Garbanzo Toons

Calling All Human Shields

Human shields and human rights monitors are needed in Gaza posthaste! We've got a situation there, where people, including children are being indiscriminately murdered. Why just recently,

By Saturday night, 25 Palestinians — including a 2-year-old and a 12-year-old — had been killed and at least 76 were wounded . . .

Where are the monitors from the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International? Why are there no peace protesters volunteering to put their lives on the line as human shields to protect these children?

And guess what, there's more.

Major roads in Gaza City were blocked by concrete barriers put up by security personnel loyal to both factions, causing traffic jams as drivers were forced on to alternate roads.

and

Late Saturday night, a 12-year-old boy was killed and two people were wounded in northern Gaza during a shootout, witnesses and hospital officials said.

plus

Some 60 people have died in Gaza since early December alone . . .

So just where is the international outcry against this genocidal violence, these crimes against humanity?

Oh yeah, that's right. There are only complaints when Israelis defend themselves against the genocidal Palestinian Muslim terror gangs. And those brave, stouthearted human shields know that while the IDF will do everything in its power, including taking more casualties, in order to avoid hurting civilians (including the useful idiots who protest against Israeli self-defense), Palestinians will happily murder them, because the Palestinians have never had to face the consequences of their actions. That's only for Jews and other infidels. Every depravity of the Palestinians is excused by the moral retards who support them. And so long as the Palestinians are doing the killing, whether they're killing Israelis or each other, the world remains uninterested or pays lip service to the violence. And will Fatah continue to receive millions of dollars from the United States as the "moderate" faction?

The double standard lives!

Labels: Palestinians

posted by Harry @ 11:40 AM 2 comments

Jimmy Carter Exposed

Since Jimmy Carter's new book attacks Israel, the Jewish State, none of his attacks have to be factual in order for Israel/Jew haters to support both Carter and his book. Carter himself, while still claiming his book to be truthful has refused to debate Alan Dershowitz (who read and condemned the book) on his dubious claims. Carter has also engaged in one of the age-old libels against the Jews, claiming an organized conspiracy of Jewish organizations who are out to demonize him for telling the - ahem - truth. Sorry, but Carter debases the word. He also claims he wanted to start a debate on an issue which hasn't been debated. Carter must not have read a newspaper or seen a news show since he left office. And as Rich Lowry points out:

Incredibly, given his media presence, Carter thinks that he is being silenced by shadowy forces. He makes this bizarre claim: “My most troubling experience has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about the book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollment.” Does Carter keep track of which schools have lots of Jews? And who does he think is keeping him from speaking at them?

One of the claims of Carter's equally dishonest supporters is that critics of the book haven't even read the book and offer no specific instances of misinformation. They must have their noses pressed so deep in Carter's screed that they see nothing of what is going on around them. If it's specifics you want, here are some from Edward Green

p. 26 Carter mentions a complaint by Samaritans he met on travels in Israel, that their holy sites were not being respected (how is unspecified) by Israeli authorities. He bolsters the complaint by invoking Jesus and his disciples who heard the same complaint almost two thousand years earlier. Carter should be informed that archaeology is a national passion in Israel and that no nation surpasses Israel in devotion to the protection and preservation of antiquities.
p. 59 In the Six Day War, Carter writes, Israel launched pre-emptive strikes against Egypt, Syria, and then Jordan. The fact is that Israel asked Jordan to stay out of the conflict and did not attack Jordan until Jordan began an assault on Israel to honor its treaty obligations to Egypt. I heard King Hussein say exactly that on TV shortly after the cessation of hostilities.
p. 84-5 Carter discussing Jordan’s economic losses from the Six day War, has another opportunity to say that Jordan hit first, but doesn’t take it. In describing the losses in population and income in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, they are described as Jordanian, not Palestinian losses: tacit notice that eighteen years after the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish portions that Palestinian nationalism had not yet widely diffused.
p. 85 Re: the civil war in Jordan between Palestinian guerillas and the Jordanian army. Carter says Syrian forces under Defense Minister Assad of Syria refused to attack Jordan’s forces and Hussein was able to prevail. The fact is that Syrian forces had already penetrated Jordan to assist the guerillas, but under Israeli threat, withdrew.
p. 95 In the course of Israel’s intervention in the Lebanese civil war in 1982, as many as 3500 non-combatant Muslims in the Shatila and Sabra Palestinian refugee camps controlled by Israel’s allies were slain, for which, Carter writes, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was held accountable. Carter omits to say that the killings were done by Maronite Christian militiamen. Ariel Sharon’s role in the matter is controversial. As commander of the Israeli and allied forces, the buck extended to him, but there is no evidence that he sanctioned the killings. He invited Lebanese Phalangist militia units to enter the refugee camps and expel the PLO fighters. Israeli soldiers would remain outside the camp while the Maronite forces under the direct command of Elie Hobeika, who would later become a longtime Lebanese parliament member and also a cabinet minister, entered. The Maronite phalangists exceeded Sharon’s orders, slaying an estimated 700-3500.
p. 127 In a stunning non sequitur Carter connects the benefits accorded the deeply religious Jewish parties in Israel, their excuse from military service and funding for benevolent causes, to his understanding “..for the first time why there was a surprising exodus of Christians from the Holy Land.”
p. 150 Carter’s discussion of the negotiations regarding a settlement of land issues between Yassir Arafat and Ehud Barak refereed by President Bill Clinton gives the impression that neither side extended itself in order to reach accommodation. That’s not the way Clinton remembers it in his biography: “Barak had shown ‘particular courage , vision, and understanding,” in making concessions and Arafat refused to seize the moment.

Is that specific enough?

According to Tom Teepen:

Carter's entirely proper concern for Palestinian refugees ignores Arab culpability in their plight. Carter repeatedly says the refugees were forced out of Israel. Many were, but Carter fails to note that others fled on their own, often at the urging of Arab capitals that promised a quick, vindicating return. Nor does Carter call much attention to the fact that Jews fled and were chased out of Arab countries in nearly equal number. Israel absorbed its refugees. Most Arab states kept theirs in wretched camps as an incitement against Israel.

Carter takes every pacific Arab utterance at face value, although the rhetoric notoriously says one thing to the West and quite another, in Arabic, for internal consumption.

He charges that Israel never allowed the Palestinian territories autonomy, but it did. The local officials were intimidated, terrorized and even murdered by other Palestinians as "collaborators."

Tracking Carter can be tricky work. As president, he had the United States vote for U.N. resolution 465, condemning Israeli settlements and demanding the return of East Jerusalem and a restoration of the 1967 borders. Within days, Carter recanted the U.S. vote — but now cites Israel's refusal to comply as evidence of Israeli perfidy.

Indeed, add up Carter's references to Israelis as acquisitive, duplicitous and devious and you get — Fagin! Maybe Carter isn't consciously appealing to latent anti-Semitism to push his case.

Israel's unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza are noted but not credited, and Carter's resort to charging Israel with apartheid — when the very point of the Gaza withdrawal was as a first step to forestalling such an eventuality — is a smear.

The Camp David Accords called for specific steps toward a broad Arab-Israeli peace. Those didn't occur, and Carter has always blamed Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, who he did not like, rather than the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who he did like.

Even Ethan Bronner, who if you read the entire review, blames most of the problems of the Middle East on Israel, points out Carter's fabrications.

his is a strange little book about the Arab-Israeli conflict from a major public figure. It is premised on the notion that Americans too often get only one side of the story, one uncritically sympathetic to Israel, so someone with authority and knowledge needs to offer a fuller picture. Fine idea. The problem is that in this book Jimmy Carter does not do so. Instead, he simply offers a narrative that is largely unsympathetic to Israel. Israeli bad faith fills the pages. Hollow statements by Israel's enemies are presented without comment. Broader regional developments go largely unexamined. In other words, whether or not Carter is right that most Americans have a distorted view of the conflict, his contribution is to offer a distortion of his own.

Yasir Arafat is portrayed as someone who disavowed terrorism. Hafez al-Assad, who was president of Syria until 2000 when he died and his son took over, is quoted for an entire section, offering harsh impressions of Israel, including the opinion that it "initiated the 1967 war in order to take even more Arab land." Carter does not contradict him. The separation barrier that Israel is building along and inside parts of the West Bank is not to stop suicide bombers and other violent attacks. Its "driving purpose," Carter says, is "the acquisition of land." Such misrepresentations - and there are others - are a shame . . .

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Washington Post offers this:

immy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made.

"With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins -- and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew -- he is on a mission from God.

and this,

This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land."

In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier.

The murder of Israelis, however, plays little role in Carter's understanding of the conflict. He writes of one Hamas bombing campaign: "Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996." That spree of bombings -- four, actually -- was unfortunate for the peace process, to be sure. It was also unfortunate for the several dozen civilians killed in these attacks. But Israeli deaths seem to be an abstraction for Carter; only the peace process is real, and the peace process would succeed, he claims, if not for Israeli intransigence.

and even this,

Carter does not recognize the fact that Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform) because to do so would fatally undermine the thesis of his book. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.

Are there more critical reviews of Carter's book by reviewers who have read the book? Of course there are. According to the afore mentioned Alan Dershowitz,

YOU CAN ALWAYS tell when a public figure has written an indefensible book: when he refuses to debate it in the court of public opinion. And you can always tell when he's a hypocrite to boot: when he says he wrote a book in order to stimulate a debate, and then he refuses to participate in any such debate. I'm talking about former president Jimmy Carter and his new book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid."

Will this deter Carter's supporters? Will they face the truth that Carter has written a dishonest book?

Never in a million years. It's much easier to blame the Jews for all that is wrong in the world than to accept personal responsibility.

Labels: Israel, Jimmy Carter

posted by Harry @ 7:45 PM 0 comments

Bad Americans Must be Punished

Let's face it, most people's thinking reflects the Bush administration's, and, as a result, the majority can't care less about the deaths due to air pollution, national security or the potential for catastrophic global warming when they purchase vehicles. The purchase and operating price are far more important.

So I am disappointed to see the price of gasoline come down and patiently await the day when gas will cost $5 per gallon or more, as it will in the near future. Only then will consumers start rejecting gas guzzlers and begin demanding and buying fuel-efficient vehicles. Only then will we begin to seriously confront climate change and our country's energy security.

That was a letter in today's Free Press. Apparently, we who drive are destroying the world. The person who wrote this letter must reside in a cave and live off the land, only eating raw food and wearing only skins from animals he himself killed so that he doesn't have to light a fire which would pollute the air. How did his letter get to the Free Press? He must have walked to their offices and dictated it. That way he wouldn't have to contribute to environmental degradation by the use of an electricity-using computer, or by sending a letter, the paper on which it was written causing the needless destruction of trees, and who knows what chemicals are in the ink? Not to mention exhaust from the mail trucks that would have had to carry the letter.

The letter is in response to a column by Tom Walsh.

Leuliette told me Tuesday he believes progress is being made with key members of Congress. "Energy policy is moving up in importance on the list of topics for the 2008 presidential campaign," he said.

It's critical, he added, that falling gas prices not be allowed to defuse the sense of urgency for new energy solutions.

"No other town in the country suffers more than Detroit from lack of an energy policy," he said. That's because drivers in the United States spend only 30% to 40% of what consumers elsewhere in the world spend for gas; that means that in recent decades Detroit's automakers have focused mostly on developing large trucks and SUVs for which there is no demand anywhere else in the world. This gives Japanese and European carmakers, which have lots of experience developing vehicles for $5-a-gallon gasoline markets, an edge in a future world of higher oil prices.

Leuliette has been a vocal supporter of hydrogen as the transportation fuel of the future. But his more important push is for a series of gas tax increases, 10 cents a year, that would nudge American gas prices closer to the world norm and force the U.S. government to adopt a real energy strategy.

What really matters is that our country -- government in tandem with industry -- go all out to accelerate development of these technologies. Otherwise, we remain vulnerable to goofballs running Iran, Venezuela and who-knows-where next.

Yes, the United States does need an intelligent energy. Yes, we absolutely must wean ourselves off of foreign oil. The best way to do that though, is to stop demonizing the oil companies and start allowing greater investment in domestic oil sources. We know they're there. If we are really interested in keeping our economy humming along and stop supporting jihad, we have all of the ingredients right here in North America.

According to Mr. Walsh, the letter writer, and other anti-capitalists, we Americans must be punished for our wealth and our success in creating a thriving economy. According to their environmentalist plans, our economy must cease humming along. If Mr. Walsh and others are so concerned that we stupid Americans are destroying the planet through our wealth-enhancing ways, they too can go live in a cave. In the meantime, shut up and leave the rest of us alone.

For more on the subject, go to American Digest.

Labels: environment, gas prices

posted by Harry @ 7:21 PM 0 comments

The '08 Election

If this is true, I'm voting for Hillary in '08. I don't even care what her policies are or who her husband is.

Labels: Bigfoot, Hillary Clinton

posted by Harry @ 7:09 PM 0 comments

How Much Longer Does the Charade Continue?

After all these years, why do they still insist that Palestinians have any legitimate demands to anything other than what they've created for themselves? According to this article

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice on Sunday that he opposes the establishment of a provisional Palestinian state within temporary borders.

Palestinian officials in recent weeks have grown increasingly wary of the idea, which was also proposed by
Israel's foreign minister, fearing they will be stuck indefinitely with a truncated state.

"We reaffirmed to Secretary Rice our rejection of any temporary or transitional solutions, including a state with temporary borders, because we don't see in it as a realistic option," he told a joint news conference with Rice.

So

Rice responded by reiterating the U.S. commitment to the internationally backed "road map" peace plan. She not address the idea of a provisional state at the news conference, but Mohammed Dahlan, a confidant of Abbas, said later she "showed understanding" for the Palestinian position.

"My work is going to be best targeted, I think, in these next months on trying to accelerate progress on the road map, which after all would lead us then to a Palestinian state and to helping the Palestinians and Israelis think through the political horizon," she said.

Rice said she was told during her trip that the United States needed to deepen its involvement in Mideast peace efforts. "You will have my commitment to do precisely that," she said.

"The Palestinian people have waited a long time for their own state. The Israeli people have waited a long time to live in security and peace with their neighbors," she said.

I'm always hearing about what a mental giant Rice is, but if she's still pandering to Abbas and his Fatah terrorists, she's showing the same inability to learn that plagues the rest of our "leadership".

Hamas, which has dominated the Cabinet since winning parliamentary elections in March, has balked at international demands it recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing peace deals before Western sanctions on economic assistance to the government could be lifted.

The international community, including the U.S., insists that any Palestinian government recognize Israel's right to exist, but Hamas has refused to do so.

In other words, it doesn't matter what Rice claims, or what Abbas says in order to maintain his position as a "moderate". As long as cash from the West keeps flowing into Palestinian coffers, Palestinians will keep attacking Israel. Rice, however, wants to keep the delusion alive that there is a Palestinian leadership that is ammenable to peace. She ignores the words and deeds of Hamas and the low level civil war that has engulfed Palestinian society. Maybe she accepts the traditional Islamic explanation for the civil war and for all Islamic troubles, an explanation built and refined over years of Islamic scholarship, and now accepted by dupes and useful idiots in the West:

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas contended that Israel and the U.S. were trying to fan the flames of a Palestinian civil war.

That's right, blame the Jews . . . excuse me, I mean the "Israel lobby." It's helped bring the Palestinians to their current state as a model society, so why mess with success? Right Condi?

If you think the situation is ugly now, if Israel gets the strong leadership they need anytime in the near future, it could get uglier. Unfortunately, violence seems to be the only negotiating tactic that either Hamas or Abbas understand. And violence will be the only tactic that will insure Israel's survival.

Labels: Abbas, Condi Rice, Hamas, Palestinians

posted by Harry @ 10:26 AM 0 comments

A Sovereign Palestine?

From The Sydney Morning Herald and linked to by way of Little Green Footballs, I found my way to an interesting opinion piece.

Not only won't there be a sovereign Palestinian state, there can't be.

It's no longer viable. At every historic juncture since Israel was created in 1948, rhetoric has taken precedence over pragmatism in the Arab world. As a result, every one of these historic junctions has resulted, without exception, in material defeat for the Palestinians.

In 1948, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs - the number remains contested and inexact - heeded calls from the Arab world and fled their homes in the newly proclaimed Israel. The result? The Palestinian position of 1948 now looks infinitely superior to the Palestinian position of today.

In 1967, Israel was invaded by its Arab neighbours in the Six Day War. The result? The Arabs lost control of the holy city of Jerusalem and the Palestinians went from Arab rule to Israeli control.

In 1982, after the Palestinians sparked a civil war in Lebanon, Israel invaded Lebanon and Jordan's army attacked the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The result? The Palestinians were crushed in Lebanon and Jordan and Israel fortified its position in the West Bank.

In 1987, the first Palestinian intifada began at the instigation of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and suicide bombings came to Israeli life. It lasted almost five years. The result? Israel again fortified and expanded its positions and the West Bank was divided into military-controlled subdivisions.

In 2000, Arafat launched the second intifada, his response to Israel's final offer in the Oslo peace accords. It lasted six years. The result? What the Palestinians were offered in 2000 is now impossible today, because Israel has since encircled Jerusalem with settlements housing 100,000 Jewish settlers. And Israel began building the Wall.

In 2006, Hezbollah attacked Israel, in the cause of Palestine, and Hamas and other militant elements fired rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, as political opposition was Islamicised. The result? Some 175 Israelis were killed by Hezbollah, for which Lebanon paid with more than 1500 dead, and Hezbollah lost its military control of southern Lebanon. It thus lost its strategic forward position for no strategic gain.

It should be obvious by now that the Palestinians and their allied Jew-hating Islamic supremecist allies haven't learned a thing. It's obvious that no one else has learned anything either. The Palestinians and surrounding Arab states get their asses handed to them time and time again. Israel, the winner in every conflict, stops way short of humiliation and total destruction so their enemies never know true defeat. Then to make matters worse, it's always Israel that begs for peace.

The world community then condemns Israel for defending themselves and beating a numerically superior enemy, you know, disproportionate response and all that. Unfortunately, the only way to end this thing is for Israel, and the West, to fight back - for real. The longer we wait, the uglier and more vicious the war is going to be when the fan gets struck - for real.

Labels: Israel, Palestinians

posted by Harry @ 9:25 PM 0 comments

The Wicked Son

David Mamet has written an intriguing little book called, The Wicked Son, sub-titled, Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews. I didn't want to buy it, but after reading a few dozen pages at random standing in my favorite book story, I knew I had to have it. It will probably make more sense to you if you're Jewish, but if you're interested in the current rise in anti-semitism, and identification with "the Palestinian cause" among Jews, this is a book worth reading. It isn't easy. Mamet has quite a vocabulary. His arguments are not always linear. And - here it comes - the obligatory - I didn't agree with everything he says. He does make a lot of sense though.

The title comes from the character in the Passover Haggadah, out of the four sons mentioned (the other 3 being the wise, the simple, and the one who doesn't even know how to ask) he is the one who asks, "What does all this mean to you?" thereby separating himself from his family and community. It's an angry book. Mamet repeatedly scolds the wicked son (the self-hating Jew), referring to his hypocricy and the emptiness of his life without a clear moral center. He scolds the wicked son for his search for meaning everywhere but within the traditions he is heir to. He condemns those Jews who want to find out about every "exotic" religion, who give great respect to all other beliefs, but who have no curiosity about the beliefs of their ancestors and even less respect.

There have always been Jews who, like the Wicked Son, reject their Judaism. Some of the most vicious persecutors of the Jews during the Spanish Inquisitions were Jewish apostates. The kapos during WWII were Jews who worked for the Nazis, helping to ship fellow Jews on their final trip to the death camps and helping to murder them once in the camps. Today, their spiritual decendents call themselves "human rights activists" and work for Palestinian causes against the State of Israel without any regard for the truth.

I would like to offer two quotes from the book;

In my lifetime we Jews, mythologically, have served the cause of soft pornography. The world weeps at our being killed. What fun.

I wrote, years ago, that Holocaust films are "Mandigo" for Jews, and that the thrill for the audience, came and comes from a protected indulgence of anti-semitism: they get to see us killed and to explain to themselves that they feel bad about it.

The film, The Sum of All Fears has Tom Clancy putting the world itself at the brink of chaos because the dumb Jews have misplaced one of their atomic bombs. Further, as the film progresses, we find that the plutonium for the bomb was stolen from the United States. Where does the blame accrue?

Plucky little Belgium struggles against the Hun, but not Israel. Well.

What can we do? I believe we can do this: we can speak up. Many of us harbor fantasies about speaking up against the Nazi tyranny. How could the world not have spoken in 1933, in 1943, we ask? Were I alive then, we fantasize, I would have spoken . . . . But we were not, or not of an age of reason and we cannot "speak up" in the past. We can speak up now.

Don't let an instance of anti-semitism pass. Stand up for yourself and stand up for your people. It is possible to support the Palestinian cause without being an anti-semite, and there are people of goodwill who do so. But much of the pro-Palestinian feeling in the West is a protected example of anti-semitism, and, when and as it is such, it should be opposed.

And finally, he offers this bit of advice to the self-hating Jew, whether it be a son or a daughter:

We are the children of kings and queens, a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. We are the children of a mystery that has not abandoned us and that has come for us; it is both described and contained in the Torah.

Labels: anti-semitism, David Mamet, Jews

posted by Harry @ 4:30 PM 2 comments