Posted on 08/18/2012 4:43:17 AM PDT by expat1000
A great deal of attention has been paid to hate-filled protests in front of synagogues by the Westboro Baptist Church or school protests in Beit Shemesh, but in Ann Arbor hate-filled left-wing protests have taken place in front of a synagogue every Sabbath for a decade.
What you are seeing is one of a few photos from Ann Arbor's Beth Israel Congregation and some of the photos get uglier than this. There has been astoundingly little media commentary on this, though if a right-wing group had been harassing a synagogue every Shabbat for a decade, there would have been four documentaries and eight books out on it by now.
The FEH site dedicated to exposing the protesters is a disturbing look into the mindset of the twisted mentally ill left. Liberal Jewish groups would like you to believe that harassment like this comes only from Neo-Nazis, but the Ann Arbor situation demonstrates that it is at least as likely to come from their own fellow travelers.
Aimee Smith of the Huron Valley Greens Party amplifies her objections to Celebrate Israel Day outside the JCC on May 17, 2009. Though not Muslim, Smith who wears a hijab, scolded the crowd, “Stop pretending you’re from Arabia. Be proud of your European roots.” At a previous JCC event she chanted, “Defecating on children’s drawings will not bring peace.” Smith, who brought her daughter to help shout down the Jewish community event, was her party’s candidate for Congress.
What exactly is the difference between this woman and the loons from the Westboro Baptist Church? Aimee Smith appears to have been wearing the hijab since at least 2003 when she began running for office as a candidate of the Green-Rainbow Party on a platform of protecting Cambridge from the Patriot Act and COINTELPRO.
Despite being endorsed by the Mystic Green Rainbow Coalition, the Palestinian American Congress and Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, her campaign was sidelined when her campaign manager, Amer Jubran faced deportation for a fake marriage, terrorist ties and assault.
The media studiously ignores people like this or even praises them. You don't hear the Green Party being classed with Neo-Nazis, even if their members insist on acting the same way.
Or this woman?
One told him, “Jewish prayers should be disrupted. You pray for genocide.” A white-haired woman holding a sign denouncing Israel rushed over to add, “It’s true! It’s true!”
Or this one?
Gloria Harb said she participates because she believes the United States’ political system is corrupted by Jews intent on furthering Israel’s agenda before America’s.
“I’m just one member of the group, and I focus on the American public and breaking the silence,” she said. “I know there are some of us who hold out hope of reaching some of those people in the synagogue, but not me.”
Fun fact. Harb means sword in Arabic. There's also this tragic story.
On most Saturdays, congregants and passersby will also see Marcia Federbush holding signs. Though the smallest in height and the oldest at 75, Federbush brings some noteworthy stature to the group. In 1988 she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame for her pioneering work battling gender discrimination in education. She divorced her husband before their 32nd anniversary about a year later. Until about a year ago, her daughter, Laurel, was a mainstay at the Shabbat protests and staunch defender in local media and blogs.
However, she no longer joins them and is now a member of Beth Israel Congregation herself.
“She had an epiphany, of sorts, I guess,” Herskovitz said. “Laurel’s gone to the dark side. She quit the vigils, and voted for McCain.”
Then there is this class act. Sol Metz.
His long white hair and frothy, prolonged beard make Metz hard to miss, and he isn’t hiding from anybody. Somewhat of a throwback from Ann Arbor’s counter-culture and anti-war movements, Metz often spoke his mind on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through frequent letters to the editor submissions to the Ann Arbor News...
Decades later, his own journeys to disputed territories after the second Intifada solidified his desire to take his ex-hippie wares to a new cause.
Though he is now a Quaker, Metz—after a long pause—acknowledges that two of his four children are practicing Jews today and don’t have much respect for his efforts.
It was right before and during that period of transition through the divorce that finances became a stiff challenge, he said. He insists that at Rosemary’s urging, he turned to the local Jewish Federation for help with clothing and other needs for his family.
He said groups like the Federation are what need to be stopped because of the money they raise for Israel. He is convinced the majority goes to military projects and settlements rather than humanitarian causes, despite his own experience with them.
He’s aware of the hypocrisy, but remains unfazed by it.
“That’s fair to say, but I don’t see a big problem with it,” Metz, 66, explained. “The U.S. government helps me too, but I don’t have any problem criticizing them either. I didn’t want the (Federation’s) help and I didn’t think they [his children] needed it.”
I've seen these types of people locally. They're a mix of elderly ex-Commies, professional leftist activists and the fourth wave of college graduates with useless degrees who majored in gender studies and critical race theory. Many of them are mentally ill. Most of them are filled with hate.
During the Bush years, the media embraced these people and their rallies. Just like they embraced OWS which attracts the same type of loons. Except they're not loons. They're mainstream figures on the left.
Going back through the years takes us to Aimee Smith's original appearance at a 2003 rally. Also there was Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky seen here embodying the best of 90's douchebag fashion.
“There is a war going on in Iraq and a war going on here,” Gould-Wartofsky said. “Harvard is a colony that needs to be liberated.”
The pair protested in song, with Gould-Wartofsky rapping “Drop beats, not bombs” to the rhythm of Ogunnaike’s drum."
Many Americans might agree that Harvard is a colony that needs to be liberated... but from the likes of Gould-Wartofsky. Today Gould-Wartofsky has improved his fashion sense to the best of 00's hipster fashion and blogs at the Huffington Post. According to his bio
Michael is an award-winning author from New York City and a MacCracken Fellow in Sociology at New York University. In addition to The Huffington Post, his work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Harvard Crimson, Monthly Review, Jewish Currents, and the books Poets Against the War (Nation Books, 2003) and Making War: English Literature and the Invasion of Iraq (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His writing has received Harvard’s James Gordon Bennett Prize and the New York Times James B. Reston Award. He has also won recognition for his work as an activist, photojournalist, violinist and fiddler. He is currently writing a book about Occupy Wall Street.
...of course he is. And yes The Wart hates Israel. Of course he does. And so I leave you with these deep thoughts from The Wart of Harvard.
Like the other artists, Gould-Wartofsky focused his readings on the topic of homelessness “just like you might write a love poem and get a girl to think of you in a deeper way. You can write a poem about, say, homelessness, and get people to think about that in a deeper way.”
Similarly you can spend a decade harassing a synagogue to get people to think about what the hell is wrong with the left in a deeper way.
The Ann Arbor hate group has apparently managed to disgust even one of its own members so badly that she joined a synagogue and began voting for McCain. Imagine how much it has "radicalized" the people actually in the synagogue.
Now that's deep.
BORDERLINES
A post at VDare makes the correct point that continuing immigration and a shift in the demographic balance of the country will mean the end of the electability of the Democratic Party. But VDare's racial focus is also missing an important component that I discussed in my article, "How the Left Wins Elections by Transforming Nations." I used a similar metaphor, but I pointed out that the transformation isn't a simple racial one, it's a cultural one.
The left is creating splinter demographic groups that favor them. These groups include the college educated, single women, gay men and other demos that aren't immigration based. Stopping or reworking immigration is an important goal, as I discussed in, "Toward a Sustainable Immigration Policy", but it won't the war. So long as the left can build coalitions of fragmented groups and use its cultural influences to dramatically reshape minds, higher education being the most obvious example, then there is no single solution.
The only serious counter to the demographic deluge facing Republicans: the Sailer Strategy—which is basically that the GOP should rally to its white base by appealing to its interests. Central to the Sailer Strategy: a time-out on immigration to stop the demographic displacement of whites.
But suppose the GOP takes that racialist approach. It would have to become a whole other kind of party. There are templates for that kind of party already in Europe and the United States, whether it's Oswald Mosley or Charles Coughlin, and it's a party with some serious socialism. A free enterprise Republican Party already exists. This would be a party that imposed tariffs, had a ton of a state industries and targeted social benefits. It would in essence be a racialist Democratic Party.
The idea that our choices lie between a Republican Party that exists only to make it easier for China to sell cheap shoddy products at Wal-Mart and a Republican Party that exists only to maintain a hold on its gerrymandered white districts where cheap shoddy products are made by state industries and 40 percent of the population lives on welfare... is not exactly optimistic.
ON THE OTHER HAND
...meet the new Republican. The new New Republican.
A New Republican accepts that our world has changed. He sees America moving from the top-down industrial age of the factory to the bottom-up communications age of the Internet. He sees a more diverse America, with more ingredients in the great racial and ethnic melting pot, women with increasing economic and cultural power, and 4.5 million new “millennial” voters under age 30 annually.
A New Republican sees a more complex, fast-moving society in which we are more highly leveraged, our lives are more intricately structured, and our social institutions are both more sophisticated and more vulnerable. He sees the promise and peril of globalization. He knows we must compete and win in a global economy whose overall wealth is expected to double within the lifetimes of Americans under age 40. A New Republican understands that the global economic frontier stretching before us is exactly the kind of opportunity that American excels at making the most of.
I don't want to be insulting here, but I imagine that the New Republican reads a lot of Alvin Toffler, has a Twitter account, TED talks on his favorites, and well... what?
Old, top-down, industrial-age schemes, still popular in Washington, excel at enforcing discipline and uniformity, but not at achieving growth or innovation. Assembly lines produce cars, not miraculous cures. Armies march, they don’t invent the iPhone or eBay.
No, major companies invent iPhones. And the iPhone was invented with rigid discipline and uniformity by Apple engineers and designers from Steve Jobs out of plants where rigid discipline is the order of the day and suicide is common.
Let's not kid ourselves. This isn't a new age because we get Facebook updates on our iPhones. The factory model still applies. Products are made in factories and even when they're made in a garage, the garage eventually becomes a factory. Innovation transforms and then becomes routine. And we need to win at that routine, not just in the brilliant engineers who ride ceramic bikes to work, listen to world music and spent their days listening to Steve Jobs yelling that the shape of the iPhone was still wrong.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the invocation of the distributed intelligence of the free market and the greater appeal of such arguments in the era of Wikipedia and Twitter. Those are arguments that we should be making. But it's also best not to forget that a giant chunk of the Web 2.0 Utopia floats on Wall Street fraud and many of its participants contribute time for free because their other needs are subsidized by the government... one way or another.
Many Americans had hoped President Obama would move the Democratic party into the future. At times, in style and language, candidate Obama seemed to augur a new era — one in which government looked more like the open-source movement and less like the top-down command structure of the Army.
The Obama administration, however, seems to be incapable of promoting any change that diminishes its own power and importance:
I'm all for the reemergence of a libertarian left, but the web isn't really free and it's a poor metaphor. For all the romance of the crowd, the internet is slowly becoming more centralized and regulated.
Obama isn't out of step with the trend, he is in step with the trend. The internet is more Google than it is open source. The key players in it don't promote any change that diminish their power and importance. If you doubt that, how many of you are using an open source browser. Oh Chrome and Safari piggyback on open source, but that's it. The only major open source browser, Firefox, has been sinking for a while.
10 years from now the internet as we know it, the one where people can be anonymous, where all sorts of sites that are out of step with world speech codes can thrive, and where it seems like the old hacker ethos still lives, will be much more endangered than it is today. 20 years from now it will be gone along with the computer and any sense of control over the system.
A New Republican might tell young, jobless millennial voters, “I think the best way to grow the economy is bottom-up and organically like Facebook. My opponent, like most Washington insiders, thinks it is top-down like an assembly-line or the army. What do you think?”
Young jobless millennial hate both the government and Facebook, but if they haven't been paying taxes yet, they probably hate Facebook more. Again, the metaphor is nice, but to young people, both Facebook and the government are creepy institutions that violate their privacy and try to pump them dry while restricting their freedom.
This could cost Democrats the most valuable political real estate they gained in the 2008 election. Without a doubt, the millennial generation Obama inspired is the most empowered generation of Americans in history. They have never been told what to do by anybody.
And this is where the tragic misunderstanding concludes.
People who have never been told what to do by anyone want someone to tell them what to do. There's a reason why fascism follows anarchy.
And the millennial isn't empowered. He or she has less empowerment than any previous generation. The millennial school is so rigid and authoritarian that it makes the educational systems of the last 70 years seem like hippie paradise. The millennial has grown up under a government that is in more control of his life than that of any American since the end of slavery.
The millennial has nearly no freedom, but isn't aware of it, because the word has very little meaning to him. Freedom is an abstract thing that he doesn't relate to the restrictions imposed on him. The internet is one of the few places where he has freedom and like all citizens of a totalitarian state, when given freedom, he lashes out violently against social norms and grasps for power through makeshift social groups.
The millennial is not the golden hippie child of the open source movement. The open source movement is just hackers doing what hackers have always done. Explore and make neat things that are then exploited by corporations. The millennial lives in the world of the TSA and Zero Tolerance, he still has the right to be angry, but not much else. Like most teenagers in the past, he rebels by conforming to the socially approved rebellion, he believes in easy black and white solutions, and he still wants someone to take care of him. With the collapse of the family, that someone is likely to be the government.
All the proposals in the article will probably play well in Silicon Valley, which has a sizable libertarian contingent, especially among engineers and a few who made it big by betting on their instincts, but Silicon Valley is just an outpost of corporate America. And Corp America loves big government. Many of them don't like Obama, but they are not fans of bottom up organic solutions or open source systems. They want someone to be in charge and in control of everything.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO BOMB IRAN, BUT IF WE DO IRAN WILL DESTROY US ALL
Demented leftist Bradley Burston has penned an article so schizophrenic it should be grounds for some kind of diagnosis.
First Burston insists that bombing Iran will usher in armageddon.
Mr. Netanyahu, before you bomb Iran, say goodbye to everyone you know. Say goodbye to everyone you love. You know you won't be able to protect all of them from the retaliation that will surely come. Everyone you know is a target. Everyone you love is in range.
Some of the rockets with high explosive warheads will get through the missile shield. And even if you and a few of your loved ones are sealed into the most sophisticated shelter yet devised, not one of you is immune. When it's over, when you get back to the surface, this will be a different country
I'm not sure whether that part was written by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Bradley Burston, but his thesis is that Iran is horrifyingly dangerous. Which is clearly why Netanyahu is absolutely crazy for not wanting Iran to have nuclear weapons.
It won't matter then, all these arguments we have over why you insist on pursuing this. Whether it was a bluff that went ballistic, or a tragic thirst for a place in history.
After writing 700 words on how Israel will suffer at the hands of Iran's Mullahs, Burston then acts as if the decision to do something about Iran's nuclear program is so wholly and incomprehensibly irrational that he can't even begin to understand it. Cognitive dissonance, you have met your match.
THE QATARI LONG GAME
Unlike European soccer officialdom, Al-Jazeera has a long-term strategy. Indeed, its soccer TV “takeover” is part of a larger trend. Qatar, where Al-Jazeera is based, beat out the U.S. two years ago in bidding to host the 2022 World Cup. As a result, the World Cup will be played during the summer in the desert. As I wrote at the time, the decision to hold play the world championship in Qatar is perhaps the most appalling and corrupt in the history of sports.
Recently, the Qatar Investment Authority took control of Paris Saint-Germain. It has already spent roughly $200 million in transfer fees for players to strengthen its roster, an ungodly amount in any league but especially in the relatively low-rent French Ligue 1. And in Spain, Barcelona agreed to a five-year, 170 million euro (then $225 million) sponsorship deal to wear the Qatar Foundation logo on its famous blue and red jerseys.
...that's an excerpt from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff and it's part of some much bigger developments. Qatar is becoming the new Saudi Arabia. It played a major role in orchestrating the so-called Arab Spring, in pressuring the West into attacking Libya and is pushing hard for an upcoming war on Syria.
Sports is war by other means and it's a vehicle for power and propaganda. Here's more of the long game.
A Qatari government investment fund on Friday said it had reached a deal with Spanish company Ferrovial to buy 20 percent of the company that operates London's Heathrow, Stansted and other British airports.
And still more...
Qatar was the top sovereign wealth buyer of European property in the last 12 months, spending 3.5 billion euros ($4.3 billion) on eight deals including the London Olympic athlete's village and a mall on Paris' Champs Elysees, data from a research firm showed.
For Qatar, the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), that spending during the year to mid-August equals only about six weeks of revenue from its LNG exports, according to Reuters calculations.
And guess who is subsidizing the Muslim Brotherhood state of Egypt that it helped bring to power.
With a plan to deposit $2 billion in Egypt's central bank, Qatar is becoming one of the top financial backers of the struggling country
...while plotting to do the same thing in Syria. But back to soccer...
Qatar’s Mohamed bin Hammam has insisted he will clear his name after FIFA’s ethics committee opened investigation proceedings against him. The former Asian Football Confederation president was handed a lifetime ban from football last year after being found guilty of bribery by a FIFA ethics committee panel during his campaign for the presidency of the sport’s world governing body.
.
LIBERALS ARE HEROES, NAVY SEALS ARE COWARDS
Media Matters' Eric Boehlert called the Navy SEALS objecting to Obama's leakapalooza, cowards. Clearly the SEALS are cowards. They don't have the guts to do what Media Matters and its man, Zero Hussein have done, like sit in a room, watch while Navy SEALS go into Pakistan and then take credit for it.
We all know who the real heroes are. They're the guys manufacturing talking points for six figure salaries at Media Matters.
AN UNFORGIVABLE SIN
Muslim groups expressed outrage on Thursday over plans to hold a wine festival in the Israeli city of Beer Sheva, which is due to take place next month in a courtyard outside a building formerly used as a mosque.
The southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel has said the festival constitutes an “unforgiveable sin” and is “a harsh blow to Muslim sensitivities,” according to Israeli media reports.
... the Islamic Movement in 48 Palestine is just the local version of Hamas which is just the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, which considers mass murder fine, but a wine festival in a courtyard outside a building which was once a mosque... now that's an unforgivable sin.
Speaking as a Jew, I'm no religiously offended by a pork festival in a courtyard next to someplace that once used to be a synagogue. I am offended by mass murderers. That is an unforgivable sin.
MATTER OVER MIND
Look, take a revolution that puts the Communists in charge, follow that up with the compulsive wiping out of the intellectual classes in their millions by Stalin, add in the massive losses in WWII, and then pile on the slow seepage of brains to the West during the Cold War.... What have you got left? A nation of increasingly stupid people whose gene pool is about two inches deep.
...also add on a system where the only line of work that rewards ingenuity and innovation is the criminal profession. Russia has been a totalitarian state for 99 percent of the time. It also has some of the most lethal, innovative and organized criminals anywhere. And some of the most passionate dissidents.
In Russia, intelligence means that you are either a vital but unrecognized part of the machinery that keeps everything from collapsing, one of the dissidents who oppose the system or one of the criminal classes who feed on everyone. Mostly the odds are good that you left the country sometime between 1981 and 2011. If you came back, it was with a second passport from the UK, Canada or Sweden and you spend as little time in the country as possible. If you're really smart then you got out in the last few years. If you aren't, then you're still investing in construction companies that aren't building anything and hoping your kids don't end up at one of those flash mobs protesting Putin.
America and Europe are full of Russians. People rarely leave a country in such numbers because the country is a good place to be. Mass immigration is a warning sign that there's something wrong with the country. Sometimes it's relatively benign things,sometimes it's big things.
PROBABLY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT...
Pakistan airbase with nuclear weapons comes under sustained attack from Taliban fighters
PROBABLY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT EITHER
DebbieSchlussel.com has learned that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at Metro Detroit Airport are outraged that they are being strongly “encouraged” to attend an event pushing Islam, Arabism, and special treatment of Arab Muslim airline passengers down their throats. They say that it’s implied that if they do not attend Monday’s session run by the pan-Muslim, openly anti-Israel Arab American National Museum in Dearbornistan, it will affect their work conditions and chances for promotions on the job.
ONLY WHEN THE DEBATE IS MODERATED BY A BLACK LESBIAN IN A WHEELCHAIR WILL THE LEGACY OF AMERICAN RACISM FINALLY BE LIFTED FROM OUR SHOULDERS
Just as the media had finished congratulating itself for selecting a woman, CNN’s Candy Crowley, as one of the 2012 presidential debate moderators for the first time in 20 years, there is now an outcry over the lack of African American representation among the moderators.
Maybe we can just choose 1,000 moderators who will fully encompass the great mosaic of diversity in this country.
ISLAMOPHOBIA STILL THE GREATEST THREAT OF OUR TIME
The murder sparked national interest after Parvaiz told police that shots were fired by three men who shouted racial epithets and called the Muslim family "terrorists."
But his story fell apart as investigators questioned him at Morristown Medical Center, and he admitted to arranging the shooting of his Pakistan-born wife, according to a court affidavit.
...so this brings down the number of actual violent religiously-motivated crimes against Muslims down to what? Probably too small a number to even mention when you consider that the number is small to begin with, includes ridiculously petty incidents and that the splashiest cases, like this, turned out to be false.
In the past few years, the local media went into frenzied cries of Islamophonia over a Muslim boy snatching the Hijab off a Muslim girl. And we are talking boy here, not even close to an adult. Media reporting carefully avoided any mention of his religion even as they screamed hate crime.
We also had a drunk Latino man who urinated on rugs piled outside a mosque, a fight between three men on the subway which turned out to have no religious component and another drunk with mental problems who stabbed a Muslim taxi driver. Those were major "Islamophobia" cases in New York.
DUCKS IN A ROW
One of these steps was the introduction of Avi Dichter, former Shin Bet chief into Israeli PM Netanyahu's security cabinet. He's replacing outgoing Home Front Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i, who will leave next week for Beijing to be Israel’s next ambassador to China.
Dichter used to be a Kadima MK,but resigned his seat and his affiliation with Kadima in order to make the move.
His security credentials are impressive, but there's a deeper connection most non-Israelis aren't aware of.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barack, PM Benyamin Netanyahu and Avi Dichter all served together in Israel's elite Army unit, the Sayeret Matkal. In other words, there's a bond there of blood and fire and of working together on military operations. The Sayeret Matkal's motto is the same as Britain's renowned Special Air Service (SAS): 'Who dares, wins.'
And they've proven it time and again.
Dichter's entry into Netanyahu's special security cabinet strikes me as assembling an old team together for a mission in enemy territory, which is exactly what the Sayeret Matkal specializes in.
The military is Israel's core old boys network. Or it used to be. The associations you make there follow you in your career. Their generation may be the last generation for whom that is truly the case, but Netanyahu is bringing as much of the opposition on board as he can.
He knows that a lot of the opposition to a strike on Iran's nuclear program is not truly ideological, it's political. To move forward before the election in the United States, he needs to bring as many of the experienced hands on the other side, particularly those with a security background, into the process.
The real redline is the election. If Obama wins, then any possibility of a strike will have to go up against everything that Barry will be able to throw at Israel. That may include threatening to warn the Saudis and Iranians about any overflights as they are happening. Even if Romney wins, the advisers will be telling him the same diplomatic things that they told Bush and Obama, that an Israeli strike will result in a regional backlash against the United States.
Until the election is wrapped up, Obama isn't likely to devote too much time to attacking or obstructing Israel. That means there are a few months in which to move. Right now the sabotage will be huge, both internal and external. The challenges of this operation are not just the ones on the battlefield, but the high risk of internal leaks from lefties, the local versions of Bradley Manning, like Anat Kamm. It also includes the open question of how far Obama's closest associates, especially Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett, will push him to go to stop any attack based on information that the CIA picks up from its own agents within Israel's political and military structures. (Yes they exist.)
Even if an operation is launched and succeeds, Iran's leaders will do their past to save face by inflicting as much damage on Israel as they can. Their primary vehicles for that will be the ones operating out of Gaza and Lebanon. Since Hamas has switched its allegiance, if the Saudis are on board with the strike, then there may be quiet there at least. But Iran will at least make an effort to lob something at Israel. It will almost certainly be conventional, but it will do it to make a point.
Iran is flailing in Syria and that makes it look weak. The Saudis once invaded Iran and Iran cannot afford to give Sunni Islamists the impression that it is weak.
If Arrow works, with G-d's help, then the damage may be light, but it is almost certain that there will be some casualties on the home front. A united domestic government, or the closest that Bibi can manage, may starve off the left's attempts at using that damage for political gain.
RELIGION OF MISINFORMATION
Some Muslim sites appear to be spreading the false rumor that I run the Religion of Peace site. While ROP is a great site and I would be happy to claim credit for it, I am not its webmaster nor do I run it or have any ties to it. But I would those in the Counterjihad to stop by there from time to time.
Finally a retired Jewish social worker from Philly has some strong words for Sarah Silverman.
7 comments You might also like: Apartheid Promoter Jimmy Carter Shills for the Mass ... Repent for Your Environmental Sins! The Great Muslim Cover Up Which Way Will the Jewish Vote Go? LinkWithin Wednesday, August 15, 2012 The Death of an American Mule Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 10 Comments Think of a hybrid, whether it's one of those ubiquitous bailout-backed vehicles that you see happy families driving around town in bailout-backed commercials or magnificent beasts such as the Liger, the Wolphin or the humble Mule. Hybrids are impressive at times, but they don't have much of a future.
Our system is an ungainly hybrid of capitalism and socialism that began when socialism was inserted as a humanizing fallback position for capitalism. Capitalism riding on socialism was meant to be more moral than the naked variety. But lately capitalism has turned into the horse and socialism into the rider, and we have just enough capitalism to pay for all the socialism.
We no longer have socialism to account for the human cost of capitalism. Capitalism now exists to cover the human cost of socialism. The crude bargain that we have is a free enterprise economy being ridden to death and then sent to the glue factory to pay for all the machinery of socialism. And this mule, this merger of the capitalist horse and the socialist donkey, is staggering around on its last legs.
Both Obama and Paul Ryan agree that the current hybrid system has no future. The debate is over whether America will go back to being a horse or turn into a donkey. The donkey party is slowly breeding out the horse lines to turn the United States into a fully socialist beast. A creature that eats money and excretes bureaucracy with a community organizer on every corner and a propaganda bulletin on every porch.
Anyone with minimal math skills can tote up the figures and see that the way things are is just about done. The hybrid alliance can't work when there is no longer enough free enterprise money to pay for the enterprise of big government. The dehybridization process has two possible approaches. Either we bid a fond farewell to big government or to the antiquated idea that individuals build things and then profit from them.
The mule has been working hard, but no amount of hard work or hybrid vigor will allow it to work off a debt being accumulated by asses who ride horses to death. The donkey party takes issue with Ann Romney's horse. It does not like horses because there is something free about them. The horse is breed exceptionalism, its speed is an exhilarating escape that speaks of open plains and unknown frontiers. But the left envisions a nation of donkeys patiently working themselves to death in their traces and then trotting off to the nationalized healthcare glue factory when they can no longer pay their taxes.
Like Animal Farm's Boxer, the American workhorse has worked itself to the bone, paying taxes on everything imaginable to subsidize the revolutionary state of the left, its mammoth bureaucracies and the bribes and favors that it doles out to its voting bases. Homes have been lost, lives shattered and families broken up so that America might "live up to" whatever promises the left has made to itself on their behalf. And like Boxer, the American and his way of life, is being taken away in a knacker's van billed as a trip to the veterinarian.
The left has forcefully accelerated the death throes of the American mule by pushing government spending beyond anything that the horse can cover. That leaves the overworked horse with only two options. It can either become a donkey and be fed and work without any say in what it is fed or how it works, or it can try to break free of the great socialist boneyard.
The one thing that everyone can agree on is that the hybrid system is done. Whatever uneasy truce has existed between American free enterprise and fee enterprise, the pretense of Democratic pols that free enterprise is a blessing to our land, rather than the reason why everyone doesn't make as much money as everyone else and why children in the ghetto don't have a 100,000-dollar education, is on the way out. Warren and Obama are trumpeting its death cry. The horse must be butchered so that the donkey party can hand out very expensive free things to all the sheep and then put them to work.
Socialism crept in the door by taking profits from free enterprise and promising to use it to make life better for those who needed it. Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are rejecting any implication that the government is the junior partner in this relationship. "You didn't build it," two political hacks who have never built anything in their life clamor. The message is that free enterprise is the junior partner, the ungrateful stepchild of the socialist stepmother who doesn't appreciate how rewarding sweeping out the ashes from the government fireplace where her money is burned can be.
The hybrid system began with socialism fixing the cracks in the free enterprise system and then shifted to free enterprise fixing the cracks in the socialist system. But the only cracks in the socialist system according to Obama and Warren come from free enterprise not paying enough of its fair share. And the only way to fix that is to get rid of free enterprise completely with the same people who gave us the public education system, the 300-dollar screwdriver, the welfare ghetto and gambling monopolies that somehow go bankrupt completely taking over the entire economy.
Between all the nonsense about Warren Buffett's six-figure secretary, the Koch Brothers inventing popular anger at big government over a game of croquet played with solid gold mallets and Sheldon Adelson's army of Chinese-Zionist death-hookers, all the 1-percent posters wielded by the 99 percent of the 1 percent and the commercials where Obama puts on his best smile to assure that he is a big fan of the blue-collar businesses that he visits once every four years, the message to the American people is that the government can no longer live within its means, so the people will have to start living within the government's means. And that is not a very reassuring message.
The last four years have demonstrated to most people who pay attention to such things that the government has failed to do anything positive about the economy. The swing voters who will likely determine this election are making their move based on their anecdotal experiences in a bad economy made worse by government intervention. Even those Obama supporters struggling to construct a positive narrative for the last four years are relying on special benefits that they received from the government-- not on general economic improvements for all.
To the donkey party, the failure of the economy is just proof that the American mule is dead and the economy needs to be taken over further. Only when they can control the price of every single commodity, the wage for every job and the amount of people hired and fired in every company will the economic recovery kick in. And by economic recovery, they mean jobs convincing the proles that even in the sixth year of the Great American Famine, the economy is doing smashingly well and the beloved leaders deserve our whole-hearted admiration and support.
That is the donkey economy we are being driven toward as the donkey party strives to make asses of us all. No matter how much control they have, they always want more and no matter how much money they have, they always want more. Their greed is endless and there are a legion of grim examples from the USSR to the Eurozone, from Mao's China to Jerry Brown's California to show us where the path to the end of the clearing will truly take us.
But it's an economy that we can still mount up and ride away from. And to do that we have to begin by asking which part of the hybrid economy really failed. Was the failure a function of free market corruption as the donkeys insist or of government corruption of the free market as the horses say. The donkeys say that the free market corrupts the government through deregulation while the horses say that the government corrupts free markets through regulation. Either argument is a call for the death of the hybrid system but the outcome of the argument will determine what system will replace it.
Our hybrid system began as charity and is ending as slavery. What began as a means of restraining monopolistic industrial feudalism has developed into a far larger feudal monopoly whose cruelty is exceeded only by its ineptness. The monstrosity that stretches its tentacles out of D.C. and through every state capital and county seat, every public and private enterprise, every store and home, makes Standard Oil seem positively benign. It has the worst habits of corporations but with no ability to make money. It has the worst aspects of a banana republic but with no national security skills. And worst of all, it is unsustainable. That is the one thing that both left and right agree on.
It may be impossible to save the American mule, which has been flogged to death by senators, activists and crony capitalists. But the American mustang isn't beyond saving. Neither is the American eagle. And our coming choices are to ride, to fly or to serve.
10 comments Tuesday, August 14, 2012 Like Allah, Islamic Revolutions Devour Their Own Children Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 5 Comments When Muslim terrorists broke into a Egyptian Army checkpoint, stole an armored vehicle and a truck, loaded the latter with explosives and tried to launch an attack on Israel, before being blown away by Israeli forces; there was a general agreement on who was to blame.
While Morsi was somewhat more discreet, the Muslim Brotherhood announced, "this crime may well be the work of Israel’s Mossad" as part of an international conspiracy to destabilize their revolution. On the other side of the border, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh offered a more open-ended explanation. "Israel is responsible, one way or another."
One way or another, Israel usually ends up being responsible for everything. Meanwhile Egypt has quietly asked Hamas to turn over a few of its terrorists who might have been involved. Because, while Israel is responsible for everything in the philosophical sense of being an omnipotent force of evil, when 16 Egyptian soldiers are killed, it becomes necessary to find the people who actually did it.
Turkey's Islamist rulers who are facing the threat of an independent Kurdish nation rising out of the ruins in Syria and Iraq also have an explanation for the situation. Turkey's Interior Minister stated that most Kurdish PKK guerrillas are not Turkish citizens and that quite a few are actually Israelis. So in between somehow recruiting multiple Egyptian Muslims willing to die for Israel, Avi and David took a trip to Kurdistan to take potshots at Turkish soldiers.
Western journalists try not to report on such embarrassing outbursts because it makes their favorite Islamists look like loony bigots who can't deal with a problem without finding some byzantine way to blame it on their least favorite minority group. The Islamists in Cairo and Ankara know better, but their ideology makes it impossible to fight other Muslims without first declaring them to be heretics or pawns of heresy.
Israel and America are convenient justifications for Muslims to kill other Muslims in the name of Allah. When Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the Saudis, he made war on them as the pawns of America. When the Saudis had overthrown the Hashemites, they had accused them of being the pawns of Britain. Now that the Salafis are confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, they are also accusing them of being the pawns of America and Israel.
"Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children," Danton says in Georg Buchner's Danton's Death, a controversial play about the French Revolution. In the modern context that line might be changed to read, "Revolution is like Allah, it devours its own children." The Muslim Brotherhood has reacted to the attack with all the expected antics of revolutionaries eager to sup at the kiddie table.
One statement urges "the Egyptian people to face up to domestic forces of sabotage and subversion, beware of their sinister calls for strife and sedition". Another calls on their own government "to implement the law firmly against the instigators of vandalism and subversion throughout the land and against their collaborators and agents involved in causing this deliberate confusion, chaos and mayhem across Egypt under the pretext of exercising freedom."
Predictably enough, the attack is being used by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to crack down on domestic dissent and replace top officials in the Egyptian military. Not to mention repeating calls for dispensing with the Camp David Accords and fully remilitarizing the Sinai. But cynicism will only take the revolution so far.
The Jihadists are the children of the Islamic Revolution. The brats of the upscale millionaire Islamists running networks of companies in Egypt and Turkey funded with Saudi and Qatari cash. But the vested interests that begin revolutions are not always the ones who benefit from them. Germany sent Lenin back in a sealed car under the protection of its soldiers for the short-term goal of taking Russia out of the war. Germany succeeded in toppling a moderate Russian government and replacing it with radical Bolsheviks, and, thirty years later Soviet troops were occupying Berlin.
The Gulf States are already quarreling with the Muslim Brotherhood and accusing it of wanting to take them over. Even while both groups are working together to take over Syria, neither trusts each other. But the real threat to them is the chaos that they have unleashed. The Muslim Brotherhood revolutionaries, like their Bolshevik spiritual ancestors, are returning from exile in the West to carry off their revolutions, but the revolution doesn't end where they say it does.
The Islamist imperative of the revolution is to purge heresy and secularism, to restore true Islam, but there has never been any consensus on what true Islam is. Even Mohammed was forced to recant some of his prophecies attributing them to "Satan" and, not long after his death, Islam began to fall apart into quarreling factions who gave rise to the Sunnis and the Shiites.
Muslims can't agree on what Islam is. What they can agree on is that most other forms of Islam are heresy and, depending on the severity of the heresy, their practitioners may be freely killed. Islamic reform movements in their revolutionary purity have treated conventional Muslims as less pure for visiting shrines, using good luck charms or watching soccer. And every Islamic reform movement has opened the door for a new group that thinks they are a bunch of liberal heretics.
"Big fleas have little fleas, Upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum." Islamic revolutions, like their secular counterparts, have countless smaller fleas who take Islam even more seriously and are even more determined to turn society into an exact ideal replica of 7th Century Arabia.
The Muslim Brotherhood might have been a flea on Egypt's back, but the Salafis are a flea on its back, and there are fleas on the backs of the Salafis. Revolutions solve these problems with an extended round of purges that ends when no one believes in anything anymore. The French Revolution drowned itself in its own blood, and the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party did likewise. By the time Mao and Stalin's last butchers were shown the door, Communism was no longer a revolutionary idea, it was just a rotting structure that would take several generations to dismantle.
For the Islamists the challenge is to firmly draw a line to their right and they cannot do that because Mohammed is on the other side of that line. Blaming Israel and "foreign elements" is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the logical consequences of their own ideology. It is also a demonstration of why ideological revolutions never prosper, but decay into paranoid tyrannies that are too afraid to loosen their grip on power because that there is no reason why what they did to the former rulers cannot also be done to them.
No matter how pure an Islamic party may claim to be, there are always newcomers who are even purer and more incorruptible. Every Jihadist gang can point to "extremists" who are too far over the line. And those extremists can point to their own extremists. And so on ad infinitum until all the fleas drinking blood are drowning in each other's blood.
Egypt has been the true heartland of the Islamic revolution because the foreign influences have given its "intellectuals" practical ideas that the Gulf clans aren't capable of. The Muslim Brotherhood's success has come from borrowing the ideas and tactics of the National Socialists and Communists. But that just makes them into a more foreign element than the purer Salafis and, in a game where victory comes to those who are willing to use violence in the name of the latest Islamic Revolution, what the Brotherhood's Arab Spring victories have truly brought it is a prominent place in an Islamic civil war.
The struggle over Syria is escalating and may well explode in a regional Sunni-Shiite civil war. Their only hope of averting this is another round of NATO intervention which exposes once again just how dependent the Muslim Brotherhood is on its Western enablers who have had to help it take power politically and militarily. But while the West plays Germany to the Brotherhood's Bolsheviks, whether the Brotherhood's Islamic Revolution will be able to take hold now depends less on its ability to manipulate a gullible leftist media and political establishment in the Eurosphere and more on being able to control the violence inherent in its own ideology.
The Muslim Brotherhood has two choices: it can either try to control the violence or direct it. Like the Saudis, it is likely to make the second choice. The Brotherhood is a terrorist group and organizing attacks through proxies is second nature to it. Iran was never able to let go of its terrorist habits, even when it would have been in its own best interests to stop. The Brotherhood isn't likely to be able to stop either. Its leaders likely imagine that the Sinai violence will allow them to play a triple game, seizing the Sinai, suppressing the opposition and keeping the Jihadi gangs pointed in Israel's direction.
But like the Saudis, they are wrong. The Saudis have redirected the Islamists who might otherwise be giving them the boot with double handfuls of money and foreign enemies. But all that means is that the Islamists have grown more dangerous and more experienced. Sooner or later the monarchies will fall, whether it's to Al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood is a minor detail. And the Brotherhood in its time will fall the same way.
Arab Muslims, unlike Persians, actually seem to want to live this way. They want revolutionary purity and executioners who will cut off the heads and hands of the less devout. They want to stone women to death and steal the daughters of Christians to replace the last wife they beat to death. And they can never get enough of all this.
The Muslim Brotherhood has only whetted their appetite for the real thing. The Salafis managed to perform quite well without the organizing power, the sophisticated tactics or the bribes of the Brotherhood. And all it takes to keep the violence going is a few dozen men here and there who are willing to die for the One True Islamic Revolution, which is no longer the sellouts of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a region where AK-47's and explosives are widely available, the rest is child's play.
Anyone can call himself an Islamic teacher and begin recording tapes calling for true Islam and then upload them to the internet. Anyone can dig up revolutionary texts from the last hundred years, rewrite them a little and lay out the principles for a truly Islamic form of government. And anyone can assure Western reporters and politicians that, despite all the bombings, their Jihadist gang is filled with moderates who are the only hope of keeping the true extremists at bay.
Another, less well-known quote from Danton's Death comes from Robespierre, loosely adapted from his own words. "The weapon of the Republic of terror, the power of the Republic is virtue - because without virtue, terror is unwholesome and without terror, virtue is powerless." This cycle of virtue and terror is an endless escalation, with virtue feeding terror and terror feeding virtue.
Revolutions like Allah devour their own children, and this one has only begun gorging at the buffet.
She sounds more like an obayma supporter than green party,
Ann Arbor is a joke. College football, okay but that’s about it...and the M does not stand for “Muslim”.
One spark and about 1/5 of the world should hit the sh*tcan, some of it in this country.
Not her fault. Someone scolded her to “get a hobby” /s
Interesting, informative, educational...horse/donkey...hybrid - capitalism/socialism...revolutions devour their own...”fascism follows anarchy”...etc., etc.
Some names mentioned. Thanks for posting.
I have a room full of computers more than capable of doing things from text editing through audio editing and video editing that exist off the 'net and are under my direct control. That's why they call them "Personal Computers".
Hey, that's the Peoples' Republic of Ann Arbor (a one party state) to you, buddy.
I sometimes wonder if they don’t ask themselves “What would John Lennon do?” about some conflict or controversy and that the answer is that he would not just shut up and play his guitar.
Tl;dr
“Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert called the Navy SEALS objecting to Obama’s leakapalooza, cowards. Clearly the SEALS are cowards. They don’t have the guts to do what Media Matters and its man, Zero Hussein have done, like sit in a room, watch while Navy SEALS go into Pakistan and then take credit for it.”
Yet they get away with it....Disgusting, to say the least.
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