Jenin with a Difference

As a follow-up to my comments on the current situation in Lebanon, consider the comments of Jonathan Kay:

Last week, the Lebanese army attacked a squalid Palestinian refugee camp that's become infested with Islamist suicide terrorists and guerilla fighters. On May 20, government troops surrounded the camp, with tanks and artillery pieces shelling it at close range. Army snipers gunned down anything that moved. At least 18 civilians were killed, and dozens more injured. Water and electricity were cut off. By week's end, much of the camp had been turned into deserted rubble. Thousands of terrified residents fleeing the camp reported harrowing stories of famished, parched families trapped in their basements.

How did the rest of the world react? The Arab League quickly condemned "the criminal and terrorist acts carried out by the terrorist group known as Fatah al-Islam," and vowed to "give its full support to the efforts of the army and the Lebanese government." EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana also condemned Fatah al-Islam, and declared Europe's "support" for Lebanon. And the UN Security Council called the actions of Fatah al-Islam "an unacceptable attack" on Lebanon's sovereignty. As for the Western media, most outlets ignored the story following the first flurry of news reports.

At this point, please indulge me by re-reading the first paragraph of this column -- except this time, substitute the world "Israeli" for "Lebanese" in the first sentence. Let's imagine what the world's reaction would be if the ongoing siege were taking place in Gaza or the West Bank instead of the Nahr al Bared refugee camp on the outskirts of Tripoli, Lebanon.

First of all, a flood of foreign journalists would descend on the camp to document Israel's cruelty and barbarism, and the story would remain front page news to this day. Al-Jazeera would be a 24/7 montage of grieving mothers swearing revenge on the Zionist butchers, and rumours would swirl of mass graves and poison gas. The Arab League, EU and United Nations would condemn Israeli aggression -- as would the editorial board of The New York Times. The Independent would dispatch Robert Fisk to embed with Fatah al-Islam. And the newspaper's cartoonist, Dave Brown, would produce another award-winning rendition of his signature theme: Jews eating Palestinian babies.

Actually, we don't need to speculate: What I have just written is exactly what happened when the Israeli army invaded the Jenin refugee camp to root out terrorists in April, 2002, a battle that was similar in scale to this month's siege at Nahr al Bared. (At Jenin, 52 refugee camp residents were killed -- most of them gunmen, according to Human Rights Watch. At Nahr al Bared, the figure is 45 and climbing.) The main difference between the two sieges is that Israel's army put its troops at far greater risk by invading Jenin with infantry -- whereas the less humane Lebanese army has simply pummelled Nahr al Bared with explosives from a distance. Jews apparently care a lot more about saving Palestinian civilians than do Lebanese soldiers.

For years, we have been told that Palestinian suffering and "humiliation" is at the root of the Middle East conflict, as well as the Western-Muslim clash of civilizations more generally. This is nonsense: The 200,000-plus Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanese camps are treated worse than dogs -- with no access to decent schools or good jobs -- and no one in the Arab world cares a whit. In fact, many Arabs seem to embrace the same blind anti-Palestinian hatred of which Israel is typically accused. When Lebanese armoured personnel carriers rolled through Tripoli on May 20, they got a standing ovation from local residents. "We wish the government would destroy the whole camp and the rest of the camps," one local told The New York Times. "Nothing good comes out of the Palestinians."

This is Jenin with a difference. And what exactly is the difference? The usual suspects—the international MSM, “human rights” groups, and Leftists in general—universally condemned Israel for a "massacre" in Jenin that never happened. They reported Arab propaganda as fact, published doctored photos, reported staged events as real ... and they did so with such enthuisiasm that one can only assume they loved it! In Lebanon, a massacre is underway, and surprise, surprise, not a peep out of the usual suspects. After all ... Israel isn't involved.

Gaza

Why are the Gaza Palestinians killing each other? Matthew Yglegias, a blogger for The Atlantic magazine on-line suggests that it’s all our fault. That the Bush Administration’s insistence on a democratic vote put Hamas in power and the resultant carnage is on us.

Michael Totten demolishes this Left-leaning trope with fact after fact. But that doesn’t answer the initial question. Why, indeed, do they kill one another? Why can’t they form a functioning government in their experimental “country” — one that Israel unilaterally gave them in 2006.

Totten comments:

There is something very consistent about governance in the Arab world. Among the Arab countries today in which there is a modicum of internal stability, each is controlled by an Arafat-type figure -- an anti-democratic strongman who is able to crush all challenges to his authority. Likewise, among those Arab countries that aren't ruled by a despot, the political dynamic is also consistent: In Lebanon, Iraq, and now Gaza, sectarian violence is the dominant form of political expression. It’s true that Arafat’s authority was weaker in Gaza than in the West Bank, but in Gaza there was always another strongman present to keep a lid on things: the Israeli occupation. When Israel disengaged in the summer of 2005, suddenly Gaza was without any master at all, and that’s exactly when the territory started going full-tilt toward the Hobbesian state of nature it now finds itself in.

And so to blame recent Bush administration choices for this lawlessness -- or more precisely, to invent stories about administration choices -- is more than a bit much. Even if the PA elections in 2006 hadn't occurred, I doubt the battle we are seeing today wouldn’t have happened. The fight is foreordained by Gaza's demography, its political and religious extremism, Arafat's death, and Israel's unwillingness to police the territory. The Bush administration is simply along for the ride -- as is Israel. And the reason why Abbas has never been able to emerge as a leader of the Palestinians is because his weakness is similarly foreordained. Consensus-based political leadership is anathema to the Arab world. We're seeing that rather starkly today in Gaza.

All of that said, I think that Yglesias ends up being partially right (even though he doesn't mean to be) when he lays the lawlessness in Gaza at Bush's feet. The sad truth is that Gaza today is a testament to the failure of the entire 14-year project of creating the Palestinian Authority, retrieving Arafat from exile, and attempting to drag the Arabs of Palestine, against their will, into western political modernity. This process was started, and most forcefully pushed forward, by the Clinton administration, and today its corpse is still being dragged around the Middle East, Weekend at Bernie's-style, by Condoleezza Rice.

It’s interesting: The Left has abandoned any hope of a political settlement in Iraq, arguing (with smug satisfaction) that they knew all along that any attempt at democracy in Iraq was doomed from the onset (in my opinion, it appears they’re probably right on that score). And yet, the same people who argue that democracy in Iraq is unrealistic suggest that if the US were more “even-handed,” a viable country would magically appear in the Palestinian territories. Can’t have it both ways.

It’s time to take a hard look at the facts on the ground, the history of the past 60 years, and the rise of Islamofascist ideology in the region, and recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian problem just might be intractable. There won’t be a solution, and that means we just might have to recognize that the “oppressed” are really the oppressors, and that the billions we pour in to support Palestinian thugs and terrorists could be far better spent in other ways.

Real Torture

If you get your news from the MSM, it’s likely you missed the fact that the US Army recently uncovered an illustrated Al Qaeda Torture Manual (warning: this link shows some gruesome stuff) in an Iraqi Al Qaeda safe house. The manual is instructional, teaching the Islamofascists how to, oh, pluck out the eye of a detainee, or cut off an arm, or drag a victim behind a car, or blowtorch bare skin. Funny, haven’t heard a peep from the “human rights” advocates who continually chastise the US for its “torture” methods … you know, playing loud music, or allowing a female to touch a Moslem male, or, heaven forbid, handling the Koran inappropriately.

Wretchard of The Belmont Club comments:

The problem with the fake is that it is always shown up by the arrival of the Real Thing. The difference between the two is often so manifest that it seems ridiculous to think that anyone could have been fooled -- even momentarily -- by the counterfeit.

The problem with the word "torture" is that it has been so artfully corrupted by some commentators that we now find ourselves at a loss to describe the kinds of activities that the al-Qaeda interrogation manual graphically recommends. Now that the term "torture" has been put in one-to-one correspondence with such admittedly unpleasant activities as punching, sleep deprivation, a handkerchief pulled over one's face and loaded with water, searches by women upon sensitive Islamic men or the disrespectful handling of Korans -- what on earth do we call gouging people's eyes out?

Answer: we call it nothing. My fearless prediction is that not a single human rights organization will seriously take the matter up. There will be no demonstrations against these barbaric practices, often inflicted upon Muslims by other Muslims, in any of the capitals of the world. Not a single committee in the United Nations will be convened nor will any functionary in the European Union lose so much as a night's sleep over it. The word for these activities -- whatever we choose to call it -- will not be spoken.

The Left must be very careful when it uses terms like “Nazis” to describe America Troops or “Hitler” to characterize the Bush, or “Gulag” to describe Quantanamo, or “torture” to describe the “admittedly unpleasant activities” that we visit on those who want to kill us. When they use those words, they are left with no way to describe the real thing – something that is far more frightening. So they choose to ignore the real thing – to walk through the looking glass and choose to believe that “the threat is overblown," or that the “War on Terror” (admittedly a poor characterization of what’s happening) is nothing more than a “bumper sticker.”

And those on the Right (Senator McCain comes to mind) who suggest that our use of “admittedly unpleasant activities” dehumanizes us and somehow gives permission to our enemies to also use them, seem blissfully unaware that an American prisoner would welcome the kind of “admittedly unpleasant activities” that occur in Quantanamo. Particularly if given a choice between them and the activities suggested in the torture manual. But, of course, there is no choice, and what we do matters very little, if at all. Islamofascists follow the manual, and their gruesome acts of barbarism don’t trouble their Islamist hearts a bit.

So we choose to turn away, so that we don’t see the reality of our enemy. We choose to ignore hard facts, documented events, lies, barbarism, because to face it all is simply too hard. We choose the world as we wish it, not the world as it is.

But the choices that force us to look the other way allow evil to fester and grow. Someday, it may become too big to ignore, regardless of our choices. By then, it may very well be too late.

It’s only a joke

I visited the home page of Amnesty International (AI) today. The featured topic was a vote entitled: “Who's got the worst human rights record?” The nominees are: Darth Vader, Hobgoblin (of Spiderman fame) and … Vice President Dick Cheney.

Covering themselves by claiming it's only a joke (21% of the respondents voted Cheney at the time of my visit) AI states:

All joking aside, the U.S. government, once perceived as a beacon of hope and justice, no longer leads the world on human rights.

The continuing allegations of U.S. torture, use of secret prisons, ghost detainees, and indefinite and unconstitutional detention at Guantanamo calls into question the U.S. commitment to fight torture and adhere to international law. The U.S. now lacks the credibility needed to improve human rights abroad.

By violating some international laws, the United States undermines all international law and promotes the idea to other countries that some laws are acceptable to ignore in the pursuit of "security."

While I was there, I did a site search using the word “Lebanon.” The result was 1,830 hits. The majority were archival entries castigating Israel for its “disproportionate” attacks on the terrorist group Hezballah during last summer’s war. I couldn’t find a single mention of the current Lebanese army attack on the Palestinian slum (oops, sorry, “refugee camp”) outside Tripoli. I guess attacks against Palestinian terrorists and their supporters are only “human rights abuses” when Israelis defend themselves.

The New York Sun reports that NGO Monitor has conducted a study of AI's findings over the past year.

Using a detailed and sophisticated qualitative model for comparing relative resources devoted to the different countries, this report clearly shows that in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and other chronic abusers of human rights.

Think about that for a moment. The "goto" source for the MSM when "human rights abuses" are in play is AI. And AI thinks that a liberal democracy's "abuses" warrant significantly more coverage than a rogue's gallery of real ME abusers.

But not to worry. After all, their biased, sanctimonious, and hypocritical positions on the Middle East make AI the only joke worth laughing at.

Liberalism

In an insightful essay, Melanie Phillips discusses the contest between liberalism and Islamism:

First of all, let me define my terms and say what I mean by Islamism and liberalism. Islamism is the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam. I’m well aware of the argument that there’s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that’s a theological argument for others to have.

By liberalism I mean the commitment to a free society, founded above all on the separation of secular government from religious worship — from which follow the concepts of equal respect for all people, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the rule of law.

These two concepts, Islamism and liberalism, are currently engaged in a fight to the death. My argument is that liberalism is in danger of losing this fight because it has so badly undermined itself and departed from its own core concepts that it is now paralysed by moral and intellectual muddle.

I have, on many occasions, wondered how the American and European Left can react sympathetically to Islamism and condemn the West’s attempts to fight it. It is America who is “the world’s worst terrorist.” It is the UK that is “acting like a fascist state.” Every precept that Islamism teaches is antithetical to the Left, but somehow, Islamofascist ideology has been inverted into one of victimization – and oh, how the Left loves a perceived victim.

The Liberal elites (academics, writers, “intellectuals”) have adopted a multiculturalist mindset that is very dangerous at this time in history. Phillips comments:

Many people think multiculturalism just means showing respect and tolerance to other cultures and faiths. If that were so, it should be unarguable. We should all support respect and tolerance. But that’s not what multiculturalism is at all. It holds that all minority values must have equal status to those of the majority. Any attempt to uphold majority values over minorities is a form of prejudice. That turns minorities into a cultural battering ram to destroy the very idea of being a majority culture at all. And so, since no culture can assert itself over any other, liberalism cannot assert itself as a dominant cultural force. Instead society must fragment into a kaleidoscope of equal — and opposing —values, and liberal values must give way to their opposite.

That is what happened over the Mohammed cartoons. Freedom of expression is a key liberal precept. But under multiculturalism, that cannot trump a minority faith which holds that to publish these images is to give offence. So the minority wins over the liberal majority value, and Europeans decry not the violence and intimidation, the kidnappings, riots and murder which followed the publication of the cartoons but the offence to minority religious feelings that was given in publishing them.

And so in the US, The New York Times, rather than defending the publication of the cartoons, condemned those that did publish. Incredible – particularly when espoused by a champion of Liberal values that include freedom of the press.

What I see happening is a distortion of reality. A through-the-looking glass world in which any criticism of Islamist thought is labeled “Islamophobia” and any overt attempt to fight it is termed “oppression” or “racism.” Again from Phillips:

As for our values, far from reasserting them they are going down like ninepins. While our universities refuse to act against Islamists on campus on the grounds of freedom of expression, Leeds university cancelled a proposed lecture on the links between the Nazis and Islamic antisemitism after protests by two Muslim students. And after students at Cambridge university published a magazine satirising religion and which published one of the images from the Mohammed cartoons, they were disciplined by the university, threatened with prosecution by the police and forced to apologise to Muslims, Christians —and Jews, who hadn’t even been mentioned.

Above all, Britain must not allow the encroachment of sharia. Yet it is paving the way for sharia. There are now areas of the country under the informal parallel jurisdiction of sharia law. A blind eye has been turned to honour killings, forced marriage and polygamy – now polygamous men settling in Britain are even receiving welfare benefits for their multiple wives. We have sharia-compliant mortgages; our tax authorities are considering recognising polygamy for inheritance tax purposes; and the government is encouraging London to become the global hub of Islamic banking, despite the fact that such arrangements will force those who make use of them to conform to sharia law.

Could this happen in the USA? It already has, but you probably haven’t heard much about it because the MSM has decided that it’s impolitic (or should I say, “Islamophobic”) to emphasize such instances. In each instance, the incident is minor (taxi drivers refusing to transport people with guide dogs [subsequently overturned after public outcry] or Moslem hate speech against Jews on University campuses that would expel anyone who delivered such diatribes against Moslems. But each slowly chips away at our freedoms and represents a small victory for Islamist thought.

I fear that the Liberalism that each of us holds dear—individual freedom of worship, expression, education, entertainment, human rights (in the true sense, not the perverted interpretation foisted on us by some Left-leaning groups)—may disappear, not because of anything that the Islamists do, but what we are doing to ourselves. The first battle in the war against Islamic fundamentalism isn’t with the fascists, it’s with ourselves. And right now, we’re losing.

Ron

Ron Paul, a relatively obscure anti-Iraq war Republican/Libertarian Congressman from Texas, has become the darling of many Left-leaning commentators and writers (e.g., John Nichols in The Nation) as a result of comments he made in last night’s Republican Presidential Candidates Debate (a better term for the event would be “serial Q&A session,” but never mind). Paul restated the Left’s mime that the 9/11 attacks were precipitated by our actions in the ME and by the bad things we’ve done to Islam and the Arabs over the past 30 years. In essence, he argued that it was our behavior that is at fault and that we were responsible for 9/11.

This claim, coming from a Texas Republican, is music to the ears of many on the Left. It validates their contention that if only we would change, Islamofascists would somehow see the light and call off their Jihad against the West.

There is no doubt that Islamists have grievances and that those grievances (whether real and imagined) fuel their outrage and precipitate at least some of their barbaric and murderous behavior.

But I’m confused. How have our past actions fueled the centuries long murderous conflict between Sunni and Shia? How has our “lack of evenhandedness” in dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict caused Fatah and Hamas to kill each other? How have our actions somehow influenced Islamist groups in Thailand to murder Buddhist teachers and school children in the southern part of that country? How have our actions caused Moslem terrorists to murder Hindus in India? What have we done that has caused the Iranian Mullahs and their proxy President to deny the Holocaust? I wonder if Ron Paul has an answer.

There’s an irony in all of this. Those who condemn the Bush administration argue that the President used trumped-up intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. In other words, the administration created a phoney grievance to justify an act of war. For this, the Left believes, Bush should be reviled. I submit that the Moslems use trumped up grievances to justify their war against the Infidel West and that people like Ron Paul and his supporters are the “useful idiots” who provide them with moral cover.

Boys and Girls

Caroline Glick discusses the courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and reports the following recent incidents from the Middle East:

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she [Ayaan Hirsi Ali] battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls.

The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.

On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

Why were these not “front page” stories in the MSM within the USA and Europe? Has Islamofascist barbarism—as evidenced by the purposeful murder of innocent children—become so commonplace that the media are numb to it. Or is it something else?

Would the reporting of these stories undermine the Left’s mime that the Islamofascist threat is overstated (or non-existent), that any criticism of Islam is “phobic,” that Islamofascist actions are all precipitated by us? Would it make the general public think a bit, or maybe rethink their disapproval of an incompetent administration who, at the very least, has had the courage to fight the evil that Glick’s vignettes illustrate?

And where is the public outrage and condemnation from Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch. Could you image what would happen if Israel wired a Palestinian school with high explosives?

And finally, where are the voices of Islam’s moderates? The purposeful slaughter of children crosses the line. It cannot be forgiven. Yet we hear … silence?

In our postmodern world, we’re supposed to believe that one person’s terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. I’m waiting for some postmodern genius to explain to me how killing “little boys and girls” for playing together makes someone a freedom fighter.

UPDATE (5/11/07)

Australia's Daily Telegraph reports that the Hamas-led Palestinian "government" has aired a popular new TV show for small children featuring a Micky Mouse clone who encourages little "Palestinian children to take up arms against Israel and America."

The Daily News revealed this week that Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV station began running the new children's series in April. Called "Tomorrow's Pioneers", it features the life-size clone of Mickey Mouse named "Farfur".

Farfur speaks in a squeaky voice and wears a tuxedo with tails and a red bow tie. He tells youngsters to drink their milk and pray, but also sings about kids arming themselves with AK-47s and striving for world domination "under Islamic leadership".

Teach your children well ...

The Hour is Late

I, like many people who have commented on the GWoT, have often used World War II as a metaphor. Wretchard of the Belmont Club comments (5/04/07, 6:51pm comment) in his inimitable style:

The problem with using World War 2 as a model of warfare is that it was a contest between industrial nations. The conflict today is between two civilizations, of which religion serves as a convenient shorthand. When we say "Muslim" or "Christian" we are using these as proxy identifiers for something even more basic.



The current tools available to the US military and diplomatic establishments cannot come near to touching the roots of the enemy's power. Pakistan alone has 30,000 madrassas with 1.5 million religious students. These provide a steady pool of people committed, not simply to the sharp end of the stick, the phenomenon we call terrorism, but to providing the "tail" to the teeth. We keep slicing off the the sharp end, but like a sharpener gnawing at an endless pencil, there's always more lead to come. The sharpener gets worn out, but the pencil remains.



The argument that the enemy production line can be stopped by merely remaining inoffensive is a dubious one. Israel tried it. Hello Olmert.

At the very minimum, even if one were inclined to be unaggressive, the current world crisis requires the creation of a kind of resistance culture within the West against the the attacking culture for it to survive. Like the Muslim with her hijab the time must come when we all wear our national costumes not simply out of custom, but out of defiance, for example.



It is a mistake to think the war against terrorism will be won in places like Iraq. It will be won in the schools and debating forums of the West long before the intellectual action even begins to shift to places like Pakistan. In a war of ideas, those institutions are the equivalent of the factories which produce victory. In a war of ideas we cannot continue the luxury of mental disarmament while the enemy goes from strength to strength.



The mental rearmament will take a long time. And it is an open question whether we can still come from behind, because we are way behind. But if there is to be any hope we must start now. The hour is desperately late.

Each of us, in our own way, goes to school. The best and brightest among the young attend university classes, were the vast majority are schooled in post-modern thinking and convinced that moral equivalence and our own sins are the cause for the problems we face. The rest of us receive the majority of what we know about the world via the MSM, where the US is taken to task for the smallest failures and infractions while Islamofascists are given a pass when they behead dozens and murder thousands of innocents while the blame (in true through-the-looking-glass fashion) falls on us.

So the madrassas educate millions in hatred, while we educate millions in self-hatred. And we continue along this path with little recognition of what it will bring. Indeed, the hour is desperately late.

A Test

The continuing MSM and political drumbeat about the causes of global warming, precipitated by Al Gore’s documentary, continues with a somewhat more muted tone in recent weeks.

The big question is: How much do you really know about the subject?

To find out, take the Global Warming Test where you’ll pit your knowledge against scientific fact.

I got 9 out of 10 questions correct, and you can bet your life, it wasn’t because I pay much attention to hysterical MSM commentators or clueless politicians. And it certainly wasn’t because I screened An Inconvenient Truth. You can too, if you spend the time to research the real science.

Take the test and also take the time to read the explanations, all backed by scientific references and clear science fact. Hope you get an A.

Kill Them All

An editorial in today’s New York Times reflects the attitude of the majority of the American and European Left and virtually every Democratic candidate for the 2008 Presidency when it states:

One major lesson of the Lebanon experience is that Israel cannot defeat its most dangerous enemies by brute force alone. Its security and survival require a more active diplomacy toward the Palestinians and Syria — and a willingness to take risks. More than ever, Israel needs a government and a leader strong enough to steer it wisely through the uncertain hazards of war and bold enough to test the equally uncertain possibilities for peace.

It appears that the NYT editorial writers (and by extension, all those who agree with them) have forgotten that Israel has exhibited a continuing “willingness to take risks”—recent examples: acceptance of the Oslo accords (now in shambles), unilateral withdrawal from Gaza—only to be faced with continuing, barbaric responses for the "oppressed" Palestinians.

But wait, maybe this is a new day. Maybe the Palestinians appreciate the earnestness of the Left and as soon as the new Democratic President is in office, will move back to the negotiating table.

For example, consider the following speech by Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (a Hamas member), as reported in The Jerusalem Post. This potential negotiating partner ended a vicious anti-Israel, anti-American speech with the following prayer:

Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet, defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.

I’m certain that Nancy and Harry and Barack and Hilary et al would argue that it’s just rhetoric. I have to wonder, though, how they’d respond if a high ranking Israeli official said the same thing, substituting "Palestinians" for "Israelis" as the object of the "kill them all" reference. There would be worldwide condemnation, wouldn't there? Strange that we hear none from the MSM, the candidates, the Euros ... nobody.

But, oh, never mind, we haven’t even begun to negotiate, appease, and take risks, have we?