Sultan Knish

Jabotinsky once warned that it came down to ending the exile or the exile will end you. The ashes prove the truth of his words. Now Israel has another choice, either it will end the peace process or the process will end it.

Muslim integration into Europe is going swimmingly, much like the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the Arab Spring. It’s going like a house on fire, not to mention a bus, a lot of cars and two towers on fire—on the other side of the Atlantic. Whatever problems there are, as with the peace process and the spring process, are undoubtedly the fault of someone who isn’t a Muslim.

Obama responded to an economic crisis by working to create two kinds of jobs. Government and union jobs. This was not about anything as simple as rewarding his supporters. The Black community got very little in exchange for supporting him. The Hispanic community similarly ended up with some token appointments, but not much to show for it. This was about shifting jobs from the private sector into the public sector and its feeders.

There's a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but not both. A free country isn’t obsessed with free riders; only a country of free things obsesses over making everyone pay their fair share to the people who want the free things. The rugged individualism of Colonial America has given way to stifling crowds, co-dependent on each other, clutching at each other’s wallets, crying, “Take from him and give to me.”

The American chief executive has a great deal of power and a chief executive who dons imperial robes is a danger with few precedents. There have been conflicts between the branches, but even FDR made a pretense of bowing to some outside authority. Obama never has, with the exception of the King of Saudi Arabia.

No one who boycotts Israel wants a specific demand met, what they want is an excuse for unleashing that overpowering hatred that Wagner tried to rationalize by claiming that Jews were incapable of creating true music and that the left rationalizes by claiming that the Jewish State is starving babies. The elaborate explanations are not the content, they are the context, they make the hatred, which is the end, seem like it is only the means to a noble end.

Our forefathers passed on to us a Bill of Rights, and we shall pass on to our descendants a Bill. A tremendous Bill which can be unrolled from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam... and all the way across the ocean to China.

The current raft of outsider-insiders, includes actors who play politicians, politicians who act like actors, billionaires who push class warfare, blue-eyed Cherokees, Nobel Peace Prize warmongers, fighting on behalf of outsider groups, like gay marriage advocates and illegal aliens, whose agendas are backed by some of the largest and well-financed lobbying groups in the country.

The Newsroom is Aaron Sorkin's sad attempt to win an argument by rewriting history and coming up with all the comebacks that his side couldn't think of two years ago. It's the sad and pathetic spectacle of an ideology creating its own fantasy version of its reality in which it won the argument.

In retrospect, the Cult of Obama had much in common with other cults. Like them it recruited young volunteers on campus. Its recruitment materials leaned heavily on books by its beloved leader. It promised them that a new age was coming and that they could be a big part of bringing it about.

The United States has drifted into lawlessness, into laws that are the guns of government. Want to force everyone to buy health insurance? Pass a law. Ignore any questions of legality because legality doesn't matter. If people come out to protest, send out your SEIU thugs to beat them. If you lose your Senate majority, use Reconciliation to pass it. If the Supreme Court threatens to investigate the Constitutionality of the law, threaten the Court.

The Israeli left is one of the few socialist movements in the First World to lose power because of immigration. Around the same time that Western immigration policies were being tuned to bring in populations with less investment in their new nations, new Israeli immigrants were more patriotic and nationalistic.

Progressives tried to balance out the instability they created by importing alien traditionalists to battle their traditionalists. But the demographic growth of traditionalists, alien and native, leads us to two kinds of societies. The kind run by native traditionalists and the kind run by alien traditionalists. And which one it will be almost entirely depends on how much power the progressives have had and for how long.

Civil rights movements have been dedicated to abrogating people's rights in the name of entitlement, bringing us to a state of affairs in which religious institutions are obligated to cover abortions, white students sit at the back of the college admissions bus behind black students, and photographers are sued for not wanting to shoot gay weddings. Such a society does not free people from oppression, but rather oppresses all in the name of someone else's greater good.

The Jewish people are survivors, not only of one Holocaust, but of many great and small. We have walked the road from a burning Jerusalem to Europe and back out of a burning Europe to Jerusalem in a mere few thousand years. That journey is the heroism of survival. It is the only heroism that matters in the long run, because it is the only kind that sustains itself.

A values-based identity appears to be superior, but it is actually the product of an identity crisis. For example, Jewish assimilation dropped the 'peoplehood' aspect, leaving behind a values-based identity. When liberal Jews express their identity, it is values-based, built around "Tikkun Olam", or "Social Justice". That opens up a hole for someone like Peter Beinart to crawl in with a crisis of Liberal Zionism, a conflict between values-based identity and Jewish survival.

The obesity epidemic is a convoluted way of saying that the problem with government health care is the people. But that's not the problem. Obesity may not be healthy, but if we ban sodas and force everyone to exercise in the yard before work, the numbers still won't balance. Because the real problem with government health care is government.

A storm is not a good time to be at the wheel of a ship and a worldwide economic disaster is not a good time to be at the wheel of the ship of state. Hard times are supposed to bring great men to the fore, but instead we have some of the sorriest men in history trying to find the wheel, sleeping off a bender in their cabins or debating whether a wheel even exists.

Diplomats have developed a bad habit of insisting on a dysfunctional status quo tilted toward the Muslim side, until the messiah of final status finally comes. There can be no Jewish housing in Jerusalem, because it's a final status issue, we can't count the refugees because it's a final status issue, and we can't question the final status, because that too is a final status issue.

The United States can survive without the international order, but it cannot survive the international order. If the United States is going to survive the century, it will have to do so as a rogue nation.

As we remember Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. Israel's greatest triumph happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War with 1948 borders - and Israel very likely would not exist today.

Weigh every story one way. Depersonalize Israelis, personalize Muslims. One is a statistic, the other a precious snowflake. A Muslim terrorist attack is always in retaliation for something, but an Israeli attack is rarely a retaliation for anything. When Israeli planes bomb a terrorist hideout, suggest that this latest action only feeds the "Cycle of Violence" and quote some official who urges Israel to return to peace negotiations.