Helen Thomas, Template of Ignorance

If you want your faith in the basic goodness, tolerance, and understanding of humankind shaken, check out the emails Rabbi Nesenoff received (linked below) after his interview with Helen Thomas went viral. And for an interesting take on the affair and some of its consequences, click on the "click here and read" link on that same page.

Thomas said what many, many people believe. The key here is "believe". Education is not the principal factor in attitude formation. (If it were, a lot of major corporations would be wasting their money on their glitzy ads aimed at appealing to emotions, not reason.) In fact, people seem to selectively seek and absorb facts which supplement their preconceptions. So Thomas apparently remained ignorant of much of the historical and religious impetus for the present imbroglio in the Middle East, even as she remains naive about "going back where they came from". There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are refugees or recent descendants of refugees. Most of them can no longer go back even were they to be welcome. Some would be killed if they returned - like the Jews going back to Arab lands (which Thomas is obviously ignorant of, or perhaps just oblivious to.) Some are offspring of divergent other lands, with each parent or grandparent from a different country. Where should they go back to, and how would they function without the language skills and personal connections, unmotivated by any desire to emigrate, into an unknown or unwelcoming culture?

The Arabs have created a uniquely dangerous and effective weapon in retaining refugees in camps paid for by us for the past 6 decades: These are readily identifiable individuals who really can go back - just as soon as all the Jews are killed. While the other 100 million refugees of the 20'th century were resettled and then resumed their lives, only this small fraction of individuals (perhaps 3/4 million) has been kept prisoner by their own brethren as a weapon aimed for the intended hegemony of the Islamic religious movement seeking world domination. Not only has the West been foolishly paying for this sly aggression. We have in this and other ways been supportive of the deliberate Arab oppression of this Arab population for all this time, keeping them hostage to their own brethren neighbors' imperialist goals. Yet we assist in the resettlement and acculturation of all other displaced populations (except, of course, the 3/4 million Jews who fled Arab atrocities for safety in Israel). We even help Christians flee their Arab persecutors from the very territories the deceptive narratives claim are unfairly "under oppressive Israeli occupation." The UN, using our funds, further encourages the Jihad-by-pathos by sustaining a separate agency whose sole function is to support the Islamic population in the Territories. This completely removes them from the real UN refugee agency which assists all other populations, and further facilitates the war against Israel.  We are subsidizing and supporting the Arab/Farsi war against Israel under the guise of humanitarian aid. These "refugees" exist in a craftily executed phony status, largely self-imposed and callously sustained by their own coreligionists. They perform a mass theatrical act designed to extract the world's ignorant sympathy. And an ignorant world has reacted as planned.

It's way past time to disband the notion of Arab refugees and get on with the acceptance of living. But the skewed politics of Arab Jihad, aided by oil and abetted by ignorance, make rational accommodation impossible, so there will be much further pain all around. There's still plenty of deliberate ignorance to support it. Helen Thomas is the archetypal case in point.

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Ira Chernus - Boob Extraordinaire

I have been repeatedly pointed to articles on TruthOut - a site devoted to a torrent of great, Progressive viewpoints except when it comes to Israel, where they reverse course and excoriate the victim Israelis and  plead deceptively for support of the violent, depraved, aggressor Muslim terrorists. One of many of their pundits is - naturally - a Jew (I use this word in its most pejorative sense, as befits one who should be scorned and vilified, just like the Church has taught for many centuries) named Ira Chernus.

Chernus claims to have been a "Jewish peace activist for over 30 years..." Yet in all that time he's apparently learned nothing. Most of us favor peace. But when push comes to shove (to reference the vernacular of his formative years) pacifism becomes suicide. And for Chernus to advocate Jewish suicide is either disingenuous or stupid.

When I was a kid, there were a couple of bullies in town whom the rest of us tried to avoid. Occasionally I would get trapped by one or two of them (they often traveled in pairs), and my only choices were to outrun them, or if that was not possible, to outsmart and/or outfight them. I returned home bloodied a few times when my pacifism and negotiating skills were of no avail. This is a regrettable microcosm of human experience. On a larger scale, humans have been attacking other humans for as long as human life has existed. Wishing away human aggression has not worked, as the Jews of Europe learned to their loss. 

It's not just in football that the best defense is a strong offense. Chernus's notion is that we can avoid aggression by submitting to it, capitulating to every hostile demand, submitting to every aggressive imposition. That is repugnant and obviously an invalid application of the goal of pacifism, which is to create peace through the goodwill and voluntary agreement of all parties to create a set of circumstances which fairly addresses the needs and desires of all. In the absence of universal agreement that peace is the goal, we have a situation where one party can continue aggression and force the other to either capitulate or to defend. There is no little bit pregnant. You are either a victim, or you protect yourself. Chernus turns this reality on its head, apparently basing his virulent criticism of Israel on his own irrational premise: "I want peace & peace is good.  Therefore if Israel just capitulates to the violent Muslim aggressors, All of Persia & Arabia will suddenly convert to pacifism & subordinate their violence to my wishes." Get real!!!

One of Chernus' biggest problems is that he is apparently incapable of discriminating between cause and effect. In a recent article, he talks about Land Day and Passover as though the difference between them was the 'ongoing tragedy' of the Palestinians versus the emancipation of the Jews. That scenario is only a mere consequence of the real source issue. And that first cause was that the Israelites were enslaved by the autocratic actions of an external Egyptian tyranny which was forced upon the Israelites through no fault of their own, while the Palestinians have imposed their own isolation upon themselves by refusing to halt the violent, aggressive attacks they have been engaged in against the Jews of Palestine since the 1880's. That antisemitic ethnic targeting precedes the founding of Israel by almost 70 years. It's a typical practice among antisemitic pundits to employ deceptive anachronism to make their irrational case sound very reasonable, since many readers are unaware of the real timelines and history.

Chernus is deeply invested with a claque of Arab apologists who twist reality to suit their own dishonorable ends. That they get away with it so often is a sad commentary on the level of debate and deception in the public arena, and the tragic inadequacy of our education and our public information systems. In his piece, Chernus talks about the "43 years of Israeli occupaton", completely ignoring the fact that the Palestinians had been occupied since the proposed establishment of that new state in 1948 until they were liberated by Israel in 1967. The vital piece of information, which Chernus would have the gullible ignore, is that Palestine was occupied by Egyptian (again!) and Jordanian invaders upon its establishment by the UN. The neighboring Arab occupation was much harsher than the Israeli. But since it was a mere extension of the ongoing orgy of Islamic antisemitism that had been the original cause for the establishment of Israel and termination of the faltering British Mandate, it is a non-issue for Israel's critics. Worse, acknowledgment of such reality would contradict Chernus's goal of fabricating a narrative which transfers blames to Israel for all the evils foisted upon the world and upon themselves by a violent and intolerant Persian/Arab-Islamic chauvinism.

In the combined first-wave Arab invasion of Palestine and Israel by seven Arab armies in 1948, one percent of the Jewish population were killed. KILLED! That is a huge proportion! Think of the US for a scaled comparison: 3.6 million human beings!! That the Israelis carried on was due only to the fact that they had no alternative, having been driven out of Europe, where they'd resided off and on for a thousand years, and from Arab countries, where they'd lived for 2600 years. We refused the Jews safe haven during the Nazi slaughters, ensuring their entry to the charnel houses of the Nazis and their antisemitic European allies (The Japanese were considerably more civilized!). The few remaining wretched refugees fled wherever they could go. Palestine was an option that appealed for historico-religious reasons and offered hope of finally re-establishing Jewish self-determination and allowing freedom from the past 2000 years of antisemitic tyranny imposed by the tolerant, pacifist, Jesus-loving Christians whose principal messages were "love, peace, and kill the Jews."  (and of course for a brief period, 'kill the Muslim infidels and recapture the Holy Land', the land of milk and blood. That hostility was brief - but antisemitism is forever.)

Chernus continues his depredations with a deceptive reference to blood-letting and with a deliberate misrepresentation of Israel's reaction to aggressive attacks by terrorists as a continuation of the bloody Biblical narrative of Passover slaughter. Confounding truth with fiction, cause with effect, victim with aggressor is Chernus's stock in trade. That doesn't make his viewpoint correct. But it helps misinform a lot of people.

Perhaps Chernus's worst deception is the Jerusalem illusion, the notion that there is a rationale to justify forcing Israel to cede their holy city to those very Arab aggressors who have repeatedly attacked them and in previous years prevented Jews from even visiting, much less living in their ancestral homeland capital. There is no possible equitable justification for such cession! His boast of his pacifist bona fides is totally irrelevant to such a faux revanchist notion, and that is itself based upon aggressive and violent intentions of conquest and ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Upon establishing Israel & Palestine, the UN envisioned Jerusalem as an open city. With the combined Arab attack and the resulting Jordanian conquest of Jerusalem in 1948, all synagogues within their grasp were destroyed. Jewish headstones were ripped up and used for building materials. Almost all traces of 3,000 years of Jewish presence were obliterated in a deliberate Arab attempt to alter history. It is only after the Arab's third formal attempt to wipe out the Jews that Israel successfully entered Jerusalem, and for the first time since the original Arab attacks, Jerusalem was finally reopened to all. Chernus employs his deceptive preachments in support of Islamic aggressions. This is pacifism? The reality is the opposite of what he claims, and peace will not be encouraged by defending those whose violent history and recourse to aggression has been well documented for a much longer period than there has been an Israel.

The overall truth about this conflict is much simpler than Chernus comprehends: the irredentist Muslim hordes are continuing a religious tradition birthed in the 7'th Century and pursued rigorously ever since. Underlying all else is a bloodthirsty religious intolerance. One sect of Islam blows up another when they're not busy enslaving or slaughtering infidels or beating or killing their women.  While Islam has not yet conquered the world, that is their clear and publicly avowed goal, and they've made substantial progress at cowing public figures and institutions throughout the West as a first step in achieving this conquest. Only in Israel is the Muslim agenda and the violent action Islam subscribes to so fully observable. Yet people like Chernus have managed to completely invert truth and fabrication on behalf of the aggressor Muslims. The Muslims attack Israel - it's got to be Israeli aggression. The Arabs kill Jews for 130 years - it's because Israelis assert control over parts of Palestine for 40 years, after repeated Arab attacks upon Israel. The Arabs demand Jerusalem - it's because they are entitled, since they conquered it in their first attack, then initiated four more wars of aggression, engaged in several informal wars, and thus in some bizarre, perverse, pacifist perspective they deserve it. Chernus and his ilk should be medicated or muzzled. His distorted perceptions do not derive from any factual history of the Middle-East conflict, and certainly are not pacifist in nature. They merely feign a false justification for the repeated, inexcusable efforts of Muslims to obliterate Israel and kill the Jews. Where have we heard that theme before? Shades of history, that was Hitler's line, and he was no pacifist!

J-Street: Alphabet Soup for Kindergarten Thinking

The latest news is that J-Street is hosting a virulently anti-Israel speaker at some conference they're holding. They really ought to embrace the concept of truth-in-advertising and rechristen themselves as terrorist supporters.

Their actions remind me of an old peace poster. Remember "What if they gave a war and nobody came"? J-Street adopts a bizarre distortion of that notion: "what if we made peace and almost everyone agreed?" These guys just do not understand the theological basis, the elemental nature of the hostility raging against not just Israel, but the entire West and even the rest of the non-Islamic world.

These are head-in-the-sand, pie-in-the-sky, wishful-thinking, anti-rational, pseudo-idealists who reject Islamic leaders' own words, delude themselves into denying the clearly stated written goals of various Islamic agencies which intend to force the world to accept Allah as the only god and thus bring the blessings of Sharia to us all. And as with all internal divisions, J-Street forces our energies to be sapped combatting their stupid misdirection, distracting us from and weakening us in our struggle to defend ourselves against an overwhelming and tireless campaign fueled by fundamentalist Islamic irrationality.

Perhaps I do the word "idealist" a disservice by applying it here? A real idealist (there's an interesting contradiction) has desirable goals which might be very difficult to accomplish, but are potentially achievable: Democracy; Universal health care; Freedom from hunger for everyone. J-Street seems to have goals which not only are not achievable, but whose self-deluding, misdirected efforts threaten great harm: Unaided human flight; Breathing underwater without scuba; Just say 'no'; 'Everybody get together, Try to love one another right now' - at least the Youngbloods understood that desirable goals are an effort, not a guarantee. "Try to love..." While peace is a desirable goal, well worth trying, striving for, it requires that the adversary also desire to try. To act without such reflected interest is to guarantee greater harm to those who fail to recognize the hazard, and also to all those who get dragged into their fatal fantasy.

Rather than refer to J-Street as idealists, we should more accurately call them idiots. Noble goals alone don't make an idealist. The process is as important as the purpose, and the range of possible outcomes is the most important constituent of all. J-Street is working hard to assure a horrible outcome, regardless of what they purport to believe. Their self-promotion reminds me of the drunk who looks for his car keys under the street lamp. That's not where he lost them, but the light is better there. J-Street wants peace - who doesn't - but cannot incorporate into their pacific calculus that the enemy absolutely refuses any outcome in which Islam is not totally dominant. That is a price for peace which is too steep for most of us, but J-Street doesn't have a problem with that intransigent requirement. Whether the J-Streeters' reason for ignoring this fatal flaw in their program is an unjustified certitude that they can in some incomprehensible fashion totally alter the value system of hundreds of millions of Muslims or whether they simply do not understand the origin and nature of the problem, the end result will be just as disastrous. Therein lies the pain.

A Little Lying Brings A Lot of Success

Flaubert & Marcuse have pointed out that perception becomes reality. The Arabs' battlefield successes have largely occurred on the disinformation front, relying as they do on this principle. We Israel supporters suffer a serious handicap in being forced to rely on truth, which is so highly circumscribed and often unglamorous. The fabricated Arab narrative is extremely elastic, tailored to fit the emotions and viewpoints of the population being addressed. It gets shaped to pre-existing enthusiasms and unconscious preconceptions and thus woos and wins over the populations of the world. We badly need substantial improvement in our efforts to inject reality into the debate which we are losing just for this reason.

How Come The UN Didn't Create A Palestinian State?

I recently read a post bemoaning the 'fact' that the UN did not establish a Palestine at the same time they created Israel. That telling, fatuous post, found on one of these blatantly anti-Israel "liberal" boards, reflects the huge amount of ignorance the antisemitic crowd brings to their venomous anti-Israel posture. The UN did create Palestine at the same time she established Israel. But five (or seven, or more - depends on how you choose to count the aggressors) Arab nations immediately invaded, destroying Palestine in their righteous quest to exterminate Israel and the Jews.

In the same vein, the bigoted ignorant decry the "apartheid" of Israel, when it is the Arab countries which tolerate no other beliefs but their own; you holler "war crimes" when Israel defends her population, which is NOT a war crime, but ignore the Arabs firing 8,000 rockets at civilians, which IS a war crime; you ignore the terror bombings of Israeli civilians, which IS a war crime; and you pretend that the Arabs don't take and torture hostages, keeping them from the Red Cross and any international contact, which IS a war crime. You protest Israel's control of traffic in and out of Gaza - a response to terror which is permitted under international law, but never complain about the Arab terror which precipitates the Israeli blockades - and that IS a war crime. Indeed, Israel is OBLIGATED under international law to protect her citizens against the onslaught of foreign terror. If she is to be faulted at all, it is for acting too slowly, and with too little force, in protecting her populace. You lie about the need for humanitarian aid (though I'm not suggesting that life in Gaza is wonderful), misrepresent the Arab exodus from what is now Israel by ignoring the fact that more Jews were forced penniless out of Arab countries than Arabs fled Israel - and you never voice any sense of injustice at that fact, nor do you express dismay at the injustice of the failure of the UN to provide any assistance whatsover to those fleeing Jews, while they have supported the Arabs and their descendents for 60 years. You ignore the fact that Jews, Muslims, Druse, Christians, Samaritans, etc. live together if not in total tranquility, at least in a semblance of peace within Israel - certainly more peacefully than Detroit is - yet the Christians, Copts, and even minority Muslims are horribly persecuted in many of the 57 Muslim-dominated countries of the OIC. You ignore the rapidly shrinking Christian populations in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon as those victims of Arab violence flee to safer havens elsewhere to escape their virulently intolerant Islamic neighbors. 200,000 Christians were recently butchered in "moderate" Indonesia", Northern Africa is alight with Islamic murder and slavery of Christians and Animists, yet you harp on that the tiny - miniscule, actually - cultural oasis of Israel "persecuting" the huge, troglodyte Arab populations surrounding her.

This is a case of the mind being led by the emotions, searching for and finding abusive lies with which to justify irrational antipathy to Israel. Even if those of you who drool hatred for Israel actually investigated what you are talking about, I'm not sure your pathological hostility would permit you to recognize the truth of Israel's unique righteousness in this cause. Sure, there are jerks in Israel, Israelis make mistakes, too, just like normal people. But they are a nation of laws. Evil is rejected, punished when caught, and vigorously opposed by an outraged, thoroughly democratic, and massively humanistic public. Israel's popluation was forged in the fires of European & Middle-Eastern antisemitism. Israelis are trying desperately to maintain a fair country in a region which is openly living in the 12'th Century. Give the Israelis a break. Correct the false propaganda you spew so relentlessly. Investigate just how viciously inaccurate that garbage you spout is. Look at what is really going on instead of regurgitating Arab lies. Compare the life of Muslims in Israel to the life of Jews (or women, or Christians) in the 57 Arab countries (hint: start with Saudi Arabia for an archetypical example of what I'm talking about). Show me one of those 57 countries where the Muslims offer a fair court system, where a person of any religious or ethnic creed can receive a fair hearing, or even bear witness. Then look at Israel, where Arabs frequently sue - and WIN - against neighbors and even the government.

Israel is not perfect - far from it. But Israel is a far better place to live - were it not for the oil-dependent countries all around the world determined to kill her population in support of their economies. The Arab irredentist doctrine is the root of all the lies which flow against Israel. Their faith requires, according to preachings around the world, that Allah must regain rule over all lands Muslims ever have conquered. After that, they must bring the One True Faith to the rest of the world, along with the repressive Shari'a law that chops off hands of shoplifters and stones women for being unveiled in public, murders women for being seen by non-related males, and says that we will all be blessed when Allah is brought to us by the sword. Something for you fanatics to look forward to, this liberation you're preaching.

There is additional irony in Arab countries not even a hundred years old telling the world that they will not accept a 60-year-old upstart non-Islamic country in their midst, despite the fact that the Palestinian territory has not been an independent country since Rome conquered it from the Jews 2,000 years ago. Now Israel has been returned to sovereignty by that dedicated body of world peace, the United Nations, yet the UN has created and continues to support the Arab camps that perpetuate anti-Israel and anti-Western violence. Oil potentates manipulate the UN, and fearful, desperate oil-consumer nations ensure that displaced Arabs will to not establish a real life and a functioning economic system. Meantime, all the Jews displaced from their hostile Arab residences have long since gone on to re-establishing new existences no thanks to the UN. We have been paying the UN to keep Arab souls on the dole for 60 years - the only place in the world where refugees have not been resettled. That's 3/4 of a million people out of 200 million refugees last century. Why do you suppose this blight is encouraged? Because the Arab governments use this human displacement as photo opportunities, a potent weapon in their determined quest to overthrow Israel and kill the Jews, their first step toward world submission to Allah. That's pretty simple, and as direct as anyone can make it. All the other blather you hear is generally fabrication. False "facts" are overwhelmingly relied upon as justification for anti-Israel sentiments. Know the truth, and the truth will set Israel free.

Many sincere supporters of impoverished Arab residents surrouding Israel paint a sympathetic picture of the victimhood of those people. And reporters fall all over themselves to echo these sad portrayals, projecting "innocent" Arab victims without accuracy or balance. They love to pretend there is no vicious terrorist provocation constantly emanating from those regions, no missiles raining down on Israeli civilians. The terrorists and their many many media supporters have been using lies and deception as the most effective weapon they've been able to field in the long-term, aggressive war they have been waging against Israel and the West.

The press alters our perceived reality when they constantly highlight the death (and purported death) and the misery of Arab citizens while conveniently overlooking the on-going death and misery of Jewish Palestinians who have been suffering from Arab attacks for 125 years, since long before there was even an Israel. Reporters studiously fail to accurately report the origins of each new battle in this long-running conflict. They never point out that each conflict is reignited by Islmo-fascist terrorists trying to kill Jews. They ignore the context of the Arab aggression, that the on-going violence is facilitated, indeed encouraged - by the neighboring despots who have a great interest in fostering continuing discord beyond their borders, and who use the fabricated external Israeli bogeyman to help suppress discontent from within. And they always report as fact the death of Arab civilians at the hands of Israeli military actions, when it later turns out that many of those victims died as a result of other Arabs violence, or as is the case with Al-Dura, were the actors in an elaborate hoax.

Human Rights Watch, while laudably anti-war, has consistently spoken with little regard for accuracy or fairness. Humans are violent. I'm sure that Human Rights Watch would deny that fact, but anybody who has any understanding of history or psychology - or experience with grade school bullies - can't escape concluding that Man has a long way to go before violent homo sapiens evolve to extinction. Given that predilection, HRW becomes Hizb'allah's allies and accomplices to murder when they blame Israel for the violence which was initiated and continues to be provoked by Hezb'allah, the Party of a merciless God, and their numerous terrorist allies. These terrorists see themselves doing God's work, which happens at the moment to be defined theologically in killing Jews and Christians wherever they can, and killing apostate Moslems - that is, Moslems who don't agree with their particularistic theology - whenever time permits. When Human Rights Watch can effectively stop the crazy bastards, maybe I'd have some reason to respect their condemnation of the victims of violence who defend themselves in as moral a way as is possible under vexing circumstances. That is, the Israelis, who are the victims despite the constant negative media portrayal.

Hezb'allah and it's allied terrorist organizations have repeatedly shown a highly sophisticated ability to manipulate (or often merely to blackmail) media and to mislead well-meaning but easily deceived NGO's into demonizing Israel's responses to the fatal provocations conducted by their own terrorist organizations. The most prominent example during Lebanon II was Hezb'allah's show and tell for "journalists" into Lebanon after an Israeli strike. The Hizb'allah guides permitted visits only to sites they had sanitized, permitted photos of prepared "victims", and then hustled the reporters away so they couldn't be too inquisitive. It was only later, after non-compromised journalists reviewed the staged photos, that the frauds and deceptions were exposed. After the staged photos of innocent death got wide circulation, "dead civilian victims" were later shown to be alive and well, but that accurate news never made it to the front pages - and often was not corrected in the media at all. In preparation for staging these photo-ops, terrorists' military equipment was removed from the locations which had been struck by Israel, and only later shown to have been present. But the media reported the scenes as required by their Hizb'allah handler/allies, and the world got front-page, worst-case reports, often untrue, and uncorrected for the most part, and certainly out of context. It was a rare occasion when someone got snared in his flagrant misrepresentation of the news, as deservedly happened to Adnann Hajj, the Reuters news photomodifier. Who knows how much of Mideast news is fabrication? Not just Photoshopping, either. Reporters have repeatedly been threatened unless they and their networks report only what the terrorists demand. The only verity is that news coming from anywhere in the Mideast other than Israel is fabrication.

As a troubling consequence of these and other clever and effective journalistic deceptions, many Westerners join the Arab chorus demonizing Israel. But could anyone possibly believe that Israel would be forced into shooting back at anyone if it weren't for the continuous Muslim killings of her citizens? Cause and effect are victims in this constant, ceaseless assault on truth. Yes, there are many horrible personal tragedies in this relentless conflict - but that is more true on the Israeli side, where the media ignore the victims, than it is on the Arab side, where terrorists use the media to arouse great sympathy for the victims who often later turn out principally to be victims of terrorist actions of one stripe or another. Distortion has become the terrorists' weapon of choice, facts are reworked as expedient to the terrorists' goal of killing all the infidels and returning the Middle East to its 12'th century glory. Israelis, the real victims in all this conflict, are constantly lied about and misrepresented by those who have found that arms alone will not fulfill their dream of Jewish extermination. It is logically absurd to believe that Israel would deliberately kill civilians when their intelligence is so sophisticated that they can tell when mobile weapons are emerging from and returning to underground bunkers. They wouldn't waste firepower on meaningless targets when it is vital for their own citizens' safety that they destroy real ones. Even more powerfully, Israel's moral attitude is such that they actually believe in the concept of purity of arms. Further, they really desire peace, while Islamists are seeking the self-defined glory of murder. Israel's attacks - in contrast to Islamic terrorists - may occasionally result in errors which kill unintended victims, but they don't attack civilians deliberately, nor do they fabricate the appearance of innocence which the Muslim terrorists utilize so cynically to garner world support in their staged photo-ops or in the blaming of deaths caused by terrorists themselves on the Israelis.

In "From Beirut to Jerusalem", Thomas Friedman, hardly a friend of Israel, reports on the case of a clan that wipes out a number of its leaders in such a way as to blame the killings on an enemy clan. That sort of devious, cynical murder of friends for the sake of publicity is precisely what distinguishes the Arab terrorists philosophically from Israelis. It clearly defines a basic, cultural difference that any critic of the news needs to bear in mind when attempting to interpret news data which could well be fabricated. Arab terrorists see murder as God's weapon of choice. Jews see killing as a defensive necessity, embarked upon only when absolutely necessary for self-preservation.

The terrorists have as their tactical plan the deliberate murder of as many Israeli civilians as possible. Since such practice violates Western cultural norms and the Geneva Conventions and UN Standards, they pretend that the Israelis are doing the same thing. Knowing how well big lies worked for Hitler, they perpetuate as many big lies as they can. In this vein, they claim to not hide among civilians when there is clearly established and voluminous evidence that such use of civilian shields is their regular practice. Israel shooting at terrorists hidden among civilians thus becomes a tragic necessity for her own protection, but results in the callous benefit to the terrorists that they can reap huge public relations bonanzas by utilizing further lies to get the world press to condemn Israel merely for effectively defending herself.

The Islamic terrorists and their patron-state masters despise honest news, seeing in Truth a vicious weapon against them. They have learned to rely on carefully crafted and subtly executed lies which have become a powerful device with which to distort local and world opinion and thus drive their malevolent program toward its goal.

The Islamo-fascist terrorists not only mutilate and murder dhimmis, showing the same disregard that Nazis had for their untermentschen - they also mutilate and kill each other in disputes about what avenue of belief in Allah is the only acceptable path to righteousness. They kill their oppressed women for reasons so superficial as to defy belief. Non-Muslims are killed at will in some Islamic countries, enslaved in others, totally banned from still others. This is a fanatical religion (perhaps that is a redundancy?) further polluted by a fanatical corps of adherents. This is Thuggee on steroids.

Arab intolerance is based entirely on an anachronistic culture which devalues human life and degrades and deligitimizes the "other", whether that other is non-Muslim or merely a different sect of Islamic belief. While the Jews are developing cures for cancer, the Islamists are a cancer on the human condition for which there seems to be no cure. When they aren't busy slaughtering the 'other' - and often even when they are - their fratricidal conflicts devastate whole regions and populations in prodigious bouts of religious fanaticism. Such fratricidal conflicts as the one between Iraq and Iran (more than a million people killed, many more maimed) foretell greater slaughters to come as Iran develops the nuclear ability to proselytize that 'there is but one god and "Allah" is His name'. Muslim fanatics are the new alchemists: When confronted with modernity, they turn gold into camel dung. Need I even name the regions they are currently devastating or attempting to devastate? Can you even count the numbers of people enslaved, the numbers murdered, the numbers displaced and starving?

The many lessons of Arab fanaticism and their implacable and effective pursuit of their irrational goals, should teach anyone to look at Arab propaganda as just that: Propaganda. It has little or no basis of fact, is not of this world, derives from an irrational though often highly persuasive effort to deceive and mislead generous Western populations into sympathetically, albeit suicidally, aiding in furthering Islamo-fascist goals of world domination. This is a domino theory that you can believe in.

There’s more to life than rebutting the constant flow of uninformed, misinformed, and/or deliberately deceptive attacks on Israel, particularly in the otherwise liberal and progressive media. Talk about failing to learn from history – much of the left doesn’t even seem to know history when it comes to the Arab – Israeli conflict. The anti-Israel crowd seem to mythologize that Israel sprang deus-ex-machina from the loins of those media-controlling capitalist Jews who just took heavily populated, highly developed, fruitful Middle-Eastern land away from the victim indigenous primitives. It would be interesting to speculate on how much of the unstated source of this “liberal” anti-Israel narrative derives from subconscious, cultural assimilation of 2,000 years of official, Western, Church-driven anti-Semitism.

Israel was founded on perhaps 15% of the land originally demarcated to become a Jewish homeland. Britain removed 70% of the promised Palestine Mandate and enthroned a desert sheik, creating Jordan. At the time of Israel’s establishment in 1948 by the UN, the Jews had hoped to be granted more of their historic homeland, but they reluctantly opted to settle for this tiny patch. The Arabs, however, not only didn’t accept Israel - they also destroyed the Palestinian state which had been simultaneously created by the UN. Five neighboring countries invaded both Palestine and Israel, occupying every area they could. Dastardly things were done all around. This was, after all, war, one of man’s crowning achievements. However, it was a war fomented by the aggressor Muslim states, pursued by them, and seemed likely to be successful since they vastly outnumbered the Jews, had air forces and tank forces, which the Jews didn’t, and were further supported by dozens of other Arab states. The Arabs killed one in every one hundred citizens of newly-founded Israel, a huge toll by any standard except the standard just previously established by Hitler.

Some argue that Israel had no right to exist because Jews have no right to live on land they purchased, in homes they bought. Why not? Others hold that Jews have no right to form a democratic government in this UN sanctioned country. Really puzzling. Still others argue that Israel is an imperfect state and therefore has no right to exist. Yet they fail to fairly compare Israeli flaws to the massive failings of her aggressor, totalitarian neighbors. This is a case where moral relativity is illuminating. Why so much focus on victim Israel’s peccadilloes and no concern whatsoever about the massive social injustices of her attackers? And why do some insist that each time the Arabs attacked Israel that it was Israel who was the aggressor?

There are also many people who distort the statistics of Israel’s founding, for example comparing the demographics of Palestine to the Jewish population of Israel, essentially comparing apples to typewriters. But population should be irrelevant in any case. Even the UN holds that freedom of movement is a civil and political right, yet pro-terror advocates rail against the Jews who fled pogroms and Hitler, lawfully bought property and settled in Palestine amongst their co-religionists whose families had remained there since antiquity. Then there are those who hold that supporting Israel is un-American, that our national interest lies in abandoning our sole democratic ally in the Middle East so we can assure ourselves of ample oil supplies. We shouldn’t take a moral stand? Are we not a country which occasionally aspires to noble actions just because they are the right thing to do, or must we merely bend our values whenever we are extorted?

I’m grateful that somehow we manage to get our relationship with Israel right as much as we do in the face of constant carping on the part of the well-meaning misinformed who are fed a constant stream of deception, the most effective weapon yet that the confrontation states have deployed against tiny Israel.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Israel accepted far less than she wanted in 1948 in hopes of a satisfactory life for the remnant of Jews who had no other sanctuary. Middle-Eastern leaders then and now rejected the UN offer, demanding total satisfaction. Perfection. Had they been capable of settling for good, there could have miraculous growth for the Arab citizens of the Middle East over the past sixty years instead of on-going despotism, poverty, violence, famine, disease, and religious manipulation everywhere. But the Arab leaders still demand perfect. They want no dhimmis anywhere in their domain -and certainly no thriving democracy in their midst. Until those Arab neighbors are willing to settle for mere good, people will continue suffering there, and Israel will be forced to continue protecting her people as best she can in the tragic environment such violent Arab intransigence creates.

UN - Agent For Genocide, Agency Of Allah

Helena Cobban, in her recent opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, elides past the one missing element in the endless quest for a Middle-East peace. She states: "...comprehensive peace between Israel and all its neighbors may look ambitious, but it is certainly quite doable..." and then "...clear majorities of citizens in Israel and neighboring Arab communities all expressed support for such an outcome..." To achieve peace, you can't just SAY that people want it. People NEED to want it, and the Islamic neighbors she attributes such a desire to have no interest in any peace other than one imposed under the next Caliphate. Making up a statistic, that is that the Arab communities support peace, doesn't make that a reality, nor does it in any way facilitate that desirable enthusiasm for peace. The truth is that among all the confrontation states, only Israel wants peace, and unless she remains strong and vigilant she is unlikely to be able to remain intact nor will she likely have peaceful borders, because her Islamic neighbors are still living in the 12'th century, with all the demagogic and atavistic prejudices and practices such retrograde existence implies.

Then, too, Ms. Cobban looks to the UN plan as though the UN has proved itself capable of doing anything constructive anywhere in the world. The UN did nothing about the Cambodian massacres, the Rwandan massacres, the Indonesian massacres, etc., and has been a major part of the problem in the Middle East, being comprised as it is of 57 Muslim nations and endless oil-dependent allies in its august, democratic, institutional bodies while there is only one Israel to vote reliably against those heavily-biased enemies of democracy and freedom. Further, the UN has shown itself allied with the violent terrorist organizations, lending its soldiers and equipment to kill and kidnap Israelis. Yet further, the UN - using our money - has spent the past 60 years continuing welfare programs whose function is to keep Arabs festering in camps, to continue the incitement of families who are not permitted, much less required, to create local economies and who thus cannot get on with building a normal society and leading a normal life. This is the only refugee population in the world in the last century, .075% of all refugees created in that century, which has been kept unassimilated in their new location. Such action deliberately adds further to the instability of the region, and has been calculatedly continued so as to function as an additional instrument of war against Israel. Ironically, we have found welfare to be counter-productive to engendering fulfilling lives in the US, and have altered our welfare laws to encourage people to engage in more productive and satisfying personal life, yet we continue to support clearly counter-productive practices - and to pay for those practices with funds that would be much better applied to remediation of problems rather than to the continued incubation of problems.

Ms. Cobban's optimistic outlook would be great were it to have some basis in reality. Unfortunately, the reality is exactly opposite, unambiguously articulated by the Iranian President. Violent hostility to dhimmis (infidels, untermentschen) and especially to Jews is cleverly nurtured and widely held throughout the troglodyte Islamic states. This unfortunate and bellicose attitude originates in Koranic interpretation, is amplified by a highly audible and widely respected clerical system which keeps the pot boiling in Islamic countries, and has been thus far used to isolate Israel and keep her population under threat of frequent death and destruction while Muslims work toward a new Final Solution in which the Arabs fulfill their dream of a 12'th Caliphate. If you listen to Ahmadinejad you should be terrified of what the Islamic world is capable of fantasyzing instead of yourself fantasyzing that the Islamic world wants peace. But if you are living in a fantasy world, then it's nice to at least hallucinate that there is a whole body of peace-loving Arab countries just awaiting the effective and efficient administration of the United Nations to bring world peace to us all.

Khoury’s “cycle of war” in Mother Jones edition of April 19, 2006 would be laughable were it not so serious. Muslims keep killing Jews, as they have been doing since the 1920's under the then leadership of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, well before Israel even existed. But the Jewish defense of their lives is a “cycle of war”, in Mr. Khoury's biased eyes.

What cockamamie notions he holds. Hamas and the Palestinian government intend to continue bombing and killing Israelis. Khoury acknowledges this in his article, yet according to him Israel should still “negotiate peaceful coexistence”. How does Israel negotiate peace when the aggressor fanatics of this conflict have said constantly, unquestionably, unwaveringly, unmistakably, irremediably, that they will kill the Jews and return the land to Dar Al Islam?

Khoury makes a convincing case that Israel is to blame for this conflict, which of course is the goal of any good propagandist. He refers to Israeli “unilateralism, colonial land grabs, and militarism”. But the reality is that the first three wars against Israel, after she was founded by the UN, were initiated by aggressor Arab states before Israel had captured any significant territory, and before she had any substantial military power. In each of those wars, there was very real question about whether she would survive the attacks by the various surrounding nations. It has only been since the 6-day war that Israel has been forced (under international law, by the way) to administer territories wrested from the aggressor Arabs (territories never referred to as “occupied” when Jordan, Egypt, and Syria occupied them). And it’s clear that Israel would be happy to relinquish territory for peace. She gave back enormous territory, including substantial improvements and oil wells, for peace with Egypt. The fantasy Khoury so deftly flourishes is based on deceptive premises which he skillfully weaves into a falsely sympathetic fabric of anti-Israel lies. That’s what propaganda is all about.

Khoury’s many misrepresentations have a military goal - to make victim Israel appear the bad guy and thus bring more pressure against her from the West. Arab & Muslim irredentists manipulate world opinion to increase pressure on Israel from world bodies already in threat of oil strangulation. They utilize all available resources to improve their ability to extort submission to Arab will.

The problems in the Middle East are much simpler - and at the same time much more complicated - than Khoury admits. The basic problem is Allah, the source of fanatical followers of Islamic concepts of justice. Israel has as neighbors a couple of dozen regimes with populations which have been brain-washed since the time of Mohammed to believe that Allah says that only Islamic Law can prevail in territories once governed by Islam. The corollary and much more complex problem is that these people believe that achieving such theocracy requires murder on scales the West hasn’t seen since... well, as Tom Lehrer put it, “We licked the Germans in 1918, and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”

On a more complicated level, it is hard for people to be objective about themselves, so the Christian West thinks of themselves as pure and virtuous, while viewing the Arabs as barbaric and beneath contempt. In fact, this arrogance seems to be a source of an odd kind of condescension, where the West overlooks the vicious barbarity of the Arabs while holding other (non-European) populations to a much higher standard of moral behavior. Suicide mass-murders in the Middle East have never even been discussed, much less acted on by the UN, while similar killings in the Balkans have elicited war crimes trials and collective punishment of the Serbs. But I digress.

The basic problem in the Middle East is the special barbarity and the theosophy of world domination espoused by Islam. Powerful as Khoury makes her sound, Israel is basically helpless, knows this, and desperately seeks peace. She is a country of 5 million people, on a tiny patch of largely barren land, facing several hundred million insane Muslims whose philosophy still includes beheading infidels, behanding thieves, murdering wives and daughters who have inadvertently attracted smiles of strangers, and, yes, killing Jews and Christians and Copts, and Hindus, and anyone else - including Muslims of different beliefs - in the name of Mohammed, who thankfully at least isn’t referred to by his followers as “the Prince of Peace”. For Mr. Khoury to publish slick deceptions from highly visible pulpits is to only promote Islamic violence and to further the Arab goal of world conquest. Until such articulate and highly visible spokespeople such as Mr. Khoury can accurately recognize and publicly preach about the real source of conflict in the Middle East - without threat of death for telling the truth - I fear that there is little chance of peace anywhere that Islam holds sway.

President Carter, in his denigration of Israel in TomPaine.com of March 9, 2006, seems to be saying that it’s okay for the Arabs to continue attacking Israel and killing Israelis, so long as Abbas verbalizes with fingers crossed that they will honor their commitment to the Road Map. For Carter cannot possibly be suggesting that the Arabs are seriously interested in peace. Or does “no” not mean “no”? Hamas has made it clear, even in English, that they intend to destroy Israel and kill the Jews. All the other fanatical Islamic groups say the same thing, but they generally do so in Arabic - or Farsi - restraining their speeches in English mostly to platitudes that excite well-meaning people to put more pressure on Israel to commit suicide.

A map of the region showing a Palestine without any hint of Israel was recently on display at the UN, while standing in front of it were senior members of the UN who observed a moment of silence to honor the homicide bombers of various Arab terror groups. This is not ancient history, but 29 November 2005. So when Carter talks of the justice to be brought forth from the UN, one has to wonder what he’s been smoking. Further, the UN resolution Carter holds up with as offering such promise, 242, places burdens on the Palestinian Muslims, not just on Israel. The Arab combatants have never even suggested that they would fulfill their end of that bargain. They are still busy training five-year-olds to be shahids.

After suffering constant war and death from even before her inception, how could anyone possibly fail to understand the strategic necessity for the actions Israel has taken to secure areas around her vulnerably narrow territory until such time as the Arabs stop killing her people? Such actions as fencing and building are reversible, if ever an Arab leadership arises which is willing to seriously negotiate for a real peace. Egypt and Jordan’s peace treaties make it clear that Israel will give up vast territory, expensive improvements, and wonderful oil wells for peace. The obstacle, despite Carter’s assertions, is not Israel’s actions, but the very real determination of the Arabs to retake by force land which is not theirs. Arab actions are grounded in religious fanatacism, Mr. Carter's tragic encouragement of Islamic violence cloaked as peace action is fueled by sophistry from fanatical Islamic propagandists, and further encouraged by naive support from well-meaning but short-sighted outsiders like himself. The issues he has been flogging are symptoms of a conflict which has gone on for more than half a century, and are consequences of, not the cause of that conflict. The aggressor Arab irredentists must be delighted to use his naivete as an additional weapon in their fight to reestablish Dar Al Islam. He appears more than willing to overlook the real source of this conflict by blaming the perennial scapegoat, the Jew of world nations. This will only encourage the Islamic aggressors to continue their ruthless aggression, for they have time, oil money, and the support of dozens of fundamentalist regimes on their side, in addition to many well-meaning but totally wrong-headed individuals. You, Mr. Carter, are working the wrong side of the street.

Leftist Liberals - Naive Footsoldiers Supporting Terrorism

Molly Little’s letter attacking Israel in the NH Gazette issue of 17 June is provocative and sympathetic, but inaccurate and deliberately deceptive. It is certainly noble to want to help the downtrodden. But it is naive and disingenuous to blame the Israelis for the many self-inflicted wounds of Arab societies. And it is remarkably patronizing and obscurant to forgive the Arab and Islamic societies their murderous and barbaric practices while deliberately ignoring the centuries of violence the Jewish Palestinians (and Coptics, Samaritans, Karaites, Maranites, etc.) have endured at the hands of Islamic troglodytes.

Isaac Asimov once responded to an uninformed and myopic assertion, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov,The Relativity of Wrong

While some of the specifics of her circumscribed view might be true, her bias is clear and blatant: Ms. Little refers to the "catastrophe" of the founding of Israel by the UN and then to the Goldstein slaughter of Arab worshipers as though that was normal, every-day fare. Sure, the Earth looks flat to the uneducated eye. The life of the Arab Palestinians - the Jews were Palestinians, too, before the UN established the Jewish State - Arab life is difficult. Neighboring Arab states have managed to use the Arab Palestinians as a guilt weapon (as well as cannon fodder) against Israel and the West. But this began with the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank in 1948, and during the two decades of Arab abuse of Palestinian Arabs, do-gooders paid no heed to the horrible conditions which totalitarian Arab occupation imposed. Ms. Little is not interested in even merely acknowledging contextual details which flesh out the circumstances under which Hebron’s citizens’ lifestyles arose. Those details might reveal that the Earth is roundish.

The Jews of Israel live in homes they acquired through inheritance (many Jewish families have lived in Palestine for centuries), or by lawful purchase of land or land and buildings, mostly before the creation of the State. The country of Israel was itself established by democratic action of the UN. She is the only open democracy in the Middle East, and is in fact the only place in the Middle East where an Arab can go to court and expect a fair trial, whether civil or criminal. West Bank Arabs utilize the modern, life-saving medical facilities in Israel and are treated absolutely without discrimination by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim doctors all practicing together in Israel. Perhaps there are provocations in some of the horrible places like Hevron - don’t forget, this was the town where many Jews were murdered in repeated anti-Semitic massacres instigated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (who spent World War II in Berlin living on a Nazi stipend) well before the State of Israel was established. There is also a war going on, a war not of Israel's choosing. The vastly outnumbered Israelis do the best they can to protect their citizens. The Jews who have returned to Hevron after having families killed and property stolen may have long memories and some animus. But the Israeli government arrests its citizens for committing violence, and has incarcerated Jewish citizens for even planning violence against Arabs. The Palestinians will only arrest the murderer of an Israeli under great pressure from the US, and then they release that person as soon as the heat is off. This does not inspire confidence that the Arabs sincerely intend peace. The Palestinians also ignore "honor killings" (the murder of women for "improprieties" such as being looked at by a passing man), and the Palestinians kill suspected Israel sympathizers brutally and without trial. Do I even need to discuss hand-lopping, beheading, and inter-clan feuds? This is a barbaric culture.

For a self-proclaimed peacenik to justify tolerance of this ingrained violence is patronizing in the extreme. It’s not the twelfth century any more. The world moves on. Japan maintains much of its unique culture, but has adopted modern, tolerant political, economic, and social models. Even China is moving in a humane direction, however glacial that progress. India is struggling to eradicate bride-burning. And even the US might someday acknowledge that all people are human, even gays. Until the idealistic "peace" movements demand humane behaviors of the Arab communities which they now so uncritically defend, we can expect those peace movements to be pawns in the unremitting and unfortunately effective propaganda weapon of the terrorist societies. So the purported peace advocates actually prove to be dangerous soldiers in behalf of the most barbaric, most warlike, most violent, and most destructive societies in the world today. That is a tragic irony.

Too many Westerners have problems addressing Middle East issues accurately in our culture governed by stringent and totally irrational Political Correctness. Arab irredentism, liturgical violence, and general atavistic enthusiasm is regarded as quaint and appealing by people working very hard to redefine 'liberal' to mean, among other things, support of Muslim demands no matter how objectionable and no matter how vicious, violent, and antagonistic to modern values. Such "Liberals" simultaneously and reflexively reject any corresponding Christian interests no matter how reasonable and embracing of modernity they may be. Those "liberals" seem especially devoted to a worship of inaccuracy, imbalance, and intellectual dishonesty whenever Israel is involved in any international showcase, though other cultures and countries (except the US) generally get a pass under similar or identical circumstances. Why should I be surprised? Things haven't changed much in the last 60 years. Or, if you happen to be an Arab woman, in the last 600.

It's vitally important to repeatedly expose the lies and deceptions of those violent enemies of modernity, for their goal is not just the elimination of Israel and the death of all Jews (that has a familiar ring, doesn't it?). They also are determined to bless us all with their conquest of our immoral societies, and intend to allow us the privilege of living fully under Sharia law whether we like it or not. If people would just wake up, they might discover that their own self-interest is heavily entwined with Israel's.