Passover 2012

By Alan Caruba

If you want to understand what Israelis and most Diaspora Jews think about the threats made against Israel, ask any Holocaust survivor. They will tell you, “When somebody says they want to kill you, you should believe them.”

Below are two excerpts from a March 30 Jerusalem Post article by Martin Sherman:

Goals: Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence. Method: Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic… in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished…. Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine.

– Fatah Constitution

Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it…. Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…. The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight [kill] the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

– Hamas Charter

Fatah and Hamas both claim to represent the Palestinians, often killing one another’s members to prove it. Fatah is located on the West Bank while Hamas controls Gaza, a place where rockets are launched into Israel every day in order to incite it to retaliate. Then, of course, the world gets to condemn--who?--the Israelis!

In July 2010 J. D. Longstreet, in July 2010, a widely read commentator, wrote, “Going back to 1937 we learn that “a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."

Palestine, in fact, was a name imposed on Israel. As J.D. Longstreet pointed out, “In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name “Palaestina” to Judea. Judea was the southern portion of what we now call the West Bank. It was an attempt, by the Romans, to isolate Jewish identification from the land of Israel.”

The Empire of Rome is no more, but 3,700 years after its founding, Israel has risen from the ashes of its history and been reborn. For much of that history, Jews have lived with the scourge of anti-Semitism. It remains a core element of Islam. These days it takes the form of an effort to impose a non-existant “nation” called Palestine on its borders. The proponants of this refer to land won in in the 1967 war when Israel was attacked by its “neighbors.”

As Ted Belman, better known as the “Israpundit” wrote:

“The Fourth Geneva Convention (FGC) is a treaty between signatory states that are called High Contracting Parties (HCP). It regulates the obligations of one HCP who occupies the land of another HCP. It defines the terms “Occupying Power” and “Occupied State”. Thus this convention does not apply to the territories because they were not the land of any HCP. They have never been the land of an HCP. Prior to 1967, Jordon was in occupation of these territories, just as Israel is currently in occupation. Jordanian sovereignty over these lands was never recognized and ultimately Jordan relinquished any claims she claimed to have over these lands. The FGC was never applied when Jordan occupied the land and it shouldn’t be applied now that Israel does.”

Israelis and everyone else have been debating a “two state solution” to grant the murderous Palestinians some legitimacy. For my part, I think American Jews should stay out of this discussion. Intrinsically, almost genetically liberal, they experienced the Holocaust protected by the Atlantic Ocean so, while one assumes they support Israel’s existence, it is entirely up to the Israeli’s to make such decisions. Parenthetically, even the Israelis have been divided over the issue, but not over their survival.

How secure do the Israelis feel these days? Not very. Over the high holy days of Passover, beginning this year on Friday at sunset, the Israeli Defense Force will be on full alert, anticipating possible attacks. In the preemptive 1967 “Six Day War” the Israelis thwarted the intension of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt to attack them yet again. The Israelis captured the Golan Heights and the West Bank of the Jordan River—formerly known as Samaria and Judea, ancient Jewish provinces.

Worse yet, as former Ambassador John Bolton wrote on April 4th in the Jewish World Review, “The Obama administration appears to be conducting an organized campaign of public pressure to stop Israel from attacking Iran's well-developed nuclear-weapons program. So intense is this effort, and so determined is President Obama to succeed, that administration officials are now leaking highly sensitive information about Israel's intentions and capabilities into the news media.”

This is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to Iran--a self-declared enemy of America--as it pursues its quest for nuclear weapons.

On Friday evening Israelis and other Jews around the world will sit down to the Seder, the traditional meal that celebrates the liberation of the Jews from captivity in Egypt. They will do so knowing that much of the world shares a mindless, baseless hatred for them, but they share a collective memory of having survived far longer than those empires and tyrants that tried to destroy them and failed.

They are not called the “chosen people” for nothing.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Defending Jesus and Judaism

By Alan Caruba

As a book reviewer I receive countless requests to read books and, when I received one regarding “Kosher Jesus” by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, I was intrigued by the title. In addition to fathering nine children, the rabbi has written 27 books, is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the profile on his website is filled with achievements and encomiums

I was, quite frankly, floored by his book. As a longtime informal student of world religions, I found his comparisons between the biblical and historical Jesus impressive. As word of this book gets out, I suspect he will be contested by Christians because he meticulously reclaims the historical Jesus as quintessentially Jewish without a hint of the Christology that was applied to his life following his death at the hands of the Romans.

With some irony, it is another rabbi, Immanuel Schochet, who recently issued a letter banning anyone from reading “Kosher Jesus”, calling it heretical. Rabbi Boteach replied saying that “America is not Iran and rabbis in the American Jewish community are not the Revolutionary Guard.” Well said!

Debuting officially on February 1st, I suspect Rabbi Boteach is going to come in for a world of disputation from elements of both the Jewish and Christian communities. Their problem will be that Rabbi Boteach is a serious student of the Torah, the Talmud (rabbinical analysis and commentary on the Torah), and the New Testament.

His book is testament (no pun intended) to his central assertion that Jesus was a charismatic rabbi, a Jew preaching exclusively to Jews at a time when Israel was seeking to throw off the occupation of the greatest pagan power of his era, the Roman Empire. Indeed, their rebellion would culminate in the destruction of the Second Temple and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews in 70 CE.

Rabbi Boteach dissects the gospels, all written well after the death of Jesus, and the writings of Saul of Tarsus, saying in effect, that Christianity wrongly asserts that the Covenant and laws of Judaism had been replaced by a religion based entirely on faith in the belief that Jesus died for the sins of the world and accepting him as a personal savior removes one’s personal responsibility to live a holy life, a righteous life, and one that accepts the Torah as God’s word and law.

Among Jewish and Christian martyrs who died for their faith, Rabbi Boteach places Jesus as the best known Jew in the world. He condemns the New Testament for seeking accommodation with the Roman Empire, composed of idol-worshipping pagans, by turning the historical Jesus into an enemy of Judaism and thereby letting loose two thousand years of anti-Semitism.

The rabbi is not seeking to convert Christians to Judaism and notes several times that Judaism does not proselytize. “Theologically, Christians and Jews think differently about the nature of the world.” Instead, he seeks to restore Jesus “to his authentic Jewish roots” to “allow a new era of Jewish-Christian reapproachement to begin.” Indeed, in the wake of the Holocaust and the reestablishment of the nation of Israel, it is clear this change has been occurring.

In a time of resurgent Islamism, Rabbi Boteach rightly says that “Jews and Christians have so much in common, we must unite behind our democratic values, defend the embattled State of Israel, and participate in a unified front against those who have vowed to defeat us.”

Amen to that!

“Kosher Jesus” will not be an easy book for Christians to read because it rebuts much of what the New Testament has to say about Jesus. It eviscerates the claims of the gospel writers and of Paul, an apostle who never knew the Jesus he promoted as part-god, part-human, a distinctly pagan belief. The Romans routinely believed their emperors were gods. The Greek pantheon of gods had distinctly human characteristics and failings.

“Restoring his Jewish identity makes (Jesus) available to us as a flesh-and-blood hero who fought for what is right, in place of a celestial icon utterly detached from human experience”, says Rabbi Boteach.

The perfection attributed to Jesus, the rabbi notes, is comparable to that attributed to the Buddha and, in the Hindu faith, to Krishna. Humanity longs for such perfection, but Judaism believes that we achieve righteousness in our struggle to do the right thing, by our acts, not by faith alone. Jews know it is human to fail and that is why God offers redemption. Indeed, the word “Israel” means “he who wrestles with God.”

I recommend “Kosher Jesus” to anyone who wrestles with God, who wrestles with their human imperfections, and who strives to live a righteous life.

Editor’s note: One can read Caruba’s monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction at http://www.bookviews.com./

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Christianity's Triumph

By Alan Caruba

“By far the most important event in the entire rise of Christianity was the meeting in Jerusalem in around the year 50, when Paul was granted the authority to convert Gentiles without them also becoming observant Jews.”

So wrote Rodney Stark, the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. His most recent book is “The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion” ($27.99, HarperCollins).

For Christians in particular, I recommend it if only because so many have a tenuous grasp of Christianity’s real history, as opposed the versions that too often are casually accepted as truth.

The truth is that the rise of Christianity is one of the most extraordinary stories of the past two millennia. Stark not only has the knowledge of his vast subject, but he writes with such felicity that it is hard to put the 500-page book aside for both its revelations and its devotion to the facts.

Despite the fact we live in a society that has at most only 4% who self-describe themselves as atheists, the more active among them have the audacity to demand that Christmas be banished to the privacy of homes or the pews and pulpits of churches. They rebuke religion in general as the source of conflict and wars, but ignore the spiritual support and ethical lessons that Christianity provides along with its promise of salvation.

While Judaism was the bedrock of morality and faith that gave it birth, Christianity made it more accessible and significantly includes the Torah as part of its liturgy.

To ignore the rise of Christianity is to be ignorant of an essential element of Western history. Likewise, to ignore the threat of Islam whose beginning is usually dated around 622 CE and which exploded following Mohammad’s death in 632 CE is to ignore the greatest threat to civilization, past and present. Less a religion than a battle plan for world conquest, Islam preaches death to all “unbelievers.” Take heed!

Stark provides a summation to his book and, even so, I shall select only parts of it in the interest of brevity.

“The first generation of the Jesus Movement consisted of a tiny and fearful minority” of a religion, Judaism, that had already been around for a thousand years or more before the assertion was made that the messiah had come and was a crucified Galilean rabbi who mainly and briefly preached in that area of Israel.

“The mission to the Jews was quite successful: large numbers of Jews in the Diasporan communities outside of Palestine did convert to Christianity.” The Diaspora were the Jewish communities in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean nations, including Rome, living in places where pagan faiths were dominant.

“Christianity was not a religion based on the slaves and lowest classes of Romans, but was particularly attractive to the privileged.” Moreover, in its earliest years, women often played important roles. Contrary to popular belief, however, “Paganism was not quickly stamped out, but disappeared very slowly.” Paganism involved the worship of multiple gods as well as a belief in magic.

Despite impressive cathedrals, in medieval times church worship among Christians was largely ignored and, as often as not, the clergy were ill-informed about the faith and sometimes not even baptized.

Despite what is said of the Crusades, they were a campaign to reclaim the holy land from Muslims who had conquered it and they were led by men who knowingly bankrupted themselves and often died in this cause. Though Christianity had been widely observed in the East, the armies of Islam destroyed all but remnants, thus shifting its survival to Europe in the West.

“Science arose only in the West because efforts to formulate and discover laws of nature only made sense if one believed in a rational creator.” Even the misnamed “Dark Ages” were actually times of technological development. Likewise historians have determined that the Spanish Inquisition was “a quite temperate body that was responsible for very few deaths and saved a great many lives by opposing the witch hunts that swept through the rest of Europe.”

Perhaps the greatest surprise was the damage done by Constantine who, having made it the religion of his empire, gave rise to an indolent and hypocritical Church hierarchy initially composed of Roman aristocracy. It fostered a clergy who were ignorant of the faith and indifferent to its mission. Not until the Reformation was competition introduced, forcing the Church to return to piety, as various Protestant sects emerged, and energized Christianity in the process.

Stark concludes that “The claim that religion must soon disappear as the world becomes more modern is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of academic atheists. Religion is thriving, perhaps as never before. More than forty percent of the people on Earth today are Christians and their number is growing more rapidly than that of any other major faith.”

And that, as they say, is the good news.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Islam: A Battle Plan to Conquer the World

By Alan Caruba

As Christians around the world celebrate Good Friday and then Easter, it behooves them to understand what the Koran, the book held sacred as the word of God (Allah), says about Christianity, Judaism and all other faiths.

This is particularly pertinent in an era in which Islam, the religion of more than a billion people throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and in increasing numbers, Europe, has entered upon a period of terrorism and warfare to advance its domination of the peoples of the Earth. Suffice to say Islam is not about tolerance.

In 2001, Diane Drew wrote a comparison of Christian scriptures with the teachings of Muhammad as found in the Koran, as well as a collection of his sayings, the Hadith. Ms. Drew makes no claims to being anything other than a Christian. She knows her Old and New Testament, and the Koran. Her website provides a clarity that is a gift to Christians who should make the effort to understand a religion that divides humanity between Dar es Islam and Dar es Harb, the world of Islam and the world of War.

I have taken the liberty of quoting from her exegesis—interpretation—that reveals not just the deep differences between Christianity and Islam, but the threat it poses to Christians, Jews, and all other “infidels”.

“Islam rejects the concept of the Trinity. The Koran misrepresents the teaching of Christianity regarding the Godhead, claiming Christians believe in ‘three gods’—Father, Mother, and Son.” (Sura 5:116, 5:73-75;cp. – Koran 5:114)

“Islam regards Jesus a prophet just like Moses, Abraham, and Noah” whereas, at the heart of Christianity is the belief that “Jesus was more than a prophet. He is God.” (Matthew 17.5; Mark 1:1; Luke 1:35; Philippians 2.6; Hebrews 1:8; 1 John 4:15). “Islam rejects the divinity of Jesus Christ.” Other religions share this view, but they do not call for the death for those who refuse conversation or death for Muslims that convert to other faiths.

“Islam rejects the doctrine of original sin” citing Muhammad’s assertion that “Every human being is born in a state of a pure nature; but through the influence of his parents, he may become non-Muslim.”

Islam denies the crucifixion of Jesus. “They denied the truth and uttered a monstrous falsehood against Mary. They declared ‘We have put to death the Messiah Jesus the son of Mary the apostle of Allah. They did not crucify him, but they thought they did…They have no knowledge thereof but the pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain, but God took him up to Himself.” (Koran 4:154-158).

Of particular concern for Christians and Jews is the way that “Islam both allows and forbids murder and violence, depending on who is the recipient of the act,” says Dew, noting that the Koran calls on Muslims to “Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion (Islam) reigns supreme, (Koran 8:37)

“The Koran instructs not to make friendship with Jews and Christians (Koran 5:51), but to war against them: ‘When the Sacred Months are over, kill those who ascribe partners to God wheresoever ye find them; seize them, encompass them, and ambush them; then if they repent and observe prayer and pay the alms, let them go their way’.” (Koran 4:5)

More to the point, the Koran instructs Muslims to “…kill the disbelievers wherever we find them” (Koran 2:191) and “murder them and treat them harshly” (Koran 9:123), and “Strike off the heads of the disbelievers” (Koran 8:12, cp. 8:60).

What Ms. Dew’s scholarly comparison of the texts of the Old and New Testament with the Koran reveals is less a religion than a battle plan for the conquest of the world. It is not the religion of love that Christianity professes, but of hatred for the unbeliever (the infidel) who must either convert or be killed.

Islam’s holy scriptures are regarded by Muslims as the word of God (Allah) and Islam regards Muhammad’s life as a guide to the practice of Islam.

I can make no claim to any great knowledge of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, but like anyone else, I can read and compare their holy scriptures. You can, too.

Islam is a religion divided by two sects, Sunni and Shiite, the members of which do not hesitate to kill each other, attacking each other’s mosques, murdering those attending funerals.

No one, not Jew, nor Christian, nor Buddhist, nor Hindu, nor atheist, is safe from Islam.

Americans and others around the world learned that afresh on 9/11. As Christians gather for Good Friday and for Easter, they must absorb, understand, and gird themselves against this harsh and dangerous reality.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Peace of Israel

By Alan Caruba

There is one nation in the Middle East that is not roiling in anarchy, rioting, and internal warfare. It does so without oppressing its citizens. It encourages and protects the practice of all religions. That nation is Israel.

The other Middle Eastern and North African nations, all predominantly Islamic, have discovered that Islam, despite its grip on the minds and souls of Muslims, does not preclude the universal human desire for freedom, for hope of a better life.

It seems that no one lacks for a reason to hate Jews, but if one steps back from the shouting and the insane claims that Jews and Zionism are responsible for everything and control everything, Israel seems to have made multiculturalism actually work.

Israel, whose official languages are Hebrew and Arabic, is home to more than seven million people, 76% if whom are Jewish and 24% are mostly Muslim, but include Christians, Bahai, and probably every other faith known to God and man.

The latest news, according to a report in the March 4th Wall Street Journal, is that Israel is weighing a new plan for a provisional Palestinian state, an offer of temporary borders within which the Palestinians could establish a nation of their own.

The problem, of course, is that the Palestinians have rejected this obvious solution for more than sixty years and are, themselves, divided between the Palestinian Authority and the radical Hamas that only wants to utterly destroy Israel and its Jewish citizens.

The French have France, the Greeks have Greece, the Turks have Turkey and all manner of self-identifying groups have their own nations, but for many worldwide the Jews are not supposed to have their own nation or to live in the land in which their ancestors have lived for 3,500 years ago.

When Muhammad began to piece together Islam, naming himself as a new prophet, he instructed the first Muslims to face Jerusalem when they prayed. After Arabian tribes of Jews refused to convert, he slaughtered their men, sold their women and children into slavery, and ordered Muslims to face Mecca instead.

The Jews, however, have some good news to celebrate because on March 3rd there was a report of Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, “Jesus of Nazareth—Part II” in which he asserts “a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ.” Given Jesus’ paternity, faith, and apostles, all Jewish, that is surely welcome news.

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council document, “Nostra Aetate”, initially affirmed that Jesus’ death could not be blamed on the Jews as a whole at that time or today. Pope Benedict’s reaffirmation of that Catholic truth should be bigger news.

In a world in which more than a billion Muslims are eager to establish a universal caliphate, mostly by the use of terror on the Earth’s other five billion inhabitants, the Pope’s book is a candle of sanity in the darkness.

Pope Benedict, forced to join the Hitler Youth, witness to the Holocaust, has made improving the Church’s relations with Jews a priority of his pontificate. He has visited the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland and Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial where he prayed for the souls of those killed for the “crime” of being Jewish.

In contrast, Islam makes death the punishment for the “crime” of converting to any other faith. That is surely a measure of how thoroughly evil it is. In Pakistan a Christian government minister was murdered this week. In Germany, a Muslim convert killed U.S. service members, and every day mullahs tell Muslims that suicide/homicide killing is a holy act. In America, the current regime refuses to use words like “terrorism” or “jihad.”

It takes clarity and courage for non-Muslims to identify the threat to their faith and their lives. Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul, was instrumental in shining a light on a comparable threat, Communism, aiding in the downfall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. An earlier Pope, Pius XII, used his powers to resist the rise and reign of Nazism.

It is a good thing to be a Catholic. It is a good thing to be a Christian. It is a good thing to be a Hindu or a Buddhist. It is a good thing to be a Jew.

The same cannot be said of those who embrace terror, murder, and death as their path to paradise.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Hating Infidels 24/7

By Alan Caruba

The Holocaust of the last century is remembered for the mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population, an estimated six million who perished. In total, an estimated eleven to seventeen million Europeans, Jews and Christians, died in the Nazi concentration and death camps or were murdered outright in their homelands.

Records were lost or didn’t list religion, but the lesser known story of the Holocaust was the death of millions of Christians, three million of whom were Poles, predominantly Catholics, killed by the Nazis for being Poles. They have a special place in Jewish history because many Poles, risking immediate execution if caught, were among the “righteous Gentiles” who were rescuers of Jews.

I cite this because there is a new Holocaust abroad in the world and it is directed at Christians, particularly in the Middle East and throughout Africa, wherever Islam is the dominant religion. Nor is this is a new phenomenon; Christians were widely persecuted under the Ottomans (Turks) when their empire encompassed much of the Middle East.

It is clearly manifesting itself again and to far too little notice.

Let it be said, too, that Islam is an equal opportunity enemy of all other faiths as was seen in the 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, that included India’s tiny Bene Israel Jewish community. The conflict between Islam and India’s Hindus goes back centuries and resulted in the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state when India gained its independence.

Why has there been so little consistent coverage of the on-going attack on Christians? This is especially curious insofar as it is estimated that there are more than two billion Christians worldwide, about a third of the global population. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they are the victims, not the perpetrators of this horror.

Today thousands of Iraqi Christians are fleeing to the comparative safety of the Kurdish area and other countries. Indeed, many Americans are unaware that much of the U.S. Arab population is, in fact, Christian, not Muslim.

In mid-December, The Telegraph, a London daily, reported that “some 1,000 families, roughly 6,000 people, have arrived in the northern Kurdish areas from Baghdad, Mosul, and Nineveh” according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “Several thousand have crossed into Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.”

Egypt is home to some twelve million Copts, otherwise known as the Coptic Orthodox Church. They have been in Egypt since 54 A.D. when St. Mark, a North African Jew, one of seventy apostles of the early church brought Christianity to that ancient land. The invasion of Muslims in 643 A.D created the inevitable adversity. On New Year’s Eve, there was a terrorist attack on the Coptic Church in Alexandria that killed 21 parishioners.

Copts have been routinely targeted for all manner of abuses and, unsurprisingly, Egypt is the epicenter for anti-Semitism in the Middle East. Officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, it has been ruled by President Hosni Mubarack since 1981. By contrast, the U.S. has had six presidents since then.

Boutros Boutros-Ghalli, a Copt and former secretary-general of the U.N., is president of the National Council of Human Rights in Cairo. In a Jan 21 article in the Wall Street Journal he cited Egypt as “a model of religious tolerance in the region” and noted that “thousands of Muslims gathered around churches across the country (on Jan 6, the eve of the Coptic Christmas) to act as human shields, protecting their Christian neighbors during their Mass.”

The exodus of Christians from the Middle East and incidents in African nations where an estimated 40% of the population are Christians speaks to the persecution that has spread everywhere before and since the rise of the Islamic Revolution, sparked by events in Iran in 1979. This has since led to the creation of Hezbollah and Hamas, two Iranian proxies. Al Qaeda, created to expel the Russians from Afghanistan, has been the tip of the Islamist sword, perpetrating 9/11 and other attacks worldwide.

The persecution historically directed against Judaism is now commonplace in its more lethal manifestations against Christians. Since the Old Testament is part of the Christian liturgy, an attack on Jews is an attack on Christians and vice-versa.

The post-war rise of secularism in Europe, along with demographic shifts in which large numbers of Muslims have taken up residence in European nations is having its affect on both Christian and Jewish communities there.

In America, the denigration of Christianity it is less visible and is not by definition persecution. A majority Christian nation, America has been experiencing a rise in efforts to diminish the acknowledgement of Christianity’s role in the nation’s history and by efforts to limit Christian symbols, prayers, and even the celebration of Christmas in public institutions and places.

Slowly, American, European and Christians worldwide are beginning to realize that they are locked in a religious war. It is a war that Christianity must engage. The silence of church leaders is no longer an option. It is a war between the 7th century and the 21st century.

It is a misnomer to call it a “war on terror.” Terror is a tactic, but this is a war against Islam because Islam has been at war with all other faiths since its inception.

In New York City, when Muslims seek to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero, they are simply exalting the atrocity of 9/11. It begs the question why its confessed perpetrator, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has not, ten years later, been brought to trial.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

No Peace for the Prince of Peace...Or Anyone Else

By Alan Caruba

As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, an apostle of love, the other two monotheistic religions view from the sidelines.

While Christians have nothing to fear from the tiny minority of Diaspora Jews and those in Israel, a very real threat exists from Islam.

Islam holds Christianity and Judaism in contempt, but because these two faiths have, as any Muslim will tell you, “a book”, they are spared an even worse judgment of Hinduism or Buddhism which do not have a central text around which their faiths revolve.

In this decade, in March 2001, the world witnessed the destruction of two ancient Buddhist statues, 114 feet high, carved out of a mountain at Bamiyan, Afghanistan. It signaled a new stage in an ancient war. It took place six months before the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11.

The statue's destruction was ordered by the fanatical fundamentalist Taliban. How fanatic? They told the Shiite Muslim residents of Bamiyan that they could either convert to Sunni Islam or they would have to leave their homes. To those who fled, the destruction was an evil and repugnant act. The outcry worldwide was unanimous.

After 9/11, the American response was a military operation to drive the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is ancient, invaded many times over the centuries, and its people still cling to their tribal ways. As in all guerrilla wars, the land belongs to the people who live there and foreign occupations won’t change much.

For Christians and Jews, the struggle against Islam has defined the last nearly 1,400 of the two thousand years that are measured from the birth of Jesus and establishment of Christianity.

Had Islam not been driven from Spain and stopped outside Vienna, there would have been no Europe, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, and most surely no Western civilization. Christians and Jews would have been dhimmi, second class citizens in their own lands, forced to pay taxes and show their obedience to Muslim overlords.

Following 9/11, the invasion by America and forces from allied nations in Afghanistan and later Iraq are reflections of the Crusades sent to reclaim Jerusalem and Muslims know it. That it was occasioned by their own actions is immaterial to them. If Iran is ultimately attacked to destroy its nuclear facilities, it will claim it is the victim, not the aggressor.

The same need to destroy the Buddha statues in Bamiyan was the same need to build Al Aqsa, a huge mosque over the holiest place in Jerusalem for Jews, the Dome of the Rock sits atop the spot attributed to where God intervened to stay Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, Isaac. It was to signal an end to human sacrifice, to idolatry.

The same drive to conquest led to the proposal to build a mosque within sight of Ground Zero in New York, a triumphalism that ignores the feeling of Americans that the martyrdom of those who died there at the hands of Muslim terrorists imbues the site with a sacred memory. The contempt the mosque represents is palpable.

I think Americans sense that an ancient war, a religious war, continues in their time, but are loath to believe it even as we fight a hot war in Afghanistan or reduce our troop strength in Iraq. As a fighting force, we may not fully leave the Middle East for a very long time because, put simply, we dare not.

After clinging to a belief in tolerance, Europeans are stirring from their reluctance to confront Islam and beginning to draw lines between themselves and the many Muslims who moved there to find work, but who never assimilated as French, as German, as Dutch, as Swedish or as British. Europeans have slowly come to realize they have an enemy in their midst.

It is why travelers fear to board airlines at this time of year.

It is why British authorities just arrested jihadists planning attacks during the Christmas holiday.

It is why Christmas mass has been abandoned in Iraq this year because of countless assassinations of Christians. Many are now fleeing that nation.

It is why the U.S. Attorney General has warned that Americans “have to be prepared for bad news” if Muslim terrorists, domestic or foreign, are successful.

It is why Americans still wait to bring a U.S. major to trial for killing thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood.

It is why we detain jihadists in Guantanamo.

It is why Palestinians have spurned any overture of peace with the Israelis.

As Christians celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, they and others, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, know there will be no peace so long as Islam makes war on all other faiths, not in the name of God, the universal Creator, but of a former Meccan moon deity named Allah.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Editor's Note: To see and hear the message of Islam, view this short video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSftYIGH6-w&feature=player_embedded

Chavez Transforming Venezuela into a Nazi State

Venezuela is being transformed into a Nazi state and the first sure signs of it are the attacks on that nation's Jews.

Why can't we find any news of this in the U.S. mainstream press? Why is this not addressed at the highest level of our government?

Thoughts on the National Day of Prayer

By Alan Caruba

I feel sorry for atheists and this is particularly true on the National Day of Prayer, May 6th. Curiously, almost every atheist I know has read the Old and New Testaments from cover to cover, apparently looking for a loophole.

I suspect that the earliest ancestors of modern man were praying in their caves and on their savannas. Prayer comes as naturally to our lips as a kiss.

Thinking about prayer led me to conclude that what we call prayer today is yet another gift of the Jews, one that preceded the gift of a messiah to Christians, even if Jews prefer to wait for one.

"The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside—our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact—new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice—are the gifts of the Jews." -- Thomas Cahill, Irish Author.

Adin Steinsaltz, writing in “The Essential Talmud” notes that, “In the First Temple era, prayer was entirely spontaneous; when a man felt the need to petition his God or thank Him, he prayed in his own words.” However, the “formal regulation of prayer had already commenced; the first psalms had been composed and were sung by the Levites on special occasions in the Temple, so the general public was aware of the existence of certain official prayer ceremonies that took place at fixed times.”

“The need for a recognized version of prayers became pressing at the beginning of the Second Temple era. “ Having returned from a long exile in Babylonia, the Jews had only sparse knowledge of the Hebrew language and of basic concepts of Judaism. “When they wanted to pray, they lacked both language and content.” As a result a Great Assembly was held and out of that came the decision to compose a standard prayer. It was composed of eighteen benedictions.

Much of this official prayer has survived to this day and it should escape no one that the Jews and Judaism have survived as well. And not just survived, but returned in our lifetimes to rebuild Israel as the world’s only Jewish state. No one with any knowledge of history and a sense of a greater power at work in the affairs of men can ignore the significance of this.

Olive Schreiner, a South African novelist and social activist, wrote: "Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather, Abraham, introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of Heaven.”

“They brought the world the Ten Commandments, which many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters.”

Christian Americans, increasingly feeling the sting of rejection, ridicule, and efforts to isolate them, now have more reason than ever to identify with and understand the centuries of oppression Jews endured.

Jews will join in the National Day of Prayer and no doubt they will regard it as a good thing, having bequeathed a heritage of the earliest prayers and having institutionalized prayer to make it available to all, inside or outside of the temple.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Let's All Passover

By Alan Caruba

Passover 2010 will occur on Tuesday, March 30. It is an ancient Jewish holy day, the first to be mentioned in the Old Testament (Torah). It will last until April 5th and is most associated with the “Seder” or family dinner composed of a number of symbolic items and the reading of the Haggadah, a book of prayers that explains the symbolism of each. The Passover Seder will be celebrated on Monday evening prior to the date of the holy day as per Jewish tradition.

The significance of Passover (Pesach) is the retelling of the story of how God, working through Moses, freed the Jews from Egyptian slavery and set them on their journey to Israel.

Biblical scholars note that Moses had not only murdered an Egyptian guard, but was not a particularly articulate man, so God in effect did not select a saint, but rather a flawed individual. Moses had been spared death as an infant when his mother saved his life by giving him up to fate. Found by an Egyptian princess, he was raised in the house of the pharaoh.

It has been a very long journey for the Jews ever since, finding, building, and losing their homeland, and millennia later, after a deliberate effort to kill the Jews of Europe, reclaiming their homeland to establish a new Jewish state in 1948. They were not welcome.

It is a sad commentary on the rest of mankind that an irrational hatred for Jews has not abated and the lies about them have never ceased.

There has been some consternation of late regarding the signals coming out of the Obama White House concerning its policy toward Israel and such things are not to be lightly dismissed. Israel is a western outpost, albeit a very tiny one, in the Middle East that is hostile to both Jews and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists.

On Passover, things around the White House may be a tad quieter given that Obama will be missing the company of Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff; David Axelrod his senior advisor; Ronald Klain the chief of staff to the Vice President; Larry Summers his an economic advisor along with Paul Volcker; Tim Geithner his Secretary of the Treasury; and Peter Orszag his head of Budget.

For those who attribute everything to the Jews, it must surely be even more disquieting that, the evening prior to the rude treatment accorded Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee hosted a dinner attended by more than 7,000 of Israel’s friends in Washington, D.C.

To the everlasting confusion of my conservative friends and colleagues, the question of why American Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats and were big donors to the Obama campaign remains a mystery. Obama has given clear evidence of “leaning” toward Muslims in general and favoring the Palestinians in particular.

Raised a Muslim in Indonesia and a parishioner for many years at a Chicago church led by a preacher unsympathetic to America, yet surrounded by Jewish advisors, the phrase “blind faith” comes to mind for those Jews who continue to support Barack Obama.

On January 12th, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that “Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates, and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.”

“Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, (and) 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.”

It would be a great thing for the world if everyone, Jew, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and atheist, sat down to celebrate Passover because a “chosen” people has given so much to the world and received so little thanks in return. You will note I did not include Muslims. Their track record is slim, their animosity to all other faiths is well known, and their current behavior worldwide is drenched in blood.

I leave you with a bit of “Jewish Zen.”

Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment
will be the least of your problems.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

A Culture Clash with Islam

By Alan Caruba

The news out of Israel is that its air force has introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day. The Heron TP drones are said to be “primarily used for surveillance and carrying diverse payloads.” I love that last one, “diverse payloads.”

Once again the Israelis have demonstrated their ability and intent to remain on the defense in a Middle East that has resisted their existence since 1948 with wars and campaigns of terror.

Better than every other nation, the Israelis understand the culture of the Middle East and the nature of their enemies. They do not underestimate them. Six decades of seeking peace with the Palestinians, pawns of Iran and the other nations that refuse them citizenship, have taught that there is no way to negotiate peace with them. All past efforts such as the Oslo Accords, withdrawal from Gaza, et cetera, lay in tatters.

History records that the Jews lost their homeland in 70 AD, disbursed into a vast Diaspora, and were unable to reclaim it until 1948. Jews had declared Israel their homeland more than three thousand years ago. Jerusalem was and is their capitol, though holy to Christians and to Muslims.

The harsh reality is that you cannot negotiate with people who want to kill you. This is the lesson of the Holocaust that cost the lives of six million European Jews in the last century. It is a lesson that neither America, Europe, nor other nations around the world have absorbed.

Ever since the advent of Islam, the invention of Muhammad, in 622 A.D., this alleged religion has waged a war of conquest to impose a universal caliphate on the world.

Islam is not a religion of tolerance. It is not a religion of peace. It is opposed to all Western concepts of public and private conduct. It is incompatible with democracy. By all standards of modern thought and behavior it is barbaric.

America has been dealing out retribution to Muslims since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates. In the modern era, Arabs and Persians have been nursing grudges going back to the Crusades, to being driven out of Spain in 1502. Thereafter in the last century the Middle East was subject to the colonialist designs of England and France after World War One.

The discovery of vast reserves of oil transformed the history of the Middle East, not so much that the lives of its people improved, nor that its monarchs and despots were any less brutal, but that the West had an essential stake there based on its need for oil.

Since 9/11 the United States has spent billions waging war in Iraq because Hussein Saddam threatened Kuwait as well as sharing a long border with Saudi Arabia. It did so in the term of George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. It was always about oil, essential to the U.S. and the West, and there is no good reason to think otherwise.

The irony of this and the current conflict in Afghanistan where no oil exists is that America has now set up an Islamic republic in Iraq and is striving to maintain the semblance of one in Afghanistan. So far the score is one less despot in Iraq and a score of mujahadin calling themselves Taliban or al Qaeda. We are engaged in “nation building” but we are simply rebuilding Islamic nations.

Despite this, the Arabs and the Persians continue to see themselves as the “victims” of America and the West. They would have no oil industry were it not for the West. They would not have the illusion of representative governments were it not for the West. They would have had no hope of joining the march of history were it not for the West.

These “victims” killed nearly 3,000 Americans who were not at war with them on September 11, 2001. They had been waging war against America and American interests from World War Two and all the years since then. They raised the level of bloodletting in the 1980s, in the 1990s, and in the first decade of the new century.

They have killed “infidels” in London, in Bali, in Beirut, in Mumbai, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and they kill their fellow Muslims with abandon in Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East and Africa.

In 2007, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University said, “There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal—--all religions claim that—--but also exclusive; that they—the Christians in one case, the Muslims in the other—are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves—--like the Jews or the Hindus—--but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way.”

“This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase.”

If the escalating threat of an Iran with nuclear weapons worries you, remember, it is a new phase of a very long struggle. People who behead other people, who routinely take hostages, who send their children to die as suicide bombers, and who hold women in virtual bondage are not like us, despite the “diversity” rubbish taught in our schools and preached as political correct everywhere else.

Some cultures—-ours—-are manifestly superior to others. America is proof of that.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2010

Jew Hatred, Fanaticism, and True Believers

By Alan Caruba

On Friday, September 4, I wrote about new efforts by “gun-grabbers” trying to find ways around the Second Amendment. At one point in the commentary I referred to the way the Nazis banned gun ownership and how this contributed to the way German Jews and others were rounded up and systematically murdered in concentration and death camps.

That was quite enough to unhinge some who read the piece and proceeded to email me to dispute the six million figure of Jewish victims that included Jews from all the conquered nations in Europe; one that is commonly agreed upon and cited when mentioning the Holocaust.

Warning: Profane language to follow:

“Hey, Alan, YOU wouldn’t know WHAT it takes to serve this country, you ill-read, cocksucker, so go fuck yourself. Non servium (sic) faggots like you make me sick! I really do suspect you of being a Zionist kike piece of shit, what with your baseless, factless, kike propaganda. Matter of fact, I am going to make you a prime candidate for my wrath and let everyone know what a lying, resourceless cocksucker you are.”

He concluded saying, “if the holocaust actually happened the way the jews say it did, we would be CELEBRATING it instead of DENYING it!”

I will spare you the rest of this rant, but the writer had identified himself as “a marine” in a prior email and I had replied that he was a disgrace to the uniform. For the record, I served in the U.S. Army, so I know what it means to wear my nation’s uniform. If he was or is a Marine, he is a prime candidate for what we used to call a “Section 8” discharge for being a mental case.

It happened that I was re-reading Eric Hoffer’s classic book, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements” when the email arrived. If I were to construct a list of books that everyone should read, Hoffer’s would be among them. It is available in softcover from Harper & Row, Perennial Library these days. It was first published in 1951.

“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.”

The fervor that Barack Obama stirred in the 2008 campaign was a tad frightening to those of us familiar with a long line of tyrants from the last century and this one. It’s the reason a lot of parents reacted instinctively to the prospect of his addressing the nation’s school children, complete with Department of Education teacher instructions on how to use this event. This wasn’t Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush issuing greetings at the start of the school year. This reeked of indoctrination.

Hoffer wrote, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he though the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: ‘No…We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.’”

Jews have served this purpose for both Christianity and Islam. They became a convenient and tangible representation of “the enemy” and they retain this status to this day, despite the horror of the Holocaust.

Hoffer wrote at a time when Communism was the predominant mass movement of the age, but he also made frequent mention of Islam in ways that one would call prescient today. “The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.”

The bile and hatred spewed by the writer of the email confirms what Hoffer wrote more than a half-century ago. “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause, but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”

Why do I suspect my email correspondent is rushing to his computer this very moment to let loose yet another senseless diatribe about the Jews?

Editor’s Note: A visit to the website of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (http://www.jpfo.org) includes a chart documenting what happens when populations are denied the right to own weapons. Historically, they died in the millions.

Saturday's Random Thoughts

By Alan Caruba

Nine Trillion Dollars. That is what the Obama administration now says will be the national budget deficit in ten years. Our current GDP, give or take a trillion, is fourteen trillion a year so you do the math. In seven months President Obama and his Democrat minions in Congress have plunged the nation into debt not seen since the waging of World War II.

Medicare. A million Baby Boomers a year will sign up to receive their Medicare “entitlements” because the members of the population bulge that followed the end of World War II is now officially old. In 1965 Medicare was signed into law as part of the older Social Security system. The enrollment age was based on the fact that 65 was about when people started dying off back then. Now the average life expectancy is 78. And that’s just the average! Little wonder anyone with any sense doesn’t want a rationed Obamacare that will, indeed, let old people suffer in lieu of caring for them. And these are people who paid into the system.

Obesity. I still cannot understand why government at any level should have anything to say about what you eat, how much you eat, and whether you are fat. A lot of fat people had fat parents and fat grandparents. Much of the condition is genetic. The rest involves lots of very affordable and tasty so-called “junk food.” Your weight is your responsibility.

Obama. I am likely to be saying this for years to come. Barack Obama is stupid. He’s stupid in the way a spineless salesman will make up things in order to make a sale. I don’t mean stupid in that he couldn’t get through college and law school. A lot of people do that and they remain essentially stupid because they cling to some very bad ideas and bad attitudes that warp their lives and, if granted power, wreak havoc on hapless victims. That’s us. He’s stupid because he thinks spending billions and billions of our dollars has no consequences or, at the very least, he won’t have to suffer them.

Mainstream Media. The Society of Professional Journalists was founded in 1909 and on August 27 it will hold a convention celebrating its centennial, but I’m betting relatively few of its 10,000 members will attend. This is because a large and growing portion of them will be out of work and unable to afford to rub shoulders with their brethren. I have been a member for some 25 years, having joined back when I was a reporter. They will have many panel discussions during the convention, but I suspect none of them will address the way journalism has shed its credibility like a cloak of invisibility. The news media, print and electronic, now stands naked for its appalling abdication of truth-telling. The biggest lie remains “global warming” which it continues to tell every time it can. The other is the notion that Barack Obama is even minimally fit to be President.

Offshore Oil Drilling. Toward the end of his eight years in office, former President Bush lifted the ban on drilling for oil and natural gas on the nation’s continental shelf. Some 85% of the area beyond our shores remain, for all intents and purposes, banned now that the Obama people hold power, nor is there any prospect of drilling in ANWR, a God-forsaken Alaskan wilderness perched atop billions of barrels of the stuff. Meanwhile, Cuba has signed deals with Russian and China to drill off its shore which just happens, at one point, to be ninety miles from Florida. This week we learned that the Obama administration has authorized lending $2 billion for offshore drilling. To Brazil! This is obscene.

The Greens. It’s summertime and, in the summertime, it gets hot. On August 25th, the National Wildlife Federation along with the Physicians for Social Responsibility will host a conference call for the media warning about heat. “Perspectives will be provided regarding the latest scientific research on heat waves and global warming,” says their announcement, claiming that heat will have “disproportionate impacts on people of color.” They are going to try to turn heat into a racial issue. The truth is that the Earth is now firmly into a cooling cycle that began in 1998 and it is likely to last another ten to twenty years. Heat waves occur naturally and global warming is a hoax. We may well see summers in the years to come that are unnaturally brief or non-existent because it will get cold and stay cold.

The Jews. What will the Jew-haters do when the world runs out of Jews? The results of a recent study, a survey of U.S. religious identification, have been released and it turns out that the number of American Jews has decreased from 5.5 million in 1990 to between 5.2 to 5.4 million today. Jews are inter-marrying out of the faith or just not showing up in the synagogues as they become increasingly secular. It’s not a big drop, but let’s put it in perspective. There are 12.5 million people living in Los Angeles and some 19 million living in New York. In Israel, there are some 7 million people, but a million of their citizens are Muslims. In terms of population, you could put all of America’s Jews in a small city in Iowa. If the Israelis don’t bomb the hell out of Iran’s nuclear facilities, there will be another Holocaust and then even the Jew-haters will miss them because they will have no one to blame for everything.

Hostage Taking -- Part Two

By Alan Caruba

According to the August 6 DEBKAfile, the three American hostages that Iran is now holding are all likely to be declared “Israeli spies” and put on trial as such. That’s a hanging offense.

Frankly, my first thought was this: How STUPID do you have to be (a) American, (b) Jewish, and (c) hiking along an unidentified area close to the border or possibly in Iran?

My second thought was: Since all three have writing credits with legitimate publications, might they, like the two Chinese-American girls, also be considered “journalists”? And, if so, is there a private plane warming up to send former President Clinton to do some official or unofficial groveling on behalf of the greatest superpower in the world?

That’s not going to happen.

The three hostages are Shane Bauer from California who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and New American Media, all liberal to the core. I suspect young Bauer will return, if he is not hung, a conservative.

His partner, Sarah Short, also from California, writes for Matador, whatever that is, and Joshua Steel Petel, from Oregon, a former yeshiva student, writes for Jewish Week. Oy! (See correction below)

They range in age from 27 to 30. How does one reach the age of 30 and not know that Iran has been hostile to the United States and Israel since its Islamist Revolution in 1979?

How does one conclude that a hike along Iran’s border does not constitute a distinct threat? Petel’s family had its origins in Iraq and had emigrated to the United States. Did no one tell him that leaving Iraq was a very good idea for a Jew and that returning there was a very bad one?

Obama, like all liberals, has never met a dictator he did not like, but Mamoud Ahmadinejad may prove a problem. For one thing, he’s miffed that Obama did not send him a note of congratulations after his “election” victory. You know, the one that brought Iranians out in the streets of Tehran to protest it?

Mamoud must have fell to his knees, faced Mecca, and thanked Allah for providing him three of the most stupid Americans, all Jews, as a means to jerk Obama around. But does he know that Obama doesn’t like Israelis and/or Jews? Just ask his pastor of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

In the same way the taking of U.S. diplomats in 1979 put an end to President Jimmy Carter’s first and last term in office, these three dimwits may just provide the same exit for Obama unless he can somehow extricate them.

The question—which will be shrouded in darkness—will be the asking price. It’s the kind of answer that distorts foreign policy because Obama will be thinking about himself, not the hostages.

A former Prime Minister of England, Harold MacMillan, was once asked what he feared most and his answer was, “Events, old chap, events.”

The three hostages are now an event.

UPDATE & CORRECTION: Aug 12

One of the detainees is identified as Joshua Fattal, not Petel. Notable among the early reports on the three detainees is the misspelling of the name Bauer as "Bower" as well. Their ages are initially reported as between 27 and 36.

Israel in the Crosshairs

By Alan Caruba

There are few nations on Earth other than Israel with a greater claim to exist as a homeland for a specific people. Along with China and India, Israel reaches back thousands of years, predating both Christianity and Islam.

For some 3,500 years, Jews have lived in Israel. In good times and bad, Jews have always identified themselves with Israel even when, as a Diaspora, they spread for their survival to many other nations. The re-establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948 led to two immediate events. Within eleven minutes after the announcement, President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation. Within hours, the Arab League declared war.

With only six hundred thousand Jewish residents at the time, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq joined together to destroy Israel. They failed. They tried again in 1967. They failed. They tried in 1973, attacking on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. They failed.

Following the 1967 war, eight Arab nations gathered in Khartoum and issued their “Three No’s.” No peace with Israel. No recognition of Israel. No negotiations with Israel. In time, Egypt would sign a peace treaty; though not abandon its animus. Jordan would make its accommodations. The others remained hostile.

To understand Israel’s situation, it is necessary to understand that (1) Jews had lived there since the days of Moses, (2) the early Zionist movement members that moved there purchased land on which to farm and live, (3) the land which was captured in successive wars had always been part of Israel, and (4) both the United Kingdom and the U.S., for their own reasons, have not been honest brokers, particularly so far as their demand that Israel negotiate with people who never had any intention to negotiate peace.

The Israelis did not steal their own land, nor are they illegitimate “occupiers” of their land regained as the result of having been attacked. What they gained in wars against them historically was always theirs and had been denied to them by the Arab nations that claimed them.

Israel has never known a day of true peace in just over sixty years of its modern existence. In his latest book, “The Late Great State of Israel”, Aaron Klein spells out why Israel is closer to destruction than anyone might imagine except for its implacable enemies.

I want Israel to exist and to thrive, but I find it unsurprising that a totally Muslim region, the Middle East and throughout the Maghreb, the Islamic northern nations of Africa, would see Israel through their xenophobic lens as in invasion by the West; by European Jews who began settling there in the early 1900s, by the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, by the host of Russian Jews granted permission to leave the former Soviet Union, and even the many Jews who felt compelled to flee Arab nations following Israel’s founding.

While Jews had always lived in Israel, the Arabs who lived there prior to its establishment identified themselves loosely as citizens of pre-World War One Syria. The land had known many conquerors, dating back to the Romans who renamed the nation Palestine in a vain effort to remove its Jewish history. Muslims fought many wars, including the Crusades, to extend and maintain their control over Jerusalem Their utter scorn and contempt for Israel and the Jews is found in the Koran and infuses Islam as does its core belief that all religions must bow down to Allah.

Christians know the fall of the Jewish state to present-day Muslim invaders would mark the end of any opportunity to visit the birthplace and ministry of Jesus and would be taken as a sign that Christianity was vulnerable wherever it is practiced. In many towns and cities of Israel where Christians had lived for centuries, they have been forced to flee before the hostility of Muslim “neighbors.”

Herein is the warning that Klein issues in his book. Those who would destroy Israel are not just external, they include (1) the Arab nations surrounding it and the so-called Palestinian “refugees” laying claim to it, (2) the United Nations that has supported the Palestinians since 1950 along with its endless resolutions singling out Israel as racists, and (3) even the largely unreported aid that the U.S. has given to Fatah, the alleged Palestinian Authority with whom Israel is supposed to negotiate peace.

Other than (4) Iran that has openly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”, the latest threat is (5) the Obama administration that is demanding a two-state accommodation with the Palestinians that they have always refused to accept because their goal is Israel’s destruction.

To put the U.S. demands that Israel stop building settlements in the disputed West Bank and other areas, consider that, according to the World Almanac, Israel is comprised of 7,849 square miles. By comparison, New Jersey is 8,721 square miles. Imagine, then, if the federal government insisted that New Jersey cede Delaware all the area from Atlantic City to the Delaware border?

Internally, from its founding, Israel has been divided between its socialist and largely secular Jews, the men and women who took up Zionism as an answer to the bigotry Jews faced in Europe pre-dating the Holocaust, and the religious Jewish community who see Israel is the fulfillment of the Torah prophesy and as the center of world Judaism. This latter group has always felt the scorn of Israel’s secular Jewish government.

Without delving into the complexities of Israeli politics, Klein makes a strong case that Israelis in recent times have been ill-served by the secular Likud and former PM Ariel Sharon’s Kadima parties. The withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the 2006 short war led by Hezbollah shattered the image of Israel’s impregnable and powerful military capabilities.

Israel’s forced removal from Gaza of its longtime Jewish residents, its abandonment to the Palestinians, and the recent military action against Hamas simply demonstrates that the Palestinians have figured out a way to demoralize Israelis with constant rocket attacks. Giving Gaza to the Palestinians merely created a new staging area for attacks.

Klein documents how several U.S. administrations have provided weapons and financial aid (through the United Nations) to Fatah. Fatah and now Hamas have used both to kill Israelis and yet successive Israeli government has participated in this lethal charade.

For now I will take some small comfort that Benjamin Netanyahu is once again Israel’s Prime Minister, but unless Israel is prepared to assert its right to its ancient and re-conquered land;

Unless it destroys the Iranian nuclear facilities for an America too weak or unwilling to address this necessity;

Unless it refuses the wrongful demands to turn over Jerusalem, its holiest sites, and other Jewish cities to their control;

Israel’s future may disappear in a nuclear cloud. There has been one Holocaust in my lifetime. I do not want to witness another.

At stake is more than Israel’s right to exist. The failure to support and protect Israel puts the entire basis and future of Western civilization at risk.

Hanukah, Miracles, and Victories

By Alan Caruba

Hanukah began at sundown Sunday evening. A friend of mine points out that all Jewish holidays begin at sundown because the ancient Jews didn’t have watches or clocks; just the sun that rose reliably in the morning and set in the evening. That’s how time was told for centuries.

By watching the heavens, the ancients got pretty good at developing calendars to know when each of the seasons began.

Hanukah celebrates the reclaiming of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem from the Assyrians and its reconsecration in the second century BCE. Oil was burned for light and, as the story goes, there was only enough for one night, but it lasted for eight. As miracles go, it’s not an especially big one.

The real miracle, of course, is that a people—the Jews—can trace their history back 3,500 years and that their religion was re-written as the basis of two of the world’s major religions. At the heart of Christianity is the story of a Jew named Jesus, his disciples, and the virtual creation of the faith by a Jew named Saul—later called Paul—who enjoyed Roman citizenship. He was educated in both cultures. The longing for a messiah had been around a long time by then.

Historians attribute the stubborn refusal of Jews to yield to Roman rule as a key factor for the downfall of the empire. Some nasty work by barbarians finished it off. In 70 AD, the Romans disbursed the Jews and many found sanctuary in Babylon. The mutual history of the Persians and the Jews goes back to those times and was always one of tolerance and friendship until Islam was introduced there. Some Jews still reside in Iran today though I would not want to trade places with them or the Baha’is, another persecuted minority. If you want to visit a beautiful Baha’i temple, you will find one in Haifa , Israel.

At the heart of Islam is a profound hatred of Jews and, not surprisingly, of Christians. Mohammad warned Muslims not to take either as friends saying, “they are only friends to each other.” Well, Christians do not have a very good record of friendship as far as Jews are concerned. In one of the most Christian of nations, Germany, at the midpoint of the last century, they tried to round up every Jew in Europe and kill them.

If you want a miracle, I suggest the reestablishment of Israel sixty years ago after centuries of life in the Diaspora was as great a miracle as one can imagine in modern times. Jesus was one Jew sacrificed for his faith in his day (the story that the Sanhedrin gave him over to the Romans must be taken with some skepticism. Jews would not have turned their co-religionist over to pagans.) But then, the New Testament was written decades after the actual events.

Today’s Israel came into being only after the sacrifice of six million innocent souls. Surely the religious scholars can find a miracle in that if they look hard enough.

And, of course, the Muslims were and are the most opposed. If the Jews could reconstitute Israel after two thousand years, what does that say of an Islam that wasn’t invented until a thousand years after Judaism and seven hundred years after the advent of Christianity?

It was during the Maccabean Revolt that the temple in Jerusalem was recaptured. The Jews were not a passive people. They knew how to put up a good fight. So Hanukah, a relatively minor celebration in Judaism, is really about a military victory as much as the story of the oil lasting longer than expected. That’s not unusual in history which is mostly about battles won and lost.

A new war has been declared against Christians and Jews by a fundamentalist element of Islam. It’s not a war that should be taken casually. It well may be, however, that the war will transform or reform Islam in significant ways. That, too, would be a miracle.

A Dangerous Place for Jews

By Alan Caruba

The world has always been a dangerous place in which to be a Jew.

The climax of modern era anti-Semitism came during my lifetime in the last century with the Nazi Holocaust, the wholesale effort to kill every Jew, man, woman and child in Europe, with the “Final Solution.” It promises to repeat itself if Iran is permitted to obtain nuclear weapons.

Despite having been the creation of the United Nations, largely in response to the Holocaust, the last sixty years of Israel’s existence have been marked by wars and constant terrorism that continues to this day. The UN has become the global locus of anti-Semitism and it will be on display at its next Durbin conference on racism. The last one was an orgy of anti-Semitism and similar ugliness.

In August, UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights group, expressed alarm over the declaration adopted by the African regional meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, which will shape the UN world conference to be held in April 2009. Among its elements was an attack on guarantees of free speech, the positioning of Islam above all other religions, and an attack on Israel and only Israel.

The growing Muslim populations in Great Britain and throughout Europe have led to a rise of anti-Semitism, but it was always latent among the non-Muslim native populations.

The embrace of Israel by America’s evangelical faith communities and the general good will toward American Jews remains intact. The problem for Jews, however, is that bad economic times never fail to raise charges that Jews are the cause.

For American Jews, this isn’t just historic paranoia. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard University professor of law and prolific author, has just had his latest book published; “The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace.” It is a disquieting sign when a former U.S. President is an active anti-Semite, though Carter is not held in high repute, nor should be.

Dershowitz also takes note of two famed commentators, Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Both have demonstrated their antipathy to the Jewish State, but the greater threat that he cites is clearly a resurgent Islam and, most particularly, Iran’s ranting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whose threats against Israel are an offense to all humanity.

As America comes to grip with a serious financial crisis, its Jewish community will be watching carefully for an indication of the libel that it is somehow responsible for the problems that ensue. Two generations have come of age since the dark days of World War II.

Perhaps no where else on Earth have Jews found a true paradise than in America. It has a long history of being congenial to Jews, though that history has been a long period of overt anti-Semitism that existed up to the revelations of the horrors of Holocaust.

No one can predict the future, but Jews have survived in many cases by being able to anticipate a reversal of fortune and the lucky ones fled to whatever sanctuary they could find.

For Israel, a nation of 5.3 million Jews and 1.3 million Muslim and Arab Christians, the threat at this point is deemed “existential”, but it grows more real with every passing day. Its fate hangs in the balance. For Jews around the world, memories of the Holocaust are never far from their thoughts.

On October 9, Yom Kippur, Jews around the world will pray for repentance and forgiveness of sins, but these are a people more sinned against than sinning.

Official Apologies as Empty Gestures

By Alan Caruba

The front page of the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest circulation daily, had a story on January 8, “Jewish Cemetery Vandalized.” In its New Jersey news section inside the paper, among the “Action in Trenton” roundup, was a short item, “Apology for slavery sails through legislature.”

I wonder if there will be an apology for the damage done to the graves of dead Jews? Not likely. Perhaps it was just some teenage vandals or perhaps it was some kind of Islamofascist message being sent?

Germany has made significant efforts to apologize for the Holocaust, but anyone who lives there will tell you that considerable anti-Semitism exists among the generations born well after that event. In many Middle East nations, the Holocaust—the deliberate murder of some six million Jews—continues to be denied.

In the United Nations, there’s a resolution condemning acts of hatred against religions, but the only one specifically named is Islam. Condemning Islam as the source of the atrocities that have been occurring in recent decades is apparently a bad thing.

These thoughts, however, are not about anti-Semitism. They are about the efficacy of apologies. This is particularly true of apologies for events in which the current residents of New Jersey or any other State did not participate. In short, why bother? What good does it do?

Slavery had been part of America’s history almost from the beginning. It was widespread throughout the world and was (and is) a mark of man’s inhumanity to man. The Founding Fathers found the issue of slavery so intractable they concluded that it should be ignored while fashioning the world’s oldest living Constitution.

A century later the northern and southern states fought a war in which slavery was the moral cause, but other issues such as state’s rights and tensions over economic issues were the driving forces. In 1800, there were 12,422 slaves in New Jersey. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments clarified issues of citizenship and rights of former slaves after the Civil War. This was then followed by a hundred years of segregation and the denial of those rights until, in the 1960s, these wrongs were laid to rest.

All of which is to say that history often is a very long and frequently painful journey to achieve a moral and legal resolution to societal wrongs. Today, a mulatto with an Islamic name is running for President. The U.S. Secretary of State is Black. Her predecessor was Black. There’s a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the struggle for racial equality. Some people would call that progress.

Some people, however, have to demand apologies. Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Maryland have issued apologies. There are similar bills pending in Massachusetts, New York, and Arkansas.

I cited the desecration of the Jewish cemetery to remind us that hate never really goes away. There will always be people who hate Jews. There will always be people who hate Blacks. Official apologies for past wrong will not change this. They are vacant gestures and, in my opinion, an affront to those who did not participate in, nor condone, past wrongs.

Saving Jerusalem

By Alan Caruba

Word is rapidly making the rounds of the blogosphere of an emergency coalition that has been formed to save Jerusalem from being divided up between the Israelis and the Palestinians as yet another effort to secure peace with the Muslims.

On the face of it, this is such an idiotic act that one can hardly imagine why the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would even consider it, let alone actually put it on the same table of utterly failed “negotiations” with various Palestinian groups whose sole objective is the destruction of Israel.

Was nothing learned from the Oslo Agreements that were almost immediately followed by Yasser Arafat’s “Intifada” and, after his death, by the civil war between his Fatah organization and Hamas?

The U.S. State Department policy toward Israel these days seems to be peace at any cost and, of course, that never was and never will be way to achieve peace. Pressuring Israel, an invaluable ally in the region, to give up a piece of Jerusalem is as wrong-headed as all the previous efforts to negotiate "a roadmap to peace" when few of Israel's neighbors are even interested in that prospect.

As other nations fall all over themselves to "make nice" with Muslims, history records that the current Middle Eastern mess that began with the debacle of the post-WWI Versailles Treaty and subsequent League of Nations, has demonstrated an Arab resistance to Western powers, then and now. In fairness, all England and France did was divide up the region for their own imperial, colonial, and economic interests.

Then- U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was a naive onlooker whose chief aim seemed to be the conversion of Arabs to Christianity and his pie-in-the-sky notion of a world governmental body that would end the prospect of future wars. That idea got blown to hell in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. (It reasserted itself in the form of the United Nations and it is still the "great powers", now called the Security Council, that makes all the big decisions about war and peace.)

In sum, Jerusalem is Judaism’s holiest city, home of the Temple Mount, its most revered site. To get an idea of how much the Muslims respect other religions, after conquering the city in 636 AD, they built the al Aqsa mosque right on top of the Temple Mount and to this day Jews are not allowed to visit any closer than the famed Wailing Wall. Before and after the Six Day War, the governance of the mosque was ceded to Jordan, a nation that has maintained good relations with Israel.

The Palestinians have systematically desecrated other sites in Israel that have also been sacred to Christians and their once flourishing Christian populations have been driven out. Even the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem, is now largely a Muslim city. The notion of transferring some of Jerusalem’s holy sites to Arab sovereignty will do no more to secure peace than any of Israel's previous efforts.

One need only see the failure of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza strip to understand the truth of this. The Gaza today is a place from where Israel is rocketed daily.

Among the organizations that are part of the emergency coalition are the National Council of Young Israel, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, and the list is growing daily.

It is entirely likely that many American Jews, even assuming they favor an independent Israel, do not understand the significance of the proposal to relinquish part of Jerusalem. Indeed, American evangelical Christians may grasp it better than their Jewish friends.

The future of Jerusalem has no place on any negotiation table with any Palestinian/Muslim entity.

Jerusalem existed for more than two thousand years before the existence of Islam. Nowhere in the Koran is the city even mentioned by name. The only reason it plays any role in the Muslim world is that it was conquered in past ages and fought over during the Crusades before lapsing into a backwater of the Ottoman Empire.

Muslims claim that Mohammed journied there one night on his favorite horse, flying through the air, ascending to heaven to spend time in the company of Jewish prophets and Jesus. On this fanciful story rests the Muslim claim to Jerusalem!!!!

What can you do? You can suggest saving Jerusalem as a sermon topic in your church or synagogue.

If you belong to a group with a Christian or Jewish affiliation, you can get the group to issue a statement opposing any transfer of control over any part of the holy city.

You can email the office of Israel’s prime minister to let him know you oppose the proposal.

If you have a blog, you can post this commentary or one of your own to let more people know about this.

If Jerusalem goes to Muslim/Arab control, the whole of Israel will follow in time and with it the dreams and hopes of countless generations of Jews and Christians.

One of the websites on which you can garner more information is:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/