The Guardian: Israel Is Only Justly Defending Itself

If even The Guardian publishes online a comment siding with Israel, by no less than Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon, it must really mean that it is becoming obvious to everyone with an ounce of brain that, defending itself after years of restraint, the Jewish state is only doing what any other country in the same situation would do.

Are The Guardian's falling readership numbers making the paper take into more consideration the opinions of people who are not totally blinded by ideology?

Hamas leaves Israel no choice:

Israel will not allow the lives of its citizens to be endangered. If only Gaza's leaders felt the same.

Hamas's charter includes the aspiration that "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)". While many concentrate on its death-cult worship, its bloodthirsty killing of adversaries, or its contempt for women, Christians and homosexuals, it is this aspiration for genocide that is at the root of Hamas activities. This is the primary reason why Hamas, the governing regime in Gaza, will never recognise or accept a peace accord with Israel in any form.

Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, thousands of rockets have rained down on Israeli cities and towns in deliberate contravention not just of international law, but all humanity and morality. While some might suggest the so-called blockade is the cause of the attacks, it is actually a consequence. The restrictions were only implemented two years after Israel left Gaza, when it was clear that instead of building a "Singapore of the Middle East", Hamas was interested in importing stockpiles of weapons from places like Iran. Instead of building a future for its people, Hamas built an open-air prison for the million and a half inhabitants who fell into its grasp.

However, Gaza was never enough for an organisation whose raison d'etre is the annihilation of Israel, and whose charter begins with the ominous warning that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it".

Every rocket from Gaza is a double war crime. First, the rockets are aimed at civilians; second, they are fired from built-up civilian areas, often close to schools, mosques and hospitals. And about 10% of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza don't reach Israel, exploding in Gaza. Mohammed Sadallah – a four-year-old killed on Saturday, his body displayed in a press conference with Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's leader – was, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, most likely killed by an errant Hamas rocket.

Hamas leaders frequently declare that their people actively seek death. Fathi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas, stated in 2008 that "for the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women and children excel. Accordingly we created a human shield of women, children and elderly. We seek death as you [Israelis] desire life."

Hamas seeks conflagration and war. Death and destruction is seen as a win-win calculation, as any Israeli death is considered a glorious achievement and every Palestinian death that of a "holy martyr", providing badly needed propaganda locally and internationally. Seemingly there are not enough deaths for them, so Hamas's military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, has been busy sending out pictures of massacres in Syria, claiming they were taken in Gaza.

Israel has been left with little choice but to root out this nest of hate and destruction. No nation on earth would allow a third of its population to live in constant fear of incessant fire emanating from a neighbouring territory. Our government exercised restraint. We gave the international community time to act. However, there was a deafening silence, demonstrating to Israelis that we had to take action to protect our citizens.

Those who refused to condemn the attacks on Israeli citizens have no right to condemn Israel's response to establish peace and quiet for its citizens. This is the basic obligation of any sovereign nation, and we will continue taking any action necessary to achieve this aim.

In the face of this undeniable truth, the usual accusation is that Israel is responding with "disproportionate force" or carrying out "collective punishment". I urge all who make this accusation to consider that Israel has successfully targeted in excess of 1,300 weapons caches, rocket launchers and other elements of Hamas's terrorist infrastructure. Yet despite this, the number of Palestinian casualties remains around one for every 13 strikes, the majority killed being active members of Hamas and combatants.

Israel will not allow its citizens' lives to be endangered. The international community must call on the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip to take the same approach with its own people.

Good News: Half of Voters Got Their Campaign News from the Web

A little piece of good news after the US election disappointment: half of voters got their campaign news from the Internet.

A pew survey released yesterday shows a steep increase in voters who got their campaign news from the Internet. The number went up from 36 percent in the 2008 election to 47 percent in this year’s election.

Television continued to serve as the primary source with 67 percent of voters saying they turned to the TV for campaign news coverage. Another interesting bit of info: Cable news was by far preferred to the networks:

Among TV news outlets, 42% cite cable news as a main source. Network television is named by 19% of voters, while 11% cite local TV news. These percentages are little changed from 2008.

Among cable networks, 23% of voters name the Fox News Channel as a main source; 18% cite CNN and 9% MSNBC. There also is little change in the percentage naming any of these cable networks from 2008.

If this trend continues and the number of voters consulting the internet for their news keeps increasing, there is a better likelihood that people will be able to go beyond the myths constructed by the mainstream media.

Why Paedophilia Concerns Have Come to Override Basic Rules of Law

Whether or not the BBC, as the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson argues, should prove that the programme Newsnight was not acting with malice towards senior Tory politician Lord McAlpine wrongly accused of paedophilia by an abuse victim, one thing is clear.

The current obsession with paedophilia seems to have erased or greatly diluted the basic legal principles that a person is innocent until proven guilty and, even more importantly, that the burden of the proof is on the accuser.

Paedophilia and, to a lesser extent, rape have become such politically incorrect crimes that they are treated as if they were worse than even murder or mutilation.

Yet losing life or a limb is certainly worse than being a victim of sex crimes.

When another child abuse scandal connected to the BBC, that of Jimmy Savile, emerged, we heard a never-ending number of celebrities and commentators repeating ad nauseam that children must absolutely be believed without a doubt in the world when they make this kind of accusations, almost implying that disbelief is a crime in itself and echoing similar assertions made about rape and women who claim to have been raped.

Nobody should be believed absolutely and undoubtedly: children, adults, women and men. People who say they have been victims of a crime are witnesses; and it is a well known fact that crime witnesses are highly unreliable, as this latest case concerning Lord McAlpine confirms for the umpteenth time.

This applies to all crimes: the least unpopular as much as the most hated ones. It has nothing to do with the severity of the crime, or how much it is disliked, or how strong emotions it arises.

It is a simple rule of law. To punish an innocent is worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

In the case of paedophilia, even accusing an innocent may be worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

"To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive" correctly writes Boris Johnson.

But why have we got to this point of insanity, where paediatricians have been lynch mobbed for having the same prefix as paedophiles (from the Greek for "child") in their name and accusations can fly around and be believed so liberally?

The reason is very simple. Starting from the 1960s "sexual revolution", strongly if not entirely consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich theories that repressing sexual impulses is not good for you, sexual activity has been removed from the moral sphere.

Contemporary, influential moral philosopher Peter Singer writes in his Practical Ethics that ethics should not concern itself with sexuality, and that driving a car, due to what he believes to be its environmental impact, raises more moral issues than having sex.

This new dogma has been readily and happily accepted by a majority opinion, leading to such nice results as multiplication of marriage breakdowns, adultery, divorces, broken families, abortions, illegitimate births, multiple partners and fathers, AIDS, increase in sexually transmitted diseases, homosexualist agenda being imposed on everybody, incest and Muslim polygamy made quasi-legal or accepted.

But public opinion, seeing where all this was going, namely that sex with children woud be next on the list of morally permissible activities, strongly drew a line at that. Something similar happened with rape.

Given the very confused ideas about sexuality and morality that prevail in our societies (and I grant that the subject is complex), all the furore about paedophilia (and to a lesser degree rape) derives from and is directly proportional to the eagerness and almost desperation with which all other forms of sexuality have been embraced without a thought in the world.

It turns out that sexual activity is not beyond the realm of ethics after all.

GOP Trilemma: Compromise, Stand Firm, Go to the Right

This interesting video sums up, better than many words and in-depth analyses, why Obama won. This has truly become a client state. I like the following definition of client state, applied to Scotland:

Keep spending more and more money on more and more voters, and you've built a client state. Those in receipt of the largesse will want it to continue. One day the money will no longer be there to spend (see technical note from Liam Byrne for details), but by that point you will have engineered a situation where any modulation of public spending will cause pain to such a large proportion of the electorate that the chances of the Conservatives winning a straight fight will be much reduced.

Although I am not American, I am very, very sad that Romney did not win the election.

I had got to like him, a Christian, obviously good, warm and gentle person. I liked the way he spoke during the presidential debates, firm but always polite, compared to the impersonal and arrogant Obama.

I can easily believe what popular radio talk show host and political commentator Rush Limbaugh said of him, that “Mitt Romney is one of the best people, human beings I’ve ever met.”

Limbaugh also said:

None of it makes any sense! Mitt Romney and his wife and his family are the essence of decency. He's the essence of achievement. Mitt Romney's life is a testament to what's possible in this country. Mitt Romney is the nicest guy anybody would ever run into. Mitt Romney is charitable. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He doesn't hate. He's not discriminatory in any way, shape, manner, or form.

This is about Romney as a person. But the reasons why I would have voted for him, if I had been American, are obviously political and I've blogged extensively about them before the election, from the economy to abortion, from Marxism to the presidential debates, from totalitarianism to the Benghazi attack.

Romney's policies were not perfect, but infinitely better than Obama's. Barack Hussein is also someone who has been very shady about his life as well as mendacious about his politics, which makes it unwise to trust him as President of the world's most powerful country.

Exactly because I am European, I've considered the US as something to look to for upholding the western and Christian values that are being eroded so rapidly in my continent.

I'm seriously saddened now to see that the US is going the European way too. But I am still hopeful: this is not the last election, and things may happen before the next that might change America's current political and economical course towards socialism, big government, welfare state, poverty and loss of moral compass.

Looking at the election results, there has clearly been a shift much more pronouncedly to the political left in US voting patterns, strongly determined by minority votes like blacks and Latinos, groups that probably made the difference about who of the two candidates got elected.

Some commentators, on the BBC for instance, said that the Republicans must acknowledge the democraphic change produced by the much higher percentage of Latinos in several states and, if they want to woo these voters, should make changes to their policies, prominently on immigration.

We have to remember this: "As Doug Ross has pointed out, Obama is – among many other things – the lawless president: the first one to sue states for enforcing laws Congress had passed".

The state in question is Arizona, and the law is the immigration law:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that one key part of the Arizona immigration law, known as Senate Bill 1070, is constitutional, paving the way for it to go into effect. Three other portions were deemed unconstitutional in a 5-3 opinion.

The part ruled constitutional is among the most controversial of the law's provisions. It requires an officer to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there's reasonable suspicion that person is in the country illegally.

The three parts ruled unconstitutional make it a state crime for an immigrant not to be carrying papers, allow for warrant-less arrest in some situations and forbid an illegal immigrant from working in Arizona.

The long-awaited decision was a partial victory for Gov. Jan Brewer and for President Barack Obama, who sued the state of Arizona to keep the law from taking effect. By striking down the portions they did, justices said states could not overstep the federal government's immigration-enforcement authority. But by upholding the portion it did, the court said it was proper for states to partner with the federal government in immigration enforcement.

This may help explain why Latinos tend to vote for Obama. But should the Republican Party make concessions of this sort and risk going against the Constitution? Is this just a small compromise, or is it damaging what America, since its foundation, really is and stands for?

On immigration, Obama was accused by Bush administration counsel John Yoo of executive overreach:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president has the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision was included to make sure that the president could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it. President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.

There are two exceptions, neither of which applies here. The first is that “the Laws” includes the Constitution. The president can and should refuse to execute congressional statutes that violate the Constitution, because the Constitution is the highest form of law. We in the Bush administration argued that the president could refuse to execute laws that infringed on the executive’s constitutional powers, particularly when it came to national security — otherwise, a Congress that had a different view of foreign policy could order the military to refuse to carry out the president’s orders as Commander-in-Chief, for example. When presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR said that they would not enforce a law, they did so when the law violated their executive powers under the Constitution or the individual rights of citizens.

The president’s right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional legislation, of course, does not apply here. No one can claim with a straight face that the immigration laws here violate the Constitution.

The second exception is prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that because of limited resources the executive cannot pursue every violation of federal law. The Justice Department must choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important, have the greatest impact, deter the most, and so on. But prosecutorial discretion is not being used in good faith here: A president cannot claim discretion honestly to say that he will not enforce an entire law - especially where, as here, the executive branch is enforcing the rest of immigration law.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

On the other side of the debate, there are those who say that Romney was not conservative enough. Romney was chosen as Republican candidate because he covered a kind of moderate middle ground in the GOP, in the hope that this would appeal to middle America's voters come Election Day.

Some commentators now say that a more consistent conservative approach would have been the way forward.

British political journalist Melanie Phillips is one of them:

Britain and the Europeans love Obama because they think he will end American exceptionalism and turn the US into a pale shadow of themselves. What they don’t realise is that, all but lobotomised by consumerist rights, state dependency, victim culture, sentimentality, post-religion, post-nationalism and post-Holocaust and Empire guilt, Britain and Europe are themselves fast going down the civilisational tubes.

Romney lost because he refused to provide an alternative to any of this for fear of being labelled a warmonger, flint-heart or social reactionary. He refused to engage with any of the issues that made this Presidential election so truly momentous. Up against the bullying of the totalitarian left, he ran for cover. He played safe, and as a result only advertised his own weakness and dishonesty. Well, voters can smell inconsistency from a mile away; they call it untrustworthiness, and they are right.

Rush Limbaugh is another:

“If there’s one option that hasn’t been tried in a long time, it’s called conservatism with a capital C,” he said. “This was not a conservative campaign.”

This is the trilemma facing the GOP: compromise, stand firm, or go the full length and be more consistent in its conservative principles.

We Know Very Little about Obama the Man

I don't know how the American people can trust as President a man who has been so, shall we say, economical with the truth even about himself as a person.

I'm not referring here to life details which concern someone's privacy. No, this is about things and events that the public has the necessity to know about a man's deep-seated beliefs, ideas and past and present behavior in order to form an opinion on his suitability as their President.

Barack Hussein Obama, about whom the overwhelming evidence is that he was born and raised a Muslim and remained a Muslim until until his late 20s, has repeatedly denied having ever been a Muslim.

A man's religious beliefs are important to understand the person in any case. In the current international political climate, with Islamism on the rise globally, Al-Qaeda much stronger than ever, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation urging the United Nations and the European Council to adopt their particular take on "human rights" through their Sharia-based Cairo Declaration while not signing the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights because in conflict with Islamic values, and the Muslim world asking for Sharia's blasphemy laws to be imposed everywhere, it is imperative for a US President at least to declare his Muslim background and sympathies, not to cover them up.

Obama lied about many facts of his life just because it suited him at the time.

Obama lied when he said that he had never been a member and candidate of the Chicago socialist New Party. Here again we don't have a little white lie, but a deception aimed at keeping the American people in the dark about his real beliefs and affiliations.

Obama lied on his country of birth, when in 1991, in order to sell his autobiography, he falsely claimed that he "was born in Kenya." Is this important? Yes, for a future President.

What all the dispute about his country of birth shows is that Obama, unlike all other US Presidents, was not vetted and scrutinized prior to or after his election.

During the 2008 Presidential election cycle, we as a nation witnessed the collapse of the American mainstream media, and the deterioration of journalism right before our very eyes. We watched the media become completely unhinged losing all journalistic integrity & moral objectivity as they jumped head first into the tank for Barack Obama openly cheer-leading for him, and essentially functioning as a political arm of the Democratic Party. The liberal media practically campaigned for him in a grotesque display of partisanship rendering themselves negligent to their own profession. The fawning media anointed Barack Obama as their “Savior” insulating him from criticism, and ignoring the extremely important Presidential vetting process which has always been a necessary step toward helping the American people select a candidate. The traditional rules & protocols that the media had applied to every other Presidential predecessor of history apparently did not apply to Barack Obama.

If Barack Obama was properly vetted and scrutinized in 2008 the way every Republican candidate is currently being looked at under the microscope, he would never have been elected by the American people. Obama’s extraordinary lack of applicable job experience required to run for the highest office in the land was glaring, but the media did its best to minimize, diminish, and flat out suppress vital information about candidate Obama from the misinformed public which would have disqualified him from contention. He had absolutely no executive/business experience, no leadership/governing experience, served less than 1 full term as a functioning U.S. Senator, had a murky past that is shrouded in secrecy, and also a history of associating himself with the most radical fringe elements of society. This included a friendship with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers along with spending 20 years in a church of hate with his bigoted mentor & father figure Jeremiah Wright preaching fiery racist rhetoric, anti-Semitic slurs, and spewing vicious anti-American rants from the pews. The fact that Obama spent 2 decades in this hostile environment listening to Wright’s hate filled sermons, and embracing this man so closely speaks volumes about his judgement, character, and world view. While campaigning in 2008, candidate Barack Obama told America, “Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself with.” This revealing statement should have been closely examined given Obama’s numerous relationships with highly questionable, and unsavory individuals yet it gained absolutely no traction within the elite media as they were far too busy drooling over Obama’s grand speeches, and trying to get his autograph.

...Liberals were so enamored by Barack Obama that they were practically ready to carve his face into Mount Rushmore, and inscribe his image onto U.S. currency before he was even sworn into the Oval Office.

If the upcoming election becomes a referendum on Obama’s disastrous economic policies, his failed stimulus packages, recklessly adding over 5 trillion dollars to our nation’s unsustainable debt, Obama-Care which continues stifling businesses from hiring, and sky rocketing gas prices, he will lose the election in a landslide. His far left divisive ideologies, and radical associations alone should be more than enough ammunition for the American people to come out to the polls in droves to ensure he is a 1 term President. Heading into the 2012 election cycle, we are about to embark on the most negative & outright vicious attack/smear campaign against the Republican nominee at the hands of Obama’s Marxist minions within the powerful liberal mainstream media establishment. If Barack Obama, and his billionaire overlord George Soros have it their way, the media conversation will be driven by an unprecedented all-out assault against the Republican opponent in a deliberately deceitful attempt to divert the attention away from Obama’s indefensible failures & abysmal Presidential record.

We are talking about a man who was given the Nobel Peace Prize just for having been elected. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, contains such an enormous amount of lies to legitimately raise the question "Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?". In the book he fabricated an account of his Kenyan grandfather being racially persecuted.

The Obama Record: The most frightening aspect of this president may not be his radical ideology but his rank dishonesty in selling that ideology. Now he's been caught lying about family racism.

In "Dreams from My Father," his 1995 memoir, Obama used the story of his paternal grandfather's imprisonment and torture at the hands of British colonists in Kenya as an example of white cruelty. He claimed Hussein Onyango Obama was unjustly detained for six months before being released a crippled, lice-ridden "old man."

In fact, none of it is true, according to Washington Post editor and biographer David Maraniss, who traveled to Kenya to investigate the tale. His grandfather was not detained or beaten by his "white rulers," as Obama, writing as a 34-year-old lawyer, claimed.

This is only the latest example of a growing body of fabrications, embellishments and outright lies told by this president, who has a real and possibly pathological problem with the truth.

...Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.

Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn "white folks" and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.

Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a "big fight" with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked "why black people were so angry all the time," when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.

In both his autobiographies, Obama paints a false portrait of a still-racist America and West, where he, his friends and relatives are victimized by that racism. Conveniently, his remedy is redistributive justice through bigger government.

In Dreams from My Father he lied, among other things, about paternal grandfather, "his maternal grandfather, his father, his mother, his parents' wedding, his stepfather's father, his high school friend, his girlfriend, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright".

Victor Davis Hanson has the final word on this: "If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother's terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything."

Donald Trump may have followed an unorthodox procedure in trying to get to the truth, but he had a point when he said that Obama is the mystery candidate:

“I thought it would be a very easy way to get transparency from the president,” he answered, going on to accuse Obama of being the “least transparent of any president — ever.”

Trump maintains that Obama’s past remains a relative mystery. And since, in his view, not many people know about the president’s personal history, gaining access to his passport and college records would be telling.

“Passport applications tell you a lot,” Trump told TheBlaze. “I would hope to find nothing – but I have a feeling that might not be the answer.”

Given how little we all know about Obama and his life, authors have made plausible and valid explanations. Joel Gilbert produced a video on DVD, Dreams From My Real Father, in which he gives good reasons to believe that Barack Obama's real father, biologically as well as ideologically, was the late Communist Party USA activist Frank Marshall Davis:

At age 18, Barack Obama admittedly arrived at Occidental College a committed revolutionary Marxist. What was the source of Obama’s foundation in Marxism?

...The film begins by presenting the case that Barack Obama's real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama’s worldview during his formative years. Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multicultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. Was the goat-herding Kenyan father only a fairy tale to obscure a Marxist agenda, irreconcilable with American values?

This fascinating narrative is based in part on two years of research, interviews, newly unearthed footage and photos and the writings of Davis and Obama himself. "Dreams From My Real Father" weaves together the proven facts with reasoned logic in an attempt to fill in the obvious gaps in Obama’s history.

Since there is a physical resemblance of Obama to communist Frank Marshall Davis, it is thought that Obama had cosmetic surgery in order to disguise that. Two nationally known cosmetic surgery experts independently reached this conclusion:

“It appears Obama had some aesthetic refinement,” said plastic surgeon J. David Holcolm.

...“Obama has gone to great lengths to obscure his past,” Gilbert said. “Now, in addition to the alleged document forgery and photographic forgery by Obama to hide his true identity, we now have evidence of facial forgery.”

Holcolm described in detail his reasons for concluding Obama has had cosmetic surgery.

“The upper and middle nasal vault are both narrowed. The tip and infra-tip are softer and the tip has been rotated up,” he said. “Alar height appears to have been reduced so the lower part of the nose that makes up the nostrils appears softer.

“These changes are not characteristic of the natural aging process,” Holcolm said, “where the tip tends to settle and rotate downward causing the appearance of a longer nose and where the tip also often widens noticeably.”

Wendy Lewis, a cosmetic surgery consultant and author of 11 consumer health and beauty books, including “America’s Cosmetic Doctors & Dentists” and “Plastic Makes Perfect,” agrees.

“In the three younger photographs, Obama appears to have a bulbous nasal tip with wide alar bases, not uncommon with males and with skin of color,” Lewis said. “The more current photos show a thinner nasal tip which suggests some finessing of his nose over the years, but it is a very natural-looking effect.”

...Gilbert suspects Obama had the surgery because he was “concerned he was looking too much like Frank Marshall Davis as he got older.”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence that Obama chose to undergo a rhinoplasty before running for U.S. Senate and facing the national spotlight,” Gilbert said. “If Obama was identified as Davis’ son, it would connect the Marxist dots of Obama’s entire life journey.”

Gilbert said Obama “needed the Kenyan father fairy tale to misdirect the public away from the fact that he is a red diaper baby, the child of a Communist Party USA propagandist and Soviet agent.”

Gilbert told WND he’s received hundreds of emails people who have received a copy of his documentary in the mail, and the main message is “good folks don’t like it when they’ve been lied to.”

Look at the pictures yourself.

The latest revelation comes from an in-depth research by Jerome Corsi of WND, author of many No. 1 N.Y. Times best-seller books on Obama:

Largely ignored [by establishment media] in 2008 was research by the Hillary Clinton campaign based on contacts developed with members of the church Obama attended for two decades, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. This is the first of a series of articles WND has developed from months of in-person interviews with church members who have known Barack and Michelle Obama over many years.

According to these sources Obama was one of the members of the Trinity United Church of Christ who benefited from a “matchmaking service” run by the Trinity Church and known as the Down Low Club. The latter is a well-known program to "help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife" as well as to help them find homosexual lovers.

Ten years ago, the New York Times reported on a growing underground subculture in the black community known as Down Low, comprised largely of men who secretly engage in homosexual activity while living “straight” lives in public.

It’s within that subtext that opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign began investigating rumors that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was running a “matchmaking service” for members of his Trinity United Church of Christ known as the Down Low Club, which included Barack Obama.

Over the past several months, WND investigators have interviewed a number of members of the church who claim the president benefited from Wright’s efforts to help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife.

The 2003 New York Times story, “Double Lives on the Down Low,” said that though many black men reject “a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate,” they “have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low.”

This is the kind of investigatigative journalism that the mainstream media should engage in to uncover the truth about the President of the United States, if they weren't too afraid of what they may find.

Douglas Murray and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Debate

I've chosen this video of a debate between Douglas Murray and renowned UK Muslim leftist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a columnist for the (self-proclaimed) Independent newspaper, because it is very representative of several things.

Alibhai-Brown starts by saying that the last time the two of them debated they were very civilized and "British", which we must assume she now regrets because this time she was anything but.

Then, after reprimanding Murray for his - in her view - generalizations about Muslims and fundamentalism, she berates British culture which, she says, is a drinking culture. So he is accused of what he does not do and she, on the other hand, does: tarring everyone in a group with the same brush.

After this nice example of inconsistency, we are treated to her description of herself as "very well-integrated", in the same breath as her protest against imposing "Britishness" on everybody living in the UK.

Many similar inanities follow before the conversation begins revolving around freedom of speech and then Iran, Israel and nuclear arms.

About freedom of speech, I'm glad to see that Douglas Murray appears to believe what I believe regarding Holocaust denial. The gist of what he says is that imprisoning David Irving for denying the Holocaust gives the President of Iran, the madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a pretext to accuse the West of double standards by showing its Achilles' heel in the defence of free speech.

Murray seems to think what I also believe about freedom of speech in general, namely that criminalizing Holocaust denial, Nazi and fascist speech is a violation of freedom of expression.

In fact, as many people have observed during the recent Muslim riots against the Muhammad film, making crimes of Holocaust denial and the rest paves the way to the Islamic world's request to impose on the West blasphemy laws outlawing criticism of Islam.

About Iran, the "very well-integrated" Yasmin Alibhai-Brown makes several attempts at morally equating it to Israel and Britain, saying that nobody should have nuclear weapons but, if some countries have them, then all countries ahould be allowed to have them too.

I found the best answer to that in a comment to the video:

In the words of Salman Rushdie:"There is only one group in the world that wishes to get nuclear weapons to use them... radical Islamists". Every country that is armed with them has them for deterrence. There are those who have them not to use them and there are those who want them to use them. Yasmin simply does not get it.

As we well know, Islamists have among their midst many suicide - nuclear or not - bombers.

The most revealing thing in this very enlightening video is the parallel in the irrationality of Alibhai-Brown's performance: she talks as irrationally as she acts irrationally during the discussion.

The lack of logic in her words is not only mirrored but confirmed and reinforced by her continuous interrupting, shouting, patronizing, forcing the others to pay attention to her, treating them like idiots, telling them what to do, pointing fingers under their nose and other hysterical behaviours.

If, at any moment, you may be tempted to take her pseudo-arguments seriously her behaviour serves as a reminder of what degree of irrationality we are dealing with here.

BBC Question Time Panellist Mehdi Hasan Calls Non-Muslims Animals

On Question Time tonight, the BBC invited as a member of the programme's esteemed panel Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan, former senior political editor of the left-wing The New Statesman and now political director at the leftist website The Huffington Post, regular contributor to The Guardian, in short one of the mainstream Islam's public figures that the UK elites and media are so keen on.

If you want to know a bit more about his views and see how much of a moderate Muslim he is, watch the video above in which he is caught comparing non-Muslims to "animals": so he is speciesist as well as Islamic supremacist.

Hasan is also in support of Iran's nuclear program.

The BBC's invitation of the leader of the BNP Nick Griffin to Question Time, which provoked so many protests, not only pales in comparison but also Griffin, despite the constant attacks he receives, has done nothing to deserve them.

If people want to continue calling Griffin and his party "racist" and "fascist", they have to support these accusations with real evidence, not demagoguery.

Obama Totalitarian Socialism's Early Signs

I knew that Obama was bad news even before he was elected President.

Four years ago, in 2008, during his first presidential campaign, my blog Of Human and Non-Human Animals was shut down by Blogger.

Not knowing why, I made several searches on Google until I found out that the same thing had recently happened to many other blogs. All these blogs had in common was that they had in any way been critical of Obama.

In a forum I found a very clear and detailed explanation of how the Obama campaign volunteers, many of whom "young, inexperienced, with little knowledge of the Internet" and, I would add, not particularly smart, had gone around the web looking for any minimal sign of dissent with their political star and tried to damage the sites containing these "heresies".

If the site was a Blogger blog, like mine, they flagged it to Blogger.

So I remembered that on this blog of mine, which was all about animal issues - its tagline is "Why giving animals a fair deal is good for humans too" -, I had posted an article entitled Candidates on Animal Rights.

In it I compared the policies of Obama and John McCain on animal issues, and found both of them seriously wanting.

I cannot know for sure, but all the available evidence, including the fact that my blog, like many others which had suffered the same fate, was then reinstated, points to my blog having been shut down for that reason.

This incident to me seemed a shocking display of censorship and curtail of free speech, especially in view of the fact that I hadn't even singled out Obama in my criticism, but had been even-handed with both of the then presidential candidates.

It immediately gave me a sense of bad things to come from Barack Hussein if elected as President of the USA, and this prediction turned out to be accurate.

Incidentally, when it comes to Obama there is always a double standard.

I remember four years ago he was treated by the media as a champion of the animal cause just because he had promised his kids a dog if elected to the White House.

Romney made an excellent joke last night, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner organized by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York to benefit needy children, when he said:

I've already seen early reports from tonight's dinner. Headline: Obama embraced by Catholics, Romney dines with rich people.

AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda

Jihad Watch has published my article AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda:

Pamela Geller’s subway ads have achieved the very important objective of making anti-jihad reach the headlines in the UK.

Even though the coverage was, as was to be expected, mostly unsympathetic to the ads, it’s not often that an ordinary person in Britain turns the TV on and hears the word “jihad” and even less “anti-jihad”, unless in connection with terrorist activities. Counterjihad posters in US main cities’ subways are a revolutionary novelty.

So I think that even if the media reports can distort and give the wrong impression about the campaign, the very fact that the general public learns about it has the positive effect of letting people know that there is a resistance to Islamic violence and arrogance, and a response to anti-Israel ads.

There are many in Britain who don’t believe the propaganda by the political classes and the media. The idea that the BBC, for example, is strongly politically biased is becoming increasingly popular, so we can expect that lots of people will take what it says with a pinch of salt.

The BBC covered the judge ruling in favour of the ads in the New York subway with “Pro-Israel 'Defeat Jihad' ads to hit New York subway”, clearly and predictably sympathetic with the MTA and CAIR point of view:

"Pro-Israel adverts that equate jihad with savagery are to appear in 10 of New York's subway stations next week, after officials failed to block them.
…Aaron Donovan, spokesman for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), told the BBC they had no choice but to run the ad.

"'Our hands are tied,' he said. 'The MTA is subject to a court-ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard.

"'That standard restricted publication of ads that demean people on the basis of their race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification. The judge recognised our intention but found our attempt to be constitutionally deficient.'"

What “race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification” is jihad? It is linked to a particular religion, yes, which is why we should be free to criticize Islam. But the ads don’t demean people for being Muslim, but just for embracing arms and killing other people. Who could object to “demeaning” murderers and terrorists?

Paradoxically, it is those like the MTA spokesman and the others who keep telling us how the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, who in practice, when they hear “jihad”, have the knee-jerk reaction of thinking “Muslims”.

Sky News similarly headlined: “Anti-Jihad Adverts To Run In New York Subway”:

"The controversial leader of the group behind the adverts says she believes that America is at risk from some Muslims.

"The head of a group that has won its fight to run controversial adverts in New York subway stations referring to some Muslims as 'savage' has told Sky News that she will fight 'to the death' for the right to offend people.

"Ms Geller told Sky News that she was unconcerned the adverts might make the subway network a target for violence.

"She said: 'Were there similar ads on the London buses and trains on 7/7? You know
there weren't.

"'I will not abridge my freedoms so as not to offend savages.

"'I won't take responsibility for other people being violent.

"'I live in America and in America we have the first amendment.'

"Ms Geller, who is a prominent supporter of Israel, stressed that she was not referring to all Muslims as savages, only those who engaged in what she characterises as ‘Jihad’.

"She believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country, and her group has launched similar campaigns before."


She believes that. And so believes everybody who has taken the time to look at the evidence as objectively as possible. That reference to “some Muslims” is ambiguous because it seems to imply, again, that Pamela Geller targets Muslims, although, for some unknown reason, not all of them.

Reporting on this without any attempt to explain the reasons behind someone’s actions is in itself deceiving. Telling that Geller “believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country” to an audience that has never been informed about what Islam preaches, how its history unfolded, what its effects globally today are, and what Sharia law involves, is implicitly portraying her as a conspiracy theorist.

Russia Today, another news channel that broadcasts in Britain, reported on the Washington court ruling:

"Judge Collyer openly described the posters as ‘hate speech’, but said the message was protected under the First Amendment as ‘core political speech’ and did not accept the Metro’s argument that it incited violence and constitutes ‘a gamble with public safety’.
AFDI, whose poster has been condemned by over 200 public organizations, had to fight a similar legal battle in New York, again winning the right to place the ads."


The word “hate” is another of those over-used and abused words, like “racism”. The politically correct and those protected by them never hate, they are just righteously angry (against injustice, presumably). Anti-jihadists who write ads hate, but Muslims violently rioting are just angry (even rightly so, because someone provoked them with – how dared they! - a film). The English Defence League staging a peaceful demonstration in Walthamstow is hate, but the far-left extremists and Muslims who pelted them with bottles and bricks only showed their anger against these “bigots”.

Hate has obviously come to mean the thought crime of not thinking politically correctly.

In the press, both The Daily Mail and The Guardian have run several articles on the subject.

They both reported, among other things, on the Mona Eltahawy incident. The MailOnline had an interview with Pamela Hall in which she talked about her plans to sue Eltahawy for the damages she caused to her clothing and equipment during her 'defense of free speech'.

The Guardian, in Comment in Free, asked its readers, “Mona Eltahawy and the anti-Muslim subway ads: is hers the right approach?”. The comments to the post are mostly answering no, drawing a distinction between exercising the freedom of speech and vandalism, and concluding that Eltahawy’s action was damaging public property and therefore illegal. This is one of the ever increasing number of cases in which the people who comment on liberal media’s articles reveal themselves to be much less on the left than the paper itself.

A commenter noticed the “anti-Muslim” in the headline, and wrote: “Strictly speaking, these ads are anti-violent-Jihad rather than anti-Muslim. That is, unless you believe that all Muslims automatically support violent Jihad. But, as we are told here so often, only a tiny, tiny minority of Muslims -- who misunderstand their Religion of Peace -- support violent Jihad. It is these people who are described in the ads as savages.”

Douglas Murray Video on Iran and Israel on the BBC

Douglas Murray is a very brave British commentator, not afraid of defying the political correctness dominating every UK public debate, even when he has to face the sancta sanctorum of that orthodoxy: the BBC.

Douglas Murray is former director of the British think tank Centre for Social Cohesion and is now an associate director of another UK think tank, the conservative, pro-Israel Henry Jackson Society.

Never Say Muslim Paedophile in Rochdale on the BBC

Last night I watched on the BBC the political debate programme Question Time. One of the questions from the studio audience to the panel of politicians, media people and other commentators was about the scandal provoked by the sexual abuse of white underage girls by Muslim men in Rochdale, Northern England.

Everyone in the programme uttered the usual platitudes and was ready to condemn the local police and social services for failing to act, but everything that was said, without exception, points to this: all the people participating in the debate are conniving with the cover-up, by sharing the very same ideology and fear - call it political correctness if you like - that caused it in the first place and, if they had been in the same position of responsibility as those police and social services, they would have done exactly the same.

How do I know that? Because, during the whole discussion, the words "Muslim" or "Islam" were not uttered even once. It must have been a feat.This is the final total score of expressions used in reference to the perpetrators or in association with what they did:

Asian males: 1

Catholic Church: 1

Catholicism: 1

Church: 1

People involved in this case: 1

People: 1

The accused involved: 1

Islam: 0

Muslims: 0

If you looked at those numbers without knowing what happened, you would guess that it was something to do with the Catholic Church - which obviously had nothing to do with it, but the mainstream media are always happy to drag it into any scandal, true, partially true, false, imagined, dreamed at night, it doesn't matter.

Labour Party's Deputy Leader Harriet Harman was particularly pathetic in her use of the most tortuous arguments to deny that the police had fear of accusations of racism or Islamophobia with consequent possible punishments as their motivation not to investigate and prosecute.

Buffoon, sorry, comedian Steve Coogan made a display of periphrases and circumlocutions, and every few words stopped in his tracks. Here is what he said when asked to explain the police's behaviour, complete with ums, pauses and hesitations:

"I think that that there's there's um... um... one thing that... We don't know the full facts, so we don't know. There's the inference that um... has been made in some quarters that it may be about the um... um... um... the religious dimension um... to this of the accused involved um... and whether um... because of sort of religious sensivitives um.. there may have been recalcitrance on the part of the police. Now, that's always a political hot potato, everyone you know wants to talk about is the perception of mysogyny in certain religions, and I'd say that that is true um... of certain aspects or certain people within Catholicism and um.. and also you know um... other religions, I don't think that any religion has a monopoly on this."

If these people couldn't even bring themselves to say the word "Islam" or "Muslim", so paralyzing is the taboo of accusing this doctrine or its followers in their mind, imagine whether, had they been in the shoes of those services whose duty was to investigate someone they can't even name, the outcome could conceivably have been different.

The show was a cover-up pointing the finger at another cover-up.

UK Papers Have Few Readers? Tax Internet Users

Leftists love the state, and the bigger it is the better.

The government is there to solve all our problems, they think. So why not use goverment intervention to save from failure UK liberal newspapers whose readership is constantly declining because people got fed up of finding in them the same old Marxist propaganda and anti-Western, pro-Islam, pro-immigration enthusiasm which is now less and less shared by the general population, who now has the free (in every sense) alternative of the internet?

This was the idea of a journalist of - surprise, surprise - The Guardian, the paper's executive investigations editor David Leigh.

His proposal is splendid from a communist viewpoint, and atrocious for everybody else: everyone in the UK with a broadband connection account should be imposed a £2 a month broadband levy, with which to create a fund to be distributed to newspapers in proportion to their UK online readership.

So, as is the usual knee-jerk response of the Left, rather than addressing a problem with a real, concrete solution to it (like, in this case, improving the quality of their rags by better meeting the demands of their potential readership), they want to ask the government to "solve" the problem by pouring more money into it (the "progressives" answer to everything, which achieves nothing except increasing public debt).

And how do you collect this new public money? By raising taxes, of course.

Most British newspapers sales are falling. Last month, The Economist says, the Guardian Media Group "reported an annual loss of around £76m ($121m). Its newspaper unit lost £54m".

Leigh thinks that the solution he proposes is "obvious", but even the online comments to his article clearly show that he is in a tiny minority to believe that although, as is often the case, people like him are probably deluded into thinking that they represent majority views.

And these are also the same "progressives" who keep telling us how they, unlike the nasty Tories who are out of touch with ordinary people, feel our pain in these difficult economic times and know how hard it is for families to get by. And yet they want households to fork out more money just to compensate the financial losses of those papers that people are not prepared to spend money to read.

So for what should they be worth saving?

BBC Unconvinced that Syrian Christians Are under Threat

Last night the BBC reported about the plight of Syrian Christians.

It's a monumental effort for the BBC to cover the topic of Christians persecuted just for being Christian. Despite the daily constant coverage of events in Syria it has talked of the country's Christians perhaps only once before, in April with a short report. And when it does it's always in an iffy way, as if it couldn't bring itself to accept that it's a real problem.

The newsreader who introduced the short, filmed report was so unfamiliar with the topic that, just before giving the percentage of Christians among Syrians, she hesitated and then got it wrong by a long shot, saying 2% instead of 10%.

The programme mentioned an interview with a woman whose "family had fled Syria for Lebanon because it was simply too frightening now for Christians, she insisted."

The report concluded:

The events of the Arab Spring have revitalised Syria's Brotherhood.

However one of the group's leaders, Molham al-Drobi, told the BBC that Christians had nothing to fear.

The Muslim Brotherhood would not try to establish an Islamic state.

"We are not working towards a religious state," he said.

"We don't think Syria is a place where you could have a religious state because Syria has different religions, different ethnic groups, different races."

That does not seem to have deterred Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood from its intention to impose Sharia law on all Egyptians, as this video of President Morsi, translated by MEMRI, shows:





Why should we believe what Brotherhood members say to us Westerners? Do they have any interest in telling non-Muslims what their intentions are? We know the answers to these questions, especially in the light of the Islamic doctrines that consider lying to unbelievers in order to further Islam's cause permissible and even desirable. War is deceit.

Economic Optimism at the Horizon

The UK's unemployment figures have decreased, but the economy is not recovering. How is it possible?

The country's unemployment rate has gone down for the fourth consecutive month.

The UK economy, at the same time, measured in terms of output and GDP (Gross Domestic Product), has been flat for two years now, and the International Monetary Fund forecasts no or little growth for this and next years.

Economists scratch their heads. These figures "defy the laws of economic gravity", claimed Gerwyn Davies of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Several theories have been proposed to explain this dichotomy and apparent paradox.

But I personally find the Royal Bank of Scotland's economist Ross Walker's explanation an interesting one, although I can't say if it's correct or not. He

says the employment numbers – which are perhaps easier to measure than economic output – at the very least ‘present a challenge to notions of technical recession’.

Markit's Chris Williamson, though warning things are about to change, agrees. 'I think employment has been on the increase simply because the economy has been growing faster, and not in recession, than the oRBSfficial GDP data suggest.'

I heard Walker on the BBC Radio 5 Live say something that seemed to point to the greater reliability of employment figures than economic output, for the reason he mention here: that they are easier to measure.

So, according to this logic, if these two indicators point in conflicting directions it's the unemployment numbers that should be believed.

And here he makes other observations:

For a long time we've argued the most important figure is the employment number, which doesn't seem to get much attention for reasons I've never understood and so it's pretty solid. It begs the question if the economy is in recession, why we are creating 180,000 new jobs.

We've had sizeable public sector layoffs and they've been a bit more frontloaded than had been expected when the fiscal consolidation began but we still seem to have reasonably robust private sector employment.

Some of it is part time, but overall it's a little better than expected. The wage figures are obviously still very soft but I think the combination of stronger employment growth and larger than expected falls in inflation are doing more to restore real incomes. They're offsetting the effects of the fairly anaemic nominal income growth.

Official figures published by the Office for National Statistics showed that in June the UK's inflation rate fell to 2.4% as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, while the Retail Prices Index, which includes housing costs, fell to 2.8%.

This is the third month in a row that the annual rate of CPI has fallen, and it is now at its lowest since November 2009, which means that UK prices are increasing at their slowest rate since the end of 2009.

The BBC says:

The rate of inflation, which indicates how fast prices are rising compared with a year earlier, is slowing due to lower food, fuel and clothing prices...

The thing having the biggest effect on household budgets is the fall in fuel prices, said Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at Conlumino.

Petrol prices fell by 4.3 pence per litre on the month, to £1.33 a litre on average. Diesel was down 4.7p to an average of £1.39.

"This has benefited most households although, in our view, it will take time for this to drive tangible changes in behaviour in terms of shopping and spending habits," he said.

Mr Saunders pointed out that wages were still rising more slowly than prices, meaning a continued squeeze on finances.

"However, if inflation continues to drop back at this pace, wage settlements will outstrip inflationary growth by the fourth quarter meaning we will see a return to growth in real disposable income," he said.

Overall, alcohol and transport costs were down by 0.5%.

Food prices were 0.1% lower.

And, if we really want to be optimistic, there is another good sign at the horizon: petrol prices are predicted to drop:

... we expect a global growth in oil production "from 93 million barrels per day today to 110 million barrels per day by 2020", an increase of almost 20 percent, the largest increase in a single decade since the 1980s...

The other obvious happy consequence that is plausible and legitimate to predict is the reduction, and even collapse, in oil prices, similarly to what happened in the 1980s. Then that oil price decrease was a powerful factor driving economic recovery and growth. It may indeed happen again.

For millions of people in Britain fuel prices are the biggest household bill concern, it will be a great relief if car petrol and other fuel prices go down.