Helen Thomas, Racist

Over his long career (which is still going strong), talk show host Bob Grant used to say that liberals are the ultimate hypocrites. Liberals (esp. liberal journalists, although that may be redundant) are the ones always labeling others racists, when it's obvious what they're all about. One of them, Helen Thomas, resigned her position with the Hearst News Service after her "controversial comments" about Israel went viral (and viral is a good word for it) on the Internet. Her retirement came with a lame apology.

Many thoughtful bloggers have weighed in on this so-called journalist's loathesome comments. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection had this to say:

The Islamist-Leftist Coalition repeatedly seeks to delegitimize Israel by claiming that Israelis are Europeans who should go back home. This racial component is key to portraying Israelis as European racists and denying the legitimacy of Israel through coalitions with "people of color."

But the portrayal of Israel as a European implant is false.

In the immediate aftermath of Israel's War of Independence (after the Arabs rejected the U.N. partition plan which would have created the first Palestinian state ever), approximately 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries, with the majority going to Israel.

What happened in 1947-1949 was an exchange of populations, with roughly equal numbers of non-Jewish Arabs leaving what now is Israel and the West Bank, and Jews leaving Arab and Muslim countries to go to Israel.

Those Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, and their descendants, now account for roughly half of Israel's population. Israel also went to great lengths to rescue the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish communities, among others.

William Katz, the editor of Urgent Agenda wrote, in part, the following:

Helen Thomas's disgusting call for Israeli Jews to "go home" to Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust took place, is even more sinister than it seems. Remarks like that are part of an international campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel by denying that Jews have a history there. But many of the same forces behind this campaign are also militantly anti-Christian. After all, if Jews have no history in Israel then, by definition, Christianity was never invented, since there could not have been a Jew named Jesus.

And Neo-Neocon added this:

Thomas’s reference to Germany and Poland as the original “home” of the Jews of Israel also expresses, among other things, her adherence to the false and misleading anti-Israel party line that Israel is composed of European Jews, which ignores the vast numbers of Jews from Arab countries who have settled there since its founding. And her particular mention of Poland as the Jewish “home” made me think of the complex yet ultimately sorrowful history of the Jews in that country...Where did that small number of surviving Polish Jews go? The answer, for quite a few, was “Israel”—the only country on earth that was/is bound to take them. But for the Helen Thomases of the world, the Jews must leave there as well—that is, if they are allowed to live at all.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson offers this perspective:

Of course, Thomas doesn’t care that nearly half the Israelis are of Middle Eastern heritage, that many Israelis can claim a family residence in “Palestine” longer than her own in the United States, that a Jewish presence in Israel dates to the dawn of recorded history, that many of Israel’s older generation were ethnically cleansed from cities like Baghdad and Cairo after the 1967 war, or that her views are in sync with the Hamas charter and Iranian promises. Note also that Thomas is not concerned with occupation in such places as Tibet, Cyprus, or Ossetia; such human-rights violations as Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds; such violence on the high seas as the North Korean attack, Iran’s hijacking of a British ship, or the pirates off Somalia. All these are mere abstractions — unless they involve the Jews.

Addendum: On the American Spectator website, Aaron Goldstein points out that "Never mind that Gaza and the West Bank were under Egyptian and Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, respectively. Isn't it curious that no one was advocating Palestinian statehood while Egypt and Jordan were occupying those territories?"

Is the Obama Presidency Unraveling?

Earlier this month, when the news broke that the Washington Post was putting Newsweek up for sale, Erick Erickson (the boss at RedState.com) wrote the following:

 Jon Meacham, the overly pretentious editor of Newsweek, has finally succeeded. He has driven Newsweek into the ground.

Meacham and the rest of the Newsweek gang decided to turn Newsweek into leftwing political pornography in order to get access to Barack Obama. Increasingly, their audience has shrunk to a few blocks on the Upper West Side, various newsrooms, Democrat offices in Washington, and some college libraries.

The rest of the world jumped to Time, which still at least pretends to be unbiased, or got off the weekly circuit altogether.

Now comes word that Christopher Ruddy, the proprietor of Newsmax.com, is apparently one of the bidders for the failed magazine. Even if you're right of center, NewsMax content may not be your cup of tea.

Against the backdrop of the BP disaster, Ruddy just penned a column that reminds us how Joe Biden predicted the inexperienced president would be tested by an international crisis within the first six months of his term (this was after Biden said that Obama was unqualified to be president):

Biden was wrong on the timing, but prophetic on the point.

Our president has been tested by al-Qaida, which apparently has tried to pull off two major terror attacks in the past year alone, first with the Detroit plane incident and recently in Times Square.

 Obama also was tested after the Fort Hood incident, again treating this case as a criminal matter. His chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, won’t even say that these terrorist incidents could be linked to “radical Islam.”

Since Obama has taken office, he has been tested consistently by the Iranian regime, which flouted free elections to keep its radical president in power. Once again, Obama was timid and delayed in his response to this outrage.

And his administration has looked silly as Iran has refused continually to comply with international demands that it stop its nuclear weapons program.

Obama has failed another test, this time from Iran’s rogue ally North Korea.

Since North Korea’s brazen act of war with its torpedo attack on a South Korean vessel, President Obama has appeared feeble.

This is no time for such weakness coming from the leader of the free world.

My God, Joe Biden was right. We elected a 47-year-old senator who has no real-world experience, and he is being tested by our enemies. They are seeing his true mettle.

Ruddy also asserts that "What we are witnessing is harsh reality bumping up against President Obama’s façade and shattering the glass — a glass image created by oratory, image and an adoring press."

Ruddy's Newsmax colleague, John LeBoutillier, doesn't hold back either:

The Obama presidency is finally being exposed for what it is: an empty vessel piloted by a guy who can’t speak without a teleprompter and who just follows the Western European anti-American, anti-free enterprise, liberal socialistic model.

And some months ago, William Katz of Urgent Agenda, wrote the following:

And so we still ask: Who is the president? We will get an inkling in the coming months as he deals with Iran, perhaps the biggest foreign policy challenge of 2010. Our answer to the question will decide Barack Obama's future, both as president and as potential (but not definite) candidate in 2012. This is political theater, and very good theater at that. And it requires acting. Ronald Reagan was a real actor, and a distinguished statesman. Barack Obama is a fake actor, with statesmanship yet to be assessed.

If the Obama administration is coming apart at the seams, should we be surprised?

To Preempt Terror, Intelligence Policy Must Change

Fitting for Memorial Day weekend, the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes recommends these steps for keeping America safer through a reform the administration's intelligence policy:

• End the investigation of CIA interrogators by the Justice Department
• Aggressively investigate the alleged exposure of CIA officials by lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees.
• Move the day-to-day direction of intelligence policy out of the West Wing. 
• Rethink interrogation policy
• Provide the intelligence community with a clear mission.  

Click here for the full article.

Bagram Detainees Staying Put--and Maybe Gitmo Detainees Too

Overruling a lower court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled on May 21 that three detainees at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base can be held indefinitely. In so doing, the panel declined to apply the U.S. Supreme Court precedent in the 2008 Boumediene v. Bush case beyond Guantanamo Bay Naval Base:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts...The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base. But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release...The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The appellate panel In Maqaleh v. Gatess explained that habeas corpus relief doesn't apply to an active theater of war in a territory outside of U.S. sovereignty.

David Rifkin, who filed a supporting brief on behalf of the government, said the decision "has restored a considerable degree of sanity to what threatened to be a crazy legal regime that would have deprived the United States, for the first time in history, of the opportunity to capture and detain — outside of the United States, in theaters of war — high-value combatants. That has been solved, and it will apply to many other situations in the future."

In the meantime, the proposed shutdown of the Gitmo prison facility seems less and less likely:

The Senate Armed Services Committee dealt a big setback to President Obama's plans to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay when lawmakers stripped funding for a new prison in Illinois to hold the detainees. Committee Chairman Carl Levin on Friday [May 28] told reporters the committee, in a voice vote, stripped $245 million that would have gone to buy and retrofit the Thomson prison in Illinois. [Washington Times]

BP Oil Spill: Will the Media Continue to "Gush" Over Their Hero?

Nearly 40 million gallons of oil "have gushed into the ocean from a broken wellhead 5,000 feet below the surface, creating a spill that has surpassed the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in terms of volume," the Washington Post reports.

Luckily we finished our workout on the stationary bike yesterday before Obama's meaningless, taxpayer-funded Louisiana Gulf Coast photo-op appeared on one of the flat screen TVs in the healthclub's cardio area. (No matter what, Obama typically gets a free ride from his vast array of media apologists. Bush was blasted immediately for his handling or mishandling of Katrina, even though the-then Democrat Louisiana governor and the Democrat New Orleans mayor shared in the culpability. With that in mind, you imagine the outcry if Bush had waited so long to visit this particular disaster area--let alone failing to mobilize all of the instrumentalities of government to "plug the hole"?)

And Yahoo News is reporting that the photo-op was ever more bogus than even commonsense would indicate. Hundreds of $12-and-hour temp workers apparently spruced up the area for the presidential visit:

Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, whose district encompasses Grand Isle, told Yahoo! News that BP bused in "hundreds" of temporary workers to clean up local beaches. And as soon as the president was en route back to Washington, the workers were clearing out of Grand Isle too, Roberts said...News of 11th-hour spruce-up brigade spread rapidly Friday afternoon and infuriated locals. One popular radio host...suggested that the Coast Guard and the White House may have been involved in setting up the "perfect photo op."

Turning to more substantive issues, Charles Krauthammer answers a question that a lot of us have been wondering about: why did British Petroleum decide to drill for oil in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production...And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So we go deep, ultra deep -- to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's amazing how this president can play golf, attend political fundraisers, and give interviews on ESPN during various national emergencies, and up until recently, the fawning media hasn't said a word.

Are things changing? Perhaps. Here, NBC's Chris Matthews temporarily jumps off the Obama bandwagon:

Border National Guard Deployment is Not Comprehensive

Deploying "up to" 1200 National Guard troops (that's 300 per shift, assuming this temporary measure is actually implemented) to the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border is obviously just a superficial, going-through-the motions move. The administration is not serious about really securing the border. For example, Obama's minions on Capitol Hill defeated a measure that would have sent 6,000 troops to the southwestern border. Similarly, Senate Democrats also blocked an amendment that would have required completion of the 700-mile border fence between the U.S. and Mexico within a year.

And you have any doubts that the temporary National Guard deployment isn't just a public relations stunt, consider this:

US National Guard troops being sent to the Mexican border will be used to stem the flow of guns and drugs across the frontier and not to enforce US immigration laws, the State Department said Wednesday.The clarification came after the Mexican government urged Washington not to use the additional troops to go after illegal immigrants. [AFP]

And ABC News reported the following:

The troops, expected to be spread along the southern border of all four southwestern states, would largely assist border patrol agents and local law enforcement by providing intelligence and intelligence analysis, surveillance and reconnaissance support, and the ability to train additional Customs and Border Protection agents,

In fact, ABC aired this surprising fair report on the president's decision:



In the meantime, the security threats at the southern border don't merely involve drug and human smugglers:

The Department of Homeland Security is alerting Texas authorities to be on the lookout for a suspected member of the Somalia-based Al Shabaab terrorist group who might be attempting to travel to the U.S. through Mexico, a security expert who has seen the memo tells FOXNews.com...Security experts tell FOXNews.com that the influx of hundreds of Somalis over the U.S. border who allegedly have ties to suspected terror cells is evidence of a porous and unsecured border being exploited by groups intent on wrecking deadly havoc on American soil.

What is is about securing the border first that this administration (and the previous one) doesn't understand? If, for example, U.S. troops can secure the border between North and South Korea and elsewhere around the world, why can't we protect our own border?

Mexico's Tough Immigration Laws

Mexican President Calderon is good on some issues, especially in his fight against the drug cartels. He is, however, way off base in his criticism of Arizona's new immigration law, given his own country's draconian immigration statutes. Mexico also has troops protecting its southern border.

Under the Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Immigrants who are deported and attempt to re-enter can be imprisoned for 10 years. Visa violators can be sentenced to six-year terms. Mexicans who help illegal immigrants are considered criminals. The law also says Mexico can deport foreigners who are deemed detrimental to "economic or national interests," violate Mexican law, are not "physically or mentally healthy" or lack the "necessary funds for their sustenance" and for their dependents.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer for once escaped the liberal cocoon and politely calls out President Calderon on his hypocrisy--starting at the 4-minute mark:



Another usually reliable liberal voice, CNN's Jack Cafferty, blasts the administration's failure to enforce immigration law: