First, let me give credit, where credit is due, to Always On Watch, whose references linked me to posts, in sequence-of-events order, at three really good blogs, here, here and here.

Thanks, AOW, you really got me to thinking about this.

We’re at war, although you won’t hear much about it from the left, with fundamentalist Islam.

This war isn’t merely a war between people whose Sabbaths fall upon different days, it is a war between two profoundly different moralities. One advocates strangling your wife if she goes to the corner for a quart of milk and forgets to bring a male family member along. It experiences no problem with sacrificing innocent people as human shields for use as propaganda against its enemy, or of committing suicide in order to murder a few women and children, with an occasional toddler, just because.

The other side is our side, at least those of us who believe in liberty and justice {boy, did that sound noble!}, ahem. Um, ahem! …. or simple human decency.

All that said, what I started thinking about after reading about the Texas incident in the first above link, from Eyes All Around, was “what if the shooter was just a maniac who happened to be of Arabian descent?”

I don’t know how many western born and parented readers have actually gotten to know any Arab Muslim immigrants (I don’t mean as “how do you do” while walking your dogs, I mean as actually sociallizing with one anothers’ families, etc). I’ll wager that most have barely if ever even seen the inside of said Muslims homes, let alone relaxed in the living room with their missus and kids in evidence.

I’ve begun to wonder about this immediate attribution to jihad that becomes the immediate issue whenever an Arab goes on a murder spree.

I’ve found myself theorizing that a significant portion of Islam’s violence output isn’t necessarily religious, but instead employs religion as an excuse to destroy and murder, some strain of hereditary mass emotional disorder. I mean, a religious doctrine that literally revolves around mass murder in order to achieve its objectives must leave quite an interesting impression on its followers, especially if they’ve grown up among a society of fellow psychotics whose religious leaders and other teachers have been preaching them a menu of intolerance and hate since they were old enough to pay attention. No, no, I’m not by any means attempting to play the liberal “it’s not this poor, hard-done-to creature’s fault that he murdered all those people, it’s society’s fault game, I’ll leave to the same idiots who believe street crime is the fault of the proletariat rather than that of the actual criminal. I chose the word “proletariat” because I want those who kollektively believe that way to feel also at home.

No, I’m from the school of thought that believes that a mad dog must be put down for the good of the community.

Imagine growing up in an Arab Muslim society. Here is a people who ceased to advance socially some fourteen centuries ago. Their issue from the days of the child molester Mohammed has grown up in a world that has been passing them by, a generation at a time, for 1400 years. The only reason they know about flushable commodes is that western countries taught them how to recover their oil, and made them rich. Today, only because they were born atop lots of black gold, instead of choosing between a dromedary and a bactiary, they can choose between a convertible and a hard top.

So yeah, I can see why centuries worth of a civilization like that unchanging, inflexible dogma of the religiously defined Muslim Middle East could have produced millions of mental basket cases over the centuries, each raising a crop of their own.

What other community, even in civilized countries, explodes into such violent, destructive riots and rampages, the tantrums from hell, over the slightest percieved offense? What other community will hang a retarded teenage girl for being taken advantage of by some sexually opportunistic adult aged grease bag? What other community bestows honor upon parents because their children sacrificed their lives to blow up innocent women and children? How many other societies raise children capable of torturing, mutilating and beheading others with the same casualness the rest of us might identify with going grocery shopping?

My point is that as in the case of the drive-by doctor, perhaps we needn’t necessarily read jihad into his actions: Perhaps they were simply a biproduct of an Arab Muslim’s inherited mental instability, as may be the sudden, reasonless violent acts of many other Arab non-members of Muslim terrorist organizations.

These are a people who have proven themselves unfit to coexist, given their collective demonstrations of bloody and senseless violence, on the same planet with civilized human beings. They are social and emotional troglodytes whose religious beliefs, like them, belong centuries in the past, and as long as we share the planet with them their violence will continue to threaten the rest of us.

Tell me I’m a bigot, call me racially insensitive, call me whatever you like, but to ignore what is coming out of the Middle East to infect the west is no figment of anybody’s imagination. It’s there, it’s an in-your-face threat to the safety of the innocent and it lives inside all too many of the “dark complexioned Arab males” you pass on the street or otherwise encounter every day, the ACLU and CAIR protected species about whom you can say no wrong without being termed a racist.

In the Convolution Department, I have long wondered why the bulk of “the black vote” seems eternally bequeathed to the political party that has been black Americans’ {no, I won’t be PC and use the term “African Americans”, because despite the left’s attempts to create ethnic divides and feel-good solidarity with Kunta Kinte, black Americans are Americans, period. Not only those who were born here, but the ones who immigrated in recent years and of their own free will, from Africa}. I have friends from Senegal and Borkina Faso who now consider themselves “Americans, period” who apparently don’t see any need in being “African Americans” like millions of black Americans do who have never been within thousands of miles of Africa . “African” Americans, like “Asian” Americans and “Mexican” Americans, bearing ethnic titles that distinguish them from “other” Americans is calculated to make them “different”. You have to make somebody officially “different” in order to single them out as targets of “bigotry”.

Wait! Something’s wrong here!

The same Democrats who have rendered it illegal to ask any questions of job applicants that might be used to discriminate against them via age, race, gender, religious preference or political point of view, to the point of not even inquiring on a job application the years someone attended a school, college, whatever because it could be used to calculate age, suddenly champion the cause of defining just which “kinds” {flavors, brands?} of Americans they are by affixing a label to them. Ain’t that grand! Luckily this is the left we’re talking about here — had Republicans first advanced this idea, we would have been immediately assailed as “racists!” The fine folks over there on the left could never be called that, because they are…. they are…. over there on the left, where racism has somehow been established as impossible to exist.

Just ask Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or any opportunistic white Democrat that arse creeps the black community for votes. They’ll tell you. “Nope, no racism on our side of the aisle. Want racism, go across there to the Republicans. We’re the Democrats here (heavenly music in background, perhaps the Hallelujah Chorus), we don’t know the meaning of the word ‘racist’, except that it only applies to Republicans.”

This is, as any informed American (informed, as one who has long ago abandoned the mainstream media as a credible source of news, sought out and found more accurate alternative sources of information) can tell you, a crock filled with the scrapings from the bottoms of numerous ill-guided shoes.

To white Democrats, black Americans are little more than pieces of meat that vote and are susceptible to an eternal con job. If you actually examine the benefits blacks enjoy when they help elect white Democrats, you’ll find that there are none — in the 50 years or so that the left has enjoyed the “support” of the black community, they haven’t gotten much of a return. The only blacks that have gotten ahead have been those who busted their touchases to do so, same as before the white Democrats took them under their dubious wing.

A fellow Republican blogger and friend who has run for state office here in North Carolina has told me of a conversation he had with a black man during a campaign, in which the black man praised his candidacy and his platform, but said he would still vote Democrat, because “I’m black.”

This is ludicrous.

A column by Jeff Jacoby is as definitive as you can get as to why.

Of course the Republican Party’s record on race is not without its blemishes. For example, at a 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond in 2002, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi praised the former Dixiecrat’s segregationist 1948 campaign for president. Republicans were scandalized and forced Lott to resign as Senate majority leader.

Democrats, by contrast, have never moved to purge Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who wrote in 1947 that he would never agree to fight “with a Negro by my side” and would “rather . . . die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.” Byrd filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and is the only senator to have voted against both of the black justices named to the Supreme Court — the liberal Thurgood Marshall and the conservative Clarence Thomas. While Byrd has said his racism is a thing of the past, that didn’t stop him from using the N-word twice in an interview on national TV in 2001. Remarkably, none of this has harmed Byrd’s standing within the Democratic Party, nor the party’s standing among black voters.

To Truncate a bit,

After all, it was the Democratic Party that vehemently defended slavery, the Democratic Party that supported the Dred Scott decision, and the Democratic Party that opposed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. It was Democrats who founded the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats who repeatedly blocked anti-lynching bills, and Democrats who enacted Jim Crow segregation across the South.

Everyone knows that it was a 19th-century Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But how many know that it was a 20th-century Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal government, appointed unabashed racists to his Cabinet, and endorsed “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s celluloid celebration of the Klan?

Speaking for myself, as a Jewish white guy from Queens, N.Y., who has been around the block a few times, I see absolutely no difference between the status of blacks as human beings and the status of whites as same. As a matter of fact, the most formidable opponent I ever had when I was playing chess at my best was a black man from San Jose, and all the black folks I know who have thrown off the idiotic “oppressed by white Republicans, can’t achieve without Democrats” syndrome and taken their lives away from the left and into their own hands are now doing extremely well in life. They are living the American lifestyle without “help” from the left.

It’s sad to see so many blacks forming their opinions via the propaganda they get from the liberal mainstream media and as a result, continuing to deny themselves the positive representation they would receive from right thinking America.

I won’t even go into all the so-called “Blaxploitation” films of the early 1970s released by liberal Hollywood that influenced black youth to believe drug dealers and pimps were “cool” (personally, I’m partial to Pam Grier, ahem, no pimping or drug dealing there), or into the Rap music/videos of today that glorify “gangstas”, “bling bling” bought with drug profits and womens’ pumping up their derriers with silicone.

The left is forever making asses and dumbjohns out of our largest minority, and said minority simply follows along as though they were a lot less intelligent than they truly are.

Bummer.

Long and short? The bigotry actually resides on the left.

Read Jacoby’s as usual on-point column in its entirety here.

According to a column by Dennis Prager, I may have been a little hasty in recent posts when I opined that the Israeli left might well, even in the face of the ongoing purely defensive Jewish State military action against terrorism, continue to emulate the American left in pure lemminglike fashion.

Happily, this doesn’t seem to be the case — Israeli liberals, unlike our own, are in touch, it would seem, with a much larger chunk of reality than one might give any liberals credit for.

The Left’s anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the “cycle of violence” between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation.

That is why the Israeli Left is almost universally in favor of Israel’s war against Hezbollah. Amos Oz, probably Israel’s best-known novelist and leading spokesman of its Left, a lifetime critic of Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians, wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

“Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. . . . This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages. . . . There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah.”

Given an identical situation in the U.S., if their conduct re our homeland’s defense against terrorism is any indicator, our own liberals would be out in the streets in force, doing the usual blocking of intersections with a little gratuitous vandalism thrown in, the ACLU hammering out dozens of lawsuits against the government, the New York Times sabotaging our defensive efforts at every turn, Greenpeace, GBLT (– I like the 2nd and 3rd letters in that order, it sounds like a certain popular sandwich, with granola added), NOW, The Sharpton-Jackson Axis, All Of Hollywood, Planned Parenthood, ELF, Everyone In Berkeley, 98% of Congressional Democrats, my personal favorite, Dykes On Bikes, and every other liberal organization “weighing in” against America. CAIR (the terrorist supporting Council for American-Islamic Relations) would be bending forward to allow PC liberals a better angle at which to perform “The Kiss Of Shame”.

It’s refreshing to know that there are some lefties out there who possess some quantity of common sense and have retained that most valuable commodity, the survival instinct. Too bad they don’t live here.

I wonder if Israel would agree to an exchange — their liberals for ours….

The entire column can be read here.

James Lileks’ OpEd must be read.

Former Undersecretary of Defense(Bush 1 Administration) and author Jed Babbin has some spot-on reasons why it would be irresponsible in an extreme for the “global community” to interfere with Israel’s prosecution of their war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and by extension Syria and Iran.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair want to send an international force to separate Israel from Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Mr. Blair said a U.N. force should be sent to “stop the bombardment coming over into Israel and therefore [give] Israel a reason to stop its attacks on Hezbollah.” Mr. Annan said such a force could “pursue the idea of stabilization.” But their idea assumes, first, that a cease-fire would protect those worthy of protection and, second, that restoring the region’s antebellum “stability” would promote long-term peace. Both assumptions are utterly false.

Hezbollah is not some small, ragged band scattered around Lebanon. It is a huge terrorist structure, built over decades, that includes thousands of men, weapons, positions, offices and everything that enables it to control southern Lebanon. Israel is now destroying that infrastructure. A cease-fire would benefit Hezbollah and threaten Israel. It would protect both Hezbollah and the nations that support it–Syria and Iran–as well as the Lebanese who have accepted the terrorist organization as a legitimate part of their government. A cease-fire would allow Hezbollah to rebuild its power base and enable it to resume its attacks whenever Damascus and Tehran desired. For Israel, a U.N. force would create no security whatever against future attacks.

It has become rather tiresome, over the years, watching the same stupid jackass politicians, including a President I happen to like, continuously pressuring Israel into cutting off defensive actions before they’ve been completed and forcing them to go through a whole lot of diplomatic posturing in order to engender “peace” in the Mideast. I say these politicians are jackasses in this regard because they are too liberal-like when it comes to negotiating with Arabs — Hamas, Hezbollah and all the rest of Islam’s terrorist organizations break every agreement, no matter what, and these stupid, moronic, imbecillic politician dumb-asses go right back the next time and do it again. Even during “peace” negotiations, Arab bombs go off on Israeli streets, in stores and restaurants and on buses.

And every time, their only accomplishment is to get the Arabs a break so they can regroup and be fresh for their next treaty violation. I’m sorry, but these western politicians are effin’ boneheads — the only way Israel will ever have any peace is if they are allowed to destroy all the terrorist infrastructure over there, root and branch, and waste every last one of the terrorists’ leaders and supporters.

Sometimes the only way to achieve peace is through winning a war, and this is something the rest of the world has been keeping Israel from doing for a long time. These “peace” processes that all these Presidents of ours like to give themselves cudos for only serve to escalate terrorism and get more Israelis murdered.

I’m sorry, but when I hear Blair and some others want to pull the same crap yet again, it makes my blood boil. At least George W. Bush seems to have realized that his entire “Roadmap” enterprise was a complete waste of his time, to say nothing of a waste of the lives of innocent people killed by terrorists his “Roadmap” got released from Israeli prisons, and has given his blessing to Israel to do what they need to do, and that at least partly redeems him from some of the less delicate references in my above rant.

Anyway, read the rest of the OpEd here.

Finished? Good, because I’m not done yet.

Now let’s talk about the damage Israel’s liberals and the general complacency of their government have done.

Daniel Pipes is right on top of it.

For 45 years, 1948-93, Israel’s strategic vision, tactical brilliance, technological innovation, and logistical cleverness won it a deterrence capability. A deep understanding of the country’s predicament, complemented by money, will power, and dedication, enabled the Israeli state systematically to burnish its reputation for toughness.

The leadership focused on the enemy’s mind and mood, adopting policies designed to degrade his morale, with the goal of inducing a sense of defeat, a realization that the Jewish state is permanent and cannot be undone. As a result, whoever attacked the Israel state paid for that mistake with captured terrorists, dead soldiers, stalled economies, and toppled regimes.

By 1993, this record of success imbued Israelis with a sense of overconfidence. They concluded they had won, ignoring the inconvenient fact that Palestinians and other enemies had not yet given up their goal of eliminating Israel. Two emotions long held in check, fatigue and hubris, came flooding out. Deciding that (1) they had enough of war and (2) they could end the war on their own terms, Israelis experimented with such exotica as “the peace process” and “disengagement.” They permitted their enemies to create a quasi-governmental structure (the “Palestinian Authority”) and to amass hoards of armaments (Hizbullah’s nearly 12,000 Katyushas in southern Lebanon). They shamelessly traded captured terrorists for hostages.

And they gave the Palestinians — Hamas, a terrorist organization whose goal is the destruction of Israel — territory annexed in 1967 specifically for the purpose of having a security buffer zone in case of another invasion attempt by Syria. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the IDF had to fight tooth and nail to kick the invading Syrians off the Golan escarpment. So now an enemy sponsored by Syria occupies the security buffer zone with Israel’s blessing. Was that a brilliant move, or what?

Somewhere I was reading recently — I can’t recall exactly where, someone compared the “useful idiots” {western liberals, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s term}, of the USSR years who believed all the B.S. of Marxist propaganda spewed by communists and responded by joining the Communist Party, etc, and today’s “useful idiots”, who are this time swallowing all the “Religion Of Peace” folderol and to compound their gullibility, are so ignorant of Israel’s history and current affairs that they believe all the “occupation” and “apartheid” rhetoric generated by Islamofascist propagandists.

Now, I can see where that might be the case with western liberals, who get all their “news” from leftist bastions of bullshit like the New York Times and who know absolutely nothing about people and human nature, but from Israelis who have lived with terrorism and broken peace agreements by Arabs for so many decades, you’d expect a little more intelligence, or at least the wisdom born of long experience.

UPDATE

My blogger friend Always On Watch has indicated that the Saudis and fellow travellers have done a John Kerry and flip-flopped on us, going from condemnation of the “irresponsibility” on Hezbollah’s part that brought the wrath of Israel down on Lebanon to the standard form, general purpose condemnation and blame laid on Israel.

It is here.

These folks, and I’m speaking of Arab Muslim leaders, are about as mature as kindergartners.

Always On Watch, an already great blog, links to this great commentary, which must be read.

Read this!

So now, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is suddenly interested in complying with UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah. One can’t help but wonder why his government made no effort to comply with the resolution until the Israeli Defense Force {IDF} began pounding the bloody crap out of his country.

Of course, the anti-Israel U.N. never enforced Lebanon’s failure to comply with the resolution, since it was more a cosmetic kind of thing than anything the corrupt global organization actually intended to be taken seriously.

Siniora said the Israel Defense Forces assault had devastated his country, and called for international aid.

Go, IDF!

Deploying Lebanese troops on the southern border, now controlled by Hezbollah, would meet a repeated United Nations and U.S. demand. This demand is also backed by UN resolution 1559, calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese army in its stead. But the government fears that using force against Hezbollah could trigger another sectarian conflict in Lebanon, which was ravaged by civil war between 1975 and 1990.

Hey, guy, who’s running your country? A legitimate and responsible government, or a terrorist organization? If you expect anyone to take your government seriously, it has to enforce order in your country and has to be the only governing authority — that means it needs to take whatever risks are necessary to do away with the power Hezbollah enjoys in Lebanon. If you have to deploy troops in the south to fight tooth and nail against Hezbollah guerillas, then that’s what you have to do.

“I declare today that Lebanon is a disaster zone in need of a comprehensive and speedy Arab plan… and [it] pleads to its friends in the world to rush to its aid,” he said.

The Lebanese army is about 70,000 strong, equipped with American, French and Russian weapons but virtually no air force.

The UN Security Council on Saturday again rejected pleas that it call for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon after the United States objected, diplomats said.

Emphasis mine. Bravo, Condi, Bolton & Bush!

If Fouad’s government isn’t “up to” addressing the Hezbollah problem, maybe they ought to sit back, break open a can of pomegranate cola and weather things out while Israel gives their country the terrorism-purging enema it so badly needs….

H/T James Taranto

I hate to say this, but the reference to French weapons brings to my mind a few thousands of cases of white flags on hand-held poles. France must be the only country in the world whose military employs personnel whose job it is to declare, “We Surrender!”

Later.

I love the way the media pounced on Bush’s use of a four letter word, especially in this headline that says Mideast crisis drives Bush to colorful language.

Bush replied: “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.” Shortly afterwards Blair noticed the microphone and hastily switched it off, but not before the recording had reached news media.

{The correction from “it” to “is” in the quoted text is mine, there is a typo in the actual article}.

Hmmm, reminds me of an occasion on which Ronald Reagan, purportedly not realizing a mic was live, scared the piss out of the Soviets with a quip about preparing to launch missiles.

I like the fact that the leaders of the U.S. and Britain are friendly and informal enough in their private conversations to speak without having to be “PR”. The way the media sounds, you’d think this was an earth shaking event. Possibly even more earth shaking than when a President makes adulterous “whoopie” with his interns, lies to Congress, commits rape and serves up sexual harrassment as frequently as a server in a diner delivers coffee to customers.

Personally, I’d've preferred, “Tony, I hope Israel tears those terrorist motherfuckers a new asshole”, but you can’t have everything….

Mark Steyn’s current column has got to be the truest and funniest I’ve ever seen on Mideast peace efforts.

An excerpt –

It’s easy to fly in a guy in a suit to hold a meeting. Half the fellows inside the Beltway have Middle East “peace plans” named after them. Bush flew in himself a year or two back to announce his “road map.” Before that it was Cheney, who flew in with the Cheney plan, which was a plan to open up a road map back to the last plan, which would get us back to “Tenet,” which would get us back to “Mitchell,” which would get us back to “Wye River,” which would get us back to “Oslo,” which would get us back to Kansas.

LOL!