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Click here for PDF Version of Issue #175 (222kb)

Dhimmi Jimmy the Jew-hater

I get a little weary about the Orwellian double-speak that is so popular in these politically-correct these days. People should be more honest. 

People are especially cautious when they dance around the first two of these propositions. 

Fear of being called a racist is almost guaranteed to shut down any discussion; it's even considered vaguely racist to draw attention to someone else's racism if he happens to be non-white (eg accusing Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe or Barack Obama's Jeremiah Wright). The true meaning of racist has been lost in the genocidal fury and criminality of the 20th century, for all it really means is that someone prefers his/her race over another, or put another way it means that in your view no-one else's race is better than your own.  It may not be true (and probably isn't!), but you'd be odd if you didn't deep down feel it.  Why would anyone think his own race is inferior to another's? 

Meanwhile, Hitler's legacy is such that people are terrified to use the word anti-Semitic with its Holocaust overtones, even when the evidence for anti-Semitism is overwhelming.  For example, it's bad enough to label Hamas as anti-Semitic even when its founding covenant specifically fosters hatred and murder of Jews, but few want to use the word against anyone else. 

But there is one undoubted old anti-Semite wandering round the world sowing Jew-hatred wherever he can.  He is the ex American president responsible for allowing, unchallenged, the launch by Iran of Islam's current war on the West.  Back in 1989 (oops, 1979), Iranian “students” (including a certain Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) invaded sovereign American territory and captured 52 American diplomats, the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor nearly four decades earlier.  Jimmy Carter's response was to launch an ill-prepared ill-fated military rescue mission that ended in conflagrations and eight American deaths in the Iranian desert.  I don't really blame him for this, because at least he was trying to do something that was right, however ham-fisted.  However, there is no excuse for following this humiliation by meekly accepting the invasion of the US Embassy in Teheran (legally, embassies are their country's sovereign territory).  An ultimatum to the new Khomeini regime, followed if necessary by a military strike at its heart, would have brought the crisis to a swift end - if not Khomeini himself - and laid down an entirely different marker of American intent for the years ahead. 

Instead the marker was ... do what you like; America will always be too timid to respond or to fight back.  And so it continued, with ever-worsening Islamic attacks on Americans and their interests, until 9/11 finally provoked America to retaliate and call a halt.   

Jimmy Carter's insouciance has cost thousands of lives since he left office.  You'd like to think that was due merely to his incompetence, ignorance, cowardliness (and perhaps greed, because his Islamist friends - the Saudi royal family, the bin Laden family, the Sheikh Zayad Centre in UAE to name but three groups - contribute mightily to his Carter Center and lifestyle). 

But his behaviour on the world stage since leads to a different conclusion that may or may not have had an influence on his negligence in 1989 1979.  For example, Iran's terrorist proxy Hezbollah felt emboldened enough to step up its murderous attacks on primarily Jews but also Americans. 

The objection levelled at me is twofold.  One, the original clarion call comes in fact from that noted old pervert the late unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Mr Ahmadinejad was merely quoting, albeit approvingly, during his speech.  Secondly, a more precise translation from Farsi would read

“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

The speech goes on to excoriate three other Satanic regimes which - to the president's approval - have since vanished: those of the Shah, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein (though he strangely neglects to thank America for two of the disappearances). 

Therefore, Mr Ahmedinajad and the Ayatollah before him are apparently not demanding that Israel be wiped from the map, merely that the existing regime vanish, just as those of the Shah, Gorbachev and Saddam are no more. 

I actually have no reason to doubt what Ms Norouzi and MEMRI say, as I don't speak Farsi.  But she is being very naive if she thinks that calling for the Israeli “regime” to vanish from the page of time is somehow different from wiping Israel from the map. 

Because since the Ayatollah's day, the Israeli “regime” has vanished - at least seven times.  That's the wonder of Western liberal democracy - the people can make regimes vanish if they don't like them.  Here are Israel's regime changes over the past three decades.

So when Mr Ahmadinejad repeats his hero's demand that the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” he must either be absolutely delighted that this has happened so often, or else he means something else altogether more sinister.  Along the lines of “wiping Israel from the map” with soon-to-be-acquired nuclear weapons, perhaps.  Or, to lift another stirring phrase from the speech: “This stain of disgrace [ie Israel] will be purged from the center of the Islamic world – and this is attainable”.

Foolish would be the Jew who believes the totalitarian Iranian theocracy bestows its seal of approval on Israeli parliamentary democracy, as Ms Norouzi and similar apologists would seem to suggest. 

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National Forum on Europe Should Recuse Itself from Lisbon

Last month, I reported on the blatant manner in which a so-called “open discussion” on the Lisbon Treaty, hosted in Dublin Castle by Ireland's taxpayer-funded National Forum on Europe, had been rigged to favour the YES side.  There had been a very similar - and similarly rigged - meeting three days earlier. 

How were these meetings rigged?

The plot thickens when you have a closer look at the NFE.  It's website proclaims that

“The National Forum On Europe animates and promotes public debate on the EU, its enlargement, its future and Ireland's place in it.  The Forum's purpose is not to advocate or promote a particular course of action. It is to be a politically neutral public space within which political views and analyses of all shades can be put forward on the EU, and on Ireland in the EU.” [my emphasis]

I had difficulty reconciling these high-sound phrases with what I had witnessed at Dublin Castle.  So I had a look at the NFE's very small membership, and suddenly all became clear.  For full membership of the Forum is limited to

There are just 32 appointees of the Oireachtas plus another 13 MEPs.  I did a little bit of research to find out where they stood on Lisbon.  And what a surprise (not).