Bloodthirsty Liberal

Thank to reader Yerushalimey for passing this along. It doesn’t break new ground (for those who have been paying attention), but it’s entertaining:

I believe I said at the time (at least pretend that I did) that Barack Obama deserved the Nobel Prize in Chemistry as much or more than he did the Peace prize.

But I have reconsidered. If they haven’t rescinded Yasser Arafat’s prize, they sure as hell shouldn’t touch Obama’s:

After the death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi at the hands of Libyan rebels, one Republican legislator wondered Saturday whether President Obama deserves the Nobel Prize he won in 2009.

“Well, I’m trying to see what the new criteria is for getting a Nobel Peace Prize. Remember they gave it to President Obama right when he took office,” Rep. Jeff Landry (R-La.) said on Fox Business Network. “And right now, I mean when you look at the, amount of people he has killed worldwide, you think to yourself, wow, what do they give it for? Maybe a new set of criteria. I don’t know, it amazes me as well.” …

Gadhafi’s death marks the latest foreign policy success for the Obama administration. Obama has also been credited for the killing of Osama bin Laden during a raid by U.S. Navy SEALS on a compound where the al Qaeda leader had been hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The Obama administration has also been successful in killing a number of other high level terrorists.

To paraphrase another parse-imonious Democratic president, I suppose it depends on the meaning of “peace”. I, for one, completely support the concept of peace through strength (as yet another president, Republican, once said). Up to and including peace through blowing the bad guys, all of them and their cousins, to smithereens. To those bumper-stickers that declare “War is not the answer”, I say it depends on the question.

None of Obama’s other broken promises—and they are legion—so becomes him as his “refudiation” (to cite yet another Republican) of the offer of the unclenched fist of friendship extended toward the Muslim world. Of course it’s unclenched: you can’t very well squeeze the trigger with your fingers balled up in a fist.

And if they’re going to start taking away Nobel Prizes from people with a little blood on their hands or stains in their characters, may I suggest they send pre-paid postage to the following recipients (in reverse chronological order), asking for the return of their medals?

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. (2007)
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei (2005)
Jimmy Carter (2002)
United Nations (U.N.), Kofi Annan (2001)
Yasser Arafat (1994)
United Nations Peacekeeping Forces (1988)
Desmond Mpilo Tutu (1984)
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (1981, 1954)
Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin (1978) [Sorry, but if we're going to be fair, neither Sadat nor Begin were known as men of peace throughout their careers.]
Henry A. Kissinger, Le Duc Tho (1973)
Willy Brandt (1971) [Soviet moles should be disqualified, don't you think?]
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1919)

Actually, the problem seems to be with the name of the prize, not the winners. If they called it the Nobel Prize for Killing People to Achieve Peace (with an option to slander Israel and spread nonsense), everyone would still qualify, including President Pant-Crease.

You’re hearing this more and more (from me, anyway):

“The question of annexation of security areas of so-called ‘population blocs’ in Judea and Samaria hasn’t been discussed in the government,” Edelstein said. “Some ministers, including myself, have said that this should probably be a step taken by the government if the Palestinians go too far unilaterally.”

“No one’s in favor of it,” he emphasized. “We would rather negotiate. We would rather do things as normal people do via negotiations, and via negotiations we can reach an arrangement in which we can find a way to live together. Unfortunately, for the last two and a half years we haven’t a partner on the Palestinian side.”

Edelstein said, “I do believe, as do most of my colleagues, that this land is Jewish land. We have the perfect right to live here and to build here. I’m well aware of the fact that Palestinians claim that this land is theirs. We have to find some modus operandi to co-exist, but the basic assumption is that this is Jewish land and that we are here by right and not just because we were looking for a place to build a couple of houses.”

Edelstein said that evacuating the so-called “Israeli illegal settlements” in Judea and Samaria would not lead to peace and reminded of the 2005 ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip and the expulsion of Gush Katif residents from their homes. He reminded those present that not only did this move not bring about peace, but resulted in countless terror attacks (the latest one having just recently occurred near Eilat) and the firing of missiles and rockets at Israeli civilians.

This is not just some blogging yahoo or knuckle-dragging troglodyte (that’s my job), this is an Israeli government minister. At least someone at the cabinet meetings is thinking and expressing sanity.

Aggie described large swathes of Judea and Samaria as empty as Wyoming. Wait till annexation; it’ll look like Iowa.

PS: You might want to hurry up, Mr. Minister.

A senior counter-terrorism expert warned Tuesday that Hamas is weighing a resumption of suicide bomb attacks against Israeli civilians.

Col. Jonathan Fighel (Ret.), a researcher with the Interdisciplinary Center’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism, spoke at the Institute’s eleventh annual terrorism conference.

“We’re seeing more and more Hamas flags in Hebron. The public atmosphere to Hamas is much more lenient. This allows the creation of operational terror cells. Hamas is taking into consideration the renewal of suicide bomb attacks,” Fighel said.

I believe in civil liberties. You can burn the American flag, or fly the Hamass flag. But if you even think about doing what this gentleman suggests, you can leave. Fly your Hamass flags in Jordan.

The Obama administration loves its drones

A U.S. drone aircraft fired on two leaders of a militant Somali organization tied to al-Qaeda, apparently wounding them, a senior U.S. military official familiar with the operation said Wednesday.

The strike last week against senior members of al-Shabab comes amid growing concern within the U.S. government that some leaders of the Islamist group are collaborating more closely with al-Qaeda to strike targets beyond Somalia, the military official said.

The airstrike makes Somalia at least the sixth country where the United States is using drone aircraft to conduct lethal attacks, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. And it comes as the CIA is expected to begin flying armed drones over Yemen in its hunt for al-Qaeda operatives.

Again, I have no problem with the technique, but I certainly wonder where the peace crowd has been hiding?

Maybe BTL will post his secret crickets audio here?

- Aggie

It’s time for another Thomas Friedman column claiming to know the secret of everlasting peace and happiness!

What else could it be?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who once wrote he would rather “herd cats” than trying to untangle the Palestinian Authority-Israeli problem, now has the final solution: The United Nations 1947 Partition Plan.

In his latest column, Friedman wrote Sunday that re-adopting the 1947 Partition Plan, which the Arab world rejected at the time and instead tried to annihilate Israel, as a solution to the age-old Arab-Israeli struggle really is “very simple.”

His proposed re-wording of the Partition Plan would state, “This body reaffirms that the area of historic Palestine should be divided into two homes for two peoples — a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. The dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed border adjustments and security arrangements for both sides. This body recognizes the Palestinian state as a member of the General Assembly and urges both sides to enter into negotiations to resolve all the other outstanding issues.”

A plan 64 years old whose time has finally come! Brilliant!

So old (nearing retirement age), it’s new!

The ’67 borders (Auschwitz borders) with mutually agreed upon land swaps! Why didn’t Obama think of that?

And all it takes is good faith negotiations! Why, it’s a cinch!

The only thing that confuses me is how someone who thinks he’s so smart thinks we’re so dumb. This plan differs not at all from the old peace plans because it is the old peace plans—the oldest of all—rolled into one.

When I was a kid, I gave my sister a pair of earrings for Christmas. But I stuck them inside a large box packed with National Geographics and wrapped the whole thing up beautifully with ribbons and bows. When the package was taken out from under the tree and handed to her, everybody marveled at the enormous gift BTL had splurged on for his sister.

And then she opened it.

Tom Friedman is bipolar toward Israel. Some days, he can barely stir himself to tell the Jewish state that it has no legitimacy; others he embraces peace plans like distant cousins at a family reunion.

I’ll just take this opportunity to suggest that no peace plan will ever succeed as long as the Palestinians carry their decades-long grudges; and if they drop them (which they won’t—I guarantee you that), any peace plan will do.

Or as the saying goes:

“If the Arabs put down their weapons, there would be no war. If the Jews put down their weapons, there would be no Israel.”

Here’s my saying:

If I were 1/10th as smart as Tom Friedman thinks he is, I’d be 10 times smarter than I think Tom Friedman is.

Aggie and I have reported pretty extensively on antisemitism and hostility toward Israel in Britain.

But Britain does have Jews (having been expelled in 1290, they eventually returned), and even a Chief Rabbi.

The Brits can’t say they didn’t know, that they weren’t told:

UK Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks slammed the notion of making peace with Hamas in a speech he gave to the House of Lords on Wednesday.

The chief rabbi said that unless Hamas changes its ways, “there may be a process but there will not be peace.”

“Peace is more than a resting place on the road to war. I cannot make peace with one who denies my right to exist.”

The speech came shortly after Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation accord in Cairo, with Hamas officials saying they will not recognize Israel.

“We, who pray for peace, understand by that word, a state in which I recognize your right to exist, and you recognize mine,” Sacks said. “That is what peace minimally means.”

He continued: “How then can we be speaking about peace when Hamas remains committed as a matter of principle to the elimination of the State of Israel, when it engages in missile attacks against innocent civilians, and uses its own innocent civilians as human shields; when it propagates some of the most vicious anti-Semitic myths ever to have inflamed the hatred and anesthetized the conscience of human beings, and two days ago praised Osama bin Laden as a holy warrior; and when it refuses to agree to the fundamental principles laid down by the Quartet not least of which is the recognition of Israel’s right to exist?”

Sacks added that Jews around the world “long for peace” and to live “without fear, without hate, without being treated as a pariah.”

He said that the Jewish people “long for the ability to live … without being blamed for the troubles of the world, without being denied the right to exist.”

“That is why I urge the government to be resolute in its insistence that the path to peace in the Middle East must begin with the unequivocal recognition of the State of Israel’s right to be,” he concluded.

While most of the Lords were asleep or doing the Times’ crossword, at least a few must have heard this. And some media must have reported it.

I don’t know. Maybe Jews in the UK who talk peace are taken about as seriously as the YouTube dogs here who can say “I ruv you”.

- Aggie

Will wonders never cease? Yesterday we heard from British Muslims for Israel; today the Huffington Post is all about how Progessives should support Israel.

Be still my heart.

The progressive movement has been tarred by a vocal minority that seeks to criticize Israel at every opportunity. It’s time for the progressive community to stand up and show its support for Israel.

Israel is a progressive’s dream: “Universal education, universal health care, equal rights, minority rights protections, strong activist courts, and gays and lesbians openly serving in the military.” As progressives, we should be outraged by the way the Arabs, including the Palestinians, treat women, gays and other minorities. We should be outraged that the Palestinians demand that no Jews should be allowed to live in the West Bank, even as over one million Palestinians live within pre-1967 Israel. We should be outraged by the beheadings and honor killings. Israel is not perfect, but Israel holds itself to its own standards, to progressive standards.

Israel is accused by some of apartheid. Yet Arab Israelis “can be found on the Supreme Court, in the Knesset (parliament), in ambassadorial positions, as senior officers in the police and army, as mayors, as deputy-speakers of the Knesset and even as government ministers and deputy ministers. Prominent Arab Israelis can be found in almost every sphere of Israeli life, including in the medical fields, media and playing on Israel’s national soccer team.” Whatever an apartheid state is, it’s not Israel.

That’s all well and good, but what about the “occupation”? What about ending the conflict between Israel and its neighbors? Progressives are on the side of peace. So is Israel. There would be no “occupation” if Jordan had not attacked Israel in 1967, and there would be no “occupation” if Palestinian leadership had accepted either of Israel’s offers in the last decade to withdraw from nearly all of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

If Palestinian leadership is so upset about the “occupation,” if Palestinian leadership is sincere about its concern for its people, why did it twice in the past decade reject the opportunity to establish a state on the West Bank?

Israel’s entire history is an unending willingness to trade land for the hope of peace despite Arab intransigence and Arab unwillingness to partner with Israel for peace.

It is very detailed. Read it all.

I gotta tell you though, the “Progressives” were out in force in Boston today, boycotting Israeli products. I responded with a full grocery cart of Israeli products. But they are scary, creepy people.

- Aggie

The faculty of the University of Johannesburg has decided to stop working with Ben Gurion University on water purification issues in South Africa. Too many Jews in Israel.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the university said “the Senate of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) today voted to allow its formal relationship with Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Israel to lapse on 1 April 2011. This was one of two options put to the vote in the Senate, the second being to allow the formal relationship with BGU to continue and to develop bilateral relations with both BGU and Palestinian universities.

Sixty percent of the Senate (72 members present) voted to allow the Memorandum of Understanding with BGU to lapse, while the balance 40 percent (45 members present) voted for bilateral agreements.”

Ben Gurion University responded regretfully at the University of Johannesburg’s decision, saying that the South African university’s decision to sever the agreement designed to solve water contamination issues in a reservoir near Johannesburg will mostly hurt South African residents.

University President Prof. Rivka Carmi said that “the only losers in this decision are the people of South Africa.”

In the official letter, BGU said it is still committed to continuing ongoing water, health care, and sustainable development collaborative work with Palestinian researches.

The agreement doesn’t mean that individual academics at UJ wouldn’t be able to pursue academic collaboration with counterparts at BGU, but they would be carried out without formal institutional arrangements.

The vote followed a campaign launched by UJ in September 2010 with a petition signed by more than 250 South African academics, with the support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that called on UJ to cut ties with BGU over what they claim is the university’s active support for the Israeli military.

Last Wednesday, UJ held a debate entitled “The Politics of Water Research and the Ethics of Academic Engagement – Should UJ terminate its water research with Israel?”, to discuss whether or not to cut ties with BGU. The seminar discussed a report released the day earlier by UJ entitled “Findings on Ben-Gurion University of the Negev: Institutional complicity and active collaboration with Israeli military, occupation and apartheid practices.”

Speaking of apartheid, how many Jews will be permitted to live in Palestine? 0. How many live in Saudi Arabia? 0. How many are left in Egypt, after the expulsions, murders and property confiscations? How many live in Libya after the slaughters, expulsions and property seizures. How about Iraq, where there used to be over 125,000 Jews? Down to fewer than seven I believe.

The Left is deeply antisemitic.

- Aggie

Itamar Marcus, creator of the important site, Palestinian Media Watch, http://palwatch.org/, explains the recent incitement to terror in the PA.

Let’s stop pretending
By ITAMAR MARCUS AND NAN JACQUES ZILBERDIK

Incitement is not just another issue to be negotiated over like borders, water and refugees; message of hate threatens peaceful solutions.

The Palestinian Authority and its leaders share the blame for the murders of those five Israelis from Itamar on Friday – including two children and an infant – along with the terrorists who committed them. It is the PA and its leaders who have prepared the ground for these murders with the incessant incitement to hatred and the glorification of violence and terror.

In spite of its conciliatory statements in English, the PA continues to use all the structures it controls to demonize Israelis and to promote violence. Terrorists are presented as heroes and role models for Palestinians, teaching that killing Israelis is a way to earn eternal fame.

Just two months ago, PA President Mahmoud Abbas sent a clear message of support for terror when he awarded $2000 to the family of a terrorist who attacked IDF soldiers. Last week, the PA’s official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida announced a football tournament named after Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and three weeks ago PA TV, which is under the direct control of Abbas’s office, broadcast videos glorifying the terrorist Habash Hanani, who in May 2002 entered Itamar and murdered three Israeli students. Twice the PA named summer camps after the terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 led the most deadly attack in Israel’s history in which 37 civilians were killed in a bus hijacking, both in 2008 and again this past summer.

But the long arm of the PA’s promotion of violence and terror goes even farther, penetrating the realm of culture and music, which has been used so often in recent years in other places in the world to promote peace and tolerance. Last year, PA TV broadcast a number of performances of a band called Alashekeen, including a song anticipating the conquering of Israel through holy war. The song presents all of Israel as “Palestine,” mentioning the Carmel region near Haifa, and the cities of Lod, Ramle, and Jerusalem as regions to be liberated: “In Ramle we are grenades… the Palestinian revolution awaits [them]… We replaced bracelets with weapons. We attacked the despicable [Zionists]. This invading enemy is on the battlefield. This is the day of consolation of jihad. Pull the trigger. We shall redeem Jerusalem, Nablus and the country.”

More significant than the repeated exposure on PA TV and at cultural events was the fact that Abbas chose to honor the musical group. He issued a presidential decree turning it into an official Palestinian national band.

And on and on it goes. Naturally,there’s more at the link.

Why do we send them our tax dollars?

- Aggie

Because I am ever the optimist, I have tried to explain these facts to certain Leftist pals. They laugh.

It was a stunning moment of moral clarity. As the South Vietnamese refugees clambered onto rickety boats in the South China Sea to escape the victorious Communists, the American Left that orchestrated the US defeat through a sustained campaign of propaganda and fake calls for peace stood silent.

As Pol Pot, the “progressive” dictator tortured and murdered a third of his people in Cambodia, the leftists “peace” activists in the US and Europe who never saw a US military operation that was justified, turned a blind eye.

The silence of the likes of Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky and their fellow travelers came to mind last week when the Western media and intellectual elites averted their gaze as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the long exiled spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood spoke before a crowd of millions at Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Qaradawi, who had been living in exile in Qatar during Hosni Mubarak’s reign, became an international jihadist superstar thanks to Qatar’s unelected potentate Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani who gave him his jihad indoctrination show on Al Jazeera. From his internationally televised soapbox, Qaradawi regularly preaches international jihad and genocide of Jewry to millions of fans worldwide.

Two important things happened during Qaradawi’s appearance in Cairo. First, his handlers refused to allow Google’s Egyptian Internet revolutionary Wael Ghonim to join the cleric on the dais. For anyone willing to notice, Qaradawi’s message in spurning Ghonim was indisputable. As far as the jihadists are concerned, Ghonim and his fellow Internet activists are the present day equivalent of Lenin’s useful idiots.

They did their job of convincing credulous Western liberals that the overthrow of Mubarak was all about sweetness and light.

And now they are no longer needed.

The second message was Qaradawi’s call to destroy Israel. With millions of adoring fans crying out “Amen,” and “Allahu Akhbar,” Qaradawi called for a Muslim conquest of Jerusalem – that is, for the destruction of Israel. As a first step, he demanded that the Egyptian military open the Egyptian border with Gaza.

In the dismal tradition of its Vietnam-era teachers, today’s international Left had nothing to say about Qaradawi’s genocidal speech. In the New York Times’ write-up of Qaradawi’s triumphant return to Egypt for instance, the murder-inciting cleric was referred to as a champion of democracy and pluralism.

The last sentence leads to perhaps the central point of my adult life. As a young adult, I often asked the mature gentile adults in my life, men and women in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s, if during the holocaust they had known what was happening. They were young adults at the time. The overwhelming majority of gentiles cried: We didn’t know! We didn’t know!. But a few honest souls said: Everyone knew. The reports were published in the newspapers of Norfolk, Nebraska – everywhere. For the longest time, I assumed that if small towns and cities knew, everyone knew. Then I read Laurel Leff’s book: Buried By The Times. Ms. Leff, a journalism prof at Northeastern U. had access to the NY Times archives and discovered that, sure enough, they suppressed information about the holocaust. Still, if you read the NY Times – you knew, but could pretend not to know. They reported it, but they buried it. Furthermore, the Catholic and Protestant journals denied that it was happening, typically by denying the veracity of Jewish reports.

If you asked any American Jewish adult, they said: Of course we knew. As children, they lay awake in their beds at night, listening to whispered conversations of their parents, trembling. They heard Hitler’s broadcasts in their living rooms. As Yiddish speakers, most of them understood the gist of what he was saying. Meanwhile, the gentile world “didn’t know”.

I have a sense that I don’t want to live long enough to hear the next generation of mature adults – my generation – cry: But we didn’t know! We didn’t know. Once in a lifetime is enough. So I spend a lot of time documenting what we all know. I don’t want them to have the luxury of doing what Ms. Glick points out they are doing.

Simple as that.

- Aggie

Abbas in English:

“I am committed to peace, but not forever,” Mr. Abbas said. “I don’t mean I will turn to violence – never. In my life, I will never do it. But I cannot stay in my office forever doing nothing.”

Abbas in Arabic:

“I have said more than once that if the Arabs want war – we are with them.”

Wait a minute, BTL. People can change their minds. Just look at you. (Stop looking at me—you’re creeping me out.)

So they can. In three days, no less:

Abbas made the statement against violence in an interview with Bernard Avishai writing for the New York Times Magazine. The statement was intended for an international audience and reported in the New York Times on January 27, 2011.

Abbas made the second statement not ruling out war in a meeting with Egyptian and other Arab journalists. This statement was meant for an Arab audience and reported in the official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on January 24, 2011.

So, the Arabs say one thing to a gullible (willfully so) West, and another to themselves.

Why does this sound familiar?

Following are excerpts from an interview with Hatem Abd Al-Qader, the Fatah official in charge of Jerusalem, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on January 24, 2011:

The negotiations are not negotiations. … [W]e do not harbor any hope that Jerusalem will be regained through negotiations. Jerusalem will be regained in other ways.

…

It is a mistake to believe that Jerusalem of the pre-1967 borders will be regained by the Palestinians and the Arabs through negotiations.

Negotiations, peace talks, summits—all are foreplay for the real orgy of blood that really turns them on.