Recently in Israel Category

That Mark Steyn is brilliant, we know.

Putting the pieces together as he does in his words about the pathology of Jew hatred is brilliant. Hatred corrupts the haters and nowhere is that shown more clearly than by the Palestinians and their Muslim brethren worldwide.

Through the centuries it is estimated that in its expansionary wars Islam has killed 270 million people, including 80 million Hindus. Jews have always been at the top of the list to be killed, following Mohammad's example.

With 1.2 billion Muslims now in the world it must be frustrating to true believer Muslims that they are somehow dominated by 14 million Jews whom they cannot exterminate.

The ‘Oldest Hatred’

It didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.

By Mark Steyn
National Review Online
January 10, 2009

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews;” in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, the congregation at a Swedish synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in; in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store; in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a Belgian synagogue; in Antwerp, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

In London, the police advise British Jews to review their security procedures because of potential revenge attacks. The Sun reports “fears” that “Islamic extremists” are drawing up a “hit list” of prominent Jews, including the Foreign Secretary, Amy Winehouse’s record producer, and the late Princess of Wales’s divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Islamic non-extremists from the British Muslim Forum, the Islamic Foundation and other impeccably respectable “moderate” groups have warned the government that the Israelis’ “disproportionate force” in Gaza risks inflaming British Muslims, “reviving extremist groups,” and provoking “UK terrorist attacks” — not against Amy Winehouse’s record producer and other sinister members of the International Jewish Conspiracy but against targets of, ah, more general interest.

Forget, for the moment, Gaza. Forget that the Palestinian people are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth. For the past sixty years they have been entrusted to the care of the United Nations, the Arab League, the PLO, Hamas and the “global community” — and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for Israeli-bound rockets, and to the UN refugee agency that turns a blind eye to it. And, even if you don’t deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in which the “Palestinian Authority” has exercised sovereign powers roughly equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to concede that the Palestinian “nationalist movement” has a profound shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and Israel has few good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist dispute, it would have been over long ago.

Israel in perspective:

Ah, yes.

There are 7 million Israelis, 20% of whom are Arab-Israeli citizens, living in a half-desert area smaller than New Jersey, surrounded by some 350 million Arabs and 70 million or so Iranians, 65% of whom are Persians and the rest a mix of Arabs and others. Since before 1948, the birth of Israel, Arabs have been seeking to wipe out the Jews in what is now Israel. Of late, Iran has chipped in and is now playing a leading role financing and arming Hamas, which is dedicated to the annihlation of Israel and its Jews.

Regardless of the differences between the Arabs and Iran (and they are real, because the Arabs fear a nuclear Iran), they are united by the teaching of Mohammad and his Koran that Jews are to be destroyed (since contemporay Jews of Mohammad refused to recognize him as a Prophet, Mohammad had them killed). Other true believers(an unknown percentage) among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims share the same goal.

Israel is at the forefront of Islam's divine mission to conquer the world. Success there would move the battlefield to "lost" Muslim lands in India (already under attack), the Balkans, Philippines, Spain and Italy while the groundwork for conquest is laid elsewhere in the world, the rest of Europe and the U.S. holding top priority along with Brazil. (Europe has between 20 and 50 million non-assimilated Muslims living there already. Shockingly, Muslims claim 12 million in Brazil, which is more than twice the number in the U.S.)

It is imperative for the West that Israel's enemies are defeated.

Many were killed by the Islamic terrorists in Mumbai, but the savagery of the murders at the Orthodox Jewish center had even experienced pathologists refusing to talk about the condition of the bodies of the young American rabbi and his six-month pregnant wife.

The one Islamic terrorist captured by Indian forces has now disclosed that the Jewish center the Nariman House, not the Taj or the other hotel or the shopping mall, was the prime target on November 26.

Ajmal reportedly told the police they wanted to sent a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue.

Approximately half the Jews in the world live in Israel and almost an equal number live in the United States. So the fixation of the Iranian leadership, Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda on killling Jews (based on the Koran and the actions of Mohammad) is shared by the Islamic terrorists of Pakistan. And millions of the Jews they seek to kill are Americans. No way. In Israel or America.

Nariman House, not Taj, was the prime target on 26/11

Somendra Sharma
January 5, 2009
DNAIndia

Think 26/11, and images of the carnage at the Taj come to mind. But the terrorists themselves were in no doubt that Nariman House was the prime focus. For this was the place which housed a Jewish centre, and the fanatics from Pakistan were clear that they wanted to send a message to the world from there.

The Mumbai crime branch, which is investigating the terror attacks, has found that the terrorists’ handlers in Pakistan were clear this operation should not fail under any circumstances. The rest of the operations — at the Taj, Oberoi and Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus — were intended to amplify the effect.

A senior police official, told DNA on condition of anonymity, that the interrogation of Mohammed Amir Iman Ajmal (aka Kasab) revealed as much. Just before entering the city, the terrorists’ team leader, Ismail Khan, briefed them once again about their targets. “But Khan briefed Imran Babar, alias Abu Akasha, and Nasir, alias Abu Umer, intensely on what to do at Nariman House,” the officer said.

When asked during interrogation why Nariman House was specifically targetted, Ajmal reportedly told the police they wanted to sent a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue.

According to the statement by Ajmal, Khan told Babar and Nasir that even if the others failed in their operation, they both could not afford to. “The Nariman House operation has to be a success,” the officer said, quoting from Ajmal’s statement.

“Khan also said that as far as Nariman House was concerned, there should not be even a minimal glitch in finding it and capturing it,” the officer quoted Ajmal as saying.

After the dinghy carrying the 10 terrorists reached Mumbai at the Macchimar colony opposite Badhwar Park in Cuffe Parade, it was decided that no bombs would be planted in the taxi to be used to reach Nariman House.

“The idea,” according to the police officer, “was that if Babar and Nasir got delayed in locating and entering Nariman House, the bomb in the taxi may explode even before they entered their target.”

The officer further quoted Ajmal’s confession as indicating the Nariman House killers may have either lost their way or took their time entering the building to avoid failure.
The dinghy reached Cuffe Parade around 8.30pm, but Babar and Nasir entered
Nariman House at around 10pm. This means they took around one- and-a-half hour to locate and enter Nariman House,” the officer said. Anyone who knows Colaba would have got there in 15-20 minutes.

Another aspect which indicates that the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) did not want the Nariman House operation to fail was Fahim Ansari’s revelation to the crime branch. Ansari, who was arrested for his alleged involvement in the bomb blasts at a CRPF camp in Lucknow in January last year, told the police that Nariman House was also surveyed by him last year. Interestingly, Ansari did not reveal this detail when he was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police in February last year.

“Ansari told us that he did not divulge this information earlier because it would have jeopardised the most important operation of the LeT. He had also been warned by the LeT that Nariman House was their most secret operation and must not be compromised at any cost,” the officer said.

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who sent the blind shiekh who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing to jail, makes it clear what it will take for Palestinians ever to have their own state in a "two-state" Palestine.

What's more, McCarthy says it will take a least a generation for Palestinians to show they are worthy of their own state. All the talk about "peace" and a two-state solution presumably just over the horizon should just stop. It just makes the Palestinians believe their terrorism is working.

Palestinians are weaned on Jew-hatred through schools and media controlled by the competing factions and other jihadists. Their national heroes are those dedicated to killing Jews, most especially the “martyrs” (or shaheed) who self-implode in suicide attacks. It is to be expected, then, that when the public is polled in the actual Palestinian territories, rather than in Condi-world, a very different reality is reflected: About three in four Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist, a figure that soars to over nine in ten when only the fighting-age demographic (between 18 and 25) is considered.

The hatred of Jews and Israel that fills the Palestinian airwaves is no different whether the broadcaster is Hamas or the Palestinian Authority controlled by Fatah.

Let’s be blunt: we are looking at a generation or more before the Palestinians might be prepared to assume the obligations of sovereignty. So we should stop talking about it. Doing so only indicates to the Palestinians that we are more interested in the simulacrum of a settlement than in cultivating a mature statehood that is stable, hopefully democratic, and respectful of its peers — such that it is capable of negotiating with them absent the notion of annihilating them. “Roadmaps” and “peace processes” which hold out the possibility (indeed, the likelihood) of near-term statehood tell the Palestinians that terrorism succeeds and that they can reap enormous benefits while continuing to work toward Israel’s demise.

In short, we can help Israel enormously in the here and now — while simultaneously setting the Palestinians on their only realistic path toward long-term prosperity — by making clear that statehood is absolutely off the table until the Palestinians convincingly abandon terrorism, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, rescind or amend all covenants to the contrary, and demonstrably overhaul their institutions (especially their media and education systems) in a manner that conveys their commitment to this new state of affairs.

In the short run, the U.S. should support Israel in its effort to break Hamas' grip on Gaza and of the Palestinian people. Secretary of State Rice not too long ago claimed that 70% of Palestinians were ready to live in peace alongside Israel. McCarthy calls that statement "preposterous." Many polls show that, despite their suffering and poverty under Hamas, Gazans support their terrorist war on Israel.

If peace is ever to come, the Palestinians' will must be broken. They must know they are defeated and cannot destroy Israel, as both Hamas and Fatah are in their founding documents dedicated to do.

Read it all.

Melanie Phillips, the distinguished British author and journalist puts Israel's war with Hamas in the proper world war context:

The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones. The deranged hatred of the Jews lies at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of America, the ‘infidel’ west and modernity, and is the reason why they wish to destroy Israel. Unless people in the west understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the west but civilisation in general.

The author, columnist and historian of ancient wars Victor Davis Hanson, distinguished senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, finds what's going on is "creepy."

It is now clear that the so-called and much praised "international community," the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

VDH's full comment:

Creepy Times

There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live.

Almost no other issue in recent memory has illustrated the moral bankruptcy of much of the international community. Hamas has no pretensions, like the PA, of being a governing authority; it used violence to rout the PA and then bragged that its charter pledging the destruction of Israel remained unchanged. Israel evacuated Gaza; Gazans in response looted their own infrastructure, alienated both the PA and Egypt,and then sent off more than 6,000 rockets against Israeli civilians, while eagerly becoming a terrorist puppet of theocratic Iran.

Nothing could be more clear: either the fact that a constitutional republic was trying to avoid civilian casualties while a terrorist organization was intent on killing Jewish civilians as it used its own citizens as shields to protect mostly young male terrorists; or the world's craven reaction to all this.

Again all very creepy — the stuff of Tolkien's Mordor. It is now clear that the so-called and much praised "international community," the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

Mark Steyn muses about the importance of culture as articulated by Samuel Huntington in his landmark essay The Clash of Civilizations.

Inevitably, the principal clash discussed in the one between the Muslm world and everyone else. Former Muslim Syrian-born Wafa Sultan on Islamic television network al Jazeera said the clash was not between civilzations but between civilzation and barbarism.

Mark notes that in Gaza Hamas has just reinstituted crucifixion as a form of punishment. The Palestinians have a single-minded focus on killing Jews as a career, with some attention paid to dispatching Christians, as they recently did by attacking a group traveling to Bethlemen for Christmas observance.

In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity.

And is poverty, as some argue, the cause of this?

Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheva, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health.

Are we actually listening to the Hamas and Iranian spokemen spout their genocidal intentions towards Israel, Britain and America, Steyn asks. Channel 4 in Britain carried a "Chirstmas message" from Iran's president Ahmadinehad because it maintained people don't get a chance to hear from him.

So when Channel 4 says that we don’t get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go “Nya nya, can’t hear you.” We do this in part because, if you’re as invested as most western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as “England’s demise is on our agenda” becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he’s a genocidal realist — look at the threads linking North Korea to Iran and to Iran’s clients in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza — and we’re the fantasists.

So which way are things trending?

The civilizational clashes of Professor Huntington’s book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the west no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from “moderation” and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

Clashing Civilizations

By Mark Steyn

So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they’re putting the Christ back in Christmas, they’re certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on December 23rd Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia — Islamic law — to the Palestinian Territories, including crucifixion. So next time you’re visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called “the Holy Land,” the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.

continue ...

So many in the West refuse to grasp the reality of Islamic hatred and violence, especially when Israel is involved. Europeans protest Israel's "disproportionate response" to thousands of rocket, missiles and mortar rounds fired from Gaza by Hamas and its allies into Israeli villages, towns and cities killing, maiming and terrorizing civiian men, women and children. President-Elect Obama, though, got it right.

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night," he said while visiting the border town of Sderot last summer, "I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that.

"And I would expect Israelis to do the right thing."

Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared as such for years by the U.S. Government. But Hamas has its supporters right here in the United States. Funds have been and are being raised for Hamas in the United States. The Islamic Holy Land Foundation and its principal officers were recently convicted of funneling "charitable" monies from its headquarters in Texas to Hamas.

Several expert observers of the influence Islam exerts on its subjects, particularly those "educated" in Muslim lands or Muslim enclaves such as exist throughout Western Europe, are now arguing that Muslim immigration into the United States should be halted before "it's too late." It is an alien culture. For Europe, with its 20-60 million (nobody knows exactly) Muslims, it may already be too late, though some there are belatedly speaking out against additional Muslim immigration. Those in England who warned of the dangers of mass Muslim immigration decades ago were pilloried.

Former Muslim Wafa Sultan, a psychiatrist who left Syria for California, disagrees with the characterization coined by Professor Sam Huntington of the war being waged by Islam as a clash of civilizations. It is the clash of civilization and barbarism, she says. .

To get a sense of some of the Muslims who are in our midst and the hatred that seethes from them, watch this 9-minute video of Palestinian and other Muslims (HT: Power Line) rallying to the Hamas' support -- in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It could have been Boston, New York or San Francisco or any of the 40 cities that Hamas is reported to have chapters in.

Yesterday we asked if Israel would stop its war against Hamas short of victory. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe asked a similar question, Has Israel learned its lesson?

Jacoby was hopeful Israel had learned its lesson, while we were pessimistic, expressing the opinion that Israel was in fact signalling it was going to repeat its mistakes in the Hezbollah war of 2006 that led to Hezbollah -- rightly -- claiming victory.

In Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces performed brilliantly, but were held back by the inept political leaders of the government who agreed to a disastrous ceasefire.

The same scenario is being reenacted in Gaza, where the IDF has delivered punishing blows to Hamas and is poised on the border ready to launch a ground assault to defeat the enemy once and for all. But already Israel's leaders are buckling.

Now the Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick weighs in with her view, which is that Israel is setting up to hand a victory to Hamas, making Israel even more unsafe that it was before the IDF campaign began. Israel is in fact going to stop short of victory.

The Olmert/Livni/Barak government is at best delivering a rap across the knuckles to Hamas and in return Hamas is getting the full support of the European Union in their demands for full control of their land and sea borders without making any meaningful concessions at all. Hamas will not be asked to stop smuggling arms, to renounce and halt terrorism and to recognize the right of Israel to exist. At most, Hamas will agree to a truce period, which it will use to dig more tunnels from Egypt to rearm itself with more weapons from Iran and more tunnels into Israel for suicide killers to sneak through. As has happened with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Hamas' war machine will be rebuilt stronger than ever.

Unfortunately, the peace-at-any-price media in Israel is praising the half-way measures of the government as if something important is being achieved. As usual, peace is in sight, but somehow it never materializes.

Glick's assessment of what's needed:

In truth, given Hamas's commitment to Israel's destruction at all costs and its indifference to the lives of its Palestinian subjects, there is only one way for Israel to secure its territory from Hamas attack. It must destroy Hamas's ability to wage war. The only way Israel can achieve its aim is by conquering Gaza, overthrowing Hamas's regime and destroying its military forces.

But that will not happen.

Since the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has already stated that it will not launch such an attack, it is obvious that Hamas will end this war with its ability to attack Israel more or less intact.

All of this leads us to a very nasty conclusion. The Olmert-Livni-Barak government now leading Israel in its war against Hamas is no different from the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government that led Israel in the 2006 war against Hizbullah. Our leaders have learned nothing from their prior failure. Indeed they are reenacting it in Gaza today.

Therefore, Glick pleads, demands, prays that the government not send IDF ground troops into Gaza to fight a war that the government has already determined to lose.

It is painfully clear that the only hope for Israel's future, indeed, its very survival, hinges on the February 10th election when a realistic, hard-headed government led by Benjamin Netanyahu can be voted in.

Continue reading "ISRAEL'S GOVERNMENT SET TO HAND VICTORY TO HAMAS"

Posted by Republican on Friday, January 2, 2009 at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
Email This | DIGG This | del.icio.us | Facebook | Stumble It

By the way, Hamas, the terrorist organization in control of Gaza, although a Sunni spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now almost 100% financed by Shiite Iran. So Iran evidences its support for Hamas and its war against the "enemy" Israel in every way and every place possible.

Click on the link below or paste it in your browser to see one such effort. You may have to register; it's free.

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1964.htm?auth=78dc2bca3072d58f8f2868122a01c621

Israel's present government doesn't have the stomach to stay the course. Even though the Israel Defense Forces are doing an outstanding job against Hamas and its facilities, the Olmert/Livni/Barak lame duck government is already looking for a way to end the battle short of victory. Now they are calling for international monitors, which are worse than a joke.

Israel agreed to end the Hezbollah war before victory and accepted international monitors in South Lebanon. The monitors do nothing and Hezbollah has rebuilt its munitions capabilty to a multiple of what they were before it started the 2006 war.

So the Olmert/Livni/Barak government wants the same thing to happen in Gaza? Madness. Israel is in a position to defeat Hamas and the IDF is welll on the way to doing that. It should do whatever it takes to achieve victory over Hamas. Hamas has made it clear it will never cease its war against Israel, so it must be destroyed.

The AP reporter in Gaza is Muslim and his bias favoring the Palestinians appears in every story. One example from today's report:

The military said aircraft also bombed smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, part of an ongoing attempt to cut off Hamas' last lifeline to the world outside the embattled Palestinian territory.

No, the smuggling tunnels are for smuggling weapons. The Rafeh crossing between Gaza and Egypt is open and is manned by Egypt. Traffic is two-way with supplies and wounded going to Egyptian hospitals.

Watch for the name Ibrahim Barzak: he slants the news. Today's news from Barzak:

Israel kills top Hamas figure, escalating campaign
By IBRAHIM BARZAK and AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writers
January 1, 2009, 11:30 a.m., Eastern Time

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israel assassinated a Hamas strongman Thursday in its first assault on the top leadership of Gaza's rulers, escalating a crushing aerial offensive even as it declared it was ready to launch a ground invasion. The airstrike targeted the four-story apartment building that was home to 52-year-old Nizar Rayan, ranked among Hamas' top five decision-makers in Gaza. It also killed 12 other people including two of Rayan's four wives and four of his 12 children, Palestinian health officials said. The Muslim faith allows men to have up to four wives.

While intensifying its 6-day-old military offensive against Hamas in Gaza, Israel also appeared to be sounding out a possible diplomatic exit by demanding international monitors as a key term of any future truce.

Israel launched the offensive Saturday to crush militants who have been terrorizing southern Israel with rocket fire from Gaza.

The campaign began after more than a week of intense Palestinian rocket fire that followed the expiration of a six-month truce. Israeli warplanes have carried out some 500 sorties against Hamas targets, and helicopters have flown hundreds more combat missions, a senior Israeli military officer said Wednesday.

More than 400 Gazans have been killed and some 1,700 have been wounded, Gaza health officials said. The U.N. says the death toll includes more than 60 civilians, 34 of them children.

Three Israeli civilians and one soldier have also died in rocket attacks that have reached deeper into Israel than ever before, bringing one-eighth of the population within rocket range.

Israel has made clear that no one in Hamas is immune from attack and Thursday's strike drove that point home. It flattened Rayan's apartment building, sending a thick plume of smoke into the air and heavily damaged several neighboring buildings.

Hamas leaders went into hiding before Israel launched its operation, but Rayan was known for openly defying Israel.

A professor of Islamic law, Rayan was closely tied to Hamas' military wing and was respected in Gaza for donning combat fatigues and personally participating in clashes against Israeli forces. He sent one of his sons on an October 2001 suicide mission that killed two Israeli settlers in Gaza.

Throughout the day, huge blasts had rocked cities and towns across Gaza as Israeli warplanes went after Gaza's parliament building, militant field operatives, police and cars. The military said aircraft also bombed smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, part of an ongoing attempt to cut off Hamas' last lifeline to the world outside the embattled Palestinian territory.

So far, the campaign to crush rocket fire on southern Israel has been conducted largely from the air. But military spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich said preparations for a ground operation were complete.

"The infantry, the artillery and other forces are ready. They're around the Gaza Strip, waiting for any calls to go inside," Leibovich said.

Hamas threatened to take revenge against Israeli soldiers who were massed along the border with Gaza, waiting for a signal to invade.

"We are waiting for you to enter Gaza to kill you or make you into Schalits," it said, referring to Sgt. Gilad Schalit who was seized by Hamas-affiliated militants 2- 1/2 years ago and remains in captivity.

Israeli Cabinet ministers have been unswayed by international calls to end the violence, which is to include a whirlwind trip around the region next week by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Instead, they authorized the military to push ahead with its campaign against militants, who fired more than 30 rockets into Israel by late Thursday afternoon, according to the military. No injuries were reported, but an eight-story house in Ashdod, 23 miles from Gaza, was hit by a rocket that pierced through two floors.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a meeting of mayors of southern communities Thursday that Israel would not shy from using its vaunted military power.

"We have no interest in a long war. We do not desire a broad campaign. We want quiet," Olmert said. "We don't want to display our might, but we will employ it if necessary."

Ordinary Israelis are not eager to see the operation expand beyond the air-based campaign, a poll Thursday showed.

Earlier this week, Olmert rebuffed a French proposal for a two-day suspension of hostilities. But at the same time, he seemed to be looking for a diplomatic way out, telling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other world leaders that Israel wouldn't agree to a truce unless international monitors took responsibility for enforcing it, government officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.

International intervention helped Israel to accept a truce that ended its 2006 war with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, when the U.N. agreed to station peacekeepers to enforce the terms. This time, Israel isn't seeking a peacekeeping force, but a monitoring body that would judge compliance on both sides.

The idea was floated before the offensive but did not gain traction because of the complications created by the existence of rival Palestinian governments in the West Bank and Gaza, defense officials said.

Gaza has been under Hamas rule since the militant group overran it in June 2007; the West Bank has remained under the control of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been negotiating peace with Israel for more than a year but has no influence over Hamas. Bringing in monitors would require cooperation between the fierce rivals.

An Abbas confidant said the Palestinian president supports international involvement.

"We are asking for a cease-fire and an international presence to monitor Israel's commitment to it," Nabil Abu Rdeneh said.
----
Amy Teibel reported from Jerusalem.

The internal struggle in Israel between the appeasement left and its media echo chamber and the patriots on the right dedicated to a free and safe Israel is coming to a head on Election Day February 10th. The incumbent government was more than justified in sending the Israel Defense Forces into war agains Hamas in Gaza to protect Israeli citizens from mortar, rocket and missile attacks. Howver, if the government were really intent on eliminating Hamas as a force, that is, defeating it, it would have done so many months ago. Instead, it is just softening Hamas up so it can resume negotiations to give something away for some temporary period of calm.

In fact, the timing of the attack just six weeks before the election appears to be a cynical attempt by the appeasement government to convince the electorate it can run the country capably and successfully bargain with Hamas for its safety.

Polls show the public substantially opposed to government plans to give away the Golan, most if not all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and strongly in favor of a strong response to Hamas and Fatah aggression in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli public has no confidence that there will ever be peace with terrorists who get their own state in a "two-state solution." It is this public sentiment that the government is trying to overcome with the timing of its IDF attack on Hamas security centers. Through the diplomatic grapevine it appears that Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be delighted if the IDF were to convincingly defeat Iranian-backed Hamas. Would that the present Israeli Livni-Olmert-Barak government were committed to victory as well.

Caroline Glick movingly describes the human side of the struggle for Israel's soul that is fast approaching a decision point. Which will prevail, defeatism and appeasement or those who see a shining future for Israel built on strength and a strong defense?

Our World: Patriots and anti-patriots

Dec. 29, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Two years ago, the North was a war zone. Fields and forests, homes and hospitals were set ablaze by Hizbullah missiles. But on Sunday afternoon, as a tireless patriot was laid to rest in the Jezreel Valley, the ground was not burning with missile fire, it was exploding with fecundity. It filled the air with the aroma of its promise of spring harvests.

A multitude of mourners from all over the country crowded into Moshav Moledet's small cemetery to pay their final respects to 53-year-old Tzafrir Ronen, who died of a heart attack on Friday night. The man they mourned had dedicated his life to defending the country. In recent years, Tzafrir spent nearly every waking moment fighting for its soul. He sought to educate his fellow Israelis about the threats facing the country generally, and specifically about the existential danger to its viability presented by the Left's defeatist and post-Zionist narrative.

For this son of the Jezreel Valley, who grew up with the land, that narrative - which argues that Israel has neither the ability nor the right to defeat its enemies and to settle its land - was the single greatest threat to the long-term well-being of the country. Over the years, as Tzafrir's frustration at the direction the country was taking grew, his message became angrier and more urgent. As each of his successive warnings - about the fraudulent Oslo peace process, the withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the criminalization of Jewish building in Judea and Samaria, the refusal to enforce laws in the Israeli Arab sector, the expulsion of the Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria and the establishment of the Hamas terror state in Gaza - were ignored by successive governments, by the media and, inevitably, by voters, Tzafrir, like so many others in his position felt he was shouting into the wind.

MARGINALIZING AND silencing voices like Tzafrir's is one of the Israeli Left's greatest achievements. By consistently ignoring or demonizing voices like Tzafrir's - who have been correct about every major strategic issue facing the country - while steadfastly legitimizing and lionizing men and women like Amos Oz, Shulamit Aloni, Yossi Beilin and Haim Ramon - who not only have been wrong about every major issue in the past generation, but have also often taken leading roles in our enemies' propaganda campaigns - the Left has managed to remove our most vibrant thinkers and bravest builders and fighters from the national debate.

But the hundreds who crowded into the cemetery on Sunday are proof that the Left's success has been far from complete. The mourners at his funeral included Israelis from all walks of life -- religious, secular, farmers, city dwellers, Jews, non-Jews, new olim and sabras. The fact that people from such diverse backgrounds and traditions have found the way to work with one another shows that in spite of the demonization of the Right, people are still interested in defending and building the country. They are still are drawn to voices in the wilderness, like Tzafrir's, which say that we must fight, and win, and that we deserve to win and should feel privileged to fight for what is right.

On the face of it, Tzafrir, his colleagues and friends could feel vindicated by the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's decision to launch Operation Cast Lead against Hamas's regime in Gaza. Since Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni first began advocating the surrender of Gaza in late 2003, Tzafrir and his colleagues were at the forefront of the protest movement against the giveaway. Not only did they argue that the forcible expulsion and destruction of communities in Gaza was a moral outrage, they warned that a withdrawal would transform Gaza into the jihadist hub it has become.

AND OF course, they were right. Far from bringing peace and stability, as they warned the likes of Olmert and Livni, withdrawal from Gaza started the countdown to the war we are now fighting. And as they warned would happen, withdrawal from Gaza allowed Hamas to become an Iranian proxy and build the Iranian-supplied army that now assaults the South with missiles and rockets.

Moreover, the international outcry which has greeted the IDF operation, and the tepid US support it has enjoyed, shows clearly that by "ending the occupation" of Gaza, (which actually ended with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994), Israel weakened rather than strengthened its international supporters. Today Israel is being condemned more harshly than it was in 2004 when the IDF nearly destroyed Hamas in Gaza by decapitating its leadership.

On the face of it, Tzafrir and his colleagues could pat themselves on the backs and say that by waging Operation Cast Lead, Livni and Olmert and the architect of unilateral surrenders of land to terrorists himself - Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who handed South Lebanon to Hizbullah in 2000 - have finally seen the light. They understand that terrorists have to be defeated and that the country is better off controlling hostile territories than allowing its enemies to control them.

BUT THIS is not the case. Olmert, Livni and Barak have made clear that they haven't changed their defeatist and post-Zionist view of Israel's prospects at all. Their current operation in Gaza is not aimed at defeating Hamas. They have uttered no call for victory. To the contrary, as Olmert made clear in his speech on Saturday evening, the goal of the current campaign is simply to "change the situation" in the South. The question is what "change" they have in mind.

For her part, Livni has called for installing the Fatah terror group in Gaza instead of Hamas. But Fatah has been rejected not only by Gazans, but by the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria as well. Bringing Fatah into Gaza would do nothing to stabilize the situation. It would simply be an invitation for Fatah to conduct war against Israel and seek an accommodation with Hamas and Iran.

Barak has claimed that we can no more negotiate a settlement with Hamas than the US can negotiate a settlement with al-Qaida. And this is true in principle. Just as al-Qaida will never live at peace with America, so Hamas will never accept peaceful coexistence with Israel. But Barak has never been one to abide by principles.

He didn't adhere to that principle six months ago when he convinced Livni and Olmert to accept a cease-fire that enabled Hamas to build its army and its missile arsenal without fear of IDF attack. And Barak did not adhere to this principle when as late as last Tuesday he was calling for a renewal of the failed, one-sided cease-fire.

THE FACT of the matter is that the change that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government seeks today has more to do with the public's perception of its competence than with any interest in changing the situation in Gaza in any fundamental way. During the Second Lebanon War, the government showed that it could not be trusted with the defense of the country and with the proper deployment of IDF soldiers. And in the aftermath of that war, the government lost its moral right to send its forces into battle.

Now it uses its campaign in Gaza as a means of winning back its moral authority. But the problem is that despite its protestations of cunning competence, the government's aims today are the same as they were in 2006. As was the case with Hizbullah, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is signaling that it seeks a new negotiated settlement with Hamas. The hoped-for settlement, which has been telegraphed to the public through the pro-government media, will leave Hamas in power in Gaza. Although the government claims that the postwar Hamas will be more peaceful than the prewar Hamas, there is no reason to believe this will be the case.

Just as has been the case with Hizbullah since the government failed to destroy the terror army in 2006, so if Hamas remains in control of Gaza after the current war, no matter what its condition, it will be perceived as the winner.

HERE IT is important to make a sharp distinction between the IDF's clear military successes in Gaza and the political leadership's problematic management of this campaign. In the former case, it is inarguable that by destroying Hamas's military installations, killing its military commanders and incapacitating its weapons smuggling infrastructure, the IDF is weakening Hamas as a military organization. And this is a great and long-awaited achievement.

In contrast, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's refusal to reconsider its defeatist political philosophy makes it apparent that in the longer term, any strategic advantage enjoyed from the IDF's success will be marginal. Like Hizbullah, Hamas - which enjoys Iranian and Syrian state sponsorship and authentic popularity throughout the Islamic world - does not have to defeat Israel to be perceived as the victor. It merely needs to survive. That is the great difference between jihadist organizations and Western democracies. And by surviving, it will expand its international cachet.

JUST AS the Bush administration seeks to accommodate Hizbullah by selling advanced weapons to the Lebanese government it dominates, so too, in the aftermath of the current campaign, Hamas will be accepted by the West.

Tzafrir Ronen, and his colleagues whose strategic wisdom caused them to be banished from the public square, can always depend on hapless, defeatist governments like that of Olmert, Livni, and Barak to remember them in times of crisis. Like a Swiss clock, whenever leaders who preach nothing but defeat and retreat to their countrymen find themselves in a position of having to fight our enemies, they know they can count on men like Tzafrir to fight for them. And to date, men like Tzafrir, who served in the IDF's elite combat units, and whose sons and daughters continue to bear the greatest burdens in our defense, have answered their calls without hesitation.

Looking at the faces of the mourners on Sunday afternoon and listening to the many eulogies of Tzafrir that repeatedly praised his Zionism, there was no room for doubt that again today these people will answer the call. But how long will this state of affairs continue? How long can failed and strategically blind politicians continue to expect the men and women they demonize to save the country after they fail, and then hand it back to them to endanger again?

UPDATE: Associated Press filed this report at 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time.

Iran supplies munitions to Hamas in Gaza as well as to Hezbullah in southern Lebanon. Iranian missiles fired from Gaza can now reach 20 to 25 miles into Israel, putting major population centers such as Ashkelon (pop. 105,000) and Ashdod (205,000) in danger.

The Hamas thugs know they are firing at civilian centers. The missiles analyzed by the Israli bomb experts contained

metal balls designed to act as shrapnel, and the intended effects were visible at a home situated just a few meters from where one of the rockets hit, which looked as if it had been sprayed with a machine gun.

Large, gaping holes peppered the front of the house.

Rocket and missile fire from Gaza has been a constant even during the so-called six-month truce which Hamas ended. Since the truce ended ten days ago the projectiles fired have been in the hundreds. Israel had warned repeatedly that the firing must stop or they would attack all Hamas security centers. Hamas often fires the missiles and rockets from mobile platforms in the middle of civilian areas, knowing that when the Israelis retaliate some of their civiilans will be killed, thus providing Hamas with pictures of "victims" for the gullible media.

Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, has not renounced terrorism and has not ceased terrorist operations against Israel's citizens. An American Muslim so-called charity the Holy Land Foundation was recently convicted in Texas of funneling money to a know terrorist organization Hamas. In that case CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) and the North American Islamic Trust, the owner of the new mosque in Boston's Roxbury district, were named as unindicted co-conspirators.)

Hizbullah-type rockets fired

Dec. 28, 2008
Yaakov Lappin , THE JERUSALEM POST
Two Katyusha rockets that Hamas fired deep into Israel on Sunday are the same type launched by Hizbullah during the Second Lebanon War, an Israel Police source told The Jerusalem Post.

The two rockets were Hamas's deepest attacks into Israeli territory to date. The first Katyusha hit in Gan Yavne, 35 km. north of the Strip, and the second struck 20 minutes later in an undisclosed location near Ashdod, 40 km. from Gaza.

Police sappers who analyzed the projectiles said they carried six to seven kilograms of explosives each, and identified them as 122-millimeter PIPE type-81 Katyusha rockets, which have a range of 40 km.

The rockets contained metal balls designed to act as shrapnel, and the intended effects were visible at a home situated just a few meters from where one of the rockets hit, which looked as if it had been sprayed with a machine gun.

Large, gaping holes peppered the front of the house.

"This is our Hanukka miracle," said Avital, a mother of five who hid with her children and husband in a safe room in the house after hearing the air raid siren. Her family was one of the few in her community on Sunday morning - most of the moshav's families were away on an organized trip. Hours later, the families returned and examined the damaged home with stunned expressions.

Dozens of people lit a large hanukkia and sang holiday songs near the home, in a show of solidarity with the family.

"At 9:30 we heard the first siren. I was praying," Avital said. "My son woke his siblings up and we entered the safe room. Soon afterward, we heard a second siren."

Avital's husband, Eyal, was working in the garden outside their home. "I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't heeded that second siren," Eyal told the Post. "I would be dead."

"We entered the safe room [again] and 30 seconds later, we heard an enormous explosion and shrapnel flying," Avital said.

"My little girl cried, but on the whole we were calm," said her husband.

Police sappers quickly arrived and removed the rocket, which hit moist sand next to the home. The soil appeared to absorb much of the explosion.

"We're reciting psalms and thanking God," Avital said. "Property is replaceable, human lives are not," she added. "We are still in shock from what happened."

Avital expressed support for the current IDF operation in Gaza, saying, "This is a kind of war, and we are prepared to take this in order to win. In Sderot, they have this every day."

The Home Front Command added Yavne and Gadera to its list of communities under threat from Hamas rockets, telling residents there they had one minute to enter shelter in the event of an air raid siren.

However, unlike in Gaza-periphery communities, the Home Front Command said life in Gadera and Yavne could continue as usual.

Britain's Channel 4 TV network created some controversy by inviting Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver a message for Christmas Day. It contended that European viewers really didn't know Ahmadinejad and his positions and it was a public service to have him, in a sense, respond to Queen Elizabeth's Christmas message as head of the Church of England.

Caroline Glick, the most perceptive of all Middle East political analysts, believes Channel 4 did the right thing.

THE FACT of the matter is that Channel 4 is right. There is a great deal of ignorance in the West about what the likes of Ahmadinejad and his colleagues in Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas stand for. But this isn't their fault. They tell us every day that they seek the destruction of the Jews and the domination of the West in the name of Islam. And every day they take actions that they believe advance their goals.

The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance of their actions.

As far as the West's leaders are concerned, Iran and its allies are unimportant. They are not actors, but objects. As far as the West's leading foreign policy "experts" and decision-makers are concerned, the only true actors on the global stage are Western powers. They alone have the power to shape reality and the world. Oddly enough, this dominant political philosophy, which is based on denying the existence of non-Western actors on the world stage, is referred to as political "realism."

Glick rightly denounces this "realism" as fantasy, whether it involves dealing with Iran, Syria, the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government, Hamas or North Korea.

These foreign policy realists maintain that talking and appeasement are the way to bend these actors to the will of the West, even though years doing that have not produced the desired Western results. The age-old definition of a madman applies: Doing the same thing that failed over and over again expecting a different result.

As a pivotal election nears in Israel (on February 10th), the Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick is concerned that the leader of the Israeli conservative Likud Party is making the same mistakes John McCain made in the U.S. presidential election. Her core conviction:

As we saw in the U.S. presidential election and in the current Israeli Knesset campaign, by moving to the left, right-leaning candidates demoralize their base. And far from convincing swing voters to support them, they make swing voters feel comfortable supporting their opponents.

And this:

By incorrectly identifying the object of both Republican dissatisfaction and swing-voter concerns, McCain demoralized his base and convinced undecided voters it was okay to support Obama. Indeed, it was McCain's anti-Republican campaign more than Obama's change campaign that brought a majority of voters to Obama. As polling data indicates, Obama did not move many Republican voters to his side.

Read it all.

How Conservatives Lose Elections

By: Caroline B. Glick

Wednesday, December 24 2008

It would seem that in recent years conservative candidates in both Israel and the U.S. have forgotten how to win an election.

The momentous Israeli election set for February 10th seems likely to put the future of Israel in the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party.

The anti-Israel forces surrounding Obama have been licking their chops, looking forward to the opportunity to sell out Israel to the Muslims clamoring for its destruction. It was very clear before the U.S. presidential election that Obama bore little sympathy for Israel. Too many of the people he is appointing to foreign poicy positions and consulting with are well-known for their antipathy for Israel: National Security Advisor Jim Jones, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, loose cannon advisor Samantha Rice, Warren Christopher and Jim Baker, just to name a few. (Also, 20 years of Jew-hatred from Jeremiah Wright has had to have some effect.) And Obama has promised to "reboot" U.S. relations with the Muslim world and has stated his intention to give a major address in a Muslim state.

People who have been in close contact with Obama's foreign policy transition team have privately acknowledged that the widespread belief that Obama will move swiftly to put the screws on Israel is fully justified. According to one source who has spent a great deal of time with the transition team since last month's US elections, Obama's people are "scope-locked" on Israel.

Even left and center Israelis realize they need a strong leader to stand up for Israel in the face of the expected onslaught from the Obama Administration. The Muslim definition of "peace" is the calm resulting from a complete conquest of the people and land Muslims have targeted. Israel is the target of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Syria. If it is wiped out, there will be peace.

It could be that Obama's negative disposition towards Jews and Israel was planted during his early years in Indonesia attending mosque with his step-father. Though Obama has blocked access to much of his history, it has become known that a prominent Muslim hater of Israel actively worked to get him admitted to Harvard Law School (and may have helped finance him while there) and that he found compatibility with the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, whose Million Man March he helped organize and attended. At a going away party in Chicago, Obama toasted the honoree, a former spokeman for Yasser Arafat, for his many insights delivered over more than a few familly dinners in his Hyde Park neighborhood. Even his Jewish chief of staff Rham Emanuel was a principal aide to President Clinton in the last days of his administration as he sought to win a Nobel Peace Prize by forcing Israel to surrender almost all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Palestinian terrorists, leaving itself defenseless. Fortunately for the future of Israel, Arafat said "no" to Clinton and Emanuel. One could not get better evidence that Palestinians didn't want to share land with Israel, they wanted to eliminate it.

The Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick describes the battle that will erupt between the Obama Administration and the people of Israel, who want to continue to live in freedom. They know they will have to defend themselves and need a leader strong enought to withstand the pressure to capitulate that will be brought to bear by Obama and his circle of Israel haters.

Israel will be be mostly alone. Though strongly supported by American Evangelicals and many other Americans, its core constituency, American Jews, sold Israel out, voting 78% for Obama, fully knowing his presidency could spell the demise of Israel. Israel has defended itself through wars and terrrorism for more than 60 years and now needs to ready itself to fend off its greatest threat in history, this time coming from its long-time supporter the United States led by a President Obama. They will vote for Benjamin Netanyahu.

The stakes could not be higher for democracy in the Middle East and the fate of half the world's Jews, as Caroline Glick explains.

Column One: Netanyahu's grand coalition

Dec. 11, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
The "international community" is eagerly anticipating the incoming Obama administration's policy toward Israel. It is widely assumed that as soon as he comes into office, US President-elect Barack Obama will move quickly to place massive pressure on the next Israeli government to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the interests of advancing a "peace process" with the Palestinians and the Syrians.

By their adoption of multiculturalism -- that is, the belief that all cultures are equally good, except Western civilization, which is universally bad and responsible for the world's ills -- as their religion, Western elites (which include the elites in India) are putting millions in extreme danger.

The Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick finds the post-Mumbai reporting, analyses and governmental commentary unreal if not insane. The mulitculturists immediately began blaming the victims because of the grievances the jihadists had supposedly suffered at the hands of India (ignoring the history of Islamic murder of 80 million Hindus in their centuries of assault). Newspapers such as the New York Times were at pains not to identify that all the attackers were Muslims (instead they were called Pakistanis and one Indian!) and to overlook the fact that the small, out-of-the-way Jewish center had been deliberately targeted.

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists. Multiculturalism is a quasi-religion predicated on both moral relativism and a basic belief in the inherent avarice of the West - particularly of the US and Israel. Multiculturalists assert that Westerners - or, in the case of India, Hindus - are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners.

What the Mubai attack and its aftermath shows:

THE ATTACKS in Mumbai and the multiculturalists' rush to minimize their significance exposed two disturbing truths about the global jihad. First, they showed that the jihadists are quick studies. With each passing day, their capacity to attack grows larger. . . .

THE SECOND truth about the global jihad that the Mumbai attacks exposed is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them. And there is nothing effective that democratic governments can do to defend against the jihadists that multiculturalists will deem acceptable. This is the case because multiculturalists cannot accept the fact that the jihadists are waging war against the West without disavowing multiculturalism itself. And since they will not disavow what has become their religion, they will never be convinced that they must stop defending jihadists.

This frightening] "refusal to acknowledge the fact of the global jihad [is shared by] many of the governments principally targeted by jihadist regimes and terror armies. Take the incoming Obama administration for example.

Iran daily threatens to destroy the US, annihilate Israel, close the Straits of Hormuz, use nuclear weapons and proliferate nuclear weapons to other states. It controls Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It is the primary sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and, with Pakistan, the major sponsor of the insurgency in Afghanistan. It has cultivated strategic ties with US foes in the Western Hemisphere like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Yet one of the first foreign policy initiatives promised by the incoming Obama administration is to attempt to diplomatically engage Iran with the aim of striking a grand bargain with the mullahs. . . .

Unless something changes soon, the consequences of the jihadist-multicultural alliance will be suffered by millions and millions of people.

To read Glick's full analysis, click here.

Note: A Power Line reader notes just how assiduously the opinion-setters in the media are going through these multicultural hoops to avoid linking Islam with terror.

Update: Mark Steyn in his weekly column also points out the way in which the cowering media avoids linking "Islam" to "terrorism" in their reports, instead referring to "gunmen," "militants," "youths" and "teenage gunmen."

The ten Islamic terrorists sent from Pakistan to commit murder in Mumbai were specifically told to target the small Jewish center for Jews traveling through India. Five hostages were found tortured and murdered, so badly so that the pathologist said he had never seen such brutality. The 29-year old rabbi from New York and his six-month pregnant wife of 28 were murdered, their 2-year old son survived. What did they have to do with Kashmir, Iraq, Hindu violence? They were sought out and killed because they were Jews.

Orphan of New York Rabbi and Wife Killed in Mumbai Attacks Leaves India
Monday , December 01, 2008

The 2-year-old orphan found drenched in the blood of his parents at the besieged Jewish center in Mumbai left India on Monday on an Israeli Air Force jet, accompanied by the Indian woman who rescued him.

Moshe Holtzberg's parents, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, ran the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai — one of 10 targets besieged by gunman over the 60-hour rampage.

During the attack Thursday, Sandra Samuel, a nanny who worked there for years, had locked herself in a laundry room when she heard Rivkah screaming for her to help. Then the screaming stopped, and it was quiet, said Robert Katz, a New York-based fund-raiser for an Israeli orphanage founded by the boy's family.

Samuel cracked open the door of her hiding place and saw a deserted staircase. She ran up one flight and saw the rabbi and his wife, covered in blood and shot to death. The child was crying beside his parents' bodies, his pants drenched in blood.

She snatched the boy, bolted down the stairs and out of the building.

"She's been there with him throughout," Katz said.

Six civilians were killed in the center — all of them Jewish and four of them Israeli, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Andy David said. In all, more than 170 died in attacks on 10 targets across the Indian city.

Moshe was accompanied on the trip to Israel by his maternal grandparents, Yehudit and Shimon Rosenberg, who were reunited with their grandson when they arrived in Mumbai on Friday.

"It was pure raw emotion, tears of joy, tears of sorrow, incredible emotion, understandably out of control," said Katz.

Asked about Moshe's condition, he said: "I don't know that he can comprehend or that he will remember seeing his parents shot in cold blood."

Before the child's departure, dozens gathered at a synagogue in Mumbai for a memorial service for the Jews slain at the Chabad center. During the service, Moshe burst into tears and called out "Ima," Hebrew for "mother."

Weeping, Shimon Rosenberg delivered a eulogy for his daughter and son-in-law, reciting the Hebrew phrases from the Book of Job: "The Lord giveth. The Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Moshe's father was a dual American-Israeli citizen and his mother was Israeli. The couple lived in Israel and Brooklyn before they moved to Mumbai in 2003.

Samuel, an Indian resident, will live with Moshe in Israel "so at least he has someone he knows and recognizes and loves," said Katz.

Though Samuel has no passport or papers, Moshe's grand-uncle, Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman, helped arrange for her to get a visa to Israel. In a sad coincidence, Grossman is founder of the Migdal Ohr, which says it is Israel's largest facility for orphaned and disadvantaged children.

The Israeli jet that carried Moshe and Samuel also carried the remains of his parents and the others killed at the Chabad House, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.

Government officials planned a small ceremony upon the plane's arrival.

"There are going to be thousands of people at this funeral," said Katz, executive vice president of Migdal Ohr's fundraising arm in New York. "This couple wasn't living in the West Bank. They weren't settlers. They weren't occupying anyone's land. They were killed because they were Jews, simple and plain."

---------------------------------------------------------------------
From the Hadith, the sayings and actions of Mohammad:

.“The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: `Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’; but the tree Gharkad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985).

The Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick, who writes weekly for the Jerusalem Post, analyzes the shocking "indifference" of American Jews to the existential threat to Israel posed by not only Iran but by President-Elect Obama. Some 78% of American Jews voted for Obama despite his amply documented history of sympathy for the Palestinians and long time friendships with haters of Jews and Israel.

Ironically, there is more support for Israel among the Christian Evangelical community than among American Jews. The same can be said for national security conservaties, the overwhelming percentage of whom are Republicans, who understand that Israel and the United States are engaged in the same war being waged aganinst them by global Islamic supremacism. Israel is an easier target because of its small size and location, surrounded as it is by 300 million Arabs and within striking distance of Persian Iran's missiles. It will need help, help that is in America's interest to give.

American Jews, like most Democrats, like to believe supremacist Islam is not a threat to the U.S. and refuse to see any connection between Israel's circumstances and those of the United States. (Will the Islamic attacks in India cause a rethink?)

As Ms. Glick noted in an earlier column American Jews are more concerned about the preservation of easy abortion access than they are about the survival of Israel. So they vote for the pro-abortion party and the abortion extremist Obama.

Shortly after Obama becomes president Israel will hold a crucial election (February 10th), in which, hopefully, a strong, realistic leader committed to preserving Israel whole and free will be elected.

As Glick sees it:

Israel's next government will be called on to defend Israel against Iran and its Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese proxies, And it will be called to act at a time when the U.S. is led by an Obama administration pledged to appease these forces. Israel will have to rally all of its supporters in the U.S. to its side in order to stand up for its survival.

She asks: Will American Jews be missing?

American Jewish Indifference

By: Caroline B. Glick
Wednesday, November 26 2008

Apparently Israel is no longer a voting issue for most American Jews.

Seventy-eight percent of American Jewish voters cast their ballots for Senator Barack Obama on November 4. Obama, who boasted the most liberal voting record in the Senate, has never distinguished himself as a firm supporter of Israel. For instance, he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment that called on the State Department to place Iran's Revolutionary Guards on its list of international terrorist organizations.

Obama counts no deeply committed Zionists among his close associates. Men and women like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Ayers, Robert Malley and Rashid Khalidi were all people Obama turned to for advice, guidance and support in his early years in politics and as a U.S. senator considering a run for the White House.

His "pro-Israel" advisers -- mainly late pick-ups as the presidential race progressed -- included no ardent Zionists to oppose the voices of his anti-Israel advisors. Instead, Obama turned to Dennis Ross and Daniel Kurtzer to advise him on the Middle East. These men, like his designated White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, have views of Israel that are indistinguishable from the positions of Israel's post-Zionist Meretz party.

During the course of the campaign, Obama gained notoriety for his hard left promises to appease U.S. foes like Iran, largely at the expense of U.S. allies like Israel. It could have been presumed that his expressed willingness to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have raised red flags throughout the American Jewish community.

After all, given the failure of the now five-year-old European-U.S. attempt to appease Iran into ending its nuclear weapons program, it is apparent that a direct U.S. presidential dialogue with Ahmadinejad will be perceived by Iran as a green light to complete its nuclear weapons program.

But American Jewish voters were only too happy to believe Obama's unconvincing attenuations of his pledge to hold talks with Ahmadinejad without preconditions. American Jews were also eager to accept his unconvincing disavowals of his association with the likes of Wright, Power, Khalidi, Malley and Brzezinski.

Obama is now signaling his support for the so-called Saudi Peace Plan, first released in 2002, which calls for Israel to destroy itself in exchange for its Arab neighbors establishing "normal" relations with it. The Saudi plan calls for Israel to remove itself completely to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and accept millions of foreign-born, hostile Arabs as full citizens as part of the so-called right of return of the descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948.

The fact that the Saudi initiative limits the relations the Arabs would have with the rump bi-national state to "normal" rather than "peaceful" shows clearly that far from being a peace plan, it is a blueprint for Israel's destruction.

In light of all of this, it is apparent that by voting for Obama, four-fifths of American Jews voted for a candidate more openly hostile to the U.S.-Israel alliance than any other major-party presidential candidate in the past generation.

One might argue that American Jews were simply unaware of Obama's actual views on Israel. It is true, after all, that the U.S. media worked overtime throughout the campaign defending and hiding Obama's longstanding connections to haters of the U.S.

But despite the media effort to conceal or explain away difficult truths about Obama's character, concerned American Jewish voters had access to the facts. Any number of alternative media outlets provided a steady stream of information about Obama's associations with Israel bashers.

More than anything else, the willingness of American Jews to believe Obama is pro-Israel shows they simply didn't care that much. If they had cared, they would have scrutinized Obama's alarming connections at least as carefully as they attacked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for her anti-abortion views. They would have wondered what it means that Obama spent twenty years of his life in the pews of a deeply anti-Semitic church at least as much as they wondered about a Jews for Jesus preacher who once spoke at Palin's church.

There are several possible and complementary explanations for American Jewry's apparent indifference to Israel's fate.

High assimilation rates cause many American Jews to feel more attachment to non-Jewish causes than to Jewish causes. At the same time, the watering-down of Jewish teachings in various Jewish communities and the replacement of Jewish law and traditions with amorphous and trendy concepts of "social justice" and multiculturalism have engendered a basic ignorance of the exceptional significance and beauty of Judaism among a large portion of American Jews.

Then there is the leadership crisis affecting world Jewry. Weak and uninspiring Israeli leaders and weak and uninspiring American Jewish leaders have failed to assert and explain the connection between Israel's security and the wellbeing of the American Jewish community. Whereas until the 1980s it went without saying for most American Jews that their fortunes were directly tied to Israel's security, today the unity of Jewish fate has been lost on ever widening circles of American Jews.

To all of this must be added the unique self-perception of American Jewry. The American Jewish community is the only community in Jewish history that refused to view itself as an exile community. Even before the American Revolution, Jewish settlers in the New World viewed America as a permanent home.

As a consequence, on a philosophical level American Jews have always held Israel and Zionism at arm's length. They could support Israel as a refuge for persecuted Jews from other countries, but they couldn't support Israel as the permanent and irreplaceable homeland for all Jews without revoking the foundational belief of their American Jewish identity.

Today Israel is threatened with annihilation and the U.S. Jewish community is suffering from more blatant and organized anti-Semitic attacks than it has seen in the past fifty years. But during this year's presidential campaign, the basic truth that the security of all Jews is dependent on the security of Israel was no match for the full consequences of failed leadership, assimilation and the basic American Jewish desire to reject the singularity of Jewish destiny.

Israel's next government will be called on to defend Israel against Iran and its Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese proxies, And it will be called to act at a time when the U.S. is led by an Obama administration pledged to appease these forces. Israel will have to rally all of its supporters in the U.S. to its side in order to stand up for its survival.

In light of the American Jewish vote, it is an open question whether Israel will receive the help of its American Jewish brethren in its hour of need.

Caroline Glick is deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Her Jewish Press-exclusive column appears the last week of each month. Her new book, "The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad," is available at Amazon.com.

It's disturbing that Obama has so many aides who are anti-Israel. It's disturbing that Obama aides met with leaders of terrorist, Iran-supported Hamas during the campaign and told the Hamas leaders to keep quiet about the meeting so as not to cause upset before the election. It's disturbing that one of Obama's most virulently anti-Israel advisors went to Damascus to meet with Syrian leader Assad.

But there's even more.

This week, Middle East Newsline reported that President-elect Obama recently sent "senior foreign policy adviser" Malley to Egypt and Syria where he "relayed a pledge from Obama that the United States would seek to enhance relations with Cairo as well as reconcile with Damascus." According to an unnamed aide, "The tenor of the messages was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests."

Are we entering a new era of accommodation of jihad terrorists bent on Israel's — and the West's — destruction?

Diana West says, "I'm very afraid."

Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

By Diana West, Syndicated Columnist
November 17, 2008

How dumb does President-elect Barack Obama think we are?

Let me rephrase the question: Are we as dumb as Obama thinks?