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A tale of two Republican Parties on a collision course

by Mojambo ( 59 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Business, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Multiculturalism, Politics, Progressives, Regulation, Republican Party, Tea Parties at February 7th, 2012 - 8:30 am

The Knish evaluates the differences between the two Republican parties. For one Republican party – the Bush family is the ideal candidate. For the other party – Ronald Reagan will always be the man.

by Daniel Greenfield

There are two Republican parties. One is fairly liberal, it is hostile to the left but it also believes in stealing their thunder by adopting moderate versions of their policies.

This Republican Party is strongly pro-business, but it believes that to succeed in a global economy the government must provide subsidies to businesses and individuals. It believes that immigration reform is needed, though its chosen candidates know to avoid using the word amnesty. It believes that national health care is inevitable and that the only way to avoid a government solution is through the individual mandate.

It is loosely conservative, but disinterested in social issues. It thinks that the left has gone too far in upending traditional values, but has no interested in combating it and finds those who do embarrassing . It adapts to changing mores with an uneasy smile and tries to pretend that it was with it all along. It has no strong religious feelings and it believes that all religious, including Islam, are basically the same.

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It is a big believer in the American Dream of economic opportunity, but is unable to think of any other national virtues beyond that. It maintains a strongly Federalist legacy and while it agrees that the Federal government has overreached itself in interfering with the business of states, it has no real interest in rolling back its powers, only in making certain that they are used “wisely”.

The only area where it actively rolls back the left’s program is its deregulation of businesses, but even this is limited to spheres that are objectionable to specific industries which lobby for deregulation. Small businesses can expect much less help, unless they band together and forcefully make something into an issue.

It has no passion for anything beyond deregulating a few specific industries. It supports the right to bear arms, not because it passionately believes in it, but because the political costs of not doing so are too high. It opposes abortion for the same reason, though its opposition is mainly a formality. It believes that gay marriage is inevitable, but isn’t willing to pick a fight with its base over it.

Its leaders and members consider themselves rationalists and believe in Global Warming because “the science says so.” They sneer at those Republicans who deny what they think is the obvious. While they are skeptical of government solutions to Global Warming, they are prepared to accept an approach that does not cause too much harm to business and is routed through private companies.

It views what the Republican Party has become as an embarrassment and while it doles out red meat to the base when it has to, it despises them and constantly dreams of ways of getting rid of them. In its fondest daydreams, a graduated amnesty program for Mexican immigrants by a Republican president turns them all into legal citizens and Republican voters, allowing them to tell their guns n bibles base to kiss off.

It does not believe that Obama is bad, only inexperienced and misguided, but basically well-meaning and its lack of support for him is not due to a firm belief that his agenda is destructive, but to political calculations and the need to appease their base.

[……]

Then there’s the other Republican Party. This party is deeply worried about the future of the country, and not just as a place to do business. It is socially conservative, strong on national defense because it believes that we do face real threats and enemies, it is opposed to amnesty and very skeptical of Federal power.

This party is more new than it is old, it’s a party that evolved in response to the transformation of the Democratic Party at the hands of the left. It is the base from which the Republican Party draws much of its support, particularly away from the Northeast, and it is struggling to force the party to match its deeds to its words.

It does not believe that most of the national debates are a tempest in a teacup that can be settled amicably behind closed doors. It is uninterested in bipartisan great compromisers, it seeks fighters who will stand up for its agenda. It is not interested in the progressive voyage to the national future that has been taken up by both parties, what it would like is independence from their reign of policy terror. It would like to roll back the progressive policymaking of both parties.

It is concerned for its ability to earn a living, for the values of its children and the basic freedoms that it can see being lost every day. It remembers a time when people had more freedom and less rules hanging over their heads. The tide of paperwork, the omnipresent regulatory state infuriate it and lead it to vote for people who claim to want Washington off their backs. But next year there are even more regulations and paperwork to deal with.

It is deeply worried about the Bill of Rights, its right to bear arms, its right to speak freely and to practice its beliefs without interference from the government. It is worried about them because it has already witnessed the dramatic erosion of its freedoms and it expects the process to continue.

It is unenthusiastic about deploying troops to maintain global hegemony or aid other nations, it is however vigorous about defending the country from enemy attack. Its members often have a tradition of military service and a skeptical view of how the politicians have used and abused the military for their own purposes.

[……]

What it wants most is independence from outside regulations that impinge on its way of life. It has little interest in positive rights and a defense of its rights by the government, what it would like is the ability to defend its own rights, to maintain a separation from the elites and its own property and family.

These two Republican parties have been on a collision course for some time now. The collision repeats itself in every election as it has throughout the 20th century. The Republican establishment has never really come to terms with its new core constituencies, the people resistant to the New Deal who were then joined by the people resistant to every other liberal big government innovation that came down the pike.

Between an establishment committed to moderate progressivism and a base that is unwilling to accept less freedoms and more regulation for their own good, is a massive divide. It is a cultural, economic, social and regional divide that needs to be talked about.

Too many establishment candidates have cakewalked into office by paying lip service to the concerns of the base without believing a word of it. Each time the process repeats itself, the collision becomes more explosive until something has to give.

Either the Republican establishment needs to step up to the plate and honestly repudiate its base or it needs to step aside and decide which it cares about more, deregulation or its version of the progressive agenda, because it cannot continue as a contradiction in terms without a meltdown. The current ugliness is a manifestation of that yawning gap between the two parties that cannot be bridged without an honest dialogue about the different values of those at the top and those at the bottom.

Read the rest – A Tale of Two Republican Parties

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Barack Obama, Business, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Multiculturalism, Politics, Progressives, Regulation, Republican Party, Tea Parties | 59 Comments »

Muslim Firsters and Israel Firsters

by Mojambo ( 98 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Iran, Iraq, Islamic hypocrisy, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Jihad, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Turkey at February 2nd, 2012 - 12:00 pm

The Knish points out for all the talk about an Israel-centric foreign policy – American soldiers have been put on the front lines to protect Muslims for years. The United States does not send aid to many terrorists around the world but the ones that we do go to those who kill Israeli Jews.

by Daniel Greenfield

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel’s failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization, run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position, it would be the Muslims First position.

The left which deploys names like Israel Firsters is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn’t fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

[……]

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being “silenced” in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel, however it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to “peer pressure and shaming”, which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In The Audacity of Hope, a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely Anti-Semitic former Black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, “I will stand with the Muslims.” And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d’Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country’s supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

He has stood with Muslims against Denmark and its freedom of speech. He has stood with Muslims against France. He has stood with Muslims against Israel. If slapping down traditional allies on behalf of Muslims is not a Muslim Firster foreign policy, then what is?

The American flag may be burned, the Koran may not

The American flag may be burned, the Koran may not. Cartoons depicting Jews as monsters can run, cartoons depicting Mohammed cannot. Six year olds must be strip searched in airports, but the people who actually are a flight risk cannot be singled out in any way.

[…….]

If any other group had received this level of favoritism, this degree of pandering at the expense of everyone else, the outrage would have been boundless. But we dare not say anything. Those who offend Muslims are held responsible for the murder of American soldiers by Muslims. In this perverse moral landscape, to speak out against the bigotry and hate preached by the Koran is to be responsible for the atrocities that the bigots will commit in outrage that anyone has spoken ill of their genocidal text.

Meanwhile the Muslim Firsters keep chanting Israel Firster at anyone who doesn’t agree that Israel is the worst country on the planet. Anything that gets in the way of the Muslim Firster foreign policy program is denounced in the most ruthlessly bigoted language possible, and when those who use it are called on it, they claim that there is a Jewish conspiracy to silence them.

This kind of obnoxious behavior has become routine. The consensus among Muslim Firsters is that Charles Freeman was a highly qualified candidate to head the National Intelligence Council, despite working at a front group for Saudi Arabia. In an interview, Freeman said that, “It is irresponsible not to question Israeli policy and to decide what is best for the American people.” But no one is allowed to question Saudi policy or decide if the Saudi Muslim lobby and its countless affiliates should be deciding what is best for the American people.

Israeli policy is questioned non-stop. Hardly a week goes by without editorials in every newspaper complaining that Netanyahu hasn’t spent enough time at the negotiating table with one half of an unelected Palestinian Authority government. When a bunch of lunatics held protests outside a girls school in a town in Israel that hardly anyone in the media had ever heard of before, there were a thousand news stories. When Saudi Arabia beheaded a woman for witchcraft, the story was quickly buried, along with her body. Unlike the Israeli school story, Hillary Clinton did not feel the need to comment on it. Not that the Saudis would listen. Masters don’t pay attention to slaves.

The thirty-five Christians arrested in Saudi Arabia at a prayer service and then beaten and subjected¬† to body cavity searches last month, are not an item for our foreign policy agenda. No matter how many American soldiers died, how many more were wounded and how many have gone on suffering from undiagonsed ailments in order to keep the House of Saud safe from Saddam. The thousands of Americans who died on September 11 because an opponent of the Saudi regime saw the presence of American forces in the holy land of Islam as an opportunity to declare a holy war against the United States are all part of the price we pay for the Muslim Firster agenda.

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They want Israel and they want Europe on a platter. They want to eliminate freedom of speech and silence anyone who speaks out about the countless dead and the destruction of free nations that will follow if they get their way.

After decades of the Muslim Firster agenda, we are under siege. There is hardly a nation in the free world that isn’t scrambling to study Israeli anti-terrorism techniques, because they are all becoming Israel. France has its own Intifada. Oslo is dangerous enough that the American embassy has to put out an advisory. London is swiftly becoming Londonistan. The end of the last states that might have been described as Muslim and secular is swiftly approaching. And still the Muslim Firsters haven’t had enough, but maybe it’s time that the rest of us have had enough of them.

If they want to condemn a Pro-Israel bias in American foreign policy, then let’s take a long honest look at whom American foreign policy really helps and which group it puts first.

Read the rest – Muslim Firsters and Israel Firsters

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Afghanistan, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Iran, Iraq, Islamic hypocrisy, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Jihad, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Turkey | 98 Comments »

American tyrants

by Mojambo ( 76 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Liberal Fascism, Politics, Progressives at February 1st, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish examines the tyrannical and dictatorial impulses of American liberalism. The fact that liberals really do not like people very much – makes their populist rhetoric all the more infuriating. Hey folks – Scott Brown is a Senator from Massachusetts – he will never be the ultimate conservative (and hope to have a political career, the same with the Maine Twins – SO GROW UP!!!). We need to cut Scott Brown some slack because Elizabeth Warren (his Democratic opponent) is so left-wing she would make the late Teddy Kennedy seem like Barry Goldwater. Key quote – No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor. Tyrants are always protectors of the people.

by Daniel Greenfield

When Elizabeth Warren went on MSNBC to deny that she was a member of the 1 percent despite her nearly 15 million dollar net worth, the denial had a cultural element to it. Despite being a millionaire, Warren did not see herself as “wealthy”.

The current debate over the 1 percent and the 99 percent is notable mainly for the shifting boundaries that are not based on economics, but on identity. For all its ‘Power to the People’ antics American liberalism is not a movement of struggling people, there is a reason why the word limousine so often comes before liberal. Its roots lie in an upper class New England strata that relentlessly fought against Southern Baptists and working class Catholic immigrants. Those roots define modern day liberals much more so than the Jacksonian populism that they occasionally try to imitate.

The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

American liberalism has traveled a slightly altered road to get to the same place. But its place is still at the top and everyone else’s place is still at the bottom. Its persistent denial of this basic truth leads to the perennial absurdity of millionaires like Elizabeth Warren playing class warrior when the only class they represent is the class of people who work for the government.

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The strange intermarriage of New England moralists, New York merchants and European radicals eventually led to a system of pushing immigrants into government service, mandating tolerance and running every aspect of human life through Washington D.C. It took a while to get there, but the system is a decade or two away from being complete. When it is complete then all our lives will be run in every possible way by the Elizabeth Warrens who will smile condescendingly at us, nudge us in the direction we are supposed to go, and when we don’t go there, then the fines and the tasers come out.

No matter how far back you go, the roots of American liberalism lie in a fear of the people, a distrust of the great unwashed. American liberals have championed voting rights, so long as they were confident that those voting were their inferiors and could be herded into voting the right way. They have always distrusted the instincts of the public, no matter how much pious ink they spilled fighting on their behalf.

That view of man’s sinful nature still informs their deepest thinkers, and the sins are still the same, the failure of fellowship, the refusal to consider the welfare of others and march in lockstep to create that ideal society. The New Jerusalem of universal brotherhood. Those ideas have been dressed up in modern clothing, transmitted as denunciations of racism and bigotry, immigration advocacy and hate crime laws, but underneath is the same notion that a society of good will to all can be forced through rigorous regimentation by the truly enlightened.

The populism of the American liberal is a cynical dumbshow where representatives of the oppressed gather in conclaves to demand more oppression by their liberal oppressors. This spectacle is at the heart of a political oligarchy, which like every oligarchy is built on government subsidies and special access to power for the privileged. And like all oligarchies it must disguise its nature by playing the protector of the people. Unlike them it must also disguise its true nature from itself.

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The American liberal would still like to play at being humble, a 99 percenter fighting against the chimera of a 1 percent oligarchy. But the entire 99 percent theme is that the 1 percent isn’t paying enough taxes. And whom do those taxes go to but to the administration and employment of the professional class warrior millionaires.

It is the very Everest of hypocrisy for the members of the oligarchy to be bemoaning all the extra tax money that could be used to pay their six figure salaries, while passing off their naked greed as a crusade on behalf of the oppressed.

There is nothing of working class advocacy in a government party looking to shovel more tax revenues into the insatiable gaping maw of its bureaucratic machinery. The idea that those monies will be used to help the downtrodden is a delusion that a brief glimpse at how much money went to connected companies and to the expansion of the government bureaucracy should easily cure. This isn’t any 99 percent at work here. It’s the 9 percent against the 63 percent.

Warren thinks of herself as not wealthy because despite her millions, she is engaged in the pious practice of public service. However big her financial resources may be, they are part of the collective whole of the oligarchy and in a different category altogether from the wealth that is earned or inherited.

To the American liberal, riches are not a matter of economics, but of identity. Wealth is a moral entity, not an economic one. What distinguishes pious millionaires like Warren from the heathens who make their money the old fashioned way is that the former achieve it through the moral pursuit of the public good, which is all the more pious for taking them to a Harvard professorship or a job in government, while the latter achieve it through economic transactions in the private sector. The former is a form of public service, the latter is public exploitation.

But a closer look at the bones and carcass of this system turns those definitions on their head. It is the Warrens who are the exploiters, consuming the wealth of a nation and spawning more committees, regulations and regulatory committees to keep on feeding off the wealth. What they give to us in exchange for what they take is not a service, it is oppression masquerading as feudal protectionism.

The American liberal is eager to protect us from powerful interests, but who will protect us from his protection, and who will turn off that protection and the money it costs us to pay for it, and worse still the freedoms that are consumed in order that we may be properly protected from ourselves.

No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor. Tyrants are always protectors of the people. And our own American Tyrants are equally certain that they are the protectors of a people who would otherwise run off cliffs, throw lawn darts at each other, tear the tags off mattresses, make racist jokes, open pill bottles too easily, have inappropriate opinions and reinforce the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy which they have thoughtfully replaced with a vast echoing bureaucratic state in which everyone is free to be different in the same way.

The American liberal does not like the people very much. Most disguise it a bit better than Elizabeth Warren but that discomfort is always there. And the discomfort comes with a distrust. They don’t like us and they don’t trust the sort of shenanigans we might get up to when they aren’t looking. Instead they are always looking, always nudging, always telling us what to think and how to live and otherwise protecting us from ourselves.

The tyrannical impulses were always there in American liberalism and like water on lilies, power brought them forth. Now we live under a system which strangles us to protect us from ever getting rid of it. The men and women strangling us smile awkwardly and tell us that it is for our own good. This tyranny for our own good requires that they toss aside our laws and replace them with their own. It requires that they spend us into bankruptcy, with much of the proceeds going to them, but in the name of a higher cause. And it demands that we praise them and if we won’t do that, then it demands that we shut up and stop broadcasting our dissatisfaction. There is no place in their ideal national community for people like us.

Read the rest – American tyrants

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Liberal Fascism, Politics, Progressives | 76 Comments »

Shed no tears for the exploding Iranian nuclear scientists

by Mojambo ( 144 Comments › )
Filed under Hamas, Hezballah, Iran, Islamic hypocrisy, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, September 11 at January 17th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish brings some sanity to the phony angst that too many leftists feel for the slowly exploding Iranian nuclear scientists. I do not expect much from al-Guardian and Salon, but Ha’aretz really is a pathetically loathsome newspaper.

by Daniel Greenfield

After having exhausted the indignant possibilities of protesting the extinction of whales, pelicans and polar bears, the left has found a new endangered species to be outraged about. Iranian nuclear scientists. It’s one thing to hug a polar bear or a tree, but it’s another to embrace an Iranian nuclear scientist, who may well be a jolly and colorful fellow with a family and a paint by numbers coloring kit of an atom, but also happens to be a participant in a plot to kill millions of people.

The left which has all the moral sense of a squashed peanut would like us to feel outraged because someone somewhere has been knocking off the engineers of death in a project whose goal is genocide. Yet if you point out to them that just last week a member of the Iranian backed Hezbollah terrorist group was arrested in Thailand for plotting a terrorist attack, you can wait a week until they shrug.

At The Atlantic, Ali Vaez and Charles Ferguson assure us that assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists makes a nuclear Iran more likely. The left specializes in irrational conundrums like this. Every time we kill a terrorist, they lecture us that this will only lead to more Muslims turning into terrorists to take their place. But really now are we to believe that Muslims will respond to the deaths of nuclear scientists by becoming nuclear scientists? Even if they do it will take them a while to get their degrees and by then Iran may not be run by a bunch of homicidal loons.

Meanwhile the same left which insists that Ahmadinejad didn’t really say he wanted to destroy Israel and which spent years arguing that there was no real evidence that Bin Laden was behind September 11, has already decided that Israel was responsible. Their proof so far is an Israeli Brigadier General’s Facebook comment that whoever did it, he isn’t shedding a tear. If that’s the left’s standard of proof then I am clearly guilty of the murder of Bin Laden, Iranian nuclear scientists and anyone else whose death I haven’t shed any tears for.

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It’s hard to think of any regime has more blowback coming to it than Iran. The Ayatollahs sponsor terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel and occasional detours into Asia and Latin America. Once such bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded 300 more. People who were not engaged in researching new ways to wipe another ethnic group off the face of the earth.

If there’s any place on earth that exceeds the Guardian and the Atlantic as a rubbish dump for moldy leftectuals, it’s Israel’s own Haaretz where Avner Cohen asks breathlessly, What if the Iranians start killing Israeli scientists? If Avner Cohen’s father was as bright as him, then around the time that Lil Avner was in diapers, he asked his wife, “What if you get an abortion?”

Sure the Iranians have been killing Israeli road repairmen and kindergarten teachers through their proxy terrorist groups, but just imagine if they start killing Israeli scientists. Next thing you know people in the Middle East will start serving pita. Avner imagines that Israeli scientists have had some immunity until now. Their only immunity has been that Iran didn’t care which Jews it killed, so long as someone named Moshe or David ended up splattered all over a wall somewhere. But Avner Cohen need not be too concerned that a member of the Revolutionary Guard will show up in his hotel room. A fellow as useful as him is not going to be on any target lists in Tehran.

Like so many of his colleagues, Avner Cohen doesn’t seem to understand what genocide means or that the Ayatollahs and their henchmen actually mean it. This bubble of privilege is what makes their idiocy so repulsive. Like Michael Moore wondering on September 11 why Al Qaeda didn’t bomb a state that voted for Bush, Cohen probably believes that the Iranian backed terrorists might take out a settler or two, or maybe one of those brown Mizrahi fellows who aren’t clever enough to get out of the draft, but they would never touch a man with an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in the History of Culture.

The common consensus among the fellows of SPINS or the Society for the Protection of Iranian Nuclear Scientists is that killing Iranian nuclear scientists will only encourage Iran to develop nuclear weapons… which in any case they are doing anyway. The SPINS position is that if we keep trying to stop Iran’s nuclear program, that will sabotage any efforts to talk Iran out of having a nuclear program. If the talks work half as well as they did in North Korea, then perhaps they are better off being sabotaged.

[…..]

Prattling about violations of Iranian sovereignty, when discussing a regime that violates the sovereignty of other states the way that other countries pick a national bird, is a waste of time even by the low standards of diplomatic breast beating. The Ayatollahs and their pet lunatic Mahmoud can’t even share power among themselves, and their grip on power is a violation of their own laws and in opposition to the will of their own people. They are entitled to as much respect of their sovereignty as they can fit in a bucket and put on their heads.

It’s unknown who or what is going through Iranian scientists and Revolutionary Guard commanders like used tissues, but it doesn’t really matter. Since its grim early days this regime has lived on terror and it remains in power only through terror, through the murder, torture and rape of its political dissidents. With a tanking economy and dissent at home, it only has one thing to offer to its fanatical base. Mass murder.

It’s not just the Israelis who don’t want to see Ayatollah Atomica. Few of Iran’s neighbors are too enthusiastic about the idea. Neither is Europe which doesn’t particularly like the idea that the next time Salman Rushdie publishes a book that infuriates some holy beardo browsing the Guardian’s book reviews in between doses of Hashish, the furious Islamist book critics will be able to threaten a radioactive review.

If worst comes to worst, a nuclear weapon would be the final doomsday option for a regime that is increasingly unpopular in some of its largest cities. There is nothing like taking out a section of Tehran to see to it that the Ayatollahs don’t end up like a certain Libyan colonel. It may be hard for many of Iran’s defenders to imagine a regime that would do this to its own people, except for the Bush Administration which they always believed was capable of anything.

At Salon, a site that most people assumed stopped operating around the time Clinton was in office, the always excitable Glenn Greenwald shrieked, “Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion?”

Greenwald would probably prefer all three and as soon as possible to happen to Tel Aviv, but Iranian backed hit squads have been killing non-scientist Americans and Israelis for decades now, without nuclear carpets being bombed or invaded. Like most bigots, Greenwald is also an idiot who assumes that there is a double standard that is weighed against his favorite killers when it actually goes the other way.

Iran has gotten a blank check on decades of terror. If someone has finally written in a name and a number and is depositing the check, then it’s a matter of Iran earning 0.000001 percent interest on its campaign of domestic and international religious terror.

At the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan, who is still under the impression that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a fatwa permitting gay marriage in his drawer which he will publish when Sullivan has written enough columns demonizing Israel, asks “Is not the group or nation responsible for the murder of civilians in another country terrorists?” This is either the opening of a postmodern Shakespearean soliloquy or the world’s dumbest moral dilemma.

[……]

If killing nuclear scientists serving the atomic production of a genocidal state is terrorism, then some of the worst terrorists were the OSS, the intelligence agency which directed its agent to make contact with Werner Heisenberg, then heading up Nazi Germany’s nuclear program and kill him if there were any indications that Germany was close to having the bomb. Heisenberg never did bite the bullet, but did claim after the war that Nazi Germany had only wanted nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, while the Allies used it as a weapon of mass destruction. It’s a lovely soliloquy that only a Sullivan or a Greenwald could believe.

[…..]

What the tender soliloquies of SPINS members for dead Iranian nuclear scientists really show are the relative values placed on the lives of members of the Iranian war machine and those of their victims. There is no deep moral theorizing when an Iranian IED blows off the leg of an Iowa boy or a Hezbollah shell lands on an Israel kindergarten. That bottled outrage is only released when a Hamas terrorist loses a right of way argument with an attack helicopter or an Al Qaeda cleric takes a magic carpet ride via a flying drone.

Iranian nuclear scientists aren’t the only ones who have children. There are cities filled with children that will be the targets of a Shiite bomb. Cities with Jewish children, Christian children and even the Muslim children that SPINS members claim to care so much about. If a few Iranian nuclear scientists experiencing a much more compact and limited explosion than the kind that they would unleash can help preserve those cities and those children then so be it. A few technicians of death are a small price to pay for the lives of millions.