Rantisi has been given the leadership of Hamas.

Defense chiefs have decided to try to kill the entire Hamas leadership, security sources said Tuesday, a day after Israel assassinated the sheikh.

I wouldn’t want to have to shop for his life insurance.

Seventy two raisins, coming up.

“I have been to the mountain top. I have a dream.”

“I have a dream of a Palestine from the west bank of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

“I have a dream of blood-sucking Zionists–men, women, babies–in their ice cream parlors, sundered and bleeding by metal fasteners soaked in rat poison, dead or writhing in agony now and for years.”

“I have a dream of a Middle East without Jews, in which Arabs can mingle with Islamicists, and oppress unbelievers and women, without being offended or defiled by the oppressive Jewish race.”

“I have a dream, of a future in which people will be judged not by the content of their character, but by their religion and ethnicity. I have seen the promised land.”

Yes, we all remember how the Reverend Martin Luther King sent out children with bombs strapped surreptiously to their bellies to deliberately murder innocents, in order to seek a better life for his people.

Mark Steyn says that our supposed betters in Europe have it backwards:

In 2002 and 2003, I took a couple of two-legged, mini fact-finding trips – first to western Europe, then on to the Middle East. And both times I was struck by the way the Muslims of Araby were far less inflamed than those in the alienated immigrant ghettoes around Paris and Amsterdam. Life in the West, exposure to the self-loathing platitudes of Anglican clerics, these are the sort of things that seem to inflame Muslims. Many of the wackiest Islamists from Richard Reid to Zacarias Moussaoui to Metin Kaplan are products of the enervated Europe symbolised by the Rev Mark Beach…

…[The Islamists’] most effective guerrillas aren’t in the Hindu Kush, where it is the work of moments to drop a daisycutter on the mighty Pashtun warrior. They’re travelling light on the bridle-paths of Europe – the small cells that operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society, while politicians cling to the beaten tracks – old ideas, multicultural pieties and a general hope that things will turn out for the best.

As usual, none of these mindless minions who claim to speak for the Iraqis have apparently bothered to ask them what they think.

Compare and contrast:

From Sydney to Tokyo, from Santiago, Chile, to Madrid, London, New York and San Francisco, demonstrators condemned U.S. policy in Iraq and said they did not believe Iraqis are better off or the world safer because of the war.

to

Seventy per cent of people said that things were going well or quite well in their lives, while only 29% felt things were bad.

And 56% said that things were better now than they were before the war.

I haven’t seen Gibson’s movie, but I didn’t think that it was anti-semitic until I read this–now I’m having doubts. I doubt if Yasser thinks that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is anti-semitic.

That is, they did if their goal in Friday’s bombing was to remove the Spanish government that supported the War on Terror. And why wouldn’t it be their goal?

I very much fear that the Spanish electorate has just dramatically increased the probability of a terrorist attack on American soil in late October and early November, emboldening them to think that they can influence American politics as well. And I hope that if my fear comes true, that in our case, it will have exactly the opposite of the intended effect, as September 11 did.

Victor Davis Hanson has some words of wisdom for those who whine about “unilateralism” and “preemption.”

Can be found here.

…In North Africa, Libya?s leader decided in December to disclose and eliminate his country?s chemical, biological and nuclear weapon programs, as well as his ballistic missiles. In the weeks since, Libya has turned over equipment and documents relating to nuclear and missile programs — including long-range ballistic missile guidance sets and centrifuge parts for uranium enrichment — and has begun the destruction of its unfilled chemical munitions. With these important steps, Libya has acted and announced to the world that they want to disarm and to prove they are doing so.

Compare Libya?s recent behavior to the behavior of the Iraqi regime. Saddam Hussein could have opened up his country to the world — just as Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and South Africa had done — and as Libya is doing today.

Instead, he chose the path of deception and defiance. He gave up tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues under the U.N. sanctions, when he could have had those sanctions lifted simply by demonstrating that he had disarmed. He passed up the ?final opportunity? that was given to him in the UN Resolution 1441 to prove that his programs were ended and his weapons were destroyed.

Even after the statues of Saddam Hussein were falling in Baghdad, the Iraqi regime continued to hide and destroy evidence systematically going through ministries destroying what they could get their hands on.

We may never know why Saddam Hussein chose the destruction of his regime over peaceful disarmament. But we know this: it was his choice. And if he had chosen differently — if the Iraqi regime had taken the steps Libya is now taking — there would have been no war…

…The advance of freedom does not come without cost or sacrifice. Last November, I was in South Korea during their debate on whether or not they should send South Korean forces to Iraq. A woman journalist came up to me and put a microphone in front of my face — she was clearly too young to have experienced the Korean war — and she said to me in a challenging voice: ?Why should young South Koreans go halfway around the world to Iraq to get killed or wounded??

Now that’s a fair question. And I said it was a fair question. I also told her that I had just come from the Korean War memorial in Seoul and there’s a wall that has every state of the 50 states in the United States with [the names of] all the people who were killed in the Korean War. I was there to put a wreath on the memorial and before I walked down there I looked up at the wall and started studying the names and there, of course, was a very dear friend from high school who was on a football team with me, and he was killed the last day of the war — the very last day.

And I said to this woman, you know, that would have been a fair question for an American journalist to ask 50 years ago — why in the world should an American go halfway around the world to South Korea and get wounded or killed?

We were in a building that looked out on the city of Seoul and I said, I’ll tell you why. Look out the window. And out that window you could see lights and cars and energy and a vibrant economy and a robust democracy. And of course I said to her if you look above the demilitarized zone from satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula, above the DMZ is darkness, nothing but darkness and a little portion (Inaudible.) of light where Pyongyang is. The same people had the same population, the same resources. And look at the difference. There are concentration camps. They’re starving. They’ve lowered the height for the people who go in the Army down to 4 feet 10 inches because people aren’t tall enough. They take people in the military below a hundred pounds. They’re 17, 18, 19 years old and frequently they look like they’re 13, 14, and 15 years old.

Korea was won at a terrible cost of life — thousands and thousands and thousands of people from the countries in this room. And was it worth it? You bet.

The world is a safer place today because the Coalition liberated 50 million people — 25 million in Afghanistan and 25 million in Iraq.

RTWT

The French are whining that they were kept in the dark about Libya.

Too bad we couldn’t have kept them in the dark about Iraq. We might have fixed things there a lot sooner.

The French are whining that they were kept in the dark about Libya.

Too bad we couldn’t have kept them in the dark about Iraq. We might have fixed things there a lot sooner.