Obama Shows His Muslim Hand

By Alan Caruba

When candidate Obama was courting the “Jewish vote” he donned a yarmulke, went to the Wailing Wall in Israel, and said all the right things. He needn’t have bothered because the American Jewish community, estimated to be approximately 5.5 million, was largely in his pocket. They have voted overwhelmingly Democrat since the days of FDR.

This is, if you think about it, fairly astonishing because his middle name is Hussein, his birth father was a Muslim, and so was his Indonesian step-father who reportedly would take him on occasion to the mosque. It is even more astonishing because he was a member for twenty years in a church whose pastor was close friends with the notorious anti-Semite, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.

Any American Jew paying any attention should surely have harbored some doubts and, six months into his presidency, a lot of American Jews are asking themselves what they were thinking when they voted for Obama.

In an article in The Jerusalem Post, Anne Bayefsky wrote, “President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American President in the history of the state of Israel.”

Surprise, surprise. Among the leaders of major Jewish organizations not invited to the July 13 meeting was one from the Zionist Organization of America. As Bayefsky noted, “The oldest pro-Israel group in the United States, with a Washington office second in size only to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was not a voice Obama wanted to hear. This leaves the President willing to engage Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but not ZOA President Mort Klein.”

In a July 21 editorial, The Washington Times criticized the U.S. State Department noting that, in the previous week, it had “delivered a demarche (a protest) to Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, to hold construction on twenty residential units on the site of the Shepherd Hotel, which stands on the edge of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.”

Does it strike anyone as odd that the State Department whose policies are set by the Oval Office is upset over a bit of housing in Jerusalem? It was, of course, the kind of Kabuki theatre in which diplomats engage to make a larger point. If the point was that the U.S. has the right to tell the sovereign nation of Israel where it can and cannot build housing it is an entirely absurd notion.

There is some further irony in that Ambassador Oren is the author of a remarkable book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present.” Had anyone in the State Department read it, they would have learned that “A full fifteen years after declaring its independence, the United States still faced a devastating threat from the Barbary pirates”, Arabs who preyed on our merchant sea trade and who ultimately were responsible for the creation of the U.S. Navy and Marines to defeat them.

In the early years of America, there was an active movement to send missionaries to the Middle East to convert them to Christianity. Now we just send troops to rid the region of psychopathic depots like Saddam Hussein and fanatical Islamo-fascists like Osama bin Laden.
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So complaining about twenty new apartment units in East Jerusalem is just another way Obama is showing his Muslim bona fides.

He has been on a “get tough” agenda since taking office in late January. The message has not been lost on the so-called Palestinians. The PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, has gone back to demanding idiotic concessions from Israel despite the fact that he and his ragged little bunch of Arafat wannabes are literally propped up by Israel as an alternative to Hamas.

Middle East expert, Daniel Pipes, recently noted that Zionists had founded the Shimon Hatzadick neighborhood in 1891 by purchasing land from Arabs. It changed hands as the Arab/Jewish conflicts occurred over the years. The pro-Nazi Amin al Husseini, Jerusalem’s mufti, put up a building in the 1930s that later served as the Shepherd Hotel. In 1985 an American businessman, Irving Moskowitz, bought the land and rented the building to the Israeli border police until 2002.

What does any of this have to do with the United States? Nothing. It is sheer hubris to say that Israel hasn’t the right to build housing for its growing population in Jerusalem or anywhere else. As for the West Bank, it was captured in 1967 after Arab nations, including Jordan, again attacked Israel.

When we give back Texas, California, and much of the U.S. Southwest to Mexico, the State Department can issue such idiotic demands.

This isn’t just about U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s about the very Muslim Barack Hussein Obama.

The Prince of Peace Vs the Prophet of War

By Alan Caruba

In the most general terms, there are about two billion people in the world who will celebrate Christmas in some fashion or other. That leaves four billion who subscribe to some other deity or to none at all.

There is some confusion over Islam because it says it respects the Jewish prophets and Jesus, but the reality is that Islam has always striven to replace anything Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist wherever it is the dominant religion.

The world was appalled in 2001 when the Taliban blew up a 2,000 year old statue of Buddha carved into a mountain wall in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, but expresses little concern that the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is built directly over the Temple Mount, a place sacred to Jews. In April 2002, Palestinian terrorists retreated to the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem knowing the Israelis would not attack them there. They defiled this most Christian of holy places.

The utter contempt Muslims show for Judaism and Christianity seems to elude a lot of people who, while turning the other cheek, find Muslims seeking to impose their sharia law on them and elbowing them out of the way as, for example, in England where many British have abandoned their churches only to see them replaced as mosques. The Church of England has devolved into a grotesquery in which its leaders make light of the most fundamental beliefs of Christianity.

If anyone doesn’t believe that there is a war of religions occurring, they are not paying attention.

You won’t find many Christian preachers speaking ill of Islam from their pulpits on the birthday of their savior, Jesus, but there is little doubt that too many Muslims will hear a different view of Jesus spoken in their mosques. It will mock the New Testament because the Koran mocks the New Testament.

The trendy rise of atheism cannot go unnoticed either, but atheists will not go unscathed should they find themselves in a Muslim-dominated society one morning. If Muslims think ill of “unbelievers”, atheists will be at the head of the line for a forced conversion or a far worse fate. Next in line will come the Jews whom Muslims are taught to hate from birth. The few Christians left will become “dhimmi” or very second-rate citizens. This is their fate throughout the Middle East where many now have fled for their lives.

If this seems a harsh look at Islam and its more than a billion followers, perhaps it is time to consider a world in which they become the dominant religion. They want to be the only religion around and some feel justified to achieve that with suicide bombers and even by flying commercial jets into buildings to kill 3,000 Americans.

On Christmas day, as churches fill and carols are sung about the “Prince of Peace”, it would be well to remember that ancient Roman dictum, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”; If you want peace, plan for war.

The Waste of Time at Annapolis

By Alan Caruba

The upcoming conference at Annapolis to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is doomed from the git-go. None of the parties with the exception of that idiot Olmert are prepared to concede anything and even the Israeli people don't have that great a death wish...despite recent evidence otherwise as in Olmert's transfer of guns and other military gear to Abbas and his little band of Fatah murderers.

The Saudis are so afraid of even being there (they see themselves as the leaders of all the Arabs since they are home to Mecca and Medina) they won't even shake hands will the Israelis. What a bunch of craven cowards.

As to the others, the Egyptians and the Jordanians have long since signed off on peace treaties with the Israelis and neither wants any more military action (both got soundly whipped in 1967). So that leaves Hamas and Hezbollah, neither of which has any intention to make peace and accept Palestinian statehood.

Back when the British mandate over Palestine was lifted, the UN offered the Palestinians the status and territory as a separate state and they refused.

In every negotiation with them since they have refused.

What the Bush Administration hopes or expects to achieve with the Annapolis conference is beyond understanding. It surely is not peace because the Palestinians have never demonstrated any evidence of wanting to make peace with Israel, i.e., stop sending suicide bombers, drive-by shooters, and stop rocketing Israel.

And the Israelis will never relinquish control over Jerusalem to the descendents of goat herders whose religion didn't even exist 1,700 years ago.

About the only predictable thing that will occur is that the conference will be played out against the background noise of terror and rocket attacks on Israel.

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/