(from a comment thread at the NRA website)
1. The ballot box.
2. The jury box.
3. The soap box.
4. The cartridge box.
Take a lesson from the UK.
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Wednesday, 28 January 2009
the experience of oppression and murder, fear of total annihilation ... and our bitter conclusion
Daniel Finkelstein at The Times (UK) Online:
It was strictly forbidden to have a notebook in Belsen, but my Aunt Ruth had one anyway. Just a little pocket diary - an appointment book with one of those tiny pencils. And in it, in the autumn of 1944, she noted that Anne Frank and Anne's sister, Ruth's schoolfriend Margot, had arrived in the concentration camp.
My mother and my aunt had been watching through the camp wire when the Franks arrived. Mum remembers it well, because they had been excited to spot girls they knew from the old days in Amsterdam. They had played in the same streets, been to the same schools and Ruth and Margot attended Hebrew classes together. The pair had once been pressed into service to act as bridesmaids, when a secretive Jewish wedding had taken place at the synagogue during their lesson time.
But Ruth and Margot did not grow up together. Because while Ruth and my mother lived, Margot and Anne never left Belsen. They died of typhus.
British Army bulldozer pushes bodies into a mass grave /Belsen Apr.1945
I am telling you this story because I want you to understand Israel.
Not to agree with all it does, not to keep quiet when you want to protest against its actions, not to side with it always, merely to understand Israel.
There are two things about the tale that help to provide insight. The first is that all these things, the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth, they aren't ancient history, and they aren't fable. They happened to real people and they happened in our lifetime. Anne and Margot Frank were just children to my aunt and my mother; they weren't icons, or symbols of anything.
The second is that world opinion weeps now for Anne Frank. But world opinion did not save her. The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews.
"Guilty as hell, free as a bird"
If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results.
After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy...
[....]
At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves—a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.
David Horowitz, September 14, 2001
.... I interviewed Ayers ten years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience:
"Guilty as hell.
Free as a bird.
America is a great country."
.... What I saw was a shallowness beyond conception. All the Weather leaders I interviewed shared a similar vacuity. They were living inside a utopian fantasy, a separate reality, and had no idea of what they had done. Nor any way to measure it. Appreciating the nation to which they were born, recognizing the great gifts of freedom and opportunity their parents and communities had given them, distinguishing between right and wrong – it was all above their mental and moral ceiling.
Mind-boggling "Stimulus" package nears $900 BILLION
See this interactive map of "Who gets what" at the Online WSJ.
No surprise to see West Virginia second from the bottom in "Aid to states per capita." Ouch. And The One hasn't even bankrupted the coal industry yet.
WSJ reports Stimulus Bill Near $900 Billion.
I take it the American public is so dazed and dumbfounded at this point that Congress can do whatever it wants regardless of the public's disapproval (over 70% on average). It ceased to matter what we think, or even if we think, on the day Obama was forced down our throats by his unprecedented coalition of aging hippie socialists, race-driven "African" Americans, gutless and irresponsible faux-journalists, the $audi royal family... and last but not least, King $oros.
So here's the situation:
.... The Democrats controlling the House have the votes to pass a stimulus bill. In the Senate, Democrats need only the support of a few Republicans to collect the 60 votes needed for passage. But Mr. Obama wants broad support, and to win over some of the Republicans seeking less spending and more tax cuts.
"I would love to not have to spend this money," Mr. Obama said, according to individuals familiar with the president's meetings with Republicans. Mr. Obama defended the plan, they said, but suggested he'd be open to new ideas to help small businesses, and that changes could come after the House vote.
"We're not going to get 100% agreement, and we might not even get 50% agreement," Mr. Obama told reporters after he left the Senate Republican lunch. "But I do think that people appreciate me walking them through my thought processes on this."
To a pathological narcissist like al Hussein Obama - with "no 'there' there" - this is what matters, that people appreciate him.
Actually governing must be a big come-down after the campaign.
Will Obama APOLOGIZE to Ahmadinejad?
This could get interesting.
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Wednesday it would welcome President Barack Obama's offer of a change in U.S. policy provided it involved a withdrawal of U.S. troops from abroad and an apology for past "crimes" against Tehran.
I would point out -perhaps needlessly- to the reading and thinking public, that in eight years with Bush at the helm, we never saw this level of chutzpah from the Iranian maniac; it was completely out of the question to think that America might apologize to the "axis of evil." In the Age of Obama, however, anything is possible. That's what keeps me up at night.
In other news, a "respected think tank" has predicted that Iran could have the ability to build a nuclear bomb by the end of next year. This is being reported widely in the UK, in Israel of course, and India -- but in America, only by FOX News and U.S. News & World Report (so far).
BtB is not surprised to find that none of the four editorials in today's New York Times even mentions Iran. And their front page is too busy gushing over Obama's [near-$900 billion] stimulus plan -its promised "relief for jobless and states on health care" and the coming "flood of aid" in education- to bother with any silliness like Ahmadinejad's daring response to Obama or the progress of his nuclear weaponization program.
For anyone interested, on page A8 Clinton sees an opportunity for Iran to return to diplomacy. Readers of the New York Times must sleep a helluva lot better at night than I do.
Olmert Quote of the Day
(In case any of our Israeli brothers and sisters are considering voting for Kadima.)
"A country cannot protect itself ad infinitum,
because there would be no end to it."
For what it's worth, come Election Day, I would side with Yoel Meltzer:
.... Although there are several political parties that define themselves as “national” or “right-wing” - Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, The Jewish Home, The National Union – only one of these parties says, in clear and straightforward terms, that it is 100% opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state, in any shape or size, in any part of the Land of Israel.
This party, The National Union, speaks clearly and directly with a real Jewish soul without worrying about political correctness. Moreover, its message, which is correct from a security perspective, is correct from a Jewish perspective as well.
.... It should be obvious then that anyone who truly cares about the future of this country should be voting for The National Union on Election Day, since it is the only party that is 100% dedicated to trying to stop the madness here.
Please don't be fooled [again].
The future of our country is at stake.
Dose of Arab-Israeli Reality Greets Obama's Middle East Envoy
"...look, if human beings don't want a better future, don't want their children to grow up in peace and have opportunities, then none of this is going to work anyway."
-- Condoleeza Rice, October 25, 2006
The HAMAS knew Obama had sent George Mitchell to secure "peace" in the Middle East. They knew that Obama's instructions were to listen, not to dictate. That's why they set off an IED yesterday, killing one Israeli soldier and wounding others, in addition to RPG and mortar attacks.
Are you listening, George?
Unbelievable as it may seem, HAMAS doesn't care what color the face of America is. Unlike the naive and swooning American public, they are not impressed with mantras of Hope and Change. They just want to drink the blood of the Jews. No kidding:
"... we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries."
This is the enemy we face. This is the enemy that begs to be defeated, because - as you should well know - "one or the other must perish." And so, when HAMAS attacked Israel yesterday and killed one of our young soldiers, Israel responded (thank Gd, because sometimes Israel can be dangerously concilliatory).
(IsraelNN.com) IDF tanks rolled back into Gaza along with foot soldiers Tuesday afternoon....
"This is a serious attack," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told soldiers during a visit near a base close to the scene of the attack and at the same time it occurred. "We cannot accept it and we will retaliate. I do not think there is any point in saying how."
He carried out his threat within hours as troops reached Khan Yunis in central Gaza. Local residents reported tank fire and Israel Air Force jets over the area. Arab sources also reported that the Air Force struck a terrorist target on a motorcycle, killing or wounding two people. The IDF said the cyclist was responsible for the morning attack.
Hamas responded with mortar fire on the Eshkol region, causing no damages or injuries but returning the area to the status quo of the days before the Cast Lead operation against the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.
And this morning? IAF aircraft struck "a number of Hamas smuggling tunnels on the southern border of the Gaza strip."
Welcome to reality, George Mitchell. You would do well to listen. Perhaps you can disabuse your boss of his foolish notion that "the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives."
Your predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, spent years -and gambled almost a billion of our American tax dollars in the last year alone- on a fantasy that Hamas and Fatah "mothers want their children to grow up to go to university." I Hope that you are more of a quick learner than she and that you will bring Change to the false premise that a "palestinian" state would solve anything, anything at all.
These people are literally blood-thirsty -- to such an extent that they seek and celebrate even their own deaths and the deaths of their children. It is on the whole a pathologically perverse society, and its only hope to ever heal lies in the possibility of being so crushed that they beg for peace.
As for "giving them a state," they couldn't even get your morning paper to the porch on time, much less govern themselves. And besides, the only state they are interested in having is one that contains no Jewish or Christian life but encompasses all the Land Holy to Jews and Christians. It would be a neat trick if they could pull it off, and btw, they will settle for nothing else.
Dear George Mitchell, you can tell Obama for me that the day we hear HAMAS beg for peace will be the day peace becomes a possibility. And not a day sooner.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
... the Gathering Night
One of the most agonising and tragic aspects of the current global wave of Jew-hatred is the prominent part played in this by Jews. This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout the centuries of Jewish persecution, from the medieval ‘conversos’ to Karl Marx and beyond, there have always been Jews who, for a variety of reasons, have been ready and willing to advance the agenda of the persecutors of the Jewish people.
Today, the west is teeming with their successors – almost always on the left, very often but not always highly secularised and with a tangential or deeply conflicted relationship with their Jewish identity, they are in the forefront of the movement to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel. They do it to no other country; only the expression of self-determination of their own people inspires in them such frenzied and obsessive loathing.
Todah to Chaim.
Dire predictions
Todah to scp. I've finally found someone almost as paranoid as myself. It's this person "Spengler," who writes at Asia Times:
Absolute power gets blamed absolutely
Today [Inauguration Day], America will place more power than any peacetime president ever has wielded into the hands of a man nobody knows. He has convinced more incompatible constituencies that he takes their side than any politician in American history. And through no fault or merit of his own, he has stumbled into more power than the White House has had since World War II.
From the day Obama was elected to 9:30am Tokyo time on Monday morning, the S&P 500 index has lost 17% of its value, after absorbing Obama's proposed cabinet and hearing the gist ofhis economic stimulus plan. That can't be blamed on Bush. It counts as the "Obama crash".
With the unprecedented power of his office, Obama inherits a commensurately high level of accountability. Unless he offers something radically different, the boomerang of expectations could flatten him faster and more thoroughly than the swift ascent of his star. People in power get blamed; people with absolute power get blamed absolutely. As the economy continues to deteriorate, there will be no one left standing to blame but Obama.
There follows a great deal of global economic information that is hard for me to fathom and which I'll leave to greater minds. We pick it up again where it's fairly straightforward:
.... The number of countries that have become wards of the international community will continue to rise.
Economic disaster will occur in geopolitical hotspots, starting with Pakistan. New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote on January 11 that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal might be Obama's worst nightmare.
The candidates for "worst nightmare", though, have multiplied since I warned at the end of October that the world isn't flat - as one New York Times writer likes to say - but rather flattened (see The world isn't flat, it's flattened, Asia Times Online, October 28, 2008).
The prospects of a narco-state on American's southern border now widely mooted in the press, might be the most daunting.
[I didn't know about Mexico either, until my trip to Texas. Check this out -Yael]
What will Obama do? He has more answers to urgent problems than the verses of Barnacle Bill the Sailor ("I'll tell Iran/that I'm the man"), but they are just as fanciful.
I have never met the man, but I have interviewed a fair sampling of his supporters, and conclude that Obama learned the power to cloud men's minds, like the Shadow on the old radio show. Apart from ambition, there is no "there" there. There are as many Obamas as there are interlocutors. He is a hollow man, I concluded, a Third World anthropologist studying us with engaged curiosity but complete emotional detachment. In this respect he is unpredictable.
I predict that he will do nothing much at all. The American economy is in trouble because Americans got too much cheap credit to buy houses, using their price appreciation to buy other consumer goods. Obama proposes to provide more cheap credit to homebuyers and incentives to buy consumer goods, which seems an odd response to the problem. Now that Americans are scared out of their wits and likely to save every available penny, it is hard to flush with enthusiasm over his program's prospects.Obama's secretary of state, the redoubtable Hillary Clinton, will pursue the same tired formulas in the Middle East and South Asia into tighter and tighter little circles, until she quits in frustration.
His Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, will do precisely what he has done in the past year in his capacity as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is to use the federal balance sheet to buy trillions of dollars of toxic assets.
And Defense Secretary Robert Gates will continue to attempt to engage the Iranians, as he has done since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when he took notes for president Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in meetings with the newly empowered mullahs.
He [The One] will make resonant speeches, hold frequent press conferences, consult friend and foe alike, and tread water while America's economy and strategic position continue to deteriorate.
His entourage of one-trick wizards, as I called them in a recent commentary, will pick over the broken American economy for trophies to put into private equity funds. (See Obama's one-trick wizards, Asia Times Online, November 25, 2008). Without casting aspersions on anyone involved, the opportunity for self-dealing in a multi-trillion-dollar bailout-cum-recapitalization of the financial system exceeds the grandest dreams of Third World kleptocrats.
At a certain point he will have to take a decisive stand on something. And then we will learn who Obama is, and what he wants.
