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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review May 16, 2008 / 11 Iyar 5768

A little rock hits a noisy target

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Throw a rock into a congregation of collies, retrievers, poodles, spaniels and assorted other aristocrats and you can be sure the dog yelping in unexpected pain is the one you hit.


President Bush, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, reminded the Knesset yesterday that the appeasement of evil is the route to catastrophe.


"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," he said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — which has been repeatedly discredited by history."


How could anyone with even a Classic Comics understanding of history quarrel with that? Who could doubt that negotiating with terrorists is an exercise for fools? Who doubts that we've heard delusional appeasement talk all through history? Who would quarrel with the proposition that "the comfort of appeasement" has been repeatedly discredited by history? Where better to say this than to those who live with the risks and perils of appeasement of Islamist thugs in the Middle East?


Well, a lot of prominent Democrats, beginning with Barack Obama, that's who. The orator prince of the South Side of Chicago was reduced to splutter and slash. "It is sad ... this false political attack ... it's time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally in Israel."


Then he repeated the naive musings of inexperience that could be taken for appeasement talk, prescribing "tough, principled and direct diplomacy to pressure countries like Iran and Syria." Nancy Pelosi, the dowager queen of San Francisco Democrats, said the president's remarks were "beneath the dignity of the office" and Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the Clinton utility man, asked whether "this president has no shame." Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, ever eager to steal the cliches of others, couldn't decide whether to affect the voice of the barnyard or reflect the twitter of the ladies' tea room: The president's remarks were "[the effluvia of a bull]" or "malarkey."


A White House aide noted that the president had sounded similar warnings before, and if the president's hysterical critics wanted to identify the appeasers, they could look to Jimmy Carter and his passionate embrace of Syrians and Palestinian terrorists on his merry prankster appeasement tour of the Middle East, just now concluded. Mzz Pelosi demanded that John McCain disavow the president, presumably in the way that she and other prominent Democrats did not disavow the peanut farmer from Plains.


"The American senator" in the president's citation, who imagined that he could have led Hitler to the Lord with a few well-chosen words in 1939, was William E. Borah of Idaho, an isolationist Republican of the early 20th century, a ladies' man of Clintonian appetite and an orator with Barack Obama's reputation for spinning smooth appeasement talk. Sen. Borah, like Sen. Obama, thought his golden tongue would resolve all arguments in his favor, and, like Bill Clinton, imagined that his sexual prowess was irresistible. Sometimes it was. He left a small-town law practice in Kansas early in the century when he got a young woman "in the family way" and her male relatives suggested that he leave town on the next train. He departed for distant Idaho. Once elected to the U.S. Senate, he cut a wide swath of notoriety in Washington, where he conducted a long affair with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whom delighted capital gossips called "Aurora Borah Alice."


You might think Sen. Obama, Mzz Pelosi, Mr. Emanuel and Joe Biden would be flattered that the president cited someone of skills and appetites so familiar to them.

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