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.

This week's column.

A screen classic of political satire is The Great McGinty, the first movie American jewel Preston Sturgess both wrote and directed (famously selling the screenplay to Paramount for $10 even as he was the highest-paid Hollywood writer on the condition that he be allowed to direct).  Brian Donlevy  (left) plays the improbable political sensation and Akim Tamiroff (right) plays his string-pulling political boss. Take a look at it and see if maybe, just maybe, it reminds you of somebody's bombastically cynical political journey to world citizenship in Berlin... minus the laughs.

Two perceptive pieces that probe where the rest of the media skim by:

One is by Andy McCarthy, who takes a closer look at the nature of the Iraqi people--and the ally-potential of Iraq--if it is considered good politics in Iraq for Iraqi Prime  Minister Nouri al-Maliki to rail, quietly enough, against a continued US presence in Iraq, while seeking prosecution privileges against US servicemen for "crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against our population," as he told Der Spiegel. I have felt similar 

Michelle Malkin instantly saw (above) what was happening during  Oba-messiah's pre-dawn photo-op at Jerusalem's Western Wall: The ultimate in campaign flim flam. Will American Jews--a key to Florida, for example--fall for this?  

This is the poster officially commemorating the 43rd anniversary of  Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party--the same party Barack Obama, taking a page, of course, from the Bush administration, yesterday rewarded with a visit for its "secular" moderation.

The symbolism in the poster is none too subtle: Israel and the territories known as the Palestinian Authority are draped in their entirety in a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf--to the obvious satisfaction of arch-terrorist Arafat depicted in the middle. Just in cas ...

Jeffrey Imm brings us up to date on Rep. Pete Hoekstra's attempts to carve out a PC-free Intelligence Zone; namely, his legislative efforts to shield our intelligence agencies from the "suggested" "terror lexicon" promoted--incredibly, suicidally--by the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counter Terrorism Center, and the State Department. This is the same lexicon I have written about (among other places, here) that bars any and all mention of Islam, jihad, caliphate, Islamic, Islamist, Islamofascist, Islamojihadofascistcaliphate....etc., from discussions of same.  

After going down to defeat in May, Congressman Hoekstra's "amendement  to bar the use of intelligence funding for ...

Today's syndicated column is drawn from my recent interview with Oskar Freysinger, a local leader of the Swiss People's Party-- much in the news now for its proposal to ban minarets in Switzerland. I'll have more to say on the subject and the man, but for now, "A Swiss `Extremist' Against Islamic Law":

In the Alps, Switzerland--“Explain the minaret ban,” I asked.

I was sitting in the side room of a house, overlooking a flat plot somewhat larger than the trampoline outside. Beyond that trampoline, still visible in the evening light ...

Love the fatuous imperiousness (below), typical of the comfy totalitarian tendencies of EU bureacrats who live to speak and think for us masses. From John Bruton, who is supposed to be EU ambassador to the US—but has any one of us he’s speaking for ever met the guy?

Americans I have met on both sides of the political aisle and in business and academic life are all baffled by the decision that the Irish electorate took--

Clearly, the ambassador should get out more.

--to reject the Lisbon Treaty, which was signed by the Irish Government on their behalf.

Well, gee, isn't that just magnanimous of the Irish government to sign a treaty on the electorate's behalf--without consul ...

Reuters this week salutes the one man, the only man, who, against all odds, perservered and stood tall and brought down the Berlin Wall.

Than man is...Bruce Springsteen.

Understandably enough, such rockin' twaddle reduced Media Busters to indignant sputtering. But this child's version of history is nothing new. Back in 2003, then-Hungarian ambassador to the US Andres Simonyi delivered a speech at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame praising rock as "a decisive factor" in the Cold War--namely, the US triumph over the USSR in the Cold War. More recen ...

From Press TV, via Islam in Europe, comes the following headline--and it's not one you read every day (or ever):

"ITALY: MOSQUES MUST RECOGNIZE ISRAEL"

Indeed, it's an apt headline, describing a bona fide and boffo story from the Italian news agency Il Tempo reporting that European Affairs Minister Andrea Rochi has actually called for action requiring that "mosque supervisors [in Italy] recognize Israel. Not only that, Rochi said, We must force those who do not recognize Israel to leave the mosques.

Not sure how he'll put that one over, but bravissimo,  Minister Rochi, for the call to action.

But look at the Press TV lead:

Italy may take its discriminatory practices to a new level, calling for m ...

This week's column about Barack Obama, the "Riefenstahl Strategy," channeling JFK, and signifying nothing at the Brandenburg Gate. 

Behold the poisonous and misleading headline in this London Timesonline article about democracy in action in Switzerland, where a petition calling for a ban on minarets launched by the anti-Islamization Swiss People's Party (SVP) has garnered roughly 115,000 signatures, thus triggering a national referendum.

"Racism row in Switzerland over minaret ban referendum"

Let me tell you something: This "row" has nothing to do with "racism"--an  ideology society understands as a hard-eyed bigotry of an unfounded and particularly nasty nature based on superfluous variations in the human race. Perceived in this way, the minaret ...

Look at them: On the left is Abdalla Salem El-Badri, the OPEC secretary general, or pirate-in-chief. On the right is Iran's thug-in-chief  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Dunno who the guy in the middle is.) This is a picture from a meeting in April, and you can be sure they are up to no good.  Need proof? Read the story from the International Herald Tribune below.

The headline is: "OPEC warns against military conflict with Iran." And if your first reaction is who the hell do they think they are, you are a red-blooded American who should write, call and collar your congressman and ask them the $64 MIllion Dollars a Gallon Question: When are we gonna drill?

By James Kanter

Foreign territory.

Headlines from Holland:

Dutch Govt Defends Jordan

Poll: [Dutch] Govt Should Complain to Jordan on Wilders Prosecution

                                           Happy Fourth of July  

The most senior judge in England--Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips (oh, please)--tonight gave his most Lordly, Chief and Just blessing to the use of   sharia law to resolve disputes among Muslims.

Another reason to be glad we declared independence.

Kathryn Lopez' Q&A with me this week at NRO probes places in The Death of the Grown-Up (the second, culminating half of the book) that the majority of reviewers ignored--from John Leo in the Wall Street Journal on pub date last August to Midge Decter in The Claremont Review this winter, with many in between. Whatever the reason (didn't read, didn't want to read), the debate  over political correctness, infantilization and how they relate both to each other and to our woeful responses to Islam and Islamization was never joined.  Here  are Kathryn's excellent questions  on the subject and my response.

Lopez: What is the real culture war?

West: “The real culture ...

This Fourth of July, light a firecracker for Geert Wilders--a true son of liberty.

From today's column:

THE HAGUE, The Netherlands -- Having run the polite-but-grim gauntlet of Dutch government security to gain access to Geert Wilders, I finally understood what the 24-hour security requirements of the man's continued existence really mean: To make the survival of Western-style liberty in the Netherlands his political cause, this Dutch parliamentarian has to live under high-tech lock and key.

This stunning paradox, with no end in sight, illust ...

Jordan, trying to extend the reach of sharia (Islamic law)  from the umma to  the West, is actually bringing criminal "FItna"-related charges against Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders (whom I interviewed on my travels  for this week's column to come). Alas, the Dutch government isn't reacting with the kind of "How dare you?" statecraft to stop this overreaching outrage in its tracks. So far, instead of setting off a loudly public round of righteous indignation and contempt, the Dutch government is promising a  "diplomatic" response, and hasn't even