Algerian Minister attributes Sarkozy's rise to power to the "Jewish lobby"

Le Figaro reported that, ahead of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Algeria next week, Mohamed Cherif Abbès, War Veterans Minister, had attributed Mr. Sarkozy’s rise to power to the "Jewish lobby". As evidence of this, Mr Abbès referred to the appointment of Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister and underlined his Jewish "origins": "Why did Bernard Kouchner, a man of the Left, decide to change sides and join the government ? His move was not guided by personal convictions. It was the result of a movement that reflects the aims of the real architects of Sarkozy’s rise to power, the Jewish lobby that has a monopoly on French industry." Mr. Abbas also hinted at President Sarkozy's "origins" - an explicit reference to his maternal grandfather who was Jewish: "You are aware of the roots of the French president and of those who brought him to power". He further added that, during the French electoral campaign, the Israeli authorities had issued a stamp bearing Sarkozy’s portrait. There is nothing new about this. Last year, when a member of the Socialist party visited Algiers, the issue of the party’s infiltration (noyautage) by Jews was raised privately …

Annapolis: Hope or scepticism for Israel-Palestine?" by Harry Hagopian - illustrated with Abbas and Olmert naked cartoon by Ben Heine

Ben Heine's comment (so that no one misses the subtle message): "The drawing shows Mahmoud Abbas (left), President of the Palestinian National Authority and Ehud Olmert (right), Prime Minister of Israel, in very tough peace negotiations..."

Ben Heine’s website carries, with the author’s permission, an article "Annapolis: Hope or scepticism for Israel-Palestine?" by Harry Hagopian, "Ecumenical, Legal & Political Consultant to the Armenian Church in the UK. Former Executive Director of the Middle East Council of Churches and a recognised regional expert, Dr Hagopian is a coordinator of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HCEF) and a lobbyist for recognition of the Armenian genocide."

A cartoon by Ben Heine illustrates Dr Hagopian's article. Its vulgar sexual connotations and explicit hate message are utterly revolting. Suffice it to say that Ben Heine (the only Belgian who took part in the infamous 2006 Tehran Holocaust cartoon contest) is highly appreciated by the far-right, conspirationist Canadian website Zionofascism which purports to expose "Zionofascism in Canada and the World". It features Heine’s portrait by Carlos Latuff depicted as James Bond fighting the Zionist Gang. The site’s "Top Clicks" are: Quotations from President Ahmadinejad of Iran; La fin de Sion (est proche) (The end of Zion is nigh); ZioPedia; and Ben Heine.

"Anti-Semitism may be a good starter but it is a bad finisher", Winston Churchill (1932)

Saving Civilization From Itself - Churchill understood that the Jews are the bedrock of Western tradition.
Arthur Herman reviews Churchill and the Jews by Martin Gilbert in the WSJ:
"A student of history, Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles - and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of "values." For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization - "that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power" that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe's arts, sciences and institutions.
To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. "The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here," Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, "not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world." …
Churchill was to be disappointed by the results of his Middle Eastern efforts, as Arabs hunted down and murdered Jewish settlers by the hundreds in the 1920s and 1930s - just at the time when Adolf Hitler was building his own regime around the persecution of the Jews in Germany. As early as 1930 Churchill realized that the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies carried the stench of an ancient evil. "Tell your boss from me," he said to a Hitler acquaintance in the late summer of 1932, as the Nazi Party was on the verge of power, "that anti-Semitism may be a good starter but it is a bad finisher." …
Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are - and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert's book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide."
Arthur L. Herman's "Gandhi & Churchill" will be published by Bantam in April.

Surrender is Not an Option, by John Bolton

Jewish Current Issues has this piece on John Bolton’s new book, Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad and the forthcoming peace conference in Annapolis:

"Bolton includes a lengthy, hour-by-hour, description of the process at the State Department and the UN by which Resolution 1701 was adopted last summer, ending the Second Lebanon War. He makes it clear it was - to be diplomatic - not a stellar performance by the State Department. Ultimately, he writes, the resolution left a situation in which "it became increasingly clear that there was not going to be another resolution to disarm Hezbollah, that the arms embargo was not being enforced, that Hezbollah was rearming, and that "enhanced UNIFIL" looked and acted much like the existing, ineffective UNIFIL."

Here is Bolton’s conclusion, near the end of the book, regarding U.S. policy and Israel:

"Because of its location, Israel experiences the terrorist threat almost daily, facing Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups, not to mention being within range of Iranian missiles. Hamas has now seized control of the Gaza Strip, fracturing the Palestinian Authority, leaving the "former terrorists" of Fatah now in control of the West Bank; Hezbollah is close to overthrowing Lebanon’s democratic government; and Syria is increasingly under Iran’s control. Given this reality, there is no rationale for the United States to pressure Israel into "peace agreements" with its remaining Arab neighbors, or to believe that "dialogue" on such issues will have any material effect on the Middle East’s numerous other conflicts. . . . Of course, Israel’s own government for its own reasons may decide to make concessions in various negotiations, and bear the consequences, but the United States has no interest in precipitating such decisions."

Last week, Bolton was the keynote speaker at a dinner of the Lincoln Club. Just before the dinner, he graciously agreed to answer a question from JCI about Secretary Rice’s current diplomatic effort:

JCI: I’m speaking with Ambassador John Bolton; it’s October 30, 2007. Ambassador Bolton, I’d like to ask you if you think Condoleezza Rice will be successful in convening a peace conference in Annapolis, who might attend, what the outcome will be.

AMBASSADOR BOLTON: I think the odds are that the conference will take place, but I am very skeptical that a positive outcome is possible. The circumstances in the region are just not conducive to progress, particularly on the Palestinian side, where there is no effective Palestinian Authority, no effective entity that can carry out commitments that might be made. And the risk is not simply that the conference will fail, but that a failed conference will leave us in a worse situation in the region.

In a later conversation, Bolton indicated the two-state solution has run its course, and that any future solution will more likely be a three-state one involving the participation of Egypt and Jordan."

A spate of anti-Semitic acts in Paris 10th arrondissement

The CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France) reports that Le Parisien carried an article on a spate of anti-Semitic acts perpetraded recently in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. The Jewish community is both worried and exasperated. On Sunday 18 November a 15-year old boy, wearing a kippa, was beaten up by three boys when leaving home. On Saturday 17 November two 10- year olds were verbally abused and punched by a boy the same age in the Vellefaux school playground. The Jewish community held a spontaneous demonstration on Tuesday 20 November. One mother complained: "The insults are only one aspect of the violence. Youngsters threaten to burn our buildings and shout: "This is Palestine. Go home". It is hell to put up with this on a daily basis." The newspaper also referred to the murder in 2003 of a young man, Sébastien Sellam. The alleged murdered, Adel, was a neighbour and a friend. After slitting his victim’s throat and mutilating his face, Adel went home and declared: "I have killed a Jew! I will go to heaven!"

Judeosphere rates the Realists

Judeosphere offers a sampling of the only too human fallibility of John Mearsheimer's and a few other Realists' predictions: "During the last few months, I've seen a number of editorials demanding that pundits be held accountable for their "complicity" in making the case for war in Iraq. Writing in the National Interest, Justin Logan offers what he considers to be a practical solution: Thanks to news cycles and short attention spans, pundits get away with murder. Columnists and talking heads can issue endless prognostications about what Iraq will look like in another six months, and because nobody’s going to remember to follow up six months on, it doesn’t matter whether they were right. The best way to correct the situation is by developing a predictions database, where experts can weigh-in on specific, falsifiable claims about the future, putting their reputations on the line. Something like this was envisioned in a DARPA program developed under Admiral John Poindexter in 2003. The so-called "policy analysis "market" was designed to allow analysts to buy futures contracts for various scenarios. As the value of these contracts went up or down, other analysts could observe and investigate why, determining how and why others were "putting their money where their mouths were", and whether they should do the same. Well now, that's interesting. What's also interesting is that Justin Logan is an analyst at the Cato Institute, which is affiliated with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are among the Coalition's founding members. So, I find myself wondering: How would the venerable foreign policy realists fare in this proposed predictions database? Here's a sampling: John Mearsheimer: An academic with such a wretched track record, that if he had been a royal astrologer he would have been beheaded. His 1990 opus [pdf] for the Atlantic Monthly, "Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War," confidently predicted that the decline of the Soviet Union would usher in a new arms race in Europe, with nations--especially Germany--rushing to build nuclear weapons. In a 1991 NYT editorial [pdf], he made the case for the First Gulf War, predicting that "a quick victory will reduce losses on both sides." (Iraqi casualties: 40,000 dead troops and more than 140,000 dead civilians.) In 1993, he declared [pdf] that a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent was "inevitable", since the country would never return its nuclear warheads to Russia. (In 1995, Ukraine returned all of Russia's nuclear weapons.) Then, in 1998, he said [pdf] the Kosovo peace agreement was "doomed" to fail because "neither the Albanians nor the Serbs are likely to stick to it." (One year later, Milosevic agreed to withdraw troops from Kosovo, and the Kosovo Liberation Army agreed to disarm.) Leon Hadar: His famous 1992 essay, "The Green Peril," declared that fundamentalist Islamic movements posed no threat to the West. (Hey, how did that turn out?) Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute: A man who has predicted war so many times it's a wonder that we haven't been bombed back into the Bronze Age. In the last eight years he's warned of a forthcoming war with China; a forthcoming Turkish war against Greece; a Marxist/narcotrafficking takeover of Colombia; and war with North Korea. Steven Clemons, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation: In 1998, he predicted an "economic tsunami" would soon strike Japan, and then engulf America and the entire global economy. (Ahhh! Run away! Run away!) And there, my friends, are the "realist" pundits. By all means, let's add them to the "predictions database," so everyone can see firsthand their true market value."

Simon Deng tells Bishop Desmond Tutu that Israel is not an apartheid Stat

Simon Deng, a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, is an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist. Simon Deng has this piece in the Jewish Advocate.
"Disappearance of Bishop Tutu
Late last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Boston’s Old South Church at a conference on "Israel Apartheid." Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.
The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families – even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa. …
Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud. …
Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?
Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela’s freedom, we Africans – all over Africa – joined in. Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.
Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans – I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.
So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?"