Poll: Most Israelis Think Israel Should Have Finished Off Hamas

Monday, March 16, 2009

Poll: Most Israelis Think Israel Should Have Finished Off Hamas

Pretty obvious, I know, but here it is...

Two-thirds of Israelis believe that Operation Cast Lead against Hamas terrorists in Gaza finished too early, according to a Truman-PSR poll released Monday.

However the survey, commissioned by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, also found that only thirty percent of Israelis back reoccupying Gaza in the case of continued rocket-fire on the South.

The two results aren't contradictory at face value. Having left, the last thing most Israelis want is to be responsible for the mess the Palestinian Authority and now Hamas have created.

Unfortunately, there's no other way to safeguard Sderot, Ashkelon and even places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem ultimately with Hamas or even the Palestinians in control of Gaza. You can't live next to a nest of venomous vipers and not get bitten...(my apologies to snakes, which unlike Hamas only kill to eat or protect their territory and perform a vital function in nature).

Israel will eventually have to go back to Gaza, clean out Hamas, annex Gaza and resettle it with Jews..even if that means transferring a number of the current inhabitants elsewhere, whether to Egypt, Jordan, or the Palestinian occupied areas of Judea and Samaria.

The loss of Gaza would also provide a good lesson to the Palestinian Authority that violence and revanchist intransigence have a cost, while peace and quiet might just end up providing them with the independent Palestinian state - 'two states for two people, living together in peace' - that they claim to want.

Obama Wants To Tax Your Employer Provided Health Benefits!

From the NY Times, here.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.

The way the current tax laws read, health benefits provided by your employer are not taxable income. The average salary in the US is around $39,200 per capita. Do the math...assuming taxation at 33% taxing your employer provided health benefits adds up to an increased liability of about $4,000 per year or $335 per month. per household.

Ain't it fun being "rich" ?

Change, suckah!

Dolphin Bubble Rings - This is Amazing!

Absolutely incredible video...

Another Obama Supporter Jumps Ship

This time it's Michael Goodwin in the very liberal NY Daily News:

Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?"

The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts.

Yes, it's early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It's a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House.

It was during George W. Bush's second term that the I-word - incompetence - became a routine broadside against him. The Democratic frenzy of Bush-bashing had not spent itself when a larger critique emerged, one not confined by partisan boundaries.

The charge of incompetence covered the mismanagement of Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the economic meltdown. By the time Bush left, the charge tipped the scales to where most of America, including many who had been supporters or just sympathetic, viewed him as a failed President.

The tag of incompetence is powerful precisely because it is a nondenominational rebuke, even when it yields a partisan result. It became the strongest argument against the GOP hammerlock on Washington and, over two elections, gave Democrats their turn at total control.

But already feelings of doubt are rising again. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were never held in high regard, so doubts about their motives and abilities are not surprising.

What matters more is the growing concern about Obama and his team. The longest campaign in presidential history is being followed by a very short honeymoon.

Polls show that most people like Obama, but they increasingly don't like his policies. The vast spending hikes and plans for more are provoking the most concern, with 82% telling a Gallup survey they are worried about the deficit and 69% worried about the rapid growth of government under Obama. Most expect their own taxes will go up as a result, despite the President's promises to the contrary.

None other than Warren Buffet, an Obama supporter, has called the administration's message on the economy "muddled." Even China says it is worried about its investments in American Treasury bonds. Ouch.

Much of the blame falls on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose appalling tax problems softened the ground under him before he took office. After his initial fumbling presentations, he became a butt of jokes on "Saturday Night Live," not a sustainable image for the point man in a recession. And still the market waits for his answer to the banks' toxic assets.

Breaking up is hard to do. Read the whole thing...

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Rats In The Cellar - When Jews Turn On Their Own

Ever wonder about whether people calling themselves Jews could actually be anti-Semites? Of course they can.

As I've mentioned before, the dinosaur media has a common tactic when it comes to attacking Israel - they'll find some self-hating leftard Jew to do the pick and shovel work for them, to fend off accusations of anti-Semitism.

This stuff typically runs in cycles. Earlier in the week it was the New York Time's own Jewish anti-Semite Roger Cohen. And now the Los Angeles Sunday Times has weighed in with a piece by one Ben Ehrenreich, who weighs in and writes that Zionism is the problem behind peace in the Middle East:

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

What Ehrenreich is telling you here is that he is a 'red diaper baby', someone raised by communists in a brand new religion that substituted for Judaism, no matter what other innocuous sounding names it might be called. This is an important sidebar. Let's go on...

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism

.

There's a real quandary here. There's so much ignorance, bigotry and selective revisionism here that even to parse it feels like a waste of time and energy.

However, for the swing votes, those who may not know any better...

Zionism per se came into existence when another highly assimilated Jew, Theodore Herzl, covered the Dreyfuss trials as a journalist and watched mobs in Paris screaming death to the Jews, almost a century after Napoleon tore down the ghetto walls and allowed French Jews to freely assimilate in French society.What Dreyfuss realized is that the experiment of Jewish assimilation was a failure, and that the way for Jews to survive in freedom and dignity was not to ride the tides of fortune as a more or less tolerated minority but to have their own country.

It was because there was no Israel that 6 million Jews ended up in the ovens, and because Israel exists that similar orgies of death and slavery were not visited on the Jews of Ethiopia, Yemen, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab world.It was Aushwitz survivor Elie Wiesel who write that to him, theholiest spot in Israel was not the Kotel but the little booth at Lod Airport where a Jew was stamping entry visas.

Useful idiots like Ehrenreich simply don't understand that or willfully refuse to admit it because it doesn't jibe with their politics.

Ehrenreich also parrots the nonsense that Israel is an apartheid state('founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity') , when in fact Israel is the most diverse and pluralistic state in the Middle East. it was, after all, not Israel that ethnically cleansed it's Arab minority after 1948...it was the Arabs who did that to the Jews. In Israel, Arabic is the country's second official language, Arab citizens have full political and legal rights and and Arabs can be found in every walk of Israeli life, including in the IDF and in Israel's Parliament, the Knesset. This is even more remarkable when one considers that Israel has been attacked by its Arab neighbors consistently since its founding.

Of course, to Ehrenreich, the very fact that Israel exists at all as a predominantly Jewish State is an affront to his leftist beliefs.

If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly 1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

I would absolutely love to see Ehrenreich's reaction if his tony West L.A. digs were under missile attack from Hamas. He'd be flailing his wrists and screaming like a wounded peahen for somebody to do something about it, yet he has no compunction in demonizing Israel for doing what it needed to do to protect its citizens under attack...which makes him a flaming hypocrite of the first order.

And I've got news for him...it wasn't Israeli policies that stopped the Palestinians from have a second Arab Palestinian state. Israel, in case anyone has forgotten, is the only country in the Middle East to give the Palestinians so much as a square dunam of land for their own and allow them to plot their own destinies. After Oslo, the Palestinians could have elected to fulfill Oslo to the letter, forswearing terrorist violence, educating their people for peace and taking the steps to form an economic and political closeness with Israel, which is the only thing that could have actually led to the success of the Oslo venture.

Instead, Arafat did what he intended to do all along, from the moment the Oslo agreements were signed. He stole the aid money gullible western idiots gave him 'for the Palestinian people' created a terrorist enclave in Gaza and the Palestinian occupied areas of Judea and Samaria ( AKA the West Bank), built an army and when he felt the time was right, launching a brutal war against Israel's civilians.

The checkpoints, the security barrier, the so-called 'occupation' and yes, Israeli military ops like Defensive Shield and Cast Lead stem from Palestinian violence against Israel's civilians and nothing else.

And the violence itself stems not from a Palestinian desire for coexistence, but from a desire to annihilate every Jew in the Middle East- which is why the Palestinians support Hamas by a vast majority.And why Ehrenreich's idiotic call for a single Arab dominated state ( because that's exactly what it would be ) is a fantasy..but one that would be paid for by other people's blood, not his if it was ever implemented.

Needless to say, that won't ever happen unless the Israelis decide to commit national suicide. But the funny thing is that if Israel ever were to disappear as a Jewish state, the only thing to change in the Middle East would be the targets..which would then ultimately end up as Ehrenreich and people that think like he does.

He really ought to read the Hamas charter sometime and see what it says about Jews not only in Israel, but worldwide.

And yes, I have absolutely no trouble whatsoever in dubbing him a Jew hater...whether he realizes it or not.

Oh, and by the way, should you care to let him know how you feel about the matter, his MySpace page can be found here