M2RB: Led Zepplin
From the houses of the holy, we can watch the white doves go.
From the door, comes Satan's daughter and it only goes to show, you know...
There's an angel on my shoulder, in my hand a sword of gold....
From the door, comes Satan's daughter and it only goes to show, you know...
There's an angel on my shoulder, in my hand a sword of gold....
Here Comes Hamas...and Egypt.
Heckava job, Barry!
By Andrew C. McCarthy
The day of reckoning is here.
For over 30 years, the United States government and the institutions
that drive public opinion have made like Susan Rice when it comes to the
ideological threat that Islamic supremacists pose to freedom,
fabricating reasons to remain in denial. Thus inured, the American
people have elected, and now reelected, a president notoriously fond of
America-bashing Islamists. The attraction would not be hard to
understand if we were not so ideology-averse — GOP strategists having
made Obama’s radicalism a subject nearly as off-limits as Islamic
supremacism, helpfully leaving the Left to fill the canvas with their
portrait of Mitt Romney: “Where Gordon Gekko Meets Michael Vick.”
The president is a movement leftist who sees in our society a
condemnable legacy of racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation
that cries out for “fundamental change.” That is not meaningfully
different from the Islamist perspective of America: The Brotherhood’s
self-proclaimed mandate to
“eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage”
is, in effect, a cognate summons to “fundamental change,” even allowing
that Islamists are driven to statism by sharia rather than Marxism. The
Brotherhood’s American mouthpiece, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, brags that
the president nabbed 85 percent of the Muslim vote on November 6 —
larger even than Obama’s lopsided share of the Hispanic vote, which has
GOP strategists hyperventilating. You wouldn’t want to take CAIR claims
at face value, but their ardor for Obama, like the Brotherhood’s, is
palpable. And as we’ve seen for four years, it is not an unrequited
love.
So along comes Hamas. Just days before the presidential election,
the terrorist organization — begotten by the Brotherhood and serving as
its Palestinian branch — spearheaded an Islamist offensive, firing in
just a few days over 120 rockets into the Jewish state from its home
base in Gaza. You may not have heard about it until a few days after the
election. Like Iran’s act of war in shooting at a U.S. drone in
international waters, it signaled a further dangerous unraveling of the
Middle East that undercut the media narrative of Obama as foreign-policy
chess master, so it was tucked under the rug. But it could not be
ignored forever, for it is not just another spike in the ever-thrumming
Gaza border skirmish. It is the renewal of an unending war — an
existential one for Israel, which is expected to fight
“proportionately,” with both hands tied behind its back, yet blithely
accept, as the international community has, the barbaric Islamist claim
that nothing short of Israel’s destruction will be satisfactory.
By its own declaration,
Hamas will be at war with Israel until the latter’s demise. Toward that
end, the jihad has now been taken to population centers such as Tel
Aviv. As of this writing, the Israeli death toll stands at three, kept
low only by the crudeness of the jihadist weapons and tactics.
By the calculation of
terrorism analyst Ryan Mauro, the onslaught begun last week brought the
yearly total of missile attacks on Israel to about 700. That is, while
the Obama administration has been facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood’s
rise in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and soon Syria — with Obama drawing ever
closer to Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even
as Erdogan champions and funds Hamas — Gaza’s jihadists have been
emboldened to step up their terror campaign.
And it is not just Gaza’s jihadists. Understand: This is not Hamas’s war
of extermination against Israel. It is Islam’s. And yes, for the
millionth time, there are various ways of interpreting Islam, but the
Islam that matters in the Middle East, the Islam that animates tens of
millions of Muslims, is Islamic supremacism. Israel, the canary in the
West’s coal mine, is not besieged by an eccentric doctrine weaved by
Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Jihadist terrorists are just the point
of the ideological spear.
Recent polling shows
that four in five Egyptians (i.e., about 60 million people) believe the
Camp David Accords — the treaty that has kept peace between Egypt and
Israel for 30 years — should be dissolved. It is the same four out of
five Egyptians that, given the chance, voted to put Islamists in control
of their government. Just as Muslims have chosen to empower Islamists
in Turkey, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tunisia, as well as in Lebanon
and Libya to a lesser but still consequential extent.
The jihad against Israel “isn’t a matter of individuals, not a matter
of community. It is a matter of a nation. The Arab nation, the Islamic
nation.” So exclaimed Egyptian
prime minister Hisham Qandil on Thursday in Gaza. He had been sent
there to show solidarity with Hamas by Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood
leader Egyptians elected as their president. “We are all behind you,”
Qandil continued — behind “the struggling nation . . . that is
presenting its children as heroes every day.”
This is how the Middle East’s Muslims see the situation. They are not
Palestinians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis, and so on. They are the ummah,
the “Islamic nation.” For them, Gaza is not a regional dustup over
parochial grievances. It is a civilizational struggle to be fought to
the finish — the finish being when the enemy is vanquished. We used to
fight wars that way, too. The fact that we’ve decided total
victory by force of arms is a quaint concept does not mean everybody
else has. Islamists define victory in the Middle East as the
annihilation of Israel. That is the ambition of the region, not just of
Hamas. Our government’s decades-old claim that the aggression results
from a “perversion of Islam” weaved by a fringe of “violent extremists”
is dangerously delusional.
Delusion, of course, is nothing new. For 30 years, ever since the Carter administration hailed Ayatollah Khomeini as a “saint,” willful blindness has
been the order of the day. It induced the Clinton and George W. Bush
administrations to insist that Islam was a “religion of peace” even as
scripture-citing Islamists repeatedly mass-murdered Americans. But
Barack Obama is something else again. This president has supplanted
conscious avoidance of our enemies’ ideology with empathy. Our
government no longer just ignores Islamist goals; it affirmatively
empowers Islamist factions.
It has been only eleven days, but we’re already seeing the wages of
November 6. The world has become a much more dangerous place, and not
just for Israelis.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.
Houses Of The Holy - Led Zepplin
Let me take you to the movies. Can I take you to the show
Let me be yours ever truly. Can I make your garden grow
From the houses of the holy, we can watch the white doves go
From the door comes Satan's daughter, and it only goes to show. You know.
There's an angel on my shoulder, In my hand a sword of gold
Let me wander in your garden. And the seeds of love I'll sow. You know.
So the world is spinning faster. Are you dizzy when you're stoned
Let the music be your master. Will you heed the master's call
Oh... Satan and man.
Said there ain't no use in crying. Cause it will only, only drive you mad
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had? Oh-oh
So let me take you, take you to the movie. Can I take you, baby, to the show.
Why don't you let me be yours ever truly. Can I make your garden grow
You know.
Let me be yours ever truly. Can I make your garden grow
From the houses of the holy, we can watch the white doves go
From the door comes Satan's daughter, and it only goes to show. You know.
There's an angel on my shoulder, In my hand a sword of gold
Let me wander in your garden. And the seeds of love I'll sow. You know.
So the world is spinning faster. Are you dizzy when you're stoned
Let the music be your master. Will you heed the master's call
Oh... Satan and man.
Said there ain't no use in crying. Cause it will only, only drive you mad
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had? Oh-oh
So let me take you, take you to the movie. Can I take you, baby, to the show.
Why don't you let me be yours ever truly. Can I make your garden grow
You know.
1 comment:
It is the renewal of an unending war — an existential one for Israel, which is expected to fight “proportionately,” with both hands tied behind its back, yet blithely accept, as the international community has, the barbaric Islamist claim that nothing short of Israel’s destruction will be satisfactory. By its own declaration, Hamas will be at war with Israel until the latter’s demise.
There will never be peace in the Middle East, vis-à-vis Israel, until one side completely humiliates and militarily annihilates the other.
Why Israel hasn't already done this leaves me at a loss -- especially when previous U.S. Presidents would have supported them ...
Post a Comment