In Commentary magazine, the admirable commentator and analyst Jennifer Rubin examines at length the possible reasons for Sarah Palin’s unpopularity with Jewish voters. If she is right – and by saying that, we are not intending to cast doubt on her conclusions – Sarah Palin is scorned by American Jews as being intellectually inferior.

‘Jews,’ Rubin writes at the end of her article (we suggest interested readers read it all) ‘are not about to cast aside their preference for those leaders whom they perceive as intellectually worthy – and socially compatible.’

In other words – ours not Jennifer Rubin’s – she is the victim of intellectual snobbery. (Maybe social snobbery too, but ‘social incompatibility’ may not be because one social group thinks itself superior to another, but simply because it feels that it has little in common with the other. So we’ll overlook that. It’s the ‘intellectually worthy’ judgment that concerns us.)

We believe Rubin is right to take into account that Jews in general place a high value on intellectual ability and achievement. It’s well known that they do. A circle of Jewish voters of our acquaintance holds that Bill Clinton deserved to be president because he was a Rhodes scholar. That’s more than enough all by itself to secure their admiration and their political loyalty. Academic brilliance, in their judgment, is a ‘pro’ that cancels any ‘con’, such as character flaws, sexual exploitation, even perjury. And that is not wise. It is also not intellectually respectable!

Most Jews in America are liberal and vote Democratic, even though Jewish interests, especially where relations between the US and Israel are concerned, are in far safer hands when the Republicans are in power. The Left is now predominantly and universally anti-Israel, and in Europe positively anti-Semitic. The illogic of Jewish loyalty to the Left in the light of these facts is glaring enough to need explanation, and Norman Podhoretz has taken a whole book (Why Are Jews Liberals?) to explain it.

So Jewish voters’ opinions of Sarah Palin can be understood in part as the opinions of the Left in general. And of course the Left is against Sarah Palin: she is a conservative and a Republican. But the degree of animosity towards her aired obsessively by leftist intellectuals goes beyond mere difference of principle and opinion. It is so contemptuous, so personal, so cruel as to outrage civilized standards. They even attack her children! Women writers ridicule her appearance (out of envy, we suspect, of her quite exceptional beauty), as if that were relevant to her politics and aspirations to leadership.

In our view Sarah Palin is highly intelligent, and – yes – not an intellectual. Thomas Sowell has convincingly defined an intellectual as someone whose product is ideas, and Sarah Palin does not fit that definition. But that is in no way a deficiency in her. America does not need an intellectual as a leader. We’d even go so far as to say that an intellectual is the last person America needs to lead it. It needs someone who is principled, who holds liberty to be the highest value, who respects the Constitution and the traditions of America, is competent, commonsensical, has proved herself electable, has been tried and tested in office, is fiscally responsible, knows the importance of keeping America militarily strong, and is exemplary in her self-reliance. If ever there was a model of an American able and willing to stand on her own two feet, it is Sarah Palin. (She and her husband fill their deep freeze with meat and fish that they themselves hunt and catch; and they built their own house. Not the sort of activities, we acknowledge, that intellectuals are likely to admire.)

We are not saying that Sarah Palin would be the indubitably best choice for the 2012 presidential election. We are saying that she would be a good candidate. And we think that Jewish voters should know that in her office when she was Governor of Alaska, she displayed an Israeli flag on her wall. Or so we have been told. If we’ve been misinformed about that, we’d still like to point out to them that she is much more likely than Obama to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

And speaking of Obama – who, it is worth noting, will not let his academic records be made public – we wonder: how do the Jews who voted for him reconcile their preference for an ‘intellectually worthy’ leader with his manifest ignorance and career-long dependence on affirmative action?

The UN climate conference at Copenhagen was fortunately a failure, and the terrible consequences that might have resulted from the achievement of its impoverishing and enslaving objectives have been averted, but immeasurable damage has already been done by the propagation of the global warming lie.

Melanie Phillips writes in the Spectator:

The IPCC is now a totally discredited body which should be investigated for the mammoth fraud it has perpetrated on the world. (Questions might also be asked about New Scientist and other scientific journals which have been party to this scam).Yet on the basis of the IPCC’s anti-scientific propaganda and the hysteria it has created, the entire political landscape in Britain and elsewhere has been reshaped, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of these countries.

In Britain, any idea that the Tories might halt the country’s gathering slippage into an existential crevasse is vitiated by the leadership’s fanatical or opportunistic (take your pick) devotion to this discredited, totalitarian dogma of man-made global warming. Interestingly, according to a survey conducted by Conservative Home, the lowest priority for the 141 Tory parliamentary candidates who took part was ‘reducing Britain’s carbon footprint’. Writer Matthew Sinclair adds anxiously:

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean that new candidates are ardent sceptics of climate change science or policy…’

Good heavens, perish the thought! After all, who could possibly think there was any doubt about it?

The Washington Post, reviewing Obama’s first year in office, stops short of hagiography, but scrapes the bottom of an almost empty barrel to find justification for its praise.

What does it pull out? Well, he made a good shot in a basketball game in front of servicemen, although he had a painful hip:

Obama was tired from the long flight, and a hip injury limited a basketball game to an informal shoot-around session. But the Senate staff members accompanying him were stunned when, on arriving at the gym, they discovered that more than 1,000 service members had packed the stands to watch. Some of Obama’s aides worried that a poor showing would yield images of Commander Air Ball. “Just make a shot or two, and that’ll be all right,” Antony J. Blinken, then the director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and now Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, told Obama.”Oh, I’ll make the shot,” he answered. He squared up behind the three-point arc for a jump shot that zipped through the net. The troops erupted, and a potentially awkward encounter ended in a moment of schoolyard glory, with future commander and troops appearing largely as equals.

And he made a few decisions that sounded good to most ears:

In his first year in office, Obama has set in motion plans to triple the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan; expanded operations against U.S. enemies in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; and, in one early instance of his willingness to use deadly force, authorized Special Forces snipers to kill three Somali pirates holding an American hostage.

Yes, that was good. But the article, more remarkable for what it leaves out than what it found to spin, does not mention, for instance, any of the administration’s foreign policy failures with Iran, the Middle East, China, Russia, or North Korea.

And what of all the intense criticism of his failure to act as a president might reasonably be expected to do in moments of crisis? For instance, when ‘on Christmas Day, a 23-year-old Muslim man from Nigeria allegedly tried to bomb a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit’ he waited three days to condemn what was manifestly an act of terrorism. Ah, the Washington Post can reveal the deep wisdom behind that:

On vacation in Hawaii at the time, Obama took several days before addressing the nation. By waiting, he had hoped to deprive al-Qaeda of a public relations victory of a presidential overreaction.

But why did he delay for months to decide on General McChrystal’s request for more troops in Aghanistan? Well, you see, it’s like this:

He has emerged as a president uncomfortable with the swagger and rhetoric traditionally used to rally troops, favoring an image of public solemnity as he wrestles with the moral consequences of war.

In any case, says the Post, he has been pretty aggressive really, when you come down to it:

Even as Obama has sought to convey an image of a deliberate leader preoccupied with the battle’s human toll, he has used military power at least as aggressively as his Republican predecessor did during the waning years of his administration.

Bravo, say we all. Or not quite all. Aren’t those the very things that his leftist base objects to? Yes, but look, says the Post to them, hasn’t he done or nearly done what you want?

Within days [of being in office], he banned the use of torture in interrogation and ordered the closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Jan. 22, 2010 —

All right, it is ‘a deadline that will be missed’ – but give him credit for his intentions:

The executive orders were part of a review of the Bush-era protocols that framed the “global war on terror,” a term Obama immediately discouraged his advisers from using because he said it overstated al-Qaeda’s strength. To the former constitutional law lecturer, the refinements in language and policy strengthened the moral argument for war.

He needed a moral argument for war because of the demands of ‘civil libertarians’:

Obama, in his new role, disregarded the advice of his military commanders and heeded the demands of civil libertarians after a campaign in which he promised a more transparent government.

The Post does not tell us what happened to that promise. But it has an explanation for why he hardly ever met with his generals between his promise to send more troops to Afghanistan at the beginning of his presidency – the promise the Post has held up for admiration – and his eventual decision made late in the year to send 30,000:

Obama intended a more formal, arm’s-length relationship with his generals than the one favored by George W. Bush, who spoke frequently with his then-commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, even though several officers were above him at the time.

“This is a president who is going to respect the chain of command,” said another senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s thinking. “He feels like it is the most efficient way to receive information and maintain control of the process.”

So that was why. Dismiss any thoughts that he did not seem to be very concerned about Afghanistan, or that he was ‘dithering’; because, you see, he was brooding on it all the time:

During White House deliberations on national security, Obama has kept his own counsel as he has made decisions, according to his aides and senior officials. But this methodical style, during the fall review of the Afghanistan strategy, provoked criticism — mainly from Republicans — that he was dithering.

In any case, don’t you see, he had those critics on the left to worry about who thought he should be brooding instead (which we suspect he was, actually) on the ‘domestic reform agenda’ (read: transformation of America into a socialist state):

Obama’s Democratic Party worried that a novice commander in chief would succumb to the wishes of his generals at the expense of his wide-ranging domestic reform agenda, which was already threatened by the rising costs of war.

How does he square his ideological pacifism, his desire that America give up its nuclear arms, and his acceptance of a Nobel peace prize, with his role as commander in chief while America is engaged in war on two fronts? He tried to explain how in his Nobel lecture. To make a case for a ‘just war’ he had his speech-writers delve into the theological works of Thomas Aquinas and Reinhold Niebuhr. It seems that the Post thinks he brought off the stunning trick of simultaneously assuring the judges that he  really was a man of peace and assuring America that he took his responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seriously. To help one assess whether he did, there’s the speech itself and the passages about it in the Post, which would take up too much space here. What we saw in Oslo was a man struggling, not with his conscience, but with the impossibility of reconciling irreconcileables.

It is extremely bad for poor people to become dependent on hand-outs from government. It is also extremely bad for poor nations to become dependent on hand-outs from rich nations. Haiti is a case in point. It is a country of despair, and foreign aid has helped to make it so.

From the Wall Street Journal, by Bret Stephens:

It’s been a week since Port-au-Prince was destroyed by an earthquake. In the days ahead, Haitians will undergo another trauma as rescue efforts struggle, and often fail, to keep pace with unfolding emergencies. After that—and most disastrously of all—will be the arrival of the soldiers of do-goodness, each with his brilliant plan to save Haitians from themselves.

“Haiti needs a new version of the Marshall Plan—now,” writes Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, by way of complaining that the hundreds of millions currently being pledged are miserly. Economist Jeffrey Sachs proposes to spend between $10 and $15 billion dollars on a five-year development program. “The obvious way for Washington to cover this new funding,” he writes, “is by introducing special taxes on Wall Street bonuses.” In a New York Times op-ed, former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush profess to want to help Haiti “become its best.” Some job they did of that when they were actually in office.

Kindness comes to Haiti, but too much kindness can kill.

All this works to salve the consciences of people whose dimly benign intention is to “do something.” It’s a potential bonanza for the misery professionals of aid agencies and NGOs, never mind that their livelihoods depend on the very poverty whose end they claim to seek…

For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.

How do I know this? It helps to read a 2006 report from the National Academy of Public Administration, usefully titled “Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed.” The report summarizes a mass of documents from various aid agencies describing their lengthy records of non-accomplishment in the country.

Here, for example, is the World Bank—now about to throw another $100 million at Haiti—on what it achieved in the country between 1986 and 2002: “The outcome of World Bank assistance programs is rated unsatisfactory (if not highly so), the institutional development impact, negligible, and the sustainability of the few benefits that have accrued, unlikely.”

Why was that? The Bank noted that “Haiti has dysfunctional budgetary, financial or procurement systems, making financial and aid management impossible.” It observed that “the government did not exhibit ownership by taking the initiative for formulating and implementing [its] assistance program.” Tellingly, it also acknowledged the “total mismatch between levels of foreign aid and government capacity to absorb it,” another way of saying that the more foreign donors spent on Haiti, the more the funds went astray.

But this still fails to get at the real problem of aid to Haiti, which has less to do with Haiti than it does with the effects of aid itself. “The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape,” James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, told Der Spiegel in 2005. “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

Take something as seemingly straightforward as food aid. “At some point,” Mr. Shikwati explains, “this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the U.N.’s World Food Program.” …

A better approach recognizes the real humanity of Haitians by treating them—once the immediate and essential tasks of rescue are over—as people capable of making responsible choices. Haiti has some of the weakest property protections in the world, as well as some of the most burdensome business regulations. In 2007, it received 10 times as much in aid ($701 million) as it did in foreign investment.

Reversing those figures is a task for Haitians alone, which the outside world can help by desisting from trying to kill them with kindness. Anything short of that and the hell that has now been visited on this sad country will come to seem like merely its first circle.

And from Slate, by Anne Applebaum :

Outside expertise will be unacceptable to many Haitians, who will see it as a colonial imposition, unwarranted interference in local affairs, cultural imperialism. Armed U.S. Marines may wind up in fire fights with .. violent gangs. Local elites—those who remain—may plot to swindle the aid missions out of their food and money.

I hope I am wrong. I am sure there are optimists out there, people who think this is Haiti’s chance to reconstruct itself, literally and figuratively, to rebuild government institutions, to attract donors and investment. Bill Clinton is such an optimist, and I am very, very glad that he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Haiti. How fortunate, at this moment, that the country has such powerful friends. Yet I also know that a successful recovery and reconstruction will require not just friends, not just money, and not just optimism, but a profound cultural and political change, the kind of change that normally takes decades. And Haiti does not have decades, it has days—maybe hours—before fresh disasters strike.

Yes, unlike the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ that Hillary Clinton invented, such a thing really does exist.

As we have been on the topic of Greenpeace, we’ll start with them. They’re a prominent player in the plot. At its website, under ‘Training’, it has this:

Do we have a reading list?

To encourage students to become more analytical and strategic campaigners, students will read books and articles on topics including campaign strategy, strategic messaging, the theory of organizing, and issue-specific reports and documents. Students are expected to complete daily reading assignments and fully participate in regular book club discussions. Past readings have included:

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky, 1971.

So Saul Alinsky – Hillary Clinton’s Marxist mentor and an inspiration to Barack Obama – is an acknowledged Greenpeace teacher. Here is his prescription for change:

An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.

And:

You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

What the international Left has, and is doing what it can with, is the ‘scientific’ claim that industrial activity is causing the planet to overheat.

It ‘s a Chicken Little kind of panic, yet multitudes have been persuaded to believe it. Huge commercial enterprises have been launched by it. Governmental programs have been established to deal with it.

How do we know that the Chicken Little sponsors are using this issue  – some credulously , some cynically – to achieve their collectivist ends?

It is no secret. The Club of Rome (for instance), a leftist conspiracy if ever there was one, openly aimed for world socialist government, and admitted in a 1974 publication titled Mankind at the Turning Point, that they intended to use global warming as a grand pretext to achieve their aim.

The tactic is this. A problem has to be chosen that can be presented as so urgent that it obviously must take priority over other considerations. It has to be something so big, so overwhelmingly dangerous, that ‘the masses’ will be prepared to make huge sacrificies to save themselves. It has to be an Uberthreat (to venture a bilingual coinage). Nothing less than the survival of the planet as a life-sustaining environment will do. Rather than see all life on earth being snuffed out, they – the masses –  will accept poorer lives, more constricted lives, even totally unfree lives, anything rather than extinction. They must be made to feel confused, uncertain, at a loss. Then they will voluntarily turn to those who offer solutions. They will accept being told what to do, and they will do it.

And there is more. If enough people can be made to believe that the calamity looming up has been caused by themselves, they will be desperate not only for a cure but for absolution and redemption from guilt. The panic-rousers rub in the guilt by calling the crisis ‘Manmade Global Warming’. Panic and guilt and a mood for groveling obedience among the masses world-wide! What a gift to the would-be Controllers, the World Community Organizers! They, the panic-rousers, are ready with their solution, their golden panacea: centralized control of all human activity – World Government.

They came damn near to achieving it too at Copenhagen in December 2009.

Thanks to one of the great heroes of history, one who can truly to be said to have saved mankind, but whose name is not yet known, who simply published the email evidence of the conspiracy and the fraud, the plot failed.

(Now we await diagnoses of paranoia from those innocent humanitarians of the Left.)

An angry commenter on our post below, The evil that Greenpeace does, raises two points in criticism of our and Paul Driessen’s accusations.

First, he declares that Greenpeace gets no government money. We are trying to find out if this is true. In the article we quote, Paul Driessen states that Greenpeace and other eco-activist organizations receive grants through Obama’s Climate Czar, Carol Browner. We have asked him for his source, and we will post what we learn if we get an answer.

Next the commenter defends Greenpeace’s attempts to embargo genetically modified grains by pointing to a recent study showing that certain modified seeds produced by Monsanto cause organ failure. There is such a study, and there is controversy over its conclusions.

Whatever the truth of these contentions turns out to be cannot modify our opinion that Greenpeace  is responsible for much suffering and death in the Third World, for instance by its all too successful opposition to the use of DDT which could protect millions from the killing disease of malaria.

From an article in Discover, January 13, 2010:

Few things bring out the hyperbole like genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and that was true again with a study making the rounds yesterday and today.

In the International Journal of Biological Studies, a team examined three genetically modified corn varieties created by Monsanto. The study’s authors say they see evidence of possible toxicity to the kidney and liver, “possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn.” However, the findings became over-hyped headlines like the Huffington Post’s “Monsanto GMO Corn Linked to Organ Failure, Study Reveals.”

That’s a pretty big leap from the not entirely convincing finding of a potentially questionable study. What actually happened is that the research team, led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, re-analyzed data from tests that Monsanto scientists themselves conducted on rats eating these three varieties of corn—data that, to be fair, the team had to scratch and claw and sue to get their hands on. In their statistical analysis, Séralini’s team says that Monsanto interpreted its own data incorrectly, and that its new analysis shows potential for toxicity.

But the scientists themselves give significant caveats that make such bold headlines a bit of a reach: “Clearly, the statistically significant effects observed here for all three GM maize varieties investigated are signs of toxicity rather than proofs of toxicity”—that is, the evidence isn’t rock solid, and not enough to warrant a bunch of alarmist headlines. The researchers argue that more research is necessary to settle the question either way: “In conclusion, our data presented here strongly recommend that additional long-term (up to 2 years) animal feeding studies be performed in at least three species, preferably also multi-generational, to provide true scientifically valid data on the acute and chronic toxic effects of GM crops, feed and foods.”

In addition, there are a couple issues that make the study itself seem a little fishy:

1. Funding. “Greenpeace contributed to the start of the investigations by funding first statistical analyses in 2006, the results were then processed further and evaluated independently by the authors,” the scientists write. Certainly one can’t oppose a huge corporation like Monsanto without funding, but drawing those funds from a political lightning rod like Greenpeace can paint conclusions in a bad light …

2. The journal: The International Journal of Biological Sciences is somewhat obscure, with an “unofficial”–that is, self-assigned–impact factor of 3.24. “In other words, it has not been assessed for impact or quality,” Ronald says. Again, that doesn’t mean Séralini’s team is wrong, but it suggests that jumping to conclusions would be unwise.

The actual data analysis of the paper has started an in-depth back-and-forth on the the statistical analysis. We’ll continue following this story to see how the analysis shakes out.

In our post Pacifists for jihad (January 13, 2010), we considered what might motivate the Code Pink women, suggesting ignorance, stupidity, and malice. On further thought, we would put hate at the top of the list.

Recently some Code Pink members tried to enter Gaza through Egypt. An Israeli woman journalist, Amira Hass, wrote a sympathetic account of the adventure which did not go quite according to plan.

(A note of passing interest: Hass is the German word for hate.)

Here’s Caroline Glick:

Last month, 1,300 pro-Palestinian activists from the US and Europe came to the region in the name of peace and social justice to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. Led by the self-declared feminist, antiwar group Code Pink, the demonstrators’ plan was to enter Gaza from the Egyptian border at Rafah and deliver “humanitarian aid” to the Hamas terrorist organization.

But it was not to be. Led by Code Pink founder and California Democratic fund-raiser Jodie Evans, the demonstrators were not welcomed by Egyptian authorities. Many were surrounded by riot police and barbed wire as they demonstrated outside the US and French embassies and the UN Development Program’s headquarters. Others were barred from leaving their hotels.

Those who managed to escape their hotels and the bullpens outside the embassies were barred from staging night protests in solidarity with Hamas on the Nile. In the end, as the militant Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Amira Hass chronicled in Haaretz last week, all but 100 of them were barred from travelling to Gaza. …

[Bernadine] Dohrn, the woman who has called for a “revolutionary war” to destroy the US, felt that the Egyptian authorities’ behavior was nothing but an unfortunate diversion from their mission…

Unfortunately for the lucky 100 who were permitted to enter Hamastan, the diversions didn’t end at the Egyptians border. Hamas immediately placed them under siege. The Palestinian champions had planned to enjoy home hospitality from friends in Gaza. But once there they were prohibited from leaving the Hamas-owned Commodore Hotel and from having any contact with local Gazans without a Hamas escort.

Rather than being permitted to judge the situation in Gaza for themselves, they were carted onto Hamas buses and taken on “devastation tours” of what their Hamas tour guides claimed was damage caused by the IDF during Operation Cast Lead. …

But they didn’t really mind. Reacting to her effective imprisonment in the Hamas-owned hotel, one of the demonstrators, an American woman named Poya Pakzad*, cooed on her blog that the Commodore Hotel was “the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at, in my life.”

Pakzad did complain, however, about what she acknowledged was the “farce” devastation tour she was taken on. She claimed that her Hamas guides were ignorant. In her studied view, they understated the number of Palestinians rendered homeless by the IDF counterterror offensive last year by some 60 percent…

Hass’s participation in the pro-Hamas propaganda trip is a bit surprising. In November 2008, she was forced to flee from Gaza to Israel after Hamas threatened to kill her. At the time, Hass appealed to the Israeli military – which she has spent the better part of her career bashing – and asked to be allowed to enter Israel from Gaza, after sailing illegally to Gaza from Cyprus on a ferry chartered by the pro-Hamas Free Gaza outfit.

Hass’s behavior is actually more revealing than surprising. The truth is that Hass and her fellow demonstrators were willing to be used as media props by Hamas precisely because it isn’t the Palestinians’ welfare that concerns them. If they cared about the Palestinians they would be demonstrating against Hamas, which prohibited local women from participating in their march to the Israeli border, and which barred non-Hamas members from speaking with them. It would offend their sensitivities that Hamas goons beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe in Islamic potato sacks. It would bother them that Hamas executes its political opponents by among other things throwing them off the roofs of apartment buildings.

The demonstrators did not come to Gaza to demonstrate their support for the Palestinians, but rather their hatred for Israel and for their own Western governments that refuse to join Hamas in its war against Israel. As one of the organizers told Hass as she sat corralled by Egyptian riot police … “In our presence here, we are saying that we are not casting the blame on Egypt. The responsibility for the shameless and obscene Israeli siege on Gaza rests squarely with our own countries.”

By happily collaborating with Hamas in its propaganda extravaganza, these demonstrators demonstrated that the rights of Palestinians are not their concern. Their concern is waging war against their own societies and against Israel. They are more than happy to have their pictures taken with the likes of Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh…

The Free Gaza movement members are but a chip off the old psychopathic block of nearly a century of far-left Western activists whose hatred for their own countries motivated them to hide the crimes of mass murderers from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh to Daniel Ortega and Saddam Hussein…

These fanatics are usually dismissed as fringe elements. But the truth is that … the distance between these true believers and the centers of state power has not been very great…

Code Pink … is welcome at the Obama White House. Its leader Evans was an official fund-raiser for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Evans visited the White House after travelling to Gaza last June. While there she met with Hamas leaders who gave her a letter for Obama. Evans met Obama himself at a donor dinner in San Francisco last October where, while standing in front of cameras, she gave him documents she received in Afghanistan, where she met with Taliban officials.

Then, too, among the board members of the Free Gaza movement is former US senator James Abourezk. Abourezk is reputedly close to Obama and according to knowledgeable sources has been a key figure in shaping Obama’s policy towards Israel… Dohrn and her husband [William] Ayres are also friendly with the president of the United States. Dohrn and Ayres have been Obama’s political patrons since he launched his first campaign for the Illinois state Senate in 1996. In White House visitors’ logs, Ayres is listed as having twice visited the building since Obama’s inauguration…

*We were in error quoting that Poya Pakzad is an American woman. Poya Pakzad is a Danish man. He has drawn our attention to the mistake in a comment. Our apologies to him.  1/19/2010

Speaking of self-righteous busybodies – which we were below, see On our masters and commanders – one of the most egregious is Greenpeace. Wielding  amazing power to influence political decisions internationally, these bigoted prigs cause millions of the world’s poorest to die by preventing them from having the means to save themselves. Their unproven and in any case imbecilic excuse is that the marvelous saving products of science and technology are harmful to Nature.

It could be argued – and we do – that they are committing mass-murder by moral arrogance.

Who makes it possible for them to work their evil?

For one, the Obama administration.

Paul Driessen writes at Townhall:

Climate-Czar Carol Browner and other federal agency heads continue to fork over large sums of taxpayer money to Greenpeace and similar eco-activists, to subsidize their anti-corporate, global warming, “sustainable” energy and regulatory thumbscrew campaigns… [Greenpeace’s] truly odious ethical violations, however, involve activities that directly damage the livelihoods and lives of innocent people, particularly in impoverished countries.

Greenpeace justifies its anti-energy ideologies by claiming they are preserving rivers, avoiding dangerous radiation and preventing “runaway” global warming… Even in the midst of a global cooling period and widening Climategate scandal, Greenpeace is still clinging to its tired fabrications and storylines…

In Britain, France and elsewhere, Greenpeace vandals have destroyed bio-engineered crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research to develop food plants that require fewer pesticides, are more nutritious, reduce dangerous mold toxins, withstand floods and droughts, and increase crop yields. The people who would benefit most from this research are the poorest, most malnourished on Earth. They could improve their lives, simply by planting different, better corn, cotton or soybean seeds..

In fact, Bt corn [where it has been used despite Greenpeace’s opposition] has enabled farmers [eg in South Africa] … to cut pesticide use and expenses by 75%, triple their profits, save 35-49 days per season working in fields, and save enough to buy a refrigerator or even a new house. And yet rich-country Greenpeace activists oppose the technology.

Greenpeace campaigns against insecticides and insect-repelling DDT are even more lethal. These chemicals could prevent malaria, which kills a million people annually and leaves millions more brain-damaged…

But Greenpeace claims “some researchers think” DDT “could be inhibiting lactation because of its estrogen-like effects and may be contributing to lactation failure throughout the world.” No peer-reviewed medical studies back up these claims, and lactation problems are definitely associated with the malaria and malnutrition that would be reduced by technologies the Warriors oppose.

Worldwide, 1.5 billion people still don’t have electricity for lights, refrigerators, stoves, schools, shops, hospitals and factories that would bring health, opportunity and prosperity. Yet Greenpeace continues to battle hydrocarbon, hydroelectric and nuclear power, telling people they should be content with solar panels or wind turbines that provide intermittent, insufficient energy – and guarantee sustained poverty.

It was Paul Driessen’s Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) that last December, during the farcical UN climate conference in Copenhagen, ‘unfurled a “Propaganda Warrior” banner from the rails of the Rainbow Warrior ship, and a “Ship of Lies” banner from Greenpeace’s other vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, as they lay anchored in Copenhagen harbor’.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a

creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no

boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed… it would

simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

– Stephen Hawking

… coming down the road at us? It’s a dangerous oxymoron.

Its drover-in-chief is the president of the United States.

It’s name is Forced Voluntarism.

It’s descending on everyone in America. Right now, some high school students are being told that in order to graduate they must put in a certain number of hours of ‘voluntary’ work.

But while it may be virtuous to give freely of your labor / to help  a struggling neighbor, it is illegal for anyone to be compelled to do so.

The Thirteenth Amendment says so:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Never one to be deterred by the Constitution, Obama has a plan to enslave us all.

How?  Apparently by means of an army of our fellow citizens.

The civilian national security force was already in place long before last July’s public proposal. …

The General of this national security force is not out in the field in Iraq or Afghanistan, but running the troops from the White House. Meet First Lady Michelle Obama, General of Public Allies New Leadership for New Times.

Public Allies, modeled after Saul Alinsky’s “Peoples Organizations”, operating under General Michelle Obama, has an alleged operating budget of more than $75-million a year, and an impressive list of donors… Naturally, it also receives grants from federal, state and municipal sources.

One third of Public Allies’ annual budget comes from AmeriCorps. To get an idea of this combo’s people power: “By early April, Obama will sign landmark legislation expanding AmeriCorps from 75,000 participants to 250,000 over the next few years.” (NewsWeek).

According to a Fact Sheet About Public Allies, Obama was a member of the founding advisory board of the non-profit organization. Michelle was the founding Executive Director of Public Allies Chicago from Spring, 1993 until Fall 1996 (italics CFP’s). She served on Public Allies national board of directors from 1997 until 2001. …

That information comes from Judi McCleod at Canada Free Press.  So does the following. The two articles we quote from may be found here and here.

It’s 2010 and you are already redefined in a new word. You are now, as far your political masters are concerned, a “communitarian”. …

In the Marxist lexicon you will never hear the pseudonym for the name communitarian: serf.

Americans being pushed into One World Government by their own president will recognize communitarianism in AmeriCorps, more correctly defined as forced voluntarism. …

Howard Dean declares that the debate between Capitalism and Socialism is over and explains that “We are going to have both”. Dean unabashedly told a roomful of people in an April 2009 video of a talk he gave in Paris that the synthesis between capitalism and socialism is called “communitarism”.

This is what communitarism disciple former U.S. President Bill Clinton told crowds in two eastern Canadian provinces last year. There has to be more public involvement in solving the world’s problems.

“Clinton spoke first on Thursday in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, and coined his own term—communitarianism—for personal involvement, the city’s Telegram newspaper reported.” (United Press International, May 29, 2009).

“All of us need to think of our citizenship in terms of what we can do in our communities and halfway around the world,” he said. “The truth is, cynicism and pessimism is an excuse to do nothing.” …

No matter how they spin it, communitarism is not based on altruism. It is social activism with a new name and its message is being spread world wide.

Communitarianism is Communism under another name. It is totalitarianism under another name.

Will the Thirteenth Amendment protect Americans from it?