A Measure Of Fear

See: Refusal of bus ads came on fear of attacks

Law-enforcement officials warned King County Executive Dow Constantine that a bus ad alleging Israeli war crimes — and two ads in response accusing Palestinians of the same — could lead to attacks on buses and passengers, according to documents filed Monday in federal court.

After being advised that news about the ad controversy had been posted on a website associated with the Palestinian Hamas movement, Constantine said, he was concerned the ad would increase the risk of a terrorist attack.

Attacks from whom?

Who do they worry would attack buses in Seattle with rocks and bricks or worse?

Egypt on the brink

See: Egypt president's son, family flee to Britain

If this is true, if Hosni Mubarak's son, the man that was being groomed to be the next leader of Egypt has fled the country, then revolution is at hand.

This could end up being another Iran or another Lebanon. Either way, it is bad for Egypt, bad for the West and bad for Israel.

The world is getting more dangerous.

Much more dangerous.

[Additional - 02:46]

See: REPORT: Egypt President Mubarak's Family Flees for UK

Fenway_Nation has a very good post on this topic. Take a look.

Hosni Mubarak And The End Of Peace In The Middle-East

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is not a nice man. Egypt owes him much. The world owes him much. And all the same, he is not a nice man.

Advancing in age, and reported to be suffering from terminal cancer, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will soon be unbound from this mortal coil. His long, difficult, and sometimes extremely unpleasant leadership of the people of Egypt will soon come to a close.

From those days long ago, immediately following the assassination of Anwar Sadatt, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has kept Egypt a relatively sane Muslim nation.

Egypt's peace with Israel, while strained and at times uncomfortable, has held.

How long will this peace last after Mubarak passes?

Would you give it days, weeks, months or optimistically, years?

When Mubarak leaves this world, the peace that we have enjoyed in the middle east, what little peace there was, may come to seem a golden age long past.

Pray for Egypt.

Pray for Israel.

Pray for all of us.

Three Must Read Essays

Start with Lee Smith's Hollow Men.

Next read Yoram Hazony's Israel Through European Eyes.

Follow that up with Daniel Gordis' The Tower of Babel and the Birth of Nationhood.

The three tie together.

There is a big picture truth in these three.

Israel is the fulcrum of the world. In these three essays, there is a glimpse of the lever that moves nations and shapes our future.

ht: Kosh's Shadow and Spin Strangeness & Charm - twitter link.

Singling Out Israel

Two paragraphs that tell the tale.

From: Israel rejects call to join anti-nuclear treaty

Early in the article:

All 189 parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the United States, called on Friday in a declaration that singled out Israel for a conference in 2012 to discuss banning weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

Later in the article, the following is admitted:

Iran was not mentioned in the NPT declaration.

Significant.

Would a Republican Adminstration have participated in this farce? Something to think about when you vote.

Israel, Existential Threats And The Loss Of American Support

See: Mood Is Dark as Israel Marks 62nd Year as a Nation

“There is a confluence of two very worrying events,” said Michael Freund, a rightist columnist for The Jerusalem Post in a telephone interview. “One is the Iranian threat, an existential threat. Add to that the fact that for the first time in recent memory there is a president in the White House who is not overly sensitive to the Jewish state and its interests. You put the two together and it will affect anyone’s mood, even an optimist like me.”

Obama's and the American Left's failure to be supportive of Israel will have serious repercussions. Serious meaning war and bloodshed.

The Islamic nations that surround Israel had been largely reluctant to attack Israel because of the support that Israel received from the US. That support is now tepid at best.

Syria's recent gift of SCUD missiles to Hizb'Allah is an indicator of what the future holds in store for Israel. Hizb'Allah will have these weapons of terror at their disposal. Can the same Hizb'Allah that has already fired thousands of rockets into Israel resist the temptation to likewise launch their SCUDS into Israel? If so, for how long? Would you hazard a guess at one month or two? One year or two? Can you even imagine that Hizb'Allah will sit on their SCUDS and not fire them?

When war comes to Israel, what will Obama do? With whom will have the most sympathy? If Obama sides with Israel's enemies, what will you do?

We will have to prepare ourselves for that test.

Hizb'Allah, Syria And The Forces Of War.

This may be a hot summer in the middle east.

See: Israel warns Syria over Hezbollah attacks

Israel has delivered a secret warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad that it will respond to missile attacks from Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese-based Islamist group, by launching immediate retaliation against Syria itself.

If Syria delivered SCUD Missiles to Hizb'Allah in Lebanon as reports in the media indicate, then we may be looking at a summer war, with Israel going up against Hizb'Allah in Lebanon and the Syrian Government itself.

Peace between Israel and its neighbors now hinges on the restraint of Hizb'Allah. Can Hizb'Allah sit there with their new SCUDs and not fire them into Israel?

What will Obama do when the shooting starts? Who will he support? Who will he condemn?

Investing The Souls Of Children In A Deep Evil

One of the worst things about evil is that all too often, those that are the principle actors of evil, believe that they are doing a good thing with the best of intentions.

Take for example the teachers that had their students send letters to the Israeli Ambassador to Spain in Madid that asked "Mr. Ambassador, how many Palestinians did you murder today?"

See: Israel Demands Explanation from Spain on Letters

This is a deep evil that has been done to these children. It invests them personally in the hatred by making them participants.

Everyone wants to believe that they are good. They also want to believe that the people that they love and respect are good. Now that these children have participated in this, they will have to confront their participation in something that is not good. A thing that they have been persuaded to participate in by people that they love, trust and respect.

The personal struggle that they will have to confront will be too much for many if not most of them. "How" they will reason "can people that I trust and respect goad me into evil? If they are good and deserving of my respect and my love, then what they have made me do must not be evil."

The teachers and others involved in this project surely believed that what they were doing was right and good.

What these teachers have done was a deep evil.

Who can repair the damage done to these children?

Hat Tips Weasel Zippers,
RealWest & Kosh of C2

Gelb on Islam

There is an important article posted up at The Daily Beast by Leslie H. Gelb . The Daily Beast is notably left of center so the publication of Gelb's article there is all the more notable.

Of the terrorist killings and maimings that have taken place over the last three years, over 90 percent have been Muslim on Muslim, Shiite on Sunni, Sunni on Sunni, or Shiite on Shiite, with rare exceptions. Most of these slaughters have religious, cultural, and historical causes. But wherever the fanatics lodge themselves firmly in power, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, they will try to practice the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. Their rule is the end of hope for women, the end of freedom for all, except themselves—and the institutionalization of corruption and cruelty, which they rationalize with their interpretation of the Koran. They’ve tried to impose totalitarianism in Iran, but haven’t succeeded so far—because the Iranian people have fought back. And if you listen to the fanatics’ rhetoric, they plan to move on to the rest of the world and apply the same principles. They are Muslim fanatics. The culprits are not Hasidic Jews running amok around the world or Tea-baggers bent on replanting Christianity among the heathen.

I think that Gelb still has a few misconceptions about Islam to work through, but he is looking at the problem of Islam with more thought than is usually found on the political left. For that he deserves our respect.

Gelb correctly takes American Political leaders on both the left and the right to task for their counterproductive avoidance of specifically identifying Muslims or Islam as the source of most terror attacks in the present world. He correctly blames "Political Correctness" for their failure to speak honestly about the problem.

Go to the link.

Read the whole article.

Marty Peretz: Obama Was Taken For A Ride.

Marty Peretz discusses the Obama and Clinton failure with Russia.

And, no, Obama hasn’t reset the American relationship with Russia. He was taken for a ride. Maybe his vanity won’t let him admit it. But, believe me, the Russians know they have taken him (and us) for a big ride, indeed.

Here are the facts:

After Obama agreed to cancel the missile defense program for Poland and the Czech Republic, the president got Moscow to give him an inch. Maybe, they said, we’d have to move on tougher measures against Iran if Tehran doesn’t satisfy us on its nukes. “Hallelujah!” said the president and his entourage.

All of this good cheer is now over. Lavrov greeted Clinton in Moscow with the bad news: “At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process. ... Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.”

Just before Hillary arrived in Moscow, she warned that America was impatient. With whom? With the Iranians, of course. But her impatience with Tehran will be useless unless we get impatient with Russia.

“We did not ask for anything today,” she said. “We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails.”

Of course, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. In fact, with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero.

The world is less safe now that Obama is President.

'Israel will attack Iran after December'

War is coming.

Israel is planning to carry out military attacks in Iran after December, a French magazine reported Thursday overnight.

According to a report in Le canard enchainé quoted by Israel Radio, Jerusalem has already ordered from a French food manufacturer high-quality combat rations for soldiers serving in elite units and also asked reservists of these units staying abroad to return to Israel.

The magazine reports further that in a recent visit to France, IDF Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told his French counterpart Jean-Louis Georgelin that Israel is not planning to bomb Iran, but may send elite troops to conduct activities on the ground there.

These, according to the magazine, may involve sabotage to nuclear facilities as well as assassinations of top Iranian nuclear scientists

The Obama Administration has brought nothing to this but weakness and confusion.

Russia shut down the attempt to bring sanctions against Iran. Hilary Clinton was handed her hat in Moscow. She got nothing.

Prepare for a rough New Years.


Hat tip to Killian Bundy over at the Correspondence Committee.

Russia Roars, Washington Whimpers

Sanctions against Iran? Forgetabaoutit!

This is a staggering defeat for the Obama administration. Putin and Medvedev are eating Obama's and Clinton's lunch.

Russia now sets the agenda. Washington only reacts.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday warned major powers against intimidating Iran and said that talk of sanctions against the Islamic Republic was "premature".

"There is no need to frighten the Iranians," Putin told reporters in Beijing.

"We need to look for a compromise. If a compromise is not found, and the discussions end in a fiasco, then we will see," he said, adding that talks of sanctions was "premature" at present.

So how about that?

Vladimir Putin is not about peace. He is about Hegemony. By playing Iran against the West and setting himself up as Iran's protector, Putin secures Russian dominance in the European political sphere. The result? - No defense systems for Eastern Europe, no hope for a free Georgia, the Ukraine is screwed and even better, oil prices will go up.

Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton are so outclassed . . .

How is that Nobel Peace Prize working for you there Obama?