Post hoc ergo propter hoc presidency

I am not trying to sound smart, and I can’t really speak Latin. The expression is simply the standard term for a logical error. In vernacular, it means “after that, hence because of that,” as most of you know. It is common for humans to draw causal connections from temporal sequences. In my field, substance use and addiction, "gateway theory," based on the same fallacy, has ruled over research and policy. Hardly anybody cared that it does not matter which drug one starts with for the risk of poisoning or addiction. But it's not just that the false causes are used as guides for action. Once they are in play, the true causes are ignored.

Does anybody doubt Trump would win, hands down, over Biden if not for the Chinese virus? He almost did (or has won) despite the Democrat agitprop that spread the calumny of the virus deaths' being Trump's fault. Nobody cared that Trump's trump card was economics, his China trade measures were substantial part of its success, and the virus came from China smack at the good time to destroy Trump's advantage. The progressive media (a clear redundancy) ignored China's role  in the spread of the virus, while Trump was depicted as a Plague-time well-poisoner.

What is the connection between the China virus and Biden's creeping out of his basement to possible presidency, with his pothead sidekick aiming at the Resolute Desk? All that was thanks to the common human mistake of readily taking “after that” for “because of that”, Trump's presidency—hence COVID deaths, the false conclusion endlessly propagated by Democrats and their media, exactly the "Organs" of the Democrat Party, as their counterparts used to be honestly called in the Soviet Union. Who cares that those deaths have no relationship whatsoever with Trump, who has done the maximum he could to withstand the biological attack while fighting the sabotage of Democrat governors, the posturing of know-nothing buffoons from NIH and WHO, and the constant attempts of political assassination from the Democrat Congress and Biden's "xenophobia" accusations. The NY governor Cuomo has actively murdered seniors by his order for care facilities—nobody will charge him with the crime. It is Trump who bears its consequences. Who cares that the US, despite all the Democrat agitprop, is far from the worst corona-wise in the world. It’s Trump's fault just because he was the president when it happened—forget all the praises Cuomo has given him in a fit of honesty.

Forget that it has been and would still be Trump's team that has born the brunt of the Chinese biological attack—and this is what it is. Even if—and it's a big if—the virus were not cooked in that Wuhan "institute," it was definitely deliberately spread to kill the US economy and thus remove Trump, the enemy of China. The Democrat fifth column was only happy to help, busy with the same work ever since Trump had been elected. Those are the causes ignored. Forget what is at stake: America’s freedom, energy independence, peace, Middle East conciliation, trade fairness, and honesty with allies and enemies. Let’s just pray that the utopia that this country has been does not turn into another nightmare of the communist takeover and bread lines. That has been a true cause-effect relationship.

The party that fought for slavery, that has revived racial conflict in this country and supports pogroms, that has open antisemites as its vocal and unrestrained leaders, that has given Iran billions to fund world-wide terror and pave its way to nukes, that is ready to reinstitute your tax-funded payments for terror murders of Israelis, that has its projected president neck-deep in corruption and client connection with the true enemies of the US—it is now on the verge of gaining unlimited power. A one-party totalitarian state, partnered with its benevolent creditor, Communist China. No Latin needed.

Intersectionality of hate

The unwieldy word “intersectionality” is relatively new. The dictionary says it was invented in 1989 to describe the confluence of various forms of discrimination. That is possible, even though 1989 does not sound like representing a time period when the likely correlation between various expressions of xenophobia would manifest in a most pressing fashion. In reality, however, the term is much better defined as a confluence of various victimhoods. More precisely, it denotes an assemblage of accusations with assigned guilts—viz., the guilts of not belonging to a class of victims, regardless of  any actual guilt.  Those excluded from among the victim classes are ipso facto oppressors. This, naturally, graywashes real oppressors--they become part of the many, those who committed genocide in Poland or Rwanda, and those who are trying to stop Taliban terror. Thus, a “white” heterosexual male is by default “intersectionally” guilty of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. 

"Whiteness", the main defining concept in the determination of "intersectionality," also covers certain groups regardless of their race, despite what that color word would seem to mean. The Jews, for instance, are viewed as "white" irrespective of their color and non-European (Asian) origin. Hence, they are not victims anymore but, by the Manichaean default, oppressors. Linda Sarsour, a prominent Democrat activist, said that Jews can't be feminists, which is one of the intersectionality component groups. The Jews' oppressor status evidence is also in the firm defense of Congresswoman Omar by her progressive Democrat colleagues. Instead of getting her censured, Omar's antisemitic statements have brought  her an appointment to the Foreign Affairs committee. There she is able to translate her Jew-hate into US policy.

In contrast to Judaism, being Muslim places one into the "brown," hence "intersectional," category, whatever the actual skin shade. Linda Sarsour is a very lightly-pigmented co-religionist of Omar's. She is a shariah and terrorist supporter, aka Obama's "champion of change" and a leader of the intersectional Women's March. She is not concerned that her Muslim devotion is incompatible with anything feminism stands on, considering that Islam scripturally holds women much below men (e.g., Koran 2:282), and Muslims above all non-Muslims (Koran 3:110). Indeed, the March was disavowed by its Jewish organizer, Vanessa Wruble, upon learning that  she was twice disqualified from it, as "white" and as a Jew. Now, to be fair, when denying the Jews their share of coveted intersectionality, Sarsour was cautious to talk about those Jews who supported Israel. Then, everyone knows that Jews generally do support the Jewish state, and everyone knows what those "anti-Zionist" provisos are worth. Sarsour's activist colleagues from the March, who adore Farrakhan, make no such fine distinctions and hold all Jews responsible as white, slavers, and generally exploiters. 

As in card games or rock-paper-scissors, there is a system of victimhoods, one trumping another. I may not have fully figured it out, with all its contingencies, but being Muslim trumps homosexuality. You may be a homophobic antisemite, but in combination with being “black” and a membership in the Nation of Islam this brings you to sit two seats from a Democrat US president. 

Being “straight” "white" non-Muslim male is trumped by all, let alone by being a "Latina," as asserted by Sonia Sotomayor. Her remark on how her ethnic origin makes her better qualified than any "white" male has landed her in the US Supreme Court as a Justice, ironic as that may sound. Heaven forfend that male has wealth. Then, the only protection from being considered fully inhuman is his generous support of all progressive causes there are, always on the verge of being denounced for any infraction. That support, however, may keep even a wealthy Jew afloat on the sea of otherwise ineluctable guilts—that’s why Soros's water is fine. His hate for Israel is par for the course. Being conservative, on the other hand, is unforgivable and punishable violently.

Hate for conservative opponents, for Israel, and for religion—except, Allah forbid, Islam—comes in one neat intersectional package. That is the modern Democrat ideology, which has evolved from its slaveholder KKK racism and statism of old times to race-, sex-, and other identity-baiting, with overt socialism on top. Long gone are the times when socialism was viewed as a swear-word, to be strenuously denied if accused of, like a shameful secret habit. It is now the mainstream ideology of the party that won popular vote in the last presidential elections. It is as mainstream and flaunted as admitting to drug abuse, also no longer a secret, to be "I-did-not-inhale" coy about. Consider Bernard Sanders. He sounded slightly off calling himself “Democratic Socialist” when running for Democrat nomination in 2016 (beware of the need to use “Democratic,” same as in DPRK or GDR). Despite the comforting adjective and the expectedly overwhelming support by the younger and entirely ignorant generation, by Obama's henchman's admission, the establishment was not ready yet to employ his communist demagoguery in full. There is no such reticence anymore in the Democrat Congress, whose members expound wild agitprop slogans and describe their drug abuse as the most natural experience.

Intersectionally with hate for capitalism, which is in a word hate for economic and political freedom, almost as many Democrats "sympathize more" with Palestinian Arabs as with Israel. An almost the same proportion, 35%, predominantly the young ones, hold an unfavorable (mostly or very) opinion of Israel, more than double that of Republicans. In another poll, a measly 27% of Democrats sympathized with Israel vs. 78% of Republicans. As Tuvia Tenenbom notes in his "The Lies They Tell," choosing "Palestine" over Israel is as certain for a progressive in the US as belief in man-made climate change. It is irrational to demand from the Congress Democrats to act against antisemitism, when their young and cool colleagues, representing the new generation of their electorate, are Jew-haters, the recent Deputy Chair of their party was a member of the Mein-Kampf-strength antisemitic Nation of Islam, and the entire Black Caucus, including Obama himself, happily met with Farrakhan, the preacher of Jew-hate whom Democrat presidential candidates reverentially call "minister." (The kompromat picture was immediately stashed away and remained hidden not just before Obama's presidential nomination but to the end of his second term.)

In their hate, they intersect with Farrakhan’s and his friend Rev. Wright’s morbid racism and antisemitism, and with the Jew-hating Palestinian Arabs—93% of their population, according to the recent poll. The hate-filled Arab population of the land illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt before the Six-Day War, governed by its two grotesquely corrupt and murderous regimes of their own choice, Hamas and the PLO, are the ultimate victims, intersecting victimhoods from colonialism, imperialism, Jews, whites, Crusaders--you name it. Regrettably, they also intersect with Jewish quislings who, like Bernard Sanders, faithfully follow their Bolshevik predecessors in their hate for capitalism, Jews, and freedom. Antisemitism, including its Jewish variety, is inevitable on the way to the totalitarian uniformity of progress.

It is Communism, now comfortably conjoined with another totalitarianism, Islam, that is the final intersection to which "intersectionality" leads. As a century before, parallel totalitarian movements gain strength around the world that does not want to remember. The Communist and National Socialist flags differed only in the small emblem on their bloody background. Today, the entire spectrum can be found in the colors of the vanguard of the immense expanse of humanity rolling in the same general direction: to squash freedom, whatever idiosyncrasies individual groups entertain, Muslim, feminist, progressive, socialist. Paraphrasing a little, "Intersectionalists of all stripes, united!"

Clash of ideologies

Islam vs. the rest of humanity is no clash of civilizations - it is barbarians vs. civilization. Barbarians that have a long-surviving ideology of total - both physical and spiritual - conquest, a complete parallel to Nazis in that regard. It is meaningless to talk about Islam's attack on the freedom of speech, on the rights of women and various "nonbelievers", on its murderous intolerance to apostasy - those are details that are inevitable derivatives of its brand of totalitarianism. It would be no Islam which is not totalitarian - it would be something else. It is not the freedoms that should be fought for when dealing with Islam - it is Islam that needs to be fought against. Unless Islam is dealt with, there eventually will be no freedom. Any freedom will be self-censored out of fear if not censored legally. Obama, "the leader of the free world",  has already outlawed freedom - from the UN podium, when he declared that those who "slander" the "prophet" of Islam have no future. He did not explain how he would deprive those infidels of the future, but other people who share his view do show how they would: witness the Charlie Hebdo execution. Meanwhile, the West hides its collective head in the sand, attempting to whitewash Islam of its defining features and ignoring its explicit goal: global domination. Islam's wrongful designation as a religion is a convenient pretext for the postponement of the adequate - ideological - clash with this totalitarian ideology, while it infiltrates politics, policies and populations.

AIPAC: No donation

I received, a couple of days ago, an email message from AIPAC, calling on me to "renew" my "gift" to this organization. I could not do that - for two reasons. First, I have never donated to AIPAC. Second, I would not do that because of the content of the message. 

It refers to a historical event: "On October 6, 1943, a delegation of American rabbis arrived at the White House for a personal audience with President Franklin Roosevelt" "to present to the president irrefutable proof that the Nazis were conducting a wholesale annihilation of European Jews," and "[t]hey were denied a meeting." This is immediately followed by: "The ensuing tragedy is, of course, well known. No coordinated Allied rescue was launched. The flames consumed 6 million." 

This, of course, implies a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy of causality: if only Roosevelt agreed to the meeting, there would be a "coordinated Allied rescue" and no Shoah. This also implies that Roosevelt did not know of the genocide, left uninformed by the rabbis (while some, like Stephen Wise, did have access to the president). Nowadays, however, due to AIPAC's activity, we are in luck: "Today we are not turned away at the door," while AIPAC is "the only organization who meets regularly with leaders in both parties to advance initiatives that enhance the safety and security of both nations." Apart from the fact that the latter statement is not true, it remains unclear why "despite our achievements [none listed - MV], Israel today remains far from safe." In fact, the only real current source of existential threat to Israel, nuclear Iran, is continually downplayed if not ignored by the consecutive US administrations, and the last one fundamentally differs from Israel in its approach to the problem. While Israel is against allowing Iran to reach the capacity to develop a nuke, Obama's administration is somehow going to control the fact of its construction - a feat requiring clairvoyance. 

The truth is that Roosevelt did know about the genocide - he did not care enough to undertake anything about it. This is why he would not waste time on meeting with the rabbis. Similarly, the Obama administration is aware that Iran would be able to put the bomb together when it has developed capacity for that - and no amount of angry rhetoric from the US would be able to stop that. Israel would be abandoned the same way the Jews were in WW2, just as the US abandoned Kurds in the aftermath of the first Saddam war, did nothing for Tutsis when they were slaughtered by Hutus in Rwanda, could not care less about Iranians when they were dying in protests to the ayatollahs, and sacrificed its own ambassador and others in Benghazi - to the politically opportune narrative of "Al Qaeda is on its heels" serving the renewal of Obama's incompetent presidency.

It is a question why AIPAC perceives itself as the only organization regularly meeting with the US "leaders" on behalf of Israel - is it wishful thinking or a goal? Either way, it is not something to be proud of, considering that there are other organizations with older and more consistent pro-Israel record, such as the ZOA.  And the "terrorist groups [will] continue to stockpile rockets aimed at Israel along her borders" because instead of putting responsibility for terror on the terrorists, Obama, unhindered by the AIPAC, puts it on Israel that dares to build housing in its own capital and resists the US calls for repeats of ethnic self-cleansing. Obama, access to whom the AIPAC's message implies, is surely aware of the impact of his anti-Israel policies and of the encouragement the Nazis' genocidal heirs - both Shi'a or Sunni - receive from his attacks on Israel's integrity, support for Muslim Brotherhood, leniency toward ayatollahs and tax persecution of pro-Israel groups. 

This is why I will donate not to self-congratulating AIPAC, but to those who indeed try to protect both nations - Israel and the US, as both are threatened by terrorist Islam, state and non-state. Perhaps, if those other organizations gain greater access to the public and US "leaders" that AIPAC claims to have monopolized,  the results will be better.

Empty advice

According to the statement of Simon Wiesenthal Center’s mission, it “confronts anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, defends the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations”. None of these goals appear to be served by the recent article by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman* in New York Daily News (June 27, 2013). The article justly rebukes the Obama administration (Sec’y Kerry) for wasting money and effort on trying to engage the corrupt Palestinian Authority. It also proposes to “empower those who want to live in peace”. That might have been a smart advice, except none of “those” is named in the article. None, that is, unless one counts “a mother of two martyred sons” who laments PA’s economic incompetence, and a sheikh who would vote for Hamas “tomorrow”, given a chance. Apart from outrageously calling the dead terrorists martyrs with no quotation marks or explanation of what this “martyrdom” means for Israelis, even more disconcerting is that the authors refer to that sheikh as a “pragmatist” just because he wants “the basic social services” – this is after the thousands of rockets that have been fired from Gaza where the peaceful “pragmatists” of the sheikh’s kind won.

It is true that the PA is no peace partner and is corrupt, but the article’s advice is vacuous as it neither proposes any valid alternative nor tells the truth: there are no “peace partners” for Israel. In fact, none is needed or possible. There can be no partnership between the aggressors and the aggressed, just as no partnership can exist between the murderer and his victim. What is needed is that the Arab aggressors who have waged the war against Israel for as long as it has existed – the irredentists who do not agree to that existence in any shape or form – stop their war and their antisemitic poisoning of their children’s minds. Nobody among the Palestinian Arabs is known to have the political will, stature, and means for ensuring that. This needs to be clearly understood, and a good start for that would be calling terrorist murderers terrorists rather than “martyrs”, and using the correct geographic names Judea and Samaria rather than the meaningless and ahistoric “West Bank” that Jordan invented during its illegal occupation of the land to render not only the territory but even toponymy Judenrein. Without that understanding, the efforts and money will continue being wasted in pursuit of mirages. 

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*Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Brackman, a historian, is a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/kerry-challenge-empower-palestinians-article-1.1384187#ixzz2XvrBUxdZ

"Islamism" vs. Occam's razor: Made in West

Dr. Daniel Pipes is a knowledgeable commentator on Islam. His expertise has been sought by policy-makers up to the level of US president. That's enough for me to get interested in Dr. Pipes's opinion, trying to form my dilettante own. Sometimes it is different from his. But first things first.

When America, helped by its few remaining allies, defeated Saddam Hussein, a bloody, bestial and bloated with pride autocrat, it found nothing better than to elect Barack Hussein as President. This is as if to prove that the inevitable associations with Saddam, with Osama, with 9-11, with anything Islam, are of no concern to the home of the brave. The symbolism of this is significant, even though, of course, there is little similarity between the two rulers. If there is any, however (perish the thought), it includes the fact that both have had a relatively thin connection with the religion that provided them with their names.

Saddam was a socialist—of his national kind—and would turn to Islam as a matter of convenience. Just as Islam's founder used to, Saddam used his “religion” to justify his atrocities. Like Muhammad, he had to do that quite a bit, and in his environment Islam generally has wider currency than in the US, being integral part of tradition. While Barack is undoubtedly a socialist of a kind too, his environment gives him much less opportunities to apply his love for the “prettiest”sounds of Islam, and much more for applying the version of Christianity that he was taught by Rev. Wright—the only one he's ever known. Nevertheless, one can't accuse Barack of fully neglecting his “grandfather's” religion. As need be, he recites the Muslim statement of faith, curses those who insult Muhammad, strenuously protects women's "right" to wear hijab, and extols Islamic “learning.” Occasionally, he even (mis)speaks  of himself as a Muslim.

Like his predecessor Bush II, he considers Islam “religion of peace”— despite all the proof to the contrary, from the Islamic scripture to the bloody history of Muslim conquest to the incessant and growing terror committed in the name of Islam. Individual and group terror, which has replaced Muslim nations' terror due to their military inferiority, is very successful. The West, ridden with guilt and ashamed of its religion, lacks moral clarity and ideologic spine. In fact, ideology is a curse word. Because of that, the reaction to Islam's terror is the opposite to rational: instead of Westerners' protecting themselves from the carriers of the murderous ideology, as they would from a foreign invasion, more of those carriers are imported to spread it. Just as Israel, under the same post-ideologic Western pressure and wishful thinking, gives up its hard-won territories for nothing in return, the West loses its territorial and ideological integrity to the alien invasion as well. The losses are tangible: Muslim settlers in the West tend to congregate geographically, squeezing out the infidels, and tend not to assimilate culturally. In effect, parts of countries become off limits to their prior inhabitants. This is combined with the political changes resulting from politicians' seeking votes from the growing Muslim block. Progressives—some from ignorance, others from the need to fight the evils of capitalism, yet others simply sharing antisemitism that is so respected in Islam—provide an abundant supply of collaborationists.

The argument is, of course, that it is “Islamism” that is bad, while Islam is as good as, if not better than, Judaism and Christianity. By implication, Islam should be as acceptable to the West as Judeo-Christian beliefs. Muslims do list those beliefs on the same breath: “Jews and Crusaders.” They do not, obviously, list Islam on the same breath, supposedly another “Abrahamic religion,” nor does anybody with a scintilla of knowledge in the West seriously consider it as another facet of the tripartite system. It does not take much to prove that both “Abrahamic religion” and “Islamism” are Western inventions.

Clearly, even in a culture that fully accepts death sentence, not everybody would want to be an executioner. Similarly, it is no proof of Islam's general rejection of terror that not every Muslim is a terrorist. Anybody familiar with Islamic writings and history knows that terror has played a central role in the spread of Islam.  But why not listen to the prime-minister of a Muslim country, elected from a Muslim party—shouldn't he be trusted as a better expert than the Western thinkers when he says there is no “moderate Islam”? In Erdogan's words, “If you say moderate Islam, then an alternative is created, and that is immoderate Islam. As a Muslim, I can't accept such a concept.” Then, as behooves a fine logician he is, he goes on to state the opposite to what he said: “Islam rejects extreme concepts. I am not an extreme Muslim. We are Muslims who have found a middle road.” Middle—between what and what? If he is not an “extreme” one, what is he if not “moderate,” if confused? His point is, anyway, that he is not a terrorist (who said he was?), and that terror cannot be called “Islamic” just as it could not be called Christian or Jewish. Of course, it could—such as when terror is committed in the name of Christianity, as it was during Jewish pogroms in Russia. Terror committed in the name of Islam, accompanied with proclaiming glory to the Islamic deity, Allah, is Muslim terror. The Turkish army chief General Buyukanit puts it succinctly: “There are certain circles that want to add the title of 'moderate Islam' to the Republic of Turkey. The source of such a title does not come from within Turkey but foreign circles.”

All these facts, and more, are considered in Dr. Pipes's blog entry of 2004 and its updates—without much discussion of whether Erdogan and other Muslims who reject the concept of “moderate vs. immoderate” Islam are right or wrong. Those facts are also recently revisited in Dr. Pipes's May 2013 Washington Times article “Islam and its infidels: How extremists distorted a religion of millions.” There he mentions the same arguments, but as given by his opponents, which is to say the opponents of the division of Islam into "moderate" and "Islamist" that he supports.

Unfortunately, that article presents no support for an entity termed “Islamism” to counter the continuities and consistencies in Islam. Contrary to Dr. Pipes's view, Muslims never needed to “absorb” from Europeans the concept of ideology: Islam has been a totalitarian ideology, by both intent and implementation, from Muhammad's times. Cultural and other achievements listed in the article, the fluctuating proportions of the “extremists,” and variation within Islam that includes “quietists,” are irrelevant. Variation exists among the followers of any ideology, as humans are thankfully not a eusocial species. After all, Schindler was a card-carrying Nazi too. That is no proof of “moderate Nazism,” however.

“Islamism” remains a redundancy invented in the West, however convenient and comfortable it might be to add an “-ism” and thus truncate the distribution of individual devotion to Islam's scriptural ideologic principles. Collapsing that dimension into the categories of “secularism,” “apologism,” and “islamism,” as suggested in Dr. Pipes's article, has no foundation in reality, if only because there are no natural/scriptural boundaries between these groupings. “Quietism” of Sufis, so frequently thought of in the West as meditative mystics, wine-imbibing poets and whirling dervishes, did not prevent Shamil Basayev and other Sufis from multiple terror acts, including the mass murder of non-Muslim children in the Beslan school. Hopefully we won't try now to invent “extremist” and “moderate” Sufis—like the rest of Muslims, they obviously represent a continuum. Historically, Sufis, organized into knight-like orders with blind obedience of members to the leader, have been fanatical warriors spearheading Islamic conquest.

Contrary to Dr. Pipes, adding an “-ism” to Islam is not at all similar to creating a term like fascism—rather, the analog to “Islamism” would be “fascismism,” a clear redundancy. It might be comfortable to think that “Islamism” allows us to fear only “10 to 15 percent of Muslims”rather than all 1.3 bln of them—even though I'd fail to take any comfort in the 10%, especially when it translates into 130,000,000 of vicious “Islamists.” There is no need, however, as Occam's razor warns us, to multiply entities when not necessary—and necessity cannot result from our need in comfort. The attempts to reify a novel entity of “Islamism” only show how well religious mimicry continues to serve Islam to mislead the wishfully thinking West.

J Dead-End

I am not a journalist to track the news. So it is only recently that I have come across a month-old column in The Jewish Chronicle authored by the two co-chairs of J Street-Pittsburgh ("Obama: ‘You must create the change you want to see’"). By itself, it is of little interest and was not a news item even when it was published. It only regurgitates approvingly some points made by Obama in his speech to Israeli students when he finally descended in his presidential glory on the bothersome country with its insufferable Prime Minister. Remember the president's sharing Sarkozy's hot mic revelations about the "liar" with whom poor Obama has to "deal" so often? The column is hardly made more interesting by its arrogant absurdities, which include calling Obama’s decision to talk to young people (instead of the Knesset) “a way to elevate the discussion about peace above the typical rancor of their leaders.” Ah, those benighted rancorous Israeli leaders - so beneath the station of our soaring president and the "co-chairs" whom I'd call paternalistic were they not women. What is interesting is not what is in, but what is not in that column – nor is it in the Obama speech.

First, missing are not only the Members of the Knesset. Obama addressed young Israelis but not young Palestinian Arabs. This is consistent with what he, along with his many mouthpieces including J Street, considers the cause of the lack of any progress in the "peace process". Nevertheless, even his words could have provided a clue to the only realistic solution. He said, "Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland..." - and the logical conclusion could well be, "the Palestinian Arabs should build theirs". That would place some responsibility on the Arabs' shoulders. The Jewish state had been built and existed de facto before it was declared in 1948. All the attempts, if any, that the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza have made to create a semblance of a working state have failed - the latest with Fayyad's resignation. Lo and behold, we now find out, he "feuded" with Abbas, the "Palestinian president" (whose term, for what it had been worth, expired in January 2009). These are the two people whom Obama, in torturous English making two persons into one entity that is on a par with a state, called Israel's "true partner" - half of which is now gone. The only state structure that functions in the "Palestinian state", declared recently for the second time, is the numerous "security forces" that double as terror groups.

Unfortunately and illogically, instead of Arabs' responsibilities, Obama concluded that sentence with the non-sequitur of their rights: "Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land". Put this way, that right - paraphrased by Obama from a verse in the Israeli state anthem - is denied to them by external forces. Not by the corruption of their own rulers and their dreams of vengeance and violent takeover of entire "Filastin", Israel included, but by the Israeli government, to pressure which the young Israelis were called by Obama. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the Arabs' responsibilities was made by the J Street writers of that column either. In the co-chairs' view, "the existential threat to Israel’s future" is not the Muslims/Arabs' refusal to reconcile with the Jewish state and to end the war they've been waging for as long as it exists, but "the lack of a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinians conflict" - which is, you guessed it, Israel's fault. Simple logic, however, should have told them that when one side has all the responsibilities while the other has rights only, the solution is as possible as the sound of one hand clapping. 

It is hard to imagine that neither Obama nor J Street are capable of seeing that. They cannot have missed that the only concessions ever made in the "peace process", and in the Arab-Israeli "conflict" in general, were Israeli. Those were not merely some formal diplomatic steps, but colossal territorial sacrifices - the land that had been paid in the blood of those who had recently survived a European genocide only to be promised another one by the Arabs, over and over again.

Nobody expects territorial gains made by other countries in the aftermath of defensive wars to be relinquished to their prior possessors: ask Russia about Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg. Or ask the Czechs about the Sudetenland, with the after-war wholesale expulsion of Germans from there, characterized by Churchill in 1944 as "the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting." No Arab country had ever been a legal possessor of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which were captured by Israel along with oil-rich Sinai during the defensive Six Day War, won under Nasser's and PLO's promises of genocide. Nevertheless, after its stunning victory Israel offered to forgo those gains - in exchange for peace. It was at the time not peace with the "Palestinians", who had not yet been invented, but with the Arabs in general. Nobody had talked then about another Arab "Palestinian" state in addition to the already existing one, Jordan. The Arab response was the "3 No's" of the Khartoum Resolution: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." After another victorious defensive war, Israel ceded Sinai to the thrice (at least) defeated enemy - for the empty paper of "peace", which would last only as long as Egypt is sure of its defeat if it starts another war. Then Israel ceded Gaza - to the nonentity of the "Palestinian Administration" - for nothing at all but hopes for a peaceful development, which had been seen as unfounded and lethal by whoever was willing to open an eye. Rockets from Gaza have pounded Israel ever since.

Why then, certainly knowing all this, Obama and his J Street fellow travelers do not address Arab responsibilities - the only thing that has always been needed for any positive change in the status quo? Why don't they ask for peace those who have ceaselessly waged the war - since the time when the Jewish state was at its embryonic stage? Why don't they ask Abbas who chairs the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was created to exterminate Israelis, in 1964, before any "occupation"? The PLO, whose ruling Charter calling for the violent liquidation of Israel has never been changed, and which has never stopped being a terrorist organization just because the West decided it no longer was? 

The reason is simple. They don't ask because they know it would be futile. They know they have nobody to address there - neither Abbas, the halved "partner" of Israel, the fake president of no country and a doctor of Holocaust denial, nor the assorted terrorist gangs including the Gaza rulers of Hamas, nor the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as a whole, which is ever ready to elect terrorists to rule them and celebrates mass murder including 9-11. It is a revolting hypocrisy when the J Street peaceniks, from the safety of Squirrel Hill (a cozy Pittsburgh neighborhood), call for Israelis to "demand from their political leaders to take the necessary risks for peace". They do it in full knowledge that those risks, taken by Israeli leaders so many times, are for continuing war and terror while the gains are mirages. This has been proven again and again whenever such risks were taken - with irreversible territorial losses, encouraging further terror.

Obama and his J Street cohorts are eager to submit Israel to those 100% risks for the sake of their political utopias. Knowingly unrealistic as those utopias are, they serve their purposes: to present Obama as a peacemaker statesman, and to fill the J Street co-chairs' leisure with self-important political activity and satisfy their leadership ambitions. Just like so many among the Jewish pacifist "co-chairs" in the US before and during 2nd World War, they care for nobody's peace except their own. It is no wonder J Street has decided to stop pretending to be "pro-Israel" to attract the kind of campus support it needs to "elevate" discussions to nowhere. With its vacuous pro-Arab rhetoric of unconditional "restraint" for Israel, J Street is a blind alley, a path leading to a deadly abyss.

The Benghazi trial

"...weighed on the scales and found wanting." Daniel 5:27

Perhaps not since the Moscow show trials have we seen such rhetoric as directed by our progressive intelligentsia at the reactionary "right-wing". Which is only fitting, considering that those trials were exactly against the "right opposition". As well as against the "left" one. Here is what one of my progressive comrades is dreaming about: "I think joe [Biden] would headbutt him [Ryan] right in his perfectly shaved chest thereby exploding his blackened, right-wing heart." Apart from the suggestive body imagery, the only thing different is that the dreams of those who called for death of the enemies of the People in Moscow of the 1930's came true - often just before the dreamers themselves were tried as well and executed. This mind-paralyzing hatred, producing verbal vomit of vulgarity at the slightest attempt of the opponent to bring up information to the contrary, makes impossible any discussion.

Supposedly capable of thinking critically, intelligent scientists recite as if on command - without a second thought (or a first one) - the trivial and pathetically petty talking points offered to them by the party apparatchiks via the tame media: free contraception for women, dog on Romney's car roof, Romney's "magic underpants" and "binders". This is at the time when the terror attack and murders in Benghazi draw into the sharpest focus the incompetence, cowardice and dishonesty of Obama's junta. The free minds of intelligentsia suspend their abilities and repeat those talking points like a character in a science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, The Snail On The Slope: suddenly a little violet cloud would form around his head, taking over control of his mind, and he would start announcing senseless but jubilant headlines about the Glorious Girlfriends' successes in the ongoing transformation of the Forest.

It is painful to watch the grimacing of the dissembling Obama Politburo, unable to disguise their lies, and the sad slant of Obama's speechifying head 1.5 months after the Benghazi events that the next day did not prevent him from enjoying his trip to Vegas and his laughing there at his own jokes. Or was a day not enough for the four deaths he observed happening in real time to sink in? To understand that he was responsible for them - that it was due to his and his coterie's negligence or willfully fatal decision that the people were dead? "Sacrificed their lives", as per the trite and false solemnity of Hillary Clinton's, whose honorary position of a former US president's wife, shared in part with others, made her eligible to be a foreign minister of the only superpower. The sacrifice was indeed made - but not by the ambassador and the fallen heroes who, denied any support, held for hours against the incredible odds, fighting mortar-armed thugs. They were sacrificed - by Obama,  Biden, Clinton, Panetta and who knows who else - on the altar of Islam-appeasing progressive ideology and self-congratulatory conclusions that "al Qaeda is on its heels". 

The Benghazi 9-11 would be the downfall of any administration - and not through its natural convenient removal by the upcoming elections, but by the public outcry demanding immediate impeachment and criminal prosecution. In the show trials of the 1930's in the Soviet Union, the guilt was invented - to get rid of Stalin's possible competitors and to suppress any dissent, the perennial dream of the progressive intelligentsia. The actual 9-11 crime and lies of Obama's clique should be enough to shatter that dream and put him out of his political misery. 

Everybody knows...

Everybody knows the deal is rotten.

                                             Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"

Everybody knows Obama lies, but admitting it requires comprehending the ugly reality of Obama's incompetence rather than unquestioningly worshiping him. This worship allows one to consider those lies pia fraus, pious fraud, and justify them fully. If the words are taken for what they fully are, one can see it was with regret that Obama said in his UN speech, "There is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy. There is no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon". There was indeed no video Obama and his clique could use for these purposes - they lied there was. He inadvertently admitted that.

On top of these lies, Obama apologized for our freedoms: "I know that not all countries in this body share this particular understanding of the protection of free speech. We recognize that. But in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete." See, they would really like to control, to cancel that pesky protection of free speech - but just cannot in 2012. Perhaps they'll be able to in 2013.

Don't forget Romney's carcinogenic properties and his Dog-On-The-Roof never-ending drama (I expect a Broadway musical to be made soon by Michael Moore). Dead ambassadors and invasions of sovereign US territory on 9-11 11 years after 9-11 are truly trivial in comparison. What jihad? All is quiet under The One's watch. Once the YouTube Muhammad movies are dealt with by the capable Obama censors, finally controlling the flow of information, we'll sing kumbaya and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.

Nobody should say Obama's presidency was a complete failure. Obama asked for an "incomplete" grade, and we have seen nothing yet indeed. It will be complete - and we'll be done too - if he gets his second term.

"Grandfather was...", Or Obama's faith

Why is so little attention paid to the choice of vice-president? Unless, that is, this is somebody of whom the left entertainment business can make a bogey like it was made of Palin. Why is there only one debate between the VP candidates, when even on the memory of the present generation the VP has become a POTUS twice? Moreover, aren't they supposed to be a team, in consultation with each other? I would suggest then that the debates should be conducted between the candidate POTUS-VP teams, with the same question answered by both in the couple, first by the prospective POTUSes and then by VPs, with the latter then being able to show their ability to contribute and, if needed, to replace the president. To be sure, the inability would also manifest. Perhaps at some point the debate rules will be so changed. No rules, however, need to be changed in order to discuss the president's convictions. Here we go, with no segue.

I don't care what religion anybody professes, if any, as long as that anybody leaves mine alone. One would think that this criterion should leave me indifferent to the issue of Obama's faith and religiosity. Shouldn't Obama's religion, anyway, concern only those firmly assigned to the category of wingnuts, in the company of "birthers", those certified paranoids who keep pointing out that Obama was listed as "born in Kenya" until after the start of his first presidential campaign? Shouldn't Madonna only  be allowed to call him a "black Muslim in the White House" without raising an outcry? Obama himself has emphatically called himself a Christian, attended a church for 20 years, and held a Reverend from that church as a member of his family until he was told he should not anymore (can happen to anybody). That's what he is then, right?

It seems, however, that the hypothesis of Obama's Islam is viewed as offensive by the Democrats and the media not only because of all  the above, but also because it has been considered to be detrimental to his candidacy - despite his handlers' supposed view of Islam as a religion at least equal to Christianity. Sometimes the stridency of insistence on Obama's Christianity is reminiscent of Clinton's "I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman". Even mentioning his second name is considered an affront, as if it were something shameful and "Barack" were not a Muslim name as well. I have been reprimanded by an Obama faithful for using his three initials, as if that was any different from FDR, JFK or LBJ. A progressive colleague of mine prefers "BO" instead, which is, I think, a real insult. Is it Islamophobia among Democrats, including Obama himself? I can't see any other possible reason for these consistent attempts to dissociate Obama from Islam. Be it as it may, apparently, nobody has been ready to celebrate the first Muslim-born President (in Islam, one is a Muslim if born to a Muslim father) - at least, as much as the first "black" president was celebrated (even though Morgan Freeman says Obama is not "black" - and Freeman should know). 

Do I then smell hypocrisy in Obama's declaration that "part of [his] responsibility as President of the United States [is] to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear" - a promise he has made to no other religion? Not to Christianity in Islamic countries, where conversion to it is punished by death, and Christians are persecuted into extinction, as they are in Egypt and in the "Palestinian" territories. Not to Judaism in both the realm of institutionally antisemitic Islam and in some Christian countries where the Jews are still routinely maligned as hell's spawn. Can you imagine Obama traveling to Jerusalem and telling Israelis that it is his responsibility to fight against antisemitism everywhere? It is hard to imagine him traveling to Jerusalem at all,  the city he called the undivided capital of Israel in front of a Jewish audience - just before he took his words back when no longer facing it. Now nobody in his entire administration can find Israel's capital on the map.  

It is this smell of hypocrisy that drives me wingnuts about Obama's beliefs - that and some concrete facts. For instance, if one is to believe Obama's memoirs, a barber once asked him, upon learning his name, “Barack, huh. You a Muslim?”. To which Barack Hussein gave a rather evasive response, "Grandfather was". The question was not about his grandfather, and he did not say "yes" or "no". Or did he? Hardly any curious barber would be satisfied by this response. 

Then the reader of "The Dreams..." learns that the "Muslim faith" was in Obama's mind "linked with the Nation of Islam". Nowhere in the book that has any negative connotation, while "the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam in turning around the lives of drug addicts and criminals" is noted more than once. He "would occasionally pick up the paper from these unfailingly polite men, in part out of sympathy to their heavy suits in the summer, their thin coats in winter; or sometimes because my attention was caught by the sensational, tabloid-style headlines (CAUCASIAN WOMAN ADMITS: WHITES ARE THE DEVIL)" - but that "sensational, tabloid-style" is the extent of his criticism of the fascist movement. I can't imagine how such a headline could catch anyone's attention, unless it evoked interest rather than disgust. It is then not surprising he got no criticism - until forced to have it - for the man "who helped introduce [him] to [his] Christian faith", another fascist. The latter quote suggests that before Wright's "introduction" he had no such faith. Whether that was the case, and whether he was a Muslim or tabula rasa in that regard, I can't know for sure, but I do surmise that Christianity was more promising in his political  "mind" of an aspiring "community organizer" than Islam, his obvious alternative choice.

What kind of Christianity - is a different matter. As it happens, the religion of Rev. Wright, Obama's spiritual father who baptized Obama's children and connected him to the black community, was such as to give Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to Farrakhan  - because, in Wright's view, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam "truly epitomized greatness." The award was a year before Obama's election and his abandonment of the Trinity Church under the campaign's pressure. That award must have been part of what Obama called "the much-admired success" of the Muslim faith. Indeed, in many ways, the odious "Christianity" of Wright and the "Islam" of Farrakhan, the fellow antisemites and racists, are alike. It would be an insult to everybody's intelligence to insist that Obama was unaware of that similarity and the mutual sympathies between Wright and Farrakhan, just as it is unlikely he had not heard anything truly revolting throughout the 20 years of his attendance of Wright's sermons.

One would think, however, that by the election time Obama had found out that the Nation of Islam's Islam was a bit different from historic Islam, however diverse that historic one still is. Perhaps that "link" was weakened, but not Obama's with Islam. When the time came for his foreign affairs, he declared "A New Beginning" for the relations between the US and... not another country, as one would think appropriate in those affairs, but with Islam, supposedly a religion. Now, that makes Islam a polity, doesn't it? His first TV interview was with Al-Arabiya, and in it he addressed "the Muslim world" - an entity that exists only in the minds of those who think that Islam unites countries and separates them from the other countries, a split into the world of Islam and the world of "disbelief", a familiar structure of Dar ul Islam and Dar ul Harb, the realm of Islam and the realm of war. Whereas in fact there is no "world of Islam" among the eternally conflicting "Islamic" countries and groups and tribes within them, Obama's declaration of America's reconciliation with the "Islamic world" creates that world in full accordance with Muslim mythology.

Then, of course, came the much-discussed Cairo speech, in the Al-Azhar University, "a beacon of Islamic learning" as the president, ostensibly knowledgeable of that learning, referred to the place. That's the same place whose Grand Imam, Tantawi, legitimized suicidal terror and wrote a 700-page book on antisemitic Islamic exegesis. His death in 2010 was lamented by Obama, as spoken of in his spokesman Gibbs's statement. It is this murderous source of "Islamic learning" who "graciously hosted President Obama last June in Cairo". Sure, Obama did admonish somebody anonymous in that Cairo speech that "Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews [which is done any time when the Jews are mentioned in a mosque] -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve." Bad memories, you see - as if the "peace process" has not resulted in hundreds of terror murders and is not by itself a war negating peace. 

Then Obama negated that admonishment anyway by equating terror and wars that Israel has been subjected to since before its reestablishment in 1948 with "the pain of dislocation of the Palestinian people" they "have endured" for "more than 60 years", that is, since 1948. No word about how those dislocated came to be dislocated, and what "occupation" he means that he speaks of in the very next sentence. There was no occupation "more than 60 years ago" - unless Obama agrees with the "Palestinian" narrative of "Naqba", whereby it is the very existence of Israel that is the occupation. To Obama, Israelis and Arabs are just "two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive," even though it is only for the "Palestinian people" that the situation is "intolerable" in his view. To Obama, the war waged by Arabs and Islam against Israel is nothing more than finger-pointing - "for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond." In his opinion, to see this conflict from the Israeli side is as wrong as seeing it from the Arab side and means to "be blind to the truth". What is Obama's truth? Simple: forget who the aggressor is and meet the "aspirations of both sides... through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security". Never mind that even in the poisonous internationally doctored prescription for that, "land for peace", Israel's part is "land". Peace is denied by the Arabs, regardless of how much land Israel is willing to give up.

While paying lip service to the need for the "Palestinian Authority" to "develop its capacity to govern" (Abbas's capacity to govern should have expired in January 2009), he demands that "Israelis must acknowledge [Palestine's right to exist] just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's" - as if that "right" of "Palestine" has not been asserted by Israel since Rabin. If Obama thinks that acknowledgment is still lacking, just as the Arabs do, nothing can convince him it's not. It is all the same to him that "privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away" and that "many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state" (obviously, not privately). Aside from the question about how he could penetrate the private thoughts of "many Muslims" - how exactly can one compare the alleged private thoughts and the official position of the Israeli governments? Another question is why those thoughts are still "private" - despite all the Osloism and "peace process". The response is, of course, that those who might have such thoughts run the risk of being murdered by the "many Muslims" if they make those thoughts public. To Obama, it is "continued Israeli settlements... construction" that  "violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace" - not the continued Arab terror, incitement, the official glorification of "martyrs", and the fact that the articles calling for the annihilation of Israel have never been removed from the "Palestinian" ruling Charter, despite the "peace process". Sure, Obama said that "Palestinians must abandon violence", but in the very next sentence he calls it "resistance", exactly what terror is called by Fatah, Hamas, Hizballah and all other terrorists and terrorism supporters. He is concerned that this "resistance" will not succeed "through violence and killing"  - not about that "Palestinians" have no right to that "resistance", moral or otherwise. This is exactly what is expected from the pupil of the antisemites and Israel-haters Rev. Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Edward Said.

Just as he whitewashes terror by calling it "resistance", he whitewashes Islam by using the standard lie that "The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as if he has killed all mankind.  (Applause.)  And the Holy Koran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.  (Applause.)" As other disingenuous apologists of Islam, he does not give the complete quote of this Koran 5:32 verse, 

"Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors." 

There is a teaching, but it is Jewish, indeed found in the Talmud. It is referred to as a Jewish belief in the Koran, which is "holy" only to the Muslims. Nowhere is it seen that Islam accepts this belief despite all the applause of the Al-Azhar audience. What sounds much more genuine is another statement of Obama's that caused applause, the one expressing his pride that "the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it". One wonders why the US government does not yet punish those who interfere with the "right of women and girls" to wear burqa - in fact, it wages a war against people who "protect" that right, in Afghanistan, wasting, as it were, the lives of young Americans.

In the end, it does not matter whether Obama's choice is antisemitic Islam or Wright's racist version of Christianity, the "black liberation theology". Both are terrible. What matters is Obama's position on the concrete issues that is defined by his ideology. This position, in which the perfectly legal building construction is equal to murder, Israel is called to return to the pre-1967 "borders" with no tangible obligation on the part of Arabs, and Jerusalem is no longer Israel's capital. This is the position where America's enemies are to be mollified and promised "more flexibility", while America's friends are to be let into the White House clandestinely, if at all, and maligned behind their backs.  It is of no interest what Obama's grandfather's faith was. His grandson's is no good, whatever its name.

Losing a Facebook friend, Or Obama's new duties

"Wowie! Wowie-wa-wa-wow!" says Cristopher Walken's amazed character in "The Continental" - and so do I. Then, of course, Walken's ladies' man only pretends to be amazed that he is rejected. He should not be amazed, because he has just offended the lady. Neither should I. 

Well, I won't torment my scarce and thus precious readership with the prelude to my dramatic story any longer. Everybody, of course, remembers my Facebook "friend" (FBF) I mentioned before, a fine statistician but, regrettably, a leftist. I have just found out he "unfriended" me. He could not take me anymore. You can see my post on his page, linking to "Filmmaker Taken in For Questioning", and the discussion that ensued, which I know I will cherish as my last memory of the dear FBF. How have I found out I was disowned? Facebook mercifully does not notify its users of those friends who  cruelly reject them, and only checking the number and then the names allows the hapless loser to detect the loss. How then? I did check. I did  - not because I keep track of that number, but because of the question I had asked my now former FBF. That question was intended to drive him into eliminating me from his virtual friendship, as I am not fond of dramatic gestures myself. Here is that entry of mine: 

"Whatever have I already been in your astute analysis of my person - and now this, "UNPLEASANT"! "Most unpleasant" out of 427 friends, no less (for statistics, I'd love to know how many of them are rated simply unpleasant). And none of this astronomical number has apparently pointed out to you the deficit of common courtesy in your "interacting", while it's hard for me to believe I've been the only one graced with your rudeness. A question arises, why you continue keeping my unpleasant self among that selected circle, let alone interacting, while you quite obviously hate my guts. Even more mysterious is how you can expect any continued "interacting" after your first paragraph in your last post - not that it is unique in your stream of personal attacks." 

I really could not imagine "interacting" (as he put it) with him any longer - not because I was offended by the ad hominems filling his posts, but because that last fit of his philistine rudeness clearly showed me the futility of my talking with him. 

Here is what it was about: I tried to present the case that the "movie" had little if anything to do with the ambassador's murder. I started with suggesting that the arrest of the author of the video smacked of violation of the 1st Amendment, and made a point that the real cause of the murders was murderous Muslim fanaticism. He started with protecting the right of Obama to distance himself and the government from the "movie" (as if anybody even as fanatical as the Muslim mob could believe that the US government had anything to do with it), and defended Nakoula's arrest despite the obvious contradictions in the account he cited:  "federal probation authorities called on the local sheriff's office to bring Nakoula in for questioning", he was taken for "a voluntary interview", "never handcuffed, he was never arrested, never detained, never in custody -- it was all voluntary" (all lies, as he has suddenly become a "flight risk"). This was topped by the FBF's own contradictions: while taking Muslim fanaticism for granted and contending that there might have been a group that targeted the ambassador, he still needed the "movie" to play a role in that - he had to, because so spake Obama and his camarilla. Then, of course, there was his unbeatable if calumnious argument that my thinking is guided by my "requirement of incessant hatred of all Islamic people", and his keeping to the line that "in Libya the people knew something about the film and the film was used to get them to the embassy" (which was in fact the Benghazi consulate and a so-called safe house) even though it was a "military group". Contradictions do not matter when whatever "Obama says ... about the video, he is only trying to weaken that opportunity [for using the video] by making it clear to as many people as possible that the video was not created by the US government nor endorsed by it, and we also condemn it. By doing that he weakens the power of people like Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah..." Imagine how much Nasrallah's power has been diminished by Obama's condemnations, unique in their sensitivity to Muslim and no other religious sentiments. 

I have no desire to gloat about my perspicacity in detecting Obama's clique's lying as well as its likely cause, which is their desire to get rid of their responsibility for criminal negligence and incompetent assessments and to mollify Muslims. There is no glory in understanding the obvious while Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Carney and Obama himself were still lying about the "spontaneous attack", and no happiness can derive from that event that has only recently become "an assault on America" after lying that "it is not a reaction to the 9/11 anniversary that we know of or to U.S. policy." As we know now, there was no "protest" - to the "movie" or otherwise - in Benghazi. By now it has been recognized by the administration and even by the US intelligence that it was a preplanned terror act having nothing to do with any "movie" - real or imagined, - which was followed the next day by the obscene act of Obama's smiling and enjoying himself in Vegas. He must be forgiven his insouciance - he could not possibly think that anything as mean as that could be organized after all his reaching out and bowing to Muslims. That was exactly the sentiment expressed by Hillary in the aftermath of the attack: "how could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?" Indeed, how? One has to be a rabid Islamophobe like myself to be able to see that it is 9-11 and what it represents that in the triangle of 9-11, the Benghazi attack and the "movie" is the source of their co-occurrence. As I told my unlamentedly former FBF, YouTube is full of anti-Islam videos. The Bakoula video that was used could be replaced by any other. Anything - everything - can be used as the pretext for murderous Muslim mobs to start rioting in the realm of the "religion of peace", and no pretext is needed for Muslim terror against America, Americans, Israel, or any other country or individual who does not share Muslim values. Perhaps Obama should establish a department for finding parole violations or any alleged crimes for all of the anti-Islam posters on YouTube - that would surely disempower Hizballah, al Qaeda and the rest of the "hijackers" of peaceful Islam, so readily converted by them into the powerful mass murder weapon.

It would only be consistent with the fact that the president of the United States has turned from the sworn protector of the US Constitution with all its inconvenient amendments into the protector of Islam, declaring from the UN podium that "[t]he future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam". The only question remains is how exactly he intends to deprive them of their future. His language is different from that of jihadis only in that they clearly explain what should happen "to those who slander the prophet of Islam". Meanwhile, he slanders those who speak of Muhammad by calling them slanderers, because it is they who speak the truth: the "prophet" was a genocidal highway robber chieftain, extortionist, child rapist... - there are too many inhumanities of his to list them in one sentence.

As befits such a dramatic change in the duties of the US President, Obama's campaign logo has now replaced the American flag (before clicking, beware that your computer may freeze - only fitting: such is Obama's commerce). It remains only to put his iconic picture - with oddly familiar raised chin - on that mutilated emblem.

Which brings me back to my sad story of losing the FBF. What is convenient about the left is their robotic predictability. Because they are firmly held within the strict confines of their Manichean ideology, dichotomizing the world into the "left" and "right" as respectively good and evil, the entities at war, anybody familiar with this ideology can say with near certainty what their reaction will be to anything that concerns it. Because the ideology is totalitarian, virtually anything concerns it, and anything can become a point where the dimension of opinions breaks into the irreconcilable dichotomy. With him, it could have happened earlier - for instance, when he compared Republican education plans with Auschwitz, because Republicans "promote this working-student program". Or when he supported his correspondent's deranged viewpoint that people hold the anti-abortion position because it would "keep the labor supply up and the labor costs down" "for the bourgeois to take advantage of" (the progressive view should then be to increase abortion rate: that should really hurt Obama's "millionaires and billionaires"). In retrospect, our inevitable falling out took too long. Unfortunately, America's falling out with its FBF in the White House may take much longer.

Take Jerusalem out of the party platforms!

Much excitement and outrage among Republicans about the deletion of Jerusalem from the Democratic platform. And of Gd. Why? Everybody should be happy about this sincerity and honesty, so rare among politicians. Why should Democrats pretend to be somebody else? Even though that might have been habitual for some prominent ones of them - notably, Joe the Coal Miner Biden and Elizabeth the Cherokee Chick Warren - why deny them the chance for repentance and redemption? This is a country where freedom of conscience is sanctified - why force Democrats to pretend they believe in Gd? Our glorious academic intelligentsia, the intellectual leadership of the Democrats, considers religious beliefs a sign of mental deficiency. Atheism is de rigeur (perhaps a bit of Buddhism is OK). Obama's mother was an atheist, his father and step-father were Muslim, and he was introduced to Christianity by Wright, whose black liberation theology is better not be raised by Obama as a discussion point. Apart from his attending Wright's church (largely a career thing), the only item pertaining to practicing religion is his "pretty sound" of the adhan, which contains the Shahada, declaration of faith in Islam (not that I am claiming he is a practicing Muslim). The Democrats omitting Him in their platform should be celebrated - both for their honesty and for the possibility that their admission of their Gdlessness may cost them some votes - of those who may have held some illusions in that respect.

The outrage about Jerusalem on the part of Republicans and the non-Democratic Jews like the ZOA is even less understandable. Jerusalem has no place in either party’s platform. Any country is free to choose any of its cities as its capital, and Jerusalem has been so chosen three thousand years ago. It does not need approval by some party's document - it's been approved by a higher power and by the whole history of the Jewish people, from David to the prayers to the defense of the city's western part in 1948-49 and the final liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 from its illegal and barbaric occupation by Jordan. It is particularly senseless, hypocritical and quite insulting when the Democrats, under Obama's orders, put Jerusalem back into the text of their platform - when his own minions cannot name Israel's capital, and it is his prerogative to finally act on the law demanding the US Embassy's move to Jerusalem rather than invoke the waiver every six months. It would be to the benefit of both parties to demand removal of Jerusalem from the Democratic platform.  For the Republicans, again, it could deduct some votes from their Democratic competitors. For the Democrats, it would be maintaining the integrity of the party, deprived of it by the shamelessly fraudulent vote count by the convention chairman Villaraigosa: there clearly was no two thirds majority, necessary for amending the platform. Honesty is certainly more important than those votes. As Obama would say (or should have said), “I’d be willing to be a one-term president over this.”

Democrats and Republicans! Desist from your lip service to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Be honest - move the Embassy already! Or be honest - and stop lying.

No Aurora, or Parrot paranoia

"А надо  бояться только того, Кто скажет: "Я знаю, как надо!" Гоните его! Не верьте ему! Он врет! Он не знает - как надо!" But fear only the one who'll say, "I know exactly, how." Do not trust in him! Do drive him away! He lies. He does not know how. - Alexander Galich

Economics is not my forte. So I won't talk much of it - but does our ruling Party really think that "command economy", as the Soviet variety used to be called, is the way the US should take? On top of it, do they think financing it with the Barry-Hoodean highway robbery of taxing "the rich" ever more makes it more hopeful?

Why I ask? In my continued discussions with the esteemed colleague from the previous post, he has recently come to what was the logical stage in the development of his "child disease of leftism" (as Lenin termed it, albeit speaking of leftism in communism). As the stages he passes through closely correspond to those of the world view of the Democratic party, it is instructive to mark this one. To wit, in his view, the example for America to follow is China. Not the Republic of China, prosperous despite (or maybe due to) its precarious existence. His beacon of hope is the People's Republic of China, a communist dictatorship that has only relatively recently allowed its citizenry to stop starving - by making them employable by the Western corporations, decentralizing and permitting free enterprise, and making the country the leading exporter in the world. In my colleague's view, however, this inclusion of China in the world economy is not the reason for the current improvement. In his opinion, the reason is that the Chinese government massively subsidizes all that's needed to get ahead.  Because no corporation can compete with the government, the US, with its backward capitalist small-government system, is doomed, as he thinks. Unless, that is, this country follows China's guiding light and gives the reins of the economy fully to the government, growing it more and more. Big government that ensues is thus a necessity, not a burden as we the benighted "conservatives" are misled to think by the "Faux News", having no brain of our own.

You'll say, "Solyndra"? Solyndra-shmolindra - it's just an unfortunate exception. You'll say, "the Soviet Union, which failed with its command economy"? Union-shmunion - and you are paranoid. See, it's completely different. In China, corporations are there, are they not, and they are surely capitalist - but the government is always just exceedingly smart and wise. In contrast to capitalist owners and the market, it knows which corporation is to swim and grow, and which is to drown, and spreads the wealth accordingly. For instance, some corporations are "too big to fail". Like GM, saved by the bailout, i.e., the money robbed... oops, taxed out of you. It does not matter that they may fail because what they make ain't good enough to be bought. My progressive colleague would never buy a GM-made car. They are entitled to be bailed out by the People's money because too many people would suffer if they fail - like Obama's friends from GM management and the UAW that gives him so many votes. It would be unfair and socially unjust to allow them to stand on their own. See, when millions are unemployed and get their checks because of (and sometimes for) not working, it is only just for us the People to pay others for working and making something people don't buy. That's why we the People now own 500 million shares, 26% of the company whose stock is worth less than 40% of what it should be to at least cover the bailout. After all, as my colleague's argument goes, aren't we subsidizing our farmers? Yes, we are - but at least we all eat, while not all of us drive Chevrolets, Cadillacs, and literally fire-breathing Chevy Volts, Cruzes, etc. 

And who indeed says that agricultural subsidies are good? One of their likely results is the catastrophic epidemic of obesity in this country - in part due to low prices on unhealthy subsidized foods. According to CDC, more than one third of the adult population and almost 20% of the young are obese. The latter proportion has tripled since 1980's. The unfair advantage granted to the producers of those staples - soy oil, corn syrup and corn starch, that is junk food (no fruits and vegetables except, very little, apples) - not only distorts the market, but kills. Yes, it is a personal responsibility to control one's food intake. It should not be discounted, however, that humans have not had time to fully evolve mechanisms for adequately dealing with refined and concentrated high-energy nutrients at virtually unlimited availability. This combines with effects of also very recent - on the evolutionary scale - low mobility that cannot be expected to be universally offset by voluntary physical exercise. Not everybody has the means, the time and the knowledge for that. Most importantly, not everybody has the will for that even when critically needed - otherwise there would likely be no obesity to start with. The government would rather try to tax and control people who are addicted to high-calorie foods from their childhood than to change its own agricultural policies that encourage the farmers to produce the enormous surplus of unhealthy food at the cost of healthy nutrition. Unlike drugs, where governmental attempts at supply control are negative and do not work (addiction rates have not decreased in decades), the governmental control of agriculture is positive and works quite well - to our grievous detriment. The government tends to know best - like it used to in the USSR. Or in China, which will eventually be the downfall of the Chinese economy unless they change more. Or may be I am just imagining, and nothing like that has never happened.

Indeed, I have more than once heard an opinion that those who came from the now extinct Soviet Union have a distorted perspective of paranoid obsession with the ongoing communist transformation of this country. Like Monty Python's parrot, communism is no more, we are told, it has ceased to be, - even in its own cage. It is even less likely to fly in this free country, and we should not try to sell the dead bird to the enlightened US public. Well, okay, it is possible that so many of us have gone if not postal then Forrestal, at least as the legend of his yelling "The Russians are coming!" goes. There surely have been mass delusions before. Judeophobia, for one, has affected Christian Europe and has been a major component of Islam since Muhammad. Nevertheless, all cases of mass paranoia have been due to intensive indoctrination, usually from a very early age, acquired, as they say in Russia, with one's mother's milk. One may be also prepared for accepting a paranoid cult based on prior prejudice and a lacuna where axiomatic religious feelings should have resided, like in the cases of the Manson family or Adam Gadahn, the American Taliban. We, who grew up in and escaped from the Soviet Union, have successfully withstood communist indoctrination, which not only presented the USSR as the pinnacle of human social achievement, but also depicted the Western society as hell on earth, where the rich and strong devour the weak and the poor, where "millionaires and billionaires" are ready to destroy the world in nuclear fire once promised some profit - never mind how they'd use it in the destroyed world, "stupid" as they are (another favorite term of the progressives). It is highly unlikely that having been immune to the Soviet propaganda, with its virtual monopoly on legal information and the scarcity of any illegal alternative, we'd be driven out of our minds by the weak, inconsistent, and contradictory ideologic information supplied by the "conservative" sources. 

It is much more likely that our dissent from the crowd educated at a comparable level in the US is due to our scale of reference, which is extended far beyond the abstract perceptions of communism that are available to US intelligentsia. This allows us to see the social phenomena not as discrete "line-item" events and occurrences, but as indicators of larger ideological constructs. Unfortunately, it is not (just) the economy, "stupid" (why can't they do without cussing?). Human history, even not so distant, has shown that people are capable of completely disregarding economy and their own material advantage - even their own lives - for an ideology's sake. Sometimes those are self-sacrifices that may be noble, altruistic and indeed result in a better future for others. Very often they are sacrifices of others by the ideologically driven leaders who themselves are doing quite well. It does not matter what this latter category calls itself - Secretary General and the Politburo, or President and his advisors, or Rais and his Authority - the result is the same. They are beyond critique, and they know exactly, how. Naturally, they also rely on unquestioning worship, like that accorded to Stalin, Mao, the Kims, and now - oh miracle! - Obama: watch the horrific Soviet-parroting organized mantric brain-washing of American kids, no different from that in today's North Korea. Those who are brought up worshiping an idol will hate his perceived human enemies - which is everybody who doubts his divinity and divine ideas.

The polarization of the country that took good root in the 1960's, despite apparent changes soon from hippies to yuppies, has created the indoctrination climate. One could say it was not communist indoctrination, even though "commune" was the name in vogue for the hippie groups. Communism as the term had lost much of its shine since Khruschev's denouncement of Stalin and become synonymous with oppression - not a good thing to accept when you preach love. Nevertheless, while not called by the dreaded name, not marching under the sickle and hammer banner, the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist and pacifist ideology was in service if not to communist goals, then to the goals of communists. Telling examples were the Jane "Hanoi" Fonda affair, and the "peace movement", in large part set up and funded by the KGB. No, the yuppified "flower children" generation did not become communist - they fought for peace and human rights. Along with the racism of the prior generation, however, they also rejected its other values - religious and thus ethical. Today, the generations of flower children and grandchildren rule the US and decide our future. It is not by accident that communists, terrorists, America-haters and Mao-worshipers keep popping up among Obama's coterie. Nowadays, it is the time-adjusted communist ideology of the current US government itself that works to destroy the hated capitalist system or, at the very least, to enable the benevolent power of the new Politburo over the "stupid" masses. For this kind of revolution, you don't need any cannonade from the Aurora, the cruiser that gave the signal for starting the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. No shooting, no civil wars - only the soft but firm congealing of power in the Kremlin, oops, the White House. Going by the same book of slogans of fair share, redistribution of wealth, "millionaires and billionaires" (used to be "bourgeoisie") - but with the book cover and the title and "the spectre of communism" cautiously stripped off.

To illustrate paranoid thinking, Robins and Post (1997) in their Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred note that for a paranoid "[w]hile there may be merit to the aphorism 'Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get me,' it is also often true to state 'Because they have been out to get me, I had better trust no one and assume I am surrounded by enemies.'" From this "often true" statement follows that paranoia can also be readily used as a political quasi-diagnosis that dichotomizes a continuous variable of perceived risk, making it easy to assign the individual at a first "symptom" to the affected group and dismiss any legitimate fears any group or its individual members might have. The progressives like to attack their opponents as mental cases. When they are in power, as in the USSR,  punitive psychiatry becomes a method of choice for dealing with political enemies, that is anybody who disagrees. Interestingly, however, it is exactly paranoids who "do not have adversaries or rivals or opponents; they have enemies, and enemies are not to be simply defeated and certainly not to be compromised with or won over. Enemies are to be destroyed" (ibid.). The paranoid log has always been lodged in the progressives' own eye. With Obama and his unconditional supporters, mainstream media filled with sticky-sweet adulation for him and hate for the half the country of enemies, communist demagoguery and deep reach into the control of economy - the parrot is alive and kicking. And it hurts.