If this is true, Britain should now be regarded – and treated – as a terrorist-supporting country:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a tottering terrorist group nearing its military collapse in Sri Lanka will defy UK anti-terrorism laws to glorify its suicide terrorism publicly when it holds its ‘suicide bombers day’ at the London Excel Centre, according to pro-LTTE media reports. Despite the proscription of the group in the United Kingdom , the Tamil language radio station, International Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) said in its broadcasts that the event would take place at the London ExCeL Centre, November 27 from 10a.m.

  Read more about it here.

Russia is clambering up the global victory stand, knocking other countries out of the way in an effort to reach her place at the top. It is a climb that the country responsible for the death of millions and the misery of billions will refuse to lose. In the last 18 years, the designs for a ‘liberal democracy’ has not been a success per se for Russia; it has been a weary aspiration, full of ideals that Russia’s powerful persons frequently misplace in order to better themselves and their future.

The truth is that Russia has not as yet changed from the cruel autocracy it has always been; it does not look set to do so either. The only apparent difference is the rise of a new elite: the oligarchs.

The question that many ask of this nouveau riche is where did their power and wealth come from? How did they become the phoenix that rose out of the ashes of the broken Soviet state in the 1990s? The most honest explanation is the result of the small reforms pushed through in the 1980s by Gorbachev. These reforms succeeded an embarrassing attempt by the Politburo to reinvigorate Lenin-Marxist economics by clamping down on ‘unearned incomes’. What this quite meant was beyond the understanding of the Soviet security services. One result of this order was the prevention of privately sold vegetables. The militia searched vehicles coming into major cities – searching for, as the newspaper Nezavisimaia Gazeta put it, “Criminal Tomatoes.” Gorbachev was extremely embarrassed by this, and realising the need for reform, changed the law in order to allow small privately owned businesses to exist – these were called the cooperatives.

So finally, as the tyrannical fire of the Communist state was starting to dwindle, the freedom of capitalism was permitted in small doses. This is where the oligarchs enter the stage – one example of whom is the prominent billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Although his first few businesses, such as a café at the Mendeleev Chemical Institute, were a failure, his fortunes soon changed completely, as did hundreds of other Russians, when they exploited a small loophole in Soviet law. Khodorkovsky took a bunch of temporary workers, called them his labour collective, and claimed subsidies from the Gosplan (the state institution for economic planning). He then took these subsidies, told the banks he had to pay his workers in real money, and was allowed to redeem the subsidies for actual cash, which he immediately turned into dollars, freeing this wealth from the dragging burden of the failing rubles. Hundreds of entrepreneurs exploited this loophole, and the Soviet state, in an effort to save their economy unwittingly gave more and more subsidies to the cooperatives – the result of which simply multiplied the fortunes of these Russians. By the collapse of the Soviet Union, hundreds were fast becoming, or had already become vulgarians with a rosy future – persons who succeeded as the state failed. This success had its integrity challenged however – it was marked with shady loans and sales of banks for fractions of their worth.

Not all oligarchs came to prominence with this relative honesty. Many of the wealthy are petro-oligarchs, men who have made their fortune by buying up the State’s largely untapped reserves of oil. In the 1990s, Yeltsin gave oil, metal and banks to the sycophants of his administration. The other prospering Russians seemed to have simply had the fortune to be in the right place at the right time. Poorer Russians will give each other knowing looks and say, “KGB, or Politburo…” These are often unproved rumours, but who was better placed to cash in on the rise of the most prosperous industries in the world than those who had controlled it not a few years previously?

One example is Vagit Alekperov. He was the Deputy Minister of Fuel and Energy under the USSR, and miraculously managed to acquire a lot of oil assets in the 1990s. He now enjoys a personal wealth of $1.3 billion.  And what of Vladimir Gusinsky? He built a huge media empire, starting this effort in the 1980s, while enjoying a close relationship with Filipp Bobkov, a KGB general who personally supervised Soviet repression of political dissidents, Christians and Jews.

When Putin arrived on the scene in 2000, he told the nouveau riche that he would not carve up the Russian economy but he warned them to keep out of politics. Wealth may not always buy power, but it certainly gives certain ambitions – and some oligarchs could not resist trying their hand. Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky were the first casualties of the oligarchs’ foray into politics, resulting in their exile just a short time later. The brutal retaliation of the Russian state has targeted journalists, political dissidents and the wealthy – men and women who have been threatened, attacked and murdered at home and abroad.

Putin plays a clever game however, and regularly meets with business leaders, in order to inform them that they will be tolerated but that they must not think or act against the state. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported a meeting in 2007: “The topics under discussion were chosen to show business its place (as was last year’s meeting, devoted to ‘the social responsibility of business before society’).”

The oligarchs are shining trophies of success for Russia, and the state is eager to show them off. Yet that same state is desperate for Russia to not become an overt plutocracy. The occasional fervent repression of rich individuals and removal of their political voice could be the wish of the state for itself to be seen as proletarian. Putin is careful to never display his wealth, but some suspect it to be vast. Anders Åslund wrote in his book, ‘Russia’s Capitalist Revolution’: “Everybody around Putin is completely corrupt, but many think that the president himself is honest. In February 2004, presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin named three men as Putin’s bagmen, including Gennady Timchenko, the co-founder of the Gunvor oil-trading company. After Rybkin made this statement, he vanished from the political stage. In September, the Polish magazine Wprost wrote that Timchenko, a former KGB officer and member of Putin’s dacha cooperative in St. Petersburg, has a net worth of $20 billion. Officially, Timchenko sells the oil of four Russian oil companies, but how are the prices determined to generate such profits? In an interview in Germany’s Die Welt on Nov. 12, Stanislav Belkovsky, the well-connected insider who initiated the Kremlin campaign against Yukos in 2003, made specific claims about Putin’s wealth. He alleged that Putin owned 37 percent of Surgutneftegaz (worth $18 billion), 4.5 percent of Gazprom ($13 billion) and half of Timchenko’s company, Gunvor (possibly $10 billion). If this information is true, Putin’s total personal fortune would amount to no less than $41 billion, placing him among the 10 richest in the world.”

In response to these allegations, at a press conference in February of this year, Putin replied: “This is true. I am the richest person not only in Europe, but also in the world. I collect emotions. And I am rich in that respect that the people of Russia have twice entrusted me with leadership of such a great country as Russia. I consider this to be my biggest fortune. As for the rumors concerning my financial wealth, I have seen some pieces of paper regarding this. This is plain chatter, not worthy discussion, plain bosh. They have picked this in their noses and have smeared this across their pieces of paper. This is how I view this.” This is a very Russian answer.

This state of affairs is reminiscent of feudal Europe. When William I conquered Britain, he rewarded flatterers of his court. Men such as the Earl of Northumbria, who had not fought him, were given large amounts of land. And although the Russian emancipation of the serfs was back in 1861, the Russian people are still very much subservient to the state and the oligarchs, that is, the Tsar and the landowners.

The financial turmoil that has engulfed the World economy has revealed the remnants of the Soviet state that still subsists in Russia. The oligarchs lost a huge amount in the recent stock market crashes, in which shares have fallen by 75% since August. Vladimir Lisin, the steel magnate owner, has lost $11.2 billion since July; Vagit Alekperov, the President and one of the biggest shareholders in Lukoil, has lost $5.13 billion; and Uralkali Dmitry Rybolovlev has stacked up losses of $7.3 billion. Meanwhile, ordinary Russians know very little of their country’s and their oligarchs’ failures. A recent poll found that 57% of Russians believed their country to be flourishing, up from 53% a few months previously. And the state-controlled media have been banned from using words such as, “crisis” and “decline”. Just as Soviet propaganda films purported, Russians are still told how terrible life in the West is. Supposedly desperate Britons are throwing themselves in the Thames; we can no longer afford to bury the dead; and the Queen is pawning her jewellery. Russia tells its people that the Motherland will be the rescuer of Europe. The state affirmed this by giving a large loan to bankrupted Iceland recently, while Western countries refused to help. The media asks Russians to thank the genius and leadership of Vladimir Putin for their country’s stability and strong position during the financial turbulence.

The truth is that oligarchs are simply pawns of the state, at the mercy of the current tolerance of the Kremlin. Putin is preparing to reinstate himself as President – so completing the transition to an authoritarian method of rule – but as the economy worsens, his forbearance from destroying the providence of Russia’s financial elite is looking to lessen fast.

As in Soviet times, it is true in Russia that if one pulls oneself up, out of the misery of the bottom of the pile, then one will risk the painful drop from the top right back to the bottom; albeit from the nocuous control of the state, the lethal prison, forced labour, Siberian exile, or the gun. Ten years ago, life had never looked better for the oligarchs – through both serendipity and dishonesty they looked set to live a comfortable life. Now they find themselves in a collapsed attempt at democracy, in an atmosphere that is breeding wanton ideals of despotism. A recent Russian reality television show has Stalin set to win ‘The Greatest Russian Ever’ award. Stalin – a man responsible for the death of tens of millions of people.

The sensible oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich, have moved to Europe, partly because of the large number of crimes accused by the Russian state and business partners against them. Abramovich in particular, emerged triumphant from the so-called ‘Aluminum Wars’; he left behind him over 100 gang fighters dead, a fellow oligarch exiled to Siberia and “numerous officials and executives” found murdered.

Russia never became a state with a free economy. Most of the oligarchs made their fortunes in a dying state through cruel and backhanded measures. And just as they rose so spectacularly, they will fall so too – especially as oil prices continue to plummet. They are bizarre figures – successors to the KGB heads and party officials – all of whom enjoy a limited autonomy in their respective areas of control; but they are still, and will always be ultimately at the mercy of the callous Russian state.

 Led by zombietime, we and many others declare today, Novemer 22, 2008, to be VI day – Victory in Iraq Day.

Read much more about it here.

Picture from Gathering of Eagles: NY

 ‘Conscience,’ Hamlet says, ‘does make cowards of us all.’

Or does cowardice claim the name of conscience – steal its identity – in order to excuse itself? 

Conscience should drive us, as individuals, to do what we believe to be morally right. But it may be a self-flattering word we use to explain why we do certain things that we actually do out of craven cowardice itself, or the sort of moral vanity that makes us want to appear virtuous rather than to act virtuously.

Governments, nations, and crowds also cover their actions with the same deceptive claim, attributing to conscience what they really do out of weakness, fear, stupidity,  hypocrisy and ideological romanticism.  

False conscience calls itself by many other names, among them these: political correctness; respect for multiculturalism or ‘diversity’; a striving for ‘social justice’ or economic equality or ‘fairness’;  remorse for (largely imaginary) historical sins. Under such names all kinds of idiotic, unjust, destructive and evil things are done.    

Exempli gratia from the real world: 

In the US millions of voters elect an unqualified candidate to political office because he is black.

Navies refrain from capturing pirates, or (even better) summarily killing them, because ‘they have human rights’.

Liberal democratic welfare states keep and protect alien Islamic preachers of terrorism and sedition, lavishly house, feed, educate and medically treat them (and their pluralities of wives and families) at the expense of their intended victims, the indigenous population, because if they’re returned to their own countries they may be tortured or executed – or even because some witness at their possible trials might be tortured.

Western governments abrogate freedom because citizens use it to criticize Muslims and their beliefs. 

European police refrain from enforcing the law against Muslim offenders.  

In Britain the rule of a single Law of the Land, the very thing that makes it possible for people of different provenance to live together in harmony, is arbitrarily abandoned by the acceptance of Sharia as a second system of law, although it is incompatible with and contradictory to the enchorial system. 

Western nations reduce their defensive power to the point of ineffectiveness while vicious tyrannical regimes, inimical to the West and motivated by a declared intention of aggression, acquire arsenals of nuclear weapons. 

Governments interfere in markets and impoverish the people.  

Jillian Becker  November 21, 2008

 Dick Morris and Eileen McGann write in Townhall:

The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union. Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the Europeans is like a partnership with death.

At the G-20 meeting, Bush agreed to subject the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our other regulatory agencies to the supervision of a global entity that would critique its regulatory standards and demand changes if it felt they were necessary. Bush agreed to create a College of Supervisors.

According to The Washington Post, it would "examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks’ operations."

Their scrutiny would extend to hedge funds and to various "exotic" financial instruments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), a European-dominated operation, would conduct "regular vigorous reviews" of American financial institutions and practices. The European-dominated College of Supervisors would also weigh in on issues like executive compensation and investment practices…

Bush, to say nothing of Obama, has given the government control over our major financial and insurance institutions. And it isn’t even our government! The power has now been transferred to the international community, led by the socialists in the European Union.

Will Obama govern from the left? He doesn’t have to. George W. Bush has done all the heavy lifting for him. It was under Bush that the government basically took over as the chief stockholder of our financial institutions and under Bush that we ceded our financial controls to the European Union. In doing so, he has done nothing to preserve what differentiates the vibrant American economy from those dying economies in Europe. Why have 80 percent of the jobs that have been created since 1980 in the industrialized world been created in the United States? How has America managed to retain its leading 24 percent share of global manufacturing even in the face of the Chinese surge? How has the U.S. GDP risen so high that it essentially equals that of the European Union, which has 50 percent more population? It has done so by an absence of stifling regulation, a liberation of capital to flow to innovative businesses, low taxes, and by a low level of unionization that has given business the flexibility to grow and prosper. Europe, stagnated by taxation and regulation, has grown by a pittance while we have roared ahead. But now Bush – not Obama – Bush has given that all up and caved in to European socialists.

The Bush legacy? European socialism. Who needs enemies with friends like Bush?

 Ruth King writes on the stupidity of linking anti-Semitism, which is wholly irrational and deeply unjust, with "Islamophobia’ which could not be more justified and reasonable.  The whole article is well worth reading. Here is a quotation from the end of it:

Muslims have killed more Americans than any group or state since the end of the Vietnam War. Yet, in an unflagging effort to reassure Muslims we were continually told that these terrorists “hijacked a great religion” and those who use it for violent ends are engaged in a “perversion” of the faith.

 

Even seemingly honorable defenders of the faith have masqueraded as moderates until they were apprehended for conspiring to aid or fund jihad and al Qaeda through communal or charitable organizations.

 

There are over 200 documented episodes where the “perverters” of the faith have been apprehended and thwarted in deadly plans right here in the United States. The charges all range from financing Islamic terrorism, obstructing justice by refusing to testify or by aiding terrorist wannabes, to stockpiling and transporting explosives and weapons, attempting to bomb airlines and military bases, providing false tips to federal law enforcement, assault and murder of family members who dishonor the family, smuggling false passports, committing arson and conspiring to kill and maim civilians. There are probably an equal number of “sleeper cells” which have been discovered and thwarted but an unsettling number which continue to operate and plot under the radar of law enforcement.

 

Is it irrational or bigoted to fear them? No. It’s prudent.

 

We should we demand that our elected legislators consider our safety and homeland security and confront and condemn putative terrorists and those who aid and abet them instead of pandering to the whining and pretended “victimhood” of those who would destroy us. I am afraid for our country. I fear creeping Sharia, and it is high time for the purported great majority of peaceful Muslims to speak out loudly and forcefully against fanatical hatred of Jews and Christians and to denounce violence and terrorism and dreams of a global Caliphate.

 

Finally, is it not perverse to trivialize the historic shame and curse of anti-Semitism by linking it to the calculated whims and deceptions of those who practice, preach and promote Jew hatred and genocide?

 

 You betcha!

 zombietime announces, and we agree, that THE WAR IN IRAQ IS OVER, and the victory should be celebrated online on November 22. Go here – there are some great pictures:

We won. The Iraq War is over. 

I declare November 22, 2008 to be "Victory in Iraq Day." (Hereafter known as "VI Day.") 

By every measure, The United States and coalition forces have conclusively defeated all enemies in Iraq, pacified the country, deposed the previous regime, successfully helped to establish a new functioning democratic government, and suppressed any lingering insurgencies. The war has come to an end. And we won. 

What more indication do you need? An announcement from the outgoing Bush administration? It’s not gonna happen. An announcement from the incoming Obama administration? That’s really not gonna happen. A declaration of victory by the media? Please. Don’t make me laugh. A concession of surrender by what few remaining insurgents remain in hiding? Forget about it. 

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat: 

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ

And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it’s up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration. 

Saturday, November 22, 2008 is the day of that celebration: Victory in Iraq Day. 

 Timothy Sandefur writes:

Liberals have lately been making much of the purported anti-intellectualism of conservatives in the late election. No doubt they’re right. But I must say I find it laughable that this charge would come from liberals of all people. The left in this country has had a long and dismal history of embracing a wide variety of anti-intellectual credos.

Start with the most obvious: the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &c.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas can simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right. And the cultural relativists who demand that we treat the dismal productions of barbaric cultures as the intellectual equivalents of Shakespeare and Homer—and tars as “racist” anyone who suggests that some cultures and their mores are better than others—are fundamentally, even proudly anti-intellectual.

These ideologies masquerade, unconvincingly, as intellectual movements, but they are simply attempts to ignore ideas, or to shoot them down with reactionary appeals to political dogmas. They treat the world of thought with the same contempt as a street thug, except that they phrase his appeal to violence in more clever terminology. In the end it is the same: power over thought, force over reason…

“Radical chic” is a leftist phenomenon, not a conservative one. It was, and is, liberals who accord street thugs and petty vandals the respectability of academic honors. The terrorist Bill Ayers? Or the terrorist Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize of the U.S.S.R.? She’s presidential chair at U.C. Santa Cruz. It was liberals who not only gave the anti-intellectual thug Norman Mailer pop icon status, but handed him the mantle of a respectable intellectual. The Jack Abbott case was a curiosity to them, and a source of gossip. When he stabbed his wife with a penknife at a dinner party, almost killing her in 1960, was that the end of his run as a leftist intellectual? Hardly. The left respects its anti-intellectual thugs.

Very similar to their awe for ideological violence is the liberal respect for consistently leftist liars like Michael Moore. Moore was made of, by, and for liberals, and he remains a celebrity to liberals despite the fact that there is probably no more recklessly anti-intellectual a figure in America today (with the possible exception of the moronic liberal darling Cornell West). He has contempt for anything approaching a truthful description of reality or a reasonable theory of politics or economics. His work is a set of cheap thrills for those with a knee-jerk hostility to the free market. Yet those thrills don’t even add up to anything like a sensible plot. His lies and distortions are well documented, and even turn off some thoughtful liberals. Yet he is still admired by a great many others, who are more committed to the party than to the basic facts. If that isn’t anti-intellectualism, I don’t know what is.

What about the “Bush lied, people died” meme? No serious person can believe that the Bush Administration consciously lied about the intelligence on Iraq in order to trump up a war to seize Iraqi oil. Yet tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people believe this, and proudly say so on the bumpers of their cars. Is this the intellectualism of the Democratic party?

Many rank and file liberals believe a whole host of basic untruths, and do not bother themselves with examining their beliefs any farther than their emotional prejudices allow them. Consider the environmentalists, who believe in a wide variety of panicky flasehoods about the state of the earth. Al Gore made a film riddled with misleading or half-true claims. Did the left correct him or urge him to be more intellectually honest? No, they gave him an Oscar.

It doesn’t get much better when you move to the more moderate liberals, either. Liberals believe that government can efficiently allocate resources, and run, say, a health care system for hundreds of millions of people, despite the basic failures of such systems in other countries. And they believe this, not because they disagree with the discoveries of economists like Friedrich Hayek, or have an answer to the problem of rent-seeking, a term which most Democrats have probably never heard. No, they believe this because of their emotional commitment to wealth-redistribution, a commitment based on a moral premise—that the wealthy should pay the bills of the poor because poverty is “unfair”—which they rarely even bother to defend. Ask why your earnings should be taken from you by the state and given to someone else, and you will rarely get an intellectual answer. I’ve certainly never been given one. I’ve heard a lot of emoting, and a lot of accusations of nefarious corporate meanness, and a lot of heart-rending stories about how hard it is to be poor. But an intellectual defense of redistributive government? That’s a rarity.

The leadership of the American left appeals not to ideas but to emotion—envy, usually, or panic—to move party members to embrace empty promises of material prosperity through government manipulation, promises no competent economist can fail to see through. The left is fond of violence and power, and the romanticism and iconography of thugs who are transformed into celebrities among leftist intellectuals. Liberals are this country’s leading practitioners of race and gender politics. Barack Obama exploits the power of crowds to chant empty slogans promising that the laws of economics can be magically suspended if we just have enough faith (“Yes, we can!”)…. And yet this is not the party of anti-intellectuals and populists?

The US victory in Iraq is bigger than even President Bush and his outgoing administration seem to realize. 

First, it can now be proclaimed as victory: 

 If Barack Obama had gotten his way, Iraq would now be in the hands of Islamists, and America’s image would have suffered a crushing blow. He voted to cut off funding for the troops, just when they needed it most, and still refuses to admit he was wrong.

Well, he was wrong, and George W. Bush deserves credit for refusing to back down when all around him were losing heart: “The war is over and we won.” [Quotations from Little Green Footballs]

And, secondly, how big and important the victory is can be best be understood from a study published by the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. It tells how the jihadists in Iraq, Zarqawi and his successors, prepared to re-establish the caliphate. They even had the caliph chosen and ready. They saw this as a step to Islamic world domination. After Zarqawi himself was killed in June 2006, his followers ‘determined to turn Iraq into a battleground [and] the incubator for their grand vision of a unified Islamic empire under the aegis of a ruling caliph.’ This vision enthralled a new generation of jihadists. As  a winning ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (assuming, as it were, the al-Qaeda franchise) they could have drawn thousands more fighters. They declared an ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ which was to be the center of victorious Islam, with Baghdad as its capital. Had the surge not take place, had it not turned the local tribal leaders against the jihadis, the triumph of militant Islam over the United States would have been seen throughout the Islamic world as a victory of historic proportions, ‘a victorious Islamic regeneration’; a caliphate might well have been established, and the non-Muslim world subjected to an onslaught of terrorism – possibly nuclear terrorism – without precedent.

The study is long, but very interesting and well worth reading. Here are two riveting passages from it:

The American public was uncurious as to the identity, nature, and goals of its enemy in Iraq. And, unfortunately, U.S. leaders and commanders were mostly complicit in such willful unawareness. The lack of interest on the part of the public was partly due to bitter partisan recriminations over the Bush administration’s policy in waging the Iraq war, and over who in Washington was to blame for the insurgency that ensued. Consequently, the doctrines of the Bush administration regarding preemptive strikes and democracy in the Middle East came under incessant scrutiny from the administration’s domestic political foes. Meanwhile, the doctrines of the jihadists were overlooked or, in the few cases where they were considered, dismissed as esoteric. Fantastical as they may be, these doctrines do indeed motivate and inform the enemy’s actions and strategy, and their significance was not recognized…

The corollary to the military defeat now being experienced by the jihadists is the even more agonizing prospect of doctrinal collapse: the heralded caliphate is stillborn, and the glorious vision of a reinvigorated Islamic state has been smashed. The anguish and demoralization brought about by this byproduct of battlefield victory cannot be overstated. To smash the dreams of a man who lives for a cause, who endures cruel deserts and damp caves while awaiting martyrdom, is a fate far worse than death. In a battle of wills, young men are able to summon the necessary willpower to press a button and to detonate themselves among innocent bystanders. They do so for the cause of jihad, and for the deferred utopia of a resurrected and avenging Islamic world power. Nothing breaks the will of the individual jihadist more than to see his ideology begin to bear fruit, only to watch that fruit rot away right before his eyes. Such has been the impact of the Zarqawist Islamic State of Iraq—the caliphate-to-be, under the Commander of the Faithful Abu Umar al-Baghdadi the Qurayshite—and such the bitter aftertaste of its ruinous downfall.

(This news and commentary was first posted on October 26 – before the election. As it was accidentally removed, we are re-posting it here.)

Gateway Pundit reports:

The LA Times is holding a video that shows Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians who are openly hostile towards Israel. Barack Obama even gives a toast to a former PLO operative at this celebration. 

If the American public saw this  side of Barack Obama he would never be elected president.

But, the media refuses to release this video.

LA Times writer Peter Wallsten [apparently basing his story on research carried out by Debbie Schlussel – JB] wrote about Barack Obama’s close association with former Palestinian operative Rashid Khalidi back in April.
Wallsten discussed a dinner held back in 2003 in honor of Khalidi, a critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights.
Barack Obama has denied his close association with Khalidi, too.

According to Wallsten the evening not surprisingly turned into a classic Jew-bash: 

"During the dinner a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

Barack Obama also praised the former PLO operative during the event.
And, Obama confessed that his family often shared dinner with the Khalidis:

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases… It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation – a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table," but around "this entire world."

…The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Khalidi and the Obamas were great friends in Chicago and often shared meals together.
By the way, Khalidi was also best friends with Bill Ayers.