Smooth Stone

I once wrote a response on Smooth Stone to a European’s anti-Israel rant and typed “Don’t you ever forget that we were writing the books that shaped your nation while your ancestors were still smearing themselves with feces and running naked after game in the wilds.” It was a great comeback that I had heard from someone whom I admired many years ago and I never forgot it. When I wrote it here on Smooth Stone, I offended one Brit who was a regular Smooth Stone reader and she never returned here, seeking solace licking her wounds elsewhere, and some others attacked me for being anti-European, like there was something wrong with disliking Europeans who still yearn to see Jews ghettoed and locked up in cattle cars.

It is with great pride and giddiness that I restore my response to its original wording, this time with proper attribution to the original author, American-Jewish statesman, Judah P. Benjamin.

May 6th marks the death of Judah P. Benjamin. He was born in 1811 and died in 1884. Benjamin was the second Jew to serve in the U.S. Senate (after David Levy Yulee of Florida), representing Louisiana.

Two U.S. presidents (Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore) offered to nominate Benjamin as the first Jew to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Benjamin declined. During the Civil War, Benjamin served in the cabinet of the Confederacy — variously as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. Remarkably, he was the only Confederate cabinet member who did not own slaves. In the immediate aftermath of the war, there surfaced an unfounded rumor, tinged with anti-Semitism, that Benjamin had masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Fearing that he could never receive a fair trial, he burnt his personal papers and fled to England under a false name. Benjamin was buried in Paris.

When another senator accused Benjamin of being an “Israelite in Egyptian clothing,” he replied:

“It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain.”

So I tip my hat to my kinsman, Judah P. Benjamin, for his verve, his brilliance, for his service to my country, and for being a role model to future generations of American Jews.

The two most widely recognized symbols of Islam are the crescent and the sword. Kind of amusing that Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign logo can be seen to feature both a crescent and a curved Islamic scimitar:

The crescent shape in Obama’s logo has the round part on top, just like a traditional crescent shaped mihrab (the Mecca direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The animation shows the two most famous mihrabs in the world: the mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba , and the Prophet’s mihrab in Medina .

The lighter vertical column in the center-bottom of the logo, presumably meant to indicate reflected light, even conveys the full vertical shape of a traditional mihrab. The scimitar in the animation is from the flag of the Bosnian regiment of the Nazi SS.

If Obama himself had come up with this crescent logo, one might suspect Islamic intent, given his Islamic heritage. But the logo was not designed by Obama. It was designed by a Chicago based branding firm named Sender, which claims credit for coming up with: “a white sunrise against a blue sky, over a landscape implied by red and white stripes.”

Obama definitely deserves to be made fun of for having a fairly obvious crescent shape in his logo, given his efforts to convince the public that he is not Muslim. This is already an uphill climb, when both his grandmother and his cousin are telling documented lies about their religion, claiming to be Christian in one venue while professing themselves Muslim in another. Lying about being Christian: it’s an Obama family tradition!

Still, there is no indication that the crescent and scimitar shapes in Obama’s logo are intended to convey any Islamic meaning. A genuine coincidence apparently. At the opposite pole is the Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial:

Contrast 1: Architect Paul Murdoch CALLS his crescent shaped memorial a crescent

The Crescent of Embrace name proves that the Flight 93 crescent was and is intended to be seen as a crescent. Only very reluctantly did the Memorial Project change the name, and the changes they made to the design are purely cosmetic. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign.

Contrast 2: The Islamic symbolism is overt

It is not plausible that an architect, designing a memorial to people murdered by Islamic terrorists, could be oblivious to the fact that his memorial design is laid out in the shape of a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag, readily identifiable as a crescent and star flag to airliners like Flight 93 passing overhead.

The Memorial Project simply assumes that the Islamic symbol shapes CAN’T be intentional, which is about like seeing an airliner fly into the World Trade Center and assuming it CAN’T be intentional. Do these people even remember the day they are supposed to be memorializing?

Contrast 3: The Flight 93 crescent contains still further Islamic symbolism

It turns out that the giant crescent points to Mecca . A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is a well known structure in the Islamic world. It is a mihrab (as seen in the above animation), which gives the direction that Muslims are to face for prayer.

Everyone at the Memorial Project is fully aware that a person facing into the giant crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca . This according to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird. Again, they all just assume that this MUST be an innocent mistake (the equivalent of seeing as SECOND airliner fly into the Trade Center , and STILL assuming it can’t POSSIBLY be intentional).

Contrast 4: Proof of intent

Paul Murdoch PROVES that the Mecca orientation is intentional by repeating it in the crescents of trees that surround the minaret like Tower of Voices . Below is an animated run-through of the repeated Mecca-orientations (2 minutes).

You can restart the animation by refreshing the page:

Animated GIF: copy and paste. You can email it! (Animation restarts each time email is opened.) Click image for larger animation, if your connection is fast enough (1MB).

Crescent of Embrace site-plan, showing both the central crescent and the Tower of Voices , here.

Contrast 5: the designer’s own thematic description is clearly terrorist memorializing

The designers of Obama’s logo offer a clearly innocent thematic description of their creation. You can tell just by looking at it what it is MEANT to signify: a white sun coming up into a blue sky over red and white rows of fruited plain. Even the uncanny intimation of the vertical sides of a traditional mihrab are fully explained by the “sun” reflecting off the red and white “landscape.”

In contrast, Paul Murdoch’s thematic account of his design is as nakedly pro-terrorist as his crescent and star layout. Murdoch says that the crescent comes from the terrorists breaking the circle. That is, they broke our liberty-loving circle, and turn it into a giant Islamic-shaped Mecca-oriented crescent.

As Tom Burnett Sr. put it in his letter to American people, asking for help with our petition to keep the crescent design off of his murdered son’s gravesite:

I don’t want to celebrate the terrorist’s circle-breaking crescent-creating feat.

And lest anyone thinks that the giant crescent is no longer present, the Park Service website makes clear that, while the redesign looks more like a circle, the circle is still broken:

The circle is broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the crash site.

The breaks are in the exact same places as before and the unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) remains completely unchanged. It it still points to Mecca . It is still the world’s largest mihrab by a factor of a hundred. The only difference is that now a chunk of the broken off part of the circle is included in the design, which is perfectly consistent with its original terrorist memorializing theme. The terrorists still break our liberty-loving circle and still turn it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent.

So there you have it. Dueling crescents! Obama’s crescent logo exemplifies innocent coincidence (however guilty Obama may be of lying about his religion). In contrast, the Flight 93 crescent exemplifies proven intent. (More of architect Paul Murdoch’s endless proofs of intent here and here.)

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On a daily basis, we hear assertions from pablum-eating pro-palestinian sheep that Israel is occupying palestinian land.

This is, of course, propaganda of the first order, since there is no such thing as palestinian land. To use that phrase - palestinian land - is to promote a blatantly political anti-Israel agenda.

The excellent article below, by Lawrence Auster, lays bare the historical facts of the matter: Israel has never taken land from the palestinians, and the palestinians have no legal claim to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) or Gaza.

We urge you, whenever you see unquestioning reports of “palestinian land”, to write the editor with a request for clarification. This article will supply you with all the facts you need:

There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was “Arab” land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let’s get a few things straight:

• As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn’t take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don’t want it back.
• If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don’t want it back.
• If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don’t even exist any more, so they can’t want it back.

So, going back 800 years, there’s no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel’s title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:

• The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:
• The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader
  who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:
• The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:
• The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:
• The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of
  the entire Near East from:
• The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the
  Islamic lands from:
• The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered
  Palestine in 638 from:
• The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn’t conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:
• The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:
• The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to
  140 B.C. won control of the land from:
• The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:
• The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:
• The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:
• The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:
• The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.

As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The territories comprising all other “Arab” states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history. The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence.

There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no “Palestinian” people and no “Palestinian” claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name “Palestinian” referred to the Jews of Palestine.

The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that “aboriginalism”—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?

Back to the Arabs: I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs’ tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?

To answer that question, let’s look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we’ve discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews. Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state
had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted.

The Jews’ willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN’s partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 ( without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated ), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel’s urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel’s existence ( achieved in ‘48 ) or about its expanded sovereignty
from the river to the sea (achieved in ‘67).

The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been “stolen” from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek
Israel’s destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as “oppressors,” and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers his traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right. With gratitude to FLAME for their dedication to defending the sovereign nation of Israel.

Attorney General Jon Bruning is a great American.

“I’m not going to use taxpayer dollars to file lawsuits for illegal aliens,” said Bruning after learning that a Hispanic couple said their landlord asked for their driver’s licenses, but didn’t ask the same of non-Hispanic tenants couple.

“You’re not going to get a free lawyer” from his office, he said, “if you’re not a citizen of this country.”

Bruning, a Republican who has made no secret of his ambition for higher office, argues that the federal 1996 welfare reform law prohibits him from providing legal services to illegal immigrants. He points to a section that says only legal residents should get state or local public benefits. The law defines them to include welfare, disability and health services.

Time to re-think purchasing car insurance with Progressive. Excerpted from DiscoverTheNetworks:

Peter B. Lewis is the current Chairman (and former CEO) of the Progressive Insurance Company, which was co-founded in 1937 by his father, Joseph Lewis. According to Forbes magazine, Peter Lewis today possesses a fortune worth an estimated $1.1 billion. A strong supporter of the Democratic Party and its agendas, Lewis first became active in politics when he served as the Ohio finance chairman for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. “I did it essentially because I hated Richard Nixon,” Lewis recounts. Over the years, Lewis has used his immense wealth to fund a host of leftist political campaigns, organizations, and causes.

Lewis was born in 1933 and graduated from Princeton University in 1955. A decade later, he took the reins of Progressive Insurance. Overseeing 100 employees and $6 million in revenues when he began, Lewis eventually grew the company to the point where it employed 14,000 people and boasted sales in excess of $4.8 billion annually. Progressive is now the third largest auto insurance company in the U.S.

Lewis is particularly interested in promoting the legalization of marijuana. In 1998 he was a signatory to a public letter addressed to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, declaring that “the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.”

Between 1991 and 2003, Lewis contributed $5 million to the American Civil Liberties Union’s drug-policy litigation project, which challenges current laws dealing with drug testing in schools and the medicinal use of marijuana. He also made large donations to drug-legalization initiatives in Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Utah, Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts.

According to the anti-drug group, National Families in Action, Lewis has “contributed heavily to the destruction of thousands of America’s children” by promoting the notion that marijuana possesses medicinal benefits and by telling youngsters that “pot is OK.”

In 1999, Hoover’s Handbook of American Business described Lewis in print as “a functioning pot-head.” In 2000, Lewis was arrested after customs agents found 1.7 ounces of marijuana and two ounces of hashish in his luggage at an airport in New Zealand. The charges were dropped when the billionaire, who said he was carrying the drugs for “medicinal purposes,” agreed to make a donation to a drug-rehabilitation center.

The reclusive Lewis does not grant interviews to the press and is rarely photographed. According to a Jane Mayer article in the New Yorker, Lewis “spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party … while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty foot yacht, Lone Ranger.”

During the 2004 election cycle, Lewis was the second leading donor to the non-party organizations known as “527s” — named after a section of the U.S. tax code that permitted unlimited “soft money” donations to groups pledging to use the funds not for the “express advocacy” of any particular political candidate, but rather for “voter education,” “issue-oriented” political advertising, and other nebulous enterprises. Lewis donated nearly $23 million to such organizations in 2004, including $16 million to the Joint Victory Campaign, $2.9 million to America Coming Together, and $2.5 million to Move On.Org.

In 2004 Lewis estimated that he had thus far given away some $250 million during his lifetime, nearly half of it ($117 million) to his alma mater, Princeton University.

Along with George Soros, Lewis is a key financial supporter of Democracy Alliance and Media Matters for America.

Lewis retired as the CEO of Progressive Insurance in 2000, but he remains the company’s Chairman of the Board.

In February 2008, Lewis contributed money to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. He is also a close friend of Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy.

Lewis’ home in Coconut Grove, Florida is decorated with numerous Andy Warhol paintings of the late Communist dictator Mao Zedong.

George Soros funded MoveOn.org that created the ad which directly compared George W. Bush to Hitler and this nation’s policies with the Third Reich. George Soros loves to fund leftwing causes and groups. He supported the now convicted lawyer, Lynn Stewart, who aided Muslim terrorists. George Soros funds groups who oppose George Bush. He created the Open Society Policy Center, an organization that would obstruct U.S. law enforcement from prosecuting the “War on Extremism” and that would also direct illegal aliens into America’s medical systems.

Somebody needs to give these leftwing rats a muzzle.

Listen now to the latest exclusive One Jerusalem Bloggers Conference Call with Caroline Glick, world journalist, policy-analyst and author of, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad.

Caroline raises important points about the future of Israel, the centrality of Jerusalem, Barak Obama’s anti-Israel advisers, Israel’s penchant for self-destruction, and what American supporters of Israel can do. As a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and many other publications, Glick has earned the respect and readership of leaders and thinkers worldwide.

In a wide-ranging interview, Caroline articulates a perceptive take on the Middle East and beyond.

Start streaming the audio, and understand why so many people are buying and reading Shackled Warrior.

Order the book from Amazon, or if sold out, get it direct from the publisher.

Kudos to JewishWorldReview’s Jonathan Mark for illuminating yet another of Barack Hussein Obama’s relationship with radical Muslim anti-Zionists, a subject that Obamaniacs in this country don’t want to discuss, mainly because they don’t want to acknowledge that they are part of the American Left which has been trying to strip this country of its Judeo-Christian heritage for the last half-century. Jonathan Mark writes:

The Los Angeles Times devoted a lengthy front-page story (April 10) by Peter Wallsten headlined, “Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama. They consider him receptive despite his clear support of Israel.” The story was not picked up by any other American paper. It is rather unusual for a major daily to think a story worthy of front-page coverage and no other paper to share that assessment.

The story focused on Obama’s time as an Illinois state legislator, just five years ago, when he was friends, if not allied, with Rashid Khalidi, the vocal anti-Zionist professor at Columbia University who at the time was living in Obama’s Chicago district; Edward Said, the late anti-Zionist professor and member of the Palestinian Authority legislature; and Ali Abunimah, a resident of Obama’s district and editor of the Electronic Intifada online journal.

Wallsten writes, the Obama-Khalidi relationship “have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.”

They base that belief on his presence at “events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed,” not unlike those who wonder about Obama’s truest self after his relationship with Wright and his anger.

“I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow for the American Task Force on Palestine, to Wallsten.

The foreign minister of Hamas has recently endorsed Obama for president, another story that has sunk like a stone, barely reported other than by Fox and a popular right-wing website, even though Sen. John McCain brought it up on the campaign trail.

In 1998, reports Wallsten, Obama attended a speech by Edward Said in which Said called for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.” Later, Obama and his wife were photographed at dinner with Said. “If only Obama could burn this picture,” writes Al Ahram, but the Cairo paper printed the picture anyway.

Abraham Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League, told the Los Angeles Times, “In the context of [Obama] spending 20 years in a church” where anti-Israel rhetoric was repeated, “that’s what makes his presence at an Arab-American event with a Said a greater concern.”

Wallsten reports that Abunimah of Electronic Intifada said he heard Obama call for an “even-handed approach” toward Israel. In 2004, when Obama was running for the Senate, Abunimah quoted Obama as saying that he was sorry he wasn’t talking more about the Palestinian cause, but that his primary campaign had constrained what he could say. (Obama told Jewish leaders in Cleveland recently that a pro-Israel position is not necessarily a pro-Likud one.)

And yet Wallsten’s story of Obama’s Palestinian-American support received almost no coverage beyond that. It was reprinted on a Fox TV Web site in Seattle and was mentioned in the Jordan Times.

Obama has not been asked about it in the debates, and in meetings with Jewish communities in Cleveland and Philadelphia, where he has been asked repeatedly about Wright’s relationship with Louis Farrakhan but not about his own relationship with Electronic Intifada.

(Obama’s Palestinian-American friendships have been reported in The Jewish Week on several occasions, the first time in 2007)

For more on historical revisionism regurgitated by Rashid Khalidi, see this.

For more on the dead Edward Said, see this.

For more on the fiercely hostile Ali Abunimah, see this.

Let’s see what the islamapologists come up with now to defend palestinian murderers killing a 70 year old woman. From Palestinian Rocket Kills Israeli Woman:

Shuli Katz, 70, of Kibbutz Gvaram, was killed Monday by a Palestinian Kassam rocket while she was visiting Moshav Yesha, 15 km. east of Gaza near the Negev town of Ofakim.

In a related item, Israel Asks UN Security Council to Condemn Palestinian Rocket Attacks:

Israel’s UN mission submitted a complaint Monday to the Security Council over Kassam attacks from Gaza, hours after Shuli Katz was killed by a Palestinian rocket. Israel asked the UN to condemn Palestinian terror as well as those countries providing assistance to terror organizations. It is the second such complaint filed by Israel in as many days.

From Olmert: No Gaza Truce If Israeli Soldier Is Not Released:

Israel will not agree to an Egyptian proposal for a truce in Gaza unless it includes the issue of arms smuggling and the release of abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told visiting Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman on Monday. “Hamas must not only halt its attacks but also the arms smuggling that has allowed the group to turn itself from a ragtag militia into a well-armed force,” Israeli officials told Suleiman.

Spilt milk, Mohammed. From Former Arab Warlord Ready for Coexistence with Israel:

As a leading figure in Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, Mohammed Ghawanmeh, 52, of Jalazone spent most of his working life in and out of Israeli prisons. “But since I was released from prison (in 2000), I have looked away from the past. There is no other option but to form peace with Israel and get on with building a state.” “We are not going back [to homes in Israel] and we know it,” he says. “If they offered anything like what Barak, Arafat and Clinton talked about in 2000, we should absolutely, positively take it, no questions asked,” he says.