The Toulouse Murders: Anti-Zionism is Racism

This week in Toulouse, France Mohammad Merah killed a rabbi and three children, dragging the youngest by her hair before he blew her brains out.   Merah stated that he was avenging Israeli murders of Palestinian children.

On November 10, 1975,  the United Nations passed General Assembly Resolution 3379. Which condemned Zionism as a form of racism.

Thirty years after the ovens went cold, the Jews were again labeled a people apart.   We have since reached the point where anti-Semitism, disguised as empathy for “opressed Palestinians” is not only acceptable, but fashionable.

Immediately following the killings in France, we heard from the Baroness Ashton, E.U. foreign policy chief, deploring the murders but somehow equating the with dead children in Gaza.  She has since somewhat nuanced her words, but not so far as to acknowledge that the innocent dead in Gaza have been and always are, killed as a result of conflict initiated by Palestinians.

And  when Islamists kill it’s not their fault.

Tarik Ramadan, Oxford Don, and doyen of the Islamic apologetic circuit, said this:

(Merah was)”…A French citizen frustrated at being unable to find his place, to give his life dignity and meaning in his own country, he would find two political causes through which he could articulate his distress: Afghanistan and Palestine. He attacked symbols like the army, and killed Jews, Christians and Muslims without distinction.”

Mera hmade his motives quite clear, targeting Jews in the name of Palestine, and French soldiers as revenge for France’s role in Afghanistan.  What do Palestine and Afghanistan have in common?  Of course, it is Islam

Ramadan’s air brushing is typical of his ilk; that such people are lionized n western intellectual circles demonstrates that we are, in our own way, as sick as the Islamic world,
where Jew hatred has a provenance almost as ancient as that of Europe.

Sahih Bukhari Hadith Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177: Narrated by Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

It is time to dispense with the term “anti-Semitism.”  Let’s call it what it is, Jew  hatred. and those who practice it what they are – Jew haters.

You who toss a keffiyeh around your neck and sip coffee as you discuss “Israeli apartheid,“ you are Jew haters.  Your black and whitechecked fashion accessory is your brown shirt.  Call yourself progressive, antifash, or whatver you like, but only the empty  abstraction and post modern obfuscation of your mimicked discourses distinguish you from Stormfront.

When you sign  “Boycott and Divestment“ petition you are a Jew hater.

Your hatred, you think, is chic concern for the down trodden  You are an engage.  In fact, you are appallingly stupid.  Your hatred is born in ignorance and intellectual superstition,  What you regard as facts are instead mythical incantations, intended to conjure up a past that never was, and to transform the present into a future that will never be.

You repeat the baseless and self important assertions of whichever half lettered disciple of Edward Said filled your vacuous, but selfish minds in some overpriced classroom.  Israel you say, is a colonial construct, a Western imposition on the Arab World.  Yet you cannot make the parallel conclusion that the map lines which define every Arab country today were drawn in Western foreign ministries.  All of these ramshackle polities calling themselves Arab states, miserable failures at providing anything but want and strife for their populations, hate Jews.  And so do you.

“Palestinians deserve to be free,” you say. Yet Israel is the only country in the middle East where all can worship freely, or not at all, and whose citizens can choose to live as religous, atheists, gays, secualar democrats, indeed any identity the wish to choose  or fashion on their own.   The extant Palestinian territories are morasses of petty despotism, extortion and nepotism.  This you would extend to a tiny, but highly successful, country in the name of a freedom that the Palestinians have long since shown they have no wish for, and you wish this on Israel because you are a Jew hater.

You would laugh at a Greek irredentist demanding a march on Constantinople.  While vast areas of Central and Eastern Europe  were once German and now are not, you do not demand right of return for Silesians, Pomeranians and Prussians.

But you do so for Palestinian Arabs.

Because you hate Jews.

If you truly cared for the Palestinians you would not urge them to continue on their fruitless absolutist quest.  For when Palestine is free, from the River to the Sea, it will be the freedom of utter devastation.

It would be a lesser rhetorical excess than those you use against to Jews to say that the blood of Janathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gabirel, and the little girl Miriam are on you  hands, but it is fair to say that your are close enough to catch the spatter.

Tarik Ramadan is a liar. And so are you when you say You aren’t anti Jew, just anti-Zionist, so you support the One State “solution.”  Jews understand when they hear talk of “solutions.

Muammed Merah was honest.  You should be too.

Say it.

I don’t love Palestine.

I hate Jews.

Death Spiral: Kathleen Sibelius and W.B. Yeats

On 29 February,  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius was on the Hill testifying as to why the Affordable Care Act is not the cause of the decline in employer provided health insurance.  When asked about the decline in employer provided health insurance coverage, the Secretary replied:*

“Well again, Congressman, what you’re seeing…  It wouldn’t have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not. The private market is in a death spiral.”

In health insurance parlance, a “death spiral” is:

“The health insurance death spiral occurs when individuals with higher health expenses are driven by market forces towards one particular plan. The higher costs associated with individuals who have pre-existing health conditions cause premiums and out-of-pocket costs to escalate, which drives healthier individuals out of the plan, because the cost becomes too high for the small amount of need they anticipate. This causes premiums and out-of-pocket costs escalate further because there aren’t as many healthy individuals left to absorb the risk, so even more healthy people leave the plan, and prices climb even higher. This cycle continues spiraling on and on until prices are so high that the coverage is unaffordable.”.(source)

This describes Obamacare.  Of course the private market is dying.  That’s the idea.  It always was.

It is something of a cliche to quote the most well known of Yeats, but when I read the word death spiral could not but hep think of the falcon’s gyre in “The Second Coming.”

                                     Turning and turning in the widening gyre
                                     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
                                     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
                                     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

This administration’s attack on the insurance market is only one instance of the anarchy they have loosed  Obama promised fundamental change.  This is one promise he has kept.

                                     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
                                      he ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Marx and Engels condemned the bourgeoisie in that  ” It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors.”   That of course was what led to the great advances in human prosperity and freedom.  The modern Left wishes to sunder the ties of law and civic responsibility that have made Western  Civilization so successful,  and reestablish those feudal ties to our natural superiors, the governing class. The sundering of of ancient ties to our freedoms has been accomplished without the blood once foretold by the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, but that “ceremony of innocence,” our confident sense of self, the optimism and energy that so entranced deTocqueville, are indeed drowning.. And thus we turn to government, even for something so basic as deciding who will care for our bodies, and how this should be done.

And those who should be guarding our institutions, seem helpless, lost, or worse, indifferent, while the new vanguard advances heedless to all objection

                                   The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                                   Are full of passionate intensity.

There is no question as to the “passionate Intensity” of this administration in pursuing its goals. Indeed, the death spiral Ms Sibelius cites is an unintended metaphor for what may be yet to come, as she testified on March 2nd:

Sebelius told a House panel Thursday that a reduction in the number of human beings born in the United States will compensate employers and insurers for the cost of complying with the new HHS mandate that will require all health-care plans to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions.

“The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception,” Sebelius said. She went on to say the estimated cost is “down not up.”

On the less weighty side of things, Ms Sibleius’ comment is typical of the kind of flip accounting gimmicks that are thrown up by all sides in political discourse.  In the longer view, it is deeply troubling. The Secretary is then perhaps unaware unaware of the demographic death spiral in the old cultures of Europe, where the birthrates for native Europeans – and yes, that means whites – have long since fallen below  replacement.

Or perhaps she is, and subscribes to the notion that the shortfall in human beings can be replaced with industrious immigrants.  One need only look to Britain where population has increased due to immigration from countries with a much lower level of economic, and human development, resulting in vast welfare dependency, defiant and resistant enclaves committed to Islamic rule, and a government that submits to the demands  of the invaders for whom it threw open the gates. Such a society most certainly “lacks all confidence.”

In the U.S., births were at replacement rate as recently as 2007, after thirty- five years  below that rate, 2.2 live births per woman, necessary to maintain a population, but has since dropped again.

“The rule which we intend to promulgate in the near future around implementation will require insurance companies, not a religious employer, but the insurance company to provide coverage for contraceptives,” Sibelius told the subcommittee.

The key word is “promulgate”.  It smacks of the arrogance of imperium. The praetors of the left know best. What we have here is a whiff of the totalitarian population control fantasies of the 1970s, a leading exponent of which was  John Holden, Obama’s “Science Czar.” He has since tepidly disavowed these views( rather recently, in fact, when they came to view), but the lesson is that he was wrong then, yet this administration is once again looking to population control, and, one could say, the eugenics of Margaret Sanger, when one considers African -American abortion rates, to manage a perceived problem.

The lLft simply doesn’t like people, other than those who form their self anointed elects( and not always then, as the history of leftist purges demonstrates)  The communist regimes of Europe and Asia spoke of their love of the masses, then slaughtered them.  The soft totalitarianism of the modern left will keep them from being born.

Coda: Finally, in a story that has hardly blazed across the airwaves, The estimated ten year cost of affordable Care, according to the CBO has doubled and the impact on employer provided coverage far more severe than anticipated.  Isn’t it always so?

*On these posts, it is my habit to use only “mainstream media”  as sources.  I am often alerted to stories by “right wing blogs,” but as I hope, in my small way, to perhaps , one at a time, convince the unconvinced, I research the stories in the traditional media which, quite undeservedly, retain a reputation for accuracy and even handedness.Yet, I was unable to find any reference on to Ms Sibelius’ testimony in the alphabet services. It’s real – you can see the video here.

Breitbart’s First Post Mortem Pitch Falls Short

Conservative New Media star Andrew’ Breitbart’s last article appeared today, the first in the series in  which, despite his death this week at 43, his organization intends to vet the President this time around, and promises to do the same with the President’s rivals.

The piece centers on a Chicano avant garde play put on in 1998, after the performance of which on one occasion then State Senator Baraka(sic) Obama appeared as a panelist. It’s pretty far left stuff, the details of which you can read here.

But in the end, it’s inside baseball.

Breitbart establishes Obama’s place in a chain of transmission going back to the thirties, even, at only two degrees of separation, touching Trotsky.  Bill Ayers and other heirs of the old left make appearances, as does writer Suds Terkel,

Fascinating stuff.

Some years ago, I was reading Sidney Hook’s autobiography “Out of Step,” In which he went after other public intellectuals, such as Irving Howe, for hiding their radical pasts and flirtations – or worse – with totalitarianism, when I remarked to a friend that, interesting as the book was, it seemed a bit quaint. In the wake of the collapse of the East Bloc.  What relevance did intellectual squabbles and confusing metamorphoses of Trotskyite splinter groups matter?  Who even gets the “Splittist” scene in “Life of Brian” anymore?  You have to be of a certain age.

I was wrong, and naïve to think the Left had ever gone away, or just become Liberals, annoying, but hardly subversive. Mr. Hook, who died in 1989, would recognize what the President has accomplished in obscuring his roots. I do not say “hide”, because the truth about Barrack Obama was there for anyone who cared to know before his election.

The problem was that “vetting” has traditionally – and foolishly – been entrusted to a restricted group of voices. In 2008, bias was not enough, and obscurantism, distortion, and outright falsehood were deployed in candidate Obama’s favor.  Making up for this egregious betrayal of trust was the project on which Mr. Breitbart had embarked before his death, and his people vow to finish it.

I hope they have more, and better, than this. When I call it inside baseball, I mean to say that those who can understand the significance of such associations and histories constitute a limited demographic. And they have long since made up their minds in regards to Mr. Obama, one way or the other.

The cause of anti leftism was dealt a blow by  its conflation with Senator McCarthy’s methods from which it has never recovered.  Even an aggressive Soviet Union, Maoist and Cambodian genocides, and countless smaller atrocities could not give it legitimacy. The left retains its mantle of altruism, seen as sometimes misguided perhaps, but altruism nevertheless. Those who oppose it on principle are, of course, fascists. This is the narrative Breitbart fought, but the battle is yet barely joined.

It is simply beyond the capacity or interest of the “crucial independent voters” to take an interest in ideological history, even were it to be fairly aired across the old media to which they maintain habitual allegiance,

Trotsy? Alinsky?   The Republic Steel strike in 1938? Sounds like history, dude. Boring. Studs Terkel?  Wasn’t he that nice old guy on PBS back when?

And in fairness, why should they take notice?  Disentangling the conflicting stories, stripping the layers and finding the truth is a pretty serious hobby for anyone, if not a full time job as it was for Andrew Breitbart.  Many would simply hope to go with their lives, trusting their government to do its best for them, and for their television and newspapers to tell them the truth,

To extend the baseball metaphor, Breitbart’s vetting roll out piece is like the statistics laced commentary during a  no hitter, a game that real fans love, but a lot of us just go to the park now and then and we want to see hits.

To score on Obama, will require no longer taking his pitches, but throwing some hard, fast balls his way, indelible messages that demonstrate this man’s antipathy to the kind of country I believe, or perhaps only hope, a majority still wants.

The Republicans throw like girls.  They need a relief pitcher.  One can only hope Breitbart is savings  its best stuff  for the later innings.