"Saccharine Christians and Their Third World Friends "

It's worse than that, Marty.

These kitchy Christians are very dishonest. Some of them have a history of appeasing Jew harting dictators.

Look at this from a Mennonite website:

"Mennonites and Hitler"

peace.mennolink.org/.../hitler.html

"We are all by now prepped up to disdain and dispel Evangelical Christians and Fundamentalist Christians and other sorts of believing Christians. Frankly, however, I am more frightened by the World Council Of Churches Christians,"

I agree, much of the antisemitism here and in Europe is coming from the left and from the Christian liberal left.

I am surprised therefore that you would join in the vilification of Sarah Palin who has uttered a strong condemnation of Ahmadinejad.  

Leftist have been trying to portray her as an antisemite when even the Chabad Rabbi in Alaska said that she had a friendly relationship with the Jewish community in that State.

I repeat that Iran is a good reson to vote for McCain, doubts about Palin notwithstanding.

I agree with the main post and the preceding comments.

Jack, Sarah Palin can read well a good speech, granted. But at  the other end of the spectrum I am sorry to say is/was her bad interview with Katie Couric and her problems dealing extemporaneously with issues that the evidence I have seen suggests are over her head. And I have been to date very sympathetic to, and open minded, about her, and sort of rooting for her. But I find her losing me now.

She can't see Israel from Alaska, so probably her policy thinking on the Middle East is a little rudimentary at the moment.

Someone on another blog quoted George Orwell in trying to describe these ''peace lovers":

"[T]here is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. … Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis… All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty."

www.orwell.ru/.../e_nat

One needs to be deliberately and willfully blind and ignorant, to insist on disowning knowledge, in order to be able to break bread with such an evil person in good faith.

All this is happening and the media is focused on whether Sarah Palin could cite an example to suit Katie Couric's dubious standards?

BTW, It wasn't so long ago that Couric herself was viciously attacked for her promotion, as a pretty face lacking the proper gravitas for the job.  One would have expected a little better behaviour from her but instead she opted for repeating Gibson's schtick of intimidating Sarah, with vengeance. Who do these people think they are?

Itzig, one’s intellectual abilities are not necessarily reflected in the way one deals with issues in conversation. We all know people who stutter or are bit dyslectic but are otherwise very capable people.

Sarah is new at this game and I suspect in a few months she’ll be able to spew bullshit every bit as expertly as Obama.  

There was nothing wrong with her answer on Russia. I looked it up and Alaska does have trade relations with Russia. In any case, being able “to see Russia from Alaska” is a figure of speech. I found it curious that people who hate Fundies for being literalists become literalists themselves when it suits them.

...She can't see Israel from Alaska, so probably her policy thinking on the Middle East is a little rudimentary at the moment...

They don't call him Ironyroad for nothing.

You are a dude aren't you? I have always so assumed.

Last time I looked!

"Maybe, since these men and woman are so alert to the pain of others, they may also grasp how their guest, the president of Iran, says again and again that the Jewish catastrophe (1939-1945) never happened."

As I said, pre-meditated willful ignorance. They cannot pretend not to know these facts. They just don't care. How come? Naivete can go only this far in explaining such complicity with an evil man.

From AFP:

"Education Minister Alireza Ali-Ahmadi attended the official launch of the book in Tehran's Palestine Square.

The cover shows a Jew with a crooked nose and dressed in traditional garb drawing outlines of dead bodies on the ground.

Inside, bearded Jews are shown leaving and re-entering a gas chamber with a counter that reads the number 5,999,999.

Another illustration depicts Jewish prisoners entering a furnace in a Nazi extermination camp and leaving from the other side as gun-wielding "terrorists."

afp.google.com/.../ALeqM5g7cMSHFVO7c995EtcchIPhgw7_ZA

Noga,

Thank you for the Orwell quote.  What is so impressive is how the quote could have been written yesterday.    דור הולך ודור בא ואין חדש תחת השמש or in the ginzy translation of the Bible,  "A generation comes and a generation goes and there is nothing new under the sun".  It's a bit comforting in a bizarre sort of way to know that some things never change and that hopefully the modern day incarnation of these naive & nihilistic creatures will be consigned to irrelevancy.

Orwell seemed to have expended much energy doing battle with the defeatist  "intellectuals" which also seems to have stimulated his creative juices.  Another one of his choice observations is that there some ideas which are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.

There is yet another recurring theme in the growing comparison between the 1930's and now.  Hitler published most of his ideas and plans in 1925 & 1926 in the two volumes of "Mein Kampf".  For the most part, he stuck to his plans, including the rabid Antisemitism which pervaded his books.  But the pacifists etc. ignored what he wrote and now the Mennonites try to sweep it all under the rug.  And now we have the Iranian-Islamist analogy in the rabid Antisemitism that pervades the thinking of the Iranian Islamist revolution, going back to Khomeini and before.  For example, back in 1963 Khomeini called the Shah a Jew and accused the Shah of taking orders from the Jews as part of their conspiracy to control the world (sure sounds like Mad Mahmoud).  The jury will note that 1963 was before the "occupation" (and no, Robert Powell, this is not a mistranslation and not just "old" material any more than Mein Kampf was "old" material; rather it is a constant, consistent and deeply rooted theme in the Khomeini philosophy and theology that rules Iran to this day).  For more on Iran's Jewish obsession, see yet another Kuntzel article which appeared originally in the Weekly Standard (www.matthiaskuentzel.de/.../irans-obsession-with-the-jews) and yet another one from the Wall Street Journal (www.matthiaskuentzel.de/.../the-booksellers-of-tehran).

So maybe now y'all might begin to understand why a very broad consensus of Israelis agree with the proposition that (contrary to Biden's views) Israel CANNOT "learn" to live with a nuclear armed Iran.

BTW, as long as the subject of "Mein Kampf" came up, one could well translate "Mein Kampf" as "My Jihad"..... just some food for thought.

Hershel Ginsburg

Efrata / Jerusalem

"Last time I looked!"

Where or what did you look at that proved you are a dude, irony? Never mind.

In an interview with Neil MacFarqhar of the NYT, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had the following exchange: NYT: On another subject, you are a Persian; you are not an Arab. Your country has never directly at least fought a war with Israel, and yet you seem obsessed

I wonder whether the root causes for such enthusiasm the Iranian genocidaire-in-the-making inspires cannot be traced back to the kind of learning picked up in American schools:

www.jpost.com/.../Satellite

"Among the claims made about Israel in some of the textbooks are that Arab countries never initiated wars against Israel, Arab nations desire peace while Israel does not and that it was Israel that placed Palestinians in refugee camps in Arab lands, not Arab governments. No mention whatsoever was found relating to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were forced out after the establishment of Israel.

In their treatment of Judaism, too, the textbooks showed a negative bias, according to the study. They often expressed a view that "Jews and Judaism are legalistic," and that "Jews care only about the letter of the law and ignore its spirit," the study found. The Jewish God is presented as "stern and warlike," and not compassionate, as is highlighted in other religions. In some instances, Jews are charged with deicide in the killing of Jesus"

What's this all about, then?

"What's this all about, then?"

A law of nature -- Political Correctness is inversely proportional to factual correctness.

hg