Shut up.

Back in the day (623 AD), Muslims killed Infidels (that would be pagans, polytheists, and fellow monotheists who were practicing their religions long before Mohammed had his vision - that would be Jews and Christians, for those of you who haven't been paying attention) who refused to convert to Islam. In those days they used the sword and arrow and other tactics that became popular in the Middle Ages.

Today, Muslims are killing Infidels with suicide bombs, truck bombs, car bombs, donkey bombs, IEDs, RPGs, and assorted rockets, when they're not trying to use even bigger trucks and explosives on airplanes.

Until Muslims start protesting these killings, they should shut up and take a good look in the mirror, instead of getting upset because the Pope quoted a medieval text referring to their earlier terrorist acts.

"We are destined to be a barrier against the return of ignorance and barbarism" wrote Thomas Jefferson, the first American president to stand up to Islamic terrorists, the Barbary "Pirates". (The French, of course, kept paying ‘tribute’ to them. Funny how some things never change…)

Hey! Don't take my word for it!

I have been accused, by some readers of my blog, of not reading history books (mostly by people who have obviously not read any history books themselves) and of exaggerating the hate, blindness and fury that fuels both Islamic fundamentalists and terrorist groups.

I received an email the other day from a friend of mine. She was born and raised in Canada, married an Israeli, and has lived in Israel for 20-some years. She stays there, even after her divorce, because it is her home and the home of her children.

Her kids are now young adults, which means they are or soon will be, in the military as part of the mandatory 2 (women)-to-3 (men) years of military service that begins at age 18. Women who opt to serve in combat positions are required to stay in for three years.

Men, and combat-trained women, continue to serve as reservists, and are called up for a month every year until they are in their mid 40s. They can continue to be on reserve duty after that age if they so desire. Reservists are subject to being recalled to active full-time duty whenever required to do so. (Israelis joke that civilians are just soldiers on 11-month long furloughs.)

So, by virtue of many things, my friend and I don't always share the same opinion of what is going on, what is needed to resolve the greater and smaller issues. I recognize that I hold the views and opinions I do not only because I've done a hell of a lot more reading throughout the years on the history of the region and the religions involved than have most people, but I also have not lived there since 1974, and I have no children who will end up on the front line...though in Israel, everyone is on the front line all the time, given that the favorite targets of their enemies are the civilians themselves and where they live, not some distant battlefield.

So, I was surprised and interested when my friend sent me what was purported to be the written version of an address given by a former Lebanese citizen, a woman who experienced first hand what I've been saying for years: When it comes to Israel, Jews in and outside of Israel, and to Christians everywhere, Moslems preach hate, order hate, and raise generations of Moslems to hate. The attributed author of the speech I received was a Christian Lebanese woman who delivered her talk at a anti-terrorist rally at Duke University in 2004.

I get a lot of purportedly true stuff sent to me by well-meaning friends and acquaintances, like the email claiming that Oliver North specifically referred to Osama bin Laden when testifying before Congress in 1987 (see Snope's Oliver Twisted and Atta Boy).

So, when I received my friend's email and started reading it, I decided to check it out first, heading to one of the urban legend sites I used to check out the validity of the report. (I use Snopes.com and UrbanLegends.about.com.)

Snopes rated it as True, and provided a link to a 45-minute video of an interview with Brigitte Gabriel. I encourage all to read the transcript of the speech she gave, listen to the interview, and check out Gabriel's organization, American Congress for Truth.

A picture's worth 1000 words...and lies

Aish.com's Photo Fraud highlights some of the altered and staged photos taken in Lebanon being published in the world press.

A rocket launcher in a terrorist training camp? Who'd'a thunk it?!

And here’s another thing that's been ticking me off about the majority of Americans stranded in Lebanon.

While they are in Lebanon, they are "Americans".

Once they reach Cyprus or the other transit points, or are back in the US, or when their families here are interviewed on TV and radio, they are "Lebanese-Americans".

Either you are American, or you are not. If you are a U.S. citizen, you are an American. You might have originally been from Lebanon, or “of Lebanese descent”, but if you are a legally a citizen, then you are an American.

Theoretically, being American should make one against terrorism and the terrorists who have the stated intent of killing Americans, but, hey, obviously I’m wrong.

How else to explain why purported Americans will vacation in a country that supports terrorism by protecting and supporting the terrorists in its midst?

If the good people of Lebanon want to stop getting bombed, they have to expose those terrorists – including their family members who are lobbing Katyushas over the border.

Blaming Israel—the Jews—and the U.S. for your problems is just the same old fundamental Arab bullshit, which feeds of the habit of a people who blame others for their own failure to take personal responsibility for the situation in which they find themselves.

The Hezbollah just launched a new type of Iranian-supplied rocket, one that can travel farther than the Russian-made Katyushas. One fell yesterday in the town near where I lived.

Am I the only one who thinks that along with longer-range rockets, Iran has probably also supplied the Hezbollah with the material needed to make dirty bombs?

Oh, but there is good news: Three weeks after the Hezbollah attacked an Israeli outpost and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and 18 days after the Hezbollah started bombing Israel, the Lebanese army found ONE rocket launcher, near a PFLP camp.

(The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded in 1967, is one of the two major terrorist organizations making up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Gee, I can see why it would have taken the Lebanese army THREE WEEKS to get around to looking in a terrorist training camp. You can probably figure out why I am finding it hard to believe that they only found ONE launcher there.

You are either part of the solution, people, or you are perpetuating the problem. It is that simple.

In other words...

...or, more accurately, in the words of others, check out:

HonestReporting.com's Israel Under Fire and their other reports

Palestinian Media Watch for a look at what they are saying and promoting that for some reason rarely ever makes it into the Western news services

Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reports and comments on the anti-West and anti-Israel/Jewish Arab press around the world

"Legitimate government", my ass

Enough already with the phrase “legitimate government” applied to Lebanon’s farce.

Any government whose ranks include avowed terrorists whose stated goal is to annihilate the people in the country next door is anything but legitimate.

Any government whose army is not permitted entry into the terrorist group’s enclave in the southern part of the capital city is anything but a legitimate government.

Kofi Annan is calling for a cease fire, for the halt to the killing of innocents. Where the hell was his concern for innocents through all the years the Arab terrorists have been blowing up Israeli citizens?

The president of Lebanon is already whining about the destruction to buildings, roads, the airport and infrastructure, and wants to know who is going to pay for the clean up and reconstruction. Well, Mr. President, it ain’t going to be Israel, whom you so clearly imply is responsible. Your government and army permitted itself to be taken over by terrorists, funded and aided by Syria and Iran. Look to them for restitution, not Israel, not the West. You lay down with terrorists, you pay the price in concrete and blood.

Enough, newscasters, with questions about why the interior ministry’s building would be bombed, and why Israel would bomb mosques and schools. Arab terrorists in all countries have used schools, mosques and hospitals to hide themselves and their weapons. If truly innocent civilians are killed when these targets are bombed, it is not the fault of the bombers, but of the civilians and governments who permitted these sites to be used as arms stores, command centers, and bunkers.

One news report today mentioned how fleeing Lebanese are flying white cloths from their cars so that everyone will know they aren’t Hezbollah. Like, the terrorists are too moral to not fly the white flags on their own cars??? Puhleeze.

I am getting sick of the news programs playing all these interviews with Lebanese-Americans who survived the bombing and managed to flee Lebanon. If they’re stupid enough to vacation and visit family who live in terrorists strongholds, whose family members may be allied with the terrorists, they do not deserve to be assisted out at US taxpayer expense. And where are the interviews with the Israelis who are once again living in bomb shelters?

And, speaking of bomb shelters, enough with the one-sided stories coming out of Nazareth. Every village and town and city in Israel has public bomb shelters. Every school, public building, hospital, and apartment building has bomb shelters or hardened rooms. Every house built in the last 25 years is required to have a basement bomb shelter. If the Nazarene Arab Moslems refused to use them or used them for other purposes, or bypassed building codes and didn’t construct them, why is that Israel’s fault? Oh, that’s right! Everything is Israel’s--the Jews’--fault! Silly me, I forgot!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for a cease fire. Once all the Hezbollah and their sympathizers are dead, their weapons destroyed, the governments of Syria and Iran replaced with people who aren’t psychopaths and their sycophants, and a buffer zone of 1000 miles from Israel, whose land area shall include the West Bank, Gaza, and Sinai is established, well, then we can reasonably talk cease fire. Otherwise, since there is no way to negotiate anything with terrorists, there can be no cease fire.

Declaration of War

Written over the course of the last week…

What the Christians of the West do not understand is that Islam has been at war with the Jews—and, thus, Israel—ever since we (that would be the Jews and Christians) refused Mohammed’s demand that we convert to his new religion. When we and the Christians refused to do so voluntarily, Moslems used their swords to force conversion. Needless to say, they got quite pissed off when that failed to wipe the Infidels from the face of the earth, and have remained so ever since.

So long as the West stayed more or less in the West and out of the Middle East, the various tribes, emirates, caliphates and sultanates that embraced their various Islamic variants went about doing their thing, becoming increasingly insular, occasionally fighting each other to prove the supremacy of their particular flavor of Islam over the other, and maintaining a steady, and increasingly annoying, policy of kidnapping to kill, enslave or hold for ransom those Infidels whose ships came within reach of the Arab pirates. Jews and Christians who stayed living in the Arab lands in which they and the generations before them had been born and lived, were periodically and systematically persecuted for sport, and occasionally killed.

Just as tightly-ruled communist countries hate and fear the capitalist West, so too do Moslems hate and fear what they see as the Devilish temptations exemplified, in their minds, by the West: freedom of speech, tolerance of different religious beliefs and cultures, and, perhaps worst of all, women who wear pants, work and interact with men who are not close male relatives, and gasp! drive cars all by themselves. Clearly, the West is the Great Satan’s playground and everything that emanates from it is to be fought against.

But instead of blocking Western TV and radio stations in their satellite receivers, ceasing all travel to western countries, and forbidding their children and other citizens from going abroad to study at Great Satan’s universities, they logically (for Moslems, illogically to most everyone else) deduce that they will go out and kill as many of us as they can in order to remake the world in their image.

If Moslems don’t want to participate in the world, fine. They should just stay the hell home, lock their doors and borders just as they’ve locked their minds, and contemplate the heaven that awaits them.

Speaking of heaven, if the Islamic male’s heaven includes a paradise with 72 virgins, what is the heaven promised to Islamic females? A place where they no longer have to wear all-encompassing robes, where they can go wherever they want whenever they want, drive themselves wherever they want, in a splendid place without a single Moslem male anywhere to be found?

Speaking of declarations of war, let’s talk about 1948, and the U.N.’s partition of various bits of the Ottoman Empire into various entities, including Israel (which was probably the last time the UN ever did anything remotely positive for Jews and for Israel), Trans-Jordan, and Lebanon. Jordan got what is called the West Bank, while Egypt got the Sinai Peninsula and a large rectangle of land (the Gaza strip) jutting up against the tiny bit of land granted to Israel.

Because the Arabs in all of the Middle East refused to accept Jews in their midst, let alone a lot a European Jews (shhhhhhh! Listen carefully. Hear the siren song of the West faintly in the distance, flowing sweetly in counterpoint to the muezzin’s call?), they called on all the Arabs living in Israel to go on vacation for a week or so, to give the Arab armies the opportunity to go in and eliminate the Jews.

And so the Arabs did as requested, and took off for a brief stay in neighboring countries, with most ending up in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

But the Arab armies lost. The great legions of fearless Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Persians and Iraqis, fueled and funded by Moslem religious and political leaders throughout the region (and U.S. and European oil money and arms) lost to the ragtag collection of Jews whose roots dug deep into the region. Jews whose families have lived on these lands since long before Mohammed dreamed up Islam. Jews who trickled back into the Fertile Crescent after being forcibly exiled at various times through the last 2,000 years. Then there were the Jews who survived the Nazis and the Tzar, starved and terrorized yet again as they made it past the British blockades, and those who came from Europe, Asia, and North and South America--even Africa--as soon as the Brits pulled out, which happened after the Brits allowed the Arabs to arm themselves, of course, but not the Jews who had to defend themselves against well-armed Arab terrorists and the combined Arab armies the West knew would soon flow across the U.N.-mandated borders.

And, so, there we are, in the aftermath of the 1948 War of Independence, and the Arabs who left on vacation suddenly declare themselves refugees, because they refuse to go back home and live amongst the Jews.

Unfortunately for them, the Arab governments of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt didn’t want them either. At least, didn’t want them merging in with their cousins in the lands they now found themselves, not when the leaders of these and the neighboring Moslem countries could use these voluntarily homeless people as weapons pointed at the heart of Israel.

And that is exactly what they did. “Palestinian refugees” do not exist. They started out as Arabs who voluntarily left their homes so that their cousins could kill Jews so they could return and get the land cultivated by the Jews, the homes built by the Jews, and the businesses and everything else designed, developed and built by the Jews.

These Arabs became refugees because their cousins refused to take them in. They have lived in the conditions they live in for the past 58 years because they keep waiting for the Jews to be killed or, in fear, flee for their lives.

But, in the mean time, the Arab “refugees” expect Israel and the West to provide them with the food, medical care, schooling, infrastructure, and jobs. Their Arab cousins who forced them into these enclaves did nothing for them and are doing nothing for them. Well, except for providing them with training in terrorist camps and funds and weapons to use to keep killing Jews, and planting their terrorist enclaves and rocket launchers in their neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and beaches.

For years, the Gaza Arabs demanded the Israelis leave Gaza – even though Israel obtained both Gaza and the West Bank after the Arabs lost the two wars the Arabs started in their attempt to get rid of Israelis. So, what happens when Israel pulls its citizens out of Gaza? Gaza Arabs and all the Arab countries get pissed off because there’s no more Israeli money funding their economy, no more jobs with Israeli businesses, no more food, no more money for their hospitals and clinics.

Yet again, the Arabs blame the Jews. Of course, they are also blaming West who has refused to cough up the money and food the Arabs are demanding, because the Arabs continue to harbor, fund and train terrorists, and call for the destruction of Israel and refuse to recognize its right—the Jews right—to exist. And so the Jews and the West are once again commingled and blamed for the problems that Arabs bring upon themselves.

You gotta admire a brain that can strap on a suicide vest or launch a rocket with one hand while keeping its other hand out demanding money, food and “justice” from the very people they are trying so hard to kill.

One of my favorite comments this past week was from one of the Hamas terrorists who was whining about Israel’s disproportionate response – that Israel was destroying more property and putting at risk more Arabs than Arab terrorists were destroying and killing Israelis.

Of course, the Arabs have always been really bad at math. Just look at all their whining when, after one of their homicide bombers kills 50+ Israelis and tourists at a restaurant, the Israeli army evicts the bomber’s family from their home, and destroys the home. Period. That, of course, sets off another Arab round of whining about how Israelis are killing the poor defenseless innocent refugees and so the poor defenseless innocent refugees have no recourse but to go out and try to kill dozens more Israelis.

Well, let’s look at proportionality, shall we?

18 Total number of Arab countries* supporting
and funding terrorist attacks against Israel

341,439,805 Total Population in these countries

6,352,805 Total Population of Israel (includes Jews, Moslems,
Christians,and others)

53.7 Number of Arabs that would have to be killed for each
Israeli killed to equal a proportionate response

*Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, UAE, Yemen; plus the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Population figures from the CIA World Fact Book, updated summer 2006.

According to CNN just now (Monday, July 17, 1500 hrs), there have been 170 reported dead in Lebanon, and 24 in Israel. For those wanting a proportional response, there needs to be another 11,188 Lebanese killed to equal the number of Israelis killed by this week’s Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon. This week. If you’d like me to add up what the proportional response figures should be for the past decade, please let me know.

In other words, until the numbers of Arabs killed by Israeli defense forces come proportionally even close to equaling the number of Israelis killed by Arab terrorists, the U.N. and its terrorist members should shut the fuck up.

Last night on the news, a video montage was shown of Lebanese fleeing to Syria from Lebanon. One woman turned to the camera and screamed, ‘Bush! This is what Bush is doing to us!”

So, kiddies, just in case you are thinking that this annoying Arab-Israeli thing is just a border dispute between two contentious neighbors, you simply are not getting it. Read the history books, not Islamic propaganda. Listen. Read some more. If you think that once all the Jews are gone the Moslems will settle happily down and ignore the rest of you, think again.

In the meantime, the world is watching while Israel takes on a job others have shrunk from: wiping out the terrorists from our midst.

The world did nothing when Iran built its nuclear reactor, but quietly thanked Israel for bombing it to pieces just before it went live (on a weekend when no one was supposed to be there, including the French nuclear scientists working on the facility. Perhaps I should add France to the above list of countries supporting Arab terrorists...).

Now, Israel is doing what Lebanon’s farce of an elected government should have done before it became so infiltrated by Hezbollah members that it crippled itself: get rid of Hezbollah.

As always, Arab terrorists embed themselves in neighborhoods populated with civilians. This means they get to hide and mostly survive unless and until the civilians get the hell out and let the bombing begin. After a certain point, however, the bombing has to start, regardless of who stayed behind.

At what point does a civilian become a collaborator instead of victim of collateral damage?

At what point does a country whose populace elects terrorists to government positions become recognized as a terrorist state instead of the victim of "minority" segments of its population?

Who makes these decisions? The terrorists? The people the terrorists have converted from collateral to collaborator? Countries like France, well known for their collaboration with the Nazis in WWII, and now bowing in fear of their own Moslem population? Qatar, who led the Arab countries pushing the UN to condemn Israel for its defense against attacks from Gaza?

Please don’t get me wrong. I would be much happier if there were indeed peace in the region, and nobody getting killed. But that is simply not going to happen so long as Arab terrorists are permitted to flourish, as long as mosques and midrassahs the world over are permitted to teach hate and preach a future in which the world is dominated by Islam.

This is not a new war. This is the continuation of the war started in 623 B.C.E., when Moslems first started slaughtering Jews and Christians who refused to convert.

How much longer will the world continue to allow Moslems to slaughter people for the simple reason that they are not themselves Moslems? Perhaps, once all of us Jews are gone, the rest of you will wake up.

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Need a little history refresher? Check out some of my past blog entries:

A Letter to the President of Iran

A Tiny Voice of Reason

Why do they hate us?

Suggestions for Summer Reading

PS: For those who think it easy for me to speak from my comfy vantage point 7400 miles away, I spent the summer of 1973, and most of 1974, in Israel, living first in the seaside town of Netanya, then on a kibbutz on the Jordan border, during a year of heavy terrorist attacks throughout the country. My 19th birthday, in fact, was spent in part trying to learn to sustain a note on a flute while in the "disco" in the kibbutz bomb shelter, where kibbutz kids had been sleeping underground for many of the years since the shelters were built after the kibbutz was founded in 1937.