Of Savages and Their Apologists

There was dancing in the streets of the Palestine territories on Tuesday, complete with the traditional handing out of sweets to the children, in celebration of the slaughter of five godly men worshiping at an Israeli synagogue. Reaction among those Palestinians’ many sympathizers here in America was more muted, but no less disturbing.

The President of the United States chose strong words to condemn the murders, but felt obliged to add that “too many Palestinians have died” as a result of Israel’s efforts to defend itself against such slaughter. He further asserted that a “majority of Palestinians want peace,” despite all those sweets being handed out on the streets of the Palestinian territory and the majority of its population that has consistently supported the Hamas terror gang that shares in power in its government and has also celebrated the murders, and thus left the impression that he would continue to insist on further Israeli concessions and self-restraint to achieve his stated goal of a Palestinian state. Most of the anti-Israel left responded with an appalling silence, but a few ventured the usual claims of moral equivalence between the Palestinians’ slaughter of random civilians with Israel’s carefully calculated strikes against terrorists. On the Cable News Network they reflexively misreported that the murders had been committed at a mosque, but even after correcting the rather significant error they invited a woman on the air to argue that because Israel has been forced by constant attacks of its neighbors to impose universal conscription it cannot suffer civilian casualties, and much of the media seemed committed to a similar evenhandedness between the killers and their victims. The Israeli government has ordered the demolition of the killers’ homes and eased restrictions on Israelis’ gun rights to allow them to defend themselves against a recent spate of lone wolf attacks on the citizenry, so we expect the left’s sensibilities to be further offended.

No one seemed willing to acknowledge that the attacks had something to do with the same religious supremacism that has lately led to the slaughter of westerners from Iraq to England to Canada to Oklahoma, even though the killers’ proud families and organizations were loudly proclaiming that motivation. Although it was widely reported that three of victims were Americans and one a Briton, and that the New York City Police Department is on alert to prevent similar acts of violence in its jurisdiction, too late to prevent the savage beating of a 53-year-old Jew at a subway station, and even though there’s a vague memory of the Palestinians dancing in the streets and handing out sweets in celebration of the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on a warm September morning some years ago, no one seemed willing to acknowledge that Israel’s fight for survival has something to do with civilization’s ongoing fight for survival.

After too many desultory conversations with the Palestinians’ sympathizers, we have reluctantly concluded they have less regard for civilization than a sentimental attraction to the killers’ claims of victimhood. The profound western civilization that has largely derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition provides them with a prosperity and freedom and opportunities for happiness unprecedented in the history of mankind, but it has also resulted in the inequalities and imperfections that are inherent in any society of humans, so they prefer the primitivism of their society’s enemies. They denounce the sexism of a society that subjects women to a scientist’s ribald shirts, and decry the homophobia of a nation whose courts haven’t yet fully imposed same-sex marriage on a wary populace, but make apologies for a religious movement that subjugates its women in ways that the women of medieval Europe would have never tolerated and whose courts have not yet decided whether beheading or stoning is the proper punishment for homosexuality.

They might yet rouse some resistance when the slaughter is visited upon their own communities, although the left’s supine response to the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on a warm September morning a few short years ago and the countless outrages that have occurred since leave little cause for hope, and when the slaughter of five godly men worshiping at an Israeli synagogue disappears from the news in a few days it will seem all the more unlikely.

— Bud Norman

Choosing One’s Outrage

There’s no telling what will offend some people’s moral sensibilities, or what will not.

A rare look at our Facebook page found several friends grousing about Israel’s meticulously limited response to the thousands of rockets that have lately been lobbed at its people by the Islamist terror gang Hamas, with one friend rather angrily demanding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance before a international war crimes tribunal, but none seemed at all troubled that an Islamist terror gang was raining rockets down on the random civilians of a civilized and democratic nation, or demanded that the perpetrators be treated as war criminal. A far greater number of Muslims have recently perished in the fighting in Syria and Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan and all the other places where internecine Islamist warfare rages, and for far less justifiable reasons, but judging by the relative lack of mainstream media coverage and Facebook chatter that doesn’t seem to trouble many consciences.

The guest list at that fancy White House gathering of African leaders is a similarly curious example of selective outrage. Among those getting the red carpet treatment and presidential promises of massive wealth redistribution are Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbasago, fresh from a killing spree that left all of his prominent political opponents dead, and Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who advocates a policy of beheading homosexuals, along with the usual assortment of seedy Afro-Marxist thugs who have made such a mess of post-colonial Africa. These elegantly embossed invitations to the White House were handed out by the same administration that routinely derides its domestic political opponents as extremists bent on dirty air and dirty water, and who are implored in faux-hip-hop fashion to “Just stop hatin’,” and it strikes us as odd. Even the most stubborn American adherents of the millennia-old notions about same sex-same marriage draw the line well short of beheading homosexuals, and thus far even the kookiest musket-weilding and tricorner-hat-wearing “tea party” types haven’t offed anybody.

The beheading-of-homosexuals part might yet yet provoke some justifiable moral outrage among the left, where anything having to do with homosexuality gets some traction, and certainly arouses more outrage than the all-too-tempting idea of simply killing all of one’s prominent political opponents, but that also seems oddly selective. We are as appalled as anyone on the left by the treatment of homosexuals in the Islamic world and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and would welcome  a more consistent American policy of protesting it, but we’d love to see the left make the same exceptions to its multi-cultural and morally relativist rules to protest the appalling treatment of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and other religious minorities in much of the world. The womenfolk are getting a raw deal in most of these fondly regarded underdog countries, too, and it seems especially odd that a modern feminism obsessed with the mating rituals of horny frat boys is indifferent to the forced genital mutilations and other brutal abuses that are common throughout a romanticized Third World.

Sometimes moral outrage is selected according to partisan obligations, like the Facebook friend who was fuming about our Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s reckless tax cuts and the resulting slight downgrade from one of the bond-rating agencies, but didn’t seem to mind when the nation’s creit ratings were downgraded after years of trillion dollar deficits under President Barack Obama. That same partisan prejudice prevented the press from highlighting Vice President Joe Biden’s hilarious repeated references to “the nation of Africa,” which is precisely the sort of thing that would have been endlessly re-played on the late night comedy shows if only Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin had said it. Oftentimes it’s that multi-cultural moral relativism that tolerates beheadings of homosexuals and genital mutilations in the more primitive and thus more spiritually pure countries, all in the name of progressivism, but insists that anyone from their supposedly more intellectually enlightened culture should be willing to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage or sign a consent form before a drunken college hook-up. In either case, one’s instincts should be set aside for a moment of more thoughtful consideration.

— Bud Norman

A Good Time For a Sex Scandal

Now would be the perfect time to make a full confession of our lurid sex scandal, if only we could muster the energy to have one. There are so many stories of earth-shaking significance afoot at the moment that even the most Clintonian sorts of escapades would attract little notice, and by the time anyone got around to paying heed we could dismiss the whole mess as old news and utterly irrelevant to our candidacy for philosopher king or whatever office we might be seeking. Summertime is when the living is easy, according to the usually reliable lyrics of Gershwin music, but this summer we’re finding it hard to keep up with the headlines.

There is still fierce fighting in Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and probably a few other places that have escaped our attention, but of course all the news is about the relatively limited conflict between the humane and democratic state of Israel and the genocidal and totalitarian terror gang Hamas. For some reason or another Muslims can kill one another by the hundreds of thousands and the toll will be mentioned in the fifth and final paragraph of a story buried as deep as you can bury a story in today’s thin newspapers, but when a few million Jews from a humane and democratic state excruciating limit Muslim casualties in response to the thousands of rockets fired at its civilian population by a genocidal and totalitarian terror gang it warrants more prominent scrutiny. Despite the tsk-tsking of polite opinion we’re firmly on the side of the humane and democratic state, and hope they persist in the fighting long enough put a permanent stop to those rockets and the rest of the deadly threats to its people, but our country’s State Department seems to be siding with the genocidal and totalitarian terror gang. Israel being forced to defend itself against genocidal and totalitarian enemies is nothing new, but the United States’ new policies regarding the conflict are a worrisome twist on an otherwise familiar plot.

Polling indicates that a reassuring majority of Americans share our preference for the humane and democratic state over the genocidal and totalitarian terror gang, and the administration seems just as indifferent to the public opinion regarding the recent invasion of the United States by the unaccompanied minors of gang-ridden Central America. A percentage of Americans that a red-state Democrat would regard as overwhelming are wanting to send the urchins back home to the embracing of their dubiously loving families as soon as possible, but the administration is sending signals that it intends to welcome them into the arms of a deficit-spending welfare state and offer millions the very amnesty deal that provoked the invasion. The Congressional response is far too convoluted to recap here, involving as it does such arcane parliamentary maneuvers as “waiving the tree” and the bizarre mix of fecklessness and incompetence that too often characterizes the House Speakership of Rep. John Boehner, but suffice to say that it’s all been scuttled for now by a torrent of public outrage and the sensible stand of Alabama’s Sen. Jeff Sessions. Sessions is our very favorite Senator, and we think he’d be a front-running presidential candidate if he didn’t sound so very much like an Alabaman.

The immigration story is going loom large through the mid-term elections, and the administration’s preference for genocidal and totalitarian terror gangs over humane and democratic states might prove an issue in some districts, so it’s easy to lose sight of such an intriguing story as the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruling that Obamacare should be enforced according to the language in the bill rather than the language that it’s dwindling number of supporters would prefer. The bill’s dwindling number of apologists insist that that subsidies shouldn’t be paid only to people who singed up in the 14 states that were willing to set up their own exchanges, but their efforts have only added to a growing number of reasons to believe that was the explicitly stated intention of the people who passed the law without reading it so they could find out what was in it. This doesn’t mean that a Supreme Court Justice would want to uphold the plain language of the law, but it makes it slightly more likely that Obamacare and all its embarrassments will remain in the news through the fall.

There’s that Argentinian default and the country’s rather comely but entirely incompetent president blaming it all on America, and the big drop in the stock market that might have been caused by the relatively good news about Gross Domestic Product that might just result in a 2.3 percent growth rate after that the dip in the last quarter, and something about some homosexual football player and some ex-coach who said something about him. Just the links that Matt Drudge daily provides about the border invasion are all too exhausting, and trying to figure out the administration’s apparent belief that the Muslim Brotherhood is crucial to world peace is downright vexing, so we’re wishing we’d spent the time on a good lurid sex scandal.

— Bud Norman

Of Metal Detectors and Failed Policies

Secretary of State John Kerry was subjected to a metal detector before seeing the Egyptian President and military dictator General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi on Wednesday, just like any schlub trying to pay a parking ticket at Wichita City Hall. Some lingering sense of patriotic pride is offended by the obviously deliberate insult to America’s highest-ranking diplomat, but when America’s highest-ranking diplomat is John Kerry it seems almost appropriate.

One labors mightily to imagine any previous Secretary of State being subjected to such taunting treatment, much less accepting it from the military dictator of a second-rate power with an apologetic “tweet” instead of a vigorous protest, but so much of America’s recent foreign policy is unprecedented that nothing really surprises any more. Kerry’s stop in inconsiderate Cairo was part of a trip to the Middle East to attempt negotiation of a cease-fire between Israel and the Hamas terror gang of Gaza, and nothing about it makes sense. The mission is unlikely to succeed, would be harmful to the region’s chances of lasting peace if it did, and will further weaken America’s standing the world in the process.

The Hamas terror gang, which makes no secret of its genocidal intentions toward world Jewry, has lately been murdering Israeli teenagers and launching thousands of deadly rockets randomly into Israeli territory. Israel has been able to keep its civilian casualties low by use of its remarkable “Iron Dome” missile defense system, but has responded by striking carefully targeted retaliatory strikes at the launch sites after warning the civilian to evacuate the areas, and has more recently launched a ground assault under unusually strict rules of engagement against the elaborate network of tunnels that Hamas has created since Israel’s evacuation of Gaza. Any previous Secretary of State would have ventured to the region only to offer unequivocal support for Israel’s restrained response, and urge that it continue until Hamas’ ability to kill innocent Israeli civilians had been thoroughly degraded, but Kerry is heading there to urge further restraint and end Israel’s efforts before they are satisfactorily concluded.

The effort also takes Kerry though Egypt, where his rude reception was predictable after America’s flailing foreign policy regarding that troubled land. Readers who have been sufficiently distracted by that homosexual football player and that racist basketball team owner can be forgiven for having forgotten, but President Barack Obama launched America’s bold new foreign policy in the Middle East by flying to Cairo for a much-ballyhooed speech offering an olive branch to the Islamic and insulted the then President and military-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak by insisting that the radical Islamist group The Muslim Brotherhood be given a seat of honor at the front of the audience. There’s no telling what Obama’s oration had to do with it, but a popular uprising backed by the Obama administration toppled Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood briefly seized power in the country. When the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule predictably proved devastating to the country’s economy and freedom the Obama administration continued to back it with both words and money, even after a military dictatorship that reverted to support for Israel and opposition to Islamist radicalism reasserted itself. Despite its many flaws, being a military dictatorship chief among them, the Egyptian military dictatorship has been laudably firm against a Hamas terror gang that is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it cannot be expected to extend the usual diplomatic protocols to a Secretary of State that represents America’s recent peculiar policies.

Kerry can expect more polite treatment from the Israelis on his next stop, but he shouldn’t expect them to take him any more seriously. The administration has been making all the obligatory statements about Israel’s right to defend itself against a terror gang that rains down rockets on its people, but the Israelis are savvy enough to have noticed all the added language about restraint and all the other code words for capitulation. Despite their extraordinary efforts to prevent civilian casualties even at the risk of Israeli soldiers, the Israelis are no doubt well aware that Kerry was overheard during a broadcast on the Fox News network sneering that their response was “A hell of a pinpoint operation.” The official line was that it the outburst was entirely inadvertent, as if such an experienced hand as Kerry would let loose in front of the microphones and cameras of the hated Fox News network, but in any case it is clear that he expects the Israelis to be even more restrained in their response to the thousands of rockets being lobbed into their country. They’ll also note that the Obama administration continues its generous subsidies to the Gaza government, even after the Hamas terror gang joined it as a partner, and that Kerry blamed the israelis for making his unlikely peace treaty “go poof” after Hamas become involved, and they could also be forgiven for subjecting him to a humiliating step through a metal detector.

Kerry might well claim that he’s going by that “international test” that he so ruinously proposed during his ill-fated presidential campaign, but at the moment he’s lagging well behind international opinion. Such fashionable western powers as France have expressed stronger support for Israel’s right to self-defense, and the kristallnacht-like rioting against the local Jewish populations seems only to have strengthened its resolve, and even the Sunni Arab countries are all offering off-the-record support for Israel’s against a terror gang backed by the Shi’ite Persian country of Iran that is cruising without meaningful American interference toward a nuclear bomb that will forever change the precarious balance of power in their powder keg regions.

None of these threatened countries will be reassured by America’s less-than-stalwart defense of its oldest allies, and none of America’s enemies will be placated. The Egyptians might as well have asked Kerry to empty his pockets, because America has relinquished its influence in the world’s most dangerous neighborhood.

— Bud Norman

The Noise in Israel and the Quiet Elsewhere

Every few years or so Israel has to wage war against the Islamist terror gangs that want to kill every Jew in the world, and the current unpleasantness is much the same as all the other occasions. What’s conspicuously different this time around, however, is that most of the world doesn’t seem to mind Israel defending its citizens.

The usual outraged demonstrations have been strikingly absent from the public squares of the Islamic world, leftist indignation in the west has been relatively muted, and many of the governments in the west have been surprisingly supportive of Israel. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and even the avowedly socialist French President Francois Hollande, whose country saw a few local Islamist terror gangs attack the local synagogues, have all called Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu with words of support. All of those calls came in before Netanyahu heard from the United States, which was formerly Israel’s best friend but has lately been more interested in dictating its housing policies and hectoring it to accept a so-called “peace treaty” with the same Islamist terror gang that is now indiscriminately lobbing rockets into their country, but even the current administration has accepted Israel’s right to self-defense in its public statements. Not so unequivocally supportive as Canada and its conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in this strange new world we find ourselves living in, but accepting nonetheless.

It would feel nice to attribute this strange new understanding to the world’s sudden ability to see the world with moral clarity, and to understand that Hamas’ rain of rockets on Israel hasn’t killed thousands only because of the Jewish state’s amazing “Iron Dome” missile defense system and that Israel’s retaliatory strikes against the launch sites have killed only hundreds because of their extraordinary efforts to prevent civilian casualties, but this is too hopeful. The public squares of the Islamic world are probably quiet only because the people gathered there are distracted by the many more thousands of co-religionists who are being slaughtered by the nominally Muslim government of Syria and the Islamist terror gang that has spilled over from that conflict into an all-out assault on Iraq. The Arab and Sunni governments of the region don’t have the usual motives to whip up anti-Israel sentiment among their restive populations, not when the rockets are being supplied by a Persian and Shiite Iranian theocracy that poses a far more frightening threat than Israel ever would. Those suddenly supportive western governments are probably making the same calculations, with a wary eye on the Islamist terror gangs living happily on welfare within their borders, and might well revert to their traditional moral relativism as soon as it is politically expedient.

Still, at this moment the tide of international opinion seems to have turned in Israel’s favor, and given that Hamas’ futile rocket-lobbing was never intended as a military victory but only a public relations coup, that bodes well for a total Israeli victory. In an ill-timed op-ed piece published in an Israeli magazine just days before Hamas started indiscriminately lobbing rockets into Israel, President Barack Obama was still urging the adoption of his proposed peace deal with the Hamas-affiliated government and claiming it would “help turn the tide of international opinion and sideline violent extremists,” but despite the Israeli’s wise decision to argue his advice the world seems willing to side with Israel’s right to sideline the violent extremists with some pin-point missile strikes at sites the civilians are long forewarned to stay away from. Perhaps this is another example of leading from behind, but it looks more like another botched attempt to keep up with rather than ahead of world opinion.

— Bud Norman

O Canada

We’re old enough to have been around when Pierre Trudeau was transforming Canada into the one of the world’s wussiest nations, and well remember how very envious was the American left. Trudeau was unabashedly socialist, considered an intellectual, and had a tabloid-worthy sex life, so he embodied everything Americans liberals would be looking for in a national leader over the subsequent decades. Even after Trudeau’s disastrous reign came to an end Canada retained a reputation for enlightened liberalism, with its health care system and gun-shyness and apologetic foreign policy and exquisitely sensitive multi-culturalism constantly cited by the likes of Michael Moore to shame the relatively conservative rubes south of its border.

We’re also old enough, alas, to have arrived at a point in our lives when we’re pining for the sort of national leadership that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now providing Canada. The sobering thought occurred to us again when Harper released a statement of unequivocal support for Israel’s right to respond however it wishes to the murderous rocket attacks on its people by the despicable terror gang Hamas, with none of the absurd moral relativism or bossy insistence on a suicidal two-state solution with a Hamas-affiliated government that our own abashedly socialist and considered-an-intellectual national leader was propounding in an op-ed piece in an Israeli magazine just before the latest attacks by that very same despicable terror gang starting lobbing rockets at civilian targets across Israel. Admitting the wisdom of the Canadian way is still uncomfortable for us, but it’s becoming all too familiar.

Harper is also quite right about the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would benefit both Canada and America and keep inexpensive oil out of the hands of Chinese industries that will use it in more environmentally unfriendly ways, but our political leadership is too beholden to environmental fantasists to allow it. Canada’s economy was largely unscathed by the financial meltdown that occurred in America and elsewhere because it had wisely declined to require its banks to loan gazillions of dollars to un-creditworthy home buyers, has further enriched itself under Harper’s leadership by encouraging rather than discouraging the exploitation of its vast natural resources through new technologies, and is now several spots ahead of the United States on the Heritage Foundation’s reliable rankings of each country’s economic freedom. Harper has even begun an anti-carbon tax coalition with the conservative government of Australia, which came to power after the liberals’ insane cap-and-trade scheme proved calamitous for that island continent’s economy, and it’s almost enough to make us think that punting on third down isn’t such a bad idea.

One of those famously smart French intellectuals is warning Britons that the European Union is demographically dying and they’d be better off casting their lot with the Anglosphere, which strikes us as good advice, but for the first time in our long lives we don’t expect for the Americans to take their usual lead in that coalition. Perhaps in another two-and-a-half years the United States can assume its rightful position among that handful of nations that the only ones to be on the right side of every battle against tyranny during the 20th Century, but until then we can only envy the leadership to the north. There’s some consolation is knowing that the once-envious liberals are just as discombobulated by it all, but it is faint.

— Bud Norman

Another Tape-Recorded Rant of Stupidity

By now just about everybody in America is feeling a satisfying sense of outrage about that creepy octogenarian basketball team owner’s stupid comments to his gold-digging girlfriend, but we hope the country can spare some indignation for the stupid comments Secretary of State John Kerry has lately been making.

Kerry has been making stupid comments ever since he launched his public service career by slandering his fellow veterans back during the Vietnam War, and made enough of them during his ill-fated presidential campaign to lose to George W. Bush, but his efforts to negotiate a peace between Israel and the Palestinian territories has inspired him to new heights of stupidity. The latest was his complaint to a roomful of influential world leaders that if Israel doesn’t agree to his preposterous proposal it will become an “apartheid state.” As with the case of that creepy octogenarian basketball team owner the remarks were surreptitiously taped and leaked to the press, causing considerable embarrassment.

Members of Congress from both parties quickly denounced the statement, with Texas’ Sen. Ted Cruz going so far as to call for Kerry’s resignation, and even the administration’s most loyal media have expressed disapproval. Even President Barack Obama has explicitly rejected the “apartheid” characterization of Israel, despite his own apparent disdain for the country, and outside the most Jew-hating corners of the Muslim world few have come to Kerry’s defense. The outcry wasn’t so loud as the one over the creepy octogenarian basketball team owner, probably because there was no comely 26-year-old mistress involved, but it was sufficient to cause Kerry to offer a half-hearted apology. “I have been around long enough to also know the power of words to create a misimpression, even when unintentional,” Kerry wrote in a State Department press release, “and if I could rewind the tape I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.”

Which is yet another stupid comment. Kerry is reiterating his previous stupid comment that the peace negotiations went “poof” because the Israelis were too slow in releasing several terrorists who would immediately resume their war against the Jewish state, and reluctant to agree to other of Kerry’s outrageous demands, ignoring that the Palestinian Authority negotiators had announced their intention of forming a coalition government with the Hamas terrorist organization that remains openly committed to the destruction of Israel. Kerry might wish he had found a more artful term to express his obvious hostility toward Israel, but he is clearly unwilling to apology for the animus itself. This is as stupid as Kerry’s arrogant belief that he could bring peace to the Middle East by forcing the Israelis to accept a suicidal capitulation to a Palestinian people who won’t accept anything less than another Holocaust, and merits public scorn.

Kerry’s comments aren’t quite so salacious as those by the creepy octogenarian basketball team owner, now can their stupidity be as easily understood by the sports talk radio audience, but they’re far more consequentially stupid.

— Bud Norman