As for Germany’s most famous living novelist, Günter Grass pretty well consorts with the paradigm, The Tin Drum having established him as a major literary and political voice of the twentieth century. Admittedly, subsequent books like Dog Years and The Flounder were notable achievements. But absent the beating of The Tin Drum, the callithumpian parade of Grass’ works in the public arena would have been far less spectacular. He cannot be dismissed as a one-shot Johnny, but his oeuvre arguably does not justify his inflated réclame. Indeed, for some time now, he has been living off the interest from the capital he invested in his heyday. Sadly, Grass lost it long ago.

This has not prevented him from generating considerable controversy with the publication in the German daily Süddeutschen Zeitung of an anti-Israeli poem titled What Must Be Said (Was gesagt werden muss). As Sebastian Hammelehle informs us in Der Spiegal Online, the German expression “what must be said” connotes the conversational cliché “There’s no law against saying that…”, which would appear to carry the same smarmy patina in our culture as “Some of my best friends are Jews.” Thus Grass does not hesitate to assert in the poem that Israel is a country “to which I am bound.” The lie is so palpable as to be embarrassing.

Similarly, Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, points out that Grass’ use of the word Überlebende (survivor) “to describe his situation and the plight of Germans in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran,” is disingenuous. “Traditionally, the word “survivor” is associated—in a German-language context—with Jewish survivors of the Shoah.” Schirrmacher believes that Grass, who in his youth was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, is engaged in a duplicitous attempt to “make peace with his own biography.”

It must be said that, whatever his motives and talents may be, Grass is obviously not a poet and What Must Be Said is demonstrably not a poem. The language of the piece is scarcely even workmanlike, fishtailing between the unctuously pulpiteering and the colorlessly prosaic. There is nothing about this dismal effort that says “I have to be a poem.” Had it been written as a short prose essay with a heavily propagandistic slant, there would have been no detectable difference. The thing has no literary merit whatsoever; to put it bluntly, it is an execrable piece of fustian.

The same must be said of the sentiment the “poem” expresses, which, as Hammelehle puts it, constitutes a “lyrical first strike” against the Jewish state. Except that there is nothing lyrical about a flat and pompous verbal eructation riddled with lies, false assumptions, evasions and catarrhal flecks of disinformation.

After 13 hours of overnight talks ending Tuesday morning at 5 a.m., euro zone finance ministers put together the latest rescue package for Greece. “We have reached a far-reaching agreement on Greece’s new program and private sector involvement that would lead to a significant debt reduction for Greece…to secure Greece’s future in the euro area,” said Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the euro-group of finance ministers. It is a future emblazoned by one over-arching reality: the relinquishment of national sovereignty is the ultimate price that must be paid by any EU nation that cannot meet its debt obligations.

Thus it is no surprise that this deal, in which Greece will receive the latest tranche of rescue funds totaling $172 billion, requires the “enhanced and permanent” presence of EU monitors and European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund representatives. Furthermore, Greece must pass legislation changing the country’s constitution in order to ensure that “priority is granted to debt-servicing payments,” which amounts to Greece depositing debt service funds into a “special account” aimed at guaranteeing repayments.

Why are the changes to the constitution and the so-called special account necessary? Greece’s next election is expected to be held in April, and these requirements eliminate the possibility that the Greek people might put politicians in office who would scuttle the agreement. It is no secret that many ordinary Greeks find the combination of wage and pension cuts, as well as the elimination of an additional 150,000 jobs to bring labor costs down by 15 percent over the next three years, unmanageable. As if on cue, yet another in a series of seemingly endless strikes has been scheduled for today by two of Greek’s biggest labor unions.

Anastasis Chrisopoulos, a 31-year-old Athens taxi driver, encapsulated the mood of a nation that has been buffeted for the last two years by this seemingly endless crisis. “Things will only get worse,” he said. “We have reached a point where we’re trying to figure out how to survive just the next day, let alone the next 10 days, the next month, the next year.”

Mr. Chrisopoulos has a partially valid point, as evidenced by an EU official who wished to remain anonymous. “We expect Greece to resume growth in 2014,” he told reporters. “We see a contraction of 4.5 percent this year and stagnation in 2013. That is a shrinkage of more that 17 percent over four years,” he added. That is not a “shrinkage.” That is a full-fledged depression, but it too must be tempered with a dose of reality: Greece’s minimum wage is still higher than either Portugal’s or Spain’s, and Greek labor costs have risen by more than 30 percent over the last decade, representing the biggest rise in the euro zone, according to EU data. For perspective’s sake, Germany’s labor costs have risen only 5 percent over the same ten years.

Yet as always, economic projections are little more than guesses, and the track record of such projections with respect to Greece is anything but reassuring. Greece’s 2011 deficit was “supposed to be” only 7.6 percent, a target set by the EU and IMF. The actual deficit was 8.5 percent, representing a difference of $1.9 billion. And one must keep in mind that such a missed projection represents the small picture. In May of 2010, Greece was given a $160 billion bailout that was ostensibly supposed to kick the proverbial can down the proverbial road for three years. Yet on June 17, 2011 the Washington Post revealed the accuracy of that prediction: “But a year later, the initiative has fallen so far short that the country is again running out of money.”

Thus the EU has been forced to cobble together bailout number two. Here are the details of the latest deal:

–Greece gets $173 billion in exchange for the aforementioned requirements.

–Banks, hedge funds, pension funds and other private investors who own around $265 billion of Greek government bonds have been asked to forgive 53.5 percent of the face value of those bonds, which would cut Greece’s current $460 billion of debt by $142 billion. The private creditor bond exchange is scheduled to take place on March 8th, and will be completed within three days. Greece’s next bond re-payment of $18 billion, due on March 20th, will also be restructured, allowing Greece to avoid default.

–Interest rates on the remaining debt will be reduced from the previous 4.8 percent to 3.65 percent, and Greece’s timeline to pay off those debts will increase from seven to 30 years.

–The European Central Bank (ECB), which is holding $65.5-72 billion of Greek bonds exempt from the write down, will send profits made on those holdings over the last two years to national central banks, whose governments will pass them on to Athens “to further improve the sustainability of Greece’s public debt.”

–if all goes according to plan, Greece’s debt ratio will be reduced from its current 160 percent of GDP to 120 percent of GDP by 2020.

Early Monday morning, after three days of intense negotiations, the Greek government approved the latest austerity measures demanded by other EU nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) by a vote of 199 to 74. In return, they get the latest bailout of $171 billion that nation needs in order to avoid default on March 20th, when a $19.1 billion payment on its debts is due–if EU finance ministers approve the accord when they meet on Feb. 15. Greek Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, who addressed the nation on Saturday night, had urged the Cabinet to approve the deal, warning of “social explosion, chaos” if it failed.

“We are a breath away from ground zero,” Mr. Papademos said in a televised address to the nation ahead of the critical vote, further noting that the envisioned austerity program will “restore the fiscal stability and global competitiveness of the economy, which will return to growth, probably in the second half of 2013.”

It’s been a tough sell. More than 3,500 people converged on Syntagma Square in Athens Saturday, marking the second day of protests and a general strike. Hundreds of riot police stood guard as a result of clashes that erupted during rallies on Friday, one of which illuminated the almost schizophrenic mindset that has arisen among the Greeks themselves: Greece’s largest police union, representing more than two-thirds of Greek policemen, threatened to issue arrest warrants for officials from Greece’s EU and IMF lenders because of their demands for the next round of austerity measures. “Since you are continuing this destructive policy, we warn you that you cannot make us fight against our brothers. We refuse to stand against our parents, our brothers, our children or any citizen who [protest and demand] a change of policy,” said a letter obtained by Reuters.

After Greece’s Parliament approved the measures, the violence got even worse. In Athens, a crowd estimated at over 100,000 vented their frustration. Rioters destroyed or seriously damaged 93 buildings and least 45 others were burned, including nine listed as national heritage sites. More than 150 stores were looted or smashed. On Monday morning, clouds of tear gas used to disperse the rioters still hung in the air, traffic lights at many major intersections were out after being smashed, and cleanup crews gathered up as much as 40 tons of broken marble and rocks from the streets of the center, while railings, drainage covers and paving stones from sidewalks also suffered extensive damage

Riots spread to the cities of Thessaloniki, Patraas, the islands of Corfu and Crete, and towns in central Greece as well. Marfin bank, the same building where three bank workers died during similar uprisings on May 5, 2010, has been burned to the ground. Two central branches of the National Bank of Greece and Eurobank EFG were also firebombed. More than 170 people were injured, with 106 police needing medical care after being assaulted by gasoline bombs, rocks and other objects hurled at them, while 70 protesters were also hospitalized. 74 people were arrested and an additional 92 were detained.

All of the mayhem has been engendered by the latest austerity measures that call for a 22 percent cut in the minimum wage to $742 per month, $397 million in pension reductions, and the elimination of 150,000 public sector jobs over the next three years. Furthermore, the approval of the measures requires a written commitment from the leaders of Greece’s two main parties, the PanHellenic Socialist Movement and conservative New Democracy party, to fully implement the program, regardless of who wins the general election expected to take place in April. “Greek promises aren’t enough for us anymore,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, echoing the demands of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, and underscoring the reality that Greece failed to implement the fiscal and structural reforms that were part of the $145 billion bailout they received in 2010.

The ability to continue down the path of austerity after the April election is critical. It is highly unlikely that public anger will be dissipated by that time, and EU leaders must be assured that, no matter how the people vote, the austerity program will remain on track. That assurance is necessary to complete the other part of the debt deal, a bond swap in which private-sector investors take a 70 percent “haircut” that will reduce Greece’s outstanding debt by $132 billion. The new bonds will have an average interest rate of 3.5 percent for bondholders, along with a warrant linked to Greek growth. German Finance Ministry spokeswoman Marianne Kothe says the bond swap deal must be completed before EU ministers finalize the bailout.

It is by now a familiar scenario for German police. The lifeless body of a teenaged Middle Eastern girl, missing since November. Discovered in a hidden spot with signs of a violent death. A suspected honor murder at the hand’s of the family, some of whose members were already in custody.

But this time the script is slightly different.

While most honor murders in Germany originate within the country’s four million strong Muslim community, the latest victim, Arzu O. from Remminghausen (German law does not allow for the release of the last name), 18, whose corpse was found last week, belonged to a little known Middle Eastern religious sect called Yazidism. And it is this sect’s adherents who are becoming better known recently for their part in the nightmarish phenomenon of honor killings in Germany. Already in 2003, the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, wrote:

More and more often, police must protect young women from the Yasidi faith community from their own relatives – and help them flee.

The Yazidis are Kurds who inhabit primarily northern Iraq but are also found in Syria and Turkey. Many Yazidis have immigrated to Germany where they form the second largest Yazidi community in the world, numbering an estimated 30,000 to 80,000, outside their home countries. Over the centuries, their religious beliefs have often put them at odds with their Muslim neighbours, who have at times cruelly discriminated against them, forcing them to convert on pain of death or sometimes just outright massacring them. Since Yazidis are not ‘People of the Book’ in the Koran, like the Jews and Christians, they were afforded no protection in Islamic lands.

Yazidi religious beliefs, like those of other religions, are complex. The Yazidis believe in one God, who created the world and left it under the care of seven angels. They don’t believe in the devil, since that would limit God’s power. Nevertheless, they have often mistakenly been called devil worshipers. Yazidism is described as being “syncretic,” influenced by Sufism and Iran’s pre-Islamic religion, Zoroastrianism. One also cannot convert to Yazidism; one is born into it.

But the problem Yazidism poses for young Yazidi women (and a few men) living in a modern Western state like Germany where freedom of choice and development of the individual are regarded as virtues is that they are not allowed to marry outside their religion. They are also not supposed to marry outside the three castes that make up their culture and usually wind up taking a cousin as a spouse. And like their Muslim neighbors, women are expected to be virgins when they marry.

“When a girl tries to marry outside the community, that is perceived not only as a dirtying of the family honor, but a break with the religion and the community,” wrote one German reporter.

Another reason Yazidis probably do not want their daughters to marry outside their religion is money. According to one report, the bride price for a Yazidi girl can cost a prospective groom and his family up to $ 80,000, “although the highest Yazidi spiritual leader…wants to limit the bride money to $5,000.” A woman marrying a non-Yazidi would probably add nothing to the family’s coffers.

Police believe Arzu’s breaking of these age-old religious restrictions is probably behind their gruesome discovery last week. Arzu, a high school student, had developed a forbidden love last summer with a 23-year-old apprentice baker, a non-Yazidi, at a bakery where she worked weekends. Her mother and older sister had also once worked there. But for wanting to determine her own life path, which includes selecting her own boyfriends like most normal teenagers do, this vibrant, young woman had to pay with her life.

Although the family, which originally came from Turkey, was described as “a shining example” of successful integration, they still acted out their archaic religious and cultural customs behind closed doors. Last August, Arzu’s family members tried to put a halt to her blossoming romance by giving her a beating, which got police attention. The assault only resulted, though, in Arzu’s fleeing the home for a women’s shelter, which alone is often reason enough for an honor killing. Once away from family control and observation, even for one night, it is suspected the girl may have lost her virginity.

“Every woman who flees the home is the object of an honor murder,” noted one German social worker. The Federal Crime Office (Germany’s FBI) registered 48 such homicides between 1996 and 2006 with a further 22 people surviving attempted honor killings.

Other reasons for honor killings, besides a loss of virginity, range from the female victim living too Western (re: independent) a lifestyle, to wanting a divorce, to fleeing either an abusive or an upcoming forced marriage. Conversion to another religion is sometimes punished by death as well as marrying or having a boyfriend outside one’s religion, race or ethnic group. Only with the blood sacrifice of a fellow human being do the murderers believe their family honor can be cleansed and restored.

German police remove Israeli flags posted in defiance to a Palestinian hate rally in Berlin:

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.

They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.

It’s well-known that German taxpayers are fed up with footing the bill for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.

“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”

Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.

But the duplicity of German Chancellor Merkel – smiling at Sarkozy in public, while throwing daggers at him in private – takes the cake.

The European media often talks of the Paris-Berlin axis, a code phrase meant to signify a marriage of reason between Europe’s two biggest economies.

But the extent of the falling out between Merkel and Sarkozy goes way beyond a marital spat. It is verging on divorce.

As the French rely increasingly on Britain and the United States, Germany is leering to the east. “What we are seeing is the emergency of a new Berlin-Moscow-Tehran axis,” the Sarkozy advisor warned.

There are many signs of trouble just beneath the surface.

First, there is Germany’s ongoing trade with Iran. Despite strong European Union sanctions on Iran, top German firms continue to do a booming business with Tehran.

Even worse: German trade associations are actively promoting exports to Iran, even as the EU calls for halting trade entirely.  Here are a few of these trade promotion events from just the past two months:

-          On October 10, 2011, a delegation from southwest Iran visited Dresden seeking to expand Iran’s purchase of oil and gas field technology from German firms. (The organizers of this event have no sense of irony, as their website slogan shows: “European-Iranian ventures, Your Economic Success”)

-          On October 26, the German Foreign Policy Association hosted Iran’s Vice Minister of Economics and Finance, Dr. Mohammad Reza Farzin, to a public forum to promote cooperation with Iran and oppose sanctions.

-          On November 8, the German Business Association hosted a German-Iranian Business Congress in Berlin, spotlighting “Iranian Business Women Power.”

-          On November 22, the Bavarian Ministry for Economics held its annual Export Promotion Day, with a special emphasis on exploring “better market chances in Iran, possibilities to invest, finding business partners in Iran.”

(Hat tip to the enterprising group known as Stop the Bomb for keeping close tabs on German exports to Iran).

We’ve been through this song and dance before with Libya and Iraq in the 1980s, where the Germans were building poison gas factories and ballistic missile plants. It became known as trade über alles.

At the same time, Merkel’s government has been pressing hard behind the scenes to block EU sanctions against the Iranian Central Bank, an initiative being promoted by French president Sarkozy.

So what’s going on? At a closed door meeting among European intelligence czars recently, top officials at Germany’s BND (their equivalent of the CIA) shocked their counterparts with the virulence of their ant-American remarks.

There’s a 1930’s style resurgence of nationalism in Germany that has caught the attention of many Europeans, the top Sarkozy advisor told me. “It’s Germany first, and to hell with Europe,” he said.

At the same time Germany is eager to protect its business ties to Tehran, Chancellor Merkel has been forging a closer political and economic relationship with Russia.

Some observers see the covert hand of Russia’s SVR intelligence service in the recent anti-nuclear campaign that led to Merkel’s surprise announcement on May 30 that Germany will close all of its 17 nuclear power plants by 2022.

The French, of course, are particularly sensitive to such things since they rely on nuclear power to produce around 80% of their electricity and are the world’s foremost exporter of nuclear power technology.

Germany’s leftist school teachers are breathing a tremendous sigh of relief – at least for the moment – due to a court ruling last week that forbids a Muslim student from praying in his Berlin school. German leftists, who used multiculturalism to get Christianity out of the public schools, were relieved Leipzig’s federal administrative court prevented Islam from filling the vacuum they created when it decreed the school had a right to prevent students from performing the Muslim mid-day prayer ritual, since it could disturb school peace.

“This is not a verdict against Islam,” stated Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest news publication, in hailing the decision. “It is a verdict for the sensible separation of state and religion.”

The ruling’s only drawback, however, was that the court stressed its decision applied only to this one school and not to the whole country.

The events leading to the anti-prayer legal ruling actually began in November, 2007, when a Muslim student, Yunus Mitschele, who was then 14, knelt down in a school corridor during a school break along with seven other Muslim students and began to pray towards Mecca, while several other “astonished” students looked on. A teacher fetched the school’s principal, Brigitte Burchardt, who waited until the prayer was finished to speak to the students, telling them, as one German newspaper reported, that “it is perhaps not a good idea what they are doing there…that church and state are largely separate…and about how it would affect other students.” Burchardt also forbid a repetition.

Afterwards, the principal spoke with the students’ parents, since she feared such a demonstrative prayer display could endanger the peace in the multicultural school. The school in question, the Diesterweg Gymnasium, an academic high school for students going on to post-secondary studies, contains students representing 29 different nationalities and five major world religions, including different strains of Islam. The German newspaper Die Welt reports that in the past this religious diversity “has lead to conflicts, and therefore the school administration had to intervene” in this case.

Burchardt came to an understanding with seven of the Muslim students and their parents; but Mitschele’s father, a German convert to Islam, would not accept her prayer prohibition and took the matter to court. In 2008, he obtained a temporary order from a lower Berlin court that would allow his son to perform his prayers once a day at school but only during a break.

“He (Yunus) was the first student in Germany to demand the right to conduct his prayers at school,” Spiegel stated.

Mitschele returned to court in 2009 to have his right to pray in school confirmed, basing his claim on the fact religious freedom is guaranteed in the German constitution. Since observant Muslims pray five times a day, he would have to pray during school hours, it was argued. In September of that year, the court agreed Mitschele did have this constitutional right and therefore should be allowed to pray in school. After the ruling, the Diesterweg Gymnasium allotted Mitschele a prayer room, although the court “did not demand it.”

But one German journalist, writing in May, 2010, wondered how important praying really was to Mitschele, since, in the eight months after the ruling, he had used this prayer room a grand total of only 14 times. In his defense, Mitschele says he couldn’t always find a teacher with a key to the room, which appears rather odd. After all, why would the school take the trouble to provide him with a prayer room, especially after this case had received so much media attention, and then not ensure access? It also appears neither the court nor the German media received a complaint from him or his father regarding his inablity to perform this supposedly all-important mid-day prayer, especially after they had gone to so much trouble to obtain this right.

This leads one to wonder whether the whole Diesterweg Gymnasium affair was simply a provocation, taking after the movement in Europe to bring Islam out of the mosques and into the public sphere. Public spaces, including whole streets, have been taken over in European cities for prayer by kneeling Muslims. These public demonstrations are not so much about piety, but rather more about establishing a dominant position for Islam in European societies by visibly occupying their public areas.

Public schools would be a tempting, and important, target in this drive, since in schools it would also be about the hearts and minds of children. But in Mitschele’s case, once the value gained by the visibility of his praying in the school’s public space, the hallway, was lost by the assignment of a prayer room, his interest in the mid-day prayer may have waned correspondingly.

Last week, a parade of events have set the stage for what may become one of the most volatile economic periods of the 21st century. On Wednesday, Germany, the linchpin nation of the European Union, had a disastrous bond auction, raising only $5.2 billion of the $8.1 billion it expected to raise. On Thursday, Portugal’s debt was reduced to junk status. On Friday, Italy’s borrowing costs soared again, reaching their highest levels since joining the EU. Belgium, which has been unable to form a government for 18 months, had its credit rating lowered from AA+ to AA. Spain, where the People’s Party will be forming a government in the coming weeks, may apply for international aid to maintain its solvency. In short, the EU is going to hell in a socialist hand basket.

Yet it is precisely the denial of that odious reality that prevents any real progress from taking place. It is a denial born of ideologically-inspired hubris, economic illiteracy, and an entitlement mentality that afflicts everyone from the top of the so-called economic food chain to the bottom. It began with the fantasy that nations with completely different cultural values could be yoked to a common currency, primarily for the purpose of preventing another World War. It was viewed as a way to prevent Germany from ever again becoming the dominant force in Europe.

It hasn’t worked. It is Germany that has blocked the European Central Bank’s (ECB) effort to make massive “eurobond” purchases from Europe’s debtor nations. Last Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated that the ECB was only responsible for monetary policy. This stance sets her apart from the rest of the EU leaders. They want the ECB to do what Ben Bernanke and the U.S. Federal Reserve have been doing: “quantitatively ease” their way out from under, by financing debt with more debt. This is the socialist-inspired “too big to fail” scheme that keeps the banks and markets afloat while they look for a soft landing. A soft landing that ostensibly gives debtor nations time to get their acts together, lower their debt-to-GDP ratios, and regain some measure of solvency.

Such a scheme brings us to the other end of the fiscal food chain. This is the end, in countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, affectionately known as the PIIGS of Europe, where the bottom end of the chain, aka the “little people,” will be forced to endure years of austerity in order to realize such a transformation.

It’s a transformation that has engendered chaos. In Italy, riots broke out earlier this month when the new government, led by technocrat Mario Monte, outlined reforms to dig that country out from under $2.6 trillion of national debt. In Greece, the latest of many riots occurred last Thursday when workers at the country’s largest power company, PPC, clashed with police. They don’t want to be tasked with collecting property taxes via electricity bills, in a country notorious for tax evasion. Yet Greece needs $10.7 billion by Christmas, or the country will run out of money. Furthermore, their newly-formed government has yet to agree on terms for a far larger bailout of $174 billion, necessary to maintain national solvency.

On the same day in Portugal, a major strike engineered by the nation’s two largest trade unions took place, due to public outrage over austerity measures there. Portugal needs $104 billion of bailout funds. In Spain on Saturday, thousands of demonstrators massed in Barcelona to participate in a planned anti-globalization rally. As a result, border controls made unnecessary by integration into the EU were reinstated to prevent outside agitators from entering the country. And in Britain, a public sector union strike is also scheduled for this coming Thursday, because the government is proposing to raise the retirement age and increase employee contributions to their pensions.

While the peoples’ anger seems justifiable, there is something missing. It is their inability to recognize that they are every bit as responsible for the current crisis as those they seek to blame for it. Ironically, both ends of the fiscal food chain have enabled each other’s demise. It was the massive amounts of credit issued by lending institutions at the top, who made billions of dollars by making easy credit available to the bottom end of the chain. It was the easy credit that enabled the socialist government spending sprees that quickly, but artificially, raised the living standards of people who were more than happy to live the good life, even if it was built on a mountain of accumulating debt. It is that debt that has now become unsustainable, putting both ends of the food chain on the brink of insolvency in the process.

Editor’s note: Visit Frank Kitman’s site at kitmantv.blogspot.com.

I edited and translated a most heartbreaking testimony by Sister Hatune of the Syrian-Orthodox monastery in Warburg, Germany. She makes an amazing effort to help and  protect the ruthlessly persecuted Christians in Iraq.

In recent years, a horrifying number of kidnappings, rapes and mutilations of Iraqi Christian girls has been perpetrated by Muslim gangs. Some 700,000 Christians are fleeing this terror, but often find themselves exposed to similar dangers when they arrive in neighboring Muslim countries. With no rights and no help from authorities, they are surely in the most desperate of situations.

Please take the time to contemplate why this is not being reported more often.

And visit Sister Hatune’s foundation for more information about her great work.

See the testimony of Sister Hatune below:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was not being honest when he said to President Obama this week that the PA was not continuing its incitement against Israel.

Responding to President Obama's demand that the PA make more progress "on incitement issues," Abbas said:

"I say in front of you, Mr. President, that we have nothing to do with incitement against Israel, and we're not doing that," Abbas said. "What we care about is to live in coexistence with Israel in order to bring about the independent Palestinian state that will live side by side with Israel..."
[AP, June 9, 2010]

In direct contradiction to Abbas's claim, Palestinian Media Watch documented in a report released this week that PA incitement to hatred and violence and non-recognition of Israel has continued unabated in the month since the start of the proximity talks.

For example, whereas Abbas said to President Obama that he supports "living side by side with Israel," just a few weeks ago official PA TV called for Israelis to leave Israel and "return" to Germany and Poland:

"Where are you [Israelis] from? Of course, you're from Ukraine; of course, you're from Germany, from Poland, from Russia, from Ethiopia... I ask of you, return to your original homeland!"
[PA TV (Fatah), May 4 and 7, 2010]

PA TV is owned by the Palestinian Authority and under direct control of the office of Abbas.

In addition, the PA this past month has continued to honor terrorists who have killed Israeli civilians by naming sporting events after them, a practice repeatedly condemned by the Obama administration.

These are just two examples among many in the new PMW report documenting that every condition, principle and expectation set by the US for accepting the Palestinian Authority as a partner in the peace process continues to be violated by the PA.

The full report follows, with many examples of incitement. Be sure to read it all.

To understand the people of Gaza, who now lay claim to the passions of humanitarians-without-a-cause, one might begin by considering Gazans’ freely elected leadership: the Hamas terror network.  And to understand Hamas, one might begin by looking closely at the Hamas logo. The logo’s center features swords and a golden-domed structure, but the squiggle at the top-center of the logo is most descriptive. One squiggle is worth a thousand words. That squiggle is not an Arabic symbol but the map of Israel.

Look even more carefully: the squiggle – the map of Israel depicted on the Hamas logo – primarily is pre-1967 Israel.  It is Israel without the Gaza Strip.  Hamas has no designs on the Gaza Strip it controls.  Rather, leveraging Gaza as a springboard for its actual aspiration, Hamas illustratively has designs on the only Palestine it ever has coveted:  the Palestine that now is called “the State of Israel.”  As Jew-hating journalist Helen Thomas recently said about Israelis, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these [Arab] people are occupied, and it’s their land.”  The Jews, Thomas added, can go back where they come from – “Poland.  Germany. . . . And America and everywhere else.”  (Reflecting ignorance all too common among the White House press corps, Thomas is unaware that the majority of Israelis are children of the Middle East, descendants of the 850,000 Jews exiled by Northern African Arab dictatorships during the years Israel was being founded.)

The only “Palestine” that ever existed was always synonymous with the Jewish homeland that later was renamed “Israel” in 1948. Rent a copy of the 1960 movie “Exodus.”  Listen dispassionately to the dialogue. Don’t take sides.  Just listen for definitions. The British, fairly or unfairly, are depicted as the bad guys in the movie, trying to keep the Jews out of “Palestine.” Paul Newman is trying to get the Jews into “Palestine.” Everyone watching the movie perceives that “Palestine” is a name that refers synonymously with “Israel.” Thus, what we seem to have had here is a failure to communicate. It could not be simpler: For the past two thousand years, since the Romans renamed the land of Israel after they expelled and exiled the Jews, “Israel” always was synonymous with “Palestine,” and “Palestine” always was “Israel.”

There never ever was an Arab Palestine entity. Who, after all, ever was its leader? Try to name any leader who ever in history led a sovereign “Palestinian Arab” people of “Arab Palestine.” What year was that entity founded? What was the name of its capital city — any capital city? Where is the drawing or photograph of its seat of government, or the place where its governmental leader lived? What was the name of its currency? Whose face, what slogan was on that currency? When did it fall? In which Olympic Games did it compete? Which issue of Encyclopedia Britannica had an entry for its government?

Consider this way:  The American city of Palestine, Texas was founded in 1846.  It was so named in honor of an early settler there, Daniel Parker, who hailed from Palestine, Illinois.  That Palestine was chartered in 1811.  It drew its name in 1678 from the French explorer, Jean LaMotte, who looked at the land and named it “Palestine” because it reminded him of the Biblical Promised Land of the Jews, flowing with milk and honey.  No one associated “Palestine” with the Arab community, not even the French in the 1600s.  Rather, the name was associated with the Jews and their Biblical Promised Land. The same with Palestine, Arkansas (pop. 741) and East Palestine, Ohio.

Before the Jewish country was named “Israel” in 1948, even the most ardent Jews identified the Jewish homeland as “Palestine.” Today’s Jerusalem Post, the English-language daily newspaper of Israel, originally was called the Palestine Post.  The pre-government institution that laid Israel’s political foundation was the Jewish Agency for Palestine, headed by Dr. Chaim Weitzmann, who became Israel’s first head of state.

It is this “Palestine” – namely, the State of Israel – that Hamas forthrightly is determined to seize.  The squiggle tells all.  To attain the power to pursue its dream of eradicating Israel from the map, Hamas first engaged in more than a decade of bloody terror, killing some 500 people in the course of more than 350 terror attacks since 1993.  Hamas popularized suicide bombing.  Then, during the January 2006 general elections held freely and with minimal intimidation within the areas of Gaza and the segments of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) controlled by the Palestine Authority, the Palestinian Arab electorate voted Hamas into power.  Hamas won 74 seats, compared to 45 for runner-up Fatah. Former President Jimmy Carter monitored the vote and declared the election of Hamas “fair and square,” deeming them free, fair, just, and transparent.  That is, the Palestinian Arab voters freely chose to be led by a group of terrorists and suicide-bomb architects outlawed throughout the world.  After winning parliamentary elections, Hamas terrorists in Gaza proceeded to launch a bloody internecine war against their political competition, Fatah terrorists loyal to Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. More than 600 Arab terrorists killed each other during the next eighteen months.  Ultimately, Hamas won and seized the reins of power in Gaza.  By virtue of the freely expressed will of the people of Gaza, Hamas now enjoys popular support to lead Gazans with the Hamas vision.

On March 5, 1933, the German people cast their ballots, resulting in Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power as chancellor of Germany.  The voters knew Hitler’s agenda, and he prosecuted the agenda he promised them.  Mass terror followed, and the world was submerged into a war that brought death to tens of millions.  By the end, America and England gained an upper hand and had enough.  In one midnight hour, the Allies dropped more than 2,300 tons of aerial bombs on Hamburg. During the bombing of Dresden, the allies dropped more than 3,900 tons of bombs in two days, killing some 25,000 Germans.  As the debate raged over whether these aerial bombings had been overkill, an underlying justification always lay in the recognition that the German civilian population had elected the Nazis and, by the power of their ballots, willingly brought the war and destruction on others – and, by the end, onto themselves.

So it is with Gazans and the Hamas terror vision for which they voted “fair and square.”  In a world that has seen Iranian civilians rise up and, like Neda Soltani, give their very lives trying to liberate themselves from the yoke of an Islamofascist regime led by Ayatollahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the stark contrast from the people of Gaza is striking.  Gazans celebrate death.  They celebrate terror.  Given a free choice, they have opted for a vision of terror aimed at wiping out innocent Western lives and eradicating Israel off the face of the earth.  In the face of such contemporary persecutions as the Sudanese terror in Darfur and the Turkish oppression of the Kurd minority that now numbers more than two million refugees, can anyone truly make a “fair and square” argument that the people of Gaza are victims of anything other than their own tragically violent predilection to support terror over coexistence and war over peace?

Dov Fischer is a legal affairs consultant and adjunct professor of the law of civil procedure and advanced torts. He was formerly Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and writes extensively on political, cultural, and religious issues.  He is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine and blogs at www.rabbidov.com

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On January 27, 1998, Yehuda Bauer, Director of Research at Yad Vashem, concluded his Holocaust commemoration address at the Bundestag in Germany with the following:

“Thou shalt not be a perpetrator.”

“Thou shalt not be a victim.”

“And Thou shalt never, but never be a bystander.”

It is remarkable that Bauer saved the strongest admonition for bystanders.

On Friday May 27, at the White House Jewish Heritage Celebration, Helen Thomas, the “dean” of the White House Press Corps, answered a journalist’s request for an opinion on Israel:

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land…not German and not Poland.”

“So, where should they go?”

“Go home. Poland, Germany.”

“So, you think the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?”

“And America and everywhere else.”

Helen Thomas is a perpetrator.  Perpetrator, because the most important aspect of the War Against Israel is the war to erode American support for Israel, the war for public opinion.  As in Vietnam, the press in America will bring about the fall of Israel and the annihilation of her people long before and more surely than those seeking the physical destruction of the Gaza blockade.

In spite of this, Helen does not fully explain the “why” of the Holocaust.  Within hours of Thomas’ Reichstag-worthy revelation, the video evidence circled the globe.  It is safe to assume that the people who come in daily contact with Helen knew what she said.

These journalists and reporters, as every educated American, have seen pictures of the Holocaust; they have probably looked in horror at images of the selection at Auschwitz, the mass-shootings in Ukraine, the portraits of Eichmann and Mengele.  This contemplation probably led to self-reassuring oaths that, “Had I been there, I would have resisted.  I would have spoken out.  The Nazis were evil monsters. How could this have happened?”

Certainly, the White House Press Corps is full of those who have thus reacted to the Nazi Holocaust.  And yet, they will sit down to dinner with Helen Thomas.  They will continue to say, “Good Morning” to her and will treat her like an icon worthy of respect.  She will stoop in her throne in the Press Corps galley.  She will not be shunned in the halls of the White House, and senators and representatives will still curry her favor or, at the very worst, attribute her rant to notorious spunk.

This is why the Holocaust happened.  A dozen average men and women weighed their careers against the consequence of protest and permitted the penetration of respectable society by anti-Semitism. The looming destruction of Israel is not to be attributed to hate-filled sectarian ideologues like Thomas, but to the reporters and journalists who will avoid nasty personal consequences, and refuse to treat her with the utter contempt she merits.  If ever Eichmann and Mengele and Goebbels deserved to be shunned as enemies of civilization, then likewise, a woman pretending to exemplify investigative excellence while suppressing the truth of the Jews’ tri-millennial claim to a homeland in the Holy Land, ought to be ostracized by anyone with a conscience.

The path to the first Holocaust was that of politically justified anti-Semitism.  Hitler began his crusade against the Jews under the pretext that they had caused, through self-interest, the defeat of Germany in the First World War.  We, fleeing precipitously towards a Second “Final Solution,” witness a similar attempt to disguise racial hatred of the Jews as dissenting political opinion.  We hear words such as “occupation, apartheid, human rights violations,” only because they camouflage an embarrassing, crass hatred.  Penetration of respectable society by this “classy, political” anti-Semitism is the first step to genocide.

The choice to become a bystander faces each member of the White House Press Corps.  Together, they should demand Helen Thomas’ expulsion from their midst, if they wish to retain their integrity and honor.

Should authorities refuse, for the obvious reason that anti-Semitism has been given the green light (no pun intended) by the example of the administration, then it is the personal responsibility of each member to treat the “Queen” and her supporters as they claim they would have treated the last batch of selectors who favored deporting the Jews to their “homeland” in the ovens of Poland.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) released by the Barack Obama administration on May 27 is not so much a look forward as a look back. It is an attempt to return to the optimistic days following the end of the Cold War when it seemed a peaceful new world order was possible. In 1999, President Bill Clinton claimed “perhaps for the first time in history, the world’s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory. The world clearly is coming together.” President Obama says essentially the same thing in the opening paragraph of his cover letter to the NSS when he notes that “globalization”—the buzz word of the post-Cold War era — has “made peace possible among the major powers.” The dangers that remain are of a different sort, “from international terrorism and the spread of deadly technologies, to economic upheaval and a changing climate.”

That the world looked like the classical liberal model expounded by Clinton in 1999 was doubtful even then. A decade later, the cracks are even larger. Five months before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, a Chinese fighter rammed a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea, an area Beijing has been trying to claim as sovereign territory. The rise of China and the emergence of other ambitious powers herald not a new world but a new cycle in the old world of international rivalry. The NSS explicitly rejects the “world as it is” in its attempt to fashion “the world we seek.” But the NSS does not lay out a path between worlds; it simply assumes the new world already exists.

There are still a few odds and ends to be cleaned up from the Bush administration, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSS pledges “a focus on defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe” but sees no real dangers after that which would require a military effort. Though the NSS identifies the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and biological) as problems, the two most menacing rogue states, North Korea and Iran, are to be dealt with through diplomacy. As the NSS states on page 23, “If North Korea eliminates its nuclear weapons program, and Iran meets its international obligations on its nuclear program, they will be able to proceed on a path to greater political and economic integration with the international community. If they ignore their international obligations, we will pursue multiple means to increase their isolation and bring them into compliance with international nonproliferation norms.” This is at best a containment policy.

But how can Pyongyang or Tehran be contained, let alone “isolated” when they have friends among the other major powers? The NSS depends on there being a consensus among the powers on issues like non-proliferation within a general spirit of cooperation. That is not how world politics is evolving.

According to the NSS, “The European Union has deepened its integration. Russia has reemerged in the international arena as a strong voice. China and India—the world’s two most populous nations—are becoming more engaged globally. From Latin America to Africa to the Pacific, new and emerging powers hold out opportunities for partnership, even as a handful of states endanger regional and global security by flouting international norms.” Under the Obama policy, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia—so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.”

The integration of the EU is being called into question by the sovereign debt crisis that has ripped through Greece and has threatened to spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. The single euro currency, once thought to be an alternative to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, is in free fall. Euro skeptics in England, France, Holland and Germany are balking at “saving” the Mediterranean and Eastern members of the bloc.

The NSS singles out Brazil for special praise saying, “We welcome Brazil’s leadership and seek to move beyond dated North-South divisions to pursue progress on bilateral, hemispheric, and global issues.” Yet, Brazil just brokered a deal with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program meant to shield it from a new round of UN sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had told President Obama personally at the Nuclear Security Summit that he would not back additional sanctions on Iran, and repeated this stance when meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Brasilia immediately after the two leaders left Washington. The Hu-Lula meeting took place within the larger context of a BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) summit where the emerging powers coordinate policies formulated primarily against the positions of the United States and EU.

South Africa joins the mix in BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), a coalition at the UN that opposes the American and European demand for mandated limits on green house gas emissions to fight alleged global warming. Supported by Russia and the group of 77 developing nations, BASIC represents the world’s rejection of President Obama’s obsession about climate change that appears repeatedly in the NSS as a priority global threat.

The core value of BASIC and its allies is unrestricted economic growth, which means intensified competition in domestic and world markets. For some time, American officials have made it clear that unless China, India and Brazil provide substantial market access to U.S. exports commensurate with their high economic growth rates, there can be no conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks. These negotiations have been stalled virtually from their inception in 2001 due to a fundamental clash of national interests.

The Obama administration has hailed China and Russia for supporting a draft sanctions proposal against Iran at the UN. Yet, Beijing and Moscow watered down the resolution to prevent it from crippling the Tehran regime. Most importantly, Russia and China will be allowed to continue investing in Iran’s energy sector, which will boost the country’s revenues which the mullah’s use to finance their aggressive foreign policy as well as nuclear development. To improve relations, the Obama administration dropped sanctions against Moscow’s state arms export agency and three Russian entities previously found to have transferred technology or weapons to Iran. The UN sanctions proposal would also allow the Russians to sell S-300 air defense missiles (which have an anti-missile capability) to Tehran. So even if the UN Security Council adopts the resolution, it will not “isolate” Iran from its main international backers.

Nor is international rivalry confined to economics and rogue states. China’s massive military modernization program, led by new weapon systems designed to attack U.S. and allied forces across Asia, is not mentioned in the NSS. To do so would have undermined the fanciful vision of a peaceful, cooperative world. It would also have called into question why the Obama Pentagon is cutting back on the high-end conventional forces, from armored units and air superiority fighters to missile defense and naval shipbuilding, that would be needed to not only counter rising “peer” competitors like China but to defeat major regional powers like North Korea and Iran.

The NSS attempts to conjure up a world in which an NSS is not needed, but the Obama administration does not have the power to change the true, dangerous nature of global politics. What the NSS reveals is the unwillingness of President Obama to deal with the world as it is. Thus, America will remain vulnerable, as its leaders are continually blindsided by the strategies of adversaries they cannot bring themselves to think about.

Jerusalem ---- May 31, 2010 .... The Israel Navy this morning blocked the Hamas backed "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", a group of ships carrying up to 800 people from entering the Gaza Strip.

Israel was well aware that this was not a humanitarian love boat trek but rather an exercise in Islamic digital PR.

The organizers of the Palestine Flotilla to Gaza consisted of some of the worst global terror groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and their fund raisers the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation.

What made this Palestine PR stunt or electronic Jihad exercise even more barbaric was the blatant use of volunteers on the ship who had good and true humanitarian intentions.

Some of these humanitarian volunteers were unaware that they were being used by the terror group Hamas as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation used both diplomats and volunteers from the UK, the US, Sweden, France, Germany and other countries as human shields as Hamas attacked a peaceful IDF boarding force with guns, knives and clubs.

Just before sunrise the IDF Navy intercepted six ships that were attempting to break the maritime closure of the Gaza Strip. Israel and the Israel Navy provided numerous warnings issued prior to the incident. The Israel Navy requested that the Hamas backed ships to redirect themselves towards Ashdod where they would be able to unload their aid supplies which would then be transferred to Gaza after undergoing security inspections.

Israel provides tons of food, water, medical supplies and fuel to Gaza on a daily basis. Israeli officials repeated that if this was a true humanitarian event, not a PR exercise, Hamas would have used the existing channels - the UN, the EU and Israel to transfer whatever cargo they had.

During the boarding of the Gaza flotilla ships, protesters onboard demonstrated that this was not a non violent event as they attacked IDF Naval personnel with live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs.

"The Palestinian Gaza demonstrators had clearly prepared their weapons in advance for this specific purpose," the IDF told the Israel News Agency....

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Speaking at a Democrat fundraiser in San Francisco on June 28, 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton bluntly warned her well-heeled supporters – some of whom had paid $10,000 to attend – that, when and if Democrats regained power, they meant to revoke Bush’s tax cuts. She said, “Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” [emphasis added] No sentence better encapsulates the Shadow Party agenda, nor better illustrates why Soros and Hillary have joined forces in the political arena. Their views on “social justice” could not be more perfectly aligned.

“The richest 1 percent of the world’s population receive as much as the poorest 57 percent,” Soros laments in his 2002 book George Soros on Globalization. Resolving this inequity will “require some resource transfers from the rich countries to the poor.” As the richest nation on earth, the United States of America would, of course, pay the lion’s share of the money required to support Soros’s new “global open society,” as he calls it. “The United States bears a special responsibility for the world because of its dominant position,” Soros explains.

Closing the gap between rich and poor nations will require putting curbs on what Soros calls “global capitalism.” Particularly egregious, in Soros’s view, is the effect of global capitalism on social security. The free flow of capital across borders reduces “the ability of the state to provide social security to its citizens,” he argues. In one respect, Soros is correct. Tax-based, pay-as-you-go social security systems of the sort that Otto von Bismarck introduced in Germany in 1889 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought to the USA in 1935 require massive taxation of working people in order to support those who are not working. In a high-tech, global marketplace, people in the upper tax brackets quickly learn to shelter their earnings from the tax collector through such expediencies as investing in offshore derivatives markets. Self-serving actions of this sort threaten the entire concept of a pay-as-you-go social safety net. As long as taxpayers can hide their assets from the government, no country can possibly collect enough taxes to provide cradle-to-grave security for its underclass. As Soros puts it, “The globalization of financial markets has rendered the welfare state that came into existence after World War II obsolete because the people who require a social safety net cannot leave the country, but the capital the welfare state used to tax can.”

The solution to this problem, according to Soros, is to turn the entire planet into a giant welfare state. In order to squeeze the necessary taxes from today’s globalized investor class, we need global institutions with the authority to track down and confiscate capital from anyone, anywhere on the planet. To this end, Soros recommends the formation of what he calls an Open Society Alliance, a global network of likeminded nations, corporations and NGOs which would operate first within the framework of the United Nations, but would later replace the UN, taking on all its current functions and more. According to Soros, this Open Society Alliance would employ various sorts of “carrots and sticks” to keep its members in line. “It would offer incentives where possible but would not shy away from enforcement where necessary,” he writes.

– The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party

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CANBERRA, Australia - Australia ordered the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat Monday after investigators concluded Israel was responsible for forging four Australian passports that were used in the slaying of a Hamas operative in Dubai.

Australia's reaction echoes that of the United Kingdom, which in March expelled a diplomat in retaliation for the use of 12 fake British passports in the plot to kill Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai authorities blame Israel's Mossad intelligence service for the January slaying.

The governments of Ireland, Germany and France have yet to state how they will react to similar cases of alleged identity fraud against its citizens, as revealed in the investigation.

Australia had not expelled a foreign diplomat since 2004.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told Parliament that the operation to kill Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room was not the first time Israel had forged Australian travel documents. He did not elaborate on previous incidents, but said the latest transgression breached "confidential undertakings" between the two countries that have stood for several years.

"These are not the actions of a friend," he said. "This is not what we expect from a nation with whom we have had such a close, friendly and supportive relationship."...

You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings.

The latest example of this is the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Graham versus Florida. The issue was whether the Constitution permitted a state to impose a sentence of life without the possibility of parole when the criminal was a youthful offender. The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that this was a violation of the Constitution.

If your copy of the Constitution doesn’t say anything about youthful offenders, do not worry that you have a defective copy. There is no such statement in the Constitution. What the justices cited as the alleged basis for their decision was the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Since 37 out of the 50 states permit sentences of life without the possibility of parole, such a sentence is not unusual. How about cruel? If it is cruel, then why is it OK to impose that sentence on people who are not youthful?

The case of Graham versus Florida involved a 16-year-old repeat offender, who was convicted of a home invasion robbery while on probation from a previous felony. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court then over-ruled that decision.

The role of an appellate court is not to simply second-guess the decision of the trial judge and jury, much less usurp the responsibility of legislatures to make social policy. But the pretense of applying the Constitution gives appellate judges the power to do both.

The bolder justices go further, citing practices in other countries as supporting their decisions that are supposedly based on the Constitution of the United States. If justices can pick and choose which legal principles and practices they will follow, from the many widely varying principles and practices in countries around the world, then they can find a basis for doing just about anything they feel like doing.

This too goes counter to the very basis of American government, as a system in which “We the people” ultimately govern ourselves through representatives of our own choosing and the officials appointed by them.

Once appellate judges are free to base their rulings on what people do in India, Egypt or Germany, Americans are no longer a self-governing people.

As if to add a touch of farce to lighten the tragedy of the dismantling of the Constitution, Supreme Court justices on opposing sides of the case of Graham versus Florida cited statistics seeking to show that there was national consensus for or against life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not institutions equipped to make policy judgments like that. Legislatures exist to make policy judgments— and to be voted out of office if these policy judgments turn out to produce results that the electorate do not want. But there are no such corrective mechanisms in place if Supreme Court justices misjudge.

Finally, there is the old, moth-eaten argument cited by Justice John Paul Stevens, that the society is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it.

Nobody— from the moment that the Constitution was adopted in the 18th century to the present— has ever denied that societies evolve, and that their laws must evolve to meet changing circumstances. But, unless Justice Stevens is either stupid or dishonest, he cannot leap from a need for laws to change to the conclusion that it is judges who must be the ones to make those changes.

Just saying the magic word “change” does not justify judges grabbing the power to make whatever changes they please in the law. There are, after all, two other branches of the federal government, specifically charged with legislative and executive responsibilities and powers, not to mention the Constitutional Amendment process.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

In the beginning of October, the United States began air strikes against the Taliban regime. The goal was to destroy ability of the al-Qaeda forces based there to strike again. Such considerations were irrelevant to leftists opposing the strikes like Berkeley Congresswoman Barbara Lee. In voting against the President’s request for an authorization to use force, Lee declared, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” The implication was that if Americans used force to defend themselves, they would be no better than the terrorists who attacked them. Lee was returned to Congress by her Democratic constituents the following year.

Protesters echoed Lee’s sentiments in campus demonstrations across the country, making them even more explicit. At the University of North Carolina, teach-ins featured professors attacking America as a “rogue state” and a greater terrorist threat than al-Qaeda; at the City University of New York, professors condemned “American imperialism;” at Brown University, students and professors went on strike chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want a racist war.” Within weeks of the most heinous attack on America in its history, radicals had turned their own country into the villain.

The refusal to concede that Americans had a right to defend themselves was difficult to understand. Equally incomprehensible was the left’s willingness to defend a fundamentalist theocracy, that oppressed women, homosexuals and non-Muslims, and that consequently should have been repellent to its own values. From both angles, the protesters’ decision to oppose the war in Afghanistan was a defining moment for the American left, analogous to its response to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.

At the time the Nazi-Soviet Pact was consummated, American Communists and progressive “fellow-travelers” had considered themselves anti-fascists and anti-imperialists. But when Moscow signed the “Non-aggression Pact” with the Nazi state, they embraced it. For the next two years – until Germany attacked Soviet Russia in June 1941— the Communists opposed the defense policies of the democracies and denounced what they referred to as an “inter-imperialist war.” When it came to choosing between the interests of the Soviet state and their “progressive agendas” – even their opposition to fascism – American Communists and their progressive allies did not hesitate to choose the former. The subtext of their reaction to the Nazi-Soviet entente was clear: their loyalty to the Soviet state overrode their loyalty to any other principle, however progressive it might seem. This kind of calculus led Stalin’s great antagonist, Leon Trotsky, to condemn the parties of the Communist International and their progressive fellow-travelers as “frontier guards for the Soviet Union.”

– Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left 

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MONTREAL - A Montreal man has collected Quebec government welfare cheques for almost 20 years, even as he criss-crossed Europe to meet six other men who've since been either killed, convicted or linked to global terrorism, lawyers for the RCMP and CSIS allege.

In recently filed court documents, government lawyers claim that while Mohamed Omary has been jobless and on the dole in Montreal since he arrived from Morocco.

Yet he still somehow found cash to repeatedly visit Europe between 1993 and 1999.

While overseas and in Montreal in the 1990s, Omary hob-nobbed with six men who've since become a who's who of Islamic terrorists, the federal security agencies claim.

Omary, a father of four, denies any involvement in terrorism and has never been charged, though his brother-in-law has been kicked out of Canada on national security grounds.

Omary's Montreal home was searched by police in 1999 at the request of French law enforcement and his telephone was also tapped for months in 2000, court records show.

Thierry Audin, a spokesman for Quebec's Ministère de l'Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale, declined comment on Omary's case or status as a welfare recipient.

"This is personal information. We cannot make any comment whatsoever about this subject," Audin told QMI Agency.

Omary visited France, Germany, Holland, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and made several trips to Morocco and Turkey staying abroad a month at a time, including stays in at least one four star hotel, the RCMP and CSIS lawyers say in the court documents.

Omary also joined a shooting club in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil and learned to handle guns. In Bosnia, Omary even learned to fire an AK 47, while purportedly there as a humanitarian worker, the government claims.

Omary's lawyer, Johanne Doyon, did not return telephone messages seeking comment for this story. A second lawyer, Alain Arsenault, referred calls to Doyon.

Last year, Omary sued the Canadian government for $1 million in Quebec Superior Court.

He claims that Canadian security officials tipped Moroccan authorities about a trip he was planning home to Morocco in January 2002 - just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Omary, a citizen of Canada and Morocco, was arrested and detained by Moroccan authorities at the Casablanca airport. His Canadian passport was confiscated.

Omary also says he was prevented from returning to Montreal for two years as CSIS and Moroccan intelligence agents pressured him to become a confidential informant when he returned to Montreal. CSIS agents he identified as "Claude and Christian" visited him in Morocco, scaring him and contributing to heart troubles, he added.

He wants damages from the Justice Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for what he claimed were lost wages as well as loss of liberty, stress, and family separation.

Omary's lawsuit described him as "an IT worker by profession and a self-employed worker in Canada for several years."

In their reply, federal lawyers said neither RCMP nor CSIS officers knew Omary had left Canada for Morocco in January 2002, so they couldn't have tipped off the Moroccan authorities.

They also said he failed to ask consular officials for a replacement Canadian passport for months, a move that could have allowed him to leave Morocco much sooner.

Omary's claim for damages and lost wages is bogus, the federal lawyers said, noting that Omary lost little if anything financially, because he's been on welfare since coming to Canada....

Security authorities in Germany believe that another member of a group of German Islamist insurgents in Pakistan has been killed. Officials wonder whether the deaths will be a deterrent for copycats or whether it will inspire others to sign up for jihad.

A second homegrown Islamist from Germany appears to have been killed in fighting in Pakistan, SPIEGEL has reported. Danny R., a 21-year-old from Berlin, first traveled to Pakistan via Istanbul on Sept. 2, 2009 together with another Islamist. There, he joined a group of insurgents in the porous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan that has been a hotbed of Taliban and terrorist activity.

German security officials have obtained information suggesting that the man was killed several days ago in Waziristan. The news comes just days after word of the death of Eric Breininger, a German-born convert to Islam who had been wanted by German police on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist cell.

Danny R., who would have turned 22 on May 1, was born in Berlin but had Dutch citizenship. He renamed himself "Elias" after his conversion to Islam and belonged to a group of radical Muslims in Berlin who claimed they wanted to wage jihad, according to officials.

From Footballer to Jihadist

Danny R. had played for a while for the soccer team BFC Alemannia 1890 in the German capital before suddenly disappearing. Authorities are currently investigating whether Danny R. died at the end of April together with Breininger, who was from the western state of Saarland, and a man born in Salzgitter near Hanover named Ahmet M. According to statements made by associates of the men, four jihadists had been traveling in a car near the city of Mir Ali in Pakistan, when they were stopped and then killed during an exchange of gunfire with soldiers.

Only a few days later, Breininger's alleged memoirs were posted on the Internet. In them, he describes his conversion and his transformation into a fervent Islamist. German security officials believe the work to be authentic and are now monitoring the impact of the latest developments on the Islamist scene in Germany. Will the deaths dissuade other German converts considering making the journey to Pakistan? Or will the war reports merely serve to attract other volunteers fascinated by the stories?

In Berlin alone last September, in addition to Danny R. and his wife, two other young couples made their way to Waziristan. And in recent years, at least six militant Islamists from Germany are known to have died in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.