Two presidential phone calls tell it all !

When I was a teenager the President of the United States telephoned astronaut Neil Armstrong to congratulate him for coming out of the lunar module and being the first man to step on the moon.

Last week the President of the United States telephoned NBA player Jason Collins to congratulate him for coming out of the closet and being the first  man to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated as 'gay'.

This says a lot about where the Left's liberal progressives have taken us in such a short time.

And this - in the same week as Rhode Island became the 10th state to legalize same-sex marriage and morning-after contraceptive pills were made freely available for girls of 15.

Churchill warned of Islamism over 100 years ago

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the infence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.

It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."


Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).

Terror's Open University

Since 9/11 the BBC and other leftist media have eschewed the T-word and disdained the very notion of a War on Terror.  

Hopefully the Boston Marathon Massacre will finally bring them to their senses and at least unite in  a determined War on Islamic Incitement & Radicalisation. 

This is the true enemy.

But this enemy cannot be destroyed by drones and M16s.

Because this enemy doesn't live in the the streets or the canyons of Tora Bora.

Instead it lives and operates in Islamic schoolrooms and madrassas for the very young and, for those who've missed out, there is the Open University of Islamic Terror on the internet.

This is what has turned students like Mohammed Atta and the Boston brothers into cold-blooded mass killers.

Israel has been pointing to Islamic incitement for a very long time as the main cause of the ongoing conflict.  The Palestinian propaganda machine continues to blame the 'Occupation'. 

But the most damaging occupation is of the minds of students and even preschoolers by their Islamic teachers.

The Sign on the Doorpost

It's been a great Pesach here in Jerusalem - always such wonderful sights, sounds and smells from the burning of the chametz to people dashing in all directions preparing for the Seder and the songs of the Hagaddah wafting from every building throughout the evening.

Friday night we were invited to friends and were astonished to see a black chassid sitting at the table. 

Here in Israel we are very accustomed to seeing African Jews - but rarely in sidelocks and such serious chassidic garb.  And this was not one of the many thousands of our  Ethiopian immigrants - but a West Indian of Jamaican parentage almost as black his traditional chassidic topcoat and hat.

I tell this story not as one of my usual ripostes to the canard of Israel Apartheid. It is just about a really charming fellow and to share his heartwarming story.

As if the appearance was not striking enough, he introduced himself with a strong east-London cockney accent before launching into a faultless kiddush, all by heart.

Needless to say, everyone wanted to know what brought him to Judaism, Israel and Chassidism.

Turns out, his family lived in a house formerly owned by Jews.  At the age of 9 he got to wondering what the tiny box screwed to the doorpost was all about. So when the builders came to renew the door, he unscrewed the box -  the mezzuzah - and took out the parchment from within. 

Unable to decipher the hieroglyphs, he took it to one of the many Jewish neighbors in the area who read it to him and explained why it goes onto the doorposts of Jewish homes.

From that little mezzuzah, he became interested and then enchanted with the  faith, its history and heritage, and 22 years ago came to Israel as a Jewish convert. He loves the life here and the way people have taken him into their hearts. Two of his 3 children are already serving in the army.

The festival of Pesach is all about doorposts - that, on the night of the 10th plague, G-d passed over the homes of  Jews in Egypt who had put a sign on their doorposts. 

Clearly it's still working.

Meanwhile in Amman ...

Palestinian Authority President Abbas went to Jordan last weekend to sign an agreement with Jordan's King Abdullah to 'defend Jerusalem' and its holy sites.

Here they are happily embracing.

A president with no state and a king with no future, signing an agreement over a city which belongs to neither.

JFK on Israel

"Israel was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom."

Iran - Israel's clock different to Obama's

On the eve of his visit to Israel, President Obama has made a statement that Iran is still 1 year away from nuclear weapons capability.

This is at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's graphic warning to the UN that Iran is expected to reach that red line by the the spring or summer of this year.

So who is right?

The truth is that, where Iran is concerned, America and Israel are working in two very different time zones.

America and the Western powers are by nature reactive. They seem content to wait until Iran carries out a North-Korea-style nuclear weapons test, perhaps in a year's time. Only when that stark reality hits them in their faces will they take action. 

Then they have the option to respond with their traditional shock and awe - like the opening round of NATO action in Bosnia. 

America had the ability to carpet-bomb Afghanistan with impunity, much the same way as Britain carpet-bombed Dresden and the Russians carpet-bombed Chechnya. 

This is not Israel's way of doing things.

When Israel bombed Saddam's nuclear facilities on June 7th 1981, it did so with a surgical strike lasting 2 minutes on a quiet Sunday afternoon. It chose this time to minimize civilian casualties to the absolute minimum. In the event, only 10 Iraqis died in the raid and the massive explosions which followed.

Israel is not reactive but proactive.  And it will aim to destroy Ahmadinejad's weapons of mass Jewish destruction in a way that causes minimal harm to ordinary Iranian citizens already repressed by his tyrannical mullocracy.

For the people of the book, every life is precious.
Carpet bombing a year from now is not in our DNA.

Robin Williams - Simply Awesome

A very busy day in a Polish shtetel

Today, on the yahrzeit of the Noam Elimelech, thousands of Jews will again return to his Polish shtetel to pray and weep at his grave. The only one left untouched by the Nazis.

My memoir of 2004 will describe much the same scenes, and the afterthoughts re our people seem to be  as fitting today as they were 9 years ago.

Click below for the 2004 story ...
Noam Elimelech

Goebells & the UN

I'm sure you've all read about this Palestinian prisoner who died in an Israeli prison, and for whom disturbances have been fomented by Mr Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. 

According to the PA this was the 203rd Palestinian prisoner to have died in an Israeli prison since 1967. They also claim that no less than 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned in those 64 years.  Even by their own hopelessly unreliable statistics, this is better than the normal human mortality rate. 

Still, my main point is that the UN decided to launch an inquiry into the death of this single Palestinian prisoner.  This against a backdrop of close to 70,000 slain in Syria and 70 children killed by Assad's missiles in the last week alone. 

Reminds me of the old WW2 joke about Goebells and Hitler. 

A journalist asked Hitler's propagandist"  I want the bottom line on what this Nazi thing is." 

Goebbels flashes him a smile and says "We intend to kill six million Jews and one postman." 

The journalist's mind races. "But why do you want to kill one postman?" 

Goebbels shouts over to Hitler: "See Adolf, I told you no-one gives a fig about the Jews!" 

I rest my case.

Can the UN even pretend to hide its anti-Semitic bias?

It is truly hopeless.

Klavan's One State Solution - an inspiration!

The Persecution of an Atrocity

UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party shares power with his coalition partners the Liberal Democrats.  One of the LibDem MPs is David Ward who issued the following statement to mark Holocaust Memorial Day:

“Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Here is my email to Mr Ward: 

Date: 28 January 2013 15:15
Subject: Dear Mr Ward ....
To: david@davidward.org.uk


My grandparents, uncles and aunts were so 'persecuted' at Auschwitz they never came back.

My father barely survived at 19 years old and died at 42 due to the experience.

So Mr Ward, what's an 'atrocity' in your book?

Is it 'forcing' Palestinians to vote in the free Jewish state? (1 million of them did last week, when they couldn't in most other Muslim countries.)

Or perhaps 'forcing' education on Palestinian youngsters, who make up 20% of Israel's university roll? 

Is it 'forcing' their womenfolk to drive cars, when they are banned from driving in Arab countries?

Ahh ... I know.

It must be that separation wall as you folks like to call it.

That's the atrocity!

Preventing Arab terrorists from killing more Jews.

Now I get it.

............................................................

Today Rupert Murdoch was decent enough to apologize for a blood-libellous cartoon which was published in his Sunday Times newspaper on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day.  Even the cartoonist regretted the timing, albeit not the content. 

Mr Ward however is unrepentant. 

Hardly surprising when you consider some of his background ..HERE.