Flags In

God bless you, vets, wherever you are. We salute you. Happy Memorial Day.

While Joplin Burns . . .

Now close your eyes and imagine he’s a white president. Say, for instance, George W. Bush.

Binyamin Netanyahu Delivers the Speech of a Lifetime

Would give a lot to hear Barack Obama utter words as resoundingly, beautifully loving of America as these:

My friends, the momentous trials of the last century, and the unfolding events of this century, attest to the decisive role of the United States in advancing peace and defending freedom. Providence entrusted the United States to be the guardian of liberty.  All peoples who cherish freedom owe a profound debt of gratitude to your great nation.   Among the most grateful nations is my nation, the people of Israel, who have fought for their liberty and survival against impossible odds, in ancient and modern times alike. 


I speak on behalf of the Jewish people and the Jewish state when I say to you, representatives of America, Thank you. Thank you for your unwavering support for Israel. Thank you for ensuring that the flame of freedom burns bright throughout the world. May God bless all of you.  And may God forever bless the United States of America.

Read the whole glorious thing, and weep that we should be saddled with the smug, second-rate, establishment-liberal narcissist who currently occupies the White House, a man “at home” slugging Guinness among the Israel-hating Irish, rather than one who loves his own nation with unabashed passion, and ours only slightly less so.

What If The Arab Spring Springs A Leak?

On one side are those who’ve spent the season cheering in (perhaps hasty) celebratory optimism the putative democratifying of Arab lands; on another is the Obama administration, dilatory, fickle, and vain as a fifteen-year-old Mean Girl doling out without appreciable pattern or explication the Yes dance cards—“reformer” Bashar Assad still has, in the bizarre, gaacky patois of Obamic diplo-speak, the opportunity to “start a serious dialogue to advance a democratic transition” (never mind the slaughter of 900 or so of his fellow Syrians)—and the No dance cards—Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi—not reformers, way not cool. On yet another side is skeptical, reluctant—cynical, even—Israel, worrying, with good reason: “Is it good for the Jews?” And, more to the point: “Is it good for the Jewish State?”  Somewhere in the middle, the Arab Spring. The “legitimate aspirations” of the Arab peoples are blooming in Tunisia (or so I keep hearing), but Spring in Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain has begun to stretch ominously into rather a Long Hot Summer, and all the hotter in Syria, the Iranian satellite, where the landscape is a killing field saturated with the blood of its own citizens, shades of Assad père, and of the Persian master.

Of course, there are aspirations and aspirations.  Do we watch Copts under attack by armed Muslim thugs in Cairo today with the same disgust and horror we felt watching Neda Agha-Soltan cut down in the streets of Tehran by Basij executioners two years ago? Do we learn that 75 percent of Egyptians view the Muslim Brotherhood favorably and 62 percent would like Egyptian law to follow the strictest interpretation of the Koran with the same alarm and dismay we felt seeing Saudi troops enter Bahrain in March (where they remain to this day) to help put down the uprising there? Do we read (in translation from Asharq al-Awsat) that a victim of Assad, Jr. “rolls up his shirt to show us marks of torture on his body [and] says: ‘I remained one and a half years in a prison under the ground and was tortured as if I were a Jew,’” with the same fear and loathing we feel reading that Syrian forces gunned down mourners at a funeral for protesters who’d been killed the previous day?

Do the Israelis have something to teach us—democracy-boosting idealists and self-idealizing leftists alike—about all of it, particularly the aspirations of an Arab enemy?

Yes, they do: They have something to teach us about Arab-state enmity so fierce it has been susceptible to negotiation only twice in six decades; explosions of violence launched so often against them over the years by states and terrorists after one end—a second Final Solution for the microscopic nation’s Jewish citizenry—that they feel naked and vulnerable when they come to America and aren’t searched at the entrance to every cafe, department store, movie theater, train station, school; “peace” negotiations so endlessly, ludicrously detailed they are down to street names and building numbers, across the table from mendacious “partners” sporting noms de guerre—Abu This and Abu That—that they could laugh (and sometimes do) at all the mordant humor of it.

But more important, the Israelis have something to teach us about what fills a vacuum. When Ariel Sharon, in a desperate bid to separate from “Palestinians” demanding de-"occupation" by the “Zionist entity,” and to gain some breathing room with the U.S. and Europe, stripped Gaza of every last groove of the Jewish double helix, the results were . . . unhappy. Gazans were not pleased to be left to their own devices; they didn’t want responsibility for seeing to themselves—as they might have done, for instance, by taking over the flourishing greenhouses left them by the extracted settlers—and they threw in their lot with the Hamas-al Qaeda axis—the same terrorists who—thanks in great part to the vacuum created by Obama’s wicked insistence, from the moment he assumed the presidency, on changing the facts on the ground in Israel—will now join a unity government with the communist Fatah “leaders” of the Arab territories of Judea and Samaria who are equally if less publicly bent on the destruction of their Jewish neighbors.

So cheer on, committed lovers of democracy, and flounder on, worthless Obamic self-lovers, but have a care all of you that this Arab Spring does not spring a leak and end up drowning us all in a great roiling tsunami of terror and bloodshed.

Through A State Department Glass Darkly

Perusing this little morsel from the office of the Deputy Secretary of State, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that State’s Arabist geographers have taken over the Foggy Bottom asylum at last: Today’s Media Note announces Mr. Steinberg’s visit to “Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank.” Well golly, State Department mouthpieces, thanks for the clarifying public admission of the thing we’ve believed about you forever, but here’s a little piece of information for your incomplete files: Jerusalem is in Israel —Biblically, historically, and, yes, even geographically—and not only is it in Israel, but it is the Eternal and Indivisible Capital of the Jewish State, and no amount of wishing or redrawing of maps by you will ever make it otherwise.

How Many Tom Friedmans Does It Take To Screw In A Chinese Lightbulb?

The Friedman carbon footprint

Three: One to sing “Mo Li Hua” (“A beautiful jasmine flower/A beautiful jasmine flower/Perfumed blossoms fill the branch/Fragrant and white for everyone’s delight/Let me come and pick a blossom/To give to someone/Jasmine flower, oh jasmine flower”) and recite words of turgid awe over china's dreamy progressive towering techno-industrial rising (jasmine-banning) miracle; another to direct his household staff—instruments of the common good (and the carbon footprint) every one—to do it for him, making certain they install only the RoHs-compliant twisty bulbs (made in China) in all his fixtures (a thousand points of dim light); and another to change his name legally from Thomas “One-party-autocracy-certainly-has-its-drawbacks.-But-when-it-is-led-by-a-reasonably-enlightened-group-of-people,-as-China-is-today,-it-can-also-have-great-advantages” Friedman to Walter “Weaklings-and-despondents-at-home-may-groan-under-the-burden-but-the-youth-and-strength-of-the-Russian-people-is-essentially-at-one-with-the-Kremlin’s-program,-believes-it-worthwhile-and-supports-it,-however hard be the sledding” Duranty.

The Dog

Proof of the existence of God.

And good for the Jews.

Why Not the Pike?

Okay, Mr. Obama, you’re right, we are not like our enemy—we are not savages, we are not monsters, we are not barbarians, we are not fiends, we are not beasts, we are not pigs: We do not shanghai cruise ships, assassinate wheelchair-bound men, and throw their bodies overboard; we do not bomb people taking buses to work; we do not intentionally maim and kill unarmed civilians doing their marketing; we do not target people eating pizza or sipping cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes; we do not massacre 20-somethings dancing at discotheques; we do not slaughter elderly citizens celebrating Passover; we do not scream Allahu Akbar! as we behead our captives and later broadcast ourselves to the world reveling in their blood; we do not burn, stab, lash, or disfigure our daughters and our sisters for sexual trespasses, alleged or otherwise; we do not destroy them in “honor killings”; we do not strap explosives to our children’s undeveloped bodies and send them out to destroy others and themselves in the bargain; we do not shoot anti-tank missiles at school buses; we do not remorselessly butcher eleven-year-olds, four-year-olds, and three-month-olds;  we do not hijack airplanes and use them as rockets to annihilate 3,000 people because our terror of modernity is so prodigious that we must devote ourselves to laying waste to it where we can; we do not choose to live as primitive animals in possession of advanced weaponry; we do not display photographs of our dead enemy—on the contrary, we confer upon him with all respect the traditional Muslim burial rites, bathing his body in perfumed water and wrapping it in pure white cloth, before tossing it into the sea because no country will have it.

No, we don’t roll that way, and of course that is all to the good. But every once in a while I wish we did. I wish we applied the ancient British custom of displaying heads on pikes along the pike now and then to that very special order of hominid—humanoid without the humanity—our foe: The sight of those decapitated crania might just serve as a deterrent to others with mass murder on their minds; and in any case we could most definitely use more of that rare, redolent, rose-scented pudding, Revenge—served hot. 
  

Must-See TV

From the indispensable MEMRI.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Say My Name

To Ismael Haniyeh, chief Hamas terrorist in Gaza, who announces: “We regard [the assassination of Osama bin Laden] as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood. . . .We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs”; and to the rest of the stone-age-cherishing, modernity-fearing, Jew-murdering, woman-ruining, child-destroying, brutality-loving, blood-lusting Islamist beasts out there, not nearly enough holy warrior Muslim Arab blood has been shed, as yet. But we have the time, and the patience, and the will to get you. Say this name: AMERICA!!

And to the self-praising, force-averse, America-diminishing Mr. Obama, thank someone other than yourself for setting in motion all—that would include the “enhanced interrogation techniques” so distasteful to you and all your community-organizing ilk, and the setting in which crucial information has been derived, Gitmo—that made it possible for the great country you seem so indisposed to lead to exterminate our blood-soaked enemy bin Laden, and show some modest reluctance, from time to time, to grab credit for the triumphs of others. Say this name: GEORGE W. BUSH!