Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

This Post could also be described as Israel Vs. New World Order
Internationalism is a huge threat.
I realize that the concept of the NWO has been framed by many people who hate Jews.... but the reality is that Israel is the biggest threat to a world government

Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
http://www.meforum.org/pipes/8771/immanuel-kant-vs-israel
As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their way of life. If democracy, free markets, and the rule of law have created an unprecedented stability, affluence, and decency; how come so many beneficiaries, fail to see this?
Why, for example, does the United States, which has so much for human welfare, inspire such hostility? And tiny Israel, the symbol of rejuvenation for a perpetually oppressed people – why does it engender such passionate hatred that otherwise decent people desire to eliminate this state?

Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem offers an explanation for this antagonism in a profound and implication-rich essay, "Israel Through European Eyes."
He begins with the notion of "paradigm shift" developed by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This influential concept holds that scientists see their subject from within a specific framework, a "paradigm." Paradigms are frameworks that underpin an understanding of reality. Facts that do not fit the paradigm are overlooked or dismissed. Kuhn reviews the history of science and shows how, in a series of scientific revolutions, paradigms shifted, as from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.
Paradigms also frame politics and Hazony applies this theory to Israel's delegitimization in the West. Israel's standing has deteriorated for decades, he argues, "not because of this or that set of facts, but because the paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has shifted." Responding to the vilification of Israel by offering corrective facts – about Israel's military morality or its medical breakthroughs – "won't have any real impact on the overall trajectory of Israel's standing among educated people in the West." Instead, the latest paradigm must be recognized and fought.
The fading paradigm sees nation-states as legitimate and positive, a means of protecting peoples and allowing them to flourish. The treaty of Westphalia (1648) was the key moment in which the sovereignty of nations was recognized. John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson endowed the nation-state ideal with global reach.
That paradigm, however, "has pretty much collapsed," Hazony asserts. The nation-state no longer appeals; many intellectuals and political figures in Europe see it "as a source of incalculable evil," a view that is fast spreading.
Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, lived 1724-1804.
The new paradigm, based ultimately on Immanuel Kant's 1795 treatise Perpetual Peace, advocates the abolition of nation-states and the establishment of international government. Supra-national institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union represent its ideals and models.
Jews and the Holocaust play a strangely central role in the paradigm shift from nation-state to multinational state. The millennial persecution of Jews, culminating in the Nazi genocide, endowed Israel with special purpose and legitimacy according to the old paradigm. From the perspective of the new paradigm, however, the Holocaust represents the excesses of a nation-state, the German one, gone mad.
Under the old nation-state paradigm, the lesson of Auschwitz was "Never again," meaning that a strong Israel was needed to protect Jews. The new paradigm leads to a very different "Never again," one which insists that no government should have the means potentially to replicate the Nazi outrages. According to it, Israel isn't the answer to Auschwitz. The European Union is. That the old-style "Never again" inspires Israelis to pursue the Western world's most unabashed policy of self-defense makes their actions particularly appalling to New Paradigmers.
Need one point out the error of ascribing Nazi outrages to the nation-state? The Nazis wanted to eliminate nation-states. No less than Kant, they dreamed of a universal state,. New Paradigmers mangle history.
Israelis themselves are not immune to the new paradigm, as the case of Avraham Burg suggests. A former speaker of Israel's parliament and candidate for prime minister, he switched paradigms and wrote a book on the legacy of the Holocaust that compares Israel to Nazi Germany. He now wants Israelis to give up on Israel as defender of the Jewish people. No one, Burg's sad example suggests, is immune from the new paradigm disease.
Hazony's essay does not offer policy responses but in a letter to me he sketched three areas to address: building awareness of the new paradigm's existence, finding anomalies to invalidate it, and revitalizing the old paradigm by bringing it up to date.
His insights are profound and his counsel timely.
Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Aug. 17, 2010 update: (1) I have gnawed away at the mystery of the Left over the past decade, writing on such varied topics as structural differences between the United States and Europe, poor Atlantic relations, opposed European and American "super-systems," the intensity of European guilt, the fear of a mythological "Empire," the mind-bending phenomenon of liberal fascism, the infatuation with international institutions, the legacy of World War I, the impact of President Kennedy's assassination, and the bias of university press publications. I have also published a small avalanche of analyses about the Left's soft spot for Islamism.
(2) Note that the new paradigm applies exclusively to Western states. Syria and Iran, to take prominent examples, get a free pass; it's quite fine for them to pursue national interests in as bellicose a fashion as possible, without invoking the Left's wrath.

via docstalk.blogspot.com

Hitler wanted to end the nation state.
Mohammad wanted to end the nation state.
...the end of division can not be achieved by men.
Our borders are what protect us from tyranny.

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Pics Of Bloomberg With His Muslim Buddies~It is ALL about $

Bloomberg, on his knees where he belongs, begging for mercy before we nevermind.

via themadjewess.wordpress.com

heh

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Did You Know That There Is A Mosque Inside The Pentagon?

By Geoffrey Grider • August 16, 2010
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What the..? In all the furor over the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, there is another mosque that doesn't seem to bother anyone at all. Want to take a guess where it is? It's inside the Pentagon where an army of over 100 Muslim clerics dispense the Koran on a daily basis.

Did you know that there is a mosque inside the Pentagon?

"Navy imam Chaplain Abuhena M. Saifulislam lifted his voice to God as he called to prayer more than 100 Department of Defense employees Monday at a celebration of Ramadan at the Pentagon. God is most great, sang the lieutenant commander and Islamic leader, in Arabic, as iftar - the end of the daily fast began. Uniformed military personnel, civilians and family members faced Mecca and knelt on adorned prayer rugs chanting their prayers in quiet invocation to Allah." source - Salon.com

This is what the Muslims did to the Pentagon on 9/11. Now there is a mosque inside the Pentagon.

The "ground zero mosque" story seems to be dying down, but nothing lays bare the absurdity of what we've just lived through quite so much as this Washington Times story, quoted above, from 2007. Yes, Muslims have infiltrated the Pentagon for their nefarious, prayerful purposes -- daring to practice their religion inside the building where 184 people died on Sept. 11, 2001.

They haven't even had the sensitivity to move two blocks, let alone a mile, away from that sacred site. The "desecration" began shockingly soon after the attacks. Cox reported in October 2001: Army Chaplain Abdul-Rasheed Muhammad, the first Muslim chaplain to serve in the military, read a verse from the Koran at the memorial service at the Pentagon on Thursday, exactly one month after the attack. Muhammad, who became a chaplain eight years ago and works at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, ministered to rescuers in front of the smoldering Pentagon after the attack. Any guesses as to why no one has ever heard about Muslims praying at the Pentagon -- let alone cared? " source - Salon.com

"We live in a great nation," said master of ceremonies Air Force Lt. Col. Timothy Oldenburg, a Muslim. "Yes, it is our First Amendment right do that - to practice our religion the way we feel, to worship God and to come to the Pentagon and celebrate Ramadan."

via nowtheendbegins.com

OMG

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More Details on Recent Turkish War Crimes

Turkey has been jumping around like a spoiled child for the last three months demanding apologies, reparations, sanctions and who knows what else in response to the deaths of nine of its citizens who attacked IDF soldiers who were trying to board the Mavi Marmara with non-lethal weapons.

The Turks have far worse than the Mavi Marmara in their own closets, and I'm not just talking about the Armenian genocide. It's time for some of those skeletons - some of them actually quite recent - to be reawakened. It seems that the 'western' Turks have long escaped international scrutiny for the fact that they conduct wars in ways that ought to be familiar to Iraqis, Iranians and Cambodians. The Turks are no better than the rest of them.

I received today from a contact in Kurdistan an eight-page pdf that he referred to as a dossier. Much of the material is available online. Although many might dismiss this material as propaganda issued by the PKK, the charges at least bear looking into. Here are some of them.

Turkey is an subscriber to many of the international agreements that are now in place. But unfortunately when the Kurds is the issue then Turkey changes her rules and ´forgets´ these international treaty obligations. But it is not only the Kurds who are suffering from these atrocities. The destiny of 1,612 prisoners of war from Cyprus, that was invaded by Turkey in 1974, is still unknown.

That's a state behaving toward 1,612 people in the same way that Hamas has behaved toward Gilad Shalit.

For two months now the war has escalated. The Turkish army is again conducting the same atrocites as before. During the last 20 days bodies of guerrillas have been captured during the war in suburbs of Siirt, Hakkari and Gumushane. The bodies of killed guerrillas have been tortured. Many of these bodies have eyes, noses, hands, fingers, heads cut off and some of them have been totally destroyed. The corpses are unable to be recognized.

Turkey has signed the 1949 War Treaty of Geneva. According to this agreement: ´´ It is forbidden to torture the bodies of those killed during the war. The killed ones should be treated with respect and their tombs should be approached with respect as expected.´´But the Turkish army is still conducting war crimes.

The photos are part of the dossier I received. They are not part of the website. They are very difficult to look at. They are dated in June 2010(21 and 30), although that might be the date that they were saved and not the date that they were taken. I'm not sure I want to post them.

In order to leave no hiding place for the guerrillas, forests are being burned in Kurdistan. Right now the forests around Sirnak, Hakkari, Siirt, Dersim, Bingol, Mardin and Bitlis are being burned by the Turkish army. The inhabitants around these regions are being prevented from extinguishing the fire. Right now thousands of acres of fields are turned into ashes. The Geneva Convention has a lot of rules covering the safety of the environment and the banning the destroying of forests;´´Damaging war methods that are continuing for a long time in a very large forest area are forbidden. Annihilation of forests and environment is not allowed to be used as a weapon.´´ What the Turkish army is doing here is also another war crime.

The dossier includes many examples of forest fires set by the Turkish army which are then allowed to burn and not fought by the government. Forest fires in the Kurdish area of Turkey are not fought by the government. The local population has no firefighting equipment to speak of. Imagine trying to fight a forest fire without helicopters!

The world ignores these events. Compare that with the reaction here in Israel when Israel destroys a few trees (by chopping them down - not by burning entire forests) to keep terrorists from hiding in them. Can you say "double standard"?

Nearly three years ago, I did a lengthy post in which I questioned why the United States and Israel were supporting Turkey in its battle with the PKK. I believe that Israel has learned its lesson (at least I hope it has). I doubt that the United States has.

For too long, Turkey has been given a free pass in anything having to do with human rights. Starting with the Armenian genocide which was swept under the rug because it conflicted with the image of a westernized Turkey in which we all wanted to believe, and continuing with Turkey's occupation of Cyprus and its ongoing battle with the Kurds, Turkey's unlawful and immoral behavior has been ignored in the vain belief that it would serve as a bridge between the West and the Muslim world.

Turkey has now chosen to abandon that bridging role, and has placed itself in the camp of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbullah. It's high time for the West to bring Turkey's chickens home to roost. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

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Ed Koch... Oh noes

poor Ed Koch. betrayed by Obama... and he is ready for another round of Jihadis.

The good news is that we can now see what each other is truly made of, who stands for what, and who does not.  The nature of the revelation is awesome, but the particular substance is not always so.
It's too bad about Ed Koch... I would have hoped for better. 

By Alan Caruba at the Canada Free Press:

.... Nine years after 9/11, less than a year since a Muslim major shot thirteen soldiers to death in Fort Hood, eight months past the failed Christmas bomber, and barely weeks after a failed attempt in Times Square to kill more innocent Americans, the former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, writing in the Huffington Post, lauds Mayor Mike Bloomberg for taking up “the fight to protect the legitimate rights of American Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero.”
Koch cites George Washington’s letter in 1790 to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island. It is a virtual poem to tolerance and a condemnation of bigotry, but the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero is not bigotry. It is the common, ancient recognition that some places are hallowed by the deaths of soldiers or by the innocent victims of evil.
The field at Gettysburg is hallowed ground. The former Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, is hallowed ground. In Sudan’s Darfur region today where genocide against Christians and animists continues will be hallowed ground.
So eager is Mayor Koch to defend the obscenity of a mosque rising where Muslims killed 2,700 people in the name of Allah, he writes, “We Jews also have our share of thieves, predators, child molesters, Ponzi-schemers, traitors and profiteers. Muslims have their share of great world accomplishments…”
This is so pathetic words cannot describe his surrender of any sense of moral outrage or the pretense of moral equivalency....

 You might want to read it all, though I completely understand if you don't.

via bokertov.typepad.com

I think I'm going to puke. Let Mosque history speak for itself Ed.
What is this that we are tolerating?

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Lebanon Gives Palestinians The Right To Enter Professions They Will Not Be Able To Join

How do you say Catch 22 in Arabic?
Aljazeera is claiming that Palestinians in Lebanon gain rights, but it is unclear exactly how:

The Lebanese government has granted some 400,000 Palestinians living in the country the right to work in professions they had been banned from for decades.
Human rights groups welcomed Tuesday's parliamentary vote as a step forward but said the bill still fell short of what is needed.
Under the new bill, Palestinians still cannot own property and are not eligible for social security or health insurance benefits.
Because

Publish Post

they will be treated as foreign workers, they are also still barred from certain occupations that the country's laws allow only Lebanese to hold.
No reciprocity
Being essentially stateless also means further hardships for Palestinians.
Gaining entry as a foreigner into prestigious jobs in Lebanon such as law, medicine and engineering requires the prospective employee to belong to the relevant professional society, most of which require the employee's home country to reciprocate.
For a Palestinian, there is no home country.
"If you're a Palestinian born and raised in Lebanon and your dream is to become a doctor, you're out of luck", Nadim Houry, the Beirut director of Human Rights Watch, told the Associated Press news agency.

via daledamos.blogspot.com

if anyone reading this gets any of this... let me know

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argument for attacking Iran now is that if you do it later there will be civilian casualties

Bomb Now or Later? Let us weigh the facts...

not everyone is as upset as Bolton by what's going on at Bushehr. Here's Stephanie Fried:

Barry Rubin dismisses the notion of an Israeli attack now and links to a piece by arms control expert Joshua Pollack, whose analysis shows why Israel has its own timetable and wouldn’t be deflected by such an event.
Experts say the announcement and subsequent fueling are significant events worthy of close scrutiny, but neither is cause for immediate panic.

“It’s highly symbolic,” American Foreign Policy Council Vice President Ilan Berman said from his D.C. office.
Iran has been trying to prove that they’re a de facto nuclear state for a long time and this bolsters their case for acceptance into the nuclear club.

Behind the scenes, numerous elements come into play in this scenario. First, Iran is striving for both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Bushehr, fueled by plutonium rather than uranium, is believed to fall into the latter category. So if there is no international outcry over fueling Bushehr — which there probably won’t be due to the fact that the facility is not a cornerstone of Iran’s nuclear program — the future question is: “if we get sacked for one, why not for the other?”
Second, the Iran-Russia relationship is key in this deal. Bushehr, says Berman, is a Russian debutante; it’s run on Russian technology and brain-powered by Russian engineers and scientists. And most probably, it’s a ruse. Says Berman:

The Russians made the Bushehr facility very high profile — it’s a showcase of their nuclear expertise. It’s also the site most picked over by UN inspectors. But we believe Iran is pursuing overt and covert programs. So the program getting the most attention paid to it is probably not the core nuclear weapons program. Bushehr is important because it shows overall nuclear technology progress but suffice it to say, this fueling feeds into the larger narrative of a nuclear state.

Another element coming into play: by fueling Bushehr, Russia is fulfilling a role as instigator/problem solver. The government is playing by the rules and grudgingly adhering to agreed upon sanctions, while at the same time sticking to the “Bushehr falls under pre-sanction contractual agreements with Iran” line. They’re double-dealing — staying in Iran’s good graces while telling the West what it wants to hear.
...
The real red line, Berman says, is not fueling the reactor but Russia’s delivery of contracted Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. Recent reports indicate Iran may be getting S-300 technologies by way of workarounds, i.e., other country vicarious sales from Russia to Iran. Berman:

Russia knows if Iran gets the S-300, that will be the basis for war because Israel will have to attack before the units get deployed. But from a Russian perspective it’s brilliant. They signed a contract and they look good and appear to be cooperating.

Same current dynamic, it appears, but with a higher stake.

And finally, there are the threats from the Iranians themselves.

An attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would be an "international crime," Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying Tuesday.
In an interview with IRNA, Salehi said that the impact of such a strike would be global. "This is stipulated in the resolutions passed by the IAEA and the UN Security Council as well as in the resolution adopted at the close of the NPT Review Conference," he stressed.

I don't expect there to be an attack in the next eight days, and I don't expect that Bushehr being fueled - if in fact it is fueled - will prevent an attack on it in the future. If either Israel or the US has to attack Iran to stop it, there are going to be thousands of civilian casualties. I'm not convinced that fact will stop an attack on Bushehr.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

Barry Rubin is wrong. keeping Civilian casualties is probably a factor, but it is doubtful that the Israeli government will commit suicide to avoid scrutiny.

noahdavidsimon's posterous

double standard of tolerance and sensitivity regarding main stream media

 how tolerant is the  media to freedom of religion?  only if it is an Islamic Mosque with ties to the Islamic Brotherhood apparently:

The media is making a very big deal out of the tolerance and sensitivity that is lacking in those who oppose building of the Ground Zero Mosque, writing about how the freedom of religion and the right to build a mosque trumps the emotions raised by the destruction of the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists and the insistence of an imam to build a mosque nearby.

Funny--that tolerance and sensitivity was thrown out the window when the media felt the need to justify the destruction of the synagogues left in Gaza after the Disengagement.

CAMERA writes about the Media Excuses Palestinian Destruction of Synagogues. Take for example, this report from CNN:

CNN’s correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Matthew Chance, similarly used the opportunity to criticize Israel while whitewashing Palestinian vandalism. Blaming Israel for leaving behind the synagogues and thus "tainting" the Palestinian "victory," Chance absolved the Palestinian Authority for not protecting the Jewish religious sites:

This structure behind me --very controversial because it is the Jewish synagogue in the middle of Netzarim. The Israeli cabinet, of course, voting to leave those synagogues standing, very much angering the Palestinian Authority, because they know that these buildings are seen very much by the vast majority of Palestinians as potent symbols of the Israeli occupation and could not be protected or even left standing. And so we're seeing very sensitive scenes here over the past few hours as the Palestinian security forces move the civilians out of that synagogue and move their bulldozers in to take away these structures, again, seen as hated symbols of the Israeli occupation. So these are scenes that are very sensitive to the Palestinian Authority. And also an aspect that's really kind of tainted the sense of victory, the sense of relief amongst the Palestinians that the Israelis are finally gone...

Read the whole thing.

But back in New York, the taint of having a mosque near Ground Zero is ignored, if not belittled. The symbolism of the mosque is trumped by the freedom of religion, with barely a mention of the compromise of building the mosque someplace else.

This example comes by way of Daniel Greenfield of the Canada Free Press, who in Just The Facts, Imam also notes how to the media, every Muslim is a moderate.

Whatever else the media may be, objective is not one of them.

And they have made very clear where their bias runs on this issue.

via daledamos.blogspot.com

destroy a synagogue... no problem.  support a violent Mosque next to ground zero?  of course they do.

Im Tirtzu threatens Ben Gurion University

Im Tirtzu, the organization that brought to light the participation of New Israel Fund beneficiaries in the preparation of the Goldstone Report, has called on Ben Gurion University to put an end to the anti-Zionist tilt in its political science department, or it will attempt to interfere with the university's sources of funding abroad.

If Ben-Gurion University of the Negev doesn't take steps "to put an end to the anti-Zionist tilt" in its politics and government department, Im Tirtzu will work to persuade donors in Israel and abroad to stop funding the university, the organization threatened in a letter to university president Prof. Rivka Carmi last month.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

I find it amusing that the administration of a University would have something against donors who are making informed decisions as to what they are funding. One would think they were against the truth.

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