We strongly recommend this brilliantly clear, highly informative, and supremely  relevant speech by Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, erstwhile Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. Its subject is ‘the practicalities, challenges and difficulties faced by military forces in trying to fight within the provisions of international law against an enemy that deliberately and consistently flouts international law.’ The good against the bad. 

We only question whether reporters will tell the truth when they are shown it in the ways that Colonel Kemp advises. With reason, we do not trust the mainstream media. They have demonstrated amply and often that they are, for the most part, on the side of the terrorists.  They are the ugly.

… but not for the gander. 

We hope that Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by force. We have noticed that talking to Iran  accomplishes nothing.

Obama’s anti-Israel administration is plainly trying to make it hard for Israel to take action against Iran.  

But Israel is a sovereign state and will make its own defense decisions.   

When Sarah Palin said so, her media critics called it ‘stupid’.

When Joe Biden says it  … 

James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don’t think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

Gibson: So if we wouldn’t second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

Palin: I don’t think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS’s Katie Couric.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled “Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That’s Okay With Me”:

Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances.

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it “absurd” and “stupid”? Well, is the pope Italian? Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

This is being read by some . . . as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Then there’s M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as “robotic” and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

In other words, under the Palin administration, we won’t second guess Israel. I think I’ve got it.

Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president’s words didn’t really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

The President said today that he has “absolutely not” given Israel a “green light” to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

Gibson: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

As we have said before, the degree of irrational foaming hatred that the  guttersnipes of the left feel and express for Sarah Palin is a measure of their fear of her. 

An example of their reasonless vituperation can be found in today’s Investor’s Business Daily in an article by one Richard Cohen, too silly and nasty to quote much of, but here’s a bit of it:

Was it OK with the GOP if the person a heartbeat away from the presidency was — pardon me, but it’s true — a ditz with no national experience whatsoever? You betcha.

This from a guy who presumably voted to put Obama into the presidency – a ditz with no useful experience of any sort if ever there was one!

(Why does the IBD  give space to columnists on the left, who contradict everything the paper stands for? To give us cause to laugh disgustedly and to remind us why we despise the left?  What other reasons could there be?) 

Sarah Palin is a born politician, and one of that rare breed, a politician with integrity. Furthermore, her policies are the best: strong defense, fiscal responsibility, limited government, a free economy, energy independence. 

We doubt that she intends to leave the political arena.  We don’t believe she could. We hope she makes lots of money with her book and through every means she can as a celebrity worthy of being celebrated. We hope she also becomes powerful, for the sake of the American people. Stay with us, Sarah, and soar to the skies!

Dennis Prager writes in Front Page Magazine:

Even if you know little or nothing about the crisis in Honduras, nearly all you need to know in order to ascertain which side is morally right is this: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Cuba’s Castro brothers, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States are all lined up against Honduras…

They claim that there was a military coup in Honduras that renders the present government illegal.

Here, in brief, are the facts. You decide.

The president of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya, a protege of Hugo Chavez, decided that he wanted to be able to be president for more than his one term that ends this coming January — perhaps for life. However, because the histories of Honduras and Latin America are replete with authoritarians and dictators, Honduras’s constitution absolutely forbids anyone from governing that country for more than one term.

So, Zelaya decided to follow Chavez’s example and find a way to change his country’s constitution. He decided to do this on his own through a referendum, without the congressional authorization demanded by Honduras’s constitution. He even had the ballots printed in Venezuela…

The Honduras Supreme Court ruled Zelaya’s non-binding referendum unconstitutional, and then instructed the military not to implement the vote as it normally does. When the head of the armed forces obeyed the legal authority, the Honduran Supreme Court, rather than President Zelaya, the president fired him and personally led a mob to storm the military base where the Venezuela-made ballots were being safeguarded.

As Jorge Hernandez Alcerro, former Honduran ambassador to the United States, wrote, “Mr. Zelaya and small segments of the population tried to write a new constitution, change the democratic system and seek his re-election, which is prohibited by the constitution.”

In order to stop this attempt to subvert the Honduran constitution, while keeping Honduras under the rule of law and preventing a Chavez-like dictatorship from developing in its country, the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest Zelaya. They did so and expelled him to neighboring Costa Rica to prevent certain violence.

Was this a “military coup” as we understand the term? Columnist Mona Charen answered this best: “There was an attempted coup in Honduras, but it was Zelaya who initiated it, not his opponents.”

Or, to put in another way: When did a military coup ever take place that was ordered by that country’s supreme court, that was supported by the political party of the president who was overthrown, in which not one person was injured, let alone killed, and which replaced the ousted the president with the president of the country’s congress, a member of the same party as the ousted president?

But none of this matters to the United Nations, which never met a left-wing tyrant it didn’t find appealing. That is why the president of the UN General Assembly, a former Sandinista foreign minister, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, accompanied Zelaya in the airplane on Zelaya’s first attempt to return to Honduras on July 5. (Brockmann, among his other radical moral positions, is so virulently anti-Israel that the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations threatened not to attend the UN Holocaust Memorial Day event if Brockmann showed up.)

And none of this matters to the OAS, which just lifted its ban on Cuba’s membership and which says nothing about Chavez’s shutting down of Venezuela’s opposition radio and television stations.

And none of this matters to the world’s left-wing media. Thus, on July 1, a writer for the United Kingdom newspaper The Guardian penned this insight: “There is no excuse for this coup…The battle between Zelaya and his opponents pits a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a Mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite.” To the Guardian writer, Zelaya was a “reform president.” Lenin’s useful idiots never die out.

And the Los Angeles Times editorial page wrote: “Even though the Honduran Congress and military may believe they are defending the country against a would-be dictator, the ends don’t justify the means.”

Quite a great deal of foolishness in one sentence. That the Los Angeles Times does not believe that Zelaya is a would-be dictator is mind-numbing. As for the cliche that “the ends don’t justify the means,” in fact they quite often do. That is one of the ways in which we measure means. One assumes that while the Los Angeles Times believes that Americans should be law-abiding, it agrees with Rosa Parks having broken the law. The ends (fighting segregation) justified the means (breaking the law).

If Honduras is hung out to dry, if America suspends trade and economic aid, the forces arrayed against liberty in Latin America will have won a major victory. On the other hand, if Honduras is not abandoned now, those Iran-supporting, America-hating, liberty-loathing forces will have suffered a major defeat.

It will be interesting to see which way the Obama administration jumps.

We draw our readers’ attention to the comment made by ‘roger in florida’ on our last posting immediately below, in which he gives a crystal-clear explanation of why a state-run health service must always necessarily be bad for the patient.

In our opinion there is no good argument for government control of health services.  

Further reinforcing our view, Investor’s Business Daily brings us this information and comment:

The Senate legislation is sponsored by the usual suspects, Democrats Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut. It’s modeled on Massachusetts’ plan, which also imposes a $1,000 fine [shared responsibility payment]… 

The CBO estimates the “shared responsibility payments will bring in about $36 billion over 10 years. This Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) bill also calls for a $750-per-worker “annual fee,” $375 for part-time workers on companies with more than 25 employees that do not offer coverage to employees.

So if you’re a small business seeking to expand beyond 25 workers, you have quite a bit to think about. That’s sure going to help job growth. In a statement released by the White House, Obama welcomed the revised legislation, saying it “reflects many of the principles I’ve laid out.”

The Kennedy-Dodd bill also provides for a government-run insurance option to compete with private plans. A competing Senate Finance Committee version does not.

According to the CBO, under its plan “the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million, and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million.” The number of uninsured would decline by only a third.

This seems to fly in the face of the Obama promise that if you like your current coverage, nothing will change. Around 80% of Americans — 243 million of us — have indicated we like our current coverage and doctors. Too bad, for that will change.

Suppose health care reform passes and all are insured, by force or otherwise. The U.S. will be short 124,400 front-line physicians by 2025, according to the Association of Medical Colleges.

That does not include the 15,585 new primary-care providers the administration plan is estimated to require.

Put together fewer doctors, more patients and government insurance, and that spells less access to care, even rationing. HillaryCare died in 1994 when Americans realized it would force them to give up the coverage and health care providers they liked.

ObamaCare is no different.

As we have said before, beware of nationalized ‘health care’. It is not care so much as control, to the ruin of the patient/victim.

Mark Steyn writes:

This is the story of a decades-long cancer survivor who survived the cancer but died of an NHS [National Health Service] bedsore:

During four weeks of what her family describe as “torture” in a bed in East Surrey Hospital, the sore resulted in a fatal blood infection and she died on October 27.

Her son Adrian Goddard, who lives in the US, said: “She survived cancer for 40 years, then died from a bedsore.

“It is just beyond belief that they could let a bedsore develop to the point where it actually kills someone from septicaemia.”

He said the nurses seemed largely unconcerned by the growing size of the sore and his mother’s increasing pain…

“The level of crisis that attracts their attention has to be very high for them to put down their biscuits.”

When we quote stories like these at NRO [National Review Online], we get a lot of e-mail saying these are just “anecdotes.” And yes, if you look on yourself as being part of a government health system of millions of people, getting a bedsore and dying in hideous pain is no big deal in the scheme of things. But I look on myself as being part of the Mark Steyn health system. So if I get a bedsore and die, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a 100% systemic failure. The difference between government health care and a private system is that, under the latter, you’re free to say, “This dump’s filthy. I’m going to the state-of-the-art joint five miles up the road.” You may have to get out your checkbook, but ultimately the decisions are yours.

In a government system, the decisions are the bureaucrats’, and that’s that. My father is currently ill, and the health “system” is doing its best to ensure it’s fatal. When an ambulance has to be called, they take him to a different hospital according to the determinations of the bed-availability bureaucrats and which facility hasn’t had to be quarantined for an infection outbreak. At the first hospital, he picked up C Difficile. At the second, MRSA. At the third, like the lady above, he got septicaemia. He’s lying there now, enjoying the socialized health care jackpot — C Diff, MRSA, septicaemia. None of these ailments are what he went in to be treated for. They were given to him by the medical system.

A piece in the Jerusalem Post about the death of Neda Soltan, a young woman murdered in the protests this week.

THIS WHOLE situation is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan. For years before 9/11, women’s groups were circulating articles, e-mails and any kind of visible validation demonstrating the horror that women lived with under the Taliban. Stories of women professors being arrested if they left their homes, videos of women being shot in public stadiums for daring to have a job, petitions, statistics, testimonials – they all got around. Well, at least among women. Yet, despite the extreme suffering of women throughout Taliban rule, the United States did not intervene, nor did anyone else – that is, until 9/11 happened. When the Taliban attacked the United States, suddenly America woke up and unanimously said, “Hey, those Taliban! They’re really bad! We should stop them!”

I would suggest to the author that the United States government is going to be – indeed, is obliged to be – more concerned about the murder of 3000 of its own citizens than the horrific internal autocratic oppression in the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

J Post reports on the continued riots.

Here’s a video of live ammunition being fired into the crowd.

Hard to tell how much is true of this, but there is no doubt of the cruel methods being used by the authorities:

“We can see the smoke and the helicopters from our house,” said a source in Teheran. “They have closed down all the roads, trapping the people, who are being bombarded.”

People were chanting “Allah Akbar” and “We will kill those who kill our brothers” from their windows, balconies, and rooftops, he said.

Most of Mousavi’s supporters “are not leaving our homes,” he went on.

“God help those people [who have gone out] in Freedom Square. The last we heard, helicopters are pouring boiling hot water on the people,” said another source. His account could not be confirmed, but other reports also spoke of boiling water being dropped from the helicopters, and of an undefined “acid” being sprayed at demonstrators by security forces on the streets. “Hospitals are overflowing and the embassies in Teheran have left their doors open to provide a haven for the injured for sanctuary,” the source added.

Obama’s starting to speak.

He is urging Iran’s leaders to “govern through consent, not coercion” And in a statement from the White House on Saturday, he said: “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”

No direct condemnation. A country that funds the murder of your soldiers in Iraq is crippled with angry young voters. If the protesters had the backing of the world’s most powerful man behind them, it would give their cause an energy and possibility of success. Some have argued that this would give the hardliners real ammunition: the chance to blame America – the interfering superpower. But this is nonsense, the protesters are people young and old, deeply religious and not at all. They have the chance to change something here. And they won’t for the most part believe that the whole protests are being fomented by Israeli and US agents – as the regime is claiming.

Iran seems to have a revolution every 35 years, and they’re overdue for one now.

Art is no longer a hobby; it is a job. This is the consequence of statist government. Between 2008 and 2011, the Arts Council England (ACE) is expected to distribute £1.6 billion of public money. If one is to think of the drastic cuts made in the last Budget, one must ask why only £4 million is being taken from the ACE’s pot. Even the strongest advocate of big government would surely concede that the government must protect its people before it entertains them.

The defence budget is facing a £2 billion cut next year, and by 2011, the NHS must find £2.3 billion of savings and education £1 billion. Why then, one asks, does the funding for the arts continue? In a recession, should government be providing money for sharks to be floated in formaldehyde for little perceivable reason?

Classical liberals and large sea creatures should be worried. Labour has developed the polar opposite of Milton Friedman’s idea of government. In early 2008, the Culture Minister Margaret Hodge called for City workers to provide more private donations to the arts. But with a new tax rate of 50%, there is a predictable lack of response from those of whom the government demands altruism. There is weary outrage among libertarians that government is happy enough to injure vital public services but then insist on greedily preserving a socially progressive image.

The American equivalent of the ACE is the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which gets around $126.3 million (£79 million) per year. This appears a paltry sum when compared to the ACE’s £463 million budget for next year, even more so when one considers the vastly greater amount of government spending in the US. America’s arts rely heavily on private donations – and citizens, both rich and poor, are eager to provide. As a percentage of GDP, the charitable contributions from individuals in the US are twice that of in the UK.

The relative lack of philanthropy towards the Arts in the UK has several possible reasons. The most obvious answer is the respective states of our collections of taxes. The huge welfare state and social interference that exists in the UK is no more than an arrangement of forced charitable donations. Taxpayers feel they have little left, and indeed little obligation, to provide charity for others. This is especially true for local charities, for why should the upkeep of local community be important if government forces politically correct and culturally manufactured community upon us?

The commensurately greater amount of charitable giving in the US can be attributed to the individuals’ quest for community. For example, 45% of American citizens’ donations are given to religions and local charities, as opposed to 13% here. The endless social interference has backfired once more.

77% of collection methods here rely on spontaneous takings of loose change, whereas in the US there is a strong culture of ‘planned giving’ (this provides 61% of non-profit organisations’ income). Furthermore, according to the newspaper Chronicle of Philanthropy, 54% of the richest US donors said that they have made charitable donations because of tax benefits and incentives. In the UK, it is the charities that obtain tax refunds and not the individuals. The British charity Art Fund recommended tax incentives before the most recent budget, but these proposals were shot down, such was the government’s dislike of offering tax benefits to the wealthy. The difference that is apparent between the UK and the US is quite clearly a consequence of the statist British government.

There once was ample example of private charity funding in the UK, from schools to art galleries. This convention, argues the Institute for Philanthropy’s director, Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, ended as the introduction of an enlarged welfare state – after the Second World War – destroyed Britain’s tradition of Victorian philanthropy. Some proof of this can be found with the American NEA. When their budget was reduced by 40 percent, from approximately $170 million to $99.5 million, private giving to the arts actually increased by 40%. The economist David Sawers’ comparison of subsidised and unsubsidised performing arts realised that cultural venues would continue to flourish were government subsidies to be abolished

The argument that government funding allows penniless individuals access to the arts is a fallacy. Most of the funds go to immensely rich organisations that often cater to a very limited section of society. For example, post-modernist art appeals to a tiny minority, and its funding has no arguable benefit for most of the public. The only time I have vaguely approved of a Labour minister was when Kim Howells said of the Turner submissions, “If this is the best that the British art establishment can come up with, God help us. It consists entirely of conceptual bullshit and the final insult was to walk through a room of Francis Bacons and Henry Moores that exude artistic ability and humanity.” The often-used argument that post-modernism should appeal to classical liberals because its iconoclasm is a strong example of individualism is nonsense; these so-called artists subsist on the involuntary contributions of the collective.

Government funding also jeopardises the independence of the arts. Not only does this interference reveal the consequences of pseudo-multiculturalism, it can constrict the variety of art produced. Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that, ‘Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature…. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.’ David Sawers has noted that British government subsidies reduce the choice and variety in the art world, whereas privately venues are more flexible, and are responsible for many different artistic genres, such as the recent revival of early music.

After over a decade of Labour in power, with tens of billions wasted on bureaucratic nonsensical jobs, with the creation of an arts scene that government ministers admit is appalling, and in the middle of one of the worst economic crises the Western World has seen, we demand to know why illogical funding continues to be inequitably poured into the modern arts?  John Adams once said that, ‘”The science of government is my duty to study…the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, so that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.’

If government ends the funding of ‘culture’, the indiviual will then provide. Government is not a Crocodile Bird – there is no symbiotic relationship between the state and the individual. It is simply not the business of government to dictate inspiration and cultivate the art of the people. Trophies of creative thought will materialise from the free man, one who is not shackled by the chains of his self-appointed patron.

And so the New Generation should ask of this government: do not fund runners to jog through the Tate Gallery every thirty seconds. If you give us working hospitals, good schools, equipment for our Armed Forces and pensions, we will provide you with art that is far sweeter than money could ever afford.

Sam Westrop

Thomas Sowell writes in part: