The Terror War years of 2003-2007 feel like ages ago now . . . though I fondly remember rooting on Jon Stewart as he launched into devestating send-ups of the Republicans and neocons. (That the Bushians and neocons were lunatics (or worse) was, of course, one of the few things that Stewart and I agreed on.) 

I was reminded of this time watching Stewart's latest take on the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. Whatever else he might be, Jon Stewart is brave. He makes criticizng Israel, Zionism, and American foreign policy funny and cool, and it's hard to imagine that won't have consequences.  

At the Republican Jewish Coalition forum, Jews commemorate the miracle of incredibly religious Christian presidential candidates fighting over who loves Jews more.

Note that in the video (which is embedded in the Audio/Video tab), Rick Perry brags about increasing aid to Israel, despite the fact that a month ago he was claiming that in his administration, the foreign-aid budgets to all nations would start at zero.   

Also, could you imagine sitting through seven three-hour debates between Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama!? Insomnia has been cured!   

In last week’s address on U.S. Middle East policy, President Obama finally unveiled his radical plans to betray Israel. Thankfully, Republican leaders and their AIPAC handlers are onto the administration’s game. They’ve sounded the alarm that Obama is throwing “our only democratic ally in the region” under a runaway bus packed with freedom-hating Islamo-Nazis. So what are the details of this malefic design? The president’s speech outlines the main elements:

• Reaffirmation of “unshakeable” U.S. security guarantees to Israel.
• Warning the Palestinians against a bid for statehood at the UN General Assembly in September.
• The two-state solution: “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people”.
• A challenge to Fatah on bringing Hamas to the negotiating table and White House insistence that the new Palestinian state be non-militarized.

Under these conditions, it’s only a matter of time before Iranian panzers make their final drive to the shores of the Mediterranean! Of course, the greatest point of contention in the matter was Obama’s call for Israel and the Palestinians to establish borders circa 1967. There is nothing terribly new about this demand, as both the Clinton and Bush II administrations conducted talks under the same basic framework. Washington’s support for Israeli-Palestinian frontiers roughly matching those before the Six Day War has merely become more explicit.

According to an article in the Independent, the English Defense League is taking a, shall we say, interesting approach to resisting Islamic colonization of the United Kingdom and the perceived encroachment of Sharia law. Some excerpts:

A white extremist organisation is forging links with Jewish, Sikh and gay communities to fuel prejudice and fear and hatred of the Muslim community, it was claimed today.

New branches of the League, such as the Jewish Division, could exploit the existing religious hostilities caused by territorial disputes in the Middle East, says Professor Copsey whose report was commissioned by the organisation Faith Matters.

It claims that these inter-faith tensions were brought into sharp focus last month when the senior US Jewish leader and Tea Party activist Rabbi Nachum Shifren denounced Islam at a EDL rally outside the Israeli Embassy in London. Israeli flags have also been spotted at several EDL demonstrations across the UK.

As well as aggravating religious tensions, the EDL has established a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Division to "defend" gay people from Sharia law. There are also specialist divisions for women, soldiers and disabled people. The report warns these communities to be vigilant against "selective racism" and the EDL’s attempts at manipulation.

Contributors to the EDL Facebook site confirm that the group wants to work with other minority organisations including those which promote women’s rights. One member writes: "After all, leftists have portrayed themselves for decades as the only ones really interested in promoting a progressive and inclusive agenda: homosexual rights, women’s equality, minority rights, reproductive rights, immigration, world peace, among others."

One member added: "Remember there is a difference between being anti-Muslim and anti-Islam. We are against the ideology not the people. Let’s not forget that many Muslim women and children are victims of their own religion."

On the surface at least, the EDL appears to be less concerned with developing a serious and reasonable defense of Western cultural heritage than in crude, philistine Islamophobia resembling that of American neocons, combined with the hoary leftist habit of denouncing everything to the right of Leon Trotsky as racist, fascist, sexist, and homophobic. Indeed, the Islamophobia of the neocons sometimes comes close to resembling the anti-Catholic tirades originating from American know-nothings of the mid-nineteenth century. It is possible to recognize Islam as one of the world’s great civilizations and religious traditions, and even find much that is admirable about Islamic culture and history, while also recognizing that uncontrolled mass immigration by Muslims into the West amounts to cultural and demographic suicide. It is even possible to at once favor the preservation of Western civilization and agree with thinkers like Michael Scheuer and Robert Pape that much of the problem with Islamic terrorism is indeed “blowback” generated by unnecessary Western, mostly American, interventions and interference in the Islamic nations, and that some kind of apocalyptic showdown between the West and Islam is neither necessary nor inevitable. As Pat Buchanan says, “They are over here because we are over there,” and there is no clear reason why we Westerners should not seek peaceful co-existence with Islam as much as possible. While we don’t want to surrender Western nations to Islamic colonization via mass immigration, there is no reason why Muslims cannot exercise sovereignty in their traditional homelands.

The English Defense League is an organization I admittedly know little about. Perhaps English readers can enlighten me. If the depiction conveyed in this article is accurate, it would appear that the EDL is less interested in defending the Western civilization of Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, and Michelangelo than in defending the Western civilization of Theodor Herzl, Betty Friedan, Harvey Milk, and RuPaul. AlternativeRight.Com contributor Richard Hoste has in the past made the plausible argument that a Europeanized Islam might even be an improvement over much of what goes on in Europe at present: “I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey. “

I’m inclined on one hand to regard these activities on the part of the EDL as one of those “So this is how it ends?” moments. If the principal objection to conquest of the West by means of demographic aggression by hostile immigrant populations is that some of the immigrants aren’t PC enough, then why bother? Surely a civilization that has sunk to such levels would deserve to die. Still, political pragmatism and eclecticism have their place. The approach of the EDL resembles in some ways the Dutch left-nationalist movement of the late Pim Fortuyn, and even my own approach to certain questions (for instance, my blurring of the left/right distinction when attacking the managerial state) bears a casual resemblance on occasion. A commenter on my blog suggests that the EDL’s efforts are largely motivated by a desire to steer anti-Islamic or anti-immigration sentiment away from support for the British National Party. That would seem to be as good an explanation for this spectacle as any. However, the EDL may have the positive unintended consequence of providing an entry level gateway for participants in its activities, particularly young people inclined towards either the Left or neocon sympathies, to eventually develop a more serious critique of the threat posed by uncontrolled immigration and a more solid intellectual and political defense of their cultural heritage and civilization.

Those who live by the smear must be prepared to die by the smear. 

The death of Joe Sobran on September 30, after several years of failing health, could not have come as a total surprise to any of his friends. News about his deteriorating condition and the need for divine intervention was steadily provided by Fran Griffin, his alter ego of many years, his longtime publisher, and, not least of all, his tireless fundraiser. From Fran’s reports throughout September, it was clear that Joe would not survive much longer. The news that he expired painlessly may have been the least disturbing communication from her during this period.

Joe’s death deprives those of us on the independent right and in Anglophone society of a brilliant literary presence. Although widely known as a political controversialist, Joe was also, not incidentally, one of the most impressive English stylists of his and my generation. Most of his columns, like his works on Shakespeare’s real identity and on complicated constitutional questions, were literary gems. And though he would not have presumed to compare his talent to that of his hero G.K. Chesterton, Joe was probably Chesterton’s equal as a master of expository prose. The reason this graduate of Eastern Michigan (and scion of a working-class Ukrainian family) rose rapidly at National Review to become a senior editor within three years, after being hired in 1972, is that William F. Buckley recognized his considerable talent.

And arguably Joe was kept at the magazine even after Norman Podhoretz and his soul-mates condemned him as an anti-Semite in 1993, because Buckley wished to hold on to his best writer. Perhaps trying to bring around his newly acquired neoconservative dinner companions, Buckley defended Joe (and Pat Buchanan) for a time as “contextual” rather than genuine anti-Semites. According to Buckley, it was because of general sensitivity to the historic problem of anti-Semitism and the special place of Israel among American Christians as well as American Jews that the frontal attack on AIPAC and Jewish media power engaged in by Joe aroused such resoundingly negative feelings.

A column by Jonah Goldberg published in the dead-tree National Review (August 30) “A Muslim Gay Bar by the Mosque?” typifies the utterly infantile quality of our current movement conservative discourse. Goldberg writes in glowing defense of Fox News celebrity Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated (presumably in a serious way) the creation of a Muslim gay bar in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Goldberg happily embraces this idea as a “tough-minded libertarian.” After all, freedom, he insists, “is a cultural institution that needs to be defended, even if that means offending people.” Moreover, “whatever you may think of gay bars, they’re not going away in the freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else in American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such places to one extent or another.”

One might ask Goldberg, the “tough-minded libertarian,” why just one month earlier he had denounced Rand Paul in a column for raising hesitant objections to Provision Two of the Civil Rights Act, a provision that restricts an employer’s right to hire whom he wants for a job. According to Goldberg in one of the most ferocious tirades I’ve seen coming from his pen, unless the subject is the critics of Israel or “Obama fascism,” he let loose against the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky for “lamenting the lost right of bigots.”

Apparently the anti-discrimination mechanism created by Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave this country “economic freedom” for the first time, although it is not at all clear how it did so. But in any case why is my historic right to hire or accommodate whom I want in my business establishment less of a right than the right to run a gay bar, to the consternation of religious and moral traditionalists? Why should I have less of a right not to confer a job on a prospective employee than to scandalize devout Christians by establishing a sodomy recruiting agency in their neighborhood?

Arnaud de Borchgrave, the son of a Belgian count who became a legendary Cold War journalist at UPI, Newsweek, and the Washington Times, and who has recently morphed into a Terror Warrior, has penned a fascinating column for UPI that raises the real possibility of an Israeli, or joint U.S.-Israeli, attack on Iran in the coming weeks. Borchgrave relies on the intel of American Conservative and Antiwar.com columnist Philip Giraldi, intel which Giraldi looks at with horror and Borchgrave, with anticipation.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, he wrote, had tasked the Strategic Command with drawing up a contingency plan in response to another Sept. 11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan was for a large-scale air assault on Iran (never mind if Iran wasn't involved) employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. More than 450 major strategic targets were listed in the plan -- evidently leaked to Giraldi by "appalled" senior U.S. Air Force officers.

I’m extremely wary of “9/11 Truth” theories, though, I must admit, information like this reminds one of the fact that Pentagon and Military Industrial Complex Big Boys can expedite their plans with false flag operations…  though, thankfully, no such incident occurred.

If Israel has decided to strike against what most Israelis see as an existential threat, it would presumably wait until the U.S. Congress' return from vacation Sept. 10. A resolution (HR 1553) is winding its way through Congress that endorses an Israeli attack on Iran, which, writes Giraldi, "would be going to war by proxy as the U.S. would almost immediately be drawn into conflict when Tehran retaliates."

Leading neo-conservatives pooh-pooh Iran's asymmetrical retaliatory capabilities as overblown anti-Israeli rhetoric. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a neo-con commentator, predicts Iran's response would be minimal and recommends Israel attack Iran to "rock the system" to make the regime "lose face" and suffer a military defeat from which its recovery would be doubtful.

This reporter first began covering Iran in August 1953 when the shah fled a revolutionary upheaval (returning 10 days later after a military crackdown and covert CIA assistance).

There is little doubt that an Israeli attack on Iran would trigger mayhem up and down the Persian Gulf and trigger a third war that would be yet another force multiplier for the U.S. deficit: Federal spending is now at $3.6 trillion; the national debt, $13.4 trillion; cost per citizen $43,000; cost per taxpayer $120,000. Check the debt clock online -- in real time.

Borchgrave seconds my contention that the neocons sincerely believe in their rosy scenarios. In Iraq, we were to be greeted as liberators and the whole operation was to be an inexpensive, perhaps even profitable, foray. The myth of Iran is that Jerusalem and/or Washington could launch a surgical, limited attack that would prevent the “Second Holocaust” and not spill over into an international conflict. Borchgrave’s passing mention of a “third world war” and the coming bankruptcy of the U.S. Treasury indicates that he’s not so deceived. Sad to say, reports of Cheney’s “large-scale air-assault” plan for Iran reveal that there are many in Washington for whom World War III is devoutly to be wished.

I don't know what to make of John Bolton's recent announcement of an August 21 "deadline" for Israel and/or America to strike Iran's Bushehr nuclear power reactor. First off, as Joshua Keating notes at Foreign Policy, “according to Bolton, right now is always the best time to attack Iran.”

In July 2009, he said that Israel would likely attack by the end of last year. In June 2008, he said it would have be before the end of the Bush administration. Way back in 2007, he was saying that "time is limited."

Bolton doesn't actually think that Israel will attack Iran this week, and believes that they have "lost this opportunity," but something tells me this isn't the last time that Bolton will give the Israelis an extension on their deadline.

No doubt.

And there’s more reason to discount Bolton and his pronouncements. Since the inauguration -- perhaps even since the 2007 NIE report on Iran -- the neocons and their frontmen have been marginalized and demoted. "Regime Change" was out, replaced by schemes that were no less interventionist but more palatable to the high-minded Soros crowd -- the "Green Revolution," which self-righteous liberals watched unfold over Twitter last spring, being the most obvious example. Bolton is, thankfully, far from power and influence at the moment, and his "deadline" might amount to no more than a mad man howling in the woods.

And an attack is still extremely difficult politically. Though there has been significantly more media chatter about Iran over the past three months, there is simply no popular mandate for action and there has been nothing like the White House-led, coordinated war rollout that we saw in 2003. Any U.S. attack would be a traumatic shock to the American public, and my guess is that, much like Washington’s other two Middle East wars, such a campaign would be highly unpopular with everyone except the neocon/neoliberal wonks living in the Beltway.

Unfortunately, none of this means that an attack isn’t in the cards.

The thing that Bolton -- and everyone else who supports confronting Iran over its nuclear ambitions -- rarely puts into words is what he expects to happen exactly after Iran’s nuclear reactor is "taken out." The neocons are famous for their rosy scenarios ("We'll be greeted as liberators!"), which they, no doubt, sincerely believe in. One senses that they think Washington and/or Jerusalem could pull off another "Operation Opera" that would quickly accomplished its goal and be soon forgotten. America’s benign hegemony could be reasserted on the cheap.

But at some level, even the neocons must recognize that Iran is a completely different ballgame. There is no possible way that Tehran would allow an attack to take place -- even a targeted, limited one aimed solely at Bushehr -- without a full-scale, extreme prejudice retaliation.  Bolton & Co. always talk about the “Second Holocaust” that shall inexorably occur “if Iran gets the Bomb,” but then fail to mention the kind of damage Tehran could inflict on Tel-Aviv and the bunched-up American military bases in Iraq with conventional weapons. In 2009, the commander in chief of Revolutionary Guards stated flatly, “Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran has missiles with the range of 2,000 km (1,250 miles), and based on that all Israeli land including that regime's nuclear facilities are in the range of our missile capabilities.”

Do Bolton and people like him understand whom they’re dealing with?

Here’s an insane article from some madman at the American Spectator fantasizing about Israel striking Iran. The conclusion is below.

"We apparently have lost four F-15s and three F-16s, all to unknown causes.

"But that is not the worst. Al-Jazeera is already broadcasting reports from Iran. They are saying we haven't done any significant damage to any of the Iranian nuclear facilities, and only killed innocent civilians in towns and cities across Iran. Hizballah will soon launch everything they have in Lebanon at us. Gaza will erupt in missile launches."

Netanyahu closed his eyes briefly. "Avi, how soon can we expect the UN's condemnation, sanctions, and so forth?"

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, shrugged. "Probably later today. I have already received a note from Hillary Clinton condemning the attack. The Americans may sponsor a Security Council resolution condemning us. You can expect a call from Obama himself any minute."

"Will anyone stand with us?"

"No, Prime Minister, we are alone."

Poor Israel!  All they want to do is burn women and children alive and nobody will stand with them!

The paranoia is what’s frightening.  The US has used its veto power at the UN to shield Israel from sanctions 40 times since 1972.  And in the fantasies of Zionists America is getting ready to sponsor resolutions against Israel.  What would neo-cons advocate the Israelis do if the US actually took a balanced position on the Middle East?  Lob a nuke at the East coast?  The author of this article actually worked in the Pentagon! Lunatics like this, not "Islamo-fascism," should keep us up at night.  

It’s not fair to blame Israelis for the nuttiness of American neo-cons but it matters to us as this Jew worship is what passes for conservatism today and may inflame the world.  If the Republicans regain power in 2012, we may or may not see a repeal of Obamacare, tax cuts, lower spending, etc. but we’re guaranteed to see the US do Israel’s bidding (more so than now).  It’s not just another foreign country; it is the master of a movement ostensibly dedicated to defending of the West and therefore if not our enemy, at least a nation whose interests diverge from ours. 

The comments are almost as frightening.

Yes, guys, Yes, you are quite correct and, since BARAK INSANE OBAMA refused to reveal where the vast bulk of the contributions to his campaign came from, it's my guess that they came from ARAB nations.

FURTHER, I AM CALLING FOR THE IMMEDIATE IMPEACHMENT of THIS PRESIDENT and, the COMPLETE REMOVAL OF ALL OF HIS REGIME AND THE OVERTURNING OF EVERY PIECE OF LEGISLATION HE AND HIS REGIME HAVE FORCED THROUGH CONGRESS !! ---- JT ----

Oh yea, all that Arab money in politics.  It’s about time the Jews stopped being so passive and made their voices heard.

Of course Iran will use nuclear weapons against the US; at the first opportunity.

But of course!  Just remember all those wars Iran’s started in the last thousand years or so.

I happen to be one of those Christians who believes we will meet Jesus in the air...and if you belong to Him (saved by grace) you won't be here to for the yucky stuff. Because...first, there is now no condenation to those who are in Christ Jesus Rom 8:1 and lastly, the church is mentioned over and over in Rev. chpts 1-4. No more mention of the church after chpt 4. , and hell doesn't break loose until after chpt 4. However, like you, no matter where I am when those dreadful days begin, I know that Jesus Christ is on my side and I will not be ashamed of Him....

AND GOD BLESS ISRAEL!

This is one of the more reasonable ones.

Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch makes the case that this sexy Russian spy story is much to do about nothing.

There’s been ripe chortling about the spy network run in the U.S.A. by the Russian SVR – successor to the KGB in the area of foreign intelligence. The eleven accused were supposedly a bunch of bumblers so deficient in remitting secrets to Moscow across nearly a decade that the FBI can’t even muster the evidence to charge them with espionage. The ten who have been arrested are accused of conspiracy to act as agents of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general, which is what lobbyists here do if they are working for, say, Georgia or China. Their filings are available for public review at the Commerce Department. If the Russians are convicted, they could be sentenced up to five years in prison.

All of the defendants who appeared in the New York court except one, the fetching Anna Chapman, are also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years of prison.

Assuming their lawyers don’t get them off, a doubtful proposition, we can assume the Russians will round up 11 Americans, accuse them of spying and then do a trade. Then both sides will start again, the Russians training fresh sets of agents to spout American baseball records, burn hamburgers over the backyard grill, jog and do other all-American things like have negative equity on their houses and owe the IRS money, and the Americans forcing their agents to read Dostoevsky.

 He goes into the possible motivations of the FBI.

The Russians say darkly that it was an effort by neoconservative forces to mar the pleasant encounter between presidents Medvedev and Obama. Maybe. But as a right-wing conspiracy to bring back the Cold War it was pretty pathetic. The Obama administration made haste to discount any serious diplomatic backwash from the arrests. Maybe the Russians were about to roll up the ring and the FBI wanted to grab a few headlines and justify their next budget request. Maybe it was part of some internecine feud between U.S. intelligence agencies. If there is – as seems likely – a back story, it will be years, if ever, before it comes out.

The FBI is probably thrilled to come up with some spies who aren’t Israelis or Americans working for the Israelis who are routinely spared the inconvenience of any trial by the intervention of Israeli-backed U.S. politicians and speedily released.

I have a hard time believing that the FBI is crawling with neo-conservative ideologues hell-bent on confronting Russia, though I could be wrong.  More likely they want to make sure that they continue giving Congress reasons to fund them.

A fundamental difference between us and the mainstream right is the latter divides government into categories of good and bad.  The parasitic state employees-social workers, run of the mill paper pushers, etc.- and their departments are subject to all the evil effects of bureaucratization while the more masculine government workers-law enforcement, firemen, soldiers-are selfless public servants who always need “support.”  In reality, like with anyone else who lives off the taxpayer, if there’s no real reason to justify an intelligence agency or large army it becomes in the interests of those working in these fields to “make work.”  The problem is even worse than it is in the rest of government because make-work military and law enforcement employees, unlike superfluous teacher's aides for example, need to kill people or throw them in jail in order to remain necessary.  

Those who see the state as something that either should be minimized or cease to exist all together need to be just as suspicious of government workers who carry guns as they are of those who don't, if not more so.