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THE DIOGENES REPORT LETTERS WARS With our country awash in Arab and other lock-step-Muslim-thinking and backed by a vast left-wing conspiracy, including many Jews, it is incumbent upon every right-thinking person to challenge the lies and misinformation that the enemies of Israel are spewing in the media, The Stamford Advocate on August 7 ran my response to the lies and half-truths they printed a few days earlier. A friend who read Salib’s letter said that he thought about responding but he felt that a response from me would be more effective. This is bad thinking. I have had so many letters printed in this newspaper that the editor might be loath to give me another shot. An answer—any response—is more effective than no response. So if you have an opportunity to refute anti-Israel letters and editorials, it is incumbent upon you to do so.
LETTERSADVOCATE@SCNI.COM The letter by Mr. Fikry B. Salib (8/2/03) which ran under the heading Avoiding Truth will hurt Mideast peace prospects is so full of untruths that it likely sounded the death-knell for peace in the region. His claim that Islamic teaching and Arab governments do not claim that Christians and Jews are infidels to be hated flies in the face of the sermons coming out every Friday from the major mosques in Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Mecca and previously Baghdad. I can supply Mr. Salib with transcripts of these blood-thirsty tirades, if he would care to read them. The same messages are part of the school texts in the Arab schools as attested to by many Western educators and government officials. Mr. Salib further claims that Christians live in harmony with their Muslim compatriots among the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians , the Syrians and the Lebanese. In reality, Christian Arabs are under tremendous pressure from the Muslims in places like Bethlehem, and many thousands have already been forced out of the Palestinian areas. In Egypt, the Christian Copts are regularly murdered by fundamentalist Islamic militias. We are more familiar with what happened in Lebanon where a bloody 15-year civil war pitted Muslims against Christians. Only the presence of the Syrian Army is preventing a renewal of this religious fighting. While there is no harmony in the other countries he names, there is less intense strife. While Mr. Salib is correct about benign Muslim regimes that welcomed Jews some 800 years ago, the record of the current Muslim world is not exemplary. Muslims are battling Hindus in Kashmir, Christians in the Philippines, pagans in Indonesia, they drove the Jews out of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan. So why should the Jews bow to spurious Muslim demands in the Land of Israel. Sincerely,
JUST TELL, DON’T ASK All of a sudden, everyone is debating where the hundreds of billions of dollars are going to come from that will be required to “rebuild” Iraq. To me it’s a no-brainer. We don’t take it out of Medicare or Medicaid or education or environment funding. As a matter of fact, the funds do not come out of the U. S. budget, at all. We just go to the Saudi royal family and tell them that they will take the required funds out of their family business annually to pay for the Iraqi “rebuilding’—no matter how many billions of bucks are needed. We don’t ask them—we tell them! This is not extortion. The family owes us. They would have been out of business if we didn’t stop Saddam from marching into their country after he invaded Kuwait. Even further back than that, it was American weapons that enabled their so-called army to defeat the rebel forces that took over the Grand Mosque and would have wiped out the family. Any shortfall from their oil revenues can be covered by selling off assets they own in the U. S., Europe and elsewhere or by debiting their Swiss bank accounts. They are smart enough to know that without America’s support they will be out of business in less than a year. But the bottom line is that they owe us. And, anyway, they should be delighted to help their brother Arabs.
ROAD MAP – 12TH EDITION With all the excitement about George W. Bush’s “Road Map” toward “peace” in the Middle East, one would think that this is a new or unique phenomenon. Perish the thought. This is actually the 12th Road Map in a series that goes back about 60 years. Of course, each edition of the Road Map had a different name but all had and have the same purpose—to restrict the Jews and Israel. With some editions of the Road Map it would be fair to use the word strangle instead of restrict. Remember some of the earlier Road Maps like: make a deal with Ibn Saud to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine (that was Franklin Roosevelt’s Road Map. The there was Harry Truman’s Road Map: recognize the new State of Israel but have an immediate arms embargo so that they can’t defend themselves. Others were called the Vance Plan and the Baker Plan and Camp David and Wye Plantations. The current Road Map is the 12th since President Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud during World War II—one plan for each President. This Road Map will disappear like all of the others because it is not a path toward peace but a scheme to reward the terrorists who dominate the Arab and Muslim peoples.
YOU DECIDE Two Arabs who arrive at JFK the same day have struck up a friendly conversation on the Saudi flight on their way to the U. S. Even though one is going to Detroit and the other to Houston, they agree to meet a year later in Jersey City to see which one has assimilated and become more Americanized. One year later they meet at a Jersey City mosque and Achmed says proudly, ”I drive a pickup, I wear Levis with a belt buckle bigger than my head, I smoke Marlboros and I drink Bud Light. See if you can beat that.” Muhammad looks him square in the eyes and says, ”Fuck you, you lying towelhead.” You decide who has become more Americanized.
ACROSS MY RADAR SCREEN Foibles Of The Times I am always amazed when I meet readers of The New York Times who fail to recognize that the paper has an agenda which it pursues with zealousness on other than the editorial page. I’ll let my readers guess what the publisher’s goals are in the following examples. Whenever The Times does a news story on homosexual and lesbian couples it makes a point of printing how many years the couple has been together. Heaven forbid that the reader should imagine that the couple met a week earlier in a gay bathhouse, which many readers may, indeed, imagine. Whenever a Jewish business executive, who does not have an obviously Jewish name, is involved in questionable or unethical activities, The Times always makes it a point to mention that he is on the board of some synagogue or is a large contributor to a Jewish charity. In its zeal to provide ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, do you think it will get around to informing its readers that husbands of the black families that are interviewed have never been in jail, or that none of the relations of an Italian family are members of the Mafia, or that none of the members of a Hispanic family are drug dealers? Just an off-hand, matter of fact mention, of course. Don’t Fence Me In It’s amazing how actions of major nations that have world-wide impact are overlooked by the media and by other major nations but the actions of one small country rivet the attention of the officials of every major country, most minor countries, and can never get off the front pages of the world’s media. Who but Israel can warrant this much attention? Except, of course, when it is under attack, then no one seems to notice. Today, it’s The Fence. Robert Frost wrote, “good fences make good neighbors.” But he didn’t live in the Middle East. It’s a place where the expression ‘good neighbors’ cannot be translated into Arabic. So, the Israeli Government decided to build a ‘good fence’ to keep out the bad neighbors. Of course, the bad neighbors are screaming that they can’t easily get into Israel to continue murdering Jews. And friends of the bad neighbors from the U. S. State Department to Europe to Muslim countries around the world are supporting them in their fight against any limitations on their right to murder. While I believe that Israel has every right to build this fence—even to electrify it to discourage left wing Israelis, as well as the bad neighbors from trying to pull down the fence—I am opposed to a fence. I am in favor of Israel defending its people against its bad neighbors, but not by a fence, which implies that land on ‘the other side’ of the fence belongs to the bad neighbors. None of the Land of Israel belongs to the bad neighbors. To prevent the bad neighbors from creating havoc in Israel a ‘living fence’ should be used. By a ‘living fence’ I mean the IDF (Israel Defense Force) with its tanks, artillery and air power. Any unauthorized bad neighbors who try to cross over the imaginary fence line should be immediately stopped with live ammunition—not rubber bullets. If fire is required from tanks, artillery and helicopter gun ships, as well as from riflemen—so be it. It will not take many outbursts of fire from the living fence before the bad neighbors learn to stay on their side of the line. If Robert Frost had lived in the Middle East, he might have written, “living fences make understanding neighbors.” The understanding neighbors on the other side of the fence would understand that the land on their side of the fence does not belong to them.
HEADLINES AND COMMENTS More Obese Teens Opt For Gastric Bypass Surgery UMass President, Brother Of Mobster, Resigns Israel Releases Hundreds Of Prisoners Queens Firefighters Flee Rat-Infested Station Magnet Schools Are Short Of Money Anti-Defamation League Voices Concerns Mel Gibson Film Will Fuel Anti-Semitism Martha Stewart Has Lower 2nd-Quarter Profit; Sales Fall Maryland Placed On Probation Rising Tide Of Islamic Militants See Iraq As The Ultimate Battlefield Files Show Archdiocese Paid $21 Million In Abuse Cases 2 Israelis Killed In Attacks By Arab Bombers Fed Maintains Its Key Rate And Suggests No Shifts Soon Senator Wants To ‘Promote Some Diversity’ In Congressional Artwork
(Not headlines but worthy of comment) In Boston, the Vatican proclaimed in July that gay adoption would actually mean doing violence to children. The reason that Barcelona is now the vanguard capital of Europe is that their cooking has improved. It is estimated that there have been more than 500 on-screen deaths in Schwarzenegger’s movies.
QUOTES I LIKE Gays are the only people left who want to get married. Iraqi democracy: everyone has the right to kill, rob or rape anyone they don’t like or like. Ms. Huffington is one of those candidates who straddles the California fault line between contender and crackpot. Today’s favorite transvestite saying: eat, drink and be Mary. Less trees, less fires. No trees, no fires. Find a job that requires direct hands-on work on site. You gotta say this for the white race—its self-confidence knows no bounds. Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where there’s no poverty, no crime, no unemployment, no war and no worry—and call it a “primitive society”? Man: an ape with possibilities. I was wise until I got married...then I became otherwise. What do you call a dwarf with ESP who escapes from prison? A small medium at large! The emperor has no clothes. The emperor has no clothes. In human striving there is no neutral gear. It is either forward or reverse. My garden will never make me famous. Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. Do not assume that the other fellow has intelligence to match yours. He may have more. Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain: the one brings pain for a moment, the other for all time.
READERS’ COMMENTS I was led to believe that a rabbi's primary duty was to teach Jews to follow the Law. According to my understanding, Jesus' objection to the money-changers was that they were charging interest, which was, before the time of Maimonides, a violation of Jewish law, and well within the purview of a dutiful rabbi intent on encouraging pursuit of Torah. This slight criticism aside, your observations are very entertaining and gave me a perspective I'd not thought of before. Thanks. ***Diogenes’ Response: Either Jesus’ understanding of the situation or your understanding of Jesus’ misunderstanding of the situation
is the problem. The people Jesus supposedly drove away from the Temple area were money-changers not money-lenders. They were not charging interest since they were not lending money. The received a service charge for performing the service of exchanging currency. This had nothing to do with a legally-acceptable rabbinic technique which allowed the charging of interest and which instituted many hundreds of years later. You know an awful lot about your gang of four. And for an invented myth derived from questionable history with little or no source data, you make up some impressive new facts. Must we take you seriously --- does one questionable history negate the other? Obviously, Mel Gibson believes his bible which overstates its case against Jews. And you were never one to shy away from your own kind of overstatement. ***Diogenes’ Response: While there is no contemporaneous evidence of the existence of the Jesus character described in the Gospels, there is ample contemporaneous information about Jewish law and custom and Roman law and custom of that period. The scenario I offered is based on that information. If the law was followed, that’s how the events would have worked out. Don’t try to be more cynical than Diogenes!!!
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