Mona Charen offers a brief history of the birth of Israel.

Sixty is pretty old for a country. Consider that by the time the United States was 60 (counting from the conclusion of the War of Independence), the year was 1843. We’d already had 10 presidents, had nearly quadrupled the size of the nation, and were on our way to becoming a world power. As with the histories of all nations, our birth was not without sins and crimes. The Indians paid a dear price for our expansion, as did the slaves. But this does not (keening college professors notwithstanding) delegitimize the entire enterprise called the United States of America. In fact, our capacity to acknowledge our faults is one aspect of our national honor.

Israel is about to celebrate its 60th birthday, but alone among the nations of the world, its legitimacy and right to exist continue to be considered matters of debate. Israel, like the U.S., is willing to be self-critical (sometimes to extremes), but this fair-mindedness seems to float on a different plane from the vituperation and defamation that is hurled at Israel from so many directions. In 2001, most of the world’s nations convened a conference on racism in South Africa. The United States withdrew after it became obvious that the conference on racism was itself racist. Condemnations of Israel dominated the proceedings, and the handouts available in the lobby featured caricatures worthy of Der Sturmer: hook-nosed Jews with Palestinian blood on their hands surrounded by bags of money.

So even now, even after triumphing over so much adversity in its all too eventful first 60 years, Israel is not considered a normal country. The campaign of delegitimization launched by its enemies has succeeded to a tremendous degree in persuading ordinary people that Israel was conceived in sin. That sin was the dispossession of the Palestinians, the rightful inhabitants of the land now called Israel. Second only to the claim that Iran seeks nuclear power for peaceful purposes, this is the most sinister lie in circulation.

There has been a continuous Jewish population in Israel since Biblical times. There have been difficulties maintaining a large Jewish presence in Jerusalem through the millennia — there was, for example, a bit of unpleasantness with the Romans around the year 70. But Jerusalem has been a majority Jewish city since the 1860s. In 1914, the British estimated that the city contained 45,000 Jews out of a total population of 65,000. When the U.N. partitioned the British Mandate territories into a Jewish and an Arab state in 1947, the Jewish section held 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. Jerusalem, with its 100,000 Jews, did not count, as the U.N. proposed to make it an international city separate from the Jewish state. As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, those who claim that Israel was created out of a majority Arab region are counting the Arabs who lived in what was then called Transjordan as well as the West Bank and Gaza.

The U.N. partition plan gave the Arabs more arable land than the Jews and gave the Jewish state a painfully slender nine-mile wasp waist. Nevertheless, the Jews agreed to the partition. The Arabs rejected it and went to war to extirpate the Jewish presence. In the war that followed, Egypt grabbed Gaza and Jordan took the West Bank. There was no talk then of ceding these territories to the “Palestinian” people for a new Arab state. They were merely called Arab refugees and, unlike the equal number of Jewish refugees who fled into Israel from Arab countries, they were denied citizenship, rights, and freedoms by their Arab brethren. They were left to fester in camps overseen by the U.N.

The Jews fled Arab nations because of persecution. Why did the Arabs flee the new Jewish state? (Note, many remained and became citizens of Israel.) Writing in the most recent issue of Commentary, Efraim Karsh reviews some of the new evidence that has come to light about the events of 1948. Not only did the Jews not force the Arabs out of their homes, they made many vain efforts to persuade them to stay put. The 6,000 Arabs of Tiberias, in a typical example, were forced to leave by their own leaders, over strenuous objections from Jewish leaders.

It may be that the local Arabs were urging their people to flee in order to spare them in what they expected would be a genocidal rout of the Jews. Fawzi Qawuqji, a leader of the Arab Liberation Army, vowed to “drive all Jews into the sea.” Having tried and failed repeatedly to annihilate the Jews (an ideal the Palestinians have yet to forsake), they labor mightily to discredit the state of Israel, and that, one must sadly reflect, has been wildly successful.

Zimbabwe Youths Kill Opposition Activists

Can we have the Rev. Wright’s opinion on this?

The naked truth about income taxes

Luxury automaker Audi appears to be considering building an assembly plant in the United States, according to comments its chief executive made in advance of a shareholder meeting in Germany.

The company is examining the possibilities for a plant, as the strong euro and rising material costs have made a U.S. plant more cost-effective.

“There are no signs right now of this situation letting up,” CEO Rupert Stadler said, according to a report by the Reuters news service.

Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen AG, also has been looking to build a U.S. plant for similar reasons and has narrowed its possible locations to Michigan, Alabama or Tennessee. A decision is expected to be announced in June.

VW has said it wants to triple its U.S. sales to 1 million units by 2018 and has suggested it wants to build the next-generation Passat in the United States.

They’d be loony to go to Michigan.

Obama’s improbable history

(Power line)

 

Senator Obama’s victory speech last night turned impressively to the general election campaign. He all but clinched the Democratic nomination last night. His speech sounded very much like a nomination acceptance speech. I expect that the themes he sounded in his speech last night will reappear in his speech this summer in Denver.

Tom Maguire caught this passage:

I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.

Maguire comments:

Obama’s supporters are too young to know any of this, but Roosevelt led the United States in the war against Hitler; the Allied policy was unconditional surrender, so there was very little for Roosevelt and Hitler to discuss, and in fact, the two did not meet at all (but they did exchange correspondence before the war). 

So my guess is that Obama is thinking of the Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin as talking to “our enemies,” although of course we were still allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan at that point. Beyond that, is the Yalta Conference something Obama and his advisers view as a success worthy of emulation? Puzzling.

And the United States has been talking with Iran right along in any event. It’s not for lack of communication that Iran has been conducting its war on the United States. 

When Obama invoked past Democratic presidents in his speech last night, he started with Roosevelt but omitted Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Moving on from the Clinton era is part of the thesis of Obama’s candidacy, so the omission is understandable. Of past Democratic presidents, none has set a better example of the pitfalls of “talking to our enemies” than Jimmy Carter, both in his presidency and his travels since (though Carter probably would not acknowledge that his interlocutors are our enemies).

Obama may not be knowledgeable enough to know he doesn’t want to emulate Roosevelt at Yalta. Perhaps he believes that Roosevelt’s name sanctions whatever action he can attach to it. But Obama is smart enough to know that he doesn’t want to profess a desire to emulate Jimmy Carter, if only on political grounds. In substance, however, it seems to me that the president Obama most closely resembles on this point is Carter.

Gore’s Myanmar Words as Inopportune as they were Repulsive

Marc Sheppard

Thirty days after Steve McIntyre caught NASA cooking climate history again - this time in a feeble attempt to somehow conceal the alarmist-embarrassing  downward trend since 1998 — Al Gore shamelessly portrayed Saturday’s Myanmar cyclone catastrophe as a ‘consequence’ of global warming. 

A mere 16 days after NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation’s cool phase shift would likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years, Gore told NPR that the “trend toward stronger and more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures.”  This just 6 days after a German study also predicted cooler ocean temperatures due to the Meridional Overturning Circulation entering a weak cycle, and in spite of there being absolutely no empirical evidence of a global warming / storm strength link. 

Gore’s monotonous and baseless account of AGW forced violent cyclones and hurricanes came just two days after McIntyre reported that 4 of the past 5 months were “‘all-time’ records for Southern Hemisphere sea ice” levels.

In fact, it was the very day after Anthony Watts reported another false start to the distinctly overdue Solar Cycle 24, a likely contributory factor to falling global temperatures, that the Nobel Peace Prize winner exploited the deaths of over 22,000 (reported and still rising) human beings to egoistically advance his threatened AGW political agenda while callously protecting his personal financial interest.

And with 41,000 reported missing since Cyclone Nargis devastated the former Burma, the death figures are sure to rise to unthinkable numbers.  Meanwhile, the nation’s corrupt military rulers are making aid delivery to ease survivor misery nearly impossible.

And while these poor souls will undoubtedly see years of unimaginable suffering and the arduous rebuilding of over a million destroyed homes, this man — who professes his desire to save the planet - saw another opportunity.  That it arrived at the end of a one month period in which another wheel fell off the greenhouse gas disinformation bus almost daily only adds to the morass.

This was an astonishingly nauseating display — even for the likes of Gore.  

Walter Williams provides a short history of environmental doomsday predictions.

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book “The Doomsday Book,” said Americans were using 50 percent of the world’s resources and “by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “… civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “… somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

(more…)

As goest Israel …

What is your position on the upcoming Durban 11 UN Conference?

Cambodia says rice cartel would ensure global food security

Why let historical evidence stop a totalitarian idea.