Rael Jean Isaac

Our New Judiciary Chairman

Michigan’s John Conyers, whose district comprises Islamic Dearbornistan, and who is slated to become chairman of the important House Judiciary Committee, ranks as much anti-American as anti-Israel. His platform, in addition to calling for the impeachment of President Bush, promises to repeal the Patriot Act and make it a criminal act to “profile” Moslem terror suspects. Over these many years, Conyers has been an eclectic champion of the notion of America-the-enemy. In 1979 he addressed the inaugural conference of the U.S. Peace Council, an offshoot of the World Peace Conference, an international Soviet front. He told the assembled Communists and far leftists (who passed a series of resolutions conforming to major Soviet objectives at the time, including one “In Solidarity with the People of Palestine”): It’s people like you who should be members of Congress” and “From you I can see the future of America.” (See Rael Jean and Erich Isaac, The Coercive Utopians, p. 152) Recently Conyers has associated himself with pro-North Korean front groups and even spoke at a rally raising money for the anti-Semitic and generally off-the-wall Lyndon LaRouche.

Defeated by Evil

Criticizing the critics of the war in Iraq, Dennis Prager (World Net Daily, Nov. 14) makes an important point: “We have not won the war in Iraq because of something completely unforeseeable: widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims....No Japanese blew up Japanese temples to rid Japan of the American occupier. No Germans mass murdered German schoolchildren and teachers to rid Germany of the American, British, French and Soviet occupiers. The level of cruelty and evil exhibited by those America is fighting in Iraq is new….It may just be impossible, if one is morally bound not to kill large numbers of civilians, to fight those who target their own civilians and hide among them….Based on what was known at the time, George Bush made a moral choice. And he would have won were it not for something new in the annals of human depravity.”

At Stake in Iraq

Military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson notes that much of the debate about the dangers of the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq under fire centers on its impact on fostering “perceptions” of American weakness. In fact, writes Hanson, it would be “the reality of power that would be gone” and legitimate questions would be raised “whether the U.S. military could win any future war – given the knowledge that barring some instantaneous victory, the American public would not allow it the time or the latitude to destroy its enemies.” [Editor’s note: “latitude” may be more important than “time.” Military columnist Ralph Peters notes that insurgents are “arrested” rather than killed on the spot with the result that Iraq’s terrified and/or partisan judges promptly release them to resume their activities.]

Writes Hanson: “When Mr. Bush contemplates what to do about Iran, he knows – and he knows Iran knows — that we are on the verge right now of a tired American public that winces at the very thought of the media storm, political fury, and wild partisan charges that would accompany any more military reactions. But the next step would be the complete loss of public confidence, in the fashion of the French, that we even could win a war if we had to. And then watch out. Great powers, like the largest animals, have a small central nervous system that directs their enormous limbs and sinews. And when it goes – call it public confidence in one’s civilization—then armies tremor, enervate, and, Europe-like, wither away.”

He Who Learns Nothing

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Dhimmi-in-chief, was in Washington in November singing the praises of wily enemy Mahmoud Abbas (“upfront, decent and against terror”) and proclaiming his eagerness to “find the best partner [for peace].” (Never mind there are none.) Grotesquely aping an American politician (and apparently forgetting the political fate of the man who made the words famous) Olmert proclaimed: “You can read my lips. I’m ready for territorial compromises, and I haven’t changed my mind.”

What mind? Since the uprooting of the Gaza settlements, rockets have rained on Israeli communities and the consensus of politicians and military men is there is nothing to be done – those on the receiving end have been told they must learn to live with it. Olmert’s fondest hope is to open up to Arab attack any part of Israel not yet in immediate rocket range.

Conniving in Self-Destruction

Since Oslo, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick observes, “Israel’s leftist governments have consistently followed a strategy of transferringresponsibility for our national security to our enemies.” First it was Yasser Arafat, more recently Mahmoud Abbas, UNIFIL and Mubarak. The results are all too predictable. In the north UNIFIL forces are enabling Hezbollah’s rearmament (while threatening and provoking Israel). In the south Egypt has announced it is deploying 5,000 troops along its border with Gaza, as it openly declares, to prevent Israel mounting a serious operation against the massive weapons smuggling that is transforming Gaza into a second south Lebanon. (Those are the weapons Egypt was supposed to be cutting off.) While the Israeli government incredibly expresses “satisfaction” with the Egyptian move, it is left to Member of the Knesset Yuval Steinitz (former chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee) to say the obvious: this is a strategic threat to Israel of the first magnitude, with Egypt “taking advantage of the weakness and incompetence of the government.”

Not content with all this, The New York Sun (November 15) reports that, under pressure from President Bush, Israel is on the brink of permitting 1500 armed soldiers of the Badr Brigade (formed from Palestinian Arab refugees in Jordan) to move into Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Israel has never allowed the Badr Brigade into this territory because it regarded it, quite rightly, as an enemy force. Now Israel expects the Badr Brigade to protect it from Hamas!
The tragic farce moves forward on its dizzying path.

The Iraqi Anthem

Thanks to Peter Metzger for bringing this to our attention. Metzger came across an online site with all the national anthems, most of which stressed the beauty of the land and longing for the homeland. Iraq’s stood out (not even North Korea, whose anthem Metzger expected to be bizarre, had anything like it.) Written by a Palestinian Arab, the verses also serve as the “unofficial” anthem of the PLO: as Metzger notes, no sign of Western values here. This is the second stanza:

“The youth will not get tired
Their goal is your independence
Or they die
We will drink from death
But we will not be slaves to our enemies
We do not want
An eternal humiliation
Nor a miserable life
We do not want
But we will return
Our great glory
My homeland
My homeland.”

From Salman Rushdie

“Meanwhile, the BBC has been instructed, we are told, that the term ‘Islamic terrorist’ can’t be used because it discriminates against Muslims. Never mind that all the terrorists who claim to be acting in the name of Islam tell us that it is Islam that is their motivation, the BBC can’t say that they’re Islamic terrorists because that’s now this new crime of what’s called ‘Islamophobia.’ I mean I just have some problem with the word because it seems to me if you have a set of ideas which I don’t like, it’s perfectly OK for me to be phobic about them. There were plenty of people who seemed to have no problem being phobic about mine but, you know, ‘Salmanophobia’ didn’t enter the language somehow...”