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

Taking Hostages: Tehran in 1979 - Cairo in 2012

American diplomats, 1979, in Tehran, Iran

By Alan Caruba

As someone who vividly recalls the Iranian “students” who took our diplomats hostage in 1979 and the 444 days it took to get them back, the repeat of this by the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, putting 19 pro-democracy, non-government organization (NGO) Americans on trial on trumped up charges has an ugly repetitive feel to it.

The contempt the Iranian revolutionaries, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, had for America and, I might add, international law and practice that goes back centuries, is everything you need to know about dealing with militant Islamists, whether they are in Iran, Egypt, or anywhere else on the face of the Earth.

Just as then-President Jimmy Carter dawdled while looking for a diplomatic response, this same scenario is now being played out by Barack Obama and it won’t work now just as it did not work then. Carter authorized a failed military operation that, by most accounts, was poorly organized and executed.

What is needed now is a Navy SEAL unit or larger force to go in, rescue our American hostages, and extract them from Cairo. We need direct military action, just as we need direct military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile operations, and the barracks of the Revolutionary Guards.

Just as Jimmy Carter was seen as weak, so too is Barack Obama and, for America and the world, that is very bad news. I don’t care if the Iranian leadership and other militant Islamists don’t like America. I want them to fear us.

Apparently they didn’t get the message when the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the home city to its military college. While bin Laden was right up the street and around the corner, we are supposed to believe that no one in Pakistan’s military or intelligence structure had the slightest idea. He was living in a large walled compound. Short of buying his own groceries, you’d think someone might have noticed. And, of course, now they are angry at us for killing the man behind the murder of some 3,000 of our citizens, including an attack on the Pentagon!

When the Iranians went into the streets in June 2009 protesting the bogus election of Mamoud Ahmadinejad, Obama’s response was that the U.S. “shouldn’t meddle” in Iran’s affairs. A plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to America in a Washington, D.C. restaurant was discovered and some people might call that “meddling” in our affairs.

This hostage-taking needs boots-on-the-ground action now. The only upside to this event is that the longer it goes on, the same disenchantment that resulted in the defeat of Jimmy Carter will be Obama’s fate in the November election.

The fact that Obama has imposed the largest debt/credit crisis that the nation has ever incurred, unemployment levels that rival the Great Depression, a housing market that is still in the tank, and is busy hollowing out the nation’s military capabilities at the worst possible time seems to gone unnoticed by the forty percent or more of Americans that think he’s doing a swell job.

Our present problem is that Obama does not like America any better than our enemies do. He does not like our Constitution, recently blaming the Founding Fathers for the limitations they wisely imposed to avoid a government grown too large and a president with powers beyond those granted.

This nation is in peril from the same gross stupidity that gripped it prior to World War Two until Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941. The war in Europe had been going on since 1939 and the Japanese had invaded China in 1937.

We are in a new, dangerous era with the chaotic situations in the Maghreb of northern Africa where U.S. assistance, via NATO, was provided to overthrow Gaddafi and Obama's swift rejection of Egypt’s Mubarack led to his downfall. There are uprisings in Syria and Yemen. It is the result of massive resentment against dictatorial regimes, but the real problem will be how these revolutions turn out.

That is something we cannot control, but we must do what we can to protect American citizens abroad to protect our national interest and to project real national power.

The Middle East is tribal. With the exception of Israel the “nations” we must deal with are merely armies with a national flag, not modern democratic governments responsive to their citizens. That is why Iraq threatens to break apart. It is why the majority Syrians want to end the minority Alawite tribe’s control. It is why Palestinians are not welcome anywhere.

The President’s top intelligence advisor recently told a Senate committee that sanctions are not working against Iran, but the President wants to pretend they are. The U.S. and the rest of the world are waiting for the Israelis to do to Iran what we and our allies should be doing to end its nuclear threat.

Likewise, if we wait around while the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo makes us look like a bunch of punks it will just get worse for us in Egypt and the Middle East just as it did in 1979.

In Egypt we need to get in, break some furniture, shoot some bad guys, get our people out, and then shut off the billion-plus dollar aid spigot.

No more American tourists, no more American aid, and no more Mr. Nice Guy.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Not If, But When

By Alan Caruba

The Jewish sage, Hillel, said, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” This has been interpreted to mean that it is an obligation to stand against evil, even if other’s courage dissert them.

One doesn’t have to be a historian, a military strategist, a biblical scholar or any other credentialed expert to know that the question of the destruction of Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities is not one of if, but when?

On previous occasions, the Israelis, sensing a direct threat, attacked nuclear facilities, first in Iraq on June 7, 1981 when it destroyed the Osiris reactor under construction and again on September 6, 2007 when it destroyed an undeclared nuclear facility in the Deir ez-Zor region in Syria. It’s worth noting that neither action sparked a war.

Earlier, in 1967, the Israelis, acting on intelligence that Egypt was about to attack, launched its air force and ground troops in what came to be known as the Six Day War. In time, Egypt came to the peace table, signing a historic agreement with Israel.

The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq now essentially clears the air lanes directly into Iran for an attack, shortening the route that otherwise might have been over the air space of Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Israel with Saudi permission could use both routes because the Saudis are just as much opposed to a nuclear Iran. As it is, the U.S. Air Force has recently re-assigned key units formerly based in Iraq to Kuwait. The Middle East chess board is being reset.

The Israelis have already undertaken long range practice runs flyiing their bombers as far as Gibraltar and back.

The chatteratti are all saying that Israel faces an “existential” threat. They’re wrong. Israel faces an actual threat of destruction and Iran’s Supreme Leader has never made a secret of his intentions.

A February 1st Wall Street Journal editorial noted that James Clapper, President Obama’s top intelligence advisor, recently told a Senate committee that Iran’s leadership, including Ali Khamenei “have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States as a response to real or perceived actions that threat the regime.”

A story last year that made brief headlines involved a disrupted plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a Washington, D.C. restaurant. The editorial noted that the press “went out of its way to cast doubt on the story. The Iranians can’t be that crazy?” Well, yes they are. What else should one expect from a regime that shouts death to America and Israel every day?

The editorial concluded, asking “If the regime is prepared to stage terrorist strikes in America when they don’t have a bomb, what will they be capable of when they do have one?”

Another suggestion that a mission is likely to occur was the unusual statement by the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, that he thought Israel would attack Iran. As the former Director of the CIA, he would be in a good position to know about such things, but it unusual for a DOD Secretary to make such predictions.

The political calculus for President Obama in an election year depends on whether the U.S. supports Israel (a popular option) or lays back and does little (as in Libya), thus losing any chance of securing the powerful evangelical Christian vote; not to mention Jewish support.

Israel will do what the United States, the Saudis, and everyone else in the region will not. It will save itself and the world from the crazed Iranian ayatollahs. The “collateral damage” will be people in Iran who will die as a result and the sad irony will be that the majority of Iranians want an end to the regime as much as the rest of the world.

Thus far, in addition to sanctions against Iran, several of its top nuclear scientists having been assassinated, and an explosion at an Iranian missile launch site killed some of its top military personnel. It also and temporarily eliminated its potential for launching a missile with a six thousand mile range, capable of hitting—you guessed it—the United States.

Presumably, members of Israel’s Mossad and the United States’ CIA should take a bow for these actions, but they can’t for obvious reasons.

After re-inviting members of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to visit recently, the Iranians refused to permit them to visit their nuclear facilities, many of which are buried in bunkers for protection. Meanwhile, the U.S. has let it be known it is working on even bigger “bunker buster” bombs.

Israel is doing its best to signal the Iranian regime that they need to change three decades of an incessant drive to acquire nuclear arms. On February 2nd, its Vice Premier and Strategic Affairs Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called a nuclear Iran “a nightmare to the free world”, noting that “the West has the ability to strike, but as long as Iran isn’t convinced that there’s a determination to follow through with it, they’ll continue with their manipulations.”

Throughout modern history, even in the face of an imminent threat, the West as vacillated, cut deals with Hitler’s Nazi regime, tried to alter North Korea’s nuclear program with bribes, and dismissed other threats.

Reading the U.S.’s true intent must be a fulltime job in some office of the Israeli government. For three years, the message has been less than encouraging and even hostile. A U.S. President who declared Israel should return to its 1967 borders is out of touch with reality. One can only hope this is all an elaborate hoax to put Iran off its guard. If so, it hasn’t worked.

As Ya’alon has said, “The Iranian threat is not a case of Iran versus Israel. Israel has never declared war on Iran, but the Khomeinistic regime has declared total war on the State of Israel’s very existence.”

The Israelis will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. It has no choice. It should be joined by the forces of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and others who would benefit, but as in 1967, 1981, and 2007, Israel will be left to do what others lack the courage to do.

© 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

Yom Kippur 2011 for Jews and the World

By Alan Caruba

Ever since the Yom Kippur War in 1973 in which Egypt and Syria chose the holiest day in the Jewish calendar to attack Israel, I have always felt a frisson of concern as the day approached. For Jews it begins the evening of Friday, October 7, and continues through Saturday for a full day of prayer that ends with the ancient, inspiring expression of hope, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Even in Jerusalem, they say “Next year in Jerusalem” because it confirms the faith’s enduring bond with the land of Israel that survived not one, but two destructions of their Temples there, exiles, and, in the last century, the Holocaust followed by a return to and rebirth of Israel as a Jewish state.

The Yom Kippur war was the fourth Arab-Israeli war, fought from October 6 to 25, and ending with decisive defeats of Egypt and Syria. What has always struck me most forcefully was the decision by the Arabs—Muslims—to choose Yom Kippur as the day of the sneak attack. It demonstrated Islam’s utter and complete contempt for Judaism, but it demonstrates its contempt for Christianity as well, for both Judaism and Christianity are theologically bonded together.

Among the early Jews to immigrate to Israel, other than the founders who came initially from Europe in response to its anti-Semitism, were an estimated 600,000 Jews who fled Middle Eastern nations under the threat of death when Israel came into being in 1948. Many had lived in those nations from biblical times. Now it is the turn of Christian Arabs to flee, if not to Israel, to anywhere else in a world, but it is the world itself that is threatened by the rise of fundamental and fanatical Islam.

Writing for Jihad Watch.com in late September, Raymond Ibrahim noted a recent report “that unprecedented numbers of Copts, Egypt’s indigenous Christian population, are emigrating from their homeland in response to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.” The attacks on Copts and their churches have been mounting. It is anticipated that within a decade a third of Egypt’s Copt population will leave.

The threats against the Copts are mirrored throughout the Middle East as Christians immigrate from Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon in search of refuge. Examples include the October 31, 2010 massacre of the Iraqi congregation of Our Lady of Deliverance Church and other attacks; the ratio of Christians to Muslims in Iraq has gone from 8% to 2% in the past decade.

We wait for word on the fate of an Iranian pastor, Youcef Nadarkhani, who has refused to renounce Christianity. On September 27, an Iranian court upheld a death penalty for the Islamic crime of “apostasy.” Leaving Islam has always been punishable by death. If the sentence is carried out, he will be the first Christian known to have been executed for his faith in 21 years in Iran. He will not be the last so long as the fanatical ayatollahs hold Iran in its grip.

The irony is that the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, (580-529 BC) freed the Jews from slavery, telling them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. Until the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a large Jewish community resided in Iran.

Meanwhile, on September 25th, a suicide bomber killed himself and wounded at least 22 other people in an attack on an Indonesian church. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest Muslim-majority nation. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “To its credit, authorities there have cracked down on hard-line Islamic groups linked to bombings on Western hotels and tourist spots—such as the attacks on Bali nightclubs in 2002 that killed 202 people, many of them foreign visitors.”

On Yom Kippur, Jews devote themselves to their Day of Atonement and pray for a year of life, health, and happiness. They do not pray for wealth. They do not pray for power. Tradition requires that they pay all debts and seek forgiveness if they believe they may have wronged someone.

Now, worldwide, Christians must, like the Jews, give renewed consideration to the threat of Islam. Drawn from desert tribal values of war and pillage, Islam has spread widely since the seventh century. It has carried its seventh century mentality forward and once again challenges the West, using terror as its chosen weapon.

Support for the Muslim Brotherhood, often misrepresented in the media as “moderate”, is suicidal. Support for Hamas is support for terrorism. And, so far, support for the Palestinians has been futile.

It is a war without quarter, whether it is an Iranian pastor, the ancient community of Egyptian Christians, or the entire nation of Israel. Islam has no tolerance for other faiths.

All must understand that we are in a war. The Israelis do. Americans must.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The World is Having a Nervous Breakdown

By Alan Caruba

If one has been in the habit of reading history then the events of the past and of the present inform each other. For this reason, it occurred to me that the world is once again having a nervous breakdown.

It’s not just about money, though surely the nations of Europe along with the U.S. have spent themselves into the poorhouse in ways that defy the imagination. If it weren’t so serious, it would be comical to see the desperation that has led our Federal Reserve to print money backed by nothing and to watch the central bankers of Europe move gobs of euros around between the new mother church, Germany, and the banks of Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Italy so that they can pay their bills.

They’re all broke. We have individual States that have a higher GDP than Greece that have balanced their budgets. Those are usually the States whose constitutions require they balance their budget. The rest are run by governors torn between taking the federal largess intended to deprive them of more sovereignty and hoping that the next natural disaster hits the State above or below them instead.

Few arrive at a nervous breakdown overnight. It takes time and a variety of bad decisions or bad luck or both. After blaming George W. Bush and Republicans for his problems, Obama has taken to blaming bad luck. Does he even know that people have concluded the economy is now officially and completely his fault?

When he proposed Obamacare, a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. to tell them not to do it. He should have listened to them. Now we call them the Tea Party.

Obama cannot explain away having increased government spending by 50% between 2008 and 2010 while calling for higher taxes on everyone at the same time there are an estimated 14 million Americans out of work, stopped looking for work, or can’t get a job because Obamacare has so screwed up the near future that businesses are reluctant to hire anyone.

The 2008 financial crisis was 100% a government creation dating back to the establishment of Fannie Mae in 1938 to purchase mortgages from banks in order to encourage more lending, more home building, more home ownership. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ignored the timeless role of greed in banking.

Rule Number One: Almost everything the government touches, it ruins in some fashion. At the very least, it increases its cost of operation.

Rule Number Two: The government’s primary function is the defense of the nation against attack. As Ronald Reagan said, “Nobody ever started a war with us because we were too strong.”

Rule Number Three: Government exists due to its ability to tax and spend other people’s money. Spending always needs to be restrained.

Rule Number Four. Government will always produce more laws and regulations than are needed. It should be restrained. (See the U.S. Constitution).

Globally, we are just emerging from a bout of total insanity called “global warming.” This was a theory that said that something that represented 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere was trapping all the heat and would kill us unless massively reduced. That “something” is carbon dioxide, a gas on which—along with oxygen—all life depends. It is plant food; the less carbon dioxide, the less vegetation. Herbivores eat vegetation and carnivores eat herbivores. Humans, being omnivores, eat both.

The other craziness afflicting the planet is “radical” Islam. The truth is that it has been just plain old Islam for about 1400 years. There are a billion Muslims, most located in the Middle East, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Wherever they are, their non-Muslim neighbors cordially hate them because Islam teaches that all other religions are false and that those who believe them—infidels—can be killed for not being Muslims. The strange part of this is, depending on whether you’re a Shiite or Sunni, it is perfectly okay to kill other Muslims, too. Christianity went through this during the Reformation, 1517 to 1648.

When I was a child, the world went crazy and held a great big war. It involved Germany, Japan, and Italy as the “Axis” powers and just about everyone else did their best to destroy their military in every way possible. The Axis was defeated first and then, still holding out, the Empire of Japan had not one, but two, atomic bombs dropped on them before they quit.

World War Two was the direct result of Europe’s World War One. The surrender terms were so awful the Germans embraced a lunatic called Hitler and the Italians fell in love with Mussolini.

The Soviet Union came out of World War One when the Germans permitted Vladimir Lenin, a Communist, into Russia. He started a revolution and the Russians swapped a czar for a new dictator. Stalin took over from Lenin, but because communism has never worked anywhere it was tried, the Soviet Union eventually fell apart in 1991. Now a republic, the new dictator is named Vladimir Putin.

As the French say, “Plus les choses changent, ils plus elles restent les memes.” The more things change, they more they stay the same.

The world is having a nervous breakdown because institutions, religions, and political ideologies are having difficulty adjusting to the migration and growth of populations. Modern communications technologies are playing a role as well.

The chimera haunting everyone is the military capacity to inflict massive devastation and death has increased beyond the confidence of governments and people that it can be controlled without having to kill a lot of people, i.e., Iranians, in the process..

Capitalism, despite an abundance of communism still around, has triumphed, but like any system, has been subjected to a great deal of abuse, rocking the economies of the U.S., Europe, and making most other nations nervous, too.

And, finally, there are six-going-on-seven billion people on a planet that is probably not intended to have that many. It puts intense strain on everything from water to food to the sources of energy that fuel modern and developing nations.

So everyone’s on edge. Nations and continents are on edge. The world is having a nervous breakdown.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Pakistan Conundrum

By Alan Caruba

The answer to whether Pakistan is our friend is “It depends.”

That’s an apt description of U.S.-Pakistani relations over the years, but one thing is sure, Pakistan believes it is surrounded by enemies in general and fears India in particular. With a mindset like that, friendship is not a priority, but survival—even if it just means muddling through another day—most surely is.

I have read several books about Pakistan in order to understand this odd nation that was peeled off from India in 1947 when the British left. Divided between eastern and western sections, even Bangladesh, formerly East Bengal, separated from its western cousin, declaring its independence in 1971. In the ensuing civil war, a million died and ten million fled to India.

In “The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad” by John R. Schmidt, a former State Department diplomat for three decades, reflects on his years in Islamabad in the years leading up to 9/11. He is a sharp observer of Pakistan and provides a lively history while unraveling the complexities of its various tribal groups, who the Taliban were and are, and how Al Qaeda established itself there.

To understand Pakistan is to understand how very different it is from America. It is a feudal society from top to bottom and it came about because its founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer, envisioned a nation separate from India because he feared that Muslims would become a political underclass in a unified India dominated by Hindus.

Fully one-third of India’s Muslim population numbering 35 million people remained behind in India. In Pakistan, it took until 1956 to come up with a constitution, a decade after independence.

A feudal society relies on patronage to function. Thus, whoever holds power at any level in Pakistan is focused on looking out for his own patronage network and not for the general welfare of the nation.

As Schmidt explains, “It requires little imagination to see where such policies lead. They lead to the poorhouse. Nations whose economics are uncompetitive in the global marketplace yet dependent on imported fuel and other vital commodities, and whose governments pay out more than they take in, are bound to be chronically broke.” As a result, a third of the Pakistani federal budget is consumed by servicing its international debt.

Typical of the Muslim outlook, if you are not a Muslim you are simply the enemy. It doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith. The problem is exacerbated because of the divisions within Islam, primarily Sunni and Shiite, have little love for one another.

Based on its fear and loathing for India, Pakistan’s various leaders concluded they needed to be a nuclear power as a deterrent. That makes Pakistan a major concern for everyone around them, the world in general, and the U.S. in particular. “If jihadists succeed in seizing power in Islamabad,” notes Schmidt, “they will inherit an arsenal that today numbers approximately one hundred nuclear warheads.”

Pinioned between India on the south and Afghanistan to the north, Pakistan’s leaders, as often as not its army generals who seized control, have only their grievances and themselves to blame for troubles with India and the rise of the Taliban who threaten the government. This explains in part why its military has always been the most stable factor throughout its relatively brief history. Based on merit, it is also represents the best leaders the nation can produce.

Even so, the decision to use proxy jihadist fighters to influence who controlled Afghanistan turned out to be a very bad one. Schmidt believes that “Pakistan seems ill-equipped to deal with this rapidly metastasizing radical Islamic threat.” Can there be a more ironic fate for a nation founded to provide a home to Muslims? The threat the Islamic radicals represent is particularly painful in a nation, the majority of whose population, are more tolerant and moderate followers of Sufi Islam.

The U.S. was none too happy to discover that Pakistan had become a nuclear power. When 9/11 occurred, its leaders were told that their cooperation was required to facilitate the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was told to break off relations with the Taliban and close its borders to Al Qaeda.

This explains why Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in the capture of top Al Qaeda leaders such Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but professed to be ignorant of the fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbotabad, a short drive from Islamabad. Indeed, for the Pakistanis, the news came as a shock and his assassination a cause for much chagrin.

In a similar fashion, the attack on Mumbai, India, by a radical Islamic group ended promising peace talks with India over Kashmir and left Pakistan’s international reputation in tatters.

As is the case in one Muslim nation after another, the central problem to their governance and international relations is radical Islam. Some nations like Indonesia have cracked down on it. Others like Yemen have been over-run by it.

Radical Islam, unless addressed by Muslims will remain a threat. It explains why U.S. troops will likely migrate in and out of Middle Eastern nations for years to come, shooting as many jihadists as possible, taking casualties, angering the local population, and confounding the public at home trying to understand why we’re there.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Five Wars, 63 Years of Terrorism, and Israel Survives

By Alan Caruba

The people who have given us bagels and lox, potato latkes, and chicken soup, in addition to the Old Testament, Albert Einstein, and a list of Nobel Prize winners as long as your arm, are in for yet another interesting week.

Last week, Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian Authority would not make a bid for statehood at the United Nations. That may have had something to do with massive pressure from the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia.

You can always trust a Palestinian’s word, right? Wrong. The next day, September 15, Abbas said the PA had changed its mind and would go to the UN Security Council to ask that it grant statehood to Palestine, admitting it as a full-fledged member.

He must have gotten a call from Turkey’s Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogen, who has been spoiling for a war with Israel and has been urging the Arab League to join in. It might have something to do with Erdogen’s beef with Greece that announced that it will begin drilling for natural gas on Monday, September 19, in Cyprus’s offshore Aphrodite field. The Turkish air force has been watching the rig, owned by Houston-based Noble Energy, move from Israel to Cyprus.

This is probably as good a way to start World War Three as any. It has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the decades of bad blood between Greece and Turkey that includes a divided Cyprus.

Israel, founded in 1948, has been through five wars with its “neighbors”, endless terrorism and rocketing, and has been openly threatened with nuclear destruction by Iran.

The only thing I can guarantee you is that Israel will be blamed for whatever happens.

This week is also the occasion for the United Nations celebration of “Durban III.” It is an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel hate fest in which every other nation in the world that practices racism is ignored and Israel is identified as the lone offender; largely because the Palestinians have refused every offer of peace and statehood made to them.

To demonstrate what an obscenity the event is, one of the keynote speakers will be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president and longtime Holocaust denier. A number of nations, including U.S., Canada and Great Britain, have already made it known they will not sit through another Ahmadinejad vituperation. Israel’s PM, Bibi Netanyahu, will be on hand to offer a response.

Anyone who still thinks the United Nations is about peace needs to pay closer attention. It is about being a global central power with authority over all the nations of the world.

Durban III is about “racism.” So how does that square with a statement by Maen Arewikat, the PA Ambassador to the United States, who last week said that an independent Palestinian state would take steps to force Jews living in the West Bank to leave. In an interview with USA Today, he said it would be in the best interest of Israelis and Palestinians to “be separated.” The Nazis had a word for this, “Judenrein.”

Elliot Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council officer, told USA Today that “No civilized country would act like this.”

The United States has already made it clear that it will veto a resolution for Palestinian statehood in the UN Security Council. So far the Palestinians have rejected the Oslo Accords and every other laborious diplomatic effort to get them to settle for peaceful coexistence. They could have had statehood after the UN partitioned the former British mandate that led to Israel’s establishment, but they rejected that option in favor of trying to drive the newly minted Israelis out of their ancestral homeland.

Jordan was among those nations that lost the 1967 war. The Israelis occupied the West Bank, a name Jordan gave to the ancient Israeli provinces of Judea and Samaria. The only reason Israel has not annexed the West Bank is that asserting such a claim would add a million Arabs to its population, none of whom have any love for Israel. Meanwhile, over the years, Israeli “settlements” have grown up on the West Bank.

President Obama has made it clear that he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders. Netanyahu has made it clear that they are indefensible.

The turmoil of the “Arab spring” has altered the cold peace that had existed between Egypt and Israel. The Israeli embassy in Cairo was attacked last week and the Israelis withdrew its staff. How many times do the Egyptians have to be defeated in war before they conclude it’s a bad idea?

The Palestinian demands have Jordon on alert as well. Jordan doesn’t want to have to absorb more Palestinian refugees into its population, thus making them a majority of the Hashemite kingdom created by the British after World War One. They tried to overthrow the former king once and he drove them into Lebanon.

The Syrian despot is busy crushing a revolution. Lebanon which used to belong to the Lebanese is now controlled by Hezbollah, a Palestinian organization backed by Iran and sworn enemies of Israel.

And how do the Palestinians have a state when the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, an Iranian-backed group located in Gaza, are at each other’s throat? If it is possible, Hamas hates Israel more than the PA.

The Palestinian dilemma is that they cannot get along with each other and no other nation in the region wants to have anything to do with them.

What will happen at the United Nations this week?

What will happen if Turkey decides to attack the oil rig off the Grecian part of Cyprus?

What will happen when the Israelis who have a defense pact with the Greeks respond?

How does NATO deal with two of its member nations going to war? What affect will this have on its role in the liberation of Libya?

It’s tough enough for the Israelis and Jews around the world to deal with the growing anti-Semitism that has been spread and nurtured by Muslims, but this irrational hatred, the well spring of the Holocaust, could set off a series of events initiated by such hatred.

Having destroyed the World Trade Center towers ten years ago, World War Three would be Islam’s gift to the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Lessons of 9/11

By Alan Caruba

October 29, 1929 is the day the stock market crashed and is generally regarded as the day the Great Depression began.

In the earliest days of that decade-long economic disaster, excavation for the building of the Empire State Building was begun on January 21, 1930. The building’s drawings and blueprint has been produced in two weeks by architect William F. Lamb who used earlier designs for another tower. On May 1, 1931, the iconic skyscraper was opened for occupancy.

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by Islamic terrorists sent by al Qaeda, almost all of whom were Saudis. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth was brought down in Pennsylvania when passengers fought the hijackers. Presumably it was headed for either the White House or the Capitol Building.

Not counting the hijackers, there were 2,977 victims.

In an exhaustive article by Andrew Rice, “The Saving of Ground Zero”, the story of the long, anguished struggle to build a new skyscraper to replace the Twin Towers was told in the August 8-14 edition of Business Week. Unlike the Empire State Building, the Freedom Tower is still under construction a decade passed the destruction that killed three thousand innocent Americans who did not know Islam was at war with America in particular and the West in general.

The triumphalism of Islam was expressed in the intent of some Muslims to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero. It evoked a national uproar, but both President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg said that freedom of religion meant that it could be built. Islam is not about freedom of religion.

Islam is not a religion of peace and not a religion of tolerance. The strangest outcome of 9/11 is the way too many Americans have steadfastly resisted the fact that Islam poses both an existential and actual threat to the nation and to Western civilization.

Since 9/11/2001, there have been 23,000 terror attacks worldwide and, once again, New York and Washington, D.C. are on alert for possible car bomb terrorist attacks.

Attacks on Americans have not ceased since 9/11, from Fort Hood to Times Square.

The 16 acres of the destroyed Twin Towers was hallowed by the murder of Americans who weren’t at war with anyone, but it was also extremely valuable real estate. As Rice wrote, “To the degree that it’s possible for a 102-story building to take a city by surprise, One World Trade Center snuck up on the New York skyline.”

“For years the project, conceived in the throes of tragedy, has been debated, negotiated, renamed, redrawn, hailed as a beacon, and maligned as a boondoggle. It wasn’t until recently, though, that it presented itself as an immutable fact, beginning to replace the void above Ground Zero with steel and reflective glass.”

Consider the contrast between 1930 New York City and 2011. It took just over a year to build the Empire State Building, employing 3,400 workers. It has taken a decade for the replacement of the Twin Towers that were owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the original developer, Larry Silverstein, has independently built three other office buildings to replace those destroyed on 9/11.

During the past decade, under the administrations of Bush and Obama, the U.S. has remained stuck in the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq. A third war, the effort to rid Libya of its dictator, has had U.S. involvement “leading from the rear”, and the whole of northern Africa’s Maghreb and Middle East is embroiled to some degree in conflict.

No one can say how the turmoil in these Muslim nations and others will turn out, but the odds are the Islamists, the jihadists, will end up in charge and their war on the West will continue.

There are lessons to be drawn from this decade and those that preceded it. Chief among them is that Islam remains at the heart of all the killing, the despotism, and instability of the Middle East and the threat to Western civilization, determined as ever to drag us back to the seventh century.

Skyscrapers can be built in a decade or less, but it takes centuries to create a civilization and to defend it against its enemies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

No Short Term Middle East Solutions

By Alan Caruba

A problem with which American administrations have grappled since the days of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency has been Arabs and the Middle East. The Marine anthem mentions “the shores of Tripoli” because, in 1801, Jefferson sent them to there to put down the Barbary pirates.

One of the best books on this subject is “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present” by Michael B. Oren who, with exquisite irony, is currently serving as the Israeli ambassador to the United States, the nation of his birth.

Regarding the Middle East, if you have had the feeling that the Obama administration has been spectacularly inept as it takes its turn at bat, you’re right. Barely six months into his first year, on June 4, 2009, the newly-minted President gave a speech in Cairo.

“I’ve come to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Obama’s impressions, aspirations, or re-write of history, past and present, clashes with the reality of current and past events. He has, in fact, adopted virtually all of his much maligned predecessor’s policies in the Middle East and took a bow for authorizing the long awaited assassination of Osama bin Laden.

As this is being written, the White House is debating the levels of military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases the public is alternatively told that the leaders of those two nations either want the U.S. to leave or to stay. Where the truth falls no one seems to know.

It is very instructive to read what is being published in the newspapers that serve readers in the Middle East. Suffice to say that neither the President, nor his policies, is well regarded. One can read daily translations of articles from their press, as well as Asia and Europe at an interesting site, .http://watchingamerica.com/News.

I would argue that no amount of “hands on” involvement with the events unfolding from the Maghreb nations of northern Africa to those that form the heart of the Middle East will significantly alter the outcome of events occurring there.

In addition to the uprisings to throw off the shackles of despotism from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria, Bahrain to Yemen, the common denominator for these and other Arab nations is their well-deserved sense of having been the victims of various regimes. They are all likely to be united in their fear of the rise of Iran, a Persian nation, and one that will soon achieve nuclear parity with Pakistan, India and, yes, Israel.

The world has lived with “the bomb” since the end of World War Two in August 1945. Nuclear weapons have not been used since, but Iran is the wild card. It will not yield to international sanctions. Its cabal of ayatollahs will not be overthrown from within. It must either suffer a massive attack on its nuclear and military facilities or it will fill the skies over Israel and other nations with mushroom clouds.

The leaders of Western nations seem unaware that, immediately upon the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D., Islam split into two factions, Sunnis and Shiites, who have been in conflict with one another ever since.

The history of Islam consists of waging war on everyone else as well either for the purpose of conversion, looting, or the collection of taxes laid on non-Muslims. This history has been broken by rare, short periods of tolerance, but Muslims, convinced that their Koran is the absolute word of Allah, have been indifferent to the values of the West and the advances of modernization that have usually been imposed on them through colonialism.

Islam has been around nearly 1,400 years and gives no evidence of reforming itself away from the Arab culture in which it took seed and away from the brutal punishments that pass for justice. It was and is a savage “religion” bent on global domination.

Even when Muslims find hospitality in non-Muslim nations like those of Europe they immediately set upon an effort to impose Sharia law, usually through intimidation, on the indigenous population. In the Middle East, hands and heads are still cut off, rape victims are stoned, and a charge of blasphemy or apostasy can get you killed.

As this is being written, Christians and the few Jews still residing in the Middle East and the Maghreb are fleeing for their lives as their churches are being burnt to the ground and their lives are at risk.

One would think that, after U.S. involvement—invasions—of Afghanistan and Iraq, we would have figured out that Islamic nations are impervious to any concept of Western style democracy. Islam’s claims to be a religion are framed within a political system run by theocrats.

Elections have managed to put Hamas in charge in Gaza and Hezbollah in charge of Lebanon. The ayatollahs grabbed power in Iran and turned that nation into a prison. The mobs in the streets of Syria are trying to overthrow the Assad dynasty, warring against an Alawaite minority tribe ruling as Baathists. Yemen is a basketcase and Somalia is even worse.

The ignorance of these facts has cost Americans billions, if not trillions, with our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has led President Obama to intercede in Libya for no good reason. It is a desert under which oil exists. Beyond that, it hardly matters which dictator is in charge. Gadhafi’s dabbling in terrorism cost him more than it was worth.

So long as Obama is President, the U.S. will pursue unrealistic and often stunningly stupid policies and actions as regards Islam and Muslim nations.

By way of one small example, in April Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, appointed Arif Alikhan, a devout Muslim, as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development. Alikhan was born in Damascus, Syria. I am sure you feel safer now knowing that.

Are there nice Muslims? Sure. Are there “moderate” Muslims? Possibly, but they are outnumbered by the millions who are not. Oil money and various illegal enterprises support terrorism. Even Americans contribute because the Obama administration will not permit exploration or drilling for an estimated 150 billion barrels of our own domestic oil.

And you still wonder why President Obama actually bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia? Or that George W. Bush ignored the fact that all but one of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists were Saudis? No President wants a repeat of the 1973 Saudi oil boycott.

Nothing good can come out of the current turmoil affecting most Arab Muslim nations. The U.S. would be wise to maintain its military power, but the fact is our Navy is being reduced, our Air Force is flying aging aircraft, and the combat divisions of our Army and Marines are worn out from repeated tours in the Middle East.

Obama is as clueless as Woodrow Wilson who thought he could bring “peace in our time” and only managed to help set in motion the run-up to World War Two. He has put America at risk in so many ways I am losing count.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Time to Leave Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

The Greek philosopher Plato said, “Only the dead know the end of war.” I doubt that in the five thousand years of what we call civilization there has ever been a day when war has not been taking place somewhere on the planet. All wars, in one fashion or another, however, have to come to an end.

The war in Afghanistan has degraded into a distraction from the nation’s desperately deteriorating financial situation. Even worse, it is part of that problem. On January 30, 2009, Bill Bonnor, best known for his newsletter, Dead Reckoning, wrote the following:

“’Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’, was what he (Osama bin laden) was up to, he said in a videotape. He even did the math. ‘Every dollar spent by al-Qaeda in attacking the United States has cost Washington $1 million in economic fallout and military spending’, said the report.

“’We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russian for ten years, [in Afghanistan] until it went bankrupt…So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’”

Can anyone deny that bin Laden was right? Can anyone deny that the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama has now expended billions in the name of bringing democracy to people who should be responsible for overthrowing their own despots? There was, after all, a time when the U.S. was an ally of bin Laden and even of Saddam Hussein!

On May 9, Rasmussen Reports noted that 56% of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan within a year. What do the people know that all the genius strategists in the State Department and Pentagon do not? They know these wars, Iraq included, are a distraction from our real problems.

I do not know how many times over the years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq I have written that we should withdraw our troops. I have noted how extended military occupations and expeditions have historically always drained and destroyed empires from the Roman to the British and now the present day Pax Americana.

America is now over $14 trillion in debt and yet we keep sending billions to nations like Pakistan and to the United Nations, most of whom must think us stupid beyond belief.

The exception to this was the long Cold War that America fought against the former Soviet Union from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventual collapse of that Communist nation in 1991. That collapse, however, was facilitated by the decision of the former Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan!

Over the course of the forty-six years the Cold War ground on, the U.S. fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. We spent what we had to for a powerful military deterrent. From Truman to Bush41 Presidents remained firm in their determination to resist the Soviet Union.

The war with Islam is different. The asymmetrical war waged against America, Israel, and the West began in earnest after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and continued through a succession of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Marines in Beirut, U.S. embassies, the USS Cole, and ultimately 9/11. Israel has had to wage a war of self defense since its first day 63 years ago. Most recently, it resisted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Islam has been around since the seventh century A.D. Its initial success saw it sweep across vast regions of the Middle East, Africa, India, up into Spain and to the gates of Europe. The inherent failure of Islam has been its resistance to all Western values that confirm the dignity of the individual, representative government, and the advances of science, literature, and the arts.

Our global opponents, Russia and China among others, are pleased that America must drain its treasury and expend the blood of its children to hold the line against Islam, but it is a short-sighted strategic error because they will find themselves on the frontlines of the war that we have been waging with massive troop deployments. Consider how much more effective drones and special operations have been.

Europe has reluctantly discovered the enemy in their midst. The flood of Muslims it invited as workers because of its failure to ensure a sufficient native population is causing Europeans to grasp at measures to either placate the Muslim population or outlaw some of its practices. The fear is palpable and is why some now refer to it as Eurabia.

NATO nations, rarely credited, have been by our side throughout the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They are now charged with determining the outcome of the insurgency in Libya, but Britain is making plans for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan for the same reasons outlined above.

It is a very old war. In 732 A.D., Muslims were defeated at Poitiers, France, halting their expansion. In 1492, Christians recaptured Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. In 1683 A.D. Muslims were defeated near Vienna. Europe was safe, but that was then and this is now.

It is reason enough for America and European nations to put their financial houses to avoid a collapse that will leave us vulnerable to the most terrible scourge of mankind.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Connecting the Dots

By Alan Caruba

It has long been my habit to collect and update data on all manner of issues and topics. In this era of Google and Bing, that may seem outdated, but it has its uses and, anyway, habits are hard to break.

The result of this is a huge pile of print-outs of articles from a variety of sources I regard as reliable for their information and opinion. Backing up this stack is a small library of books, the result of fifty years of reviewing, on matters old and new. This affords me the opportunity to swiftly and easily write my commentaries.

I suspect the average person depends on a handful of information sources simply because they lack the luxury of time. As skepticism of the mainstream media has grown, it accounts for why a reliable 20%-25% of the population remains fixed in their liberal, generally mistaken, view of issues and events. They are the ones still tuning in Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News or who think that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show constitutes real news. Try as I may to point out that Stewart’s show is on the Comedy Channel, the numbskulls ignore it.

The reason Osama bin Laden “sleeps with the fishes” is that there are scores of intelligence analysts whose sole job is to connect the dots from a mountain of information that flows into the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and other government agencies charged with keeping us alive.

The decision to kill bin Laden was a political one, so the likelihood is that his command staff will be killed on a regular basis between now and the 2012 elections. You may recall that a drone tried to take out al Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen at the same time in a two-fer, but his days are numbered.

Suffice to say, the nation’s affairs and the world’s are incredibly complex, so data collection is an essential way to make any sense of it.

Let me, randomly, provide just a few pieces of information through which I daily sift to construct a view of the shifting landscape of events, personalities, and issues.

While we are constantly told of the Palestinian “refugees” Gerald A. Honigman, reflecting on the May 15 “Nakba” demonstrations against Israel, asked about the fate of “some twelve million native Egyptian Copts—the pre-Arab, non-Arab people of Eqypt whose men frequently get murdered, women raped, churches torched, (and who) live in a constant state of intimidation? When will over thirty million native, pre-Arab, non-Arab Kabyle, Amazigh, and other native, North African people—the ‘Berbers’—get to have their Nakba Day? Or the “35 million stateless people—the Kurds—get their own special day as well.”

The Institute for Energy Research, on May 12, commenting on the calls to take tax subsidies from U.S. oil companies, said, “If the senators proved anything today, it was how out of touch they are with basic economics. Oil companies pay over $30 billion per year to federal, state, and local governments in order to produce energy in the U.S.” Meanwhile, Obama administration illegal moratoriums “have already decreased oil production in the Gulf of Mexico by 360,000 barrels a day.” In a major flip-flop, the president has announced a lease program to open up oil drilling in places that were sacrosanct just days before.

As Congress and the White House squabble over lifting the debt ceiling limit, on April 22nd CNSnews reporrted that “Federal agencies reported improper payments estimated at $125.4 billion in fiscal year 2010, an increase of $16.2 billion from the $109.2 billion estimate in fiscal 2009, the Government Acountability Office said.” Fully 94% of those payments came from “social spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.” Maybe making a decent effort to stop wasting money would be a good idea?

On April 18th, Investors Business Daily, reported that “The EPA admits to Congress that it does not take into account the impact of its regulations on employment, the economy or internatinal competitiveness. Neither, apparently, does the White House.” This is a key factor in the loss of manufacturing and other business enterprises, along with the jobs they represent.

On April 1, Stephen Moore, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said, “It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities, combined.”

An editorial in the April 28th Washington Times opined that “President Obama rails against Wall Street to score political points. But when the smoke clears from all the demogoguery, the financial regulations he is publishing will result in fewer loans, more costly credit and individuals facing more risk.”

If converting food crops to fuel seems like madness defined, Elizabeth Rosenthal, writing in the April 6th New York Tmes, reported that “Each year, an ever larger portion of the world’s crops—cassava and corn, sugar and palm oil—is being diverted for biofuels as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossel fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy to keep their cars and industries running.” Wasting food? That’s the stuff of revolution everywhere.

Just this quick sampling reveals the nation is being run in an astonishingly incompetent and stupid fashion. The government’s repeated use of lies and fear to influence public opinion is dangerous in so many ways. It is fundamentally unAmerican.

It took from the late 1980s to 2009 to put an end to the global warming hoax. One scientist called it thirty wasted, lost years.

The Islamic jihad has been in effect since 632 A.D.

Communism, imposed on Russia in 1917, destroyed generations in the former Soviet Union, in the Peoples Republic of China, and still stunts life for millions today.

Surrendering to malicious religions, economic and environmental theories or wild self-indulgence is bad for individuals, nations, and the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Swirl of Conspiracy Theories

By Alan Caruba

It is testimony to how little Barack Hussein Obama and the government he heads is trusted when one considers the swirl of conspiracy theories that filled the forums on the Internet, the comments attached to articles analyzing the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the general discourse of the chatteratti on radio and television.

Soon enough, photographic evidence will be offered as proof and, even then, the conspiracy theories will question them.

This occurred to me as I searched foreign news websites for information that was not directly generated by the White House. To my surprise, Al Jazeera had a remarkably comprehensive round-up of statements and quotes by leaders from around the world, all welcoming news of Osama’s death.

It also struck me that many commentators took note of the fact that Obama had actually fulfilled former President G.W. Bush’s promise to find Osama and bring him to justice “dead or alive.” The fact that Obama has been, willingly or not, pursuing the objectives of his predecessor did not go unnoticed. In the end, Obama may not get all the credit he craves from the event.

The same Internet that invented and elevated Obama to the Oval Office has been dissecting and disputing virtually everything he has had to say, officially or not, over the past two years or so. He has not come off well.

While all presidents have had to circumvent the truth from time to time, Obama quickly earned a reputation as a serial liar, a 24/7 dissembler, and a thoroughly unreliable source for information about everything from his birth certificate, his two memoirs, and other pronouncements.

Little wonder that spinners of conspiracy theories immediately seized on the news of Osama’s death to wonder out loud about its timing. Was that intended to disrupt the airing of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice”? Why was Osama buried at sea? Why was he living in a private compound just outside of Islamabad, Pakistan near a military facility? Et cetera!

I was reminded of Occam’s Razor. “The 14th century philosopher William of Occam had a keen eye for plausibility. We know his approach to problem solving by the label "Occam's Razor," an axiom often stated in shorthand as, "The simplest explanation is usually the best."


And then I thought of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theory. The more closely you study the subject, the less clearly defined it becomes.

There are useful lessons to be drawn from both. The first is that the basic facts that have been released by the White House and reported widely are probably true. A Navy Seal Team, acting on intelligence gathered by the CIA, Pentagon, and other U.S. sources, identified where Osama was staying and killed him. This is the simplest explanation.

Beyond that, the speculation regarding the event only serves to obscure it.

Writing at the Middle East Forum, Raymond Ibrahim offered a very useful reminder.

“Years ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda's undisputed leader, placed it all in context. After he was asked about the status of bin Laden and the Taliban's Mullah Omar, he confidently replied:

‘Jihad in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or organization. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until Allah Almighty inherits the earth and those who live in it. Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Laden—may Allah protect them from all evil—are merely two soldiers of Islam in the journey of jihad, while the struggle between Truth [Islam] and Falsehood [non-Islam] transcends time.’”

Jihad does transcend time. In a dispatch published in The New York Times on May 20, 1876, “The Disturbances in Constantinople”, the reporter noted that “Our readers, not familiar with Oriental countries can hardly appreciate the passion of fanaticism which at times burns in the breast of the lower classes among the Mohammedans. The majority of these have no idea of the progress made by the Western races, or of the inferiority of their country to other modern states.”

Given 9/11 and modern communications, those in the West do better understand the fanaticism of Islam. Constantinople is now called Istanbul. And Turkey, a bridge between the East and West, has been sliding back into the fantasies and fanaticism of the past.

America, the apotheosis of the modern world, reached out to kill its avowed enemy. That is what great powers have always done and must always do.

© 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

Welcome to the Middle East. We're All Crazy Here.

By Alan Caruba

A recent Fox News channel report concerned a student from Vermont’s Middlebury College who was studying international relations overseas in Cairo when that city came unglued. He was given the opportunity to go to Damascus, Syria to continue his studies and he jumped at it. Bad move. While there some kind of protest broke out and the secret police scooped him up and threw him in jail for two weeks.

It took an American embassy intervention to get him out despite the fact he had shown Syrian authorities his passport and his student identification papers. He was not physically mistreated, but other prisoners were. He learned that “they can arrest you for any reason or no reason.”

Signs at airports and seaports should say, “Welcome to the Middle East. We’re All Crazy Here.”

President Obama’s “kinetic military action”, swiftly passed off to NATO (which is another way of spelling USA), and currently a mess waiting for someone to kill Muammar Gadhafi (how’s that for a plan?) has simply confirmed what everyone suspected. So far as the Middle East is concerned, he has no foreign policy.

Why are we in _______ (fill in the blank) is the question people keep asking every time some ghastly new piece of news is reported. The place is wall-to-wall lunatics. When not blowing each other to hell during religious pilgrimages, funerals, and other gala events, they are killing medical missionaries, United Nations diplomats, and others who think they can be helped. They can’t.

The so-called Palestinians have had over sixty years to find some small measure of peace with the Israelis, but have rejected every single effort. Lately, Hamas has (a) murdered an Israeli family, (b) set off a bomb in Jerusalem, (c) and gone back to firing rockets into Israel. What is wrong with this picture? Everything!

In a splendid reversal of logic, the Jews are blamed for everything in the Middle East (and everywhere else for that matter), but Christians there are being systematically driven from their homes or attacked. What most Western Christians have not grasped is that they are the new Jews, next in line for the same abuse.

Let your fingers do the walking over a map of northern Africa and the Middle East, and you will barely find a nation that is not in some kind of turmoil. Tunisia is in the process of sorting out power sharing now that their former dictator is gone. Libya’s problems would be resolved if Col Gadhafi would accept Uganda’s generous offer to take him in.

Egypt’s power brokers are deciding just how Islamic it will be. Home to some stunningly beautiful women, wrapping them in burkas would be everyone’s loss and make it difficult for Miss Egypt to compete in the next Miss Universe contest.

Turkey, which used to have a secular government and thought of itself as part of Europe is now veering into the We’re Crazy Muslims School of Governance. Syria is seeing signs of internal opposition to a regime that is now in its second generation and famed for “The Hafez al-Assad Guide to Suppressing Everyone in Syria.” Jordan is trying to cope with its own large Palestinian population that is making noises about its royal family.

Iraq, whom the U.S. freed from Saddam Hussein, is some kind of limbo trying to figure out how to be Iran’s neighbor without being Iran’s lunch. Bahrain just decided it would much rather be Saudi Arabia’s butt-boy than Iran’s. The Saudis have announced that they will be building a new facility in Bahrain where their navy can park in the event of any unpleasantness in the Persian Gulf.

Pakistan can barely pass for being a nation. It’s more like a large, albeit mountainous military base; one that has nuclear weapons. Pakistan is most famous for floods and earthquakes. Nothing good comes out of Pakistan, including the Taliban. And then there is Afghanistan and its Stone Age people who have outlasted every invader since Alexander of Macedonia and not improved one bit.

The United Arab Emirates and Qatar, two small Gulf States, are lying low, but Yemen, sharing a long border with Saudi Arabia has a ton of internal conflict. Oman seems okay, but you never know.

Perhaps the “good news” is that every nation in the region is terrified of the truly crazy Iranians who have been announcing since 1979 that, as soon as they get nuclear weapons, they are going to destroy Israel and after that, well, just about everyone else.

Why anyone would want to worship in a radioactive al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is anyone’s guess.

So, if you’re planning your next vacation or you’re a university student trying to figure out where to study, I suggest you think Disneyland for the family and, for great food on a student’s stipend, Italy.

Remember, “Welcome to the Middle East. We’re All Crazy Here.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

War for No Particular Reason

By Alan Caruba

Thanks to the Obama administration, we have now entered upon a new phase of foreign policy. It is war for no particular reason.

Why are we doing anything in Libya? We’re not messing around in any of those other places that involve governments shooting at their own people. Obama famously did not want to “meddle” when the Iranians filled the streets of Tehran in 2009, protesting a stolen election by Mamoud Imanutjob and Ayatollah Comeandgetme.

Americans are connoisseurs of invasions. We know a good one when we see it and are not easily fooled by those who say, “We’re dropping thousands of pounds of ordnance and launching numerous missiles, but we are not in a war. It’s a kinetic military action.” Yeah, right.

Telling Americans that their nation—without so much as a phone call to Congress—has launched a military action over (but not IN) Libya and that NATO is really running the operation, (with a Canadian general taking orders from two American generals) suggests that the White House thinks we are really STUPID.

We know what an invasion looks like. Bush41 had a great one in Kuwait and Bush43 had an even better one in Iraq. It may not have been D-Day, but it was good enough for a generation born too late to remember Normandy Beach. When it comes to invading countries, we are the gold standard.

Conservatives wonder why the liberals screamed bloody murder when Bush43 invaded Iraq after getting all kinds of UN resolutions and authorization from Congress, but are curiously silent when Obama begins bombing the hell out of Tripoli “for humanitarian reasons.” Of course, in fairness, liberals never want to invade any place. That’s why you don’t find many liberals in the Marines and other branches of service.

How do you tell a good despot from a bad one? Let me explain. There are the pro-U.S. ones who cooperate with us and there are all the others. As some statesman once said, nations have interests, not friends.

It is necessary to understand that those generating an Islamic revolution have no love for the monarchs and the former colonels and generals who run Muslim nations. Their ideal is something like Iran. The initial goal of al Qaeda, for example, was (and is) to overthrow the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. They, in turn, told bin Laden to get out and stay out.

The present unrest in Muslim nations is the result of the convergance of al Qaeda and Iranian agendas to exercise control over those nations. But first, they intend to destroy everyone, Jew, gentile, and Arab alike, in Israel. According to Islamic lore, they can’t really take over the world until this is accomplished.

Americans have been slow to grasp that the Iranians have been preparing since 1979 to sweep across the region and the world to ensure that Islam (Shiite version only) is the only religion with the power to dictate to all others. There is zero room for tolerance in Islam, a “religion” that separates the world into dar al Islam and dar al Harb (the world of war!)

As a non-war the Libyan operation is especially disappointing since the so-called rebels at this early point have less cohesion than a Hell’s Angels chapter. This has not deterred talk of “arming” them. However, the latest word out of Libya is that the “rebels” made a couple of million by selling thousands of mustard and nerve gas shells they found in military facilities around Benghazi to the Palestinian terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah. Let those creeps arm themselves.

How was it that a President who spent weeks agonizing over what to do in Afghanistan took only a few days to decide that the U.S. should start lobbing missiles into Gadhafi’s Libyan compound?

One obvious answer is that the man is just a moron. The other is that he lacks any serious opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike, and for now is being allowed to get away with it.

The U.S. Navy and Marines showed up in Tripoli in 1801 to deal out some hurt and a message to the Barbary pirates harassing our merchant ships. President Thomas Jefferson concluded that killing the pirates was cheaper than paying them the bribes they demanded. He was right.

The rebellion against Gadhafi appears to have a contingent of jihadists that include al Qaeda’s professional mujahideen that migrate from war zone to war zone, but the bottom line appears to be that folks throughout the Middle East are just fed up with the current crop of despots. Forty years in control seems to be the cut-off point whether it was Egypt’s Mubarack, Libya’s Gadhafi, or the former Tunisian tough guy, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

This Libyan non-war reeks of having been a political decision. It is surely not a military one. Odds are that Obama is not paying attention to what his generals are telling him and it’s for damn sure he doesn’t care what the U.S. Constitution has to say on the subject.

No one knows how this kinetic farce will play out, but since Obama is channeling Jimmy Carter, there is a strong likelihood the U.S. is going to end up looking bad and events in the Middle East will just get worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2011