Sex Aversion 288

Following on from our post Childlessness (April 30, 2012), we quote today from an article about a spreading aversion to sex. It is by Spengler, writing in the Asia Times:

A Japanese government study [shows that] almost a third of Japanese boys aged 16-19 and three-fifths of girls say that they have no interest in sex. …

The hormones of late adolescence evidently rage in vain against some cultural barrier that makes young Japanese “despise” sexual relations. …

For 60 years, the sexual revolution insisted that repressed desire is the root of all evil. It turns out that the ultimate victim of the sexual revolution is sex itself.

What makes the Japanese hate sex? The same things that make a growing proportion of Americans hate sex. Joan Sewell’s 2007 book I’d Rather Eat Chocolate became the manifesto of American women who don’t like sex …

Pharmaceutical companies are racing to market a pill to revive fading female libido, to no avail: women do not want to be sex objects, and a culture that objectifies women will make them hate sex …

Japan is a step ahead of the United States, as the first industrial country to bring sadism and pedophilia into the mainstream. … A streak of cruelty pervades Japanese culture … But the West has begun to embrace cruelty in sexual relations on a scale comparable to Japan, and the consequences most likely will be identical.

For example: Fifty Shades of Grey [by E L James], the adult version of the Twilight vampire-and-werewolf series, has become a soccer-mom bestseller. Now we know what the original, adolescent version was about, namely sadism and submission. What is it that makes adolescent girls crave sexual control and degradation? Evidently, it is the same thing that prompts their mothers to buy heavy-breathing pulp versions of the same thing in more explicit form.

After half a century of sexual revolution – otherwise known as objectification – women suffer en masse from the sexual equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, identification with their tormentors, as a number of popular commentators observe. After a quarter-million e-book downloads, Viking Press has just paid a seven-figure advance to … E L James, an Englishwoman who initially posted the manuscript as bondage porn on a Twilight fan fiction site under the screen-name “SnowqueensIcedragon”.  In the original, still available online, little Bella of the Twilight books is deflowered not by her vampire boyfriend, but by a billionaire sadist instead, and becomes his adoring sex slave. …

The Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek … got the 2004 Nobel Prize in literature for explicit portrayals of sexual violence, but with literary pretensions. Jelinek … is an Austrian communist who politicizes domination. …

Why are so many American women fascinated by sexual cruelty? The answer is that the prevailing regime of sexual objectification already carries with it the experience of cruelty. For adolescent girls, the replacement of courtship by “hooking up” with “friends with benefits” is a cruel prospect.

Somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate explanation. Cruel prospects might be expected to invoke a yearning for happier ones, not an appetite for reading about cruelty.

Even though only three out of ten American teenagers aged 13 to 16 are sexually active, the options available to adolescent girls are narrowly defined. Adolescent boys are monsters, as anyone who has been one, or known one, can attest, and to require adolescent girls to engage in sexual activity of any kind with such creatures is horrifying. The considerate and courteous young vampire of the Twilight books is a cavalier by comparison.

Freud’s question, “What do women want?,” showed what an ideologically-driven fanatic he was. Women want what every human being wants, which is to be unique, and to be loved for their uniqueness. With rare exceptions, human beings become unique by bearing and raising children: a child can have only one mother. Women are unique as mothers, and men are lifted above their animal instincts by their attachment to the mother of their children.

The moment we separate sexuality from child-bearing, we turn women into generic sexual objects, which makes it impossible for them to obtain what they want, because sexual objects are generic. The one thing you know with 100% certainty about any woman you see, supermodels included, is that some man, somewhere, is tired of sleeping with her. If women cannot control men by bearing their children, what other means to they have to control them? We find the answer in the sudden popularity of dominant-submissive fantasies.

The dominant “master of the universe” in EL James’ story can be controlled by his own need to dominate, for the submissive female heroine has something that he needs in addition to generic sexuality. …

The controller is controlled by the woman he controls? Control, control. Women liberationists, are you listening?

The stylized sexual games that EL James recounts become a creepy substitute for actual courtship. Like the romance novel hero, who must pay court to the female lead, the “master of the universe” must pay prolonged attention to the female lead in preparation for sexual acts. Romance fiction requires a suspension of disbelief that is increasingly precarious in a culture of sexual exploitation. The dominant-submissive fantasy is more credible.

The sudden popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey portends the death of America’s libido.  I cannot speak from personal experience, but the paradox of domination … surely applies to the ritualistic cruelty described in this silly book and its sequels. After the initial frisson has passed, repetition of the same handcuffs-and-riding-crop routine must become unspeakably boring over time. …

And when perversion fails to titillate, nothing at all will. Like Japanese women, who encountered mainstream sexual violence and now eschew sex altogether, American women will have a great deal less sex and a great deal more chocolate.

All the signs are there. …  American women will follow their Japanese sisters into asexuality, and if women become sufficiently disgusted with men, men will become disgusted with themselves.

But then again, much of that diagnosis may be just psychobabble. The ingestion of chemicals could be to blame:

There might be a simpler explanation for the disappearance of Japan’s libido. Between 1998 and 2003, sales of anti-depressants in Japan quintupled …

Prozac is well known to cause sexual dysfunction, along with general calming. Maybe the attack on depression and hyperactivity is affecting aggression, violence, crime, and many other antisocial behaviors. …  Maybe America and other nations are prescribing themselves a gradual but gigantic and deadly loss of libido.

Whether it is due to disgust at the misery of their circumstances, or the side-effect of drugs intended to dull the misery of their circumstances, women are abandoning sexuality.

When human beings cease to desire each other physically, it is because they have ceased to desire each other at all. The things that motivate human beings to unite in intimate and permanent union, procreating and acculturating another generation, give way to the pure exercise of ego.

No, no: “pure ego” is being denied. What is the evolutionary use of sexual desire? The only discernible purpose our biology provides for us is to reproduce. As a biologist once put it: “The only reason an egg gives birth to a chicken is to ensure that there will be another egg.”

But we agree with the main point: promiscuous sex is lonely, sterile, boring, purposeless, destructive of dignity and self-respect, and terminally bad for human beings both individually and as the human race.

The typical [not quite – JB] American household no longer harbors a family but a person living alone. As Eric Klinenberg reports in his much-commented new book Going Solo, 28% of all American households now contain a single person, compared to just 9% in 1950.

Klinenberg, to be sure, thinks this is wonderful; his typical “Singleton” lives in Manhattan, hangs out at the local sushi bar and coffee shop, swims in a rich cultural current, and devotes himself to the grand diversion of the age, namely “self-realization”, which is easier to pursue in the absence of another self that might make competing demands.

In another 20 years or so, though, the self-sufficient singles of American cities will emulate the kodokushi (“lonely death”) victims of Japan, another much-commented 21st-century phenomenon. … Kodokushi clean-up has become a minor industry:

In the 1990s … the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn’t any family to call on. So [he] started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse.

That is the end that enlightened secular culture has prefigured for us …: to leave no trace of our mortal existence except for a grease-stain on the carpet.

A sickening image, a pathetic fate.

But we don’t like his putting in the word “secular”. His implication is that lack of religious belief underlies or directly causes this vast disillusionment and lapse into hopeless futility. What does religion offer as a counter? A purpose beyond this world, this life? It is in this world, this life that we need happiness and fulfillment. There is no other.

 

(Hat tip for the link, reader and commenter rogerinflorida.)

Free universal enstupidation 240

Fred Reed is a man who rants cogently and eloquently. Sometimes we agree with him, often we don’t, but he’s usually worth reading.

We find much to agree with in this provocative article of his, but also quite a lot to question:

I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean.

Schooling … should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Allowing for some hyperbole, we accept those points.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate—“graduate”—from high school—“high school”—unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

For those of reasonably average acuity, it little profits to go beyond learning to read, which they can do quite well, and to use a calculator. Upon their leaving high school, question them and you find that they know almost nothing. They could learn more, average not being stupid, but modest intelligence implies no interest in study. This is true only of academic subjects such as history, literature, and physics. They will study things that seem practical to them. Far better to teach the modestly acute such things as will allow them to earn a living, be they typing, carpentry, or diesel repair. Society depends on such people. But why inflict upon them the geography of Southeast Asia, the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of the nineteenth century? Demonstrably they remember none of it.

Some who favor the public schools assert that an informed public is necessary to a functioning democracy. True, and beyond doubt. But we do not have an informed public, never have had one, and never will.

Nor, really, do we have a functioning democracy.

On that point he goes on to explain:

Any survey will reveal that most people have no grasp of geography, history, law, government, finance, international relations, or politics. And most people have neither the intelligence nor the interest to learn these things. If schools were not the disasters they are, they still couldn’t produce a public able to govern a nation.

“A public able to govern a nation”. Yes, that would be a description of a functioning democracy. But as the “witless” and those who have “no interest in study” will always constitute a significant part of the demos, it would follow that “a functioning democracy” is forever impossible. And yet – how informed must a public be, or how many persons must be well informed, to sustain “a functioning democracy”? Ill-informed or even illiterate persons can be astute, for instance, about money. (As the old song goes: “He signs his checks with Xs but they cash them just the same.”)

But it is for the intelligent that the public schools—“schools”—are most baneful. It is hideous for the bright, especially bright boys, to sit year after year in an inescapable miasma of appalling dronedom while some low-voltage mental drab wanders on about banalities that would depress a garden slug.

Yes, that’s all too often the case.

The public schools are worse than no schools for the quick. A sharp kid often arrives at school already reading. Very quickly he (or, most assuredly, she) reads four years ahead of grade. These children teach themselves. They read indiscriminately, without judgement—at first anyway—and pick up ideas, facts, and vocabulary. They also begin to think. …

Yes again. Those who want to learn will learn.

The bright should go to school, but it is well to distinguish between a school and a penitentiary. They need schools at their level, taught by teachers at their level. It is not hard to get intelligent children to learn things, and indeed today a whole system of day-care centers only partly succeeds in keeping them from doing it.

By “day-care centers” he means the public schools of course, and we think he’s right that intelligent children manage to learn without much help from public school teachers.

They like learning things … When I was in grade school in the early Fifties, bright kids read, shrew-like, four times their body weight in books… In third grade or so, they had microscopes (Gilbert for hoi polloi, but mine was a fifteen-dollar upscale model from Edmund Scientific) and knew about rotifers and Canada balsam and well slides and planaria.

These young, out of human decency, for the benefit of the country, should not be subjected to public education—“education.” Where do we think high-bypass turbofans come from? Are they invented by heart-warming morons?

To a remarkable extent, dumb-ass public schools are simply not necessary. … The absorptive capacity of smart kids is large if you just stay out of their way. A bright boy of eleven can quickly master a collegiate text of physiology, for example. This is less astonishing than perhaps it sounds. The human body consists of comprehensible parts that do comprehensible things. If he is interested, which is the key, he will learn them, while apparently being unable to learn state capitals, which don’t interest him.

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

An interesting view; true if communism is “the rule of the proletariat”, and if the proletariat rules. In any case, whoever is ruling is getting it wrong.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

We’d hope that nobody with a substantial IQ would deliberately set out “to use it for the good of society”. If he uses it for his own good it would be almost impossible for him not to be contributing something valuable to others.

That the type of education or training provided should suit abilities and answer vocational needs is a thoroughly reasonable proposal.

And government should have nothing to do with education.

 

(Hat tip, our reader and commenter Frank)

Smile 98

Picture from Bare Naked Islam

Posted under Humor, Islam, Muslims by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, May 1, 2012

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Allen West talks sense about Islamic terrorism 79

Posted under Commentary, Islam, jihad, Muslims, Progressivism, Terrorism, United States, War by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, May 1, 2012

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Childlessness 183

Environmentalists – adherents of the religion of Gaia – want the population of the world to shrink. Some of them want the human race to become extinct. (See our post Earth Day: ideally celebrated with human sacrifice, April 22, 2012.)

In many countries – all of Europe, Russia, and Japan being notable examples – indigenous populations are shrinking rapidly.

In the United States, the birth rate keeps the population stable and immigration increases it. But there is here, as elsewhere in the developed world, a high abortion rate, and advocacy for infanticide among the leftist self-appointed elite. (See our post The Nazi ethics of the left, March 5, 2012.)

People who have no children save themselves a large expense. They are less tied down. Through their active years they are freer to please themselves.

But what happens to them when they grow old?

This is from an essay by Nicholas Eberstadt, in the Spring issue of the Wilson Quarterly, titled Japan Shrinks:

In 2006, Japan reached a demographic and social turning point. According to Tokyo’s official statistics, deaths that year very slightly outnumbered births.. … Japan is now a “net mortality society.” Death rates today are routinely higher than birthrates, and the imbalance is growing. The nation is set to commence a prolonged period of depopulation. …

Japan’s historically robust (if perhaps at times stifling) family relations, a pillar of society in all earlier generations, stand to be severely and perhaps decisively eroded in the coming decades. Traditional “Asian family values” — the ideals of universal marriage and parenthood — are already largely a curiosity of the past in Japan. Their decay has set in motion a variety of powerful trends which virtually ensure that the Japan of 2040 will be a country with far greater numbers of aged isolates, divorced individuals, and adults whose family lines come to an end with them.

At its heart, marriage in traditional Japan was a matter of duty, not just love. … Unshackled from the obligations of the old family order, Japan’s young men and women have plunged into a previously unknown territory of interpersonal options. … Even as young Japanese increasingly avoid marriage, divorce is further undermining the country’s family structure. Just as being unmarried at prime child-rearing age is no longer a situation requiring explanation, divorce now bears no stigma. Between 1970 and 2009, the annual tally of divorces nearly tripled. The number of new marriages, meanwhile, slumped by nearly a third. …

As the flight from marriage and the normalization of divorce has recast living arrangements in Japan, the cohort of married fertile adults has plummeted in size. … Nowadays, the odds of being married are barely even within this key demographic group. And marriage is the only real path to parenthood. Unwed motherhood remains, so to speak, inconceivable because of the enduring disgrace conferred by out-of-wedlock births.

In effect, the Japanese have embraced voluntary mass childlessness. …

Rates of childlessness have been generally rising throughout the industrialized world since 1945, but Japan’s levels were high to begin with. …

Though it can be represented in cold statistics, the human flavor of Japan’s new demographic order may be better captured in anecdote:

• Rental “relatives” are now readily available throughout the country for celebrations when a groom or bride lacks requisite kin.

• “Babyloids” — small, furry, robotic dolls that can mimic some of the sounds and gestures of real babies — are being marketed to help older Japanese cope with loneliness and depression.

• Robot pets and rental pets are also available for those who seek the affection of an animal but cannot cope with having one to look after.

• In a recent government survey, one-third of boys ages 16 to 19 described themselves as uninterested in or positively averse to sexual intimacy.

• Young Japanese men are, however, clearly very interested in video games and the Internet: In 2009, a 27-year-old Japanese man made history by “marrying” a female video game character’s avatar while thousands watched online.

• Japanese researchers are pioneering the development of attractive, lifelike androids. Earlier this year, a persuasively realistic humanoid called Geminoid F was displayed in a department store window, appearing to wait for a friend.

These random facts may not reflect the full spectrum of everyday life in modern Japan, but like anecdotes about any country, they reveal things that are genuine, distinctive, and arguably meaningful about it today—and perhaps tomorrow as well.

What will all of these unfolding demographic and familial changes mean for the Japan of 2040?

Generally and probably, a poorer, harder, lonelier, drearier life for a perishing nation is the answer. For details read the whole article here.

“If I wanted America to fail …” 5

Fire or ice 149

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

– Robert Frost

*

This is from Canada Free Press by Robert Felix:

Satellite data show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range on the China-Pakistan border are putting on mass, defying the general trend toward glacier shrinkage. In an article entitled “Slight mass gain of Karakoram glaciers in the early twenty-first century,” Researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Grenoble admit to “an anomalous gain of mass” for the Karakoram glaciers.

This is in direct contradiction to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which claimed that ice from most of the region could disappear by 2035.

Often considered a part of the Himalayas, the Karakoram range, which runs through Pakistan, India and China, is technically a separate chain that includes K2, the world’s second-highest peak. …

We’re talking about the greatest chain of ice-capped peaks in the world — from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan — and satellite measurements show that they have lost NO ice in the past 10 years.

Not only have they lost no ice, in a defiant act of political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas – including Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat – are actually growing.

“These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”

And get this. Eighty seven of those glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s.

But we don’t need to look to the Himalayas for growing glaciers. Glaciers are also growing in the United States. Yes, in the United States.

Look at California. All seven glaciers on California’s Mount Shasta are growing, including three-mile-long Whitney glacier, the state’s largest.

Farther north in Washington State, the Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier Peak in northern Washington are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt. Saint Helens is now larger than it was before the 1980 eruption.

Even farther north, the Juneau Icefield, which covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere, is also growing.

Are these growing glaciers also just “an anomalous gain of mass”? Well, let’s look at a few other countries.

• Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing.

• Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.

• Glaciers are growing in Norway, says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE).

• And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing. (The Franz Josef glacier is advancing at the rate of 4 to 7 feet per day!)

But these glaciers are babies when you look at our planet’s largest ice mass, namely, the Antarctic ice sheet.

Contrary to what you may have heard, this huge ice sheet is growing.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D’Aleo.

Antarctic sea ice has also been increasing, on average, since 1980.

Think about that.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States, is about 90 times bigger than all of the rest of the world’s glaciers combined.

Close to 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

Welcome to the new ice age.

Are the warmists embarrassed? Well, yes:

“Our measurements…indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was -0.01 mm yr for the period from 1999 to 2008,” write the French researchers [Julie Gardelle, Etienne Berthier, Yves Arnaud].

Huh? What does that mean? “The contribution to sea-level rise was MINUS 0.01 mm per year”? …

“Why this should be is not clear,” writes BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black. “Though it is well known from studies in other parts of the world that climate change can cause extra precipitation into cold regions which, if they are cold enough, gets added to the existing mass of ice.”

Get that? Global warming adds to the existing mass of ice (“climate change” being the replacement phrase for “global warming” since global warming paused in the last ten years).

Uh huh. First we’re told that global warming will melt all of the world’s glaciers and sea levels will rise catastrophically. Now, we’re being told that global warming will make the glaciers grow and contribute – in a minus sort of way – to sea level rise. Does that mean that sea levels will fall?

If it does mean that, you won’t hear the warmists say so. They believe that sea levels will rise, so rise they must.

Seems, one way or another, the earth has only about 5 billion more years before Carl Sagan’s promised “last perfect day” and then …

Cruel but not unusual in the Arab world 98

The authenticity of this horrific video of a man being buried alive in Syria is being questioned.

Sparse as the information surrounding it is, it seems to us extremely unlikely that anyone would voluntarily undergo what we see this man suffering merely to help create a propaganda hoax.

As it is not made clear who the perpetrators are, for whom would the propaganda be useful? They are assumed to be Syrian soldiers, but do Syrian soldiers wear sneakers? And if most of them are soldiers, why is the man in jeans working with them?

What we do know is that such atrocities are carried out in the Arab world. The language spoken here is Arabic. It is generally agreed that the video has come from Syria. It seems certain enough that Arabs are doing it.

Posted under Arab States, Commentary, Syria, Videos by Jillian Becker on Friday, April 27, 2012

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Now call it treason 295

Recent events and disclosures at the highest levels of our government demonstrate that our own rulers … have through folly and dishonesty exposed themselves as “useful idiots” or worse, liars and functionaries whose loyalties may well be to other than the United States.

This is from an article by David Meir-Levi at Front Page:

On April 10, Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, stated that “religion is not driving extremist violence” in Nigeria. This pronouncement was made one day after Boko Haram, the uber-violent Muslim jihadist Nigerian terrorists, bombed a church killing 39 Christians.

Carson told us an unconscionable and transparent lie …  given the Boko Haram’s overt and unabashed self-definition as a brutally violent Muslim terrorist organization which condemns all things non-Muslim as “Haram” (prohibited) …

What impelled Mr. Carson to lie such that anyone anywhere who does not live under a rock can see that he is lying? …

The Saudi royal family has over the past decades insinuated itself into our State Department by promising State Department officials serving in the Arab world generous sinecures when they have retired from their official duties, as long as they represent Saudi interests to the US government while serving in the State Department. These Saudi long-range bribes render our officials servants of the Saudi government, representing Saudi interests to our government instead of the other way around.

How many Americans ostensibly serving US interests, and paid by American tax-payers to serve US interests, are in fact working for the Saudis? Who could know, since each traitor must try to keep his secret?  It is bad that any are, it is appalling that many probably are.

One thing is apparent, since Johnnie Carson is able openly to tell his blatant lie: the head of the State Department is allowing it to happen.

But the problem runs deeper than one State Department functionary whose integrity may have been compromised by Muslim forces that want him to lie on behalf of Islamic jihadist terrorists. His boss is Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State. She has been silent regarding his transparent lie. Is Saudi penetration so deep that even the Secretary of State cannot publicly correct the errors of a State Department employee; and is it only the Saudis?

Both deeper and higher the rot reaches:

Very distressingly, it may be more than the State Department alone that is in question here. President Obama and the State Department have been unwilling to rule out aid to Hamas despite the fact that that very same State Department has classified Hamas as a terrorist organization, and American law prohibits US financial aid to terrorist organizations.

As Trudy Rubin observed last year in a Washington Post article: “The most ominous interpretation of the mush coming from the State Department (regarding aid to Hamas) is that the administration is so rudderless, unprincipled and desperate to avoid a clear defeat in its efforts to foist a “peace agreement” on the parties that it would go so far as to continue to do business with the PA, despite (the PA’s) taking on a partner that has killed Americans, seeks Israel’s destruction and, from behind the skirts of women and the cribs of children, has conducted a missile bombardment of Israel.”

The State Department’s rudderless, unprincipled pronouncements contradict its own policy denying aid to any terrorist organization. …

Obama and Hillary Clinton plainly do not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization. It’s writ large in their record of the past three years that their sympathies lie strongly with Hamas and strongly  against Israel.

Significant percentages of Gazan Arabs … really want Hamas and other terror groups to just keep on bombing Israel, just keep on killing Jews. Yet the State Department and our President are unclear as to whether or not it is a good idea for the USA to continue to provide Hamas with hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars …

Then there is Madame Secretary’s comments on TV to a young and activist Tunisian audience on April 17. When asked why American Presidential candidates on both sides support Israel and Zionism, she said:

“Well, first, let me say you will learn as your democracy develops that a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention. There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people.”

In plainer words: “We  lie a lot, but the truth is we do not support Israel.” 

Our Secretary of State told her Tunisian audience, in front of international TV, that our Presidential candidates lie to get votes, and they are lying about their support for Israel. Then she went on to say:

“…watch what President Obama says and does. He’s our President. He represents all of the United States, and he will be reelected President, so I think that that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are and what our President believes.

Yes, watch him. He does make clear his aggression towards Israel. He bows to the Saudis. He wants money to go to Hamas. In this, if only in this, Hillary Clinton is right. The whole world should read the clear signals of his beliefs.

In other words, the President is really on your side, Tunisian youth, and Obama’s pro-Israel statements in the previous campaign and during his current tenure are lies, as is the pro-Israel rhetoric of the Republican candidates.

There is no reason at present to doubt that Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s “rhetoric” about being pro-Israel is merely a convenient lie. The left habitually ascribes its own faults and evil plots to its opponents.

Secretary Clinton subordinated U.S. interests to partisan considerations and told her Muslim audience what she figured they wanted to hear, namely that the USA does not really support Israel, that’s just mendacious campaign rhetoric. In addition to calling her own President and most Republican candidates liars, she also unabashedly contradicted 65 years of the Israel-USA relationship. …

And Obama himself, Mr. “knife in Israel’s back,” has pandered to the Persians, curtseyed to the Caliph (king Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), flip-flopped in representing himself on the Arab-Israel issue, and tried his best during the three years of his presidency, to make a shambles of the traditional US-Israel relationship. …

Our leaders at the highest levels … have revealed to us their naked dishonesty. They are not honest stewards of American society, nor honest brokers in the Israel-Arab conflict, nor even stalwart defenders of our own country, their own country, in Western Civilization’s defensive war against Islamofascist, triumphalist, totalitarian, terrorist jihad. They have been compromised by forces at least one of which is Saudi oil money.

– To which forces they have been not just open but positively welcoming, because their prejudices are in favor of Islam and the Arabs, and profoundly against American exceptionalism and the ideal of individual liberty. 

What will it take before we can end the lies, stop the posturing, and call the complicity of our President and his Department of State with Muslim jihadist terrorism what it really is?

A leap of faith 23

Posted under cartoons, Commentary, Economics, Humor, Socialism, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, April 25, 2012

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