Category Archives: Iraq

Bush Shoed In Baghdad

As CNN reports, Bush traveled to Iraq

To celebrate the conclusion of the security pact, called the Strategic Framework Agreement and the Status of Forces Agreement, the White House said.
The pact will replace a U.N. mandate for the U.S. presence in Iraq that expires at the end of this year. The agreement, reached after months of negotiations, sets June 30, 2009, as the deadline for U.S. combat troops to withdraw from all Iraqi cities and towns. The date for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq is December 31, 2011.

During a news conference, “an angry Iraqi man jumped up and threw shoes at Bush… President Bush … ducked … as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki tries to protect him Sunday. …Throwing shoes at someone, or sitting so that the bottom of a shoe faces another person, is considered an insult among Muslims.”

If only Muslims confined themselves to shoe tossing. It’s far preferable to bomb throwing.

“The man was dragged out screaming after throwing the shoes.”

Of course, Iraqis, of whom millions have been displaced and tens of thousands killed due to Bush’s war, have every reason in the world to throw boots, baklava, or even bombs at Bush.

Bush responded fast and well: He joked about the incident and asserted that protest was the hallmark of a free society, blah, blah.

As I have observed before, “the Bush administration might just have taken the wind out of the war as an issue for Barack Obama. As it is, Obama had grown weaker on that front, his position increasingly converging with McCain’s. But if Bush finalizes the withdrawal, he will have taken the issue and the decision away from Obama. Strategically, it’s a smart move.”

As for the shoeing Iraqi, I’ve said it again and again: impeachment and war-crimes prosecutions is what this administration deserves for launching an unjust war, an obligation the opportunistic Democrats would never fulfill.

Martyrdom In Mumbai Un-Jewish

Iraq, Islam, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

Rabbi B. Isaacson, my father—also a scholar of Judaism—imparted a bit of Jewish Halacha (law) during the bi-weekly telephone conversation I put through to South Africa, where he (sadly) resides.

The topic: Chabad Jews and their outpost in India, which is a hotbed of Jihad, anti-Hindu and other.

But first, with society’s unfaithful watchdogs (media) pretending that the larger population is statistically as likely as are Jews to be the target of Islamic terrorists—Mark Steyn’s wry reminder of the reality of anti-Jewish Jihad is warranted (via Jihad Watch):

At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultra-Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been over there in the first place.”

Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accidental” hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it’s not a hostage situation, it’s a mass murder-in-waiting.

[Snip]

Dad, who considers Chabadniks a dubious sect, avers that they should not have set up a post in India.

For long—since the 8th century—Jihadis have waged pitched battles against the “infidels” of India. India is a dangerous place, especially for Jews.

Jews don’t missionize; Mormons do. The object of the outpost was to provide a kosher meal for Jewish travelers.

More significantly, Jews don’t martyr themselves. Jewish law forbids the wanton endangerment, or squandering, of life. Giving one’s life unnecessarily is a sin in Judaism. The Palestinian culture of death banks on the Jewish culture of life to sustain its murderous momentum.

According to the Talmud, “To save one life is like saving the world.”

SIDEBAR: As a matter interest, this verse was later on claimed by the Quran, which quickly qualified the otherwise-universal Jewish credo. The Qur’anic ayah states:

On that account: We ordained
For the Children of Israel
That if anyone slew
A person—unless it be
For murder or for spreading
Mischief in the land—
It would be as if
He slew the whole people… (Verse 5:32)

“Mischief in the land” gives the Muslim wide discretion in killing Jews.

Back to Mumbai’s Jewish martyrs: Had they followed Jewish law, demurs dad, they would not have endangered themselves and their child.

Jewish law calls for martyrdom under these three contingencies only:

MURDER: If a Jew is instructed to kill another human being on pain of death, he must refuse, and prepare to die.

The Talmud states (in Sanhedrin 74a): “It happened with Rava: A man came to Rava and told him that the governor of the city had ordered that he (the man) slay a certain man or himself suffer death, and Rava said to him: ‘Rather than slay another person, you must permit yourself to be slain, for how do you know that your blood is redder than his, perhaps his blood is redder than yours?'” [Beautiful metaphor]

IDOLATRY. If a Jew is threatened with conversion to an idolatrous deity or death, he must choose death.

There is a famous example that can be found in the Babylonian Talmud Gittin 57b, the apocryphal II Maccabees 7, and other sources about Hannah and her seven sons, a story associated with the holiday of Hanukkah. Rather than prostrate before an idol of Zeus placed in the Second Temple, Hannah defies the Greek-Assyrian King Antiochus IV and allows her sons to be killed one by one before she herself is killed.

[Wikipedia]

SEXUAL IMMORALITY. If a Jewish woman is threatened with rape on pain of death, she must prepare to die.

[Source: Monty Python, “The Life of Brian.” Brian the Hebrew is told by his mother that his father was a Roman. Brian cries, “Tell me you were raped, Mother.” She/he replies, “Well, at first.” Sorry dad, I couldn’t help that.]

These teachings are expounded on in Wikipedia (bar “The Life of Brian” citation.)

Unexplained is their proper application. No other rabbinical authority that I know of has applied the teachings to the strange specter—and subsequent martyrdom—of members of a Chabad mission in Mumbai.

In any event, according to Rabbi Isaacson, had the unfortunate Chabadniks adhered to the letter and spirit of the Jewish law, they would not have decamped to India and died there.

Poll Shows Americans Buy Obama Bull

Barack Obama, Iraq, The Zeitgeist, War

“Fifty-five percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday back the president-elect when it comes to reducing the number of American combat troops in Iraq and increasing the number in Afghanistan.

“The reason is simple,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “The war in Iraq is very unpopular, while a majority support the war in Afghanistan.”

This seems to bear out what I conjectured sometime ago in “A War To Call His Own”:

“Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own. In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.”

'Hindus, Jews, And Jihad Terror in Mumbai'

Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

“Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements. Urging a ‘full struggle’ against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress, he stated:

We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.”

SO WRITES ANDY BOSTOM AT THE AMERICAN THINKER. The article, “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai,” fills in the lacunae left by the media, which “offered no speculation about Islamic Jew hatred as an obvious potential motivation for the transparently selective attack on Mumbai’s Chabad House — a focal point symbol of the miniscule [sic] Jewish community of 5000 (or 0.03%) in a city of some 15 million inhabitants. More egregiously, this neglect of any hateful Islamic motivations for the targeted murder of such innocent Jews — including a young Lubavitcher Rabbi and his wife — was accompanied by consistently dehumanizing and demeaning references to these victims as ‘Ultra-Orthodox,’ and their entirely false characterization as ‘missionaries.'”

MOST POIGNANT WERE THE ASPIRATIONS OF “Sir Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958), the preeminent historian of Mughal India,” who “wrote admiringly of what the Jews of Palestine had accomplished once liberated from the yoke of jihad-imposed Islamic Law. The implication was clear that he harbored similar hopes for his own people, the Hindus of India, and those of their Muslim neighbors willing to abandon the supremacist, discriminatory, and backward mandates of Islam”:

Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule. (See Kinglake’s graphic description). Today Jewish rule has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the modern civilised life have been made available in this little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there from the countries ruled by the Shariat [Sharia; Islamic Law]. This is the lesson for the living history.

The complete article is “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai.”