Melanie Phillips' Article - A Must Read!

Senseless killings are just that regardless of the victim. A nine year child's life is as precious as an accomplished jurist or Congresswoman though might not get the same media and news coverage.

The media's bias has been given another opportunity to misplace blame but I believe Shakespeare had it right the first time - "...man's inhumanity to man." It is nothing new, will continue and it happens regardless of so called political rhetoric.

Frankly, I am not surprised this tragedy is being attributed to Palin, Tea Partiers but I do not understand why no one has blamed GW as well? (See 1,1a and 1b below.)

And now for a look at the medical future of tree hugging tree climbers.
(See 1c below.)

Finally, call me neurotic but in addition to the warnings below one probably should not run for Congress. (See 1d below.)
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Hello father, hello mother, here I am at camp Granada and they just got removed from U.S. passports. (See 2 below.)
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Iran claims nabbed spy was trained in Israel by Mossad. (See 3 below.)
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According to Melanie Phillips, Israel lost the propaganda war a long time ago and the West is equally vulnerable and equally unprepared.

Phillips writes: "...believers in Islam see their religion as perfect and thus what's happened is a pattern of thinking in the west which turns reality upside down. Remarkably, this in turn echoes a very similar inversion of reality within the Islamic world, where such inversion has a theological base.

Because Islam is considered perfect, its adherents can never do wrong. All their aggression is therefore represented as self-defense, while western/Israeli self-defense is said to be aggression...What is remarkable is that instead of treating this as a pathological deformity of thinking, the western progressive intelligentsia has largely embraced it as rational and true. And to a large extent this is because that same western intelligentsia has itself supplanted rationality by ideology — or the dogma of a particular idea.

Objectivity, evidence and truth have been ditched for ideologies such as moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, transnationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism..."

This is one of the finest most lucid article I have ever posted and I urge you to read it in full.(See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence
By Michael Filozof

It took less than 24 hours for the political left to seize upon the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people on Saturday to blame the political right for the shooting.


Perhaps the most egregious example came from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote, "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was." (The newspaper that published plagiarized and fabricated accounts of the "D.C. sniper" by affirmative-action hire Jayson Blair in 2003 is still publishing unsubstantiated suppositions without "proof," eh?)


"[Giffords'] father says that 'the whole Tea Party' was her enemy," continued Krugman. "And yes, she was on Sarah Palin's infamous 'crosshairs' list." As if that was not enough, Krugman went on to invoke the specter of Tim McVeigh.


Well, we do have some proof now, and it's clear that the shooter was in no way connected to the Tea Party, the Republican Party, or any other movement on the political right. Law enforcement officials have revealed that suspect Jared Loughner was rejected by the Army and kicked out of college. He appeared to have mental health issues, and he was a reader of The Communist Manifesto.


But since Krugman and the other members of the leftist chattering classes have brought up the subject of politically inspired violence, maybe we ought to remind them of the left's protracted association with political violence.


We could begin over a century ago, when William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was inspired by anarchist Emma Goldman (today a darling of the academic feminists). Goldman's lover, Alexander Berkman, attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick because Frick was a prominent capitalist.


But it wasn't until the 1960s (when Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh became idols of the American left) that the left really ramped up the violence. Who can forget Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam? Or Eldridge "rape is an insurrectionary act" Cleaver and his Black Panthers? What about the bombings perpetrated by the Weathermen? Former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers is, of course, a close associate of President Barack Obama. Ayers managed to escape prosecution (and proclaimed himself "[g]uilty as hell, free as a bird"), but his wife Bernadine Dohrn served jail time for her part in the violence. Black radicals seized Cornell University at gunpoint in 1969, the same year the SDS and the Weathermen staged the "Days of Rage" riots. Race riots took place in Watts in 1965 and nationwide in 1968; leftists rioted at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. John Kennedy was murdered by a communist, and Robert Kennedy was shot by a Palestinian -- hardly men of the right.


The 1970s weren't much calmer. The Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was bombed by leftist radicals in 1970. Heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and took part in a series of armed bank robberies by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA inspired Sarah Jane Moore to try to assassinate Gerald Ford -- less than three weeks after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, tried to kill Ford also. And what about the shooting of FBI agents at Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement in 1975?


Since we're taking about violence against members of Congress, how can we possibly fail to mention the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and the mass suicide of nine hundred people by the leftist/Marxist Jonestown cult in 1978?


Does anyone recall that President Clinton pardoned members of the Marxist-Leninist-inspired Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN? Clinton also pardoned left-wing radical Susan Rosenberg, who was imprisoned for her role in the murder of two police officers and a security guard in a robbery in 1981. She was offered a teaching job at Hamilton College, but public outcry forced her to decline the position.


More recently, we've seen anarchist and communist riots against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and violent anti-Bush and antiwar protests. In 2007, leftist playwrights in New York created a stage performance about killing president Bush.


The politics of the contemporary left is absolutely intertwined with either tacit or overt support for violence. How dare the left-wing media attempt to pin the actions of a deranged individual in Tucson on the right! To do so is nothing less than a calumny, a slander, and a blatant hypocrisy.




1a)Climate of Hate
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

And there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning




1b)Let's not make this something it isn't
By Steve Kornacki

I'll admit that my first thought on Saturday upon hearing that Gabrielle Giffords had been shot was that it was probably the work of a politically motivated right-wing extremist. And based on my initial conversations with colleagues and friends -- to say nothing of what I observed on Twitter -- I was hardly alone.

It certainly seemed logical. There have been plenty of times since the fall of 2008, when Barack Obama’s pending election as president began stirring some hysterical and occasionally alarming rumblings from the right’s fringe, that I’ve wondered if it wasn’t all leading to some act of violence against Obama or another major Democratic official. On Saturday, it seemed, that awful moment had actually arrived.

A day later, though, that’s not exactly how things look. To be sure, Giffords’ shooting -- and the shootings of nearly two dozen other people who were in her vicinity -- is a horrific tragedy, and at a certain level, it really doesn’t matter what motivated Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old suspect who is now in custody.

But it should also be noted that what we have learned so far about Loughner defies ideological branding. Based on his MySpace page and series of YouTube videos he apparently made, Loughner is fixated on his area’s literacy rate, government "mind control methods," and ... something having to do with America’s currency. A high school classmate describes him as "left-wing." He also is apparently fond of "Mein Kampf" and Karl Marx and may be somehow connected to a fringe anti-immigration group. And he despised Giffords. Make what you will of all of that. My hunch is that Lougnher is just basically crazy, and that his political thinking isn’t particularly coherent or organized.


Thus, the degree to which post-shooting commentary has focused on the provocative rhetoric of Sarah Palin and other Tea Party favorites doesn’t fully make sense to me. Sure, I understand the idea that Palin’s “Don’t retreat, reload!” command and Sharron Angle’s talk of "Second Amendment remedies," to pick two of the most frequently cited examples, may have helped in some way to create an atmosphere conducive to some nut picking up a weapon and taking matters into his own hands. And I understand the idea that, even if Loughner had no idea who Sharron Angle is and even if he never saw Palin’s infamous cross-hairs map, it still makes sense to encourage political leaders to ditch violent rhetoric.

But I also can’t help detecting a desire to make Saturday’s shooting something that it doesn’t seem to be – a chance to say, "See, we told you" to Palin and the Tea Party crowd. Or, as Rep. Raul Grijalva, who represents the district next to Giffords’ in Arizona, put it in an interview with the Nation: "Ms. Palin needs to look at her own behavior." He is far from alone in expressing this sentiment.

This seems unfair. At best, the connection between Palin’s behavior and Saturday’s tragedy is abstract. If anything, the shooting reinforces a point that James Fallows has made: The motives of political assassins rarely have anything to do with mainstream political debate and rhetoric. For now, at least, this seems to be the case with Loughner. This doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable to criticize Palin and others who push the envelope with their rhetoric. But when liberals use this moment to highlight every provocative statement Palin has made, it’s also not unreasonable if she says that her opponents are trying just a little too hard to make her the villain.

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.


1c) A woman from Los Angeles, CA who was a tree hugger, a Democrat, and an
anti-hunter, purchased a piece of timberland near Colville, WA.

There was a large tree on one of the highest points in the tract. She wanted a
good view of the natural splendor of her land so she started to climb the big
tree. As she neared the top she encountered a spotted owl that attacked her.
In her haste to escape, the woman slid down the tree to the ground and got many
splinters in her crotch.

In considerable pain, she hurried to Mt. Carmel ER to see a doctor. She told him
she was an environmentalist, a Democrat, and an anti-hunter and how she came to
get all the splinters. The doctor listened to her story with great patience and
then told her to go wait in the examining room and he would see if he could help
her.

She sat and waited three hours before the doctor reappeared.
The angry woman demanded, "What took you so long?"
He smiled and then told her, "Well, I had to get permits from the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management before
I could remove old-growth timber from a recreational area. I'm sorry, but due
to Obama Care, they turned me down."


1d)Everyone should take 5 minutes to read this. It may save your life or a loved one's life.


In daylight hours, refresh yourself
of these things to do in an emergency situation...

This is for you, and for you to share with your wife, your children, everyone you know.

It never hurts to be careful in this crazy world we live in.


1. Tip from Tae Kwon Do :
The elbow is the strongest point (?joint)on your body.

If you are close enough to use it, do!

2.. Learned this from a tourist guide.If a robber asks for your wallet and/or purse,

DO NOT HAND IT TO HIM. Toss it away from you....Chances are that he is more interested in your wallet and/or purse than you, and he will go for the wallet/purse.

RUN LIKE MAD IN THE OTHER DIRECTION!

3. If you are ever thrown into the trunk(?boot)of a car, kick out the back(?rear) tail lights and stick your arm out the hole and start waving like crazy..

The driver won't see you, but everybody else will. This has saved lives..

4. Women have a tendency to get into their cars after shopping, eating, working, etc., and just sit (doing their checkbook,(?checklist) or making a list, etc.
DON'T DO THIS!)

The predator will be watching you, and this is the perfect opportunity for him to get in on the passenger side, put a gun to your head, and tell you where to go.

AS SOON AS YOU GET INTO YOUR CAR , LOCK THE DOORS AND LEAVE..

If someone is in the car with a gun to your head

DO NOT DRIVE OFF,Repeat: DO NOT DRIVE OFF! Instead 'gun' the engine and speed into anything, wrecking the car. Your Air Bag will save you. If the person is in the back seat they will get the worst of it .

As soon as the car crashes bail out and run.

It is better than having them find your bod in a remote location.

5. A few notes about getting into your car in a parking lot,or parking garage:

A.) Be aware: look around you,look into your car, at the passenger side floor,

and in the back seat.

B.) If you are parked next to a big van, enter your car from the passenger door.

Most serial killers attack their victims by pulling them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars.

C.) Look at the car parked on the driver's side of your vehicle, and the passenger side... If a male is sitting alone in the seat nearest your car, you may want to walk back into the mall, or work, and get a guard/policeman to walk you back out.

IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY. (And better paranoid than dead.)

6 ALWAYS take the elevator instead of the stairs. Stairwells are horrible places to be alone and the perfect crime spot. This is especially true at NIGHT!

7. If the predator has a gun and you are not under his control, ALWAYS RUN!

The predator will only hit you (a running target) 4 in 100 times; and even then,it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ.

RUN, Preferably in a zig -zag pattern!

8. As women, we are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP

It may get you raped, or killed. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, was a good-looking,
well educated man, who ALWAYS played on the sympathies of unsuspecting women. He walked with a cane, or a limp, and often asked 'for help' into his vehicle or with his vehicle, which is when he abducted his next victim.

9. Another Safety Point:

Someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby on her porch the night before last,and she called the police because it was late and she thought it was weird.... The police told her'Whatever you do, DO NOT open the door..'

The lady then said that it sounded like the baby had crawled near a window, and she was worried that it would crawl to the street and get run over.

The policeman said, 'We already have a unit on the way,whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.'

He told her that they think a serial killer has a baby's cry recorded and uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone dropped off a baby.. He said they have not verified it, but have had several calls by women saying that they hear baby's cries outside their doors when they're home alone at night.


10. Water scam!

If you wake up in the middle of the night to hear all your taps outside running or what you think is a burst pipe, DO NOT GO OUT TO INVESTIGATE! These people turn on all your outside taps so that you will go out to investigate and then attack.

Stay alert, keep safe, and look out for your neighbors!


This e-mail should be taken seriously because the Crying Baby Theory was mentioned on
America 's Most Wanted when they profiled the serial killer in Louisiana

The world we live in has a lot of crazies in it and it's better to be safe than sorry..
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2)Obama's State Dept. Removes Mother, Father From Passports


In what seems to be a diplomatic effort at extreme political correctness and a nod to gay rights groups, the Obama administration is removing the words “mother” and “father” from U.S. passport applications and replacing them with “gender neutral” terminology. Mom and dad will now be referred to rather coldly as “parent one” and “parent two.”

Conservative Christian groups are outraged over the decision.

“Only in the topsy-turvy world of left-wing political correctness could it be considered an ‘improvement’ for a birth-related document to provide less information about the circumstances of that birth,” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins wrote in a statement to Fox News Radio. “This is clearly designed to advance the causes of same-sex ‘marriage’ and homosexual parenting without statutory authority, and violates the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act.”

“The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services, confirmed Fox News. "They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’"

A statement on the State Department website noted: “These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.” The statement didn't note if it was for child applications only.

The new passport applications, not yet available to the public, will be available online soon. Sprague told Fox the decision to remove the traditional parenting names was not an act of political correctness.

“We find that with changes in medical science and reproductive technology that we are confronting situations now that we would not have anticipated 10 or 15 years ago,” she said.

Gay rights groups are applauding the decision.

“Changing the term mother and father to the more global term of parent allows many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn’t recognize their family,” said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Equality Council.

Her organization lobbied the government for several years to remove the words from passport applications.

“Our government needs to recognize that the family structure is changing,” Chrisler said. “The best thing that we can do is support people who are raising kids in loving, stable families.”

The new gender-neutral passport application will be rolled out in February.
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3)Iran claims it nabbed Mossad spy trained in Israel
By YAAKOV KATZ


Captured network of spies allegedly linked to assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist a year ago; Iranian state TV broadcasts confession of one suspect saying he learned in Israel how to place bombs in cars.

A possible blow was dealt to the Mossad on Monday after Iranian intelligence services announced they had succeeded in penetrating the Israeli spy agency’s operations in that country.

According to a statement put out by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, Iran had arrested a network of spies linked to the assassination of one of the country’s top nuclear scientists a year ago, and the spies had revealed information on additional anti-Iran Israeli plots.
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4)Israel's supporters better wake up!
By Melanie Phillips


One of Britain's most respected columnists challenges the Jewish state's defenders (and the West) to reconsider reality



As we all know by now, Israel has lost the battle for public opinion in the West. Even the Israel government is now acknowledging this fact. Israel and its defenders have been outclassed and outmaneuvered in a war of the mind being waged on a battleground it never even acknowledged it was on.

Calls for more and better hasbara, however, are meaningless if the message or narrative promoted by Israel and its defenders misses the point of the attack being waged upon it. And it does miss that point, by a mile.

You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.

The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not just of the media animosity or economic or academic boycotts. It goes across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes.

In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonization and delegitimization of Israel.

The scale of this phenomenon is nothing short of a multi-layered civilizational crisis.

The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society's thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.

In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions.

This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimizer, truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.

This madness is being promulgated through a global alliance between state and non-state actors — diplomats and journalists, politicians and NGOs and websites. Many of these are waging war not just against Israel but against the west.

There are two preconditions for an effective fightback. First is to form effective structures of resistance. Those structures, however, depend in turn on a correct understanding of the nature and scale of what we are up against.

So far, the structures are not in place, and more important still, what Israel is up against is grossly — and fatally — underestimated and misunderstood.

The problem is that we are dealing with a pathology — to which we nevertheless respond as if it were rational behavior.

What's happened is a pattern of thinking in the west which turns reality upside down. Remarkably, this in turn echoes a very similar inversion of reality within the Islamic world, where such inversion has a theological base.

Because Islam is considered perfect, its adherents can never do wrong. All their aggression is therefore represented as self-defense, while western/Israeli self-defense is said to be aggression.

So in this Orwellian universe the enslavement of Muslim women is said to represent their liberation; democracy is a means of enslavement from which the west must be freed; and the murder of Israelis is the purest form of justice.

Furthermore, this is overlaid by the phenomenon of 'psychological projection' in which the Islamic world not only denies its own misdeeds but ascribes them instead to its victims.

So while Muslims deny the Holocaust, they claim that Israel is carrying out a holocaust in Gaza. Antisemitism is central to Jewish experience in Europe; Muslims claim that 'Islamophobia' is rife throughout Europe.

Israel gives all Jews the 'right of return' to Israel on account of the unique reality of global Jewish persecution; the Muslims claim a 'right of return' — not to their own putative state of Palestine, but to Israel. They even claim that the Palestinians are the world's 'new Jews'.

These and many other examples are used within the Islamic world to negate Jewish experience and appropriate it for itself to obtain what Muslims want in terms of status, power and conquest.

What is remarkable is that instead of treating this as a pathological deformity of thinking, the western progressive intelligentsia has largely embraced it as rational and true. And to a large extent this is because that same western intelligentsia has itself supplanted rationality by ideology — or the dogma of a particular idea.

Objectivity, evidence and truth have been ditched for ideologies such as moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, transnationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism.

Across a wide range of such issues, it's no longer possible to have a rational discussion with the progressive intelligentsia, as on each issue there's only one story for them which brooks no dissent.

This is because, rather than arriving at a conclusion from the evidence, ideology inescapably wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. So ideology of any kind is fundamentally anti-reason and truth. And if there's no truth, there can be no lies either; truth and lies become merely 'alternative narratives'.

Moral and cultural relativism — the belief that subjective experience trumps moral authority and any notion of objectivity or truth — has turned right and wrong on their heads.

Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups — those without power — can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because — in the hateful discourse of today — Jews are held to be all-powerful as they 'control' the media, Wall Street and America.

So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up as they are the third world victims of the west; so any atrocities they commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be Israel's own fault.

So the way has been opened for mass credulity towards propaganda and fabrication. The custodians of reason have thus turned into destroyers of reason — centered in the crucible of reason, the university.


All these different ideologies are utopian; in their different ways, they all posit the creation of the perfect society. That is why they are considered 'progressive', and people on the progressive wing of politics sign up to them. That helps explain the distressing fact that so many Jews on the left also sign up to Israel-hatred, since they too sign up to such utopian ideologies.

But when utopias fail, as they always do, their adherents invariably select scapegoats on whom they turn to express their rage over the thwarting of the establishment of that perfect society. And since utopia is all about realizing the perfect society, these scapegoats become enemies of humanity.

For Greens, such enemies of humanity are capitalists; for anti imperialists, America; for militant atheists, religious believers. Anti-Zionists turn on Israel for thwarting the end to the 'Jewish question': the redemption of western guilt for the persecution of the Jews — a guilt which can never be redeemed as long as the wretched Jews continue to make themselves the targets of attack.

In short, therefore, the west cannot defend itself against the Islamic jihad because it can't itself even think straight any more.

But this lethal muddle in the minds of the intelligentsia must be viewed in turn in the context of a global diplomatic process which itself embodies upside-down thinking, which fans the flames of bigotry and defeatism — and in which Israel itself has been tragically, and suicidally, complicit.

It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why those promoting genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.

In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part of the Jews' legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started hijacking planes, the west's response was to invite them to the UN to plead their cause.

And despite the Arabs' repeated refused to accept the two state solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert and their current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not making enough concessions to them — while giving a free pass to those who still refuse to accept Israel's right to exist.

It is astonishing that the west expects Israel to make any concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender. This is expected by the civilized world of no other country.

Yet we are repeatedly told even by certain supporters of Israel that the Palestinians have a right to a state. Why? In any other conflict, such aggression forfeits any rights at all.

I am not saying that Israel should retain all the disputed territories; it may well be in its own interests to give some of them up. But the point is that Israel has made all the concessions over the years while the Arabs have made none — yet it is Israel, not the Arabs, that is under pressure from the west.

This is diplomacy as scripted by Franz Kafka.

The single greatest reason for the endless continuation of the Middle East impasse is that Britain, Europe and America have continuously rewarded the aggressor and either attacked the victim or left it twisting in the wind.

That's what needs to be said by Israel and its defenders. But Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the false analysis of the enemy's narrative.

Even many of Israel's friends spout the demonstrably absurd proposition that a Palestine state would solve the problem, that the impediment to a Palestine state is the 'settlers', but that Israel is not taking action to remove the 'settlers' — and so therefore they too inescapably agree that Israel is the problem.

Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.

That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor — the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the 'settlements' and the territories.

Yet since Oslo, Israel has meekly gone along with this mad pressure. It has never said it is totally unconscionable. It has never put the all-important argument from justice on its own account. So it has allowed its enemies to appropriate this argument mendaciously as their own. But if Israel doesn't make the case properly on its own behalf, how can anyone else do so?

To which Israel says realpolitik dictates it has to go along with the diplomatic game being played. But diplomatic realpolitik is what brought us all to this position — the brink of a terrible war with Iran which is treated by America with kid gloves while Israel is put under the cosh.

For the west to suck up to its enemies while bashing its friends like this is the diplomatic version of auto-immune disease. And eventually this disease will kill it.

What Israel has failed to recognize is that the battleground on which it is being forced to fight is not just military. It is also a battleground of the mind, and the strategy being used against it — and to which it needs to respond in kind — is psychological warfare.

The Arab and Muslim world long ago realized if it set the narrative in its own image, it would recruit millions of fanatics to its cause and also confuse and demoralize its victims. In this it has wildly succeeded.

There is therefore an overwhelming need for Israel to alter its strategy. Indeed, it needs to have a strategy.

And this brings us to perhaps the most difficult challenge in all of this — the fact that the role played by the Israel government is of critical importance. Unless it adopts the correct strategy, its defenders will remain crippled.

Yet any promising initiatives seem to fall victim to Israel's chaotic political structure, which appears to prevent the Prime Minister from being master in his own house. Good ideas are habitually destroyed by rampaging egos and turf wars between Israeli Cabinet ministers.

This is no way to run a chip shop, let alone a country under existential siege.

The fact remains that both Israel and diaspora Jews have to rethink. They have to realize they must start fighting on the battleground where the attack is actually being mounted against them. And the goal has to be to seize and retake the moral high ground.

This strategy requires two different tactics: one for those who are capable of rational thought, and another for those who are not.

The first group comprises those who are not irrational but merely desperately ignorant. Much of the obsession with Israel's behavior is due to the widespread belief that its very existence is an aberration which, although understandable at the time it came into being, was a historic mistake.

People believe that Israel was created as a way of redeeming Holocaust guilt. Accordingly, they believe that European Jews with no previous connection to Palestine — which they believe was the historic homeland of Palestinian Muslims who had lived there since time immemorial — were transplanted there as foreign invaders, from where they drove out the indigenous Arabs into the West Bank and Gaza. These are territories which Israel is now occupying illegally oppressing the Palestinians and frustrating the creation of a state of Palestine which would end the conflict.

Of course every one of those assumptions is false. But from those false assumptions proceeds the understandable belief not just that Israel's behavior is unjust, illegal and oppressive but that it is unjust and oppressive by virtue of its very existence.

For these people there is an urgent need for a proactive educational approach. No-one has ever told them that these beliefs are false — and when they are told, the effect is often transformative.

There is a desperate and urgent need to educate such people in Jewish and Middle East history; to enlighten them about the shameful role played by Britain in Palestine in tearing up its treaty obligations; to tell them that under international law Israel is entitled to the disputed territories — land within which Britain undertook to settle the Jews 'from the river to the sea' because of their historic and unique rights to that land.

That's all necessary for those who are still rational. For bigots, however, there is no point arguing with them. They are, by definition, beyond all reason. Their influence simply has to be destroyed. They have to be held to account for their lies and bigotry which should be forensically exposed.

So Israel and its defenders should be demanding of the world why it expects Israel alone to make compromises with people who have tried for nine decades to wipe out the Jewish presence in the land and are still firing rockets at it.

They should expose the pretence of Britain or European countries which claim to have Israel's security needs at heart but forbid it from using military means to defend itself; and which — as did the British Government recently — turn Israeli self-defense against the jihadi lynch-mob on board the Turkish terror ship Mavi Marmara into an attack to be condemned, or demand the opening of the border with Gaza which would allow in arms to kill more Israelis.

Israel and its defenders should be asking why so-called friends in the west want a Palestine state, since once the IDF depart the disputed territories they will become in short order yet another Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist entity which will pose a further threat not just to Israel but to the west.

They should be asking why the EU is continuing to fund the genocidal incitement against Jews promoted by the Palestine Authority.

They should be asking so-called 'progressives' — including Jewish 'progressives' — why they support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine.

They should be asking them why they are not marching against Hamas on account of its tyrannical oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. Why they are ignoring Arab and Muslim persecution of women and homosexuals.

Why they are not mounting a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Mahmoud Abbas's PA and Hamas, on account of Abbas's Holocaust denial and the clear evidence of continuation of Nazi Jew-hatred in a direct line of descent from predecessors who were Hitler's supporters in Palestine.

As for western Israel-bashers, Israel and its defenders should accuse them not of Jew-hating motives that cannot be proved but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. They should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to social gatherings, show them disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs. Turn their own weapons against them.

They should be telling the Jews 'own story of refugees and ethnic cleansing — the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab lands after 1948, and who now make up more than half of Israel's population. It's good to see that at last Israel is beginning to bring this to the world's attention. In Britain virtually no-one knows about it. At a stroke it takes the ground from under the feet of those demanding the 'right of return' for Arabs.

They should be holding Arab and Islamic democracy weeks on campus, to expose the oppression and persecution within that world against women, homosexuals and others.

They should be singling out the Anglican church and the revival of ancient theological Jew-hatred being spread within the Anglican world by the Palestinian Christians of the Sabeel centre.

At the same time, they should be focusing on their true friends within the Christian world, not just in America but also in Africa and Asia where there is an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Israel which could be mobilized into a global fighting force.

They should be campaigning against the UN and the hijacking of international law and human rights by anti-western, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian ideologues.

They should be confronting head-on the false claim that bigotry is confined to the right. They should be pointing the finger at the 'progressive' left to show how it is actually supporting the mortal enemies not just of Israel but the west.

And they should be making this case to Israelis themselves, to counter the delegitimization and ignorance in Israeli universities and to educate the Israeli young in their own national history.

In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defense and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologize. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defense intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.

It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel — the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.

Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home — including within Israel — and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.

In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel's seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.

For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.

It's time for Israel to realize that military campaigns against its enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.
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