We enjoy reading Mike Adams, and see eye-to-eye with him on many political issues.

Where we do not agree with him – as with the otherwise admirable Ann Coulter – is on religion.

Well, we’re atheist conservatives and they are Christians, so that’s no surprise.

Today in an article in Townhall titled ‘Liberty and Tyranny’ – well worth reading in full – Mike Adams criticizes statism, progressivism, and the left’s ideal of equality. We share his views on them. Then he comes to the question of ‘rights’.

He asks ‘a serious question: If rights are not bestowed by a Creator, then under what conditions do they exist? In other words, who bestows them?’

The answer is nobody unless the state. A right can only be granted in law. Because we do not believe in a supernatural lawmaker, a Creator of our universe and us, we do not accept the idea of ‘human rights’ at all, or of ‘natural rights’.

We prefer to say that we human beings are – or ought to be – FREE to do whatever we choose provided we break no laws. Law sets limits on our freedom, and should do so rationally and equally.

Nobody’s ‘right’ whether in sentiment or law should ever impose an obligation on another person, except the obligation of restraint. Whoever it was who said, ‘the freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins,’ expressed it perfectly. A list of rights according to Franklin Roosevelt – as quoted by Adams – includes: a right to a useful and remunerative job and a wage adequate to provide food and clothing and recreation; a farmer’s right sell his produce for enough to give him a decent living; everyone’s right to a home, medical care, pensions, education and more. It is an endorsement of the Marxist notion: ‘to each according to his need’. Those who hold to that creed believe that a man should receive in exchange for something he sells – his labor, an artifact, or whatever he offers – the payment that he wants.

But our wants are limitless, while the value of what we have to sell is not.

Only the free market can determine value. A buyer will pay as much as the thing he is buying is worth to him. The more buyers who want the thing on offer, the higher the price will be.

The only alternative to economic freedom is distribution by tyrannical government. A government that arbitrarily distributes the wealth of the people is by definition a tyranny.

You can never have liberty and equality. The choice is between freedom and equality. (By which we mean economic equality: equality before the law is essential to freedom.)

In freedom, if an individual wants to earn more, he can do so by providing more and better goods and services. That is to say, we assess our needs for ourselves and work as well as we can to get the money to pay for them: which could be summed up as ‘from each according to his need’.

Will we get as much as we want? That will depend on our individual ability.

So we reverse the Marxist tag ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need,’ and make ours, ‘from each according to his need and to each according to his ability.’

The market will decide the reward. All we can do is our best. We have no ‘right’ to demand handouts from others on the grounds that we ‘need’ what they have.

To put it another way, socialism is theft.

Here in full is Melanie Phillips’s article in the Spectator (and please click on the link to Sultan Knish):

As predicted here repeatedly – Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus, and he’s getting American Jews to do his dirty work for him. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly told the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Sunday that efforts to stop Iran hinged on peace talks with the Palestinians. General James Jones, National Security Adviser to Obama, reportedly told a European foreign minister a week ago that unlike the Bush administration, Obama will be ‘forceful’ with Israel. Ha’aretz reports:

Jones is quoted in the telegram as saying that the United States, European Union and moderate Arab states must redefine ‘a satisfactory endgame solution.’ The U.S. national security adviser did not mention Israel as party to these consultations.

Of course not. If you are going to throw a country under the bus, you don’t invite it to discuss the manner of its destruction with the assassins who are co-ordinating the crime. As I said here months ago, the appointment of Jones and the elevation of his post of National Security Adviser at the expense of the Secretary of State was all part of the strategy to centralise power in the hands of those who want to do Israel harm.

Yesterday Vice-President Joe Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry turned the thumbscrews tighter, telling Israel to stop building more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow Palestinians freedom of movement.

This is all not only evil but exceptionally stupid. The idea that a Palestine state will help build a coalition against Iran is demonstrably absurd. The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran.

The idea that if a Palestine state comes into being it will be easier to handle Iran is the opposite of the case: a Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense thatit will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel’s security is ludicrous.

It is of course, by any sane standard, quite fantastic that America is behaving as if it is Israel which is holding up a peace settlement when Israel has made concession after concession – giving up Sinai, giving up Gaza, offering all the territories to the Arabs in return for peace in 1967, offering more than 90 per cent of them ditto in 2000, ditto again to Mahmoud Abbas in the past year — only to be attacked in return by a Palestinian terrorist entity, backed in its continued aggression, let us not forget, by the countries of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has made no concessions at all and is not being pressured to do so.

It is not the aggressor here but the victim of aggression that America is now choosing to beat up. In any sane world, one might think the Americans would be piling the pressure on the Palestinians to renounce their genocidal ambitions against Israel, to stop teaching and training their children to hate and kill Jews, to adhere to the primary requirement in the Road Map that they must dismantle their infrastructure of violence as the first step in the peace process; one might think, indeed, that they would view Mahmoud Abbas’s repeated statements that the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state to be the main impediment to peace.

But no. The repeated professions that America will never jeopardise Israel’s security are stomach churning when Obama is actually blaming Israel for measures it has taken to safeguard its security – the settlements were always first and foremost a security measure, and the travel restrictions are there solely to prevent more Israelis being murdered – and trying to force it to abandon them. Today comes further news that Obama will also try to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons – which it only has as a last ditch insurance against the attempt to annihilate it to which several billion Arabs remain pledged.

Of course Obama doesn’t care that Hamas would run any Palestinian state. Of course he doesn’t care that Israel would be unable to defend itself against such a terrorist state. Because he regards Israel as at best totally expendable, and at worst as a running sore on the world’s body politic that has to be purged altogether (see this bleak assessment by Sultan Knish). His administration is proceeding on the entirely false analysis that a state of Palestine is the solution to the Middle East impasse and the route to peace in the region. What that state will look like or do is something to which at best the administration’s collective mind is shut and at worst makes it a potential cynical accomplice to the unconscionable. So Israel is to be forced out of the West Bank. Far from building a coalition against Iran, Obama is thus doing Iran’s work for it.

None of this, however, should come as the slightest surprise to anyone who paid any attention to Obama’s background, associations and friendships before he became President and to the cabal of Israel-bashers, appeasers and Jew-haters he appointed to his administration, with a few useful idiots thrown in for plausible deniability.

American Jews, meanwhile, are reacting as predicted – with a total absence of spine.  As IsraelMatzav reports, AIPAC was sending delegates to visit Congress to ‘convince’ Representatives and Senators to sign a petition calling for a two-state solution. Inspired! Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America’s elite.

But the ordinary American people are a different matter. They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and certainly America’s Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk.

This is shaping up to be the biggest crisis in relations between Israel and America since the foundation of Israel six decades ago. Those who hate Israel and the Jews will be gloating. This after all is precisely what they hoped Obama would do. To any decent person looking on aghast, this is where the moral sickness of the west reaches the critical care ward.

Ben Shapiro writes in Townhall:

One hundred days into Barack Obama’s presidency, he demonstrated cowardice abroad and demagogic tyranny at home. On the 105th day of his presidency, he demonstrated his clear-cut anti-Semitism.

On Monday, Rahm Emanuel, the president’s hatchet man, delivered a message to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. According to the Jerusalem Post, Emanuel stated, “Thwarting Iran’s nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.” The message is clear: America will bar any action against Iran unless Israel makes concessions to the Palestinian Arab thugs who seek to eviscerate all Jewish presence east of the Mediterranean.

Emanuel isn’t the first Obama lackey to link American opposition to Iran with Israeli concessions. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress, “For Israel to get the kind of strong support it’s looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts.” The two issues — Iranian nuclear development and the Israeli-Arab conflict — “go hand in hand.”

This is pure nonsense. The Iranian nuclear program threatens not only Israel, but U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government of Turkey, the government of Saudi Arabia, and the territory of Eastern Europe. Iran’s centrifuges make it a regional power, able to leverage its calculated irrationality into fearful appeasement by the West. America’s interest in the Iranian nuclear program has nothing to do with the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The Obama administration knows this. They simply don’t care. Their position is clear: America’s ally, Israel, is no longer valuable. Sacrificing it in order to win Obama global popularity points is a worthwhile pursuit. The Obama administration offers Israel a choice between being a victim of suicide via territorial concessions to the Palestinian Arabs, or a victim of homicide via Iran. And the Obama administration forces that choice so that Obama can smile and wave at cheering throngs of Jew-hating maniacs who populate the Muslim world.

This is anti-Semitism at its finest. Not even in the heyday of the Carter administration did such anti-Semitism find expression in American foreign policy.

Obama’s defenders no doubt scoff at such accusations.

Obama, the Man of Tolerance, an anti-Semite?

Yes. An anti-Semite…

Obama is concerned when a Muslim state [Pakistan] populated by radical Muslim sympathizers makes territorial concessions to those radical Muslim sympathizers. He is concerned that those Muslim terrorists will be within 100 miles of a Muslim capital. And he is worried that Muslim terrorist attacks on Muslims will escalate.

Yet Obama advocates for territorial concessions by Jews to radical Muslims. He presses Jews to hand over territory not 100 miles from the capital, but constituting half the capital itself. He knows that each time Israel has made territorial concessions, Muslim terrorists have upped the ante — most recently in both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. And he knows that the Palestinian Arabs have never and will never lay down their arms. Yet he threatens Israel with allowing its nuclear annihilation if Israel refuses to authorize euthanasia.

During the election campaign, I wrote that Obama was “the most dangerous candidate for the state of Israel since its creation in 1948.” I wrote, “Any American Jew who votes for Obama ought to be ashamed of him or herself.” My words were not strong enough. Any Jew who continues to support Obama’s foreign policy should turn in his badge as a Jew — that means you, Rahm Emanuel. And all Americans who support Israel must stand up against a president who values the genocidal murderers in Muslim lands over our democratic allies in the Jewish State.

Friday, May 01, 2009 
By Eric Shawn

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518611,00.html

The cover of “Jihad Recollections,” a magazine about Al Qaeda that impels Americans to join in jihad.

It’s been likened to Al Qaeda’s “Vanity Fair,” a new English-language Internet magazine called “Jihad Recollections” that focuses on the terrorist group, its founder, Usama Bin Laden, and how to commit jihad. It also predicts the demise of the United States.

“This is designed for Americans,” says noted terrorism expert Steven Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism in Washington, D.C., and author of the book “American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.”…

It is not clear what connection, if any, the magazine has to Al Qaeda or its followers. It is published by the “Al Fursan Media Foundation,” but FOX News could not find such an organization or a way to contact them for comment.

Yet “Jihad Recollections” certainly highlights the terrorist group and the goals of Islamic jihad in a sophisticated and graphically slick presentation similar to any high quality Web site.

The magazine includes the speeches and writings of Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Articles range from “Four Practical Steps to Expand the Global Jihad,” to “The Science Behind Night Vision Technology” and “Principles of Guerrilla Warfare.”

“The magazine is quite startling,” said Emerson. It is “a veritable manual on how to carry out terrorism. It’s quite shocking, and the question is whether it violates the law or not.”

The first issue says of the 9/11 attacks, that “the strategy was genius.” It calls America “one of the most atrocious and egotistical regimes to date,” and it accuses the United States of spreading corruption in Islamic countries through its embassies. “How can we expect from America any good?” it asks. “We only expect from it every evil and corruption.”

“Jihad Recollections” appears to prepare followers to engage in jihad…

In fact, “Jihad Recollections” proclaims: “It is the first of its kind as it is geared towards the English speaking Muslims who are interested in gaining heights in their religious, political, economical, social, technological, strategic, historical, biographical and health awareness.”

The writing may be a bit flamboyant, and while it boasts that “The U.S. grows weaker every day,” there is no explicit call for violence against the country or against Americans. Emerson thinks the publication is “pushing the envelope of the First Amendment” by reporting on jihad issues, and he says it indicates that the Internet is being used as “one of the major sources for radicalization.” …

More than 5,000 people have viewed “Jihad Recollections” and 11 people list it as one of their “favorites.” Who are its readers? And do they adhere to the jihad philosophy?

Whoever is behind “Jihad Recollections” has a strange mix of opinion with one focus: seemingly to spread the message of Islamic jihad at the expense of Americans. That such a publication is accessible at all speaks to the freedoms we enjoy in our country while, experts say, also serving as a warning of the danger that Islamic militants and radicals pose to our nation.

[NOTE re the reference to the ‘Conquering of Rome’ in the picture of the magazine’s cover: the Arabic word Rom – literally ‘Rome’ – means the Christian world. – JB]

 Al-Qaeda is roaring back into Iraq. 

Pakistan is disintegrating, and the Taliban is likely to take control of its nuclear arsenal.  

Iran and North Korea are producing nuclear weapons. 

Israel has called up its airforce reservists.

What is the Obama administration doing about these developments?

What is it likely to do?

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child will apparently have full legal force in the US.

This means that American moms may not smack their kids or – O boy, will they be in for it!  

But  – liberals be assured – it does not forbid you to kill them if they’re born alive when you try to abort them.   

And it will not stop little boys in Africa being armed with Kalashnikovs and sent into battles to kill and be killed. It will not stop the seizure or purchase of children by African and Arab slave dealers. It will not stop children being held and exploited as slaves for labour and sex. It will not save little Muslim girls from having their genitals sawn off. It will not stop the ritual killing of children as human sacrifices by certain African and Far Eastern religious cults. It will not stop Hamas from using children as human shields. And it will not stop Islamic moms and dads having their children blow up in suicide bombings. 

 The dear leader said (July 17, 2009): 

There isn’t really a choice. Iran, with the active help of the UN and the passive help of the decaying West, will win. Lebanon will be a bunker. 

 From the Investor’s Business Daily:

The Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in a car bombing also killed 22 others and sparked a nationwide protest that became known as the Cedar Revolution.

It soon forced the withdrawal of Syria’s army after decades of de facto occupation of a neighbor it had refused to formally recognize, a sovereign nation it viewed as a lost province of a Greater Syria.

In the aftermath of the assassination, a U.N. commission was formed to determine who killed Hariri and to bring them to justice. Most fingers pointed at Lebanon’s former occupier, Syria, which not surprisingly failed to cooperate in the investigation.

The initial report by Detlev Mehlis, the chief U.N. investigator into Hariri’s assassination, said the decision to kill Hariri, who Damascus feared would rally Lebanese opposition to Syrian influence, "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials" and their Lebanese operatives.

On Wednesday, it became clear that Hariri’s assassins might never be brought to justice and that the U.N. isn’t serious about dealing with that assault on Lebanese democracy — part of a long series of assassinations of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians and journalists.

Judge Daniel Franzen ordered four Lebanese generals suspected of involvement in Hariri’s murder freed on the grounds there was insufficient evidence for keeping them jailed. In fact, it was not so much a lack of evidence as it was a lack of will by the international community, which refused to press Syria on the issue.

After Hariri’s assassination, the formation of the international tribunal into his death and the withdrawal of Syrian forces gave a boost to those hoping Syrian influence and control were at an end and Lebanese democracy was safe. But much has changed in the last four years.

In 2006, the terrorist group Hezbollah, heavily armed and financed by Damascus and Tehran, provoked a war with Israel using Lebanon and its people as a human shield.

Despite U.N. Resolution 1559, which demanded all militia groups disarm, Hezbollah kept its weapons and added more while it began a two-year campaign marked by additional violence and assassinations to destabilize the government of Lebanon.

The campaign culminated in early 2008 with Hezbollah laying siege to government buildings and storming pro-government militia headquarters in West Beirut. The violence subsided after talks in Doha, Qatar, gave Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) its long sought veto power over government decisions in a new Cabinet of national unity. But Hezbollah wants more and in the upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections, may win it all.

Sources in Lebanon say that in recent months Iran has smuggled upward of a billion dollars into Lebanon to help its puppet creation, Hezbollah, buy the election. "Hezbollah intends to win these elections at all costs," says Toni Nissi, secretary-general of the National Council for the Cedar Revolution. "This election victory will allow them to transform their illegal institutions into legal ones." …

Many fear this election could be as disastrous for Middle East peace as the 2006 election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza.

"The choice is between Lebanon as a beach and Lebanon as a bunker," Middle East expert Amir Taheri recently quoted a Lebanese businessman as saying. "Lebanon could either become an extension of Europe in the Middle East or a bridgehead for Iran in the Mediterranean."

All that will be needed for Iran to triumph will be for the West to continue to do virtually nothing.

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media which long since stopped reporting truthfully from the Middle East, but Christians there, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, are suffering severe persecution by  ‘the religion of peace’.  Many seek asylum in Israel. 

This month Pope Benedict is to visit what both Christians and Jews call the Holy Land. Denis Maceoin, in an article that first appeared in the Catholic Herald, has some advice for him.

An urgent matter on the pope’s agenda must surely be the plight of Christians in the West Bank and Gaza. Harassed by militant Islamic groups, the Christian population there has been dwindling. In 1990, Christians made up 60% of the population in Bethlehem; today, a mere 19 years later, they number just 20% and that figure is shrinking rapidly. Christians in the Palestinian territories have fallen in numbers from 15% of the population in 1950 to less than 1% today. Calls have been made for their extinction, and attacks are regularly made on institutions and individual Christians. More and more Christians pack their bags and flee. In Israel, their numbers have risen from 34,000 in 1948 to more than 140,000 today. If the pope does not speak out and make this an issue of international concern, the bombings, the beatings and the intimidation will continue, and before very long the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem will be left to the tender mercies of Islamic Jihad.

Middle East sources are claiming – without providing evidence as yet – that Obama has envoys negotiating directly with Ahmadinejad and the mullahs for co-operation in dealing with the increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan. Iran’s permission is being sought, they say, for American troops to move through Iran. A novel idea that would be – to depend on the goodwill of your worst enemies and give them a possible stranglehold on your forces!

The governing Democrats are too taken up with grave and urgent matters at home, such as censoring Rush Limbaugh, keeping a close watch on vets in case they develop terrorist tendencies, and trying to get members of the Bush administration prosecuted in revenge for President Clinton’s impeachment, to bother with Iran and the Taliban becoming nuclear powers. But it seems there is one foreign issue that Obama and his Secretary of State seriously want to resolve: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Caroline Glick, in her article that we quote from below, seems to be of the opinion that Obama is warning Israel that he’ll let Iran go nuclear unless Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to dance yet again the old ‘two-state hop’ with one or another Palestinian terrorist leader. But Netanyahu himself is of a contrary opinion – that a settlement with the Palestinians will only become possible if Iran is neutralized first. So intent are Obama and Hillary Clinton on realizing the unrealizable goal of a Palestinian state (which the Palestinians themselves don’t want), they seem not to have noticed that even the Arab states are much more troubled by Iran developing a nuclear war capability than they are by the Palestinian issue. The Obama administration also seems not to be aware that a nuclear Iran is a danger not only to Israel but also to America and the whole world.

It is a strange situation when Egypt and Jordan feel it necessary to defend Israel against American criticism. But this is the situation in which we find ourselves today. Last Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee that Arab support for Israel’s bid to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is contingent on its agreeing to support the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state. In her words, "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it’s looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts." As far as Clinton is concerned, the two, "go hand-in-hand."

But just around the time that Clinton was making this statement, Jordan’s King Abdullah II was telling The Washington Post that he is satisfied with the Netanyahu government’s position on the Palestinians. In his words, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has "sent a message that he’s committed to peace with the Arabs. All the words I heard were the right words."

As for Egypt, in spite of the media’s hysteria that Egypt won’t deal with the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration’s warning that Israel can only expect Egypt to support its position that Iran must be denied nuclear weapons if it gives Jerusalem to the PLO, last week’s visit by Egypt’s intelligence chief Omar Suleiman clearly demonstrated that Egypt wishes to work with the government on a whole host of issues. Coming as it did on the heels of Egypt’s revelation that Iranian-controlled Hizbullah agents were arrested for planning strategic attacks against it, Suleiman’s visit was a clear sign that Egypt is as keen as Israel to neutralize Iranian power in the region by preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

And Egypt and Jordan are not alone in supporting Israel’s commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. American and other Western sources who have visited the Persian Gulf in recent months report that leaders of the Gulf states from Bahrain – which Iran refers to as its 14th province – to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and, of course, to Iraq – are praying for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and only complain that it has waited so long to attack them…

UNFORTUNATELY … as the Arabs line up behind Israel, the Obama administration is operating under the delusion that the Iranians will be convinced to give up their nuclear program [only] if Israel destroys its communities in Judea and Samaria. According to reports published last week in Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz, President Barack Obama’s in-house post-Zionist, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, told an American Jewish leader that for Israel to receive the administration’s support for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it must not only say that it supports establishing a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza, it must begin expelling its citizens from their homes and communities in Judea and Samaria to prove its good faith.

With just months separating Iran from either joining the nuclear club or from being barred entry to the clubhouse, the Obama administration’s apparent obsession with Judea and Samaria tells us that unlike Israel and the Arab world, its Middle East policies are based on a willful denial of reality…

IF IRAN acquires nuclear weapons, the Obama administration can throw its hopes for Middle East peace out the window. Today, even without nuclear weapons, Iran is the major force behind the continued Palestinian war against Israel. Iran exerts complete control over Hamas and Islamic Jihad and partial control over Fatah. In and of itself, Iran’s current control over Palestinian terror groups suffices to expose the Obama administration’s plan to force Israel to destroy its communities in Judea and Samaria as misguided in the extreme. With Iran calling the shots for the Palestinians, it is clear that any land Israel vacates will fall under Iranian control. That is, every concession the US forces Israel to make will redound directly to Iran’s benefit. This is why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s claim that it will be impossible to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians without first neutralizing Iran rings so true…

GLOBALLY OF COURSE, a nuclear-armed Iran would be well positioned to take over the world’s oil markets. With Saudi Arabia’s main oil installations located in the predominantly Shi’ite eastern provinces, it would be able to credibly threaten to destroy Saudi oil installations and so assert control over them. With Iran’s strategic alliance with Venezuela, once it controls Saudi oil fields, it hard to see how it would not become the undisputed ruler of the oil economy.

Certainly Europe would put up no resistance. Today, with much of Europe already within range of Iran’s ballistic missiles, with Iranian-controlled terror cells fanned out throughout the continent and with Europe dependent on Persian Gulf oil, there is little doubt of the direction its foreign policy would take in the event that Iran becomes a nuclear power. Obviously any thought of economic sanctions would disappear as European energy giants lined up to develop Iranian gas fields, and European banks clamored to finance the projects.

Finally, there is America. With Israel either barely surviving or destroyed, with the Arab world and Europe bowing before the mullahs, with much of Central and South America fully integrated into the Iranian axis, America would arguably find itself at greater risk of economic destruction and catastrophic attack than at any time in its history since the War of 1812. An EMP attack that could potentially send the US back to the pre-industrial age would become a real possibility. An Iranian controlled oil economy, financed by euros, would threaten to displace the dollar and the US economy as the backbone of the global economy. The US’s military options – particularly given Obama’s stated intention to all but end US missile defense programs and scrap much of its already aging nuclear arsenal – would be more apparent than real.

Yet what Clinton’s statements before Congress, Emmanuel’s statements to that American Jewish leader and Obama’s unremitting pandering to Teheran and its Syrian and Turkish allies all make clear is that none of these reasonable scenarios has made a dent in the administration’s thinking. As far as the Obama White House is concerned, Iran will be talked out of its plans for regional and global domination the minute that Israel agrees to give its land to the Palestinians. The fact that no evidence exists that could possibly support this assertion is irrelevant.

On Sunday, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland claimed that Obama will not publish his administration’s policy on Iran until after he meets with Netanyahu at the White House on May 18. It will be during that meeting, Hoagland wrote, that Obama will seek to convince Netanyahu that there is no reason to attack Iran. The fact that Obama could even raise such an argument, when by Israel’s calculations Iran will either become a nuclear power or be denied nuclear weapons within the next 180 days, shows that his arguments are based on a denial of the danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel and to global security as a whole.

It is true that you can’t help but get a funny feeling when you see the Arabs defending Israel from American criticism. But with the Obama administration’s Middle East policy firmly grounded in La La Land, what choice do they have? They understand that today all that stands between them and enslavement to the mullahs is the Israel Air Force and Binyamin Netanyahu’s courage.