The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up. The Watcher’s Council wishes you all a wonderful Fourth of July. Celebrate!!
“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.” – Sir Winston Churchill
“They dress the wound of my people lightly. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” – Jeremiah 6:14
“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them, even though they exaggerated this issue he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah Willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.” – Sheik Yusef Al-Qaradawi, Spiritual leader on the Muslim Brotherhood in a sermon on al-Jazeera, January 28 2009
“If They want a holy war, we will give them a holy war.” – Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
This week’s winning entry was Three Funerals… And The End of The Beginning by Joshuapundit. Three Israeli teens who were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by Hamas were buried this week and I had a few things to say about it. Here’s a slice:
Today, three young Jewish boys were laid to rest.The bodies of Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Frenkel, also 16 (HY”D)were buried in Modi’in in a ceremony that was attended by thousands of Israelis in what became a day of national mourning.
The bodies of the three boys, kidnapped by Hamas operatives on June 12 were found in a shallow grave near the Arab village of Halhul, just north of Hebron. According to Israeli forensic experts, they were murdered in cold blood shortly after they were kidnapped and buried hastily as their kidnappers fled. But not too hastily. As one of my sources on the scene let me know yesterday, the killers took the time first before they shoved the corpses into the hole to mutilate the boys’ bodies in classic Arab fashion. Israel’s Channel Two described the condition of the bodies as ‘harrowing’.
This was meant to send a message to the Israelis. So was the attack on the clearly marked ambulance carrying the murdered boys’ bodies to Israel to be buried, and the widespread instances of celebration of the ‘victory’ by Arabs living under the Palestinian Authority. and even in Israel itself.
Nor are children left untouched by this poison.They’re being indoctrinated as the next generation of murderers in the name of Allah.
The message, of course, is the same one the Arabs whom call themselves Palestinians have been sending ever since Yasser Arafat invented them. To them, or at least to the majority, this is a tribal war to the knife, no holds barred and none of the niceties of civilized behavior apply. They want the Jews ethnically cleansed by whatever means necessary. There is no desire for peace or real negotiation, no farcical ‘two state solution’ so beloved of the West and what remains of the Israeli Left. And that message is being sent out every day by Hamas, who are at least more honest about the matter and Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah, on whose official Facebook page the image immediately above this paragraph appeared.
After these murders, the message finally may be beginning to sink in with most Israelis, especially given the response from the West. After all, the Palestinians are whom they are, and their brutality is to be expected.But the civilized nations of the West?
The Israelis can’t have failed to notice that for all the pro-forma condemnations from the US, the UN and the EU, the underlying message is ‘so sad your children got murdered, but you ought to be used to that by now. We’re still going to continue funding the new Fatah-Hamas government because they’re one big happy family now, so the important thing for Israel is to exercise is restraint. Suck it up.’
To be totally honest about the matter, it is difficult for me to express adequately the way that message makes me feel…that the American government now funds and supports a genocidal group that would celebrate my murder or the murder of my loved ones just as enthusiastically as they’re celebrating the murder of those three boys. Three unarmed boys murdered in cold blood, whom Wafa, the PA owned news service referred to as ‘three soldiers’. I admit that I still haven’t sorted out my feelings on that one, but my thoughts are far from pleasant.
President Barack Hussein Obama, the leader of the country that is supposed to be Israel’s strongest ally had nothing to say at all about the matter for three weeks, and finally released a statement pretty much along these same lines once the bodies were found, perhaps because someone in the State Department reminded him it might be a good idea to say something. In contrast, that supposed cold fish, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, made several calls to Israeli PM Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman over the newly installed Jerusalem-Moscow secure hotline during the crisis, and took the time and trouble after the bodies were found to compose a hand written letter to Netanyahu, asking him to express Putin’s personal condolences to the boys’ families.
Much more at the link.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Sultan Knish – Our Consensus Rulers, submitted by The Independent Sentinel.
In this piece, the Sultan examines the reality of what ‘consensus’ actually is as practiced by our elites. Do read it.
Here are this week’s full results:
Council Winners
- *First place with 5 2/3 votes! – Joshuapundit – Three Funerals… And The End of The Beginning
- Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – The Right Planet – Gut Check Iraq
- Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – VA Right! – An Analysis of the US Senate Races – Who Will Win Control in November?
- Third place with 1 1/3 votes – The Noisy Room – Doubling Down On Operation Choke Point
- Fourth place with 1 vote – Bookworm Room – John Oliver manages to pack all the Left’s stupid Hobby Lobby arguments into one “comedy” shtick
- Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Ask Marion – Obama Racks Up a String of Judicial Losses at Supreme Court
- Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Glittering Eye – What Do You Want Judges To Do?
- Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Rhymes With Right – Does Barack Obama Understand The Constitution?
- Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Simply Jews – Presbyterian divestment from Israel: The Dying Swan dance or a marketing gimmick?
- Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Independent Sentinel – Watch Out Fishermen, Obama Is Planning a Seafood Fraud Crisis
Non-Council Winners
- *First place with 2 1/3 votes! – Sultan Knish – Our Consensus Rulers submitted by The Independent Sentinel
- Second place with 2 votes – Mark Steyn – The Morning After submitted by The Noisy Room
- Third place with 1 2/3 votes – Matt Walsh – Isn’t it mean and hateful to deport illegal immigrants? submitted by Joshuapundit
- Fourth place *t* with 2 votes – Isi Leibler – The Klinghoffer Opera and the American Jewish Establishment submitted by Simply Jews
- Fourth place *t* with 2 votes – Charles C. Johnson/Got News – Cochran Campaign Manager, Staffer Busted in Illegal Vote Buying Operation submitted by Nice Deb
- Fifth place *t* with 1 vote – The Borowitz Report – Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form submitted by The Glittering Eye
- Fifth place *t* with 1 vote – The Federalist – Do Your Politics Require You To Oppose Bill Of Rights? That’s Not Good submitted by Rhymes with Right
- Fifth place *t* with 1 vote – The American Interest/Bilahari Kausikan – A Nuclear Weapon Free World and Other Delusions submitted by The Razor
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Commentary – Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness submitted by The Right Planet
- Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Noah Pollock – Bias Against Israel submitted by The Watcher
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – John Podhoret/Commentary – The Secret of ‘Asymmetrical Warfare’ — There Are Two Actors… submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – Douglas Ernst – Marvel’s Dan Slott stretches his bigotry muscles, tells Christians to build companies in ‘Christ-land’ submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
- Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Daily Caller – Lois Lerner and Fellow IRS Official Announced Targeting At 2010 Conference The Same Month Their Emails Went Missing submitted by VA Right!
See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day and weigh in… don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that!
I’m not sure why Palestinians are somehow an invented category– the land of Palestine was inhabited, and I don’t see why we can’t call the inhabitants of Palestine “Palestinians,” nor do I see why we can’t call their descendents “Palestinians.” At any rate, it seems at least as proper as to call people who moved from, e.g., Europe, to Israel in 1948 “Israelis.” I have no problem with either, and I’d like an explanation as to why one is appropriate but not the other.
More to the point, I don’t see why we can’t simply regard criminals as criminals. Why must these criminals be stigmatized specifically as “Arabs,” or “Palestinians,” or “Muslims”? Does it matter? Do their crimes become less awful if we lump them in with some larger sociological group? Or more awful?
Perhaps the thought is that as members of those groups they have some specific agenda that must be recognized, but I think that this way of thinking plays right into the hands of dangerous criminals, and we should fervently resist. That extraordinary foolish statement by Begin, “If they want holy war, we’ll give them holy war…” Allowing criminals to set our agenda for us! No– we shall regard criminals as nothing more than criminals, and refuse to dignify their crimes in this way, just as we shall refuse to dignify the murder of Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir as an “Israeli war crime,” as many Palestinians might want us to do. If we cannot do this, if we cannot face violent crime with clear eyes, we do an incredible injustice to Israelis and Palestinians alike.