No one in the US who runs for public office has suggested that the US break with Israel to appease terrorists. Obama certainly hasn't suggested that, and perhaps apart from the really lunatic fringes of both Left and Right, that notion doesn’t get any oxygen at all here. Obviously, Bush wasn't referring to American politicians in this passage, but instead politicians in Europe and elsewhere who have either an animus towards Israel or appreciation for dhimmitude. Nothing - and I mean nothing - in this speech points to any candidate or the Democratic Party, unless they identify themselves as the reference.
When the party's top four Democrats come roaring out of the blocks in unison, something has hit a nerve.
In this particular instance of Pres. Bush's speech, however, Marc Armbinder reports that President Bush was referring to Carter's Hamas junket when talking about appeasement. Noel Sheppard posted the entire transcript of Pres. Bush's speech.
Obama took it personal. Thick skin doesn't wear well on presidential candidates.
"I'm a strong believer in civility and I'm a strong believer in a bipartisan foreign policy, but that cause is not served with dishonest, divisive attacks of the sort that we've seen out of George Bush and John McCain over the last couple days,"
Absolutely not: Discussing where any Presidential candidate stands on foreign policy is an essential issue of a campaign, as it has world-wide repercussions.
The Obama campaign doesn't want people to discuss why Hamas is Betsy asks,
Why isn't it a legitimate question to ponder why Hamas supports Obama?
Indeed, we should be asking why do the Palestinians like Obama so much.
Ed says that the Obama campaign's made a rookie mistake in taking offense at "appeasement" charges. Or you can say that the Obamanians have identified themselves with appeasement to the point that when the word is mentioned, they hear their names called.
Hamas leaders Mahmoud al-Zahar and Saeed Seyam entered Egypt via the Rafah border crossing along with four other Hamas officials and headed by road to Cairo, witnesses said. They were escorted at the border by Egyptian security men. ... Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip by force in June from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, has rejected Western demands to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing Israeli-Palestinian interim peace deals
The bill, the Coordinated American Response to Extreme Radicals Act (CARTER Act), would prohibit any taxpayer dollars from being directed to the Carter Center. The Center has received at least $19 million in federal taxpayer funds since 2001.
The Hamas Charter asserts that "initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to [Hamas’] principles....There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad." And by Jihad, Hamas does not mean an internal struggle for personal improvement.
Not only do Hamas members oppose a "two-state solution," they believe that nation-states are un-Islamic. Instead, an Islamic caliphate is to be re-established, an empire that is to expand until the Dar al-Islam, the world ruled by righteous Muslims, consumes the Dar al-Harb, the world in which infidels and apostates currently hold sway. "Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad," Hamas member and Palestinian parliamentarian Yunis al-Asal pledged this month on a Hamas television program.
Does Carter sincerely think he can convince Meshaal to reject such ideas and embrace the Carter Center's kumbaya mission of "waging peace and building hope"? Does he really believe he can change Mashaal's mind, much less open his heart?
On Sunday, Aaron Klein and John Batchelor interviewed Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to the Prime Minister of Hamas, on WABC radio. The interview produced a scoop which, for some reason, has not been widely publicized: Hamas has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Yousef said, "We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election."
Expect a rerun of the disastrous Carter presidency if Obama gets the job.
Gateway Pundit has the video of Carter explaining why he wants to meet with Hamas:
In the video, Carter explains (emphasis added),
"It's very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel, and to cooperate with Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians"
A couple of years ago Gateway Pundit posted Jimmy Carter Parades the World's 10 Worst Dictators, a who's who in Jimmy's work: Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, Kim Jung Il of North Korea and Omar al-Bashar of Sudan all hold places of honor at Jimmy's table.
Former President Jimmy Carter is reportedly preparing an unprecedented meeting with the leader of Hamas, an organization that the U.S. government considers one of the leading terrorist threats in the world.
The Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported Tuesday that Carter was planning a trip to Syria for mid-April, during which he would meet with Khaled Meshal, the exiled head of the Palestinian terror group Hamas, on April 18. ... Meshal, who lives in Syria to avoid being arrested by the Israeli government, leads Hamas from his seat in Damascus, where he is a guest of Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Well, while Jimmy's in the vicinity, he might as well drop by Bashar's, who Nancy remembers so fondly:
Because, after all, few things spread the virtues of democracy like kissing up to murderous thugs.
A council of world leaders launched by former President Nelson Mandela is sending a three-person team to try to help ease tensions in the Middle East, the organization known as The Elders said Friday.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Irish President Mary Robinson will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia April 13-21.
Ponder that: the President whose administration was defined by the Iranian hostage crisis, and the UN president whose tenure was defined by the Oil=For-Food scandal, the biggest fraud in the history of mankind (which would have not come to light if it weren't for the US invasion of Iraq), are heading to the Middle East "to help ease tensions".
But whether there is or isn't, we all know what's going to come out of that: more demands that Israel give in, more platitudes on Palestinian victimization, and more deja-vu, all over again.
Cuba expects to sign deals worth $150 million with American food producers at talks starting on Monday that point to sustained U.S. interest in the Cuban market despite political hurdles. ... One U.S. farm state delegation after another has gone to Havana this year to pitch sales of wheat, corn, beans, peas, lentils, chicken and other products needed by communist Cuba to feed its people. ... U.S. sales to Cuba are allowed on a cash-only basis under an exception to the embargo enforced against Castro's leftist government since 1962. Despite the hostility between Washington and Havana, [US] exports have totaled $1.55 billion since 2001.
Americans talk about freedom so passionately because we are passionate about that great ideal.
Freedom is the foundation of our beliefs. Because of freedom we free to choose the things we believe in, without fear of violence or repercussion. Freedom is the only ideology that wants to make the world a better place, a place where each and every one of us can author our own destiny- and do so without without stripping others of their rights. In a free society, we are free to exercise free will. We can choose to believe in God or we can exercise that free will and choose not to believe in God. In a free society, God takes care of His affairs. In a society that isn't free, the tyranny du jour takes it upon itself to handle God's affairs for Him.
The fight for freedom has not been easy. It never is. There are those that see the cost of freedom and want us to abandon the citizens of nations that so desperately need liberation from tyranny. It is tempting indeed to walk away, in the myopic and absurd belief that we would be forever extricating ourselves from a problem.
Siggy has been my podcast guest three times and tomorrow he'll co-host with me as we welcome Gates of Vienna's Dymphna and Baron Bodissey.
If you didn't listen to Siggy's reading of School Daze, go back and listen. This was my inagural podcast and it certainly was "starting with the right foot".
There are many reasons people think Mrs Clinton will not be elected president. She lacks warmth; she is too polarising a figure; the American people don’t want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the Clinton presidency.
But they all miss this essential counterpoint. As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.
If Mr. Baker ever comes to Princeton I'll buy him a beer.
Rare is the politician, on either side of the divide between the parties, who can be relied upon speak clearly and to the point, and always to call things by their right names. Porfessional pols and their staffs might not believe Sapir and Whorf's conjecture that words have the power to shape reality, but their confidence in the power of words to shape popular convictions appears boundless.
George Orwell's landmark essay "Politics and the English Language" is replete with piercing observations about the insidiousness of such rhetoric. Among its many powerful points is that we must know what a thing is to argue for or against it:
Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Orwell's essay should be required reading for every American who thinks himself qualified to vote, or to hold a political opinion. Much of the damage that has been done to freedom these past eighty years has passed into law under the cover of "terms of art," periphrases and circumlocutions of the sort it describes.
All the events of last spring are only a foretaste of something much bigger, something still unnamed. And when it ends, those who have managed to escape will ask themselves: Why didn't we see the handwriting on the wall when there was still time? If Muslim protests against a few harmless cartoons can cause the free world to capitulate in the face of violence, how will this free world react to something that is truly relevant? It is already difficult enough to see that Israel is not merely battling a few militants, but is facing a serious threat to its very existence from Iran. All too often it is ignored that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already taken the first step by calling for "a world without Zionism" -- a call that pro-Israel Europeans only managed to condemn with a mild, "unacceptable." How would they react if Iran were in a position to back up its threats with nuclear weapons?
The problem is that Carter does not provide an alternative view but the view from an alternative universe, with facts which are non-facts, events which are ignored and clear justifications for suicide terrorism.
No One Can See Him, That's How Fast He's Running "No Sign of Fidel as Cubans Wait, Wonder"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 24 "Chavez Says Castro 'Almost Jogging' "--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 24
The Beeb found one guy blogging from Cuba. Make no mistake, that blogger has to toe the line.
Pastimes I signed up for Twitter, where you can post updates on what you are doing during your day. Since I live a pedestrian and totally uninteresting life, I'm posting short quotes from poems I've read over the years.
Today's verse is the first line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, in keeping with this morning's cold weather.
Look at the pink box in the sidebar for each day's verse.
Has a former president of the United States - a Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less - given his blessing to wanton murder and terrorist assaults against Israel?
Sure looks that way.
How else to read that astonishing statement on page 213 of Jimmy Carter's new anti-Israel screed, "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid"?
To wit: "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." (Emphasis added.)
You don't have to read between the lines here.
Carter isn't calling on the Palestinians to give up terror and murder now as a way to convince Israel they are serious about peace. Rather, he says they can wait until they've achieved their goals at the bargaining table. No need, says Carter, to give up terrorism until then.
When Larry King referred to my review several times to challenge Carter, Carter first said I hadn't read the book and then blustered, "You know, I think it's a waste of my time and yours to quote professor Dershowitz. He's so obviously biased, Larry, and it's not worth my time to waste it on commenting on him." (He never did answer King's questions.)
The next week Carter wrote a series of op-eds bemoaning the reception his book had received. He wrote that his "most troubling experience" had been "the rejection of [his] offers to speak" at "university campuses with high Jewish enrollment." The fact is that Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz had invited Carter to come to Brandeis to debate me, and Carter refused. The reason Carter gave was this: "There is no need to for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."
As Carter knows, I've been to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, many times -- certainly more times than Carter has been there -- and I've written three books dealing with the subject of Middle Eastern history, politics, and the peace process. The real reason Carter won't debate me is that I would correct his factual errors. It's not that I know too little; it's that I know too much.
Nor is Carter the unbiased observer of the Middle East that he claims to be. He has accepted money and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan , saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred. Zayed's personal foundation, the Zayed Center, claims that it was Zionists, rather than Nazis, who "were the people who killed the Jews in Europe" during the Holocaust. It has held lectures on the blood libel and conspiracy theories about Jews and America perpetrating Sept. 11. Carter's acceptance of money from this biased group casts real doubt on his objectivity and creates an obvious conflict of interest.
Carter's refusal to debate wouldn't be so strange if it weren't for the fact that he claims that he wrote the book precisely so as to start debate over the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process. If that were really true, Carter would be thrilled to have the opportunity to debate. Authors should be accountable for their ideas and their facts. Books shouldn't be like chapel, delivered from on high and believed on faith.
Guevara is not just a dead white guy from a well-to-do family who terrorized a racially mixed nation and executed hundreds of thousands of innocents in the late 1950s and 1960s. He is also a symbol of the totalitarian regime that persists in Cuba, which still practices his ideology of intolerance, hatred and repression. It is not the torture and killing alone that make the tragedy. That only describes the methodology. Guevara's wider goal - to forcibly strip a population of its soul and spirit - is what is truly frightening and deplorable. Christians, who celebrate the birth of their Savior on Monday, have particularly suffered under Guevara's dream of revolution, which has lasted since 1959.
If you haven't read Steve Salerno's book, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, but you watch daytime TV, you should read it. Shawn Macomber interviews Steve Salerno, Self-Help Cries Out for Help
"We are each, to varying degrees," you write, "victims of 'second-hand self-help.'" Further: "You may think Dr. Phil is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or you may chortle at his braggadocio and his sagebrush sagacity. But almost no one worries about Dr. Phil." How, exactly are we with neither subscription to Oprah's magazine nor $7000 tickets to a Tony Robbins weekend caught in that web? Why should we fear Dr. Phil?
SS: Where to begin? Moral relativism, with its blurring and rationalization of good and evil, comes directly out of self-help's concept of "personal truth" -- that is, each of us is entitled to define his private reality, with all such realities enjoying equal stature. Self-help also gave us the self-esteem movement, and its idea that the very worst thing you can do is hurt someone's feelings. This has been especially disastrous in schools, where the practical effect is to teach kids to pride themselves on second-rate performance; test scores clearly show this. Today's entitlement culture had its genesis at the intersection of those two constructs: self-esteem and personal truth. The "diseasing of America," too, can be traced to AA's successful crusade to de-stigmatize alcoholism. That reasoning has since been expanded to cover myriad behaviors that once were regarded as character flaws. Further, since diseases are things you have to recover from, companies now find themselves in the curious position of committing a disproportionate amount of resources to their least productive workers. You don't just summarily fire people anymore. You send them to rehab. The menu now includes paid programs for substance abuse, gambling, "anger management," sexual addiction, etc. Then there's the whole Culture of Blame and all of its documented ills. At the other end of the spectrum, "empowerment" dogma is inducing millions of Americans to abandon medical orthodoxy and instead "tap their inner healing energies." Major medical centers now include mind-body regimens as part of the overall treatment for no better reason than patients increasingly are asking for it. So you have medical protocols driven not by validated research, but by consumer demand. What a terrifying notion! I could go on and on.
Also from Maria, Bert Preluski asks, Will Jimmy Carter please just go away? The problem is, every time Jimmy goes away he blesses the pseudo election of some tinpot dictator or another.
Fausta was born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico and is a long-term resident of Princeton, New Jersey. She discusses New Jersey, taxation, current events, and how news are reported in the French and Spanish-language media at Fausta's Blog.
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... we should be talking to the Iranians because, 
At 
The Democrat party has a long history of appeasement. You can look back to Jimmy Carter's entire administration, Madeline Albright's meetings with 
