UPDATED: Masada on Mount Sinjar (ISIS Crisis Continued)

Ancient History, Europe, History, Iraq, Israel, Jihad, Media, States' Rights

“Masada on Mount Sinjar” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Purportedly, forty thousand refugees, among them 25,000 children, were said to be stranded on the parched terrains of the Sinjar, in scorching heat, without sustenance. That is until Barack Obama broke up the gathering. Overnight. “That’s enough, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over.” Yes, the president and his minions have pronounced the catastrophe on the Sinjar Mountains over. However, just because the Obama machine declares it so, does not make it so. I would point BHO believers to Channel 4 veteran reporter Jonathan Rugman, who questions—even mocks—the administration’s rapid, fact-finding methodology:

Crisis, what crisis? The Americans have ruled out a military airlift of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar on the grounds that the situation is not as bad as previously thought. … Are the Americans saying that the refugees are not spread out any more but have either been shepherded or moved into a concentrated area where they can be counted?

Let us, then, stick with Mr. Rugman’s findings, shall we? As the courageous correspondent has discovered, the Kurd-coordinated airdrops are executed by only four helicopters (one has since crashed), allotted by Baghdad. Emergency supplies are available in abundance at various nodal points; not so the means to deliver them. Priorities set by the central government do not include “rescuing a little known Yazidi minority in Kurdistan, a region which wants to break away from Iraq and become its own country.”

The Kurds assisting those marooned on the mountains would like to secede from the morass that is Iraq. Alas, the master puppeteers in Washington have hitherto been wedded to a unified (at the point of a gun) Iraq, dominated by a strong (sectarian and corrupt) central authority. This White House, and the one before it, fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage. …

… Read the complete column. “Masada on Mount Sinjar” is now on WND.

UPDATE (8/15): If there is one constant you can trust it is that he lies. They all lie. “Break it up, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over,” Obama announced to the world, Thursday. I guess the president was attempting to will a new reality with words. The American media bought it and scattered. I was quite comfortable that “Masada on Mount Sinjar” was closer to the truth than Obama’s agitprop, even though it was submitted before his “Yazidis disperse” injunction.

Indeed, the ISIS crisis continues. Thirty miles from Sinjar, on Friday afternoon, reports BBCNews, “Militants in northern Iraq … massacred at least 80 men from the Yazidi faith in a village and abducted women and children.”

MORE.

UPDATED: Had Robin Williams Been Hopelessly Boxed In? (My Bad)

Celebrity, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment

To be sure, Robin Williams was an enormous talent. This is reflected in the myriad interviews and standup routines playing on TV since his suicide. Although I’ve always enjoyed these impromptu exchanges when I caught them—I’m familiar only with the handful of dramas and thrillers in which Williams starred. And superbly so. As someone who despises silly slapstick like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “The Birdcage,” I have to wonder why a talent like Williams was typecast as the eternal clown. Perhaps this deadening dead-end made him so very sad.

The Williams of “One Hour Photo” was hypnotic in the depth of his portrayal of a lonely misfit’s unraveling. His role in “Insomnia” was less memorable, but nevertheless chilling, as it ought to have been. Roger Ebert panned “The World According to Garp,” but I loved Williams in it. I saw “The Night Listener,” too.

That’s as far as the Robin Williams oeuvre available to me goes. Sad that. Had Robin Williams of blessed memory been hopelessly boxed in? I suspect so.

Williams seemed a gentle soul. He had a sad, intelligent, twinkle in the eyes, and he always looked as if he was about to start bawling, for real.

UPDATE (8/16): My Bad. “Awakenings”: A doff of the hat to my young friend Kerry Crowel, who reminded me that “‘Awakenings’ starred Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro in a really heavy drama about a doctor caring for patients that have awoken from long comas, or something like that. I remember the critics loving it.” I loved it too. I saw it. Both actors were brilliant.

UPDATED: Way To Go, Bros (Clarification)

Barack Obama, Criminal Injustice, Race

The black community’s resistance to a police force with a militarized mindset and arms to match is to be commended. Were Michael Brown a white boy slain for no reason—his “community” of submissives would be slobbering on TV, rather than protesting on the streets. Go bros. (Yes, I know my ghetto is contrived.)

The brown Brown was “an unarmed black teenager, … killed by a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.” According to Vox.com,

Brown was shot multiple times and killed by a Ferguson police officer in the early afternoon of Saturday, August 9, outside an apartment complex. Brown was unarmed. All shell casings found at the scene were from the police officer’s gun.

Barack Obama is the annoyance in this sad incident, insisting on meddling, as he did for Trayvon Martin.

UPDATE (8/13): It appears from the Facebook thread that I had not made myself clear: The post is in praise of the spirit of the protest, but certainly not of any destruction of private property.

UPDATED: ‘New Anti-Semitism’ Is As Old As Islam (‘Did Mohammed Invent Profiling?’)

Anti-Semitism, Europe, Islam, Judaism & Jews

Jewish leaders, reports the Washington Post, “are talking of the rise of a ‘new anti-Semitism.'”

Not again.

Following the lead of these self-anointed “leaders,” the WaPo tells of a French Muslim comedian who is as vile an antisemite as one can get. From that one-case study, the reporter, it would appear, deduced that he had sufficient evidence to support the leaders’ suggestion that antisemitism afflicts certain segments of European society (especially “far-right nationalists”) with equal ferocity. An equal opportunity bias.

(USA Today’s report is less Pollyanna-like.)

I haven’t researched the European hard right for some time, but last I looked, it was pro-Israel, unlike its American counterpart. Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front identified with Israel. Even the late Jörg Haider of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, who “exhibit[ed] every sign of antiSemitism”—Hugh Fitzgerald’s estimation, not mine—was … “not quite so systematically vicious when it [came] to the state of Israel.” Vlaams Belang of Belgium was pro-Israel. Leader Filip Dewinter told a Jewish magazine: “One has to choose sides. Which side are you on in the ‘war on terror,’ “the side of western democracy and western civilization, with its Judeo-Christian roots, or the side of radical Islam?”

There may be residual antisemitism in Europe, but the “new antisemitism” is associated with Muslim immigration into Europe, the UK and North America.

In Canada, Muslims now greatly outnumber Jews. What remains of a European Jewry devastated by the Holocaust comes under daily assaults and threats, mostly from the 20-million strong Muslim community.

Still the exponential growth of the Muslim community through immigration has failed to alarm Jewish leaders. Listening to them, you would think that the chief dangers to Jewish continuity are marauding Mormons, whose sin is to convert dead Jews, or Mel Gibson.

As Palestinian and Arab propaganda would have it, Muslim hate for the Jew is a contemporary phenomenon, caused entirely by the tiny “Zionist state.” While the contempt for the dhimmi, as the Jew was derogatorily termed, has evolved over the years—drawing on “traditional Koranic slurs,” as well as gathering vintage Nazi debris along the way—the hate boasts a pure Islamic pedigree.

The so-called “new antisemitism” is as old as Islam. Read on.

UPDATE (8/12): For those who failed to read relevant section in “Did Mohammed Invent Profiling?”, here they are:

… In the land that was once Babylonia, the Jews of Iraq weathered the vicissitudes of a daily life without rights but with endless indignities. Some particularly murderous landmarks stand out: the A.D. 1000 expropriation of Jewish property, the 1333 destruction of their synagogues, and the 1776 Basra slaughter, leading up to mob killings in 1941 and numerous public-square hangings between 1969 and 1973.

The chronicles of Jewish life over the centuries in Aden, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Libya are similarly marred. As one 19th-century observer recounted, the ancient community of Yemenite Jews was “in a position of inferiority, and is oppressed by a people which declares itself holy and pious but which is very brutal, barbarous and hard-hearted.” Of particular note is the murder in 1032 of thousands of Jews in Fez, Morocco, followed, in 1146, by the Almohad atrocities in which hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians were massacred by the Muslim Almohads.

As Palestinian and Arab propaganda would have it, Muslim hate for the Jew is a contemporary phenomenon, caused entirely by the tiny “Zionist state.” While the contempt for the dhimmi, as the Jew was derogatorily termed, has evolved over the years—drawing on “traditional Koranic slurs,” as well as gathering vintage Nazi debris along the way—the hate boasts a pure Islamic pedigree.

“In 1940,” … “the mufti [a kind of rabbi] of Jerusalem wrote to the Axis powers requesting the right of the Arabs to settle the question of the Jews along similar lines to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.” Egyptian Minister Anwar Sadat’s touch was somewhat comical. In 1950, Sadat, who may have confused Hitler for Houdini, published an open “Dear Adolf” letter, commending Hitler for “saving the world from this malignant evil.”

In 1964 a “scholar” from the University of Damascus issued a warning to the Syrian public to refrain from “letting your children out at night, lest the Jew come and take their blood for the purpose of making matzot for Passover.” (My mother’s matzo balls, incidentally, are nowhere near that labor intensive.) Such a sentiment is still very much within the realm of respected political and intellectual discourse throughout the Arab world.

An anti-Semitic czarist canard and fraud like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” has been adopted as Arab lore. Last year, UN-funded Muslim pamphleteers handed out The Protocols at the “anti-racist” conference in Durban. The charge that Jews are taking over the world joins the deicide charge and the denial—and justification—of the Holocaust, among Saudis, Egyptians, Palestinian…you name them.

Before Arab leaders realized they had won the propaganda war and could relax, they had frenetically and cunningly been extending specious invites for Arab Jews to return to their homelands. You see, the approximately 1.5 million Jewish refugees from Arab lands could have become a considerable obstacle to the Palestinian propaganda machine had Israel been as conniving as her enemies. Imagine the kind of trump card Israel might have wielded had she, like her uncivilized neighbors, kept these legitimate Jewish refugees in camps, refused to settle them, fomented hate among them for the Arab, and turned the fugitives into political pawns—as Arab nations have so masterfully done to their so-called refugees.

In 1976, these Jewish refugees, represented by the American Sephardi Federation, responded to the cynical invites with a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The ad entailed a news service photo that showed a mob of Iraqi onlookers surrounding two bodies suspended from a scaffold. The dangling bodies were those of Sabam Haim, and David Hazaquil, both Jews, hung in Baghdad. Beneath the photograph the organization responded: “Invitation declined.”