Five Dead Jews

By Alan Caruba

For the same reason it is difficult to comprehend what will surely be a large loss of life following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it is hard to grasp that, halfway through the last century, when I was a child, Nazis killed six million Jews for being Jews.

The mind rejects such insanity. We recoil from such barbarity, but we can understand what it means when a family of five is slain in their beds while they slept. That is what happened to the Fogel family in their home last Friday in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. They were killed for being Jews.

The victims were Rabbi Udi Fogel, 36, who taught at the Itamar yeshiva; his wife, Ruth Fogel, 34. Yoav, age 11. Eldad, age 4. And tiny baby, Hadas. Eldad was stabbed in the heart. His baby sister had her throat cut. The others died in a similar fashion.

Their blood-soaked bodies were found by their sister, Tamar, age 12, when she returned home that evening and mercifully spared were Roi, age 8, and Yishai, age 2, as they slept in another room.

There is a fence around Itamar, but for whatever reason, it was scaled and when the guards, alerted by a motion detector, found no evidence of a breach, they assumed some animal had set it off. They were wrong.

The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.

This occurred in an Israel now regularly called an “apartheid” nation for seeking to defend itself against a people, the so-called Palestinians, who have refused to recognize its nationhood for more than sixty years. It is a nation isolated and under attack in the United Nations despite the fact that organization supposedly exists to peacefully resolve issues, not stoke the fires of hatred as it does.

News of the murders was given a tepid rebuke by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced “violence by any quarter” without the specificity of naming Hamas.

In a phone call to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that terrorism was not going to restructure the settlement map on the West Bank and, to back it up, Israel announced it would authorize the construction of 500 new homes in West Bank settlements, 100 for each of the murdered Fogels.

There is a particular irony in the murder of the Fogels. They had originally lived in Gaza and had moved to Itmar in 2007 when, under former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, they were among the Israelis who were forcibly removed by their own nation in order to provide Palestinians a strip of land on which to build a state of their own.

Instead, the Palestinians used Gaza as a forward line of war to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel. It took Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to dampen their enthusiasm for that. By then, Hamas had driven the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza at gunpoint.

DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency, noted that the attack was “the first of its kind in years. Hamas websites hailed the murder as ‘heroic’, without taking any responsibility.”

The murders come at a time when Rep. Peter King is holding congressional hearings on the threat of radicalized Muslims in America who pose a threat to our lives. He has been attacked for putting the spotlight on this threat despite the fact that we are now almost a decade passed 9/11 and there have been the Fort Hood murders, as well as a series of attacks, planned, foiled, and near misses, in the past decade.

The Israelis are not so naïve, so fearful to face the truth about Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular. They are not so politically correct they will not say words like “terrorism” or “Islamic jihad.” They are not led by idiots like Obama’s National Security advisor who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization.

Light a candle for the Fogels. Say a prayer for the Fogels. They are your family too.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

How Are the Jews Doing?

By Alan Caruba

Wondering how the world’s Jews are doing may seem a trivial question, but I have long thought of Jews as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When events turn nasty in the world, it is the Jews who are most often its first victims.

If there is a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide it is, frankly, hard to detect from the constant, endless background noise from those who hate Jews full-time and would be utterly bereft of any purpose in life if there were no Jews.

Sadly, Christians in the Middle East are suffering attacks that have long been familiar to Jews throughout history and, these days, the Israelis. There is no room for live-and-let-live in that region of the world where the two Islamic sects, Sunni and Shia, do not hesitate to kill one another.

When one considers that the Iranian mullahs, desperately trying to construct their own nuclear weapons, have vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map, inquiring as to the Jews’ welfare in general and Israelis in particular is not a trivial question. A nuclear attack could easily cascade into a general exchange of such weapons, a goal the mullahs actually want to trigger.

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

So, perhaps, in a way, we are all Jews.

In October 2010, my eye was caught by a speech by the press magnate, Rupert Murdoch, to the annual banquet of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” said Murdock.

This may be difficult for most Americans to comprehend because perhaps no where else in the world, other than Israel, have Jews not only prospered, but found a level of acceptance that is truly unique. In Israel, being a Jew is the ultimate definition of normality.

Murdoch, however, said that “conventional” anti-Semitism has largely failed, citing the wars against Israel since its founding in 1948. Now, said Murdock, Jews are the target of a “soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it.”

This is going to be particularly evident when “Durban III”, a United Nations conference, takes place in September.

Originally called the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance” the UN conference name was shortened to the “World Conference Against Racism.” Suffice to say, as with most things involving the UN, the conferences have been the exact opposite of their announced purpose.

The previous Durban conference in Geneva caused European delegates to walk out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, a keynote speaker, launched into a tirade against Israel and Jews. The Conference is recognized worldwide as a cesspool of anti-Semitism. In both conferences the hatred was directed against America as well as Israel.

Durban III will be held in New York!

It will be instructive to see if the U.S. government will send delegates to this hate fest or will officially and outspokenly protest and reject its message.

As Murdoch noted in October, there is a “curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran—a nation that makes no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction—pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.”

Murdoch said that anti-Semitism has found “a disturbing new home…in polite society, especially in Europe” and expressed concern that America was “distancing herself from the Jewish state.” He added that “the most virulent strains of anti-Semitism “come from the left”, often dressed up “as legitimate disagreement with Israel.”

He warned that Obama administration policies, generally called an outreach to the Muslim world, “Far from making peace more possible…are making hostilities more certain.”

The Iranian mullahs and their Syrian puppet have been supplying an enormous stash of rockets to Hezbollah, the Iranian's Palestinian entity in Lebanon, just as they fund and direct Hamas in Gaza. 2011 may well be a repeat of the 2006 hostilities and Israel will surely not repeat the mistakes that prolonged the last conflict.

So 2011 is yet another year in which to ask how are the Jews doing around the world.

The U.S. and its allies have been militarily engaging virulent Islamists since 9/11, but Islamist attacks predate that event by many years. The Islamist threat has spread to Europe and England, and remains active against America.

The Holocaust is a symbol and a warning of what happens when Jews or any other group is targeted for extermination. Death to America is chanted daily by some. Afterward, “genocide” entered the lexicon as the practice infected parts of Asia and Africa.

The Jews remain the most useful barometer to determine the advance or retreat of evil in the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Why are Liberals Blind to the Evil in the World?

By Alan Caruba

Why do so many Jews, located primarily in New York City, Los Angeles, and in Florida, mindlessly vote the Democrat Party line and thus support the Democrat destruction of the nation remains a mystery to me, but the same can be also said of Afro-Americans. Perhaps it is because both share a history of persecution and both are drawn to any message of hope and change.

Despite being a tiny minority, 0.2 of the world’s population, the Jews have produced some of the greatest minds of the modern era. They dominate the Nobel Prizes in science, medicine and physics. They have played a major role in American culture on Broadway, Hollywood, radio and television.

Politically, however, too many Jews who are seen as shapers of public opinion often appear to be blind to evil in the world. They cannot seem to recognize those who would kill them and their fellow countrymen. Unfairly, we expect Jews to be more moral, more just, more resistant to evil, but they are just like the rest of us, easily seduced by power, fearful of rejection.

Nine years after 9/11, less than a year since a Muslim major shot thirteen soldiers to death in Fort Hood, eight months past the failed Christmas bomber, and barely weeks after a failed attempt in Times Square to kill more innocent Americans, the former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, writing in the Huffington Post, lauds Mayor Mike Bloomberg for taking up “the fight to protect the legitimate rights of American Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero.”

Koch cites George Washington’s letter in 1790 to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island. It is a virtual poem to tolerance and a condemnation of bigotry, but the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero is not bigotry. It is the common, ancient recognition that some places are hallowed by the deaths of soldiers or by the innocent victims of evil.

The field at Gettysburg is hallowed ground. The former Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, is hallowed ground. In Sudan’s Darfur region today where genocide against Christians and animists continues will be hallowed ground.

So eager is Mayor Koch to defend the obscenity of a mosque rising where Muslims killed 2,700 people in the name of Allah, he writes, “We Jews also have our share of thieves, predators, child molesters, Ponzi-schemers, traitors and profiteers. Muslims have their share of great world accomplishments…”

This is so pathetic words cannot describe his surrender of any sense of moral outrage or the pretense of moral equivalency.

At least Mayor Koch was able to acknowledge that Muslims “also have their share of crazies, tyrants, homophobes, those holding hostile and irrational attitudes toward women, vilification of Jews, Christians, Hindus and other so-called infidels.”

It was not Jews who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl for the crime of being a Jew. The Jews do not murder Christian missionaries providing medical services as Afghan Taliban did a week ago.

Violations of the most fundamental human rights are simply not in the Jewish DNA. Having been slaves in Egypt, they celebrate freedom on Passover every year. Having reclaimed a synagogue from the Assyrians, they celebrate Hanukah every year. They
celebrate Purim to remember how Queen Esther saved her fellow Jews.

Koch mimics the Muslims who slander Israelis with being Nazis when they defend themselves against suicide bombers and thousands of rockets from Gaza. If the Muslims do bad things, Koch believes he must cite Jews as capable of the same, but self-defense is understood worldwide as a duty.

It is the Israelis who have protected the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, built over one of the most sacred sites of Judaism, the Temple Mount. Christian Arabs and Bahai adherents from Iran found sanctuary in Israel, having had to flee Middle Eastern nations as their Jewish neighbors did.

There is no moral equivalency with Muslim acts of terror. They are part of a campaign to impose Islam on the world. In that quest, Muslims have murdered Muslims as well as unbelievers.

It is a familiar liberal failing to refuse to recognize evil, to name it, and to denounce it.

Americans are right to condemn the insult and the arrogance of claiming to build a mosque dedicated to brotherhood when Islam does not recognize any other religion as valid or of having a right to exist.

And yet, any yet, Mayor Koch ended his convoluted, meandering comments on the prospect of a Ground Zero mosque saying, “I believe we are locked in battle with fanatical Islam and will be for the foreseeable future.” He’s right, but you don’t have to be a fanatic to believe what Muslims believe. You need only read the Koran.

The history of Islam is a history of conquest and a resurgent Islam is on the march everywhere again.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

What Do the Jews Think?

By Alan Caruba

The never-ending interest in what America’s Jews think about Barack Obama or Israel or anything else has always struck me as vastly disproportionate to their numbers.

American Jews are barely 2.2% of the U.S. population; numbering 6.4 million in 2008.
America, however, is home to 40% of the world’s population of Jews, about the same as Israel.

I suspect it has more to do with America’s Christian roots dating back to the beginning of the nation when the Mayflower Compact conceived of the pilgrim’s journey as one to build a new Jerusalem, a shining city on a hill.

The Internet ensures that tons of information flows into my office and among that tide are epistles from Israpundit.com. The latest was “An Open Letter to American Jews” and among its historic citations of Israel’s struggle to establish and maintain itself in the face of unremitting hostility was a very real concern about President Obama’s policies vis-à-vis Israel.

Jews are the world’s canaries in the coal mine. When bad things happen to Jews it portends bad things for the rest of the global population. Among the things most remembered from World War Two is the Holocaust that killed, not only six million Jews, but five million others in the Nazi concentration camps.

So taking note of what Israpundit, Ted Belman, is thinking these days reflects not just Israeli fears, but those of the U.S. Jews as well.

Belman cited an article in the Boston Globe about a February Gallup poll. Reporter Jeff Jacoby wrote that “support for Israel vs. the Palestinians has climbed to a stratospheric 85 percent among Republicans; the comparable figure for Democrats is an anemic 48 percent.”

This is significant if only because American Jews have mostly identified with the Democrat Party and supported its candidates. The real support for Israel, however, comes from Republicans.

There appears to be no support in the Obama White House.

The recent deliberately shabby treatment of Israel’s Prime Minister by President Obama was intended to be seen by the world and especially by Israel’s enemies as a change from all other previous administrations since the days of Truman, the first to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation in 1948.

Fully 333 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a bipartisan letter to the Secretary of State critical of the administration’s treatment of Israel. Jacoby noted that 91 Democrats—-more than a third of the entire Democrat caucus declined to sign. “Yet this is the party you are affiliated with,” said Belmen.

What do American Jews think of Israel’s situation? The 2010 annual survey of American Jewish opinion by the American Jewish Committee found that the vast majority, 94%, want the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in any agreement and 61% support an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Fully 75% believe that the goal of the Arabs is the destruction of Israel.

One can only hope that goal is not also shared by President Barack Hussein Obama.

Belman wrote, “I am not asking you to abandon the Democrat Party, nor am I asking you to abandon your liberal values. I am asking you to abandon Barack Obama who, I think you agree, has abandoned Israel. You may even agree that he has also abandoned America and even liberalism, as you understand it.”

Strong words, but these times call for strong words. On Tax Day, April 15, similar thoughts were spoken at Tea Party rallies across the nation.

Even former New York Mayor Ed Koch, writing in the Huffington Post on April 12, said, “I weep as I witness outrageous verbal attacks on Israel. What makes these verbal assaults and distortions all the more painful is that they are being orchestrated by President Obama.”

What do the Jews think? They think that Obama has gone beyond a mere difference in policy with Israel. They think a man who sat in the Chicago church of an anti-America, anti-Semitic preacher of hate is letting Israel’s enemies know that he will do nothing to assist Israel if it finds itself under attack again.

What matters now is what all Americans think because his actions have consequences. Most surely, whatever President Obama says these days on any issue cannot be trusted.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Islamic Anti-Semitism is a Very Old Story

By Alan Caruba

There is, in fact, nothing new in the recent arrest of four American-born Muslims seeking to kill Jews in their houses of worship, two synagogues in New York City.

The killing of Jews goes back to the early years of Islam when the Jews of the Qurayzah tribe, one of a few that had settled in Arabia, refused to accept Mohammed’s claim to be the prophet of a new religion called Islam.

By that time, after Islam was initiated in 622 A.D., Judaism had been around over two thousand years and the story of their own prophets had become a history that the emerging religion of Christianity incorporated as well, along with its own saints and martyrs

In true seventh century fashion, Mohammed ordered that all seven hundred men of the Jewish tribe be put to death and their women and children sold as slaves. (Hadith Book 019, Number 4364) Killing Jews entered the Koran and Islamic lore as a wholly
acceptable thing to do. Though Jews have lived in Arab nations for centuries, they have done so always at the sufferance of the ruling powers and with no hope of protection.

When Israel announced its founding in 1948, thousands of Jews throughout the Middle East were forced to flee to the new nation for their lives. In the years leading up to its independence, attacks on Jewish settlers were commonplace.

In America, Jews have been the victims of attacks by jihadists, radical Islamists, going back to the late 1970s. In March 1977 Hanafi Muslims seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., including the headquarters of the B’nai B’rith. They held hostages for 39 hours. There was one death as a result.

In November 1990, El Sayyid Nosair assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in a New York hotel. In March 1994, Rashid Baz, a Palestinian immigrant, opened fire on a van carrying orthodox Jewish boys crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, killing one of them.

In 1997, another Palestinian, Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, shot at seven tourists visiting the top of the Empire State building, killing one and wounding another. His suicide note said that U.S. was using Israel against the Palestinians.

The 9/11 Islamic terrorists killed not only Jews in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but co-religionists and, of course, many Christians. With the exception of the Muslims they killed, the others were all infidels, unbelievers, and their death is prescribed in the Koran. “When ye encounter the infidels,” Mohammed said, “strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter of them.”

Muslims deny the truth of both Jewish and Christian doctrines, nor are they apparently reluctant to kill other Muslims when they gather for prayer in their mosques.

There are other incidents, but they all represent the hatred many Muslims feel toward Jews even if they have never met one. More than sixty years of attacks on Israel tells you everything you need to know about how Middle Eastern Muslims feel about Jews. The entire region is suffused in anti-Semitism, they breathe it like the air.

So the news of the arrests of four criminals, all of whom had converted to Islam while in prison, will now be added to the scoreboard that all American Jews carry around in the back of their mind.

It is ironic that Barack Hussein Obama garnered so much of the Jewish vote to become President. This is a man who wants to close down “Gitmo” and put its terrorist detainees in American prisons where they presumably will be able to infect other prisoners with the same cancerous hatred that motivated the thwarted wannabe jihadists.

At this point, not only will no state will accept the Guantanamo detainees, but no other nation wants them either. One out of seven of those released to date has returned to the occupation of Islamic terrorist.

This latest batch of holy warriors for Islam was not taken on the field of battle in Iraq or Afghanistan. They were born here.

A word to the wise for all those who think America is to blame for terrorist acts; they are authorized by the Koran.

A tip of the hat to Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum for his catalog of attacks on American Jews in recent times.

The UN Celebrates "Palestinians", Hates Jews

By Alan Caruba

On Monday, November 24, the United Nations will commemorate its annual “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People”, a hate-filled day that ignores its own role in the establishment of Israel.

An international institution that trumpets its Universal Declaration of Human Rights while openly seeking the destruction of the population of one of its member nations is so inherently debased that it should cease to exist.

The notion that the United States of America should continue to participate in the UN on the grounds that it is the only forum or means to resolve conflicts is absurd.

Monday’s observance marks November 29, 1947, the day that the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish and an Arab state in what was formerly the Palestinian Mandate whose administration had been ceded to Great Britain following the end of World War One.

The State of Israel was not created out of “Palestinian” lands. It was part of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled much of the Middle East for four hundred years and which, at the Versailles conference following the end of WWI, was divided into nations conjured up by England and France. Among the newly designated nations were Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

There were no “Palestinian” people claiming a land called Palestine. Most of the Arabs regarded themselves as living in the southern portion of Syria.

The 1947 UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining twenty percent of the Palestine Mandate. There was to be the State of Israel for the Jews and a new state for the Arabs.

What happened, however, was that the Arabs rejected a state of their own and launched a genocidal war against Israel. The war was the primary cause of the Arab refugee problem that exists today because none of the Arab nations in the region would accept the refugees and the UN facilitated their permanent status and continues to do so today.

There were, however, Jewish refugees. Between 1949 and 1954, an estimated 800,000 Jews were forced to flee the Arab and Muslims lands where they had lived for hundreds of years. In addition, many European Jews who had survived the Nazi Holocaust migrated to Israel. Later they would be followed by the persecuted Jews of Russia and other lands.

On Monday afternoon, the UN General Assembly will convene to discuss the “Question of Palestine” and if this is redolent of the Nazi “Final Solution” the comparison is accurate. The General Assembly is scheduled to adopt six resolutions condemning only Israel for violations of human rights. This will bring the total thus far this year to twenty such resolutions as opposed to four resolutions critical of any of the remaining 191 UN member nations.

Israel is not “occupying” land that belongs to a Palestinian state because no such state exists. It has occupied land won repeatedly in combat for its very existence. In recent years it ceded the Gaza strip to the Palestinian Liberation Authority, Fatah, but the result has been that Hamas drove Fatah from Gaza at gunpoint and now uses it to launch rockets against Israel on a daily basis. The West Bank, by any international standard, is a legitimate part of Israel.

The Arabs who did not flee Israel in 1947 were the lucky ones. They were able to remain in the only functioning, true democracy in the Middle East and today their children and grandchildren number more than a million Israel citizens, some of whom serve in the Israeli Knesset or parliament, on the Israeli Supreme Court benches, and as tenured professors in Israeli colleges and universities.

The United Nations continues to promulgate the most offensive anti-Semitism found anywhere in the world and Monday’s observance is just one aspect of it. Its “Durban II” conference on racism to be held in Geneva in April 2009 will be a repeat of the hateful first conference that was boycotted by several nations, including the United States. It should be condemned and avoided by all nations that take the professed UN Human Rights declaration at its word.

Those attending Monday’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People should be hosed down and driven from the chambers where it is held. The General Assembly should be seen for what it is, a place of shame, duplicity, and genocidal hatred in which no civilized nation should take its seat.

Coincidences About Life and Death

By Alan Caruba

If you’re a writer, you begin to notice how various pieces of information come at you in what appears to be a random fashion, but which have a curious way of connecting. That’s because everything human connects in some fashion. Nothing human happens in a vacuum.

On Sunday evening, the famed “60 Minutes” had a segment on the Israeli Air Force, interviews with its commander and with some of its pilots, including one girl who was small enough to be asked if they made uniforms in her size. She flew a U.S. made Apache helicopter, the kind the Israelis use to kill the leaders of Hamas if they can find them driving around Gaza. They use them to suppress the daily rocketing. She was only one of forty in her class who earned the right to kill Israel’s enemies in this fashion.

Others flew large fighter planes, acknowledging that Israel rules the skies. That’s a good thing because the field from which they fly is only fifteen minutes from Beirut or Damascus. Everyone, young men and women, in Israel must serve in its defense force, but the Air Force has the right to choose the best among them to fly. It is not a choice for those called to this duty and, even then, only the best among them will have the responsibility.

Israel cannot lose a single war. So far, as it makes ready to celebrate its sixtieth year, it has not. Against impossible odds, the Jews fought, triumphed, and survived. It is not a coincidence. They have no intention of being killed like sheep as occurred to six million European Jews during World War II. Some of the survivors made it to Israel to reclaim their lives and to resurrect their nation.

Later Sunday evening, I turned to the National Geographic Channel and it had a program that showed extremely rare photos of the commandant and staff of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where, astoundingly, a million Jews were systematically killed between 1944 and the end of the war in the following year. The work for the staff was very demanding, trainloads of Jews would arrive and as many as 8,000 at a time had to be sent to the gas chambers, their bodies burned in the crematoriums.

The photos of the staff showed them relaxing from their task. In one, maybe twenty women are shown being given blueberries, all young, smiling. In others, the men seemed in good spirits, including a smiling Dr. Mengele who, by age 32, had both a medical degree and one in philosophy. They were happy in their work and their work was not war, but murder, genocide.

The photos of a trainload of Hungarian Jews showed men, women, and children of all ages, including a mother holding her baby. With the exception of those separated to become workers, all were killed within hours of arrival. The mind cannot comprehend murder on such a scale.

The Israeli Air Force general put it this way, when Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, you have to take him at his word.

The world did not believe what the Nazis were saying until it was too late to realize they were telling the truth when the said that Europe must be “judenfrei”; that all the Jews must be killed. Not surprisingly, Ahmadinejad also denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

About seven months ago, the Israeli Air Force blew up a nuclear facility in Syria that we are now told was being built under the supervision of North Koreans whose chief export is death. It is only a matter of time before the Israelis will have to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities being built, we’re told, for “peaceful” purposes. One hopes that American bombers will be flying with them.

As the war clouds gathered, the British tried to negotiate peace with the Nazis. The Russians signed a peace pact. In 1939 the Nazis attacked Poland and, as they say, the rest is history. History teaches that you cannot negotiate with murderers, with people who have a history of taking hostages, with men obsessed with the belief that their god commands them to do monstrous evil. You must kill them before they kill you.

The Israelis know this.

One hopes the rest of the world and, especially, America, does as well.

More Dead Jews

By Alan Caruba

Here are their names:

Yohai Livshitz, 18
Neria Cohen, 15
Yonatan Yizhak Eldar, 16
Yanadav Haim Hirschfeld, 19
Segev Peniel Avihail, 15
Avraham David Moses, 16
Ro’I Roth, 18
Maharta Taruno, 26

All dead. All murdered in a Jerusalem yeshiva on March 6th.

A thousand years before the birth of Mohammad there was a Jerusalem and a Jewish homeland, but Islam demands and Islam celebrates the death of Jews and all other non-believers, including its own apostates.

The only alternative is to be a “dhimmi”, a second-rate citizen subject to the abuses of arrogant Muslims.

They celebrated the murders in Gaza by, of course, shooting off guns.

Gaza, which the Israelis abandoned to the Palestinians in the hope they might take the land and make a nation for themselves. On one side, the Egyptians built a wall to keep the Palestinians out. On the other side, the Israelis built a wall to keep the Palestinians in.

That’s what you do with a deranged and homicidal population.

Hamas took credit for the murders and then retracted it. Hamas or Hezbollah, it doesn’t matter. They are both Palestinian. Fatah, also Palestinian, grown fat stealing the aid sent by the EU and even the U.S. is no longer a factor despite the pretence of securing “peace” with or through them.

What can be said of a people who celebrate the murder of children?

What can be said of a people who send their own children to die as suicide bombers?

How can such people lay claim to anything the world recognizes as moral behavior?

Islam is a belief devoted only to death; a Paradise for its endless martyrs, and a Hell for Muslims who do not totally surrender their lives to it and, of course, for the unbelievers.

What did those Jewish youth do to justify their murder? Nothing. They were killed for the same reason Jews were slaughtered in the millions in my own lifetime—for the crime of being Jewish.

People say that the problems in the Middle East would go away if there was no Israel, but where were the survivors of the Nazi death camps to go? Where were the Russian “Refuzniks” to find sanctuary?

If other peoples can have a homeland, why must Jews alone be denied theirs?

The problems of the Middle East are the problems anyone in any previous century, coming in contact with Muslims, would have easily described, and which England and Europe in this century are encountering.

The problem is Islam, was Islam, will be Islam.

Let us no longer hear talk of a “peace process” between Israel and its enemies.

The Palestinian cancer, alive and well in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, to name just a few places it infects, must either burn itself out or be destroyed for the threat it is.

Kristallnacht

By Alan Caruba

An interesting thing happened in Prague last November. There was, so far as I can determine, virtually no news of the event except in a few newspapers that might be expected to cover it.

The place was Prague, but what precipitated the event had occurred in 1938 in Nazi Germany and had come to be called “Kristallnacht”, the night of broken glass when synagogues and other places associated with Jews were attacked and destroyed.

By the time it ended, Nazi stormtroopers had killed 91 Jews and 30,000 others had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps. It marked the beginning of what was to be known as “the final solution”, the deliberate murder of millions of European Jews that has since been called the Holocaust.

In Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, the word went out that several hundred neo-Nazis were preparing to march on the city’s Jewish quarter on the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

They found themselves confronted by thousands of Czechs who filled the streets that Sabbath Saturday to show their solidarity with their nation’s Jews. Masses of non-Jews showed up wearing yellow Stars of David inscribed with the word “Jude”, the same symbol the Nazis had required Jews to wear.

There were some bloody street fights, but the 1,400 police who had been mobilized, along with the sheer numbers of the anti-Nazi protesters were sufficient to maintain the peace. It was the first time in recent memory that residents of a former Eastern bloc capital had taken to the streets to protest anti-Semitism.

Only about 1,500 Jews live in Prague, but an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 protesters were on hand for the day’s events that included prayer, musical performances, and presentations by Holocaust survivors that were projected on a large outdoor screen.

While there are probably less than 1,000 active neo-Nazis in the Czech Republic, there are others throughout Europe and anti-Semitism, though muted, remains a part of European culture.

Prague Mayor, Pavel Bern, addressed thousands during a ceremony sponsored by the Jewish Liberal Union. “We need to cultivate the national memory to avoid what happened in the past.” The Nazis murdered 80,000 of Czechoslovakia’s 120,000 Jews during World War II.

The Czechs remembered. They came together to protest the evil of anti-Semitism, but we all have to remember and we all have to protest whenever some group, any group, is singled out from the family of man for murder.

When the Iranian leaders say the Holocaust is a myth, the truth cries out from six million graves. We must not be silent. When they threaten tiny Israel with nuclear death, we must not be silent. We must say to ourselves, “Never again.”

We must all become Jews in the face of evil. Silence is the ally of those who would perpetrate such horrors.

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.

Greens Want One Less Hanuka Candle

'Green Hanukkia' campaign sparks ire
Gil Hoffman , THE JERUSALEM POST
Dec. 4, 2007

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

It never ceases to amaze me. I have a friend, John Brignell, whose website, NumberWatch, has a page devoted to all the things attributed to global warming. There are easily more than 600 or so, but every single day the Greens come forth with one more totally idiotic thing everyone should or should not do to avoid global warming.

They can stop now. There is NO global warming beyond the perfectly natural warming that has been occurring since the end of the last mini-ice age around 1850. Nor is there any dramatic increase in the so-called temperature of the earth.

Telling Jews not to light all the candles to celebrate Hanuka is the same kind of insulting hogwash that afflicts Christians who are abused for putting out some Christmas lights.