The Hedgehog Blog

Evidence of Voter Fraud Exists--If One Looks for it

2012-02-19T16:05:00.000-08:00

A hot issue between Democrats and Republicans in recent years has been the question of requiring official identification, with a photograph, in order to vote. Republicans have pushed for such laws, arguing that they are necessary to prevent electoral fraud. The Democrats have countered that there is no evidence of wide-spread voting fraud, and that the Republicans use the issue as a ploy to discourage minorities and poor people from voting.

Perhaps the reason that there has been little evidence of fraud is that no one has looked for it. In Collier County, Florida, the local NBC affiliate examined local jury recusal forms, filed by persons called for jury service who responded that they could not serve because they were not U.S. citizens. NBC2 found nearly 100 names of registered voters who when called to jury service opted out, claiming that they were not citizens.

Keep in mind that this was just one county in Florida, and the registered voters in question all had been called for jury duty. Since persons summoned for jury service presumably represent only a small fraction of the total number of registered voters, the number of non-citizens on the voter rolls is most likely many times the number discovered by NBC2. Also, some non-citizens called to jury duty may have chosen to appear rather than sign a document certifying that they are not citizens.

What would happen if the Los Angeles Times conducted the same type of investigation in Los Angeles County? One can only imagine, but please do not hold your breath waiting for our home town newspaper to follow through.

(Hat tip: Paul Kujawsky.)

The Donald Endorses the Mitt; Mitt Drops the Ball

2012-02-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

Today in Las Vegas, Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for the office of President of the United States. It's a setback, but I still support Mitt.

Of far more concern is Mitt's tin ear for political speech, as evidenced by the now infamous "very poor" interview with Soledad O'Brien. Doesn't Mitt realize that the MSNBCs and Jon Stewarts of the world lie in wait for a Republican Presidential wannabe to make such a gaffe? This is like President George H.W. Bush's remark about a supermarket price scanner. It will be used by the Democrats ad infinitum between now and November to prove that Governor Romney is a wealthy out-of-touch patrician. Indeed, it is being used to that effect by Rick Santorum right now.

Mitt, you have got to do better if you are going to prevent President Obama from becoming the next Harry S. Truman. The very thought makes me Dewey-eyed, and that's not a good thing.

MK Tzipi Hotovely on Dignity and Honor for the Women of Israel

2012-01-12T18:44:00.000-08:00

Tzipi Hotovely is a Member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, from the Likud Party. She is a Torah-observant Jewish woman, an attorney, and, when elected at the age of 30, she became the youngest person ever to serve in the Knesset. I have never met her, but I am privileged to be on her e-mail distribution list. Some of our readers may have heard about recent incidents in which thugs from a fringe Orthodox Jewish sect have bullied and harrassed young girls at a Modern Orthodox elementary school, Orot, in Beit Shemesh and have tried to intimidate female bus riders on public buses passing through Haredi neighborhoods in Jerusalem into sitting at the rear of the bus. Here is MK Hotovely's position on these recent incidents:

The Knesset
MK Tzipi Hotovely
Jerusalem, 16th of Tevet, 5772January 12th, 2012

Dear Ralph:

You may be interested to know that in recent weeks a battle has ensued to protect the honor and dignity of women in Israel. I grew up as part of the National Religious community. In school I learned of Devorah the Prophetess. At Home every Shabbat we sang Eshet Chayil, "a Woman of Valor", and in synagogue once a year we celebrated the heroic acts of Queen Esther. I grew up proud to be a Jewish woman.

In the last month multiple incidents have occurred affecting the role of women in Israeli society, while widening the schism between Israel's Ultra-Orthodox population and the rest of its citizens. An eight year old girl in Bet Shemesh was spit upon on her way to school, because she was "immodestly dressed". Women and female soldiers were defamed and harassed because they refused to move to the back of a public bus. Mass protests for, and against, the actions of the Ultra-Orthodox ensued. In this time, I attempted to understand all perspectives on the issues at hand. I visited with families involved in these incidents, as well as municipal officials and community leaders. Along with my colleagues from the Committee for the Advancement of Women, I boarded a "Mehadrin" (Ultra Orthodox) bus and sat down up front, where I was berated with unpleasant verbal assaults. I also spent a Shabbat in Beitar Illit, a community with a significant Ultra-Orthodox population, to better understand their perspectives on the issues.

From my experiences, I have seen that this is not a conflict between the religious and secular. There are two battles here. The first is being waged by a small extremist group, from within the Ultra-Orthodox, who have attempted to hijack Judaism. In their distorted view, they have turned a religion which teaches of love and respect towards thy neighbor, into a religion of internecine persecution, animus, and division amongst the Jewish people. This cannot be tolerated in the one State we have and the police must enforce the law against any who seek to violate it. The second battle is over the role of women in society, an issue of culture which all sectors of Israeli society are responsible for. As the famous US Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education proved, "separate but equal, is not equal". Two weeks ago, five women were inducted as pilots in the Israeli Air Force. If they can sit in the cockpit watching over our country, then as the Chair of the Woman's Committee, I will ensure that these modern day Devorahs, and all other women, will sit wherever they want on a public bus.

I am proud to share with you that, this week, the cabinet approved a law granting free education to children of three and four years of age. Next year this will provide over a quarter of a million Israeli children with education, and allow thousands of young mothers to return to the work force. As daycare costs have skyrocketed this has been one of the main battles of my committee. Now that this law has been approved, we can begin to educate children at a younger age with strong Jewish values, while strengthening the careers of countless women as respected, equal and integrated members of the work force. It is through education and opportunity that we shall promote a culture of dignity and honor for the Women of Israel.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please feel free to contact me. To better update you on the latest developments please be sure to stop by my Facebook page,, with up to the minute news to keep you informed. It is my sincere hope that together we will work to forge a brighter future for the men and women of Israel.

Shabbat Shalom,
Tzipi Hotovely
Member of the 18th Knesset Chairperson,
Committee on the Status of Women

Why President Obama Adopted the National Security Policies of President George W. Bush

2012-01-11T14:57:00.000-08:00

Candidate Barack Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. It is still open. Candidate Barack Obama criticized the troop surge in Iraq. President Obama implemented his own troop surge in Afghanistan. Candidate Barack Obama vowed to end what he criticized as Bush Administration offenses against human rights and civil liberties, including extraordinary rendition and targeted assassinations. President Obama has continued both, and even expanded targeted assassinations to include an American citizen, killed by a drone attack without any attempt at arrest or trial. One can only imagine the outcry if such an action had been ordered by President George W. Bush.

To what may we attribute the apparent change of heart on the part of President Obama. In some cases, no doubt, such as civilian trials for terrorists and the closing of Guantanamo, the President would have gone further were it not for unyielding political opposition, including from his own Democratic Party in Congress. However, at least one seasoned Washington observer, veteran Senatorial staffer Dr. David Luchins, although he claims no specific knowledge of what transpired, attributes President Obama's tranformative thinking to "the talk," the national security briefing he received upon his election to the Presidency, even before he took the oath of office. Suddenly President Obama was burdened with the full and accurate picture of national security threats against the United States and its citizens. Suddently he was forced to come to terms with the most vivid evidence that there really is evil out there--very bad people who want to hurt us very badly.

I hope that Dr. Luchins is correct. I hope that the change in the President's thinking proves that a person may grow in the office of the United States Presidency, and grow very quickly. When President Obama was elected, I somewhat pompously declared myself to be a member of the loyal opposition, ready to criticize the Administration when it veered off course, but always ready to support the President when he did what was right by our country. In that spirit, I write now that while I have many objections to the President's foreign and domestic policies, on some of the most critical issues of national defense and security, I can heartily say, "Well done, Mr. President."

Car Bomb Kills Iranian Nuclear Scientist

2012-01-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

Working in the Iranian nuclear weapons program has become a hazardous profession of late. The latest fatality was Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, deputy head of the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, killed today by a car bomb in Tehran.

Speculation runs rampant that the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists is the work of the Mossad or CIA. In what I feel is a well-reasoned column, Shoshan Bryen at the Jewish Policy Center argues that such precisely targeted assassinations are morally preferable to both airstrikes and economic sanctions as a means of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

While I agree with Ms. Bryen's reasoning, I fear that such targeted assassinations alone will only slow down, but not prevent, Iranian nuclear weapons development. Therefore ultimately airstrikes by the United States and other Western nations may ultimately prove necessary. Indeed, former White House adviser Dennis Ross told Bloomberg in an interview Monday that no one should doubt President Obama's willingness to use military force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He's Back! What the Kosher Hedgehog did During the Holidays

2012-01-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Frustrated Hedgehog Blog Readers:

I am sure that both of you were very concerned that I have not posted since Nov. 22, 2011. As for Lowell Brown, the Original Hedgehog (although he seems now to disdain his animal identity), he has not posted since Utah's football embarrassment against Cal on October 22. Not even the Utes's overtime victory over Georgia Tech in the Sun Bowl seems to have revived him. Lowell, let's see that Ute pride--Utah upheld the honor of the PAC 12 after bowl losses by Cal, ASU, and UCLA.

PAC 12 football also explains part of my long hiatus. I attended the Fiesta Bowl on January 2. I am a native Phoenician, and my trip allowed me to re-connect with old friends and re-visit the haunts of my youth. Phoenix is a beautiful and well-governed city. (Indeed, a boyhood friend and fellow ASU law alumnus, Phil Gordon, was completing his term as Mayor of Phoenix as I arrived.)

As for the Fiesta Bowl itself, it was a great game. The few from my seat is shown above. Unfortunately, as I repeatedly complained during the Fiesta Bowl to my best boyhood friend Brian, who attended the game with me, I hate great games. I want one-sided routs in favor of my team. Great games can be lost.

That complaint unfortunately proved prophetic, as Stanford Coach David Shaw snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by taking the ball out of the hands of two-time Heisman runner-up and presumptive NFL draft first round top pick Quarterback Andrew Luck, and entrusting the game to a redshirt freshman kicker who was coming back from an injury and had been inconsistent during the last games of the season and in the Fiesta Bowl itself. Luck was simply superb in his last game as Stanford's quarterback--it is too bad that his coach decided to play consertively when the game was on the line.

However I am not bitter. Congratulations to the Oklahoma State Cowboys. May your horse go lame on the waterless plains.

I also spent nearly a week on a visit to my daughter Elise and her husband Eliott in their recently purchased co-op in Riverdale, NY, where they apparently are neighbors to President Obama's newly appointed Chief of Staff, Jack Lew. Coincidentally, my daughter Sara and son Nathan live in the neighborhood of former Obama Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who belongs to Sara's synagogue. Mr. Lew, when he is in residence, belongs to the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, rather than to the synagogue that Elise and Eliott have been attending, the Riverdale Jewish Center.

I do not mean here to suggest any Kostant family influence over national policy. As readers of the blog know, I am a Romney man myself. And congratulations to Mitt on his big primary victory in New Hampshire.

Mamet: Conflict, Choice and Surrender

2011-11-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

One of my pet peeves about the media is the way that local news, and to a lesser extent network news as well, deals with stories about legislation. "GOP blocks jobs bill," or "Republicans oppose environmental bill" are typical headlines. Rarely does the news story analyse the actual legislation and its likely impact. As David Mamet points out in his column in the November 17, 2011 Jewish Journal, hard analysis may demonstrate that what is sold by its proponents as a "jobs bill" may in fact be more likely to result in the loss of jobs.

Likewise one sees so-called environmental legislation that at best is innocuous in its effect on the environment, and at worse may well result in a decline in environmental quality. And we are all familiar with the "education bill" that if enacted would only further aggravate conditions in our schools.

Sometimes, a deliberately misleading bill of goods is being sold by the media, but quite often the reporter is simply too lazy or too stupid to read and try to understand what the proposed law would accomplish. Frequently enough, the actual objective of the legislation is to line the pockets of someone, or a lot of someones, either politicians or special interest groups, or both. Nonetheless, anyone courageous enough to oppose a "jobs bill" risks being branded as "anti-jobs," opponents of an "education bill" are labeled as anti-education and those who vote to defeat an "environmental bill" earn the reputation of being enemies of the environment, if not of planet earth itself.

In an intelligent and articulate article (what else would one expect of a Pulitzer-prize winning playwright?), Mamet appeals to the American Jewish community not to make the same mistake regarding the "Middle East Peace Process." Do not be so mentally lazy and so craven, he implores, as to fall for the conventional wisdom that if Israel would just make more concessions to the Palestinians, peace would inevitably follow.

Read the column. A summary cannot do it adequate justice.

Arab League Confrontation with Assad May Bring U.S., Israel into Conflict with Iran

2011-11-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

A Jewish proverb holds that since the destruction of the first Temple, prophecy has been given only to fools and children. With that caveat, the Kosher Hedgehog calls his readers' attention to an ominous development on the international scene, which could lead to a confrontation of the United States with Iran, in which the Arab League would back the U.S. in an alliance of strange bedfellows with Israel.

The Arab League is reconvening after the Syrian government failed to keep its agreement, reached last week in negotiations with the Arab League, to refrain from killing anti-government demonstrators. Instead, Syrian forces murdered 13 protesters today on the Id-Al Adhar Islamic holiday.

Today's Jerusalem Post quotes Mideast analyst Walid Phares as observing, "The Arab League has the intentions to support the uprising in Syria but needs a US commitment to support them if Iran retaliates." Unlike most Arab states, Syria is allied with Iran, as the photo above of Syrian President Assad meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei depicts.

Now here is the "prophecy." The Kosher Hedgehog believes that Iranian retaliation most likely would be directed, in the first instance, not at any Arab League nation, but rather at Israel. Here is one scenario: The Arab League enters into open support of Syrian rebels. To counter that pressure, Iran turns loose Hezbollah and Hamas to launch rocket and missile attacks against Israel. Such a move effectively dares the Arab League to publicly oppose Iranian and Syrian proxies when they launch attacks on Israel.

Israel is in no mood to placidly sit back and do nothing and absorb rocket and missile attacks as it did at the behest of the United States during the first Gulf War, when the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq launched missiles at Israel. For one thing, Israel does not trust the government of President Barack Obama to effectively defend it against Iran, in the manner that President George H.W. Bush defended Israel against Iraq, when the U.S. and its allies dispatched their forces to liberate Kuwait and launched air strikes on Iraq, and the U.S. sent Patriot anti-missile equipment and crews to Israel. Of course, President Bush's primary objective was to liberate Kuwait, and his principal concern in the wake of Iraqi missile attacks on Israel was to prevent Israeli military retaliation against Iraq that might drive Arab nations out of the anti-Hussein coalition. Nonetheless, regardless of the motives of U.S. actions, Israel knew that the might of the U.S. armed forces would be unleashed against Saddam Hussein, while now an American attack on Iran is far from a foregone conclusion.

Second, the people of Israel are far more vulnerable today to deadly attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza than they were to Iraqi missiles in the first Gulf War.

Finally, Israel is itching for diplomatic cover for an attempt to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, which pose an existential threat to Israel. The Israeli government might consider an Iranian-directed attack by Hamas and Hezbollah to present that opportunity. Yes, Israel would endure international condemnation, joined in publicly and vociferously by the Arab Gulf States. Secretly, however, those same Arab States would be delighted, and might even lend covert support to an Israeli attack. For example, Saudi Arabia might turn a blind radar eye to overflights by Israeli fighter-bombers and refueling of those aircraft in Saudi airspace.

Of course, the better strategic alternative would be for the United States to lead a sustained international campaign to dismantle the Iranian nuclear weapons program, by military force if necessary. But I have no confidence that the Obama Administration would lead such a campaign, and, sadly, I suspect that the government of Israel shares my view.

Not A Good Day for Utah Football

2011-10-22T19:27:00.001-07:00

But a great day for Stanford Football

And a Word About Israeli "Disproportionate Responses" to Arab Attacks

2011-10-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

Whenever Israel defends itself against attacks from Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists, or from Hezbollah in Lebanon, she is criticized for her "disproportionate response." It would appear that Hamas, which is so proud of the 1,177:1 rate of exchange in the Gilad Shalit ransom, has now itself established the appropriate level of a proportionate response to an Arab attack. From now on, for each Israeli killed or injured by Arabs (victims of terror such as the Fogel family pictured on the left or Ido Zoldan, pictured prior to his murder with his widow and orphan child on the right), Hamas must surely deem Israel to be reacting proportionately so long as it kills or injures less than 1177 Arabs in return.

Please do not think that I am advocating mass murder or accuse me of racism. In Jewish belief, the taking of a single human life, regardless of nationality or religion, is equated to the destruction of a world. But Jews are not pacifists, and taking the life of an enemy in wartime or self-defense is permitted.

I merely am pointing to the logical conclusion to be reached using the moral values of Hamas.

Egypt Puts Propaganda Ahead of Gilad Shalit's Welfare

2011-10-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

I first noticed what was going on when Al Jazeera interviewed released Palestinian prisoners as they arrived in Egypt. One after another, they thanked the Egyptian government for their release. Not one even mentioned Hamas. Very strange. It occurred to me that the Egyptian Information Ministry was putting on a propaganda show.

That was less of a concern with the Arab releasees, because they had been well-treated and well-fed during their terms in Israeli prisons. They could worship in mosques in the prisons, fraternize with fellow prisoners and receive visitors.

Gilad Shalit had no such advantages. He has been in solitary confinement for over 4 years, with no one to talk to but his guards. He has not been allowed visitors, even from the Red Cross. The Israeli doctors who examined him upon his arrival in Israel said he was suffering from malnutrition and lack of sunlight. He also is obviously suffering from the mental effects of lack of human contact.

But, as reported in this AP story, that didn't stop the Egyptian Information Ministry from staging a propaganda interview with Shalit even before he was allowed to call his parents. Blinking, obviously dazed and near fainting, he was subjected to ridiculous questions from an Egyptian television "journalist," Shahira Amin, such as the following:

"You have known what it is like to be in captivity. There are more than 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. Will you help campaign for their release?" [Shalit was kidnapped. The prisonres in Israei jails are convicted terrorists and criminals.]

Amin also asked Shalit why he only gave one interview while in captivity, ignoring the fact that Hamas had kept him in solitary confinement.

Throughout the interview, armed Hamas militants surrounded Shalit, including one wearing a black knit mask over his face. Shalit must have been terrified that the entire interview was a prelude to returning him to his Hamas captors.

One would think that Arabs would be ashamed of the contrast between the levels of humanity in Israel and in the Arab world.

BARUCHIM HABAIM: Welcome Home, Gilad

2011-10-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

Joe Lieberman Writes Why Romney's Mormon Faith Must not be a Barrier to his Candidacy

2011-10-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

In the Washington Post, the Kosher Hedgehog's co-religionist, Senator Joe Lieberman, the first Jew to be nominated by a major party for the Vice Presidency of the United States, explains why the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney, Lowell's co-religionist, should not be a bar to his candidacy for the U.S. Presidency.

Is Israel Paying Too High a Price for Gilad Shalit's Freedom?

2011-10-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

God bless Gilad Shavit. God willing, may he soon be reunited with his family. May he marry, have children, build a bayit neeman, a faithful house, in Israel. May he prosper and live until 120 years.

That having been said, is Israel paying too high a price for his freedom? Reportedly, Israel will release some 1000 Palestinian Arab prisoners from Israeli jails, many of whom are serving time for murder, and some of them for multiple murders. The Israeli victims were mostly civilians, non-combatants, including women and small children. The perpetrators committed the killings deliberately, and in cold blood. Corporal Gilad Shalit, in contrast, was guilty only of being captured by Hamas thugs while on patrol duty in Israel.

This afternoon, Dennis Prager, speaking on the Hugh Hewitt Show, said that he feared that the Israeli government was making a huge mistake. John R. Bolton, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, expressed a similar opinion.

Yes, it is a religious obligation in Judaism to ransom Jewish captives. However, it is also the halacha, Jewish law, that one does not pay too exorbinant a ransom price, lest the ransom encourage more kidnappings of Jews.

Someone, and it may have been Dennis Prager, once said that if he were Noam Shalit, Gilad's father, he would put unrelenting pressure on the Israeli government to pay whatever price was necessary to free his son; but that if he were an Israeli citizen, he would hope that the Israeli Prime Minister had sufficient moral strength to look Noam Shalit in the eye and say, "No, the price is too high."

May God erase from human memory those wicked persons whose evil deeds compel such a difficult choice.

Alan Dershowitz Flays the UN and the Palestinian Statehood Initiative

2011-10-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

From PJTV, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz's speech at the Durban Watch Conference. Lecturing across the street from the UN, Dershowitz, armed only with logic and facts, flays the UN and the Palestinian statehood initiative. Along the way, he totally discredits the concept of basing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on "the 1967 borders with mutually agreed-upon swaps," demonstrating how that position would almost certainly result in the loss to Israel and the Jewish people of the Western Wall, the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and access to the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, all of which are not within the so-called 1967 borders. The video could not be embedded on this blog, so please follow the link.

Palestinian Authority Claims State Covering All of Israel

2011-10-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Palestinian Authority (the "PA") is seeking recognition of the State of Palestine from the United Nations. One of the legal attributes of national sovereignty is control over the territory the state purports to govern. So what territory does the Palestinian Authority claim? Well, here (courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, whose logo appears in the lower left-hand corner) is a graphic broadcast by PA TV, the official PA television broadcasting station, controlled directly by the office of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, commemorating the application to the United Nations for recognition of the State of Palestine. It shows the Palestinian flag wrapped around the entirety of Israel, with a key symbolizing ownership.

[Of course, the PMW logo did not appear on the original image broadcast by PA Television.]

As documented by photographs at the Palestinian Media Watch website, this is only one of many official PA maps that depict the boundaries of the future Palestine as covering all of present-day Israel.

The PA does not view its application for UN recognition and membership as the means to achieve sovereignty over only Gaza, Yehuda and Shomron (the so-called West Bank). It wants the whole cheese blintz, so to speak. It views the creation of a Palestinian State in Gaza and the West Bank to be just another step toward its ultimate goal of eliminating the State of Israel. That is why the PA refuses to engage in face-to-face negotiations--any peace treaty emerging from such negotiations, even if it gave the Palestinians all of the West Bank and Gaza, and East Jerusalem as its capital, G-d forbid, would also require the Palestinians to give up any territorial claims on what remained of Israel, and to give up the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the lands within the 1949 armstice lines. That goes against the PA's fundamental objective, the entire reason for its existence--the eradication of the world's only Jewish state.

CERN Reports Particles Moving Faster than Light Speed

2011-09-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

If this story turns out to be true, it would invalidate Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity and revolutionize physics. Also, it restores hope for intergalactic space travel at warp speed. "Mr. Zulu, warp factor seven."

Dry Bones on Uncle Sam's Current Economic Dilemma

2011-09-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

How said, but how true.

Palestinians Want It All--All of Israel that is

2011-09-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, has an op-ed column in today's Los Angeles Times. It is particularly revealing if one wants to understand the Palestinian Arab world view. He criticizes the effort of the Palestinian Authority for recognition as an independent state within the 1949 armstice lines (the so-called "1967 borders") because it would leave 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs as citizens of Israel within the 1949 armstice lines and would abandon the right of Palestinian Arabs to return to their homes within Israel. If one gives his arguments any thought, one realizes that what Professor Makdisi is advocating is the reversal of the 1947 resolution partitioning the Palestinian Mandate into a Jewish State and an Arab State. In its place he wants a partition into an Arab State and a binational state that would in due course become an Arab State.

The only surprising aspect of this column is its criticism of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, because if the truth were known what Makdisi wants is what Abbas wants as well. Abbas just does a better job of hiding the ball. If all the PA wanted was a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, it could have achieved that objective long ago, but only at the cost of relinquishing any claim on the part of Palestinian refugees to resettle inside Israel. Abbas, like Arafat (may the name of the wicked be erased) before him would not make that concession.

That is the main justification behind the PA's effort to obtain recognition of a Palestinian State through the United Nations, bypassing negotiations with Israel. A negotiated peace would require recognition of Israel as the Jewish State called for in the 1947 partition resolution, and relinquishment of any Palestinian right of return. A unilateral declaration of statehood, on the other hand, would give the Palestinians a state without compelling them to recognize Israel, relinquish claims to Israeli territory, or relinquish a claimed right of return. It thereby preserves the true Palestinian objective, the elimination of the world's only Jewish State.

Useful Idiot Update-Ahmadinejad Cancels Dinner Invitation to Columbia Students

2011-09-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad abruptly cancelled his dinner invitation extended to Columbia students while he visits New York City for the UN General Assembly session. The cancellation came without explanation.

Oh dear! Who can the students find for a substitute dinner guest? After all, neither Bashar al-Assad, nor Muammar Gaddafi are expected this year. Of course, there is always Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas. He meets the relevant anti-Jewish criterion.

Refusal to Sell F-22 Jets to Taiwan Raises Doubts About U.S. Reliability as Ally

2011-09-21T18:16:00.000-07:00

"Why won't Israel take risks for peace, and rely on the United States to protect its security?" That is a question one often hears from well-meaning American friends of Israel who are puzzled by what they perceive as its obstinate preoccupation with security issues.

Taiwanese may be able to partially answer that question today. The Obama Administration announced that it will not sell Taiwan the 66 new F-16 C/D fighter planes requested by that government. Instead, the United States will only agree to upgrade Taiwan's existing fleet of F-16 A/B aircraft.

The decision, apparently intended to mollify China, drew instant bipartisan criticism. Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, in whose state Lockheed Martin would have built the Taiwanese jets, called the move a "slap in the face of an ally." Even Obama partisan Howard Berman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called it a "half measure."

Half a measure was not better than none as far as China was concerned. The U.S. action intended to defer to Chinese diplomatic sensitivities was instead met with an angry denunciation by Beijing. The pressure from China for a complete U.S. abandonment of the Taiwanese government continues unabated.

Understandably, U.S. allies, including Israel, watch and wonder. Are their fears overblown? Well, have you ever heard of the Shah of Iran? Or a former Egyptian dictator named Hosni Mubarak? Or a country called the Republic of Vietnam, more commonly known as South Vietnam? They also were allies of the United States, until the United States abandoned them. Who's next?

Israel Sends Assistance to International Disaster Sites

2011-09-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

If an extraterrestrial visitor to Earth were to judge only by resolutions condemning Israel passed by the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council, the visitor would assume that it is the most evil nation in the world today, if not in all human history. More resolutions condemning Israel are passed than against all other nations of the world combined.

Once the visitor educated itself about earthly politics and the sorry condition of the United Nations, and then examined the facts further, it would come to a very different conclusion. Here is an incomplete list of how Israel has responded in recent years to international disasters, by rendering humanitarian assistance:

Albania- After severe flooding in December of last year, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered 307 family-sized tents for families made homeless by flooding there.

Congo- Israel sent 4 tons of humanitarian aid to the country in November 2008 to relieve the suffering of the population in rural areas.

Dominican Republic- Israel sent relief teams to assist in cleanup operations in the wake of Tropical Storm Noel in November 2007.

Greece- Israel sent 52 firefighters to assist in battling major conflagrations there in August 2007.

Haiti- In January 2010 Israel was the first country to successfully setup a fully equipped field hospital just 4 days after the devastating earthquake that struck the country.

India- Israel sent 150 emergency personnel to assist in relief efforts after the January 2001 earthquake in Western India.

Indonesia- In January 2005 Israel sent 75 tons of relief material for the benefit of those made homeless by the December 2004 Tsunami.

Kenya- Israel sent search and rescue teams to Kenya after the bombing of the US Embassy there in August 1998.

Macedonia- Israel sent firefighting equipment twice in 2007 to assist in battling major blazes there in July and August 2007.

Mauritania- Two medical missions sent to the country by Israel in 1999 to treat eye problems among the populace.

Mexico- Israel sent relief teams to assist in cleanup operations in the wake of Tropical Storm Noel in November 2007.

Myanmar- Israel sent relief workers to help local officials in the wake of the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis.

Nepal – Israel's non-profit organization Tevel b'Tzedek sends volunteers to help with Kathmandu street children's crises in ongoing programs.

Nicaragua- Israel sent relief teams to assist in cleanup operations in the wake of Hurricane Felix in September 2007.

Nigeria- Israel sent medical supplies to Nigeria in March 2006 to battle bird flu.

Philippines- In response to the damage caused by typhoon Ondoy, Israel sent planeloads of medicine to the beleaguered areas in October 2009.

Sri Lanka- After the December 2004 Tsunami Israel delivered emergency food kitchens to help feed those displaced by the devastating wave.

Turkey- Israel sent 250 relief workers to assist in cleanup operations after the August 1999 earthquake that hit Turkey, followed by a complete field hospital. After the area was cleared, Israel then built a village of prefabricated houses for the survivors.

This list does not include Israeli humanitarian assistance sent to Japan, China, Kashmir, Chad & Somalia'

The source of all this humanitarian aid is a tiny nation with a land mass the size of New Jersey and a population of only seven million. Its humanitarian contributions dwarf those of the Islamic nations, probably combined, with their billions of petroleum income and over a billion and a half in population.

Indeed, a number of the recipients of aid listed above are Islamic nations and other countries who regularly vote to condemn Israel in the United Nations.

Hat tip: Israel Up Close, www.israelupclose.org.

Palestine will be an Apartheid State

2011-09-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Boycott and Delegitimization Campaign against Israel tries to portray Israel as an apartheid state. The charge will not stand up to scrutiny-Israel's 1.6 million Arab citizens, about 20% of its population, have full civil rights, vote, form political parties, serve in the Knesset, and participate in every aspect and institution of Israel, including (if they are Druse or Beduin) in the military. Whether Moslem or Christian, their freedom to worship and to teach their religion to their children and others is unfettered. Of course Israel is not free of discrimination against Arabs, just as the U.S. is not free of discrimination against its racial minorities. However, the situation can only be termed "apartheid" by someone who is recklesssly or wilfully ignorant of the facts.

Now let's turn to Saudi Arabia. Jews are not even allowed in the country. Christians--including visiting businessmen-- may only practice privately. Jewish and Christian books are banned. The situation for other non-Islamic religions is the same or worse. Only Moslems have any civil rights. Why is Saudi Arabia not branded an apartheid state?

How about the areas of Yehuda and Shomron (the so-called West Bank) under the control of the Palestinian Authority or Gaza, under the control of Hamas. Except for the formerly Jewish wives of Arabs, who no longer practice their religion, the life expectancy of an unarmed Jew in those areas may be measured in minutes. Forget about legal rights, mere survival is an issue. Why are Hamas and the Palestinian Authority not condemned as apartheid regimes?

In case you might think that matters will improve with Palestinian independence, this week Maen Areikat (the smiling gentleman in the photo to the left), the Palestinian Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States, met with reporters in Washington D.C. this morning at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. He informed them that Jews will not be permitted in the new Palestine.

Why are so many nations eager to approve the creation of a truly apartheid racist state, at Israel's expense.

(Hat tip: Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post.)

Desperately Spinning Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the GOP Victory in NY9

2011-09-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

"It's a very difficult district for Democrats."
--Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to the Wall Street Journal, regarding the victory of Republican Bob Turner in the special congressional election for the New York Ninth Congressional District.

The New York Ninth Congressional District is 57% Democratic and 18% Republican, and has not elected a Republican to Congress since 1920.

In NY9th, Orthodox Jews Voted Their Conscience, Not Their Affiliation

2011-09-13T21:32:00.001-07:00

Just how much of a repudiation of the Obama Administration's policies was the election of Republican political novice Bob Turner (photo right) over Democratic NY state Assemblyman David Weprin in the special election for the New York Ninth Congressional District? Well, here's a hint: the large Orthodox Jewish community in the Ninth apparently voted heavily in favor of the GOP's Turner, in preference to the Orthodox Jewish candidate, Assemblyman Weprin. And the issues that drove votes away from Weprin were (1) his decisive vote in the New York State Assembly for gay marriage, and (2) anger over the Obama's Administrations lack of support for Israel. Concerns over Israel led to cross-party endorsements of Bob Turner by former New York City Democratic Congressman and Mayor Ed Koch and by Weprin's fellow Orthodox Jewish Assemblyman Dov Hikind (Democrat-Brooklyn). Hikind summed up the race nicely, when he said that he hoped the election of a Republican by the heavily Democratic Brooklyn and Queens congressional district would "send a message to President Obama about his failed, disastrous economic policies and his reckless policies toward Israel."

I am proud that the Orthodox Jewish voters of the New York Ninth Congressional District chose their principles over feelings of religious or ethnic loyalty in electing Bob Turner to Congress.

Useful Idiots Update: NBC Films "Day in the Life" of Ahmadinejad

2011-09-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

Continuing to fulfill its self-designated role as a "useful idiot" promoting the enemies of the United States, NBC News has filmed a "day in the life" of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during which reporter Ann Curry shadowed the Islamist radical from dawn until well after midnight. NBC News will no doubt defend its decision to provide free PR to one of the world's most dangerous political leaders by arguing that it is trying to increase understanding between Americans and Iranians. Will NBC warn its viewers that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a totalitarian state bereft of a free press, and that everything NBC was allowed to film was carefully stage-managed? Probably not. Read all about it in the Jerusalem Post.

Not to be outdone by the mainstream media, higher education is doing its utmost to educate useful idiots in training. Columbia University has announced that 15 of its students will have a private dinner meeting with Ahmadinejad when he comes to New York City later this month to address the UN General Assembly. Perhaps they can offer him a tour of the newly opened 9-11 memorial. Or, they may prefer to join him in a demonstration against Zionism and in favor of the UN vote on Palestinian statehood. It is good to know that a new generation is being nurtured to defend our freedom.

To be fair, Columbia President Lee Bollinger acquitted himself quite well back in 2007, when Ahmadinejad appeared at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs' annual World Leaders Forum. The Iranian President faced critical questions from both students and faculty--memorably responding to a question about gay rights in Iran by stating that there are no homosexuals in his country. (It would have been more truthful for him to say, "There are no live homosexuals that I know about in my country.") In introducing Ahmadinejad to the audience, President Bollinger said, "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator."

However, this format of this year's event allows Ahmadinejad to avoid public questioning about the radical Islamist policies of his government. It is likely to be an Iranian PR triumph pure and simple. When the students shake the dictator's hand, it will be still be dripping with the blood of the pro-democracy protesters murdered on the streets of Tehran last year.

Motorcyclist rescued from beneath burning car

2011-09-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

This happened in Logan, Utah. The quick, organize action by this group of bystanders is impressive. Reports are that the motorcyclist who was pulled out from under the car is expected to recover fully. Maybe he'll start wearing a helmet after this.

Glenn Beck Was Right--Update: Cairo Mob Invades Israeli Embassy

2011-09-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

Lest we forget the mentality in the Arab world that led to 9-11, on Saturday, a mob broke away from "pro-democracy" demonstrations and stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo. They broke into the embassy and began throwing documents out the windows. Fortunately, the embassy staff had escaped. The Israeli ambassador, his staff and their families have been evacuated to Israel. The Egyptian army and police did not interfere with the mob or intervene at all until hours after the attack began, and then only after urgent calls to the Egyptian Defense Minister from U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who warned his Israeli counterpart that a failure to act swiftly to end the attack on the embassy would have grave consequences. (Under international law, a nation's embassy is its sovereign territory. The actions of the mob legally amounted to an invasion of Israel.) Following Secretary Panetta's call, Egyptian commandos rescued 6 embassy guards from the mob. Previously, the Egyptian Defense Minister had refused to take calls from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Typically, in today's Los Angeles Times, a front page feature story portrays Israel's mounting tensions with Egypt and Turkey as Israel's fault. The story falsely distorts Israel's refusal to apologize to Turkey for May 2010 deaths of nine Turkish nationals on the Mavi Mamara, a ship that was part of a flotilla seeking to run Israel's Gaza blockade. The article fails to mention that Israel offered an expression of regret at the loss of life, but insisted that its soldiers not be exposed to civil liability; that Turkey demanded that any apology include a termination of the Gaza blockade (which even the United Nations report on the incident concluded is legal under international law); or that when Israeli commandos initially attempted to board the Mavi Mamara, armed only with paintball guns, the "activists" on board attacked them with clubs and knives. On the other vessels in the convoy, which offered no resistance to boarding by the Israeli commandos, no one was injured on either side.

Turkish Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan has announced that Turkish warships will now escort flotillas to Gaza. That is an extremely provocative action; if Israel is to maintain a legal naval blockade essential to its security, it must risk an armed confrontation with the Turkish navy.

Rick Rescorla Remembered 10 Years Later--"The Real Heroes are Dead."

2011-09-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

As my commemoration on the 10th anniversary of 9-11, I remember my personal hero who gave his life that day, Rick Rescorla, the Vice President of Security for Morgan-Stanley/Dean-Witter, who is shown in the photo above speaking into a bullhorn, supervising the evacuation of 2700 of his firm's employees from the south tower of the World Trade Center. From his post in the south tower, he also supervised the successful evacuation of another 1500 Morgan Stanley employees from the WTC5 office building. When all of the employees had been evacuated safely, he returned to the south tower to insure that no one had been left behind. He was in the tower when it collapsed.

Rick Rescorla had led a heroic life even before he gave his last full measure of devotion on 9-11. To honor Mr. Resorla, and the other heroes and victims of 9-11, I am reprising a Hedgehog Post from May 25, 2009. As the Baal Shem Tov once said, memory is redemption.

He was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. He enlisted in the British Army in 1957, trained as a paratrooper. After emigrating to the United States, he joined the U.S. Army in 1963, attended Officer Candidate School and upon graduation was assigned as a platoon leader in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore. It was in that capacity that he served with distinction at the Battle of Ia Drang, between November 14 and November 18, 1965, as related in "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," by Lt. Gen. (ret) Hal Moore and Joe Galloway. His iconic photo taken by then war correspondent Joe Galloway during that battle appears on the cover of the book. Described by Hal Moore as "the best platoon leader I ever saw," his companions at Ia Drang related how he raised their morale during a critical night of the battle by leading cheers and singing Cornish battle songs.

Rescorla's Vietnam honors included the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, a Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. Yet he rarely spoke about Vietnam, and when he received a copy of "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," with his picture on the cover, he set it aside and never read it. "The real heroes are dead," he told his wife, Susan.

On September 11, 2001, Rick Rescorla was Vice President of Security for Morgan-Stanley/Dean-Witter, stationed at its headquarters in the World Trade Center. There he gave his last full measure of devotion to his adopted nation. The last years and hours of his life are related in a heart-rending narrative by James Stewart, "The Real Heroes Are Dead, a love story" published in the New Yorker in February 2002.

Recorla had predicted that the twin towers would be the target of a second attack by Islamist terrorists, and had prepared for it. On September 11, the frequent evacuation drills he had imposed on the Morgan-Stanley/Dean-Witter employees paid off, as under his direction over 2700 employees safely made their way down the fire escape stairwells of the south tower of the World Trade Center. From his post in the south tower, Rescorla also oversaw the evacuation of another 1000 Morgan Stanley employees from WTC5.

When an old army buddy, Dan Hill, reached him by cell phone during the evacuation, he could be heard calmly and collectively barking orders through a bullhorn. He exhorted his fellow employees to "...be proud to be an American ...everyone will be talking about you tomorrow". He then burst into song:

Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can’t you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors’ pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!

In his last cell phone call with his wife Susan, he told her, ”Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.” After evacuating the employees from the south tower, he took his security team back into the tower to make one last sweep, to make sure everyone had safely escaped. When one of his colleagues told him he too had to evacuate the World Trade Center, Rescorla replied, "As soon as I make sure everyone else is out". He was last seen alive on the 10th floor, moving upward, shortly before the south tower collapsed.

Every year, on March 25, Medal of Honor Day, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, a society of the some 100 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, selects three civilians to receive the Above and Beyond Medal. In this manner, those of our living veterans who most exemplify the ideals of courage, sacrifice, integrity, patriotism, commitment and citizenship associated with the Medal of Honor itself, continue to give to our country by recognizing those qualities in civilian life. On March 25, 2009, in a ceremony before the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, Rick Rescorla posthumously received the Above and Beyond Medal.

posted by The Kosher Hedgehog at 1:12 PM

1 Comments:
Anonymous said...
Every time I read Rick Rescorla's story, it bring me to tears. It has broken my heart. He is more of a hero than most of the people born here. His name should be fill our history books but sadly it will not. He is a HERO!!!! As Sept 11th draws near once again the tears will flow and and the pain in my heart will return. The world is alot more empty without Mr. Rescorla in it.

Sunday, August 30, 2009 9:29:00 AM

UPDATE 9/11/2011: After completing the above post, I learned that James Stewart published a book-length treatment of his New Yorker portrait of Rick and Sue Rescorla, and Rick's best friend Dan Hill, called "Heart of a Soldier." Most incredibly, the San Francisco City Opera commissioned a new opera based on "Heart of a Soldier," which premiered last night!

The PAC-12 Era Begins

2011-09-10T10:46:00.001-07:00

Today the Utah Utes play the Southern Cal Trojans for the first-ever PAC-12 conference football game. On this historic day, we are flying the University of Utah flag at our house.

When Many Arizona Hotels Barred Jews

2011-09-08T19:10:00.000-07:00

We often forget the progress made in civil rights in the United States in a relatively short time. This story from the Arizona Republic relates how many Arizona hotels and resorts banned Jewish guests until the 1950s and 1960s. The story focuses on the San Marcos Hotel in Chandler, Arizona.

It also focuses on a Southern California Jewish businessman, Adolph Weinberg, who befriended the Basha family, helped rescue that family's dairy business following the death of his friend Eddie, the patriarch, in 1958. Eddie Basha, Jr., who became a grocery store magnate, fondly remembers Weinberg to this day. A few years earlier, Weinberg even contributed $75,000 to build a convent at St Mary Basha school, the first Catholic school in Chandler, and a pet project of Eddie, Sr.

I did not know about the San Marcos Hotel. (Who went to Chandler?) But I well remember my parents telling me about how the Camelback Inn formerly banned Jews. Indeed, one of the dintinctions between that Scottsdale resort and its neighbor, Del Webb's Mountain Shadows, was that Mountain Shadows welcomed Jewish patronage. Needless to say, for years after the Camelback Inn changed its evil ways, the Phoenix Jewish community tended to book banquets and other events at Mountain Shadows in preference to the Camelback Inn.

This all changed in my lifetime, and legal segregation by race, religion or national origin ended with the Public Accomodation anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Sadly for the Republican Party, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater chose to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because he strongly believed that it unconstitutionally extended federal authority over the use of private property. His opposition, although well-intended, was the beginning of the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, which contributed greatly to the Presidential electoral victory of Richard Nixon in 1968, but at the same time changed the GOP from the party of freedom for African Americans (which it had been since the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln) to the party, in the eyes of most African Americans, of former Dixiecrats and segretationists. That sad legacy continues to this day. Many Americans now forget that among the champions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were Republican Senators Everett Dirksen of Illinois (who helped draft the law) and Jacob Javits of New York. Other prominent GOP champions of civil rights legislation included New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Michigan Governor George Romney (father of Mitt Romney).

Ironically, unlike many GOP former Dixiecrats, Senator Barry Goldwater was no racist or segregationist. His reservations concerning the federal civil rights act were sincerely held. He had no such reservations about local government acting to end racial segregation. As a private citizen, operating his family's Phoenix department store, he was the first Phoenix business man to hire African American sales clerks, and he had been instrumental in integrating Phoenix public schools and restaurants and the Arizona National Guard. Yet he was tarred with the charge of racism, and that charge plagues the Republican Party to this day.

"It's the Sun, Stupid" Update

2011-09-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

Anne Jolis in The Wall Street Journal writes how advances in research of how cosmic rays affect cloud formation have reopened the scientific debate on the causes of climate change, despite the best efforts of Al Gore to suppress it.

PAC-12 Football Begins

2011-08-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

Since Ralph and I are both PAC-12 fans (having received all our degrees from PAC-12 institutions) we are departing from the usual political/cultural fare here to share this video:

2011 PAC-12 FOOTBALL TRAILER from WayFen Inc. on Vimeo.

Go Utes! Go Cardinal! Go Sun Devils!

"It's the Sun, Stupid"

2011-08-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the Hadron nuclear accelerator, has published in the scientific journal Nature the findings from an experiment ongoing since 2009, conducted by 63 scientists from 17 institutes in Europe and the United States, on the factors that determine global temperatures. It turns out that the action of the sun's magnetic field on cosmic rays is the major determining factor. When the sun's magnetic field readily allows cosmic rays to reach the earth, those rays seed cloud cloud cover, resulting in precipitation and cooler temperatures. However, when the magnetic field deflects cosmic rays away from the earth, cloud formation is restricted, and temperatures rise. According to this model, CO2 emissions from human activity has an insignificant effect.

The report is getting very little media coverage. I wonder why. One can imagine how the mainstream media would be trumpeting this report it if it bolstered global warming orthodoxy.

I do not want to oversell the significance of this report. As near as I can tell, the study raises more questions than it answers, and merely furthers a promising line of inquiry into the effect of the sun's magnetic field and cosmic rays on global temperatures. It by no means settles the issue of what are the primary causes of climate change. But, at the very least, this is a setback to those who argue that the cause of global warming is beyond legitimate scientific debate.

In any event, those who wish to know more would do well to start with this report by British science writer Nigel Calder.

Chief Rabbi Sacks on the Malady that Afflicts Britain and the West

2011-08-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

In the Wall Street Journal, Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, writes that the recent London riots are attributable to the moral disintegration that began in the 1960s in Great Britain, the United States and virtually every other Western society. Rabbi Sacks writes:

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you.

Rabbi Sacks notes that as a result of the collapse of the authority of Judaeo-Christian values in Britain, today over 40% of children are born out of wedlock, and "whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models," so that many British young men are socialized in gangs. He cites the evergrowing list of social maladies resulting from the same source:

They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

The most interesting insight of Rabbi Sacks is that this has happened before, in Great Britain and the United States in the 1820s, when the great migrations from the countryside to the cities sparked by the Industrial Revolution led to a breakdown of traditional institutions of religious and civil authority. Broken families, alcoholism and violent crime abounded. Here, Rabbi Sacks writes, is what turned the tide:

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

Rabbi Sacks argues that now, as then, the cure for the social disease afflicting the West is not government. Rather, "It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good."

The question, Rabbi Sacks poses, is whether the West will apply the cure before its moral and societal disintegration is irreversible.

Mort Zuckerman on Obama's Compentency Crisis

2011-08-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

Mortimer Zuckerman, who supported the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, writes in today's Wall Street Journal that the crisis facing the Obama Presidency is one of competency and the absence of leadership. I thought Mr. Zuckerman's critique of the President's advocacy of "taxing millionaires and billionaires" was particularly biting and cogent, coming as it does from an advocate of higher taxes:

He made the politically tested and calculated statement that if you raise taxes on billionaires and millionaires you could solve the problem. This is not so. Even for those who support higher taxes on the wealthy, as I do, we must remember that we have an income tax system in which fully half the "taxpayers" pay no tax at all, and in which the variety of loopholes cries out for a real reform of the tax code. Even if the government instituted a 100% tax on both corporate profits and personal incomes above $250,000 per year, it would yield enough revenue to run the government for only six months. Why? Because under Mr. Obama's presidency, government spending has swelled to 24% of GDP from 18%.

Mr. Zuckerman goes on to advocate a real reform of the tax code that asks everyone to make some contribution, but at the same time eliminates loopholes and special allowances.

20 Years Since Crown Heights Pogrom

2011-08-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago tomorrow, the first and thank God the only anti-Jewish pogrom in American history erupted in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The precipitating event was a fatal automobile accident, when a car from a motorcade, accompanying the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, of Blessed Memory, hit a car in an intersection, veered out of control onto the sidewalk, and struck and killed a seven-year old African-American youngster, Gavin Cato. Before police could arrive, Yosef Lifish, the driver, had been beaten up by local Dominican and African American bystanders. When a local ambulance service, run by the Lubavitcher community, arrived on the scene, the police ordered the ambulance to remove Lifish from the scene to protect his safety. This action started a false rumor that the Chasidic ambulance crew had refused to treat Gavin Cato, which further infuriated the crowd.

Some three hours later, a mob of about 20 black men attacked Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old University of Melbourne student in the United States conducting research for his doctorate. They stabbed him several times in the back and beat him severely, fracturing his skull. Before being taken to the hospital, Rosenbaum was able to identify 16-year-old Lemrick Nelson, Jr. as his assailant in a line-up shown to him by the police. Rosenbaum died later that night. Nelson was charged with murder and acquitted, but later convicted of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights; he eventually admitted that he had indeed stabbed Rosenbaum. For murdering Yankel Rosenbaum, Nelson received a prison sentence of only 10 years.

Here is the description of the ensuing rioting from Wikepedia:

For three days following the accident, numerous African Americans and Caribbean Americans of the neighborhood, joined by growing numbers of non-residents, rioted in Crown Heights. In the rioting of the ensuing three days, many of the rioters "did not even live in Crown Heights."

During the riots, Jews were injured, stores were looted, and cars and homes were damaged. The rioters identified Jewish homes by the mezuzot affixed to the front doors. Rioters marched through Crown Heights carrying anti-Semitic signs and an Israeli flag was burned. Rioters threw bricks and bottles at police; shots were fired at police and police cars were pelted and overturned, including the Police Commissioner’s car.

An additional 350 police officers were added to the regular duty roster on August 20 and were assigned to Crown Heights in an attempt to quell the rioting. After episodes of rock- and bottle-throwing involving hundreds of blacks and Jews, and after groups of blacks marched through Crown Heights chanting "No Justice, No Peace!", "Death to the Jews!", and "Whose streets? Our streets!", an additional 1,200 police officers were sent to confront rioters in Crown Heights. Riots escalated to the extent that a detachment of 200 police officers was overwhelmed and had to retreat for their safety. On August 22, over 1,800 police officers, including mounted and motorcycle units, had been dispatched to stop the attacks on people and property.

By the time the three days of rioting ended, 152 police officers and 38 civilians were injured, 27 vehicles were destroyed, seven stores were looted or burned,and 225 cases of robbery and burglary were committed. At least 129 arrests were made during the riots, including 122 blacks and seven whites. Property damage was estimated at one million dollars.

On August 26, 1991, just days after the riots subsided, Reverend Al Sharpton spoke at the funeral of Gavin Cato. Rather than trying to ease racial strife, he chose to incite it further, leading mourners at Gavin Cato's funeral in chants of "No Justice, No Peace." Here is a documented excerpt from Sharpton's funeral oration:

The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. ... It's an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. ... All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin' and grinnin'. Pay for your deeds.

Sharpton has never apologized for his anti-semitic remarks. Later, after the driver Yosef Lifish was cleared of all charges, and emigrated to Israel for his own safety, Sharpton traveled to Israel to try to serve Lifish in a civil lawsuit brought by the Cato family. When bystanders shouted at him to "go to hell," he responded, "I already am in hell; I'm in Israel." Outrage against Sharpton arose again this week, when it was announced that he was invited to participate in a synagogue's program on Jewish-African American relations 20 years after the Crown Heights riots. Reverend Sharpton wisely withdrew from the program.

There was at least one good outcome of the Crown Heights riot--it ended the political career of Mayor David Dinkins, who was viewed as having grossly mishandled the situation. His successor Rudy Giuliani, during his electoral campaign against Dinkins, was one of the first people to correctly describe the Crown Heights riots for what they were--an anti-semitic pogrom.

As the 20th anniversary of the riots approached, Ari Goldblum, back then a New York Times reporter covering the riots, recalled in New York Jewish Week how the Times typically reported the story as "racial strife," as if both Jews and blacks were rioting and fighting in the streets. Exasperated by how his stories of anti-semitic attacks were being rewritten and distorted, he finally blew up at his editors, yelling over the phone, "I am writing memos and what comes out in the paper? ‘Hasidim and blacks clashed’? That’s not what is happening here. Jews are being attacked! You’ve got this story all wrong. All wrong.”

The retrospective of Jane Eisner, the editor of the Forward, closely follows the New York Times analysis so decried by Mr. Goldblum. She wrote how back in 1977, 14 years before the riots, on her first visit to Crown Heights, she already witnessed the smoldering racial atmosphere in the Brooklyn neighborhood, which she attributed to African American resentment over the political clout wielded by the Lubavitcher Chasidim:

When I was spending a lot of time in Crown Heights, I learned that blacks there were still smarting after losing a fierce political battle over redistricting in 1976, which they believed allowed the Lubavitchers to gain special law enforcement protection and other perks.

“The issue, basically, was power,” said the Rev. Hebert D. Daughtry, then pastor of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church. Daughtry remains a rambunctious civil rights activist. He told me that the Hasidim “had actualized all the verbiage of the black power people. They knew they’d be able to bring their numbers into play to control goods and services, so they went after it and got it. They were able to achieve a political end and keep everything else intact.”

Although she tempers her analysis by saying that the Lubavitchers, facing a rising crime wave in Crown Heights in those decades, had good reason to seek political cloout, the overall tone of her article frankly outraged me. Here is my comment:

So Rev. Daughtry, a "civil rights activist" (like Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped provoke and perpetuate the Crown Heights riots), believes that the cause of the first pogrom in U.S. history was that the Jews had seized power and control of the government in their Brooklyn neighborhood. But of course that has been the rallying cry of anti-Semites from Khelnytsky through Goebbels to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood today. It is patronizing and indeed racist to so "explain" the actions of the black rioters. I may resent the political gains of another ethnic or racial group. That resentment does not entitle me to riot and commit murder in their community.

I apologize to Reverend Sharpton for suggesting he provoked the Crown Heights riots. He only perpetuated the rancorous atmosphere with his funeral oration. Other than that caveat, I stand by my comment. Do you agree with me?

Irony Watch: Mike Allen's latest dispatch from the president's Martha's Vineyard vacation

2011-08-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from Mike Allen's Politico Playbook, reporting on the president's Martha's Vineyard vacation. The irony is pretty rich:

Ira Stoll, editor and founder of FutureOfCapitalism.com, emails: …."Spotted Wednesday night on Deep Bottom Road: Margaret Marshall, the chief justice who authored the Massachusetts gay marriage decision, driving out in a gray Honda SUV with Anthony Lewis in the passenger seat. Welcome to paradise. ... There's plenty of regular folk here. Compared to Nantucket or Bridgehampton, it's practically middle America."

How out of touch can these people be?

The 600-point Dow Slide and President Obama: Is He A Sudden Convert to American Exceptionalism?

2011-08-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

You may recall that when President Obama was asked if he believes in American exceptionalism, he famously responded:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Well, today, responding to the Dow crash of over 600 points, he said:

“This is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a triple-A country."

So, combining the president's statements and apparent philosophy, I guess this means:

“I believe America is a triple-A country, just as I suspect that the Brits believe they're a triple-A country and the Greeks believe they're a triple-A country."

Well, maybe not the Greeks, but you get my point.

UPDATE:

This piece by Nile Gardiner, "The stunning decline of Barack Obama 2011 edition: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency continues to melt down," is a must-read.

"Doorbell:" A must-watch YouTube Video

2011-08-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

Send this one around to everyone you know:

The video itself can be found here.

Update on Hezbollah's Growing Presence in Latin America

2011-08-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

AIPAC's Near East Report has published the best update I have seen on the growing Hezbollah presence in Latin America, especially in Venezuela under the patronage of Hugo Chavez, and the threat that it poses to the United States. Fortunately, Congress is paying attention.

Perhaps the most damaging blow that could be dealt against Hezbollah in Latin America would be the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. That would deprive Hezbollah in its home base in Lebanon of the political, financial and logistical support of one its two main patrons, which are Iran and Syria. It might even lead to a resurgence of the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, which threatened to non-violently liberate Lebanon from the control of Hezbollah's militias after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. However, Hezbollah succeeded through the threat of force in suppressing the Cedar Revolution. Today, Hezbollah has been so well funded and armed by Syria and Iran that not even the Lebanese Army has the strength to break its grip.

Islamists Overwhelm Liberals at Cairo Demonstration. Glenn Beck was Right.

2011-07-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and their Islamist allies overwhelmed liberal activists in numbers and decibels at a Tahrir Square rally today. The rally was originally called to demonstrate the continuing unity of the protest movement that led to the fall of the regime of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, and its organizers had agreed that the participating organizations should keep the rally free of divisive issues. But the Islamists quickly turned the rally into a demonstration for the institution of strict Islamic law in Egypt. The AP reports:

Instead of "Peaceful, peaceful," which demonstrators have chanted during confrontations with security forces, they repeated "Islamic, Islamic." And instead of "The people want to topple the regime" — a chant made famous in Tunisia and adopted across the region — they yelled, "The people want to implement Sharia," or Islamic law.

Does everyone remember how the mainstream media ridiculed Glenn Beck when he suggested that the Arab Spring and the Tahrir Square demonstrations would be used by the Islamists to advance their plan for a new caliphate under Islamic law? I disagree with Mr. Beck somewhat, because I believe that many of the Tahrir Square demonstrators, especially at the earliest rallies, sincerely advocated for a liberal, if not secular, democracy. However, subsequent events suggest that the liberal pro-democracy advocates will turn out to have been the "useful idiots" (Lenin's catch phrase) for the better organized and highly motivated Islamists. If so, then what will emerge in Egypt, and perhaps in other "Arab Spring" nations as well, will be a Salafist or Sunni version of the Shiite Islamic dictatorship in Tehran. Mr. Beck may not have been accurate in every detail, but his overall prediction appears to have been right on the mark.

In what is probably not an unrelated news item, in fact reported by AP in the same story, gunmen in the Minya province, south of Cairo, opened fire at a car carrying five Christians, murdering two of them. This is the second fatal attack in as many weeks in the predominantly Christian town of Roman.

It ought not need to be said, but must unfortunately must be stated in the currently charged atmosphere following the terrorist attacks in Norway, that the sentiments in this post are not directed against Islam or Moslems generally, but only at those Islamist extremists who would deny to others the same religious liberty that they so strongly claim for themselves. I treasure living in a nation where Moslems, Christians, Jews, believers of every stripe, and, yes, non-believers as well, enjoy freedom of religion (or non-religion if they prefer) and of expression. I just want to keep it that way.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tells the Truth About the "Occupied Territories"

2011-07-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Hurrah for Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and StandWithUs.com! Finally an Israeli government official is engaging in effective public education to counter the cumulative effective of lies from the Palestinians and their allies in Western government and the media. In this video, produced by the Israeli government and StandWithUs, Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon presents the historical facts concerning the status of the so-called "West Bank" and "Occupied Territories" under international law.

If any readers disagree with this presentation, I challenge them to refute it with facts, not name-calling. If you comply with that ground rule, our Comment section is open to you.

Incidentally, as you might expect, the Palestinian Authority is apopletic over this video. In their view when the Israeli government presents the truth, it amounts to a rejection of the "peace process." And if by the "peace process," one means the Oslo Accords and their aftermath, then the PA is probably correct. Of course, the "peace process" has nothing to do with real peace.

Hat tip: HonestReporting.com

In Tunisia, the Arab Spring is Producing a Bitter Harvest

2011-07-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Jews of Tunis, circa 1900

Tunisia was the birthplace of the Arab Spring. A frustrated fruit vendor's self-immolation in December 2010 led to mass street protests that by the following month had unseated President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years in power. Because Tunisia is homogeneous, relatively prosperous and has a tradition of secularism and women's rights, observers had hoped these characteristics would help turn Tunisia into an example of progressive Arab democracy.

That now seems unlikely. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, early this month, the authority in charge of post-Ben Ali political reform adopted a "republican pact" to form the basis of a new constitution. The completed pact included the provision prohibiting ties with Israel. Islamist parties, along with Arab nationalists and extreme leftist factions, are pushing to implement a constitutional provision that would ban normalization of relations with Israel.

The constitutional provision does not prohibit normal relations with Israel while it occupies lands captured in 1967. It does not prohibit normal relations with Israel while there is no settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It forbids normal relations with Israel, period.

Once again events prove the truth of the George Will aphorism: "The problem in the Arab world is not that Israel is being provocative, but rather that Israel's being is provocative."

Let's think about just how radical and unusual such a constitutional provision would be in international affairs. For over 70 years, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a Cold War and were implacable enemies. Yet no one ever seriously proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning normal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, nor was a provision banning normal relations with the U.S. ever a part of the Soviet constitution.

At a rally held a week ago in Tunis to oppose any attempt to remove the anti-Israel provision from the draft constitution, Tunisian veterans who took part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war were featured. To refresh the readers' memories, the Arab nations who attacked Israel in 1948 were not trying to keep Israel within its June 1967 borders, they were trying to strangle the newborn nation at birth.

Moreover, following the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish community of Tunisia, which dated back to the Roman Empire, dwindled under unrelenting oppression from 110,000 to about 1700 today. About half of Tunisia's Jews fled to Israel, and half to France.

Jordan Opposes UN General Assembly Declaration to Create Palestinian State

2011-07-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

According to an opinion column by Alexander Bligh, which appears in today's Jerusalem Post online, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has broken from the Arab League consensus, and is opposing a United Nations General Assembly resolution to create a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza. Bligh based his column on the publication by the Dubai-based daily Al-Bayan of a leaked report that Jordan’s prime minister had revealed that his country would vote against Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly.

Jordan has long been on record as supporting a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and has waived any territorial claims on the West Bank. So why would Jordan oppose the General Assembly resolution? Apparently, Jordan recognizes that the creation of a Palestinian state in any context other than a negotiated peace treaty with Israel would heighten rather than lower the prospects of war, and in all probability would give rise to an Islamist terrorist regime that would threaten the security of both Israel and Jordan.

So Israel and Jordan, the two nations most directly concerned, which would share borders with a new Palestinian state, both sharply oppose the proposed United Nations General Assembly resolution, scheduled to come to a vote in September.

Excavations of Philistine City of Gath Bolster Biblical Narrative

2011-07-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

An international team of archaeologists is currently excavating the ruins at Tel-El-Safi, Israel of the Philistine city of Gath, the home according to the Bible of the Philistine warrior Goliath, who discomforted the tribes of Israel under King Saul, until he was slain by David.

Lo and behold, the discoveries to date are all consistent with the Biblical narrative. Gath flourished in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, contemporaneously with era of Kings Saul, David and Solomon as described in the Bible. It appears to have been destroyed by the Aramean king Hazael around 830 BCE, an incident related in the Book of Kings. The archaeologists have even found shards bearing names similar to Goliath, names of Indo-European rather than Semitic origin, reflecting the roots of the Philistines in ancient Greece.

One of the most intriguing finds at Gath is a large structure, possibly a temple, Tel-El-Safi is a ruined temple, with two pillars. This find bolsters the historicity of another Biblical story featuring the Philistines. After his famous haircut by Delilah and his capture, blinding and imprisonment by the Philistines, the Hebrew Judge Samson is brought to the temple of the idol Dagon in Gaza, to be mocked by his captors. Samson prays to God for his strength to be returned one last time, and he topples the two support pillars of the temple, brining it down upon the heads of his tormentors. The design of the structure found at Gath and a similar Philistine structure discovered at Tel Qasile, north of Tel Aviv, are consistent with Biblical narrative.

An Associated Press story about the dig appears here. Of course, secularists and Palestinians hate this sort of story.

New from LATMA: "The Audacity of Dopes"

2011-07-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Israeli conservative political comedy troup LATMA presents its satiricial take on the Gaza Boatlift:

See if you can spot Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick in this video.

Egyptian "Reform" Politician Blames 9-11 on US and Calls Holocaust a Lie

2011-07-06T15:08:00.000-07:00

In an interview with the Washington Times, a leader of Egypt’s top secular party said the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were “made in the USA,” the Holocaust is “a lie” and Anne Frank’s memoir is “a fake.” Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of Egypt's Wafd Party, made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times last week.

In response to his remarks that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have pulled off the 9-11 attacks, the interviewer asked Mr. Ezz El-Arab who he believed was behind the attacks. Mr. Ezz El-Arab identified the CIA, Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, and the “military-industrial complex.”

Mr. Ezz El-Arab said he accepted that the Nazis killed “hundreds of thousands” of Jews. “But gas chambers and skinning them alive and all this? Fanciful stories,” he added. Mr. Ezz El-Arab also attacked the authenticity of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which he said he studied as a doctoral student in Stockholm. “I could swear to God it’s a fake,” the Wafd leader said. “The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.”

He also alleged that Jewish American soldiers serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq had looted antiquities, with the intention of planting them in archaelogical digs at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in order to bolster Jewish claims that the Temple was once located there.

Mr. Ezz El-Arab is not a fringe politician. His Wafd is arguably the second-most powerful political party to the Muslim Brotherhood, a formerly banned Islamist group. Moreover, last month Wafd announced it would run jointly with the Brotherhood and 16 other blocs in September’s parliamentary elections to present a united front as Egypt forges a new government. So his beliefs about 9-11 and the Holocaust may well reflect the state of mind of the future Egpytian government. Indeed, he is probably a moderate compared with the Islamists in his future coalition.

Ironically, the Jerusalem Post notes that Mr. Ezz El-Arab gave the interview at the "First Annual Conference on Democracy and Human Rights," hosted in Budapest, Hungary by the Tom Lantos Institute and Center for Democratic Transition. Mr. Lantos of blessed memory, a longtime Democratic congressman from California who died in 2008, survived a forced-labor camp in his native Hungary and lost his mother and other family members to the Nazi occupation. Some 450,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, although Mr. Ezz El-Arab apparently does not believe it.

Remember how liberal pundits ridiculed Glenn Beck when he warned about emerging Islamist power in Egypt? I hope that they are still laughing a year from now, when Egypt probably will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wafd Party, and others sharing Mr. Ezz El-Arab-s enlightened outlook.

Open Letter to the Los Angeles Times

2011-06-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

(Because they probably will not print the letter I sent them.)

Today, Sunday, June 12, on its OP-Ed page, under the heading "What is the U.N.'s role?," the Los Angeles Times published a column by Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy political bureau chief of Hamas. The Hamas Charter, entitled "The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement," issued August 18, 1988, the organizational document of Hamas, calls for the murder of Jews, not just "Israelis," not just "Zionists," but Jews.

Would the Times also have published a column by Adolf Hitler, explaining his program for rebuilding Germany? (Like Mr. Marzook, Herr Hitler might well have cloaked his lies, distortions and Jew hatred for easy digestion by a naive American audience.) Perhaps there are two sides to every political issue, including even the wisdom of a UN General Assembly resolution creating a Palestinian state, but the Times needs to ask itself whether it could not have found an advocate of that position whose organization does not also advocate genocide? Or does the Times consider a Hamas leader a legitimate spokesperson for Jew hatred?

Although Hamas spokespersons and their apologists often attempt to downplay the significance of the Hamas Covenant, the organization has never repudiated it. Nor could it honestly do so. The relationship of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in general to Jew hatred is not casual. The spiritual forebearer of Hamas, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in pre-World War II Palestine. [Reader, please note that "Palestine" was never an independent country, and certainly not an Arab one, but rather the area assigned by the League of Nations to Britain after World War I, under a mandate to create a Jewish homeland.] During World War II, he became a valued ally of Nazi Germany and an honored friend of Adolf Hitler. He even helped recruit two Bosnian Moslem divisions of the SS. He is shown in the photo below, published in a Vienna newspaper in 1944, reviewing Bosnian Moslem SS troops:

The French arrested the Grand Mufti at the end of World War II, and both Great Britain and Yugoslavia requested his extradition to stand trial for collaboration with the Nazis and war crimes. Eager to enhance its status in the Arab world, the French refused the extradition requests and allowed his departure to Cairo. In Egypt, where he enthsiastically participated in the Arab military campaigns to destroy the newly declared State of Israel, he placed a young man, apparently his grand nephew, Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, in charge of arms procurement to fight the Jewish State. That young man later becomes known to the world as Yasser Arafat. The Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine later becomes known to the world as Hamas.

Would the Los Angeles Times have printed a column on "the Palestine question" by the Grand Mufti?

"We Have Returned"--The Reunification of Jerusalem 44 Years Ago Today

2011-06-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

Forty-four years ago today, on the Jewish calendar, on the 28th day of the month of Iyar in the year 5771 (June 7, 1967, according to the secular calendar), Israeli paratroopers stood at the foot of the Western Wall--the Kotel Maaravi--in Jerusalem, where no Jew had been permitted to stand since the Jordanian Arab Legion had conquered the Jewish Quarter in 1948. They were dazed, overcome by the realization of what they had accomplished. For the first time in some 1900 years, there was Jewish sovereignty over the Har HaBayit, the Temple Mount.

Rabbi Shlomo Goren, then the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces, and later the Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of Israel, rushed to the still unsecured and dangerous site to join the troops and lead them in prayer, and blow the shofar at the Wall. Israelis thrilled to the radio broadcast of the words of the commander of the 55th Paratroopers Brigade, General Mordechai "Motta" Gur, proclaiming, "Har HaBayit Byadeinu," ["the Temple Mount is in our hands."].

Although the Arab rulers of Jerusalem for the previous 19 years had banned Jews from visiting their most holy site, not once did it occur to Israel to deal similarly with their defeated former Moslem and Christian Arab foes. On the day of the reunification of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defense, declared:

"The Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem this morning. We have reunited the divided city of Jerusalem. We have returned to our most holy of places. We have returned, never to be separated from them ever again. To our Arab neighbors we offer even now, and even more fervently at this time, our hand in peace.

"And to the members of other religions--Christians and Moslems--we give you our solemn promise that we will preserve your complete freedom and all of your religious rights. We have not come to Jerusalem to conquer the holy places of others, nor to keep away those of other religions, rather to guarantee its safety and to live with others in fellowship."

To the people of Israel who heard these words, it must have seemed like wakening to a dream, from the horrific nightmares of the preceding weeks. In the month preceding the outbreak of the Six Day War, President Nasser of Egypt had expelled UN peace keepers from the Sinai, closed the Straight of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and formed a military alliance with Syria and Jordan. Syria and Egypt moved thousands of their troops toward their borders with Israel. Arab leaders proudly and publicly proclaimed their intention to finally destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea. Israelis and Jews throughout the world felt their blood chill with a dread feeling of deja vu as mass rallies of "the Arab street" in Cairo and Damascus chanted "Death to the Jews." (The photo below right shows Egyptian soldiers at such a demonstration.) On May 18, the Voice of the Arabs radio broadcast from Cairo proclaimed:

"The Zionist barrack in Palestine is about to collapse and be destroyed. Every one of the hundred million Arabs has been living for the past nineteen years on one hope – to live to see the day Israel is liquidated…There is no life, no peace nor hope for the gangs of Zionism to remain in the occupied land."

"As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel….The sole method we shall apply against Israel is a total war which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence".

(As a 16-year old Jewish boy in Phoenix, Arizona, I well remember the fear that a second Holocaust, a second genocide of my people, was about to ensue, only 22 years after the previous one had ended.)

The military situation was so fraught that on May 28, when Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol delivered a live radio address to reassure his nation, listeners thought he sounded frightened.

And suddenly, not only had the danger passed, but with God's hand the Israel Defense Forces had utterly defeated their enemies on every front, culminating in the unification of Jerusalem. In the words of the Psalmist, "When the Lord brought back those who returned to Zion, we were like dreamers," and, "Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem is built as a city that is bound firmly together.

Perhaps that is why, President Obama, the Prime Minister of Israel is so adamant about never agreeing to a repartition of Jerusalem. We have returned to our most holy of places, please God, never to be separated from them ever again.

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-30T16:24:00.001-07:00

Had I spent a very long time trying to compose a post to honor our fallen soldiers, I could not have done better than this post by Rick Richman at Jewish Current Issues.

Guide to Boycotting Israel

2011-05-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

Of course, boycotts aimed at Jews are not new, as the photo above demonstrates. Regarding the current boycott and divestment campaign against Israel, I have seen a number of e-mails, web posts and other new media offerings with a similar theme, but I found this one, entitled "Before You Boycott Israel," particularly amusing.

President Obama Statement Once Again Makes MidEast Negotiations Less Likely

2011-05-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama has once again scored on his own goal. (For non-sports fans, that's a bad thing.) Intending to advance the resumption of meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, he has inadvertently made it more unlikely that the Palestinians will engage in serious peace talks with Israel.

On June 4, 2009, President Barack Obama made his famous Cairo speech, his first effort at advancing U.S. relations with the Islamic and Arab world. In the course of that speech, although it included several true and positive statements about Israel, he said the following fateful words:

"At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop." [Emphasis added.]

In fairness to President Obama, the illegitimacy of Israeli settlements in Yehuda and Shomron ["the West Bank"] is a long-held (and in my view wrongly held) American diplomatic position. However, the cessation of Israeli settlement activity had never before been viewed as a prerequisite to the resumption of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. From the moment that President Obama uttered the words, "It is time for these settlements to stop," the Palestinian Authority adopted the position that the cessation of all Israeli settlement activity was a precondition for Palestinian Authority participation in peace negotiations with Israel. And that cessation included, in the Palestinian view, construction within Jerusalem and even construction within the boundaries of existiing settlements. The result--there have been no meaningful Israeli-Arab peace negotiations since June 4, 2009.

Now President Obama has not only repeated the same mistake, he has aggravated it. On May 19, 2011, at the State Department, President Obama outlined his Administration's comprehensive Middle East policy. When he reached the subject of Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, he said many positive things, including a reaffirmation of U.S. friendship with Israel and the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. He even said the following about a transitional period following the creation of a Palestinian state:

"The full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign, non-militarized state. The duration of this transition period must be agreed, and the effectiveness of security arrangements must be demonstrated." [Emphasis added.]

But before that in his speech he uttered the following fateful words:

"The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognised borders are established for both states."

Again, I would argue, that statement reflects long-standing American policy, and does not require a pullback to the June 4, 1967 borders of Israel. At least that is how the statement should have been parsed and publicized by the Israeli government. Instead--and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu certainly shares some blame for this outcome due to his clumsy reaction, along with Republican pundits and politicians who wanted to portray President Obama as a betrayor of Israel and American media that wanted to promote the appearance of a U.S.-Israel split for its newsworthiness--his statement was widely interpreted as requiring Israel to accept the June 4, 1067 borders.

Of course, given that opening, the Palestinian Authority pounced. JTA reports:

"Palestinian officials said they would not resume peace negotiations unless Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepts President Obama's 1967 border guidelines.

"'If Netanyahu agrees, we shall turn over a new leaf,' Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator in peace talks, was quoted as saying Sunday in Ynet. 'If he doesn't, then there is no point talking about a peace process. We're saying it loud and clear.'

"Erekat, a member of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party central committee, repeated similar statements to the KUNA Kuwaiti news agency and others that were rebroadcast on Israel Radio.

"'Once Netanyahu says that the negotiations will lead to a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, then everything will be set,' Erekat said, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA."

Note that Mr. Erekat's statement omitted President Obama's reference to "mutually agreed swaps."

So now, as a direct result of two speeches by President Obama, the officially stated Palestinian Authority position is that peace negotiations cannot resume unless and until Israel first agrees to (1) a full cessation of all settlement activity, and (2)a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. Of course, no responsible Israeli government would make those concessions in advance of any negotiations. So once again, the President's words have made the resumption of peace negotiations less likely.

At some point President Obama may come to understand that Palestinian leaders cannot appear to their own people to be less tough on Israel than the White House. Until then, please Mr. President, no more speeches on Middle East peace.

Only in San Francisco: Ballot Measure to Ban Male Circumcision

2011-05-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

On November 8, 2011, San Francisco voters will go to the polls to decide whether to ban a fundamental religious practice of Jews and Muslims. Jews circumcise their baby boys at the age of 8 days, following the commandment given by God to Abraham in the Torah, to circumcise his son Isaac when the boy was 8 days old. Abraham also circumcised his son Ishmael on the same day. Since Ishmael was 13 years old at the time, his spiritual descendents, followers of Islam, circumcise their male sons at age 13. The San Francisco measure would ban penile circumcision unless the person being circumcised is at least 18 years of age and has given his written consent.

Judaism calls its ritual circumcision "brit milah," the covenant of circumcision, because it marks the entry of the child into the covenant with God of our forefather Abraham. As Rabbi Gil Leeds, a certified mohel, trained in the medical procedure and religious practice of circumcision, writes in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

It is a covenantal act that Jews have practiced since the time of the Patriarch Abraham more than three-and-a-half millennia ago. It reflects a commitment to monotheism that reaches back to the dawn of observance practiced even under religious oppression. The holiday of Chanukah emerged after the Greeks banned circumcision, which led to a bloody revolt. The Romans banned circumcision after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. Defying death, Jews secretly followed their tradition.

The ancient Greeks opposed male circumcision because they considered it a mutilation of the perfect male human form. Is it coincidental that this modern attempt to ban circumcision is occurring in a city where homosexuality is more integral to the popular culture than in almost any society since ancient Greece? I would say not, but that is pure speculation on my part.

What is not speculation is that 12,000 signatures were all that was necessary to put on the ballot a proposition that is, in the words of Marc Stern of American Jewish Committee, "the most direct assault on Jewish religious practice in the United States."

Proponents of the measure argue that brit milah puts a baby through a traumatically painful experience that causes mental and physical scars that last a lifetime. I have attended many, many ritual circumcisions, and can personally testify that most of the crying of the baby comes while the mohel is preparing the child for the surgery, before any cutting has occurred. The baby typically is calm and happy just a short time later. Millions of Jewish men can personally testify that they have suffered no lasting trauma from their circumcisions.

"Es ist schwer zu sein a Yid ," it is hard to be a Jew, goes the old Yiddish saying. In recent years in the secular West it is becoming legally harder. In addition to attempts to ban brit milah, we have the continuing attempts to ban the kosher slaughter of animals, schitah. The Netherlands appears to be on the verge of banning kosher slaughter, through a law requiring that an animal be stunned before it is slaughtered. Ironically, Holland was the first European country to allow the free and open practice of Judaism after the persecutions of the Middle Ages.

The Netherlands would thereby join New Zealand, which banned kosher slaughter last year, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. New Zealand currently allows the import of kosher meat other than chicken. (That puts the kabash on the traditional Friday night Sabbath dinner.) A week before New Zealand implemented its ban, the European Union's parliament voted that all packages of kosher meat must bear a label stating that the animal was slaughtered without prior stunning. In Switzerland, where kosher slaughter has been banned since 1893, an animal rights activist is actively promoting a legal ban on the import of kosher and halal meat, imposing an even greater hardship on the Jewish and Muslim citizens of that nation.

By the way, the foremost expert on humane slaughter of animals, Temple Grandin, has repeatedly stated that when done properly, kosher slaughter causes no more pain and suffering to the animal than methods involving prior stunning.

Why George Mitchell Failed to Negotiate Middle East Peace--and What will Happen Next

2011-05-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

George Mitchell, appointed by President Obama as the United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, has resigned his post. The man who successfully brokered peace in Northern Ireland was unable to even bring the two sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the table. One may safely predict that in the coming weeks many pundits will attribute Mitchell's failure to insufficient American diplomatic pressure on Israel to suspend settlement activity.

Tawfik Hamid, a senior fellow and chairman of the study of Islamic radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, writes in the Jerusalem Post that those pundits would be mistaken. Pressuring Israel to give up more land will not peacefully end the Arab-Israeli conflict because the conflict is not about land. He notes that throughout the Muslim world, including this week in Cairo's Tahrir Square, pro-Palestian demonstrators chant, "Khyber Khyber Ya Yahood... Gaish Muhammad Sawfa Yaood." This chant warns the Jews that that the army of Muhammad is coming back for a repeat of what was done to the Jewish Khyber tribe. Hamid explains in his column that according to authentic Islamic history books, the Islamic army, led by Muhammad, annihilated the Jewish tribe of Khyber, raping its women and killing all its men.

Hamid continues, "Until US envoys to the Middle East realize that the problem in the eyes of the Palestinians and their supporters is not the borders of Israel but the very existence of the country, all future missions will similarly fail." The problem, he explains, is not political but rather theological: Islamists, including Hamas, which now shares governing power over the Palestinian Authority with Fatah, is committed to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Indeed, many in the "moderate" Fatah faction and elsewhere in the Arab world share Hamas' objectives and murderous anti-Semitic philosophy, as shown by the vicious, Nazi-style propaganda that appears throughout Islamic media. Hamid writes, "Publishing dehumanizing cartoons in the mainstream media, and blaming Jews for nearly every problem in the world has become much too common in the leading Arab media over the past few decades. ... It is virtually impossible to promote any form of peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict without reducing such levels of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world."

Hamid knows of what he writes. Himself a one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt, he was a member of a terrorist Islamic organization JI with Dr. Ayman Al-Zawaherri, who became later on the second in command of Al-Qaeda. Some twenty-five years ago, he recognized the threat of Radical Islam and the need for a reformation based upon modern peaceful interpretations of classical Islamic core texts. His website is
www.tawfikhamid.com

I am extremely pessimistic regarding the near-time prospects for a peaceful end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It should not be so--the so-called Arab spring has exposed Israel's enemies for what they are and always have been--murderous dictatorial regimes. The economic misery of the masses in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and, yes, Gaza and the West Bank, is not the product of some Zionist plot, but rather of the backward tyrants that governed the now-revolting masses.

Yet, the Arab popular movements that have challenged those deposts seem to view Israel as a greater enemy than their own authoritarian rulers. Islamist demonstrators in Cairo, when they are not murdering Copts and burning their churches, have quickly reverted to vicious anti-Israel propaganda. The military government that currently rules Egypt has announced plans to improve relations with the Nazi-like government of Iran and to reopen the Gaza border, allowing Hamas, the Iran's puppet in Gaza, to openly import advanced Iranian missiles and other weapons. Iran is of course up to the same act on Israel's northern border with Lebanon and Syria, where the mullahs act through Hezbollah and the Assad regime.

In September, the Palestinian Authority has said it will make a unilateral declaration of statehood before the United Nations, and over 60 countries already have declared their intention to recognize the Palestinian state. It is predictable that the new nation of Palestine will immediately be admitted to the United Nations, and that Israel will be declared by the UN to be unlawfully occupying the lands of a member state. That will set the stage for UN sanctions and international armed intervention to "liberate" the occupied Palestinian lands.

What the U.S. stance will be if all this transpires is unknown. What is clear is that the United States has not taken vigorous steps to publicly oppose the Palestinian move toward a unilateral declaration of independence. The sad truth is that the Obama Administration can seriously undermine Israel without ever publicly taking a stand against the Jewish state; the U.S. need merely stand by and do nothing or lodge only mild disapproval.

What will follow for some time, sadly, will be the most difficult period for world Jewry since the Shoah. The Jewish state will be under siege and abandoned by her former allies. And as international opposition to Israel grows, and Israel is increasingly declared to be the cause of all problems and discord in the world, Jews in the Diaspora should not expect to escape persecution in their own countries.

Having said all that, I am not at all pessimistic about the eventual outcome. This has all been foreseen and predicted.

"Behold, they shall be ashamed and confounded, all who were incensed with you. They shall be as nothing and shall perish, those who strove against you. You will seek them and you will not find them, the people who contended with you. They will be like nothing and like zero, the people who made war on you. Because I the Lord your God, who strenghtens your right hand, who says to you, 'Fear not, I will help you. Fear not, worm Yaakov [Jacob],people of Israel, I will help you, says the Lord, your Redeemer and the Holy One of Israel." [Isaiah 41:11-14]

Should We Rejoice Over the Death of Osama Bin Laden?

2011-05-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

A lively discussion has sprung up over the question of whether it is proper to rejoice over the death of Osama Bin Laden. No where is that discussion livelier than within the Jewish community. As quoted by JTA, Rabbi Tzvi Freedman writing on Chabad.org says that even asking the question is very Jewish. "It's so typically Jewish to feel guilty about rejoicing," he observed. The JTA article quotes responses from various rabbis from all of the denominations of Judaism.

Jewish religious tradition is ambivalent on the issue. On the one hand, a wag once said that the Jewish festivals can be explained in three sentences: "They tried to kill us. They failed. Let's eat." Pesach, Channukah and Purim are prime examples of that genre of celebration.

And yet, at the Passover Seder, we spill drops of wine from our full wine cups when we recite the 10 plagues, and the most common explanation of the custom to express sadness that our enemies had to suffer in order for the Jewish nation to achieve its freedom from Egyptian slavery.

Moreover, there is a midrash that when Moses and the Children of Israel united in song at the Red Sea, upon witnessing the drowning of Pharoah and his army and chariots, the angelic hosts wanted to join in the chorus of praise for God, but God himself silenced them, admonishing, "The works of my creation are drowning, and you want to sing praises?" And yet, God did not silence Moses and the Children of Israel, and the Song at the Sea is considered a moment at which they achieved spiritual sublimity. Apparently, it was proper for the Children of Israel to sing and rejoice, but not proper for the angels to join them.

Here is the response of the esteemed Talmudist and teacher of Chabad Chasidism, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (photo above right)to the question:

In the Bible, we have two almost opposite reactions to the fall of an enemy. On the on hand, we have the famous verse that says, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.” (Proverbs 24, 17) On the other hand, we have, among many others, the verse, “When the wicked perish, there is joy.” (Ibid., 11, 10)

In fact, there is no contradiction between those two verses. The first one refers to a situation in which there is animosity or a quarrel between two people. In such a case, a person may have an enemy, but his downfall shouldn’t be any reason for rejoicing. Whatever the quarrel – commercial, political or any other kind – the enemy is just a person in opposition. Such people may cause discomfort to the other side, but essentially, both parties are equal to each other. Therefore, one should not rejoice when one’s enemy has fallen.

The other verse does not deal with personal or national disagreement, but with an objective fact: there indeed are in the world wicked people. And when the wicked are destroyed, others should express their approval and their joy that some vicious object or person has disappeared from the world. Osama bin Laden created for himself a very clear position as one of the wicked, and therefore the world should be happy when at least one element of evil is no longer functioning.

I will follow Rabbi Steinsaltz's advice and be happy at the downfall of a wicked person. What do you think?

Did the Tip That Led to Discovery of Bin Laden's Location Came from "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" Banned by Obama?

2011-05-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is reporting that the information on bin Laden's courier that led to his compound and the al-Qaeda leader's death was derived from interrogating Guantanamo Bay detainees. According to Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute, those detainees were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi, and the courier's name was disclosed during CIA interrogations using enhanced interrogation techniques - techniques the Obama administration banned the CIA from using. Thiessen writes:

Before coming to Gitmo, both [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi] were held by the CIA as part of the agency’s enhanced interrogation program, and provided the information that led to bin Laden’s death after undergoing interrogation by the CIA. In other words, the crowning achievement of Obama’s presidency came as a direct result of the CIA interrogation program he has denigrated and shut down. Something the president forgot to mention last night, when he claimed credit for “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.” The president owes some thanks—and apologies—to the men and women of the CIA’s interrogation program.

Adds the Jewish Policy Center:

If Thiessen's statement proves true, not only would bin Laden's death be a feather in Obama's cap, but former President Bush's as well for instituting those techniques.

[Hat tip: Jewish Policy Center]

The Glory of Declarative Sentences

2011-05-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

This is a message that deserves to go viral:

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Osama bin Laden's Death: Photo of the Day

2011-05-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

KOSHER HEDGEHOGS FOR ROMNEY 2012

2011-04-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

Quite frankly, the race for the 2012 Republican Nomination for President until now been rather depressing. Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and now Donald Trump have made the field of potential nominees more closely resemble a clown act than a race of serious political candidates. Fortunately, Palin and Huckabee seem more and more reluctant to relinquish their well-compensated sinecures at Fox News, and I am thoroughly convinced that The Donald views his campaign as the greatest publicity stunt ever in the entire history of the world, which will drive the ratings for "The Celebrity Apprentice" to unprecedented heights. Good luck with that, Donald.

As Hugh Hewitt has repeatedly stated, there are two serious candidates, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. I am endorsing Mitt Romney. Indeed, I consider him quite simply to be the most qualified Republican on the national scene to be the President of the United States. On the other side of the aisle, only Secretary of State Hilary Clinton matches his credentials. As for the President, he has already demonstrated over the past 29 months that he is neither qualifed nor sufficiently competent to merit re-election. That having been said, he will nonetheless be a formidable candidate, and the GOP must put its best foot forward if it hopes to capture the White House in 2012.

That means nominating Mitt Romney. Above all, this will be an election about the economy. So was 2008, and the GOP made a fatal error in not choosing its most articulate spokesperson on economic issues to be its standard bearer. That mistake must not be repeated. Romney will be able to shred the President in a debate about the economy. I look forward to that debate.

The Romney campaign has come up with a great fund-raising concept: limited edition bumper stickers. Only 2012 will be printed and each will be numbered. You can get one for a donation of $50 or more at www.mittromney.com.

Happy Easter 2011

2011-04-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

Easter Music

Once again Easter is here, and as before I'll post the words of my all-time favorite hymn, "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing:"

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I'm come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

This biographical summary tells us a little about the author, Robert Robinson. The music is a beautiful traditional tune named "Nettleton," about which you can find more in Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, by John Wyeth. I've heard several hymns set to the same tune. As a congregational hymn "Come Thou Fount" is a little on the difficult side but most church choirs can handle it easily. My favorite arrangement is the one by Mack Wilberg, associate conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Easter Thoughts

This is another favorite, from the late Neal A. Maxwell, of whom Hugh Hewitt is a great admirer. It's full of quotable nuggets:

The gift of immortality to all is so choice a gift that our rejoicing in these two great and generous gifts should drown out any sorrow, assuage any grief, conquer any mood, dissolve any despair, and tame any tragedy.

Even those who see life as pointless will one day point with adoration to the performance of the Man of Galilee in the crowded moments of time known as Gethsemane and Calvary. Those who now say life is meaningless will yet applaud the atonement, which saved us all from meaninglessness.

Christ’s victory over death routs the rationale that there is a general and irreversible human predicament; there are only personal predicaments, but even from these we can also be rescued by following the pathway of Him who rescued us from general extinction.

A disciple’s “brightness of hope,” therefore, means that at funerals his tears are not because of termination, but because of interruption and separation. Though just as wet, his tears are not of despair, but of appreciation and anticipation. Yes, for disciples, the closing of a grave is but the closing of a door that will later be flung open.

It is the Garden Tomb, not life, that is empty!

Neal A. Maxwell, Wherefore Ye Must Press Forward, pp. 132-3

"Those who now say life is meaningless will yet applaud the atonement, which saved us all from meaninglessness."

I love that. Happy Easter.

Why "The Book of Mormon" is a Broadway Hit, But No One is Staging "The Koran."

2011-04-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

The creators of South Park have a Broadway hit on their hands. "The Book of Mormon" is sold out for weeks. Reviews of the musical comedy appear in the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times. Interestingly, nowhere in either publication did the reviewer question in the slightest respect the propriety of a musical comedy based on the ridicule of an entire religion. It's as if the reviewers concluded that the idea of skewering Mormon beliefs is so far within the boundaries of appropriate discourse that it's not even controversial.

Meanwhile, in Florida, an obscure Protestant minister of a tiny church "put the Koran on trial" for rape and murder, found it guilty, sentenced it to burning and carried out the sentence. A month later, clerics in Afghanistan, probably in the service of the Taliban insurgency there, used the Koran burning incident to whip up mosque worshipers into a frenzy that erupted in deadly riots. The rioting over the next three days took some 18 lives, including 7 UN guards and workers murdered in an attack on the UN office in the city where the rioting began.

Now I am not going to give a pass to the Florida pastor whose Koran burning set off the incident. It was entirely forseeable that the Koran buring would lead to the loss of innocent lives, and one must take moral responsibility for the foreseeable results of one's acts.

However, at the same time, his moral culpability by no means rises to the level of the Moslem clerics who deliberately provoked the riots and to the murderers themselves. (To his credit, President Obama publicly expressed the same opinion.) Such violence would be improper even if directed at a person who actually burned a Koran, and of course the victims of the mobs in Afghanistan had nothing to do with the burning of a Koran in Florida.

While many of us might have foreseen that such violence would result from the burning of a Koran, and would therefore fault the Florida pastor for his actions, we would never be concerned about riots and murders possibly resulting from Mormon anger over "The Book of Mormon." There is no risk that Mormons will attack non-Mormons out of fury over the Broadway musical. Indeed, here is the official statement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on "The Book of Mormon" musical:

The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.

Not only need the creators of "The Book of Mormon" not fear Mormon retaliation, but although the musical could justifiably be attacked as racist (in its portrayal of Ugandans), Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably are not looking over their shoulder for vengeful African Americans either.

So in view of this atmosphere of tolerance, may we look forward to the Broadway opening of "The Koran," a musical comedy that applies the same approach to Islamic scripture? Not bloody likely. Indeed, the only time that Parker and Stone have been threatened with death by a religious group was when a radical Muslim group was angered by a South Park episode depicting the prophet Muhammad in a bear suit.

Which brings me to my main point. While pundits are piling on the Florida pastor, I would hope they display a modicum of cultural loyalty and courage and issue a challenge to the real villains in this story--radical Islamist clerics who react with murderous fury to what they deem to be insults to Islam, but who themselves are unwilling to extend respect to other religions and beliefs. They say that Jews are monkeys, Christians are "Crusaders," and call for the death of both.

It often seems that there are no values or sacred cows left in American--certainly musicals such as "The Book of Mormon" and shows such as "South Park" show that everything and everyone is open to ridicule. The only enduring values in modern Western civilization appear to be tolerance and diversity. If so, let's at least not patronize Islam by giving its advocates a pass on those values. The price for full Islamic participation in Western society must be respect for other religions and beliefs, and tolerance of critics of Islamic belief. We must always defend the free speech rights of critics of Islam. And those Islamists, both in Western countries and worldwide, who reject Western values should be called to task for their hate and bigotry.

Obama's Libya Speech--The Missing Word was "Congress"

2011-03-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

Did you notice the glaring absence of one word in the President's address to the nation on U.S. intervention in Libya? That word is "Congress." President Obama said nothing about formally consulting with Congress, either before or after the commitment of U.S. military force to enforce a no-fly zone. (Briefings with Congressional leaders are nice, but have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution or the War Powers Act.) Nothing, not a word, in the President's speech suggested that there was any limit on Presidential power to take the military actions he has taken regarding Libya. In sort, the President considers his actions to be inherent in his Constitutional power as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. armed forces, period.

As John Yoo correctly pointed out in a column that appeared in the Wall Street Journal online on March 25, delightfully entitled "Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President, the President's unilateral action, coupled with silence from nearly all Demoratic Senators other than Dennis Kucinich, amounts to an endorsement of the scope of Presidential war powers advocated by the George W. Bush administration:

Imagine the uproar if President Bush had unilaterally launched air attacks against Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. But since it's Mr. Obama's finger on the trigger, Democratic leaders in Congress have kept quiet—demonstrating that their opposition to presidential power during the Bush years was political, not principled.

Mr. Obama's exercise of war powers in Libya is firmly in the tradition of American foreign policy. Throughout our history, neither presidents nor Congress have acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can conduct military hostilities abroad. We have used force abroad more than 100 times but declared war in only five cases: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars, and World Wars I and II.

Without any approval from Congress, presidents have sent forces to battle Indians, Barbary Pirates and Russian revolutionaries, to fight North Korean and Chinese Communists in Korea, to engineer regime changes in South and Central America, and to prevent human rights disasters in the Balkans. Other conflicts, such as the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War, received legislative "authorization" but not declarations of war.

Since Vietnam, however, antiwar Democrats have sought to replace the Constitution's reliance on swift presidential action in war with a radically different system appropriate for peacetime: Congress makes policy, the president implements it. In 1973, they passed the War Powers Resolution to require congressional permission for any military intervention abroad, but no president has accepted the law's constitutionality.

I support the President's actions in Libya. I do not think that he has violated law or exceeded his powers in so acting. I just wish he would show a little humility by acknowledging that he was mistaken in 2007, when then-Senator Obama said, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Muslims Have the Right Under American Contract Law to Have Disputes Decided in Arbitration According to Sharia

2011-03-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

The conservative blogosphere is going bonkers. "Tampa Court Allows Sharia Law!" "Judge Orders Use of Islamic Law in Tampa Lawsuit!" There is less here than meets the eye.

Here is what I believe actually has occurred. Two pious Muslims entered into an arbitration agreement to have a dispute determined in a private arbitration under Sharia law. When one party reneged, either refusing to proceed with the arbitration or refusing to abide by the arbitrator's decision, Florida Circuit Court Judge Richard A. Nielsen ordered the parties to resolve the dispute in accordance with the arbitration agreement. That is not an American court applying Sharia law. That is an American court applying Florida contract law to enforce a contract.

Across our country, thousands of disputes are resolved each year before Jewish religious courts, betei dinim, applying Torah law. (Sometimes, especially in commercial disputes, Torah law dictates that secular law govern the dispute, but that is still the application of Torah law.) If the parties, in their original contract or after a dispute arises, enter into an arbitration agreement, designating a bet din (Jewish rabbinical court)as the arbitrator, the decision of the bet din is enforeceable in most American courts, including California state courts. The courts who enforce the decision of the bet din are not violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They are not applying Torah law. They are enforcing American contract law. If there is a distinction between the enforcement of an arbitration award rendered under Jewish law by a bet din and one rendered by Islamic judges under Sharia, I don't see it. Indeed, any such distinction would probably itself violate the First Amendment.

Cool it, my conservative brothers. You are only proving yourselves the successor to the 19th century "Know Nothing" Party in deed as well in name.

New Disaster in Japan--Giant Lizard Attacks Tokyo!

2011-03-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

Yet another disaster has struck Japan. A giant lizard has come ashore in Tokyo harbor and is destroying the city. Scientists suspect the creature may be a mutation caused by radiation leaking from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

What the Murders of the Fogel Family Say About Palestinian and Muslim Jew Hatred

2011-03-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

Dennis Prager, at Townhall.com, writes that the terrorist murders of the Fogel family, including a 3-month old infant, at Itamar and the gang rape of CBS News correspondent Lara Logan (whose attackers shouted, "Jew, Jew") tell us a good deal about Palestinian and Muslim Jew hatred:

The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim and some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran), "Jew" is not a person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.

Think of any conflict in the world -- Pakistan-India, China-Tibet, North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.

There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children -- often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) -- as it was to murder Jewish adults.

Bret Stephens expresses a similar view in a Wall Street Journal column, entitled "Are Settlers Even Human?" An excerpt of that column appears here at World Jewish Daily.com. Unfortunately the full column in the Wall Street Journal is available only to subscribers.

I would like to think that Messrs. Prager and Stephens are wrong or are exaggerating the situation. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that they are right. It is no repudiation of Dennis' argument to say that many, perhaps most Moslems do not dehumanize Jews. Most Germans did not dehumanize Jews.

(HT: National Council of Young Israel.)

Iran's Fars News Agency Lauds Murder of Infants

2011-03-13T15:44:00.000-07:00

Iran's Fars News Agency joyously reported yesterday that a newly formed Palestinian
group named after Imad Mugniyah - a Hezbollah commander killed by Israel three years ago - and affiliated with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah movement, had claimed responsibility for the "killing of five Zionists" in the Israeli settlement of Itamar. A member of the new group "managed to kill all the five Zionists who were in the house on Saturday morning, the statement from the group added, mentioning that the Palestinian combatant has returned home safely after conducting his mission successfully."

The statement from this new terrorist band left out a few critical facts concerning the bravery of the attacker or attackers. (The number of assailants is as yet unknown.) The "Zionists" that were stabbed to death included 3-month old Hadas Fogel, 3-year old Elad Fogel and 11-year old Yoav Fogel, as well as their parents Rose and Rabbi Udi Fogel. Udi Fogel appears to have been killed as he slept beside his infant daughter, whose throat was slashed. Photos of the slain "Zionists" appear above. (Rose Fogel appears in the background of the photo of Yoav.) When one views the ferocious demeanor of Hadas, Elad and Yoav, one can only marvel at the courage of their attackers.

Also, contary to the Fars news report, the terrorists in fact failed to kill two "Zionists" in the house at the time of the attack, a 6-year old boy who was asleep on the couch and a 2-year old boy asleep in his bed, both of whom the murderers may have missed in the dark. There were signs that Rose Fogel was awake and tried to defend herself against her attackers, so the murdered womans's resistance may have caused the murderers to lose courage and flee.

Hamas reacted by defending the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation by any means, including the deliberate murder of children, while also suggesting that the family had been murdered by Israelis.

Score One for the Luddites. Nuclear Power Plants are NOT Yet Adequately Earthquake Safe.

2011-03-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

"Japan Races to Prevent Nuclear Meltdowns" reads the headline on this AP story. In the AP photo above left, a technician tests a father and infant for exposure to radiation.

The Kosher Hedgehog knows when to admit a mistake. I had thought that nuclear power plant safety technology had advanced in recent decades to the point where a nuclear power plant may be safely located in a seismically active zone. The fallout (both literal and figurative) from the Japanese earthquake last week proves unforunately that this is not yet the case. As I post this column, thank G-d, there has not yet been any large-scale release of radiation, if Japanese official reports are to be believed. However, the Japanese government has been compelled to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from the areas surrounding its threatened nuclear plants, and the Japanese are scrambling to cool down the reactors where the cooling systems have failed in a desperate effort to prevent core meltdowns.

That is not good enough. Any nuclear plant in a seismic zone must have a mechanism that reliably will cool down or shut down the core in the event of an earthquake sufficiently strong to threaten the efficacy of the nuclear core cooling system, and that mechanism must itself be earthquake proof. The Japanese plants failed that test.

I am shocked and surprised that in Japan, the only nation on earth ever to suffer nuclear attack, and therefore reputedly a country that harbors deeply ingrained anti-nuclear sentiment, and moreover a place where awareness of seismic threat is deeply imbedded in the culture and the national consciousness, the political will somehow was mustered to build nuclear plants that turned out to be entirely too vulnerable to earthquakes. Admittedly I do not know how new or old those plants are, or whether they have state-of-the-art seismic protection systems. However, any argument that these were old-design plants is hardly persuasive--if that is the case they either should have been retrofitted or closed.

Also, I am not persuaded by the argument that a .9 Richter scale earthquake is a once in a half-millenium event. A far weaker quake centered closer to the nuclear plants most likely would have done the same damage to the plant cooling systems.

If I had to vote today whether to approve the construction of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which is located on the Pacific Ocean coastline in northern San Diego County, I unequivocably would vote no. Until the nuclear industry can convincingly empirically demonstrate with a very high degree of reliability that it has developed a seismically safe plant design, any new nuclear plants had better be located well away from the Alaska-Washington-Oregon-California coast and fault-lines. Hawaii and the seismically active portions of Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho also must be ruled out as nuclear power plants sites for the time being. Ditto the 200-mile long New Madrid Seismic Zone which covers portions of Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas. Until the seismic issue has a technological fix with demonstrated reliability, one should put nuclear plants only in relatively benign seismic zones, such as South Dakota or Kansas. And then make sure the plants are tornado-proof.

Two Videos That Tell You Everything You Need to Know about the 2008 Market Meltdown

2011-03-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

First, a short summary of a quaint economic concept called "moral hazard:"

And then an embarrassing example of Congressional cluelessness:

This all began under Bill Clinton, was made worse when G.W. Bush did nothing about it, and was capped off with President Obama's decision to bail out the banks and financier who gleefuly made billions of dollars off the house of cards they financed.

Kosher Hedgehog Comment: Well said, Lowell. The Barney Frank video beautifully illustrates a characteristic of every economic bubble, from the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1636-37 through the dot.com mania and the recently burst housing bubble that produced our current financial recession, and that characteristic is that the bullish pundits always argue that the current boom is different from every other speculative bubble in the past because the rules have changed. One heard this during the dot.com bubble of 1999-2003, when investment funds chased start-up companies, practically throwing millions at them and imploring them to maintain a "high burn rate" of invested capital, even though the path by which many of the new online businesses would generate income, much less profits, was often unclear. Skeptics were belittled for not understanding that there was a "new paradigm" and "the rules have changed." Although Barney Frank employed different lyrics in the 2005 video, the careful listener will conclude that he was singing the same old song.

Is it only me, or does anyone else hear the same tune now playing in the gold and precious metals market?

Hard Left's Obsession with Israel Ignores True Victims of Human Rights Abuse; Roger Waters of Pink Floyd Joins the Boycott Campaign Against Israel

2011-03-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

Alan Dershowitz is a man of the left. In an earlier time he would have been described as a liberal. Yet nowadays Professor Dershowitz, like Senator Joe Lieberman, is frequently pilloried by the hard left, because he refuses to suspend common sense and common decency when it comes to criticism of the United States of America and Israel.

Professor Dershowitz swings back at his critics and connects with this column posted at Hudson New York , entitled, "How the Hard Left, By Focusing Only on Israel, Encouraged Arab Despotism." Here is an excerpt:

Now the hard left is finally talking about torture and other undemocratic abuses in Egypt and Jordan, as well as the despotism of virtually all Arab regimes. Do you recall any campus protests against Egypt or Mubarak? Do you recall any calls for divestment and boycotts against Arab dictators? No, because there weren't any. The hard left was too busy condemning the Middle East's only democracy, Israel. Radical leftists and campus demonstrators, by giving a pass to the worst forms of tyranny, encouraged their perpetuation. Now, finally, they are jumping on the bandwagon of condemnation, though still not with the fury that they reserve for the one nation in the Middle East that has complete free speech, gender equality, gay rights, an open and critical press, an independent judiciary and fair and open elections.

The double standard is alive and well on the hard left, and its victims include the citizens of Arab regimes who suffer under the heal of authoritarian dictators. Even more important they include victims of genocides, such as those perpetrated in Rwanda, Darfur and Cambodia—victims who did not prick the consciences of the hard left because the perpetrators were Arabs or Communists, rather than Americans or Israelis

Yes, as Professor Dershowitz notes, the double standard lives on, and nowhere does it thrive more heartily than among the politically correct artists of popular music, now leading the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel ("BSD"). In today's Jerusalem Post one may read how Roger Waters, the former bassist and lead singer of Pink Floyd, has declared his support for BSD, joining folk music legend Pete Seeger. Waters is quoted as saying, "For me it means declaring my intention to stand in solidarity, not only with the people of Palestine, but also with the many thousands of Israelis who disagree with their government's racist and colonial policies, by joining a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.”

Mr. Waters apparently was particularly appalled by his visit to the security barrier separating the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories from Israel. It is not reported that he ever visited the former site of Sabarro's restaurant in Jerusalem, or any of the many other sites of the Palestinian suicide bombings that murdered hundreds of Israelis. Here are the photos of two victims of one of those attacks, Dr. David Applebaum and his daughter Nava, murdered at the Cafe Hillel bombing in Jerusalem in 2003.

Dr. Appelbaum was the head of the emergency room at Shaarei Tzedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and founder of Terem, the first network of emergency medical service clinics in Israel in addition to the Red Magen David. He personally saved the lives of hundreds of Palestinian Arabs as well as Israeli Jews and Arabs, and the emergency clinics he founded continue to do so until this day. He had taken Nava to Cafe Hillel as a last special father-daughter outing before Nava's wedding, scheduled for the next night. Their murderer was a Hamas terrorist dispatched from Ramallah, now thankfully on the other side of the security barrier that Mr. Waters so despises.

Of course, the purpose of the security barrier was to prevent such terrorist outrages, and it has been largely successful. But apparently Israeli lives are less important to Mr. Waters than offenses to his political aesthetic. Mr. Waters, please explain to the holy neshamot (souls) of David and Nava Appelbaum why you see fit to support a boycott, divestment and sanction campaign against Israel, but not against Hamas.

By the way, Mr. Waters never joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Mubarak's Egypt, pre-coup Tunisia or Libya. That is of course because, as Professor Dershowitz points out, there never were any such campaigns. Indeed, while the world watches the spectacle of Mohammar Qadafi using fighter planes, tanks and machine guns to mow down thousands of Libyan citizens, a number of music industry notables such as Beyonce, Nelly Furtado, and Mariah Carey have been embarrassed by revelations that they performed at private concerts for the Qadafi family. (Usher was paid to appear with Beyonce, although he apparently did not actually perform). Now these celebrities, who are shocked, SCHOCKED, to find out that they performed for the murderous despot's clan are scrambling to donate the huge fees they earned to human rights organizations. It is a virtual cinch that some of the NGO's receiving the Qadafi-sourced booty from the embarrassed celebrities themselves sponsor and support the BSD campaign against Israel.

As Professor Dershowitz notes, "There is only one acceptable standard of international human rights: the worst must come first." By that standard, Mr. Waters should be ashamed of himself. Take your boycott, sir, and shove it up your Dark Side of the Moon.

Depleted U.S. Navy Threatens Our National Interests

2011-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

What you see above is the U.S. Enterprise under way full speed ahead. The world'slargest carrier has been under way a good deal lately.

Just back on February 18 it had been transiting the strategic Strait of Bab el-Mandab, a key chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is located between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea, and connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Three to four billion barrels of oil per day are shipped through the Strait, making it a vital waterway for the global economy, according to a U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson.

"The Bab el-Mandeb Strait and Gulf of Aden are strategically important to the United States as an important sea lane for lawful shipping and transit," said Rear Adm. Terry B. Kraft, Commander of Enterprise CSG, quoted in defpro news. "Our presence in the region helps ensure this freedom of navigation and the defense of these interests."

The deployment of the Enterprise and its two support ships to the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet area of operations was intended to discourage Iranian threats to shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, and also to provide security against Somali pirates, whose attacks on shipping in the area have included the taking of oil tankers.

But as reported yesterday, including this story in the Daily Mail, the Enterprise has broken off its anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden and is steaming through the Suez Canal for possible duty off the coast of Libya. The Enterprise and its Carrier Air Wing One and Carrier Strike Force would be needed if the U.S. participates in the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. The Mediterranean Sea is the bailiwick of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

This flurry of activity underscores a concern raised by a national security pundit interviewed yesterday on Fox News. She stated that the U.S. does not have a single aircraft carrier assigned to the Sixth Fleet capable of implementing a no-fly zone. Indeed, while Britain and France sent warships to remove their civilians from Tripoli, the U.S. found itself compelled to lease a passenger ferry. Heaven knows what we would have done if U.S. Marines had been needed again "on the shores of Tripoli" in the course of evacuation of U.S. citizens from Libya.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Mark Helprin bemoans the decline of U.S. Naval power generally, and calls for an immediate reversal of this trend. Mr. Helprin describes how far the decline has proceeded:

The overall effect of recent erosions is illustrated by the fact that 60 ships were commonly underway in America's seaward approaches in 1998, but today—despite opportunities for the infiltration of terrorists, the potential of weapons of mass destruction, and the ability of rogue nations to sea-launch intermediate and short-range ballistic missiles—there are only 20.

The stakes are desperate, as he points out. Not only does the U.S. face threats from piracy and Iran in the Gulf of Aden, and must be prepared to act in the unpredictable situation in North Africa, but in the Pacific and the South China Sea, China's navy rises while ours declines.

Navies are expensive. We are in a budget crisis and even the defense budget must be put under scrutiny. But the amount the U.S. spends on maintaining a naval presence across the seven seas must be increased, not cut back.

UPDATE: This AFP story states that two U.S. amphibious assault warships, carrying U.S. Marines, the USS Kearsage and the USS Ponce, passed through the Suez Canal in route toward the Libyan coast. According to this story, in contrast to the Daily Mail dispatch, the Enterprise remains on station in the northern Red Sea, and is not yet on route to the Mediterranean, although it is available for duty. So, as I surmised, not only is there no full-sized carrier assigned to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, but amphibious assault ships with U.S. Marine forces also had to be transferred from the Fifth to the Sixth Fleet, a voyage of some days during which the lives of American evacuees in Tripoli might have been endangered. Indeed, one might ask, what would happen if those assault vessels and Marines were now suddenly needed back in the Gulf region, due to an Iranian threat, and an Iranian proxy attacked and succeeded in closing the Suez Canal, blocking their rapid return. We need an aircraft carrier and amphibious assault capability in both theaters.

The Space Shuttle Discovery Launch, as Seen from a Passing Airliner

2011-03-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

Why is it that I never get to see stuff like this when I am on a plane?

Mark Helprin Writes of the Threat and the Beauty of Winter

2011-02-24T13:01:00.000-08:00

Mark Helprin, a warrior poet, writes in "The Fire We Tend Against Winter" of the threat and terrible beauty of winter. The column first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 18, 2011, and is now available at his website. Here is a sample to whet the reader's appetite:

The world changes as snow and cold test one's fiber and ingenuity, something that brings far more satisfaction than just living easily. You become both more contemplative and more alert. The fire you make and tend against winter is one of the great things in life if only because it stands for life itself opposing the forces that someday will end it.

Of course here in Southern California we know little of that.

The Lara Logan Episode: How Identity Politics Influence Media Coverage at Cairo's Tahrir Square and Elsewhere

2011-02-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

In a column republished at Jewish World Review, Caroline Glick raises some interesting questions:

Why have Western media outlets provided so little coverage about the widespread attacks on foreign journalists in and around Cairo's Tahrir Square?

In the case of the beating and sexual assault suffered by CBS correspondent Lara Logan, why was so little attention given to the perpetrators of the attack? Why has there been so little comment on the misogyny of Egyptian society. (Here Ms. Glick valuably contrasts the absence of the misogyny angle from the Lara Logan story with the media attention given a lawsuit filed by former U.S. servicewomen right around the time of the Lara Logan incident against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, claiming that both men and the U.S. Defense establishment are responsible for the sexual assaults the female soldiers suffered during their military service.)

Radical leftist journalist Nir Rosen has been roundly attacked by reporters and commentators after he wrote defamatory attacks on Lara Logan on Twitter. In the past, Rosen has called for the destruction of Israel, chapioned Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban (with whom he was an embedded reporter) and cheered on the enemies of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. For his previous efforts, Rosen earned praise, awards and fellowships from the journalistic community. Why were only his attacks on Ms. Logan viewed as crossing a line of journalistic propriety?

Ms. Glick convincingly argues that the answer to all of these questions, and indeed the leitmotif that determines coverage of events by Western media, is the role of identity politics in current journalism, specifically the hierarchy of victimology. She notes:

Identity politics revolve around the narrative of victimization. For adherents to identity politics, the victim is not a person, but a member of a privileged victim group. That is, the status of victimhood is not determined by facts, but by membership in an identity group. Stories about victims are not dictated by facts. Victim stories are tailored to fit the victim. Facts, values, and individual responsibility are all irrelevant.

In light of this, a person's membership in specific victim groups is far more important than his behavior. And there is a clear pecking order of victimhood in identity politics. Anti-American Third World national, religious and ethnic groups are at the top of the victim food chain. They out-victim everyone else.

After them come the Western victims: Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, children and animals.

Israelis, Jews, Americans, white males and rich people are the predetermined perpetrators. No matter how badly they are victimized, brave reporters will go to heroic lengths to ignore, underplay or explain away their suffering.

In cases when victim groups are attacked by victim groups — for instance when Iraqis were attacked by Saddam or Palestinians are attacked by the PA, the media tend to ignore the story.

When members of Western victim groups are attacked by Third World victims, the story can be reported, but with as little mention of the identity of the victim-perpetrators as possible. So it was with coverage of Logan and the rest of the foreign reporters assaulted in Egypt. They were attacked by invisible attackers with no identities, no barbaric values, no moral responsibility, and no criminal culpability. CBS went so far as to blur the faces of the men who surrounded Logan in the moments before she was attacked.

Indeed, Ms. Glick notes, "The fact that Logan was brutalized for 20 to 30 minutes and that her attackers screamed out 'Jew, Jew, Jew,' as they ravaged her was absent from the CBS report and from most other follow-on reports in the US media."

According to Ms. Glick, Mr. Rosen's unforgiveable error, in the eyes of his peers, was his failure to recognize that by being sexually assaulted, Ms. Logan had moved into a category of protected victim, this being the case even though her assailants were themselves identified victims--third-world Islamic peoples--whose culpability has not been discussed and is not to be discussed in the limited press coverage of the attack on Ms. Logan.

Indeed one might say that the only person likely to be held culpable in the Western media for an attack on Ms. Logan is poor Mr. Rosen. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Libya and the UN Commission on Human Rights

2011-02-23T23:29:00.001-08:00

Dry Bones continues to zing them in on the political crises sweeping the Arab world. Now his targets are Libya, Gadhafi and the UN Commission on Human Rights. Normally that body is interested in singling out only one nation for condemnation--Israel. Will that change as Gadhafi massacres Libyan citizens by the thousands?

Is This a Fair Criticism of the Obama Administration's Foreign Policy?

2011-02-21T19:10:00.001-08:00

Some Republican leaders have actually praised the way that the Obama Admnistration has handled the unrest that is now erupting across the Arab world. This cartoonist chose a more cynical slant?
What say you, Hedgehog readers?

Movie Review: "Unknown"

2011-02-21T16:28:00.000-08:00

My son and I just saw "Unknown." I would have saved it for airplane, Netflix, or DVD viewing, but Kenneth Turan, the L.A. Times movie critic, wrote a good review so we decided to see it. It's really quite good, sort of in the same genre as "The Bourne Identity" movies. I think it'll do quite well. It has a good plot that keeps you guessing, some good twists, decently acted, and a couple of the obligatory car chases and explosions (but less of that, and more credible, than in the Bourne movies).

It's also safe for family viewing for those who are comfortable with a PG-13 rating. There is one barnyard epithet in the whole movie and there are a fair number of dead bodies (it is, after all, a spy movie), but no gore. Well-done, all in all. Recommended!

Michael Medved Takes on the Paranoid Style in American Conservatism

2011-02-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

Michael Medved is a wise and reasonable man. He must be, since we agree so much of the time. In today's Wall Street Journal, he criticizes the current fashion among some on the political right, including Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, of accusing President Obama of deliberately attempting to weaken the United States. Mr. Medved would not agree with that charge even when leveled at his "gold standard" of a misguided President, Jimmy Carter.

Writing his Wall Street Journal column took some considerable degree of political courage. Conservatives publicly take on Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh at their peril. There will be fallout, and one hopes that Mr. Medved is wearing his radiation suit. But his message needed saying. Mr. Medved may have been mindful of the words of Rabbi Hillel in the Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Avot 2:6), "In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man."

There is indeed a certain kookiness that manifests itself more often than one would like in conservative political discourse. Of course, there are both nuts and fruits on both ends of the political spectrum and even sprinkled in the middle. Mr. Medved, who hosts a weekly "conspiracy hour" on his radio show, during which his listeners may vent their paranoid fantasies, knows this as well as anyone. However, when the kookiness begins to creep into the conservative political mainstream, one needs to address it.

Conservatives should limit their criticism of President Obama's policies to the demerits of the policies themselves, which are numerous and create--and please understand that we are speaking figuratively here--a target-rich environment. The right should not resort to groundless and often luny accusations regarding motives. Let's leave that to MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos. [photo credit Ben Lautman.]

Dry Bones: The Middle East Election Hotel

2011-02-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

Alright, everyone, rush over to the Dry Bones Blog. Yaakov Kirschen has been working overtime on Egypt and the results are very, very funny. Here's a sample:

Soros Says Israel is "Main Stumbling Block" to U.S. Support of Egyptian Democracy!

2011-02-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

In an opinion column published February 3, in the Washington Post, entitled "Why Obama has to get Egypt Right," financier George Soros wrote, "President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy."

Fair enough. I concur that the United States should do its utmost to help foster a peaceful, stable transition toward a democracy in Egypt. But then, incredibly, Soros adds:

"The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality."

(Emphasis added.)

You say what? Soros is dredging up the old bromide that Israel and its American supporters control U.S. foreign policy, to the detriment of American interests.

I await the outcry and condemnation of Soros' column from any of the 400 some rabbis who demanded that Fox News discipline Glenn Beck for his remarks about Soros. Those rabbis ignored the fact, indeed were probably completely unaware, that during the very week that Glenn Beck made the remarks about Soros that they condemned as anti-Semitic, he featured Rabbi Daniel Lapin as his guest for an entire show. Some anti-Semite. Of course many of those 400 rabbis probably consider Rabbi Lapin unJewish on account of his outspoken political conservatism.

Fortunately, we don't have to wait for a response from the rabbis who signed the anti-Beck petition to Fox. In this week's Jewish Journal, columnist David Suissa castigates Soros for his op-ed, and points out that Israel is the beacon and model in the Middle East for Arab nations wanting more democracy, not the stumbling block.

Why does David Suissa see so clearly that it is the words of George Soros, not Glenn Beck, that should be viewed as a legitimate affront by American Jews? Well, it may just be a coincidence that David Suissa is a traditionally observant religious Jew, Orthodox, if you will, unlike, I would wager, nearly all of the signers of the anti-Glenn Beck petition. But I don't think so. The true religion of too many American rabbis is liberalism, not Judaism, and that is why Glenn Beck so offends them.

EGYPT--Too Soon to Call

2011-02-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

To those loyal Hedgehog readers posed at the edge of their seats waiting for a meaningful comment on the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the Kosher Hedgehog believes it's simply too soon for meaningful punditry. I already outlined the possible outcomes back on January 30 ("Woody Hayes, Hosni Mubarak and the future of Egypt"). To the three alternatives I listed in that article, I would add the possibility of a military dictatorship essentially similar to the Mubarak regime, with only the face of the ultimate leader having changed. It will be a year or more before we have any idea how this will all sort out. Let's talk then.

Chill Out about Egypt, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity--It's the Muslin Brotherhood, Not the Muslim Brotherhood

2011-02-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

Based on briefings from confidential sources, I am convinced that Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Frank Gaffney are all worked up over nothing, a mixup if you will. The organization trying to oust Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is not the Muslim Brotherhood, but the Muslin Brotherhood, a trade organization trying to promote the export from Egypt of muslin cotton cloth. Naturally this has met with strong opposition from American cotton-growing interests, who had the foresight to outbid, or outbribe, the Mubarak government, which explains why Murbarak has suppressed the Muslin Brotherhood. Murbarak and the American cotton growers also connived to portray the Muslin Brotherhood as Islamist fanatics. However, as the illustration of 1838 Muslin fashion at left, courtesy of Wickepedia, tastefully demonstrates, the Muslin Brotherhood is not Islamist in dress or manner.

I look forward to explaining the confusion to Sean, Rachel or Chris, whoever books my appearance first.

DRY BONES on Egypt

2011-02-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

Readers may not be aware that according to one Jewish midrashic interpretation, the Valley of Dry Bones vision of the Prophet Ezekiel took place in Egypt, along the Sinai coastal plain. According to this midrash, the dry bones seen by the prophet were people from the Tribe of Ephraim, who jumped the gun on the exodus from Egyptian slavery, tried to reach the Land of Israel along the shorter coastal route, and were attacked and massacred by the Philistines.

So it is fitting that Yaakov Kirschen of DRY BONES, while not a prophet, at least gives us his graphic punditry on the situation in Egypt. Here are two offerings:

Not content with pictures, Kirschen adds these pithy thoughts:

"Sadly, for his entire Presidency, Mubarak squelched all sport and cultural exchanges with Israel, and prevented Egyptian tourism to the Jewish state. If he had allowed Egyptians to see and visit the free and democratic state next door, the "pro Democracy" riots would have broken out years ago ...but the Moslem Brotherhood would not have been waiting to pick up the pieces.

* * *
A thought: If the demonstrations sweeping the Middle East are the natural outpouring of a desire for freedom, why is it that they all seem to be targeting pro Western regimes? How come we're not seeing thousands of demonstrators in the streets of the cities of the Iranian-aligned Syrian dictatorship?"

Beautiful Mosaic Floor Uncovered at Site of Prophet Zacharia's Tomb in Israel

2011-02-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

Israel National News/Arutz 7 reports that archaeologists have uncovered an especially large and beautiful mosaic floor at the site in Hirbat Madras, on the Judaen coastal plain, identified by scholars as the residence and tomb of the Prophet Zacharia. The report states that the finds at the site include the ruins of an ancient synagogue dating back to Second Temple times. Hirbet Madras was known as the site of a large, important Jewish community from the Second Temple period. The city was destroyed during the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 CE.

However, the destruction of Hirbet Madras did not end its use as a religious site. According to archaeologists, "Based on the results of the excavation, a church dating to the Byzantine period was apparently built inside a large public compound from the Second Temple period and the Bar Kochba Revolt. Eight marble columns bearing capitals especially imported from Turkey graced the nave of the basilica."

It is unclear to me from the Israel National News report whether the mosaic floor dates back to the Second Temple structure or was installed later in the Byzantine church. Regardless, other discoveries at the site bore witness to its use during the Second Temple period. "Among the items found in the rooms were coins from the time of the Great Revolt (66-70 CE) and the Bar Kochba Revolt (132 - 135 CE), stone vessels, lamps and various Jewish pottery vessels from the period."

Of course, since according to Palestinian "scholars" Jews never lived in the Land of Israel before the Zionist invasion, clearly there has been some colossal misunderstanding by the archaeologists and Hirbet Madras must be the remnants of the ancient Palestinian Arab civilization. I hope there is no Hebrew writing on those coins--it would be embarrassing.

Woody Hayes, Hosni Mubarak and the Future of Egypt

2011-01-30T15:52:00.000-08:00

Legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes famously said, "There are three things that can happen when you pass the ball, and two of them are bad."

The same might be said for the imminent demise of the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Egypt may emerge as (1) an anti-American and anti-Israeli Islamist state under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, which repudiates the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty; (2) an anti-American and anti-Israeli secular democratic state with a strong Islamist influence, which repudiates the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty; or (3) a secular democratic state that embraces the West and maintins peace with Israel. Unfortunately, the last alternative appears to me to be the least likely.

College football, even at Ohio State, evolved past the "three yards and a cloud of dust" offensive philosophy of Woody Hayes. The great Ohio State teams of recent years have fully embraced the forward pass.

Likewise, the United States and Israel cannot expect that Egypt and the rest of the Arab world will remain under the rule of pro-American but corrupt dictators who ruthlessly suppress dissent while the economic well-being of their peoples slips ever lower. The Egyptian people insist on democracy and freedom now, even if like Iran they may surrender their democracy to Islamist authoritarianism after a single election. All one can do is watch and hope and pray for the best. God has a plan and it is in his hands.

Israeli Labor Party of Blessed Memory

2011-01-30T15:14:00.000-08:00

While the world watches events in Egypt with fear and trepidation, a recent event in Israel should not pass without comment. Dry Boness has a typically wry cartoon about the defection of present Israeli Defense Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak from the Labor Party. But for once I think that our friend Yaakov Kirschen has missed the main point. By choosing to remain in Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government over remaining in the Labor Party, Barak effectively euthanized the political party of Israel's founding, the Labor Party of David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and Yitchak Rabin, which now has just eight seats in the 120-member Knesset.

As Sara Honig notes in her column in the Jerusalem Post, the Labor Party died of terminal leftist elitism and internationalism. Ms. Honig writes that while still espousing democratic socialism:

"Labor paradoxically became the party of big business, of millionaires and billionaires and their emulators who aspire to sidestep pesky Jewish travails and struggles, live high on the hog and pretend that they are in Davos all year around. Belittled plebians are uncannily insightful. They see right through the hypocrisy."

My, does that sound like any American political party, say, the party of the Clintons, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, George Soros and Renaissance Weekends at Hilton Head?

In addition to economic and social elitism, the other primary cause of Labor's demise was its abandonment of Jewish identity and the Zionist vision, in favor of insipid internationalism. Unfortunately for Labor, Ms. Honig observes, "The proletariat Laborites profess to represent is patriotic and retains commonsense self-preservation techniques." Again the parallel to the Democratic Party, especially in the immediate wake of 9/11, is uncanny.

But in the case of Labor, the abandonment of Jewish idenity and Zionism was especially suicidal because Labor thereby abandoned its soul and its heritage. Ms. Honig describes how in the 1930s and 1940s, when it became clear that the price for Israeli statehood would be the partition of Palestine, David Ben Gurion, even while accepting territorial compromise, eloquently declared that the rights of the Jewish people to all of the Land of Israel were eternal and inalienable. That was the greatness of the Israeli Labor Party then, which will be remembered long after the current remnant of Labor disappears into politicial and historic irrelevancy.

Brawling Democracy: WSJ's Bret Stephens Says He Will Miss Keith Olbermann

2011-01-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

American democracy is best-served when its political debates take the form of honest brawls, not polite posturing, says Wall Street Journal Editor Bret Stephens in a column today. That is why he regrets the departure of Keith Olbermann from MNBC.

Rabbi Shmuely Boteach Backs Sarah Palin Use of "Blood Libel"

2011-01-14T12:18:00.000-08:00

When the Kosher Hedgehog heard that Jewish organizations were protesting the use by Sarah Palin of the term "blood libel," his first reaction was to ask, "Which Jewish organizations?" That was because certain Jewish organizations, such as the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (whose Associate Director Mark Pelavin made one of the first public criticisms of Governor Palin), predictably would have publicly criticized almost any defense that Governor Palin might have made to accusations that her website may have provoked the Tucson shooting. Indeed, Reform Judaism has been aptly described as "the Democratic Party at prayer."

Yet even Mr. Pelavin, although he criticized the use by Governor Palin of the term "blood libel," conceded that she had a valid point. His statment notes:

Of course Sarah Palin is correct that neither she nor any other individual is culpable for the actions of Jared Lee Loughner, the disturbed man who killed 6 and wounded many others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson this weekend. Unless evidence emerges to the contrary, we urge those who attempt to make a direct causal connection between the excesses of political rhetoric and this tragic shooting to desist.

So Governor Palin's "offense" is reduced to her choice of terms--Mr. Pelavin believes for Governor Palin to use the term "blood libel" in the manner she did is "to water down the meaning of this phrase in this manner that diminishes the distinctive nature of the historic anti-Semitism associated with the use of the blood libel."

So too Rabbi Marvin Hier, the director of a Jewish organization that is not normally so associated with liberal political sentiments, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, described Governor Palin's choice of terms as "over the top." Both criticisms are similar to criticism often leveled by Jewish organizations at the overly liberal use of the term "holocaust."

Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, however, in today's Wall Street Journal, defends Governor Palin's selection of "blood libel" to describe the accusations made against her. Writing with his usual scholarship and clarity, he argues:

Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.

As both the supporters and critics of Governor Palin have pointed out, the primary meaning of the term "blood libel" is the accusation that Jews murder non-Jews to make Passover matzoh. This malevolent fiction itself is probably rooted in the accusation in the Gospel of Matthew that that Jews killed Jesus and enthusiastically embraced responsibility for his murder, telling Roman governor Pontius Pilate, "His blood be upon us and our children" (Matthew 27:25).

Although a complete fabrication, the blood libel against the Jewish people has shown a remarkable resilience, flourishing in the Middle Ages, and surfacing again in Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany. The illustration below comes from a German newspaper in the Nazi era.

Today, the blood libel is a favorite theme in Arab anti-Israel propaganda and has been the subject of popular books and even a television series in Egpyt and Syria.

I recall reading one Rabbi's positive lesson that Torah-observant Jews may draw from the blood libel. Non-Jews attack our stubborn adherence to the Torah, saying, "Look around you--there are billions of Christians and Moslems, hundreds of millions of Buddhists and Hindus, and yet only perhaps 14 million Jews, of whom likely less than three million are Torah-observant in the traditional sense. Why won't you admit the validity of popular opinion?" To which the Jew may reply, "Popular opinion in the past, and even today in the Arab world, contends that Jews consume the blood of non-Jews for their matzoh, which we know is a complete falsehood without any basis in reality whatsover. So too, we know that popular religious opinion may have no basis in reality whatsover, and rely instead on the testimony of our ancestors that Moses our Teacher is truth and his Torah is truth."

Noah's Winery? Archaeologists Discover 6100 year old Winery in Armenia

2011-01-11T13:55:00.000-08:00

Archaeologists from the University of California at Los Angeles have discovered the oldest known winery, in a cave in Armenia, according to an announcement by the National Geographic Society and a published paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The scientists discovered earthenware equipment from a Copper Age site in a cave in Armenia, including huge clay vats where grapes apparently were stomped by foot and fermented, storage jars, and cups carved from animal horns (apparently this ancient winery had a tasting room), as well as fossilized grape seeds and skins. They date the discovery to approximately 6100 years ago.

Alright, time now for some completely unsubtantiated Biblical speculation. The Kosher Hedgehog theorizes, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the UCLA archaeologists actually have stumbled upon Noah's winery, described in Genesis 9:20-21. (For the benefit of Original Hedgehog Lowell Brown, a devout Mormon, allow me to point out that the results of Noah's efforts as a vintner were not entirely blessed, to say the least.) Here is my entire proof:

The winery was discovered in a cave in Armenia. Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark came to rest when the waters of the Biblical flood receded (Genesis 8:4), in present-day Turkey, is located in the Armenian highlands. QED

Admittedly, there are a few holes in my theory. Chief among them is that the scientists date the find back 6100 years, while the traditional Jewish calendar holds that this year is only 5771 years from the creation of Adam. (According to the traditional Jewish view, the flood occurred in year 1656 from creation, or only 4115 years ago.)

I will try to resolve these difficulties this evening, in the tasting room and the Tierra Sur restaurant at the Herzog Wine Cellars winery in Oxnard, California.

Spanish Government Sponsors Palestinian TV Ad Supporting Boycott of Israel

2011-01-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

Last week Palestinian Authority television began broadcasting a commercial urging Palestinians to boycott Israeli goods. As reported by Palestinian Media Watch, the sponsorship credits at the end of the ad list:

The Spanish government,
the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
AECID (Spanish governmental humanitarian aid development),
ACSUR (a Spanish non-profit organization),
Canaan Joint Development Project for Jerusalem (Palestinian).

This story illustrates the sad decline in Spanish-Israeli and Spanish-Jewish relations under Spain's current government, led by President Jose' Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party. His government seems to be a throwback to that of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, which expelled all Jews from Spain in 1492. [I take this personally, as the descendent of exiled Spanish Jews. My grandfather Ralph Cohen, after whom I am named, was a Greek Jew whose first language was Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish dialect.] President Zapatero is squandering the years of gradual reapproachment between Spain and world Jewry that began at the end of the Franco regime. His primary foreign relations objective appears to be friendly relations with the Islamic world, as the Islamic reconquista of Al Andalus continues.

In sad contrast, the previous President, Jose Maria Aznar Lopez, of the Partido Popular (affiliated in the European Parliament with the centrist Christian Democratic European People's Party) was and remains an outspoken advocate of democracy, individual freedom and friendship with Israel. Indeed, he founded the Friends of Israel initiative, whose stated goal is to "counter the attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders".

UPDATE Jan. 12. 2011:

The Spanish government denies its sponsorship of the Palestinian Authority boycott adverstisement. Speaking to Israel's Channel 2 television news, a spokesperson said, "We [the Spanish government] don't know about a broadcast that we funded. The Spanish government logo was used without our knowledge." Channel 2 further reports that following its inquiry, the Spanish government has opened an investigation to find out exactly what happened. Source: Palestinian Media Watch.

Mitt Romney is Early Favorite in US and Israel for 2012 GOP Presidential Nomination

2011-01-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

A column in the Jerusalem Post reports that Mitt Romney not only holds a narrow lead in a Clausen Poll guaging the preferences of Republicans voters for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination; he also is viewed as the most likely nominee by both Republican and Democratic "insiders" based on a National Journal survey; and he is the preferred candidate (in the current field) of the "Israel Factor," a panel of Israeli analysts of the American political scene, sponsored by the Jerusalem Post. The Israel Factor panel ranked leading potential Republican nominees from 1 to 10 on their support of Israel, with 1 being bad for Israel and 10 being good for Israel. Romney led all candidates except for Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear to be considering another Presidential run. The makeup and biography of the "Israel Factor" panel appears here.

However, in order to win the GOP nomination, Mr. Romney must overcome the anti-Mormon bias among evangelical Christians in the Republican base that sunk his 2008 nomination effort. To educate themselves on that issue, Hedgehog readers should visit the Article VI Blog, created and operated by the original Hedgehog, Lowell Brown, a Mormon, and John Schroeder, an evangelical Christian.

Mr. Romney continues to enjoy the endorsement of the Kosher Hedgehog, who wonders how history might have been different had the GOP chosen the best candidate as its Presidential nominee in 2008. Fortunately, we have a do-over.

Insanity is not a Political Ideology

2011-01-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

First and foremost, The Hedgehog Blog joins our fellow citizens in wishing condolences to the families of those killed in the Tucson shooting, and in praying for the rapid recovery of Representative Gabrielle Gifford and the others wounded in the incident.

That having been said, I utterly reject the idea that robust political debate provoked the deranged young man into his shooting spree this past Saturday. Insanity knows no political ideology. All of the personal acquaintances interviewed by journalists concur that the shooter was a deeply disturbed individual. There is no evidence, for example, that either the Tea Party movement or Sara Palin's website had any influence on him whatsoever. Indeed, evidence suggests that the assassin's pathological fixation on Representative Gifford began after he met her in 2007, well before either Sara Palin or the Tea Party movement rose to prominence.

As Bret Baier and Bryan York both have noted, following the Fort Hood shooting, by Nidal Malik Hasan, who frequented radical Islamist websites, spouted radical Islamist ideology, communicated with a radical Islamist terrorist leader and fugitive from U.S. prosecution, and shouted "Allah Akbar" before opening fire on his unarmed fellow soldiers, political pundits on the left frequently admonished us to be cautious about attributing a religious or political motive to Hasan's murderous actions. Apparently, for at least some on the left, no such hesitancy need be adhered to when the source of the alleged provocation is legitimate conservative political expression. If a graphic on Sara Palin's website put a target symbol over several Congressional districts identified as vulnerable for defeat of a Democratic incumbent, including the district of Representative Gifford, why that makes her responsible for the shooting in Tucson.

No matter, as Glenn Reynolds notes in today's Wall Street Journal, that the left-wing Daily Kos website used nearly identical imagery in calling for Representative Gifford's defeat in the Democractic Primary by a "progressive" candidate, stating that Gifford's district was "bullseyed." No matter that President Obama famously remarked in a 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia that "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." No matter (although Professor Reynolds does not raise this example in his column) that during the George W. Bush administration, anti-war protestors carried wanted poster placards with photos of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, festooned with the legend "Wanted Dead or Alive." As Professor Reynolds notes, "When Democrats use language like this...it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate."

Please do not misunderstand me. I agree that our society would benefit from a lowering of the vitriol level in political expression on both sides of the spectrum. Our criticism of our political opponents always should be expressed with respect, and with an awareness that both the left and the right want the best for our country, although they differ radically on the means to achieve it. Finally, there is no question that the enduring genius of the American democratic republic is that our Constitution and political system allows for peaceful political change, as we just experienced in the last election.

But if I have to choose between avoiding offense and vigorous political debate, I will choose free expression every time. Every notorious shooting is followed by calls for gun bans; yet the Second Amendment to the Constituion has been held to prohibit blanket prohibitions on firearms. If I would not countenance an unconstitutional ban on gun ownership in reaction to the Tucson shooting, I certainly will not countenance a stifling of political expression.

STANFORD QB ANDREW LUCK TURNS HIS BACK ON THE NFL DRAFT

2011-01-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

In a decision that potentially could cost him 40 million dollars, Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck, number 2 in this year's Heisman Trophy vote and the consensus number 1 NFL draft pick had he gone pro this year, has decided to return to Stanford for his redshirt junior year. "I am committed to earning my degree in architectural design from Stanford University and am on track to accomplish this at the completion of the spring quarter of 2012", Luck said in a statement released by the school.

His father, Oliver Luck, the Athletic Director at West Virginia University and an NFL veteran who himself played 4 year of college football, applauded his son's decision:

"This is a win-win for him. He gets to spend another year at Stanford, be part of team that will be highly ranked again next year, finish his degree and enjoy Palo Alto. It's not like the NFL is going anywhere, it's one of the best run leagues in the world. It will still be there when he graduates."

Prior to the announcement of Luck's decision, sports pundits had speculated that economic reality would force Luck into the pros--the NFL is considering implementing a rookie salary cap that if it goes into effect for the 2012 draft could cost Luck tens of millions of dollars. One pundit remarked, "This could be the most expensive architectural design decree in history."

His father Oliver Luck had it right when he said, "It’s a Rorschach test for people’s values system."

In the end, Luck put aside concerns about the salary cap and the risk of declining performance and potential injury in his final year of college football, and even disregarded the imminent loss of his beloved head coach Jim Harbaugh to the San Francisco 49'ers, and went with his heart. He loves Stanford and Palo Alto, loves his team and loves his life as a college student and player. Luck typically made the announcement in a one-sentence statement, without a press conference, hoopla or fan fare.

Way to go, Andrew. Ultimately, G-d willing, you will be a success in the NFL and in architecture or whatever profession or business endeavors you pursue when your playing days are over. In the meantime, Stanford may have lost Jim Harbaugh, but it's not out of Luck.

A late farewell to 2010

2011-01-07T07:30:00.000-08:00

The folks at JibJab never disappoint:

Fair and Balanced Clergy?

2011-01-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

Our blog friend Yaakov Kirschen, the cartoonist of Dry Bones, somehow always manages to pithily capture irony with a few picture boxes and captions. Recently newspapers in Israel and around the world trumpeted what they described as the latest example of racist discrimination in Israel, a letter signed by some municipal rabbis condemning the rental or sale of apartments in Jewish neighborhoods in Israel to Arabs. The letter was immediately condemned by two of the most prominent rabbis and decisors of halacha (Jewish law) in the haredi community, the centenarian sage Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv and Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman. Rav Elyashiv showed that age has not dulled his sense of humor, quipping "I've said for some time that there are rabbis who must have their pens taken away from them."

Dry Bones notes that a similarly forthright condemnation of discrimination has not come from the Moslem clergy of Jordan or Yehuda and Shomron ("the West Bank"), where the penalty for selling land to Jews is capital punishment, and the penalty is carried out. Indeed, just this past September the Palestinian Authority confirmed the policy, describing the sale of land by Arabs to Jews as "high treason."

J Street Paid Thousands to PR Firm Owned by Its President

2011-01-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

J Street is the left-wing Jewish political organization whose philosophy is to "support" Israel by loud public criticism of all of its actions and policies, and by advocating peace at any price, including especially weakening Israel's national security. Consequently, it quickly became the favorite Jewish communal organization of the Obama White House. For example, Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, did not attend J Street's annual conference in October 2009, but senior Obama Administration officials, including national security advisor James Jones, were delighted to participate.

Now a Washington Times news story has revealed that J Street also has a second agenda, namely lining the pockets of a PR firm in which J Street founder and President Jeremy Ben-Ami (photo top LEFT) owns a 15% interest. The Washington Times reports that Ben-Or consulting charged J Street, a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization, $56,000 over a six-month period.

Ben-Ami has denied any conflict of interest, saying in a statement released through a spokesperson that even though he started Ben-Or and still retains a 15% shareholder's interest in the firm, he relinquished "all rights to on-going compensation" from the company when he left the firm in 2000. However, that statement belies the fact that no common stock shareholder of a corporation ever has a right to "on-going compensation." Rather, shareholders have a right in dividends and distribution from the company, as determined by the corporation's board of directors. Also, the value of a shareholder's stock is directly related to the earnings of the corporation.

Moreover, Ben-Ami has shown less than complete fidelity to the truth in the past. He repeatedly publicly denied that J Street had any connection with the left-wing and anti-Israel billionaire George Soros, only to apologetically confirm another Washington Times scoop this past September, which revealed that Soros and his children had donated $245,000 to J Street in the year of its founding, 2008, and another $500,000 since, about seven percent of J Street's total fundraising.

The current Times story notes, "According to nonprofit analysts, Mr. Ben-Ami's stake creates a conflict of interest that runs afoul of ethical — if not legal — restrictions on acts of 'self-dealing,' in which an officer in a tax-exempt organization receives undue benefit from that organization's transactions."

As J Street and Ben-Ami continue to dissemble in reaction to this newest revelation concerning its activities, one need only ask how J Street would react to a report of similar self-dealing at the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), which is J Street's favorite whipping boy on account of its steadfast political advocacy for Israel.

Movement for Jonathan Pollard Release Widens

2011-01-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

Listeners to the Hugh Hewitt Show some weeks back heard Dennis Prager argue persuasively in favor of a Presidential commutation of the life sentence of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1984 following his conviction for espionage. Hugh had quizzed Dennis that day because the Cabinet of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had voted to formally request that President Obama commute Pollard's life sentence.

Now a letter signed by 500 rabbis and prominent Jewish and non-Jewish religious and communal leaders has been sent to President Obama, supporting his immediate release. As reported by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post, the letter reads in part:

Mr. Pollard is currently serving his 26th year of a life sentence, having been indicted on one count of passing classified information to an ally without intent to harm the United States. We certainly do not condone his crime, nor do we underestimate the gravity of the offense. But it is patently clear that the sentence was and remains terribly disproportionate - the average punishment is a 2-4 year prison term - and (as several federal judges have noted) constitutes a gross miscarriage of justice.

Public support for Pollard's release has come from such diverse figures of the political and religious right and left as Pastor John Hagee, Gary Bauer, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olsen. As the letter to Presidential Obama further notes:

Perhaps most noteworthy, similar support has come from those who have seen the classified information of the actual damage caused including former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, Congressman Anthony Weiner, and former Senator and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dennis DeConcini.

It is important to note that neither the Israeli government, nor the signers of the letter to the President, are requesting a Presidential pardon for Pollard. He should remain a convicted felon, but he should not remain in prison after 25 years. He did the crime, but he has more than done the time.

U.S. Fecklessness Drives Jordan Into Iran's Embrace

2010-12-27T18:51:00.000-08:00

Caroline Glick, in a column in the Jerusalem Post entitled "Slouching Towards Tehran," notes that Jordan's King Abdullah II was one of the first world leaders to sound an alarm regarding Iran, warning in 2004 of a "Shi'ite crescent," extending from Iran to Iraq and then through Syria to Lebanon. As recently as 2009, according to State Department communication disclosed by Wikileaks, U.S. Ambassador to Jordan R. Stephen Beecroft reported that a Jordanian Senator, Said Rifai, had beseeched, “Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.”

However, two weeks ago, Ms. Glick notes, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, the chief of staff of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, met with King Abdullah Amman and extended a formal invitation from Ahmadinejad for him to pay a state visit to Iran. His Hashemite Majesty accepted the invitation.

What happened to erode King Abdullah's former defiance of the Tehran mullahs? The Obama Administration. The Jordanian monarch watched President Obama's feckless efforts to engage the Islamic Republic in Iran in dialogue and diplomacy. According to the Beecroft cable from Wikileaks, King Abdullah had previously warned Washington that if the Arab world perceived that the U.S. was appeasing Iran at their expense, "that engagement will set off a stampede of Arab states looking to get ahead of the curve and reach their own separate peace with Teheran."

Ms. Glick writes that Jordan watched as Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian election, and the U.S. did nothing. Iran prevented the pro-U.S. faction that won the Iraqi elections from taking office, and forced the reinstallation of the defeated pro-Iran Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the U.S. did nothing. Iran conducted repeated war games along the Straits of Hormuz, progressed in its nuclear program, deepened its military alliances with Turkey and Venezuela and escalated its proxy war against the US and its allies in Afghanistan. The Obama Administration said little and did nothing.

And so, Ms. Glick observes, Jordanian King Abdullah II has adopted the strategy successfully employed by his father: "The late King Hussein survived by watchng the prevailing winds closely and always siding with the side he believed was strongest at any given time." Jordan, a weak nation, is moving quickly to make its separate peace with Ahmadinejad.

The biggest immediate loser of this American foreign policy failure, of course, will not be the United States, but rather Israel, which now watches as yet another of its neighbors cozies up to the Islamic Republic of Iran, an implacable enemy set on the destruction of the Jewish State.

Columbia University Establishes a Center for Palestine Studies

2010-12-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

At the New Rebublic online, writers Armin Rosen and Jordan Hirsch, both recent Columbia graduates, endorse "Palestine Studies" as an appropriate academic discipline, but express concern that the new Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia University already shows signs of a center of anti-Israel political activism.

Here is a prime example: One of Israel's hallmark achievements as a secular, democratic society is its tolerance of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered (LGBT)persons--unique in the Middle East. It is common for gay Palestinian Arabs to flee Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of Yehuda and Shomron ("the West Bank"), where they live in great physical danger, for the tolerant atmosphere of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. So how does legal scholar Katherine Franke describe her own reasons for association with the Center for Palestine Studies? She told Messrs. Rosen and Hirsch that she focuses on “gender and sexuality and how the rights of LGBT people in Israel are being used to punish Israel’s Arab neighbors.” So instead of studying how LGBT people fare in Palestine, which presumably would be the topic most directly related to "Palestine Studies," she instead will emphasize in her work how the positive treatment of LGBT people in Israel is actually just one more weapon wielded by the nefarious Zionists in pursuit of their unceasing persecution of their Arab neighbors.

Rosen and Hirsch also present the example of Mahmood Mamdani, the former head of Columbia's Institute of African Studies, who is now associated with the CPS. Professor Mamdani "justifies his involvement by pointing to a conference he helped to organize titled 'Post-Apartheid Reflections on Israel and Palestine,' which taught him 'how a thematic focus [on Palestine] could bring African scholars … into the mainstream of intellectual discussions.'" This reflects his prior anti-Israel political activism--"in a 2002 speech at a pro-divestment teach-in, Mamdani argued that Israel was an apartheid state and a settler-colonial enterprise comparable to Liberia." So in the case of Mr. Mamdani, as for Ms. Franke, the focus of "Palestine Studies" is not the academic inquiry into Palestine, but scholarship aimed at attacking and ultimately delegitimizing Israel.

Where I depart from the outlook of Messrs. Rosen and Hirsch is their surprise that a Center for Palestine Studies would be devoted primarily to anti-Israel studies and activism. It was inevitable--indeed a Center for Palestine Studies could not be anything other than a center to lay the scholastic groundwork for the delegitimization of Israel. That is because the entire concept of a Palestinian nation arose solely as a means to combat Zionism and the creation of Israel. The Palestinians are not merely anti-Israel, they are the anti-Israel. Of course there was never an independent nation of Palestine. Indeed I challenge the readers to find any reference to "Palestinians" prior to 1948 that refers to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. The only people who called themselves "Palestinians" during the British Mandate over Palestine, from 1920 through 1948, were the Jewish residents of Palestine.

One need not take my word regarding the nature of Palestinian peoplehood. Read "the Palestinian National Covenant," the constitutional document of the so-called Palestinian people. It largely defines the Palestian nationality by its opposition to Zionism and its objective of eliminating Israel, and by the negation of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel. It was not enough to assert, in Article 7, "That there is a Palestinian community and that it has material, spiritual, and historical connection with Palestine are indisputable facts." The Covenant felt compelled to add, in Article 20, "Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood." For the concept of an Arab Palestinian people to flourish, the idea of the Jewish people residing in its historical homeland must be negated.

Indeed, the Covenant even hints that the notion of Palestinian Arab nationality is just a way station toward the higher goal of a united Arab nation, in which, once the Zionist enterprise is uprooted, the concept of a separate Arab Palestinian people would wither away. Thus, Article 12 states, in its entirety:

"The Palestinian people believe in Arab unity. In order to contribute their share toward the attainment of that objective, however, they must, at the present stage of their struggle, safeguard their Palestinian identity and develop their consciousness of that identity, and oppose any plan that may dissolve or impair it."

(Emphasis added.)

In other words, let's first get rid of the Zionists, then we can revisit whether we have any further use for this "Palestinian identity" baggage.

So, Messrs. Rosen and Hirsch, let us not fool ourselves--a Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University is, and could not be anything but, an academic center for anti-Israel studies and political activism.

Arab Foreign Ministers Demand U.S. Endorsement of Israeli Pullback to 1967 Borders Before Peace Talks Resume

2010-12-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

Those who are so quick to blame Israel for the breakdown in Middle East peace negotiations had better come up with an explanation for this news story. Meeting in Cairo today, Arab foreign ministers spoke out against any further peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, whether in direct or indirect negotiations, until the United States endorses a pullback by Israel to its borders prior to the June 1967 "Six Day War." The chutzpah of this demand is breath-taking: the Arab nations are demanding that the U.S. endorse the surrender of all of Israel's negotiating leverage before peace talks may even resume.

A little history may be useful to the reader in understanding the audacity of the Arab demand. The pre-June 1967 borders of Israel were not internationally recognized borders, but rather the 1949 ceasefire lines left after Israel successfully beat back an invasion by Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in its War of Independence. Because U.N. negotiator Ralph Bunche, an American diplomat who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the ceasefire negotiations and implementation, drew the ceasefire lines on the "official" U.N. map in green ink, the ceasefire lines became known as the "Green Line." They were never recognized as Israel's national borders by any of the Arab nations who had invaded the newborn Jewish State, seeking to strangle it at birth. To the contrary, those nations never recognized the legitimate existence of Israel as a nation at all, and except for Egypt and Jordan they still do not recognize her existence, and have been in a continuous declared state of war with Israel since 1948.

Yet now the very nations that invaded Israel in 1948 and sought to destroy her again in 1967 have the temerity and insolence to demand that the United States endorse the Green Line as Israel's borders before peace talks may resume.

Here are two more pieces of historical information that reveal the pernicious nature of the declaration by the Arab foreign ministers:

1. From the 1949 ceasefire until June 5, 1967, all of what is now known as the West Bank (Yehuda and Shomron) and the Gaza Strip were occupied, not by Israel, but by Kingdom of Transjordan (which annexed the West Bank and changed its name to Jordan) and by Egypt (whose armies controlled Gaza). At any time during those 18 years, nothing would have prevented the Arab League from endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state in those territories or Egypt and Jordan from midwifing its birth. They did not do so and had no desire to do so. The demands for a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza did not arise until after the Six-Day War, when contrary to the expectations of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, which had united to once again try to destroy Israel, Israel decisively defeated their armies and conquered Yehuda, Shomron, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. (Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982 after those two nations signed a peace treaty.)

2. In the 1949-1949 War, Arab armies captured the three most important Jewish holy sites, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem. During the next 18 years, no Jew (not merely no Israeli, but no Jew) was allowed to visit and pray at those sites. (If you don't believe this, you are probably unaware that no Jew may enter Saudi Arabia today.) Jewish towns and villages such as the Etzion group in Yehuda, the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem and Kfar Drom in Gaza were also captured, and their Jewish inhabitants either killed or taken prisoner. In the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, the Jordanian Arab Legion and Palestinian Arabs looted and destroyed over 50 synagogues and houses of study, including the famous and beautiful Hurva Synagogue. No Jew was allowed to live in those areas, or anywhere in Yehuda, Shomron or Gaza, for the next 18 years. (That situation still prevails in Gaza, under Hamas, and in those areas of Yehuda and Shomron controlled by the "moderate" Palestinian authority.) The Arab Legion commander who led the conquest of the Jewish Quarter bragged to his superiors, "For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible."

It was impossible until June 1967. Jews only regained access to their holy places and were able to rebuild their destroyed homes, synagogues and houses of study in the Old City of Jerusalem, Yehuda, Shomron and Gaza as a result of the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War.

In contrast, from the 1949 ceasefire until today, Israel has tolerated and provided full civil rights to all of its citizens, Jew and Arab, Moslem and Christian, including the unfettered right to practice their religions. The government of Israel not only protects Moslem and Christian holy places under its control, it financially supports them.

Yet these arrogant sons of Ishmael (of whom an angel of the Lord aptly says in the Bible, Genesis 16:12 "He will be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man and every man's hand shall be against him")now have the utter nerve to demand that the U.S. endorse and pressure Israel to surrender back what she lost in 1948-49 and regained in 1967. In order to even talk about peace with the Palestinians, the Arab foreign ministers say that the U.S. must urge Israel and the Jewish people to give up any claim to the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Hurva and the rebuilt and new synagogues and houses of study; Israel must depart from Tomb of the Patriarchs, Rachel's Tomb and the towns, villages and farms that the Arab armies callously destroyed in 1949, to say nothing of the Jerusalem neighborhoods cities, towns, villages and farms that Israel has built "over the Green Line," in Yehuda and Shomron since June 1967.

All this, so that the Palestinian Arabs will be able to make their new terrorist state Yudenrein (free of Jews), as Saudi Arabia, Gaza and the PA-controlled portions of Yehuda and Shomron are today. And Israel's critics acuse her of ethnic cleansing? What a joke!

This public challenge to U.S. foreign policy by the Arab ministers must be met with a public response by the United States. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton must issue a statement endorsing the immediate resumption of direct peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, without any preconditions.