Charles Krauthammer, always worth reading and hearing, writes brilliantly on Obama’s narcissism:

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history – "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" – when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Read the whole column here.

 Melanie Phillips writes that appeasement, far from preventing war from happening, actually causes it.  

The Iranian regime should be under the maximum economic diplomatic and military pressure, treated as a pariah state and kept guessing about the possibility of a US attack, all in order to weaken and destabilise it. Instead this latest act of craven American appeasement will strengthen it because it displays in flashing neon lights the message that America hasn’t got a clue what to do about Iran and so could Tehran kindly help it out of this jam, please. Far from avoiding war, this only makes it more likely – and more likely also that when that terrible eventuality occurs, Iran will be on the front foot.

History teaches us, after all, that war is the inevitable outcome of appeasement because, instead of preventing bad people from doing bad things, it galvanises them further to do so. When the Americans talked to the Japanese, the result was Pearl Harbour. When Chamberlain talked to Hitler, the result was the invasion of Poland. And when Britain tried to appease the Arab Nazis in 1930s Palestine by offering to reward them for their terrorist intransigence by giving them half the land promised to the Jews, the result was the Arab war of annihilation against the reborn Jewish state – a war which continues to this day.

Moreover, Iran is as strong as it is today only because of the astounding fact that America has refused to fight back in the war that Iran has been prosecuting against it now for almost three decades. When its people were taken hostage at the US embassy, Jimmy Carter infamously sat on his hands. When more than 240 Americans were murdered when Iran bombed the US marine barracks, the US did virtually nothing. When Iran fomented attacks in Iraq and blew up coalition troops by its roadside bombs, America gave orders to its military that there were to be no covert ops in Iran and not even any hot pursuit of Iranian terrorists over the border. And when Iran turned Lebanon into a proxy battleground and stifled the nascent Lebanese democracy, America looked the other way. So much for the ‘Bush doctrine’.

It is however quite staggering to witness this change in attitude towards Israel by a man who had been arguably the most pro-Israel American president in history. Yet now he is giving the impression that – in the prescient cry of Ariel Sharon – Israel is to play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, with William Burns about to join the EU in sealing its fate in a re-run of the Munich agreement. This in turn follows the intense American pressure upon Israel to reach a suicidal deal with Fatah to establish what would inevitably be a Palestinian terror state. But of course, entirely contrary to the false belief that America has its strings pulled by the Zionists, more often than not American presidents have by their actions shown they are no friend at all to Israel. Clinton, that quintessential false friend, was a key player in the Oslo peace process which armed Fatah and resulted in thousands of Israelis dead in the second intifada and the strengthening of the jihad everywhere. Over the years America has constantly forced Israel to make ‘painful concessions’ which have imperilled its security, while refusing to compel the Arabs to make any concessions at all and insisting on rewarding them instead for their aggression. It is that systematic accommodation with genocidal terror and the sacrifice of truth and justice on the altar of appeasement which is the single most important reason for the never-ending Middle East impasse – and why the whole of the free world is now about to be held to ransom.

 That Israel should unnecessarily capitulate to Hizbullah is  distressing enough, but that America should capitulate to Iran is not only distressing, it is immensely dangerous.

Yet that apparently is what ‘s happening. The US is reopening diplomatic relations with the Iranians. If the State Department has excelled itself in wanting to act even more against American interests than usual, why has President Bush let it do so? Or was it his own idea?    

His Middle East policy was reduced to tatters when he and Rice did all they could to sell Israel out to Abbas the Terrorist.

Then he went on his knees to Saudi Arabia for more oil. 

Now he’s crawling to Ahmadinejad.

Speak up, John McCain! Say  you are disgusted! Promise to use America’s might on the side of right!

 Israel went to war to get back two kidnapped soldiers. Ended the war without getting them back. Now exchanges live terrorists for the two dead (and mutilated) bodies, giving strong incentive to its enemies to kidnap as many more Israelis as they can, and kill them – by any appalling means.

It’s hard to say whether Prime Minister Olmert is more stupid or wicked. In my book he’s a traitor, several times over. His forcing Jews to leave their homes in Gaza was another of his betrayals of his own people.

As he’s notoriously a man susceptible to bribery, I wonder if he’s been bribed to use his office to destroy Israel? Just a thought.  

Melanie Phillips tells the story of the immoral exchange of murderers for corpses and comments on it here.  

 Daniel Hannan writes in the Telegraph:

A fearful blow has been struck against national sovereignty. The International Criminal Court has launched a prosecution against a head of state – a state, moreover, that has not signed the ICC treaty. International human rights apparatchiks are enjoying the warm glow of self-righteousness; but they have just made the world a darker and more dangerous place.

Don’t get me wrong: the man they have arraigned, Omar al-Bashir, is an unutterable swine. Having seized power in a military putsch, he has maintained himself in office by displacing and terrorising millions of his citizens. Some 300,000 Sudanese are estimated to have been killed in his civil wars and, while the government does not bear sole responsibility for each of those deaths, it must be reckoned the worst offender.

How, then, could I possibly object to bringing such a monster to trial? If the defunct Sudanese legal system can’t deal with him, shouldn’t someone else?

Well, maybe: but this will mean conquering Sudan. Bashir is the head of state, the supreme repository and exemplar of Sudanese sovereignty. Indicting him amounts to a declaration of war. Now there may well be an argument for military intervention in Sudan. Quite apart from having presided over the genocidal purges in Darfur, Bashir has given the rest of the world ample cross-border provocation. He turned his country into a base for terrorists of every stripe: the Ugandan child-kidnappers of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Carlos the Jackal, even Osama bin Laden. I’m not a big fan of invading other countries but, if we’re going to pick on one, Sudan is a pretty good candidate.

Except that the international community is emphatically not proposing an invasion. The prosecution is a narcissistic act, intended to make liberal internationalists feel superior and to bolster the ICC’s damaged reputation (its first case, against a Congolese militia leader, has just collapsed) rather than to ameliorate the lot of the Sudanese. Declaring war without meaning to wage it – which is what the indictment means – will simply deter the ghastly Khartoum regime from reaching any kind of accommodation with its opponents. Rather like an insistence on unconditional surrender, the prosecution will serve chiefly to make the autocrats more determined.

That’s the problem with these international law codes. By definition, the only countries on which they have any effect are democracies: tyrants simply ignore them. For the sake of being rude about Bashir – without any practical consequences – the ICC will substantively and genuinely diminish the sovereignty of free nations

 Power Line correctly argues:

OBAMA ON JERUSALEM – DISHONEST, IGNORANT, OR BOTH

 

As with virtually every other issue of consequence, Barack Obama has failed to take a consistent, coherent position with respect to his goal for the city of Jerusalem. A few months ago, when he was pandering to the pro-Israel audience at AIPAC, Obama said that Jerusalem should remain “undivided.” For those with a basic understanding of the discourse on this issue, the meaning of his statement was clear – Jerusalem will remain the Jewish people’s historical capital city and will remain exclusively part of the Jewish state under any future agreement with the Palestinians.

Obama, moreover, had plenty of incentive to convey this position to the AIPAC convention. Indeed, any other descripton of the future of Jerusalem would have played poorly with an audience Obama very much wanted to impress.

However, Obama’s handlers were uncomfortable with Obama’s statement because the call for an undivided city might “prejudice” the “final status” of Jerusalem. The party line among mainstream advocates of the "peace process" is to call on Israel and the Palestinians negotiate without such preconditions, with the "final status" of Jerusalem to be resolved at the end of the process.

With the AIPAC convention behind him, Obama has fallen back to the party line. Attempting to "clarify" his "poorly phrased" remarks to the pro-Israel crowd, Obama now says:

The point we were simply making was that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the ‘67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent. I was not trying to predetermine what are essentially final-status issues.

But that is an easy point to make. If this is what Obama wanted to convey to AIPAC, it’s difficult to believe he would have used the loaded term "undivided."

But what of Obama’s current vision under which Mr. Yes-We-Can resolves to "create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent" that it is not exclusively part of a Jewish state but requires no barriers? The question answers itself. Here’s how David Hazony, a resident of Jerusalem, puts it:

What could it possibly mean to want a “coherent” city that is the capital of two different countries, one of which has been teaching its entire population to hate the other and commit suicide bombings in its restaurants for 15 years now — and all this without a proper border? I live in Jerusalem. The border between Israel and the Palestinians, wherever it may run, and no matter how long peace reigns, will never be like that between Massachusetts and Connecticut. It is unlikely ever even to be like the one between Arizona and Mexico. If there is ever a division of Jerusalem, there will be more than just barbed wire separating the two halves of the city. We are talking about different worlds entirely, and security arrangements will reflect this.

As Hazony concludes, Obama either understands this or he doesn’t. If he does, he is being dishonest when he claim the city can be undivided in other than the sense in which his AIPAC remarks were construed. If he doesn’t, his ignorance is staggering.

 

 Read here how European states are allowing Islam to conquer them by sedition, and how the US is threatened by the same process. 

In Britain the Lord Chief Justice approves of the introduction of Shariah law to govern financial transactions. There are those who advocate its introduction into the US. What would the effects be? 

In an article on the fact that Iran has been at war with the US for decades, this statement appears . It is a stark warning.

We must counter the effort being made by the Iranians and other Islamists to use so-called Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF) as a means to wage “financial jihad” against us. Before SCF instruments proliferate further in our capital markets, in the process legitimating and helping to underwrite the repressive, anti-constitutional and subversive program the Iranian mullahs (among others) call Shariah, that program must be recognized for what it is – sedition – and prosecuted as such. 

‘The dismal truth is that the UN is the principal engine for the perpetuation of chaos, terror, misery and injustice across the world.

It is high time we abolished this obscene institution and created instead a United Democratic Nations to promote freedom and justice.’

 

So writes Melanie Phillips in a must-read article here. 

 Would Obama bring change to the corruption which remains an integral part of the political culture of Chicago and Illinois?

‘His chief advisor, David Axelrod, is working with the Alliance to Protect the Illinois Constitution, a big labor/big business coalition, to defeat this opportunity for change. Barack’s main man is helping the most powerful special interests of his state’s dysfunctional status quo in a multi-million dollar campaign to prevent the chance for change on this November’s statewide ballot.’

Read more about it here.