How Yitzhak Rabin enabled jihadism to be established at Israel's expense

Amnon Lord writes about how the late left-wing Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin's "legacy" is not one of "peace":

For three decades, memorial ceremonies and community events commemorating Rabin have drawn their meaning largely from the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics since his assassination. Some argue that the unspoken "charge" behind the legal campaign against Netanyahu has always been his supposed moral responsibility for Rabin's death, a kind of modern blood libel that reenergized the Left.

Unlike other countries where leaders have been assassinated, in Israel an entire segment of society was blamed collectively. The tragedy is that Rabin's death enshrined the Oslo Accords as a sacred legacy of the Left, while for the Right they symbolized deception and national endangerment. Rabin himself had long resisted the idea of negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Only two months before the signing ceremony on the White House lawn did he agree to meet Yasser Arafat and accept the PLO as a partner. Until then, he remained committed to the official Washington talks with the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation he inherited from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Many on the Right felt betrayed, that Rabin had concealed his true intentions during the 1992 election campaign. True, he repeatedly ruled out direct talks with the PLO, but he did say publicly that he planned to grant the Palestinians autonomy in the territories within nine months of taking office. That was his policy, not a capitulation to Shimon Peres or Yossi Beilin, except insofar as he later signed that autonomy agreement with Arafat. [...]

But Rabin and his colleagues failed to foresee that the territories handed to the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, would become bases for rocket fire and terrorism. He dismissed warnings from Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon that rockets would one day be launched from Gaza toward Ashkelon. "From Gaza? Impossible," he scoffed.

During that same period, Meretz MK Yossi Sarid declared, "Rabin must be encouraged." And indeed, as Labor shifted leftward, the Israeli Left was already legitimizing contact with Hamas, the terrorist arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. In December 1992, Rabin's government expelled 415 Hamas leaders to southern Lebanon. The move was turned by the Left and by US President Bill Clinton into a propaganda victory for Hamas. Israel was forced to bring the deportees back, and left-wing activists, led by Uri Avnery, protested in solidarity with Hamas in Jerusalem. Avnery later boasted that their campaign had proven that Israel could never again carry out such expulsions.

It's vital to remember that Sharon later turned against his electorate and enabled just what Rabin set out the groundswork for. In contrast to Rabin, Sharon is otherwise not celebrated today, and deservedly so. But this makes clear how Rabin was a bad lot, and he was a disgrace. Some of his actions were also deeply harmful to Americans and Europeans. That he has any kind of a following today is also very sad, as his attack on the Altalena during the 1940s was horrific.

After October 7, some leftists hopefully changed their view of Muslims

In this Wash. Free Beacon article, they interview a leftist "peace activist" who appears to have changed after her experience with the jihadists from Gaza who also invaded her household on October 7:

Irit Lahav, 57, was a peace activist who believed in the decency of the Palestinian people. Then, on Oct. 7, ordinary Gazans joined in a terrorist attack that left more than one in four of her neighbors in Kibbutz Nir Oz dead or abducted.

For many members of Nir Oz and other Israelis, the atrocities of Oct. 7—and particularly the broad participation of the Gazan public in the day—destroyed their faith in coexistence with the Palestinians.

Lahav, a manager at a travel company, long participated in peace demonstrations. In recent years, she volunteered for an Israeli charity called Road to Recovery, driving Palestinian children from the border of the Gaza Strip, less than two miles from her home, to Israeli hospitals for life-saving medical care.

"We thought that Palestinians are good people. All they want is peace and prosperity," Lahav told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview from a hotel in this Red Sea resort city where she and most of her community were temporarily relocated. "It's just that Hamas is forcing them to be in this aggressive situation."

When terrorists first shook the door of her safe room on Oct. 7, Lahav was sure that she and her 22-year-old daughter were about to be killed. But a makeshift lock she had fashioned out of an oar and a vacuum cleaner thwarted three separate break-in attempts. The women lay in the darkened room for about 10 hours listening to sounds of automatic gunfire and grenade explosions. At one point, they heard a group of teenagers robbing their house.

Later, Lahav learned from other Nir Oz survivors that Gazan women and children as young as 10 years old had followed Hamas terrorists into the kibbutz, looting, helping the armed terrorists, and apparently enjoying themselves.

"Basically it was sort of an invasion of a community," Lahav said. "That's why for me, I cannot say this was a Hamas action. No, for me, this was a Palestinian action. A whole community had come to our kibbutz, took our things, stole stuff, killed people, and kidnapped others."

"Am I thinking about myself being foolish until now?" Lahav added. "Maybe. But more is that I'm disappointed in them, that they're so cruel, have no values, really lost their human values."

During Israel's ongoing war to destroy Hamas, 40 of the hostages taken from Nir Oz have been released, while 30 remain in Gaza. Several other hostages have been declared dead in recent weeks, bringing the total number of people killed from Nir Oz to 46.

While it's good to know she's changed her mind about what people like her still call a "palestinian people", it remains to be seen if any of these presumably no-longer-peace-activists recognize that Islam played a very horrific major role in the bloodbath of October 7. And what would Lahav say if "settlers" of background more religious than hers were the victims? Lahav should publicly renounce all associations with anyone who until now supported Islamic savages. And she'd do well to consider how many women in Europe, in example, have fallen victim to Islamofascism as well. Many on the left now owe a serious apology.

US State Department worked with George Soros to influence other nations to move to theleft

HUGE Soros find: Docs show Soros operation and State Dept working hand in glove (with your tax dollars). @JudicialWatch does the heavy lifting in court to get answers...https://t.co/IVIT7185tD pic.twitter.com/luM0TDWno0

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) October 8, 2018

More at Vlad Tepes.

The Destruction of Our Aesthetic Environment

The Left over the last few decades has been very successful in destroying our aesthetic environment. What Rhett Buttler said parting ways with Scarlett is how I feel today:

"I want to see if somewhere there isn't something left in life of charm and grace."

Women with tattoos and nose rings, graffiti on walls as an excuse for free expression, and the crassness and shameless statements from celebrities and politicians has given new meaning to Karl Marx's wish that we have a 'classless' society.

We do. Just not the one he envisioned.

Dennis Prager on his website sums up why the Left loathes civilization - their lack of standards.

So, the Big Question is, why? Why is the left hostile toward Western civilization? 

After decades of considering this question, I have concluded the answer is this: standards. 

The left hates standards — moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and it has excelled in all three. 

Why does the left hate standards? It hates standards because when there are standards, there is judgment. And leftists don’t want to be judged. 

They don't like to be shamed either. But it must be done. 

Thus, Michelangelo is no better than any contemporary artist, and Rembrandt is no greater than any non-Western artist. So, too, street graffiti — which is essentially the defacing of public and private property, and thus serves to undermine civilization — is “art.” 

Melody-free, harmony-free, atonal sounds are just as good as Beethoven’s music. And Western classical music is no better than the music of any non-Western civilization. Guatemalan poets are every bit as worthy of study as Shakespeare. 

When the Nobel Prize-winning American novelist Saul Bellow asked an interviewer, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” all hell broke loose on the cultural left. Bellow had implied that the greatest writers of fiction were Western. 

Why such antagonism? Because if some art is really better than other art, your art may be judged inferior. The narcissism of left-wing thought does not allow for anyone to be better than you artistically or in any other way. Therefore, all art and artists must be equal. 

In the moral realm, the same rejection of standards exists. Thus, the left loathed President Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” because that would mean America was morally superior to the Soviet Union. And such a judgment was unacceptable. The whole left-wing moral vocabulary is a rejection of Western moral standards: “tolerance,” “inclusion,” “anti-discrimination” (by definition, standards discriminate), “non-judgmental,” and even “income inequality,” which deems some peoples’ work more valuable than others. 

Every civilization had slavery. But only thanks to Judeo-Christian civilization was slavery abolished there, and eventually elsewhere. Nevertheless, to speak about any moral superiority of Western or Judeo-Christian civilization is completely unacceptable, thanks to the left’s stranglehold on education and most media. 

In this regard, the protection of Islam by the left is so thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths such as that the status of women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic world. The veil women wear, for example, is dehumanizing. Yet, in a speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a rabbi who, at the time, was the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that a woman’s voluntary choice to wear a head scarf “deserves our respect. 

And a women wearing enough tattoos looking like a Longshoremen does not earn mine. Nether foul mouthed celebrities.

And finally, we come to the left’s loathing of the religions of Western civilization — the Judeo-Christian religions, which have clear standards of right and wrong.
Bible-based religions affirm a morally judging God. For the left, that is anathema. For the left, the only judging allowed is leftists’ judging of others. No one judges the left — neither man nor God.

Let the knives fly.

Sunday Funny

On second thought, maybe not so funny.

Oh, Goodie! Look What's Coming To Washington On September 17 (Correction: October 6)

From Front Page Magazine:

Bringing Tahrir Square to Washington

A coalition of leftist groups is promising to occupy part of downtown Washington, D.C. “with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo” next month.

This exercise in Marxist mobocracy is just one of many scheduled nationwide in coming months. It will take place nearly three weeks after the Left’s “Days of Rage” occupation of Wall Street scheduled for Sept. 17.

The Washington protest is modeled after the demonstrations that brought down the Egyptian government earlier this year. It is being organized by an umbrella group called the October 2011 Coalition, which is run by David Swanson, a former spokesman for ACORN and the International Labor Communications Association....

And check out this portion, toward the end of the article:

Joanne Dowdell, a Democratic congressional candidate in New Hampshire, said she is seeking office because the 2012 election is about “class warfare.” Dowdell is not on the fringes of her party. She is a former DNC committeewoman and was a delegate at the 2008 party convention that nominated Obama for the presidency.

Maybe the September 17 demonstration won't amount to much.

But we are seeing how the 2012 election will be framed by the Left: as class warfare.

It's going to be a rough ride to November 2012.

Mark my words: "You ain't seen nuthin' yet."

The Essence of Marxism

"Why do you have a right to your money?"

The above quotations is 28 seconds in during the confrontation between a Tea Partier and a union member:

Sums Up Copenhagen Summit: Armed Response to 'Climategate' question

Dissenters Are "Political Terrorists"

(graphic courtesy of GM's Place - disseminate freely)
According to business columnist Steven Pearlstein, who wrote the following August 7, 2009 essay in the Washington Post:

Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

[...]

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.

As one who always reads Pearlstein's columns, which typically often sound financial advice, I have to say that I'm astounded as the position he has taken in this essay.

Those with concerns about ObamaCare are "political terrorists"? Perhaps Pearlstein is a covert disciple of Cass Suntein and Zephyr Teachout....

Read the rest at Always On Watch.

You Tube Says, "This video may not be suitable for minors." Oh, really?

Self defense and killing terrorists are objectionable? Well, as far as the left and the dhimmis are concerned, yes.

What will Obama say when he thinks the time is right?

The Jerusalem Post/AP Wire report that for now, Barack Obama is just "monitoring" the Gaza/Hamas situation:

A top adviser to Barack Obama said the US president-elect is monitoring Israel's intense air offensive again Gaza rocket squads and Hamas members but declined comment on the fresh Mideast crisis, deferring to the Bush administration.

David Axelrod said Obama, vacationing in Hawaii, was in contact with US President George W. Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but that comment from him was not appropriate. More than 290 Palestinians have died in the first two days of the air campaign.

"President Bush speaks for the United States until Jan. 20 and we're going to honor that," Axelrod said Sunday.

Axelrod, a top presidential campaign official who is moving into Obama's White House inner circle, acknowledged that the United States has had a "special relationship" with Israel, calling it an "important bond, an important relationship."

Obama is "going to work closely with the Israelis. They're a great ally of ours, the most important ally in the region," Axelrod said. "And that is a fundamental principle from which he'll work. But he will do so in a way that will promote the cause of peace, and work closely with the Israelis and the Palestinians on that."

I think they've just spoken already, and implied what many predict - classic moral equivalence. Plus, what they say about being allies, I'm sorry, but I doubt he considers Israel that.

Your next President?

Censorship in Spain

The most important concern I had before 9 March elections was precisely that of censorship against non-politically correct ideas if Zapatero won. Well, Zapatero won and the first intent of censorship has come too. A supposedly anti-racist NGO Movement against intolerance has asked the Government to see if they can shut several webs and blogs because they were listed in an anti-immigration website deemed as "racist and far-right". The problem is that the authors of those blogs listed weren't even aware their blogs were listed there and the NGO didn't even take the time to read all the blogs they were -and are- asking to shut. Now they have even erased some of them -also here-, while keeping others listed, and menacing them with legal actions because of the "Statements that are made against the NGO and its president".