Anti-Americans in Our Midst

This photo, from This Ain't Hell, shows protesters in Washington, D.C., marching at a rally sponsored by INTERNATIONAL Answer. That's a Hamas flag in the middle. A pro-Palestinian activist attacked a counter-demonstrator at the event.

These people are neo-Stalinists allied with militant Islam to destroy the West. There's no other way to put it. Folks on the left are mounting deathly moral equivalence. They place the onus on Israel and are more than willing to condone, even encourage, the deaths of Palestinian civilians if that brings international condemnation on the Jewish state. I've written about this many times, so folks know where I stand, and you can be sure I'll continue to bring updates. Meanwhile, Scott at Powerline has a great piece up, "America's Fifth Column":

The United States obviously has a substantial number of citizens and residents who support America's Islamist enemies. Many of them are to be found on the leftover left, which has embraced a weird alliance with radical Islam.

Many of them are to be found among Arab and Muslim immigrants who identify with our enemies. Among these some are to be found within the Arab/Muslim "civil rights" and charitable front groups such as the late Holy Land Foundation, CAIR, and other of the unindicted co-conspirators in the criminal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation. The flow of immigrants who identify with America's enemies should have been stopped in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

When the Fort Dix Five were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers, CAIR and the American Muslim Union attacked the jury's verdict. "Many people in the Muslim community will see this as a case of entrapment," the executive director of CAIR's New Jersey chapter told the local media. The president of the American Muslim Union also questioned the jury's decision. He asserted that the defendants didn't "actually mean to do anything." According to him, "they were acting stupid, like they thought the whole thing was a joke."

As I wrote in "Coming clean about CAIR," CAIR is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that was founded as a Hamas front group. Bill Roggio points out that four current and former senior leaders of the American Muslim Union were associated with a mosque established by the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation was of course the American fundraising arm of Hamas.

Israel's offensive against Hamas has naturally brought some of these folks out into the streets. CAIR and other Islamist groups have been organizing public expressions of support for Hamas and condemnation of Israel in the United States. We noted one such demonstration led by CAIR in Minneapolis earlier this week. Now Phyllis Chesler has compiled an account of other such demonstrations supporting Hamas elsewhere around the United States.

Check the link for the video at Powerline.

Supporting Obama (Grudgingly) is About America Winning

Dan Nexon just about flipped his lid when I wrote my election night (meltdown) post on Barack Obama's eminently dishonest victory on November 4th. Since then I've repeatedly stated that while I couldn't disagree more with Barack Obama and the far-left agenda that he represents (or that'll he'll implement via his cabinet appointees and his extreme left legislative agenda), I will nevertheless support Barack Obama as my president AND in time of emergency I would not hesitate to serve my country while a Democratic administration resides in Washington.

A lot of conservatives aren't going to accept Obama under any circumstances, considering his surreptitious campaign, his history of radical training, ideology, and activism, and the media and popular personality cult that's metastasized around him. Having said all this, I have to agree with Nikki's post on the need to support the Democratic administration come January 20th:

I WANT MY COUNTRY TO SUCCEED, under this administration and any other. Its not about my party being in power or my agenda winning, its about America winning. Strange concept isn't it? Americans winning regardless of who is in power. A President is not like your favorite sports team. You should never cheer for the failure of any sitting President as you have done with this one. I am officially the opposite of a democrat ... objective and fair. I will not rip for the sake of ripping. I will give honest and well-researched opinion even if it means I am a RINO to my cohorts. Few are the courageous who speak without caring what their own colleagues will think and dems are squeamish little pansies when it comes to truth. The opposite of policy will not be mine. My opinions are not written to win friends and influence people. Its what I think ... you can tell me where I am wrong, which I rarely am ... HA! So take it up the shoot like a colonoscopy dems, you are now accountable. I hope you can take the heat, at least my heat will be honest and not out of derangement. MWAH!

I know a lot of my readers cringe at the thought of supporting this administration (and I can think of a few who are "not so courageous"), but Nikki's right: We will support the government of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, even if for all intents and purposes we'll have a facsimile of such at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

God bless this country, now and for eternity.

Death of Nizar Rayan Marks Return of Targeted Killings

The Israel missile strike that killed senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan may signal the state's return to a policy of targeted killings, the Los Angeles Times reports:

An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed a major Hamas political and military leader Thursday, and most of his family, as the militant group continued to launch rockets deep into Israeli territory.

The dueling strikes came amid rising international calls for an end to the bloodshed, which has killed at least 418 Palestinians and four Israelis.

The attack on Nizar Rayan, confirmed by Israeli officials, family members and Hamas, may signal a shift in Israeli tactics as the assault on Gaza enters its sixth day. After nearly a week of pounding police stations, security compounds, rocket-launching cells and cross-border tunnels, the Jewish state could be reviving its practice of assassinating Hamas leaders.

Rayan, 49, is the most senior Hamas official killed since the movement's co-founders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantisi died in Israeli airstrikes less than a month apart in 2004, said a senior Hamas official speaking on condition of anonymity.

An Islamic scholar and university instructor, Rayan was a force in both the political and military wings of Hamas. The hulking, bearded imam was a hard-line theologian and military commander.

"This is a difficult hit for Hamas. Even they admit it," said Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman. Leibovich declined to comment on whether the strike on Rayan represented a formal return of the assassination policy.

The battle-hardened militant group has proved adept at replacing leaders, calling into question the effectiveness of the tactic. After the killings of Yassin and Rantisi, Hamas regrouped stronger than ever around a new command structure based in both Gaza and Damascus, Syria.

In January 2006, it won Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating its bitter rival, the U.S.-backed Fatah faction. When a brief Fatah-Hamas unity government collapsed in summer 2007, Hamas fighters routed better-equipped Fatah forces in Gaza in four days and have controlled the territory since.

Despite Hamas' demonstrated adaptability, Rayan's death is a clear loss on multiple levels.

He was uniquely popular and respected among the military wing; unlike most of the movement's civilian leadership, Rayan fought alongside troops in battles with Israeli soldiers and tanks.

He advocated suicide bombings, and his own son, 22, died in such an attack on an Israeli settlement.

Although most senior Hamas leaders went into hiding when the Israeli air barrages began, Rayan made a point of living openly in his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp. He encouraged other leaders to follow suit.

"He refused to leave his house; he preferred to be a martyr," the Hamas official said.

Thirteen members of Rayan's family, including all four of his wives, were also killed in the strike, his teenage son Baraa told The Times.

Two more children are missing and presumed buried under the rubble of their family home.

See also Brietbart's item, "On Eve of His Death, Hamas Leader in Gaza Predicted Victory," via Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: "Nizar Rayan, center, was killed at his home in Jabaliya, along with his four wives and other family members. The Gaza professor advocated suicide attacks against Israel. (Sept. 15, 2007 photo)," Los Angeles Times.

Richard Falk and the Left's Construction of Gaza

Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international relations at Princeton and a hard-left anti-American and anti-Israel peace activist. I vaguely remember reading some of Falk's research during my graduate school training. What sticks out about him in my memory is that he was never a major thinker and his work was always at the margins of mainstream discourses driving important paradigmatic debates in the field.

In any case, I mention this as a preface to Falk's essay at Huffington Post, "Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe":

For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot. During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle.

Israel also refused exit permits to students with foreign fellowship awards and to Gazan journalists and respected NGO representatives. At the same time, it made it increasingly difficult for journalists to enter, and I was myself expelled from Israel a couple of weeks ago when I tried to enter to carry out my UN job of monitoring respect for human rights in occupied Palestine, that is, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza. Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months.

As always in relation to the underlying conflict, some facts bearing on this latest crisis are murky and contested, although the American public in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly pro-Israeli media lens. Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased incidence of rocket attacks. But the reality is more clouded. There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom. Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort to do so.

All of this is pure propaganda. I have no need to rebut the points any further, but the part about "no substantial rocket fire" would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Readers should visit Gateway Pundit to get a bit of "substantial" reality about what's really happening in the Middle East.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Bill Ayers' "Mind-Blowing" Idiocy

Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers has a post up at Huffington Post lamenting the missed opportunity of appointing Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education in an Obama administration.

Just reading the post gives one an idea of what the U.S. would be like if the "progressive" left were to gain majoritarian power in U.S. politics:

I would have picked Darling-Hammond, but then again I would have picked Noam Chomsky for state, Naomi Klein for defense, Bernardine Dohrn for Attorney General, Bill Fletcher for commerce, James Thindwa for labor, Barbara Ransby for human services, Paul Krugman for treasury, and Amy Goodman for press secretary. So what do I know?

Now that's a progressive cabinet, a true anti-American nihilist dream team! Of course, this is also the nightmare conservatives hoped to prevent by defeating the shady Chicago socialist at the polls. It's a good thing that "The One" had enough sense to foresee immediate repudiation in the Senate in the event that such a cabinet be appointed.

But Ayers continues with the progressive left's education agenda in the years ahead:

In the realm of education, there is nothing preventing any of us from pressing to change the dominant discourse that has controlled the discussion for many years. It's reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how? Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don't differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, and that is a belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it's based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions---Who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed? --- and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Democratic educators focus their efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy should be characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing - always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal?
Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There's no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating "educational debt," the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers. So let's push for that, and let's make it happen before Arne Duncan or anyone else grants us permission [emphasis added].

As someone who's actually in the trenches with inner-city kids, a majority of whom can barely read, it's really is breathtaking to read this.

Keep in mind, of course, that when Fox News approached Ayers in October asking for an on-camera apology for his past terrorist acts, this "mind-blowing" champion of "anti-imperialist free thinking " called the cops to protect him from the free press, the key institution of open societies which we might call one of the "hallmarks of a truly democratic society."

The kids in this country really need to go to school if they fall for this guy's baloney.

Mainstream Democrats Love Obama, Netroots on the Outs

Glenn Greenwald is up in arms again this morning. He's cherry-picking Rasmussen's poll findings on Israel-Gaza, which hold that the public's "divided" over Israel's Gaza attacks. Actually, folks aren't all that divided when you break down the findings, and note this statistic on what political scientists call "attentive publics" (folks who pay attention to news and public affairs):

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of those who say they are following news out of Gaza Very Closely support Israel's military action, while 30% favor diplomacy.

Greenwald's constant meme is how members of both parties completely disregard public opinion in order to shill for Israel.

The guy's a joke, frankly, and it's interesting that today's Gallup's tracking poll on Barack Obama finds near-unanimous support among mainstream Democrats (called "liberals" at the article), while roughly 7 percent of those on the left are apparently unhappy with the direction Obama has taken during the presidential transition:

Gallup Poll Daily tracking finds support for Barack Obama among liberal Democrats holding steady at 93% despite news reports that his core supporters are disappointed with some of his cabinet appointments and other decisions. Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Obama's ratings have improved among conservative Republicans, up from 23% to 29%.

More than 9 in 10 liberal Democrats have expressed confidence that Obama will make a good president since Gallup began tracking these opinions after the election last November. Moderate and conservative Democrats show nearly as high levels of confidence.

Obama's recent decision to have conservative preacher Rick Warren deliver the invocation at the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration and his choices of Republicans Robert Gates and Ray LaHood for cabinet positions have been controversial among members of the political left. Additionally, women's groups have been reported as expressing disappointment that Obama has not selected more women for cabinet-level positions in his administration. But these decisions apparently have not shaken liberal Democrats' confidence in Obama to any perceptible degree, according to aggregated data of thousands of Gallup Poll daily interviews from the immediate post-election period (Nov. 5-30), early December (Dec. 1-17) after he announced many of his cabinet choices, and in recent days (Dec. 18-28) after announcing Warren's role in the inauguration, arguably his most controversial action to date.

The number in the table at the poll for "liberal Democrats" and Obama's "favorable" ratings is 96 percent. It's the nihilist leftists who are most upset about things like Rick Warren and the lack of "diversity" in the cabinet. I'd be surprised if they actually made up the four percent or so who aren't in that figure, although keep in mind that the hard-left forces are extremely vocal and overrepresented on liberal media outlets. They thus make up for their small overall numbers with their outsized personalities and demands, while being enabled by the fawning media attention of a prostrate media cabal.

Notice, by the way, the numbers of "moderate" and "conservative" Republicans who are giving Obama the benefit of the doubt ("a slim majority of moderate and liberal Republicans, 51%, say they are confident Obama will be a good president"). Maybe Obama's "centrism" is paying off with a pre-inaugural bipartisan honeymoon?

The Crash of 2008 and the Decline of the West?

Roger Altman, at Foreign Affairs, argues that the collapse of the American economy in 2008 will accelerate the decline of the United States and Europe as the leading actors in the international balance of power. I'm always skeptical of the decline thesis. In Altman's case he makes dramatic claims of America's lost hegemony, then concludes the article with a number of points that weaken his arguments. In particular, Altman makes emphatic claims that China is now the main beneficiary of U.S. economic woes, and that Beijing - with trillions of dollars in surplus reserves - will be the next global "lender of last resort." Yet then he proposes strengthening U.S.-dominated world financial institutions like the IMF, which were American creations at the end of World War II. He also concedes at the conclusion of the article that the U.S. "will remain the most powerful nation on earth for a while longer." Such an initial dramatic case for American decline and inevitable international systemic change ends up having as much firepower as a pop-gun.

I've written on this topic plenty of times (see the discussion of Robert Lieber's counter-thesis, in "Resurgent Declinism in International Relations). Still, Altman's essay does include a penetrating explanation for the collapse of financial markets in 2008. So, considering my post yesterday, I'll leave readers with that:

Conventional wisdom attributes the crisis to the collapse of housing prices and the subprime mortgage market in the United States. This is not correct; these were themselves the consequence of another problem. The crisis' underlying cause was the (invariably lethal) combination of very low interest rates and unprecedented levels of liquidity. The low interest rates reflected the U.S. government's overly accommodating monetary policy after 9/11. (The U.S. Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate to nearly one percent in late 2001 and maintained it near that very low level for three years.) The liquidity reflected, among other factors, what Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has called "the global savings glut": the enormous financial surpluses realized by certain countries, particularly China, Singapore, and the oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf. Until the mid-1990s, most emerging economies ran balance-of-payments deficits as they imported capital to finance their growth. But the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, among other things, changed this in much of Asia. After that, surpluses grew throughout the region and then were consistently recycled back to the West in the form of portfolio investments.

Facing low yields, this mountain of liquidity naturally sought higher ones. One basic law of finance is that yields on loans are inversely proportional to credit quality: the stronger the borrower, the lower the yield, and vice versa. Huge amounts of capital thus flowed into the subprime mortgage sector and toward weak borrowers of all types in the United States, in Europe, and, to a lesser extent, around the world. For example, the annual volume of U.S. subprime and other securitized mortgages rose from a long-term average of approximately $100 billion to over $600 billion in 2005 and 2006. As with all financial bubbles, the lessons of history, including about long-term default rates on such poor credits, were ignored.

This flood of mortgage money caused residential and commercial real estate prices to rise at unprecedented rates. Whereas the average U.S. home had appreciated at 1.4 percent annually over the 30 years before 2000, the appreciation rate roared forward at 7.6 percent annually from 2000 through mid-2006. From mid-2005 to mid-2006, amid rampant speculation in the housing market, it was 11 percent.

But like most spikes in commodity prices, this one eventually reversed itself -- and with a vengeance. Housing prices have been falling sharply for over two years, and so far there is no sign that they will bottom out. Futures markets are signaling that, from peak to trough, the drop in the value of the nation's housing stock could reach 30-35 percent. This would be an astonishing fall for a pool of assets once valued at $13 trillion.

This collapse in housing prices undermined the value of the multitrillion-dollar pool of lower-value mortgages that had been created over the 2003-6 period. In addition, countless subprime mortgages that were structured to be artificially cheap at the outset began to convert to more expensive terms. Innumerable borrowers could not afford the adjusted terms, and delinquencies became more frequent. Losses on these loans began to emerge in mid-2007 and quickly grew to staggering levels. And with prices in real estate and other asset values still dropping, the value of these loans is continuing to deteriorate. The larger financial institutions are reporting continuous losses. They mark down the value of a loan or similar asset in one quarter, only to mark it down again in the next. This self-reinforcing downward cycle has caused markets to plunge across the globe.

The damage is most visible at the household level. Americans have lost one-quarter of their net worth in just a year and a half, since June 30, 2007, and the trend continues. Americans' largest single asset is the equity in their homes. Total home equity in the United States, which was valued at $13 trillion at its peak in 2006, had dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and was still falling in late 2008. Total retirement assets, Americans' second-largest household asset, dropped by 22 percent, from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008. During the same period, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion and pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. Taken together, these losses total a staggering $8.3 trillion.

Such large and sudden hits have shocked U.S. families. And because these have occurred amid headlines reporting failing financial institutions and huge bailouts, Americans' fears over the safety and accessibility of their deposits are now more pervasive than they have been since 1933. This is why Americans withdrew $150 billion from money-market funds over a two-day period in September (average weekly outflows are just $5 billion). It is also why the Federal Reserve established a special $540 billion facility to help these funds meet continuing redemptions.

There's more at the link.

Peace in the Middle East?

The debate on Israel's Gaza campaign continues this morning with Charles Krauthammer's excellent piece at the Washington Post, "Moral Clarity in Gaza." Carl in Jerusalem responds with "Krauthammer on Moral Clarity," adding this:

Krauthammer succinctly states the moral clarity that emerges from examining Israel's conduct of the current war in Gaza and comparing it to the conduct of the 'Palestinians' ....

Krauthammer goes on to state the obvious: Israel wants peace. Hamas wants perpetual war. He's right about that.But Krauthammer wrongly describes the mistake Israel committed three years ago by leaving Gaza, and because of that, he risks encouraging decision makers in Jerusalem and Washington to make the same mistake again.

Israel's only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence - the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.

That's nonsense. Israel should never have withdrawn from Gaza in the first place. Every security assessment - without exception - in the summer of 2005 said that once Israel withdrew from Gaza, the rocket fire on Israel's Negev would increase. You see, the 'Palestinians' started firing rockets on the Negev from Gaza when they started the Oslo War in 2000. And they have never stopped.

Thursday night, Charles Johnson presented a couple of graphs of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza into the Negev and noted the sharp increase in those rockets since Hamas threw out Fatah in the summer of 2007. But not all of those rockets and mortar shells in 2007 were fired after Fatah was thrown out. And there were actually more rockets fired in 2006 - the year after Israel left Gaza when Fatah was nominally in control - than there were in 2007.

Israel's mistake was leaving Gaza in the first place. Once Israel left, it could not enforce a no-tolerance policy on 'Palestinian' rockets and mortars. The launchers are too mobile. The terrorists - as Krauthammer notes - hide among the civilians and are more than happy to take them along to the 72 virgins. The only reason that Israel doesn't also have rockets and mortars raining down on the center of the country is that when the IDF went into Judea and Samaria's cities during 2002's Operation Defensive Shield, it stayed there. That's the lesson that should have been learned long before the expulsion from Gaza.

Krauthammer - like all of us - wants a 'sustainable and enduring cease fire.' Without IDF troops stationed in Gaza, that won't happen. Because it's not just Hamas that wants a perpetual war against Israel until the Jewish state no longer exists. It's the entire Arab and Muslim world.

I'm inclined to think that perpetual war is the most likely future prospects for Israel and the Middle East, although I'm intrigued by the history of diplomacy in the region. Egypt and Israel have been at peace since 1978. Jordan joined the coalitions of Arab states fighting the Jewish state, but has been a partner for peace since 1994.

Last night I read Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's review of recent books on the peace process at the New York Review. The authors are partisan, and unfair to the Bush administration's Middle East diplomacy, and the New York Review is leftist. Nevertheless, some of the conclusions are interesting and worth consideration:

In Israel, endemic governmental weakness and instability and deepening social fragmentation, combined with the spoiling capacity of small yet increasingly powerful settler constituencies, call into question the state's ability to achieve, let alone carry out, an agreement that would entail the uprooting of tens of thousands of West Bank settlers. The generation of Israeli founding fathers, perhaps, might have succeeded in carrying off such a withdrawal, though it says something that even they didn't try. Their successors, more factional chiefs than national leaders, are not so well equipped.

The graver problem today is on the Palestinian side. If one strips away the institutional veneer—Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, various secular political groupings, the Palestinian Authority—what is left is largely empty shells with neither an agreed-upon program nor recognized leadership. The national movement, once embodied by Fatah and Arafat, is adrift. From its vestiges, the Islamist movement Hamas has flourished and, amid the flurry of negotiations between Abbas and Olmert over a putative albeit wholly theoretical deal, it cannot have escaped notice that the more practical and meaningful negotiations have been between Israel and Hamas—over a cease-fire, for example. Still, the Islamist movement cannot, any more than Fatah, claim to represent the Palestinian people or to be empowered to negotiate on their behalf. The rift between the two organizations, most visibly manifested in the increasingly deep split between the West Bank and Gaza, makes a two-state solution harder to achieve. Israel long complained it had no Palestinian partner and, at the outset, the complaint had the feel of a pretext. Increasingly, it has the ring of truth.

Among Palestinians, moreover, the prize of statehood is losing its luster. The two-state solution today matters most to those who matter least, the political and economic elite whose positions, attained thanks to the malpractices of the Palestinian Authority, would be enhanced by acquiring a state. To many others, the dividends of such a solution—a state in Gaza and much of the West Bank—risk being outweighed by the sacrifices: forsaking any self-defense capacity, tolerating Israeli security intrusion, renouncing the refugees' right of return, and compromising on Jerusalem.

Arafat embraced the two-state solution and sold it to his people. It took him fifteen years—from 1973 to 1988—to turn it from an act of betrayal and high treason to what most of his people saw as the culmination of the Palestinian national movement. He did so with a militancy his successors lack and which seemed to both defy and negate the concessions such a solution entailed. He exhibited perpetual defiance, which was one of the many reasons why the US and Israel distrusted him even in the best of times, and why Palestinians continued to be drawn to him even at the worst of them. With his passing, it is hard to see who among his heirs can acquiesce in the necessary compromises and still pull off a solution.

When word recently leaked of a deal purportedly proposed by Olmert to Abbas in their one-on-one negotiations, the world got a glimpse of how little Israelis and Palestinians have begun to care. The proposal—a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with one-to-one territorial exchanges; a limited number of refugees coming into Israel; a Palestinian capital comprising the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; a special regime for the holy sites—was not ideal for either side. It was probably better for Palestinians than what was suggested at Camp David; arguably better for Israelis than what has been mooted in a series of unofficial agreements over the ensuing eight years. In earlier days such a plan would have generated immense interest and large political waves. It provoked neither. Familiarity has bred indifference. The two-state solution, it turns out, is endangered, not rescued, by being endlessly discussed.

Such changes in Israeli and Palestinian realities have taken place against the backdrop of deep alterations in the regional balance of power. Where traditional US allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia once set both the agenda and tone of Middle East diplomacy, they appear worn out and bereft of a cause other than preventing their own decline. Their energy seems to have been sapped and their regional authority diminished. On issue after issue—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Israel-Palestine—they have proved passive or, when active, feckless, unable to influence events or buttress their allies. Their close ties to Washington damage their credibility without being of much help to the US.

They are progressively upstaged by more dynamic players: those leading the charge against America's allies—Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas—and those—Qatar and Turkey—seeking to mediate between the two. All these developments challenge a US strategy that relies exclusively on so-called "moderate" Arab states and leaders, which are losing steam, in order to counter "radical" Islamist states and movements, which are gaining it.

The image of President Obama unveiling his vision of an Israeli–Palestinian settlement to overjoyed Arab leaders and universal endorsement may not, under the circumstances, be quite so alluring. A peace plan that has grown tedious by virtue of repetition is unlikely to generate popular enthusiasm; its backing by fading Arab leaders is unlikely to give it a boost.

The new president enjoys an enormous, perhaps unprecedented reservoir of regional goodwill. Yet it is goodwill based on hope that Obama can break from past American conduct and style, not reinforce them. The surest way to diminish Obama's appeal to the region would be for him to present a plan with no real future in the company of leaders burdened by their past.

There's more at the link, and I'll have more in upcoming essays.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

American Power in 2009

Courtney, my young blogging buddy at GSGF, asked if I was going to write a New Year's post. Well, yes, and I might as well get around to it before the Rose Bowl starts. Otherwise, I'll be online all afternoon, and I want to leave this one on top until tomorrow.

I'm not one for resolutions. I need to lose some weight, and I'm going to work on that, primarily by blogging less and hiking more. My main concern for myself and my family this year, frankly, is economic. No big worries, actually. My job is fine, and my college so far has pledged not to lay off faculty. My wife's also very happy in her new position as an assistant store manager at a major retail outlet in the region. My kids are doing fine, although I do pledge to work harder at helping my youngest son with his learning. He's about a year behind where he should be in school and we're working with doctors and the school staff to pin down the challenges and move forward. No, my biggest worry is the housing market. I'm going to need to refinance at the end of this year. The loan's an adjustable, one of the easier ones to get a few years back when the market was still booming. We have a new home. My neighborhood's development was completed in 2005, and we moved in our current location in early 2006. I haven't checked the papers or talked with neighbors, but I'm pretty sure homes in our neighborhood are selling for about $100 to $150 thousand less than their selling prices, and that might be an underestimate. I'm guessing my mortgage is flat on equity or underwater. Lenders have pulled back, and who knows what things'll be like when they ask for that appraisal? I don't like to think about it because I get anxiety attacks. I will deal with it at the appropriate time. It's not an emergency or anything. But when the loan payments balloon I don't know if we'll afford them and we'll be deciding what to do at that time, although I'm confident that God's goodness will help me though any difficulties. One reason I don't blog about the housing market that much is because I'm in the thick of the difficulties and I wish some things had turned out differently.

So, with that, let me turn to what I want to do this year with my blog, American Power. I thought about doing some big roundup of favorite blogs or favorite blog posts I'd written in 2008. Either way something like that was going to take a lot of work. Just as I was thinking about it, I came across this awesome post at "This Ain't Hell, But You Can See it From Here." Jonn Lilyea, the author, makes a number of insightful observations about blogging, and I especially liked this passage on personal hopes for readership, and the phenomenal community-building that blogging's all about:

We’ve been lucky with traffic, because some of the finest bloggers on the web have cut us a break and sent traffic our way with little prodding. And I’ve got a lot of great readers and commenters who’ve been loyal for months now.

It always amazes me when I’m cruising the internet looking for stuff to write about, I’ll come upon a blog that I’ve never heard of and I’ll see This Ain’t Hell tucked in among some of the big names in the blog roll. It’s so gratifying.

I used to link to every blog that linked to us, but it’s impossible to keep up with everyone these days, but I’ve never turned down anyone who asked for a link - which is obvious by the length of my blogroll. I also used to read every blog in the blog roll everyday - that has become impossible, too. But I do my best to keep up.

If you check the post you'll find one of the most extensive roundups of appreciations and kudos available. I left a comment and admitted that this was the New Year's post I was hoping to write. It's a real beauty.

I too have too many bloggers whom I admire and appreciate. Some of them are professionals or top conserservatives in the right-blogosphere. Jonn at This Ain't Hell has another neat bit that's relevant:

I tried so long to get a link from Blackfive and finally scored on National Airborne Day. Since then I’ve tossed brews back with Matt and Uncle Jimbo and met Laughing Wolf at a barbeque.

What's great about the post is it's humility. I think most serious bloggers - folks who write well and wish to see their essays gain wider exposure - also hope to be seen and linked by some of the top bloggers on the web. Jonn notes also that he finally got a link from Hot Air, for example, and that had to be cool.

I've also been lucky at American Power. I can't name all the top bloggers who have thrown me a link, and I've had quite a few, thankfully. Probably the most generous is Jeff and his co-bloggers at Protein Wisdom. Those guys write well, especially Jeff, and they send a lot of traffic. Tom McGuire linked once and I was astounded at the guy's traffic. People were clicking that link for days. The Other McCain's a generous linker, and last week he sent a lot of traffic my way when his post got picked up at Instapundit (not quite an "Instalanche" on my side, but cool anyway). There may be a few other great bloggers who've sent readers may way who I'm omitting (Tigerhawk sent me a lot of traffic over Thanksgiving weekend, now that I think about it). It's the ones who haven't that confound me. For the life of me, Jules Crittenden, who's always a great read and a font of moral clarity, just won't deign to associate with American Power. I sent him an e-mail with a link yesterday, and that's that. He's into the blogging hierarchy thing. He loves to thank all the big bloggers who send him links, and blows off those down at the lower 9th tier as infinitesimal. I also sent Pamela Geller a link the other day, but I misspelled her name at my post and she let me know that THAT WAS A BIG BLOGGING SOCIAL FAUX PAS. I guess Atlas Shrugs is off the list of American Power benefactors!

In any case, I'm not too serious about it. I think I get more links from the big lefty blogs that I piss off, especially Lawyers, Guns and Money. The hits to my stat counter from the progressives are nice, although I could do without the threats and intimidation in the comment threads.

Anyway, I mostly just have fun getting my ideas out there and building community with regular folks. I don't blog for fame or income (and I don't reallly understand those blog "blegs" for money you see sometimes, which is basically online panhandling). I've built up a whole bunch of friends online who are my best buddies, literally. I can't mention them all, of course, as I'd be here all day. I correspond with Jan at Vinegar and Honey quite a bit. We share our outrages with each other and generate ideas for blog posts. Courtney checks in a lot with reports on balancing the demands of college, home life, and blogging. If I'm forgetting any other regular visitors, just sent me an e-mail and I'll add your link to this post.

Now, as far as what I'm going to do with this blog going forward? Well, I haven't thought much about it. Things will pretty much be the way they are. Readers might have noticed that I like to write in depth on some of the hottest news stories of the day, especially as those events have implications on politics, cultural change, and national security. The gay marriage debate and the Mumbai massacre are the earlier examples, and the current ongoing Israel campaign in Gaza being this week's example. This is when I do my best blogging. I know there's a decline in the variety of blog posts, but the quality of the analysis goes up, as the constant posting on topic is recursive and ends up being like a research topic. Plus, I'm able to get a lot of outrage off my chest and piss off the secular progressives who are intent to destroy this nation.

In fact, that's what I've pretty much always done. While the hardcore progressives are in fact a small percentage of the American electorate, their influence is magnified by their representation in the media, the transnational corporate sector, and in the schools, from K-12 all the way to the elite universities. One of the biggest calamities of Barack Obama's election is that he personally legitmates the secular progressive agenda by his background, ideology, and training (and he successfully suppressed his radicalism during the campaign and has so far abandoned an outwardly aggressive progressivism amid the realities of transitioning to goverment in a center-right polity).

So that's what readers can expect in 2009. This blog, American Power, is a voice of moral clarity. Note though, please, that I am a humble and very imperfect man. I strive to be as caring and trusting as I can be, and I'm working on it. Last year I begain attending church again for the first time in decades. I don't go as often as I like, but it's fulfilling to me to be around people with strong moral values and a respect for traditionalism in family and culture. We are losing this as a society. Not religion, of course, but a true practicing Christianity that take spirtual values as meaningful and life-driving - and I mean as a code by which to live ethically and good.

On the other hand, I'm not one to "turn the other cheek," to let ideological bygones be bygones. I'll fight for my principles in blogging battles, as well as in the campus debates the occassionally erupt at my school - because the views I represent need to be expressed and defended. If I make people uncomfortable, that's just the way it's going to have to be. If I lose readers or traffic because I'm "too serious," well, I have no apologies. One of the things that drives me buggy about a lot of big academic bloggers is their refusal to take moral stands. Daniel Drezner's the worst. A Jewish scholar of international relations, I've rarely seen him get truly outraged at the leftist nihilism and pro-Palestinian Israel-bashing in the academy and online. Perhaps I've missed something at his blog, but I got tired of it, of his refusal as a "blogademic" to ruffle any feathers among the scholarly mandarin-gatekeepers at the top peer-reviewed journals.

In any case, I'm rambling and the Rose Bowl's starting.

Let me close by sending folks over to Paula in Israel, who writes one of the most vitally interesting blogs I've seen in a while. Also, if you're a regular commenter or visitor here who doesn't blog, what are you waiting for? Start a blog at Blogger (for free) and I'll give you a huge shout-out at American Power!

Happy New Year!

Foreign Affairs: "In Memoriam: Samuel P. Huntington"

Foreign Affairs has made available the late Samuel Huntington's essays at the magazine: "In Memoriam: Samuel P. Huntington":

To commemorate the passing of Samuel P. Huntington, the preeminent political scientist of the second half of the twentieth century, Foreign Affairs has made available this selection of writings by and about him from our pages.

The compendium includes one of my favorites, which I read years ago as an undergraduate, "The U.S. - Decline or Renewal?" The article's powerfully relevant today, with all the fashionable talk of an impending American decline amid our current economic troubles.

I wrote on Huntington's death last Saturday, before Fouad Ajami's commemoration appeared at the Wall Street Journal. Ajami offers an excellent summary of Huntington's major themes, especially Huntington's most important article in the last couple of decades, "The Clash of Civilizations?"

What I found most interesting in Ajami's piece was his personal reflections on Huntington, and the latter's fading scholarly model as the traditionalist political scientist:

If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along.

A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom, an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him in the regrettably small way I did.

We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.

More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran through the work of Huntington's final years.

Exposing the Progressive Left’s Revolutionary Agenda

I've been reading Maggie's Farm a bit this past week, and Bird Dog's been reposting some of his older essays during his vacation blogging downtime (this has been an interesting refresher on Antonio Gramsci).

He's got another one up today, "Gramsci Week, #4: "The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism." Bird Dog's drawing on the writing of Linda Kimball, who I've not come across before. Here's the introduction to her essay on the New Left, also quoted a Bird Dog's:

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. “The Sixties are dead,” wrote columnist George Will (Slamming the Doors, Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace’ activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay’ rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of subversive organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.

I followed some of Kimball's references at her essay. She's a talented writer with a powerful conservative voice. Her conclusion here sums up the driving seniment behind much of my blogging:

It is said that courage is the first of the virtues because without it fear will paralyze man, thus keeping him from acting upon his moral convictions and speaking truth. Thus bringing about a general state of paralyzing fear, apathy, and submission—the chains of tyranny—is the purpose behind psychopolitical cultural terrorism, for the communist Left’s revolutionary agenda must, at all costs, be clothed in darkness.

The antidote is courage and the light of truth. If we are to win this cultural war and reclaim and rebuild America so our children and their children’s children can live in a ‘Shining City on the Hill’ where liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency flourish, we must muster the courage to fearlessly expose the communist Left’s revolutionary agenda to the Light of Truth. Truth and the courage to speak it will set us free.

Progressive Blogs and Zionist Concern Trolls

Readers should take a look at the intra-ideological debate taking place among progressive bloggers on the question of Israel and the campaign in Gaza.

Philip Munger has a post at Oxdown Gazette that addresses the apparently bitter online battles between hardline pro-Palestian progressives and apparently "moderate" pro-Israel leftists. I'm struck by the language Munger uses to describe backers of Israel: "Zionist concern trolls and flamers." The way Munger describes thing, you'd think that bloggers and commenters at Daily Kos had a side gig at Contentions. Recall, of course, that Daily Kos is a blog that hosts the most rabid anti-Semitism online, for example, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel," which calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.

Wading through the comments at Munger's peace one finds a link to a Jane Hamsher Firedoglake essay on the progressive/moderate debate, evincing classic nihilist form, "The Third Rail of “Israel” Cools in the Blogosphere":

For years, the subject of Israel has been the biggest third rail subject we have to deal with. Any time we wanted to mention Israel in a post we had to alert the mods to strap on their hazmat suits, because the comments section would invariably turn into a shitstorm. Any criticism of Israel was greeted with catcalls of anti-semitism, which would inevitably draw out the anti-semites. The next thing you know, the mods are tearing their hair out and Bill O'Reilly is calling you a Nazi.

It was extraordinarily difficult to provide a place for free speech and open discussion and yet police racism and hate speech. Most people concluded (quite rightly) that the conditions were not right for a mature discussion of the subject, and just avoided it.

But as the current crisis unfolds in Gaza, all that seems to have reversed itself. Although a lot of bloggers are still obviously gun shy, it looks like readers are ready to take it on, and they are doing so without letting the conversation devolve into an endless flame war. I read closely the comments section of Gregg Mitchell's top-rated Kos diary on the diversity of opinion about the Gaza situation within the Israeli press, which commenters reflected in their own disparate opinions. But despite the attempts of a couple of trolls to derail the conversation, it remained remarkably civil.

A series of diaries on the subject of Gaza subsequently made their way onto the recommended list, some critical of Israel's actions and others in support. But one thing is becoming clear - the third rail is cooling off.

Opinions will differ as to why this is happening, and Obama's November victory certainly sets the stage - people really are eager for change. But I would attribute this turn of events to three things ...

Before I discuss Hamsher's "three things," note how her mention of Obama's victory confirms a point I've made for months: The hard-left sees in the Obama administration the wedge to impose its radical secular-progressive on the rest of society. Lord knows they've made great headway. Anyway, it's worth citing Hamsher's additional discussion. She mentions the liberal Jewish lobbying group "J Street" as a new source of "peace" dialog on Israel, alhtough Hamsher's second and third points are really combined huzzahs for Joe Klein, the Jewish antiwar mouthpiece of the journalistic left:

2) Joe Klein: The importance of what Joe Klein did in the face of intimidation tactics from the extreme right cannot be overstated. When Jennifer Rubin of Commentary Magazine called Klein an "anti-semite" for criticizing Israel and the ADL piled on and condemned him, it was pretty much just standard operating procedure for them -- tactics that had silenced many critics before. But Klein was totally (and appropriately) enraged by this kind of thuggery, and fought back publicly on the pages of Time.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

Klein really became the first person in a venue as establishment-serving as Time Magazine to explicitly criticize neocons for their Israel-centric fixations and, much more importantly, for their disgusting exploitation of "anti-semitism" accusations against anyone and everyone who disagrees with their views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, on the Middle East.

Having someone like Klein, in a place like Time, make those arguments without punishment is highly threatening to the neocons' ability to continue to intimidate people away from expressing divergent views by wielding "anti-semitism" accusations. And they know that it is threatening, which is why, once Klein began doing it, they engaged in a full-court swarm to attack and demonize Klein and even insinuate that he should and would be fired for his transgressions on the topic of neocons and Israel.

I got a front row seat to the battle at a BBC dinner in New York with Commentary Magazine's John Podhoretz and Klein:

No sooner had the dinner begun than the two were screaming at each other over the table. "You're a shithead! You're a shithead!" screamed The Pod. "Why don't you just call me an antisemite? That's what you do!" retorted Klein.

Klein never backed down, and he used his perch at Time to expose the intimidation racket they were running, marginalizing them as right-wing extremists. I applauded him at the time, and continue to think that he made a tremendous contribution to the evolution of the conversation around Israel.

3) Leadership: What Klein did to Commentary Magazine and the ADL, Glenn Greenwald has done to Marty Peretz and the neocon propaganda organ he runs at The New Republic. Likewise Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Spencer Ackerman, Paul Rosenberg, Siun, Ian Welsh and Stirling Newberry have done a tremendous job of stepping outside the "usual suspect" sources and taking advantage of a new freedom to explore the subject of Israel from a multiplicity of viewpoints with intelligence and integrity.

Readers may have noticed how Hamsher rounds up the usual rogue's gallery of nihilist leftists and persistently diabolical Israel-bashers (on this, see Noah Pollak's related essay, "The Juicebox Mafia on Gaza").

I rarely use "anti-Semitic" to describe these folks. It almost goes without saying when many of their posts mount the most disgusting demonizations of the government and people of Israel. But it's the larger point people should keep in mind. As I've noted before, the health and preservation of the state of Israel is an EKG on the life of Western civilization. If and when pro-Palestinian "peace" activists prevail in their endless campaign of death and destruction of the Jewish state the rest of the traditional international community can kiss the fight for decency, light, and reason goodbye. Goodness will have been enveloped by the forces of nihilist evil. International postmodernism and the spread of the transnational secular-collectivist state won't be far behind.

This is why I blog. Tune-in here throughout 2009 for updates on the hard-left's campaign of endless recriminations against "Zionist concern trolls" and the normal folks who otherwise want to cherish and preserve the culture and values of modernity.

Geert Wilders: Front Page Magazine's Man of the Year

Geert Wilders has been named Front Page Magazine's Man of the Year:

It’s a safe bet that Geert Wilders won’t be Time magazine’s Man of the Year any time soon. If anything, the unusually coiffed Dutch MP is a favorite hate figure of the Western media, which has spent years vilifying him as a “reactionary,” a “particularly dangerous type of demagogue,” a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.” Wilders would almost certainly plead guilty to the last charge, and with ample reason. His tireless campaign to sound the alarm about the growing threat of Islamic radicalism in the West has turned him into a target of Islamic jihadists and the object of untold assassination plots. A 2006 death threat, one of hundreds he’s received, declared that his “infidel blood will flow freely on cursed Dutch streets.” Al-Qaeda has specifically singled him out for slaughter.

Against this menacing background, it would have been no failing in his character if Wilders had decided that the price of speaking out about Islamic fundamentalism was too high; others in his prominent position would have reached just that conclusion. Instead, Wilders has persevered. Braving daily death threats and sacrificing the security that his critics take for granted, he has opted for the often-thankless task of saving Western civilization from its Islamist discontents – beginning with the valuable reminder that the demands of Islamic zealots are not only not congruent with Western values but are, in fact, in direct conflict with them. For his impressive personal courage, his steadfast political commitment, and his refreshing disdain for the suffocating pieties of political correctness, Geert Wilders is Front Page Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2008.

The steep risks involved in Wilders’s anti-Islamist campaign are tragically illustrated by the fates of two of his countrymen. Pim Fortuyn, the popular Dutch politician who warned against the Islamisation of Dutch society and railed against the “backwardness” of certain Islamic traditions, was gunned down by a crazed animal-rights activist in 2002. His killer later claimed that he had shot Fortuyn in order to defend Dutch Muslims from persecution.

Next on the hit list was Dutch provocateur and documentarian Theo Van Gogh. In 2004, Van Gogh was gruesomely murdered in Amsterdam by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born Islamist who judged Van Gogh’s film on the mistreatment of women in Islam, Submission, to be a crime deserving of death. To Van Gogh’s butchered body, Bouyeri pinned a list of “infidels” who “deserved to be slaughtered.” Among the names singled out for execution was Geert Wilders.

The threats were all too real. Shortly after Van Gogh’s murder, Dutch authorities discovered an Islamist network with advanced plans to kill Wilders, and an internet video surfaced promising 72 virgins to anyone who carried out the deed. As police investigated, Wilders was forced into 24-hour protection, traveling from safe house to safe house to avoid his pursuers. Even today he is never without dark-suited bodyguards by his side. “There’s no freedom, no privacy,” Wilders says. “If I said I was not afraid, I would be lying.”

There's lots more at the link. I like this line from the conclusion:

Geert Wilders has made all the right enemies. At a time when many counsel accommodation of Islamist demands, Wilders remains defiant. In an era of civilizational self-loathing, he defends the West without apology. Despite the threats to his life, he refuses to be silenced. For all this, Wilders deserves the praise of many – including the many in the West who scorn his name.

I wrote earlier on Wilders' interview at the Wall Street Journal. See, "Mumbai: India's 9/11."

Bush Won Legal Fights in War on Terror

President Bush prevailed on most of the domestic legal and political battles over the administration's policies on the war on terrorism following September 11, 2001. The Los Angeles Times reports:

George W. Bush will end his presidency in retreat, forced to compromise on several fronts. Free-market economics have given way to massive government bailouts, and an assertive, unilateral foreign policy has yielded to one more attuned to world opinion. But in his defense of the war on terrorism, Bush has succeeded in beating back nearly all legal challenges -- including those to some of his most controversial policies.

Among them are a domestic surveillance program to intercept international phone calls, the rounding up of Muslim men for questioning after the Sept. 11 attacks, the holding of suspects in military custody in this country without filing charges, harsh interrogations -- some have called it torture -- of suspects arrested abroad, and the detention of foreign captives at a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Because of the administration's successful defense of such policies, they not only will be a part of Bush's legacy but will be around for his successors. Even if Barack Obama rejects or sharply modifies Bush's positions, the precedents will remain for future chief executives.

Soon after Sept. 11, Bush said that as commander in chief he had the "inherent" power to act boldly in the nation's defense, regardless of whether Congress or the courts agreed.

His claim has been much criticized. It also has not been accepted by Congress or endorsed by the Supreme Court. The justices have said the president must act according to the law, not in spite of it.

Nonetheless, Bush's anti-terrorism policies have not been blocked by the courts or Congress. When the Supreme Court struck down Bush's use of special military trials at Guantanamo on grounds that he had no legal basis for creating them, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act to authorize the trials.

When critics claimed the National Security Agency was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting calls without a warrant, Congress passed a law to authorize such wiretapping. The same measure also granted legal immunity to telephone companies that had cooperated with the administration.

Bush's tenure has been particularly frustrating for civil libertarians. They had believed that when the government violated the Constitution, someone could go to court and challenge it. But it's not clear that truism is still true.

Bush's lawyers have succeeded not by proving the constitutionality of the policies but by using procedural barriers to prevent lawsuits from going forward.

When the American Civil Liberties Union sued over the warrantless wiretapping, Bush's lawyers said the plaintiffs had no standing because they could not prove that their phones had been tapped. The government also refused to answer questions about whether the plaintiffs had been tapped, pleading national security.

When civil libertarians sued on behalf of men who said they had been wrongly abducted and tortured by the CIA, Bush's lawyers argued that the cases involved "state secrets." The courts agreed and dismissed the lawsuits.

"It has been a sad story," said Melissa Goodman, an ACLU lawyer. "The government has thrown up roadblocks. . . . We have never gotten judges to rule whether their acts have violated the Constitution or whether torture is unconstitutional."

I say good for the administration!

See also my recent essays on the administration's counterterror policies, "Enhanced Interrogation's in the Charts Again," and "Lawfare" and Bush Administration War Crimes Trials."

Photo Credit: "The military prison at Guantanamo may be the exception to Bush’s string of legal successes. The Supreme Court struck down his policies regarding the holding and trying of prisoners there. But the administration has resisted changes," Los Angeles Times.

Morally Clueless? Megan McArdle on Israel-Palestine

Megan McArdle's the economics blogger at the Atlantic. She's usually very sharp. Today, though, she's faltering. We see this in her essay, "The Problem With Israel-Palestine Blogging," where the fatal flaw of her libertarian (and apparently amoral) epistemology is revealed:

Everyone engaged in it is interested in proving that one side is righter than the other. Since no action in the region has occurred without plausible provocation for 4,000 years or so, this requires constantly shifting the metrics by which you measure whichever side you happen to favor. Point out that Israel is killing a lot of civilians and you are told that they had to do something in response to the Hamas rockets. Point out that practically, the response they chose has absolutely no strategic or tactical benefit, and a huge potential downside, and you are castigated for your lack of moral outrage about Hamas's attacks on civilians. Either Israel is doing this because it hopes to gain something, in which case the whole thing is hopelessly ass-backwards - they are strengthening Hamas and worsening their international political position - or it thinks that it's okay to kill boatloads of civilians purely for revenge against Hamas; revenge for attacks that have so far killed and injured almost no one. This rather undercuts the argument of moral superiority, because guess what? That's what Hamas thinks it's doing.

On the other side, there's a tendency to forget, or forget to mention, that whatever the provocation, a plurality-to-majority of Palestinians constantly and actively wish to kill large numbers of Israelis purely for revenge. Gaza wants to be at war with Israel, and then hide behind the protections of not-quite-war, because they haven't the foggiest hope of winning anything like a real war.

I'm of Northern Irish descent, and I grew up in New York City in a mostly Jewish high school, and so as you can imagine, I've heard all the arguments about who's really to blame about a zillion times. And all I get out of it in the end is that the whole thing makes me sick and sad. I don't see any untainted victims. I see a bunch of people who have been stomped on by history beating up each other in revenge for past wrongs that can't be righted, lashing out whenever they think they can get away with it without losing the foreign funding that allows them to continue the fun. And I don't ever blog about it because one is not allowed to have an opinion on the matter - no matter what I say, I'll be excusing terrorism or, irrelevantly, the holocaust, or shilling for western imperialism.

The saddest, truest thing that I've ever heard about the conflict is a friend who said that it seems to him like a stable equilibrium. In that spirit, I'm turning comments off on this post. Happy New Year.

After all of this, McArdle suggests that it's "sad" there's a "stable equlibrium." Why would one who adopts a position of moral equivalence be "sad" if the Middle East balance of power is at a "stable equilibrium"? Considering that materially Israel is thousands of times more powerful than Hamas and the rump-Palestian Authority, such parity - if demonstrated as objectively true - should be seen as a disaster for Israel's survival as a sovereign state and a boon to those who see Palestinian terrorists as morally equal.

Not only that, McArdle's not very good at posing hypotheticals. If she or anyone she knows has actually said that Israel's response "has absolutely no strategic or tactical benefit, and a huge potential downside," then frankly she has no business talking about Middle East international politics (or she needs to spend some time with Zbigniew Brzezinski). Israel planned, for two years, last weekend's airstrikes down to the finest detail. The overwhelming number of those killed were Hamas terrorists, and the civilian lives would have been spared had not Palestinian rocket depots been set up within civilian residential lodgings. The airstrikes and likely ground incursion have restored strategic confidence to the Israelis, and breaking the Hamas resistance may well be key to success on West Bank diplomacy.

But the "4,000 years" thing is particularly a killer. Conflict in the Middle East - while driven fundamentally by religion - is existentially about national sovereignty, and that systemic element is the basis for this crisis of states and national peoples, which dates back roughly 100 years to, say, the Balfour Declaration. There really was no "Palestianian" people at that times. Bedouin and nomadic peoples of Arab extraction would be the most accurate ethnic designation. The push for a true Palestinian "nation" is a 20th century phenomenon. Prior to this, the Ottoman empire maintained authority across the region, and the grand muftis and Arab grandees enjoyed power, prestige, and privilege under a what was essentially an imperial Islamic caliphate. As for "plausible provocations," since 1948 - when Israel was established with the blessings and legitimacy of international law, embodied by the will of the United Nations, and out of the existential bleakness of the European Shoah - Israel has been in a constant state of siege, fighting at least a half-a-dozen wars and with roughly a third of the nations of the world calling essentially for the elimination of the Jewish state in Eretz Israel.

Much has been written this last few days on Israel's "disproportionate" response. Readers can check my blogging tags below for some of my earlier posts. Here I'm simply going to let Melanie Phillips have the (next to the) last word, drawing on her powerful essay from earlier this year, "This Blog And (Some of) Its Readers":

I have noticed a persistent complaint by some readers posting comments on my blog entries which I think requires some comment and clarification ... They seem to believe that it is wrong for me to write about Israel as often as I do ... Some of these readers, as is painfully obvious from their comments, simply have a big problem with Jews – at least, Jews who identify with and defend the Jewish people. But others, whose instincts may be rather more decent, seem to be labouring under one or two misapprehensions. So let me make a number of things clear ....

... the reason why Israel figures so heavily in any discussion about the predicaments of our era is that Israel is the defining moral issue of our time. It is Israel, and the century-old existential onslaught against the Jewish people in its ancient homeland, which stands at the very centre of the titanic fight by truth against lies, fact against propaganda, freedom against totalitarianism, liberty against slavery, justice against injustice and reason against irrationality in which the entire free world is currently engaged. Israel is the quintessential canary in the mine. It is the front-line in the defence of the free world. If it goes down, the rest of us will go down. Those who are on the wrong side of the Israel issue are on the wrong side in the great struggle for civilisation against barbarism. That is why I return to it again and again.

I would only add that it seems chauvinistic and ethnically-insulting for McArdle to suggest that growing up "in New York City in a mostly Jewish high school" gives her some kind of superior insight to Israel's predicament. Having said that, McArdle's nevertheless smart to close comments on her post. Israel-Palestine's the hottest of the international hot-button issues, and Lord knows it brings out the nastiest of the fever-swamp nasties.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.