Anti-Americans in Our Midst

This photo, from This Ain't Hell, shows protesters in Washington, D.C., marching at a rally sponsored by INTERNATIONAL Answer. That's a Hamas flag in the middle. A pro-Palestinian activist attacked a counter-demonstrator at the event.

These people are neo-Stalinists allied with militant Islam to destroy the West. There's no other way to put it. Folks on the left are mounting deathly moral equivalence. They place the onus on Israel and are more than willing to condone, even encourage, the deaths of Palestinian civilians if that brings international condemnation on the Jewish state. I've written about this many times, so folks know where I stand, and you can be sure I'll continue to bring updates. Meanwhile, Scott at Powerline has a great piece up, "America's Fifth Column":

The United States obviously has a substantial number of citizens and residents who support America's Islamist enemies. Many of them are to be found on the leftover left, which has embraced a weird alliance with radical Islam.

Many of them are to be found among Arab and Muslim immigrants who identify with our enemies. Among these some are to be found within the Arab/Muslim "civil rights" and charitable front groups such as the late Holy Land Foundation, CAIR, and other of the unindicted co-conspirators in the criminal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation. The flow of immigrants who identify with America's enemies should have been stopped in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

When the Fort Dix Five were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers, CAIR and the American Muslim Union attacked the jury's verdict. "Many people in the Muslim community will see this as a case of entrapment," the executive director of CAIR's New Jersey chapter told the local media. The president of the American Muslim Union also questioned the jury's decision. He asserted that the defendants didn't "actually mean to do anything." According to him, "they were acting stupid, like they thought the whole thing was a joke."

As I wrote in "Coming clean about CAIR," CAIR is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that was founded as a Hamas front group. Bill Roggio points out that four current and former senior leaders of the American Muslim Union were associated with a mosque established by the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation was of course the American fundraising arm of Hamas.

Israel's offensive against Hamas has naturally brought some of these folks out into the streets. CAIR and other Islamist groups have been organizing public expressions of support for Hamas and condemnation of Israel in the United States. We noted one such demonstration led by CAIR in Minneapolis earlier this week. Now Phyllis Chesler has compiled an account of other such demonstrations supporting Hamas elsewhere around the United States.

Check the link for the video at Powerline.

Supporting Obama (Grudgingly) is About America Winning

Dan Nexon just about flipped his lid when I wrote my election night (meltdown) post on Barack Obama's eminently dishonest victory on November 4th. Since then I've repeatedly stated that while I couldn't disagree more with Barack Obama and the far-left agenda that he represents (or that'll he'll implement via his cabinet appointees and his extreme left legislative agenda), I will nevertheless support Barack Obama as my president AND in time of emergency I would not hesitate to serve my country while a Democratic administration resides in Washington.

A lot of conservatives aren't going to accept Obama under any circumstances, considering his surreptitious campaign, his history of radical training, ideology, and activism, and the media and popular personality cult that's metastasized around him. Having said all this, I have to agree with Nikki's post on the need to support the Democratic administration come January 20th:

I WANT MY COUNTRY TO SUCCEED, under this administration and any other. Its not about my party being in power or my agenda winning, its about America winning. Strange concept isn't it? Americans winning regardless of who is in power. A President is not like your favorite sports team. You should never cheer for the failure of any sitting President as you have done with this one. I am officially the opposite of a democrat ... objective and fair. I will not rip for the sake of ripping. I will give honest and well-researched opinion even if it means I am a RINO to my cohorts. Few are the courageous who speak without caring what their own colleagues will think and dems are squeamish little pansies when it comes to truth. The opposite of policy will not be mine. My opinions are not written to win friends and influence people. Its what I think ... you can tell me where I am wrong, which I rarely am ... HA! So take it up the shoot like a colonoscopy dems, you are now accountable. I hope you can take the heat, at least my heat will be honest and not out of derangement. MWAH!

I know a lot of my readers cringe at the thought of supporting this administration (and I can think of a few who are "not so courageous"), but Nikki's right: We will support the government of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, even if for all intents and purposes we'll have a facsimile of such at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

God bless this country, now and for eternity.

Death of Nizar Rayan Marks Return of Targeted Killings

The Israel missile strike that killed senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan may signal the state's return to a policy of targeted killings, the Los Angeles Times reports:

An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed a major Hamas political and military leader Thursday, and most of his family, as the militant group continued to launch rockets deep into Israeli territory.

The dueling strikes came amid rising international calls for an end to the bloodshed, which has killed at least 418 Palestinians and four Israelis.

The attack on Nizar Rayan, confirmed by Israeli officials, family members and Hamas, may signal a shift in Israeli tactics as the assault on Gaza enters its sixth day. After nearly a week of pounding police stations, security compounds, rocket-launching cells and cross-border tunnels, the Jewish state could be reviving its practice of assassinating Hamas leaders.

Rayan, 49, is the most senior Hamas official killed since the movement's co-founders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantisi died in Israeli airstrikes less than a month apart in 2004, said a senior Hamas official speaking on condition of anonymity.

An Islamic scholar and university instructor, Rayan was a force in both the political and military wings of Hamas. The hulking, bearded imam was a hard-line theologian and military commander.

"This is a difficult hit for Hamas. Even they admit it," said Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman. Leibovich declined to comment on whether the strike on Rayan represented a formal return of the assassination policy.

The battle-hardened militant group has proved adept at replacing leaders, calling into question the effectiveness of the tactic. After the killings of Yassin and Rantisi, Hamas regrouped stronger than ever around a new command structure based in both Gaza and Damascus, Syria.

In January 2006, it won Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating its bitter rival, the U.S.-backed Fatah faction. When a brief Fatah-Hamas unity government collapsed in summer 2007, Hamas fighters routed better-equipped Fatah forces in Gaza in four days and have controlled the territory since.

Despite Hamas' demonstrated adaptability, Rayan's death is a clear loss on multiple levels.

He was uniquely popular and respected among the military wing; unlike most of the movement's civilian leadership, Rayan fought alongside troops in battles with Israeli soldiers and tanks.

He advocated suicide bombings, and his own son, 22, died in such an attack on an Israeli settlement.

Although most senior Hamas leaders went into hiding when the Israeli air barrages began, Rayan made a point of living openly in his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp. He encouraged other leaders to follow suit.

"He refused to leave his house; he preferred to be a martyr," the Hamas official said.

Thirteen members of Rayan's family, including all four of his wives, were also killed in the strike, his teenage son Baraa told The Times.

Two more children are missing and presumed buried under the rubble of their family home.

See also Brietbart's item, "On Eve of His Death, Hamas Leader in Gaza Predicted Victory," via Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: "Nizar Rayan, center, was killed at his home in Jabaliya, along with his four wives and other family members. The Gaza professor advocated suicide attacks against Israel. (Sept. 15, 2007 photo)," Los Angeles Times.

Richard Falk and the Left's Construction of Gaza

Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international relations at Princeton and a hard-left anti-American and anti-Israel peace activist. I vaguely remember reading some of Falk's research during my graduate school training. What sticks out about him in my memory is that he was never a major thinker and his work was always at the margins of mainstream discourses driving important paradigmatic debates in the field.

In any case, I mention this as a preface to Falk's essay at Huffington Post, "Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe":

For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot. During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle.

Israel also refused exit permits to students with foreign fellowship awards and to Gazan journalists and respected NGO representatives. At the same time, it made it increasingly difficult for journalists to enter, and I was myself expelled from Israel a couple of weeks ago when I tried to enter to carry out my UN job of monitoring respect for human rights in occupied Palestine, that is, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza. Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months.

As always in relation to the underlying conflict, some facts bearing on this latest crisis are murky and contested, although the American public in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly pro-Israeli media lens. Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased incidence of rocket attacks. But the reality is more clouded. There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom. Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort to do so.

All of this is pure propaganda. I have no need to rebut the points any further, but the part about "no substantial rocket fire" would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Readers should visit Gateway Pundit to get a bit of "substantial" reality about what's really happening in the Middle East.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Bill Ayers' "Mind-Blowing" Idiocy

Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers has a post up at Huffington Post lamenting the missed opportunity of appointing Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education in an Obama administration.

Just reading the post gives one an idea of what the U.S. would be like if the "progressive" left were to gain majoritarian power in U.S. politics:

I would have picked Darling-Hammond, but then again I would have picked Noam Chomsky for state, Naomi Klein for defense, Bernardine Dohrn for Attorney General, Bill Fletcher for commerce, James Thindwa for labor, Barbara Ransby for human services, Paul Krugman for treasury, and Amy Goodman for press secretary. So what do I know?

Now that's a progressive cabinet, a true anti-American nihilist dream team! Of course, this is also the nightmare conservatives hoped to prevent by defeating the shady Chicago socialist at the polls. It's a good thing that "The One" had enough sense to foresee immediate repudiation in the Senate in the event that such a cabinet be appointed.

But Ayers continues with the progressive left's education agenda in the years ahead:

In the realm of education, there is nothing preventing any of us from pressing to change the dominant discourse that has controlled the discussion for many years. It's reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how? Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don't differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, and that is a belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it's based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions---Who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed? --- and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Democratic educators focus their efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy should be characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing - always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal?
Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There's no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating "educational debt," the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers. So let's push for that, and let's make it happen before Arne Duncan or anyone else grants us permission [emphasis added].

As someone who's actually in the trenches with inner-city kids, a majority of whom can barely read, it's really is breathtaking to read this.

Keep in mind, of course, that when Fox News approached Ayers in October asking for an on-camera apology for his past terrorist acts, this "mind-blowing" champion of "anti-imperialist free thinking " called the cops to protect him from the free press, the key institution of open societies which we might call one of the "hallmarks of a truly democratic society."

The kids in this country really need to go to school if they fall for this guy's baloney.

Mainstream Democrats Love Obama, Netroots on the Outs

Glenn Greenwald is up in arms again this morning. He's cherry-picking Rasmussen's poll findings on Israel-Gaza, which hold that the public's "divided" over Israel's Gaza attacks. Actually, folks aren't all that divided when you break down the findings, and note this statistic on what political scientists call "attentive publics" (folks who pay attention to news and public affairs):

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of those who say they are following news out of Gaza Very Closely support Israel's military action, while 30% favor diplomacy.

Greenwald's constant meme is how members of both parties completely disregard public opinion in order to shill for Israel.

The guy's a joke, frankly, and it's interesting that today's Gallup's tracking poll on Barack Obama finds near-unanimous support among mainstream Democrats (called "liberals" at the article), while roughly 7 percent of those on the left are apparently unhappy with the direction Obama has taken during the presidential transition:

Gallup Poll Daily tracking finds support for Barack Obama among liberal Democrats holding steady at 93% despite news reports that his core supporters are disappointed with some of his cabinet appointments and other decisions. Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Obama's ratings have improved among conservative Republicans, up from 23% to 29%.

More than 9 in 10 liberal Democrats have expressed confidence that Obama will make a good president since Gallup began tracking these opinions after the election last November. Moderate and conservative Democrats show nearly as high levels of confidence.

Obama's recent decision to have conservative preacher Rick Warren deliver the invocation at the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration and his choices of Republicans Robert Gates and Ray LaHood for cabinet positions have been controversial among members of the political left. Additionally, women's groups have been reported as expressing disappointment that Obama has not selected more women for cabinet-level positions in his administration. But these decisions apparently have not shaken liberal Democrats' confidence in Obama to any perceptible degree, according to aggregated data of thousands of Gallup Poll daily interviews from the immediate post-election period (Nov. 5-30), early December (Dec. 1-17) after he announced many of his cabinet choices, and in recent days (Dec. 18-28) after announcing Warren's role in the inauguration, arguably his most controversial action to date.

The number in the table at the poll for "liberal Democrats" and Obama's "favorable" ratings is 96 percent. It's the nihilist leftists who are most upset about things like Rick Warren and the lack of "diversity" in the cabinet. I'd be surprised if they actually made up the four percent or so who aren't in that figure, although keep in mind that the hard-left forces are extremely vocal and overrepresented on liberal media outlets. They thus make up for their small overall numbers with their outsized personalities and demands, while being enabled by the fawning media attention of a prostrate media cabal.

Notice, by the way, the numbers of "moderate" and "conservative" Republicans who are giving Obama the benefit of the doubt ("a slim majority of moderate and liberal Republicans, 51%, say they are confident Obama will be a good president"). Maybe Obama's "centrism" is paying off with a pre-inaugural bipartisan honeymoon?

The Crash of 2008 and the Decline of the West?

Roger Altman, at Foreign Affairs, argues that the collapse of the American economy in 2008 will accelerate the decline of the United States and Europe as the leading actors in the international balance of power. I'm always skeptical of the decline thesis. In Altman's case he makes dramatic claims of America's lost hegemony, then concludes the article with a number of points that weaken his arguments. In particular, Altman makes emphatic claims that China is now the main beneficiary of U.S. economic woes, and that Beijing - with trillions of dollars in surplus reserves - will be the next global "lender of last resort." Yet then he proposes strengthening U.S.-dominated world financial institutions like the IMF, which were American creations at the end of World War II. He also concedes at the conclusion of the article that the U.S. "will remain the most powerful nation on earth for a while longer." Such an initial dramatic case for American decline and inevitable international systemic change ends up having as much firepower as a pop-gun.

I've written on this topic plenty of times (see the discussion of Robert Lieber's counter-thesis, in "Resurgent Declinism in International Relations). Still, Altman's essay does include a penetrating explanation for the collapse of financial markets in 2008. So, considering my post yesterday, I'll leave readers with that:

Conventional wisdom attributes the crisis to the collapse of housing prices and the subprime mortgage market in the United States. This is not correct; these were themselves the consequence of another problem. The crisis' underlying cause was the (invariably lethal) combination of very low interest rates and unprecedented levels of liquidity. The low interest rates reflected the U.S. government's overly accommodating monetary policy after 9/11. (The U.S. Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate to nearly one percent in late 2001 and maintained it near that very low level for three years.) The liquidity reflected, among other factors, what Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has called "the global savings glut": the enormous financial surpluses realized by certain countries, particularly China, Singapore, and the oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf. Until the mid-1990s, most emerging economies ran balance-of-payments deficits as they imported capital to finance their growth. But the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, among other things, changed this in much of Asia. After that, surpluses grew throughout the region and then were consistently recycled back to the West in the form of portfolio investments.

Facing low yields, this mountain of liquidity naturally sought higher ones. One basic law of finance is that yields on loans are inversely proportional to credit quality: the stronger the borrower, the lower the yield, and vice versa. Huge amounts of capital thus flowed into the subprime mortgage sector and toward weak borrowers of all types in the United States, in Europe, and, to a lesser extent, around the world. For example, the annual volume of U.S. subprime and other securitized mortgages rose from a long-term average of approximately $100 billion to over $600 billion in 2005 and 2006. As with all financial bubbles, the lessons of history, including about long-term default rates on such poor credits, were ignored.

This flood of mortgage money caused residential and commercial real estate prices to rise at unprecedented rates. Whereas the average U.S. home had appreciated at 1.4 percent annually over the 30 years before 2000, the appreciation rate roared forward at 7.6 percent annually from 2000 through mid-2006. From mid-2005 to mid-2006, amid rampant speculation in the housing market, it was 11 percent.

But like most spikes in commodity prices, this one eventually reversed itself -- and with a vengeance. Housing prices have been falling sharply for over two years, and so far there is no sign that they will bottom out. Futures markets are signaling that, from peak to trough, the drop in the value of the nation's housing stock could reach 30-35 percent. This would be an astonishing fall for a pool of assets once valued at $13 trillion.

This collapse in housing prices undermined the value of the multitrillion-dollar pool of lower-value mortgages that had been created over the 2003-6 period. In addition, countless subprime mortgages that were structured to be artificially cheap at the outset began to convert to more expensive terms. Innumerable borrowers could not afford the adjusted terms, and delinquencies became more frequent. Losses on these loans began to emerge in mid-2007 and quickly grew to staggering levels. And with prices in real estate and other asset values still dropping, the value of these loans is continuing to deteriorate. The larger financial institutions are reporting continuous losses. They mark down the value of a loan or similar asset in one quarter, only to mark it down again in the next. This self-reinforcing downward cycle has caused markets to plunge across the globe.

The damage is most visible at the household level. Americans have lost one-quarter of their net worth in just a year and a half, since June 30, 2007, and the trend continues. Americans' largest single asset is the equity in their homes. Total home equity in the United States, which was valued at $13 trillion at its peak in 2006, had dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and was still falling in late 2008. Total retirement assets, Americans' second-largest household asset, dropped by 22 percent, from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008. During the same period, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion and pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. Taken together, these losses total a staggering $8.3 trillion.

Such large and sudden hits have shocked U.S. families. And because these have occurred amid headlines reporting failing financial institutions and huge bailouts, Americans' fears over the safety and accessibility of their deposits are now more pervasive than they have been since 1933. This is why Americans withdrew $150 billion from money-market funds over a two-day period in September (average weekly outflows are just $5 billion). It is also why the Federal Reserve established a special $540 billion facility to help these funds meet continuing redemptions.

There's more at the link.