Iran: To bomb or not to bomb - That is the... Umm, Never Mind

OK, this is twice in one week.  I wrote this today and was just planning on finishing editing it and sending it in, when I read that President Trump has just bombed three sites in Iran!  I've been locked out by X and haven't actually been paying attention to the news because I'm trying to survive 95 degree temps with no AC.  Now this!  As Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to say... Never mind...

Jews, Jews & more Jews... Lessons to be learned

Jews seem to generate a lot of negative emotions among non-Jews. While it's become particularly intense since Israel began retaliating against Hamas, it's been going on for a long time.  

The Romans fought three wars against the Jews, who had been a civilization for over a millennium before the time the Romans touched the sands of the Middle East.  The first of those wars, the First Jewish – Roman War 66-73 AD, which ended with the deaths of defenders of Masada resulted in destruction of the Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple, the death of 50,000 Jews and absolute Roman control of Jerusalem.

Over the course of the three wars the Jewish universe would change dramatically, with the adherents going from a powerful entity (although one subservient to the Romans) in the eastern Mediterranean, with semi-autonomous local control and nominal power over large swaths of land to a vilified people with virtually no power, no land and its surviving population either sold into slavery or kicked out of its traditional home and spread out across the region.

The reasons given for people hating Jews through the ages are numerous. They were a thorn in the side of the Romans.  They killed Christ.  They’re greedy bankers.  They’re insular, self-dealing and dislike non-Jews and their faith puts them above other 2^nd tier peoples and religions. Then there’s people who say Jews stole the land from the Arabs, put Palestinians in camps and Israel was founded by men like like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who were actual terrorists. 

In America some of that hate exists.  Why? The answers are things like: Because Jews control everything.  Jews built and control Hollywood, think Loew, Meyer and Warner up to Weinstein, Geffen & Emanuel. Jews control the media, think Zucker, Iger, Bloomberg, Newhouse and others. Jews frequently use finance to perpetrate scams on others, think Boesky, Epstein and Madoff. They control Wall Street, think Bill Ackman, Larry Fink & Stephen A. Schwarzman, Steve Cohen, John Paulson and many others. They have a huge influence in technology & Silicon Valley, think Zuckerberg, Ellison, Page & Brin, Ballmer, Dell and Cuban.  In business in general they’re everywhere, founding Home Depot, Carnival Cruise Lines, Rocket Mortgage, Levis, Hyatt Hotels, Ben & Jerrys, Starbucks, Snapple and many more.

Then of course there is the place where power is most cancerous, government.  Here, particularly where Democrats are concerned, Jews play a dominant role.  This just fired administration is a great example:  Homeland Security was helmed by Alejandro Mayorkas, Treasury by Janet Yellin, State by Tony Blinken while the AG was Merrick Garland, and the Chief of Staff was Ron Klain, who followed Jeffrey Zients. Not to mention the bottom feeders in Congress from Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff.  And the groups which push America to pour billions of dollars into Israel’s security like AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee). 

And lastly it was the Rosenbergs who gave the secrets of nuclear power to the Soviets, Marc Elias who helped Joe Biden steal the White House and George Soros who has funded the near collapse of the United States. 

All in all, for someone looking to hate, Jews make a good target. 

But here’s the thing… most of the names listed above – even the vermin Democrats – are relatively well known because they’ve been successful.  And most of them – except the vermin Democrats – have become successful because they created a business or a service that consumers – all consumers, not just Jews – were able and willing to exchange their hard earned money for in a free market, i.e. making people’s lives better.  That is very possibly the most noble way for a human being to make money.

When someone stops to think of all the Jewish names above, and other ones they know, one might think that Jews are a huge segment of the population.  But they’re not.  Here in America Jews number about 7 million, or about 2% of the population. Worldwide the 16 million Jews, represent just .2% of the population.

Do you ever wonder why when we think of Jews we think of banking and media and not construction or farming?  Is it because Jews can’t build or farm? No. They built Jerusalem long before the Romans arrived and created a vibrant farming industry out of what was essentially a 19^th century desert in what would later become Israel.  The reason Jews are often associated with banking and media and other such pursuits has to do with the fact that historically, in much of the world they were prohibited from large swaths of the economy. In Europe, under both the Romans and their Christian successors Jews were often excluded from craft and merchant guilds.  In Islamic lands while not necessarily excluded, they faced Jizya, a tax on non-Muslims. 

Those exclusions and taxes dovetailed with usury bans on Christians and Muslims to open up a significant opportunity for Jews, which they were well equipped to take advantage of.  A key element of their being able to take advantage of that opportunity comes directly from the Jewish faith itself, which requires Jews read the Torah.  Literacy, and its companion numeracy, allowed Jews to be successful bankers. That expertise and success in turn provided them with the capital and connections with which to branch into other elements of what we would today call white collar businesses. 

One might ask, given this success, why are there still so few Jews relative to the rest of the population. A number of factors. In increasingly prosperous nations, success tends to reduce the number of children a family has. Additionally, successful Jews often intermarry, particularly into Christian families and seem to drift away from the faith. And lastly, as Gad Saad points out in The Parasitic Mind, Judaism demands a great deal of its adherents and even more from those who want to become members.  The result is that while Jewish civilization is one of the oldest in human history, its adherents remain a tiny fraction of mankind.

That tiny number hides much.  With their focus on education handed down over thousands of years, Jews have among the highest IQs in the world. Indeed, while representing just .2% of the world’s population, Jews represent more than 20% of Nobel Prize recipients across disciplines and fully 41% in Economics, 26% in Medicine and 25% in Physics.  Jews outperform virtually every other group on the planet in terms of success across a wide swath of culture and civilization.  Mark Twain observed:  “[The Jews] are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy… [Jewish] contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world… and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”

While like members of every other group on the planet, there are no doubt Jews who are avaricious, malicious and mendacious, but I would suggest they too are a minority.  I would further suggest that the hatred with which Jews are held by has little to do with anything other than envy.  People hate or dislike Jews because they are in aggregate so successful, and they focus on the key elements that made them so: family, community and education.  (I myself neither hate nor dislike Jews, but I am somewhat dumbfounded why so many ostensibly smart people vote for Democrats, who are against virtually everything Jews have harnessed to succeed…)

The fact that Jews make up such an incredible proportion of successful Americans should not be a reason to hate them, but rather should be taken as a roadmap.  Tony Robbins may have put it best:  “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.”

While I doubt I could ever become a chess master regardless of how much I practiced, the notion of strong families, strong communities and a focus on education is a proven 3,000 year old recipe for success.  America would be far better off if more people followed it. 

America is headed for a civil war… maybe.

The 19^th century Prussian general Karl Von Clausewitz famously said: “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.” or as we more often hear it, “War is but politics by different means.”

War is what generally happens when two (or more) sides get to a point where they can no longer peacefully coexist with the current circumstances.  We’re there…

How does one know a civil war is coming?  Have you been on a college campus lately?

2024 is an echo of 1968, the original Summer of Love.  Today the ostensible catalyst for what we’re seeing on campuses across the country is the Israeli “genocide” happening in Gaza.  We’re seeing a virtual replay of the original “Summer of Love” where entitled students took over campuses while feckless administration cowards fiddled while their schools figuratively burned.  In ’68 the students were protesting the Vietnam War (they were really protesting the draft, the war was just the rallying point) and then as now, Columbia was the epicenter. 

Spreading from Columbia across the country, that summer protests raged and chats of “Hell no, we won’t go” and images of Black Power fists were everywhere to be seen and heard on the nightly news. Today the news and social media are filled with chants of “From the river to the sea,” images of Palestinian flags, BLM signs and & Antifa graffiti and anyone not wearing a keffiyeh being declared a “Zionist.”

The difference between 1968 and 2024 is that back then most of the country disagreed with the protesters. 

In November 1968 Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the Electoral College 301 – 191.  Add to that the 46 electors that George Wallace took and the country voted 347 to 191 against the Democrats (57% vs 43% in the popular vote).  And this was at a time when most Democrats were strongly anti-Communist and being pro American was considered normal, almost required.

Today we have a completely different landscape.  In 2024 Democrats are virtually indistinguishable from Communists and being pro American is seen as racist. 

Hence the college protests.  They’re not just pro-Hamas, they’re much, much more.  These protests are very much a reflection of their time in the seemingly mainstream nature of the beliefs that power them. They’re at their core not just anti-Israel, they’re antisemitic, they’re anti-American, anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-police, and of course, anti-white. 

Sadly, all of those things are basically mainstream Democrat policies in 2024.  We see every single one of them play out across the country in federal, state and local governments.  From stultifying climate change regulations to the housing of illegals to DEI diktats to the reimagining of police, there’s virtually nothing that government does today that isn’t infused with the workings of a leftist’s wet dream.  And at the end of the day, while some new incremental CAFE standard from Washington or a DEI hire at the local university might not sound particularly onerous, in reality they’re just more bars of the leftist policy prison being implemented around the country. 

Half of the American population have become anti-everything America once stood for, and they’re actively leveraging the power of the government to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” against everything traditionally American.  Given that the other half has no interest in watching their country be destroyed, feel like they have few viable tools with which to stop the destruction, and are told by the government they’re the enemy, the country is sitting on a powder keg.

If this was the Roman Empire or 1945 Germany it might be possible to split the nation in two where the east would go one direction and the west another, but it’s not. What we’re faced with is an urban / rural dichotomy where the population of cities are largely hardcore leftists and the population of the suburbs and rural America are more traditionally patriotic.

While a clean split is simply not feasible, a continuation of the current trajectory isn’t either.

Which is where these college protests come in.  As they morph into fortified CHAZ like encampments across the country, where the American flag is replaced by the Palestinian flag or where their own violent “security” staff keeps others at bay, the pressure will only ramp up on the feckless university leaders to do something.  But of course, given that most are fellow travelers with the protesters, they’ll no doubt drag their feet, which will only serve embolden the them.

Funded by the modern incarnation of Satan himself, George Soros, the protests will spill out beyond the universities, returning to bridges, highways, and other choke points around the country.  They’ll be joined by LGTBQXYZ activists, environmental wackos as well as more Antifa and BLM agitators. Together they’ll try and bring the country to a halt. It won’t happen of course as local police and the National Guard will be called out – often by reluctant, sympathetic Democrat leaders – to restore some law and order. 

But the lines will be drawn.  On the one side will be Americans who understand exactly how fortunate we are, how difficult it is to create prosperity and how, while imperfect, America is the greatest nation yet produced.  On the other side will be Americans who know little about history, spit on their birthright and seek to turn the United States into Venezuela. At some point the former will decide they've had enough and do what they need to do to put a stop to it.

With all due respect to Von Clausewitz, I’d suggest politics is a prelude to war. At least in this case. It’s not inevitable, but it is likely. But… we could get lucky.

The terrorist sympathizers taking over campuses are sufficiently emboldened by the support they’re getting from Democrats that they’re willing to say what they really think, to be crystal clear about what they support (Hamas & terrorism) and what they don’t (America).  In doing so they may discover that they and their Democrat brethren have overplayed their hands. By showing America exactly who they are and how much they hate everything about America, perhaps enough Democrats will see the light and vote for the guy who promises to put America first. They might still hate him, but hopefully they’ll love their country more.  If enough do, we just might avoid another civil war…

Setting Good Money on Fire After Setting Bad Money on Fire in Gaza

I was walking down the street yesterday, and suddenly, I heard honking from a bunch of cars. Not sure what it was, I looked over to see a cavalcade of cars driving by, waving big Palestinian flags out their windows. This went on for about five minutes until, eventually, they had all disappeared.

This comes on the heels of seeing the Palestinian flag painted on the sides of buildings or on overpasses or stickers stuck to signs and the windows of various McDonald’s –and not put there by the store’s owners! Thankfully, there was no real disturbance other than a bit of annoyance.

They are, of course, protesting the alleged “genocide” that’s being carried out in Gaza by the IDF. We’ve been told that, in the slightly over 100 days since the beginning of this war, there have been more than 24,000 civilian casualties at the hands of the IDF. Given that that information is coming from Palestinian “authorities” which, in Gaza is Hamas, that number is likely highly exaggerated. Even so, if the actual number is 10% of that total, it’s a tragedy. One civilian death, never mind 2,400 or 24,000, is a tragedy. It’s not genocide, but it’s a tragedy nonetheless.

Simply, it’s war, and most wars include civilian deaths, many of them.

And how did we get to this war? As everyone knows, it started on October 7th when Hamas sent terrorists (“freedom fighters”) into Israel who raped, tortured, and murdered some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, with victims ranging from 10-month-old babies to 80-plus-year-old men and women. And they kidnapped 200 more.

The depravity of the attacks was extraordinary, something along the lines of Dr. Mengele or the Rape of Nanking. We’re told, however, that while the events of Oct 7th were indeed despicable, the Israeli response has been disproportionate insofar as civilians have died. And as such, we’re also told that Israel needs to be stopped. And punished.

Solely for argument’s sake, let’s pretend that there is some moral equivalency here and agree that the terrorist attack by Hamas and the so-called disproportionate response from Israel are somehow equal.

Then the question becomes, how did we get to this place? In November, someone posted a TikTok video showcasing “Beautiful Gaza that you never saw before. Filmed just before Oct 7th, 2023.” The video shows bright Mediterranean colors, beautiful smiling faces, and everything from bustling stores to beach resorts to crowded restaurants and much more. It looks like a Madison Avenue marketing job seeking to induce the world to spend their next vacation in Gaza. (See also this tweet describing what soldiers saw: wealth and militarization.)

Nevertheless, we’ve repeatedly been told that Gaza is a modern concentration camp. That’s why, pro-Hamas factions insist, Hamas was forced to attack Israel in an attempt to break the Israeli chokehold on the Palestinians.

But, if indeed it is true that Israel was turning Gaza into a giant death camp, where was the rest of the world? Why weren’t they helping? Well, it turns out, the world was helping… A lot. And I mean a lot!

Over the decade-and-a-half since Hamas was elected, Gaza has received approximately $40 billion in support from around the world. That included $5 billion from the United Nations, almost $2 billion from Qatar, $20 billion from the Palestinian Authority (which itself receives billions annually from the world community), as well as over a billion dollars each from the US, Europe, and Iran.

The average works out to about $3 billion annually for a population of approximately 2.3 million people or about $1,300 per person living in Gaza. That $1,300 makes up a little less than half of the per capita income of the average citizen of Gaza. Other sources of income are primarily small businesses and agriculture.

We’re told that the citizens of Gaza live in poverty that Israel imposes upon them. The approximate $3,000 per capita income of the citizens of Gaza puts them at about 165 in the world rankings, ahead of 30 nations, most in Africa.

However, the reality is that, if Palestinians live in poverty, it’s the fault of Hamas. The leaders of Hamas have stolen at least $11 billion of the money that was supposed to go to the citizens of the Gaza Strip. They enjoy that fortune relaxing safely in their multimillion-dollar compounds in Qatar.

What’s more, and far more deadly, is that Hamas spends billions of dollars a year on things that have nothing to do with supporting Gazan citizens. Firstly, they have spent over $1 billion on a 350-mile-long network of tunnels under Gaza, a 141-square-mile strip of land. Every mile of those tunnels represents piping or concrete or steel that could have gone to building schools, shopping malls, hospitals or anything else that could have positively affected the lives of Gazans. But they didn’t.

Those tunnels had to be used for something, of course, and that something was and is preparing to attack and actually attacking Israel. Of course, to do that, they need weapons and Hamas has spent $5 billion on weapons over the last decade and a half. Everything from small arms to bombs to missiles.

Together, the total theft for the tunnels and the military spending equals $17 billion or 42% of the world’s contributions to Gaza over that 15-year period. But here’s the thing: As bad as it was that Hamas squandered at least 42% of Gaza’s donations, the reality is that the real damage isn’t the money. The real damage is that, instead of focusing the people on building a thriving, robust economy, Hamas instead focused on teaching children to hate Israel and launching tens of thousands of rockets into Israel.

So, Hamas pushed the hate narrative and launched missiles into Israel on a regular basis, actions that would, of course, prompt reprisals, which would, in turn, reinforce the hate. It was and is a never-ending cycle of victimization, hate, and poverty. Hamas, not the Gazans, profited from this. Yet, somehow, the money keeps coming... because most relevant actors don’t care about actual progress or peace.

Nonetheless, they say that hindsight is 20/20. That’s true, and so too is the reality that, had Hamas taken a different path and its leaders pushed for living in peace with Israel rather than cultivating a perpetual war footing, we wouldn’t be watching Gaza turned into a parking lot. But they didn’t, and we are.

This is simply another example of leaders using their citizens as cannon fodder so that they can accumulate fortune and power. When the dust settles, one can only hope the Gazan people look at the difference between their world and the luxury their leaders enjoy and decide to vote for a different path forward, one that doesn’t include perpetual war and tragedy. Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.

A Sad Legacy of the Culture of Victimhood and Grift

For over a month we’ve seen videos exposing Hamas’s depravity. Its soldiers’ blatant disregard for human life and the seeming joy with which they carried out their depravity was disheartening.

Sadly, this kind of depravity can be found closer to home, too, where videos abound of black crime across America, with people shot, pushed in front of trains, sucker punched, beaten to a pulp, and even killed by individuals, gangs, or groups of “teens.”

In both cases, the perpetrators have an ostensible enemy at whom their anger is directed. For Hamas, it’s Jews, and for blacks, it’s whites. Apologists for both groups claim it’s the actions of the “oppressor” that caused the “victims” to react. For Hamas, it’s Jews “stealing” Palestinian lands. For blacks, it’s slavery and Jim Crow. In both cases, though, the outsized violence against bystanders demonstrates that those are just convenient justifications for evil people to gain power.

Hamas’s soldiers, while blaming Jews for everything, often target Muslims as well. They also carelessly target their weapons, striking their own people, while hiding soldiers and materials behind women and children in mosques, schools, and hospitals. When Israel retaliates and civilians die, the resulting images make great PR.

In America, even as the grifters at BLM and Antifa claim that white racism is the cause of virtually every evil, which inevitably creates black criminals who abuse whites or rob, plunder, and destroy businesses, the reality is that most of the victims of black criminals are themselves black. But that doesn’t matter to the race hustlers who use lies and deception to keep blacks and naive white liberals angry. Democrat race pimps don’t care that far more black blood is in the street because all they need is one video of a white person acting or reacting against a black person, and they’ve won the lottery, as they did with videos of Rodney King and George Floyd did.

In reality, being an oppressed minority is not necessarily a recipe for failure, as Thomas Sowell explains in Discrimination and Disparities. He discusses the relative success of various minorities around the world, including the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe, Indians in East Africa, Koreans in America, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and many other groups reviled in the countries in which they live.

The reality is that American blacks and the Palestinians have both had many opportunities to achieve success and usually squandered them away.

First, the Palestinians. Up until the mid-20th century, there was no such thing as Arab Palestinians. In the 2,000 years before the pre-Christian era, the one constant in the land was a Jewish presence, whether as a nation or as a vassal of Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. After the Romans ended the Jewish nation and created a Palestinian colony, there were the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and, eventually, the Ottomans, and then the English.

The one constant was the Jews. Aside from Bedouins and the Druze, who have been there for several hundred years, the Arabs who identify today as Palestinians mostly drifted into the land beginning in the 1830s.

For the century preceding Israel’s establishment, much of the area was sparsely populated with towns and tribes in constant battle. In addition, the land was inhospitable, and agriculture struggled (something that changed only when Zionist Jews brought in modern farming techniques and hard work).

Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem as early as at least 1875—and in the late 19th century began purchasing land from the Arabs. By 1948, Jews owned 8% of the land that would become Israel, while 3.3% was in Arab hands, and 17% had been abandoned by Arabs planning on returning after Israel was eliminated. Britain owned the remaining 70%, which it took from the Ottoman Turks after WWI. The local Arabs never owned it. Thus, it’s a lie that Israel stole its land from the Arabs.

In 1924, Britain split the land in two, with British-mandate Palestine going to the Jews and Trans-Jordan (modern-day Jordan) going to the local Arabs. That didn’t stick. In 1948, after the Arabs had already gotten Trans-Jordan, the UN split British-mandate Palestine again, creating the State of Israel, which was liberally interspersed with an Arab state. The Arabs responded by attacking the newly created nation to take it all.

In 1999, Bill Clinton negotiated a treaty between the PLO and Israel that would have given the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and various concessions within Israel proper. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, rejected it and instead launched a war against Israel. In 2005, Israel exited Gaza, removing 5,000 of its own citizens, and allowed the area to be self-governing. The citizens elected Hamas.

Since Israel exited Gaza, the world has donated over $10 billion there. Sadly, instead of spending money on building up the infrastructure and industry, Hamas put much of that money into building a “Metro” of tunnels into Israel and buying weapons to attack Israel. Imagine how different Gaza would be had its leaders spent that money building schools and viaducts, training entrepreneurs, or enhancing the agriculture industry.

But alas, they didn’t—their leaders would rather maintain the cult of victimhood as it’s far more profitable. (Just before his death in 2004, Yassir Arafat was said to have had a personal fortune of between $1 and $3 billion – stolen from the gullible Palestinians.) Hamas simply said that Israel was the enemy and was responsible for the Palestinians’ plight and then focused on war. Of course, it didn’t have to be that way. Israel built a thriving nation out of the desert. With global support and money, the Palestinians could have done the same. They chose not to.

Similarly, in the United States, slavery ended in 1865, and Jim Crow was gone by 1965, but that didn’t stop the victim industrial complex from poisoning the minds of many black Americans. For four decades, the Democrat party, the media, and America’s schools have told blacks they can’t succeed because of white racism. (This despite the fact that American blacks have incomes that exceed the average of almost every country on the planet.)

They’ve told blacks that racist whites are waiting to lynch blacks. Since at least 2008, they’ve told blacks that, because of systemic racism, they cannot succeed and aren’t responsible for their conditions or actions. Along the way, grifters like Patrisse Cullors, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama got rich. When Barack Obama was elected race relations were about the best they’d been in history. Not so much now… Imagine what America would be like today had he been a unifier and tried to empower black entrepreneurship rather than being the race pimp he was.

At home and in Israel, we’re seeing the same thing: People greedy for power and wealth tell specific groups they’re victims incapable of helping themselves, thereby turning them into drones committed to violent struggle. Then, say their alleged oppressors are subhuman beings who deserve what they get. Do all of this, and it’s no surprise that these “victims” embrace a savage mindset without empathy, making them not only willing but enthusiastic about unimaginable and routine cruelty.

While the “oppressors” are the ostensible targets, it doesn’t really matter if innocents get killed, which is exactly what we see. Hamas is sacrificing Palestinians, and blacks are killing blacks along with whites and Asians, all because they believe the lie that they’re victims and their oppressors deserve what they get. Victimhood is a bloody game but, sadly, a profitable one.

What We are Seeing in the Streets and on Campuses is not Fringe...

Like most Americans, I was of course shocked by the vicious inhumanity that the coward terrorist group Hamas carried out in Israel three weeks ago. Unfortunately, organized evil is neither unique nor surprising. The Nazis were equally evil across Europe, as were the Japanese at Nanking and Stalin with Ukraine and Mao with his own people. Sadly, evil happens, devils exist and thankfully they are rarely celebrated.

But rarely doesn’t mean never, and the most shocking thing was not the evil perpetrated, but rather the extraordinary support it has received. Not only is Hamas’s evil finding exuberant support in places like Iran and Qatar where you might expect it, but there were tens of thousands of Muslims – and their liberal comrades – in places like New York, Detroit, and Washington out en masse vocally demonstrating their support for these monsters.  And it wasn’t just on the streets, in places like Harvard and Yale and NYU you had students and professors and organizations blaming Israel for Hamas’s inhumanity.  Even as the full extent of the carnage emerged, days after the world was able to see the barbarity of what the savages carried out, the rallies in support not only didn’t diminish, they seemed to grow.  I couldn’t help wonder what that portends for our future. 

As an American I shook my head, stunned as I watched the scenes play out. I wondered how so many people, with smiles on their non hidden faces, could cheer such evil.  How supposedly intelligent people could put their names in support of such barbarism.  My reaction to a few posts on Twitter was “Send them to Gaza”. Not that it was going to happen, but it’s one thing to cheer the beheading of babies and raping of women from five thousand miles away, it’s another thing to do so when there’s a realistic possibility of the IDF ending you.

Of course that’s not going to happen, but then I wondered to myself, what is wrong with these people and why are they allowed to do this? Before the words even formed in my head I answered my own question:  Free speech… that extraordinary thing we have which most Muslim countries don’t.

All of that led my brain to a quote that is often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:  “When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights, when they are in the majority there are no minority rights.” The British Bulldog may not have said that, but a look at a map of nations with Sharia law suggests the reality of it.

“But we don’t live in one of those countries” you might say, “these people are just fringe wackos.” Not so much. A 2015 poll of Muslims in America showed the following: “More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.” It also found “nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, ‘It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.’” and “Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.” Anyone watching the thousands of protesters in Atlanta, Chicago, and Tampa could easily see that it’s likely the numbers listed above have only grown worse – from a free republic’s perspective.

Now, support for Sharia doesn’t necessarily equate to support for the actions Hamas took last week, but a Venn Diagram would likely demonstrate a great deal of overlap. 

But then you say, “Muslims are barely 1% of the population, this can’t be a threat.” Maybe, but think about this: trans people are far fewer yet today we find ourselves in the midst of national fights about bathrooms, sports and the “medical” butchering of children. Interestingly, most of the people who support the LBGTQXYZ123 agenda also support “Palestine”, where many would likely be thrown off the top of buildings were they to actually go there.

So the question becomes, how does a pluralistic, secular state that puts value on individual liberty deal with vile ideas that are repugnant to the basic elements of the culture and those who espouse them? Is the Constitution a suicide pact that allows those who object to its foundational principles to use the document’s freedoms to take power in order to eliminate it?

In his autobiography Malcom X talks about being invited to speak at Harvard and other prestigious universities, this at the time he was spewing much of his pre enlightened anti-white racist venom. He marvels that while he was invited to speak and said things that most of the audience disagreed with, they were always courteous and usually engaged in a healthy, respectful dialogue. Contrast that with today’s conservative speakers such as Heather MacDonald, Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro who have had events cancelled or found themselves drowned out and threatened by leftists who equate speech they don’t like with violence. Not surprisingly, a recent poll showed that 66% of college students find this acceptable while another showed that 65% of Democrats supported censoring “misinformation”.

Now, maybe this vile and public championing of hate will be a tipping point where the Democrat coalition fractures as the various victim classes it has nurtured twist themselves into pretzels trying to be good team players. I doubt it, because Democrats in toto hate America, hate freedom and most of all hate Donald Trump & MAGA and put power above everything else.

Nonetheless, what we saw over the last week causes one to stand up and take notice about those who would use our freedoms to end them for everyone else. The adage of “One man, one vote, one time.” refers to the idea of someone or some group using the democratic norms of a nation to win an election then use that victory to eviscerate freedom. Think Hitler in Germany, Chavez in Venezuela, or Erdogan in Turkey. If we’ve learned anything since the reign of Barack Obama it’s that America is not immune to the danger of political parties weaponizing government for their own purposes. Given that the people cheering on the butchers of Hamas are a core part of the Democrat coalition, we should not be too quick to dismiss them as fringe… we could all live to regret it.  

Quelle Surprise! Five years of Barack Obama undermining American influence in the world...

The American military is the most powerful in the world. Indeed, we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. As one might expect, that amount of military spending translates into a lot of influence around the world, far beyond the bases in Germany or the battlefields of Afghanistan. From leading NATO to acting as the last – and in reality the first – line of defense of nations such as Japan, South Korea, Kuwait and many others, the United States exercises more global power than any nation in history, even during times of peace.

What is unique about the United States however is the fact that as powerful as its military might is, that’s never been the sole source of American influence and indeed during most of the last century, the military was not even the most powerful element of that influence. Since the end of World War II, the two biggest drivers of American influence in the world have been economics and ideals.

The march of free markets around the world over the last 50 years has been largely been led by the United States. From a shining showcase of the prosperity free markets can achieve to the spread of specialization, the importation of products and the outsourcing of services, the economic power of the United States has inspired and lifted billions of people around the world out of poverty over the last half century.

At the same time, the ideals of American freedom and democracy have inspired the world for more than two centuries. From the American Revolution inspiring the French to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor inspiring a papier-mâché version in Tiananmen Square to the rainbow of revolutions over the last twenty years, American ideals, despite their sometimes failed execution both at home and abroad, have inspired (and influenced) patriots and freedom loving people around the world for decades on end.

American prosperity, when combined with the ideals of freedom and democracy have done more to lift the spirits and life spans of more people across the planet than any military of any size could ever hope to accomplish. The military certainly helps spread those ideals however, whether it be helping rescue the world from two World Wars or American ships and planes delivering billions of dollars of water and foodstuffs to disaster zones or famine ravaged nations.

At the end of the day American influence is largely the source of three things: The prosperity created by free markets, the ideals of freedom and democracy, and military strength. Sometimes those drivers work together while at other times they work independently of one another. They manifest themselves in small ways such as providing disaster relief to Haiti, the Philippines or countless places in between and big ways such as political and or military support for allies or a burgeoning democracy. At the same time that influence has created a tapestry of relationships around the world from strong allies to bitter enemies. In an almost perfect example the old adage you get what you give, to the degree that America succeeds in cultivating allies and friends in the world, the more prosperity we enjoy and the fewer times our military is called upon to engage in actual shooting.

All of that may be changing because of Barack Obama. For five years while he was busy inflicting his fascist, redistributitive economic policies on the citizens of the United States, he has been diminishing American influence abroad at the same time. Time and again Obama has come down on the side of leftists and American enemies. The Iran “deal” is only the latest in a very long line.

In 2009 Obama sided with leftist Honduran President Manuel Zelaya as he sought to defy the Honduran Constitution and run for reelection. Eventually Zelaya was forced into exile and as a result of his continued agitation for violence in the streets, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous nations in the world.

That same year Obama bowed to Vladimir Putin and threw American allies under the bus as he abandoned plans for a missile defense shield in Poland. 2009 also brought Iran’s Green Movement. When Iranian students took to the streets seeking to overthrow the avowed American enemy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Barack Obama ignored pleas for a public display of support, moral or otherwise. In contrast, when protesters – including the Muslim Brotherhood – called for the ouster of one of America’s strongest allies in the region, Hosni Mubarak, Obama quickly called for Mubarak to resign. Not surprisingly, less than two years later Egypt was in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2011 President Obama helped unleash Hell when he sent American air forces to support the overthrow of an admittedly not nice guy, Muammar Gaddafi. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the chaos that was unleashed has turned Libya into an ungovernable mess where local private militias (some of whom are Al Qaeda) are far more powerful than the government itself. Indeed, according to the Cato Institute “Human rights conditions in post-intervention Libya... are considerably worse than in the decade preceding the war.” It was in the middle of this this ungovernable mess that an American Ambassador and three others were killed by Al Qaeda in 2012. 2011 was also the year he pulled the United States out of Iraq in the worst possible way, leaving the United States with virtually no influence in a country American troops had fighting and dying in for a decade.

Finally we find our feckless president in 2013 leading his march to diminish American power in the world. His first step was to undercut longtime ally Britain in their renewed dispute with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, unlike Ronald Reagan, who was a staunch supporter of the Brits during the Falkland War in 1982. His next step was to let Bashir Assad outwit him while simultaneously turning Vladimir Putin into a credible world leader. Obama accomplished this dual disaster as he blinked at actually doing anything about a chemical weapons red line he had offhandedly warned Assad not to cross. Next he betrayed staunch American allies Israel and Saudi Arabia when he proffered a nuclear agreement with Iran that John Bolton calls “Abject surrender by the United States”. Finally just last week, he essentially acquiesced to a Chinese power grab – and simultaneously undermined allies Japan and South Korea – as the US advised American airlines to comply with China’s demands for notification when they planned to fly over water and islands claimed by all three.

For five years we have seen that whatever the situation, Barack Obama consistently chooses decisions that will weaken American power and influence in the world. The history of an American superpower is not one that is without blemishes, but it has clearly been a force for good in the world. Can you imagine a 2013 where the dominant power for the previous century had been the Soviets or the Red Chinese or some incarnation of Al Qaeda? That ability to influence events and nations requires far more than just a powerful military. It requires a leader who recognizes that American influence has been a significant catalyst for the improvement of the condition of man around the world, and one who is willing to use that fact as his North Star when carrying out foreign policy. Barack Obama has consistently done just the opposite. From supporting leftists in Central America to betraying allies on practically every continent to fueling the replacement of imperfect dictators with whom we could work with Anti-American Islamists or even chaos, for five years he has chosen the path that leads to diminished American influence.

We’ve known from before the election that Barack Obama is no fan of the American Constitution or free markets. From his willingness to diminish America on the world stage at every turn it appears that it’s not just American institutions that Obama despises, but rather the idea of a strong America itself.