The choice before the Cambridge Debating Society was whether one should choose war to stop Iran from going nuclear, or simply accept a nuclear Iran.  Douglas Murray offers a devastating rebuttal to those who say, “Who cares if Iran goes nuclear?”  The 11 minute video starts out good and, halfway through, gets great:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hat tip:  Seraphic Secret

As a companion piece, please watch a different video that Robert Avrech posted about challenging Muslim ideology vis a vis the Jews and Israel.

American universities pay lip service to multiculturalism and inclusiveness, but one of their despicable secrets is that, while conservative and Jewish speakers are ignored or shouted down with no push-back whatsoever from the university administrations, pro-Palestinian speakers are given a bully pulpit.  The worse their rhetoric — the more anti-inflammatory and antisemitic — the more aggressively the university administrations go the mat for them to defend their right to free speech.  One of the best and most diligent chroniclers of this trend is Bruce Kesler, who blogs at Maggie’s Farm.

Kesler has now turned the spotlight on Cal State University, Northridge, where David Klein, a math professor has a university sanctioned webpage devoted, not to math, but to demonizing Israel in terms that would have made Goebbels, Eichmann, and the whole gang proud.  The good professor, you see, is exercising his “right to free speech.”

Back in the day, I naively understood professorial free speech to mean that, within the context of teaching the subject matter for which he was hired, a professor could not be coerced into limiting his teaching to state/employer mandated doctrine.  To do so would destroy an academic institution’s ability to introduce students to new ideas and new ways of thinking.  Foolish me.  I didn’t understand that academic free speech means that tax payer funded universities are open forums for one thing and one thing only:  the most radical Left ideology on any subject known to man.

Would anyone care to explain to Mr. Bookworm the difference between an extremist sect breaking its country’s laws by discriminating against women, and a country that has as an integral part of its law and culture murderous attacks on women, “witches,” children and gays?

He professes to be bewildered.

There is a tendency to imagine politics as a straight line, going from Left to Right, or statist to individualist.  I think, though, that it would be more accurate to imagine it as a curve, with the two ends sometimes straining to meet each other.  Ron Paul’s libertarianism, which includes a Truther strain, deep hostility to Israel and Jews, support for Cynthia McKinney, and a healthy dollop of paranoia, is closer in tone to the far Left than it is to the Republican Party with which he’s allied himself.

There’s no doubt but that Ron Paul has good ideas.  Up to a certain point, his libertarianism is appealing, insofar as he talks about small government and greater individual freedom.  And then he veers into crazy land, and ends up sounding exactly like Van Jones or some other paranoid anti-American guy on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Nevertheless, crazy or not, he’s got fans in Iowa.  Before Paul starts congratulating himself on his compelling message and amazing traction, he might want to look at Iowa’s political legacy, which goes back to a radical Progressive who held views remarkably similar to those that Paul spouts now.  In other words, when it comes to Iowa, this ground’s already been fertilized.

UPDATE:  For a more detailed analysis about the myriad problems with Ron Paul, check out this Dorothy Rabinowitz article (which may or may not be behind a pay wall).  As I’ve said, Paul has some good ideas about small government and they shouldn’t be discounted.  Those ideas, however, are inextricably intertwined with an often amoral world view that must be considered in discounting Paul as a serious candidate.

Another powerful Danny Ayalon video.  Watch it, then, please, please, please share it with people.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Or view it here if it doesn’t load on my webpage.)

Incidentally, will it make you feel better to know that Danny Ayalon, reciting just the facts set forth in the above video, is causing some embarrassment for the UN, which is incapable of addressing the charges?  It certainly made me feel better.

Question:  I just wanted to ask a question about comments that were made by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Daniel Ayalon, before the Human Rights High Commissioner for Refugees’ ministerial event in Geneva last week.  He basically said that the cause of the Palestinian refugee issue was not so much the dispossession of the majority of Palestinians from their homeland by Jewish militias during the 1948 war and refusal of Israel to enable their right to return under resolution 194.  He said rather that it was the establishment of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] which has perpetuated the refugee status by applying unique criteria to it.  And I just wonder whether either the Secretary-General or UNRWA has made any response to this statement.

Associate Spokesperson:  No.  We don’t go into the lengthy history of how the refugee crisis started.  As you know, the historians may have differing interpretations of what brought on the refugee crisis.  UNRWA, it should be stressed, was established in response to the refugee crisis.  And, as you know, the presence of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency throughout the region is designed to deal with the number, the very large number of Palestinian refugees throughout the region.  If the situation can be resolved and the situation of the Palestinian refugees can be addressed fairly, then UNRWA’s work will have been done, but at this stage, we are not there.  It has a lot of work in a lot of countries with, as you know, tens of thousands of people.

Question:  Excuse me, is there no response to the statement by [Deputy] Foreign Minister Ayalon that UNRWA is perpetuating the status of the refugees?

Associate Spokesperson:  I wouldn’t react to specific comments.  Over the years people have disagreed and have had their own interpretations of…

Question:  This is not just a personal comment, this is on the Israeli Government official website, his statement is made.  And he is a minister in the Israeli Government.

Associate Spokesperson:  Like I said to you just a second ago, the creation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was in response to the refugee crisis.  It is there to handle the situation, the very large situation of refugees across the region that had erupted.  And its existence over the decades is testament to the fact that, throughout this time, the situation of the Palestinian refugees remains to be resolved.  Yes?

Hat tip:  Sadie

“Facts are stubborn things.”  — John Adams.

“Ideologues are even more stubborn than facts.”  — Bookworm

A few nights ago, Mr. Bookworm watched the movie Shattered Glass with the children.  It’s a fairly good retelling of the way in which Stephen Glass, a young feature writer at The New Republic, wrote a series of fraudulent articles.  I was a TNR subscriber at the time, and I vividly remember what might have been his most famous article, the one describing orgies of sex, drink and drugs at a young conservative convention.  The article was a perfect fraud because it so deftly fed into liberal prejudice about conservatives:  there was no way, we liberals thought, that conservatives could actually live up to the standards they sought to impose upon ordinary Americans.  Because we didn’t believe in those lifestyle values, we assumed that young conservatives were hypocrites — and Thank God for true journalists like Stephen Glass who were out there exposing this hypocrisy to the world.  Except, of course, for the fact that every word Glass wrote was a lie.

At the end of Shattered Glass, the movie informs the viewer that Glass went to law school and is working as a paralegal.  (I won’t even try to figure out why a highly respectable law school such as Georgetown would allot one of the valuable spaces in its freshman class to a conscienceless con man.)

My children were perplexed.  “A lawyer?  Why a lawyer?”  Mr. Bookworm knew the answer:  “Because lawyers lie.  That’s their job.  The better the liar, the more money they make.”

As a lawyer whose lies have never gone beyond social white lies (“That dress is lovely!” “I’m so sorry, but I’m already booked that night.”), I took umbrage at that statement.  “Good lawyers never lie!  They simply advocate.  I take the facts and put them together in a coherent, honest narrative that ties in with applicable law.  If my client has no case, I say so.  My integrity, and the integrity of my friends and colleagues, demands no less.  I’ve known lying lawyers, but they’re bottom feeders and viewed with disdain by decent practitioners.”

The fine line between advocacy and lying was a struggle for the children.  Imagine a car accident, I said.  A car traveling in excess of the speed limit passed through an intersection, and shortly thereafter struck a pedestrian.  If there was a subsequent lawsuit, there would be two ways to describe that car’s journey through the intersection.  If I represented the car’s driver at trial, I would never say anything other than that he “drove” through the intersection.  This would be a completely correct statement.  I would be implying, of course, that the defendant’s speed wasn’t so excessive that it could lead to an accident.  In the same trial, the attorney for the pedestrian would invariably say that the defendant “sped” or “raced” through the intersection, implying that he was out of control by the time he hit the pedestrian.  Again, since I’ve posited a speed above the speed limit (although I haven’t said by how much, whether two miles above or twenty miles above), that too is a truthful statement.  Both lawyers are being completely truthful, but both approaches are spin aimed at persuading an audience (the jury) to reach one of two antithetical conclusions.

I think the kids understand me.  Mr. Bookworm — well, I’m not so sure.  He is, after all, a man of the Left, and if there’s one thing a lifetime on the Left has taught me, it that my blog’s motto is accurate:  “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.”  To the Left, fact and spin are indistinguishable.  Truth isn’t a construct based upon irrefutable and stubborn facts.  Instead, truth is an ideological conclusion, sustained by whatever means necessary.

Interestingly, the day after I had this instructive conversation with the kids, the blogosphere was suddenly saturated with stories of stubborn ideologues, relentlessly intertwining conclusions and facts.  Unfortunately for public discourse, these ideologues are journalists.

The most well-known post is Mark Hemingway’s Lies, Damned Lies, and “Fact Checking.  In it, Hemingway takes aim at the proliferation of “fact checking” articles from major media outlets.

Fact checking can be useful, of course.  Going back to my car example above, the speed at which the driver traveled is a fact.  If he was going twenty miles above the limit, but his advocate claims he was only going two miles above the limit, that claim is a lie and a fact checker should call him on it.  In the world of liberal fact checking, however, the fact checkers confuse their spin (i.e., the advocacy of their ideology) for objective facts.  They would be challenging the lawyer they’re hostile to over his honest, albeit emotionally loaded, word choice (e.g., “drove” versus “sped”).

Here’s Hemingway’s conclusion, one he reaches after offering several egregious examples of the way Leftists confuse ideological “truth” with facts:

While it was always difficult in practice, once upon a time journalists at least paid obeisance to the idea of reporting the facts, as opposed to commenting on “narratives”​—​let alone being responsible for creating and debunking them.

But today’s fact checkers are largely uninterested in emphasizing the primacy of information. Accordingly, this is what happens when the media talk about fact checking: The Washington Post pats the AP on the back for questioning the veracity of a media-created narrative ex post facto, then cites a brazenly partisan blogger as proof that the effort to smack it down was successful.

What’s going on here should be obvious enough. With the rise of cable news and the Internet, traditional media institutions are increasingly unable to control what political rhetoric and which narratives catch fire with the public. Media fact-checking operations aren’t about checking facts so much as they are about a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths out of the conversation.

Hemingway deservedly got attention for this brilliant deconstruction of ideological advancement dressed up as fact-checking, but he wasn’t the only one.  At the same time,  James Taranto caught the AP “fact checking” Newt’s debate promise that he will move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  The AP says that this “fact” — one that most of us would see as a promise of future action — is “false” because other presidential candidates have made the same promise to no effect.  Taranto understands what’s going on, and it’s not that Newt was lying:

To be sure, some things about the future are known with sufficient certainty that they are indistinguishable from facts. If Gingrich claimed to be immortal, the AP would be justified in running a “fact check” refutation even if it was not also an obituary. Likewise if he said tomorrow’s sunrise would occur at 3 p.m. on the East Coast, we could be sure he was wrong.

But the idea that Gingrich’s pledge is contrary to fact because other politicians have failed to keep the same promise is beyond ludicrous. Did the AP in 2008 run a “fact check” rebutting Barack Obama’s promise to enact “heath-care reform” because so many previous presidents have futilely attempted to do so?

[snip]

It would not have been hard to recast this story to make it journalistically sound, though it would have entailed a bit more work. Gearan could have begun by reporting the Gingrich promise, then put it in historical context by noting the record of other presidents. The arguments for why such a move is a bad idea could have been aired, too–not in Gearan’s own voice, but by interviewing diplomats or scholars who think it’s a bad idea. It might also have been worthwhile to seek a follow-up interview with Gingrich or a spokesman to ask why voters should expect him to keep this promise when past presidents haven’t.

Instead, the AP published what is essentially an opinion piece, and a rather lazy one at that. If we may borrow Gingrich’s favorite word, to label that a “fact check”–as if it had some greater authority than actual reporting–is fundamentally dishonest.

Taranto is correct that, if one actually cares about objective, verifiable facts, AP’s conduct was “fundamentally dishonest.”  I wonder, though, if he makes the mistakes of thinking that liberals actually care.  (I suspect that Taranto is to savvy to make this thinking error.)  To liberals, the only truth is ideology, and if one cares about ideological truth, “facts” are merely tools to be manipulated.

I am not about to call the AP or American journalists Nazis, because they’re not, but I can’t help but be struck by the way the parallelism between their belief that ultimate, ideological truth trumps verifiable fact, on the one hand, and Goebbels’ understanding of the propaganda necessary to bring German citizens to Naziism, on the other hand:

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result.  It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

Or, as he more famously said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Given that too many American journalists (both as individuals and as institutions) seem comfortably wedded to a Goebbel-esque view of truth, is it any surprise that they rate so low in the public’s estimation when it comes to assessing their ethics and honesty?  While poll results show that they still rank above lawyers, lobbyists, politicians and used car salesmen, the margin is awfully small.

(As an aside, looking at that “ethics by profession” chart to which I just linked, is it any surprise that the military ranks so high?  It isn’t to me.  For years, we’ve watched our military put itself on the front line to defend America, both her people and her ethos.  We know that when our troops take that oath — a serious oath that America’s First Sergeant analyzes beautifully here — they mean it.  They say it, they mean it, they do it.)

As I mentioned above, journalists do manage to cling to an honesty position slightly above that held by politicians.  That’s not a surprise either.  After all, Eric Holder, who is both a lawyer and a politician, managed to state perfectly the Leftist (and, incidentally, the narcissist) approach to truth and lying:

Still unsatisfied, Sensenbrenner followed up again. “Tell me what the difference is between lying and misleading Congress in this context?,” he asked Holder.

Holder responded that whether a statement is a lie or misleading comment depends on what the person making it is thinking at the time.

“If you want to have this legal conversation, it all has to do with your state of mind, and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that can be considered perjury or a lie,” Holder said.

I know that what Holder meant to say is that ones ability to tell the truth is necessarily going to be limited by the universe of factual information available. If my boss has kept me sequestered from his side job as a drug dealer, I am telling the truth when I testify that he doesn’t deal drugs. However, Holder’s phrasing, which focuses on the speaker’s intent, rather than his fund of knowledge, manages to be the perfect Leftist/narcissist paradigm: truth is what you need to say at the moment.

Holder’s not the only lying politician.  I’ve repeatedly document at this blog Obama’s Leftist/narcissist approach to the truth.  (See here, here, here, here and here, for example.)  Three years into Obama’s presidency, more and more people are catching on to Obama’s distant relationship to stubborn facts.  Indeed, an audience member at a well-attended military briefing (upwards of 200 people), told me that a civilian who attended the briefing interrupted the speaker to say, “C’mon, don’t give me the Barack Obama answer, give me the real answer.”  The room’s response was telling:  silence, followed by titters.  No anger, no hissing, no booing.  Admittedly, given Obama’s approach to the military, it’s not surprising that a military venue wouldn’t take umbrage at this statement, but it is nevertheless impressive that Obama’s very name is becoming synonymous with lies.

Obama, of course, didn’t help his case with his recent Osawatomie speech, which was a truly magnificent example of ignorance, ideological spin, and blatant factual dishonesty.  Needless to say, the media didn’t fact-check the speech, since it advanced their ideology.  The fact that it was ideologically true satisfied the media, despite the egregiously wrong objective facts.

I’ll wrap this post up with two more points, one about a really big lie and one about a surprising truth.

The big lie:  climate change.  I’m not sure I need to say more.  We now know from a huge onrush of facts — actual, objective facts, such as the Climategate emails — that those advancing AGW have been systematically fudging data, omitting data, asserting falsehoods, substituting beliefs for facts, and stifling dissenting voices.  (Only today, Charlie Martin notes that our own DOJ is doing things that might be construed as stifling dissent, but he hastens to add — with a rigid adherence to truth — that the facts are currently too unclear to make that conclusion.)  Indeed, the whole environmental movement, not just the AGW side of it, has abandoned itself to an orgy of ideology, one that sees scientists, who should have a rigid adherence to scientific truth based upon verifiable data, happily abandoning data in favor of ideology.  (This post offers a two-fer, with both a corrupt scientist and a corrupt attorney.)

And here’s the surprising truth:  Newt’s courageous willingness to state that the Palestinians are an “invented” people.

Discussing the origin of the state of Israel in the 1940s, Mr. Gingrich said: “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.”

On objective facts, Newt is completely, absolutely right.  That the Palestinians have since coalesced into a coherent group identity separate from other Arabs is true too, but it doesn’t erase the truth of Newt’s statement.  Newt’s statement matters because understanding the truth behind Palestinian identity makes it clear that it is Goebbel-esque propaganda about the Palestinian’s imaginary past that places the Israelis in an unflattering, and dishonest, light, as apartheid colonialist land-grabbers:

One might ask why this should matter: Regardless of when either Jews or Palestinians arrived, millions of both live east of the Jordan River​ today, and that’s the reality policymakers must deal with. But in truth, it matters greatly – because Western support for Palestinian negotiating positions stems largely from the widespread view that Palestinians are an indigenous people whose land was stolen by Western (Jewish) interlopers.

Current demographic realities would probably suffice to convince most Westerners that a Palestinian state should exist. But the same can’t be said of Western insistence that its border must be the 1967 lines, with adjustments possible only via one-to-one territorial swaps and only if the Palestinians consent. Indeed, just 44 years ago, UN Resolution 242 was carefully crafted to reflect a Western consensus that the 1967 lines shouldn’t be the permanent border. So what changed?

The answer lies in the phrase routinely used to describe the West Bank and Gaza today, but which almost nobody used back in 1967, when Israel captured these areas from Jordan and Egypt, respectively: “occupied Palestinian territory.” This phrase implies that the land belongs to the Palestinians and always has. And if so, why shouldn’t Israel be required to give back every last inch?

But if the land hasn’t belonged to the Palestinians “from time immemorial” – if instead, both Palestinians and Jews comprise small indigenous populations augmented by massive immigration in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, with the West Bank and Gaza becoming fully Judenrein only after Jordan and Egypt occupied them in 1948 – then there’s no inherent reason why the border must necessarily be in one place rather than another. To create two states, a border must be drawn somewhere, but that “somewhere” should depend only on the parties’ current needs – just as the drafters of Resolution 242 envisioned.

Newt’s willingness to state truths is one of the more attractive things about his candidacy.  He can be unfiltered, which is worrisome, but that unfiltered quality is what allows him to trample over established Leftist political orthodoxies, and make statements that cut through the cognitive dissonance that affects anybody who lives in a world dominated by a statist media.  I hope that, whether Newt makes it to the White House or not, he sticks with this honesty.

Right now, Newt’s refreshing factual honesty makes me think of the first half of the I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy, in inveterate liar, makes a bet that she can tell the truth for 24 hours.  One of the funniest scenes in TV history has Lucy sitting down for a bridge game with three of her friends and abandoning all her social lies in favor of the truth, as she sees it, about their clothes, their children, their decor, and their personalities.  (Sadly, I can’t find a clip of that on the internet.)  In a lesson Newt would do well to heed, when Lucy gets the chance to achieve her heart’s desire — a show business gig — truth goes out the window, landing her in a hair-raising, but naturally quite funny, situation.

There’s nothing new about lying.  It comes with our lizard brains and can serve a very useful purpose, whether one is a spy, a prisoner of war, or a husband whose wife asks “Does this dress make me look fat?”  However, in the world of politics and journalism, lies have vast and significant consequences for nations.  When those who need to tell the truth routinely lie, not just to save face, but to advance underlying, and often disguised, ideological goals, we as a nation are in great danger.  Thankfully, we have an alternative media now that helps suss out the truth, but it only benefits those who willingly pay attention.

Others have said it, but I like best the way Evelyn Gordon said it.  After confirming the historic accuracy of Newt’s claim (namely, that Arabs moved into the land at the end of the 19th century, rather than having lived there since time immemorial), Gordon goes on:

One might ask why this should matter: Regardless of when either Jews or Palestinians arrived, millions of both live east of the Jordan River​ today, and that’s the reality policymakers must deal with. But in truth, it matters greatly – because Western support for Palestinian negotiating positions stems largely from the widespread view that Palestinians are an indigenous people whose land was stolen by Western (Jewish) interlopers.

Current demographic realities would probably suffice to convince most Westerners that a Palestinian state should exist. But the same can’t be said of Western insistence that its border must be the 1967 lines, with adjustments possible only via one-to-one territorial swaps and only if the Palestinians consent. Indeed, just 44 years ago, UN Resolution 242 was carefully crafted to reflect a Western consensus that the 1967 lines shouldn’t be the permanent border. So what changed?

The answer lies in the phrase routinely used to describe the West Bank and Gaza today, but which almost nobody used back in 1967, when Israel captured these areas from Jordan and Egypt, respectively: “occupied Palestinian territory.” This phrase implies that the land belongs to the Palestinians and always has. And if so, why shouldn’t Israel be required to give back every last inch?

But if the land hasn’t belonged to the Palestinians “from time immemorial” – if instead, both Palestinians and Jews comprise small indigenous populations augmented by massive immigration in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, with the West Bank and Gaza becoming fully Judenrein only after Jordan and Egypt occupied them in 1948 – then there’s no inherent reason why the border must necessarily be in one place rather than another. To create two states, a border must be drawn somewhere, but that “somewhere” should depend only on the parties’ current needs – just as the drafters of Resolution 242 envisioned.

Read the rest here.

I’ve never doubted Obama’s fundamental anti-Israel beliefs, nor have I ever thought he’s on a right, or even a sane, track in the Middle East. As much as anything, though, my feelings regarding Obama’s Israel/Middle East attitudes were predicated on a gut attitude resulting from his pre-presidency friendships and his execrable Cairo speech. Now, though, after almost three years of his presidency, the evidence is in, and Barry Rubin explains that my instincts (and yours too) are born out by the facts:

In a major address on U S. Middle East policy to the Brookings Institution, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave us a clear picture of the Obama Administration’s view of the region. When taken along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on the same subject, we now know the following regarding Obama’s policy:

It is dangerously and absurdly wrong. This administration totally and completely, dangerously and disastrously for U.S. interests misunderstand the Middle East. They are 180 degrees off course, that is heading in the opposite direction of safety.

Despite the satisfactory state of relations on a purely military level, the Obama Administration is not a friend of Israel, even to the extent that it was arguably so in the first two years of this presidency.

It is now an enemy; it is on the other side.  Again, the issue is not mainly bilateral relations but the administration’s help and encouragement to those forces that are Israel’s biggest enemies, that want to rekindle war, and that are 100 percent against a two-state solution. And I don’t mean the Palestinian Authority, I mean the Islamists.

And the Obama Administration is also a strategic enemy of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan. It is also a strategic enemy to the democratic opposition forces in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Having analyzed and studied the Middle East for almost four decades I say none of this lightly. And these conclusions arise simply from watching what the administration says and does.

Read the rest here.

Ignore the fact that the Qur’an is drenched in Jew hated.  Ignore the fact that, since Islam came into being, it has alternately treated Jews as second class citizens or actively tried to slaughter them.  If you can ignore those realities, you too can be an American ambassador in the Obama administration.  You get bonus points if you’re a self-loathing, Leftist Jew who holds the job.  With those credentials, it is possible to say with a perfectly straight face that world-wide Muslim antisemitism is — yes, wait for it . . . the Jews’ fault!

Growing global anti-Semitism is linked to Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, [Howard Gutman] the American ambassador to Belgium told stunned Jewish conference attendants in Brussels earlier this week.

[snip]

A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Gutman said. He also argued that an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism.

Fortunately, the speaker who came on immediately after Gutman’s statement (and please note that Gutman ran away for an “appointment” immediately after dropping this antisemitic bombshell) did not feel that politeness constrained him from speaking the truth:

[T]he next speaker offered a scathing rebuttal to the envoy’s remarks.

“The modern Anti-Semite formally condemns Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and expresses upmost sympathy with the Jewish people. He simply has created a new species, the “Anti-Zionist” or – even more sophisticated – the so-called ‘Israel critic,’” Germany attorney Nathan Gelbart said.

“The ‘Israel critic’ will never state ‘Jews go home’ but is questioning the legality of the incorporation of the State of Israel and therefore the right for the Jewish people to settle in their homeland. He will not say the Jews are the evil of the world but claim that the State of Israel is a major cause for instability and war in the region,” he said. “There is no other country, no other people on this planet the ‘Israel critic’ would dedicate so much time and devotion as to the case of Israel.”

“For no other country he would criticize or ask to boycott its goods or academics. And this for one simple reason: Because Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not more and not less,” Gelbart said.

Despite his actions, his words, and the words of his agents, Obama still has the audacity to boast about his pro-Israel credentials:

Though Barack Obama has been picking fights with the government of the State of Israel since his first day in office, the flip side of that relationship is his desperate desire to convince American Jews he’s the Jewish state’s best friend. That’s been an even tougher sell in the last year, and polls have consistently shown Obama’s support among American Jews declining. But at a fundraiser last night at the home of Jack Rosen, president of the largely defunct American Jewish Congress, Obama was tooting his own horn again, in a way that reflects not only his political agenda but his well-known high opinion of himself:

And as Jack alluded to, this administration — I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration. And that’s not just our opinion, that’s the opinion of the Israeli government. Whether it’s making sure that our intelligence cooperation is effective, to making sure that we’re able to construct something like an Iron Dome so that we don’t have missiles raining down on Tel Aviv, we have been consistent in insisting that we don’t compromise when it comes to Israel’s security. And that’s not just something I say privately, that’s something that I said in the U.N. General Assembly. And that will continue.

American Jews have shown themselves remarkably faithful in their love affair with Democrats, despite the fact that this recent administration has been the spousal equivalent of a wife beater. Let’s hope that evidence such as Gutman’s remarks — made in antisemitic Belgium of all places — will help more Jews figure out that they’re in an abusive relationship and decide to get the Hell out of it. The true Lefties amongst the Jews will never leave, but maybe the others, the “I vote Democrat because Republicans are antisemites” will start heading for the battered Democratic Jews’ shelter (aka, the Republican Party).

There’s just something awesome…a je ne sais quoi..about Israeli humor in the face of adversity.

For all you Dylan fans….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nbA0h0WfA4U

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Ka-nife?