Dems Put Aside Resentments About Obama

by Jonathan S. Tobin

If four years ago, Barack Obama was the magnetic force around which Democrats rallied, today the relationship between the president and his party appears to be a bit cooler. The president still has his idolaters and they will be conspicuous in Charlotte this week. But, as Politico reports today, Democratic officeholders and many party activists regard the man whose re-election is the centerpiece of their efforts this year as a distant and somewhat aloof leader. While his current political strategy appears to be in tune with others on his ticket in terms of class warfare and demonizing the Republicans, they are keenly aware that he regards himself more as a “party of one” than the ringleader of a coalition. More interested in branding himself as above politics, he remains “oddly unenthusiastic about other Democrats.”

That has proven sufficient to create enough disgruntled sources for a piece that reinforces the already widespread impression about the president’s arrogance. Though rank and file voters may not care much about his attitude, those who have been asked to carry the water for the White House in Congress and vote for unpopular measures like the stimulus boondoggle or ObamaCare resent it. This has been a White House that loves to play favorites when it comes to the political fortunes of his party members. Yet they have little choice but to swallow his arrogance. They must fight for him or find themselves swamped by another Tea Party tide, as was the case in 2010.

Complaints about the White House are a perennial of electoral politics and have been heard every four years no matter which party is in power. But Obama’s behavior seems to be a particularly egregious example of a man at the top acquiring an “Après moi, le deluge,” outlook on his followers. He has satisfied some of his party’s key constituencies, especially those on the left, with his stands on gay marriage, oil pipelines, cap and trade and other environmental extremism as well as his executive order preventing the enforcement of immigration laws. But, as Politico puts it: “his allies say his timing on such issues suits his own needs, not those of the party.” Obama’s fealty to liberal ideology on those issues has helped his own fundraising but often left Democrats outside of deep blue enclaves on both coasts in a difficult position.

That hasn’t created a strong bond between the president and Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate. Reportedly, the president is as sick of House Leader Nancy Pelosi as the Republicans but he appears to respect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid because he doesn’t whine as much as the former speaker. However, Democrats know they have to put their resentments aside in the next two months. The only way to ensure that the Democrats hold onto the Senate and not lose more ground in the House is a Barack Obama victory in November. For these next few days and the fall campaign to follow, the backbiting will cease, as Democrats will extol the president’s virtues though without getting much love in return.

But should he prevail, expect these petty resentments to play a not-unimportant role in the four years that will follow. Second terms are always unpleasant affairs in which party loyalty to a lame duck wears thin. The simmering anger about the president’s arrogance will, no doubt, be vented as investigations into White House security leaks, “Fast and Furious” and other scandals to come, increase.

Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/09/02/dems-put-aside-resentments-about-obama/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Palestinians Reveal the Ties of Jews to Palestine

by Michael Curtis

The Palestinians have inadvertently contributed to the truth of the historic relationship of Jews with the land of Israel.

How? By asking the World Heritage Committee (WHC) of UNESCO to recognize Battir, a village about 5 miles west of Bethlehem, as a World Heritage Site and add it to the 936 sites already maintained by UNESCO. Unwittingly, the Palestinians have given the world the opportunity to learn about a historic relationship.

The Palestinians in October 2011 were granted full membership in UNESCO, which they hoped would lead to international recognition of a state of Palestine. As a consequence of this membership, they are a party to the proceedings of the WHC, which has 21 changing members, presently including Russia, Qatar, Algeria, and the United Arab Emirates, but not including the United States or Britain.

The request regarding the recognition of Battir is connected with the Palestinian's more ambitious claim to be accorded by UNESCO the heritage over the basilica of the Church of the Nativity, regarded as the birthplace of Jesus, and the Pilgrimage Route, Bethlehem. Already, UNESCO has designated two Jewish sacred sites -- Rachel's Tomb, the burial place of the matriarch Rachel, the wife of Jacob, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron -- not as Jewish holy sites, but as mosques. Only the United States voted against this proposal that was approved by 44 of the 58 members of the board of UNESCO.

The claim made by the Palestinians for Battir to be recognized as a Heritage Site is ostensibly based on its unusual topography of historic terraces and its Roman irrigation system. The Palestinian Authority (PA) asserts that that it is a "historically sensitive area ... where a millenary irrigation system is still in use to water the vegetable gardens of Battir." The village, which has grown in recent years to a population of 4,000, does have seven natural springs, an old Roman bath, and an irrigation system that waters fruit and vegetables.

However, the reason for the Palestinian request is more political than aesthetic. The PA argues that Israel is planning to build part of its security fence through the valley and that it will damage a site that it claims, in accordance with the UNESCO operational guidelines concerning the acceptance of World Heritage Sites, is "representative of a culture."

The Palestinian complaint is that the Israeli fence will deny the ability of the residents to enjoy their natural heritage and sustain the land. The village, they argue, should be maintained as a landmark of Palestinian and humanitarian heritage. The complaint has gone to the Israeli Supreme Court, which will adjudicate the question of the exact route of the fence, whether it should be rerouted, and whether the route is in accordance with Israeli security considerations.

All will almost certainly acknowledge the pleasant nature of the village and its picturesque character. Yet the Palestinians' ambitious claim is deficient in a number of ways. Though the Roman irrigation system is historically interesting, in fact, the village gets most of its water from the West Bank Water Department, the public water network established in 1980. The village has grown substantially since then, and the natural heritage there is threatened more by increased housing development than by any Israeli action. Moreover, pretty though the area might be, it does not meet the objective requirements of UNESCO -- namely, that a Heritage Site be a place of beauty, of importance, and of outstanding universal value.

But most important, the Palestinians have unwittingly drawn attention to the historic Jewish relationship with and claim to the land of Palestine. The original name of Battir was Betar, the last fortress of Bar Kochba (son of a star) in his revolt against the Romans in 132-135. The revolt led to the creation of an independent state of Israel over parts of Judea for over two years before being crushed by the Roman army of six legions. The result was the killing of thousands of Jews -- perhaps half a million -- and the loss of Israeli independence and of Jewish religious and political authority. The Romans did not allow the Jews to bury their dead in Betar.

A Jewish entity was not again the center of religious, cultural, and political life until the 20^th century, but Betar remained an important symbolic reminder of the Jewish past. The Revisionist Zionist youth movement, formed in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky, took its name from the fortress. The movement played a role in fighting against Nazi Germany in World War II. Interestingly, Jabotinsky's main political opponent, David Ben Gurion, is said by some to have taken his Hebrew name from one of the generals who fought in Betar.

Betar is a reminder of courage, of fighting against overwhelming odds, of struggle against those who would eliminate Jews, and of self-assertion in pursuit of independence. By their action, the Palestinians have allowed the international community to become aware of the Jewish history of Betar. Israelis, confronting the immediate menace of Iran, not to mention the existential threat and the relentless assault by many against their country, can once again evoke the historic lesson of Betar in their response to the danger they face. That response will now, as in the past, embody the words of Pericles's great funeral speech: "happiness requires freedom, and freedom requires courage."

Michael Curtis is author of Should Israel Exist? A Sovereign Nation under attack by the International Community.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/the_palestinians_reveal_the_ties_of_jews_to_palestine.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Huffington Post Whitewashes Sharia

by Pamela Geller

Last November, the Huffington Post published a piece that so fully displays the Islamic supremacist/enemedia strategy to full-on whitewash sharia and sell it to the American public that it is worth revisiting now -- especially since their agenda has advanced on all fronts since then, and the voices of truth are increasingly silenced and shut out of the public discourse.

Big broadcast news and print media offer Islamic supremacists and their leftist shills unfettered access to defame, lie about, smear, and give misleading information about freedom's fiercest defenders, without giving the victims of these vicious defamation campaigns the opportunity to rebut the false charges. This is twenty-first-century Goebbels-style propaganda. Islamic supremacists and their useful idiots on the left are given enormous power -- the kind of influence and access to deceive and mislead the American people that Nazi propagandists were given in Germany. The fact that people like Robert Spencer and me have any influence at all is a testament to the American people, who love freedom and seek out the truth.

And so we come to "Shariah Law: The Five Things Every Non-Muslim (and Muslim) Should Know," published by Qasim Rashid in the HuffPo. Rashid first tells us that "Shariah is the law of the Qur'an and literally means 'A path to life giving water.' In fact, the word Yarrah (i.e. the root of the Hebrew word Torah) means precisely the same thing. Therefore, Shariah is actually ingrained in Abrahamic tradition."

But my lawyer David Yerushalmi, who has represented me in numerous groundbreaking free speech cases, explains that Rashid is completely misrepresenting the Hebrew. According to Yerushalmi:

[Rashid's] linking the Hebrew root Y-R-H to sharia is absurd. He is trying to link sharia as "the right path" as in Islamic law to the Hebrew root for what is Torah. That is, the Hebrew root of Torah is H-R-H, meaning to instruct. A cognate of this is Y-R-H which is the root for shoot (as in shoot an arrow) or in some cases direct/instruct. But this has nothing to do with "the right path to the water" because Y-R-H can also mean a bad instruction or a shot off target. The only possible comparison at the level of meaning between sharia and a Hebrew word is to Halacha, which shares no etymological connection to sharia. It does have the same kind of meaning as in "the way" and is the word for Jewish law. The point of all of this is that "scholarship" on these matters by the Muslim Brotherhood and by leftists is almost always just wrong and bad.

Of course, Rashid is implying that sharia and Jewish law are essentially equivalent. That claim is a staple of the whitewashes of sharia in the American media and courts. But Yerushalmi explains why the two are not equivalent here. He says that sharia "is fundamentally and critically unlike Jewish law and any form of Christian canon or ecclesiastical law" primarily because "neither Jewish law nor Christian dogma permits the forceful imposition of a theocracy in lieu of representative government or the replacement of our constitution with theocratic legislation."

Sharia does. But Rashid claims that "Shariah forbids that it be imposed on any unwilling person. Islam's founder, Prophet Muhammad, demonstrated that Shariah may only be applied if people willingly apply it to themselves--never through forced government implementation." Apparently he would have us believe that anyone can opt out at any time? A thief can decide that he isn't willing to have his hand cut off? An adulteress can say, "No, thank you, I would prefer not to be stoned to death"? Can non-Muslims say, "I'd prefer not to be a dhimmi, and would like to have equal rights with the Muslims, please"?

Look at the two premier sharia states in the world today: Saudi Arabia and Iran. Both are repressive, coercive, authoritarian regimes with dismal human rights records. Nor do the oppressed Shi'ite minority in Saudi Arabia or the oppressed Bahá'ís in Iran ever get asked if they are willing before sharia restrictions are imposed upon them. If they dare to complain, life gets even worse for them.

But Rashid insists that sharia requires "absolute justice." The trick here is that sharia's idea of justice and Western principles of justice are very different. Under sharia, Muslims deny the freedom of speech, execute apostates from Islam, cut clitorises, beat and honor-kill women, and deny basic rights to non-Muslims, and more -- and they call it all justice.

Rashid then goes on to say that Muslims do not want sharia to rule America, that sharia is a personal relationship with God, and that religion must not be a matter of the state. Then why is it that everywhere sharia is in force now, and everywhere it has ever been adopted, it is a matter of the state, and it covers every aspect of political life, not just one's "personal relationship with God"? Qasim Rashid would have us believe that all the great Islamic empires of the Middle Ages, and Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan, all misunderstand sharia as having something to do with the governance of the state, and not just with private religious matters.

And no Muslims want sharia to rule America? Qasim Rashid didn't check with Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram, who wrote in "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America," the Brotherhood's strategy document for the U.S., that the Muslim Brothers "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

But ignoring that, Rashid then claims that "if Shariah was banned, then American Muslims could not marry, inherit, write wills or choose to divorce per Islam's guidelines. If similar restrictions were imposed for other faith groups, then no Minister could conduct a marriage ceremony, no Catholic Bishop could read the last rites and no Rabbi could perform circumcision on an infant male Jewish child--because these are all Judeo-Christian religious laws."

This is a hysterical false charge. Anti-sharia laws aren't designed to restrict Muslims' personal religious freedom. I don't care if you worship a stone; just don't stone me with it. The anti-sharia laws are designed to restrict the political and supremacist aspects of sharia -- the elements of Islamic law that are incompatible with our freedoms. That's all.

Rashid keeps lying from there, claiming that "[s]hariah law champions absolute freedom of conscience and freedom of religion." But just as sharia offers a different understanding of "justice" from that which prevails in the West, so also it has a different understanding of what constitutes "oppression." Under sharia, the dhimmis -- Jews, Christians, and other "People of the Book" in the Islamic state -- are subjugated under the rule of the Muslims and denied basic rights. They have to pay a special tax (jizya) from which Muslims are exempt. Reliance of the Traveler, a manual of Islamic jurisprudence certified as "reliable" by Egypt's Al-Azhar University, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, explains that non-Muslims are "forbidden to ring church bells or display crosses, recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays, and are forbidden to build new churches" (o.11.5 [6,7]). They're also forbidden to hold authority over Muslims, and so are relegated to the most menial jobs in society. If they complain about their lot or "insult" Islam or Muhammad, they can lawfully be killed. Qasim Rashid calls this being able to "worship in peace and without oppression."

Rashid then claims that oppressive sharia states "have ignored the fundamental tenet of justice inherent in Shariah Law, and have instead used Shariah as an excuse to gain power and sanction religious extremism." Rashid is forced to say this because sharia states are so savage. But his argument falls on one key point: if there is no real "Sharia compliant" country in the world today, why are all those countries that claim to be implementing sharia misinterpreting it in the same way? Sharia states today and throughout Islamic history have oppressed women and non-Muslims; executed heretics, apostates, blasphemers, gays, and others; and ruthlessly punished those who dared to speak out against all this. Those have been features of every single sharia state that has ever existed.

But Qasim Rashid wants you to believe that they all got sharia wrong. And at the PuffHo, there's a sucker born every minute.

Pamela Geller is the publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and the author of the WND Books title Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/the_huffington_post_whitewashes_sharia.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Arabs of South America

by Mike Konrad

Most Americans are unaware of this, but there is a massive Arab community in Latin America. Overall, 5% of Latin America is Arab in origin, which corresponds to roughly 25-30 million people. This can vary from a low of 2% in Uruguay to an astounding 9% in Argentina; but still you rarely hear about it, except for the occasional arrest of an al-Qaeda member. There is a good reason for this.

Latin-American Arabs are overwhelmingly Christian; usually they are Syrian Orthodox or Roman Catholic, the older liturgical churches which blend in seamlessly in the area. Those who aren't have often converted to Evangelical Christianity. Islam, though found, is not so common among them. Overall, probably 97% or more of Latin-American Arabs are Christians, though this can vary from country to country.

The reason we rarely hear about these Arabs is because they are, for the most part, Westernized Christians. It was this Christianity which became the instrument of their assimilation and success.

The Arabs in South America tend to be elites. In many ways, their rise has mirrored the success of Jews in the United States, and even surpassed them.

The richest man in the world is a Lebanese-Mexican, Carlos Slim. A president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, was of Syrian origin. Three presidents of Ecuador were of Lebanese origin as well as one president of Colombia, Julio Tubay. A vice president in Uruguay and another in Brazil were Lebanese. At least two Central American presidents were of Palestinian origin, and this list is nowhere near complete. The famous actress Salma Hayek was born a Lebanese-Mexican. Shakira is part-Lebanese, and so on. Dissertations have been written on Latin Arabs, but sadly, few are in English.

The Arabs started arriving in the mid-19^th century. Some, such as the Lebanese Maronite Catholics, were fleeing the genocidal assaults of Turkish and Druze Muslims, which would have exterminated them had it not been for French intervention in 1860. Later Maronites would flee PLO attempts at extermination. Others, such as Palestinian-Christians, fled Ottoman Turkish oppression and the military draft, where it was not safe to be a dhimmi in a Muslim Army. Syrian Christians left for similar reasons.

Almost none of this can be blamed on Zionists, whom the current fashion would accuse. The Arab flight started much too early. In the case of Palestinian-Christians, flight from Turkish rule removed a sizeable portion of the Christians out of the Holy Land before the Israeli-Muslim conflict even started. Yes, a few fled in 1948 and 1967, but these are not typical of the demographic.

In Brazil, the Arab presence is so ubiquitous that a Lebanese dish, kibbe, is now found all over Brazil, being sold by street vendors. A fast food restaurant chain called Habib's has 300 outlets all over the country and specializes in Lebanese food, along with basic fare. Arabic food is now considered part of Brazilian. cuisine, much as we Americans have adopted Italian pizza.

In Chile, which received massive Palestinian-Christian immigration, one family, the Yarur family, rose to produce 60% of Chile's textile manufacturing at one point. Palestinian-Christians are now 3% of Chile's population, slightly more than the percentage of Jews in the United States. Another 2% of Chile is either Lebanese or Syrian Christian. Most are now monolingual Spanish-speakers, with many marrying outside their communities into other ethnic groups to finish the melting pot dynamic. The process has gone both ways, and Chile's Syrian Orthodox Church now reports that "[t]here is also an increasing number of non-Arab Chileans who are joining Orthodoxy."

The Arabs are so thoroughly integrated into Chile that a commercial honoring their history ran during Chile's Bicentennial in 2010.

Chile's Palestinians, roughly 450,000-500,000, are the largest population of Christian-Palestinians on the planet, outnumbering their Christian cousins in Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) by a ratio of 3 to 1. Chilean-Palestinians are over 99% Christian, and they constitute about half the world's Palestinian Christians. Only the Mideast has more Palestinians, but these are mostly Muslim. Chile is the world center of Palestinian Christianity.

So what can we learn from this?

The first thing we can learn is that in contravention of both prejudice and political correctness, Latin-American Arabs are proof that Arabs are not the problem; rather, Islam is. When the Arab is divorced from Islam, he cannot help but succeed; where he remains in Islam, he cannot help but fail. Even in the Mideast, apart from oil wealth, the Muslims are almost always poorer than the Christians. Only the demand for oil sustains them.

Latin America, until recently, was rarely a model of good governance; yet the Latin Arab prospered and excelled. He had native talent. During this same period, poverty was the norm in the Arab world outside a few oil plutocracies. The only difference between the two was religious affiliation, and this cannot be ignored. Nor is this racial prejudice, since we are talking about the same people. The only distinguishing feature is that Latin America's Arabs are overwhelmingly Christian.

The success of the Irish, Sicilians, and Jews in America demonstrated that their impoverished condition in Europe was the result of oppression, and not some endemic racial or religious characteristic. The distinguishing feature was liberty vs. tyranny.

But Latin-American governments were often as corrupt as any Arab one. The only distinguishing feature between successful Latin Arabs and Old-World Arabs was religion, and we are forced to conclude that Islam is the source of Arab backwardness.

This is obvious, yet it remains unspoken.

Christianity, until the 7^th century, was the dominant religion among the Arabs. Over time, it has dropped off. Today, 90% of Syrians and Palestinians are Muslims. Lebanon, which used to be Christian, is now majority-Muslim, with the Christians fleeing. It has been offered that the Christians have a lower birth rate, but the fact is that most just fled. Were the Syrian Orthodox and the Maronites in Latin America reintroduced to the Mideast, Syria and Lebanon would be majority-Christian; but no sane Latin Arab would want to return, especially now that stable democracy is the norm in their Latin countries.

Twenty-five to thirty million highly successful Latin-Arabs who prospered under a range of governments which ran the gamut from tyranny to liberty, from European Argentina to Mestizo Mexico, prove that the only thing which can hold an Arab back is Islam.

However, something is arising which is troubling.

Iranian and Islamic oil money has waltzed in to South America on a campaign of Islamization and anti-Zionism. Being overwhelmingly Christian, one would expect Latin Arabs to be immune to Islamic persuasion, and every indication is that they are. Yet, though the Saudis and Iranians can't convert many of these Latin-Arabs to Islam, they have successfully converted a number of them to a virulent anti-Zionism.

The Saudis have financed the building of the King Fahd Mosque in Buenos Aires, even though only roughly 1% of Argentina is Muslim, and the vast majority of those are non-practicing, according to the Argentine academics Pedro Brieger and Enrique Herszkowich, who wrote, "a realistic guess for the Muslim population of Buenos Aires might be around 4,500, far fewer than the number projected by some Muslim officials."

From this mosque, the Islamic Center of the Republic of Argentina (CIRA) has already been instrumental in the cancelation of a popular secular Arab-Argentine program to make way for a Saudi-financed Muslim show called El cálamo y su mensaje (The Quill and Its Message). The show is now on Argentine Public TV, even though the Arab-Argentine community wanted no part of it and protested the cancelation.

The Iranians have now set up HispanTV, an Iranian propaganda network aimed at Latin America. Iran's English equivalent, PressTV, was banned from broadcasting to Britain recently because of it propaganda excesses. But HispanTV marches on.

We should not be surprised to find that Chile's Palestinian community is starting to be radicalized against Israel, and in favor of an increasingly Islamic Palestinian cause. Though their ancestors fled Islam, they have now become the Western Christian face of pro-Palestinian propaganda in South America.

What has to be remembered is that in Latin America, while there are Jewish communities, particularly in Argentina, they have nowhere near the clout of AIPAC or the ADL, and so this Islamic propaganda can float in uncontested -- and, in Venezuela's case, with the support of the Chávez government. If one thinks Zionist groups have too much power in America, one should examine South America, where Arab lies go unaddressed, and see the difference. It is quite ugly.

The West has to fight for Latin America. The Islamic groups came in almost unopposed to propagandize the area. While the USA and Israel slept, the propaganda machine marched in. We cannot lay blame for all of this on Hugo Chávez and his partnership with Iran. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and we ignored the arena. The Muslims knew they had kinsmen in the West -- albeit infidels -- and sent out feelers. Al-Jazeera regularly reports on South American news. Why don't our networks?

The USA, and Israel, must march in with a concerted effort. They must remind the Latin Arabs why they fled to South America in the first place. They must be as politically incorrect about it as the Muslims are. The USA must dispense with religious neutrality on this issue, or we will lose.

Right now, Chile's Palestinians are an elite, and they should be disabused of their anti-Zionism. They have the potential of greatly helping or hurting Israel, as they are the standard-bearers of the Palestinian cause in South America. Some hard bargaining should be attempted.

Jewish organizations might consider sponsoring some Christians in the contested areas to emigrate to Chile. These Christians are stuck in a nasty situation, between two camps to which they do not belong. Whichever side prevails in the Holy Land, the Christians have to know they will be a minority. Prosperity in Chile would be an attractive alternative.

Brazil has surpassed Britain in economic power. Chile is now first-world. Argentina is borderline first-world. South America is rising. It should not be left to Muslim propaganda to determine its worldview.

Mercifully, the history of the Arabs in South America is helpful. They need only be reminded of why they are in South America in the first place.

As for the West, we should be apprised that South America is living proof that Islam is what is destroying the Arabs. In South America, the Arabs, freed from Islam, have risen to an enviable elite status. This has to be trumpeted to the world ... and to the Islamic Ummah.

South America presents the world with a different view of what it means to be Arab: successful, rich, elite, and respected. All of this springs from their Christianity. There is no reason why the Muslim world should not be told the reason for their own failures, and the solution: Christianity.

There is one shining spot in all of this. There is a massive Evangelical revival going on in South America. It has even swept up some Arab Christians. Brazil is about ready to flip from Catholicism. Chile is now 15% Evangelical. Even Catholic Argentina is being affected. These Evangelicals are very pro-Israel, and Israel is starting to take notice, albeit far too late.

Mike Konrad is American -- not Hispanic, Latin, or Jewish -- and runs a website latinarabia.com, where he examines this Latin-Arab subculture. The website is in preliminary stages. He first has to improve his Spanish.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/the_arabs_of_south_america.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Media Madness, and the Reckoning

by Clarice Feldman

Last week a line was crossed, and full blown insanity manifested itself in the formerly-mainstream media. My friend JMH is a model of a temperate media consumer, but watching the coverage of the Republican convention, she could not contain her fury:

Something just snapped today, when I read about the race baiters at MSNBC not even airing any of the Convention's minority speakers. Even if Artur Davis weren't black, how is it a non-story, when the guy who seconded Obama's nomination ends up with a prime time spot on the GOP Convention stage? Ditto for covering Ted Cruz, who pulled off the most spectacular extremist Tea Party upsets of campaign 2012. It's not just MSNBC either; NBC "curated" both of them right out of "some of the notable speeches" in Tampa.

I know, I know. I know. But it's the brazenness of it all that just stuns me, and keeps on stunning me, no matter how prepared to expect it I should be by now. Today, however, I'm also stunned by just how deep the reservoir of my own anger about it has become. It's so blinding that I can't even concentrate on anything else.

That was early in the convention. There was much more to be furious about as the coverage continued.

Yahoo Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian, formerly at ABC where he produced this famous and fact free ambush of Sarah Palin, mistakenly thought he was off mic when he said Ann and Mitt Romney had no problem with African Americans suffering as a result of hurricane Isaac. They're not concerned at all. "They're happy to have a party with black people drowning," As it turned out, Mitt Romney headed out to flood stricken Louisiana at the close of the convention, and only after that became known did Obama cancel his fund raising plans elsewhere and head out there, too.

In fact, Obama has a history of ignoring all citizens suffering from catastrophe. In 2009 when an ice storm killed 42 and left millions of Americans without power or water or shelter, Obama hosted a lavish Super Bowl cocktail party with $100/lb Wagyu beef appetizers. Worse, as Chalian was leveling that mendacious, hate-filled charge, Obama was chatting online on Reddit with his supporters, not flying to the scene of the destruction.

On hearing Chalian was fired, PBS's Gwen Ifill whose outrageously biased moderation in the 2008 debates set a new low, rushed to his defense:

gwen ifill ‏@pbsgwen
One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God's gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid
11:32 AM - 29 Aug 12 · Details"

https://twitter.com/pbsgwen

Like JMH, Roger L. Simon was astonished at the degree of the media's racism and called it pathological:

Racism is stalking the Republican Convention in Tampa. But it's not from the Republicans. It's from the mainstream media.

First it was MSNBC treating convention speakers Artur Davis, Mia Love, and Ted Cruz like nonpersons. And now it's Yahoo! Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian getting caught on an ABC webcast saying Mitt Romney would be "happy to have a party when black people drown."

Chalian, not surprisingly, was fired almost immediately when the word got out, but the climate in which he would make such an insane statement is very much alive and well. Why would anyone dream of saying such a thing in a semi-public situation if he didn't feel safe and among friends?

The left/liberal need to think Republicans and conservatives racists is more than just projection. At this point, it is nothing short of a mental illness. It is so far divorced from reality, it has to be pathological. No longer are these people able to observe reality with anything close to impartiality. We are not in the world of politics, ladies and gentlemen. We are in the world Freud, Jung, Adler, and people bouncing off walls.

He's right of course.

How divorced from reality is the claim that Republicans and conservatives are racists? Bgates corrects the media narrative.

41 voting members of the House of Representatives are black.

39 of them are Democrats. (Those numbers would be 42 and 40 save for the death of a Rep in March.)

Given that Democrats famously spurn color blindness to embrace affirmative action, how many of those 39 do you suppose come from majority-white districts?

Did you guess four?

Meanwhile, there are two black Republicans in the House. They were elected from districts that are 82% and 75% white, whiter than any district that sent a black Democrat to the 112th Congress. Apparently an overwhelmingly white electorate is no bar to a black candidate - so long as the overwhelmingly white electorate is also majority Republican.

Tammy Bruce offers up a plausible theory to explain the media's insanity, insanity so widespread even the occasionally more temperate Juan Williams was shamefully swept up in it:

I knew the liberal establishment would have a meltdown swathed in violence and depravity as they realized they were being rejected, and that time has arrived. Just after last night's RNC convention liberals wasted no time attacking the women they see as a threat. The truth of the matter, of course, is that liberals destroyed their own bizarre vision for the future with actions that most of America is now rejecting. Instead of looking in the mirror, they've chosen to target Mia Love and Ann Romney, two obvious conservative superstars who have appeal across the political and socio-economic spectrum.

The first indication of how vile liberals will get comes from Juan Williams who called Mrs. Romney a "Corporate Wife" last night after he speech. Talk about 'coded phrases'! A 'corporate wife' is a phrase used on the left for a woman who has married for money and plays a role so she'll continue to get money. In other words, a lying whore. Both Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly sounded shocked. Immediately after that remarkable speech last night that's where Williams went. I then saw tweets with the same general message. This had clearly been a messaging decision prior to Ann's speech. I don't think they counted on the speech being as distinctive and as strong as it was.

Besides being pathological, the media approach is clearly coordinated , and understandably so given the incestuous relationships between so many in the media and the Democratic party detailed by Erick Erickson at redstate.

I wonder if any of these people have noticed that the Republican Party has more elected Hispanic Congressmen and Governors than the Democrats?

It is not an accident that the media, immediately after the Democrats started pushing out the War on Women, began running stories about the GOP's hostility to women. It is now not an accident that the media, led by NBC and the Politico (which also partnered on that pathetic GOP primary debate), would peddle out the GOP and race stories.

It is far too much to be a coincidence that the Politico and NBC have ties, sometimes in the same bed, to Democrat and leftwing activists and then hop out of bed on the same page as the Democrats' talking points.

Well, if they watched the convention on the networks, and not CSPAN, convention viewers might have missed Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Susana Martinez' stirring speeches. Watch this video to see how NBC covered some yammering by Democrat shill Andrea Mitchell instead of the first three minutes of Sen. Rubio's barnburner speech.

Quite frankly, criticism of Obama is not racism no matter that people like Lawrence O'Donnell and Chris Matthews hear dog whistles of racism in everything. (Matthews laughably went so far as to suggest he lives in D.C. and therefore has a firsthand knowledge others don't of blacks. In fact, he is paid millions of dollars a year by NBC to spew his mad commentary and lives in a very white affluent suburb in which with 2,000 residents there are a total of 10 black residents.) So out-of control is Matthews that after the RNC wrapped up, he got into a 2 AM public verbal altercation in Tampa, asking a group of Republicans if they were at a "douchebag convention."

Since we now know that half a million dollars in Stimulus money was funneled to MSNBC for commercials on the Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann shows, advertising Job Corps training that produced no jobs, MSNBC henceforth should be known as "The semi-official Obama Administration News Agency," much like Al Ahram in Egypt.

Investors Business Daily's cartoonist Michael Ramirez ran a cartoon of a dog labeled "Media" making love to Obama's leg. Come to think of it maybe that's a true picture, a metamorphosis that explains why so many of them hear "dog whistles" of racism that the rest of us cannot hear, drawing that notion from language that in no rational way warrants that characterization.

The media madness this past week truly was beyond parody. If you doubt me read this exchange between MSNBC's Martin Bashir and Lawrence O'Donnell in which reference to Obama's golfing is said to be a "racial double entendre" suggesting that he's like Tiger Woods "famous for chasing cocktail waitresses".

(These two cuckoos aren't alone. If you want to see how idiotic P.C. language codes are becoming check out this historically inaccurate explanation by a highly paid Department of State official as to why terms like "rule of thumb" and "hold down the fort are racially insensitive and should be avoided. It's impossible not to laugh out loud until you realize how much tax revenues go to pay him and others like him to peddle this ahistoric claptrap.)

As the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto reminds us:

[quote] Obama's journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician's actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn't say that. Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: "We don't like black people."

It's television manufacturing a virtual reality, which is to say unreality, a dangerous state of affairs. Sultan Knish has written the most brilliant essay explaining this . Here's but a tiny sample. You really must read it all:

The people who decided to make Obama popular did so through constant repetition that translated into the peer pressure of the trend. Obama became a trending topic and everyone followed along because in an unreal world, you follow the unreal leader.

Obama is fake, his popularity is fake, but it's also real, because fake is now the ultimate reality. The purveyors of fakeness have demonstrated their ability to transform the unreal into the real through manufactured consensus. By insisting that something unpopular was popular often enough, they made it popular. And by insisting that something popular is really unpopular, they did the opposite. [snip]

There is a very specific category of people who are uncomfortable with the way things are and for the most people these are the people who have ongoing forcible contact with realities that don't go away when the talking head begins jabbering, the memes begin spewing and the trending topics trend. These are the people who work for a living outside the bubble, who know that external safety nets are unreliable and that they are always on the edge of something... even if they don't always know what. [snip]

When all the bubbles of rhetoric pop, there are still the hard unpleasant realities to deal with. Bailouts and money pits can only bury them for so long. Governments sending money to banks and swapping worthless commodities that only exist in the theory of a theory only work for as long as people believe in them.

Even an unreal economy reported on by an unreal media cheering on an unreal leader can only run for so long until reality punches through the illusion, the curtain falls, the magicians scramble off the stage with rabbits and doves tucked into their pants, and everyone wakes up to realize that the dream is over and we realize that we are entering a world where the stories no longer matter and history is about to begin.

Tune out the media or find yourself either enraged or lulled into unreality -- brainwashed as it were. You can watch important events on CSPAN and easily access transcripts and videos of speeches and debates online. Time to stop the insanity provided by the media intermediaries and keep your mind clear.

For some time now, professor Glenn Reynolds, known to many as Instapundit, has talked about "preference cascades" I think the insanity of the media is triggered by their sense that a preference cascade is building up in the US which will wash them and their political clients out to sea.

What is a "preference cascade"?

As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. In a totalitarian society, the dissenter fears that if he speaks up, his will be a lone voice, easily squashed by the enforcers of the regime. When dissenters realize they are not alone, and the true strength of their numbers becomes apparent, "invincible" regimes vanish with astonishing speed.

The same effect can occur without brutal oppression, when fear of ostracism and ridicule cause people to suppress their own doubts. This kind of preference falsification requires strict discipline from the makers of opinion. Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a "Fresh Air" listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.

Why do I think the media manufactured consensus is unraveling and the cascade begun?

I see signs of it everywhere. There was the 2010 wipeout of the Democrats in Congress and statehouses. There was the massive consumer Chick-fil-A response to the boycott movement, Obama's campaign staff has had a hard time meeting fund raising goals and filling the stands for his appearances. This week -- respecting his speech at the DNC convention -- they are even resorting to giving tickets to the event away free in bars.

And this: Voter ID in the polls is grossly oversampling Democrats. And even Democratic pollsters are giving away the game. Polls showing Obama in the lead are, I believe, phony as his make believe large twitter following which it turns out is mostly an online audience he paid for.

Here's Stephen Green:

Democracy Corps - that's James Carville and Stan Greenberg's polling outfit - has Romney up 16 points with independents.

16 points.

Voter ID typically runs low-to-mid 30s for Republicans and Democrats alike, leaving the remainder as Independents. What's that mean? If Carville and Greenberg have it right (and many other polls show Romney way up with Indies), it can mean only one thing: Democrats are being oversampled, and grossly.

Admittedly, voter ID is a tricky thing to measure, and trickier still to sample. But most polls I've seen have had D samples the same or higher than in 2008, when Black Jesus was still bringing us the hope and change and lowering the oceans and all that stuff. And they've R samples the same or lower than 2008, even though the GOP managed to flip 63 House seats in 2010.

The game is rigged. Don't let that stop you from playing.

It could be just me -- after all I never watch television -- but my thought is that a convention that begins with a jummah call to Moslem prayer and features Sandra Fluke demanding we pay for her contraceptive costs is not going to turn this around for the President or his media friends.

Clarice Feldman

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/media_madness_and_the_reckoning.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

More Than Half of London’s Babies are Born to Foreign Mothers

by Daniel Greenfield

Speaking at a rally marking 9/11, Anjem Choudary bragged that a birth explosion would let followers of Islam take control of the country.

The mob bayed and cheered as he said: “About 500 people in Britain become Muslim every day.

“The Home Office say there are 1.5 million Muslims but there were 1.5million ten years ago. Since then our brothers in Bethnal Green, Whitechapel and other places have had eight or nine children each. Eight children here, ten children, 15 children. There must be at least six million people.

“It may be by pure conversion that Britain will become an Islamic state. We may never need to conquer it from the outside.”

How on target is Choudary?

The demographic war isn’t completely lost, but it’s not going all that well either.

A total of 184,000 children were born in these circumstances, with almost half of them in London, which has a foreign-born mother rate of 56.7 per cent, far above the national average of 25.5 per cent. According to official figures, the average hospital birth can cost £1,600, meaning the total cost to the NHS of these would have been at least £30million. Some of the women will have been born abroad and settled in the UK but a number will have visited just to use the NHS.

Health tourism is actually the best case scenario for the UK since the costs are going to be much higher for raising these children in a cradle-to-grave state than for just popping in and out of the country. And there’s the demographic threat.

It came as it was also announced that net migration to the UK is still at 216,000 a year, which is still double the Government’s 100,000 target.

Women born in the UK had 1,957 fewer babies in 2011 compared with the previous year, in a reversal of rising numbers of births to UK-born women since 2002.

Meanwhile mothers born outside the UK had 2,702 more babies, in line with a trend since 1995 for the number of births to women who came to the UK from abroad to rise year-on-year.

The ONS said: ‘This is the highest proportion of births to mothers born outside the UK since the collection of parents’ country of birth was introduced at birth registration in 1969.

Only 4 of the top 10 countries on the list are Muslim or heavily Muslim, but they are also 5 of the top 6 countries and the differences are huge with over 50,000 of the babies on the top 10 list coming from Muslim or heavily Muslim countries while non-Muslim countries accounted for less than 40,000.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/more-than-half-of-londons-babies-are-born-to-foreign-mothers/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Muslim Brotherhood Now Has Right to Declare War

by Daniel Greenfield

The authority to declare war will be stripped from the Supreme Council of Armed Forces and given to the president, Egypt’s constitutional assembly decided. To declare war, the president will require the consent of the National Defense Council, a security body revived in June by the army and comprising political and military figures. It will also require the consent of the People’s Assembly, Egypt’s parliament, but not that of SCAF.

What this means is that the Muslim Brotherhood now has the unilateral ability to go to war with Israel or any other country at any time of its choosing. The Egyptian military will receive its marching orders. With troops concentrations in the Sinai and the Muslim Brotherhood negotiating with Salafis to form an alliance with Sinai Bedouins… the Sinai is about to turn into Gaza.

Terrorist attacks on Israel will come out of the Sinai. Israeli responses will be met with threats of war from Egypt. Eventually an incident may ignite the spark that the Muslim Brotherhood is looking for.

Picture this.

And according to Magda Kankil of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, Egypt will move to a ration card system for bread as well. [5] If Egyptians want to eat, or cook dinner with propane, they can apply for a ration card to the local Muslim Brotherhood office.

Egypt spends roughly US$25 billion a year on fuel, and the present subsidy of 95.5 Egyptian pounds is a life-and-death matter for the Egyptian poor. According to the Wall Street Journal on March 22, “Subsidies already absorb at least 28% of Egypt’s budget outlay of 476 billion Egyptian pounds ($79 billion). [6] About two-thirds of that goes toward fuel and energy, with the rest aimed at reducing food prices, particularly for wheat.”

A massive reduction in subsidies combined with rationing will put the existence of half of Egypt’s people under the immediate control of the state.

Now when things are at their worst, an incident occurs, probably manufactured in Egypt. Israel responds. Egypt declares war, diverting attention from domestic chaos. When the dust settles, the Muslim Brotherhood conducts a massive purge of domestic Zionist collaborators imprisoning most of their liberal opposition.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-brotherhood-now-has-right-to-declare-war/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

International Community Must Set Clear Red Lines for Iran

by Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

Netanyahu speaking at his Sunday morning cabinet meeting. | Photo credit: AFP

The international community is not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday at the weekly cabinet meeting.

He said the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran "confirms what we have been saying for some time — while the international sanctions are indeed making things difficult for the Iranian economy, they are not delaying the progress of the Iranian nuclear project."

"The Iranians are using the talks with the major powers to gain time in order to advance their nuclear project. I believe that the truth must be told — the international community is not setting Iran a clear red line and Iran does not see international determination to stop its nuclear project,” Netanyahu said. "Until Iran sees a clear red line and such determination, it will not stop the progress of its nuclear project — and Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons."

Meanwhile, former Kadima MK Tzachi Hanegbi, a Netanyahu confidant, made similar statements earlier Sunday when he told Israel Radio that it appeared the U.S. would not step up to attack Iran "and we will have to rely on ourselves."

Hanegbi, who previously served as head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee for the Kadima party and is reportedly on his way back into the Likud, said the recent IAEA report showed, despite claims to the contrary, that time was running out as Iran is making rapid advances in its nuclear program and continues enriching uranium to high levels.

Speaking at a city hall meeting in northern Israel a day earlier, Hanegbi said that U.S. President Barack Obama had yet to present a credible military threat that could deter Iran from seeking nuclear weapons.

"I don't see that there is a credible threat for American action; the rhetoric of the U.S. president is too vague, very amorphous ... I don't see that (Obama's words) will be translated into more tangible intentions and therefore this is probably why the Iranians don't take it seriously, they speak out against it and they dismiss it," Hanegbi said.

He stressed that a forthright U.S. military threat was the most effective way to stop Iran.

"If there will not be a credible threat of military action, there probably won't be another way to persuade the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. The most credible threat is the American threat, the American ability and its might are far more worrisome for the Iranians than Israel's," Hanegbi said.

But he added that Israeli action could also be effective in causing Iran to abandon its nuclear enrichment ambitions.

"Is the Israeli threat credible? I am not able ... to tell the Iranians about our capabilities but the fact that I am talking about it shows that I do not think it is unrealistic," Hanegbi said.

In his interview with Israel Radio on Sunday, the former MK, who quit the opposition Kadima party in July to join up with Likud and Netanyahu, said that Washington does not oppose an Israeli strike on Iran and that the disputes between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations were overblown.

He added that tensions between the two countries and statements last week by U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey opposing an Israeli attack stem from Washington's concern ahead of the U.S. presidential elections that an Israeli strike would hurt the chances of one of the candidates to become president.

In a different tone, former Supreme Court Justice Eliyahu Winograd, who headed a committee which investigated mistakes made during the Second Lebanon War, spoke out against a possible unilateral attack on Iran, saying Sunday that it could "endanger the future of Israel."

In a special interview with Army Radio, Winograd expressed concern over whether Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had followed lessons learned from the Second Lebanon War, as presented in the Winograd Committee's report.

"I am not convinced that the decision-makers ... who now need to decide whether to attack Iran, will implement the findings of that report," he said. "If that is the case, we are all in big trouble."

In a harsh criticism of Netanyahu and Barak, Winograd said, "You're going to endanger our entire country, everything we have built. Both the country physically and its economy."

Responding to what Barak predicted would be the number of lives lost in an Iranian counter-attack against Israel, Wingorad said, "No more than 500 dead? Did you count them? How do you know? ... I do not know what [Netanyahu and Barak's] considerations are, but this is irresponsibility to the first degree."

In response to Winograd's comments, Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) said, "I am astonished by the honorable judge, who apparently forgot that a nuclear Iran which has threatened to destroy Israel is a much greater danger to the future of the country. Even if the U.S. decided to lead an attack on Iran, we would, unfortunately, still be hit with missiles, as happened during the war in Iraq."

Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=5642

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

2,000 Road Terror Attacks Since January Says IDF

by Chana Ya'ar

A rock used for throwing in attacks by PA Arabs

Israel news photo: HLJ

Israeli motorists once again faced the challenge of dodging potentially lethal mini-missiles on the roads of Judea on Sunday afternoon in a fresh round of road terror, after more than 2,000 such attacks this year alone.

Palestinian Authority Arabs hurled large, irregularly shaped, sharp-edged rocks at vehicles with Israeli license plates traveling along Highway 60 near Hevron.

No one was physically hurt in the attack reported to the police, and the vehicle was not damaged. Nevertheless, the experience is traumatizing, at the least.

Just two days ago, a person was injured Thursday night in a massive rock attack on vehicles with Israeli license plates traveling along the northern section of Highway 60.

The attack took place in the Binyamin region, between the Jewish community of Ofra and Wadi Charmiya, according to the Tatzpit news agency. The victim was treated at the scene before being evacuated to the hospital.

A number of vehicles suffered serious damage in the barrage of attacks. IDF troops fanned out to search for the perpetrators.

According to IDF sources, more than 2,000 such attacks have been recorded since the start of this year. Rock attacks aimed at motorists and even residents in Jewish communities are a form of terrorism.

On the roads of Israel, such attacks are now becoming known as “road terror.” They are intended to seriously maim, and to kill – and sometimes they succeed.

Chana Ya'ar

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/159537#.UEPkm6NO6ZR

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Futility of Relying on the International Community

by Isi Leibler

Over 120 countries – equating to two thirds of total United Nations membership – convened in Teheran to partake in the 16^th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) hosted by the Iranian Islamic Republic.

The Iranians boasted that 3 Kings, 27 presidents, 8 Prime Ministers and 50 Foreign Ministers attended. Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsy was present, breaching Egypt’s long standing estrangement from Iran which he now describes as “a strategic ally”, even though he condemned Assad’s regime in Syria. India, the world’s most populous democracy, participated with a delegation of 250 headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, stating shamelessly that its objective was to increase trade and commerce with Iran.

Despite appeals from the United States and others, UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, also attended. He did so only days after his condemnation of Iran for defying repeated Security Council resolutions demanding that it end its uranium enrichment program and repeatedly contravening the UN Charter by calling for the destruction of Israel.

In his address to participants, Ban, without explicitly naming Iran, did condemn “threats by any member state to destroy one another, or outrageous attempts to deny historical facts such as the Holocaust”. He also called on Iran to stop supplying arms to Assad in Syria and expressed regret that Iran’s refusal to halt its nuclear enrichment program.

Ban’s media spokesman, Martin Nesirsky stated that in private meetings with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad, the UN leader also referred to the vicious verbal attacks on Israel as offensive, inflammatory and unacceptable.

But this did not detract from the fact that combined with representatives from 120 nations, the UN Secretary General’s presence effectively provided legitimacy to Iran and sabotaged efforts to isolate it as a pariah state, the regime which serves as a launching pad for global terrorism. In fact, only last week, Iran proudly proclaimed that it had dispatched members of its Revolutionary Guard Corps and other fighting personnel to support Assad’s criminal rule in Syria.

At the opening of the conference, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini made yet another feral anti-Semitic speech, shamelessly exhorting the world to annihilate Israel the cancerous growth, referring to the “blood-thirsty Zionist wolves” who kill and torture Palestinians and control the global media. Yet the UN Secretary General, together with the other 120 participants remained passively glued to their seats. In many respects, the atmosphere was reminiscent of the late 1930s when the European nations, bent on appeasing Hitler, abandoned Czechoslovakia.

Had the Iranians, instead of targeting Israel, been describing a country like the UK as the cancer of Europe and calling for its elimination, it would have been inconceivable for Ban and the participating countries to attend a meeting hosted by such rogues. But apparently, for Israel, anything goes, provoking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to appropriately describe the Tehran NAM summit as “a disgrace and stain on humanity”.

To exacerbate matters, in their closing statement, the 120 participants mockingly denounced the UN Security Council “unilateral sanctions” and unanimously endorsed Iran’s right to pursue “a peaceful nuclear program” including “nuclear enrichment”.

Nor was there a single dissenting voice when Egyptian President Morsi handed over the rotating presidency to Holocaust denier, President Ahmadinejad who will now preside over NAM during the next three years.

Any criticism or deviation from Iranian policy such as Ban’s censure of Iranian behavior or Morsy’s condemnation of Syria’s Assad was predictably censored by the local media who presented the Summit to the Iranian public as a vindication of their policies and a global rejection of efforts to isolate and impose sanctions against their government.

Not surprisingly, the Iranian leaders jubilantly proclaimed that the broad global participation vindicated them and represented a repudiation of US and Western efforts to deter them from becoming a nuclear power. All in all, it was a major PR victory for this evil regime and an indictment of the dismal state of the international community.

The willingness of so many countries to attend such a conference in Teheran at this time and unanimously endorse the Ayatollah’s nuclear policies, clearly demonstrates the abysmal failure of Obama’s initial policy of “engaging” with Iran and his subsequent decision to impose sanctions and isolate the rogue state.

This episode underlines the futility of Israel relying on the international community to resolve potential conflicts.

It also reaffirms the disfunctionality of the United Nations, which the Obama Administration continues to appease.

Nothing epitomizes this more demonstratively than the prominent role of Syria, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Saudi-Arabia and similar dictatorships have contributed towards formulating the policy of the so-called United Nations Human Rights Council. Ironically, both Syria and Sudan, whose leaders are recognized war criminals, notorious for brutally butchering their own people, are candidates for seats on this bogus organization’s council scheduled for election next month.

Ironically, the US is the principal financial donor to the UN - to the tune of a staggering $6 billion annually. It is highly unlikely that UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon would have dignified the Iranians with his presence, had the US threatened to review its funding to the UN budget if he proceeded to undermine efforts to isolate Iran for defying Security Council demands and repeatedly calling for the annihilation of a member state.

The United States and Western democracies must recognize that they will become utterly impotent if their global policies continue to be effectively subject to veto by international bodies dominated by an alliance of Islamic nations, dictatorships and tyrannies.

Democracies should unite and seek to create a world order which will strengthen freedom, encourage oppressed people to achieve self-determination and if required, be willing to employ military power to deter the barbarians at our gates. Failure to confront these problems now, threatens the long-term survival prospects for Western civilization.

In Europe, the motivation to resist antidemocratic forces has been substantially weakened by the immigration of large numbers of Moslems who have undermined the foundations of genuine multiculturalism by seeking to impose their way of life on indigenous communities. This has been aided and abetted by the postmodernists –– whose anarchical leftism and confused anti-colonialism have led them to allying themselves with terrorist organizations and apologists for the most rabid racist.

The message emerging for us in Israel is that we must retain our relationship with democratic countries, in particular the US, which despite the Obama administration’s appeasement of Muslim extremism, has not capitulated to Islamic pressures like the Europeans.

Ultimately, the bottom line is that we must not succumb to pressures from those seeking to deter us from taking steps to thwart threats to our survival. Nor should we be tempted to rely on undertakings from other, “friendly” nations. We have learnt from bitter experience, that when the chips are down we must rely on ourselves. As Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon recently stated “the righteous work may be done by others, but we have to prepare as if no one else will do it for us”.

This column was originally published in the Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom

Some of my recent articles:

The Jewish Struggle for Universal Human Rights (August 30, 2012)

Irresponsible Israeli Politicians and Media on Rampage (August 23, 2012)

Billionaires and the Looming Jewish Leadership Crisis (August 16, 2012)

Wistrich on "The Left, the Jews and Israel" (August 9, 2012)

Isi Leibler's website can be viewed at www.wordfromjerusalem.com; He may be contacted at ileibler@netvision.net.il

Source: http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=4258

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.