Comments on reads 9/30 II

Charles Krauthammer: Land without peace: Why Abbas went to the U.N.

● Camp David, 2000. At a U.S.-sponsored summit, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offers Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza — and, astonishingly, the previously inconceivable division of Jerusalem. Arafat refuses. And makes no counteroffer, thereby demonstrating his unseriousness about making any deal. Instead, within two months, he launches a savage terror war that kills a thousand Israelis.
● Taba, 2001. An even sweeter deal — the Clinton Parameters — is offered. Arafat walks away again.
● Israel, 2008. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes the ultimate capitulation to Palestinian demands — 100 percent of the West Bank (with land swaps), Palestinian statehood, the division of Jerusalem with the Muslim parts becoming the capital of the new Palestine. And incredibly, he offers to turn over the city’s holy places, including the Western Wall — Judaism’s most sacred site, its Kaaba — to an international body on which sit Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Did Abbas accept? Of course not. If he had, the conflict would be over and Palestine would already be a member of the United Nations.

FP: Why should he? If you were negotiating and every time you started violence, or rejected an offer, or initiated action to delegitimize you you got a better offer, what would you do? At this rate he’ll get all of Israel pretty soon.

Ron Radosh: John B. Judis of The New Republic Joins the Israel-Bashers

There was a time when The New Republic could be counted on for one thing: the defense of Israel, holding up the necessity of maintaining the U.S.-Israel alliance, and a comprehension that the only democracy in the Middle East deserves our support not only because it is morally right, but because it is in the interest of America’s national security. A few days ago, however,many of the magazine’s readers were shocked to find an article on its website by Senior Editor John B. Judis titled “Why the U.S. Should Support Palestinian Statehood at the U.N.”
It is the type of screed that one has come to expect in the pages of The Nation, The New York Review of Books and The American Conservative, as well as in the writings of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. These venues in particular have had wide influence and distribution, and certainly, a similar form of argument has no need to also take up the pages of TNR. In many ways, publishing of the piece by its current editors is nothing but a spit in the face to the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of TNR, Martin Peretz. His unabashed defense of the Jewish state and his moral clarity about the issues underlying the world’s growing attacks on Israel have regularly enraged the the chorus of Israel bashers. To have a piece of this nature now appear in the journal of opinion he has led for years and which he has funded is a rebuke to him from the team that now runs the magazine.
The Judis article is especially repugnant because it contains many falsehoods, bad history, and a failure to understand the issues contributing to the hatred for Israel that is growing around the world.

FP: The notion of American exceptionalism notwithstanding, the US is subject to the same forces that all societies are subject too and responds in a common way to circumstances. Scapegoating has traditionally been the mechanism invented to achieve denial of responsibility. In times of societal crisis the traditional scapegoat has been, for various reasons, the Jew. Today the West, including the US, is in existential crisis and it is incapable to accept that this is due to self-destruction. Naturally, Europe reacts in the traditional anti-Semitic way, and the US, as it turns out, is not any different. That is why even people who are not expected to succumb to the same scapegoating. And as Radosh, myself and others demonstrate, they are as ignorant and nonrational in that as everybody else.

Peter Van Buren: Checkbook Diplomacy

In 2009, the State Department sent me to Iraq for a year as part of the civilian surge deployed to backstop the more muscular military one. At the head of a six-person Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), I was assigned to spend U.S. government money creating projects that would lift the local economy and lure young men away from the dead-end opportunities of al Qaeda. I was to empower women, turning them into entrepreneurs and handing them a future instead of a suicide vest. This was newfangled hearts and minds, as practiced with a lavish checkbook and supervised by a skittish embassy looking for "victory" anywhere it could be found. We really did believe money could buy us love and win the war.
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The work was done by amateurs like me, sent to Iraq on one-year tours without guidance or training, and eager to create photogenic success stories that would get us all promoted. No idea was too bizarre, too gimmicky, or too pointless for us hearts-and-minders...
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Here are some of the wacky ideas we came up with to rebuild Iraq, and remember: These are the wacky ones that actually got U.S. taxpayer funding.
French Pastry Classes
Cost: $9,797
In the hands of one PRT in southern Baghdad, our instructions to help female entrepreneurs translated into pastry classes for disadvantaged Iraqi women who presumably could then go open cute little French cafes in their city's bombed-out streets. In the funding request, the PRT stipulated that "a French Chef with experience in both baking pastries and in teaching pastry classes internationally" would volunteer to teach. So, you may ask, if the French chef was volunteering le time, what was the $9,797 spent on? Well, some was certainly spent on paying students to attend. It was almost impossible to get Iraqis to show up for these things (as they had to, if you wanted your photos of the event to look good) without offering a free lunch, taxi fare, and a stipend. Needless to say, I never heard of any pâtisseries sprouting up on the road to Baghdad's airport.
...
Musclemen Mural
Cost: $22,180
One PRT hired a local artist to paint a mural on the side of a gym near Sadr City. The purpose was to "provide an aesthetically pleasing sight upon entry, helping to bring a sense of normalcy for the citizens in the area and for those passing through." What we ended up with instead was a group of oiled, homoerotic Steve Reeves musclemen.
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Baghdad Yellow Pages
Cost: $7,000
In a country with few land-line phones and a seriously toxic business environment, some Green Zone genius decided that economic success hinged on producing the first-ever Baghdad Yellow Pages. Even under pressure, we could come up with only 250 businesses that had permanent phone numbers in a city of several million people. My PRT was saddled with hundreds of copies of the finished product. We could not safely go door-to-door and so hired a local contractor, at seven bucks a copy, to give the books away. He dropped off a few copies here and there and likely dumped the rest behind some abandoned building.
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Road to Nowhere
Cost: Unknown
In 2009, the U.S. Army hired a contractor to pave a short stretch of dirt road near the city of Salman Pak, with the idea of increasing commerce between two nearby neighborhoods. The contractor, however, took the money and laid down only gravel -- which made the road just passable enough that insurgents started to use it as a transit route. The local residents appealed to the police, who set up barricades, ending what little commerce the original dirt road had sustained.

FP: And these are not even part of the billions gone missing. Validates my argument that the US knows and understands nothing of foreign cultures and therefore has no chance in hell in nation building. It wastes enormous resources for no gains, quite the contrary.

Claire Berlinski: My Top Ten Slimming Secrets

Now that I have your attention, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has declared that "national governments can't be trusted" and has suggested that it might be wise to give all the power, well, to him:

He called for more power for the EU's institutions, arguing that it was an "illusion" to think that the euro zone's economic policy could be coordinated just by the European Council, the institution that comprises the leaders of the EU's 27 members, which meets twice a year.
He said that setting rules for a stable euro zone could not only be left to the member states. "That will never work," he said, explaining that national governments "always try to negotiate." Barroso said there was a good reason why there were independent institutions such as the European Commission -- the EU's executive body -- and the EU's Court of Justice.

FP: In addition to scapegoating the Jews, the other certain effect of a crisis.

Comments on reads 9/30

PowerLine: Is Europe A Country?

Well, that is largely the point of the European Union, isn’t it? Europe’s political class suffered from two sources of frustration: one, Europe’s countries are relatively small and are outclassed economically and militarily by the United States; and two, Europe’s people, for the most part, are not as far left as the political class. The European Union was designed to solve both of these problems. Beginning with the Common Market, which was a good idea, and continuing with monetary union, which was not, the EU was intended to evolve until Europe was in effect a single country, administered by Brussels bureaucrats who represent the continent’s political class rather than the voters of any particular country.
For a while, the project seemed to be going well. It hit a major snag with the banking crisis, which threatens the viability of monetary union. But the EU’s biggest problem isn’t fiscal. Its biggest problem is that Europe’s peoples have never bought into the idea that Europe should supersede their longstanding national loyalties. Englishmen stubbornly insist on remaining Englishmen, Spaniards Spaniards, and so on. The bureaucrats thought they could somehow finesse the issue of national loyalties; presumably they imagined that over time, national identities would blur and dissolve. Instead, policies like the EU’s insistence that residents of all member states be eligible for welfare benefits in Britain are bringing the more fundamental issues inherent in European union to the forefront. My own opinion is that as such contradictions are heightened, it becomes increasingly apparent that the EU is unlikely to survive in anything like its current form.

FP: Whether the abomination called EU survives or not, Europe is finished—the financial crisis is bringing all its fundamental problems to the fore. The welfare state, demographics and infiltration by unintegrated immigrants spell the end of its civilization. Not to mention stupidity (see next).

David Thompson: Worth Every Penny

Readers may have noted the NowhereIsland art project, in which assorted radical freeloaders – referred to as a “think tank” - were shipped to the Arctic at public expense to ponder the possibilities of progressive utopia and generally engorge their cultural glands. While moored at Nyskjaeret, an apparently unclaimed island the size of a football pitch, our merry band of thinkers gathered sand and rock and loaded it onto a barge, thereby creating a floating “visual sculpture” of tremendous, indeed profound, political significance. Said work will subsequently “tour” the south coast of Britain, leaving better, more enlightened people in its wake.
The project’s intellectual lynchpin, artist Alex Hartley, has explained why his subsidised trip was so imperative:

It will gather ideas around climate change, land grab, colonialism, migration… all of these issues that can be put onto the blank canvas of this new land… My plan is to take a part of the island into international waters and declare it as a micro-nation so people can register to become citizens… We have just declared our statehood. This moment marks seven years of work inspired by a simple question: What if an Arctic island went south in search of its people?...

Others have taken a less sympathetic view. Among them, Geoffrey Cox, Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon, who referred to the project as an “extraordinary folly”:
I think my constituents are going to find it quite astonishing that… we are spending half a million pounds digging up earth from somewhere in Norway and floating it down the South West coast.
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Laurie’s reflections are, however, tinged with sadness. Not least regarding the notes of public disapproval:

Of all the myriad problems with the NowhereIsland project, the press have inevitably focused on the most anodine [sic] and inconsequential: the money… I believe in art, and folly, and dreams. I believe that if we can’t collectively subsidise artists to imagine new worlds for us, we have no business speaking of social progress.

Yes, I know. It’s so unexpected. Pretentious taxpayer-funded noodling is vital, says beneficiary of pretentious taxpayer-funded noodling. Because Laurie believes in folly, see, ideally when done at someone else’s expense and regardless of their objections. And because without the Arts Council and its politically generic freeloading caste, all human progress would simply grind to a halt. Besides, grumbling about the extortion and misuse of other people’s money - half a million pounds of it - is anodyne and inconsequential.
Out of her way, you little people.

FP: When god distributed stupidity in the world, these “artists” and those who fund them stood several times in line.

PowerLine: The Trouble With Crony Capitalism

Yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loan guarantees to “green energy” companies. Drudge is headlining the fact that, as reported by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, most of that amount–$737 million–is going to SolarReserve LLC for a solar-thermal project in Nevada. SolarReserve’s “investment partners”–I take it that means owners–include the Pacific Corporate Group’s Clean Energy and Technology Fund. One of Pacific Corporate Group’s principals is Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law, Ronald Pelosi. Another of SolarReserve’s owners is Argonaut Private Equity, whose managing director, Steve Mitchell, is on Solyndra’s board of directors.
My guess is that government underwriting of SolarReserve’s project is a horrible idea. But suppose it isn’t: who is going to believe that the Obama administration wasn’t influenced by Pelosi’s brother-in-law’s involvement in the project? Likewise, who will believe that Democratic donor George Kaiser’s involvement in Solyndra was irrelevant to the government’s misbegotten support for that company? Hemingway writes that “[i]t’s increasingly hard to tell the government’s green jobs subsidies apart from the Democrats’ friends and family rewards program.” That’s true, and whether “green energy” corruption is real or only perceived, it breeds cynicism and erodes trust in government–which, not coincidentally, is at an all-time low.
But the problem goes deeper still. When the federal government gets into the business of picking winners and losers among private businesses, it is easy to identify the winners–they are companies like Solyndra and SolarReserve that get government money or loan guaranties. But what about the losers? A much larger number of companies who don’t get federal money are in that category, and how will we ever know who they are, let alone know whether they were losers because someone involved in them is a Republican donor?
There is no such thing as “good” crony capitalism. Once the government gets into the business of favoring some private businesses over others, the results can only be bad, and not only, or even primarily, because of the loans that wind up costing the taxpayers.

FP: This banana republic mechanism is one of the many via which which the kleptocracy has been bringing the US down (read the comments).

Obama’s uncle sparks outrage

President Obama’s illegal alien half uncle, though facing a deportation order, is back on the job at a mom-and-pop grog shop in Framingham, his lawyer said yesterday — leaving advocates of tough immigration enforcement bewildered and outraged.
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Immigration authorities yesterday told the Herald they would look into whether Obama has legal authority to work under the terms of his release but did not respond to repeated follow-up calls.
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Dane said the Obama administration has drawn his group’s ire by issuing temporary work permits to deportable illegals — a policy that might now be benefiting the president’s uncle.
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“If there was any time at all to be restricting work permits, it would be now,” Dane said. “And if there’s any category of people who are not entitled to jobs, it’s people who are not entitled to be in the United States.”

FP: Speaking of banana republic: Obama’s job program.

Comments on Reads 9/28 II

Daniel Pipes: The Attack on Israel's Embassy in Cairo

What a brilliant move this was by the military leadership, bringing it no less than seven layers of achievement.

• The assault's anti-Zionist character won the military regime support from domestic Islamists.
• It discredited the liberal protestors.
• It permitted the military to defeat its internal rival, the prime minister, as suggested by his prompt resignation, followed by a sheepish return.
• It justified the possible return to martial rule, more complete than the one imposed by Sadat in 1981, as suggested by Information Minister Osama Heikal saying on television that the authorities will apply the entire emergency law.
• It put pressure on Israel to make more concessions to Egypt.
• It boosted Tantawi's standing in Arab/Muslim countries.
• It reminded the West that it needs Tantawi to fend off the Islamists.

Comment: This little piece of theater confirms that the military still rules Egypt, using familiar deceptive tactics, with liberals and Islamists still the sideshow they have been since 1952.

FP: Further evidence of what Middle Easterners have that the West can’t hold a candle to: cunning. That’s one reason why the latter does not have a chance.

Max Boot: Erdogan Due for a Comeuppance

More broadly, Turkey offers an alternative model for religious protesters around the region who might otherwise be beguiled by the theocratic Iranian state. Granted, Erdogan is an Islamist, but he is a relatively moderate Islamist, at least as compared to Ayatollah Ali Khameini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Turkey is rated as only “partly free” by Freedom House, but it’s a heck of a lot freer and more pro-Western than Iran. That may be faint praise, but we’re talking about the Middle East here—not Scandinavia. Adjust your expectations accordingly. It is just possible that, for all of his anti-Israel fulminations, Erdogan could be a positive force for change in the region by offering a viable alternative to the Hezbollah/Iran model for large numbers of Islamists who would never have embraced the kind of strict secularism created by Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.

FP: It is very much perplexing how knowledgeable and intelligent people so easily fall for wishful thinking. First, Erdogan, by his own admission and his history is hardly a moderate Islamist. He only moderated himself after his first political failure in order to win election. Second, everything he’s done in Turkey since his first win is what a shrewd Islamist would do to entrench himself in power so that he can, at the proper time, expose his full Islamism. Third, the hatred of Israel that he is spewing cannot be explained just by strategic and tactical considerations—it is the extreme and emotional behavior that only a radical Islamist would reveal. How are his Holocaust treatment and his absurd lies about Israel murdering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians different than AchtungMyJihad? His tendency to ask for apologies from infidels left and right when is the responsible party is an recognizable component of radical Islamism. Who must the Islamists sleep with to be accepted as such in the West?
Read carefully Michael Young’s 'Zero problems' in Ankara is havoc for the neighbourhood’ and you should detect the Islamist instinct quite easily.

Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby: Last Man Standing: Is America Fading in the New Middle East?

Fair-minded people might question the assumption that the US has a legacy of shame in the Middle East. While acting in our interests, we have also regularly helped peoples of this region. But the issue for the moment is not whether America deserves the charges levied against it, but how the region will react if it perceives that we are constrained by them. Those in the region who must chart their future course will weigh the strength and constancy of ours. Practical men, they will consider our self-interest as the surest rock upon which our policy, and their security, might be built. If they perceive that we shrink from our own interests, they will neither value them nor feel that they can rely on us. Then we will have very little influence left in a region that presidents of both parties have long considered vital.
…
Ghaith al-Omari, an Arab analyst, observed that “it’s become fashionable to ‘dis’ the Americans. The prevalent mood now is to say that the United States is no longer relevant.” No one policy brought us to this point. No one policy will reverse the impressions we have made. Meanwhile, our remorseless adversaries wake each morning keen to push us aside. If we allow their hour to come, the uncertainties and problems of tomorrow will dwarf those of today. Ultimately, we may be forced once again to take aggressive action that might otherwise have been avoided, or have come at a lesser cost.

FP: It is the underlying theme of this blog that America (and the West) are fading and that everything that is happening in the Middle East is a consequence of, not a cause of that fading.

Spengler: Why Do We Allow Pakistan and Iran to Murder Americans?

If Franz Kafka covered the Pentagon for the Washington Post, he couldn’t have done better than yesterday’s backgrounder by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, titled, “Adm. Mullen’s words on Pakistan come under scrutiny.” Unnamed Obama administration officials told the newspaper that “Adm. Mike Mullen’s assertion last week that an anti-American insurgent group in Afghanistan is a ‘veritable arm’ of Pakistan’s spy service was overstated and contributed to overheated reactions in Pakistan and misperceptions in Washington.” But the officials didn’t want to be quoted publicly so as not to be seen challenging the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
A serving officer tells the truth in public about Pakistani spooks plotting with jihadi fanatics to attack a U.S. embassy and murder Americans? And the State Department types lurk in the shadows complaining that he’s exaggerating? It must be that the Kingdom’s coming, or the Year of Jubilo. The fact that the striped pants set doesn’t have the temerity to refute, or let alone rein in, the estimable Admiral Mullen after he exposed Pakistani collaboration tells a great deal about the mood of the American people.
Judging from the questions thrown at me on radio talk shows during the past week, Americans have no patience for putative allies who conspire behind our backs to murder American personnel. They want to know: Why do we put up with this sort of murderous betrayal from Islamabad?
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I complained at the time, “A rough translation of Mullen’s remarks into civilian political language is that the quixotic notion of building democracy in the Middle East led the United States into an Iranian trap.” Iran could (and still can) act as a spoiler in Iraq and make shambles of our trillion-dollar investment in Iraqi democracy. The Bush administration held back from hitting Iran because, as Mike Mullen explained, our nation-building exercise made American warriors into targets and hostages.
It is a howling disgrace that the United States of America permits a fourth-rate power like Pakistan to collude with terrorists to attack an American embassy. The American people will never understand or accept such a thing.
We should have allied with India from the outset to sort out the Afghani problem by encircling Pakistan. Now that the Chinese have moved into the situation with their customary opportunism, the equation is considerable tougher to solve — but not impossible. China views Pakistan with profound ambivalence, particularly because Pakistan allows Chinese Muslim terrorists to operate on their common border.
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I wrote Why Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) to destroy the illusion that stability in the Muslim world is an achievable goal. The Muslim world has entered a civilizational tailspin, visible in the convulsive failure perversely called “the Arab Spring,” and the apocalyptic pessimism that has taken hold of Iran — and, seemingly, Turkey. An abyss of instability yawns from Libya to Afghanistan. We cannot bring stability, let along democracy, to this part of the world. At best we can insulate ourselves from the consequences.
The first thing to do is to ensure that state sponsors of terrorism tremble in fear of the consequences of taking American lives. Let them worry about instability. And let their paranoid imaginations run wild concerning what we might to do them.

FP: It’s too late. The west is gone and it is this strategy and these tactics that are major reasons for that.

Comments on Reads 9/28

Matt Taibbi: 'Occupy Wall Street': Drawing the Battle Lines

There is a huge number of Americans who simply don't realize that they've been victimized by Wall Street – that they've paid inflated commodity prices due to irresponsible speculation and manipulation, seen their home values depressed thanks to corruption in the mortgage markets, subsidized banker bonuses with their tax dollars and/or been forced to pay usurious interest rates for consumer credit, among other things.
I would imagine the end game of any movement against Wall Street corruption is going to involve some very elaborate organization. There are going to have to be consumer and investor boycotts, shareholder revolts, criminal prosecutions, new laws passed, and other moves. But a good first step is making people aware of the battle lines. It sounds like these demonstrations have that potential.

FP: I doubt it. The corporate welfare state is too entrenched to be dismantled, which is what is required. And the substitution of vocational training and indoctrination for education does not equip the public for this task. Which suits the powers that be.

‘Post’ poll finds surge in Obama popularity in Israel

54% call US president’s policies pro-Israel, 19% say they were more pro- Palestinian; Likud would gain 32 seats, Labor 26 if elections held now; 50% view Netanyahu favorably.

FP: I expected Israelis to be less gullible than American Jews. Looks like I was wrong.

Most Israeli Arabs are "proud to be Israeli"

The Israel Democracy Index survey 2011, released their results a few days ago. One question they asked was intriguing: How proud are you to be an Israeli?
Among Jews, the vast majority - nearly 88% - said they were either "very proud" or "quite proud" to be Israeli.
But the Arab response was positive as well. 52.8% said they were proud, as opposed to 41.6% who said they were not.
Nearly 64% of Israeli Arabs said they were "certain" they wanted to live in Israel for the long term, with another 18% saying they want to but are not certain.
Not all the news is good, though. In response to the statement "It is never justified to use violence to achieve political ends" over half the Arabs (55%) strongly or somewhat disagreed.

FP: Careful consideration of the inconsistency of these results results reveals a more problematic picture than it appears.

PowerLine: Ben-Hur, Palestinian!

The great epic Ben-Hur, which won 11 Oscars in 1959, is being released in a 50th anniversary DVD edition. The Los Angeles Times notes the occasion with this howler, via Big Hollywood:

Based on the novel by Lew Wallace, the period drama revolves around Judah Ben-Hur (Heston), a Palestinian nobleman who is enslaved by the Romans, engages in one of the most thrilling chariot races ever captured on screen, and even encounters Jesus Christ.

In this bizarre sentence, the Times critic not only misplaces the whole context of the movie–Ben-Hur was, of course, a Jew, and there are no “Palestinians” in sight–but also backhands the whole point of the movie: Ben-Hur “even” encounters Jesus Christ! It would be hard to write a more myopic sentence about any movie or other artistic work.

FP: Palestine, Palestine uber alles! The West shoves it into every possible hole.

Ralph Peters: Putin's political soul

Western consciences may be briefly troubled, but Putin knows the international community won't impose meaningful penalties. Seduced by Kremlin policies -- from oil and gas concessions to cynical hints of strategic cooperation -- Western leaders have too many chips in the game.
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Internationally, he sizes up interlocutors with the deftness of the skilled agent-handler he was in the bad old days. His outbursts of temper and brutal language make news (while, again, appealing to his base), but his policies are cold-blooded, ruthless -- and strikingly successful.
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He steamrolled a one-sided new START agreement over American negotiators who desperately wanted a deal. His manipulation of Europe has given him virtually every pipeline agreement he wanted while sidelining NATO's new members in the east and keeping Ukraine weak and disunited.
He dismembered Georgia but paid no price for it. He has even achieved a grip over supplies for our troops in Afghanistan second only to the chokehold we granted Pakistan in a fit of strategic ineptitude.
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For centuries Moscow called itself the "Third Rome," after the cities of St. Peter and Constantine. The allusion may be particularly apt, since Putin has done what a series of strong emperors did after the first fall of Rome or the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople: He has restored, if briefly, a fallen glory.
Demographically, economically, developmentally, militarily, even educationally, Russia appears doomed to fierce decline. But one man of genius has brought his people a last, autumnal reprieve. Vladimir Putin is a dangerous man, but a splendid czar.

FP: The US is in a better state than Russia, yet Russia behaves much more like a superpower than the US. It’s a matter of competence and skill.

Comments on Reads 9/27

CAMERA: Is Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan an Out-Of-Control Bully?

Last year, a Turkish boat engaged in an act of war by trying to break Israel's legal blockade on Gaza. Its occupants violently attacked Israeli soldiers who attempted to stop it. The soldiers tried to defend themselves from being lynched and in the ensuing battle, nine attackers were killed. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan demanded an apology from Israel. But after Israel's refusal to apologize for what it saw as a result of Turkey's own wrongdoing, and a UN report that found Israel's maritime blockade of Gaza legal, a furious Erdogan threatened Israel with warships, leaving even the New York Times to wonder whether he was dangerously out of control.

Now Erdogan is throwing his weight around again... this time at the UN and this time literally. The New York Times reports about a scuffle that ensued when Erdogan tried to push his way into an overcrowded gallery to cheer the Palestinian leader's speech on Friday. After a guard tried to stop him, Erdogan disregarded him and pressed forward. The guard pushed him and "a fracas erupted that was audible four flours below." And while it was the guard who in the process of doing his job ended up in hospital with a rib injury, it is the Turkish prime minister who has demanded an apology. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, however, unlike Israel, has acceded to Erdogan's requests and appeased him with an apology and the firing of several UN guards.
But is appeasement really the best way forward with a bully who has clearly lost control?

FP: Bullies know who the weaklings are and bullies them. Appeasing bullies is a fool’s errand—it invites more bullying. Now, let’s get Turkey into the EU, so that he can better bully her. Here’s who they say Israel should have apologized to (via Elder of Ziyon):

From the transcript of Fareed Zakaria's interview with Tayyip Erdogan on CNN, Sunday:

They say that Palestine is bombing and disturbing the people of Israel, and many Israelis have been killed.I'm very clear in my remarks. I would like to see accurate statistics of how many Israelis have been killed by the bombs thrown by Palestinians or with the rockets that were launched by them, 10, 20, 100, 200, how many? Please document it. Let us know.
But on the other hand, we know that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed. Only as a result of the Gaza attack, thousands of people were killed. These are very clear remarks. The Israeli people are only resorting back to the issue of genocide in history.
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How do you think Palestine is capable of killing as many Israeli people as claimed? Let's stop deceiving each other because the human race will no longer be deceived. Everybody knows what Israel is about.

I recommend Daniel Pipes’ Is Turkey Going Rogue? Where he gives several persuasive reasons to believe that Turkey is the most dangerous state in the Middle East.

David Bernstein: A Challenge to John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer has written a lengthy and somewhat rambling response on Stephen Walt’s blog to criticism of him, especially by Jeffrey Goldberg for endorsing an anti-Semitic book by a kooky fringe anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon. One could go blow by blow through all the overwrought distortions in Mearsheimer’s post, but I’m going to focus on one. Mearsheimer is not content to argue, as he does, that he didn’t know Atzmon from a hole-in-the-head, and endorsed the book because he found it provocative and interesting. If he had limited himself to this, he could have then added that he wasn’t aware of Atzmon’s anti-Semitic background and didn’t read the book in that light. Now that he knows, he regrets his association with Atzmon and the book.
Nope. Mearsheimer actually defends Atzmon from the charge of anti-Semitism.
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Mearsheimer accuses his critics of suggesting that he must be an anti-Semite, given that he is intellectually in bed, so to speak, with the likes of Gilad Atzmon. Certainly, it’s reasonable to suspect Mearsheimer of anti-Semitism as this point, given that the main alternative explanation, that he is simply a fool who endorses highly polemical books attacking Jews and Israel without reading them closely or knowing anything about the author, has now been rebutted by Mearsheimer himself. But one could also posit Mearsheimer has decided to adopt a “Popular Front Strategy”, willing to accept any anti-Israel allies even from the blatantly anti-Semitic fringe. Regardless, it’s a pathetic fall from grace for Mearsheimer, and it’s disappointing to see that his co-author Walt is enabling him rather than pulling him back from the brink.

FP: All the exchanges in the blogosphere on the subject miss the important aspect. It’s not whether Mearsheimer is an anti-Semite—his initial work with Walt clearly established that they both are, as I argued in a piece I wrote at the time (if it quacks like a duck…). It is his sense—accurate I think—that it is now acceptable to express anti-Semitism openly in its vilest forms and that there won’t be any significant price to pay for it.

David Pryce-Jones: Dictators’ Options Narrow

Perhaps the temptation is always there to rule without the consent of the ruled. The European Union is another example of it. I woke up one day to discover that I had a president, a Belgian, of whom I had never heard. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy take decisions for whole populations like the Greeks who are expected to obey. Such figureheads have no legitimacy to be acting for people who are not their constituents and never will be. It is painfully plain that those who set up this EU made a historic mistake. It will be a matter of luck if the world gets out of it without a major crisis.

FP: Doesn’t the collapse of the West count as a major crisis?

Elder of Ziyon: Report behind the scenes of Abbas/Obama meeting

Palestine Press Agency quotes a source who says what happened behind the scenes during the meeting between President Obama and Mahmoud Abbas last Thursday.
According to the source, Obama told Abbas that if a drop of American blood is shed as a result of a US veto, he would hold Abbas personally responsible. Abbas answered that it is up to God.
In response, Abbas threatened to dissolve the PA and leave the international community in charge of the fate of the Palestinian Arabs.
The same source says that a number of Arab countries also tried to convince Abbas not to go forward with the bid, including Morocco, Jordan and the UAE.
The report goes on to say that Abbas conferred with the PLO leadership at the last minute to see if they wanted him to postpone the bid, but he was convinced by the enthusiasm of the crowds at the rallies (that his government engineered to begin with!)
The source also said that Abbas is trying to distance the US from any role in future negotiations.

FP: I am trying to imagine the depth of hatred towards Israel that causes the world to put up with and even support the pathetic, treacherous and murderous Palestinians. You give Arabs a finger and they'll take the whole hand.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Muslim World Frays, UN Obsessed by Israel

A note, before I proceed: I support the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem, and have for many years. I believe it’s in Israel’s best interest to have an independent Palestinian state as a neighbor, and I also support Palestinian statehood because Palestinians define themselves as a nation and have the right to live free and unmolested in their own country.

FP: How idiotic: if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn and a tower in Paris to sell you. And then they wonder why the peace process keeps failing and blame Israel. Now Consider this:

Last week, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, shared with me a list of the diverse steps the country has taken to protect Israel from what she and President Barack Obama consider to be scapegoating by the world body. The list includes U.S. opposition to the “dozens of biased resolutions” directed against Israel in the General Assembly, and also notes the number of times the U.S. has fought for the appointment of Israelis to various posts within the UN, from which they are, as a matter of course, excluded.
It also offers a good illustration of the lengths the U.S. must go to in fighting the UN’s pathological, detestable and intermittently comical obsession with Israel -- one that prevents it from forcefully addressing many of the more dire problems confronting the Arab world.
At times, the list reads like satire. There is, for instance, this item: “The United States continues to call for the resignation of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk. The United States has strongly condemned his anti-Semitic statements and web postings, as well as his deeply offensive statements in support of 9/11 conspiracy theories.”
The UN doesn’t consider it overly troubling that a top human-rights official has trafficked in anti-Semitic propaganda and is a Sept. 11 “truther.”
Then there was this uplifting episode, brought to us courtesy of Syria: “At the Human Rights Council, the United States forcefully opposed 2010 statements by a Syrian official that Israeli children are taught to sing songs about drinking the blood of Arabs. The United States worked with the HRC President to make clear that such language is outrageous and offensive and has no place in UN bodies.”

Is that what the US government should occupy itself with? It does not occur to Goldberg, let alone the Obama administration, that perhaps it is time to question the nature and existence of the UN, particularly given the fact that without US funding that existence is not possible?

Ed Koch endorses Obama

Perhaps the Jews-against-Obama storyline has hit its high-water mark.
Ed Koch, citing Obama's speech to the United Nations and an invitation to a "fun" event with the president, writes today:

The President should be praised for intervening with the Egyptian army to save the Israeli diplomatic personnel from physical assault and providing the Israeli military with bunker buster bombs, advanced military technology and providing military intelligence cooperation far exceeding his predecessors. I’m now on board the Obama Reelection Express.

FP: Oh, American liberal Jews are so easy to fool, all it takes is a speech. No wonder Obama felt he could do anything to Israel without losing them. Even very revealing slips of the tongue don’t matter.

Khaled Abu Toameh on Abbas giving the finger to the US

Abbas Gives the Finger to Obama

By rejecting both of US President Barack Obama's requests -- to avoid a United Nations bid for Palestinian Statehood and to return to the negotiating table -- the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, is now hoping to join the bandwagon of the few Arab and Muslim leaders who have dared to stand up to the Americans.

For many years, Abbas's Arab and Muslim enemies had condemned him as a "puppet" in the hands of the US.

But his decision to dump the US will certainly help him get rid of that image. Abbas is well aware of the fact that anti-American sentiments remain as high as ever in most of the Arab and Islamic countries. This was the reason he decided that it would be unwise of him to continue swimming against this tide.

By distancing himself from Washington, Abbas has moved closer toward the Arab world's anti-US camp, led by Iran and consisting of Hamas, Hizbullah and other radical groups.

It is no surprise, therefore, that some Hamas leaders have come out in support of Abbas's decision to spit in the face of the Obama administration. In a sign of improved relations between the two parties, Abbas's Fatah faction has now decided to resume unity talks with Hamas in the hope of forming a new government in the near future.

The campaign of incitement against Obama and the US will also whip up anti-American sentiments in the Arab world and could lead to endangering the lives of US citizens and troops in the Middle East.
For weeks, the Obama administration tried to persuade Abbas to abandon his plan to seek full membership in the UN for a Palestinian state, to no avail.

Even threats to cut off financial aid to the Palestinian Authority and veto the motion at the UN Security

Council did not stop Abbas from going ahead with his statehood bid.

Nor did the hundreds of millions of dollars that were granted to Abbas's administration in the West Bank over the past few years help prevent the statehood plan.

Further, Abbas has not only turned his back on the Americans; he is now also whipping up anti-American sentiment among Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world.

The verbal assault on Obama and the US began long before Abbas submitted his application for statehood to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Speaking to journalists in Ramallah, top Abbas aides accused Obama of "surrendering to Zionist pressure" because of his repeated attempts to dissuade Abbas from embarking on a unilateral move at the UN.

The aides also accused Obama of being influenced by "Zionist and pro-Israel" advisors. One official in Ramallah even went as far as calling for a boycott of US envoy Dennis Ross under the pretext that he was "pro-Israel." Ross and another US envoy, David Hale, had both been dispatched to Ramallah to try to persuade Abbas to agree to the unconditional resumption of peace talks with Israel.

Since Abbas delivered his speech at the UN last week, the Palestinian Authority has stepped up its criticism of Obama and the US. On instructions from senior Palestinian officials, demonstrators took to the streets to chant anti-US slogans and burn portraits of Obama in scenes reminiscent of mass anti-American protests by supporters of Iran and Hizbullah.

Abbas and his aides are now hoping that the Arab and Islamic countries would compensate them for the loss of financial aid from the US, which has been giving the Palestinian Authority -- more than $450 million a year. The Palestinians believe that the Arab and Muslim leaders are so afraid of the "Arab Spring" that they will be forced to start funding the Palestinians.

The Saudis were the first to prove this theory correct. Last week, they informed the Palestinian Authority of their decision to channel $200 million in urgent aid to the Palestinians. It now remains to be seen if other countries will follow suit. If that happens, Obama can expect still another finger from Abbas.

FP: The underlying reason for all that is happening now in the Middle East is the self-induced domestic and international collapse of the West. That's what facilitated the Arab upheavals and the release of the anti-Semitic and anti-western hatreds that had been for decades channeled by the dictators away from themselves. In short, we are watching the PostWest.
If Obama is re-elected by default (there is no serious Republican contender), relieved from electoral constraints he will no longer want to isolate the US for the sake of Israel and will stop even pretending it supports her. There's little doubt that he cannot stand being accused of being a tool of the Jews. In fact, in the US anti-Semitism is no longer a rarity and it is now tolerated in the open, even by the government:

NoahPollak Why is former State Dept. spokesman @PJCrowley appearing on a panel at the Palestine Center with John Mearsheimer? http://t.co/T4aFSXqr.

And the American liberal Jews fail to realize the lesson of the Holocaust. 

Beware of the future. This is realism, not pessimism--those who forget the past are doomed to relive it.

Comments on Reads 9/26

Walter Russell Mead: Report From The Middle East: Part One

The core problem with the land for peace concept at the basis of both the Oslo Accords and every effort since to revive the moribund peace process is, simply, this: the process doesn’t offer enough land to the Palestinians or enough peace to the Israelis to be satisfactory to either side.
This is not because the two sides do not understand each other, or because there is something wrong with their leaders or their political processes. There are good and rational reasons why impoverished Palestinians in Gaza don’t want to sign away their right of return, and there are good and rational reasons why Israelis don’t want to make territorial concessions and dismantle settlements for an illusory peace.
Both sides, however, are compelled to fake an eagerness for peace because neither wants to look like the skunk at the global garden party. For the US, the EU and the Arab states, peace between Israelis and Palestinians on almost any terms would be a huge plus. Failing actual peace, a peace process that contains the political fallout from the dispute and allows the rest of the world to go about its business undisturbed is in the national interest of almost everyone.
The Israelis and Palestinians both know this; therefore both sides try to exact the highest possible price in aid and political concessions and assurances from outside powers before entering negotiations that, again, both Israelis and Palestinians don’t regard with much hope.
On the other hand, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want the blame for blocking negotiations or making them fail. Both sides want to keep the outside world sweet. The Palestinian Authority would be hard pressed to survive for six months without the cash it gets from Europe, the US and Arab states; Israel also cannot afford to endanger its political support in the US and elsewhere by too-obviously spurning the peace process. What both sides do is to raise as many procedural and substantive obstacles and preconditions as possible in order to keep the process at bay.

FP: Wrong. No matter how clear and obvious the Arabs make it, even the relatively knowledgeable and reasoning in the West refuse to conceive of and accept the Palestinian position as genocidal. The only land they want is Israel itself. Their so-called nationalism is defined as the denial of Jewish nationalism, which is why the conflict for them is a zero-sum game and co-existence is unacceptable. As Steve commented on Mead:

Professor Mead’s analysis is logical as long as you accept his basic premise that the Palestinian Arabs’ principle goal is the creation of their own sovereign state, not the destruction of the Jewish one. From the statements of Haj Amin Al-Husseini to the present, the latter goal has always been clearly articulated. That is why well-meaning U.S. policy and professor Mead’s logical solution will continue to fail forever.

The refusal to accept reality does not lead to just failure—it enables Western support of the Palestinians that guarantees that they won’t ever compromise on the existence of Israel. In short, the West is directly responsible for sustaining the conflict and potentially facilitating another Holocaust.

Erdogan accuses Israel of using Holocaust for political gain

Turkish PM reiterates demand that Israel must first apologize for deadly 2010 flotilla raid before ties restored • "Relations with Israel are broken," he says • Joint Iranian-Turkish campaign against Kurd rebels not ruled out.

FP: And yet Claire Berlinski is pleased by a Turkish suggestion that Israel capitulate to Erdogan’s demands because Turkey is worth saving as an ally. This from the author who praised Margaret Thatcher’s leadership.

Police conclude Kiryat Arba car crash a terror attack

Police first said death of Asher Palmer and infant son result of accident, later confirm stones had been hurled at vehicle. Settlement leaders: Police tried to cover up murder to prevent price tag response.
Police concluded Sunday that Asher Palmer and his son Yehonatan were killed in a car cash after stones were hurled at them on Highway 60.
Asher Palmer, 25, and his 1-year-old son, Yehonatan, were killed Friday when their car overturned near Kiryat Arba. After an initial inquiry, the police ruled out the possibility that the accident had been caused by stones that were hurled at the vehicle by Palestinians.
But an examination of the father's body revealed fractures to his skull. "It was clearly a terrorist attack, Asher's gun had been stolen, there were rocks inside the vehicle and it was clear Asher was hit by a rock," Palmer's family said after police informed them of their conclusion that the incident was in fact the result of a terror attack.

FP: Instinctive reaction: let’s give them a state. It’s not the Palestinians that endanger Israel’s future, it’s Israel. If it continues in this appeasement mold, which signals weakness, it’s doomed.

Saudi women get the vote – but not much more

Saudi king allows women to vote in parliamentary elections from 2015 • Women also to stand for election to municipal councils and to king’s advisory council • Women still barred from driving, tourism and medical treatment without male consent.

FP: Safe move. How many women will vote independently and what do you think will be the influence of family’s man on their vote? Any idea what it’ll happen to them if them if they ignore the pressure?

Spengler on Obama's "Jew, I mean a janitor” Freudian slip (MUST READ)

My Pajamas Media colleague Ed Driscoll has already picked up Obama’s “Jew, I mean a janitor” gaffe on CNBC. For those who just got back from vacation on another planet, what Obama said to the Congressional Black Caucus was:

If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a Jew, uh, as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor. I have no problem with that.

It’s already hit a number of the conservative discussion boards, but except for a passing mention at a Los Angeles Times blog, this utterly outrageous slip made into not one mainstream media news outlet. Ed is right: if this had been Bush, we would have not heard the end of it.

You must read it all, including the comments.

Collected links

Greg Sheridan: Anti-Semitism the real issue that dare not speak its name

CAMERA: Makdisi: Eliminating Jewish State More Important than Creating Palestinian One

Fred Siegel: A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism

Moshe Arens: The Palestinian state and its Jewish refugees

Ariel Sharon carried out such an ethnic cleansing operation in the large Jewish settlement bloc in Gush Katif, using the Israel Defense Forces to forcibly uproot 8,000 Jewish farmers from their lands.

Comments on Reads 9/24

Jeffrey Goldberg: John Mearsheimer Endorses a Hitler Apologist and Holocaust Revisionist

If you recall from the fight over "The Israel Lobby," which Mearsheimer wrote with Stephen Walt, of Harvard, the authors claimed that they were simply writing a critique of American foreign policy, and of certain American citizens who, they said, "distorted" foreign policy. Many of us disagreed. Here is a bit of what David Rothkopf wrote about Mearsheimer and Walt: "W)hatever the pale intellectual merits of his hackneyed argument may be (the authors) know full well that their prominence on this issue has come not because they have had a single new insight but rather because they were willing and one can only believe inclined to play to a crowd whose 'views' were fueled by prejudice and worse. They may not be anti-Semites themselves but they made a cynical decision to cash in on anti-Semitism by offering to dress up old hatreds in the dowdy Brooks Brothers suits of the Kennedy School and the University of Chicago."
Now, Mearsheimer is endorsing the writing of a man who espouses neo-Nazi views. In other words, he's not even bothering to make believe anymore -- he's moved from a self-described critic of Israel to a corrosive critic of Jewry itself. The blogger Adam Holland, like yours truly, didn't quite believe that Mearsheimer would endorse such a crude anti-Semite, so he asked him to confirm:

I had trouble believing that a distinguished professor at one of the world's greatest universities would link himself to a hatemonger like Atzmon. So I sent Professor Mearsheimer an email quoting the blurb and asking him to verify it's accuracy.  I also gave him an opportunity to amend it or add to it.  Here's what he wrote back:
"The blurb below is the one I wrote for "The Wandering Who" and I have no reason to amend it or embellish it, as it accurately reflects my view of the book."

Gilad Atzmon, by the way, is also on record saying this:

"I believe that from certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany."

Perhaps Mearsheimer has found a new co-author.

FP: From the first time I became aware of Mearsheimer and Walt’s work on the Jewish lobby I thought it was the work of anti-semites, no matter how much effort was made to refrain from accusing them of racism just because they were academics; and I even wrote an online article about it. Well, voila.
Unless and until people learn to call a spade a spade—if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck—this mental illness will only spread and get accepted.

CENGİZ AKTAR: Presidential system: Looking for absolute power

Although it is a widespread style of administration, the presidential system works democratically well only in the United States, maybe in Brazil now and perhaps in Mexico in the future. Most countries governed by a presidential system are dictatorships. A few familiar names are Azerbaijan, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Armenia and Sudan… But before we discuss this model, we should look at the discrepancies of the system at work. For the problem is not the lack of more power but of a social contract to keep this power at check through legislature, law and regional structures; or in other words, it is about the lack of a democratic constitution.
Since everyone in Turkey believes that only top positions can change things in the country, everyone wants to become prime minister. Apparently, the prime minister is unsatisfied with having such power, so he wants to have some more by becoming the president of the country.
So, let me wrap this up with a famous quote by Lord Acton: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

FP: Islamism is as compatible with democracy as Nazism or Communism were: temporarily. And here's Claire Berlinski:

More vibrant democracy:

Parliament will open on Oct. 1. The first item on the agenda for the chairmanship council will be the broadcast hours of the “Meclis TV” [Parliament TV]. This is because Parliamentary Speaker Çiçek has not renewed the contract with the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, or TRT, as he did last term. The group speeches of leaders will not be broadcast during this term. Also, the general assembly sessions will be on air between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Except for these hours, there will be no broadcast. The opposition is reacting to this. The CHP and MHP say this is a means of “censorship” and they argue that the parliamentary activities are being snatched away from the people. According to whispers, Speaker Çiçek will not take a step back. It could be possible to install a closed circuit broadcast within the parliamentary campus so that parliamentary deputies are well informed of sessions. That is a broadcast system closed to the public but open to deputies is in question. Let’s see who will be the winner of the broadcast fight ...
This is how it works, you see?
...
It means no one will even be able to watch the debate about the new constitution that will, supposedly, shape Turkey's future. Here's why it matters. As for the opposition, they're not serious about winning, anyway, so who cares.

Turkey has been presented as the model of a democratic Muslim country. But secularism was imposed on the country dictatorially via military rule and it was only a matter of time before Islam would surface; and only a matter of time before it would do what it’s wont to do.

Comments on Reads 9/22 III

Jewish occupation vs. gentile presence

In over two-thousand Reuters stories published over just the last couple of years, the news agency refers to Israel's control of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as an "occupation".  This, despite the fact that the territory is officially unallocated to any sovereign and disputed between Jews and Arabs.
By contrast, when Reuters discusses the (internationally recognized as illegal) three-decade occupation of Lebanon by Syria or the (internationally recognized as illegal) nearly four-decade occupation of Cyprus by Turkey, the occupation is referred to merely as a "military presence":

Cyprus has been split since the 1974 invasion in the aftermath of a brief Greek-inspired coup in Nicosia, and Turkey maintains a military presence in the Turkish Cypriot state.

Why the double standard?

FP: A rhetorical question.

In UN, PA Maps Erase All of Israel

This will certainly help them get votes at the UN...

Palestinian Authority representatives in the United Nations are handing out maps of "Palestine" that show it in place of all of Israel, including Tel Aviv, reports David Bedein of the Israel Resource Review.
Bedein, who is currently in the United States, told Arutz Sheva: "They do not want a Palestinian state, but all of Palestine. The maps they hand out in their offices include all of 'Palestine.' They erase Israel completely in their maps."

FP: First, this is nothing new, they’ve been using that map and expressing this objective all the time, the West just refuses to listen. But second, are you kidding me, the UN? This will not prevent them from getting votes, quite the opposite. A time is coming when even this will be accepted openly by the world. In fact, it already is, except it’s implicit in the world’s actions, rather than explicit. But not for long.

U.S. leads mass walkout of Ahmadinejad’s UN speech

UNITED NATIONS — Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on the warpath against the West at the United Nations again Thursday sparking a mass walkout by outraged US and European delegations.
The Iranian leader repeated comments casting doubt on the origins of the Holocaust and the September 11, 2001 attacks and criticized the United States for killing Osama bin Laden rather than bringing him to trial.
European countries use the Holocaust as an excuse to pay “ransom to the Zionists,” he said. The “diabolical” aims of the West are the cause of wars and the financial crisis, Ahmadinejad stormed.
In a repeat of walkouts at the United Nations and other international events in recent years, a US diplomat monitoring the speech in the UN General Assembly left halfway through the 20 minute discourse. The 27 European Union nations then followed in a coordinated protest move.

FP: Given how vile the nutter is, that all the West is capable to do is to walk out on him while doing nothing to prevent him from going nuclear tells you that are already getting a glimpse at the PostWest.

Young becoming "lost generation" amid recession

New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.
"We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers," said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.
"Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade," Sum said.

FP: America’s future.

Solyndra employees: Company suffered from mismanagement, heavy spending

Former employees of Solyndra, the shuttered solar company that exhausted half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, said they saw questionable spending by management almost as soon as a federal agency approved a $535 million government-backed loan for the start-up.
A new factory built with public money boasted a gleaming conference room with glass walls that, with the flip of a switch, turned a smoky gray to conceal the room’s occupants. Hastily purchased state-of-the-art equipment ended up being sold for pennies on the dollar, still in its plastic wrap, employees said.
As the $344 million factory went up just down the road from the company’s leased plant in Fremont, Calif., workers watched as pallets of unsold solar panels stacked up in storage. Many wondered: Was the factory needed?
“After we got the loan guarantee, they were just spending money left and right,” said former Solyndra engineer Lindsey Eastburn. “Because we were doing well, nobody cared. Because of that infusion of money, it made people sloppy.”
Solyndra’s ability to secure federal backing also made the company eager for more assistance, interviews and records show. Company executives ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts, hiring a former Senate aide to work with the White House and the Energy Department. Within a week of getting a loan guarantee commitment from the Energy Department, Solyndra applied for another, worth $400 million. It never won final approval.

FP: The corporate welfare state and crony capitalism at their best.

Comments on Reads 9/22 II

Jeff Jacoby: No to statehood

“It is our legitimate right to demand the full membership of the state of Palestine in the UN,’’ Abbas declared in Ramallah on Friday, “to put an end to a historical injustice by attaining liberty and independence, like the other peoples of the earth.’’
But for the better part of a century, Arab leaders of Palestine have consistently said no when presented with the chance to build a state of their own. They said no in 1937, when the British government, which then ruled Palestine, proposed to divide the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. Arab leaders said no again in 1947, choosing to go to war rather than accept the UN’s decision to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations. When Israel in 1967 offered to relinquish the land it had acquired in exchange for peace with its neighbors, the Arab world’s response, issued at a summit in Khartoum, was not one no, but three: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.’’
At Camp David in 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a sovereign state with shared control of Jerusalem and billions of dollars in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and returned to launch the deadly terror war known as the Second Intifada.
…
It is no mystery, however. The raison d’être of the Palestinian movement has never been the establishment and building-up of a sovereign Palestinian homeland. It has always been the negation of a sovereign Jewish homeland. That is why well-intended proposals for a “two-state solution’’ have never come to fruition, no matter how earnestly proposed by US presidents or UN secretaries-general. And that is why Abbas and other Palestinian leaders insist that a Palestinian state would be explicitly Arab and Muslim, but adamantly refuse to acknowledge that Israel is legitimately the Jewish state.
“Palestinian nationalism,’’ Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, “was based on driving all Israelis out.’’ Sadly, it still is.
…
It is this grotesque and bloody culture that Palestinian leaders want the UN to affirm as worthy of statehood. The wonder is not they make the request, but that anyone thinks it should be granted.

FP:Bingo.

CAMERA: Palestinian Official: No End of Conflict After Palestinian State

There was a time when Palestinian leaders sought to conceal their goal of overrunning the Jewish state in misleading commentary for Western audiences that implied a willingness to accept coexistence with a sovereign Israel. Now, evidently, times have changed and blunt statements are deemed safe to make. A remarkable interview in Lebanon's Daily Star (September 15, 2011) illustrates the shift. According to Abdullah Abdullah, Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, Palestinians would not all become automatic citizens of any future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The story reports:

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens. Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would "absolutely not" be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees.

Abdullah's willingness to leave Palestinians stateless in camps even in territory under Palestinian authority is spelled out further for anyone who's missed the point:

The right of return that Abdullah says is to be negotiated would not only apply to those Palestinians whose origins are within the 1967 borders of the state, he adds. “The state is the 1967 borders, but the refugees are not only from the 1967 borders. The refugees are from all over Palestine. When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

Is that clear? "When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict" just a change in the rules of the game. Sound like the PLO's 1974 "phased plan" for the destruction of Israel?
Something, indeed, is changing when an "ambassador" can give an interview such as this and there's not a ripple in the Western media.

FP: Yes, the world has again exposed its anti-Semitism, which hid for a while.

The GOP message to Israel

Bill Clinton summarizes the Republican message to Israel:
You guys [Israel] do whatever you want — keep the West Bank. We’re coming back, we’ll have the White House and Congress, and we’ll let you do whatever you want.

FP: And this is the President who was the best for Israel???? I never trusted and don’t now the perception that American politicians are pro-Israel. It’s after they retire that they reveal where their sympathies really lie.

Ben Smith:Dept. of linkage

Adam Kredo gets a readout from an Obama call today with rabbis:

"The most important thing we can do to stabilize the strategic situation for Israel is if we can actually resolve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis because that's what feeds so much of the tumult in Egypt," Obama said. "That's what I think has created the deep tension between Turkey and Israel and Turkey has historically been a friend and ally of Israel. That's why we think direct negotiations are so critical."

FP: Compare this to my previous post of and comments on Claire Berlinski’s analysis. Either pathetic ignorance or pathetic fooling the gullible for support, probably both. And even more pathetic is that nobody challenges Obama’s crap.

Elliott Abrams: Of Gratitude, Ingratitude, And Imprisonment In Iran

In the last year I have written several blog posts about the American hikers imprisoned in Iran, hoping to help keep attention focused on getting them freed. Like every American I was delighted to see them out, finally, yesterday.
But like many Americans, I was not delighted by the statement made immediately by one of the two, Shane Bauer. After thanking the Sultan of Oman for helping get them out, he said this:

Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran.

Who exactly are the “political prisoners” in America? Can we have some names? Who exactly are the “unjustly imprisoned people” in America, and how precisely does Mr. Bauer know them to be “unjustly imprisoned” rather than convicted according to due process of law?
Given that Mr. Bauer has just suffered two years imprisonment by Iran for the crime of hiking and mistakenly crossing a border, is he entirely comfortable with his comparison of the two countries in the statement just quoted? So it would appear. Thinking of the immense diplomatic activity this country undertook to free him and the enthusiasm with which his liberation was greeted yesterday, that statement of his leaves a very bad taste.

FP: Even more pathetic. That's why Americans are treated so. Some superpower. Let Iran try to do this to China, or Russia, or Turkey.

PLO Representative Is New Huffington Post Blogger

Who would have imagined that an organization that the US designated a terrorist organization in 1988 and who committed an assassination of two US diplomats would be given a voice on the Huffington Post? And yet that is exactly what has happened: Today's latest and greatest blog post on the subject of the Palestinian statehood drive is written by Maen Rashid Areikat, the Chief Representative of the PLO to the United States. Isn't that fantastic?

FP: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and others have published op-eds by Hamas functionaries, so… That’s why the US is where it is.

Comments on Reads 9/22

Victor Davis Hanson: Can Israel Survive?

Not now. A soon-to-be-nuclear Iran serially promises to destroy Israel. The Erdogan government in Turkey brags about its Ottoman Islamist past — and wants to provoke Israel into an eastern-Mediterranean shooting war. Pakistan is the world’s leading host and exporter of jihadists obsessed with destroying Israel. The oil-rich Gulf states use their vast petroleum wealth and clout to line up oil importers against Israel. The 21st-century United Nations is a de facto enemy of the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, the West is nearly bankrupt. The European Union is on the brink of dissolving, its population shrinking amid growing numbers of Islamic immigrants.
America is $16 trillion in debt. We are tired of three wars. The Obama administration initially thought putting a little light between Israel and the United States might coax Arab countries into negotiating a peace. That new American triangulation certainly has given a far more confident Muslim world more hope — but it is hope that just maybe the United States cannot or will not come to Israel’s aid if Muslim states ratchet up the tension.
It is trendy to blame Israeli intransigence for all these bleak developments. But to do so is simply to forget history. There were three Arab efforts to destroy Israel before it occupied any borderlands after its victory in 1967. Later, it gave back all of Sinai and yet now faces a hostile Egypt. It got out of Lebanon — and Hezbollah crowed that Israel was weakening, as that terrorist organization moved in and stockpiled thousands of missiles pointed at Tel Aviv. Israel got out of Gaza and earned as thanks both rocket showers and a terrorist Hamas government sworn to destroy the Jewish state.
...
By now we know both what will start and what will deter yet another conflict in the Middle East. In the past, wars broke out when the Arab states thought they could win them and stopped when they realized they could not.
But now a new array of factors — ever more Islamist enemies of Israel such as Turkey and Iran, ever more likelihood of frontline Arab Islamist governments, ever more fear of Islamic terrorism, ever more unabashed anti-Semitism, ever more petrodollars flowing into the Middle East, ever more prospects of nuclear Islamist states, and ever more indifference by Europe and the United States — has probably convinced Israel’s enemies that finally they can win what they could not in 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006.
So brace yourself. The next war against Israel is no longer a matter of if — only when. And it will be far more deadly than any we’ve witnessed in quite some time.

FP: There is nothing like signaling weakness to induce Arabs/Islamists to walk--literally--all over you.

Martin Kramer: Fawaz Gerges: Al Qaeda is dead! (Again!)

Maybe Al Qaeda is washed up. I'm open to the argument. But I'm very much the doubter when it's made by someone who, in the year prior to 9/11, also argued that Al Qaeda was washed up—someone who, in the fall of 2000, said that the US was "inflating Bin Laden's importance," and that "since the blasts in Africa [in 1998], not a single American life has been lost to al-Qa'ida." That would be Fawaz Gerges.
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Gerges only knows one tune: Muslims hate the terrorists among them, so the terrorists are always losing popularity, struggling to survive, “on the run,” and so on. Just leave the Muslims alone, they’ll sort it out. The idea may look debatable to you, but it’s worked for him—professorships, book contracts, media gigs. How well it holds up in practice doesn’t really matter, given the public’s memory deficit. Still, it’s amazing (to me) that Gerges shows not a smidgeon of the humility usually imparted by a rough encounter with reality. Not him! He just repeats his same old arguments, made with the same measure of cocksure certitude.
I don’t know if Al Qaeda is up for another round or has gone down for the count, and experts disagree on it. I do know that Fawaz Gerges doesn’t know either. And if it were my day job to know, I’d be worried—should Gerges, by some strange aberration of nature, actually be some sort of negative oracle, whose assertions are reliably and consistently false.

FP: It is not just poor memory. He also tells Americans what they want to hear. You know what they say: if you can't say anything positive, don't say anything. It would be interesting to check his funding sources. I am willing to bet they're those interested in spreading the good news.

JoshuaPundit: It Begins: Israeli Baby Injured As 'Palestinian' Riots Break Out

A baby girl became the first casualty as violent riots broke out in Judea and Samaria among 'Palestinians' seeking to prove their worthiness for statehood by throwing stones at Jews and generally exhibiting the sort of behavior they've become known for.
The baby was injured when she was struck in the head by a stone while her mother was carrying her between Tapuah and Migdalim junctions near Petah Tikva.
A second Israeli was injured by stones when he drove a little too close to the Palestinian town of Halhul.
Rioting also flared up near Qalandiya and Hebron, where mobs stoned Israeli security forces, burned tires and blocked roads.
I think we can expect more of this kind of behavior.

FP: That's their natural behavior. Who deserves a state more than they do?

Matt Taibbi: Moody's Bank Downgrades: What, Us Worry?

Big news in the financial world yesterday, as Moody’s downgraded three of America’s biggest commercial banks. The ratings agency hit Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup
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But there’s no way this isn’t a serious blow to all these banks. You know you’re seriously fucked when even Moody’s, the most whorishly corrupt ratings company in modern history – one that “accidentally” gave billions in dicey derivatives AAA ratings a few years back (blaming the faux-bullish ratings on a computer error) – can’t find a way to avoid downgrading you.
And here’s my question today for folks keeping their money at Bank of America: How psyched are you today to have your bank downgraded to just above junk status even before the inevitable implosion of the Countrywide portfolio, that Yucca Mountain of deadly and still-severely-overmarked mortgages that BofA is toting along?
These three banks control, cumulatively, about a quarter of all America’s deposits. But it’s probably nothing to worry about, right? How about Ted Danson’s CSI debut? Man, is he having a quirky and idiosyncratic second career, or what?

FP: America down the drain courtesy of the corporate welfare state.

Comments on Reads 9/21

Obama UN address angers Palestinians

Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki told Palestinian television following Obama's speech that "The time has come for us to stop differentiating between Israel and the US, because they are committing the same crime.
"The Americans slaughtered the Indians there, so wouldn't they be capable of slaughter here? The world is a small global village, and it is changing," he added.

FP: The Palestinians sure know something about slaughter. Anyway, let’s pump them full of more billions.

Omri Ceren: Abbas: No, Of Course We Won’t Ever Give Up Trying To Overrun Israel

We’re now entering the part of the campaign season where disagreements and concerns about Obama’s approach to Israel – including his first-phone-call embrace of Abbas and his policy of putting “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel – get dismissed as “smears” and “myths.” The strategy is an exact replay of what the Democrats did in 2008, where groups like the NJDC shouted down concerns about Obama’s anti-Israel advisers, his anti-Israel associates, and his anti-Israel rhetoric.
The goal isn’t to answer arguments. The president’s defenders want to categorically dismiss his critics as disingenuous liars, the better to ensure low-information voters don’t try to evaluate the criticisms. Having succeeded last time with press releases like “Another Ad, Another Lie” and accusations of “hypocrisy and the blatant disregard for truth,” Obama’s ostensibly pro-Israel defenders have no incentive to try anything new. That’s kind of lucky for them, because any actual defense would require exploring his record on Israel, which would involve Reuters articles with phrases like “historic crisis” and “35-year low.”

Omri Ceren: Questions Arise About Partisan Documents

(1) What is the financial relationship between the Obama campaign and Wexler’s “non-partisan” think tank?
(2) Did that financial relationship exist last May when Wexler and Krieger wrote their op-ed for the WSJ, and if so, did they disclose the conflict to the WSJ?
(3) Did that financial relationship exist last week when Krieger fed Laura Rozen a quote about how hard the Obama administration was working to avoid a Palestinian UDI resolution, and if so, did he disclose the conflict to her?
(4) Does that financial relationship extend to Wexler’s defenses of Obama and attacks on Perry yesterday – in other words, his work as an expert surrogate – or is that separate?
(5) The campaign team aren’t going to keep trotting out Wexler and Krieger as independent analysts are they?
Answers to these questions would be helpful, because right now, it seems like Wexler and Krieger are being paid to deny the extent to which Obama has eroded the U.S./Israeli relationship, and instead of disclosing as much, they’re giving interviews as non-partisan analysts.

FP: Jews too. Yuckh.

Obama, Ergodan seek common ground on Middle East

American, Turkish leaders avoid Israeli-Turkish issue while discussing upcoming Palestinian statehood bid, counter-terrorism.

FP: More evidence of where Obama's sympathies lie. (see next)

Walter Russell Mead: The Persian Hotline

Things have been heating up in the Persian Gulf over the past few months. Iranian boats and aircraft have assumed threatening positions toward American vessels, and the two sides have come close to firing on each other on a few occasions. This tension has prompted the Navy to consider a military hotline with the Islamic Republic.
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The hotline is probably a good idea. Many are understandably worried about establishing military communications with a rogue state known for sponsoring terrorist groups across the middle east and calling for the destruction of Israel. Yet establishing an emergency hotline is not equivalent to an endorsement of the regime — look at the “red telephone” to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. In any case practical mil/mil talks are not diplomatic encounters; soldiers arrange temporary cease fires with the enemy in time of war.
President Obama may finally get the dialogue with Iran he promised on the campaign — although perhaps not quite in the way he expected.

FP: Looks like Iran is well on its way to substitute the Soviet Union as the new power to contend with. The PostWest.

Brad Reed: Breaking America's Trickle-Down Stockholm Syndrome

The most frustrating aspect of modern political life is the fact that the American public has internalized the (false) idea that magical self-made rich supermen don't owe anything to the society that nurtured them because they've earned every dime of their fortunes all by themselves without any help from the government. The reality, of course, is just the opposite.

FP: Aside from the basic functions of government without which the rich couldn't have become so, the corporate welfare state today robs the taxpayer to enrich corporate and Wall Street speculators and frauds.