Mark Steyn gives us a sad catalog of recent outrages:

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews;” in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, the congregation at a Swedish synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in; in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store; in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a Belgian synagogue; in Antwerp, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

In London, the police advise British Jews to review their security procedures because of potential revenge attacks.

As Steyn has pointed out elsewhere, if you think this is bad, just wait until Moslems make up 25% of the European population. At that point, European Jews will be lucky if they are only forced into Ghettos. My advice to European Jews: get out, now. Europe has lost the will to live and they will buy an extra decade of peace with your lives, if that proves necessary (and it will, if the Islamo-fascists have their way about it). The reason the EU is strangely silent about Hamas atrocities and eager with denunciations of Israel’s measured and proportionate response is because there are a lot more Moslems in Europe than there are Jews. Period. End of story.

This isn’t the return of the old anti-Semitism – not a return to the anti-Semitism which ranged from mere social inconvenience to Jews (such as, for most countries, an inability of Jews to join the Navy due to “dietary issues”) up to the pogroms of Czarist Russia. No, this is a return to the Hitlerian nightmare where the Jews are not just singled out as an enemy, but singled out as those who’s death will make for heaven on earth. Six decades after Europe said “never again!”, we’re on the verge of another Holocaust, and only the United States stands as a bulwark for the Jews of Europe and the Middle East against massacre.

There is a lesson to be taken here – that when a society cuts itself off from its wellsprings it will die via suicide and will become progressively nastier and greedier as it goes. Europe started to cut itself off from its Christian roots in the late 18th century and from that time until this, it has just gotten worse…more cruel, more base. Now the Europeans are so weak they can’t even murder on their own…but they are willing accomplices in Islamo-fascist murders of Jews. Standing in the crumbling Imperial box of Judeo-Christian civilization, the Europeans turn thumbs down to those already clawed by the lions…and they do this just to keep the lions busy and spare their own miserable lives for one more day.

Ultimately, the choice will be laid before us – to rescue the Jews, again, as well as those Europeans who have not fallen into the depths of depravity, or allow them to be murdered.

I do wonder what our choice will be?

Interesting news story:

President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.

How do you subtly sabotage a nuclear program? Fairly easily in a nation which is a user rather than developer of new technology. Its complex and its been done before and if you really are interested you can go dig it up. There is no way to absolutely stop Iran’s nuclear program short of regime change – and so our goal has long been to try and knock it back by ten years, and presume that within ten years the Iranian people will finally have had enough of the corrupt mullahs and there will be a revolution to bring in a more reasonable government. You can knock it back ten years by blowing it sky high, or you can sabotage it – if we’ve gone the sabotage route (and there really is no way to be certain of this from our position), then we have to award President Bush some sort of medal for this, alone: getting a CIA and larger intelligence community up to snuff enough to carry off something as complex – and dangerous – as subtle sabotage (what is subtle sabotage? Well, lets just say that un-subtle sabotage is blowing up a bridge, or some such).

This news story – which, like all MSM stories, must still be taken with a grain of salt – does explain to me why Israel hasn’t acted directly against Iran’s nuclear program. Keeping on good terms with us is vital, but stopping Iran’s nuclear program is a matter of national survival for the Israelis and if push ever comes to shove, Israel will apply whatever force proves necessary to stop Iran from deploying nuclear weapons which can hit Israel (and this is even if we extend our “nuclear umbrella” to Israel – the Israelis will be entirely unimpressed with any post-Holocaust II promise on our part to massacre those who massacred the Israelis).

Now, as to how this effects Obama – the clock is still ticking, and if Israel feels that Iran is approaching a deployable nuclear force, then Israel will insist upon US action, or will take it upon herself. Obama will send someone to talk to the Iranians – these talks will get nowhere (even if there is some sort of paper agreement signed) as the Iranian leadership is lunatic and thus will honor any agreement – if at all – only if its in their immediate interest to do so. So, talks or no talks, there might come a day – even with US sabotage slowing it down – when Iran has a credible nuclear force coming on line in the near future where Obama will have to decide to let Israel loose to destroy Iran’s nuclear program (and thus upset our applecarts in both Iraq and Afghanistan), or order a US strike to pre-empt any Israeli action.

Its going to be a thorny issue, and I hope that Obama has someone besides Hillary to lean on for advice.

Not as easy as some might think – from NRO’s The Corner:

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, tells Stephen Moore, “We need to understand that only once since 1896 has a party that took the White House not held on for at least two terms, and that was when Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. So the odds are stacked against us.” Fair enough. But the last time we had three back-to-back eight-year presidencies was 1801-1825. (If you’re strict in your definitions, we hadn’t even had two back-to-back eight-year presidencies since then—until the one we’re ending now.)

So, it is hard to get an incumbent President out of the White House – as Democrats learned in 1956, 1972, 1984 and 2004 and as Republicans learned in 1964 and 1996. But there is 1992, 1980 and 1932…all you need is either a split vote in the party in power (as in 1992), or for the party in power to preside over national collapse (as in 1932 and 1980).

To face facts: if, as we hope, Obama turns out to be a good President who executes policies which work to the advantage of the United States and thus things get better by 2012, then we don’t have much chance of beating him. Its not impossible, but its very, very hard. On the other hand if, as we fear, Obama turns out to be a miserable President who saddles us with policies which wreck the nation, then we don’t have much chance of losing to him.

We can, of course, all sign up at Daily Kos as kook leftists and start harping on Obama’s failure to turn the United States immediately into the United Socialist States of America and how, ya know?, Obama still hasn’t brought Bush up on war crimes charges….and hope that the kook left splits off from Obama…all we need is a kook left billionaire to play the role of Perot…Soros is out as he’s not a native born American; do we have anyone else to fit the bill?

Time will tell.

With approximately 6,000 years of recorded human history, there’s a lot to cover – so, what should we cover?

In my view, adjusting for age levels, we should cover the basics – who founded this nation and why. The Civil War. The settlement of the west. The American rise to world power (which would include WWII). After that, it gets more tricky, because we’re dealing with areas where a lot of people have current political axes to grind. Additionally, a lot of flat out lies and just bags of half truths have made it into the national consciousness – and a great deal of these have ardent defenders – so to write the truth would, in and of itself, become controversial. So, stick with the basics and allow the kids to find out about post-WWII history on their own, or in college.

What do you think?

Shiela Dixon, DEMOCRAT mayor of Baltimore has been indicted on 12 counts of felony theft, perjury, fraud and misconduct in office. This is rather run of the mill stuff for big city, Democrat mayors – but our concern is just how long her endorsement of Barack Obama will remain on The One’s website?

This is time and date stamped as all our entries are, so click the link from time to time to see if there’s any changes. Meanwhile, I wonder if Obama still considers her a “trailblazer”, as he stated when thanking her for the endorsement?

Or knock me over with one.

Not that this is any big surprise, or anything, but lo and behold, as The Right Perspective reports, Obama’s choice for energy czar just happens to be a card-carrying socialist.

Oh… not just any socialist, mind you, but Carol M. Browner is a member of the “Commission for a Sustainable World Society,” an offshoot of the organization “Socialist International.”

I’ve often observed that far from being a group of well-meaning tree-huggers, the radical environmentalists see environmental issues as one of the primary vehicles from which they can slam more and more of their radical political agenda down our throats; which more than explains why they cling to their environmental dogma a hell of a lot more than conservatives cling to “guns and religion.” This despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

So is it really any surprise that Barack Hussein Obama, who cut his teeth under the tutelage of such leftist luminaries as Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky, would actually appoint socialists to help run his administration?

Ya get who you vote for.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Planned Parenthood is cutting 20 percent of its staff due to the Madoff-involved fall of the Picower Foundation, as Crain’s Business reports, “The $1 billion foundation was one of the few major funders of reproductive rights issues.”

Couldn’t happen to nicer people: This is what they really need, some down time. And now that they’ll have some time to think about things, lets hope they take some time to think the abortion issue all the way through…

In November 2006, the national unemployment rate was 4.4%. Republicans controlled Congress and the White House.

In December 2008, the national unemployment rate was 7.2%. Democrats had been in control of Congress for nearly two years.

Looking ahead the next two years, with Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, how wuch worse is it going to get and how long will it take for the voters to realize they made a mistake is November 2006 and November 2008?

Obama pledged to be President of all Americans and earn all of our support – so, this augurs ill:

New Gallup polling shows that 53% of Americans favor and 36% oppose Congress’ passing a new $775 billion stimulus package of the type President-elect Barack Obama described in his Thursday speech on the economy. There is even higher support for specific elements it could include, such as major new government spending for infrastructure, income tax cuts, and tax incentives for businesses.

Obama won 53% of the vote, 53% back his plan. Amazing. I was figuring this to start out with 60-65% support…this stimulus is going to be a hard sell, and if it doesn’t start producing good effects quickly, support for it will crater.

You can go to the Obama clock…its rather depressing, right now, but it gets better every second.