David Solway writes (read the whole article at Front Page Magazine): 

Our political leaders, the majority of our public intellectuals and the mainstream media have not realized, or myopically refuse to realize, what is at stake as the historical drama in which we are implicated unfolds—a drama in which Iran and Israel are the central actors. 

Let us imagine a terrifying possibility. We know that Iran has vowed to unleash nuclear havoc upon Israel. Should Israel respond in kind, as it would have every right to do, the damage may not be confined to a localized area. Many people are callous enough to accept the nuclear probability of Tel Aviv and Tehran reduced to rubble and ash, so long as they can get on with their lives. What they do not realize is that they too are in the line of fire.

An atomic missile falling on Kharg Island, for example, Iran’s major oil depot in the Persian Gulf, would ignite a radioactive oil fire that could probably not be extinguished and the skies would gradually darken over us all. Such a conflagration would more likely than not have to burn itself out, when it might well be too late to recover from its effect on climate and agriculture. Israel would undoubtedly do its utmost to avoid striking such installations, but Iran remains one vast inflammable oil well. An errant nuclear-tipped missile, launched from either side, may have planetary consequences. Krakatoa would be as nothing in comparison. Saddam lighting up a number of oil wells in Kuwait would not even qualify as a harbinger of what would occur—we recall that it took several months for American engineers to control a relatively minor irritation in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.

We are now living what may be the most precarious moment in the recorded history of the world as we continue to play the dangerous game of Iranian roulette—the game in which not one but five of the six chambers are loaded…

In the current play of innocuous strategies vis à vis Iran, of abject appeasement and feeble sanction, juicy carrot and twig-like stick, this is not a fifth act we should placidly discount. Former American ambassador to the UN John Bolton, one of our most reliable analysts, has warned that “there are no incentives that will dissuade Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons” (Newsmax, January 28, 2009). And so far, no disincentives either…

Ahmadinejad has made clear his intention to prompt the advent of the Mahdi by initiating an act of apocalyptic violence. It’s not a bad plan from the Imamic perspective. Accelerate the Mahdi’s arrival by bringing about a nuclear cataclysm and reap the reward of either of two outcomes. Israel is destroyed and Iran survives since, as Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has informed us, Iran can absorb “thirty or forty million martyrs” in its march toward a global Caliphate. Alternatively, Iran is also consumed and very possibly the world along with it, a global conquest to be savored from a position of vantage in Jannah, the Garden of Eternal Delights. Either way, victory.

Fear-mongering? Think again. Those who would argue that such a scenario makes no sense and is in fact counter-productive have simply not grasped the metality in question. A nuclear weapon is only a bigger suicide bomb and there are prospective “martyrs” aplenty…

The aim is to ensure that Iran stays afloat while it prepares to accomplish its mission, predicated on the calculated risk that neither Israel nor America will intervene in time to deflect its trajectory. It’s a gamble, but one the Iranians are confident they can win. (And they certainly have nothing to worry about from a flaccid and propitiatory Europe.)…

 We should do well to keep in mind that we are not treating with a cadre of lucid and sensible actors who can be trusted to be reasonable—as we understand reasonableness. They are labile, invidious and locked in a mental universe that is utterly foreign to our own…

The original statement delivered in Farsi at the “World without Zionism” conference held in Tehran on October 26, 2005 translates literally as: Israel “must be erased from the page of time,” a slogan draped across Shihab-3 missiles at military parades, which makes the intent rather obvious. “Wiped off the map” is the non-literal translation provided by the New York Times… 

Many of Iran’s enablers in Western intellectual and political circles, such as Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, Stephen Walt of “Israel Lobby” fame, the despicable Jimmy Carter and American Congressmen Denis Kucinich and Ron Paul, have tried to soft-pedal Ahmadinejad’s threat. The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Max Rodendeck speaks dismissively of Iran’s “nuclear gadgetry.” … The downward appraisal by the American National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear program, which reduced the threat index and thereby mitigated the urgency of the situation, turns out to have been totally misguided. It was subsequently reversed by director Michael McConnell at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 5, 2008.

Ahmadinejad looks and acts like a small-time crook, but he will soon have his finger on a big-time button. Nor should we be deceived by his apparent buffoonery. He means what he says and he needs to be taken at his word…                                  

Jews now have their own nation and are no longer powerless to react or to exact vengeance. If Israel finds itself in the throes of annihilation in a second Holocaust, left to smoulder in the world’s guilty unconcern, no one can dictate to it what its response should be. And no one should consider himself exempt from the consequences.

It is time to rub the slumber from our eyes. Should Iran carry out its promise to destroy Israel, whether directly or by proxy, thus hastening the looming parousia of the long-awaited Mahdi, and Israel retaliate in nuclear reprisal, the region will be set ablaze. The fact that the world economy would crater far more severely than anything we are experiencing today is almost beside the point. Far worse, the effect on the global ecology might well be disastrous and possibly terminal, and we, too, like our foolish predecessors, will have learned too late that blindness and make-believe never work. The writing is not only on the wall; it is in the documents, the proclamations, the newspapers, the texts of speeches…

Our attention has been distracted by other volatile nuclear powers, such as Pakistan and North Korea. Pakistan in particular, if the inchmeal approach of the Taliban toward the capital is not halted, will need to be robustly confronted. But in an oil-drenched region primed to go up in flames, in which one nation is acquiring offensive nuclear ordnance which it vows to use and another is ready to respond defensively, the immediate world-threat is Iran. It must be dealt with in short order, whether militarily or economically, and its nuclear designs effectively negated.

For if we do not wake up, the day may dawn when we do not wake up.

 Pakistan is disintegrating. There the Taliban is rapidly gaining territory and power, and it may not be long before it has its hands on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. And that would mean al-Qaeda will own The Bomb. 

The US under the Obama presidency will do nothing to prevent this happening. And it would be against India taking action to destroy Pakistan’s  nuclear installations.

Likewise, it will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed power. And it is against Israel taking action to destroy Iran’s nuclear development sites.

Caroline Glick warns:

The situation in Pakistan of course is similar to the situation in Iran. There, as Iran moves swiftly towards the nuclear club, the US on the one hand refuses – as it does with Pakistan – to make the hard but essential decision to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And on the other hand, it warns Israel daily that it opposes any independent Israeli operation to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed state. That is, the Obama administration is forcing Israel to weigh the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran against the threat of an abrogation of its strategic alliance with the US in the event that it prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power on its own.

In both Pakistan and Iran, the clock is ticking. The US’s reluctance to face up to the ugliness of the options at its disposal will not make them any prettier. Indeed, with each passing day the stark choice placed before America and its allies becomes ever more apparent. In both Pakistan and Iran, the choice is and will remain seeing the US and its allies taking swift and decisive action to neutralize nuclear programs that threaten global security, or seeing the world’s worst actors successfully arm themselves with the world’s most dangerous weapons. 

 Thomas Sowell writes about America’s moral decay, and the pessimism, approaching despair, that many feel with the political direction it has taken:

One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs.

Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone’s paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?

Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel.

If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea.

Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the militarily strongest nation on earth, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not.

It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender– and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb– dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles– might be enough to get us to surrender.

If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.

It doesn’t matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians– at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies.

Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.

How did we get to this point? It was no single thing.

The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of "non-judgmental" affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.

The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind.

We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before in our history. The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington’s army was totally immobilized by a vast impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape. That is how they ended up in Valley Forge.

In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did, at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet.

Over the years, we have had our share of miraculous deliverances. But that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair.

 Melanie Phillips  writes in The Spectator:

Durban 2 is central to the attempt by the Arab and Muslim world to legitimise the destruction of Israel. It also seeks to criminalise all criticism of Islam and suppress free speech under the guise of combating ‘Islamophobia’ as part of its jihadi strategy of progressively crippling all the west’s defences. This is the process Obama is now validating. If anything shows beyond a doubt that America is now set on a path of both doing the Jewish people maximum harm and surrendering to the intimidation by the Muslim world, its participation in the obscenity of Durban 2 is surely it.

As Gregg Rickman [former US special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism] writes in aghast disbelief:

In encouraging this conference to reconvene and worse, leaving it in the hands of the likes of Iran, Libya and other terrorist states, the United Nations again dishonors itself by allowing these tyrants a platform to impose their racial and religious bigotry on the world. How can the United States possibly be a part of this insanity?

The answer lies in the man whom it has elected as its 44th President.

One might think alarm bells might now be ringing in the American Jewish community. On the contrary. These are the people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama (because he was a Democrat, because he was black and because he would liberalise abortion; the psychopathology of the majority of American Jews and their actual attitude towards Israel is an issue for another time). And they are the people he has now suborned. For on his delegation at Geneva, taking part in this process of delegitimising the Jewish state while pretending to put a brake on the process, is one Felice Gaer, a senior official of the American Jewish Committee.

Yes, that American Jewish Committee – you know, the so-called ‘Jewish lobby’ which (according to Mearsheimer/ Walt and every Jew-hater from the neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites to the pages of the Guardian and Independent) manipulates America to do the bidding of Israel. Uh-huh. So let’s get this straight. Having voted this man into power, the AJC now has its head up Obama’s backside while he lends legitimacy and strength to those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and the free world – all the time pretending to themselves that they are helping to mitigate the damage.

Some lobby.

The fact is that Israel faces the nightmare scenario that it now stands alone – and against America. Whether through naivety, ideology or rank malice, there is now a fifth columnist in the White House, delivering (however unwittingly) the agenda of the enemies of the west and undermining the cause of the free world. The vast majority of Americans who staunchly support Israel’s struggle to exist in the face of genocidal attack, and understand only too well its role as the front line of defence for the free world, need to become aware of what is being done in their name.

Last September, Mithal al-Alusi, an Iraqi Sunni MP, arrived in Israel to attend an annual counter-terrorism conference. He forcefully cried, “In Israel, there is no occupation; there is liberalism,” to the sound of roaring applause from Israelis and foreign diplomats. Upon his return to Iraq, the National Assembly of Iraq voted to remove his parliamentary immunities and banned him from travelling. He was arrested and threatened with the death penalty. This was not his first visit; in 2004 he made a public visit to Israel. Consequently, five months later, both his sons were murdered. He was sacked from his job at the De-Baathification Commission and was expelled from the Iraqi National Congress.

Al-Alusi recognises that Iraq and Israel share similar challenges, namely the murderous Iranian-funded terrorism that has taken so many lives in both countries. Al-Alusi has lauded Israel as a beacon of hope and liberalism. The Israeli elections on Tuesday were crucially important because it is vital that the future Israeli government seeks to uphold the equality and the civil liberties for all its citizens – Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Druze – that she has attempted to keep implemented since her foundation sixty years ago. She must continue to be the model of a liberal democracy in the despotism-riddled Middle East, despite the very opposite image peddled by the Western Left, the media and the Islamists. It is easy for much of the West to forget that Israel has many Arab politicians, several serving in the cabinet.

The Israeli exit polls show that Kadima, the current ruling party, has won the most seats. But Israel suffers the proportional representation system that is used so widely across Europe; this means that a Kadima politician may not necessarily take the position of Prime Minister. What will happen? And what are the implications for Israel, the region and the world?
Last Tuesday’s election was a year earlier than necessary because the current Prime Minister Olmert resigned after continuous public pressure and police investigations into tales of corruption, and the new leader of Kadima, Tzipi Livni, was unable to form a new coalition.

The Knesset is a unicameral parliament. Its 120 members, known as MKs, are elected to four-year terms in a secret ballot whereat the public will vote for a party and not an individual MK. Seats are allocated in proportion to the number of votes each party receives beyond a threshold of two percent. The 120 seats are apportioned through party-list proportional representation using the d’Hondt method – a widely used system that employs a highest averages method. Once the official results are published, the President of Israel gives the task of forming a majority coalition to an MK whom he believes to have the best chance of succeeding. That MK is then given up to 42 days to negotiate a working coalition with other parties and present his government to the Knesset for a vote of confidence. If the government is approved, the MK then becomes Prime Minister.

The numbers and distribution of Knesset seats in the February elections are as follows: Kadima 28; Likud 27; Yisrael Beitenu 15; Labor 13; Shas 11; United Torah Judaism 5; Hadash 4; United Arab List-Ta’al 4; National Union 4; Meretz 3; Habayit Hayehudi 3; Balad 3.

The politics of Israel is an extraordinary maelstrom of differing ideals, religions and methods. Muslim voters have supported right-wing Zionist parties and religious Jews have voted for Arab parties. In the disorder of the system there is hope and wonderment at the extraordinary examples of different cultures and religions campaigning peacefully and democratically together to sustain hope and achieve peace; a possibility that cannot be found elsewhere in the Middle East.

There are a huge number of different parties that represent all walks of life, but this election showed huge gains for the Right. The Centrist Kadima was a party that sprang out of a squabbling Likud because of disagreement over the disengagement plan from Gaza. Kadima’s win was a surprise to many – especially the pollsters, who had projected Likud to top the results. Kadima’s decision to withdraw from Gaza was highly criticized at the time and now there is little success to show for it – Gaza has become a terrorist state with regular pogroms against its own people and regular attacks against the civilians of Israel. Kadima’s leadership has been weak in times of war, and its dithering in Lebanon is arguably accountable for the deaths of Israeli soldiers. The decision to release Samir Kuntar – a Lebanese terrorist who beat a little blonde four-year-old Jewish girl to death by smashing apart her head with a rock – provoked huge condemnation and dismay from the media and the public. Kadima has been regarded as an ineffectual, weak government – a feeble image that the Israelis have known hostile Arab states to prey upon. Thus Kadima’s decision finally to respond to the constant barrage of rocket fire from Gaza caused some surprise among the government’s detractors. The attempt to destroy Hamas’ weapon caches in December – Operation Cast Lead – may have changed the minds of many Israelis. The operation certainly sapped Likud’s criticism and its accusations of Kadima’s apparent apathy to the vicious attacks by Hamas.

Despite Kadima winning the largest number of seats, it does not have the support from the other large parties and given the current stances of Likud, Yisrael Beitenu and Shas, it is highly unlikely that Tzipi Livni will be able to secure a working coalition. In this case, President Shimon Peres may ask Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud to form a coalition from the Right-wing parties that dominate the election results.
The large gains by the right can be explained by the realisation among Israelis that their doves have been met with rockets and that their concessions have been met with violence. In 2001, the then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank with border compensations to make up for the other 3%. Furthermore, Jerusalem would be a shared capital for both countries. When the Palestinians shot down this offer, so fell the appeal of the Left. Further failures to respond properly to terrorist attacks resulted in more support manifesting for the Right. The South of Israel, especially around towns such as Sderot, which has endured thousands of rockets and mortar attacks, almost entirely voted for the Right. The residents want military action to end the indiscriminate attacks on their town – rockets are fired when school is starting or finishing and the children are out on the streets. Suliman Qadia – a Palestinian from Gaza from where the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet, helped him escape, said of Hamas: “Nothing else will work, we just need to go into Gaza, full force, and pound them, erase them completely, until it’s over. That’s the only language they understand and believe me – I know what I’m talking about. After all, I lived with them.”

The Northern Arab town Haifa and Tel-Aviv voted for the Left and Centrists; in the South the persistent attacks and a demand for their end necessitated an almost entirely Right-wing stronghold. In other words, the rockets voted.

Obama’s Presidency is also a cause for concern among Israelis. There is a real fear that he would not act to stop a nuclear-armed Iran. In response to an American President perceived as Left-wing, a more hawkish Prime Minister feels like a necessary choice to many Israeli voters.

The reason Likud could not strongly capitalise on the Left’s decline was the belief that Netanyahu’s previous term as Prime Minister in the late nineties was considered by-and-large a failure – he had made similar profitless concessions to the Palestinians that Kadima has made. Netanyahu has also failed to provide a direction for Israel that differs from Kadima’s. Thus, many Israelis that wished to respond to the Palestinian attacks – not to turn the other cheek but to clench their fists – voted for the further-Right parties, such as Shas or Beitenu.

Among the political parties there is a great deal of squabbling. The main issue that divides them so, is of course the path to peace with the Palestinians. There are those that would appease and there are those that would defend themselves at all cost. What is clear however is that Proportional Representation (PR) is disastrous for Israel. This tiny country is at war, and has been so for the last sixty years. It cannot afford to have chaos in the government at a time when order has never been so important. It can be argued that PR does help to unify the country – every party represents all Israelis regardless and so there is no chance of segregation through politics and race. But what of the small Bedouin tribe who needs representation in Knesset and has no MK to do so? Israel needs strength, equality and democracy, and PR does not sustain these values effectively.

One prospect is certain – whoever becomes Prime Minister will have to use a coalition of Right-wing parties. This would suggest – unless the Iranian elections in June provide a reformist candidate that would halt their nuclear programme – that a future Israeli government will take military action against Iran. Hezbollah’s steadily growing supply of rockets in the South of Lebanon and the large-scale Syrian troop movements to the border with Israel, suggests it is possible that a large conflict may break out across the region, a danger exacerbated by Iran’s increased missile capability and promises of retaliation. When Israel’s security is directly threatened, there is little argument among her political parties. Even the far-left parties supported Israel’s recent defensive campaign against Hamas, and in the face of Iran, there is strong unity. Military action is seen as a last resort but recognized as a very possible outcome.

Furthermore, the build-up on the Right would mean that the destruction of the Jewish West Bank settlements would seem unlikely as a means of concession. The idea of displacing almost half a million Jewish settlers is unthinkable to the Right, especially after the ruinous withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that just brought more attacks and death to Southern Israel.

The truth is that Israel’s future has never been so uncertain. There is much speculation as to from whom and from which parties a coalition will be formed. Some American commentators have suggested Lieberman of Yisrael Beitenu will be given the foreign office portfolio, and there are even rumours that Livni and Netanyahu might share the position of Prime Minister. It is impossible to know or understand what bargaining and comprising is going on by the political parties behind the scenes. And in some ways, the choice of government may not matter. In foreign affairs, the actions of Israel can only be dictated by the hostile states surrounding it. Every government must protect its people, and Israel’s actions – while perhaps varying in strength – will be unchanged no matter what current party is in power. In times of war, Israel does not want an attempt at government, but definite ordered rule – an effective government is needed.

The results of the elections have reacted little to domestic affairs but largely to the changing world. Reasons such as Obama’s Presidency, a Turkish government that is arguably no longer secular, the Iranian elections in June, the undeniable attempts by Hamas to destroy Israel and her people, are all reasons for many Israeli voters to have demanded a stronger, more hawkish government. But uncertain times have bred uncertain results – now Israel must bring order out of the chaos if she wishes to succeed and survive.

 In her column in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick discusses the new US President’s prompt outreach to the Islamic world, as described in our post below, and finds that it portends an ominous change in US policy. Unlike other commentators who indulgently regard Obama’s interview with al-Arabiya as merely naive, she reads it as a distinct signal of that change. ‘We are ready to initiate a new partnership,’ with the Muslim world, he said, and she believes he means it. She points out:

Obama implied that the US may be willing to overlook Teheran’s support for terrorism when he referred to Iran’s "past" support for terrorist organizations. Obama placed a past tense modifier on Iranian sponsorship of terrorism even through just last week a US Navy ship intercepted an Iranian vessel smuggling arms to Hamas in Gaza in the Red Sea. Due to an absence of political authorization to seize the Iranian ship, the US Navy was compelled to permit it to sail on to Syria.

Ahmadinejad has made his preconditions for negotiations with the US explicit. They are: one, that the US must abandon its alliance with Israel; and two, that the US must accept a nuclear armed Iran.

 She writes: 

It is apparent that Obama remains convinced that the US is indeed to blame for the supposed crisis of confidence that the Islamic world suffers from in its dealings with America. By this reasoning, it is for the US, not for Teheran, to show its sincerity, because the US, rather than Teheran, is to blame for the dismal state of relations prevailing between the two countries.  

If in fact Obama truly intends to move ahead with his plan to engage the mullahs, then he will effectively legitimize – if not adopt – Teheran’s preconditions that the US end its alliance with Israel, which Iran seeks to destroy, and accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

In other words, Obama may well be willing to pay the price Iran, the Arabs, and the whole of the Islamic world demand for peace with America. If America pays that price, no more ‘war on terror’;  no more need to protect America from Islamic terrorist attacks, so no more Gitmos, no more wire-taps. No more burning of the American flag by protestors in Muslim lands (including Europe). America – and its President – will be universally loved. And what is that price? Only the abandonment of Israel. A small price to pay for such gains. 

All that America has done for Muslims, listed by Charles Krauthammer (see the post below), weigh nothing against the US’s biggest insult to Islam: its alliance with Israel. That is what Ahmadinejad was referring to when he said in the letter he wrote to Obama on November 6: ‘The expectation is that the unjust actions of the past 60 years will give way to a policy encouraging the full rights of all nations.’ 

What now can Israel rely on to save it from annihilation? Only what it has always had since it’s founding 60 years ago: the strength of its own right arm. If it fails to use it, there is nothing else. 

From Zomblog:

On January 10, the war between Israel and Hamas became a global conflict. No longer confined to the Gaza Strip, the fighting spread to cities around the world: what were billed as “anti-war” demonstrations from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and beyond were in fact overtly pro-Hamas demonstrations, and on Saturday, January 10 there was an unprecedented eruption of violence and extremism in dozens of European and American cities, surpassing anything seen at anti-war rallies in recent years:

¤ In London, protesters physically attacked police officers with unrestrained abandon and no fear of arrest;
¤ In Copenhagen, Hamas supporters screamed in public that they want to kill all Jews;
¤ In Calgary, neo-Nazis marched alongside leftists and Muslim extremists, in a grand coalition of anti-Semites;
¤ In Los Angeles, a car full of Israel-supporters barely escaped serious harm when an enraged mob tried to attack them;
¤ In Duisberg (Germany), police broke into a private home and tore down a flag displaying a Star of David, to appease stone-throwing protesters;
¤ In Belfast, an Israel-owned mall kiosk was surrounded and menacingly harrassed;
…to name just a few, as you will see in the reports listed below.

One wonders: Why January 10? Was the aggression somehow coordinated among the various far-left and Islamic groups which organized the protests in each city — an attempt to “Globalize the Intifada“? Or did the simultaneous outbreak of violence and anger in several places occur naturally? We may never know. But for some reason, this particular moment in the seemingly endless battle between Israel and its neighbors has tipped the scales, and the fighting now happens not just in Gaza, but wherever in the world Hamas supporters come face to face with anyone they deem an opponent (whether those be Israel supporters or police officers). The Hamas supporters will claim that the reason for the fresh anger now is that Israel has gone too far this time, allowing too many civilian casualties and unleashing a disproportionately large response. But what seems disproportionate this time around is not the nature of the fighting in Gaza but the extent to which the media buys into the Hamas narrative, and the unchallenged propaganda coming out of the war zone.

In any case, this post is meant to be a comprehensive roundup of the many anti-Israel protests that happened on January 10, 2009. And what makes these reports especially noteworthy is that they were almost all produced by citizen journalists: In just about every city, the mainstream media failed to cover the incidents thoroughly or honestly: As protesters waved Hamas flags and screamed “Long Live Hitler,” bloggers stepped in to do the job the media wouldn’t do.

Below is a list of the outbreaks of protest violence and extremism in each location: A few videos and photos are posted here, but most of the documentation is to be found in the various links provided…

Read the rest here.

 Joe the Plumber reports from Israel on PJTV.

In our view, this modest, intelligent, independent, sensible, honest man – brave too, making sure others get into a rocket-shelter before himself, as the video shows – embodies much that is good about America. 

We’d also like to think of him as typical of Americans, but after the recent election we know that cannot, unfortunately, be the case.

The New York Times claims that President Bush turned down an Israeli request for bunker-busting bombs and permission to overfly Iraq so that the Israeli Air Force could disable or destroy Iran’s nuclear-bomb production.

The NYT cannot be trusted to report the truth, but in this instance it’s not easy to see how lying would be in the interests of that traitorous newspaper.

If the report is true, then Bush has imperiled the world. By letting Iran become a nuclear power, he becomes a co-author of the terror and destruction Iran will inflict on Israel and all of us.  

We praise President Bush for eliminating the tyrant Saddam Hussein, for leading America to victory in Iraq, and for keeping Americans safe from more terrorist attacks after 9/11.

But if he is now tolerating Iran’s arming itself with nuclear bombs, he is undoing the good he has done. A nuclear armed Iran is a far greater threat to America than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ever were.

President Clinton had a number of opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden and each time made the bad judgment not to do so. If President Bush has really stopped Israel from destroying Iran’s bomb-producing sites,  he has made a worse misjudgment. America will pay dearly for it.

All hope that the US itself will act effectively to stop Iran ends, we believe, with the Bush presidency. It seems to us most unlikely that Obama will do anything but make futile attempts to appease that evil regime.

 Hugh Hewitt interviews Michael Oren in Townhall – an extract: 

Hewitt: In response to all of these arguments that Israel is using disproportionate force, since it’s going to be condemned for it anyway, you wrote, why shouldn’t Israel smash Hamas promptly and massively, and reap the benefits in terms of self-respect, deterrence, and a respite for its embattled citizens? Is there a calculation, is Israel holding back right now?  Oren: Well, Israel is always holding back. We have a very, very large army. We have many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of tanks and cannons and aircraft, and we’re using only a small fraction of that tonight in Gaza. We often get accused of using disproportionate force here, and that D-word appeared on the first day of the war. Force is only disproportionate if the army had achieved its goals and was still bombing Gaza. We haven’t achieved our goals yet. We have to use the requisite amount of force to try to end the bombing of our cities. And Israel also has invested very, very heavily in civil defense. It’s one of the reasons our casualties are so low. The Palestinians have not invested a dime in civil defense. They have no bomb shelters. They have no air raid sirens. And Israel probably shouldn’t be penalized for having invested so heavily in the safety of its citizens. So there’s that feeling here. Hewitt: There’s an argument made … that, look at the slaughter—you’ve got of hundreds of Palestinians versus a handful of Israelis killed. It’s got to be disproportionate. That’s from his articles. What do you respond to that?  Oren: My response is if you used that argument in World War II, America would have lost it. America had to use a massive amount of force to win the war. If it hadn’t used that force, it wouldn’t have won the war—and it was overwhelming force. There was no complaint about it, I think, among the American people at the time. The same thing is true here. We will use the amount of force that is necessary to stop rocket fire on our civilians….

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