Would It Help if They Wore Black Hats?

WASHINGTON — The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews. (“PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews”).

With all we’ve got on our national mind these days, we Americans can get confused.  Maybe it’s all those cell phone microwaves burrowing into our brains and all that tweeting.  Could a  clear-headed people who hadn’t been reduced to conversation via misspelled sentence fragments ever go to sleep undisturbed that we have all these vampire-based TV shows, the Bravo network, and Eric Holder as attorney general?

These distractions may just explain how Americans can still be so confused about what’s going on between Israel and her mortal enemies: the stateless Palestinians, and the 1.5 billion Muslim ummah. some with nukes, who side with them in their lust for Israel’s destruction.

According to the latest poll by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center asking if the UN should recognize an independent Palestinian nation:

Fully a quarter of Americans express no opinion when asked for their “sympathies” between the two parties, a near high in polls back to 1982. In all, 40 percent say they side with the Israelis, 10 percent with the Palestinians, and 21 percent volunteer “neither.” Among those paying “a lot” of attention to the statehood issue, a majority — 55 percent — sympathize with Israel; 19 percent with the Palestinians.

Twenty-one percent don’t know their sympathies?  (Frankly, it feels even higher.)

American public opinion swings back and forth from decade to decade on all sorts of issues.   But in spite of that we’ve always shared in common the  national trait of rooting for the underdog.  Show us which one is being pushed around, and we know where our sympathies lie.

But, for some reason, that doesn’t apply when the underdog is Israel.

This 21% “neither” number is as if the whole country watched “Rocky,” and 65 million of your countrymen said afterwards they’re not sure if Creed should have won that fight.  And the Palestinians, sensing this confusion, intend to exploit it at the UN. 

Adding to this signal of confusion is President Obama.   In his speech about the Palestinian request for statehood to the UN the other day, he said, “One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own.”

When Palestinians have been allowed to vote, they have gleefully elected a terrorist group like Fatah, except when they could do even worse by electing a terrorist group like Hamas. When America was attacked on 9/11, Palestinians handed out candy to their children and danced in the streets. 

So whatever else may be said about all this, what can’t seriously be suggested is that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own. That’s why the President, in spite of what he says the Palestinians “deserve,” is opposing statehood.

Now Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the guy whom we we confused Americans erroneously believe is a peace-loving moderate (but only compared with Hamas), declared last December,  “I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.” And now the PLO’s envoy to the US,  Maen Areikat, says there won’t be any Jews in a Palestinian state – even as his government is applying to the UN for Palestinian statehood.   Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported the story or Areikat’s comments.

USA Today did report:

Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.

Israel has 1.3 million Muslims who are Israeli citizens. Jews have lived in "Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank, for thousands of years.

But now 21% of underdog-loving Americans don’t want to pick sides? Isn’t it interesting how the large majority (55%) in the Pew poll of those who sympathize with Israel tracks with people who pay attention to the issue?

Too bad that not paying attention to this issue is a very big American national pastime right now, along with downloading ringtones and getting tattoos.

But even if you’re one of those whose opinion is that the Palestinians “deserve their own state” --maybe because you heard sound bites somewhere about how Israel is an “apartheid state” and an is engaged in “illegal occupation” of Palestinian national territory, and you think they might be the underdogs – does it bother you at all to know that the Palestinians intend to establish a racist state next door to a people whose right to exist they have never once acknowledged?

Don’t you owe it to yourself to get the facts?

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Send in the Clowns

Michigan Congresswoman Candice Miller has done some truth-telling in a column this past week in The Detroit News. (“Miller: Military commissions best place for terrorists trials”).   Maybe she’ll fill some of the void left by Michigan’s loss of Congressman Pete Hoekstra.

Treating terrorism as a criminal matter the way we used to, Rep. Miller writes, did nothing to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet the Obama administration is now clinging to this same “flawed approach”:

affording constitutional rights to terrorists, including the right to remain silent, to which I believe they are not entitled. Our enemy views this system as a weakness to be exploited to advance their cause.

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured, he is reported to have told his interrogators, "I'll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer."

Fortunately for the nation, KSM was captured under the Bush-Cheney administration, and they knew we were in a war.  Mohammed never got to New York, and the mastermind of 9/11 wound up talking instead to the guys of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation team someplace else. These conversations led to KSM eventually disclosing  invaluable information, including the plans for a 9/11 follow-up attack on Los Angeles,  and key information that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In stark contrast, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, when he should have long since been facing a military at Guantanamo, is  going on trial here in Detroit.  Writes Rep. Miller:

This administration's ideological blinders prevent it from seeing what most Americans innately understand — these enemies of freedom do not deserve the protection of our Constitution; they are, and should be treated as, enemy combatants. Never before has any nation extended such a robust set of protections to its enemies, and given them a forum to spew their vile hatred.

Recently, potential jury members and the city of Detroit were treated to such an outburst by Abdulmutallab who shouted, "Osama's alive" and "Jihad" during a jury selection hearing in federal court. This terrorist was afforded his Miranda rights shortly after his capture, given the the best medical care at the University of Michigan Hospital and is being afforded a standby attorney even though he has decided to represent himself. Taxpayers are footing the entire bill.

While we watch the pre-trial unfold, it is disheartening to watch as yet another terror trial turns into a circus.

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Obama’s Reluctant Lifeline

Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley has an apt summation of President Obama’s mentality on Israel in his Sunday column: “Obama comes from the faculty lounge, the place where Israel is most detested and where Palestinians retain their victim status no matter what atrocities they commit.” (“N.Y. voters stand up for Israel”).

Finley sees the shellacking the Democrats took in New York’s 9^th District last Tuesday as punishment from the sizable Jewish electorate there for his “wobbly support of Israel.” He’s also optimistic that Obama got the message.

We’ll see.  

I think “wobbly” is far too kind a term for the policy of betrayal Obama has been enthusiastically implementing since the start of his term. I do agree that Obama’s hatred for Israel is rooted in his academic background and his lefty politics.  But wobbly is what you get when a politician is ambivalent.  Obama isn’t ambivalent about Israel. He really does hate that Jewish homeland. 

Nor do I agree with Finley that this president has shown much taste for political pragmatism. He’s been ideological on all of his major policies: on reducing American influence, on wealth redistribution, on increasing government control, on sapping America’s key alliances, on weakening Israel.

Finley’s optimistic that Obama will set aside his ideology now and the 9^th district’s rebuke may mean “a lifeline” thrown Israel’s way.

Considering all the perils Israel faces from Egypt, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Hamas, and a newly-minted “Palestinian state” that will be a forward base for every jihadist maniac from 57 Muslim states, is a lifeline thrown out at the point of a political gun really enough?

The Palestinian Big Lie

Sol Stern has published the following on NRO:

On September 20, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, will take his case for Palestinian statehood to the United Nations. This is a matter of basic justice, Abbas will argue, because the Palestinian people were dispossessed by the new state of Israel in 1948, and the current Israeli government is still preventing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

But Abbas’s claim is based on a big historical lie.

In fact, Abbas has lately been lying about his own life story as one of those “dispossessed” Palestinians. Last May, he published an op-ed article in the New York Times titled “The Long Overdue Palestinian State,” in which he recounted his own “expulsion” by the Jews in 1948, at the age of 13. Abbas wrote that “shortly after” the U.N. General Assembly voted to partition the “Palestinian homeland”into two states in 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.” Abbas claimed that he and his family were forced out of their home in the Galilean city of Safed and fled to Syria, where they “took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees.” For dramatic effect, the Times provided an illustration above Abbas’s article depicting a young boy standing next to a tent in the desert and gazing forlornly at the verdant hills of Galilee just over the horizon.

In his Times op-ed, Abbas also wrote, “Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.” Abbas didn’t explain how any country could have recognized a United Nations–designated Palestinian state that the Palestinians and the Arab states themselves rejected. The Arab Higher Committee (AHC) was the recognized representative of the Palestinian people at the time of the U.N. partition vote. The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledgling Jewish state in “rivers of blood.”

Following instructions from the AHC, Palestinian militias and volunteers from neighboring Arab countries began attacking Jewish settlements after the U.N. partition plan was announced in November 1947. The irregular Arab units were ordered to take strategic strongholds and hold on until the expected invasion of Israel by regular Arab armies after the British withdrawal on May 14, 1948. What happened in Safed was typical of the bloody inter-communal warfare that soon convulsed the country. Elements of the Arab Liberation Army — the main Palestinian armed force — plus Jordanian irregular units, entered Safed’s Arab neighborhoods and began sporadic attacks on the Jewish quarter. Facing a full-scale invasion of Galilee by the Syrian and Jordanian regular armies, Jewish military commanders couldn’t afford to have armed Palestinian units behind their lines. On the night of May 8, reinforcements from the Palmach, the elite Jewish strike force, counterattacked and took the key Arab strongholds in the city. Almost immediately, Safed’s Arabs began streaming out toward the Syrian border. There were no expulsions of Arab civilians by Israeli forces.

In his Times op-ed, Abbas even contradicted previous accounts he had offered in which he conceded that his family left Safed voluntarily— in part because of fear that the Jews would seek revenge for a murderous rampage by local Arabs against the Jewish community in 1929. In an interview on Palestinian radio, Abbas said, “We left [Safed] on foot at night to the Jordan River. . . . Eventually, we settled in Damascus. My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work.” There was no mention by Abbas in that earlier interview of living in a canvas tent.

President Abbas’s historical distortions (clearly not fact-checked by the Times) are at the very heart of the Palestinian nakbamyth (nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe”) and emblematic of the Palestinian leadership’s century-long refusal to accept a Jewish state in any part of the Arab Middle East. That obstinate rejection, not the Israeli government’s positions about borders or West Bank settlements, remains the No. 1 obstacle to peace in the Holy Land.

Last week, as he prepared for his statehood initiative at the U.N., the Palestinian president reaffirmed that the issue for the Palestinians is not the occupation of the West Bank, but the very creation of Israel. In a New York Times report from the Palestinian capital of Ramallah, Abbas was quoted: “Some Israelis complain that this is a unilateral move, but when you address 193 countries, that is not unilateral. We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.” The Times reporter didn’t bother commenting that the 63 years of “occupation” Abbas was complaining about goes back to 1948 and the original sin, for the Palestinians, of the creation of the modern state of Israel.

Resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict is tough enough; it becomes almost impossible when one side insists on lying about the conflict’s origins.

— Sol Stern, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, is the author of the just published A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred (an Encounter Broadside).

‘If You Love Me, Shear My Sheep’

From NRO:

Worry Not, Obama Can Still Be Like Jesus

By Charles C. W. Cooke

President Obama may well be taking flack from all sides, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still be compared to Jesus Christ. In a blog post Wednesday, NPR lamented that The One’s loss of mojo — which is apparently the product of the“realities of governing as opposed to the unrealities of presidential campaigns” — has changed the president into a “human figure compared with the almost messiah-like status he had in the eyes of many supporters in 2008.”

Still, fear not, for the attenuation of Obama’s appeal ”doesn’t mean there still isn’t the occasional moment reminiscent of a Bible story.” That’s lucky, then. NPR explains:

Here’s John 21:15, the New International Version, describing a scene between Jesus and his disciples:

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter,”Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”

“Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.”

Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”

Most people will have seen President Obama’s call for yet another stimulus as somewhat routine, and possibly even thought that the terms in which the appeal was couched bordered on narcissism. (“If you love me, you got to help me pass this bill. (Applause.) If you love me, you got to help me pass this bill.”) It’s good to know that, even in these troubled times, what looked like a routine political speech was in fact reminiscent of something on an altogether higher plain.

These Aren’t Diamonds on the Soles of My Shoes, or, These Keds Are All Right

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Detroit’s very own Mohamed Atta Mini-Me,  made his first bad impression on prospective jurors Wednesday by leaning back in his chair in court and putting his feet up on the defense table.

The attitude was captured nicely by courtroom artist Carole Kabrin here.

Showing the soles of one’s foot is a significant insult in the Islamic world.

You may recall how the BBC and others in the leftist media never got tired of pointing this out when George W. Bush was the target of a thrown shoe in Iraq. 

No one’s mentioning it now, though.  Maybe that’s because the intended target is only the American judicial system – the trial judge and the prospective jurors.  In other words, you and me, America.

The U-bomber also acted up by saying things in court like, “Osama is alive,” “Jihad,” and “I'm being forced to wear prison clothes.”

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, explains it this way. "He's delusional. Even al-Qaida has recognized bin Laden is dead. I don't know what point he was trying to make, except being disruptive."

Walid is being too modest pretending not to see the point. You know it can’t be easy for Walid having a prominent Muslim Brotherhood operative in town, hand-picked by al-Awlaki himself,  and then not being able to show him any better hospitality than to keep describing him in the press as  “delusional,” and “insane.”

Regardless, Walid pretended not to recognize the shoe insult, and confined his shoe-related reaction to observing how the U-bomber has “got more shoes than some poor kids who live in Detroit." We’re not sure what the significance of that is.

Abdulmutallab has more prison clothes than those poor kids do, too: but U-bomber’s complaining he’s forced to wear them, whereas the Detroit kids dress like that of their own free will. What’s up with all that?

What Walid cares about more than anything right now is driving a wedge into your head between this Nigerian kid and his plain-spoken jihadist logic and the word “Muslim.”

All to distract from one of “the most closely watched terror cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”   Not that that’s saying much, since there have been so few, and none of them closely watched.  Closer to the truth that the same Muslim leaders and media brains who brought us “Ten Years After: The 9-11 Tragedy” are never going to get this trial in focus, because Islam is in the dock with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

I’m at least encouraged for now that U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds, appointed to the federal bench by the first President Bush, has avoided two pitfalls into which many trial judges fall. The first pitfall is indulging the notion that jury fairness exists in inverse proportion to jury awareness of what happened. “We are not trying to find people who have never heard of this case,” said Judge Edmunds. “We are looking for people who can serve as fair, objective and impartial jurors.” It’s much better for everyone if we have a jury who aren’t  not so insulated and ignorant that they’ve never even heard of terrorism, or jet planes or even underwear (in other words, pretty much the same standard used to select the O.J. jury).

The second encouraging thing is Judge Edmund’s finding that the U-bomber’s admissions when he was first being interrogated by the FBI will not be excluded just because he was on a powerful painkiller and wasn’t given his Miranda warnings. The judge said “national security fears justified agents not reading Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights before interrogating him.” A burn until nurse helping treat him said he was “lucid and not confused” in spite of a hefty dose of fentanyl.

DU has been unable to confirm if the U-bomber next will argue for exclusion of  his statements on the alternative ground that he made them after the hospital staff taking care of him refused his request to turn off Christmas music, thus violating his First Amendment right to be free from unwanted Christian speech.

Hate on the Left Is Beginning to Tell

Imagine my surprise when I saw this in the New York Times today:

Rampage Puts Focus on the Left’s Climate of Hate

LAS VEGAS -- The shooting of a group of uniformed National Guard members as they ate breakfast at an IHOP restaurant in Carson City, Nev on Tuesday set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.

While the exact motivations of the suspect in the shootings remained unclear, the targeting of members of the United States military, whose staunchest supporters are found among America’s conservatives, quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence by the nation’s progressives have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.

Only a few hours before the attack, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., sharing a Labor Day stage with President Obama in Detroit on Monday, described Democratic opposition to their Republican opponents as “a war,” and called on his followers to “take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” 2011 has already seen rallies in which members of a progressive seminar openly suggested “stringing up” Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, and killing Fox News’s Roger Ailes.

New York Times opinion writer, Paul Krugman, is wondering in his most recent column:

“When you heard the terrible news from Nevada, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

“Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since Maxine Waters told Tea Party members to ‘go straight to hell.’  Before that were the endless comparisons of Tea Party supporters and conservatives ‘hostage-takers,’ ‘terrorists,’ and the Ku Klux Klan.

“It’s true that the shooter in Nevada appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

“Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the left. It’s hard to imagine a Republican member of Congress urging constituents to be ‘get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.’; but Democratic Representative Michael Capuano, who did just that, becoming a hero to the public unions demonstrating in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year. The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.” . . . .

OK. I didn’t actually read any of this in the Times. I cribbed 50% of it from reporting in the Times done immediately following the Tucson shootings in January.  Then I borrowed the rest from a Paul Krugman hand-wringer blaming the Tucson shooting directly on conservatives.

All I wrote today is what you never saw or heard since yesterday’s murder of three National Guardsman, and wounding of two, and wounding of a half-dozen more in Nevada.  I’m not saying that Jimmy Hoffa caused this guy in Nevada to grab a gun and start shooting.

I mimicked the Times’s handling of this sort of thing to make the same point that countless commentators have been making about the media double standard since the latest headline about Hoffa’s speech in Detroit. That double standard immunizes comments from Obama, Hoffa, Waters, Jackson, Dean, Moore, etc., from charges of incivility or even bad manners. What more can be said about a double standard? It’s real, and we have to make the most of it.

I just thought I would imagine what it would sound like if the shoe were on the other foot, if only for a few moments.

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Another View on Rick Perry

In the interest of fair play, I think I should post something from the other side about Governor Rick Perry’s connections with Islam.  I recently posted Pamela Geller’s American Thinker article on Perry, (“Et Tu, Perry?”).  I think Pam is plenty smart.  But it’s early days and I don’t know everything.

Governor Perry's Islam Connection

By Amil Imani
The news of Governor Rick Perry jumping into the Republican nomination race for president released a media tsunami that assaulted my brain. In no time at all, people came up with a long list of negatives about him. In a democracy, honest and thorough scrutiny of anyone's records seeking a public office is not only the prerogative of the electorate, but its duty.

Being a lifelong critic of Islam, red flags popped up in my head at Perry's purported cozy relationship with Islam and prompted me to look very closely at the governor's record on this particular issue and at this specific time.

All kinds of worrisome thoughts flashed through my head. For one, I recalled another Republican Texas governor who became president and grew hoarse by so often shouting the mantra "Islam is a religion of peace." Is this another Texas Republican governor somehow beholden to oil interests and the oil sheiks of Saudi Arabia? Is he really another for-purchase politician dispensing favors to the powers that be? In this case, are deep-pocketed Muslims hell-bent on furthering Islam by exploiting the vulnerabilities of democratic societies? Are this man's sympathies with Arabs, and is he none too friendly toward Israel? I decided to strip my biases, look for facts, and let them settle these issues.

The facts are that Perry has indeed had a cordial relationship with Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims live in the Lone Star State. And a governor is to serve every segment of the population in accordance with the law. I grant that. But, is Governor Perry being even-handed with Muslims, as he is expected to be, or is he favoring them?

He is reported to be particularly friendly with the Ismailis, a relatively small sect of Shi'a Islam. Is there something fishy about that? There are roughly twenty to thirty thousand Ismailis who live in Texas, a small percentage of the Muslims in the state. Besides, if Perry wanted to curry favor with Muslims, why would he hitch his wagon to the Ismailis? Ismailis are persecuted and castigated by major Islamic sects such as the Sunnis who rule Saudi Arabia and the Twelve Imamates Shi'a who run Iran.

The Ismailis are hardly a significant Islamic force, as compared to the other sects. They number around fifteen million in the world and are splintered into several sects. By far the largest of the Ismaili sects is the Nizari Ismaili, with its followers adhering to dual loyalties. Their spiritual allegiance is to the Imam of the Time (Imam az Zaman), who is believed to be the interlocutor between Allah and the people. The position of the Imam az Zaman is hereditary from male to male, purportedly tracing back to Muhammad. Ismailis also owe allegiance to their countries as a fundamental obligation.

How militant and jihad-minded are the Ismailis, as compared to other sects of Islam? The Ismailis still hold to the notion of jihad, since the admonition is frequently stipulated in the Quran. They believe in what can be called "self-jihad" -- battling the self to become a better Muslim -- and "other-jihad," which is warring against non-Muslims. Only the Imam az Zaman can proclaim the fatwa authorizing warring against others. Since they are a small Muslim minority and widely scattered in many countries, Ismailis are less likely to be able to wage any kind of violent campaign against others. Yet, the idea of "other-jihad" is still within their belief make-up, since it is nearly a pillar of Islam. Furthermore, the notion of "self-jihad" can also be problematic, if the individual believer molds himself into a "pious" type by adopting the numerous anti-non-Muslim provisions of the Quran.

Any and all sects of Islam operate on the basis of the Quran and its various derivations, such that one and all are inimical to liberty and are violence-prone. In fairness to the Ismailis, it must be granted that they are less combative and Ummahist (international community of Islam) than other sects of Islam.
It is a fact that Perry, following the practice of a long line of other politicians such as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the late President John F. Kennedy, built a cordial relationship with the Aga Khan (Imam az Zaman) of the Ismailis.

Although Perry's cordial relationship with the Ismailis is indeed true, it hardly warrants alarm. What is more disturbing is the claim, nearly all of it originating from one source, that Governor Perry is supported by CAIR.

Facts show the contrary. There are reports that CAIR, the Islamist organization, was upset for not being invited to Perry's Response prayer event in Houston. CAIR has teamed up with the ACLU protesting the exclusion.

Another line of argument implying Perry's Islamic leanings, if not his out-and-out support, pertains to inclusion of Islam in the state's educational curriculum. I looked closely into that claim, because it is indeed a critical juncture where young minds can indeed be influenced.

The nuggets of the Muslim history curriculum Perry helped coordinate in Texas are summarized below. It says:
Countries of Western Civilization have secular governments, which means great toleration of cultural and religious differences.

Countries of Islamic Civilization for the most part either have religiously dominated governments or demands to make them more religious, which means less toleration of cultural and religious differences.

Muslims often lack respect for Western traditions and points of view. The Muslim relationship to the West is colored by the belief that Western beliefs [whether Christian or atheist] are defective and therefore inferior to Islam.

No matter how I tried, I couldn't reach the conclusion that this inclusion promotes Islam or is pro-Sharia. It seems that the mere fact that Islam is included in the curriculum represents supporting it.

And with regard to the concern that the education curriculum Perry promoted is pro-Arab and against Israel, the evidence is exactly the opposite. The lesson on Israel reads:

Since the end of World War One Palestine had been under the control of Great Britain, who at first welcomed the hardworking Jewish settlers. They made the most of the harsh conditions, bringing economic success to an area that had for a very long time been poor. Arab natives also welcomed the newcomers. But as the number of Jewish settlers increased and their economic success contrasted sharply with the economic backwardness of the Palestinian Arabs, the Arab attitude began to change.

Immediately, all its Arab neighbors declared war on Israel. As a result of this war, the territory of Israel expanded somewhat, and many Arab citizens of Israel fled to a small corner of Israel called the Gaza Strip. The Arab states refused to admit these refugees, preferring them to stay there as a testimony to the evil of the Jewish state. They are still there. These Arabs began calling themselves Palestinians and demanding a state of their own.

Criticism flew Rick Perry's way fast and furiously and from all directions. Here, Alana Goodman in Commentary bats a big one down.

And Perry's stance on other Islam issues speaks for itself. When Perry was questioned about building a mosque near ground-zero in New York, for instance, he

said, "To build a mosque near Ground Zero would be insensitive to the victims and families of 9/11 and would make the healing process much more difficult for everyone that was touched by this tragedy. I'm a big believer in freedom of religion but believe it would be best for all involved to put the facility elsewhere. However, zoning is a local responsibility and as a staunch supporter of the 10th Amendment, I do not think the federal government should take steps to intercede or overrule the wishes of local residents. The citizens of New York City will decide the fate of this building.

What about Perry's support for Israel? After a trip to the area in 2007, the governor supported Texas' divestment from companies that do business with Iran, a main supporter of Hamas. Also, the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce was created to help launch future commercial interests and solidify the strong business and cultural connections between Texas and Israel.

Governor Rick Perry was awarded the Defender of Jerusalem 2009 award during his trip when he also met with top Israeli political and academic leaders. 

Unless someone can come up with solid evidence to the contrary, I feel relieved that Governor Perry is not an Islamophile. He is not even an Islamic apologist, and he can be entrusted with the responsibility of guarding our nation's priceless heritage of liberty against the assaults of Islamic fascism. 

Amil Imani is the author of a new book, Operation Persian Gulf.

Hijabis in Playland

There was a riot of Muslims at the Playland amusement park in Westchester County, New York this past Tuesday:
  

A number of them flew into a violent rage when told that, due to safety rules, women had to remove their flowing head scarves or hijabs before going on certain rides -- including the Catch-a-Wave ride, the Crazy Mouse roller coaster and the Dragon Coaster, according to news reports describing a violent melee involving Muslims fighting police, security personnel, and each other. It prompted a large police response -- at least 60 police cruisers from nine agencies, along with a police helicopter circling overhead, according to The Journal News, a local Gannett newspaper offering the best coverage of the melee.

Some 15 people were arrested following the melee, reportedly involving 30 to 40 people. The trip was arranged by the Muslim American Society of New York, which had expected to bring some 3,000 people to Playland, the paper noted.

How come the Muslim American Society apparently failed to let everybody on its outing know about the "no hijab" policy in advance? That's a question some park officials were asking, including Deputy Parks Commissioner Peter Tartaglia. He told The Journal News that park officials had "painstakingly" told the organizer about the headgear ban. But apparently, he said, those rules weren't passed along to many attendees.

Then again, maybe Muslim leaders deliberately failed to pass along the "no hijab" policy because they felt they were being bullied; or perhaps they were content to let a confrontation occur. (“Riot at amusement park over 'no hijab' rule”).

The heroine of this jihad is Ola Salem, 17, of Coney Island. Watch the  video interview with Ms. Salem, and you can appreciate my skepticism, as she describes with what celerity she organized an impromptu flying wedge of angry hijabis at the entrance to the park.

As she tells it, after being told by the ride operator about the rule on long scarves, Ms. Salem, instead of merely complying or moving on, told the operator’s supervisor that removing her hijab would be “as if I take off my shirt.”

Well, no one was asking her to take off her shirt. The supervisor repeated that if she wanted to get on the ride, she could remove her scarf. As Ms. Salem recounts, 

“It was offensive but I let that go. (!) So I decided to gather a couple women that also wear the scarf. I gathered about 50 when I started.”

To Ms. Salem, “letting it go” means gathering the largest demonstration she can muster, and gathering “a couple women” means 50 to start off with. She either has a phenomenal number of friends, or is a born organizer. Once Ms. Salem’s mob of fifty angry Arab women confronted the manager of the park, who was, (she says)“disrespectful also,” they tripled their number and moved it to the park entrance. (I wonder if her poor sister ever got to go on any more rides after this, She wasn’t wearing a hijab.)
 
Based on her own account, it was Ms. Salem who raised the stakes every step of the way. When being told of the rule, she simply expected it to be suspended for herself and her fellow hijabis regardless of the purpose behind it. When an exception wasn’t made for her, that was “offensive,” and “disrespectful.”

Absent from all this is any idea that Ms. Salem and her fellow Muslims could have handled this otherwise than by getting it their own way. Capturing the spirit nicely, Amr Khater, who brought his family along with this group, saw the whole thing from only one side. "Everybody got mad, everybody got upset. It's our holiday. Why would you do this to us?"

Ms. Salem told the New York Times that “They said no because of my ‘headgear’. . . I said, ‘It’s not my headgear, it’s my religion.’” Never mind that the ride operator never said no to her eight-year-old sister, whom the operator would have concluded was also a Muslim, nor any of the several hundred male Muslims who were getting on rides all over the place.

Ms. Salem may just as well have said of the riot she started: “I said it was discrimination, but it’s not discrimination, it’s my religion.”

Thus the genius of those colorful scarves. They’re not just headgear: they’re weapons.
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Woe Unto Them that Call Evil Good, and Good Evil

Dennis Prager writes the following for NRO:

Israel — an Apartheid State? 

Next month, the U.N.-sponsored Hate-Israel Festival known as Durban III takes place. Under the heading “Anti-Racism,” the great bulk of the conference, like its Durban I and II predecessors, consists of condemning Israel for racism and equating it with an apartheid state.

Of the world’s many great lies, this is among the greatest.

How do we know it is a lie? Because when South Africa was an apartheid state, no one accused Israel of being one. Even the U.N. would have regarded the accusation as absurd. Israel has nothing in common with an apartheid state, but few people know enough about Israel — or about apartheid South Africa — to refute the libel.

So let’s respond. First, what is an apartheid state? And, does Israel fit that definition?
From 1948 to 1994, South Africa, the country that came up with this term, had an official policy that declared blacks second-class citizens in every aspect of that nation’s life. 

Among many other prohibitions on the country’s blacks, they could not vote; could not hold political office; were forced to reside in certain locations; could not marry whites; and couldn’t even use the same public restrooms as whites.

Not one of those restrictions applies to Arabs living in Israel.

One and a half million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20 percent of the country’s population. They have the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. They can vote, and they do. They can serve in the Israeli parliament, and they do. They can own property, businesses, and work in professions alongside other Israelis, and they do. They can be judges, and they are. Here’s one telling example: It was an Arab judge on Israel’s supreme court who sentenced the former president of Israel, a Jew, to jail on a rape charge.

Some other examples of Arabs in Israeli life: Reda Mansour was the youngest ambassador in Israel’s history, and is now Consul General at Israel’s Atlanta Consulate; Walid Badir is an international soccer star on Israel’s national team, and captain of one of Tel Aviv’s major teams; Rana Raslan is a former Miss Israel; Ishmael Khaldi was until recently the deputy consul of Israel in San Francisco; Khaled Abu Toameh is a major journalist with the Jerusalem Post; Ghaleb Majadele was until recently a minister in the Israeli Government. They are all Israeli Arabs. Not one is a Jew.

Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world. No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel have.

Now one might counter, “Yes, Palestinians who live inside Israel have all these rights, but what about the Palestinians who live in what are known as the occupied territories? Aren’t they treated differently?” 

Yes, of course, they are — they are not citizens of Israel. They are governed by either the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) or by Hamas. The control Israel has over these people’s lives is largely manifested when they want to enter Israel. Then they are subjected to long lines and strict searches because Israel must weed out potential terrorists. 

Otherwise, Israel has little control over the day-to-day life of Palestinians, and was prepared to have no control in 2000 when it agreed to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state to which it gave 97 percent of the land it had conquered in the 1967 War. The Palestinian response was to unleash an intifada of terror against Israeli civilians.  

And what about the security wall that divides Israel and the West Bank? Is that an example of apartheid? That this is even raised as an issue is remarkable.   

One might as well mention the security fence between the United States and Mexico an example of apartheid. There is no difference between the American wall at its southern border and the Israeli wall on its eastern border. Both barriers have been built to keep unwanted people from entering the country. Israel built its security wall in order to keep terrorists from entering Israel and murdering its citizens.  

What appears to bother those who work to delegitimize Israel by calling it an apartheid state is that the barrier has worked. The wall separating Israel from the West Bank has probably been the most successful terrorism-prevention program ever enacted.  

So, then, why is Israel called an apartheid state? Because by comparing the freest, most equitable country in the Middle East to the former South Africa, those who seek Israel’s demise hope they can persuade uninformed people that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist just as apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve to exist.

Yet, the people who know better than anyone else what a lie the apartheid accusation is are Israel’s Arabs — which is why they prefer to live in the Jewish state than in any Arab state. There are lies, and then there are loathsome lies. “Israel is an apartheid state” is in the latter category.

Its only aim is to hasten the extermination of Israel.
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The Missing Link Wore Underpants

Forget midnight football practice. Michigan’s most famous visiting jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka, the Underwear Bomber, showed what Ramadan observance really means when, “in defense of Muhammad [Peace be Upon Him]” . . . . he “assaulted several officers from his cell” in Milan Prison on Wednesda, “in the Holy Month of Ramadan.”
 
And it’s not just me saying he committed assault. The words above are the U-Bomber’s very own verbatim description of his actions in the handwritten motion he submitted Thursday to the US District Court in Detroit.  In it, he demands that officers not be allowed to respond with “excessive force” when all he was doing was “justly defending Muhammad [PBUH] and his Religion.” Defending them, that is, by launching a pre-emptive and unprovoked assault on several officers.
 
U-Bomber’s motion is in the hallowed jailhouse tradition of inmates who denounce the wicked jailers who brutalize them for no reason when all the inmate was doing was minding his own business.  In U-Bomb’s case, his description of himself minding his own business happens to include charging, unprovoked, several of his guards.  For this, he argues, there is absolutely no reason why he should be punished.

By the U-Bomber’s concept of justice, one he shares with millions of jihadists around the world, an aggressive act is a permissible “defensive” act when waged against anyone defaming Muhammad.   So fundamental a truth is this in the U-Bomber’s  mind that he sees no need to include in his motion any details, real or invented, of any wrongdoing or provcative behavior on the part of the officers that could explain his outbrust of violence.  He never says the officers flushed his Koran, or called him an Islamophobic name, or tried to read to him from the polytheist Bible.  What he does say is that the “ United States legally allows the defamation of Muhammad (PBUH), and by allowing so it is defaming and Abusing Him] PBUH.”
  
This is his legal argument, that because the American system of free speech doesn’t prohibit criticism of Muhammad under pain of execution, (à la Saudi Arabia, Iran, or, soon, Egypt) then it’s clearly lawful for any Muslim to attack Americans whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.
  
To his (Islamic) way of thinking, the U-Bomber’s “defensive jihad”against the officers he attacked was self-evidently justified because, for merely representing an unIslamic legal system that isn’t constituted according to Sharia, the officers were ipso facto aggressors against Islam.


Abdulmutallab isn’t crazy, and he isn’t stupid. Read his motion and it’s clear that not only is he not a raving lunatic, but he’s able to write English better than the average American can.  His rationale is completely consistent.  His failed attack on Flight 253, his attack on the officers this week, and his explanations for both attacks (and what I’m sure will be many more unprovoked attacks through the duration of his long and miserable life as a failed jihadist), follow the conventional Islamist jurisprudence that blesses unprovoked belligerence against nonMuslims. By defining the mere existence of people who willfully choose to disbelieve in Islam as an attack upon the Ummah, every attack on a nonMuslim can be justified as a defense of Allah and his prophet.

And this isn’t just the idiosyncratic misunderstanding of Islam by a deranged, misguided individual who is never going to draw a free breath again.  His views are important especially because they are the views of the imams, the mosques, the Brotherhood, and the Ummah that sent him here to kill as many Americans as possible.
 
Last fall Andrew McCarthy reported how Times Square bomber Feisal Shahzad, “[d]efiant and remorseless to the end,” responded  when asked by Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, as she sentenced him to life in prison, if he seriously believed the Koran wanted him to kill innocent people?

“The Koran gives you the right to defend,” he replied, adding, ”That’s all I’m doing.”

Robert Spencer wrote that Osama bin Ladin relied on Qur’an 22:39 in his communiques, justifying al Qaeda’s war as “defensive jihad,” not “war because of differences in religion, or in search of spoils of war.”
It is unbelief itself, Spencer explain, that constitutes

aggression for some Islamic authorities, and given the Qur’anic command to fight unbelievers until ‘religion is all for Allah’ (8:39), it is cold comfort to unbelievers, and no restraint for jihadists, to remind them that they should only be fighting aggression.

This is consistent with the views of the Muslim Brotherhood’s intellectual godfather, Sayyid Qutb when, as Spencer recounts, Qutb says that

“aggression has been committed in the first place, against God's Lordship of the universe and against other human beings who are forced to submit to deities other than God.” “Aggression,” then, is rebelling against God and submission to deities other than God: he sees the aggression simply as not believing in Islam.

While it may be a slight overstatement to say that just by sharing the planet with a Muslim an unbeliever in Islam is provoking a retaliation, there still is no shortage of fresh examples of that logic being applied.  Just yesterday Clifford May described what is happening now that Albania has become the first European member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference: 

When local authorities in the northern Albanian, majority-Catholic city of Shkoder announced that Mother Teresa would be commemorated with a statue, three Muslim NGOs protested — calling that a “provocation” against Islam.

Commemorating Mother Teresa a provocation of Islam?  It’s almost as if, in his evil genius, Muhammad had contrived to sanctify and transform into a virtue the base and ancient brutality that Cain used to justify slaying Abel, the harmless brother who provoked him just by being who he was.
Forget that local CAIR and ISNA spokesmen are saying whatever they can to distance Abdulmutallab, our living, breathing, Koran-invoking specimen of Homo Jihadicus, from the fairy image of mainstream Islam they’re determined to project. The reason ISNA’s Imam Steve Mustapha Eltruk calls Abdulmutallab a fool, and Dawud Walid’s public comments sound like desperate signals to his fellow Muslim Brotherhood member that “[h]e really needs to be quiet with these sideshow antics,” is that the U-Bomber, talking, is as destructive to the Brotherhood’s dawa as the U-Bomber, blowing up, was meant to be destructive to Flight 253’s infidels.

Anwar al-Awlaki never assigned Abdulmutallab to be either an apologist for Islam nor one of its taqiyya specialists, pulling wool over our eyes in the Dar-al-Harb.  All he was meant to be were the remains of Seat Zero in the smoldering rubble of Northwest Flight 253 after it came down in a ball of fire on top of my freaking garage. Now he’s still alive by some cruel joke of Allah, giving the local Ikhwan fits when he recites in open court passages from the not-so-Top Secret jihadi training manual.

Properly made use of, (which I doubt very much he will be), the U-Bomber could be priceless as a living diorama for demonstrating to skeptical Americans that there really is an unmistakeable chain linking the attacks of 9/11 with thousands of violent events before and after in what the Muslim Brotherhood defines as the Grand Jihad.

The same way the evolutionary Missing Link (if he weren’t Missing) would complete the Chain of Being between prehistoric apes and your most recent grandchild, the Underwear Bomber directly links contemporary global jihadism, as preached by al Awlaki, Choudhary, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, just to name a few, with the attacks perpetrated by Mohammed Atta, bin  Ladin, and al Qaeda in 2001.  In other words, we shouldn't be memorializing the attack, but preparing for the next one.
 
Americans in 2011 by and large are harbouring the dangerous delusion that the World Trade Center attacks were an historically isolated incident representing just a few individuals who were misinformed about their own faith -- and the entire threat they posed died with them. This delusion only stays alive and spreads because most of our enemies, and too many of our friends, keep repeating that a billion Muslims couldn’t possibly wish us any harm.

The Underwear Bomber says otherwise.  And I mean he is literally saying otherwise. Because among the ways Missing Link Abdulmutallab differs from the evolutionary version are that a) he actually exists, and b) he’s not fossilized bones but alive and eager to share with us the details of his primitive worldview.    I can’t imagine Richard Dawkins, upon meeting Neanderthal in the flesh, would not want to hear all about his dear old gorilla grandmother and his gifted toolmaking grandson?   Now here we have U-Bomb in captivity, not only having tried to blow our airliner up, but talking about why he was trying to blow our airliner up. Imagine if somehow Mohammed Atta had survived, and instead of plaintively asking oursleves, “Why do they hate us so much?” we couwould be able to ask him: “So, Mohammed? Why do you hate us so much?”
  
And wouldn’t we be insane not to listen to the answer?
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Et Tu, Perry?

I knew there was something about Perry I didn’t like.  Pam Geller explains what it is at American Thinker:

Perry's Problematic Pals

By Pamela Geller

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Saturday that he is going to seek the Republican nomination for President, and in his speech declaring his candidacy, he sounded great: "we reject this President's unbridled fixation on taking more money out of the wallets and pocketbooks of American families and employers and giving it to a central government," Perry said. "'Spreading the wealth' punishes success while setting America on course to greater dependency on government. Washington's insatiable desire to spend our children's inheritance on failed 'stimulus' plans and other misguided economic theories have given us record debt and left us with far too many unemployed."

Perry promises to fix all that: "We'll create jobs. We'll get America working again. We'll create jobs and we'll build wealth, we'll truly educate and innovate in science, and in technology, engineering and math. We'll create the jobs and the progress needed to get America working again."

Sounds good. But Perry has been sucked into the propaganda vortex, and is now wielding his enormous power to influence changes in the schoolrooms and in the curricula to reflect a sharia compliant version of Islam. He is a friend of the Aga Khan, the multimillionaire head of the Ismailis, a Shi'ite sect of Islam that today proclaims its nonviolence but in ages past was the sect that gave rise to the Assassins. Perry has concluded at least two cooperation agreements between the state of Texas and the Ismailis, including a comprehensive program to feed children in Texas public schools and taqiyya nonsense about how Islam is a religion of peace. Another agreement stipulates that Texas officials will work with the Ismailis in the "fields of education, health sciences, natural disaster preparedness and recovery, culture and the environment." Perry let on that this was all about whitewashing Islam's bloody historical and modern-day record: "traditional Western education speaks little of the influence of Muslim scientists, scholars, throughout history, and for that matter the cultural treasures that stand today in testament to their wisdom."

It gets worse. Last March, Perry gave a speech in Dallas in the company of Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist was close to George W. Bush, and Perry's anti-tax, anti-Big Government rhetoric sounds like it's right out of Norquist's playbook. But there is a dark side to Norquist as well: Norquist's ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. He and his Palestinian wife, Samah Alrayyes -- who was director of communications for his Islamic Free Market Institute until they married in 2005 -- are very active in "Muslim outreach." Six weeks after 9/11, The New Republic ran an exposé explaining how Norquist arranged for George W. Bush to meet with fifteen Islamic supremacists at the White House on September 26, 2001 -- to show how Muslims rejected terrorism.

The only problem was that the ones with Bush didn't. To Bush's left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas "freedom fighters." Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that "we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list." And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America, who once told a Muslim crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans that "America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come."

It was Norquist who ushered these silver-tongued jihadists into the Oval Office of an incurious president after the worst attack ever on American soil. Yet in December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist "has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover's part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends." Nor has Norquist changed course since then.

Grover Norquist was on the Islamic payroll before and after the carnage of September 11. Gaffney revealed Norquist's close ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now serving time in prison for financing jihad activity. In 2000, Alamoudi said at a rally, "I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody support Hamas here? ... Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. I wished they added that I am also a supporter of Hezb'allah." Alamoudi was at that time head of the now-defunct "moderate" group known as American Muslim Council (AMC), and he was active in other Muslim groups in the U.S. that showed sympathy to or support for jihadists. And Alamoudi gave $50,000 to the lobbying group Janus-Merritt Strategies, which Norquist co-founded. Alamoudi also helped found Norquist's Islamic Institute with a $10,000 loan and a gift of another $10,000.

It was bad enough that Bush was close to Norquist. There is no way the GOP can again nominate anyone who is so completely and utterly clueless about the fifth column within. Ten years after 9/11, can't we nominate someone who can speak to the ominous threat posed by Islamic supremacists in this country? There are no secrets here, even if the stealth jihad is covert and sneaky. We know what they are doing. See their whole plan, and how to fight it, in my new book Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.

Rick Perry must not be the Republican nominee. Rick Perry must not be President. Have we not had enough of this systemic sedition?

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The Daily Mail reports on how the Islamist group, Islam4UK is asserting itself in East London:
Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.
Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.’
The bright yellow messages daubed on bus stops and street lamps have already been seen across certain boroughs in London and order that in the ‘zone’ there should be ‘no gambling’, ‘no music or concerts’, ‘no porn or prostitution’, ‘no drugs or smoking’ and ‘no alcohol’.

Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed responsibility for the scheme, saying he plans to flood specific Muslim and non-Muslim communities around the UK and ‘put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term’.

You can read the rest of it here. 

Dennis Prager writes:

Jews’ True Friends
What will it take to wake Jews up?

The citizens of San Francisco will be voting on a proposition that seeks to ban circumcision in that city. Although I am strongly opposed to the proposition, if it passes, some good may come of it.

Let me explain. I am a passionate advocate of the Jewish ritual known as the brit (often pronounced bris) — the ritual circumcision of eight-day-old Jewish boys. I am even an advocate of circumcision generally. I was recently in Africa — in Zimbabwe and Zambia — where I delivered mosquito nets and seeds to the poorest of Africa’s poor. I saw giant billboards there, as well as in neighboring Botswana, exhorting men to get circumcised. The World Health Organization estimates that male circumcision reduces the rate of heterosexually transmitted AIDS by about 60 percent.

Regarding Jewish ritual circumcision, I can only say that I cried like a baby at the brit of my two sons. All I could think of was that, like generations of Jews who came before me, I had been given the gift of transmitting an unbroken chain of Judaism that dates back to Abraham — 3,600 years ago.

I find the arguments of those who campaign against the brit to be specious. The notion that some terrible, lasting pain is inflicted on the baby is simply ludicrous. The average time the baby cries is probably well under the time it cries than when tired, or desiring milk — and it does so far less frantically. I fully understand the conflicted feelings of the mother, and I see no reason for her to be present when the actual cutting of the foreskin takes place.

Does the baby experience pain and discomfort afterward? Yes. But it is temporary, and the baby heals quickly.

The advantages wildly outweigh the momentary pain. The brit uniquely strengthens a Jew’s religious identification, and the ceremony instills in the family and the community a profound identification with the nearly four millennia of the Jews’ world-changing history.

As for the argument that the foreskin is important, I can only say that in my most self-pitying moments I cannot recall lamenting not having my foreskin. As I have told anti-circumcision activists on my radio show, you have to be pretty bored with life to be preoccupied with not having foreskin.

One might add that the same people who are profoundly upset over the removal of foreskin rarely have a problem with the removal of a living human fetus. San Francisco considers protecting the human fetus religious fanaticism, but it is seriously considering protecting a newborn’s foreskin.
So, then, given my profound support for circumcision, what good could possibly come from San Francisco passing a ban on it? 

If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the Left. Obviously, San Francisco’s already-existing bans — on toys in Happy Meals, on soda in city-owned properties, on plastic bags, and the city’s proposed ban on the sale of pets, including goldfish — have not made many Jews (or non-Jews) wonder whether left-wing governance is dangerous. But perhaps a ban on circumcision will. 

Of course, not everyone who is on the left — and certainly not the traditional liberal — is an enemy of the Jews. But, aside from Islamists, virtually all the enemies of the Jews are on the left. 

The worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel (i.e., to pave the way for moral acceptance of Israel’s destruction) is virtually all on the left. Universities in America and elsewhere in the Western world, as well as the mainstream news-media outlets around the globe, are all dominated by the Left. They drum into the minds of their students, readers, listeners, and viewers that Israel is one of the worst societies on earth.

The anti-Israel propaganda on the left is so great and so effective that according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Many of the youths who survived the [Norway] massacre said they thought the killer, dressed as a police officer, was simulating Israeli crimes against Palestinians in the occupied territories.” 

Yet, most American Jews still walk around thinking that Christians and conservatives are their enemies when, in fact, they are the best friends Jews have in the world today. From the present conservative Canadian government, which is probably the most vocal pro-Israel country at present, to every major conservative talk-show host in America (including the fiercely pro-Jewish and pro-Israel Glenn Beck, who has been libeled as an anti-Semite), to the leader of Holland’s Party for Freedom and member of the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders (one of the most eloquent pro-Israel voices in Europe today), to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — the Right is where the Jews’ friends are.

What will it take for this generation of Jews on the left to realize what Arthur Koestler — perhaps the most prominent Jewish leftist of a previous generation — came to realize: namely, that leftism is “the god that failed”? Will it take a San Francisco ban on the oldest practice of the Jewish people? The city of Berkeley declaring Marines “unwelcome intruders”? PETA arguing that there is no moral difference between barbecuing chickens and cremating Jews? The ostracizing of the Jewish state from the world community by institutions dominated by the Left?
Whatever it takes, the sooner the better.
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