Men & Women Who Hothouse Hamasniks & Those Who Love Them

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism, The Zeitgeist

Believe it or not, there are a couple of *creeps and kooks on the Internet who find nothing creepy or kooky about how Palestinians cultivate kids into killers.

By the looks of it (take a look), this “educational” effort is a real communal affair, involving immediate and extended family, grandmothers too. Nothing cute about them or their offspring. Yet some find them sympathetic, certainly tragic, even endearing. Fail to finesse this ugly and evil specter and Friends of the Palestinian Authority and Enemies of Everything Israel accuse you of bias.

You must understand, after all, that the tinfoil faithful usually read from a script every bit as binding as the Quran. They parrot their lines like any good madrasa student regurgitates The Hadith and Sunnah. And in particular, our automatons shun the concepts of free will or personal responsibility when it comes to the Palestinians, and blame Israel for causing Palestinians to raise children to die as “martyrs.”

What do you know? A Jewish mother prays for a lawyer or a doctor; her Palestinian neighbor prefers a cold-blooded killer. All out of necessity, you see. For, as her defenders preach, under the skin, all mothers are equal in their love for their offspring. Including those who partake in “sex-selective infanticide in several of the world’s cultures.” Ultimately, behind every fine female who kills her kid or raises him to kill lurks a man, often an Israeli.

Yes, it’s Israel’s doing.

If not for the Israelis, a veritable economic oasis and a culture of life would flourish where a black hole now threatens to collapse on itself. And the evidence for this putative Palestinian revival, whence does it come? Why, from the Islamic world, at large. Oh, you mean to say the Ummah is not exactly in the grips of a Renaissance? Well, then, let me tell you about those crusaders.

And so the blame game goes.

* The link to the suicide slideshow promo originated at the little green footballs, was picked up by Michelle Malkin, and was lovingly redeemed and reinterpreted (minus soft focus, though) by libertarian exculpators of evil, where yours truly found it. (What’s up with the popular affectation of giving credit to the finder of a link, by the way? It’s not as if he or she is a real secondary source.)
†Recommended reading: “Coddling Killers: The Liberal Root-Causes Racket”, The American Spectator.

Rational Profiling: Cabbies Do It Too

America, Individual Rights, Race

“To decrease the risks of an extremely dangerous job, [taxi drivers] profile potential passengers, taking into account a composite of characteristics, of which race is one. I venture that if human beings were not in the habit of constructing such cognitive categories and using these to predict and protect against risk and danger, our prehistoric ancestor Homo erectus might not have stuck around long enough to evolve into Homo sapiens.”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “Rational Profiling: Cabbies Do It Too.”

Fierce, Fabulous Fallaci

Classical Liberalism, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Free Speech, The Zeitgeist

Here’s an interview with Oriana Fallaci in The New Yorker that doesn’t do her justice. Fallaci is unique in the annals of journalism. No superlative can properly describe the kind of irreverent grilling she subjected her interviewees to. The clubby, tête-à -têtes journalists conduct with their overlords are a disgrace—they’ll never come close to Fallaci’s skin-them-alive inquisitions.
Omitted from this interview is how Fallaci began her exchange with Qaddafi. It approximates the following paraphrase: “So your manifesto is so small and insignificant it fits in my powder puff. Why should anyone take you seriously”?”
When I attended journalism school, my teachers held her up as the iconic role model to emulate (of course, this would be unheard of in the left-liberal, groupthink dominated journalism schools of today). Thus one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received was Reginald Firehammer’s. In “The Passion of Principles,” his review of my book for the Randian Free Radical, he likened my passion to Fallaci’s. The passion, perhaps, but never the courage, the life-force, or the capacity for adventure.
The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot depicts Fallaci as pathologically anti-authoritarian. Is there any other way to be? Talbot, moreover, likes Fallaci’s classically liberal feminism, but flagrantly frames her crusade against Islam as a function of waning faculties. Yes, Fallaci is out of place in youth-worshipping America, where the lukewarm nonchalance of a Wonkette and her “Whatever” Generation is considered the ideal intellectual and existential temperament.
It would, however, be a grave mistake not to heed Fallaci’s warnings. This is an immensely cultured woman, steeped in the past. She understands history and the forces that shape it. More material, she has lived it.

Killing Commerce

Canada, Economy, Law

I import my beans freshly roasted from the fabulous JJ Bean Coffee in Vancouver, Canada. The place is charming and quaint—it sports a vintage 4-barrel Jabez Burns sample roaster. Back in the day, I used to love sipping a cup of the house blend and munching banana bread as I waited for my beans to be packaged.

The other day I was informed by JJ Bean’s insurance agent that the company’s goods will no longer be available in the US:

Legal liability laws in the US and Canada differ markedly with respect to consumer products. American product liability laws include ‘Strict Liability’ and this difference makes it prohibitively expensive for JJ Bean to continue with its US sales.
In Canada when a business sells a product, and that product causes harm to the consumer, the consumer must prove that the product caused the harm. In the US the onus of proof shifts onto the business owner, who must prove that he did not negligently cause the harm, something that is generally much more difficult to prove.
Accordingly, commercial legal liability insurance premiums in the US are much higher than in Canada, and if a Canadian business sells products into the US they are subject to these higher rates.

Because JJ Bean is a small franchise, it doesn’t generate enough business to support the steep overhead.

It is clear that Canadian law is far more compatible with the free market. American law is illiberal; it gums up trade, infantilizes Americans, and is tantamount to open season on business. What makes it particularly egregious is that, in the event that some malcontent initiates criminal proceedings against the company, the law leans toward a presumption of guilt, not innocence. Innocent until proven guilty; no crime without intent—now aren’t those supposed to be some of the foundations of the American judicial and constitution tradition?