...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

 

Bad idea: Forbes headline—Bush looks to UN for Mideast solution.

 

Given its record, including its woeful inaction in Darfur where thousands upon thousands of people have been hacked to death by machete-wielding Arab militias, I wouldn’t look to the UN to solve a parking ticket dispute. No doubt they’d bung it up in traffic court, set up an agency designed to keep people who’ve been given tickets stewing about it for decades after the original ticket was written, attempt to bribe the police with promises of lucrative and oily pay-offs, or send in Angelina Jolie for a pointless (but mighty fetching) photo-op with traffic control officers.

 

Bush needs to be reminded that the UN hasn’t been part of the solution for a long time now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:00 | link | comments (3)

 

Losing the war: Whether or not it turns out that some of the photos from Qana have been deliberately staged for the benefit of gullible and easily manipulated Western media outlets, one thing is eminently clear: There is no way Israel can win this P.R. war. Israel’s enemies have become so adept at pushing the “Arabs are the victims, Israel is the brutal aggressor” line—first in the Palestinians territories and now in Lebanon, that truth and reality no longer matter; indeed, they seem quaint relics of a time long past. What matters is that the media and a large portion of the world, including the EU (which sold its soul to become part of larger Eurabia) and the Muslim-enthralled U.N. are predisposed to think ill of Israel—even if it’s fighting for its life against avowed genocidal fascists who are deranged religious fanatics sponsored by a genocidal fascist Shia republic, and even if these genocidal Shia fascists have cynically put people, including women and children, in harm’s way. Hezbollah uses kiddies as human shields? Ho hum. Israel fights back and, in the course of doing so kills some of the kiddies Hezbollah is cynically using as juvenile cannon fodder? Apologies from Israel. Howls of outrage from all quarters. Human rights organizations slamming Israel for war crimes. Sob stories by Mark MacKinnon. Und so weiter. (See, who says High School German doesn’t come in handy sometimes?)

 

In fact, there is really only one way for Israel to win the P.R. war: by losing the war. By lying down and allowing the jihad juggernaut to roll over it. By permitting the Islamic Nazis to do the Jews of Israel what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe—that is, to turn them into ashes.

 

The hell with that. This time around, the Jews won’t even be able to count on the world’s crocodile tears and monuments to those murdered. This time around (God forbid) the world will say the Jews of Israel had it coming, because of all the nasty things they did to those nice Palestinians, to those helpless, innocent Lebanese.

 

Even with the jihad raging all over the world, and even with the threat it poses to civilization as a whole, that’s the only narrative the mainstream media and most people seem willing to accept.

 

How to account for this wilful blindness, a calamitous failing that may well spell our doom? My mother always used to tell me to not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. In this instance at least, I’d say both malice AND stupidity (along with a heaping helping of Jew-hatred, a dementia known to corrode the grey matter--just look at Mel) are to blame.

 

Update: Mark Steyn on today’s naked Jew-hatred, which is manifested as naked hatred for the Jewish state:

One of the curious side-effects of the jihad is that it’s liberated among non-Muslims in the west an amazing resurgence in old-school Jew-hatred. I don’t just mean the coded stuff – “Oh, those Jews are so clever” – or the casual prejudices of the schoolyard – “He Jewed me out of two shillings for a Mars Bar” -  but just plain naked virulent hatred. Right now I’m getting a ton of mail like this:

Israelis are the pigs of planet earth: butchering Arab babies, polluting the sea, the land, and the very air we breathe with the the stench of their inhumanity. Israel is a collection of the scum of earth and should be destroyed.

That’s from Nica Campbell, and her opening sentences are only the warm-up. For centuries, Jews were viewed as sinister wandering rootless cosmopolitan figures of no national allegiance. So they became a conventional sovereign state and now they’re hated for that. The standard defense is that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israeli policies, but, as Miss Campbell’s letter suggests, what’s being questioned is not Israel’s policies but the right of Israel to have policies, especially on national security. If, say, some fellows in Mexico had kidnapped California State Troopers and were lobbing rockets randomly into residential areas of San Diego and Los Angeles, even La-La-Land libs would be demanding the US respond. It’s only the Israelis the world wishes to deny the conventional rights of sovereignty. In other words, it’s the legitimacy of the state that’s at issue. In effect, Israel has become the geopolitical version of the European Jew who’s allowed to operate a store in the town but not to exercise full ownership rights: in the old days, Jews faced property restrictions; now they face sovereignty restrictions…

 

Update: Truer words were never spoken: These days, only terrorists are allowed to wage war. From the Conservative Voice:

…The conflicts begun by both Hezbollah and Hamas started with invasions of Israel, the killing of Israeli soldiers, kidnappings of other Israeli soldiers—followed by immediate rocket launches (from both entities) into Israel. Certainly sounds coordinated to me. But, it is Israel who is condemned by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for killing ostensible civilians in Qana. People die in war. That’s why the phrase “war is hell” came into being. But, when one’s country is attacked, there is only one option for survival—fight back. Israel, however, is being condemned for fighting back in any way that might actually destroy the terrorist organizations that started the conflict in the first place.

It is clear that the increasingly useless United Nations does not want terrorist organizations to be destroyed. It actually wants to send “diplomatic envoys” to “discuss the situation” with these terrorist bodies. And the UN expects, nee demands that the civilized world agree to its madness. The predominant reason the UN has used is that Israel is employing “disproportionate force” against the terrorists. Should Israel be throwing rocks at Hezbollah and Hamas? The UN apparently thinks so.

There is no disproportionate force in existence, when fighting for survival against enemies who have vowed to wipe you and your country from the map—as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has commanded. There is no disproportionate force in existence, when fighting against enemies who purposefully target civilians. There is no disproportionate force that exists or that will ever exist, when people are fighting for their lives and the lives of their families and loved ones—against enemies who are hell-bent upon killing them. There are, also, few-to-no diplomatic channels that can be employed against pure and unadulterated evil; an evil that is determined to destroy you and your seed—forever. But, it seems that the UN and the leftist world press has a solution. In their ever-quickening attempts toward suicide, they have decided that the victims of violence should be hamstrung. And they have decreed that the Islamo-fascist perpetrators of said violence and avowed-genocide should be rewarded.

The bottom line? Only the terrorists should be allowed to fight. Yeah. That should do it!

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:03 | link | comments

 

Tories stand with Israel: When I saw the title of this piece by Larry Zolf on the Ceeb website—“Harper’s Israel policy has deep roots”—I cringed. I thought it was going to be a typical “bash Israel” piece, the kind that has become standard issue at Canada’s publicly-funded broadcaster. (As a taxpayer and a dissatisfied consumer, I’d like to know who to phone to get a rebate for my share of the funding? I’m tired of paying for a broadcaster that has more in common with al Jazeera than it does with Fox.) But when I read the piece, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise:

The standard charge against Stephen Harper's foreign policy is that it's a clone of the policies of U.S. President George Bush.

Harper, his critics say, has gutted the image of Canada as a neutral middle power and peacemaker, a nation with a pragmatic foreign policy. He has, they say, a foreign policy that is brand new for Canada: a one-sided defence of Israel.

These critics all focus on the so-called "golden age of diplomacy" as practiced by the Liberals under Lester Pearson: a tradition of studied neutrality in the Middle East that has been embraced in Canadian foreign policy under the Liberals ever since.

It's this foreign policy that Harper has scuttled. Harper is pro-Israel and has kept a close lid on the Foreign Affairs Department, lest it stray too far from his line on the Mideast.

The historically challenged small 'l' liberal media sees Harper as an unbalanced supporter of Israel and sees Israel as the aggressor in the present crisis in Lebanon.

The real model for Harper's stance

But a closer look at history shows that Harper's stance on the Middle East is not aping Bush and the Americans. A careful look shows that the real model for Harper's present foreign policy and stand on Israel is John Diefenbaker.

In 1956, Britain, France and Israel went to war with Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. Pearson and Louis St. Laurent condemned the European powers and Israel.

In 1957, the Diefenbaker Tories upset the Pearson Liberals in an election that directly challenged the traditional Liberal Pearson view of foreign policy and the Middle East.

Diefenbaker sharply attacked the St. Laurent-Pearson Liberals for their Suez policy. He dumped the idea of a moderate, neutral and pragmatic Canada in favour of taking a stand with the defence of Britain, France and Israel. And he won the election.

As prime minister, he created a pro-Israel, anti-Pearson and anti-External Affairs policy.

He was convinced that External Affairs (as Foreign Affairs was called at the time) was against both Israel and his government's foreign policy and he viewed the department with suspicion.

Mulroney echoed Diefenbaker's views

From the mid-1980s to the early '90s, another Tory prime minister, Brian Mulroney, echoed Diefenbaker in his distrust of Foreign Affairs and in his pro-Israel stance.

That's the tradition Harper is following.

His hands-on policy — and his one-man rule on foreign affairs and anything the Foreign Affairs Department does — is reminiscent of Dief's distrust of the department and bitter dislike of Pearson. Diefenbaker was convinced that External Affairs was anti-Israel and against the foreign policy of his government.

Harper, like Diefenbaker, also distrusts the media's stance on Israel.

Diefenbaker, a lifelong supporter of Israel, did not like the position the Kennedys and the American liberal media took on Israel and the Mideast. Harper is a disciple of William Buckley Jr., whose contempt of American liberals' and the media's stand on Israel is well known.

The liberal media argument that Harper is too pro-Israel and too pro-Bush is simplistic. And its criticism of Harper as a blundering, wrongheaded, rookie simpleton in the Middle East does not square with history.

Harper is not George Bush's toadie. His policy on Israel and the Mideast is part of a long Tory tradition.

To review: Diefenbaker, Mulroney, Harper—friends of Israel. Trudeau, Chretien, Martin and the new Liberal leader, whoever he or she may be—not.

Something for Jews who would support Israel and would like to see it (and Canada) survive the jihad to bear in mind come election time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:36 | link | comments (1)

 

Pessimistic forecast: In Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz warns that the “United States, Israel, and every sentient being in the path of the Islamist crusade are teetering on the brink of a massive defeat in Lebanon and thus in the war on terror.”

 

Read it and weep.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:47 | link | comments

 

Jew-haters round-up:

 

• In Sydney, Australia, a synagogue was attacked.
• In Berlin, a Holocaust memorial was defaced. 
• In Canada, the Mideast conflict is blames for a dizzying rise in anti-Jewish incidents, including one where a Jewish family was sent a decapitated pig.
• In Miami, two synagogues and two businesses with a largely Jewish clientele are vandalized.
• And let’s not forget Seattle, and whatever horrible things are going on—but are being covered up—in Europe.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:19 | link | comments

 

Chutzpah!: Iran, the Shia dystopia that’s rushing to complete its nuclear project, the better to be and display the biggest Muslim dick in the neighbourhood; the nation led by genocidal Islamo-Nazis who vow to eliminate the Jewish “cancer”; the state sponsor of Hezbollah, which greenlighted the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in order to divert the attention away from Iran's nuclear schemes—must I go on? Those guys are saying that “peace” hinges on divesting Israel (that Jewish blot on the impeccable Muslim map) of its nuclear weapons.

 

Count on Kofi and the gang to see that as a not unreasonable request.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:07 | link | comments

 

Mel-t down: I don’t know about you, but the news that Mel Gibson has exposed himself to be an insane Jew-hater is about as shocking as the news that the newly reconstituted UN Human Rights Council is just as pointless and Jew-hating as the old UN body it replaced. That is, not at all shocking.

 

Oh, sure, hearing Mel utter the actual words—that “the Jews” (booga booga) are responsible for all the wars in the world—is a bit startling, but only when you consider that they’re coming out of the mouth of the man once identified by People magazine as the sexiest man alive. But when you remember that this is the same guy who adorned his Jesus movie with some particularly gruesome and extra-textual touches—like that scene where the Jewish children turn into demons—it all falls into place.

 

Word is that Hollywood is divided about Mel’s melee with the L.A. policeman (who Mel queried about his possible Semitic-ness—at least he didn’t ask him to drop his pants). Some say it’s proof that, despite previous denials that he harboured any anti-Jewish animus, Mel is a more dashing but somewhat less Teutonic version of egregious Jew-hater Ernst Zundel. Others are saying, hey, give the guy a break: He’s under a lot of pressure; he hasn’t been able to lick a stubborn drinking problem; and don’t forget he’s made a crap-load of money, and odds are he can do it again. 

 

Me? I’ve always believed in vino veritas, and much as my heart went pitta-pat for Mel back in day (especially his turn as the outrageously attractive reporter in The Year of Living Dangerously—ayzeh chatichah, as they say in Hebrew), I can’t help but think that the booze loosened his tongue and allowed him to speak from his heart.

 

Which, we can now say with more certainly, is a cold-blooded, Jews-are-Christ-killers, antisemitic organ.

 

Much like his hate-corroded, delusional brain.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:51 | link | comments

 

No win situation: Don’t worry about Israel. She’ll survive—just as long as no more Hezbollah supporters and their children, who’ve been content to live amongst their heroes and champions—are killed. Because unless Israel can turn back the tide of the jihad in a bloodless manner and keep all the little Lebanese Hezbollah supporters alive and in one piece (certainly, a demand that isn’t made of the jihadis, who are way behind in the casualty sweepstakes and haven’t yet killed enough Jews to make the war “proportionate”), it will continue to be pilloried in the clueless mainstream media by the likes of the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon.

 

Here’s how MacKinnon begins today’s emotionally manipulative account of the Israeli reprisal than resulted in civilian casualties:

QANA, LEBANON -- A baby's diaper, a child's colouring book and a woman's dress lying grotesquely beside the rubble. This is what remained yesterday after Israel bombed a residential building where 63 people from two families had huddled together for 16 straight nights, hoping the air raids would leave the unfinished structure alone.

At least 55 people, 34 or more of them children, were crushed to death in the Israeli attack. More bodies were still believed to be buried inside yesterday as night fell.

Brothers Abbas and Haider Hashem had worked for four years to build the home, which was envisioned to house their large extended family. Yesterday, it was reduced to a pile of shattered concrete and twisted metal that collapsed on and suffocated those who had been hiding in the basement when the Israeli bomb hit.

All around lay suggestions of the humble life the Hashems and the neighbouring Shalhoub clan lived during their time inside the simple shelter. The colouring book was filled with pictures of a girl and her dog shaded yellow and green. There were soccer trading cards, track pants, a mismatched collection of sandals and a plastic bottle of cooking oil.

There's little question that this was a town that supported Hezbollah, the Shia militia that provoked war by capturing two Israeli soldiers almost three weeks ago. A giant photograph of Iran's deceased Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini glares at drivers from one of the main roads leading into town.

Residents speak admiringly of what they call "the resistance."

But as a front-end loader clawed through the rubble last night -- the work occasionally pausing as United Nations and Red Cross staff carefully extracted another body part from the wreckage -- there were no obvious signs of Hezbollah's presence.

Israel has acknowledged targeting the building between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. yesterday morning, saying the attack was a response to Hezbollah fire from the area. That charge will likely never be proved or disproved. There was no destroyed truck at the site that might have been a mobile missile launcher; no mangled military equipment...

Now, don’t you hate those brutal Israelis for what they’ve done to this idyllic Islamo-Nazi village?

 

Bravo, MacKinnon, for a job well done.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:54 | link | comments

 

Down time:

 

A blogging break

Is what I’ll take.

Sat. and Sun., and then,

Back on Monday again.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:01 | link | comments

 

Where’s Nasty: Hiding out at the Iranian embassy. Where else would he be? (link via Drudge)

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:15 | link | comments

 

The ties that (don’t) bind: A group I’m involved in was brainstorming (or spit-balling, in current parlance) the other day about the most effective ways to dispel Jew-hatred. During the discussion, the leader of the group mentioned that she had spoken to someone who thinks the best way to do that is to “build bridges” between Jews and Muslims—individuals, groups and communities—hoping that in times of crisis these bridges will hold.

 

I strongly disagreed. While I see nothing wrong with maintaining friendly relationships, (“it couldn’t hurt,” as the old punchline goes) I said that it’s dangerous to think see such “friendships” as operating on anything more than the most superficial level, to expect to maintain them when the chips are down, so to speak.

 

That’s the same point I tried to make to Bernie Farber, back when we exchanged e-mails regarding the CJC’s condemnation of the Danish newspaper that had published the Mo ‘toons. At the time, Farber was extremely pleased that Muslim organizations had commended the CJC’s stance (quel surprise!) and insisted that these ties would stand us in good stead when the CJC marched arm-in-arm with Muslim groups to lobby the provincial government to fund our religious schools.

 

An article in the New York-based Jewish weekly, Forward, proves my point (and shows how naïve and short-sighted the CJC was). The piece is written by a Jew who lives in Detroit and thought he had built solid relationships with local Muslims. (Detroit and nearby Dearborn are home to a large population of Muslims.) It took the current war between Israel and the jihadis to show him how flimsy these bonds really were:

Here in the metro Detroit area, we have been fortunate when it comes to inter-group and inter-religious relations. Civility between diverse ethnic and interfaith groups, including members of the large local Arab American community, has largely been maintained throughout the most difficult of times, even when ethnic, religious and cultural conflicts flare in other parts of the world.

That is, until recent days. What I heard and saw at recent anti-war rallies in Detroit and Dearborn went far beyond the pale.

I was among the thousands who attended a rally in Dearborn on July 18, and I never felt so alone in my life. I understand tensions are high in the Arab-American community. I sincerely sympathize with the deep concern for family and friends in Lebanon; I, too, worry about family and friends in Israel. Yet it is one thing to criticize Israeli policy, and quite another to compare Israeli actions to Nazi Germany's final solution that exterminated 6 million Jews.

As I walked among the rally participants, several thoughts rushed through my mind. The first was how young many of them were. A whole generation of metro Detroiters — our future neighbors, schoolmates, co-workers and leaders — will remember this day forever.

Second, I struggled to come to grips with how Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah could be so glorified. Nasrallah heads an extremist terrorist group that frequently calls not only for "death to Israel," but also "death to America." Hezbollah is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Lebanon, and hundreds of innocent civilians. As an American and a Jew, it is difficult for me to understand why so many Arab Americans in my community venerate him and others of his ilk.

Finally, the antisemitic placards at the rally were a horrendous display of Israel as Nazi obsession. Signs compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler and equated Stars of David with Nazi swastikas; one sign read, "Israel Nazi Are the Same Thing." This ugly comparison demeans the victims, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, of Nazi genocide, demonizes Israelis, and dehumanizes those who support Israel. Had the July 18 rally been held in Europe instead of Dearborn, it would likely have been officially classified as an antisemitic event.

After so many years promoting tolerance and the need for understanding among Detroit's rich mosaic of ethnic, racial and religious groups — and it pains me to say this — the Jewish community here should be alarmed about what the future will be like for our children, and their children, in metro Detroit. The Arab Americans' youthfulness and sheer numbers must be noted. They are learning quickly about political activism in America, and have connections with activist groups throughout the world.

We cannot afford to ignore their anger and misguided messages. We need to think long and hard about future interactions…

An object lesson for us all, including those of us who are proud to call one of the world’s most multicultural cities our home.

 

Update: And speaking of Detroit and Dearborn…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments

 

1984 today: Charles Krauthammer on our Orwellian times. From JWR:

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history that flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.

On Wednesday, CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead, it attacked dual-use infrastructure — bridges, roads, airport runways — and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten-thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

I’m pretty sure that last question was rhetorical.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:44 | link | comments

 

A tale of two papers: There’s a disconnect (a chasm, really) between the Globe and Mail’s news coverage of the current phase of the jihad against Israel and the paper’s editorial position. News-wise, the Globe’s husband and wife team of MacKinnon and Wheeler have been writing stories in which Israel is the brutal aggressor and the Lebanese their hapless and innocent victims; Hezbollah is bad too, but not as bad as the Zionists. Editorial-wise, the Globe has been much more balanced and perceptive about the situation, and willing to shoot down some of the nonsense that been flying around.

 

Case in point: today’s lead editorial which examines--and torpedoes--Canada’s “mythical status as honest broker in the Middle East”:

 

…The awkward truth is that Canada has done little to advance Middle East peace. Our last big contribution occurred when Lester Pearson helped negotiate an end to the Suez crisis in 1956, half a century ago. Our only significant role in the Oslo peace process that began in the 1990s was to head a committee on the fate of refugees, an issue that has yet to be solved. No recent Canadian prime minister has been even a bit player in settling the region’s quarrels. When a crisis erupts, as it has this month, no on in the Middle East asks: What does Canada think?

 

The reputation that Mr. Harper is supposed to be squandering exists mainly in the minds of Canadians like Mr. Axworthy and Mr. Graham. We are not abandoning our role as honest broker in the Middle East because we never were one.

 

In any case, it is hard to see exactly what even the most honest broker could do in the present situation. The Oslo process is dead. The “road map” to peace is in tatters. The current Palestinian government, led by Hamas, a terrorist group, refuses even to acknowledge Israel’s right exist. Hezbollah, which started the current conflict by kidnapping and killing Israel’s soldiers, and then firing rockets at Israeli cities, is devoted to Israel’s destruction.

 

To take a neutral stand between terrorist militias fuelled by radical Islam and a democratic country defending itself from attack would have been a perversion of our traditions…

 

Hear, hear.

 

There’s no disconnect between the National Post’s news coverage and its editorial position re the current crisis. The two are in complete harmony. Here’s part of the Post’s excellent editorial explaining the connection between Hezbollah and its puppet master, Iran, and the central but behind-the-scenes role the dystopia is playing in this war:

For the last two weeks, innocent Israelis have been killed in missile barrages from Lebanese-based Hezbollah terrorists and militia. On the other side of the border, more than 300 Lebanese civilians have been accidentally killed by Israeli bombs aimed at Hezbollah assets. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have engaged with Hezbollah gunmen in ground combat, with both sides taking heavy casualties. All this loss of life was caused by Hezbollah's decision to stage an unprovoked act of war on uncontested, sovereign Israeli soil two weeks ago.

But why did Hezbollah do it? Since the government of Lebanon and most ordinary Lebanese people plainly didn't want this war, who did? Who is pulling Hezbollah's strings?

HERE ARE A FEW CLUES:

- The Shiite terrorist group receives US$120-million in annual financing from Tehran, where it operates an office on a central downtown street.

- Hezbollah was created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Several hundred IRGC officers are operating in Lebanon to this day, assisting Hezbollah's war effort.

- According to Western intelligence sources, over the last six months, the IRGC has been teaching Hezbollah how to operate its massive stock of rockets, many of which are from Iran. These include Zelzal missiles, which can reach Tel Aviv and beyond.

- On Wednesday, more than 60 Iranian self-declared suicide bombers, bedecked in Hezbollah paraphernalia, set off from Tehran in a "holy war" against Israeli forces in Lebanon.

- Yesterday, a Kuwaiti newspaper broke the news that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is travelling to Damascus for secret meetings with Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani.

- During fighting in Lebanon, Israeli soldiers have seized weaponry marked with the logo of Iranian military manufacturers, such as the grenade launcher featured in the photo below.

- Earlier this month, Iranian troops assisted Hezbollah in firing a C-802 radar-guided missile at an Israeli warship, killing several crew members and nearly sinking the craft.

- Iranian officials met with Hezbollah leaders in Damascus on July 12, the very day this conflict started and -- as David Frum has noted on these pages -- the same day Western nations announced a threat of economic sanctions against Iran if the Islamic Republic refused to curtail its nuclear program.

Get the picture? As despicable and murderous as Hezbollah's own jihadist ideology may be, the group is very much a creature of Iran, which is seeking to flex its muscle against the West without actually attacking Western targets directly. Whether or not one thinks Israel is exercising "disproportionate" force in the prosecution of this war, there is no doubt about who is behind it: The people dying in Haifa and Beirut are the victims of a proxy conflict funded and planned by warmongers in Tehran…

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:04 | link | comments

 

Inappropriate funding: Islam Online, a Wahabist-funded website which propogandizes on behalf of the one true faith and often has scathing things to say about America and Israel, is sponsoring a program, based in Munich, to help train science journalists in the Middle East. And by the Middle East, of course, they mean the Arab Middle East. (Not that science journalists in the tiny Jewish sector need any special training, living as they do in a democracy that’s in the forefront of science and technology.)

 

And you’ll never guess who’s coughing up some of the cash to pay for the program:

 

...Dr. Magdy Said, former head of IslamOnline.net's science and cultural departments, commented on the website's participation in the program. "It's been one of our goals as a science department at IslamOnline.net to build our skills in a step-by-step process in order to play a role in the science and technology system in the Arab and developing worlds," he said. "If there are calls for reform in the Arab and developing worlds, part of these reforms must be in the science and technology sector. And we at IslamOnline.net believe that we must play a role in the popularization of science as part of these reforms," added Said. "By participating in the World Federation of Science Journalists' two-year mentoring program, we are partaking in the reform of science journalism in our part of the world. We also benefit ourselves by learning more skills and gaining more knowledge in our field of work. We are taking one more large step ahead in fulfilling some of our goals at IslamOnline.net," he concluded. 

The 20 experienced science journalists in the Munich training workshop have jointly accumulated more than 300 years of accumulated experience in science journalism, establishing science beats, and creating associations. They come from Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South and North America, as well as Europe.

Dr. Kathryn O'Hara, who holds the Chair in Science Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, structured the Munich session. "Thinking like a mentor is not necessarily the same as thinking like a journalist," she explained. "There is a huge wealth of expertise in this group."

The session was organized in collaboration with Technisch-Literarische Gesellschaft (TELI) and the Wissenschafts-Pressekonferenz (WPK), the two German science journalist associations.  Regional co-ordinators are Diran Onifade, a Nigerian television reporter, for English-speaking Africa; Nadia El-Awady, science editor of the Cairo-based IslamOnline.net internet service for the Arabic-speaking world, and science journalism professor Gervais Mbarga of the University of Yaounde in Cameroon for Francophone Africa.

The mentoring scheme is funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DfID).

Um, why is Canada paying to train Arab journalists in Munich with the aim of furthering the goals of Islam Online? Surely our tax dollars could be put to much better use—say, like helping resettle all those Hezbollah supporters, er, Lebanese-Canadians, fleeing the war.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:56 | link | comments

No escape: Interim Liberal leader Bill Graham is shooting off his mouth again. Bill, like the rest of the clueless left, is displeased with Canada’s so-called “new direction”—you know, how it’s “tilting” toward Israel and George W. Bush’s America and tilting away from its mythical fence-sitting, er, peace-keeping position. From the Toronto Star:

MONTREAL — Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s reaction to the death of a Canadian peacekeeper in Lebanon was irresponsible and risks making Canada irrelevant in the region, interim Liberal leader Bill Graham said Thursday.

“Everybody watching Canada at this time is concerned about whether or not Canada is, by its actions, making itself irrelevant in terms of being able to contribute to the possibility of a long-term peace in the Middle East,” Graham said.

 

The former Liberal foreign affairs and defence minister said Harper has signalled a shift in Canadian policy by strongly backing Israel in the conflict.

In the wake of the presumed death of Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener of Kingston, Harper questioned why the UN remained in the lookout post along the Israeli-Lebanese border two weeks after Israel’s military offensive began.

“It is essentially a war zone,” the prime minister said after saying the death of the Canadian was a “great tragedy.”

 

“I found Mr. Harper’s reaction . . . completely unacceptable,” Graham said after a meeting with an environmental group.

 

Canada has been sending peacekeepers to the Middle East since former Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson first sent them there in the 1960s, Graham said.

 

The Canadian peacekeeper died Tuesday along with three other unarmed observers at a clearly marked UN post.

 

“Mr. Harper showed irresponsibility by putting into question Canada’s traditional position contributing to peace,” Graham said.

 

While noting that Israel has the right to defend itself against a terrorist organization like Hezbollah, which the Liberals previously banned in Canada, Graham said Canada has always stressed long-term peace rather than an immediate military solution.

 

He said Canada must retain its independence in the face of views from the United States and others.

 

“Harper shouldn’t simply repeat what (U.S. President George W.) Bush or (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice have said.”

 

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Tuesday the Israeli attack on the UN post appeared to be deliberate. Harper responded that the facts suggested otherwise, noting the Jewish state has co-operated with Canada over the evacuation of its citizens from Lebanon.

 

Graham didn’t address the pertinence of the presence of the observation post. But he recalled that the Israelis invited the UN to watch the Hezbollah, which controls the area…

 

I have the sense that Bill and the gang think they can somehow isolate Canada from the current war—not unlike the isolationists who encouraged Americans to sit out WWII. Like them, Bill is under the impression—misimpression, actually—that this isn’t our fight, and that we can avoid being pulled into it as long as we don’t “take sides.”

 

Silly Billy. You can’t sit out the jihad. Not when you’re squatting on a choice piece of real estate in Dar al Harb and the jihadis think the folks next door are Great Satan.

 

Of course, by the time Bill et al figure this out—that’s assuming they ever do—it’ll probably be too late.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:27 | link | comments

 

Fascist parallels: Here's a chart of some of the striking--and terrifying--points of comparison between the Nazis of yore and the Islamo-Nazis of today:

	The Nazis	Iran/Hezbollah and other jiahdists
Primary focus of rage:	The Jews of Europe	the Jews of Israel
Preferred antisemitic metaphor:	Jews are “a vermin” that must be “exterminated"	Jews are “a blot” that must be “wiped off the map; a “cancer” that must be erradicated
Alleged “grievance” designed to boost allegiance and membership:	After WWI (a war they believed they could have and should have won) Germany was forced to sign an onerous armistice agreement after WWI that unfairly punished them and benefited—who else?—the Jews. And, oh, yeah--the Jews were also responsible for facilitating the German defeat and for starting the entire war, the greedy, underhanded buggers.	Muslims around the world are being unfairly treated by infidels and three (now four, with Lebanon) of their nations are under “occupation,” two of them by—who else?—the Jews.
Inspirational document/author:	Mein Kampf, literally “my struggle,” by Adolf Hitler	The Koran, by Allah as revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. One of the book’s core tenets is “jihad,” literally, “a struggle."
Marching style:	Goose-stepping soldiers who offer a straight-armed salute	Ditto
Opportunities for young people?	Yes, “Hitlerjungen,” brainwashed to become martyrs for the German Reich—the greatest glory possible.	Yes, young shahids-to-be, brainwashed to become martyrs for Islam—the greatest glory possible.
Goals:	“Lebensram”; a Judenrein Europe (to start); a 1000 year Reich; world conquest.	A Judenrein Middle East (to start); Shia domination of the Muslim world (to start; world conquest.
Philosophy toward women:	“Kinder, kuchen, kirche”	Ditto, only substitute “mosque” for the last item.
Great moments in appeasement:	Too many to list here, among them: Germany asks for and gets the Ruhr valley; Germany asks for and gets the Sudentenland; British P.M. Nigel Chamberlain announces “peace in our time.”	Too many to list here, among them: the “road map” to “peace in our time”; the failure to sanction Iran or do anything substantive to put the brakes on its nuclear program; the framing of Lebanon as the “good guy” and Israel as the “bad guy” in its existential war with Hezbollah, so the world won’t feel too bad should the Jews of Israel be slaughtered in a second Holocaust.
Number of Jews murdered (est.)	Six million Jews on the continent of Europe	TBA, but a pool of close to six million are avaible for genocide in Israel.  Add to that the small number of Jews who remain in Iran, Syia and the rest of the Muslim world (for a start).
Deranged leader(s)	Adolf Hitler, “Der Fuhrer.”	Mahmoud Ahmajinejad, Sheikh Nasrallah, frontmen for Iran’s mad mullahs.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:11 | link | comments

 

Kind-hearted refugees: My nominee for the day’s most egregious piece of anti-Israel propaganda in a mainstream newspaper (admittedly, an extremely crowded field): this article by the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon. MacKinnon and his wife, Caroline Wheeler, also a Globe reporter on the scene, have been the paper’s tag-team of Israel-bashers before and during the recent conflict. In this piece, MacKinnon hits all the usual notes designed to make you root for the poor dispossessed and despise their cruel displacers (boo, hiss, Israel), including my "favourite" image—desperate  “refugees” clutching beloved keys to doors they will never re-open.

 

I’d advise you to grab a hankie before plowing ahead. This one’s a real sob-fest:

Lebanese refugees bond with their Palestinian hosts

MARK MACKINNON

AL-BAS REFUGEE CAMP, LEBANON -- There are few places in the world where the anger at Israel, both age-old and freshly stirred, runs as deep as on these streets, where images of Yasser Arafat stare at you from nearly every wall.

Established in 1948 as Palestinians fled north during the war that gave birth to the Jewish state, al-Bas is a place where residents still clutch keys and ownership documents to places in Israel that they likely will never see again.

Today this refugee camp, on the edge of the hard-hit port city of Tyre, has seen its population of 5,000 swell by 500 families who have arrived from across southern Lebanon, in a fashion similar to the Palestinian exodus of 58 years ago -- abandoning their homes as they fled an advancing Israeli army.

The Palestinians have suddenly gone from being beggars to gracious hosts, opening their doors and sharing their food with the new arrivals. They intrinsically understand what their guests are going through better than anyone else could.The al-Bas elementary school, where hundreds of men, women and children spent last night lying on the cold floor with pillows but no blankets, has become a uniquely Lebanese place of compounded misery and shared anger, a refugee camp within a refugee camp.

"There's a closeness. They took us in, and now it's our turn to take them in," said Mohammed Atiyeh, an official from the Palestinian Fatah faction who is running the makeshift camp. "We're used to being targeted by Israel. . . . To Israel, there's no difference between Palestinians and Lebanese."

The feeling of togetherness in this conflict has been deepened by the fact that Israel's two-week-old assault on southern Lebanon has coincided with a three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip. Israel has linked its attacks on the Lebanese Hezbollah militia and the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority as part of the same "war on terror," and the two Islamic groups have repeatedly expressed solidarity with each other since the fighting began.

"We have the same feeling right now. We are protesting what the Israelis are doing in both places," Mr. Atiyeh said. "It's really one people who are suffering together.”

Huda Diab, a 35-year-old mother of six who spent most of the last two weeks living in the al-Bas elementary school, says she felt a kinship with the Palestinians as soon as she arrived. "The Palestinian people welcomed us. The government didn't help us. The Palestinians are sharing their own things with us," she said, lying on the floor with her children near the school's entrance. "We're refugees staying in refugees' homes. We understand each other."...

So if I understand things correctly, people from Lebanon, a country which refused to absorb and grant citizenship to Palestinians who have been “refugees” lo these many countless years, are now refugees themselves because of a crisis which stems from the refusal of Israel’s Arab neighbours to absorb the original Arab refugees from that almost six decades-old Arab war with Israel. And many of these same Lebanese were granted citizenship in a flash from Canada, a nation which opened its doors to them after a much more recent civil war in Lebanon, and which was forced to rescue a slew of them when the war that stems from the refusal of Israel’s Arab neighbours to absorb the original Arab refugees from that almost six decades-old war heated up.

 

To state it more plainly: three years in Canada, and you can become a Canadian citizen. Fifty-eight years in Lebanon, and you're still a Palestinian "refugee."

 

There’s a bitter irony there, one which the ever-oblivious MacKinnon fails to notice. How can he, when he’s so busy tugging furiously at our heart-strings?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:51 | link | comments

 

A picture worth a thousand words:

 

 

The flags of kindred spirits, the UN and

Hezbollah, waving side by side at a UN outpost

in southern Lebanon.( Ain’t that sweet?)

(link via the Herald Sun)

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:01 | link | comments

 

Unconnected dot: The inestimable Hugh Fitzgerald on the media’s dangerous fixation on the minutia of Israel’s counter-attacks in Lebanon (a fixation he calls “a rich harvest of nonsense). The real danger is that it’s preventing people from seeing the “bigger picture.”

…But we are carefully to keep our gaze not on Islam worldwide, not on all the instruments of Jihad. We are carefully to pretend that the war against the Infidel state of Israel has nothing to do with Islam, when it is all about Islam. Hamas and Hizballah are nothing but Islam. Al Qaeda is nothing but Islam. The war in 1948 was about removing the Jews from Dar al-Islam. Nasser presented this theme more in terms of pan-Arabism -- but what was pan-Arabism itself except a subset of Islam? It was the initial expression of Muslim pan-Islamic sentiment before the bonanza of the oil wealth (ten trillion dollars since 1973), which paid for mosques, madrasas, and worldwide propaganda and Da'wa, not to mention armaments galore. Then the nearly-simultaneous entry into Western Europe of large numbers of Muslims from different countries was accompanied by smug assumptions that Islam was just a different religion, rather than a complete politico-theological system. No one understood that its basis, its beating heart, was the duty of Jihad and the clear division of the world between Believer and Infidel, between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet had this been properly understood, and had the older generation of Western experts on Islam been heeded, this would have led to a much more circumspect policy regarding the dangerous Muslim entry deep within, and deep behind, what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines…

You can understand why CNN and the rest are so caught up in the scenes of destruction: Great visuals, clear-cut bad guy (Israel), and an excuse to ignore the angry (and scary) jihadi elephant running riot and crapping all over the living room.

 

Update: Duh!

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:42 | link | comments

 

Annan’s efforts: In a headline that made me laugh out loud this morning (my best laugh of the day, so far), the Toronto Star insists that Israel’s inadvertent hit on a UN outpost was “A double blow” for Kofi Annan because he’s “worked hard to boost Israel at the UN.”

 

(Please, take a moment or three to release any pent-up chortles…There, doesn’t that feel better?)

 

The New York Daily News unpacks the reason for my mirth:

...It defies reason and humanity to believe Israel determined to launch a lethal attack against the world body, but that was Annan's impulse, one obviously rooted in the animus that informs virtually all he says and does regarding Israel. He is among the leading voices calling on a country besieged by terrorism to lay down its arms before those who would destroy it. And he is among those who, unbelievably, charge Israel with disproportionate use of force.

Since Hezbollah provoked the fight with a bloody cross-border kidnapping, Israel has dropped 40,000 shells on Lebanon, killing roughly 400 people - a figure that testifies to Israeli restraint. Yet Annan is appalled, putting him in the same camp as the top Hezbollah man who admitted he never expected such Israeli fury.

Annan's accusations against Israel are all the more odious because he is the chief of an organization that failed to implement Security Council Resolution 1559, which passed three years ago demanding the disbanding and disarmament of all militias in Lebanon and the control of the Lebanese government over all territory. If the UN had carried through, Hezbollah attacks would have long ended…

Hate to have to break it to you Kofi, but your so-called (and completely fictitious) “boost” is a bust.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:09 | link | comments

 

An idea whose time will never come, one can only hope and pray: From the New York Post:

 

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is floating a two-step plan for "enduring peace" on the Israel-Lebanon border as she meets with world leaders in Rome today, officials say.

 

The huddle is aimed at ending the warfare triggered two weeks ago when Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorists crossed the border to kidnap two Israeli soldiers.

 

The first step in Rice's plan could be an interim international force of 10,000 troops - perhaps from Muslim nations such as Egypt and Turkey - to stay for 90 days or so once there's a cease-fire.

They could be replaced by a bigger international force of up to 30,000 troops to create a buffer zone protecting Israel and help Lebanon establish control over areas now run by Hezbollah…

 

More of that “creative” thinking we’ve come to know and loathe, courtesy the muddle-headed folks as Foggy Bottom.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:08 | link | comments (1)

 

Survivors: A Professor Emeritus at Ryerson University (my alma mater) calls for “peace with justice.” Here’s his letter in the Toronto Star:

 

As a survivor of the Holocaust against Jews, I am deeply influenced by my Jewish community's prophetic tradition that teaches: "Justice, justice shall you pursue." Your editorial expresses an important step toward peace with justice in the Middle East: sending United Nations troops to Lebanon.

 

But for justice to be achieved, it is not enough for a United Nations military force to be mandated to stop all violent attacks against Israel by Hezbollah, Hamas and other extremists. This new UN force must also be mandated to end Israeli control and Jewish settlements in territories outside of Israel, that is, all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

 

For such a UN force to be successful, it must have the capacity to exclude certain nations from participation when those nations are in conflict of interest with its mission. Any nation dedicated to destroying Israel (e.g. Iran), or any major arms supplier to the region (e.g. United States) must be excluded from a UN force in the Middle East.

 

At the same time as this new international force works to secure Israel's right to exist, and to support a viable Palestinian state, diplomacy by world leaders must broker negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians leading to binding international arbitration of all their outstanding disputes.

 

"Unrealistic: It's never been done before." If we had allowed cynics and people stuck in the past to veto progress, there would be no social or scientific advances. For the sake of peace with justice in the Middle East, and also for the future survival of human life on this planet, it is high time to achieve progress in effective enforcement of justice in the international arena.

Ben Carniol, Professor Emeritus, Ryerson University, Toronto

 

And here’s the letter I sent in response:

 

As a survivor of the Holocaust, Ben Carniol has firsthand experience of the kind of horrors that can be unleashed when fascists with a deep-seated and irrational hatred of Jews are allowed to pursue their agenda of genocide. Yet, at a time when the Jews of Israel are facing the same kind of threat that the Jews of Europe faced during the Nazi era, Carniol prefers to avert his eyes to this reality and asks us to link the Hezbollah/Hamas effort to wipe Jews off the map to Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

 

Carniol insists that “justice” will be served once these Israeli misdeeds have been redressed, and that it is not “unrealistic” to expect a diplomatic solution to the seemingly intractable problems in the region. I’d like to be hopeful, too. However, recent events argue against him. The last two times Israel has withdrawn from “occupied” territory—in Lebanon and Gaza—the genocidal Islamists, Hezbollah and Hamas, gained control. From Israel’s perspective, the only item these terrorists might be willing to discuss is the timing and manner of Israel’s demise—let’s call it Holocaust, part II. For obvious reasons, that’s a discussion Israel is unwilling to have. Nor is it willing to put its fate in the hands of the UN, an organization which continues to favour Israel’s enemies, and has never been effective in the region.

 

No, unlike Ben Carniol, Israel has assimilated the most important lesson of the Holocaust—the lesson which led directly to the establishment of a Jewish state: When Jew-hating fascists want to kill you en masse, you cannot count on anyone to rescue you; you have to rescue yourselves.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:13 | link | comments (4)

 

Who should pay?: Dan Kelly of Halifax poses an interesting question in a letter to the Globe and Mail’s editor this morning (link available by subscription): “Why doesn’t Canada ask Israel to cover the evacuation costs [of Lebanese-Canadian]?”

 

Why, indeed.

 

Well, Dan, let’s start with the fact that Israel is fighting back against genocidal Islamist terrorists who have been firing thousands of missiles at it. Add to that the reality that these terrorists plunked themselves down smack in the middle of the Lebanese locals, the better to use them as human shields so that when Israel tries to take out military targets, they are bound to hit civilians and raise a hue and cry (like yours) against the Jewish state. And how’s this? The Lebanese, who, I know, I know, have been trying to get their nascent democracy in gear despite being in the grip of the Syria and Hezbollah, have watched this immense build-up of missiles, shipped in courtesy the mad mullahs of the Islamist dysptopia, and, rather than make a fuss, have been content to live cheek by jowl with the terrorists and their weapons and pretend, like happy, clueless little Candides, that all was hunky-dory in what they thought was the best of all possible worlds. And anyway, many of these folks had a “get out of Lebanon free” card—the Canadian passport they’d managed to score by living in Canada for three years (the minimum time required to qualify for citizenship) and then decamping to their real home and native land, Lebanon. But, hey, you can’t blame them. They’re only taking advantage of the rope we gave them to hang us with, the rope which tells people (if rope could talk), “if you want to collect an array of passports and be a Canadian-Lebanese-Uzbekistani-Tahitian, no problemo.”

 

So you see, Dan, asking Israel to pay the costs of evacuation is kind of cheeky and rather sad. It’s a sign that you don’t really have a clear picture of what’s going on here, and that you're unable to tell the good guys from the bad guys—and no wonder, considering that much of the media you're exposed to is in the dark like you.

 

Finally, to return to your query: Who should pay? Here’s my list: Lebanon, Iran, Syria, the UN. And don't forget Hezbollah.

 

I think that about covers it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:33 | link | comments (1)

 

Heavy metal thunder: Nasty Nasrallah and his group, Hellsbollocks, have reworked that old Steppenwolf favourite, “Born to be Wild”:

 

Get yer missiles launchin’,

Heading on to Haifa,

Lookin’ for explosions,

We’ll blast all the Jews away.

Yeah, world we’re gonna make it happen.

Wipe the map clean, make it Judenrein.

Fire all of our ammo at ‘em.

Give ‘em a deadline.

 

We like bombs and weapons,

Smuggled in from Eye-ran.

Mullahs are our masters.

Crazy fascists just like us.

Yeah, world we’re gonna run you over.

Make ev’ryone fall into line.

And soon when Iran goes fission

It will be sublime.

 

And you thought Nazis were bad

We were born, born to jihad.

We’ll make you submit.

It won’t hurt a bit.

 

Born to jiha-a-ad.

Born to jiha-a-ad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:48 | link | comments

 

Our own worst enemies: As Israel faces off against genocidal Islamists in the fight of its life, American Jews can’t seem can’t seem to get past their traditional political orientation and their hatred for George Bush.

 

As David Gelernter explains in Front Page Magazine, this is hardly the first time American Jews have worked against their own interests:

 

American Jews (especially the intellectual leadership) have a tragic history of acting against their own professed interests. In the years before Pearl Harbour, U.S. intellectuals on the whole (especially New York intellectuals) vehemently opposed American entry alongside Britain into the war against Nazi Germany. Of course many New York intellectuals were not Jews, and many American Jews didn’t care for New York intellectuals. But journals like Partisan Review helped shape the cultural climate—and were fiercely antiwar until Pearl Harbor—and were shaped, themselves, by Jewish intellectuals. Leading Jewish intellectuals signed a Partisan Review statement explaining that “Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here…The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.”…

 

Read that ancient Partisan Review statement and the truth hits home.  The problem with the American Jewish left, from 1940 through 2996 is not malevolence but naivete—naivete so great, it is the next best thing to stupidity. Naivete is an occupational hazard among all intellectuals. But American Jews at large respect their intellectuals as much as any group does, and more than most—and way too much for common sense.

 

The Palestinian Arabs who cheer terrorists on do so out of hate, which is far stronger than intelligent self-interest (or any other emotion). American Jews used to act out of very different motives; used to vote left our of idealism. But that is starting to change. As the left-wing agenda dries up, nothing remains to feed on (if you are used to getting your nourishment left of center) but the bitter weeds of hate. And thus the tragic, pathetic surge of hatred for George Bush on the left, including among left-wing Jews. As I heard someone say last week, “I think Bush is doing great on Israel. Naturally, I still hate his guts.”

 

The paragraph that follows is my favourite part of Gelernter’s piece because of how he deftly eviscerates Washington Post columnist Richard “Hunker” Cohen:

 

For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen—who explains that the “greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake.” Who advises Israel to “hunker down,” while “waiting (and hoping that history will get distracted and move on to something else.” It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn’t—or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that someone else could be using, and maybe wants to. The Earth’s surface did not expand to make room for him. Births have outstripped deaths on this planet for many generations. But we are not in the habit of demanding human beings justify their existence or be mowed down, and the idea is equally bad in the case of nations…

 

Actually, I’d like to read the column in which Richard Cohen justifies his existence. It would no doubt be vastly more compelling that his usual drivel.

 

Update: Caroline Glick on the left’s pathologies. From JWR:

…THE CURRENT campaign in northern Israel and Lebanon has brought into sharp focus the major pathologies and strengths of the West in fighting the Iranian-led jihadist axis. The British government's push for a cease-fire, together with the enthusiasm of the UN and France for sending their own troops to Lebanon to protect the Lebanese from the "disproportionate" Israelis; the demand of Israel's radical Left that a deal be made with Syria; and the demands of leftist ideologues in the US that an artificial deadline be set for the conclusion of Israel's operations in Lebanon all point to a similar pathology.

As a group, the ideological Left rejects the notion of victory in war for Western forces (although it is fine for jihadists); rejects the notion that there are enemies that are impossible to appease; and specifically rejects the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself against its enemies, let alone vanquish its foes…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:31 | link | comments

 

Taking sides: The Globe and Mail has another in its unofficial series of opinion pieces by notable Canadians counselling a return to "the good old days" when we sat on the fence and played “honest broker.” On Saturday, the Globe printed an  article in that vein by former Liberal mucky-muck, Lloyd Axworthy. Today’s comment is by Paul Heinbecker, a former Canadian ambassador to the UN (so you know where his head is at). Heinbecker insists that Israel and the Palestinians bear equal blame for the failure to come to terms at the peace table—Israel for building settlements in the West Bank; the Palestinians for “resorting to terrorism” in response. He makes absolutely no distinction between Israel, fighting for its life against genocidal Islamists who want to obliterate it, and the genocidal Islamists. As far as Heinbecker is concerned, both should carry equal weight with Canada, otherwise our reputation for fence-sitting, er, honest brokering, will be impaired and Canada’s the “peace” component of our motto “peace, order and good government” motto will be put at risk.

 

Heinbecker once served as Canada’s ambassador to Germany, so I’m sure he’s well-apprised of that nation's wretched history vis a vis the Jews. In a different era, no doubt, he would have had no difficulty distinguishing “the Jewish side” from “the Nazi side." Perhaps he could gain some moral clarity on the current issue if he took off his diplomatic blinkers and saw Hezbollah for what it is: the return of the Nazis in Islamic garb.

 

Alan Dershowitz is under no illusions about Hezbollah or the perils of the UN’s (and the Globe’s) much-vaunted even-handedness. Here he is in the Chicago Tribune (link via Real Clear Politics):

 

If anyone wonders why the UN has rendered itself worse than irrelevant in the Arab-Israeli conflict, all he or she need do is read UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's July 20 statement. Annan goes to great pains to suggest equal fault and moral equivalence between the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas that specifically target innocent civilians and the self-defense efforts by Israel, which tries desperately, though not always successfully, to avoid causing civilian casualties. In his statement, Annan never condemns, or even mentions, terrorism, which is a root cause and precipitator of the conflict.

Even Annan was forced to acknowledge that "Hezbollah's provocative attack on July 12 was the trigger of this particular crisis"; that Hezbollah is "deliberate[ly] targeting ... Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons"; and that Israel has the "right to defend itself under Article 51 of the UN charter." But he doesn't stop there. He goes out of his way to insist on equating Hezbollah's terrorists with Israeli military response, which he labels "disproportionate" and "collective punishment." He condemns both Hezbollah and Israel. He also criticizes Israel for its efforts at preventing Qassam rocket attacks against its civilian populations, noting that the Hamas rockets have produced no "casualties in the past month." (This, of course, is not for lack of trying.) He ignores Hamas' long history of terrorism against innocent civilians.

Annan then calls for an "immediate cessation of indiscriminate and disproportionate violence" on both sides, again suggesting a moral equivalence. Among the most immoral positions anyone can take is to suggest a moral equivalence between morally different actions.

Part of the goal of organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas is to gain moral legitimacy for their terrorist tactics by having them equated with the conventional military tactics used by democratic regimes. Only the morally obtuse--or perverse--cannot recognize the difference between a terrorist group that targets civilian population centers with anti-personnel weapons designed to maximize civilian casualties and a democracy that seeks to prevent terrorism by employing smart bombs designed to minimize civilian casualties.

Annan knows better than to suggest a moral equivalence. He is fully aware of the tactic employed by terrorists of launching their rockets from, and hiding behind, civilian shields, so as to make democracies have to kill some civilians to get at the terrorists.

But Annan heads an organization that is so anti-Israel that as the late Abba Eban, the early Israeli ambassador to the UN, once put it: "If Algeria proposed a resolution that the Earth was flat and that Israel has flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 120 to 3, with 27 abstentions."…

 

The point must be made here: Not taking sides is taking sides, because it accords Israel's enemies a legitimacy they don’t deserve, one which makes them even stronger and more dangerous--to Israel and to us. In so doing,  the “dishonest brokers”—the UN and internationalists like Axworthy and Heinbecker—only hasten the day when our enemies are finally able to achieve their goals.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:31 | link | comments

 

Nasty speaks out: MEMRI has a translation of Nasty Nasrallah’s interview the other day on al Jazeera TV. The gist of his comments: Hellsbollocks won’t rest while there’s a single Jew left in Israel, Iran is neck deep in the do-do, Iran and Hellsbollocks are using the “Palestinians” (about who they don't really couldn’t give a hoot) as cover, and the government of Lebanon seems awfully palsy-walsy with Nasrallah and his genocidal crew, which tends to cast doubt on Lebanon's whole "helpless victim" routine. Here’s a portion of Nasty’s remarks:

…"Hizbullah has always placed Lebanese national interests above any other interest. During the national dialogue, I said to them: You have known us for 23-24 years. I am ready to tell each and every one of them which battles he has fought - some of them, not all of them... I am ready to tell some of them which battles they have fought for the sake of foreign, rather than Lebanese, interests. Tell me when we, Hizbullah, did anything to Lebanon, or led it into war, for the sake of foreign, rather than Lebanese, interests. They could not give me a single example."

[...]

"Victory in this case does not mean that I will enter and conquer the north of Palestine, and liberate Nahariya, Haifa, and Tiberias. This is not one of our slogans. This is a long process, which pertains to the Palestinians and to the nation. This is another issue. The victory that we are talking about - If the resistance survives, this will be a victory. If its determination is not broken, this will be a victory. If Lebanon is not humiliated, if its honor and dignity remain intact, if Lebanon continues to face all alone the strongest military force in the region, and if it perseveres and refuses to accept any humiliating terms in the settlement of this issue - this will be a victory. If we are not militarily defeated, this will be a victory. As long as a single missile is launched from Lebanon to target the Zionists, as long as a single fighter fires his gun, as long as someone plants an explosive device for the Israelis, this means that the resistance still exists."

[...]

"Today, we Shi'ites are fighting Israel. Our fighting and perseverance ultimately serve our brothers in Palestine, who are Sunni, not Shi'ite. In other words, we, Shi'ites and Sunnis, fight side by side against Israel, which is supported and strengthened by America. I'm telling you that if [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert reaches a point at which he says to the Americans, 'I cannot complete this,' Bush will say to him, 'You go on, and if you encounter a problem, I will resolve it for you.' This is what I meant when I talked about 'a battle of the nation,' and I saw [on TV] that you commented on this. I am not fighting on behalf of the nation. But I say that the outcome of the battle that Hizbullah is fighting in Lebanon, for better or worse, is an outcome for the nation. Defeat in Lebanon is defeat for the nation, and victory in Lebanon is victory for the nation, just like in 2000."

[...]

"For 23 years, we have been talking to our people, motivating them, talking about martyrdom, the honor of martyrdom, and the place of the martyrs. Do the Zionists, or those who encourage them, believe that I, or anyone in the Hizbullah leadership, fears martyrdom? We love martyrdom. We take precautions in order to prevent Israel from making any gains. But on the personal level, and as a personal aspiration, each and every one of us hopes to be destined to martyrdom at the hands of those people, the killers of the prophets and the messengers, and most hostile to the believers, as it says in the Koran."

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:58 | link | comments

 

Hardee-har-har: The other Trudeau (who in his own way is just as clueless and misguided as our late, revered Canadian Prime Minister) has a high-larious cartoon about the President and how he’s so discombobulated that he mixes up—get this—Hezbollah, ebola and stem cell research.

 

It’s about as amusing as the prospect of genocidal Islamists effecting a second Holocaust while the world, once again, stands idly by. (I say that as someone who disagrees with Bush’s stance on stem-cell research, but who knows that the U.S. is the primary impediment to Dar es Salaam—the peace that is promised once all the world is under Islam’s thumb.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:37 | link | comments (1)

 

A love song from Nasty Nasrallah to Moo Jihad:

 

Du bist mein.

Ich bin dein.

Let’s make the Mideast

Judenrein.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:20 | link | comments

 

A bad move: An interesting take on the Iran and Hezbollah from iranian.com:

The current conflict, which almost certainly took part with Iran's agreement, is not wielding many positive results for Iran.

Iran intended to use the current conflict as a tool to bolster its deterrence image. The kidnappings which were followed by Katyusha missile attacks were meant to send a message to Jerusalem. This message meant to say “stop threatening us, and forget about attacking our nuclear installations, because we could cause you severe pain”. Instead, by initiating the attack, Iran gave Israel a pretext to attack its military capability in Lebanon, and to cause damage to it. This bolstered Israel's deterrence at the expense of Iran and Hezbollah's.

Furthermore, Israel used this opportunity to send its own message to Tehran. Through its tough response, Israel military informed Iran that “We are ready to respond very harshly to any kind of threat. Bear that in mind before you attack us again”.

The Iranian government was also hoping that it could use the current conflict as a tool to show the UN and the international community that it is Israel who is a bigger and more immediate danger to the stability of the region, and not Iran.

However to Iran's disappointment, Hezbollah is being seen as the perpetrator instead. This was shown by Koffi Annan's statement, which said that Hezbollah is holding Lebanon hostage by its acts. Although the statement also condemned Israel, its hostility towards Hezbollah could not be ignored.

Meanwhile, no body is knocking on Iran's door, so that it mediates with Hezbollah, like they did with Syria's President Hafez Assad in 1996, during operation Grapes of Wrath. Assad used the opportunity to elevate his status in the Middle East and the world as a regional playmaker. This earned him many visits by the then US Secretary of state, Warren Christopher.

The same is not happening with Ahmadinejad or any other senior Iranian dignitary. Javier Solana did not include Iran is his recent peace making trip to the region. Meanwhile it is impossible to even think that Condoleezza Rice will go to Tehran when she embarks on her mission to the region next Sunday.

If anything, the Middle East is shutting its doors in the face of Iran. This was shown on Saturday 15th of July when the Arab Foreign Ministers held a meeting to discuss the current crisis. Iran wanted to attend. Its request was politely but firmly turned down. The Saudis, Egyptians and the Jordanians are in no mood to include Iran in regional matters. As far as they are concerned, the recent Hezbollah operation was for the benefit of Tehran, at their expense.

Implications
Increasing number of civilian casualties in Lebanon may assist Hezbollah's claims that it is the victim of Israel's aggression. Despite that, the results so far show that a number of long term damages have been caused against Iran's position and its Hezbollah allies.

First and foremost, the fact that the recent conflict has led to further isolation of Iran in the region and the UN is likely to damage Iran's diplomatic stance in the nuclear negotiations.

The situation is likely to become worse for Tehran, as the international community is in almost unison agreement that Hezbollah will have to be removed from the Israel - Lebanon border, to enable an international force to take their place. The loss of its positions on the border will dent Hezbollah's image. Just imagine for a moment. Hezbollah fighters, armed to the teeth, standing 30 kilometres away from the front line. Not a very convenient image for an organisation which prides itself on being on the front line of the fight against Israel. This will put Hezbollah's claims that it needs an armed wing to defend Lebanon under a question mark, which in the long term could damage Iran's ambitions to use Lebanon as a military base…

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:21 | link | comments

 

The full Monty: According to this article from The American Thinker, Israel is employing the strategic approach of WWII British Field Marshall Montgomery’s, i.e. go-slow and live to fight another day. James Lewis says that, given Israel’s size and strength, is far better to go that route than to try to emulate American General George S. Patton’s lightning-speed tactics:

While General George S. Patton was winning public laurels for fast armored strikes against German forces in WWII, Field Marshall Montgomery ran a parallel British army that made haste slowly. Patton is often considered the most brilliant US Army commander of the time, but Monty had his reasons. Today, the Israelis may be using a Monty strategy, because it makes more sense.

One difference between Patton and Montgomery is obvious: Patton was an American, backed with the limitless resources of the US homeland. The United States came into the war in 1942, while the Brits had barely managed to save their army at Dunkirk, retreating from continental Europe.  Throughout the war Britain was in desperate straits militarily and economically. Moreover the British armed forces had fought for two generations, barely surviving World War I. The British Empire was clearly breaking apart. They could not afford high-risk gambles.

Forget more sophisticated arguments. Doing high-risk armored thrusts made sense for Patton (though Eisenhower kept him on a short leash). It never made any sense for Monty. Nobody at Whitehall was going to thank him for winning a battle and losing his army.

Israel is in a Montgomery position today. For sixty years, they have been fighting ever new ranks of deadly enemies. Israel is not a culture that celebrates death in battle. Yet they have won, time and again, by being smarter and tougher than the opposition, finding weak spots in enemy tactics and strategy, and only then hitting with local superiority until the enemy finally broke and fled. That is why they are now safe from attack from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon. But they are not safe from Iran, which has never been bloodied in battle with  Israel.

Today the IDF is facing an Iranian proxy guerrila army that is very well trained, supplied, and dug in. They are clever enough, and ruthless, and bloodthirsty.  They know how to play the media for maximum propaganda advantage.

Iran’s martyrdom cult is the first one faced by Western armed forces since Imperial Japan. For Khomeiniacs, dying in battle is celebrated as a path to Paradise, while on the Hamas side, the family sometimes performs a joyful wedding when their shahid succeeds in suicide-murder against Jews.

Meanwhile, the international media are tilting the playing field so that mere survival for Hezbollah will be counted as a victory for the suiciders, and a major defeat for Israel.

Israelis are therefore in the position of sane soldiers fighting crazies on a tilted playing field. But unlike the heroic US Marines against the Japanese at Iwo Jima, this is not a one-time battle with a lot of resources on the side of sanity and civilization. It is an ongoing generational war of attrition, in which the sheer capacity to sustain morale counts as much as anything else.

So a Field-Marshall Montgomery strategy makes a lot of sense. Never give the enemy the initiative, even tactically. Bring all your strengths to bear, and none of the enemy’s. Don’t treat this as a football game; it’s better to survive and fight again than to look good to the media.

What we are seeing today looks like constant probing. Every other day we hear that yes, the IDF will attack on the ground, in strength, or no, they won’t. The IDF command may not know yet. There is a lot of tactical fighting going on, with special ops (five of whom just lost their lives), a lot of probing behind enemy lines, massive artillery and air strikes, and attempts to drive away civilians, so Hezbollah won’t have children to hide behind and turn into involuntary martyrs. A lot more is going on behind the scenes than we will ever know.

The international Left is therefore trying to rush the endgame, with slanted horror stories. In some cases even friendly commentators are insisting that the IDF has to fight this battle in their way. But if the Israels are smart and self-confident they will take their time. They are unbelievably lucky to have George Bush in the White House and Condi Rice at State, with a real and sympathetic understanding of the Israeli position. They are playing for time and giving sustained diplomatic support. That’s the only thing the civilized world can do right now...

And here’s one of the international leftists who’s trying to rush the endgame—the New Yorker's editor, David Remnick. Remnick miscomprehends and misexplains virtually the entire situation, from soup to nuts (to employ a gastronomical archaism from the 1930s):

 

Just four months ago, following the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert was elected Prime Minister of Israel. The hopeful narrative of his campaign was that of a career hard-liner who, like the great majority of Israelis, had finally come to believe that his country’s occupation of the more than three and a half million Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank was morally untenable, spiritually corrosive, and politically senseless. Olmert comes from an activist family that believed in the Greater Israel ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was a “Likud prince,” a champion of the mass-settlement project. But, in the footsteps of Sharon, who had closed the settlements of Gaza, Olmert declared his intention to extend the process known as “disengagement” to most (if not enough) of the West Bank. In the early weeks of his premiership, his greatest concern seemed to be how best to time the withdrawals and avoid any clashes between his own police and the most zealous of the settlers. Because the process lacked a Palestinian partner, the disengagement plan was too peremptory to promise a final settlement, but at least it suggested progress toward the sole mutually acceptable resolution of the historic conflict—two viable states, side by side, in a lasting, if uneasy, peace.

That strand of Middle Eastern optimism is now a memory. Olmert is fighting a war on two fronts—in Gaza against Hamas and in Lebanon against a large and sophisticated Hezbollah militia—and it is entirely possible, if sense and diplomacy do not quickly intercede, that the region, already inflamed by the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and the murderous insurgency that has followed, will face a danger level not seen in decades. By the end of last week, a ground war seemed imminent. Some observers speak forebodingly of 1914, but the most immediate result of this war will likely be to undermine the Israeli consensus for territorial compromise with the Palestinians, shatter the fragile Lebanese polity, and radicalize more Muslims in the region and beyond.

Much of the Israeli public has concluded that a policy of territorial retreat only emboldened the militias on their borders. After the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, many had hoped that Hezbollah, which was born in reaction to the Israeli invasion in 1982, would transform itself into a conventional political party, a peaceful champion of the Shiite underclass. Instead, it built up its arsenal and accelerated its attacks across Israel’s northern border. Similarly, after Israel withdrew from Gaza last year, Palestinian fighters, with the encouragement of the new Hamas government, lobbed more than seven hundred rockets into Sderot and other towns in southwest Israel.

Olmert had to respond. But he has done so in a way that pleases his enemies while bringing despair to countless innocents. Israel’s intention is to disarm the militias, to protect the citizens of Haifa, Afula, and Safed, but its attacks have killed hundreds of Lebanese, many of them civilians. Hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in fear. Israeli bombs have also demolished significant parts of the Lebanese infrastructure: the landing strips of Beirut, grain silos, roads, fuel storage, apartment buildings. Food and medical supplies are running short. Such is the vanity—and the inevitable result—of “surgical” strikes. Israel can neither morally nor politically finish this mission on its own. The Party of God, for its part, uses civilians as both shields and targets, and boasts of its own escape.

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, has denounced the scale of the Israeli counterattack, saying that he will ask for compensation for his country’s losses, and has rightly appealed to the United Nations, Europe, and the United States to broker a ceasefire. He has also described the powerlessness of his national government before Hezbollah in the most plaintive terms. Hezbollah, he told an interviewer for Milan’s Corriere della Sera last week, had created a “state within a state,” adding, “It’s not a mystery that Hezbollah answers to the political agendas of Tehran and Damascus.” The Lebanese government has been simply too weak to deal with it, much less to fulfill the section of Resolution 1559 of the U.N. Security Council which calls for the mandatory disarmament of all militias in Lebanon.

When the conflict first erupted, the governments of Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were only mildly critical of Israel’s response. More surprising, they denounced Hezbollah for its cross-border raids, its rocket fire, and its kidnappings of Israeli soldiers. The Sunni Arab states fear the rise of a “Shiite crescent” from Iran through Iraq and on to Bekaa. But, as the body count mounts and the destruction in Lebanon increases, that political balancing act will collapse, and the very sort of anti-Israeli fury that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been counting on will surely grow.

Among the more vexing questions of this war is what to do about its likely instigator: the government in Tehran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards first came to Lebanon in 1982 to help arm and train Hezbollah, which then, according to its foes, carried out a string of horrific attacks, including the killing of two hundred and forty-one American servicemen in Beirut and the bombing of the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Hamas has benefitted from similar assistance. Both groups have lately gained a large measure of power at the ballot box even as they receive military and strategic support from a country that is defiantly developing a nuclear weapon and openly advertises its hopes for the destruction of Israel. “The final point of liberal civilization is the false and corrupt state that has occupied Jerusalem,” the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on Iranian television last week. “That’s what all those who talk about liberalism and support it have in common.” Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of Kayhan, a newspaper affiliated with the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, recently wrote that the annihilation of Israel “is not only a religious and national duty, but also a universal human duty, from which no Muslim or free human being can be exempt.”

So far, the performance of the Western diplomatic world has been bewildering. Kofi Annan has been slow to act and his warnings have been ineffectual. President Bush flashed Israel a rhetorical green light and then, after a cringe-making performance at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, where he deflected a reporter’s serious question about Lebanon with frat-boy joshing, flew home to veto a stem-cell-research bill. It was left to the French President, Jacques Chirac, to call most clearly for a ceasefire, a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and the implementation of Resolution 1559, “on the clear understanding—and all the Lebanese have to understand and recognize this—that there cannot be a politically stable Lebanon shouldering her responsibilities and pursuing her development, a democratic Lebanon, if part of her territory is occupied by militia who do not obey the central Lebanese government.”

To distract the world from its nuclear ambitions and to keep conflict alive in the Middle East, Iran, through its client militia in Lebanon, has indulged in a provocation of the most dangerous kind. Now its opponents face a challenge that demands endurance and strategic calculation, an unwillingness to fall further into a trap where politics ends and the forces of chaos inevitably triumph.

  

Well, at least he got that part about Iran right.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:04 | link | comments

 

“Restraint” and survival: Last week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen urged the Jews of Israel to “hunker down.” This week, various leaders continue to implore the Jewish state to “exercise restraint.” Suzanne Fields, taking in the long view of the longest hatred (historian Robert Wistrich’s term for antisemitism), explains that “hunkering” and “restraint” are the most effective ways to bring about Holocaust, the sequel. From JWR:

They're caricatured with hooknoses and humpbacks, as sucking up a sow's excrement, murdering children for their blood in a recipe for matzoh. They're scorned for being weak and sneered at for being strong, for passivity and aggression, for segregating themselves and for assimilating to disappear among their secular neighbors. They're too studious or merely stupid, obsessed with cleanliness or living in filth, hated for their industry and reviled for their sloth. They're condemned as greedy capitalists and naive communists, as reactionaries and radicals, patriotic nationalists and secular internationalists, for being stateless and for building a thriving state.

Jews are persecuted when they don't convert and persecuted when they do. The converted are accused of hating themselves, and the unconverted are accused of hating everybody else. Seneca, the Roman tragedian, expressed annoyance at Roman Jews for their observance of a ritual Sabbath: "This meant that Jews were wasting one-seventh of their lives doing nothing."

Now the Jews of Israel, doing what they have to do to survive, are accused of "acting out of proportion" to the daily assault of Iranian rockets fired by Hezbollah to kill Jews in their homes. The Jews should show restraint. Restraint was what the Jews in Germany showed when the Nazis were organizing the Holocaust and the world wouldn't believe that what was happening was happening. Restraint is what the rest of the world showed when they dismissed a crazy Austrian paperhanger and his nutty book, "Mein Kampf." If the rest of the world was willing to ignore Hitler and his boasting and bloviating, why couldn't the Jews?

Restraint is what you show in disputes with rational people who are willing to compromise, who will give up something in return for something. But restraint can buy time for your uncompromising enemies to enable them to plot the ambush to kill you later. During the Holocaust, certain Jewish leaders, eager to show restraint by trusting their enemies, gave up lists of Jews, a few at a time, to save others a little while longer.

Ariel Sharon, showing restraint, organized the withdrawal from Gaza as a way to achieve peace through strength, a controversial idea but nevertheless credible. You could call it aggressive restraint. All that was wrong with it was that it didn't work and was perceived as weakness by the enemies of Israel. The only thing Israel got was more rockets on its cities, the elevation of Hamas to power and the kidnapping of its soldiers standing duty in Israeli territory. "When you keep pinching a lion," Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, writes in Die Welt, the German daily, "sooner or later he'll clobber you with his paw." Throughout history, others have had a lot of advice for the Jews, cheap at the price. America aside, there was not much else. Anti-Semitism is often personal, and always political. The anti-Semites get away with acting on their prejudice because there's a political environment where spin is appreciated. Anti-Zionism, the legitimate criticism of Israel politics and policy, is not always anti-Semitism. But it usually is. Once upon a time, the world's sympathy rested with the Jews. The United Nations approved the creation of Israel; the Jews had suffered so much in the early decades of the 20th century. Israel gave the Jews a new identity, an opportunity to create a country by working the land, bringing it to flower and training men (and women) to fight back when attacked. They succeeded beyond their dreams, beyond the nightmares of their critics. When Israelis survived in the wars of 1948, 1964 and 1967, no thanks to restraint, their global supporters began to fall away. Jews were easier to feel sorry for when they couldn't fight back.

"Nathan the Wise," an 18th-century German play by Gotthold Lessing, depicts a flattering portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, the playwright's famous Jewish friend. When the Sultan Saladin asks Nathan, the Moses figure, to explain his identity, Nathan replies simply: Ich bin ein Mensch — "I am a man." This line infuriated Hannah Arendt, writing about it after the Holocaust. It characterized the Jew in a private, personal way, she said, ignoring his specific identity subject to political vulnerability. She knew what the Israelis have had to learn the hard way. For a Jew, being a man is not good enough unless it's backed up by the power to survive.

It’s ironic that Fields would mention Hannah Arendt in this context. Though a brilliant scholar with a towering intellect, Arendt, a life-long defender of Nazi-supporter, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (her mentor and former lover) was an avowed anti-Zionist who often got things wrong and wrote scathingly about Israel's decision to apprehend Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:03 | link | comments

 

Innocent bystander or receptive host?: The media would have you believe that Lebanon is the former. In Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz advances arguments for the former:

 

…Critics of Israel’s defensive war against Islamic terrorists are busily wringing their hands over the destruction that has been wreaked on Lebanon, which is portrayed as innocent. They invoke these tragedies while calling on Israel to cease its fire and leave the Hezbollah aggressors intact. Since Israel had no role in starting this war, this is like blaming the Allies for the damage inflicted on Germany in World War II—and doing so in the midst of the war. Critics who make such charges and demands in the midst of a war are aiding and abetting the aggressors.

 

But the very idea that Lebanon is an innocent bystander in the war against Israel won’t wash. Lebanon is host to the terrorist aggressor which has sworn to eliminate Israel and its Jews from the face of the earth. This is the explicit creed of both Hezbollah and its sponsor Iran. And not just in their charter of in statements made months or years ago. Iran’s little dictator reiterated this threat yesterday in the midst of Islam’s aggressive war against the Jews: “Israel has pushed the button of its own destruction. The Zionists made their worst decision and triggered their extinction by attacking Lebanon.” Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, occupying two cabinet positions and seats in its parliament. The Lebanese government agreed to enforce UN Resolution 1559 which calls on it to disarm all militias on its territory, namely Hezbollah. If the Lebanese Government had performed this obligation, there would be no war, and there would be no Lebanese civilian casualties…

 

Update: Jihad/Dhimmi Watch’s eloquent eminence grise, Hugh Fitzgerald, on Lebanon’s complicity. Fitzgerald is discussing it in the context of NRP’s seemingly endless coverage of departing “refugees” whose harrowing stories are designed to evoke maximum empathy from the broadcaster’s soft-hearted/headed listeners:

…And why was it, in the course of this interview, and in all of the coverage, there is never a discussion of the obvious. What is the obvious? The obvious are those 12,000-15,000 missiles. What are they doing in Lebanon? Where did they come from? Who supplied them? Who brought them into Lebanon? Did no one notice them? What did the "Lebanese" think was going to happen with those missiles and all their other military equipment? What did they think those goosestepping black-balaclaved Kalashnikov-clutching bezonians of beetle-browed Nasrallah, he of the Nazi rhetoric, and the fascist blackshirts, were going to do? Just squirrel them away for the hell of it?

Whenever I hear anyone from Lebanon say that "everything was fine, it was all so wonderful" and now "everything is destroyed," I want to ask them how they can say with a straight face that "everything was fine" when, step by careful step, more arms and missiles were being brought in from Iran, and Syria, than are in the armories of even some European countries? How dare they say that up until now "everything was fine"? And how dare they pretend, as the Shi'a and other Muslims do, that everything was okay up to now, when the Christians have been under threat, steadily menaced and undermined, for the past half-century? How can they say this with poker faces when the undermining of what had once been a Christian-majority refuge in the heart of unpleasant Dar al-Islam has continued right through to today?...  

 

Update: I am reminded of an anecdote my brother recounted the other day. He was recalling his visit to Dachau some years ago, and said he was shocked to discover it was a mere subway stop away from Munich. When he arrived at the Concentration Camp, which has been preserved as a memorial, he was handed a piece of paper written on behalf of the town of Dachau. It was a disclaimer which insisted that the people of the town had now idea of what was happening there during the war, and they wanted everyone to know that they bore absolutely no responsibility for it.

 

Nice try. The people of Dachau may not have known for sure what was going on behind the camp’s closed doors, but could see for themselves that lots of Jews were being transported in but none were going out, so their protestations are at the very least, disingenuous. In the same way, the people of Southern Lebanon freely chose to live in the midst of terrorists who were basically calling the shots in the region. They knew that what these terrorists hoped to achieve, i.e. the total destruction of Israel, and they could see thousands of missiles being amassed in their neigbourhood for that precise purpose. The Lebanese people as a whole may not be responsible for Hezbollah’s actions, but they must bear some responsibility for legitimizing a party of terrorists, for turning a blind eye as Iran, via Syria, smuggled thousands of missiles into their country, and for failing to lift a finger to halt this build-up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:04 | link | comments

 

Ma nishtanah: Why is this war different from all other wars? Michael Barone elaborates. From Real Clear Politics:

This Middle East crisis is different from all other Middle East crises. Over the years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, the United States and other onlookers have gotten used to a certain kind of Middle East crisis. Palestinians or their sympathizers would threaten and wreak violence against Israel. Israel would respond, sometimes locally, sometimes by major actions like the defensive War of 1973 or the occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982. The cry would go up: Let the cycle of violence end, let Israel give up land that it has occupied in return for peace.

On occasion, with established states whose leaders decided they had no interest in continuing violence, the recommended solution would work. Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the one nation whose giant demographic size made it an existential threat to Israel, decided to go to Jerusalem and then to Camp David where, under the tutelage of Jimmy Carter, he and Israel's Menachem Begin made what has turned out to be a cold peace. The late King Hussein of Jordan, threatened by Palestinian terrorists himself, dealt quietly with Israel and, in time, made a formal peace as well. Sadat and Hussein, and their successors, never really wanted to destroy Israel. So they made peace.

The formula of land for peace has not worked as well with others. Bill Clinton devoted much of his vast psychic energy and negotiating skill to making a land-for-peace deal between first Yitzhak Rabin and then Ehud Barak of Israel, and Yasir Arafat of the PLO. In 2000, he got Barak to offer Arafat the lion's share of the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace. Arafat refused and launched the Second Intifada instead. Rabin and Barak, both distinguished military leaders, imagined that Arafat wanted land enough to make peace. But Arafat preferred the armed struggle that left him in control of Palestinian Authority funds. He encouraged the Palestinian people to continue to lust after the destruction of Israel.

Today, almost no one is demanding a land-for-peace deal. The reason is obvious. Israel left the Gaza strip last year, and the Palestinians there, instead of observing a cold peace, began launching missiles into Israel and elected a Hamas government that seeks Israel's destruction. Now, Hamas forces have killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Similarly, Israel left southern Lebanon to the tender mercies of Iran-supported Hezbollah fully six years ago. But Hezbollah, urged on by the Iranian mullahs who want to deflect attention from their nuclear program, has lobbed missiles into Haifa and attacked Israeli soldiers.

No government can be expected to ignore such armed attacks on its people and its military forces. Land-for-peace is a non-starter. Hamas and Hezbollah already have land. And they have made it clear that they will never willingly make peace…

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:42 | link | comments

 

Backlash in Britain: Folks in the U.K. are starting to feel mighty uncomfortable about letting hoardes of “undesirable” immigrants flood into the country—“undesirables” from Bulgaria and Romania, that is. From the Times Online:

 

THE Home Office is privately warning that 45,000 “undesirable” migrants from Romania and Bulgaria could legally be allowed to live in Britain when the two countries join the European Union next year.

It has drawn up a confidential “warnings index” of people from the two states, most of whom are suspected of having criminal associations or posing a security risk.

According to a paper circulated in Whitehall last week, ministers fear they may be unable to stop these people settling in Britain and claiming state benefits when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU.

The paper reveals that the government privately estimates between 60,000 and 140,000 Romanians and Bulgarians will arrive in Britain in the first year after accession.

Ministers were criticised for underestimating the number of migrants from the eight eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004. Experts last week revealed that 600,000 had come to Britain since 2004, compared with the government’s estimate of between 5,000 and 13,000 a year.

The Home Office paper, from Joan Ryan, the Home Office minister, reveals deep concerns in government that a new wave of immigration may provoke a public backlash.

It warns of EU “enlargement fatigue” and that the “enough is enough” argument is winning…

I can understand the “fatigue” they feel for these “threatening” outsiders. You never know when one of those Bulgarians is going to fall prey to a religious motivational speaker who’ll convince the “disaffected” lad to stow a bomb in his rucksack and blow himself up on a public conveyance in the name of, um, Bulgaria.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:07 | link | comments

 

In a fog: Condi Rice is calling upon the genocidal Islamists to, er, rein in the genocidal Islamists.

 

I’m told people over at Foggy Bottom get paid big bucks to come up with such lamebrain schemes.

 

Update: Does anyone at Foggy Bottom read MEMRI? Do they even know what it is? From an article posted today (which compares and contrasts the Saudi-Taliban relationship with the Iran-Hezbollah one):

 

…However, the Hizbullah model differs from the Afghanistan model in one important respect: the depth of the ties between the "client" militia and the "sponsor" country. While the ties between the Afghani mujahideen and Saudi Arabia were basically ephemeral ties of religious affiliation, the ties between Iran and Hizbullah are an open-ended religious and strategic symbiosis.

Hizbullah is not an independent Lebanese organization. It is part and parcel of the Iranian state, and Iran sees in Hizbullah "one of the mainstays of its strategic security." Hizbullah is "Iran's first line of defense against Israel" and the West.(1) One of Hizbullah's founders, Subhi Al-Tufeili, stated in an interview that "Hizbullah's leadership is Velayat-e-Faqih – that is, Ali Khamenei."(2)

For these reasons, Iran was even willing to commit itself to a joint military pact with Syria in order to assure the steady flow of weapons to Hizbullah. The agreement was signed one month before the outbreak of the war, and the Iranian and Syrian defense ministers announced on the occasion of the signing that "Iran sees Syria's security as its own."(3)…

 

Update: And here’s something the Taliban and Hezbollah have in common. I’ll give you a hint. It’s starts with a “j” and rhymes with “we mad.”

 

From Monsters & Critics:

Kabul - Taliban rebels in Afghanistan on Sunday called on Muslims of the world to support the Hezbollah 'mujaheddin' in their fight against Israeli forces, calling the conflict in Lebanon an American plot to bring the Arab world under Israeli control.

'We call on all Muslims in the world, especially Arabs, to unite against the Zionist and American oppressors and to stand behind the mujaheddin in their fight,' said a purported statement by the Taliban's high council, a copy of which was sent to Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa's Kabul office.

The statement was issued against the backdrop of increased Taliban-led militancy, mainly in Afghanistan's southern provinces.

Its authors said 'the cruel air and ground assaults' being conducted by Israel in Lebanon were an American attempt 'to bring the Arab world under the control of Israel.' .

The statement alleged that Israel's attacks on Gaza and Lebanon had been planned after consultations with the United States and its allies.

Taliban insurgents have been waging war against US-backed Afghan government and multinational forces in the country since their fundamentalist Islamic regime was toppled in a US-led campaign in late 2001.

The call for a unified Muslim position on the Middle East crisis comes two days after an influential hardline Islamic leader in Pakistan called on Muslim countries to send troops to Lebanon to defend civilians there, news reports said.

'Armies of the Muslim countries should jointly respond to the Israeli attack on innocent citizens of Lebanon,' said Maulana Fazal- ur-Rehman, a central figure in the six-party Islamic alliance of Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and leader of the opposition in the national assembly.

Rehman's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam has been sympathetic to the Taliban and spearheaded huge anti-American protests during the US-led strikes on Kabul in 2001.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:00 | link | comments

 

Upholding Islamism: Tell me again why Canadians are putting their lives on the line for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? From the Times Online:

 

AFGHANISTAN’S notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was set up by the Taliban to enforce bans on women doing anything from working to wearing nail varnish or laughing out loud, is to be re-created by the government in Kabul.

The decision has provoked an outcry among women and human rights activists who fear a return to the days when religious police patrolled the streets, beating or arresting any woman who was not properly covered by a burqa or accompanied by a male relative.

“This is a very bad idea at a bad time,” said Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Asia research director of Human Rights Watch. “We’re close to the edge in Afghanistan. It really could all go wrong and it is alarming that the United Nations and western governments are not speaking out on this issue.”

President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet has approved the proposal to re-establish the department, and the measure will go to Afghanistan’s parliament when it reconvenes later this summer. The conservative complexion of the assembly makes it likely to be passed.

“When we talk of ‘vice and virtue’ . . . the one introduced by the Taliban comes to our minds. But it won’t be like that,” insisted Mohammad Karim Rahimi, a spokesman for the president. “It will be an organisation which will work on promoting morality in society as exists in any other Islamic country.”

Nematullah Shahrani, the religious affairs minister who will oversee the department, claims it will focus on alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption. But critics point out that Afghanistan’s criminal laws already address these issues and say that once the department has been re-established, it will be easy to misuse.

“We are worried that there are no clear terms of reference for this body,” said Nader Nadery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “It will remind people of the Taliban.”

“They haven’t even bothered to change the name,” said Malalai Joya, a courageous female MP whose outspokenness means she has to travel with bodyguards and move every day because of threats to her life. Joya, 28, was physically attacked in parliament in May after she criticised warlords.

“The situation for women in Afghanistan has not improved,” she said. “People in the outside world say Afghan women don’t have to wear burqas any more and yes, it’s true that in some provinces like Kabul, Jalalabad and Herat, women can go outside without a burqa.

“They can go and work in offices, and we have 68 women MPs. But more and more women are wearing burqas because of the lack of security. Look at the high rate of suicide among our women — Afghan women prefer to die than live because there is no security.

“In my opinion what we have in power under the mask of democracy are the brothers of Taliban — fundamentalists, warlords and drug lords,” she added. “Our country is under the shadow of their black hands. They are against women and re-creating the [department] is proof of this.”…

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:23 | link | comments

 

A no brainer: Chechnya, Darfur, Somalia, Beirut: Guess which arena of conflict, in the UN’s estimation violates “humanitarian law”?

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:13 | link | comments

 

Dead wood: The Seattle (thick as a) Post-(un)Intelligencer would have us believe, among other balderdash, that:

 

• The Iran-Hezbollah arrangement is a “marriage of convenience”;
• Saudia Arabia is a “moderate” nation;
• Syria poses no military threat to Israel.

 

Incisive analysis there, Starbuckians. That and about $4.00 will get you a grande Mochaccino.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:06 | link | comments

 

Monster on the loose: Mark Steyn describes how “the Palestine question” has morphed into Godzilla (or to be more accurate, Allahzilla), and now threatens the entire world. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

…Suppose this were true -- that terrorists blew up Oz honeymooners and Scandinavian stoners in Balinese nightclubs because of "the Palestinian question." Doesn't this suggest that these people are, at a certain level, nuts? After all, there are plenty of IRA sympathizers around the world (try making the Ulster Unionist case in a Boston bar) and yet they never thought to protest British rule in Northern Ireland by blowing up, say, German tourists in Thailand. Yet the more the thin skein of Palestinian grievance was stretched to justify atrocities halfway around the world, the more the Arab League big-shot emirs and European Union foreign ministers looked down from their windows and cooed, "See my parade passing!"

They've now belatedly realized they're at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved -- Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.

But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.

Meanwhile, Kofi Annan in a remarkable display of urgency (at least when compared with Sudan, Rwanda, Congo et al.) is proposing apropos Israel and Hezbollah that U.N. peacekeepers go in, not to keep the "peace" between two sovereign states but rather between a sovereign state and a usurper terrorist gang. Contemptible as he is, the secretary-general shows a shrewd understanding of the way the world is heading: Already "non-state actors" have more sophisticated rocketry than many EU nations; if Iran has its way, its proxies will be implied nuclear powers. Maybe we should put them on the U.N. Security Council.

So what is in reality Israel's first non-Arab war is a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow: The EU and Arab League won't quite spell it out, but, to modify that Le Monde headline, they are all Jews now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:19 | link | comments

 

Old news: Ceeb headline: Saddam hospitabled, ‘unstable’ due to hunger strike.

 

I’d say he was ‘unstable’ long before any hunger strike.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:30 | link | comments

 

An amorality tale: There is something comical, something pathetic, about Harpoon Siddiqui’s latest diatribe wherein he marshals the “moral authoritiy” of such amoral figures as Louise Arbour and Bill Graham to make his case (yet again) against Israel and America. Read it and weep:

T he voluminous coverage and commentary on Stephen Harper's stand on the Middle East hasn't quite conveyed the full extent of his Americanized and Israelized foreign policy.

 

The Israeli military offensive on Lebanon that he considered "measured" has been condemned by no less a moral authority than Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, as a possible war crime, a violation of international humanitarian as well as criminal law.

 

When was the last time a sitting prime minister was so thoroughly contradicted on the international stage by another Canadian — in this case, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, who indicted Slobodan Milosevic?

 

Bill Graham has also raised the illegality of killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure. More than opposition leader and former foreign minister, he is one of Canada's leading experts on international law.

 

The leaders of the European Union, Russia and Japan, as well as the International Red Cross, have said that Israel has a right to defend itself but that it may be violating the principle of proportionality provided for under the Geneva Conventions.

 

Yet here's Harper in the logically lopsided and morally obtuse position of defending the foreign aggression that killed eight Canadians and destroyed the airport, roads and major exit routes in a country from which Canada is trying to rescue thousands of its stranded citizens.

 

He has joined Israel and the United States in resisting worldwide calls for a ceasefire that would facilitate that rescue.

 

Israel wants to continue the war until it has eliminated or weakened Hezbollah. If there's more civilian carnage and the country continues to be "torn to shreds," as the Lebanese prime minister put it, so be it. The U.S. concurs. So does Harper.

 

He has also balked at the G-8 idea, advocated by Tony Blair and Angela Merkel, of a beefed-up UN force in southern Lebanon. Like George W. Bush and Ehud Olmert, Harper would rather have the Lebanese army there.

 

A 2004 UN resolution did call for just that and the dismantling of Hezbollah. But the Lebanese government has been too weak to implement it and is now destabilized by the Israeli siege…

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:10 | link | comments

 

Protest in T.O.: Thousands of people turned out in Toronto yesterday to show their support for Nasty Nasrallah and his Heavy Metal group, Hellsbollocks. A sea of pro-Islamo-fascists, snillingers, “moderate” Muslims, and assorted stoopy-dupes marched down University Avenue from the Israeli consulate to the American consulate, raising their fists, screaming invective and carrying signs in support of the jihadis. Here’s how the Toronto Star describes it in today’s paper (with the most egregious portions bolded by moi):

 

Hundreds of red and white Lebanese flags waved on Toronto's downtown streets as thousands of protestors called for an end to the violence in Lebanon.

 

To the beat of drums, the demonstrators yesterday gathered first at the Israeli consulate on Bloor St. W. before marching to the United States consulate on University Ave.

 

The horde chanted slogans condemning Israel for the deaths of Lebanese civilians and slammed Prime Minister Stephen Harper's comments calling Israel's response "measured."

 

Many also called for sanctions and a boycott of Israeli goods and businesses. The chants that rang out included "Shame, Shame, Shame," "The people united will never be defeated," "Shame on you Mr. Harper" and "Arab lives have value too."

 

Organizers estimated more than 10,000 people participated in the protest, but Toronto police would only say thousands of people took part.

 

"It is important for everyone regardless of religion or ethnicity, who believes in human rights and dignity, to call for an end to Israel's brutal actions," said Nadia Daar, a spokesperson for the Coalition Against Israel Apartheid, one of the groups which organized the rally.

 

Other organizers included the Canadian Peace Alliance, Canadian Arab Federation, Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, and the Muslim United group.

Though the crowd included Christians and Jews, the majority were from Muslim groups.

The demonstrators also waved Palestinian flags and called on Israel to respect the rights of Palestinians.

 

Judith Weisman, a member of the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, said: "I am Jewish and I am against Israel's actions."

 

Several protestors carried placards featuring photos of wounded Lebanese children and of Israeli children writing on missiles. Some protestors also hoisted pictures of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

 

The march began in front of the Israeli consulate under rain and ended at the U.S. Consulate under semi-clear skies. Peggy Nash, a member of Parliament for Parkdale-High Park, said the violence must stop.

 

"We are the voices of sanity, calling for peace," Nash, a New Democrat said…

 

When the inmates of the asylum assert that they’re the ones who are sane, you know the world’s in big trouble.

 

Update: When I read the idiotic comments of a Jewish woman protesting on behalf of Islamic-fascism, I can’t help but think how fortunate she is to live in a country where she is free to be an idiot. Unlike the Jews of the Islamic dystopia, who, to placate their Muslim overlords, have no choice but to support their murderous policies

 

From a report in the Jerusalem Post about Moo Jihad's latest threats:

 

In Teheran, the government has sanctioned billboards showing Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and a message that it is the duty of Muslims to "wipe out" Israel. Officials also organized a demonstration in the southern city of Shiraz by Iran's small Jewish community calling for Israel's destruction and praising Hizbullah.

 

I guess the real difference here is between those who freely choose to behave like dhimmis and those poor souls who have no other option.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:00 | link | comments

 

Netanyahu’s prescience: One of my least favourite sayings in the English language is, “ I told you so.” Too whiny. Too self-satisfied. Too “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah” for my taste. So instead of saying, well, you know, I’ll merely cite the title of this NRO piece—Bibi was right:

 

“Our security problems are not about to go away with the withdrawal; they will only begin.”

 

The prophecies of Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have come to fruition, and proponents of the Gaza Strip pullout have a lot to answer for.

Written off as a reactionary right-winger by those who think that militant Palestinian minds can be swayed from the goal of the destruction of Israel, one can take note today of why Netanyahu so fervently opposed Israel’s Gaza pullout — and why he was right to do so.

“Gaza will be transformed into a base for Islamic terrorism adjacent to the coast of the State of Israel,” Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post days before the withdrawal.

The Post reported last October that al Qaeda may have moved in as soon as Israel moved o”ut. “Our efforts are now focused on establishing a strong and unified Muslim nation where love prevails among all its members,” read a leaflet distributed in Khan Younis. The al Qaeda group also claimed in a video that it had fired rockets into Israeli settlements on the eve of disengagement. In March, two West Bank Palestinians allegedly plotting a large-scale attack were charged with membership in al Qaeda.

In addition to physical presence, al Qaeda has stepped up propaganda in the region. Their online “Voice of the Caliphate” news show has accused Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas of collaborating with Israel against Hamas, and in June al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri called on Palestinians to reject a two-state referendum proposed by Abbas. A pamphlet circulated in Gaza by the Army of Jihad in February and obtained by World Net Daily claimed that al Qaeda had a leader in the region, to appear “very soon.”

Gaza, post-pullout, has provided a safe haven in a pitifully weak security situation, with a government sympathetic to jihad.

This has also inspired terrorist groups to get more ambitious. Hamas’s military wing scored distance records with its upgraded Qassam rockets, striking deeper than previous Palestinian rockets have ever reached into Israeli territory. Hezbollah has also achieved its deepest strikes into northern Israel.

THE FURY OF MUSLIM NATIONS
“This it isn’t just our problem,” Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post back at the pullout. “It’s the West’s problem as well because forces that are controlled, deployed and cooperate with Iran—and today Hezbollah and Hamas are controlled in a significant way by Iran—will receive an additional base of operations not only in close proximity to Israel’s cities but also on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea not far from Europe.”

Now Israel is simultaneously under attack from both terrorist groups—receiving vociferous backing in recent days from none other than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…

 

If Israel (and for that matter, Western civilization) is to survive, it will be because of “right-wing reactionaries” like Netanyahu. The clueless, defeatist, feckless Left will lead us to our doom.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:54 | link | comments

 

Mental case: One of my theories as to why mankind continues to get itself in such messes is that far too many people in this world are ignorance, irrational or stupid, or some combination thereof. True, some of them are also flaming bananas (bananas flambé?), but I’m not sure if I put Iran’s Mahdi-wannabe, Moo Jihad in this category, as James Lewis on the The American Thinker site does. Lewis says that Moo’s latest missive, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel proves that he’s insane because only someone completely out of his gourd would invite a German leader to help him complete Hitler’s Final Solution.

 

Maybe so. But if he’s nuts, he’s nuts in that cold, calculating, Hitler-like way that tries to figure out all the angles and has conceived grandiose plans for conquest predicated on a genocide of the Jews.

 

So at the end of the day, it doesn’t much matter if he’s genuinely nuts or not. All that matters is that Iran and its flying monkeys, Hezbollah, must be stopped before they wipe out the Jews of Israel.

 

If you want to hold onto the hope that such a catastrophe—Hitler’s last laugh—won’t be allowed to happen, that, at the eleventh hour, the U.S. will ride to the rescue, I suggest you not read this piece by Ralph Peters in the New York Daily News.

 

Instead, read this one by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s much more optimistic.

 

Update: Merkel has filed Moo’s missive in the appropriate place--the trash bin--refusing to even dignify it with a response. From Der Spiegel:

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has dismissed a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The missive contains no references to Tehran's nuclear program or the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. But there are "unacceptable" remarks about Israel's and the Holocaust.

Iran's leader had sent a 10-page letter to the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday. It contains "many claims that are not acceptable to us, in particular about Israel, the state of Israel's right to exist and the Holocaust," government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said on Friday in Berlin. In the past, Ahmadinejad has made comments in which he labelled the Nazi Holocaust a myth and called for the destruction of the state of Israel. "Our position on these questions is known," Wilhelm said, noting that Merkel has repeatedly identified Israel's right to exist as a cornerstone of German policy and that "it is in no way acceptable to us to question it."…

 

Update: These folks prove my theory. They are ignorant, irrational and stupid.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:57 | link | comments

 

Oh, behave Iran: In his weekly conversation with Hugh Hewitt, Mark Steyn says that Syria is Mini-Me to Iran’s Dr. Evil.

 

Perfect!

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:33 | link | comments

 

Firmez la bouche, Ms. Arbour: Louise Arbour is the former Quebec judge who now sits atop one of most reprehensible of UN agencies—and, as we all know, that’s saying something. However, because this laughingstock is supposedly concerned with “human rights,” she feels she has the human right to sit on her high horse and lob ridiculous threats at the state that occupies “most loathed nation” status in the UN pantheon.

 

Israel’s ambassador to Canada knocks the puffed-up pigeon off her “exalted” perch. From the CBC:

Israel's ambassador to Canada has dismissed a warning from Canadian jurist Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, that war crimes charges may be warranted against Israel and Hezbollah if measures aren't taken to protect civilians.

Alan Baker says that Arbour, who has been an international war crimes prosecutor and a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, doesn't understand the situation.

He says his country is attacking legitimate Hezbollah military targets and she should be careful with her language.

"I completely reject Louise Arbour's warning. Israel doesn't target civilian concentrations, and I think that by merely giving such a warning she's jumping to conclusions and as a judge she should know better," he says.

With Hezbollah launching rockets into Israeli cities and Israel bombing densely populated areas in southern Lebanon, hundreds of civilians are dead on the Lebanese side and more than a dozen in Israel.

Arbour issued a statement on Wednesday saying that indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians and that bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians, is unjustifiable.

She has the support of her boss, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has condemned both parties for killing civilians at an alarming rate.

The Israeli ambassador isn't apologizing for his country's strategy. He says Arbour fails to grasp the nature of the conflict.

"The Hezbollah are using schools and clinics and the back gardens of houses to put their missile placements there, and they are turning these civilian establishments and civilian areas into legitimate targets."

He says Israel won't entertain the idea of a ceasefire until Hezbollah has been pushed from its border.

On Friday, thousands of people were fleeing Lebanese border villages after a new Israeli warning of a possible attack. There was no indication that Arbour's warning or Annan's plea for civilians would stop either the attack or the rockets falling on Israel.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:23 | link | comments

  

The “ceders” of Lebanon: Fouad Ajami has a superb, must-read analysis of the situation in Lebanon. He says the Lebanese have been unable to steer their own ship of state for some time, which is why they’ve been plunged into war yet again. From Opinion Journal:

 

…In an earlier time, three decades ago, Lebanon was made to pay for the legends of Arabism, and for the false glamour of the Palestinian "revolutionary" experiment. The country lost well over a quarter-century of its history--its best people quit it, and its modernist inheritance was brutally and steadily undermined.

 

Now comes this new push by Damascus and Tehran. It promises nothing save sterility and ruin. It will throw the Lebanese back onto a history whose terrible harvest is well known to them. The military performance of Hezbollah, it should be apparent by now, is not a performance of a militia; nor are unmanned drones and missiles of long range the weapons of boys of the alleyways. A formidable military structure has been put together by the Iranians in Lebanon. In a small, densely populated country that keeps and knows no secrets, Hezbollah and its Iranian handlers have been at work on this military undertaking for quite some time, under the gaze of Lebanese authorities too frightened to raise questions.

The Mediterranean vocation of Lebanon as a land of enlightenment and commerce may have had its exaggerations and pretense. But set it against the future offered Lebanon by Syria, and by Tehran's theocrats seeking a diplomatic reprieve for themselves by setting Lebanon on fire, and Lebanon's choice should be easy to see.

 

The Lebanese, though, are not masters of their own domain. They will need protection and political support; they will need to see the will and the designs of the radical axis contested by resolute American power, and by an Arab constellation of states that can convince the Shiites of Lebanon that there is a place for them in the Arab scheme of things. For a long time, the Arab states have worked through and favored the Sunni middle classes of Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli. This has made it easy for Iran--overcoming barriers of language and distance--to make its inroads into a large Shiite community awakening to a sense of power and violation. To truly turn Iran back from the Mediterranean, to check its reach into Beirut, the Arab world needs to rethink the basic compact of its communities, and those Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world will have to be brought into the fold.

 

Lebanon's strength lies in its weakness, went an old maxim. And the Arab states themselves were for decades egregious in the way they treated Lebanon, shifting onto it the burden of the Palestinian fight with Israel, acquiescing in the encroachments on its sovereignty by the Palestinians and the Syrians--encroachments often subsidized with Arab money. Iran then picked up where the Arab states left off. Now that weakness of the Lebanese state has become a source of great menace to the Lebanese, and to their neighbors as well.

No one can say with confidence how this crisis will play out. There are limits on what Israel can do in Lebanon. The Israelis will not be pulled deeper into Lebanon and its villages and urban alleyways, and Israel can't be expected to disarm Hezbollah or to find its missiles in Lebanon's crannies. Finding the political way out, and working out a decent security arrangement on the border, will require a serious international effort and active American diplomacy. International peacekeeping forces have had a bad name, and they often deserve it. But they may be inevitable on Lebanon's border with Israel; they may be needed to buy time for the Lebanese government to come into full sovereignty over its soil.

 

The Europeans claim a special affinity for Lebanon, a country of the eastern Mediterranean. This is their chance to help redeem that land, and to come to its rescue by strengthening its national army and its bureaucratic institutions. We have already seen order's enemies play their hand. We now await the forces of order and rescue, and by all appearances a long, big struggle is playing out in Lebanon. This is from the Book of Habakkuk: "The violence done to Lebanon shall overwhelm you" (2:17). The struggles of the mighty forces of the region yet again converge on a small country that has seen more than its share of history's heartbreak and history's follies.

 

Update: A rebuttal to Ajami’s call for an international force of peacekeepers. From The American Thinker:

The United Nations wants to deploy an international peace keeping force in the region but Israeli leaders are opposed to this idea, based on what they believe has been a less than satisfactory role played by UNIFIL already.  Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni see no reason to add another force, especially one that would become problematic if it ended up in the crossfire between Hezbollah and Israel.  Historically, peace keeping forces in this part of the world end up with heavy losses, as happened in Lebanon in the early 1980’s. During the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, two truck bombs struck buildings in Beirut where U.S. and French Multinational Forces were stationed killing hundreds of soldiers.  That led to the withdrawal of international peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. Why consider putting an additional force now in this volatile region? 

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:59 | link | comments

 

Survivor, Israel: Kofi Annan wants “hostilities” between Israel and Hezbollah to cease. David Warren explains why, in the interest of its own survival, Israel must decline to comply with that request:

Traditionally, at this point in her response to terror attacks, the world diplomatic community persuades Israel to agree a ceasefire, and the terrorists are saved to fight another day. This is what happened in 1982. The Israelis were in a position to annihilate Yasser Arafat’s PLO, whom they had surrounded in Beirut. Instead, they agreed to let them escape to Tunisia. The rest is history: recurring again and again.

Kofi Annan is trying to do the same thing over: to save Hezbollah (this time) with a ceasefire, by promising Israel that a large force of international “peacekeepers” will take their place. But a U.N. force is no likelier to disarm Hezbollah than the Lebanese army was (when Lebanon agreed to disarm Hezbollah, most recently in 2004). After a brief lull in the shooting, and a chance to regroup and rebuild, Hezbollah would be back at Israel’s throat.

The Israelis know this, now, from hard experience. There is overwhelming popular support for the course Prime Minister Olmert has set out. The Israelis will not be taking advice, from such as Russia and France. The Americans, even the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, show signs of having seriously absorbed their own lessons from recent history. John Bolton is sitting squarely in the Security Council, prepared to veto every effort to force the Israelis to desist. This time -- with or without the world’s permission -- the Israelis are going to finish the job…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:33 | link | comments

 

Beware of the “experts”: They can really screw things up. By Edward Alexander in the Seattle Times (link via RealClear Politics):

…For nearly 40 years, academic Middle East experts and State Department inventors of quixotic "peace plans" have insisted that Israeli occupation of "Arab lands" causes Arab hatred and terror and is the "root cause" of the conflict; end the occupation, they have always said, and all will be well.

How, then, is it that, starting the very day after its withdrawal from Gaza last year and six years after its unilateral retreat from Lebanon, Israel is under attack from both those places?

Would it not be closer to the truth to say that terror is caused far less by Israeli military occupation than by the removal of that occupation?

Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish residents from an area achieves nothing except to invite greater terror and aggression from people who use every meter of land they control not to build their own state but to destroy an existing state.

This is why the idea — promoted by virtually every recent American (and Israeli) administration — of two sovereign entities, Jewish and Arab, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is dangerous fantasy.

What, except historical amnesia, could have made the experts forget that it was Arab hatred and aggression that led, in 1967, to occupation, and not occupation that led to Arab hatred and violence? For 19 years, starting in 1948, the Arabs had full possession of the "West Bank," theirs to do with whatever they chose, and — as always — what they chose was not an independent Palestinian state but incessant terrorist attacks on Israel.

Fences afford Israel only temporary and partial protection; they cannot keep out rockets and missiles, such as have been raining down on Israeli towns in the south of the country ever since Hamas won the election in Gaza (a voting result that could have come as a surprise only to the experts, including Condoleezza Rice). Unless Israel controls both sides of its borders, it can have no security against invaders bent on raw murder.

Can anything positive emerge from the current carnage? Perhaps. Since Hezbollah has over the years killed hundreds of Americans (most notably the Marines in Lebanon) without ever paying a price, its destruction by Israel would constitute a major American victory; the same may be said of Hamas, whose agents of mass murder are already operating in America.

Perhaps the incessant nattering about "the occupation" will finally give way to a recognition that the real "root cause" of Middle Eastern wars is a genocidal Islamicist culture, which must be uprooted by a process roughly akin to the denazification of Germany after World War II…