Hagel denies Armenian genocide

Armenian-American leaders and human rights advocates have expressed deep reservations about the nomination of Chuck Hagel to lead the defense department.
Hagel, a two-term Republican senator from Nebraska, was nominated Monday as President Barack Obama’s pick to head the Pentagon. He faces criticism for opposing a 2005 congressional resolution recognizing Turkey’s genocide of more than one million Armenians.
“What happened in 1915 happened in 1915,” Hagel said during a 2005 trip to Armenia when he was serving in the Senate. “As one United States senator, I think the better way to deal with this is to leave it open to historians and others to decide what happened and why.”
“The fact is that this region needs to move forward,” Hagel continued. “We need to find a lasting, just peace between Turkey and Armenia and the other nations of this region. I am not sure that by going back and dealing with that in some way that causes one side or the other to be put in difficult spot, helps move the peace process forward.”
Armenian-American leaders and genocide experts decried these comments as insensitive and dangerous. They maintain that Hagel’s willingness to overlook the systematic genocide of more than one million people raises concerns about his possible tenure as the nation’s top defense official.
“Senator Hagel’s remarks from 2005 ignore a proud chapter in U.S. history during which America’s diplomatic community played an important role denouncing human rights violations and setting an example of humanitarian assistance on behalf of a people at risk,” said Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the nonpartisan Armenian Assembly of America. (more)

you can't say Hagel has not been consistent in his loyalties. It would be interesting now that Turkey has a proxy war with Iran in Syria where his bias would leave him. I really don't want to find this out however.

Genocide Watch Issues Alert: South Africa In Early Stages Of White Genocide

World’s top genocide expert and founder of Genocide Watch, Prof. Gregory Stanton, visits South Africa to investigate violence against whites (Afrikaners). He warns them at a press conference on July 26 2012: “Don’t give up your guns.”
“UN’s Francis Deng has been informed; and I will also inform Samantha Power, head of the US Atrocities Prevention Board, as well as the FBI’S Genocide Prevention Unit upon my return.” – Prof. Gregory Stanton, World’s Top Genocide expert, founder Genocide Watch

July 26, 2012, 11am PRETORIA – Press conference by Prof Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch US in South Africa: as reported by dr Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans-Action-Group:
- Stanton said he was on a fact-finding mission regarding the extraordinarily high numbers of cruelty displayed during attacks and murders against white farmers, their families and workers; and also interviewed community leaders about the widespread anti-Afrikaner discrimination and hatespeech emanating from the ANC-regime.

“Genocide Watch had raised South Africa to level 6 when Malema was singing Kill the Boer song’. And now SA president Jacob Zuma is also singing it.”
He said at the start of his press conference that he had tried to get interviews with ANC-leaders specifically to discuss the hatespeech issue surround the Kill the Boer song. He was refused access. “I would have dearly loved to have spoken to them’; he said at the well-attended press conference at the Transvaal Agricultural Union’s headquarters in Silverton, Pretoria.

“We at Genocide Watch have enough suspicion that there may be an organised effort at a genocide in South Africa, and we will continue to monitor the situation closely’.
“Desecration of bodies in SA also happened in Rwanda and Burundi”, he said — adding that he would be meeting the US Minister of Council today to inform them of the situation in South Africa”. He had spoken to many Afrikaners from all walks of life and is returning with hitherto-unknown details about atrocities.
“You only need a small group to carry out a full-blown genocide. When I talked about the 8 stages of genocide, some of the early stages are precursors to genocide’.
“The SA farm murders should become ‘a priority crime’ for the South African government, and that they had to try their very best to try and stop them.
Many of the Afrikaners present also asked him exactly what genocide entailed. He explained that for instance, ‘if the government took away your children and prevented you from speaking Afrikaans to them, it is a genocide act. “And driving people out of their territory is also another form of genocide.’ Also: “Killing members of a group, even 3,000, could constitute a genocide.’
Asked by Edwin Leemans of the Boereleed Institute whether the ANC-leaders could be taken to the International criminal court in the Hague to be tried, he replied “South Africa is a state-party to the Rome Statute. Policians could be tried in The Hague regarding their inflammatory speech towards Afrikaners.’
Stanton said he had spoken to community leaders and crime-victims during his fact-finding tour in South Africa.
‘Francis Deng of the United Nations has also taken notice of what is happening in South Africa to the Afrikaners.” He also undertook to take all the information he had gathered on his fact-finding tour in South Africa to Samantha Power, head of the US Atrocities Prevention Board, as well as to the FBI’S Genocide Prevention Unit.
He did not express any political views – for instance regarding the rights of Afrikaners to self-determination – as posed by Cor Ehlers.
And one Afrikaner at the press conference challenged Stanton, saying he was ‘skeptic’ about Stanton’s claims: Johan Burger of the Institute for Security Studies and a former SA Police Commissioner, asked: “what is the factual basis for the assumptions we are making’? Stanton explained that similar incredulity was seen in Europe and the USA regarding reports about any pending Afrikaner genocide.
“The godlike status of Mandela is like that of Martin Luther King or Ghandi. We now know they were not perfect. Nevertheless, as long as Mandela is alive, Europe and the US will not believe the situation in which Afrikaners now find themselves in South Africa.”
He expressed the hope that ‘war would never happen in South Africa: that you will be able to fight back against the communist ideology’. He also urged the Afrikaners to ‘fight back using the courts and the policing system, and ‘for God’s sake don’t ever give up your guns, despite the gun laws.’
End
About Gregory Stanton: Gregory H. Stanton is the Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. He is the best known for his work in the area of genocide studies. He is the founder (1999) and president of Genocide Watch, the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Campaign to End Genocide. From 2007 to 2009 he was the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Stanton comes from the lineage of women’s suffrage activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery leader. He worked as a voting rights worker in Mississippi, a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, and as Church World Service/CARE Field Director in Cambodia in 1980.
Stanton is Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia. From 2003 to 2009 he was the James Farmer Professor in Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He has been a Law Professor at Washington and Lee University, American University, and the University of Swaziland. He has degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Law School, and a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2001–2002).
Stanton served in the State Department (1992–1999), where he drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, and the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war. In 1994, Stanton won the American Foreign Service Association’s prestigious W. Averell Harriman award for “extraordinary contributions to the practice of diplomacy exemplifying intellectual courage,” based on his dissent from U.S. policy on the Rwandan genocide. He wrote the State Department options paper on ways to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice in Cambodia.
In 1999 Stanton founded Genocide Watch. From 1999 to 2000, he also served as Co-Chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court. Genocide Watch is the Chair and Coordinator of the International Campaign to End Genocide, which includes 30 organizations in 11 countries, including the Minority Rights Group, the International Crisis Group, the Aegis Trust, Survival International, and the Genocide Intervention Network.
Before he joined the State Department, Stanton was a legal advisor to RUKH, the Ukrainian independence movement, work for which he was named the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America’s 1992 Man of the Year. He was the Chair of the American Bar Association Young Lawyer’s Division Committee on Human Rights and a member of the A.B.A.’s Standing Committee on World Order Under Law.
In 2007, Stanton was elected President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, to serve until 2009.

via patdollard.com

Another Multicultural Failure. Is freedom allowing people who want to kill you to live with you?

America's One Child Policy

Vice President Joe Biden, Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, visited China and voiced his understanding of China's One Child Policy. The part that he understood was the forced abortions and the eugenics of baby girls. The part that he didn't understand was how the Chinese government expects one breadwinner to support four retirees. But as usual Biden had it backward.

The Chinese government isn't worried about how retirees will be supported, because they have no investment in them. They'll receive whatever social benefits are doled out, and that's it. China's brutal pragmatism and lack of democracy makes rationing health care and anything else easy. Massive rallies and protests happen all the time in the People's Republic, unreported by the media, and are ignored by the authorities. Tienanmen Square showed the limits of popular protest in creating political change. It's a lesson that neither the leadership nor the people have forgotten. Biden should have really been asking his question in Washington D.C. While America has no official one child policy, it has promoted a shift from family savings and support, to a government supervised safety net. Taxes have gone up, the single income family has become rarer and birth rates have dropped. Marriage and children have become more expensive, the former has dropped at a staggering rate among lower income families, and the latter has gone up leading to large numbers of single parents.

The modern state has all for intents and purposes tried to replace the family, providing an expensive cradle to grave social support network. A network that favors those most who work the least.

The government replaces fathers, mothers and children. Children are cared for by the government. So are their elderly parents. The utility of having children diminishes. And the entire system is funded by higher taxes and economic gimmicks that decrease jobs and diminish buying power which lowers the number of self-supporting families, and lowers birth rates in general and especially among the productive working class who usually provide the biological base for population expansion.

Boosting tax revenues means rewarding spenders over savers, which leads to a consumeristic society that drives even more people into the social welfare system. And even those who stay out of it and try to save, are operating in a system whose monetary policy and programs are set against them. The short term tax revenue gains and monetary policy gimmicks lead to much larger problem as again they create more dependency as everyone is forced into relying on the government social safety net.

Birth rate is the engine behind the social safety net. If the birth rate falls, then even when practiced with the best intentions, the whole system becomes a massive Ponzi scheme. But how do you keep the birth rate high when taxes are high, higher education has become mandatory and a consumer society teaches people to reward themselves now, instead of deferring instant gratification until later?

And without a high birth rate, a major revenue gap opens up. If solvent long term funds were used to prepare for the gap, then the day of disaster could be delayed. But the same political elite that created the problem is also guilty of uncontrollably spending all those funds, and then holding out their hand for more.

In Europe, one answer has been more government subsidies for children. A typical statist solution that tries to use the unacknowledged source of the problem to create incentives to bypass its consequences. While subsidies can marginally increase birth rates, they do not address the real problem.

Taking away people's money and then paying them to go shopping in order to stimulate the economy is common enough in the United States. And it never works. You can't restore a healthy economy with subsidies and you can't restore a healthy birth rate with some social benefits. It's not just about the money, it's also about the culture that was created by those policies. A post-family culture.

So the other Western solution is to import immigrants from a different culture with high birth rates. Europe has all but destroyed itself with that approach, and America is speedily following along. Sure, the total birth rate numbers look good, and no one is supposed to care how many European countries are set to be Muslim by 2100.

But the economics of it still don't work because social utilization goes up drastically to pay for all those extra children, many of whom will never work legally, others who will take far more out of the economy than they will ever put back in. The cost of trying and then imprisoning a single criminal for a year is staggering. Those rapes, murders and drug deals don't just have a human cost-- they have a shocking economic toll. And throw in a major riot like in London and the economic damage adds up to the loss of entire major cities.

And there we are back again to Europe set for a Muslim majority, and America set for a Hispanic majority, and both are going completely bankrupt anyway.

Chinese leaders could have pointed all this out to Biden, but they find it easier to let our civilizations collapse in their own time, while the Century of China gets underway. China may never make it, its own economy is parasitically interlinked with ours and its centrally planned economics and social unrest will probably take it down before 2050. This would be nothing new for China which has gone down this way before. And dynasty or party, it has never really learned from its mistakes.

And Europe arguably has never learned from the mistakes of the Roman Empire, instead again overreaching its conquests, outsourcing its defense, showing weakness at the worst possible time, opening cities to barbarians and engaging in absolute folly in a crisis have been repeated. And the United States is following along.

Peering at the world through the spyglass of history, it would seem as if every people are repeating their old errors again. The State of Israel looks a lot like the latter days of its kingdoms, placing its faith in an untrustworthy power, Egypt and Rome, and allowing itself to be led to disaster by internal division and treason. The Muslim world is aching to revive the Caliphate with the same end results, cultural decay and collapse.

It's astounding that no one has learned anything in thousands of years except how to make a better smartphone. We can put people on the moon and make dinner in five minutes, but we can't stop destroying ourselves in cycle after cycle of history while finding creative ways to justify our suicides.

America doesn't need a One Child Policy, but it has one anyway that punishes childbirth among productive populations and rewards it among unproductive populations. That leads to a division of lower income populations into a working class and a welfare class. With the working class supporting the welfare class. Marriage is down among both classes. It's too expensive for the working class and too unnecessary for the welfare class. Why bother getting married when the local aid office is already your husband, wife and parents combined? The more children you have, the more the government takes care of you.

If China's One Child Policy is a moral horror, the Western One Child Policy is an economic and social horror that has already destroyed major European and American cities. And it's just getting started.

The left's fear and loathing of Western self-perpetuation translates into shrill agitation for population control. Which means more tax penalized one child or no child families in the West alongside ten child Bangladeshi families living off social welfare since tax penalties can't be expected to apply to people who don't pay taxes.

The countries worried about population growth have too little of it, and the countries that aren't worried about it have too much of it. Globalists dream of some UN administered worldwide population scheme, but if no major country was willing to turn over its nuclear weapons to the UN, how likely is it that they'll turn over their babies?

Ted Turner has praised China's One Child policy and suggested that tax penalties could be used to dissuade large families, along with Cap and Trade for babies to allow those families or countries who don't have children to sell their childbearing rights to more fertile people and places.

Turner's plan would allow Europe to sell its child credits to Africa, but how would Africa afford it? China would have an entirely new export in baby credits, but the main countries buying it wouldn't be able to pay for it either. There's something ghoulish about such talk of trading unborn babies between the continents, aborted Western and Chinese babies being sold as credits to create new babies in countries subsidized by Western aid.

But we're trading enough live babies already. There is a booming trade in Chinese and African babies being adopted by Western couples. As with other Western industries, the manufacturing is outsourced to China, while the Western consumer overpays for a product that seems convenient in the short term, but is highly injurious to him and his society in the long term.

The consequences of using the Third World as a baby manufacturing factory, through immigration or adoption, are the end of the First World. You can outsource your energy production to countries that hate you and finance a way of global terrorism. You can outsource your manufacturing and industry to countries that hate you and lose much of your economy and gain a powerful new enemy. But when you outsource your population replacement to peoples that hate you-- then you're gone.

A country can survive anything but its own self-inflicted genocide. And low birth rates combined with population replacement amount to that. Suicidal genocide by a civilization that no longer thinks there's any reason to go on.

The West has subsidized population booms in the Third World with its medicine and its aid. Now it's subsidizing its own population replacement by them. Uncle Sam, John Bull and Madam Liberty are sitting in a skyscraper somewhere with pistols to their heads, cheerfully making plans for their farewell parties. The parties will have a very diverse invitation list. And the evening will end with the suicide of the cultures that contributed so much to the world in the last 500 years.

But the fecklessness of Western liberals and liberalized conservatives may stem their self-inflicted suicide. Before the populations are wiped out, the economies will be.

America and Europe are coming up against the impossibility of maintaining their governments and their economies at the same time. They will have to choose one or the other, and whichever choice they make will leave their countries much less attractive to immigrants.

Either the end of the social safety net or the end of economic growth will significantly reduce rates of immigration and even lead to the exit of some immigrants. It's already happening in America just on the current unemployment rates alone. A complete economic collapse would dramatically reverse the number of opportunistic immigrants who come for profits, rather than for freedoms. But this isn't any kind of solution, it's more like a suicide realizing that he can't hang himself and jump into the water at the same time. He'll have to choose one or the other.

But drowning a dog to kill the fleas on it is no answer. Even if you reduce the number of fleas, the dog is still dead. And it's not clear if the dog can be revived again. The Russian people have never recovered from the damage done to them by Communism. Neither have their birth rates. America isn't as badly off-- but many European countries may have passed the point of return. The easiest way to tell may be to see which countries have an active political movement dedicated to national survival and which don't.

The 2012 election looks set to come down to a contest between a candidate who favors open borders and economic growth-- and a candidate who favors open borders and big government. Lucky us. We'll get to choose between a man who still wants us to have hope and faith in being able to hang ourselves and jump in the lake at the same time-- and a man who believes the future lies in jumping into the Rio Grande and lowering taxes. As they say north of the border, Dios Bendice a Estados Undisos Mexicanos.

Not that it matters. The fleas aren't killing the dog, they're feeding off its self-inflicted wounds. And the wounds are economic and cultural. Japan kept out immigrants, but its low birth rate and falling marriage rate, under the shadow of a big government maintained recession puts it in the same club as the rest of the First World It may avoid filling its cities with Third Worlders doing manual labor and low level crime, and instead replace them with robots, but it's still on the path to extinction.

Meanwhile back in China, the Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, was explaining to his hosts who were trying to stifle their laughter, how unsustainable their system is.

"Poor dumb bastard," they think, "doesn't he understand that this is what drives our competitiveness. That Chinese parents push their child even harder to succeed when he is their sole source of support?

But how could Biden understand, what government control, estate taxes and the death of the family have robbed America of? Chinese families may have only one child, or two, but they still think in the long term. That child is their future. But Biden's own party is barely capable of thinking two weeks ahead. His opposition is hardly much better. Show me a Republican with a long term plan for the country, and I'll show you an unelectable candidate. Show me a Republican with short term solutions that ignore long term problems-- and I'll call him, Mr. President.

Having children is about thinking of the future. Cultures that stop thinking of the future, that cannot imagine the world going on after they die, find innovative ways to commit suicidal genocide. The left is right that having children is not selfless, it's long term selfishness. It's our willful desire to keep our blood and our people around on the planet long after we're gone.

Long term selfishness like that built this country. It built a lot of countries. It raised industries out of the ground and covered the continent with people. But when a culture loses its sense of long term selfishness, what replaces it is a short attention span and instant gratification. And as the economic reasons for having children vanish, and so does the structure of the family, the reasons for having children diminish. The biological need is replaced by housepets and casual sex.

China's competitiveness is personal, but it transcends the personal. Its leaders are venal, greedy and amoral-- but they also think of the future. American competitiveness is personal. It doesn't look to the future. Our companies are satisfied with making short term gains. Our politicians look for short term successes. Our culture seeks only to lock in the benefits of the present, while China sacrifices the present for the future. It does so in brutal and ugly ways, but you don't have to fight a duel nicely to win. You just have to play to win.

Children are the staying power of a nation. They are its long term projection into the future. When a nation does not think of the future, then it has no children and when a nation has no children, then it has no future.
Sultan Knish

Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?

The military conquest of the land of Canaan by the Hebrews in about 1200 B.C.E. is often characterized as “genocide” and has all but become emblematic of biblical violence and intolerance. God told Moses:

But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them — the Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite — just as the Lord your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord your God. So Joshua [Moses' successor] conquered all the land: the mountain country and the South and the lowland and the wilderness slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord, God of Israel had commanded.

...God clearly ordered the Hebrews to annihilate the Canaanites and surrounding peoples. Such violence is therefore an expression of God's will, for good or ill. Regardless, all the historic violence committed by the Hebrews and recorded in the Old Testament is just that—history. It happened; God commanded it. But it revolved around a specific time and place and was directed against a specific people. At no time did such violence go on to become standardized or codified into Jewish law. In short, biblical accounts of violence are descriptive, not prescriptive.
This is where Islamic violence is unique. Though similar to the violence of the Old Testament—commanded by God and manifested in history—certain aspects of Islamic violence and intolerance have become standardized in Islamic law and apply at all times. Thus, while the violence found in the Qur'an has a historical context, its ultimate significance is theological. Consider the following Qur'anic verses, better known as the "sword-verses":

Then, when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way.
Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day, and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden – such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book – until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled.

....MORE
Summer 2009 | Middle East Quarterly,
Volume XVI: Number 3, pp. 3-12 |
by Raymond Ibrahim
and image via wilybadger.wordpress.com

Free Palestine is CODE for KILL THE JEWS!

The ferocity of the purge in which they were subsequently purged was such that the word "purge" doesn't really convey it. Imagine pigbreathed men wandering blindfolded through the crowd at a Coldplay concert, swinging chainsaws, flamethrowers and yetis about in a random but deadly fashion, and you're getting close.

(LISTEN)

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

...... ..... ..... ..

and yet a CNN Poll Shows Highest Support for Israel; Lowest for Palestinians in History

The Blind Accordion Player (Ben Shahn) via Modern Art 2011

Those who survived were a red-eyed phalanx of psychos who snorted vodka, smoked trees, dammed rivers with human heads, played Poland like an accordion and parked their tanks on top of Hitler's house. Not pretty, but more effective at getting rid of Nazis than Futurist poetry, innovative camera techniques and endless speccy speeches. via alfanalf.blogspot.com

CNN Poll Shows Highest Support for Israel; Lowest for Palestinians in History

According to a new CNN Poll Americans sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians by 67 to 16%.

...who is going to tell these back-up singers

that dressed that way in a "Palestine"

is not the most advisable way to go about? 

And [the Pro Palestinian] fellow
just above would also be

very unhappy with that cleavage.

via myrightword.blogspot.com

Free Palestine is CODE for KILL THE JEWS!

It’s the Coalition Of The Dumb –
and all the usual suspects are here –
Mark Thomas,
ultra-Marxist alleged ‘comedian’,
anti-Semitic fake charity lefties War on Want,
together with a host of nonentities
from the music business,
and, ahem, Coldplay:

...The ferocity of the purge
in which they were subsequently
purged was such that the word "purge"
doesn't really convey it.
Imagine pigbreathed men
wandering blindfolded through
the crowd at a Coldplay concert,
swinging chainsaws, flamethrowers and yetis
about in a random but deadly fashion,
and you're getting close.

The fact-free, indoctrinating fluff of
‘Crime Against Humanity’
proves once again that pop musicians
should, in general, stick to making music
and not trouble their already low brain cell counts
with the history and problems of a region
that most of them would have trouble
pointing out on a map.

more via
rubinreports.blogspot.com

and via
undhimmi.com
image via backseatblogger.com
and image of
Gwyneth Paltrow
with pigs head
in

Sympathy with Israel is up from 60% in 2009. While 65% says the U.S. should not take either side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 35% say the U.S. should take Israel's side while just 1% favors backing the Palestinians.

Obama's altruistic foreign policy

If only in the interest of intellectual hygiene, it would be refreshing if the Obama administration would stop ascribing moral impetuses to its foreign policy.
Today, US forces are engaged in a slowly escalating war on behalf of al-Qaida penetrated antiregime forces in Libya. It is difficult to know the significance of al-Qaida's role in the opposition forces because to date, the self-proclaimed rebel government has only disclosed 10 of its 31 members.
Indeed, according to The New York Times, the NATO-backed opposition to dictator Muammar Gaddafi is so disorganized that it cannot even agree about who the commander of its forces is.
And yet, despite the fact that the Obama administration has no clear notion of who is leading the fight against Gaddafi or what they stand for, this week the White House informed Congress that it will begin directly funding the al-Qaida-linked rebels, starting with $25 million in non-lethal material. This aid, like the NATO no-fly zone preventing Gaddafi from using his air force, and the British military trainers now being deployed to Libya to teach the rebels to fight, will probably end up serving no greater end then prolonging the current stalemate. With the Obama administration unwilling to enforce the no-fly zone with US combat aircraft, unwilling to take action to depose Gaddafi and unwilling to cultivate responsible, pro-Western successors to Gaddafi, the angry tyrant will probably remain in power indefinitely.
In and of itself, the fact that the war has already reached a stalemate constitutes a complete failure of the administration's stated aim of protecting innocent Libyan civilians from slaughter.
Not only are both the regime forces and the rebel forces killing civilians daily. Due to both sides' willingness to use civilians as human shields, NATO forces unable to differentiate between fighters and civilians and so they too are killing their share of civilians.
In deciding in favor of military intervention on the basis of a transnational legal doctrine never accepted as law by the US Congress called "responsibility to protect," President Barack Obama was reportedly swayed by the arguments of his senior national security adviser Samantha Power. Over the past 15 years, Power has fashioned herself into a celebrity policy wonk by cultivating a public persona of herself as a woman moved by the desire to prevent genocide. In a profile of Power in the current issue of the National Journal, Jacob Heilbrunn explains, "Power is not just an advocate for human rights. She is an outspoken crusader against genocide..."
Heilbrunn writes that Power's influence over Obama and her celebrity status has made her the leader of a new US foreign policy elite. "This elite," he writes, "is united by a shared belief that American foreign policy must be fundamentally transformed from an obsession with national interests into a broader agenda that seeks justice for women and minorities, and promotes democracy whenever and wherever it can -- at the point of a cruise missile if necessary."
As the prolonged slaughter in Libya and expected continued failure of the NATO mission make clear, Power and her new foreign policy elite have so far distinguished themselves mainly by their gross incompetence.
But then, even if the Libyan mission were crowned in success, it wouldn't make the moral pretentions of the US adventure there any less disingenuous. And this is not simply because the administration-backed rebels include al-Qaida fighters.
The fact is that the moral arguments used for intervening militarily on behalf of Gaddafi's opposition pale in comparison to the moral arguments for intervening in multiple conflicts where the Obama administration refuses to lift a finger. At a minimum, this moral inconsistency renders it impossible for the Obama administration to credibly embrace the mantel of moral actor on the world stage.
Consider the administration's Afghanistan policy.
Over the past week, the White House and the State Department have both acknowledged that administration officials are conducting negotiations with the Taliban.
Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the administration's policy. During a memorial service for the late ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who at the time of his death last December was the most outspoken administration figure advocating engaging Mullah Omar and his followers, Clinton said, "Those who found negotiations with the Taliban distasteful got a very powerful response from Richard - diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends."
Of course, the Taliban are not simply not America's friends. They are the enemy of every good and decent human impulse. The US went to war against the Taliban in 2001 because the Bush administration rightly held them accountable for Osama bin Laden and his terror army which the Taliban sponsored, hosted and sheltered on its territory.
But the Taliban are America's enemy not just because they bear responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the US. They are the enemy of the US because they are evil monsters.
Apparently, the supposedly moral, anti-genocidal, pro-women Obama administration needs to be reminded why it is not merely distasteful but immoral to engage the Taliban. So here it goes.
Under the Taliban, the women and girls of Afghanistan were the most oppressed, most terrorized, most endangered group of people in the world. Women and girls were denied every single human right. They were effectively prisoners in their homes, allowed on the streets only when fully covered and escorted by a male relative.
They were denied the right to education, work and medical care. Women who failed to abide in full by these merciless rules were beaten, imprisoned, tortured, and stoned to death.
The Taliban's barbaric treatment of women and girls probably couldn't have justified their overthrow at the hands of the US military. But it certainly justified the US's refusal to even consider treating them like legitimate political actors in the 10 years since NATO forces first arrived in Afghanistan. And yet, the self-proclaimed champions of the downtrodden in the administration are doing the morally unjustifiable. They are negotiating, and so legitimizing the most diabolical sexual tyranny known to man. Obama, Clinton, Power and their colleagues are now shamelessly advancing a policy that increases the likelihood that the Taliban will again rise to power and enslave Afghanistan's women and girls once more.
Then there is Syria. In acts of stunning courage, despite massive regime violence that has killed approximately two hundred people in three weeks, anti-regime protesters in Syria are not standing down. Instead, they are consistently escalating their protests. They have promised that the demonstrations after Friday prayers this week will dwarf the already unprecedented country-wide protests we have seen to date.
In the midst of the Syrian demonstrators' calls for freedom from one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East, the Obama administration has sided with their murderous dictator Bashar Assad, referring to him as a "reformer."
As Heibrunn notes in his profile of Power, she and her colleagues find concerns about US national interests parochial at best and immoral at worst. Her clear aim -- and that of her boss - has been to separate US foreign policy from US interests by tethering it to transnational organizations like the UN.
Given the administration's contempt for policy based on US national interests, it would be too much to expect the White House to notice that Syria's Assad regime is one of the greatest state supporters of terrorism in the world and that its overthrow would be a body blow to Iran, Venezuela, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida and therefore a boon for US national security.
In theory, the Syrian opposition presents the likes of Obama and Power with what ought to be a serious moral dilemma. First, they seem to fit the precise definition of the sort of people that the transnationalists have a responsibility to protect.
They are being gunned down by the dozen as they march with olive branches and demand change they can believe in. Moreover, their plan for ousting Assad involves subordinating him to the transnationalists at the UN.
According to a report last week in The Washington Times, Washington-based representatives of several Syrian opposition groups have asked the administration to do three things in support of the opposition, all of which are consonant with the administration's own oft stated foreign policy preferences.
They have requested that Obama condemn the regime's murderous actions in front of television cameras. They have asked the administration to initiate an investigation of Assad's murderous response to the demonstrations at the UN Human Rights Council. And they have asked the administration to enact unilateral sanctions against a few Syrian leaders who have given troops the orders to kill the protesters.
The administration has not responded to the request to act against Assad at the UN Human Rights Council. It has refused the opposition's other two requests.
These responses are no surprise in light of the Obama administration's abject and consistent refusal to take any steps that could help Iran's pro-democracy, pro-women's rights, pro-Western opposition Green Movement in its nearly two-year-old struggle to overthrow the nuclear proliferating, terror-supporting, genocide-inciting, elections-stealing mullocracy.
Power's personal contribution to the shocking moral failings of the administration's foreign policy is of a piece with her known hostility towards Israel. That hostility, which involves a moral inversion of the reality of the Palestinian war against Israel, was most graphically exposed in a 2002 interview. Then, at the height of the Palestinian terror war against Israel, when Palestinian terrorists from Hamas and Fatah alike were carrying out daily attacks whose clear aim was the massacre of as many Israeli civilians as possible simply because they were Israelis, Power said in a filmed interview that she supported deploying a "mammoth" US military force to Israel to protect the Palestinians from the IDF.
In periodic attempts to convince credulous pro-Israel writers that she doesn't actually support invading Israel, Power has claimed that her statements calling for just such an invasion and additional remarks in which she blamed American Jews for US support of Israel were inexplicable lapses of judgment.
But then there have been so many lapses in judgment in her behavior and in the actions of the administration she serves that it is hard to see where the lapses begin and the judgment ends. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and Israel are only the tip of the iceberg. Everywhere from Honduras to Venezuela, from Britain to Russia, from Colombia to Cuba, Japan to China, Egypt to Lebanon, to Poland and the Czech Republic and beyond, those lapses in judgment are informing policies that place the US consistently on the side of aggressors against their victims.
Back in the pre-Obama days, when US foreign policy was supposed to serve US interests, it would have mattered that these policies all weaken the US and its allies and empower its foes. But now, in the era of the purely altruistic Obama administration, none of that matters.
What does matter is that the purely altruistic Obama foreign policy is empowering genocidal, misogynist, bigoted tyrants worldwide.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

by Caroline Glick via docstalk.blogspot.com

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

Shmuely Boteach calls Samantha Power one of his heroes

Oy vey.... I knew I wasn't going to like this article when in the second paragraph, Orthodox Rabbi Shmuely Boteach described the Irish-born shikse married to a JINO (Jew in Name Only) as 'one of my heroes.' It gets worse from there. It sounds like Boteach was overly impressed with the fact that she invited him to meet with her at the White House.

The principal comments attributed to her come from an interview she granted in 2002, when she was asked to respond to a “thought experiment” regarding what she would advise an American president if it seemed that either party in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were moving toward genocide. Power, fresh on the national scene, was baited and answered that preventing such a genocide could entail being prepared to alienate a powerful constituency – by which she meant the American-Jewish community – and sending in a protective force. From these comments – putting Israel and the possibility of genocide in a single sentence – Power has been conflated with other enemies of Israel.
In our conversation, she rejected utterly the notion she had any animus toward Israel and acknowledged that she had erred in offering hypothetical comments. She said opponents of Obama had unfairly taken her disorganized comments further and characterized them as “invade Israel” talk. She said that if she really believed Israel could even be remotely accused of genocide, then the correct forum for that view would have been in the 664 pages of her book, wherein she details all the genocides of the 20th century.

They're not the only comments - we'll come back to the others - but although I have shown it before, let's once again go to the videotape of that infamous 2002 interview.

Does that sound like a friend of Israel?
Rabbi Boteach goes on to cite another point in Power's favor.

In addition, some leading members of the American Jewish establishment told me that Power was instrumental in having America decline attendance at Durban II in April 2009, otherwise known as the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, which promised to be, like Durban I in 2001, a UNsponsored Israel hate-fest.

How's that for a vague description? Who were these 'leading members of the American Jewish establishment'? Will they come to Power's defense too? If not, why not?
Actually, it 's worse than just vague. Recall that by the time the US pulled out of Durban II, it was too late to torpedo the conference. In fact, Power did everything she could to turn the conference into something that the US would feel it could attend. She is also an admirer of Durban II Secretary General Mary Robinson, who received a President's medal along with the Jew-hating South African Bishop Desmond Tutu - probably both on Power's recommendation.
And then Boteach really goes off the deep end.

THERE HAVE been other comments by Power that have been interpreted as hostile to Israel, but the interpretations rely on the presumption, generated in 2002, that she is anti- Israel. Based on Power’s clarification – and much more importantly, her actions – I believe this perception to be without merit.

Huh? Let's look at some of Power's comments that were hostile to Israel other than that original video and see whether they stand in their own right.
In a lengthy article on President Obama's on President Obama's foreign policy advisers during the 2008 campaign, Ed Lasky had a lot to say about Samantha Power. Here are some highlights that have nothing to do with that 2002 video.

Power also showed her animus toward Israel in another instance, appearing to argue with the New York Times for more negative coverage of Israel in the paper. As Noah Pollak writes:

"Martin Kramer points us to an interesting quote from the 2003 book Ethnic Violence and Justice, in which Samantha Power, one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers, asks a question of David Rohde, a reporter who covered the intifada for the New York Times. The quote is as follows:

Samantha Power: I have a question for David about working for the New York Times. I was struck by a headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: "Human Rights Report Finds Massacre Did Not Occur in Jenin." The second paragraph said, "Oh, but lots of war crimes did." Why wouldn't they make the war crimes the headline and the non-massacre the second paragraph?

(The article to which Power refers is here, and its headline is: "MIDEAST TURMOIL: INQUIRY; Rights Group Doubts Mass Deaths in Jenin, but Sees Signs of War Crimes." Obviously, Power has misremembered the headline.)
Here we have another window into the thinking of Power: Israel is accused in sensational press reports of a massacre in Jenin, and is subjected to severe international condemnation; Human Rights Watch finally gets out a report and says there was no massacre; the NYT reports this as its headline; and Power thinks the headline still should have been: Israel guilty of war crimes!"
Revelations regarding Power's views of Israel can be found in her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the UN official killed in Baghdad in a 2003 terrorist bombing. A series of terrorist attacks emanating from the mini-terror state created in Southern Lebanon by the PLO had led to an Israeli occupation of the southern portion of Lebanon. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon had been inserted to quell the conflict, but was proving ineffectual. Israeli forces remained in place.
Power wrote:

" Israeli forces refused to comply with the spirit of international demands to withdraw and the major powers on the Security Council were not prepared to deal with the gnarly issues that had sparked the Israelis invasion in the first place: dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity".

The "spirit of international demands" to withdraw? Aside from wondering what that means and the enforceability of such a spirit, how about that phrase "dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity"? The dispossessed Palestinians had left Palestine mostly at the behest of calls by their Arab brethren to step out of the way as armed forces invaded Israel upon its founding. They and their descendants were denied rights by Lebanon and were unable to assimilate -- unlike the 600,000 Jews who were stripped of their possessions in Arab lands and whom Israel welcomed. The term "Israeli insecurity" makes it seem as if the Israelis were suffering from an emotional or psychological condition. In fact, it was not insecurity, per se, that the Israelis suffered from. It was Palestinian terrorism that the Lebanese government refused to prevent.
There is more from Ms. Power. Israel warned UNIFIL of its upcoming move into Southern Lebanon. Power talked of this move as a "ploy" and then wrote of "humiliation" that was to come as Israel ignored UN efforts to stop them. She wrote:

"Israel had thumbed its nose at the Security Council resolutions that demanded that Israel stay out of Lebanon, and in the course of invading a neighbor, its forces had trampled on the UN peacekeepers in its way".

She quotes the subject of her book -- really a hagiography -- calling the Israelis "bastards". She writes that the degradations suffered by UNIFIL before the Israeli invasion was felt far worse after the Israelis came into Lebanon. She writes that the Israeli authorities "threatened the peacekeepers and denigrated them".

And then there's this from another Lasky article on Power.

She sat down for an interview with England's New Statesman magazine and what she said may surprise many Americans. During the interview, she stated that President Obama would engage with President Ahmadinejad, North Korea, and Syria. Then she is asked, "...is there anyone he wouldn't talk to"?
She responded that there was no one among "elected heads of state. He won't talk to Hamas, but he would talk to Abbas". The interviewer points out that inconsistency inherent in her answer by informing the Harvard foreign policy expert that Hamas was a democratically-elected government and that Abbas' Fatah party lost the last popular vote.
Professor Power backtracked and then said that Barack Obama would talk to "heads of state" and swiftly veered off into a discussion about how America has supported dictatorships in the past. This seems to cut both ways. Would President Obama talk to Hamas? Is Hamas a dictatorship, democratically elected?
...
Even the interviewer doubts Power's sincerity at that point, titling the next section " The Odd Fib" and indicating that he did not believe she's convinced by what she is saying and that dissembling does not come easy to her (for confirmation of this, see her defensive interview with Shmuel Rosner and the critique of the same by Paul Mirengoff of Powerline.)
The interviewer notes (presumably because America is in the heat of the primary season)

"...it is politically impossible for Obama to talk to Hamas, even if he wants to. She can't say that, though" because of what he depicts as internet smears. The interviewer characterizes these criticisms as allegations that she is anti-Semitic. So far as I have seen, nobody has ever made this allegation. The focus has been on her policy principles.

Then, in the money quote, Power plaintively complains:

"So much of it is about: 'Is he going to be good for the Jews?'"

How much comfort can pro-Israel voters take in a candidate whose possible Secretary of State feels free to characterize legitimate concerns and questions as revolving around the issue of "is it good for the Jews"? Ms. Power might be unaware that support for our ally Israel is widespread across America and cuts across all religious and ethnic groups.

This is what Boteach calls a 'friend of Israel'?
In this article from February 2010, Power was also critical of Israel's handling of the Goldstone Report:

Heading the Israeli delegation was the Foreign Ministry's deputy director for international organizations, Eviatar Manor. The delegation met with officials including the U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, Michael Posner, and President Barack Obama's adviser on human rights, Samantha Power.
The Americans were interested to hear whether Israel had decided on whether to set up a committee to investigate Operation Cast Lead. Power asked about Israeli public opinion on this issue.
Power did not hide her criticism of Israel's handling of the Goldstone report; she asked whether Israel's thinking on the issue was "strategic or tactical."
"Is the correct strategy fighting Goldstone on all fronts?" she asked.
A main message of the U.S. officials was that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was directly linked to the ability of Israel's critics to push the Goldstone report forward and the ability to block the report's consequences.

Translation: Power to Israel: 'You brought Goldstone on yourselves, and we're not going to help you out of it unless you ease up on Hamas.' A pro-Israel attitude, Shmuely?
I searched in vain for quotes from Samantha Power decrying Muslim hatred or Islamic terrorism. I didn't find any. I did, however, find this from the New Statesman interview cited above:

All we talk about is 'Islamic terrorism'. If the two words are associated for long enough it's obviously going to have an effect on how people think about Muslims. But I think Obama's going to do wonders for closing those chasms. Even just opening up a conversation is going to get us some of the way. And it's not insignificant that he spent time in a Muslim country, that he is half Kenyan - a lot of barriers have been bust through.

She's likely one of the architects of the Obama administration's newspeak in which 'Islam' and 'terrorism' are never used together (and 'terrorism' isn't used at all).

Feminists Psychoanalyze Themselves Again

Rabbi Boteach seems enamored with Power. He has fallen completely for the spin that will try to present her as a fitting choice for Secretary of State if God forbid Obama should be re-elected. Whether Boteach was impressed by the visit to the White House, or by Power's opposition to his next door neighbor, Muammar Gadhafi (which may have resulted in the US supporting al-Qaeda-backed rebels at Power's behest), Boteach seems to have fallen for Power lock, stock and barrel. We should not make the same mistake.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

think about the kind of background Samantha Power comes from. The head of Columbia University who is also the top guy at the Washington Post and chairman of the board of the NY Fed Bank is the man who gave her the Pulitzer Prize. This Samantha rubs shoulders with the scum who destroyed America... surely she can come up with a rabbi to be a friend with... oh wait... she just did.

Al Jazeera's shill to U.S. audience by Pres. Bollinger of Columbia U. AKA Washington Post AKA chair Fed Bank

Lee Bollinger, Columbia University's $1,753,984-a-year president who also serves as chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Columbia Univ. President 
Lee C. Bollinger
(a member of the 
Pulitzer Prize board)
awarding Samantha Powers

her trophy Pulitzer
so she can have an excuse
to say Obama should invade Israel

Lee Bollinger, Columbia University's $1,753,984-a-year president who also serves as chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has an article in Bloomberg Businessweek arguing that the Federal Communications Commission should force cable companies to carry Al Jazeera. He describes access to the channel as "critically valuable" to "our democracy" and to "America's understanding of the world."

This is ridiculous. Anyone who wants to see what Al Jazeera English has on offer can easily visit its Web site. One can find an article by an American responding to the recent murder of Israeli children by writing that "Netanyahu has never condemned or even expressed remorse over the killing of 300 plus Palestinian children by the IDF during the Gaza war. (In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any Israeli government that ever even criticised the killing of Palestinian children by the IDF, although many hundreds have been killed over the last decade)." One can find an article by a Columbia professor asserting that "a 'manly' and 'straight' heteronormativity was manufactured for 'Arabs'" and calling for humans to transcend "obscene class divisions."
There's no disclosure at all to Bloomberg Businessweek readers that Mr. Bollinger and Columbia have some substantial ties to the al Thani family that owns both the country of Qatar and Al Jazeera. A Columbia art exhibit Web site acknowledges the support of "The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar and the Qatar Foundation, Her Excellency Sheikha al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani." ABC News reported "the Qatari princess went to college at Duke University in North Carolina and is now pursuing a masters at Columbia University in New York." Mr. Bollinger has shown no hesitation in the past when it comes to accepting donations from undemocratic or unfree Arab countries; Columbia took money from the United Arab Emirates that Harvard refused to accept. If Americans are looking for an Al Jazeera-type perspective they don't even need the American government to force Al Jazeera onto their cable television; they can just go enroll in Columbia's Middle East studies department, at least one of whose professors Mayor Bloomberg's own administration has adjudged unworthy of training New York City public school teachers.
The whole column is an embarrassment to both Mr. Bollinger (who is apparently difficult to embarrass) and Businessweek. It's not clear what is so special about Al Jazeera that it deserves to be forced by the U.S. government onto American televisions. Does Mr. Bollinger want every foreign television channel whose owner is a major Columbia donor or potential one to be forced by the American government onto American television?
Mr. Bollinger is a paid director of the Washington Post Company, which owns a cable television company that serves 720,000 customers in 19 states. If he thinks it's so vitally important to American democracy for all Americans to watch Al Jazeera, let him speak up at the next Post board meeting and earn his directors fees by forcing Al Jazeera into the cable package of all of his own company's customers, rather than asking the government to impose the channel on the rest of us.

via futureofcapitalism.com
Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University via charlierose.com

Columbia Journalism School's Lecture Hall was packed Friday afternoon when a panel of five journalists and digital media experts gathered to discuss the power and potential of social media in a televised discussion with Marwan Bishara, host of Al Jazeera English's "Empire."Watch it here  Check the broadcast schedule via journalism.columbia.ed Al Jazeera: Reporting in Gaza Listen via journalism.columbia.edu

Cable ONE is a United States cable service provider and subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, functioning as its own self-contained corporation within its parent company. The company's name and current focus dates back to 1997; prior to that time the company was known as Post-Newsweek Cable. It is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.^[1]
Cable ONE is the 10th largest cable provider ^[2] in the USA with most subscribers residing in small rural communities in nineteen midwestern, southern, and western states. As of January 2009, about 699,000 subscribers receive basic service and about 230,000 receive digital video service from Cable ONE. The company offers broadband Internet to over 370,000 subscribers. ^[3] In May 2006, Cable ONE began a system-by-system launch of its digital telephone service with currently about 94,000 subscribers. Cable ONE is the only major cable provider that maps subchannel numbers same as digital cable box channel numbers. ^[4] via en.wikipedia.org

J’Accuse: Palestinians of War Crimes and Genocide

Palestinian and Arab propaganda has demonized Jewish settlers as illegal, fanatic, racist, violent, angry, and hell-bent on revenge. The mainstream media has followed suit and has consistently justified Palestinian terrorism against Israelis as caused by the "provocative" settlements. People consistently forget that Arabs were murdering Jewish civilians on a mass basis for fifty years before the Jewish state was born and then for an additional twenty years before Israel won the 1967 war of self-defense, long before there were "settlements." The Arab murder of Israeli civilians continues to this day. Please see the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website on "Which Came First – Terrorism or 'Occupation'?"

Based on the United Nations and Nuremberg definitions of “genocide,” I hereby accuse the  Palestinian Arabs of committing both “war crimes” and “genocide” against the Jews. Palestinians terrorists have just murdered three children and two unarmed, civilian adults in cold blood. Historically, Palestinian Arabs have murdered—on purpose, not by accident— thousands of Jewish children and Jewish and Israeli civilians. Their intent is as genocidal as Ahmadinejad’s. They wish to abolish the Jewish state and slaughter all the Jews. They say so themselves.

Read the complete original version of this item... via frontpagemag.com via phyllis-chesler.com

March 15 Update: Palestinian Denials Reach New Nadir, Blame Tai Workers 

March 14 -- In the wake of the murders of five members of the Fogel family, including a toddler and an infant, Hamas announced:

Palestinian National Movement Hamas official Ezzat Al-Rashak said that the movement is not responsible for the murder of the five family members from the Itamar settlement.

Al-Rashak confirmed that harming children is not part of Hamas' policy, nor is it the policy of the resistance factions.

He also confirmed that the possibility that the incident was carried out by settlers for criminal motives should not be ruled out.

This is not the first time that Hamas has denied its practice of targeting children. Following the 2004 terrorist attack against Russian schoolchildren, a Hamas official similarly denied that the terror group targets children. As CAMERA noted at the time, the Associated Press reported:

The Palestinian militant group Hamas contends its policy is not to target children, although it justifies attacks on civilians to avenge Israeli army attacks on ordinary citizens.

“We are freedom fighters, not gangs,” a senior Hamas official in Gaza told the AP. “Women and children are not a target for Hamas. They have never been a target and they will never be our main target despite the daily killing of our women and children by Israel in cold blood.”

Abu Mahmoud, a spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, said the group was “shocked by what we see on television” about the Russian school standoff.

“We would never agree to such a thing,” he said. “We never did such a thing and never would. When there is an explosion and children are killed, we are sorry for this because this was a mistake, not on purpose.”

Back in 2004, CAMERA's Lee Green compiled the following list of attacks in which Hamas and other "resistance factions" (ie, terror groups) clearly targeted children. The children were not accidental victims, but were intentionally shot or bombed. For example:

• March 5, 2003 — Palestinian terrorists chose to bomb Bus 37 in Haifa shortly after school let out. The bus is on a school route and 9 schoolchildren were among the 17 killed in that attack. Dozens of children were wounded.

• Dec. 3, 2003 — Palestinian terrorists planned to blow up schoolchildren at the Ort Alon High School in Yokneam, the sister city of St. Louis. Thankfully, due to Israeli intelligence sources and the security fence, the Israelis were able to catch the bombers before they reached the school.

• May 2, 2004 — Terrorists ambushed the car of Tali Hatuel, who was 9 months pregnant, and shot her and her four young daughters, aged 2, 7, 9 and 11. It was daylight and the terrorists obviously knew they were killing four small children because they shot them all at point blank range.

Suicide terrorists see exactly who they are going to kill before they detonate themselves. If they didn't want to kill children, they could walk out of their chosen restaurants, buses and teen discos, and choose a different target when they saw that many children were present.

• June 1, 2001 — a Palestinian terrorist chose to detonate himself among a long line of teenagers , their youth clearly visible to him, at the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv. 11 teenagers under the age of 18 were among the dead.

• Mar 2, 2002 —Outside of a Jerusalem synagogue, a terrorist detonated a bomb next to a group of mainly women standing outside with their young children, several in baby carriages . The victims: Shlomo Nehmad (40), his wife Gafnit (32), and their daughters Shiraz (7) and Liran (3); Avraham Eliahu Nehmad, (7), Shaul Nehmad (15); Lidor Ilan (12) and his sister Oriah (18 months); Tzofia Ya'arit Eliyahu (23) and her son Ya'akov Avraham (seven months); and Avi Hazan, (37). The Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade took responsibility for the attack.

• Aug 19, 2003 — Twenty-three people were killed, including seven children when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself on a No. 2 Egged bus in Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood. The bus was filled with children. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. The child victims: Shmuel Taubenfeld, 3 months, of New Square, New York; Shmuel Zargari, 11 months; Tehilla Nathanson, 3; Issachar Reinitz, 9; Avraham Bar-Or, 12; Binyamin Bergman, 15; Elisheva Meshulami, 16.

• Nov. 20, 2000 — terrorists attacked a bus carrying children from Kfar Darom to school in Gush Katif. Five children were injured, many of whom had limbs blown off.

• Mar 26, 2001 — a Palestinian sniper took aim at 10 month old Shalhevet Pass, who was sitting in her stroller. She was fatally shot in the head. This was hardly an “accident.” She was the target, even though her father was standing right beside her.

• Nov. 10, 2002 — Revital Ohayon, 34, and her two sons, Matan, 5, and Noam, 4, were shot to death by an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorist who broke into their home at Kibbutz Metzer.

• May 9, 2001 — Yossi Ish-Ran, 14, and Kobi Mandell, 14 , both of Tekoa, were savagely beaten to death with stones in a cave about 200 meters from the small community south of Jerusalem where they lived.

Unfortunately, since 2004, many more names have joined this horrific list.

• Apr 2, 2009 - Shlomo Nativ, 13, was killed by an axe-wielding terrorist in his community of Bat Ayin in Gush Etzion.

• Mar 6, 2008 - Eight students of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem were killed when a terrorist armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle infiltrated the yeshiva and opened fire in the library where about 80 people were gathered, mostly teenagers. Eleven others were wounded, three critically. Among the victims were Segev Peniel Avihail, 15, of Neve Daniel; Neria Cohen, 15, of Jerusalem; Yonatan Yitzhak Eldar, 16, of Shilo; Yohai Lifshitz, 17, of Jerusalem; and  Avraham David Moses, 16, of Efrat.

• March 30, 2006 - Shaked Lasker, 16, of Kedumim was killed when a suicide bomber hitchhiker disguised as an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student detonated his explosive device in a private vehicle near the entrance to Kedumim.

• Oct. 16, 2005 - Oz Ben-Meir, 15, of Maon were killed and three were wounded when Palestinians opened fire at the Gush Etzion junction south of Jerusalem. Another teenager was shot and seriously wounded near Eli, in Samaria. The Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Additional Palestinian Denials

There were plenty more influential Palestinians suffering from denial following the murder of the Fogel family, and they weren't only from Hamas. For instance, writing in his regular column, in the Palestinian Authority-controlled newspaper Al Hayat Al-Jadida, Adli Sadek stated:

It bears repeating that the murder of children, if carried out by Palestinian hands, must not be part of the national struggle, which has generally sought . . . to engage with the soldiers of the occupation and not hurt Israeli children. (Quoted in Ha'aretz)

Ha'aretz also reported:

Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki, however, was one of a number of senior PA officials who continued to imply that the Fogels were not murdered for nationalist reasons. "People and an infant were butchered in a way no Palestinian has ever done. . . raising questions about Israel's rush to accuse the Palestinians," he said. (ibid)

Denials like these, completely disconnected from reality and the historical record, give a shot of adrenaline to the anti-Israel conspiracy types, lurking in talkback threads, and absurdly blaming the Mossad for the massacre of a Jewish family. Take, for example, "ausjustice," who posts his vitriol on the Los Angeles Times at 12:29 AM today:

My latest information is that the settler family murders were carried out under the direction of a Shin Bet unit and authorised from the highest level. It was considered acceptable to "sacrifice"  the family for the purposes of raising Israeli anger against Palestinians, attracting international sympathy for Israel, strengthening pressure on the PA and justifying the continued un-official policy of settlement expansion.

Israeli support for the hardline right wing policies has been fading and opposition against extremist settlers increasing in recent months threatening the government of BN and increasing international calls for a resolution of borders with an increasing number of countries recognising a Palestinian state outside the '67 borders.

There is no doubt who is to gain from these murders. A few will question the high probability this attack originated  from their own government departments. It has been common practice for Mossad to arrange "false fleg" operations dating back to terrorist bombings of British and American interests prior to 1948,  their bombing Synagogues in Iraq to hasten the flow of migrants to the new state,  while laying blame on Arabs.

Undoubtedly a few Palestinians have already been ear marked to accept the blame and will confess under torture. 

The incitement originating from Hamas and Palestinian Authority officials echoes through the cesspools of the American talkbacks, laying the groundwork for yet another attack against innocent civilians.

March 15 Update: Palestinian Denials Reach New Nadir, Blame Tai Workers

The Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz report today that a number of Web sites linked to the Palestinian Authority are blaming the Fogel's murders on a Tai worker. (See, for example, the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency.) Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel commendably point out the falsity of Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki's claim that Palestinians don't engage is such brutal violence:

At this point, though, all the signs indicate the Itamar massacre was a terror attack. Malki seems to have forgotten the dozens of attacks carried out by Palestinian terrorists - intent on killing children, women and old people. In November 2002, Sirhan Sirhan entered a house in Kibbutz Metzer and murdered a mother and her two children, aged 4 and 5, after killing another man and woman. This is just one example of several.

via camera.org