Jew baiting in The Guardian

James Taranto catches a hilarious correction in London's Guardian:

A quote by Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister, within a panel that formed part of the Palestine papers, was cut in a way that may have given a misleading impression. The quote appeared as: "The Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state." To clarify, the full quote is: "I understand the sentiments of the Palestinians when they see the settlements being built. The meaning from the Palestinian perspective is that Israel takes more land, that the Palestinian state will be impossible, the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state." (What they said ... 24 January, page 4.)

See, the actual quote is a Livni describing Palestinian propaganda, but the paper edited it to present the Palestinian propaganda itself! Hilarious (in a macabre sort of way) example of the fundamental anti-Semitism that is so matter of fact on the European left.

Quick hits 4/20

Some things i ran across in my reading:

James Taranto, on why the left needs racism:

The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party. […]

To keep blacks voting Democratic, it is necessary for the party and its supporters to keep alive the idea that racism is prevalent in America and to portray the Republican Party (as well as independent challengers to the Democrats, such as the tea-party movement) as racist. The election of Barack Obama made nonsense of the idea that America remains a racist country and thereby necessitated an intensifying of attacks on the opposition as racist.

Walter Williams, concluding a superb piece on the destructive effects of minimum wage laws: “Tragically, minimum wages have the unquestioned support of good-hearted, well-meaning people with little understanding who become the useful idiots of charlatans, quacks and racists.”

Via Jay Nordlinger, this Benjamin Netanyahu quote is chilling and sad: “Iran’s leaders are barreling toward developing a nuclear weapon, and openly declaring their desire to destroy Israel. In the face of these repeated pledges to remove the Jewish state from the earth, we encounter in the best case a limp reaction, and even that is fading. We do not hear the necessary rejection, no harsh denunciation, no outcry. The world is carrying on as usual, and there are those who direct their fire at us, at Israel.”

Also via JN, a great Bill Buckley quote: “When you wished long life to Fidel Castro, were you wishing a short life to his prisoners?” Unwittingly or not, yes you were.

The administration that keeps on giving

Lest you think that Carterian idiocy only emanates from the former president himself, I give you his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (from a Daily Beat interview):

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

Three decades later, it's still gives you chills to think that these people ran the country for four years.

Helpful Middle East reminder

You can never remind Palestinian fetishists enough of this self-evident truth; the source is Dean Barrett, but the old link I had appears to be dead:

1) What would happen if all the Arab nations and their terrorist proxies like Hezbollah set down their arms and gave up their ambitions to drive Israel into the sea?

There would be peace in the Middle East.

2) What would happen if Israel disbanded the IDF, junked its nuclear weapons and declared to its neighbors that she would do anything to live in peace?

Israel would be annihilated, millions of its citizens killed. The term genocide could be used to describe the ensuing holocaust, but since that term has been so hopelessly debased by American academics, a new term would have to be created like super-duper-mega genocide to really capture the nature of things.

Genocide averted? etc.

An attempted genocide foiled?

Russian sources are claming that an Iranian ship captured by Somali pirates was a huge dirty bomb headed for Israel on Yom Kippur:

At this writing, the MV Iran Deyanat is at anchor, watched closely by American, French and Russian naval units.

[Russian sources claim she] was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

From the same post, this hilariously ironic news:

Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with IRNA, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.

It turns out that Obama's promised capitulation is a one-way street.

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There’s really very little difference between the Daily Kos web community and the KKK; it’s just a difference in which groups are the targets of their hate. A common fantasy of the loony left is to criminalize dissent, to establish a leftist totalitarian police state. Here’s a sample of this line of “thought”:

I support Obama, but I disagree on some major issues. One is that we need to use major authoritarian measures against wingnuts and theocrats to save this country. That in particular includes deprogramming institutions and a Gitmo like camp to deal with the worst wingnuts. These people should be removed from general society and need to be shut up.

I have believed this for years, but the behavior of the wingnuts at the McCain and Palin rallies further underscores the need to take harsh action against these people. Lincoln and FDR had to bend the Constitution at times, and I hope Obama has the guts to do so too to deal with these third rate creatures.

Hey, they hate religion too, maybe they can take up cross burning!

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Re: the Mark Steyn passage I quoted on Monday, John Hinderaker adds:

American liberals have yearned to match Europe's supposed sophistication as long as America has existed. Maybe someone should give them the news: adopting Euro-style leftism in 2008 would be a bit like having a go at European fascism in 1945.

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Hilarious passage from a Washington Post story on the Wizards:

After players filed on to buses to take them back to the hotel following Sunday’s practice, an English-speaking Berliner who happened to be walking by tried to figure out what she was seeing.

“Who are the Wizards?” she asked.

When told that the team is from the United States and plays basketball in the NBA, the woman smiled.

“Oh, like the Lakers,” she said.

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This scouting tool sounds very cool:

The [Phoenix] scouts have a cutting edge computer program, where they can literally call up video clips of any player in the draft based on certain categories, like “transition defense” or “three-point shots” or “post-up possessions”, and the computer will run a series of clips of the good and the bad of that player in those circumstances.

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President Bush is really hurting McCain right now, but not in a way you’ll often see acknowledged.

It is because Bush has essentially won the Iraq front of the WOT, making it a non-issue in the campaign. Were it an issue, Obama’s repeated promises to surrender would be held against him, but at this point not even a hard leftist could find a way to lose this thing, so a huge liability is removed from his ledger.

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Genius satire from Sense of Events:

With the price of petroleum having fallen from almost $150 per barrel last summer to about $81, the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain rushed to outline their respective plans to rescue beleaguered oil companies from nose-diving profits and earnings.

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A McCain-Obama difference I had not heard about: while neither supports a return to a military draft, they do differ on the specifics.

[T]he two presidential candidates disagree on a key foundation of any future draft: Mr. Obama supports a requirement for both men and women to register with the Selective Service, while Mr. McCain doesn't think women should have to register.

Also, Mr. Obama would consider officially opening combat positions to women. Mr. McCain would not.

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I’m shocked, shocked to learn that YouTube is using the DMCA as justification to take down anti-Obama content but not doing the same to anti-McCain content.

Although the co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold is on shaky ground making free political speech arguments.

Silver linings etc.

If Obama wins and the expected Democrat gains in the House and Senate materialize, the party will finally be on board with the War on Terror. Why? Because Democrats would finally have to leave the children’s table and come eat with the adults.

There would no longer be any Bush and/or Republican majority to blame for any potential attack on the US; when you have to…you know…govern, it’s a whole new ballgame. Suddenly a domestic attack would not only be bad for the country, it would be bad for the party.

That changes everything. Suddenly spying on, detaining and interrogating or even killing terrorists won’t seem such a bad idea. Sure, the Kos/HuffPo/MoveOn crowd will howl in protest and make all kinds of profane threats, but ultimately they would return to pom-pom waving – you don’t really expect them and the Soros money machine that finds them to start backing Republicans, do you?

Much as it’s hard to find anybody who admits to being an anti-anti-Communist today, a Democrat sweep will turn critics of “domestic spying” and “torture” into an endangered species.

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Another change would be big media’s treatment of the poor. One thing to keep in mind whenever you see income statistics used to make points about poverty: most of the true income of the poor does not come in the form of what most of us think of as income.

About 78% (source: Thomas Sowell) of the economic resources used by people in the bottom quintile of income comes in the form of cash transfer payments (welfare, food stamps etc.) and in-kind transfers (subsidized housing, medical care etc.).

Thus quoted “income” statistics can take the form of true income or only income earned from working, which leaves out more than 3/4 of true income. Expect the poor to suddenly be reported as much better off in the event of a Democrat sweep, even if they don’t have another penny beyond what they did during the Bush administration.

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Random statistic: Spanish-speaking US immigrants earn 50-60% more if they also speak English, according to Mexico’s TV Azteca. Think about that the next time you hear some activist saying that it’s racist to require immigrants to learn English.

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You often hear that this is the first election since 1952 that neither the president nor the vice president will be his party’s presidential nominee.

What you don’t hear as much is that this is the first election since 1928 that neither the president nor the vice president has sought the presidency. Truman dropped out of the 1952 race after an early primary loss.

So if you’re looking to precedent to figure out how this year’s election will go…good luck with that.

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Fascinating admission from Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw (via Front Page Magazine):

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. [Emphasis added.]

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Is there a New York Times Worst Seller List?

Nancy Pelosi’s new book sold 2,737 copies in its first week. And I have to wonder, even of that paltry number, how many were bought by Democrat-leaning organizations to use as rewards for contributors. 2,700?

The First Amendment may guarantee freedom of speech, but it does not guarantee that anybody will listen or take you seriously.

Favridiculous etc

When I turn on the ESPNews to get scores off the crawl and see the subjects roll by, NL … AL … NFL … NBA … Olympics … Favre. Brett Favre, he has become his own category, hell maybe he’s become his own sport.

The good news is DirecTV just moved the Big Ten Network from channel 220 to 610 so there is a spot open for the Favre Channel.

The worst thing is, after a month or more of it already, there’s still a ton to go. Just wait until they play and exhibition game, and when he plays an exhibition game, and when he or Aaron Rogers do well or poorly in an exhibition game, and don’t even get me started on what happens when one of them is named the starter and then throws two picks in a real game.

You think you’re beaten down now, just wait…

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This quote from Israeli air commander Col. Ziv Levy (from a 60 Minutes segment earlier this year) is chilling: “We spend a lot of time and a lot of effort in training and being prepared for the worst. We cannot lose a single war. The first war we lose, Israel will cease to exist.”

It’s a simple point and we all know it well, but it still needs to be repeated regularly lest we forget or downplay Israel’s peril.

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Queen’s “We Will Rock You” may have been a simple song, but don’t blame guitarist
Brian May. That’s Doctor May to you, buster! He has just published his doctoral thesis, "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”.

When he’s not gigging he’s busy being the Chancellor of John Moores University and doing segments on an astronomy TV show.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/08/02/1938239.shtml
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0387777059/

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If only the default position on racial grievance was that of Walter Williams and his “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent,” the world would be a much better place.
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/gift.html

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Government 101: In 1972, the FDA passed a law requiring child safety caps on many medications, the driving force being publicity surrounding children poisoned by aspirin. You can guess what happened then – many people, especially older, left the caps off because they were too hard to open. And people became more likely to leave bottles in places where children can get to them, lulled into carelessness because they felt the caps were safer.

The result: an additional 3000 children have been poisoned by aspirin because of the regulation (per consumer advocate John Stossel).

Random thoughts

An irony of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s reactionary, racist hate mongering: he was born in 1941, which means he lived 23 years (until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) when it was legal for the government to discriminate against blacks on the basis of their race…and has now lived 30 years (and counting) since the legality of the government discriminating against whites on the basis of their race was affirmed (in the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision).

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My favorite bird? Yep, you guessed it.

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Maybe the most amazing NBA stat I’ve ever seen: in April, Jose Calderon dished out 66 assists and turned the ball over…once.

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From an Obama speech: “[A Pennsylvania man] can't afford four more years of an energy policy written by the oil companies and for the oil companies; a policy that is not only keeping gas at record prices but funding both sides of the war on terror and destroying our planet.”

Psst, Barack…one of the sides in the war on terror is the good guys, funding them is a good thing.

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That deserves a “Wow!”: Argentine Olympian and occasional NBA rotation player Walter “Fabio” Herrmann can palm a basketball using just his index finger and thumb. Try that out sometime.

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This Israeli story would seem certain to be a parody were we not so well-acquainted with hate speech as academic scholarship:

A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers' committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.

The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that "the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals."

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: "In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done."

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes.

Did you get that? If Israeli soldiers rape Arab women, it is evidence of racism. And if Israeli soldiers do not rape Arab women, it is evidence of racism. Could you imagine a more perfect illustration of modern education?

Sad but true

Dean Barnett:

If James Baker ran a bipartisan Blue-Ribbon panel tasked with saving social security, his commission would conclude that no real progress on social security was possible until Israel ceded the Golan Heights to Syria and made whatever concessions necessary to mollify Hamas.

Comical bias

When you see this headline:

Rockets hit Lebanon despite cease-fire

you would think that Israel had broken the cease-fire, wouldn't you? That's where AP is trying to lead you, forcing you to read into the second paragraph before revealing the truth:

"Hezbollah guerrillas fired at least 10 Katyusha rockets that landed in southern Lebanon early Tuesday."

The anti-Jew, anti-Israel bias in most of the world's media would be comical if it wasn't so tragic.

Hezbollah's human shields

Walter Reich in the New York Sun expands on Hezbollah's human shield strategy and its implications for civilized nations:

On the day an Israeli airstrike inadvertently killed some 28 civilians in the Lebanese town of Qana, a Berlin daily, Der Tagesspiegel, published an amazing letter that summarized the Hezbollah strategy that resulted in those deaths.

The letter-writer, who identified himself as Dr. Mounir Herzallah, said he was a Shiite from southern Lebanon who had lived there until 2002. After the Israelis withdrew from the area in 2000, he recalled, Hezbollah moved into his town, dug rocket depots in bunkers, and then built a school and a residence over those bunkers.

The letter went on: "Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews would lose in any event because the rockets would either be fired at them or, if they attacked the rocket depots, they would be condemned by world opinion on account of the dead civilians. These people do not care about the Lebanese population; they use them as shields and, once dead, as propaganda."

[...]

Despite [authenticity] uncertainties, I think it's worth quoting from this letter because it formulates, in a way better than I've ever heard it formulated before, the human-shield strategy that is being used by Hezbollah, as well as by Hamas, against Israel — and also by forces with which we and other Western powers have been engaging on battlefields that are unfamiliar to us in this post-9/11 world.

Qana is, in fact, the new face of war. And this letter describes the contours of that face, as well as the mad logic behind its eyes, with the concision and clarity we'll need in order to be able to judge the actions of countries that are forced to respond to it — and in order to respond to it ourselves with a maximum of both humaneness and realism. There will be more Qanas in Israel's future, and many more in ours.

Specialists in military strategy, having recognized the challenges posed by this human-shield strategy, see a solution in better intelligence — in particular, better human intelligence. They argue that in order to avert international condemnation — which can be even more damaging than losing on the battlefield — armies shouldn't attack built-up areas, even ones being used to launch rockets that are killing their civilians, unless they can be sure that their own attacks won't kill civilians on the other side.

The problem is that an army facing such an enemy can almost never be absolutely sure of that. And if the standard such an army has to satisfy is absolute certainty that it will never harm civilians, then it will never be able to fight such an enemy even when the threat is critical — even when the rockets, endless volleys of them, are sure to be fired. Countries needing to protect their citizens will be utterly defenseless.

The letter in the German newspaper shines a clarifying and sobering light on a strategy that, like terrorism itself, is used precisely because it works. In an age in which many organizations and even some countries are prepared to sacrifice their own civilians in the service of killing ours — and are prepared to do so by situating their weapons, even weapons of mass destruction, in places of human habitation — we have to be ready for more Qanas. We have to be ready to place the blame for such Qanas on those who engineer them. We have to learn how to expose the depraved but effective logic that will make those Qanas happen. And we have to learn how to fight a war that's built on that logic even if we can't always be absolutely sure that innocents won't suffer as a result.

All countries have an obligation to minimize the loss of civilian life, both on their own side and on the other. But no country has an obligation to allow itself to be destroyed or its people killed. Demanding that of any country is a perversion not only of the ethics of war but also of the ethics of life.

The propaganda war

I have yet to touch on the outbreak of fake and staged Hezbollah propaganda photos that the US and other Western media have, in some cases unwittingly and almost certainly purposefully in others, been running throughout the Israeli-Iran/Syrian conflict in Lebanon. To get an idea of how Hezbollah operatives (in this case the notorious Green Helmet Guy) choreograph their anti-Israel messages, check out this video from German television if you have the stomach for it.

In case you don't care to watch, what they do here is load the body of a dead child into an ambulance, then take the body back out and transfer it from a light stretcher used in the ambulance to a heavy duty gurney used in a rescue operation (to create the impression that it has just arrived from the bombed area), uncover it, clear other people out of the cmaera path, and pose it for photographs.

This, along with firing rockets from residential neighborhoods, mosques and hospitals among other civilian areas in the desperate hope of goading Israelis into bombing Lebanese civilians, is what the month-long conflict was all about. Hezbollah tried to maximize civilian casualties on both sides to order to stir up anti-Israeli (and of course by extension anti-Jew) sentiment. Sadly, a compliant and credible media were among their best allies.

And more sadly still, we seem to have lost our moral compass in supporting a disastrous UN resolution that merely gives Hezbollah time to rearm and start killing anew. An excellent account of the resolution and its implications is here.

Bolton on a ceasefire

UN Ambassador John Bolton answers the call for an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire with his customary brilliance:

Well look, I think we could have a cessation of hostilities immediately if Hezbollah would stop terrorizing innocent civilians and give up the kidnapped Israeli soldiers. So that to the extent this crisis continues, the cause is Hezbollah. How you get a ceasefire between one entity, which is a government of a democratically elected state on the one hand, and another entity on the other which is a terrorist gang, no one has yet explained. The government of Israel, everybody says, has the right to exercise the right of self-defense, which even if there are criticisms of Israeli actions by some, they recognize the fundamental right to self-defense. That's a legitimate right. Are there any activities that Hezbollah engages in, militarily that are legitimate? I don't think so. All of its activities are terrorist and all of them are illegitimate, so I don't see the balance or the parallelism between the two sides and therefore I think it's a very fundamental question: how a terrorist group agrees to a ceasefire. You know in a democratically elected government, the theory is that the people ultimately can hold the government accountable when it does something and doesn't live up to it. How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitment that a terrorist group will abide by a ceasefire? What does a terrorist group think a ceasefire is? These are - you can use the words "cessation of hostilities" or "truce" or "ceasefire." Nobody has yet explained how a terrorist group and a democratic state come to a mutual ceasefire.