Genocide of the unborn

This picture of 'unborn' Amiad Yisrael wrapped in his burial tallit is truly heartbreaking. It is a tragedy for his parents and all of Israel. But the picture must also convey a message to all of us.

The message is that these rabid Arab beasts have gone way beyond the idea of driving us out of our land. Now they don’t even want us born into it.

This and other brazen attacks, including today’s killings in Jerusalem, show very clearly that we are still dealing with the same PLO as before they were gentrified by the Oslo Accords. The difference is that they no longer fear our soldiers or our people. Goldstone probes, prisoner releases and the sacred cow of human rights have worn down our deterrence at every level. Where the IDF used to have news reporters embedded with their units – now they have lawyers. Soldiers have to think twice or three times before defending themselves, whilst their fanatical opponents exploit those vital milliseconds to their most savage advantage.

I have always thought that the fundamental difference between Left and Right is that leftists do not accept that there is such a thing as pure evil in this world. It’s really no more complicated than that.

Unlike realists on the Right, leftists always react to evil acts by blaming anyone or anything other than the perpetrator. For the common killer or rapist the ‘justification’ is usually a broken home, poverty, drugs or abuse by their stepfathers. For suicide bombers and terrorists it’s usually about their hopelessness under grinding poverty and lack of education or civil rights under Western domination or Israeli 'occupation'.

It’s nearly 20 years since 9-11 and leftists have still not internalised the lesson that there is indeed such a thing as pure evil in this world. Evil that cannot be justified at any level. That a so-called human being could stand at an airline departure gate in a queue with smiling families, young children and infants knowing full well that he would be turning them into human bombs within less than an hour. It is the lowest level of evil you can possibly imagine. And yet the 9-11 hijackers were educated middle class men mostly from rich, unoccupied and unoppressed Saudi Arabia.

The same pure evil exists in Tehran, where the ayatollahs call Israel ‘a one-bomb country’. Given a window of opportunity they would not hesitate to seize the moment to incinerate 8 million people – the devil may care if they are Jews or Muslims. It still beggars belief that a US president gifted 150 billion dollars to such genocidal fanatics let alone with the support of 5 major world powers who still oppose Trump’s new sanctions.

And the same evil exists within our homeland, as we end this awful week of killings by our so-called peace partners. The leftists sipping their lattes in Tel Aviv will blame the settlers, the occupation, the right-wing Likud or Jewish Home parties, the Nation State Law … anything but the killers themselves. It’s time they woke up to the stark reality that pure evil exists, can never be justified and must never be trusted to live among us.

Human Rights are for Human Beings

This week’s publication by Senate Democrats of a report into CIA interrogation methods was a lot to do with party politics.  But the sanctimonious and handwringing response from pundits well beyond America’s shores is all about what is wrong with us – not what’s wrong with the CIA.

Had this report come out soon after 9-11, only the most lunatic fringe of the Left would have been crying foul over the human rights of any suspect in the planning and execution of such an inhuman outrage. 13 years on, the sheer horror of that day seems to have worn off to the extent that it’s fashionable to be counted amongst the handwringers. The day after the report was published I wonder how many of the silent majority felt embarrassed to argue the opposite view on chat radio, or around the office water cooler?

Instead of finding our voices in demanding zero tolerance for the culture that spawned 9-11, we’ve fallen into a tyranny of political correctness where it is expected that we sacrifice our true and honest feelings of anger and deep resentment on the altar of self-blame and dhimmitude.

The same perversion of crime & punishment runs at the local level. Whenever some deviant carries out an evil act, the calls are not to "lock him up" but to investigate his childhood and find out how we or society made him do it. And when such scumbags get shot in the process of their crimes, it's law enforcement that gets the heat and a good cop is hounded out of his job and his hometown.

In an average week, thousands of Sunnis kill thousands of Shia and vice versa. Do such people give a damn about a handful of their brothers being waterboarded or dying of hypothermia chained to the floor of a CIA safehouse?  No, not unless it embarrasses the Great Satan.

In addition to thoroughly demoralizing those who work in the CIA, this report promises to make millionaires out of every Guantanamo inmate and vastly enrich the CAIR lawyers who will be falling over each other in the rush to bring civil suits against super-rich Uncle Sam.

I often think about what my grandparents and the millions of other Holocaust victims might say to those Jews who today attack and delegitimize our only and tiny state, which might well have saved them in that era.

The same goes for 9-11 victims.

What would the murdered traders of Cantor Fitzgerald now be saying to those who bewail the mistreatment of the plotters and accomplices of such mass murder?  How might they feel about all this week’s liberal op-eds and the luvvies on their chat shows?  And the prospect of million-dollar payouts to those who still laud the heroism of the hijackers, while their own widows and orphaned children struggle without a father and breadwinner?

If this is the ‘high ground’ that America is claimed to have lost, then that high ground is where our liberty will surely be buried forever.

9-11 was a declaration of war by radical Islam on the West. You cannot fight by the Queensberry Rules when your opponent is breaking all of them. Those who flew planes loaded with passengers into buildings filled with people were crazed beasts. Those who sent them, funded them or still honor them are creatures of pure evil.

If they want human rights, let them first join humanity.

A sermon for our times

As is my custom I caught up on emails on the flight to Israel.  This one I had never read before. Dating back 1 year to Rosh Hashana 2010, it is a sermon given by American Rabbi Shlomo Lewis of Congregation Etz Chayim in Marietta, Georgia. It's a masterpiece of a sermon. Even if you had seen it before, it is regrettably still as topical now as it was a year ago ... mainly because the attitude of world leaders, the UN and media has not changed one jot.

Here it is ...

I thought long and I thought hard on whether to deliver the sermon I am about to share. We all wish to bounce happily out of shul on the High

Holidays, filled with warm fuzzies, ready to gobble up our brisket, our honey cakes and our kugel. We want to be shaken and stirred – but not too much. We waant to be guilt-schlepped – but not too much. We want to be provoked but not too much. We want to be transformed but not too much.

I get it, but as a rabbi I have a compelling obligation, a responsibility to articulate what is in my heart and what I passionately believe must be said and must be heard. And so, I am guided not by what is easy to say but by what is painful to express. I am guided not by the frivolous but by the serious. I am guided not by delicacy but by urgency.

We are at war. We are at war with an enemy as savage, as voracious, as heartless as the Nazis but one wouldn’t know it from our behavior. During WWII we didn’t refer to storm troopers as freedom fighters. We didn’t call the Gestapo, militants. We didn’t see the attacks on our Merchant Marine as acts by rogue sailors. We did not justify the Nazis rise to power as our fault. We did not grovel before the Nazis, thumping our hearts and confessing to abusing and mistreating and humiliating the German people. We did not apologize for Dresden, nor for The Battle of the Bulge, nor for ElAlamein, nor for D-Day.

Evil – ultimate, irreconcilable, evil threatened us and Roosevelt and Churchill had moral clarity and an exquisite understanding of what was at stake. It was not just the Sudetenland, not just Tubruk, not just Vienna, not just Casablanca. It was the entire planet. Read history and beshocked at how frighteningly close Hitler came to creating a Pax Germana on every continent.

Not all Germans were Nazis – most were decent, most were revoolted by the Third Reich, most were good citizens hoisting a beer, earning a living and tucking in their children at night. But, too many looked away, too many cried out in lame defense – I didn’t know, Too manny were silent. Guilt absolutely falls upon those who committed the atrocities, but responsibility and guilt falls upon those who did nothing as well. Fault was not just with the goose steppers but with those who pulled the curtains shut, said and did nothing.

In WWII we won because we got it. We understood who the enemy was and we knew that the end had to be unconditional and absolute. We did not stumble around worrying about offending the Nazis. We did not measure every word so as not to upset our foe. We built planes and tanks and battleships and went to war to win!¦.. to rid the world of malevolence.

We are at war… yet too many stubbornly and foolishly don’t put the pieces together and refuse to identify the evil doers. We are circumspect and disgracefully politically correct.

Let me mince no words in saying that from Fort Hood to Bali, from Times Square to London, from Madrid to Mumbai, from 9/11 to Gaza, the murderers, the barbarians are radical Islamists.

To camouflage their identity is sedition. To excuse their deeds is contemptible. To mask their intentions is unconscionable.

A few years ago I visited Lithuania on a Jewish genealogical tour. It was a stunning journey and a very personal, spiritual pilgrimage. When we visited Kovno we davened Maariv at the only remaining shul in the city. Before the war there were thirty-seven shuls for 38,000 Jews. Now only one, a shrinking, gray congregation. We made minyon for the handful of aged worshippers in the Choral Synagogue, a once majestic, jewel in Kovno.

After my return home I visited Cherry Hill for Shabbos. At the oneg an elderly family friend, Joe Magun, came over to me.


“Shalom”, he said. “Your abba told me you just came back from Lithuania.”

“Yes,” I replied. “It was quite a powerful experience.” “Did you visit the Choral Synagogue in Kovno? The one with the big arch in the courtyard?”


“Yes, I did. In fact, we helped them make minyon.”


His eyes opened wide in joy at our shared memory. For a moment he gazed into the distance and then, he returned. “Shalom, I grew up only a few feet away from the arch. The Choral Synagogue was where I davened as a child.”

He paused for a moment and once again was lost in the past. His smile faded. Pain filled his wrinkled face. “I remember one Shabbos in 1938 when Vladimir Jabotinsky came to the shul” (Jabotinsky was Menachim Begin’s mentor; he was a fiery orator, an unflinching Zionist radical, whose politics were to the far right.) Joe continued “When Jabotinsky came, he delivered the drash on Shabbos morning and I can still hear his words burning in my ears. He climbed up to the shtender, stared at us from the bima, glared at us with eyes full of fire and cried out. “EHR KUMT. YIDN FARLAWST AYER SHTETL – He’s coming. Jews abandon your city.”

We thought we were safe in Lithuania from the Nazis, from Hitler. We had lived there, thrived for a thousand years but Jabotinsky was right — his warning prophetic. We got out but most did not.


We are not in Lithuania. It is not the 1930s. There is no Luftwaffe overhead. No U-boats off the coast of long Island. No Panzer divisions on our borders. But make no mistake; we are under attack – our values, our tolerance, our freedom, our virtue, our land.


Now before some folks roll their eyes and glance at their watches let me state emphatically, unmistakably “ I have no pathology of hate, nor am I a manic Paul Revere, galloping through the countryside. I am not a pessimist, nor prone to panic attacks. I am a lover of humanity, all humanity.


Whether they worship in a synagogue, a church, a mosque, a temple or don’t worship at all. I have no bone of bigotry in my body, but what I do have is hatred for those who hate, intolerance for those who are intolerant, and a guiltless, unstoppable obsession to see evil eradicated.

Today the enemy is radical Islam but it must be said sadly and reluctantly that there are unwitting, co-conspirators who strengthen the hands of the evil doers. Let me state that the overwhelming number of Muslims are good Muslims, fine human beings who want nothing more than a Jeep Cherokee in their driveway, a flat screen TV on their wall and a good education for their children, but these good Muslims have an obligation to destiny, to decency that thus far for the most part they have avoided. The Kulturkampf is not only external but internal as well. The good Muslims must sponsor rallies in Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in the UN Plaza, on the Champs Elysee, in Mecca condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent. Thus far, they have not. The good Muslims must place ads in the NY Times. They must buy time on network TV, on cable stations, in the Jerusalem Post, in Le Monde, in Al Watan, on Al Jazeera condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent – thus far, they have not. Their silence allows the vicious to tarnish Islam and define it.

Brutal acts of commission and yawning acts of omission both strengthen the hand of the devil.


I recall a conversation with my father shortly before he died that helped me understand how perilous and how broken is our world; that we are living on the narrow seam of civilization and moral oblivion. Knowing he had little time left he shared the following – Shal. I am ready to leave this earth.


Sure I’d like to live a little longer, see a few more sunrises, but truthfully, I’ve had it. I’m done. Finished. I hope the Good Lord takes me soon because I am unable to live in this world knowing what it has become.


This startling admission of moral exhaustion from a man who witnessed and lived through the Depression, the Holocaust, WWII, Communist Triumphalism, McCarthyism, Strontium 90 and polio. – Yet his twilight observation was – The he worst is yet to come. And he wanted out.


I share my father’s angst and fear that too many do not see the authentic, existential threat we face nor confront the source of our peril. We must wake up and smell the hookah.


Lighten up, Lewis. Take a chill pill, some of you are quietly thinking. You’re sounding like Glen Beck. It’s not that bad. It’s not that real.


But I am here to tell you – It is. Ask the member of our shul whose sister was vaporized in the Twin Towers and identified finally by her charred teeth, if this is real or not. Ask the members of our shul who fled a bus in downtown Paris, fearing for their safety from a gang of Muslim thugs, if this is an exaggeration. Ask the member of our shul whose son tracks Arab terrorist infiltrators who target – pizza parlors, nursery schools, Pesach seders, city buses and play grounds, if this is dramatic, paranoid hyperbole.


Ask them, ask all of them – ask the American GI’s we sit next to on planes who are here for a brief respite while we fly off on our Delta vacation package. Ask them if it’s bad. Ask them if it’s real.


Did anyone imagine in the 1920′s what Europe would look like in the 1940′s. Did anyone presume to know in the coffee houses of Berlin or in the opera halls of Vienna that genocide would soon become the celebrated culture? Did anyone think that a goofy-looking painter named Shickelgruber would go from the beer halls of Munich and jail, to the Reichstag as Feuhrer in less than a decade? Did Jews pack their bags and leave Warsaw, Vilna, Athens, Paris, Bialystok, Minsk, knowing that soon their new address would be Treblinka, Sobibor, Dachau and Auschwitz?


The sages teach – Aizehu chacham – haroeh et hanoanolad – Who is a wise person – he who sees into the e future. We dare not wallow in complacency, in a misguided tolerance and naive sense of security.


We must be diligent students of history and not sit in ash cloth at the waters of Babylon weeping. We cannot be hypnotized by eloquent-sounding rhetoric that soothes our heart but endangers our soul. We cannot be lulled into inaction for fear of offending the offenders. Radical Islam is the scourge and this must be cried out from every mountain top. From sea to shining sea, we must stand tall, prideful of our stunning decency and moral resilience. Immediately after 9/11 how many mosques were destroyed in America? None. After 9/11, how many Muslims were killed in America?


None. After 9/11, how many anti-Muslim rallies were held in America? None. And yet, we apologize. We grovel. We beg forgiveness.


The mystifying litany of our foolishness continues. Should there be a shul in Hebron on the site where Baruch Goldstein gunned down twenty-seven Arabs at noonday prayers? Should there be a museum praising the U.S. Calvary on the site of Wounded Knee? Should there be a German cultural center in Auschwitz? Should a church be built in the Syrian town of Maarra where Crusaders slaughtered over 100,000 Muslims? Should there be a thirteen story mosque and Islamic Center only a few steps from Ground Zero?


Despite all the rhetoric, the essence of the matter can be distilled quite easily. The Muslim community has the absolute, constitutional right to build their building wherever they wish. I don’t buy the argument – “When we can build a church or a synagogue in Mecca they can build a mosque here.” America is greater than Saudi Arabia. And New York is greater than Mecca. Democracy and freedom must prevail.


Can they build? Certainly. May they build? Certainly. But should they build at that site? No — but that decision must come from them, not from us. Sensitivity, compassion cannot be measured in feet or yards or in blocks. One either feels the pain of others and cares, or does not.


If those behind this project are good, peace-loving, sincere, tolerant Muslims, as they claim, then they should know better, rip up the zoning permits and build elsewhere.


Believe it or not, I am a dues-paying, card carrying member of the ACLU, yet from start of finish, I find this sorry episode disturbing to say the least.


William Burroughs, the novelist and poet, in a wry moment wrote – After one look at this planet, any visitor from outer space would say – I want to see the manager.


Let us understand that the radical Islamist assaults all over the globe are but skirmishes, fire fights, and vicious decoys. Christ and the anti-Christ. Gog & Magog. The Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness; the bloody collision between civilization and depravity is on the border between Lebanon and Israel. It is on the Gaza Coast and in the Judean Hills of the West Bank. It is on the sandy beaches of Tel Aviv and on the cobblestoned mall of Ben Yehuda Street. It is in the underground schools of Sderot and on the bullet-proofed inner-city buses. It is in every school yard, hospital, nursery, classroom, park, theater – in every place of innoceence and purity.


Israel is the laboratory – the test market. Every death, every explosion, every grisly encounter is not a random, bloody orgy. It is a calculated, strategic probe into the heart, guts and soul of the West.


In the Six Day War, Israel was the proxy of Western values and strategy while the Arab alliance was the proxy of Eastern, Soviet values and strategy. Today too, it is a confrontation of proxies, but the stakes are greater than East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel in her struggle represents the civilized world, while Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Queda, Iran, Islamic Jihad, represent the world of psychopathic, loathesome evil.


As Israel, imperfect as she is, resists the onslaught, many in the Western World have lost their way displaying not admiration, not sympathy, not understanding, for Israel’s galling plight, but downright hostility and contempt. Without moral clarity, we are doomed because Israel’s gallingplight ultimately will be ours. Hanna Arendt in her classic Origins of Totalitarianism accurately portrays the first target of tyranny as the Jew.


We are the trial balloon. The canary in the coal mine. If the Jew/Israel is permitted to bleed with nary a protest from “good guy” then tyranny snickers and pushes forward with its agenda.


Moral confusion is a deadly weakness and it has reached epic proportions in the West; from the Oval Office to the UN, from the BBC to Reuters to MSNBC, from the New York Times to Le Monde, from university campuses to British teachers unions, from the International Red Cross to Amnesty International, from Goldstone to Elvis Costello, from the Presbyterian Church to the Archbishop of Canterbury.


There is a message sent and consequences when our president visits Turkey and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and not Israel.


There is a message sent and consequences when free speech on campus is only for those championing Palestinian rights.


There is a message sent and consequences when the media deliberately doctors and edits film clips to demonize Israel.


There is a message sent and consequences when the UN blasts Israel relentlessly, effectively ignoring Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, North Korea, China and other noxious states.


There is a message sent and consequences when liberal churches are motivated by Liberation Theology, not historical accuracy.


There is a message sent and consequences when murderers and terrorists are defended by the obscenely transparent “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”


John Milton warned, “Hypocrisy is the only evil that walks invisible.”


A few days after the Gaza blockade incident in the spring, a congregant happened past my office, glanced in and asked in a friendly tone –


“Rabbi. How’re ya’ doing?”


I looked up, sort of smiled and replied – “I’ve had better days.”


“What’s the matter? Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?” he inquired.


“Thank you for the offer but I’m just bummed out today and I showed him a newspaper article I was reading.


“Madrid gay pride parade bans Israeli group over Gaza Ship Raid.” I explained to my visitor – “The Israeli gay pride contingent ffrom Tel Aviv was not allowed to participate in the Spanish gay pride parade because the mayor of Tel Aviv did not apologize for the raid by the Israeli military.”


The only country in the entire Middle East where gay rights exist, is Israel. The only country in the entire Middle East where there is a gay pride parade, is Israel. The only country in the Middle East that has gay neighborhoods and gay bars, is Israel.


Gays in the Gaza would be strung up, executed by Hamas if they came out and yet Israel is vilified and ostracized. Disinvited to the parade.


Looking for logic?


Looking for reason?


Looking for sanity?


Kafka on his darkest, gloomiest day could not keep up with this bizarre spectacle and we “useful idiots” pander and fawn over cutthroats, sinking deeper and deeper into moral decay, as the enemy laughs all the way to the West Bank and beyond.

It is exhausting and dispiriting. We live in an age that is redefining righteousness where those with moral clarity are an endangered, beleaguered specie.

Isaiah warned us thousands of years ago – “Oye Lehem Sheh-Korim Layome, Laila v’Laila, yome – Woe to them who call the day, night and the night, day.” We live on a planet that is both Chelm and Sodom. It is a frightening and maddening place to be.

How do we convince the world and many of our own, that this is not just anti-Semitism, that this is not just anti-Zionism but a full throttled attack by unholy, radical Islamists on everything that is morally precious to us?

How do we convince the world and many of our own that conciliation is not an option, that compromise is not a choice?

Everything we are. Everything we believe. Everything we treasure, is at risk.

The threat is so unbelievably clear and the enemy so unbelievably ruthless how anyone in their right mind doesn’t get it is baffling. Let’s try an analogy. If someone contracted a life-threatening infection and we not only scolded them for using antibiotics but insisted that the bacteria had a right to infect their body and that perhaps, if we gave the invading infection an arm and a few toes, the bacteria would be satisfied and stop spreading

Anyone buy that medical advice? Well, folks, that’s our approach to the radical Islamist bacteria. It is amoral, has no conscience and will spread unless it is eradicated. – There is no negotiating.; Appeasement is death.

I was no great fan of George Bush – didn’t vote for him. (By the way, I’m still a registered Democrat.) I disagreed with many of his policies but one thing he had right. His moral clarity was flawless when it came to the War on Terror, the War on Radical Islamist Terror. There was no middle ground – either you were friend or foe. There was no place in Bush’s world for a Switzerland. He knew that this competition was not Toyota against G.M., not the Iphone against the Droid, not the Braves against the Phillies, but a deadly serious war, winner take all. Blink and you lose. Underestimate, and you get crushed.

I know that there are those sitting here today who have turned me off. But I also know that many turned off their rabbis seventy five years ago in Warsaw, Riga, Berlin, Amsterdam, Cracow, Vilna. I get no satisfaction from that knowledge, only a bitter sense that there is nothing new under the sun.

Enough rhetoric – how about a little “show and tell?” A few weeks ago on the cover of Time magazine was a horrific picture with a horrific story.

The photo was of an eighteen year old Afghani woman, Bibi Aisha, who fled her abusive husband and his abusive family. Days later the Taliban found her and dragged her to a mountain clearing where she was found guilty of violating Sharia Law. Her punishment was immediate. She was pinned to the ground by four men while her husband sliced off her ears, and then he cut off her nose.

That is the enemy.

If nothing else stirs us. If nothing else convinces us, let Bibi Aisha’s mutilated face be the face of Islamic radicalism. Let her face shake upeven the most complacent and naive among us. In the holy crusade against this ultimate evil, pictures of Bibi Aisha’s disfigurement should be displayed on billboards, along every highway from Route 66 to the Autobahn, to the Transarabian Highway. Her picture should be posted on every lobby wall from Tokyo to Stockholm to Rio. On every network, at every commercial break, Bibi Aisha’s face should appear with the caption – “Radical Islamic savages did this.” And underneath – This ad was approved by Hamas, by Hezbollah, by Taliban, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, by Islamic Jihad, by Fatah al Islam, by Magar Nodal Hassan, by Richard Reid, by Ahmanijad, by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, by Osama bin Laden, by Edward Said, by The Muslim Brotherhood, by Al Qaeda, by CAIR.

“The moral sentiment is the drop that balances the sea” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Today, my friends, the sea is woefully out of balance and we could easily drown in our moral myopia and worship of political correctness.

We peer up into the heavens sending probes to distant galaxies. We peer down into quarks discovering particles that would astonish Einstein. We create computers that rival the mind, technologies that surpass science fiction. What we imagine, with astounding rapidity, becomes real. If we dream it, it does, indeed, come. And yet, we are at a critical point in the history of this planet that could send us back into the cave, to a culture that would make the Neanderthal blush with shame.

Our parents and grandparents saw the swastika and recoiled, understood the threat and destroyed the Nazis. We see the banner of Radical Islam and can do no less.

A rabbi was once asked by his students…. “Rebbi. Why are your sermons so stern?” Replied the rabbi, “If a house is on fire and we chose not to wake up our children, for fear of disturbing their sleep, would that be love? Kinderlach, “di hoyz brent. Children our house is on fire and I must arouse you from your slumber.”

During WWII and the Holocaust was it business as usual for priests, ministers, rabbis? Did they deliver benign homilies and lovely sermons as Europe fell, as the Pacific fell, as North Africa fell, as the Mideast and South America tottered, as England bled? Did they ignore the demonic juggernaut and the foul breath of evil? They did not. There was clarity, courage, vision, determination, sacrifice, and we were victorious. Today it must be our finest hour as well. We dare not retreat into the banality of our routines, glance at headlines and presume that the good guys will prevail.

Democracies don’t always win.

Tyrannies don’t always lose.

My friends – the world is on fire and we must awake from our slumber.

EHR KUMT!

Human rights for inhuman terrorists

The moonbats of the liberal left would be a laughingstock if it weren't for the serious damage they are doing by championing the human rights of inhuman terrorists.  Such moonbats can even become presidents, as this recent email I received tells so chillingly .... 

As President George W. Bush's top speechwriter, Marc Thiessen was provided unique access to the CIA program used in interrogating top Al Qaeda terrorists, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). Now, his riveting new book, "Courting Disaster", How the CIA Kept America Safe (Regnery), has been published.

Here is an excerpt from "Courting Disaster": Just before dawn on March 1, 2003, two dozen heavily armed Pakistani tactical assault forces move in and surround a safe house in Rawalpindi. A few hours earlier they had received a text message from an informant inside the house. It read: "I am with KSM."

Bursting in, they find the disheveled mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in his bedroom. He is taken into custody. In the safe house, they find a treasure trove of computers, documents, cell phones and other valuable "pocket litter."

Once in custody, KSM is defiant. He refuses to answer questions, informing his captors that he will tell them everything when he gets to America and sees his lawyer. But KSM is not taken to America to see a lawyer Instead he is taken to a secret CIA "black site" in an undisclosed location. Upon arrival, KSM finds himself in the complete control of Americans. He does not know where he is, how long he will be there, or what his fate will be.

Despite his circumstances, KSM still refuses to talk. He spews contempt at his interrogators, telling them Americans are weak, lack resilience, and are unable to do what is necessary to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals. He has trained to resist interrogation. When he is asked for information about future attacks, he tells his questioners scornfully: "Soon, you will know."

It becomes clear he will not reveal the information using traditional interrogation techniques. So he undergoes a series of "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved for use only on the most high-value detainees. The techniques include waterboarding. His resistance is described by one senior American official as "superhuman." Eventually, however, the techniques work, and KSM becomes cooperative-for reasons that will be described later in this book.

He begins telling his CIA de-briefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets. He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda's operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics. He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids. He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications. He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists, KSM's questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world.

In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the "Bojinka plot" to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean.

Years later, an observant CIA officer notices the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appear to match KSM's description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack.

In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot. On the night of Aug.9, 2006 they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects. They find a USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven trans-Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other:

* United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at 2:15 p.m.;

* Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00 p.m.;

* Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15 p.m.;

* United Airlines Flight 959 to Chicago departing at 3:40 p.m.;

* United Airlines Flight 925 to Washington departing at 4:20 p.m.;

* American Airlines Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 p.m;

* American Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 p.m.

They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives. And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared.

Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much. Few Americans are aware of the fact al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude. And still fewer realize the terrorists' true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

This is only one of the many attacks stopped with the help of the CIA interrogation program established by the Bush Administration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

(For other foiled terrorist plots, see page 9 of "Courting Disaster.")

In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots, CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al Qaeda Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, intelligence officials say, well over half of the information our government had about al Qaeda-how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks-came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.

Former CIA Director George Tenet has declared: "I know this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said: "The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work."

Even Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has acknowledged: "High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."

Leon Panetta, Obama's CIA Director, has said: "Important information was gathered from these detainees. It provided information that was acted upon."

And John Brennan, Obama's Homeland Security Advisor, when asked in an interview if enhanced-interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, replied : "Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes."

On Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13491, closing the CIA program and directing that, henceforth, all interrogations by U.S personnel must follow the techniques contained in the Army Field Manual.

The morning of the announcement, Mike Hayden was still in his post as CIA Director, He called White House Counsel Greg Craig and told him bluntly: "You didn't ask, but this is the CIA officially nonconcurring". The president went ahead anyway, over ruling the objections of the agency.

A few months later, on April 16, 2009, President Obama ordered the release of four Justice Department memos that described in detail the techniques used to interrogate KSM and other high-value terrorists. This time, not just Hayden (who was now retired) but five CIA directors -including Obama's own director, Leon Panetta -- objected. George Tenet called to urge against the memos' release. So did Porter Goss. So did John Deutch. Hayden says: "You had CIA directors in a continuous unbroken stream to 1995 calling saying, 'Don't do this.'"

In addition to objections from the men who led the agency for a collective 14 years, the President also heard objections from the agency's covert field operatives. A few weeks earlier, Panetta had arranged for the eight top officials of the Clandestine Service to meet with the President. It was highly unusual for these clandestine officers to visit the Oval Office, and they used the opportunity to warn the President that releasing the memos would put agency operatives at risk. The President reportedly listened respectfully-and then ignored their advice. With these actions, Barack Obama arguably did more damage to America's national security in his first 100 days of office than any President in American history.

But how many people know this?

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He still doesn't get it ....

The utter vacuousness of Barack Obama's presidency seems to resonate more with every speech he makes.

On this 9th anniversary of the Islamic butchery wrought on 9-11-2001 he recited these words from his ever-present teleprompter ...

"The highest honor we can pay those we lost, indeed our greatest weapon in this ongoing war, is to do what our adversaries fear the most -- to stay true to who we are, as Americans; to renew our sense of common purpose; to say that we define the character of our country, and we will not let the acts of some small band of murderers who slaughter the innocent and cower in caves distort who we are,"

Wrong Mr.President.
Very nice flowery words and sentiments ... but still plain wrong!

The 'highest honor' you can pay those lost souls and the families who grieve them is to finally acknowledge who did it and why.

That way the people of the United States might finally be able to rally round a commander-in-chief who has found the courage to call evil by its real name.

They rallied round the leaders who identified Nazism as the enemy and defeated it.

They rallied round the leaders who identified Communism as the enemy and defeated it.

Until the leaders of the free world tell the people 'we are at war with Islamism' there will be no serious prospect of defeating it.

Which means there will be ever more 9-11s wrought by this creed that glorifies death.

And the victims of 9-11-2001 shall have died without purpose.

Some honor!

9-11 after 8 years

Another year - another anniversary of the greatest terrorist outrage in history.



After 8 years, we still wait for an apology from the Muslim world for what was done in the name of their prophet.



Or at least a speech of condemnation from ANY major Muslim cleric.



To the best of my knowledge, we have heard neither.



Instead it is America who apologises to the Muslim world.



To the Saudis, who provided 11 out of the 19 hijackers, Obama bows in homage.

To the Palestinians, who celebrated the 2,974 deaths with street parties and sweets, America and Europe has never ceased doling out tens of millions in cash.

And to he rest of the Arab world which celebrated 9-11 in their own special ways, Obama reaches out in peaceful engagement whilst acknowledging the tremendous contributions they have made to mankind.

There's no better way to dishonor the memory of the victims of 9-11 and to absolutely assure the free world of 'more of the same' to come.

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That Cairo Speech

Arising from all the commentary and analysis over Obama's speech in Cairo I am ...

1. Deeply hurt - as the son of a Holocaust survivor - at the equivalence he drew between Palestinians living in 'trophy' refugee camps and the 6 million Jews who were horrifically murdered by the Nazis and their European compatriots.


2. Grossly offended by seeing him casting Israeli security forces in the role of white slavers.


3. Surprised at his ignorance of basic facts such as Jewish ties to the land of Israel going back a little further than the UN partition plan (like perhaps a thousand years before the birth of Islam) and suggesting there were 3 times as many Muslims in America than there actually are.


4. Amused at his reference to the Koran as a book of peace. He clearly hasn't read it at all - anymore than he read the trillion-dollar bailout bill.

But mostly, I'm fed up with his endless apologies to Islamist sheikhs, rulers despots and dictators.

Am I the only one who’s still asking why not a single Muslim leader has the guts to make this kind of grand speech to the free world and publicly apologize for - and dissociate from - the appalling slaughter of innocents on September 11th 2001 ???

If anyone out there has ever seen or heard of such a speech having been made - I'd really love to see the YouTube link.