Al Gore’s Global Warming

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, January 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: As a winter storm shutters D.C.-area schools, Al Gore does a show-and-tell on global warming before Congress. The road to Copenhagen is being paved with good intentions.

---

Read More: Global Warming

---

“When it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things,” a joking President Obama told reporters Wednesday morning. Daughters Malia and Sasha had a snow day as the private school they attend, Sidwell Friends, closed due to a winter ice and snow storm.

Truer words were never spoken. When it comes to weather, the current Democratic majorities in the nation’s capital don’t have a clue. But neither that nor the weather deterred Gore from testifying Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the need to pursue a treaty to lower carbon emissions at a United Nations conference in Copenhagen next December.

The storm has been blamed for at least 23 deaths and a glaze of ice and snow that caused widespread power failures from the Southern Plains to the East Coast. As the roads in D.C. iced and the snow fell, Gore might as well have quoted Groucho’s line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”

Gore would probably blame the storm on global warming too. In his eyes and those of fellow warm-mongers, global warming causes everything — including the global cooling that has been both obvious and documented since 1998. These cyclical trends used to be called weather. Now they’re ominously called “climate change.”

To underscore his point, Gore flipped through more than four dozen new slides showing melting ice caps, Western wildfires, deforestation and oxygen-depleted seas in a hearing room where the lights were dimmed. Dim bulbs or not, some facts were left out of his presentation.

Each year, millions of square miles of sea ice melt and refreeze. The amounts vary from season to season. Despite photos of floating polar bears taken in summer, data reported by the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center show global sea ice levels the same as they were in 1979, when satellite observations began.

The island nation of Tuvalu, poster child for rising sea levels, is still well above water at last report.

Pictures of a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf that’s been warming for decades are common. But the shelf in question constitutes just 2% of the continent, and temperatures show that the entire continent has been cooling for decades, with thickening ice.

Western wildfires are due in large part to the failure to clear dead trees and underbrush that fuel these fires because lumber companies might profit or the habitat of endangered critters might be harmed.

Deforestation has been fueled by the Gore-induced quest for biofuels and the planting of cleared areas with crops like corn to be put in our gas tanks. The Paris-based OECD says the use of fuels such as ethanol made from corn, palm oil and other sources using crops as raw material amounts to “a cure that is worse than the disease they seek to heal.”

Oxygen-depleted seas are caused in part by this increased planting of crops for biofuels such as ethanol to replace petroleum, something Gore supports. This has created dead zones for marine life in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, while driving up food prices around the globe.

Gore insists that climate change brings drought, famine and increasing numbers of ferocious storms. However, total hurricane energy activity, as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has dropped by two-thirds since the record was set in 2005. Hurricane activity, like all weather, is cyclical.

As environmental guru Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” points out, famine has declined rapidly over the past half-century even as greenhouse gases have risen.

That is, until we started using food to fuel our cars. The World Bank estimates that this policy has driven at least 30 million people worldwide into hunger.

If it keeps snowing, Al, there’s a shovel-ready job waiting for you in D.C.

The Day America Lost the War on Terror

Friends,

Obama has barely warmed his seat in the White House yet he has clearly defined this country’s new attitude toward Israel and Muslim Jihadists.

Where is the outrage of Jews who voted for Hussein Obama to the tune of 82% at his appointments of George Mitchell and Dennis Ross to spearhead our new policies toward Israel and Iran. Mitchell attempted, during the Clinton years, to blame both Israel and the Palestinians equally for Palestinian violence and Dennis Ross was the architect of the failed Oslo Accords under Clinton that has brought Israel to its current position; on its knees. Neither of these diplomats ever came to the conclusion that Arafat was a terrorist.

The appointments of both of these apologists for Muslim terror does not bode well for this country and Israel. The columnist below adds to this conclusion of our country’s new path towards terror.

Alan

——————————-

The Day America Lost the War on Terror
Ben Shapiro www.Townhall.com
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

On Nov. 4, 2008, America lost the war on terror. President Barack Obama’s feckless, pathetically apologetic perspective on foreign policy spells the end of the quest for liberty in the Middle East. It spells the end of America’s moral leadership in the global war for freedom. And it spells the end of a hard-fought campaign to protect America. Our enemies must be happily celebrating their great good fortune in America’s election of this platitudinous, morally relativistic, Jimmy Carter carbon copy in the midst of battle.

On Jan. 26, 2009, Obama granted his first television interview as president of the United States to Al Arabiya, the Dubai-based television network part-owned by the Saudi government. In the interview, he demonstrated with the utmost clarity that his understanding is inversely proportional to his arrogance.

He started by humbling America before the world. “(A)ll too often the United States starts by dictating,” Obama said, shame for his country dripping from his lips. “So let’s listen.” There was no call for the Muslim world, which has sponsored genocide after genocide, terrorist group upon terrorist group, to listen.

Obama apologized for President Bush’s “Islamic fascism” terminology, equating Muslim terrorism with nonexistent terrorism by Jews and Christians: “the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations — whether Muslim or any other faith in the past — that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith’s name.” There was no call for the Muslim world to actively fight terrorism — honesty is not the Obama administration’s policy.

Obama repeated the Clintonian line that the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict could be solved by pressing Israel into negotiations with terrorists — a foolish conceit that has cost Israeli and Palestinian lives. He talked about getting rid of “preconceptions” regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict — code for embracing negotiations with Hamas. He pledged to talk with Iran — on the same day that Iran’s government spokesman branded the Holocaust “a big lie.” He bought into the Muslim-sponsored notion that the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict lies at the heart of all trouble in the Middle East. He praised the one-sided Saudi peace plan as an act of “great courage.”

Most sickeningly, Obama openly jettisoned his constitutional role as the caretaker for America’s national interest. Instead, Obama posed himself as an honest broker between America and the Muslim world. “(T)he United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect,” he said. “I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.” Obama didn’t stop there. He stated that his job is to speak for the Muslim world, defending them from Americans’ negative perceptions: “And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”

No, Mr. President. Your job is not to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world harbors us no ill will. That is their job. The Muslim world must demonstrate with its words and actions that they do not wish America replaced with an Islamic state. They must demonstrate that they do not support terrorism against America and our allies.

Your job is to protect and defend the United States of America. That is your sworn duty.

And you abrogate your sworn duty every time you go on Arab television stations and apologize for America’s foreign policy. You abrogate your sworn duty every time you force American allies to negotiate with terrorists. You abrogate your sworn duty every time you pledge to protect the interests “not just of the United States, but also ordinary people who right now are suffering from poverty and a lack of opportunity” — the same ordinary people who elect Hamas, prop up the Ayatollahs, supported the Taliban, recruit for al-Qaida, and live off of the beneficence of Hezbollah. Not all Muslims are “extraordinary people,” and the interests of suffering Muslims do not always align with American interests.

On Nov. 4, 2008, Americans elected their first international president. They elected a man who does not seek to preserve American values. Leftists perceived George W. Bush as an imperialist for American interests; by the same token, Obama is an imperialist for “global interests.” In a war to save America from implacable foes, Obama’s Global Interest Imperialism dooms American exceptionalism to the ash heap of history. With it may go the last, best hope of Earth.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Addicted to Oil

Oil – Islam – Terrorism

BREAK FREE FROM FOREIGN OIL

National Security Court?

National Security Court? We Already Have One

by Bill West
IPT News
January 26, 2009

http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/984

Last week, the Wall Street Journal offered an op-ed article detailing the difficulties facing the Obama Administration in closing the Guantanamo detention center: what to do with those detainees and how to handle terrorism suspects captured in the future on foreign battlefields by our military and intelligence services. The article notes that a possible option to solve these problems would be the Congressional creation of a new “National Security Court.” Such a court would be a hybrid of federal civilian criminal courts, U.S. military courts and the Guantanamo-based military commissions.

This concept has been around for a couple of years now. It was initially proposed by Andrew McCarthy, the former senior Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York who successfully prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” as well as the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center attack. The concept appears to have substantial merit. Theoretically, such a court would be able to try cases against terrorist enemy combatants utilizing both overt evidence and, under tightly controlled circumstances, classified intelligence evidence. The creation of a National Security Court would require the proverbial act of Congress.

Some argue such a National Security Court would be a “star chamber” and would fly in the face of traditional American jurisprudence. However, if properly structured and staffed, such a court would go a long way to solve the conundrum of how to deal with enemy combatant terror suspects, many of whom cannot effectively be tried in civilian courts due to the classified nature of key evidence against them. Presumably, within a National Security Court system, defense attorneys would receive appropriate security clearances, and unclassified summaries of classified evidence would be provided to defendants whenever possible. Mechanisms would likely be in place to allow for the secure and, if necessary anonymous, testimony of intelligence agents and their “assets.” Does all this sound a bit too fantastic to really work? It might be a surprise to learn the United States already has a workable, if not working, version of a National Security Court.

The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-132) created significant revisions to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Among those revisions was the creation of Title V of the INA. That provision created the Alien Terrorist Removal Procedures and the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC). The ATRC was the result of a bi-partisan Congressional effort supported by then-President Bill Clinton. The ATRC changed the nature of potential deportation (removal) adjudication substantially, but in a limited and controlled fashion.

Before the ATRC, all formal deportation cases resided in the Immigration Court system that is rooted in Title II of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That court process requires, for the adjudication of the merits of deportation charges, that the Government present overt evidence in open and adversarial court proceedings. Classified, or secret, evidence can be utilized in Title II Immigration Court proceedings only under very limited circumstances, where it is presented in-camera and ex-parte to the court, for the court to render decisions on certain immigration relief issues. Those relief issues include release from custody in pending deportation proceedings and the various kinds of discretionary relief from deportation, like political asylum.

In contrast, regular Immigration Court proceedings require the underlying substantive deportation charges be proven with overt, publicly scrutinized evidence to which the alien respondent (defendant in deportation cases) and his/her attorneys receive full access. The ATRC, however, changed that process for what was then the significant but small population of aliens suspected of being involved in terrorism and terror support activities. The ATRC process can be invoked only if it is determined – and that determination literally requires a decision by the U.S. Attorney General – that the case cannot be handled in regular Immigration Court proceedings. That situation would virtually always be when key evidence is classified – obtained by intelligence agencies or other highly covert sources.

The ATRC provides mechanisms for classified information to be used as evidence to adjudicate the merits of the underlying deportation charges. That is done, however, under notably limited and tightly controlled procedures. Whenever possible, unclassified summaries of classified evidence are to be provided to the respondent and his/her attorneys. Defense attorneys may be granted security clearances so they can have access to classified evidence and the respondent and his/her attorneys may challenge the evidence against him/her. The judges who sit on the Court are selected by the Chief Justice of the United States (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), and all the judges receive appropriate security clearances. As previously stated, only cases certified by the Attorney General, after a multi-level and multi-agency review process, can be heard by the Court. There is a specific adversarial process allowed in the court proceedings and special, yet still adversarial, appellate proceedings are permitted.

The ATRC has been in operational existence since about 1997. As noteworthy as this “national security” court for deportation cases might seem, ironically, not one case has been tried before it. In the hue and cry of the late 1990s over the use of “secret” evidence in immigration proceedings, the same Clinton Administration that supported the creation of the ATRC chose the politically expedient avenue of not sending any cases to it. Similarly, if perhaps inexplicably, the Bush Administration did not refer any cases to the ATRC, even after the 9/11 attacks. Even while the Bush Administration and the Congress toiled over the creation of the Guantanamo military commissions, wherein classified evidence could be allowed to prosecute detained enemy combatants who might face the death penalty, no deportation cases were sent to the already duly constituted ATRC.

The inactive ATRC does not mean its underlying concept is without merit. Its lack of utilization is likely more the result of misplaced political correctness at the highest levels of our political leadership. If the creation of a new National Security Court is to be seriously considered, Congress and the new Administration may do well to look at the ATRC as a model. Many of the procedural and operational issues that might relate to a National Security Court have already been addressed with the Alien Terrorist Removal Court.

Bill West is a consultant to the Investigative Project on Terrorism. He retired in 2003 as chief of the national security section for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A ‘jihad of self-examination’ is long overdue for Islamists

Other Voices: A ‘jihad of self-examination’ is long overdue for Islamists

Posted by Steve Pastner January 22, 2009 12:43PM

By Steve Pastner

Other Voices Steve Pastner The writer is a retired anthropology professor and sculptor who specialized in the tribal regions of the Islamic world, conducting fieldwork in southwest Pakistan and the Horn of Africa, among other places.

Sigmund Freud jokingly noted that the Irish are the only group impervious to psychoanalysis. If by that he meant “resistant to constructive self analysis and criticism,” it’s obvious Freud never met Islamists or their supporters, both within and beyond the Muslim community. This is indicated by the spate of demonstrations locally and globally in support of Hamas extremists and associated calls for the abolition of the state of Israel – not just cessation of its Gaza operation.

If pro-Hamas Muslims truly possessed honor, you’d think that to protest the dishonorable horrors perpetrated in the name of Islam by the terrorist likes of Hamas, they’d practice either mass apostasy or a major internal “jihad al aql”- an Arabic term I coined for a thus-far-hypothetical “struggle for rational self-improvement” along the lines of the western “age of reason.”

After all, Jihadi misdeeds not only target “infidels” (in Israel, Mumbai, Beslan, London, Madrid, the Twin Towers, etc.) but also co-religionists in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan and indeed Palestinian areas, among others, where they constitute a good chunk of the undeniable misery of many Muslims.

Yet rather than self-criticize, even when they are victims, the most vocal/visible Muslim spokesmen continue to disproportionately blame others for largely self-generated problems.

Numerous factors internal to the Islamic world are behind such problems. Start with endless violent and shifting intra-Muslim ethnic, sectarian and other conflicts down to the level of clans and even families, all as acute in Palestinian areas as anywhere. These make reliable treaties difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and maintain.

Add to this patterns of graft and corruption in many Muslim settings that would shame even the Illinois governor and you’re incubating a homegrown petri dish of problems, quite apart from “zionist” and “western imperialist” whipping boys. The latter scapegoating is particularly hypocritical given Islam’s own history of imperialism that is far older than the West’s, while Israel has no such history at all, beyond U.N.-legitimated ancient claims to a Vermont-sized scrap of real estate. Sadly for all concerned this scrap includes strategic border areas reluctantly occupied in wars Israel won (but didn’t start), about which there is enormous agonizing and debate within the Israeli and wider Jewish communities and which its genocidal, uncompromising enemies won’t even let it return without a fight.

Then throw in an unhealthy dash of religiously sanctioned “taqiyyah” or “say anything if it’ll forward the cause of Islam” on the propaganda and diplomatic fronts. Toss in a generous pinch of children weaponized into homicidal and suicidal “martyrs” via toxic madrassah indoctrination and you’ve got messes that spill into others’ backyards, from the World Trade Center, to Hamas rockets into Israel and a possible war between India and Pakistan over the latter’s stonewalling about its links to the Mumbai massacre.

To contribute essays to Other Voices, contact Bob Needham, opinion editor, at 734-994-6825 or bneedham@annarbornews.com.

When that happens it’s not surprising that Muslims, many innocent, suffer. While this is tragic, it’s not a morally equivalent “cycle of violence” at all but instead often has a genesis – and also, importantly, remedies – within the “umma” (Muslim community of believers) itself.

The ineffectiveness of moderate Muslims in reining in extremists should also be a source of embarrassed self-criticism. But this much cliched “vast majority” may, in fact, be numerically overstated, as witnessed by large violent turnouts that can be mobilized for nonsensical cartoon protests and to demonize Jews while few show up to decry, say, the recent Mumbai carnage, or the indiscriminate suicide and rocket attacks on civilians in Israel which are at the root of the current Gaza crisis. In any case, a constructive internal Islamic critique has not materialized in any significant public (a key word!) measure, thereby minimizing opportunities for real peace.

In his “Murder in Amsterdam,” author Ian Buruma addresses the killing by a Dutch Muslim of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was rightly concerned about the dramatic increase in Islamic radicalism in Europe. This book raises the unhappy need to explore “limits to tolerance” when dealing with such extremism in western countries, where liberal values have become a shield protecting grossly illiberal acts and aspirations. Much of the anti-Semitic postering and vocalizing in recent Dearborn and Ann Arbor anti-Israel protests, and elsewhere in the U.S. and Europe, raises just such a troubling specter, as does recent Gaza-related vandalism against Jewish schools in Chicago.

In contrast to well-documented neo-Nazi links to radical Islamists (see George Michaels’ “The Enemy of My Enemy”), many non-Muslim groupies of Hamas and other jihadis, such as Ann Arbor’s longtime synagogue harassers, describe themselves as of the “left.” Frequently they are part of the “International Solidarity,” Green Party (once respectable before its environmentalism was trumped by boosterism for Islamic extremists) and “boycott Israel” movements (a version of which was, happily, trounced at the local food co-op last year). They too, a la Freud’s observation, could profit from cognitive readjustment therapy. This might reconcile the huge “disconnect” between their sanctimonious self-proclaimed status as “peace-loving progressives” and “human rights activists” and their strident, unambiguous support for some of the most repressive, aggressive and bigoted ideologies since Hitler.

News readers should check out the blog site “zionistsout.blogspot.com” affiliated with the local synagogue picketers and boycott advocates. It is a disgrace that local Muslims have not forcefully repudiated these views.

As a former, once-sympathetic professional student of the Muslim world, I hope an internal reformation of Islam, based on more Muslims publicly engaging in constructive self-criticism (a la the brave Somali activist Hirsi Ali, currently under death threats for her criticisms of her own religion, and my friend Akbar Ahmed, the Pakistani scholar-diplomat in exile) makes possible my renewed respect and affection for a rich but currently deeply flawed religious culture (the essence of any religion being what it motivates believers to do in its name).

Until that happens, the growing domination of extremists, both extra-governmental and elected, as in Iran and Gaza , supported by western apologists (whose motives range along a spectrum from well-meaning gullibility through opportunism to anti-Semitic malice) makes Islam hazardous not just to others but to itself.

Geert Wilders

Interview with Geert Wilders at The Hague

bijenkorf.wordpress.com

bijenkorf.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/geert-wilders

Obama wants to ban Limbaugh

Obama wants to ban Limbaugh.

What Obama Should Tell the Muslim World

IPT News
January 23, 2009

http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/980

Print

Send

Comment

RSS

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title:”What Obama Should Tell the Muslim World’,', url:”http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/980′,’, summary:”During the transition, aides to President Barack Obama indicated he wanted to travel to a Muslim capital and deliver a speech early in his administration. Improving relations to the Muslim world is a goal he stated Tuesday in his inaugural address: “To…’,', content:”During the transition, aides to President Barack Obama indicated he wanted to travel to a Muslim capital and deliver a speech early in his administration. Improving relations to the Muslim world is a goal he stated Tuesday in his inaugural address: “To…’,', published:”2009-01-23 00:00:00′,’, icon: ‘http://www.investigativeproject.org/favicon.ico’ }, {button:true} );

document.getElementById(’share_cell’).style.display = ”;

During the transition, aides to President Barack Obama indicated he wanted to travel to a Muslim capital and deliver a speech early in his administration. Improving relations to the Muslim world is a goal he stated Tuesday in his inaugural address:

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

In anticipation of the President’s planned speech, the Investigative Project on Terrorism asked two anti-Islamist Muslims for their input about what he should say. Their essays reflect their opinions and not necessarily those of the IPT.

Ali Alyami is the Executive Director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia. Here is the opening of his essay:

Obama and Muslim Autocratic Regimes

Faced with economic crises at home and globally, threats of nuclear proliferation, unresolved conflicts in the “Greater Middle East,” grinding poverty, conflicts and spread of deadly, but curable diseases in Africa, President Obama has a formidable agenda to deal with. There is no more appropriate place to start his fight against these daunting issues than in the Middle East, where the root causes of destabilizing religious extremism, intolerance, use of religion as a deadly tool to achieve political objectives, rise and exportation of deadly ideology, Wahhabism, are posing ominous threats to the world’s economies, peace and preservation of democratic and humane values.

A recent article published by President Obama’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, wondered “Which Muslim capital will Barack Obama choose?” The article was predicated on speculative reports as to what Muslim country Mr. Obama might visit to start a healing dialogue with Muslims. Arab and Muslim regimes, their controlled populations and severely censored media have been celebrating Mr. Obama’s election and expect him to apologize for, or at least acknowledge publicly, that America has wronged them, especially in recent years. Arab and Muslim regimes expect President Obama to embrace them, solve the Arab-Israeli conflict as proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002, and retreat from advocating transparent democratic reforms, power-sharing and respect for basic human rights in Arab and Muslim tyrannically-ruled societies.

President Obama will be ill advised – and America and the international community will continue to pay a very high price – if he heeds advice from those who might encourage him to be an apologetic and appeasing president. As the leader of the free world and representative of the most democratic and powerful nation on this planet, Mr. Obama should start his first speech to Arabs and Muslims, rulers and ruled, moderates and extremists, by making it unequivocally clear that the international economies, peace and preservation of democratic values must be on the top list of every Muslim regime’s agenda.

He should make it clear that the root causes of religious extremism and its byproduct, terrorism, must be ended by those who created them in the first place. The President must make it clear to Arab and Muslim autocratic regimes that all governments’ owned and financed religious schools and mosques that advocate intolerance of non-Muslims, ethnic and religious minorities must be either transformed from the ground up, be closed without any delays or face dire consequences. The leaders of non-compliant countries must be banned from participating in international organizations and forums, banned from traveling and have their assets frozen.

The rest of Alyami’s essay can be seen here.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a community activist, and a physician in private practice. The opening section of his essay follows:

President Obama’s Message to the Muslim World: Walk the walk and then we’ll talk the talk

Recently, President Obama’s transition staff announced that he would like to deliver a speech in the first 100 days of his administration in an Islamic capital to improve America’s image in the Muslim world. The best venue for this speech is certainly Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The following is the speech President Obama will never give to the Muslim world. But it never hurts to dream…

President Obama:

Thank you. As we begin to lay the groundwork of my administration, I have been looking forward to this, my maiden voyage as President of the United States into the Muslim world. As the son of a Kenyan immigrant to the United States, I cannot help but understand the plight of minorities in the Muslim world and the desire of so many who live in Muslim majority nations to flee to the United States in order to live in freedom. I have fond memories of my childhood years in Indonesia but still thank God every day for my family’s desire to live in the land of freedom in the United States.

But I know we can see a day when Muslim-majority nations can be lands of freedom. Yes we can. But first we must usher in change. Change from the despotism and militant Islamism which has ravaged the human rights of those living in Muslim nations. But the first step is doing away with denial. On my inaugural I said, ‘To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” I am here to extend a hand to all of your citizens and especially those who believe in freedom.

The Saudi royal family has certainly been generous to our universities and Presidential libraries. But it is not a surprise how little criticism of Wahhabism or political Islam comes out of those universities. How can we be a beacon of freedom for your people, for the world, when our human rights standards vary with the highest bidder? The opportunity I have had in America to become President is the sign of a nation which honors the rights of every citizen equally before the law.

Yes, you can see a day where every Saudi, every Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, and Pakistani has the same opportunity. But that needs real change, real education, real human rights. It is time for the Muslim world and its nations to honor the rights and opportunities of every one of its citizens who happen to come from outside the tribes in control.

Every human being living in Saudi Arabia should have the right to build a house of worship, not only Muslims. Theocrats have enabled a shar’ia based legal system which is an anathema to liberty and basic human rights –all in the name of the religion of Islam. Your Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has tried to make any discussion in the United Nations on this subject illegal by pretending to just want to protect the name of Islam through what are clearly blasphemy laws. I will not stand idly by as the OIC turns the UN into an Inquisition. I am here to tell you that I will do what I can to stop U.S. funding of the U.N., which dishonors its charter and what Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues in 1948 described as “the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all people.”

I will also remind you of another warning uttered by Eleanor Roosevelt, “we must not be deluded by the efforts of the forces of reaction to prostitute the great words of our free tradition and thereby to confuse the struggle.”

The rest of Jasser’s essay can be seen here.

How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas

By ANDREW HIGGINS

Moshav Tekuma, Israel

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

View Slideshow

Abid Katib/Getty Images

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas.

Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a “determined and successful military operation.” More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.

Hamas responded the next day by lobbing five rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles down the road from Moshav Tekuma, the farming village where Mr. Cohen lives. Hamas then announced its own cease-fire.

Since then, Hamas leaders have emerged from hiding and reasserted their control over Gaza. Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at a more durable truce are expected to start this weekend. President Barack Obama said this week that lasting calm “requires more than a long cease-fire” and depends on Israel and a future Palestinian state “living side by side in peace and security.”

A look at Israel’s decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals — including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists — reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel’s efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people.

Israel’s experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda.

APA /Landov

Hamas supporters in Gaza City after the cease-fire.

At stake is the future of what used to be the British Mandate of Palestine, the biblical lands now comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Israelis and Palestinians have each asserted claims over the same territory.

The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO’s Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue “resistance.” Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005.

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”

Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group’s recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. “Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons,” Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.

Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military’s Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: “It is like saying: ‘I will kill all the mosquitoes.’ But then you get even worse insects that will kill you…You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda.”

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel — particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 — Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel’s main ally, the U.S.

Now, one big fear in Israel and elsewhere is that while Hamas has been hammered hard, the war might have boosted the group’s popular appeal. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, came out of hiding last Sunday to declare that “God has granted us a great victory.”

Most damaged from the war, say many Palestinians, is Fatah, now Israel’s principal negotiating partner. “Everyone is praising the resistance and thinks that Fatah is not part of it,” says Baker Abu-Baker, a longtime Fatah supporter and author of a book on Hamas.

A Lack of Devotion

Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: “Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution.” Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.

After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.

At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country’s then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.

“We were all stunned,” says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas’s Damascus-based political chief. “The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity,” says Mr. Tamimi.

In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory’s previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people world-wide.

View Full Image

Heidi Levine/Sipa Press for The Wall Street Journal

A poster of the late Sheikh Yassin hangs near a building destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza.

The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.

Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government’s religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. “They said, ‘Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,’” recalls Mr. Cohen.

Instead, Israel’s military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war.

Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza’s Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin’s long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel’s former military attache in Iran, he’d watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, “our main enemy was Fatah,” and the cleric “was still 100% peaceful” towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.

Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. “We had no problems with him,” he says.

In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines.

Mr. Segev says the army didn’t want to get involved in Palestinian quarrels but did send soldiers to prevent Islamists from burning down the house of the Red Crescent’s secular chief, a socialist who supported the PLO.

‘An Alternative to the PLO’

Clashes between Islamists and secular nationalists spread to the West Bank and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism.

As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. “I said: ‘If they want to burn each other let them go,’” recalls Mr. Harari.

A leader of Birzeit’s Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says “they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO.”

A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin’s Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama’s reach across Gaza.

Around the time of Sheikh Yassin’s arrest, Mr. Cohen, the religious affairs official, sent a report to senior Israeli military and civilian officials in Gaza. Describing the cleric as a “diabolical” figure, he warned that Israel’s policy towards the Islamists was allowing Mujama to develop into a dangerous force.

“I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” Mr. Cohen wrote.

Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: “Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas.”

Roni Shaked, a former officer of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and author of a book on Hamas, says Sheikh Yassin and his followers had a long-term perspective whose dangers were not understood at the time. “They worked slowly, slowly, step by step according to the Muslim Brotherhood plan.”

Declaring Jihad

In 1987, several Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver, triggering a wave of protests that became known as the first Intifada, Mr. Yassin and six other Mujama Islamists launched Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas’s charter, released a year later, is studded with anti-Semitism and declares “jihad its path and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief.”

Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah and initially unaware of the Hamas charter, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas’s founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel’s then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO. Mr. Zahar, the only Hamas founder known to be alive today, is now the group’s senior political leader in Gaza.

In 1989, Hamas carried out its first attack on Israel, abducting and killing two soldiers. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin and sentenced him to life. It later rounded up more than 400 suspected Hamas activists, including Mr. Zahar, and deported them to southern Lebanon. There, they hooked up with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed A-Team of anti-Israeli militancy.

Many of the deportees later returned to Gaza. Hamas built up its arsenal and escalated its attacks, while all along maintaining the social network that underpinned its support in Gaza.

Meanwhile, its enemy, the PLO, dropped its commitment to Israel’s destruction and started negotiating a two-state settlement. Hamas accused it of treachery. This accusation found increasing resonance as Israel kept developing settlements on occupied Palestinian land, particularly the West Bank. Though the West Bank had passed to the nominal control of a new Palestinian Authority, it was still dotted with Israeli military checkpoints and a growing number of Israeli settlers.

Unable to uproot a now entrenched Islamist network that had suddenly replaced the PLO as its main foe, Israel tried to decapitate it. It started targeting Hamas leaders. This, too, made no dent in Hamas’s support, and sometimes even helped the group. In 1997, for example, Israel’s Mossad spy agency tried to poison Hamas’s exiled political leader Mr. Mashaal, who was then living in Jordan.

The agents got caught and, to get them out of a Jordanian jail, Israel agreed to release Sheikh Yassin. The cleric set off on a tour of the Islamic world to raise support and money. He returned to Gaza to a hero’s welcome.

Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad officer who negotiated the deal that released Sheikh Yassin, says the cleric’s freedom was hard to swallow, but Israel had no choice. After the fiasco in Jordan, Mr. Halevy was named director of Mossad, a position he held until 2002. Two years later, Sheikh Yassin was killed by an Israeli air strike.

Mr. Halevy has in recent years urged Israel to negotiate with Hamas. He says that “Hamas can be crushed,” but he believes that “the price of crushing Hamas is a price that Israel would prefer not to pay.” When Israel’s authoritarian secular neighbor, Syria, launched a campaign to wipe out Muslim Brotherhood militants in the early 1980s it killed more than 20,000 people, many of them civilians.

In its recent war in Gaza, Israel didn’t set the destruction of Hamas as its goal. It limited its stated objectives to halting the Islamists’ rocket fire and battering their overall military capacity. At the start of the Israeli operation in December, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told parliament that the goal was “to deal Hamas a severe blow, a blow that will cause it to stop its hostile actions from Gaza at Israeli citizens and soldiers.”

Walking back to his house from the rubble of his neighbor’s home, Mr. Cohen, the former religious affairs official in Gaza, curses Hamas and also what he sees as missteps that allowed Islamists to put down deep roots in Gaza.

He recalls a 1970s meeting with a traditional Islamic cleric who wanted Israel to stop cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood followers of Sheikh Yassin: “He told me: ‘You are going to have big regrets in 20 or 30 years.’ He was right.”

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com

Hate-Free Speech

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, January 22, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Islamofascism: A threat to basic freedom has opened a new front in the war on terror. Dutch filmmaker and politician Geert Wilders is finding out what it means to yell “truth!” in a crowded theater.

---

Read More: Europe & Central Asia

---

Wilders is a leader in the Dutch Freedom Party and a thorn in the side of politically correct Europeans who’ve been cowered by their increasing Muslim populations into accepting the creeping Islamicization of Europe — or Eurabia, as we and others have dubbed it.

In March 2008, Wilders posted “Fitna,” a film about the Koran, on the Internet. It equates Islam with violence and the Koran with Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” at least in its advocacy of obscene violence against humanity and as a blueprint of things to come.

The opening scenes of “Fitna,” a Koranic term sometimes translated as “strife,” shows a copy of the Koran followed by footage of the attacks on the U.S. on 9-11, then London in July 2005 and then Madrid in March 2004. Subtle he is not. But neither is he a criminal.

It did not help that Wilders included in the film a scene showing Muslim protesters holding signs reading “God Bless Hitler.” This would tend to lend credence to Wilders’ thesis. Mention of Hitler and Nazism in any context is still a touchy subject in Europe to this day, as is criticism of anything Muslim.

On Wednesday the Dutch Court of Appeals ordered a criminal prosecution of Wilders, who is also a member of the Dutch parliament. “The Amsterdam appeals court has ordered the prosecution of member of parliament Geert Wilders for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs,” the court said in a statement.

As his film shows, this largely amounts to quoting the Koran accurately and reporting the statements of Muslim organizations and their supporters, many of which can’t be repeated here.

Wilders is in fact guilty of nothing but resisting the Islamicization of Europe and the attempt to impose Sharia law on the West. Suppressing all criticism of and debate about Islam is part of that move. Free speech and Sharia law are incompatible.

Columnist Mark Steyn felt Wilders’ pain in 2008, when he went on trial in Canada for “Islamophobia.” As in Wilders’ case, this consisted largely of quoting Muslim speakers verbatim and then drawing obvious conclusions. Steyn ultimately prevailed, without civil libertarians warning of any “chilling effect” on public discourse.

Leading this charge to eviscerate freedom of speech in the West is a group called the Organization of the Islamic Conference, composed of Muslim governments in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and around the globe. Its stated mission is “defending the image of Islam, and combating the phenomenon of Islamophobia.” In practice, this means using our freedoms to end them.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the OIC, says the group has already targeted the United States. “We have established an OIC group in Washington, D.C.,” he announced recently, “with the aim of playing a more active role in engaging American lawmakers.” Prosecution of American politicians and opinion-makers may not be far off.

Ihsanoglu also gave us a warning: “In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna,’ ” he said, “we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.”

We are reminded of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-great-grandson of the famous artist, who crossed that “red line” and paid for it with his life in 2004. He was shot and his throat slit on an Amsterdam street after making the film “Submission,” which criticized the Islamic world for its harsh treatment of women as exhibited in the Taliban’s reign of terror in Afghanistan. Was his film hate speech or merely a documentary of Muslim intolerance?

Islamofascists know that free speech is the linchpin of Western democracy. We need people like Wilders, van Gogh and Steyn, who dare to exercise that right in the face of such threats. We need to know the truth, for that’s what shall keep us free.

Obama flashes irritation in press room

By JONATHAN MARTIN & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 1/22/09 6:43 PM EST  Updated: 1/23/09 12:01 AM EST

President Obama made a surprise visit to the White House press corps Thursday night, but got agitated when he was faced with a substantive question.

Asked how he could reconcile a strict ban on lobbyists in his administration with a Deputy Defense Secretary nominee who lobbied for Raytheon, Obama interrupted with a knowing smile on his face.

“Ahh, see,” he said, “I came down here to visit. See this is what happens. I can’t end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here.”

Pressed further by the Politico reporter about his Pentagon nominee, William J. Lynn III, Obama turned more serious, putting his hand on the reporter’s shoulder and staring him in the eye.

“Alright, come on” he said, with obvious irritation in his voice. “We will be having a press conference at which time you can feel free to [ask] questions. Right now, I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself to you guys – that’s all I was trying to do.”

The president was quickly saved by a cameraman in the room who called out: “I’d like to say it one more time: ‘Mr. President.’ ”

Obama spent about 10 minutes total, winding his way through a crush of reporters and photographers between the upper and lower floors of the journalists’ workspace and asking questions about who worked where and how the booths and desks were assigned.

Reporters had little warning about the impromptu visit by the new president, and those who were in the downstairs portion of the press quarters only came to the briefing room after an unexpected and cryptic announcement on the internal intercom that they do so.

“This is worse than the Middle East,” he joked, alluding to the territorial claims staked on the cramped corridor. “Who’s sitting where and all that stuff.”

He revealed that he had already gotten in two work outs since being sworn in Tuesday.

“Turns out I have a little gym up there,” he said with a smile.

Obama said he had watched press secretary Robert Gibbs debut briefing “in anticipation of some flop sweat. … I just want to thank you for not completely ripping up Gibbs,” Obama said.

“I am very proud of him today. He got a fist bump from me.”

Arab Economic Summit

This reinforces our recent comments on Arab world holdings in American banks and our stock markets.

We do know that non-American George Soros helped the bail-out to get worse

Arab investors have lost 2.5 trillion dollars from the credit crunch, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad al-Sabah, whose country hosts an Arab economic summit next week, said on Friday.

“The Arab world has lost 2.5 trillion dollars in the past four months” as a result of the global financial crisis, Sheikh Mohammad told a press conference following a joint meeting of Arab foreign and finance ministers in Kuwait.

He also said that about 60 percent of development projects “have either been postponed or cancelled” by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states because of the global meltdown.

Arab leaders who hold their first ever economic summit on January 19-20 will discuss the impact of the worldwide economic meltdown on the 22 Arab countries.

The biggest loss was an estimated 40 percent drop in the value of Arab investments abroad, which previously totalled around 2.5 trillion dollars.

Falls on stock markets contributed more than 600 billion dollars to the losses, while Arab investors were further affected by a sharp decline in oil revenues, the declining value of property investments and other repercussions of the global downturn.

Next week’s summit will also discuss the Gaza war but leaders are still intent on agreeing a joint response to the financial crisis.

Obama’s a man, not a superman

Brilliant he may be, but for his own good don’t forget that Obama’s a man, not a superman

London Daily Mail

Stephen Glover

Last updated at 7:55 AM on 22nd January 2009

Barack Obama takes the oath of office as he is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States

Barack Obama is overflowing with integrity and honesty.

He will re-fashion politics, and take America forward into the next phase of her glorious history.

He is favourably compared to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. These are remarks we have heard from pundits as well as ordinary people in America and this country over the past few days. Are they true? It is impossible to say. At present there would seem to be little basis for saying them.

Of course his inauguration as the 44th President of the United States was moving. His speech on Tuesday, if not his very best, was stirring. There is a remarkable dignity and serenity about the man. He seems clever, committed and clear-thinking.

It would take a heart of stone not to celebrate his achievement as the first black man – or at any rate the first person of mixed race – to enter the White House. He has come from nowhere, or almost nowhere, through sheer strength of will to lead the world’s most powerful nation. America, despite everything, retains the capacity to inspire.

And yet, and yet. When nearly everyone agrees on limited evidence that a person or thing is superlative, and somehow beyond criticism, it is usually a good idea to hang back from the crowd. Unanimity about any untested proposition makes me uneasy.

But that is what we have. It is not just the liberals who are mushy about him. Hard-baked Republicans have gone weak at the knees. There is a widespread hope bordering on expectation that this inexperienced President and his untried administration will be able to sort out the world’s economic difficulties in a trice, and put America back on the path to prosperity while solving myriad international problems. If only it were that simple.

How eagerly we forget the disappointments of the past, and the scepticism that experience has taught us, so that we greet Mr Obama virtually as a Messiah. Desperate times evoke desperate hopes.

Our reaction reminds me of what happened in this country in 1997 after Tony Blair’s landslide victory. Remember all the hoopla, and the genuine emotion. Even some Tories were misty-eyed. Many people were certain – as they are after Tuesday’s inauguration – that there was a new beginning.

Alas, once the shining dawn had passed we soon entered a depressingly familiar landscape defined by broken promises, botched policies, and sleaze. Then came Iraq, and the realisation that Blair was not at all a ’straight kinda guy’. It was politics as usual.

My point is not that Mr Obama is an American re-tread of Tony Blair. There may be the same flashing smile, and the same contrived – and bogus – pretence of operating above politics. But the new President does seem a more substantial figure, and he does not obviously exhibit Mr Blair’s craving to be loved.

No, the two men are not replicas. It is our unguarded euphoria that is the same. In fact, it is much greater now. People weep in the street, and pundits in countless studios become soppy. Everyone is for Obama, only much more so, as everyone was for Blair nearly 12 years ago.

This is not healthy. If a politician is beyond criticism, he is apt to feel and act like a god.

That is what has happened in countless totalitarian states, whose leaders invariably encourage a personality cult. It is not supposed to happen in modern democracies, but it does.

After their wipe-out in 1997, the Tories constituted a hopeless opposition. For the next few years the Republicans in Congress are likely to be equally feeble. If the media reaction to Mr Obama’s inauguration is anything to go by, he will enjoy a generally supine and fawning Press, just as Mr Blair did until he ran into the buffers over Iraq.

So the new President may not be tested and held to account as he should be. Brilliant though he may be – and we really don’t know one way or the other – he is undoubtedly very inexperienced.

In fact, I can’t think of a U.S. President over the past 30 years who has assumed the highest office with so little executive experience. To be frank, Mr Obama has had none – just like Mr Blair in 1997.

Such political know-how that he does have was largely gleaned in the rather murky world of Chicago machine politics, where he had one or two dodgy associations that have already caused him some embarrassment. Media which are craven are hardly likely to shine a light into a closet that might contain more disturbing specimens.

New era, great expectations: George and Laura Bush welcome Barack and Michelle Obama to the White House. Obama has a lot to of work on his hands following ‘George W. Bush… the worst American President in living memory’

Nor would people be wise to go on judging Mr Obama by the quality of his oratory rather than the efficacy of his deeds. Oratory can be uplifting, as Winston Churchill proved at various junctures during the last war, but America needs effective policies not pretty words. Mr Obama is a genius at making grandiloquent statements that would command the agreement of almost every person on the planet. Now we are looking for the beef.

In fact, I must own up to a feeling which in the present climate will be regarded as almost heretical. I realise that he is accounted by the media as one of the finest orators of all time. I read in one paper yesterday of his ‘perfectly crafted sentences’. Really? His speeches sometimes seem to me woolly in their content, and hackneyed or overly sentimental in their delivery.

Take Mr Obama’s reaction to the news that the 76-year-old Senator Edward Kennedy had collapsed and suffered convulsions at the inaugural lunch on Tuesday. He could have simply said that he was very sorry to hear the news, and that he hoped Mr Kennedy would get better soon. In the event he said in his characteristically overblown way: ‘And so I would be lying to you if I did not say that right now part of me is with him.’

What insincere, over-the-top nonsense. One might almost say Blairite nonsense. Despite losing part of himself to the Senator, the President gamely attended ten balls with his wife.

Am I a cynical journalist who cannot recognise political genius and goodness and eloquence when they stare me in the face? Possibly. In fact, I hope so. No one would be more pleased than me if Mr Obama turned out to be half as wonderful as his supporters and cheerleaders think he is.

America and the rest of us face daunting challenges. In my book George W. Bush was the worst American President in living memory. No American occupant of the White House in recent times has bequeathed so many appalling problems, most of which were partly or largely of his own making. The United States and the world yearn for an outstanding President, and it will be wonderful if Mr Obama turns out to be that man.

But don’t decide that he is until he has succeeded. Let him be held to account by politicians and the press and the people. Let’s not forget that, despite being young, clever and charismatic, he is only a mortal politician. For his sake, as well as ours, we should not expect the impossible.

Apologia for Hamas

U.S. Army War College Publishes Apologia for Hamas

IPT News
January 21, 2009

http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/979

Send

RSS

The U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published a monograph last month by Sherifa Zuhur entitled, “Hamas and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based Politics,” a fairly bland heading that only hints at its deeply disturbing content. This monograph is more accurately described as an apologia for Hamas, a violent Islamist organization dedicated to jihad and the destruction of the State of Israel. Hamas was first designated by the United States (U.S.) government as a terrorist organization in 1995 by a presidential executive order and then again as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in 1997. Hamas has remained on the FTO list ever since. The essay also consistently demonizes Israel and its legitimate defense of national sovereignty under international law.

The U.S. Army War College is an official educational facility of the Department of Defense, and is accredited by the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. The mission of the Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based War College is to prepare its students for strategic leadership positions in the U.S. military and senior levels of civilian policymaking. American taxpayers fund the War College and its Strategic Studies Institute.

According to the monograph’s forward (written by SSI Director Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.), “Hamas and Israel” provides “an orientation to HAMAS and its base” that demonstrates how “efforts….to separate HAMAS from its popular support and network of social and charitable organizations…have not been effective in destroying the organization, nor in eradicating the will to resist among a fairly large segment of the Palestinian population.”[1] The pronounced bias in support of Hamas and against the State of Israel that suffuses this monograph shows in the absence of any explanation for why Hamas would continue to be engaged in resistance of any sort through the end of 2008, much less incessant rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilian population centers, more than three years after Israel withdrew completely from Gaza. Instead, key recommendations include the need for “Israel and the United States…to abandon their policies of non-negotiation and non-communication with HAMAS.”[2] Additionally, according to Zuhur, Israel needs to “abandon the aspects of its new defensive strategy which are calculated to thwart peace efforts,”[3] by “[d]ismantling the settlements in the West Bank”[4] and recognizing what Zuhur calls “Hamas’ political and strategic development”[5] instead of villainizing the group. She claims that “Israel could not tolerate Palestinian Arabs’ resistance of their [sic] authority on the legal basis of denial of self-determination”[6] and slips in a stab at what she terms “Israel’s rejection of all comprehensive peace offers by the Arabs.”[7] Statements like these betray the actual purpose of this monograph: to criticize Israel for exercising its sovereign right to self-defense while giving Hamas a free pass for terrorist assaults that deliberately target Israel’s civilian population. It should be noted that this monograph was published the very week that Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip on 27 December 2008.

American dedication to free speech should not extend to using taxpayer money to pay for a paean to Islamist terrorism, backed by shoddy research and written at what is supposed to be this nation’s premier U.S. Army institute for national security research and analysis. Unfortunately, there is precedent at SSI for this genre of terrorist apologia. Sherifa Zuhur, an American citizen who is Research Professor of Islamic and Regional Studies at SSI, is the same author who penned an April 2008 SSI monograph, “Precision in the Global War on Terror: Inciting Muslims Through the War of Ideas.”

That monograph takes the form of a Glossary of Terms, from A to Z, which Zuhur uses to identify “a trend of pathologizing beliefs and practices that are at the core of Islam.”[8] Her definitions invariably deny any link between Islam and terrorism and claim that the violence of the suicide bomber is “not a manifestation of belief nor a natural outcome of Islamism or ‘fundamentalism,’ but rather a tactic, labeled with the religious principle of Jihad, that is intended to build an ethos, a camaraderie, and dependency on others engaging in violence.”[9]

Zuhur overlooks the Hamas charter, a theological covenant with Allah, which takes the motto of its parent organization, The Muslim Brotherhood, as its own:

Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model to be followed,

the Koran its constitution, Jihad its way,

and death for the sake of Allah its loftiest desire

Article Seven of the covenant justifies its anti-Semitic mission to obliterate Israel with the notorious hadith authenticated by the two most authoritative hadith scholars in Islam, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim:

The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight

The Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones,

And each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah,

there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…

Had Zuhur included something more than false, dismissive references to the Hamas Covenant in her latest monograph, she may have had a much harder time excoriating Israel for its “…stance towards the democratically-elected Palestinian government headed by HAMAS [which] has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.”[10] Zuhur describes the charter as “defunct” and claims that Hamas leadership no longer “cites or refers to” it while generally playing down its aggressive anti-Israel elements.[11] Yet, as recently as 2007, the Hamas leadership issued an official statement to defend itself against criticism from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two. “We will not betray promises we made to God to continue the path of Jihad and resistance until the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine,”[12] according to the statement. This statement not only clearly reaffirms Hamas’ commitment to the destruction of Israel, but notably as well underscores the theological character of the Hamas Covenant, which declares “promises we made to God.”

Tellingly, Zuhur’s monographs lack citations from recognized Islamic authorities, legal texts, or scriptures. Such quotations would refute her premise that the violent intolerance intrinsic to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Shari’a is not based explicitly in Islamic doctrine.

She also neglects to cite key references in her attempt to portray the Brotherhood as an organization “committed to global change for many decades”[13] that has “restricted its activities to Muslim education and social support.“[14] Here, she conveniently ignores the self-described mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S., which was revealed in a Brotherhood document first introduced into evidence at the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial:

Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America: …The Ikhwan 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…”[15] (emphasis added)

Zuhur’s protestations on behalf of Hamas’ “charitable social services”[16] make a false distinction between those affiliated with al-Qaeda (acknowledged as violent) and those connected to Hamas, which has “carefully separated political and military wings.”[17] Similarly, she claims that “Hamas shares an acceptance of the scientific rational traditions of the West along with moderate Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.”[18] In the rush to publish, Zuhur must have missed reports that the Hamas parliament voted in December 2008 to legalize Shari’a hudud punishments like amputation, flogging, and crucifixion.[19]

In publishing these two monographs by Sherifa Zuhur, the U.S. Army War College exposes itself to serious questions about its advocacy and promotion of views it knows or should have known are deeply inimical to U.S. national security interests. These two publications are each described on their title pages as “a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101.”[20] But their author shills for a foreign terrorist organization. She attacks Israel, a friend and ally of the U.S. and an outpost of liberal democracy in the Middle East, which has been forced to fight jihadist efforts to destroy it for the entire 60 years of its existence. It is fine to present students with varying perspectives on a conflict, but when taxpayer money is used, a higher standard should be demanded. Congress should investigate why the US Army is funding papers supporting Hamas.

---

[1] Zuhur, Sherifa, “Hamas and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based Politics,” Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, December 2008. (pg. v)

[2] Ibid, pg. 63

[3] Ibid, pg. 18.

[4] Ibid, pg. 65

[5] Ibid, pg. x

[6] Ibid, pg. 1

[7] Ibid, pg. 14

[8] Zuhur, Sherifa, “Precision in the Global War on Terror: Inciting Muslims Through the War of Ideas,” Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, April 2008. From the Forward, pg. v.

[9] Ibid, pg. 110

[10] Zuhur, “Hamas and Israel,” pg.1

[11] Ibid, pg. 30-31

[12] Al-Mughrabi, Nidal, “Hamas says still seeks Israel’s destruction,” Reuters, March 12, 2007.

[13] Zuhur, “Hamas and Israel,” pg. 63

[14] Ibid, pg. 91

[15]From ‘On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America’ (5/22/1991); entered into evidence at the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas, TX. While this federal prosecution ended indecisively, Zuhur would have known before “Hamas and Israel” was published in late December 2008 that on November 24, 2008, a unanimous jury conviction on 108 counts was returned in the retrial against five former Holy Land Foundation officials for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

[16] Zuhur, “Hamas and Israel,” pg.18; also “Precision in the Global War on Terror,” pg. 114, where she protests that “…with the War on Terror came an attack on many Islamic charitable associations, both those somehow linked to al-Qa’ida and to organizations that most Muslims regard as nationalist and more moderate like Hamas.”

[17] Ibid (“Hamas and Israel”), pg. 39

[18] Ibid, pg. 60

[19] “Hamas Sanctions Sharia Law,” CBNNews.com, December 24, 2008. http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/507872.aspx

[20] Zuhur, “Hamas and Israel,” from the bottom of the monograph’s title page

Al-Qaida’s Threat Is Still With Us

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | 21 January 2009

War On Terror: President Obama steps into office with awesome responsibilities, not least of which is protecting the U.S. from its enemies, foreign and domestic. From Algeria, we get a reminder of how tough that job is.

---

Read More: Global War On Terror | Election 2008

---

For those who think the global war on terror is just a bad memory from the Bush administration, you might be surprised to discover it isn’t. The threat is real — even more so, given that so many people are convinced it no longer exists.

An overlooked news item out of Algeria puts to rest that notion. The report says that an al-Qaida affiliate there abruptly closed a mountain training base after an experiment with biological weapons went wrong.

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition he not be named, confirmed the accident that led to a shutdown of the training facility in Tizi Ouzou, a province in eastern Algeria.

He said the U.S. intercepted desperate communications between the group and al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan’s tribal region earlier this month suggesting that the camp had been quickly abandoned.

A report by the Sun, a British tabloid, said at least 40 operatives belonging to al-Qaida in the Land of the Maghreb (AQLIM), an al-Qaida affiliate in North Africa, were killed in a training accident.

From the sound of it, they were likely killed by a strain of the bubonic plague — the deadly rat-borne bacterial disease that ravaged much of the world in the 13th and 14th century, wiping out fully a third of Europe’s population. An airborne version, pneumonic plague, is equally deadly.

The details are horrific. The Algerian victims were said to be afflicted with horrible boils in different parts of their bodies, dying in excruciating pain after just a few hours. It’s an awful way to die.

Since AQLIM boasts of 1,000 members in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Nigeria, the loss of 40 terrorists will barely scratch the surface of their membership.

What worries us is that if the “accident” was part of a wider program to create a deadly bioweapon to be used against civilians — possibly in the U.S. or Europe — then we are in serious danger.

For seven years now, Americans have been safe. After 9/11, former President Bush rocked the terrorists on their heels by pursuing them wherever they were.

Osama bin Laden has been reduced to wheezing out badly recorded threats to the U.S. from his hideout in Pakistan’s badlands, possibly a cave. Other al-Qaida terrorist affiliates have scattered across the region, living in fear of being given up for a reward.

The U.S. military, at Bush’s behest, has put relentless and merciless pressure on the terrorists. U.S. killer drones prowl the skies over terrorist safe havens, looking for targets and, with Hellfire missiles, often finding them.

At least six senior al-Qaida leaders have been killed in just the last six months. As the indispensable Web site Stratfor has noted, Pakistan has become “the al-Qaida version of hell.”

This explains in large part why we haven’t suffered a second hor-rific terrorist strike since 9/11. But the accident in Algeria likewise suggests that we can never let down our guard.

A bioweapon loosed on a major population center is a terrifying prospect. The last plague outbreak in London in 1665 killed more than 30,000 people in a city much smaller than the one today.

Al-Qaida doesn’t lack the will to do this, just the means.

Developing a biological or chemical weapon is “something that al-Qaida still aspires to do,” a former National Security Council counterterrorism expert, Roger Cressey, told the Washington Times.

President Obama, to his credit, has vowed to support sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to help win the war against the Taliban on the ground and continue to defeat al-Qaida. But will he continue to fight the broader war against terrorism?~~~

We hope so. If his inaugural address is any indication, he just might. Obama pointedly noted that “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred” — a clear reference to al-Qaida and the threat it still poses.

While campaigning, Obama called for all troops to be pulled from Iraq by the end of 2008, and for Guantanamo to be shut immediately. Since winning the presidency, he’s backtracked on both pledges.

That shows flexibility and wisdom. He’ll need both, since the U.S. faces a terrorist threat that will take advantage of our inattention or our weakness to kill as many of us as possible, without remorse.

Lincoln: Godspeed

Lincoln: Godspeed

Please Keep Them Safe

Rick Warren, Obama

Liberals don’t have to worry – Obama goes to the other extreme by inviting Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.  – see “Still alert” below.

Rick Warren, Obama and the Left

The left’s intolerance of Rick Warren could slow Obama’s progress.

The most thoughtful and interesting debate of the two-year-long presidential campaign occurred last August at Saddleback Church between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by Saddleback pastor Rick Warren. So it is notable that President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration next month has brought forth hyperpartisan invective from the Democratic left. It has spent the past week conveying to the world its disappointment and disgust with the choice of Pastor Warren because he opposes gay marriage and abortion.

AP

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said that “By inviting Rick Warren to your Inauguration, you have tarnished the view that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender [LGBT] Americans have a place at your table.”

The head of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, is “deeply disappointed.” She says Mr. Obama should have picked someone with “consistent mainstream American values.”

Perhaps the most telling comment came from a “very disappointed” Rep. Barney Frank, who pointed out that during the campaign Senator Obama’s “stated commitment to LGBT rights won him the strong support of the great majority of those who support that cause.” Mr. Frank is putting down a marker; the left will monitor whether the new President deserves their continued support after the Warren-blessed Inauguration.

During the famous and corrosive Culture Wars, both sides accused the other of unremitting intolerance. Our own longstanding view has been that conferring protected legal status on the most politicized issues in those disputes, such as abortion and gay marriage, properly belongs inside the political system of the states, where diverse populations can work toward a political settlement.

Californians did so in November when they voted to pass Prop. 8, in effect disapproving of legal status for gay marriage. Rick Warren, an evangelical minister, as well as the Mormon Church worked for Prop. 8’s passage. It won by about 52% to 47%.

Afterwards, some gay leaders said their side would have to work harder to make more voters understand their arguments. More publicized, though, were the acts of retribution taken by gay activists in California against individuals whom campaign-contributions showed to have supported Prop. 8. Some were forced out of their jobs.

For about a generation, many on the left have believed that active and unapologetic intolerance of the right was justified because its views on matters such as abortion and gay rights were simply unacceptable. This moral somersault may work for them, but to the average American voter, a full-throated assault on the likes of Rick Warren for being “wrong” on two of many issues looks like simple intolerance.

The person in this drama for whom the leftwing Democratic habit of moralized intolerance could be a problem is Barack Obama. The left loaded up heavily in its support of candidate Obama, first against the Clinton machine — always thought to be too willing to compromise with the center — and then in the general campaign. These elements in the Democratic Party know what they want Barack Obama to deliver on judges, the environment, global warming and lifestyle rights litigation.

Mr. Obama’s choice of Rick Warren for the Inaugural’s invocation suggests that he is intent on using the momentum of his remarkable victory to build a governing coalition for the long haul. The silver lining for Republicans may be that the left won’t let him do that.

=====================

Obama prayer speaker comes from group feds say is linked to Hamas

By JOSH GERSTEIN, Politico.com
One of the religious leaders invited to address Barack Obama’s inaugural prayer service Wednesday heads an Islamic group named by federal prosecutors as a co-conspirator in a terrorism-fundraising trial in Texas. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is scheduled to join Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis offering prayers for the new president and his family during a service at the National Cathedral in Washington, organizers announced Friday. Mattson’s group calls itself “the largest Muslim umbrella organization” in North America. However, in May 2007, federal prosecutors included ISNA on a list of nearly 300 co-conspirators filed in a criminal case charging that the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, funneled more than $12 million to Hamas. The U.S. government designated Hamas as a terrorist group in 1995.

War Without End

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | 8 January 2009

Mideast: Proponents of a French-Egyptian plan for a cease-fire in Gaza say it might stop the fighting. But for any chance at peace, Hamas must be defeated decisively.

---

Read More: Middle East & North Africa | Global War On Terror

---

The idea behind French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s plan was to call an immediate cease-fire to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza — which Israel did — then to hold urgent talks to stop the violence. Israel, with reservations, agreed; Hamas, however, rejected the idea.

Don’t worry. Israel will get blamed.

Watching the world’s reaction as a small nation surrounded by enemies defends itself from attack is a sickening thing. Along with celebrity Israel-haters such as singer Annie Lennox and former model and rock-star wife Bianca Jagger, the far left in the U.S., a large swath of European intelligentsia and the United Nations have cast Israel as villain and Hamas as victim.

But they’ve got it backwards. Israel has taken extraordinary care to avoid civilian casualties, going so far as to warn those in buildings it is preparing to strike. Hamas has no such compunction. It uses civilians as human shields, hoping to raise the death toll so the so-called “international community” will blame Israel even more.

In talks, Israel has shown repeatedly through concessions as well as words that it wants a deal and will accept a Palestinian state.

But each time Israel has made concessions, it’s been met with the implacable fury of its foe. The world Islamist movement, as embodied by Hamas, seeks Israel’s annihilation and nothing else.

It happened after talks at Camp David in July 2000 with President Clinton, when Israel offered PLO chief Yasser Arafat literally 98% of the land he requested, and the possibility of getting most of the remaining 2% down the road. The response? Arafat stormed out, and the violent Second Intifada began.

In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, an act of good will and a major strategic concession to its enemies. But there was no reciprocity. Islamist terrorists attacked Israel, and in 2006 the Palestinians themselves voted Hamas into power — knowing full well that Hamas’ explicit goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.

More recently, Hamas spent a six-month cease-fire with Israel rearming and restocking its weapons. When that cease-fire ended on Dec. 19, 2008, Hamas began lobbing deadly Iranian-built Qassam and Russian-designed Grad rockets at Israeli civilian populations.

Fortunately for Israel, a network of bomb shelters built over 60 years of unyielding conflict has kept casualties to a minimum.

Sadly, the same can’t be said in Gaza. Hamas has used children’s schools, hospitals and mosques as staging grounds for attacks and to store munitions. When civilian human shields are inevitably harmed — and injuries to children and innocents are always regrettable — Hamas doesn’t get blamed. Israel does.

Those who think Israel should stop fighting miss the point: Hamas’ 1988 charter explicitly calls for the murder of Jews in the name of Islam and the destruction of Israel. It must be repudiated.

The Gaza war could end tomorrow, and the promise of a Palestinian state redeemed, if Hamas and its terrorist allies in the Mideast, including Iran, ended their war of extermination against Israel.

Sadly, this won’t happen. No country can negotiate away its very existence. If Israel doesn’t destroy Hamas, it will never have peace.

Random thoughts on the passing scene

9 April 2009 – IBD

By Thomas Sowell
Random thoughts on the passing scene:

Most of the problems of this country are not nearly as bad as the “solutions” — especially the solutions that politicians come up with during election years.

Some people actually think that televising Congress gives us information. What it really does is give politicians millions of dollars worth of free advertising, while they play charades on camera to fool the rest of us.

Alfred E. Neuman of Mad magazine said: “What, me worry?” During election years, Democrats running for office say: “What, me liberal?”

Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.

What is more scary than any particular candidate or policy is the gullibility of the public and their willingness to be satisfied with talking points, rather than serious arguments.

One way to reduce illegal immigration might be to translate some of our far-left publications into Spanish and give everyone in Mexico subscriptions. After they read how terrible this country is, many may want to stay away.

Whenever I see one of Barack Obama’s smooth performances, it reminds me of a saying from my old neighborhood in Harlem: “An eel is like sandpaper compared to you.”

Most people on the Right have no problem understanding people on the Left because many, if not most, were on the Left themselves when they were younger. But many, if not most, people on the Left find it inexplicable how any decent and intelligent person could be on the Right.
It is amazing to me that there are people who still take seriously claims by some candidates that they are against “special interests.” All politicians are against their opponents’ special interests and in favor of their own special interests.

Nothing is more fraudulent than calls for a “dialogue on race.” Those who issue such calls are usually quick to cry “racism” at any frank criticism. They are almost invariably seeking a monologue on race, to which others are supposed to listen.

The same people who have gone ballistic when some prominent figure is found to belong to some all-male social club are full of excuses for why Barack Obama remained a member of a racist and anti-American church for 20 years.

Among the many wise things said by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. Yet an incredible number of people make up whatever “facts” are needed to support whatever they choose to believe.

Rachael Ray is showing up in so many places on various television programs, on magazine covers, on boxes of crackers that the question must be asked: Are we sure that she is not twins, or perhaps triplets?

The way to get people’s votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.

The idea behind giving professors lifetime tenure is that this will enable them to speak out freely. But it would be hard to name any other occupation with a more cowardly record than academics, who have been giving in to politically correct campus bullies ever since the 1960s.

There is no question that Barack Obama is a clever and glib fellow. There is also no question that some of the most foolish, dangerous, and horrific things done around the world in the past hundred years have been done by clever and glib fellows.

When someone is brutally murdered, the media often defuse our shock by focusing on praise of the victim, instead of focusing on what can be done to keep the murderer from ever doing this again. In the midst of all this emotional venting, it is galling to realize that chances are the murderer will eventually be put back on the street again.

Hamas Uses Schools and Ceasefire to Shoot Rockets at Israel

Columbo on Obama

I know I’ve sent this before – but all of us should save this, especially because Obama will be our President today – OBAMANATION DAY 20 JANUARY 2009.

Excuse me Mr. Obama, I mean Senator Obama, sir. Um . . . know you are busy and important and stuff. I mean running for president is very important and . . . ah . . . I hate to bother you. I will only take a minute ok, sir?

See, I have these missing pieces that are holding me up, and I was wondering sir, if you could take time out of your busy schedule and help me out. You know, no big deal, just some loose ends and things.

Well, listen, anyways, I can ‘t seem to get the information I need to wrap this up.

These things seem to either be locked up or not available. They should be available as part of the public record given the high office you are seeking to win, Sir. I’ m sure it’s just some oversight or glitch or something, so if you could you tell me where these things are..
Could you help me please find these things, sir?
Let’s see here….Ah, Yes, Sir It’s just a short list….Shouldn’t take too long if we could just get together, Sir……AllI need is :

Your Occidental College records
Your Columbia College records
Your Columbia Thesis paper
Your Harvard College records
Your Selective Service Registration
Your medical records
Your Illinois State Senate records
Your Illinois State Senate schedule
Your Law practice client list
A Certified Copy of your original Birth certificate
Your embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth
Your Harvard Law Review articles that were published
Your University of Chicago scholarly articles
Your Record of baptism

Oh hey… listen, Sir ! I know you are VERY busy! Is this too much for you now? I mean,…I tell you what. I will come back tomorrow. Give you some time to get these things together, you know? I mean, I know you are busy, so I will just let myself out……But I will be back tomorrow. And the day after………..

Who wants to know these things ask Senator Obama? Columbo answered:

THE PEOPLE

Jackie Mason on Obama

Paratroopers Operate in Gaza

Paratroopers Operate in Gaza, 16 Jan 2009, 10:26 IST

Paratroopers prepare for confrontation with Hamas forces.

Paratrooper Brigade commander, Hartzi Halevi, during an IDF operation in Gaza.

Ann Coulter: Guilty

Seven Chapters – each one of them all block busters – full of information that is vital to every one of us who loves America.

More Soon,

Don