Haaretz today reports on Joseph Yousef, who is, amazingly enough, the Christian convert son of a popular Hamas leader. He now lives in exile in California.

"Send regards to Israel, I miss it. I respect Israel and admire it as a country," he says.

"You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death."

Is that the justification for the suicide attacks?

"More than that. An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In ...

Jonathan Spyer reports (via Andrew Bostom):

On Wednesday, the Israeli security cabinet held its first discussion ever on the issue of the global jihad.

Blink. Blink....

Given theat Israel stands on the front line of global jihad,  I guess it's--understatement of the milennium--about time.

Spyer writes:

One may assume that this discussion was n ...

Between Obama's Ego Explosion and Americans Wanting to Drill--69 percent!--John McCain suddenly looks more like a winner (despite himself).

The Washington Post reports: In his closed door meeting with House Democrats this evening, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama... concluded, "this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for."

The 200,000 souls who thronged to his speech in Berlin came not just for him, he told the enthralled audience of congressional representatives.

"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," he said.

Air sickness ...

...the top ten "public intellectuals" in the world are Muslims?

That's what Foreign Policy magazine determined, having turned its decision over to an Internet poll in which over 500,000 voters participated in just four weeks.

FP explains:

For example, a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites. Others issued press releases or gave interviews to local newspapers. Press coverage profiling these intellectuals appeared around the world, with stories running in Canada, India, Indonesia, Qatar, Spain, and elsewhere.

No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list. In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman ...

All in a day's work: The indefatigable Robert Spencer, far from shrinking from, or even just ignoring the personal attack--"Spencer hates Muslims"--transforms it into an inspirational object lesson on distractingly deceptive smear tactics.

From the ultimate point of Spencer's post:

3. In saying "Spencer hates Muslims," [Grover] Norquist does what he has done for years. [Frank] Gaffney says in his article that Norquist "made repeated ad hominem attacks on Fox TV and elsewhere against me and anyone else (including noted experts like Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson) who dared to warn about the dangers of Islamism. More often than not, he portrayed such warnings as bigoted, racist denunciations of all Muslims."

The bottom line on that, however, is that even if Pipes an ...

When is the world gonna wise up and see the crocodile in the Arab tears for the "Palestinian people"? It's all just another way to bleed the West.

From the Washington Post report on the 19 out of 22 Arab nations who have not made good on their pledges to the Palestian Authority (even as the US and the Eu strap themselves to pour money over the PA):

Out of 22 Arab nations that made pledges, only three -- Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- have contributed funds this year, while oil-ri ...

Last month, I highlighted the confusion of our government, which, in its effort to stop the insidious cultivation of Afghan opium, has, for example, been issuing sharia-compliant micro-loans to Afghan farmers NOT to grow opium poppies, even as it has been ordering the military to turn a blind eye to such poppy cultivation. Meanwhile, the poisonous harvest continues to expand across the country, thus enriching and funding the Taliban (not to mention elements of the Afghan government)--who, of course, our military is supposed to be defeating.

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine carries a lucid and sobering

From The New York Times:

Dear Parents: Please Relax, It’s Just Camp

Obama in Berlin sure looked like a rock concert, although most of the media didn't mention why: It was a rock concert. That is, before Obama took the stage, two popular German acts performed free for the incredible (shrinking?) crowd.