Hitch Vs. the Rabbi

Things I learned from Rabbi David Wolpe's charming write up of his traveling road show/debate with Christopher Hitchens:

• Although he's agressively atheistic, Hitchens, who was in his 30s when he learned his mother was Jewish (which, according to Judaism, makes him a Jew), has a seder every year. (Wolpe's salami on wry: "I can't help think how chic it would be to say, "Oh yes, last year I had seder at the Hitchenses' ."" Right on, Rabbi. It's even chic-er--and, given Hitchens' reputation, shikkur-er--than saying, "Oh yes, last year I had seder at the Obamas's.")
• Hitchens is quicker with the withering comebacks, but the Rabbi is a whole lot wiser.
• Hitchens has cancer. That being the case, he might want to start praying--you know, just to hedge his bets.  ("Give him some chicken soup," advises the little Yiddish-accented woman in an old Borscht Belt joke to a doctor attending a gent on his death bed. "Madam, it wouldn't help," says the doctor, exasperated, after she repeats it several times. "It vouldn't hoit," is her sage response. Same thing with prayer, Hitch.)

Fried Pride

It's a scorcher out there. Sure hope Queers for Sharia remembered to wear their sunscreen. This one--sorry, Ethel--goes out to all the Jew-haters marching in the blazing heat to show how "proud" they are about who they're shtupping:

There’s no hatred like Jew-hatred
Like no hatred I know.
Everything about it is derangement.
Everything about it’s blooming nuts.
QuAIA and its ilk suffer estrangement,
Want rearrangement of Zion’s huts.
There’s no marchers like Pride marchers
They’re fried in the sun's glow.
Even tho’ sharia kills all sorts of queers
Pride types hope Is-ra-el disappears.
Islam’s “peace” should last about a thousand years.
Let’s go on with the Sho(ah).
Let’s go on with the show.

Taking a Breather

Due to circumstances entirely within my control I will be away from the computer for the next two--and possibly even three--days.

Have a great weekend!

Top Ten Reasons to Love Canada Now

Two of them are Justin Bieber and our "cuisine". If that's the best we can come up with, we pretty much suck.

The Anti-QuAIA Fiasco Was Foretold

Despite initially being given the old heave-ho, Queers Against Casablanca Waters will be out in full force this weekend, a tremendous "victory," we've been told, for "free speech." And in case you think that it wasn't fated to turn out exactly as it has, here's an eerily prescient comment from back in April that appeared in Israeli lefty rag Ha'aretz:

I am queer and in Toronto and I fully support QaIA. And, don't you worry, despite the Pro-Israel camp lying through their teeth to label them a hate group, they'll stay and Pride will continue. You just watch us! ... it is so nice to be queer sometimes...:) And the more the Pro-Israel group goes at it,... the better known they will become... and the more supporters they will have. So please, go on about it. As someone else put it in a Toronto discussion... if this was "queers agasint (sic) dutch apartheid" the dutch would laugh... they know they aren't an apartheid state, they know everyone can tell they aren't... I guess Pro-Israel groups aren't so sure that the issue is so clear. And about gay policies in the middle eastern world... we know... we hate it, but we are also human beings and all human rights matter to us.

Save, of course, for the "human right" of Jews to have their own state (while Muslims, incredibly, are entitled to a near-Heinz 57 of 'em, no questions asked). That said, I think there's a bitter lesson here for Israel supporters. Quite often, seeking to "ban" something you don't like has the unintended consequence of making you look bad and bolstering your opponent. (And that said, the argument about "the dutch" laughing off the apartheid charge won't wash, because no one, as far as I know, is in the throes of an irrational obsession about "the dutch" being irredeemably evil and Holland therefore having to cease to be for the sake of mankind.)

Losing It

Caroline Glick sees a parallel between Israel's war in Lebanon ten years ago and the current war in Afghanistan:

Today US forces in Afghanistan are fighting in a manner that is depressingly similar to that forced upon IDF forces in Lebanon in the 1990s. Like the US forces in Afghanistan today, during the 1990s, concerns about civilian casualties caused Israel's political leadership to constrain IDF actions in southern Lebanon in a manner that effectively transformed soldiers into sitting ducks. Israel's finest were reduced to fighting from fortified positions and Hizbullah was given a free hand to intimidate Lebanese civilians, commandeer private homes and schools to use as firing positions and forward bases, and generally maintain the initiative in the fighting.

As he withdrew IDF forces from south Lebanon ten years ago — like Biden today — then prime minister Ehud Barak claimed that Israel didn't need boots on the ground to fight Hizbullah. If we needed to go in to fight, we would send in commando squads or fighter jets to do the job. Of course, as US drone operations in Pakistan again demonstrate, without a presence on the ground, you cannot have any certainty that you are attacking real targets.

The important story this week was not about a US general with abysmal judgment about the media. Rather the story is that in Afghanistan, the US is repeating a sorry pattern of Western nations of not understanding — or perhaps not caring -- that if you are not willing to fight a war to victory, you will lose it.

The Lights Are On (in Bloomberg's Brain) But Nobody's Home

Showing that what he knows about jihad and sharia couldn't even fill a thimble, NYC's mayor issues a "clarification" of his position re the proposal to build two Muslims houses of worship near the site where twin towers were toppled by jihadis:

If somebody wants to build a religious house of worship, they should do it and we shouldn't be in the business of picking which religions can and which religions can't. I think it's fair to say if somebody was going to try to on that piece of property build a church or a synagogue, nobody would be yelling and screaming. And the fact of the matter is that Muslims have a right to do it too. What is great about America and particularly New York is we welcome everybody and I just- you know, if we are so afraid of something like this, what does it say about us? Democracy is stronger than this. You know, the ability to practice your religion is the- was one of the real reasons America was founded. And for us to say no is just, I think, not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.

For us to call him a twit is just, I think, not a nice but an appropriate way to phrase it.

Harpoon's Excellent Summit Adventure

Harpoon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star's resident shill for Islam, regales us with his "journey inside the G20 security zone," comparing security for the event to--wait for it--the war on terror:

The Toronto overkill was not unlike the war on terror, with no bounds of common sense or costs, and forever gearing up for an infinite variety of worst-case scenarios and — inevitably — failing, while making road kill of innocent citizens.

But today, let’s forget all that and wish each other a very happy Canada Day.

Let's not. Let's instead acknowledge that "the Toronto overkill" is nothing at all like the war on terror, given that the summit was a one-time event that lasted all of three days, whereas "jihad is the way, sharia is the goal" until the goal is finally reached, and there's an apparently inexhaustible supply of young Muslims hankering for a hook up with heavenly harlots.

Nice try, though, Harpoon.

Tin-Eared Tom

Thomas L. Friedman is swooning like a tweener who's caught sight of Justin Bieber over something called the Al Quds Index:

What’s that? It’s the P.S.E., or Palestine Securities Exchange. Based in Nablus, in the West Bank, the Al-Quds Index has actually been having a solid year — and therein lies a tale.

Which, alas, Tom proceeds to tell in typical eye-glazing fashion:

“It has outperformed the stock exchanges of most Arab countries,” said Samir Hulileh, the C.E.O. of Palestine Development and Investment, which owns the exchange. The P.S.E. was established in 1996 with 19 companies and now has 41 — and 8 more will join this year. The companies listed there include the Commercial Bank of Palestine, Nablus Surgical Center, Palestine Electric Company and Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers. “Most are underpriced because of the political risk component,” said Hulileh. So if you don’t mind a little volatility, there is a lot of potential upside here. Indeed, there will soon be an E.T.F. — an exchange-traded fund — that tracks the Al-Quds Index so you can sit in America and go long or short peace in Palestine.

Still awake after that snooze-a-thon? Me neither. To spare you having to read on, I'll summarize the rest: Tom is tickled to see the Fatah faction getting its act together "under the leadership of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the former World Bank economist who has unleashed a real Palestinian “revolution.”" It's the prelude, he thinks, to a sovereign Palestine.

Nothing wrong with that, right?
 
Well, no. Not if you believe that anything called "Al Quds" could, as they say, be good for the Jews.
 
Me? I don't happen to think that just because Abbas and the boys got themselves a little "stock exchange" going on, they have any intention of allowing a Jewish Israel to remain on the scene.
 
But, hey, that's just me. Tom, who has never failed to fall for a smooth Arab with a slick line, thinks "Al Quds" is good thing; in Friedmanian terms, a Jetsons thing. In reality, though, the name says it all. Al Quds (which, to me, always sounds like a grunt) is the Arab name for a Jewish city--a name that obliterates Jewish history, in the same way that "Istanbul" obliterated the Christian history of Constantinople. In that way, it is really more of a Flintstones thing.
 
And "Fred" Friedman? Sadly, he remains as tin-eared as ever, concluding with this swipe at the "right":

(F)or Israelis on the right, particularly West Bank settlers, who love the notion that there are no responsible Palestinians to talk to so the status quo will never change, Fayyadism is a real threat. Akiva Eldar, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, described this group perfectly the other day when he wrote how they “won’t relinquish the Arabs’ ‘no’s. Or, as the poet Constantine Cavafy wrote in ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ ... : ‘And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution.’ ”

As the poet Dr. Seuss wrote in Yertle the Turtle: "Oy to the vey!" (He didn't really write that, by the way.) A kind of "solution," huh? Ripping idea. Presumably, though, it won't be one of those barbaric "final" ones: we Jews have had quite enough of those.
 
Some people are Jetsons. Some are Flinstones. And some, like Tom, think they're Jetsons, but have rocks in their head.

Pecking Order

They said it couldn't be done. Three--count 'em--three seemingly unrelated concurent events (Pride 2010, Jihadstock and the centenerary of Frank Loesser's birth) brought together in a single song parody. (The "I" in the song is a by-the-book Islamist; the "you" is the type of usefully idiotic queer who proudly marches against the only queer-friendly land in the Middle East):

I hate you
A bushel and a peck
A bushel and a peck
And a rope around yer neck
A rope around yer neck
Or a really sharp sword
A really sharp sword and you'll get your just "reward"
'Cause you're queer
Better fear
'Cause I hate you
A bushel and a peck
Sharia's what directs me to
A doodle-oodle-ooh-doo
A-doodle-oodle-oodle-ooh-doo
A-doodle-oodle-oodle-ooh-doo...

Oh, Canada

Binks stands on guard for thee.