An informal blogpost here by Sam Westrop, Director of IMED, about the challenges facing the discussion of Israel on campuses in the UK.

This turn of events is not the aim of StandforPeace. Instead, we are an unashamedly pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian group – that is, we encourage both Jewish and Palestinian self-determination. The emotional hatred perpetrated by groups such as Action Palestine, PSC and Viva Palestina prevents any progress or hope. Their tactics are devoid of the progressive, liberal and veritably Jewish sense of optimism and forward thinking. They appear more interested in preventing Jewish self-determination than actually ever encouraging Palestinian self-determination. The negation or rationality also prevents identifying where moral culpability lies – show a picture of a dead baby, and it is the product of Israel’s cruel and wanton agenda to genocidally murder; it is never the fault of Hamas firing rockets or planting IEDs in the baby’s nursery.

It is a specious tactic to describe ‘activists’ or groups such as Action Palestine as ‘pro-Palestinian’, because they are not; they are almost solely anti-Israeli, and show little drive for peace.

…

Much like the flotilla activists, the white, middle-class, pro-Hamas PSC persons were also armed; in this case, with a McCarthy-esque biography of me, poorly researched claims from the Internet. There were wild accusations that I took money from the far right, I had a paid agenda to slander ‘pro-Palestinian’ activists, I was in cahoots with the Ayn Rand Institute. Only three days before, several National Front and BNP members had accused me of similar crimes, switching far-right for far-left. Potato, potahto; tomato, tomahto – let’s call the whole thing off.

…

Accusations of racism are often the refuge of the weird and the virulent ideologues. Who can forget Ahmadinejad and Mugabe leading the speeches at the UN’s anti-racism conference? – an event that appeared to be solely dedicated to hatred of Israel, an event led by two genocidal dictators – the former the patron and supporter of most of the terror and suffering in the Middle East.

Described by some fellow Amnesty activists as ‘quiet and unfriendly’, Fraser is not a manifest lunatic like Jamie ‘Stan’ Stanley, but he is someone who is slightly more sinister. Slightly more intelligent than Stanley, Fraser has the nihilist fascinations with suffering and vulgarity. He proudly boasts that his first ‘book’ was banned under obscenity laws.

Read more!

The Oil Pollution Act 1990 makes the President wholly responsible for cleaning up an oil spill.

Jim Campbell at Canada Free Press tells us more about what the law says:

Amended Section 311 of the federal Clean Water Act. Section 311 now provides in part that:

(A) If a discharge, or a substantial threat of a discharge, of oil or a hazardous substance from a vessel, offshore facility, or onshore facility is of such a size or character as to be a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United States (including but not limited to fish, shellfish, wildlife, other natural resources, and the public and private beaches and shorelines of the United States), the President shall direct all Federal, State, and private actions to remove the discharge or to mitigate or prevent the threat of the discharge.

(B) In carrying out this paragraph, the President may, without regard to any other provision of law governing contracting procedures or employment of personnel by the Federal Government–

(i) remove or arrange for the removal of the discharge, or mitigate or prevent the substantial threat of the discharge; and

(ii) remove and, if necessary, destroy a vessel discharging, or threatening to discharge, by whatever means are available.

For a picture of the sheer panic now gripping the White House  –  comic  in contrast to the appallingly serious consequences of the oil spill itself – read this account in the Washington Post. Of course that newspaper doesn’t intend its report to be funny. It intends to show how hard the administration is trying to cope with the crisis, and suggest that it’s really tough on the poor [actually plain incompetent and managerially inexperienced] president. But it’s irresistibly Keystone Kops laughable all the same.

Examples:

The administration is now scrambling to reclaim control, the appearance and the reality of it, over a situation that defies both.

It has been a hasty and somewhat chaotic mobilization of a wide array of disparate government resources — including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the military …

The new normal at the Obama White House has required that a whole new schedule be laid on top of the old one. There is a daily oil-spill conference call for Cabinet officers, one for their deputies, yet another with the governors of affected states, and sometimes as many as three briefings a day that include the president himself. …

Though every day is jammed with interagency conference calls and a river of e-mails in between, some officials complain that at times they still feel like they are talking past each other. …

Signals get crossed. On Wednesday, the Minerals Management Service approved two shallow-water drilling permits, only to reverse both the next day, along with those for three other shallow-water operations. Some officials in the Gulf Coast region have complained that they can’t figure out what the administration’s drilling policy really is these days. …

In his radio address Saturday, Obama enumerated the scope of his endeavor to contain the damage, including 17,500 National Guard troops; 20,000 personnel protecting the waters and coasts; 1,900 vessels; 4.3 million feet of boom.

Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll …

The president has pressured other oil companies to step up… [expecting] the entire petroleum industry to dedicate its engineering talent to fixing the spill and preventing others. …

But Obama and his team are still feeling their way, and it is not at all clear what this vast marshaling of resources will accomplish. …

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has launched criminal and civil investigations …

The administration is sending as its emissaries officials who have ties to the region ..

White House officials complain, with some justification, that they are caught between contradictory narratives about their handling of the crisis: that the president is not engaged enough in the details of the response, or that he is getting bogged down in them; that he should spend more time in the gulf making common cause with its residents, or that his repeated trips down there are merely publicity stunts.

And there remains the question of whether, for all its efforts, the administration can really gain control, or even the illusion of it. …

Ashley Mote, Member of the European Parliament 2004-2009, writes that the European Union turned a blind eye to illegal sales of uranium to Iran (and even possibly paid for them), and so surreptitiously helped the Iranian regime to arm itself with nuclear weapons. The uranium, he says, was shipped from the former Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Joseph Conrad set his famous story of savagery and cannibalism, Heart of Darkness.

Note: Neither the Democratic Republic of the Congo nor the European Union is a democracy.

Two news items in the media over the last day or so oblige me to break silence on Iran’s acquisition of weapons-grade uranium. They have had it for several years.

Today the Daily Express reports that Iran has “two tons of uranium” which “would be enough for two nuclear warheads”. Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a report headlined “Iran on the brink of a nuclear bomb.”

Comments on the web this morning are suggesting both stories are exaggerations at least, and fabrications at worst.

I profoundly disagree.

While I was in Brussels between 2004 and 2009 I and others established beyond doubt, with the assistance of retired diplomats from the former Belgian Congo, that weapons-grade uranium was being shipped from the former Belgian Congo direct to Iran, despite a world-wide ban on such traffic.

The Belgian EU Commissioner Louis Michel, supposedly responsible for the EU’s humanitarian aid to the third world from 2003 to 2009, was – at the time – directly related to one of the directors of the company in the Congo making the shipments.

He refused to answer any questions on his links, or to account for the EU funds being sent to the Congo.

Worse, despite the considerable evidence I and others presented to OLAF (the EU’s supposedly ‘independent’ fraud investigation organisation) they refused to look into the matter. The director-general, a former German judge called Bruner, told me in committee that “we do not snoop on our friends”. …

Personally I have not the slightest doubt Iran is determined to have its own atomic bomb and will stop at nothing to get it. What the former diplomats told and showed me let me in no doubt whatsoever. I saw, and still have copies of, bills of lading and other export documents. I am also of the firm opinion that the EU has (perhaps unwittingly, but I doubt it) helped finance Iran’s acquisition of weapons-grade uranium over several years.

If you ask me why key people inside the EU’s secretive supreme soviet might countenance such dangerously de-stabilising mischief, I need only point you towards the almost pathological hatred of the USA to be found amongst almost all its members.

Pat Condell eloquently denounces the mosque to be built at Ground Zero as the insult it is to the victims of 9/11, and to civilization.

Obama is acting the role of POTUS, not  filling it. He reads from a script. He does not understand the responsibilities of his position.

That’s the opinion of several commentators.

Carol Peracchio writes at the American Thinker:

So far, Obama’s approach to being president has appeared to be: 1. Make a speech outlining a policy (health care, stimulus). 2. Hand everything to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. 3. When the negative public reaction reaches critical mass, threatening passage of the legislation, spend the last two days before the vote twisting arms and making offers to Democrats. 4. Pass the legislation on a strictly party-line vote. 5. Make another speech taking full credit for whatever ended up passing.

Unless reading a teleprompter can be considered work, it’s obvious that anything that can be considered an achievement of this presidency is due to Pelosi and Reid, with honorable mention in the arm-twisting category to Rahm Emmanuel. And in the rare instance where a goal of the president does not involve Congress (think the Chicago Olympics), Obama’s “read a speech” approach to hard work is shown to be an utter failure. If there is even a tiny glimmer of light in the Gulf oil spill disaster, it’s that the Obama con that he actually is working and involved has been exposed …

A fascinating illustration of Obama’s work ethic can be seen in this article by Jack Cashill, who has done exhaustive research on the dubious authorship of Barack Obama’s autobiography. Apparently a “hopelessly blocked” Obama gave all his notes to his friend Bill Ayers, who “helped” produce a manuscript. Exchange Nancy Pelosi for Bill Ayers, and we see that Obama’s modus operandi toward actual work has not changed. …

President Obama played the Big Con and became president by perfecting the art of appearing cool, calm, intellectual, and competent. Unfortunately, this seems to be the extent of his repertoire of emotions… No matter the crisis, the president reads his lines the exact same way: cool, calm, detached. He is truly one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen. It’s too bad there isn’t a director around who can tell our (Not So) Great Pretender, “I’m afraid you’re just not what we’re looking for.”

From Newsmax, by Theodore Kettle:

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, whose tireless leadership in the days and weeks after 9/11 made him a national hero, has accused President Obama of doing everything wrong in his handling of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It couldn’t be worse,” Guiliani said Wednesday when asked by Fox News’ Sean Hannity to rate Obama’s performance. “I mean, this would be an example, if you’re taught ‘Leadership 101,’ of exactly what not to do: minimize it at first; two days after or three days after it happened, go on vacation. … He’s been on vacation more often than he has, by far, been to Louisiana or Mississippi, or any of the places affected,” Giuliani added. …

According to Giuliani, the president’s nonchalance delivers a “signal right into the entire bureaucracy, that they’re also very lackadaisical about it. But one of the things you understand as a leader is: your actions are going to energize your bureaucracy to do the best it can.”

The ex-NYC mayor charged that Obama exhibited a similar lack of leadership in the case of the Christmas Day botched airliner bombing last year, with a negative ripple effect as the result.

“He did the same thing on the Christmas Day bombing,” Giuliani told Hannity. “He stays on vacation for 11 days. So the other guys go on vacation.” That’s a clear reference to National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter not cutting short a ski trip after the December 25 near-destruction of a Detroit-bound passenger jet. … The reality is that the administration has made every mistake it could possibly make, right down to this criminal investigation of BP. … Are you gonna distract them from the job of what they’re supposed to be doing? … If we’ve got a bunch of criminals doing it, why are we allowing them to do it?” Giuliani wondered.

From the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell:

Pretending that our economy can survive without a commitment to safe oil operations is naïve at best. It is binary: If we don’t drill, we import. And if we don’t open drilling to easier sources such as onshore deposits and shale, we limit ourselves to riskier exploration a mile below the ocean floor. Despite the president’s assertions at his press conference earlier this week, billions of barrels of “easily accessible” oil have been turned into “impossible to access” oil by federal regulations and moratoria – including the President’s own actions – that block any access.

What the President should do is examine the red tape that may have contributed to the failure to contain the environmental disaster. Were there missed opportunities to burn off more of the leaking oil because of overblown air pollution standards? What were the holdups in the use of dispersants? Did federal permitting delays stop Louisiana from creating the artificial barriers it needed? The answers to these questions appear to be yes, and that responsibility lies with the President. He and his team should make it top priority to waive any regulatory barriers that continue to slow cleanup and recovery efforts. …

The Deepwater Horizon platform sat on federal waters and was under federal jurisdiction. It is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that the leased space is not a threat to public health or safety. And it is the responsibility of the government to ensure the clean up efforts in the Gulf are appropriately managed. …

Coordinating the cleanup is equally imperative … The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 authorizes the president to oversee the cleanup efforts of the responsible parties, and offshore this duty falls to the U.S. Coast Guard. Yet, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had to lobby the White House for weeks to get engaged on this front. …

The Obama administration’s resort to criminal investigation and possible prosecution of BP is not only premature, it is predictable. In the wake of accusations that Obama has failed to take decisive action, his administration is taking the path of “nothing shows that you are ‘doing something’ like prosecuting someone.”

It is possible that criminal wrongdoing occurred, but the current approach—one that all but announces that criminal charges will be brought and then seeks to identify the crime and who will be designated as criminal—undermines the criminal justice system and Americans’ respect for the law. …

President Obama instinctively leans toward an activist government except when every so often he hesitates. Ironically, it is these moments that tend to be the precise times when the federal government’s role is most justified, whether that be border security, the war on terror, ceding sovereignty to multilateral organizations, or now in the Gulf. The federal government has a role in the Gulf, and it’s time for the president to articulate it to the American people.

We don’t disagree that Obama’s an incompetent windbag and a bad actor, but he has real power and is using it to impose his collectivist ideals on America, immensely harming the country he was so disastrously elected to lead.

Obama and his National Security appointees, Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, deny that Islam is waging jihad on America and the whole of the non-Muslim world. But – block their ears and sing out “la-la-la” as they might – they cannot alter the truth that the jihad is being waged, or fail to hear authoritative voices saying that it is. Obama may want to deny it because he has deep sympathy with Islam, and because he‘s a Left radical by upbringing, training, and conviction. Islam and the Left are allies against the Western ideal of individual freedom. They resemble each other in that they’re both collectivist ideologies. This means they can strive together to destroy freedom, but the one is egalitarian, the other non-egalitarian; the one fosters diversity, the other demands uniformity; the one preaches tolerance, the other is harshly intolerant. Eventually, if they were to win their war against freedom, they would surely turn on each other with intense hatred and fury. If Obama experienced such a conflict within himself, it’s hard to imagine how he’d resolve it.

The alliance between Islam and the Left is the theme of a new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, by Andrew McCarthy, the former Assistant United States Attorney who successfully prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He writes about it at PowerLine. Here’s part of what he says:

What is surprising, and dismaying, is that the book’s message should come as news to anyone, as if there were [any] real question about whether such a grand jihad exists. Though our opinion elites and their media allies remain desperate to suppress the story, the proof of an Islamist conspiracy to destroy the West is stark and undeniable, and the instances of Islamists being aided and abetted by Leftists are too numerous for serious people to deny the alliance – not merger but alliance – between the two.

As demonstrated at the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trials in Texas, internal Muslim Brotherhood memoranda are unabashed in describing Islamists as engaged in a “civilizational” war against the West. In America, the Brothers attest that theirs is a “grand jihad” to destroy the United States – mainly from within, mainly by “sabotage.”

We don’t like the terms “civilizational war” and “Islamists”. The first because we think the war is not between two civilizations but between their barbarism and our civilization; and the second for reasons that McCarthy himself is well aware of:

I use the term Islamist advisedly. In the book’s second chapter, I’ve tried to take on the excruciating question of whether the existential challenge we face is Islam itself. …

The problem is that those who say Islam is the problem have the better case. I was first struck by this sad fact during our terrorism trial in 1995, when I had to get ready to cross-examine the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman. … I thought that if what we were saying as a government were true – if these terrorists were lying about Islam and perverting its doctrine in order to justify mass-murder attacks – then surely I should be able to locate three or four places where the Blind Sheikh had misstated the Koran and the other species of Muslim scripture. I searched high and low, but there were none. …

The point is that where the Blind Sheikh cited scripture, he did it quite accurately. … He is a renowned doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Egypt – the seat of Sunni learning and one of the oldest and most respected academic institutions in the world. His construction of Islam, however frightening, was literal and cogent.

Islam is not a religion of peace and Islamic doctrine is not moderate. …

It is supremacist, totalitarian, and violent… drawn faithfully and logically from scripture – which is why it is endorsed by so many influential clerics and shariah authorities who have spent their lives in Islamic study. …

The thrust of my book is that we need to come to terms with this in order to defend ourselves. There is a vibrant debate in the Muslim world about terrorism. We need to understand, though, that it is a debate about methodology. Islamist terrorists and other Islamists are in harmony about the endgame: they would like to see shariah installed and the West Islamicized. That a person is not willing to mass-murder non-Muslims in order to accelerate that process does not make him a moderate. …

Since the book was published last week, I’ve been asked questions like: “So, are you saying that President Obama wants to implement sharia?” and ” Isn’t it true that if Islamists came to power, the Left would have a lot to fear?” Again, the alliance between Islamists and Leftists … is an alliance, not a merger. Leftists and Islamists have worked together numerous times in history … That they work together is not a hypothesis on my part; this partnership exists, period. And why it exists is simply explained, if we are willing to look at the facts.

While they differ on a number of significant issues, Islamists and Leftists are in harmony on many parts of the big picture. Islamism and today’s Leftism (which, as I note in the book, David Horowitz aptly calls “neocommunism”) are both authoritarian ideologies: they favor a muscular central government, virulently reject capitalism, and are totalitarian in the sense that they want to dictate all aspects human life. They both see the individual as existing to serve the greater community (the state or the umma). Saliently, they have a common enemy: Western culture, American constitutional republicanism, and their foundation, individual liberty.

When I argue that Islamists and Leftists are working together to sabotage America, this is what I am talking about. Historically, when Islamists and Leftists collaborate against a common enemy (e.g., the Shah in Iran, the monarchy in Egypt), these marriages of convenience break apart when the common enemy has been eliminated. We are a long way from that point in America – and, hopefully, we never reach it. We must expect, though, that Islamists and Leftists will continue their alliance as long as the Western way of life remains an obstacle to their respective utopias.

We have written quite often about the myth of man-made global warming. Now we can confidently declare that the myth is fading.

The collectivists who tried to frighten us into accepting poorer lives and “world governance” in order to “save the planet”, are disappointed. They’ll have to search for some other excuse to control us, and they’ll find one of course.

To the general public, the most persuasive argument against believing the myth is probably the economic crisis, the scientific arguments on both sides being hard for the non-scientist to follow.

Whatever the reason, the folks are no longer buying the scare.

Summing up the change in the climate of opinion on climate change, Cal Thomas writes at Townhall:

The myth of “global warming,” or climate change … is sinking with greater force than melting icebergs, if they were melting, which many believe they are not.

After spending years promoting “global warming,” the media are beginning to turn in the face of growing evidence that they have been wrong. The London Times recently reported: “Britain’s premier scientific institution [The Royal Society] is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.” …

In Canada, the polar bear — which has been used by global warming promoters to put a cuddly face on the issue — is in danger of not being endangered any longer. CBC News reported that the polar bear’s designation as a “species of special concern” has been suspended …

The New York Times recently lamented “global warmism’s loss of credibility” in a story about hundreds of “environmental activists who met to ponder this question: “if the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?” The “consensus” never was a consensus. Most of us may not have gotten an “A” in science, but we can sense when we are being bamboozled. …

Meteorologists, like Joe D’Aleo of The Weather Channel, are publicly distancing themselves from the false doctrine of global warming. D’Aleo says, “We’ll have La Nina conditions before the summer is over, and it will intensify further through the fall and winter. Thus we’ll have cooler temperatures for the next couple of years.”

Remember the scare ignited in 2007 by supposed melting Arctic ice caps? The Star Canada says a new analysis shows that the apparent change was the result of “shifting winds,” while an expedition last year to the North Pole discovered the ice “100 percent thicker than expected.” …

Watch for the hardcore “global warming” cultists to continue clinging to their beliefs; but also watch increasing numbers of scientists and eventually politicians to abandon this once “certain” faith and to look for other ways to control our lives. In that pursuit, the left never quits. Rather than acknowledge their error, they will go on to make new mistakes, knowing they will never be held accountable.

A lone Jew, Daniel Pereg (15), defies an Islamic lynch-mob at an anti-Israel rally in Los Angeles

WorldNetDaily reports that yet another Marxist ideologue has been appointed to an advisory position at the White House.

Obama’s appointment of Ben Scott as Innovation Adviser shows that he is steadily intent on putting an end to the freedom of the internet.

Ben Scott was policy director of the far left Free Press, which is dedicated to the cause of imposing government regulation of the media in general and the internet in particular. Just as their name “Free Press” is Orwellian Newspeak for their aim of suppressing conservative views in the press, so are their words for internet control. “Net neutrality” they call it.

Obviously the chief target of the Free Press Marxists is any medium of conservative opinion: Talk Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and all of us who speak our minds freely on the internet. But they wouldn’t stop there. They want  total government control of the media.

Aaron Klein, author of the WND report, writes:

Scott authored a book, “The Future of Media,” which was edited by the founder of Free Press, Robert W. McChesney.

McChesney is an avowed Marxist who has recommended capitalism be dismantled.

He is a professor at the University of Illinois and former editor of the Marxist journal Monthly Review. …

The board of Free Press has included a slew of radicals, such as Obama’s former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, who resigned after it was exposed he founded a communist organization. …

Free Press published a study advocating the development of a “world class” government-run media system in the U.S.

Now the group is pushing a new organization, StopBigMedia.com, that advocates the downfall of “big media” and the creation of new media to “promote local ownership, amplify minority voices, support quality [ie. leftist] journalism, and bring local artists, voices and viewpoints to the airwaves.”

To us it is startling to learn that the far left wants to smash “Big Media” when in our eyes Big Media for the most part bends strongly to their side. But even in the New York Times, MSNBC and so on, occasional anti-left views can be read or heard. That won’t do for totalitarians.

Free Press has ties to other members of the Obama administration.

Obama’s “Internet czar,” Susan P. Crawford, spoke at a Free Press’s May 14, 2009, “Changing Media” summit in Washington, D.C.

Free Press is one of the many organizations funded by George Soros and the Joyce Foundation. (Barack Obama sat on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which is one of many charity foundations hijacked by the radical left.)

More on the Free Press can be found at Discover the Networks, including this:

In November 2003, Free Press organized its first National Conference on Media Reform at the University of Wisconsin-Madison …  Z Magazine [far left radical] reported that this conference prominently featured “El Salvador and Palestine solidarity activists” who “gave updates on their work.”

And this:

While many of its conferences have featured speakers advocating a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine [more Newspeak], Free Press has focused its efforts on advocating for “net neutrality,” progressive legislation that would allow the government greater regulatory control over the Internet.

Even while its founders and conferences call for revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the socialization of America, Free Press has been regularly granted audiences not only with members of Congress, but with those overseeing media policy at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). For example, when Julius Genachowski, who worked as a prominent leader in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, became chairman of the FCC (on June 29, 2009), he promptly appointed Free Press spokeswoman Jen Howard to be his press secretary. By late September, three months into his new job, Genachowski announced his plan to push for net neutrality.

In April 2010, the FCC’s net neutrality bid hit a hurdle when a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC did not have the right to regulate Comcast’s network management. …

On May 11, 2010, at a Free Press Summit in Washington DC, Democratic Senator Bryon Dorgan gave the keynote speech and declared that critics of net neutrality were simply engaging in the “big lie that permeates public policy today.” He also argued that net neutrality could not be accurately described as a takeover of the Internet, since the Internet was created by the federal government in the first place and already had rules that underpinned net neutrality.

Whatever he meant by “the internet was created by the federal government”, it is worth remembering that the World Wide Web was invented by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. No innovation comes out of a government-controlled environment. Innovation can only happen where the individual is free. The internet is a sphere of freedom throughout the world, and its existence works strongly against the collectivist tendency that politicians, academics, and all the red-winged minions of the left toil at advancing night and day. And that of course is why these totalitarians want to control it.

The Guardian, which is strongly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, reports that the Obama administration is secretly in contact with Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza:

The United States is sending a succession of envoys to engage with Hamas but lacks the bravery to talk to the Islamist movement openly, its leader, Khaled Meshal, said in an interview with the Guardian.

Meshal praised President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia for meeting him in Damascus and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, for hosting the discussion 10 days ago. He told Medvedev that the US was also talking to him. “I thanked him for that meeting and told him the Americans contact us, but are not brave enough to do so openly,” said Meshal. “I am confident that in the very near future, everyone will realise that they will have to deal with Hamas.”

The claim that the US is engaging with a group it lists as a terrorist organisation will upset the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose security forces have locked up and allegedly tortured leading Hamas members in the West Bank. …

Meshal said the tectonic plates in the Middle East were shifting, with Iran, Turkey and Syria emerging as regional powers. Egypt was in the throes of a battle for succession that would paralyse it as a regional player. As a result, Israel was losing its power to impose conditions on a weakened Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.

As it felt its power ebbing, Israel needed a new war but was crippled by self-doubt, Meshal said. He claimed the attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, and against Hamas in Gaza in 2009, left both organisations stronger politically and militarily.

“Israel is conducting exercises threatening Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria. It needs a war, but choosing the front to fight on will not be a picnic and this reflects the crisis in Israel. It does not want peace, but the option of war is not easy for it,” he said.

Hamas and Hezbollah, it should be remembered, exist to attack Israel. Hamas was created by the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah – “The Party of God” –  by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, both for the sole purpose of attacking Israel.

Hamas and its supporters are provoking war. The Turkish-led flotilla that tried to break the Gaza blockade was a trap into which the Israelis unaccountably fell.

Caroline Glick writes:

The fact that IDF forces boarding the ships would be met by trenchant, violent opposition was knowable simply by looking at Turkey’s role in the operation. First of all, the Turkish government-supported NGO behind the operation is IHH. As the US government, the Turkish government in the 1990s, the Investigative Project on Terrorism and countless other sources have proven, IHH is a terrorist organization with direct links to al-Qaida and Hamas. Its members have been involved in terrorist warfare from Chechnya and Bosnia to Iraq and Israel.

(And the Turkish Prime Minister has the chutzpah to call in the Israeli ambassador and reproach Israel for attacking “peaceful humanitarians”!)

It’s surprising that the IDF did not anticipate an armed attack, but they did not. They shot paint-balls at their assailants, who use knives, clubs, and at least one gun. Eventually the Israelis had to defend themselves with bullets. Hamas has won a world-wide propaganda victory claiming that the only aim of the ships was “to take humanitarian aid” to Gaza, and that innocent “peace protestors” were shot down in cold blood by the Israelis. Most of the world is only too willing to believe them.The world denies Israel the right to defend itself. But Israel’s only choice is between self-defense and obliteration.

Hezbollah – which John Brennan, Obama’s National Security Adviser, absurdly declares has a “moderate” faction that should be negotiated with – has recently been armed by Syria with Scud missiles. Iran has enough enriched uranium to make at least two bombs, and probably already has them. In addition it might have bought one or more from North Korea.

There will be war, and it will be nuclear war.

Israel will have to use nuclear weapons.*

There will probably be nuclear war in the Far East too. Nuclear-armed North Korea is threatening “all-out war” against South Korea, and China will support its Communist ally.

The wars will be the result of Obama’s policies of “engagement” with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, and North Korea.

Obama the Disarmer – the passionate nuclear disarmer – will be a cause of nuclear war.

*Go here to watch a Pajamas TV video of Sam Cohen, “Manhattan project member and father of the neutron bomb”, saying what we say about Iran, Israel, and the necessity for Israel to use its nuclear bombs. He advises the Israelis to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities “tomorrow morning”.