It needs to be said over and over again: It is not the size of the Jewish state that troubles the Arabs, and Muslims in general; it is the fact that a Jewish state exists at all.

Their only solution to the Arab-Israel conflict is the total elimination of Israel; is and always has been. That is why ‘Peace Now’ and all the treaties and the conferences and  the diplomatic missions and the UN interferences and the ‘Land for Peace’ optimism have not amounted to a hill of beans. That is why Arafat turned down an offer that would have given the Palestinians 95 percent of the ‘territorial demands’ they pretended to for a time. That is why all efforts by President Bush, or Secretary of State Rice (who seems grossly to misunderstand the whole issue), or Tony Blair, or anyone else to broker a peace deal are doomed to failure. That is why Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza made no difference to the constant claim that Gaza is ‘occupied territory’, and why if Israel stops building settlements on the West Bank there will be no cheers, not the least expression of satisfaction from the Palestinians, but only more complaints and more demands, and no doubt active aggression, as there is now from Gaza.

The conflict can only be settled by total victory for the Arab-Islamic aggressors, or such a show of strength by the West as a whole in support of Israel that  the aggressors give up.

What is the likelihood of  the West so wholeheartedly supporting Israel? Not high.  And when the whole of Europe has come to be dominated by its growing Islamic populations – which is very likely to happen –  the chances for Israel’s survival will be greatly diminished. 

Why this persistent willful blindness on the part of Western leaders to the realities of the conflict? 

One may as well ask, why two thousand years of persecution of the Jews?

The Jews are among that minority of peoples who have done no harm to other peoples in all that time. They are hugely benefactors of all mankind. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Jews – the vast majority of whom were miserably poor and oppressed –  were falsely, absurdly, and wickedly accused of plotting to dominate the world. The forgery known as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were (as Professor Norman Cohn has brilliantly demonstrated in his book by this name) a ‘Warrant for Genocide’ – the genocide of the Holocaust. The wave of revulsion that went round the world when the Nazi death-camps were liberated and the atrocities committed by the Germans became known, translated itself into an abhorrence of  ‘racism’ – but the only people who have not been the beneficiaries of that abhorrence are the Jews themselves.

Now Muslims frequently and openly preach that they desire a caliphate to rule the whole world under Sharia law. Their holy books prescribe world-domination. Their method of achieving it is to carry out  acts of murderous violence with the utmost cruelty, such as beheading victims – even young children –  or burning them to death; blowing people up en masse in trains, flying planes into office buildings so that workers inside them are forced to choose between incinerating themselves or jumping hundreds of feet to their deaths below. At the same time the jihadists of Islam are using the freedoms and tolerance of the West to infiltrate and undermine it.  These things are actually happening.  There is no false accusation here, no forged documents.  But Islam does not stand accused of the evil aim, the atrocities, the crimes, by Western governments. Now that the plot of destruction and domination is real, the politicians, the majority of the intellectual elites and the ‘fourth estate’ of the journalists shake in their boots and pretend that it is not happening. Now that the threat is real, they are really afraid. They cringe before the monsters who are attacking and humiliating them. Shame on them all!

 Jonah Goldberg writes in Townhall:

‘Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.

The interesting question isn’t "Why is there poverty?" It’s "Why is there wealth?" Or: "Why is there prosperity here but not there?"

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.’

Read the whole thing here – it’s very good. 

‘Now along comes Obama—whose foreign policy experience wouldn’t cover the head of a pin—saying an Obama administration will “start early” to get this conflict wrapped up.

It also emerged this week, though, that Arab states may not share Obama’s sense of urgency when it comes to helping Palestinians. Reuters reports that “Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has appealed to the World Bank to help him secure emergency financing to bridge a shortfall in donor funds and pay public workers.” The PA is in a “budget crisis despite billions of dollars in aid pledged last year to support a U.S.-backed peace drive.”

It’s not that the U.S. itself has been remiss in its payments; “the State Department said the [U.S.] had already surpassed its $555 million in pledged support for 2008 to the [PA] and urged other donors to help out.”

But “many Arab states have not met their financial commitments despite pressure from Washington.” Meanwhile “workers in Gaza say Hamas, which receives support from Iran and other Islamist allies, has been paying salaries on time despite the Western boycott….”

Why would that be? If boosting Fatah, beating Hamas, and solving the Palestinian problem is so crucial to the “moderate” Arab states, why would they be laggard in their PA payments even as Iran and company keep giving Hamas all it needs? Part of the answer, aside from stinginess, requires looking at the real Middle East and not the version of it painted by Western guilt.

Take Jordan, for instance. Last month it was reported that “Jordan has quietly let the Bush White House know it is concerned over the prospect of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank…. [Jordanian] officials said Jordan’s King Abdullah has warned the administration that [such a] state…would fuel the Islamic opposition and could lead to an attempt to overthrow the kingdom.”

Indeed, in the real Middle East—despite de rigueur public statements by Abdullah and his father-predecessor King Hussein about the desirability of a Palestinian state—Jordan has long feared such an outcome. Jordan has both a large Palestinian population and a simmering Islamist movement, and knows a Palestinian state across the river is just the thing that would light the spark of insurrection.

As for Syria, to assume that creating a Palestinian state would soften it is to ignore the fact that for decades Syria has hosted in Damascus precisely those Palestinian terrorist organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP-GC, and others that are most openly contemptuous of any “solution” other than Israel’s eradication. For believing the regime can be wooed away from this posture there’s a Middle Eastern word—chutzpah.

Then there are the Saudis, still believed by many to be the linchpin of a more Western-aligned, America-accepting Middle East. Yet their much-touted 2002 peace plan calls for a “return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel—code for its demographic demise.

Some of the reasons, then, for the lack of Arab eagerness to aid the PA are: fear of a Palestinian state; ideological rejection of a Palestinian state on only part of the land; and ideological rejection of Israel.

If such nuances tend to escape the Bush administration, they’re even less likely to register with Obama. It’s very possible, though, that by the time he would be president, there will be a different Israeli government that’s more security-conscious and less pliant than Olmert’s government was. If so, expect to see Obama square off against what he would perceive as the real obstacle to peace and harmony: Israel. It’s a grim prospect.’

Read the rest of the article in Front Page Magazine here.

 It’s up to the voters now to crush this egomaniac.

Even the Washington Post is irritated by his hubris.  This comes from a column titled ‘President Obama Continues His Victory Tour’.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reported last week that Obama has directed his staff to begin planning for his transition to the White House, causing Republicans to howl about premature drape measuring. Obama was even feeling confident enough to give British Prime Minister Gordon Brown some management advice over the weekend. "If what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything, then you end up being a dilettante," he advised the prime minister.       

Thomas Sowell, perhaps the wisest man in America, thinks that Obama may not be naive after all, but worse. 

Although most of the mainstream media are still swooning over Barack Obama, a few critics are calling the things he advocates "naive." But that assumes that he is trying to solve the country’s problems. If he is trying to solve his own problem of getting elected, then he is telling the voters just what they want to hear. That is not naive but shrewd and cynical.

Barack Obama’s father, and the chief mentor of his youth, and all the people who have most influenced him and promoted him throughout his life have been on the Extremely Far Left. 

Read this article and this one in Investor’s Business Daily  which make it clear as daylight that Barack Obama is a Socialist and if he were to be elected President, would turn the United States, with the help of a Democratic majority in Congress, into a  Socialist state, and try to take the country into a  Socialist International such as Marx and Lenin dreamed of.  

Quotations: 

‘Throughout his career, Obama has worked closely with a network of stone-cold socialists and full-blown communists striving for "economic justice."

He’s been traveling in an orbit of collectivism that runs from Nairobi to Honolulu, and on through Chicago to Washington.

Yet a recent AP poll found that only 6% of Americans would describe Obama as "liberal," let alone socialist.

Public opinion polls usually reflect media opinion, and the media by and large have portrayed Obama as a moderate "outsider" (the No. 1 term survey respondents associate him with) who will bring a "breath of fresh air" to Washington.

The few who have drilled down on his radical roots have tended to downplay or pooh-pooh them. Even skeptics have failed to connect the dots for fear of being called the dreaded "r" word.

But too much is at stake in this election to continue mincing words.

Both a historic banking crisis and 1970s-style stagflation loom over the economy. Democrats, who already control Congress, now threaten to filibuster-proof the Senate in what could be a watershed election for them — at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

A perfect storm of statism is forming, and our economic freedoms are at serious risk.

 

Those who care less about looking politically correct than preserving the free-market individualism that’s made this country great have to start calling things by their proper name to avert long-term disaster.’

 

Furthermore:

‘Obama’s Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want, one that challenges America’s very sovereignty. The former "post-racial" candidate obviously intends to be a post-national president.’

 The various institutions of  ‘world government’  are a looming danger to all free democracies.

Obama’s declaration that he is ‘a citizen of the world’  should set alarm bells ringing throughout the United States.   The following comes from an article you can find here. 

In fact, the terminology Citizen Obama uses reveals an attachment to a radical transformation of not just our foreign policy but of the nature of our country itself.  The “change” he has in mind could prove fatal to our sovereignty and constitutional form of government.

Questions about the appropriate role of America in the world and how it conducts its relationships with foreign powers are, of course, essential topics in any presidential campaign.  That is particularly true at a moment when the United States finds itself engaged in a global war with a totalitarian ideology, Islamofascism, that has embedded itself in many allied countries and enjoys strong support from most of our foes.

It falls most immediately to Senator John McCain to highlight Citizen Obama’s radical answers to these questions and ultimately to U.S. voters to determine whether they want a global citizen in the White House or a president of, by and for the American people.    

 Dennis Prager examines what Obama actually said in Berlin and finds ignorance, distortion and naivete. 

For instance:

Obama: "Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin."

 In his attempt to exaggerate the role of Berlin before his large Berlin audience, Obama made a claim that simply makes no sense. "Berlin stood in the way" of another World War beginning? How? If anything, Berlin was the flash point of East-West tension and therefore could have triggered a war.

Read the whole excellent comment here.     

 The visits of Barack Obama and two other senators to Afghanistan and Iraq, brief as they were, may have had some point to them. But It’s hard to discern the purpose of letting this posturizing, gum-chewing, know-nothing-done-nothing egotist cavort round three European capitals, declaiming his empty rhetoric and acting as if he were President of the United States. One wonders why President Sarkozy was willing to play a ceremonious part in the charade. Has the little trip given Obama valuable experience of the world so that he can formulate wise foreign policy? These crazy theatrics should be an embarrassment to the Democrats, and would be if the Party as a whole weren’t so far gone in craziness as even to think of putting up such a fellow for the office of president.  He has done nothing for his country. His associates have been criminals, terrorists, slum-developers, Communists, hate-preachers. When one remembers the great men of extraordinary achievement and ability, and  high probity, like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Reagan to whom they now propose that this fellow could be a successor, one can scarcely believe such a degeneration of values can have come about. Will voters wake up in time from the strange mad dream into which the sonorous speechifying of this lightweight politician has lulled many of them, and save their country and the world from the irreversible disaster that his election would bring? 

 Obama, self-vaunting, under-informed, in love with his own rhetorical flourishes as always, and mixing his metaphors, gave a typically posturing and empty speech in Berlin. 

Read John Bolton’s comments on it here.