The Conservative Brotherhood

UNMASKING HAMAS: Former Palestinian Terrorist Explains The Mindset Of Militants

After months of having rockets fired by Hamas militants into civilian neighborhoods, Israel decided to respond with air strikes on Gaza, directed at Hamas.

Can there ever be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

Former Palestinian terrorist Walid Shoebat insists that for things to change, it needs to start with the Palestinians. “Most people simply do not understand the level of hatred palestinians have for Israel,” he says, “If they did, there would be no discussion about whether or not Israel is justified in these attacks.”

An acquaintance called my last post entitled, "Our Elite Class 2" a "diatribe". As I am sure she knows the meaning of the word, and have every reason to respect her intellect and credentials, the tone I struck must have been more cacophonous than I intended. I didn't intend for it to sound angry or pugnacious, though upon a re-read I can understand how it could be taken that way. In my defense, my upbringing is making a belated re-appearance. I am one of those folks who were raised by people who talked one way at the kitchen table and another way when transacting business on site or phone, or speaking in a public forum, such as the PTA or block meeting. There came a time when it was politically incorrect to speak "properly". It was only recently that I understood how communication was inhibited, and to an extent limited, by colloquialisms of convenience, outside of a convenient dialect called Standard English, with its helpful vocabulary and complexity. Since this is a public forum, and I am a novice, I naturally rely on my dictionary and thesaurus. I admit I find the process of translating thoughts into words daunting, especially for public consumption, but I do it voluntarily, and more often than not, joyously. It is somewhat disconcerting and humbling that I have messed up and come across as angry and bitter. Was the “diatribe” the words or the thought? If the question is asked, I need to improve my prose.

In a prior post I asked, "Is our elite class a failure?" I acknowledge there are many ways to evaluate and assess the trajectory of our nation. Some may see our transition as positive evolution, leaving the temporary advantages of older schemes to those emerging nations enriching themselves on the remaining entrails of twentieth century industry and technology, while we endure the painful and necessary conversion to the economy of the twenty-first century. Another school of thought is that our elite leadership class has become arrogant, self-serving, effete, and hidebound; losing to more intellectually vigorous and ambitious societies. The record of history and current evidence extends more plausibility to the latter scenario. One signpost to support this may be the state of what was once the jewel of our society, our educational system.

An odd question occurred to me recently which may only be very tenuously connected to the raison d’être of this site. I strive, with varying degrees of success, to make proper use of this forum and to submit contributions that are topical and hopefully display an attempt at thoughtfulness. I try to resist casual ruminations and navel gazing and usually focus on producing a response to a current political event, situation, or blog. But, there is a question that has been rattling around in my head for a while that is sort of relevant to things discussed here, with the added advantage of offering me a change of mental scenery. Before I state the question, I will admit that I'm not immune to the deceptions of jealousy, envy, and the rationalizations necessary to assuage my inadequacies and failures, and I request that particular attention be paid to any influence of such things that may appear in what follows. Having said that, it is against the backdrop of the multiple calamities that presently afflict our nation that I ask, "Is our elite class a failure?" When caught up in the maelstrom of catastrophe and controversy, it seems it is the usual tendency to search, not the elite plateau, but the other regions of society to find the origins of the problems; as we see in the scapegoating of the unionized workers in the auto industry debacle. The highly educated and wealthy decision makers are benignly treated as victims of circumstance rather than as vicars of circumstance, and are passively charged with solving problems using their same methodology and intellectual pathology that are the genesis of the problems. I realize that is a very provocative allegation to make, and is so broad and general it can be expected to be infected with much error and points of contention. But the genuine question is not if my allusion possesses error, but to what degree is it erroneous?

The following is a press release from our friends at the Thomas More Law Center and SANEWorks.

SANE's David Yerushalmi joined forces with the Thomas More Law Center to file a federal lawsuit today against the federal government for supporting Shariah in violation of the First Amendment. This is no throw-away claim or frivolous lawsuit. By taking over AIG with $150 billion of tax payer money, the USG is now in the business of promoting, supporting and advocating Shariah.

You can download the complaint (Murray v Paulson et al) here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER (734) 827-2001

There was an interesting discussion on Cobb's site a couple of days ago, concerning Barack Obama's election and its corollary impact on black identity that is and that was. One respondent to Cobb's blog related an interchange with his fifty-four year old father and himself, the thirty year old son, who didn't vote for Obama, because in his principled universe skin color was just a minor non-deciding variable. What struck me is that both parties had a deep respect for the position of the other, as well as wonderment at the difference a sliver of a generation can make. The son asked for any insight from any denizen of cyberspace that could help explain the quandary that his still relatively young father, as well as many on par and senior to his dad, never expected to live to see a black man ascend to the office of the U.S. Presidency, while he finds very little compelling emotional significance in an occurrence that he perceives as merely a slight tremor and not an earthquake that caused the demise of even one crystal wine glass of societal tranquility. I can almost understand the young man's puzzlement. After the fact, it is hard to fathom what so many were so fearful about for so long. I was originally tempted to avoid the deeper implications of his question and just say it was a generational thing, falling back on the tried and true, "You had to be there". But it occurred to me he wasn't really asking about "then", he was reflecting on the shared experience of "now". Cobb’s blog touched on such ancillaries as "Magic Negro", "real black experience", slave ancestry, ethnic mix, skin color, and whether and to what degree political and social progress was truncated by self-limitation in the black populace. Obviously, these are the areas of active inquiry for today’s questing minds seeking more than an impetuous rehash of war stories from the Civil Rights pedantocracy. At some point, history and the present must resolve the proper order of priority, and it is natural and beneficial to be reminded of that by the young.

In my last post I suggested it may not be intellectually necessary to have unquestioning loyalty to the theory of Supply Side Economics. To those with a better grasp of the subject my understanding of the topic may be frustrating in its error, and to others my acceptance of the possibility of alternative formulas to advance economic success and social equity may be tantamount to sacrilege. How and why would a so-called conservative challenge the orthodoxy of the past twenty-five years? I don't know if it is a good defense to admit that I have long been suspicious of orthodoxy, even at times when I had no knowledge of a prudentially true alternative. It may have begun when, as a youth, I accidentally learned the difference between religion and theology. I often wonder what shape my mind would have assumed had I not chanced upon that elucidation at that formative and impressionable stage of life. A few years earlier it would have been meaningless, a few years later I would have likely committed to the only theology I had been exposed to, and my identity to myself and those around me would have set in place obstacles to change that could only be overturned by radical and wrenching disruption to an established order among us. I think history shows it is easier to cause people to believe something than it is to get them to change their minds. That is why I hesitate to carve my beliefs in stone. Carvings made in the Mesozoic Era don't always hold data applicable to the Cenozoic, nor can social norms often transfer, with relevance, from ancient to contemporary society. And more to the point for our discussion, the mathematical equations of economic theory are indentured to the vicissitudes of group and political dynamics, which have been and are likely to remain, fluid. The devil is in the variables.