heritage who would take this kind of "The best defense is a good offense" opening gambit. To be sure, something like it is often the the first rock under which criminals and scoundrels to try to burrow in order to avoid detection and punishment. Attempting to appear tougher and more aggrieved than the authorities and the people they protect and serve is an old standby, the only older one maybe "the devil made me do it". The thing is, this one about the humiliation and insult to Islam has come to be the signature offensive weapon of the anti-western Jihad.

And it goes way back before 9/11 when the media in the U.S. first asked the pathetic question "Why Do They Hate Us?". It is the underlying reason that the Islamic World can (will) not coexist peacefully with Israel. The existence of a country full of productive, egalitarian people who value individual rights and enterprise over religious honor and collective shame is a constant humiliation because Israeli society works and thrives in a way that Arab society (whether it is an Islamic "republic" or a secular dictatorship) simply can't. If you read the rants of bin Laden (and Qutb and al Banna before him) its clear that Alaeddin Hadid's gambit here falls directly within the long tradition of justifying violence against the the west and its institutions and claiming exemption from the cultural norms and laws of the western countries in which they choose to live by virtue of their Arab culture and its religious Doppelgänger, Islam.

This is deflection and as I have pointed out before deflection is the classic tactic of the domestic abuser. With deflection beaten and abused women may be convinced that they brought the abuse on themselves and victims of terror can be misled to think that the terrorist is, somehow justified. The only surprise here is that there are a great many people who cannot see it for what it is.

So classic is the abusive overtone here that, personally, I would not be surprised to find that Alaeddin either knew about the beatings as they were happening or even did them himself and forced his wife to take the rap.

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at some of Mr. Hadid's statements. He told the press that his wife, "never leaves the home without covering up...It is against our religion; we do not do this in our culture,"

No, what they do in Alaeddin's culture, apparently is called deflection and blaming the victim.

The best indication of what upsets him the most about the death of this little girl is this sentence:
"People have been calling me about this all day." The poor guy. There is nothing a member of an unreconstructed honor/shame culture hates more than having to deal with public knowledge of his wife savage beating murder of a two-year-old girl than a public display of her bare shoulders. Either one, if kept private, is not so bad.

He's not upset at what happened he is upset about the fact that it has become so public and that his wife's shoulders and hair were exposed.

Even in an Arab culture this would be bad but not an insult. Why is this such an insult now? In a time when anyone who cares to can view videos of on the internet of teenage moslem women being hung, stoned and beaten in various stages of undress for crimes like being seen with a male relative other than her husband of having been brutally raped and not being able to fight off her attackers. None of these have been denounced as insults to Islam- even though because they are committed in the name of religion, they should rightfully be denounced as insults to humanity.

Has anyone in the Islamic world recognized the humiliation and beheading of Daniel Pearl as an insult to Judaism? You will recall he was forced to declare himself a Jew just before his head was hacked from his living body. Did anyone object to the insult to Judeo-Christian civilization when American soldiers were dragged through he filthy streets of Mogadishu? Did we not bend ourselves into fantastic positions of contorted self-deprecation to avoid calling 9/11 (and Madrid, and Fiji and the Sbarro restaurant and Beslan and the thousands of other bloody Islamic attacks) an Islamic Insult to western civilization?

No. This run-of-the-mill mug shot is only an insult because it is a photo of a Muslim who lives and did something terrible in a country in which Islam is just another religion, not the supreme and unquestioned ruling authority in every aspect of life. It is an insult because it is proof that Islam is not SUPREME- at least not here, not yet.

This is what they cannot bear.

Too bad for the little girl with dozens of bruises, beaten until her little body just stopped breathing. Who cares about the accused wife who's husband was, at the very least complicit and very possibly culpable? They want us to have sympathy for the poor islamic supremacists who are just too pathetic, inept and despicable, and whose faith is in a god too absolute and a prophet and scripture too political to actually be universal and supreme.

If you had any question of the meaning of our fight against terror , here it is- We are up against a belief system in which individual human beings, their suffering, their lives, their ideas and their feelings are all side issues. In Islamic Arab Culture, Islam is the ultimate trump card. the frame of reference that makes all other considerations irrelevant. If you can square your behavior with Allah, if you can convince yourself and some ignorant constituency that you are acting in the service service of Allah ad his messenger, you can justify any atrocity, ignore any fact, commit any abuse, tell any lie and desecrate any other religion or code of ethics in the world and claim to be a righteous man. This is religious fascism.

When you get right down to the nub of the matter, when we get our own values right, Western Culture holds right and wrong or, more accurately, good and evil as the supreme criteria- not blind faith or politics or, even, science. We try to discriminate between good and evil in everything. We have chosen our religious leaders and our political leaders in our best effort to achieve The Good. Many of us have trouble telling the greater goods from the lesser ones and many of us, fail in very human ways to achieve the good for which we yearn. But we need to pay close attention to lessons like the one the Hadid family is teaching us.I began this blog with a post about my own daughter and her brush with the evil of Islamiist fascism and I don't think its an accident that this subject comes up over and over. We are different because we come from a different culture- and ours is better- because we care.

O(blah-blah)bama in the Balance

It is true that your great triumph to this point, the thing that has gotten you the presidency, is your ability to stand up and orate in a dignified and reassuring way. It is also true that this is a very important thing for a politician to be able to do. But you must be aware that this is not all that is going to be required from you.

That’s too bad because it is beginning to look like its the only thing you are good at.

Your promises of transparency disappeared in the pork-filled, un-read, pages of the first stimulus package that was cobbled together by people unnamed and railroaded through the legislature in the throes of trumped-up panic.
Your dedication to integrity has been exposed as a sham as you fill your administration with tax cheats and self-promoting ideologues.

You bow down to Saudi royalty as they smile in smug approval at your subservience, live under our protection and continue to make war on our values and undermine our civilization.

You hide behind a feckless Judenrat (Emmanuel, Boxer, et al) of compliant “warranting Jews” as you make flirtatious overtures to Iranian Mullahs. Then you just smile knowingly when their nasty little poppet-despot Achmadinejad insults you and America by throwing your words back at you. All the while he funds and fosters surrogate terror armies and continues to prepare to destroy our only real ally in the Middle East with a Nuclear Holocaust.

You cluck your tongue and issue empty cautions (they are not even strong enough to be called threats) as the lunatic despot of North Korea fires a ballistic missile over the very heads of our faithful ally Japan and in our general direction.
Even before you left the G20 meeting, the Europeans were getting tired of you. As you headed for the door you were already being called a windbag and a bore.

By the way, that sound you heard as you left Europe was the last few intelligent people in France and Germany letting out a gasp of recognition that they have gotten the ineffectual and self-deprecating America they thought they have wanted and are now more alone than they have been since 1941- with a more insidious and persistent enemy knocking at the gates.

You, my president, are looking less like The One and a great deal more like The Wizard of Oz. But here’s the catch, no one is going to kill the wicked witch for you. You are they guy we are all looking to. You are going to have to drop the Mr. McCawber routine and actually do something.

Sooner would be better than later, because one or two terror attacks in the US or a nuclear bomb blast over Tel Aviv will reverse the historical importance of your presidency- instead of the name of the first African American leader of the Free World O(blah-blah)bama will be forever known as the epitome of empty, impotent bloviation.