ISRAEL

Why America supports Israel: "America's loyalty to Israel isn't engineered by a Zionist cabal that dupes American citizens and hijacks their government. US policy tends to align closely with Israel's because Americans *like* Israel. They instinctively sympathize with Israel's fight for survival in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods. If public opinion weren't robustly pro-Israel in the first place, the White House and Congress would be far less inclined to give Israel's advocates the time of day. There's a name for that phenomenon. It's called democracy.... American history is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian soil, nourishing a special kinship between America's Christians and the Jewish people. The founders of the American republic were deeply influenced by the Hebrew scriptures and believed that they, like the Jews of old, had been taken out of bondage by God and led by Him to a Promised Land. Long before there was a modern state of Israel, American leaders expressed "Zionist" leanings: "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation," former President John Adams wrote in 1819. Nearly two centuries later, millions of American Christians are passionate supporters of the Jewish state."

Harvard hucksters hype Israeli pseudo-historians: "The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia -- Israel's own Ward Churchills -- are the pretentiously self-styled 'New Historians.' This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: 'We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas'), who've cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they've thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon. They claim 'Zionist imperialists' cheated Palestinian peasants out of their land (which was, in fact, bought fairly and legally), and that these interlopers conducted a systematic and deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing with respect to the 'indigenous population.' (There undoubtedly have been sporadic acts of aggression and even terror against Palestinian Arabs by Jews during the War of Independence. But there is simply no historical evidence that they have been the result of a concerted or systematic campaign.)"

Overstating Jewish power : "If it is Israel that decides on the deployment of American force, it seems odd that the first President Bush had to order them to stay out of the coalition to free Kuwait, and it is even more odd that the first order of neocon business has not been an attack on Iran, as Israeli hawks have been urging. Mearsheimer and Walt are especially weak on this point: They speak darkly about neocon and Israeli maneuvers in respect to Tehran today, but they entirely fail to explain why the main initiative against the mullahs has come from the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Authority, two organizations where the voice of the Jewish lobby is, to say the least, distinctly muted. Their theory does nothing to explain why it was French President Jacques Chirac who took the lead in isolating the death-squad regime of Assad's Syria (a government that Mearsheimer and Walt regard, for reasons of their own, as a force for stability)."

Israel avoids victory : "As Israelis go to the polls, not one of the leading parties offers the option of winning the war against the Palestinians. It's a striking and dangerous lacuna. ... The Arabs fight to eliminate Israel, Israel fights to win the acceptance of its neighbors. The first is offensive in intent, the second is defensive. The former is barbaric, and the latter civilized."

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ELSEWHERE

High IQ Kids Have Different Brain Growth : "The brains of high IQ children show a distinct pattern of development, according to a study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. The cortex, or outer mantle of the brain, starts out thinner and thickens more rapidly in very intelligent children, say the researchers. It then peaks at around 11 or 12 years old before thinning rapidly in the late teens. This developmental pattern, rather than sheer brain size, may have more to do with intelligence said Philip Shaw, lead author of the NIH study. He said the changes are subtle and what is driving them is a mystery. The scientists discovered the association between intelligence and brain development by taking MRI scans of 307 healthy children and teenagers, aged 5-19, over 2-year intervals as they grew up.

Commemorative crosses constitute the establishment of a church??: "The Utah Attorney General's Office has asked a judge to toss out a lawsuit filed against the state over roadside crosses honoring troopers killed in the line of duty. The lawsuit was filed by the American Atheists, who say the crosses are religious symbols that violate the separation of church and state." There is NO constitutional requirement to separate church and State -- only a requirement that no particular church be "established" (State supported)

French winemakers surrender to Anglo-Saxon practices (how that must hurt!): "After failing to hold off the onslaught from New World winemakers, France is to join them in such heresies as adding wood chips and - perhaps - even watering down the wine. The Agriculture Minister has issued a plan to let vignerons compete with growers in the Antipodes and the Americas whose simple flavours and clever marketing have been winning the world's wine drinkers. "We have to make wine for consumers, not wine that producers dream of," said Bernard Pomel, author of the plan, which is likely to be adopted soon as law. France still dominates the wine trade, with 40 per cent of world production by value, but its share of the market has been dwindling for a decade. Brussels is even about to allow France to turn thousands of barrels of unsold bordeaux into vinegar.

New Canadian government shows principles: "Hamas ministers on their first day in office today pledged to continue the battle for Israel's destruction and shrugged off warnings that they were leading the Palestinian Authority into a financial and political abyss.... Canada announced that it was cutting off aid as of today, while Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said that America was reviewing its Palestinian aid programmes to see which ones it would need to freeze. "The principle is very clear. We're not going to fund a Hamas-led government, provide funding to a Hamas-led government," she said".

More pandering to the fragile self-esteem of Muslims: "Posters with the phrase "America's latest hero is a Muslim straight out of jail" has been banned from the Tube [subway] by London Underground. LU said it will not show the posters from a 1 million pound advertising campaign for new TV series "Sleeper Cell" until creators remove the word Muslim from the text. It claims it will offend people and it is trying to be sensationalist".

No homosexual marriage for Australia: "The Federal Government will legislate against any attempts by the ACT to give gay couples the same rights as married couples, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said today. Mr Ruddock said today the Government would investigate what it could do to block attempts by the ACT Labor Government to pass laws that would establish civil unions for homosexual couples. The ACT legislation would allow those in a civil union the same rights as marriage in everything but name. Under the constitution, the Commonwealth has responsibility for marriage and in 2004, with bipartisan support, the Federal Government legislated to effectively ban gay marriage. Mr Ruddock said the Commonwealth was unhappy with the ACT's attempts to work around federal laws. "Let me make it very clear, that will not satisfy the Commonwealth and we would include the introduction of legislation to prevent that from occurring," he said.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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