Today Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, whose business it is to defend Israel from its genocidal Arab and Iranian enemies,  and President Obama, whose sympathies are with the Arabs and who is reluctant to take any efficient measures to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons and using them to destroy Israel, are clashing with each other in a polite fashion and will try to find some points of agreement and compromise to bamboozle the American public into believing that Obama has a workable plan to pacify the Middle East, and that Israel may still depend on the US for support in a world that mostly wants it wiped off the map.

While we await the statement that will confirm this prediction of ours, we offer this extract from a Melanie Phillips article in the Spectator  to show how little chance there is of any real agreement between Netanyahu and Obama. She demonstrates that the Middle East policy of Britain is concocted from the same delusions as Obama’s. 

‘Palestinian statelessness is the biggest recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world,’ said (British Foreign Secretary) Mr Miliband.

Ah yes – Palestinian statelessness was obviously uppermost in the minds of the Islamists who blew up Mumbai; it was obviously the reason they bombed Spain to help along the restoration of the caliphate and tried to do the same to France, that legendary ally of Israel; it’s obviously the driving passion of the Chechen Islamist separatists; it’s obviously the rallying cry of the Islamists in Indonesia who intend to Islamise southern Asia; it’s obviously the reason Islamists are persecuting, murdering and driving out Christians across the Third World from Sudan and Nigeria to Bethlehem and Gaza.

For various reasons, however, this idiotic but deeply ideological analysis is now accepted by many non-ideological folk as axiomatic. They are all fixated by the delusion that a Palestine state is the key to peace between Israel and the Arabs. It is not. The briefest knowledge of history tells us that it is not – for the simple reason that it has been on offer repeatedly for seven (some would say nine) decades, with the Jews in agreement – indeed, with the Israelis in recent years offering the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of the disputed territories — and yet the only response from the Arabs has been war.

The requirement by the Arab side is not for a Palestine state. It is for the end of the Jewish state. It is not just Hamas that declares this over and over again. It is also the supposedly ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, who say repeatedly that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these facts are simply ignored as if they don’t exist…

What is even more remarkable is that these twin icons of progressive politics, Obama and Miliband, are actually pushing the cause of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing. For the proposed Palestine state is to have not one Jew living inside its borders. So Obama and Miliband say the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East can only be served by the creation of a racist, exclusionary state — while beating up on Israel, which actually gives full civil rights to its Arab and Muslim citizens.

The key to the ending of the war between the Arabs and Israel is that the Arabs and the wider Muslim world have to grasp that it is in their interests to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, legitimised as such under international law, and to abandon for ever their attempt to remove it from the map… 

But instead, the message the Arab and Muslim world is currently getting from America and Britain – with their overtures to Iran and creeping recognition of Hamas — is that its violence and aggression have paid off and that the great prizes, not merely of Israel’s destruction but also the defeat of the free world, are now within reach. Having accepted the Arab and Muslim narrative on Israel/Palestine, and having decided that appeasement is the only way forward, Obama and Miliband are making the strongest effort since Carter to pressurise Israel to become the propitiatory sacrifice to the enemies of civilisation. And … Israel is to be blamed if it refuses to play the role.

In a speech on May 16, 2009, Michelle Obama announced that the President has ordered the establishment of ‘an Office of Social Innovation’.

Bearing in mind that in a political context the word ‘social’ negates any word that it precedes – as in ‘social justice’, ‘social democracy’, ‘social conscience’ – this is not good news for innovation.

True innovation springs from originality of thought, and it occurs only when gifted and inspired individuals have time and money to spare, and where they can reasonably expect achievement to bring reward.   

When individual freedom is suppressed and conformity imposed, innovation is brought to an end. And when that happens in a nation, it stagnates.

By ‘social innovation’ the Obamas can only mean community organizing.  The Office of Social Innovation will recruit a multitude of young volunteers to pressure their fellow citizens into consensus and obedience, in preparation for concerted ‘grass-roots’ political action – as was done by young Maoists in China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’; as the Hitler Youth did in the Third Reich.

One of our readers, A.G.S., sent us an idea he had for an article comparing America now to the early days of Mussolini’s Italy. The thought came to him, he wrote, when he read Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann. He outlined the article he had in mind and asked me [JB] if I would complete it. At first I was a little skeptical; I felt he was exaggerating. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself in agreement with him. The following is the result of our collaboration.

*** 

In his famous story Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann demonstrates how fascism under Mussolini corrupted the Italian populace. At the start of his regime a general feeling spread among the Italians that it was right to impose conformity, and society was gripped by a mood of collective censoriousness. In the story, set in an Italian holiday resort, a child takes off her bathing suit to wash the sand out of it in the sea, and her momentary nudity arouses the wrath of the crowd on the beach, the police are informed and the child’s family is fined. The story as a whole is about the destruction of individual will during an evening’s entertainment by an evil hypnotist. The allegorical implications are unmistakeable.

As in Italy then, an atmosphere of authoritarian regulation is spreading in the US now. There is a powerful demand, emanating from the president and his circle, for mental and physical conformity.

Proofs of this intent abound. Group action and community involvement are encouraged, with the aim of inducing non-conformists to fall in line. The Department of Homeland Security issues a memo warning that persons who have a political point of view different from the present federal government majority are a threat to society. Anyone challenging the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which the Democrats in power have embraced as an orthodoxy, is denounced as a heretic. In the cause of mitigating the projected undesirable effects of climate change, the government proposes to dictate what sources of energy you may use and to what extent.  It will regulate the temperature of your house, the clothes you may wear, the food you may eat, and the car you may drive. In sickness and infirmity your body will be treated as the government decides when its nationalized health policy is imposed. Government will decree what opinions you may express on talk radio, in the universities and schools, and soon in any public forum. By ‘spreading the wealth around’ it will set a limit to how high any individual may rise by his own efforts.  Government will rule on how much business managers may be paid and under what union-dictated terms an employee may work.

When conformity is legislated and imposed by force, dissent criminalized and punished, authoritarianism has become tyranny. 

Obama is the Mussolini of America.

Claudia Rosett writes in Canada Free Press:

From World War II to the winning of the Cold War, to the push during the Bush first term to stop the old axis of evil in its tracks, American influence and might has long served the world well. “Change” on this front is perilous, and it is happening.

What began as a shift to “soft power” during the Bush second term has been further evolving under Obama into a surrealpolitik of reset buttons, apologies for America and avowals of “respect” for governments such as Syria and Iran–whose rulers respect neither America nor the basic rights of their own citizens and neighbors.

Iran’s rulers brag up their nuclear program on Iranian television–as they did, again, just last week. In response, Washington huffs and puffs, and reverts to the much-tried-and-failed formula in which the solution to such menaces as terrorist-sponsoring Iran is supposed to be the speedy incarnation of terrorist-spawning Palestinian authorities into rulers of a sovereign state. North Korea conducts illicit missile tests, threatens a second nuclear test, and announces that after years of talks and American concessions Pyongyang will pursue whatever nuclear programs it wants…

On the nuclear front, the threat is not just the prospect of proliferation of bombs among rogue and despotic states–problematic enough though that would be for anyone inside the blast radius, should one of those bombs go off. The further problem is the message such proliferation sends: that arsenals of this kind may be acquired with malign intent and relative impunity; that the least scrupulous of nations are rewarded with out-sized power and influence.

Since the toppling of Taliban rule in Afghanistan in 2001, and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in 2003, America has shown growing reluctance to engage in anything smacking of real confrontation abroad. Saddam’s overthrow is by now an issue now so macerated by Washington infighting that the majority of American policymakers treat it as a terrible mistake to have rid the Middle East of a mass-murdering, war-mongering tyrant. And while America has been sticking it out in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been no clear signal sent that when fresh threats arise, America will as a matter of course stand up definitively to anything more than four Somali pirates in a small boat.

In this opportunistic world, what, then, are the new rules of the game? Are they the rules of the morally perverted United Nations Human Rights Council? That’s where America, in its new eagerness to “engage” with all comers has just won a seat alongside such world-class human rights abusers as China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. Are they the rules of the Indian Ocean? That’s where America now seems willing to try to rescue its own citizens if they are actually held hostage, but there is still no will to actually clean out the pirate dens. Are the new rules those of Iran’s hostage politics? That’s where victories consist of obtaining the release of prisoners who should never have been held in the first place…

America is coasting right now on the strength of genuine past victories and of the seemingly inexhaustible resources produced by a longtime mix of democracy and free markets. Lamentations and financial woes notwithstanding, most Americans still live cocooned in enough comforts so that it’s easy to forget just how rough the world can get. If America won’t lead the way, lay down the rules and proudly defend them, big change is indeed on its way. It won’t be the change we seek.

Our reader ‘roger in florida’ has told us that  DebkaFile , the source of the following information, is generally unreliable, but as this is peculiarly interesting we offer it for what it’s worth:

Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency Leon Panetta visited Israel two weeks ago to explore Israel’s intentions with regard to a raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities and its alignment with Egypt and Saudi Arabia for this shared objective.

On the one hand, Panetta showed Israeli leaders a new US report which estimates first, that Iran lacks adequate military resources to shield its nuclear sites from attack and, second, would pull its punches in responding to an Israeli strike. On the other, it is feared in Washington that by linking up with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Israel would be free to send its warplanes against Iran through the skies of its two Arab partners, without deferring to the United States.

This report was also presented by defense secretary Robert Gates on May 5-6 to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo and Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh.

None of the three Middle East leaders took the report seriously because –

1. They could not make out if it was meant to encourage or deter an Israeli attack? Surely, the best time to strike would be before Iran acquires adequate defenses for its nuclear sites. Is that what the Obama administration is after?

2. Israel does not believe that Iran would emulate Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who refrained from hitting back after Israel demolished his nuclear reactor in 1981. Iran’s rulers are committed to massive retaliation or else face a degree of popular contempt that would test the regime’s survival.

Panetta and Gates alike returned home convinced that Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf emirates are far more fearful of a nuclear-armed Iran than of clashing with the Obama administration over its policy of engaging Iran.

This understanding prompted a policy review in Washington, which is still going on.

One outward symptom of a possible reversal was the sudden announcement on May 8 that President Obama had decided to again address the Muslim world from Egypt on June 4, ten days after Mubarak visits Washington. On the same day, he also renewed sanctions against Syria, which, after weeks of diplomatic pursuit, he accused of sponsoring terror and seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Washington’s dawning appreciation that the rise of a nuclear-armed, terror-sponsoring Iran is the burning preoccupation of Middle East rulers, leaving the Palestinian issue for another day, will certainly make Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s talks in the White House next Monday, May 18, a lot smoother. The clash which otherwise would have been unavoidable may now be averted.

Christians in Islamic states are being continually and ruthlessly persecuted and slaughtered.  Heads of the various Christian churches, Western Governments, the big political parties, and the mainstream media are pretending it’s not happening.

Click on the video (from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center) to learn how bad it is.

Meanwhile, because European governments and political parties are refusing to acknowledge that there is any threat to the survival of their indigenous cultures as Muslim numbers grow by birth and conversion, neo-Nazi parties are gaining support among the electorates. Angry voices are calling for the forceful expulsion of Muslims. There is reason to fear outbreaks of Muslim and anti-Muslim violence this summer in many parts of Europe. The stench of genocidal hatred is in the air.

What should be attacked are not Muslims but the ideology of Islam. Not people, but ideas. The fight should not be with clubs, fists, boots and guns, but with words. Islam should be argued against, rationally, strongly, persistently in every public forum, actual and electronic, that our civilization has at its disposal.

Yet the UN is trying to stop all criticism of that cruel, intolerant, oppressive, murderous creed.

Furthermore, it’s hard to argue against the nonsense Muhammad taught without also pointing out that all other religious belief  is equally absurd. True, Judaism and Christianity do not preach moral evil as Islam does.  But Christianity has practiced it (both the Catholic and Protestant branches have burnt their heretics), and besides, any insistence on irrational belief is corrupting.

But as the Taliban take over Pakistan and its nuclear arms; as Ahmadinejad prepares his nuclear bombs to destroy the Jewish state; as the Sunni fanatics of Hamas gain support from the Shias of Iran (as well as from Obama’s administration); as Hizbollah takes control of Lebanon; as Turkey turns Islamist; as Somalia ferments jihad on the high seas; as terrorists train under Somali and Pakistani jihadis in camps scattered through the US; as Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan; it would seem clearer than ever that the  human race would be better off without religion.

Here is part of a lecture given by Mark Steyn at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009. If we had a laurel wreath to bestow we would crown Mark Steyn the greatest living journalist. 

“Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: We’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic: It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die…

It seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus ‘n’ truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential…

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct…

Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up…

These programs … deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That’s the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process… “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it’s better to jump off the train as you’re leaving the station and it’s still picking up speed than when it’s roaring down the track and you realize you’ve got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express…

There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz “town meetings” in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away…

If you’re a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you’re an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator. They’re not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the “free” health care—and in the end you may not get the “free” health care anyway. Under Britain’s National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it’s appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his “lifestyle choices” get a pass while theirs don’t. But that’s the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can’t get you on grounds of your personal health, they’ll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn’t this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What’s a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home…

That’s Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really?… The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end. That’s Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it’s a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts…

A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state…

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They’re the three anglophone members of the G7. They’re three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of “stimulus” (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you’re a child in the government nursery, why shouldn’t Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you’re forbidden to think …

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn’t about the money. It’s more profound than that…

The key word here is “give.” When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence…

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it…

Small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline.

Thomas Sowell writes today in Townhall on  ‘the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about “torturing” captured terrorists’:

People’s actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn’t descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make water-boarding look like a picnic.

You wouldn’t care what the New York Times would say or what “world opinion” in the U.N. would say. You would save your loved one’s life and tell those other people what they could do.

But if the United States behaves that way it is called “arrogance”– even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president…

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought…

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than “militants” or “insurgents”? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?…

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

From Canada Free Press, an article by Humberto Fontova:

For “fostering extremism and hatred “ Britain’s home Secretary has barred the immensely popular U.S. radio commentator Michael Savage from setting foot in the UK. “Coming to the U.K. is a privilege,” explained Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, “and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values to undermine our way of life. Therefore, I will not hesitate to name and shame those who foster extremist views as I want them to know that they are not welcome here.”

Fair enough, Ms Smith. But Che Guevara’s daughter, Aleida, will be in Britain next month for a hoopla titled Cuba50, which is billed as “the biggest European celebration in this 50th anniversary year.” In London’s expansive Barbican Centre, Britain will throw the continent’s biggest party commemorating fifty years of Castro’s Stalinist regime, which jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered political prisoners at a higher rate than pre-war Hitler’s, and came closest of anyone to plunging the world into nuclear war…

Aleida Guevara will visit Home Secretary Smith’s jurisdictional domain in order to promote, in her own words: “my father’s ideals, his concerns, and his ambitions. I believe that my father is a banner to the world!” adds Che’s well-fed (in sharp contrast to most Cubans) daughter.

Fine. Let’s have a look at Aleida’s father’s “ambitions,” keeping in mind that “hate speech” is a buzz-term beloved by the likes of Jacqui Smith and, for them, has an extremely elastic application.

”Hatred as the central element of our struggle!” raved Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in his 1966 Message to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. “Hatred that is intransigent…hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine…We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow!…

We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation. We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. We’ll attack him wherever we find him. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! These hyenas (Americans) are fit only for extermination. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm! The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!..My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood.”

And Aleida’s father made good on his boast. The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” rarely reached Che Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged or blindfolded men (and boys.) “The Black Book of Communism,” written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy,) estimates 14,000 firing squad executions in Cuba by the end of the 1960’s, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of over 3 million executions in the U.S.

Aleida’s father delighted in delivering the coup de grace to dozens of these. When office work (signing execution warrants) tore him away from his beloved execution pits, Che ameliorated his emotional deprivation by having a special window installed in his office so he could watch his busy firing squads at work, beaming at the spectacle. Among many others, Aleida’s father invited Ernest Hemingway as a spectator to the slaughter…

“Gay-bashing” seems to figure big in Jacqui Smith’s definition of hate speech. But apparently when this bashing comes in the literal form, involving Soviet gun-butts and bayonets bashing a gay’s head until he dies from massive cerebral trauma, it fails to fall under her definition of “Hate Speech.”

In the process of these tortures and murders Aleida’s dad helped his Cuban mentor establish a personal fiefdom that proved quite enduring. This totalitarian endurance is what Jacqui Smith’s London will celebrate next month.

Alas, when Aleida’s father finally found himself up against armed and determined enemies in Bolivia, all his bloodthirsty bluster vanished in a “poof.” “Don’t shoot!” he whimpered to his U.S. trained Bolivian captors as he dropped his fully loaded weapons, “I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

His Bolivian captors viewed the matter differently. In fact they adopted a policy that has since become a favorite among Americans who encounter (so-called) endangered species on their property: “Shoot, Shovel and Shut up.” Justice has never been better served.

From Power Line:

Barack Obama says his first criterion for Supreme Court justices will be “empathy.” Michael Ramirez comments: 

Deciding cases on the basis of “empathy” really means ruling in favor of politically-influential constituencies. We got a preview of the law of “empathy” in the Obama administration’s effort to violate the legal rights of Chrysler’s secured creditors in order to funnel money to the United Auto Workers. “Empathy” is another word for lawlessness.