Wizblog

John Steele Gordon:

Charleston, South Carolina, was the cradle of the Confederacy. And come next January, barring unforeseen developments, it and the rest of the 1st District will have a black Congressman for the first time since Reconstruction. Tim Scott defeated Paul Thurmond for the Republican nomination last night, and the district has been a safe Republican seat since 1981. It wasn’t even close, with Scott trouncing Strom Thurmond’s son by 61 to 39 percent.

That a black man could beat the son of the legendary segregationist so badly in a district where the Civil War began — the district where Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — is a measure of just how much the South has changed in the last 50 years, and the country’s politics and race relations along with it.

But assuming Scott is elected, he needn’t apply for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, of course. It’s a measure of how little the left in American politics has changed in the last 50 years that the Black Caucus — devoted to race-based politics and victimology — admits only liberal Democratic members.

To be fair, it has been a while since there was such a thing as a black Republican Congressman for the Black Caucus to consider (J.C. Watts), and if elected, Scott will face the customary leftist smears of inauthenticity and Uncle Tomism endured by all blacks who stray from identity politics orthodoxy. If the past predicts the future, he will be called a "race traitor" and there will be no end to leftist attempts to marginalize and defame him.

May he have the courage and character to persevere until he is joined in Congress by many more black conservatives, and the poisonous and condescending idea that all blacks should be of one correct political persuasion is consigned to the scrap heap once and for all.

It is notable that Scott was endorsed by Sarah Palin, and won big in a majority white (66%) congressional district...all of which confounds and refutes the "Tea Partiers are racists" crowd...an inconvenient reality that they will doubtless ignore.

Posted by dan at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (121)

Classic Steyn. Hilarious, right down to the new Hillary campaign slogan. (Yes, I'm in the Mark Steyn Fan Club...we have a secret handshake and everything)

Posted by dan at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (56)

From MEMRI - The Middle East Media Research Institute

American Al-Qaeda Operative Adam Gadahn Threatens More Anti-American Terror Attacks in a Personal Address to President Obama, and Concludes: Next Time We Might Not Show the Same Restraint and Self-control

Barack:

I know that as you slither snakelike into the second year of your reign as a purported president of change, you are finding your hands full with running the affairs of a declining and besieged empire and – in the process – proving yourself to be nothing more than another treacherous, bloodthirsty and narrow-minded American war president, what with your overseeing of the hasty overhauling of America’s compromised homeland security cordon, your brazen escalation of American aggression and interference in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and your removal of our captive brothers from detention facilities scattered around the globe to Muslim-only concentration camps in Illinois, Bagram and elsewhere, all in the name of protecting the American people from the threat of Muslim retaliation for American crimes, or what you insist on calling the threat of al-Qaida and al-Qaida inspired terrorism.

Click above for the rest.

Quite a catch for Al Qaeda and their sponsors...this American-born America-hater Gadahn. A useful tool for the leadership, for sure... the best possible P.R. man to trot out the company line. Unfortunately, it also means he likely has access to the ways and means to complement his own zeal for terror attacks. It comforts me to know that we have many missiles with Adam Gadahn's name on them, and when he screws up, in Karachi or elsewhere, he'll be vaporized by the U.S. military as the enemy he is.

No one can deny that Barack Obama has been making war on al Qaeda and their Taliban counterparts, but as Michael Ledeen and Andy McCarthy repeatedly point out, the disconnect of those anti-terror policies from the direct sponsorship of the terrorist organizations by Iran's mullahs, continues to make our policy incoherent. Predator drones for al Qaeda, and engagement for Tehran...and of course the disconnect, if not the engagement policy, long predates Obama.

Because it is Iranian IED's killing our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Iran-funded Hamas bombing Israel from Gaza. The Hezbollah that blew up our African embassies and sits on Israel's borders is an Iranian creation. Iran harbors Osama bin Laden. Could they mock us any more openly? Yet their fraudulently-elected President is permitted to fly here and speak at the United Nations. Excerpting Ledeen:

...from time to time a military leader will stand up and tell the press or the Congress about the ongoing attacks against American military personnel from the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are very short-lived episodes. Neither our journalists nor our elected representatives demand to know more, because they really do not want to know more. If they knew more, if they added up all these episodes over many years they would have to recognize the pattern, that is to say, the war that is being waged against us.

McCarthy was asking in 2006, as Bush was kicking the can down the road..."How many Americans do they need to kill before we get the point?" This administration is still counting...and to make it worse, they're disinclined to do much to help the Iranian democracy movement, even rhetorically, lest we risk irritating our negotiating partners.

We talk because talking is an end in itself for the diplomatic class. Iran talks...or doesn't...depending on the day...because they don't quite have their nukes yet.

Posted by dan at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (53)

Full text of Obama's speech on the Gulf oill spill.

I think quoting Olberman is unprecedented in this space, but his response immediately following the speech was apt..."it was a great speech if you've been on another planet the last 57 days".

Using the occasion to campaign for cap and trade energy taxation wasn't giving the people exactly what they wanted to hear either, I suspect, as McConnell says in the response (below)

The ever present strawmen were there...he's reforming an agency that operated on "a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility - a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves". Yep, that sounds like the Department of the Interior.

So the regulated shouldn't view their government regulators with hostility...but they shouldn't get too cozy with them either. Embrace your government overlords...just don't jump into bed with them. The relationship between government and the entities they regulate is too adversarial...and not adversarial enough. Got it.

I know of no one who thought the next step in cleaning up the Gulf mess should be an Obama speech....and I think turning it into a commercial for another huge tax increase was politically tone deaf and inappropriate. But hey...he's in the middle of the toughest year and a half of any year and a half since the 1930s, hadn't you heard?

Here's an excerpt from Sen. McConnell's response:

...day after day, as the oil continues to flow, what we hear about from the administration is how tough they plan to be with BP and now, apparently, how important it is that we institute a new tax that will raise energy costs for every single American but which will do nothing to plug the leak. Never has a mission statement fit an administration as perfectly as Rahm Emanuel’s “never allow a crisis to go to waste.” Climate change policy is important, but first things first.

Americans are saying two things at the moment: stop this spill and clean it up. So with all due respect to the White House, the wetlands of the Bayou, the beaches of the coast, and our waters in the Gulf are far more important than the status of the Democrats’ legislative agenda in Washington. Americans want us to stop the oil spill first. And until this leak is plugged, they’re not in any mood to hand over even more power in the form of a new national energy tax to a government that, so far, hasn’t lived up to their expectations in its response to this crisis.

Posted by dan at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (54)

Doctor Zero is still optimistic, because he rejects The Pillars of Apathy

I refuse to believe government programs launched in the Forties, Sixties, and Seventies are indestructible features of our lives, immune to repeal or reform. I don’t believe a nation with a 234-year history of courage and industry is destined to suffocate in a shallow pool of nanny-state cement, poured only a few generations ago. It will be difficult for the American giant to rise again… but history unfolds in the space between difficult and impossible.

There is no such thing as eternal legislation. Even the Constitution can be amended. It’s only a question of how much willpower it will take for us to cast aside the intolerable acts of our political class. We are descended from men who showed great vigor in resisting intolerable acts.

[...]

I reject the notion that politicians are universally corrupt and treacherous, leaving the voters with no meaningful power but to select the next batch of crooks to rob them blind. There are some men and women of true character and integrity in public offices throughout the land. There should be more of them. We should demand it. Throwing up our hands and accepting the notion that all of them are charlatans set the bar low enough for a useless “community organizer” with a shady past to stumble over it. It’s what got us trillion-dollar spending bills full of vague assumptions and lies, pushed by a government that has no serious plans beyond making itself larger. It’s how we ended up with a chief executive who only bothers to come into the office long enough to write himself a bigger budget, and looks honestly stunned when his country expects him to do something productive, or even take their side in an international debate.

Posted by dan at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (49)

More Steyn...the guy is prolific.

Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

Posted by dan at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Jen Rubin on what Congress is doing to pressure Obama on Israel, and to go around him to Netanyahu.

Related:

Scott at Power Line

Worst First - Alan Dershowitz

Posted by dan at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (71)

Mark Steyn talks about "The left’s strange hostility to Hirsi Ali"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s great cause is women’s liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on “speaking truth to power,” the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat.

The latest is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Reviewing Ayaan’s new book Nomad, he begins:

“She has managed to outrage more people—in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her—in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir.”
That’s his opening pitch: if there are those who wish to kill her, it’s her fault because she’s a provocateuse who’s found a lucrative shtick in “working on antagonizing” people. The Times headlines Kristof’s review “The Gadfly,” as if she’s a less raddled and corpulent Gore Vidal. In fact, she wrote a screenplay for a film; Muslim belligerents threatened to kill her and her director; they made good on one half of that threat. This isn’t shtick.

As per usual with Steyn, read it all....

Another example of shooting the messenger who brings awkward and revealing tidings...David Horowitz attempts to elicit comment from Joshua Micah Marshall, leading light of the liberal blogosphere, on the deafening silence emanating from the left on the oppression of women and gays in Islam, and their failure to proudly (liberally?) stand up to Islamic totalitarianism as the enemy of America and the West that it is. The exchange is ably narrated and commented upon by David Swindle.

As far as I can tell from their correspondence, Marshall's answer is basically "it's not my job". Marshall has instead expended his progressive pixels ridiculing Horowitz for his tireless work championing the cause of women's rights under Islam on American college campuses. All Horowitz wants to know is where the self-professed liberals are. He'd like to think they'd have his back as he speaks out against the gay-lynching, woman-oppressing, Jew-hating theocratic culture of radical Islam. And he can't hear them.

Horowitz infuriates the left just as Hirsi Ali does...by rubbing the noses of self-styled liberals in their own illiberalism and incoherence. A feminist movement that ignores the oppression of women under Islam is not a movement worthy of the name. They'd rather point to other outcomes in society that offend them...not enough female CEO's, for example. Unlike Hirsi Ali's brand of courage, that sort of protest doesn't get one's throat slit in the street.

By the way, female CEO's are just fine...in theory....as a prop for political grievance. That is, until they have actual experience and success in the cruel, capitalist private sector....and then perhaps run for elective office as Republicans. Then they get icky all of a sudden...and they are fiercely opposed as the enemy by the same folks who fancy themselves advocates for women. That these smart, capable female CEO's might have acquired skills in...say, efficient management of large amounts of money...which might prove useful in government work....is a bug, not a feature, apparently. Hear them roar. But I digress in a big way...

As Christopher Hitchens (and no doubt others) has repeatedly said, no one deserves the label of liberal who is so indifferent as to whether people live in freedom or under tyranny. This is the hole that leftists dig for themselves when they allow their multicultural pieties (and their allergy to agreeing with conservatives) to trump their liberal principles. And they respond with indignant fury...and in Marshall's case, evasions and subject-changing...when true fighters for individual freedom like Hirsi Ali and Horowitz ask them..."What happened to your liberalism?"

Posted by dan at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (154)

Dorothy Rabinowitz - The Alien in the White House

...it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion.

[...]

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

[...]

The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good.

Posted by dan at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (59)

National Deficit-Reduction Commissioner, Andy Stern:

"America needs a 21st century economic plan because we now know the market-worshipping, privatizing, de-regulating, dehumanizing American financial plan has failed and should never be revived, worshipping the market again....It has failed America and everyone that works here."

Yes, Andy, the American system of capitalism and free enterprise that has produced the highest standard of living in human history, and is at the same time the most generous, charitable, freedom-enhancing nation on the planet, is an abject failure. Clearly we need to emulate more closely the European social democracies that are currently in a death spiral.

It's beyond a simple lack of patriotism with poseurs like Stern. After all, they think patriotism is out-dated...retrograde. There's nothing about America or its values that is worth defending...that is, until it is transformed by them, via raw state power, into something more admirable...less exceptional. Hubris on stilts.

Posted by dan at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

When the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year (it is not in Obama's DNA to extend them) the already struggling private economy "will collapse", according to Arthur Laffer. As weak as the 2010 numbers look, they are artificially strong, according to Laffer, as earners continue to declare income sooner (2010), rather than wait until tax rates jump after the first of the year.

Arthur Laffer: Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse - WSJ.com

Posted by dan at 8:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (73)

By acclaim, the conservative blogosphere's favorite Democrat...Mickey Kaus:

In an obviously effective attempt to attract free attention to his hopeless primary campaign against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, California's Mickey Kaus has just announced the three backroom bribes that he would accept from the Obama administration to drop his challenge.

The California primary is Tuesday.

[...]

The candidate who claims to be no politician said he would accept no ordinary federal bureaucrat's job. However, he could be purchased by employment as:

--Head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to push for an actual physical fence on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants and to end the "anointed incumbent...Boxer's obsessive talk of amnesty, sorry, 'a path to citizenship'" that actually acts as a powerful lure for even more illegal immigrants.

--Second, Kaus kindly offers, Obama could put him on the National Labor Relations Board so he could thwart "Big Labor's attempt to add to their dwindling memberships by avoiding secret ballots in union organizing drives."

--Finally, Kaus offered to accept an administration job offer to the Department of Education to write "a scathing report" on California teachers' unions and their deleterious impact on the state.

Posted by dan at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Two great pieces this week by Arthur C. Brooks, President of AEI

WSJ - Slouching Towards Athens;The Obama agenda and the Europeanization of America.

Our friends across the Atlantic are fond of saying that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work. According to the data, they are basically right. Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that while the average Italian, for example, enjoys 42 days of vacation per year, the average American has 16.

A predictable corollary: Many Europeans also expect others to work so they can live. The International Social Survey Programme asked Americans and Europeans whether they believe "It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes." In virtually all of Western Europe more than 50% agree, and in many countries it is much higher—77% in Spain, whose redistributive economy is in shambles. Meanwhile, only 33% of Americans agree with income redistribution.

Simply put, Europeans have a much stronger taste for other people's money than we do. This is vividly illustrated by the recent protests in the U.S. and Greece.

Why are citizens rioting and striking in Greece? Despite the worst economic crisis in decades, labor unions and state functionaries demand that others pay for the early retirements, lifetime benefits and state pensions to which they feel entitled. In America, however, the tea partiers demonstrate not to get more from others, but rather against government growth, public debt, bailouts and a budget-busting government overhaul of the health-care industry.

In other words, the tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding. It is an example of American exceptionalism if there ever was one.

And at NRO, an eloquent case for free enterprise, and what's at stake in its battle against big government...

Happy Now?

Reads like it might be essentially Chapter One of The Battle, Brooks' new book.

Posted by dan at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (60)

Beautiful.

UPDATE: I have replaced the original YouTube version of this video with a link from Eyeblast (via Ed Morrissey), because YouTube caved to a baseless copyright claim by Warner Bros and took down the video. "We Con the World" was obviously a parody of the original "We Are the World" song, and as such protected under the "Fair Use" rules, but then YouTube is gutless and avoids litigation at the expense of free speech principles, especially when the politics of the issue suit them. Weasels. More from Ed Driscoll.

See also:

Krauthammer:

The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence. The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Photos: The Horrifying Toll of the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

Behind the Headlines: The Israeli humanitarian lifeline to Gaza

UPDATE: Four Hamas rockets hit Israel from Gaza..

This is powerful...Free Gaza, indeed.

A. Barton Hinkle - Richmond Times-Dispatch

What's the real problem with Israel's assault on the Gaza flotilla? It's not the loss of life. Almost nobody cares about that. It's not the suffering of Palestinians. When Palestinians suffer, the world shrugs.

Remember the worldwide condemnations, the protests across Europe and Asia, the stern rebukes from the world's high councils in January of last year -- when Hamas militants executed 54 members of the Fatah party and tortured 175 more for (allegedly) collaborating with Israel? You don't? That's because the killing and torture went on with almost no notice or comment.

How about the world's outrage in November 2007, when Hamas gunmen killed seven civilians and wounded 80 more during a rally memorializing Yasser Arafat in Gaza? If you don't remember the outrage, the marches in the street, the scathing U.N. resolutions, that's because there weren't any.

Nor did the world weep when the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) suspended operations in Gaza after two staff members were caught in a Hamas-Fatah crossfire and killed. When Palestinian factional violence impedes humanitarian aid, well, tsk-tsk.

Last February, Amnesty International reported that numerous prisoners injured by an Israeli bombing of a prison were "shot dead in the hospitals where they were receiving treatment." But they weren't shot by Israelis, so nobody objected.

According to a report by Reuters, "An estimated 616 Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting since Hamas defeated Fatah" in January 2006.

World reaction? Shrug.

Two wrongs don't make a right, and none of the above is meant to excuse Israel's clumsy, ill-orchestrated boarding of the Mavi Marmara. Nor is it meant to offer an unequivocal defense of the blockade, a legitimate point of contention. (Are cilantro, sage, chocolate, and notebooks really tools of terrorism? Really?)

The point is simply that those professing to be so broken up about the blockade and Israel's enforcement of it have been remarkably subdued whenever suffering is inflicted by someone other than Jews.

Peter Wehner:

Sometimes it is the duty of responsible people to reject the shadows in favor of reality. And in the case of Israel -- not always, but often enough -- the reality is this: it is being condemned not because of its actions; it is being condemned because of its very existence, because of its very nature, and yes, because of its Jewishness. The objections against Israel are not specific to this or that act; they are existential.

I say that in full recognition that many fine and intelligent people, including close friends of mine, view Israel in a far more critical light than do I. Reasonable people can certainly interpret facts and just causes in different ways. But for others, there is more, much more, going on than simply that.

The assault on Israel that we see emanating from some quarters of the American left and a few remaining pockets on the “paleo-conservative” right, in parts of Europe, in much of the Muslim world, and from international organizations like the United Nations and so-called human rights groups is too fierce, too hypocritical, too unqualified, and too preposterous to be explained by anything other than malignant motivations. These critics are far too eager to light the match -- any match -- that leads to an anti-Israeli conflagration.

Let’s cut through the clouds of deceit and duplicity, shall we? Israel, more than any nation on earth, is held to an impossible standard. Its own sacrifices for peace, which exceed those of any other country, are constantly overlooked while the sadistic acts and crimes of its enemies too often excused.

Thomas Joscelyn - Flotilla Organizer has "Clear, Long-Standing Ties to Terrorism and Jihad"

I realize I'm heavy on the Contentions links here, but they keep saying what needs to be said...

Jonathan Tobin:

The blockade of Gaza restricts the importation of arms and construction materials that could allow the Hamas regime there to rebuild its defense. It does not restrict food and medicine. It was implemented in the wake of Hamas’s seizure of power in the strip, a bloody coup that took the lives of many Palestinians. Indeed, even the diplomatic Quartet of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations vowed not to deal with Hamas until it recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced violence. But having refused to do either, or to free an Israeli soldier who has been held captive since 2006, Hamas is hoping that Western sympathy ginned up by the flotilla incident will result in an end to the blockade and ultimately recognition for the Islamist regime they have established in Gaza and which they hope to eventually extend to the West Bank. Granting Hamas such a victory would do more than any Israeli settlement could ever do to undermine the rival Palestinian Authority led by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas or the administration’s unlikely hopes for peace.

But just as important is the fact that Hamas — like Hezbollah, its terrorist counterpart in Lebanon — is a key ally of Iran. The West backed the blockade in the first place partially to prevent Gaza from becoming an armed Iranian enclave on the Mediterranean. Despite the claim that the blockade can be lifted without Iran or Hamas benefiting, it is hard to see how any alternative to the current restrictions will do anything but allow Hamas to freely import both arms and ammunition from its patron in Tehran and permanently establish its hold on power.

Liz Cheney - Keep America Safe

Yesterday, President Obama said the Israeli action to stop the flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip was “tragic.” What is truly tragic is that President Obama is perpetuating Israel’s enemies’ version of events. The Israeli government has imposed a blockade around Gaza because Hamas remains committed to Israel’s destruction, refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist and using territory under their control to launch attacks against Israeli civilians. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, in order to prevent the re-arming of Hamas, is in full compliance with international law. Had the Turkish flotilla truly been interested in providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, they would have accepted the Israeli offer to off-load their supplies peacefully at the Israeli port of Haifa for transport into Gaza. President Obama is contributing to the isolation of Israel, and sending a clear signal to the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis that their methods for ostracizing Israel will succeed, and will be met by no resistance from America. There is no middle ground here. Either the United States stands with the people of Israel in the war against radical Islamic terrorism or we are providing encouragement to Israel’s enemies—and our own. Keep America Safe calls on President Obama to reverse his present course and support the state of Israel immediately and unequivocally:

Posted by dan at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (61)

Excerpting Alan Dershowitz' column.....RTWT

Singling Out Israel For "International Investigation"

In a world in which North Korea sinks a South Korean naval vessel killing dozens, Iran arms Islamic terrorists, who kill hundreds, Russia bombs Chechnya, killing thousands, and the United States and Great Britain, while targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban, kill an indeterminate number of civilians, only Israel is subjected to international "investigations" such as that conducted by Richard Goldstone and that being called for by the Security Council in the wake of the recent flotilla fiasco.

Why only Israel? Why is the United Nations silent about other situations that cry out for international investigations? Surely it's not because what Israel did was worse than what other member nations have done. Certainly it's not because Israel lacks self-criticism or mechanisms for internal investigation. Plainly it's not because the other "offenders" were provoked, while Israel was unprovoked.

There is only one answer--because Israel has long been singled out for public scrutiny and opprobrium by the United Nations in particular and the international community in general.

[...]

If the United Nations is to get into the business of ordering and conducting international investigations, it must establish neutral and objective criteria for when such an investigation is warranted. These criteria must be equally applicable to all nations, and not merely to the Jewish nation.

Primary among the criteria must be "the worst first." Under that rule, investigations must be conducted in the order of the seriousness of the offense, not the unpopularity of the offender. Israel's actions in enforcing its blockade ranks fairly low on the pecking order of offenses, compared to those that have never been subjected to a mandated international investigation. Until and unless North Korea, Iran, Russia and other nations are required to undergo international scrutiny, the demand that Israel do so is illegitimate.

Posted by dan at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (64)

The new McCarthy book arrived yesterday, and I ripped through the first 100 pages last night. I wish the first chapter were available online, but for now, settle for McCarthy talking about the book at Power Line

The provocative sub-title will no doubt earn McCarthy instant outrage and dismissals from the left, but he doesn't suggest that the Alinskyite crowd in the White House is colluding or cooperating with the jihadists to sabotage America...just that they share a goal....the end of our capitalist social order and our culture of individual freedom. Argue the point if you can.

McCarthy stresses that while the numbers of violent Islamist terrorists is relatively low, a high percentage of Muslims do favor the implementation of sharia law, so just because they don't personally take part in blowing up skyscrapers, their more subtle efforts at undermining secular law are no less radical and no less a malign force in our society. Yet we define these people as "moderates"...and that's nuts. From the Power Line piece...

The point is that Islamist ideology - the modern version conceived by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, refined by thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, and expounded by the likes of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, probably the most influential Sunni cleric living today - is very mainstream. Sure, it is an aberrant position to endorse the killing of Muslims who fail to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam; but if the proposition at issue becomes, say, "I support the killing of Americans operating in Muslim countries," or "I would like to see the U.S. Constitution replaced by sharia law," we find the percentage of approving Muslims shoots skyward. Indeed, while much was made of Qaradawi's condemnation of the 9/11 attacks (a condemnation that was more tactical position than a moral one), the same Qaradawi issued a fatwa in 2004 calling for attacks on American troops in Iraq - and in so doing drew strong support from scholars at al-Azhar University.

The thrust of my book is that we need to come to terms with this in order to defend ourselves. There is a vibrant debate in the Muslim world about terrorism. We need to understand, though, that it is a debate about methodology. Islamist terrorists and other Islamists are in harmony about the endgame: they would like to see sharia installed and the West Islamicized. That a person is not willing to mass-murder non-Muslims in order to accelerate that process does not make him a moderate.

In the chapter about what to call the threat, I ultimately conclude that it is best to describe it as "Islamism" or the "Islamist" challenge. I do this as a hopeful nod to the millions of Muslims who both reject violence and do not want to live in sharia societies. But I do it with my eyes open. It may well be that these Muslims will not succeed in reforming their creed, in stripping from it the elements that cannot coexist with such core tenets of Western liberalism as freedom of conscience, the proposition that people have a right to make law for themselves, the proposition that freedom really is freedom rather than perfect submission, the equality of men and women and of Muslims and non-Muslims. Still, I think we have to support the reformist cause. I do not believe we can entice natural allies to our side by telling them their religion is irredeemable. They are trying to redeem it, and it is in our interest to help them - while recognizing that they may very well fail.

Seems to me far closer to "realism" than the folks who refuse even to utter the "I"- word when discussing terrorism.

More McCarthy in this concise statement of his case at the NY Post

Posted by dan at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)