Noon Hour Reading for the First Day of Summer

Geert Wilders and King Hussein agree that location is everything

"As if we needed another reason to love the refreshingly bold Wilders, he gives the sane, logical, knowing-right-from-wrong crowd another huge one. Hitting a grand slam out of the tell-it-like-it-is park, Wilders declared, "Jordan is Palestine."

Wilders, who leads the right-wing political party in Holland, said he believed Jordan's name should be changed to Palestine. He stated, "There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan. Changing its name to Palestine will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternate homeland." Brilliant! Place the problem child right back in the lap of the nation who threw it under the bus.

Just in case that wasn't enough to rile the Arab world, Wilders also said, "If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West. It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle, between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism.""

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"Thank you, Geert Wilders, for echoing voices from the past and reminding us what revisionists want us to forget. The entire farce of the Palestinian cause is literally a house built on Hashemite sand."

Jews and Bloody Minded Professors

"Today, the bloody-minded intellectuals are Obama's answer to the very existence of Israel. And America.

A lot of those professors are Jewish -- by ancestry, but not by faith. Or anything else by faith. They are secularists, profoundly alienated from normal people. Like secularists everywhere, they have fallen in love with a goofy messianic fantasy instead of the bad old beliefs. Their spitting rage against Christianity and Orthodox Judaism is a measure of their alienation. They worshiped Obama -- until it turned out that he couldn't stop the oil exploding in the Gulf after all. But don't worry -- they'll find another savior soon, because they're always on the lookout.

I have a friend who is a Jewish secularist, and also a bloody-minded professor -- particularly about Israel. Like Obama, he is willing to see Israel destroyed to protect his faith in utopian internationalism. That's who Obama is. Obama doesn't hate America; he only hates America as a country. See, the Founders got it all wrong. Lincoln was wrong to save the Union. Reagan was wrong to invite the Evil Empire to crumble of its own inner contradictions. It would be good for America to stop being a nation and leave everything to Obama and his buds. That's "progressivism." As G.K. Chesterton wrote, the left loves humanity, but it doesn't have much truck with real people."

Hehehehe. I remember when that realization dawned on me, too. The epiphany was almost word for word the same. I had noticed that all my leftist "friends" and acquaintances loved humanity but hated their neighbours.

"This is the left-fascist alliance of our times, our Hitler-Stalin Pact. Don't ever forget it just because it's not an official treaty. The Left and the fascist Muslims are working hand-in-glove wherever they can, including the White House."

Israel and the Surrender of the West

"This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas's remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn't they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel's legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again."

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"...This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas's recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns—or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel, not of Hamas.

One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on."

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"Our problem in the West is understandable. We don't want to lose more moral authority than we already have. So we choose not to see certain things that are right in front of us. For example, we ignore that the Palestinians—and for that matter much of the Middle East—are driven to militancy and war not by legitimate complaints against Israel or the West but by an internalized sense of inferiority. If the Palestinians got everything they want—a sovereign nation and even, let's say, a nuclear weapon—they would wake the next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority. For better or for worse, modernity is now the measure of man.

"And the quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity—no matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy's wealth proves his inhumanity.

In other words, my hatred is my self-esteem. This must have much to do with why Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestinians—and by implication the broader Muslim world—into a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace.

And this recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world's great problems today—whether in the suburbs of Paris and London, or in Kabul and Karachi, or in Queens, N.Y., and Gaza. The fervor for hatred as deliverance may not define the Muslim world, but it has become a drug that consoles elements of that world in the larger competition with the West. This is the problem we in the West have no easy solution to, and we scapegoat Israel—admonish it to behave better—so as not to feel helpless. We see our own vulnerability there."