Neither Mattson nor her organization have been charged. But prosecutors wrote in July that they had “a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking” the group to Hamas and other radical groups.

There’s a twist, of course.  Mattson and her group have worked with the Bush administration, providing religious training to the FBI.  Wait a second.  Does this mean the Bush administration is responsible for aiding and abetting terrorists?

Despite the sensationalistic headline that I’m only helping to propogate, Haaretz notes that Mattson and her group, The Islamic Society of North America, have not actually charged with anything.  And from what it seems, Mattson been rather known throughout the community in actually denouncing terrorism.  The case is a complicated one:

All this was going on while officials in the law enforcement and intelligence community apparently had evidence that the Islamic Society of North America had ties to terrorists and to the Holy Land Foundation. That foundation and five of its former leaders were convicted at a retrial in November of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas.

Mark Pelavin, director of inter-religious affairs for the Union for Reform Judaism, another organization participating in the prayer service, called Mattson “a really important voice denouncing terrorism.”

“Clearly, Dr. Mattson has been welcome throughout the government,” he said. “I haven’t found anyone anywhere who’s found anything Dr. Mattson has said that’s anything other than clearly denouncing terrorism in quite explicit Islamic terms.”

The government may not even have a case at all:

According to e-mails filed in the court case, one of the prosecutors seemed willing to ask the judge to remove the group from the list.

Or if they do have a case, maybe they just don’t want nasty questions as to why they didn’t better vette the group first before working with them.  Take your pick.

Still, an investigation is just an investigation, so Obama probably doesn’t have much to worry about for Wednesday.

©2009 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella body of 51 Jewish groups, has not issued a statement about the evacuation of settlers and their supporters from a disputed house in the West Bank town December 4 followed by settler violence against Hebron’s Palestinian residents.

Moreover, Daily Alert, the Presidents Conference’s Internet newsletters of Middle East-related published articles, did not refer to the incidents at all during the week after they occurred. Daily Alert is sent via e-mail to tens of thousands of free subscribers and is displayed on Web site of the Presidents Conference.

…Calls seeking comment from the Presidents Conference’s executive vice president, Malcolm Hoenlein, and its chair, Harold Tanner, were not returned.

The Forward does not note that Aipac too has refused to issue any statement, though JTA earlier reported on Aipac’s silence by claiming the group generally doesn’t make public statements about internal Israeli policy (isn’t that a laugh, considering how aggressively interventionist their approach is regarding promoting Israeli interests within a U.S. political context).  To my mind, even if this is true, it does not excuse its silence on such an important issue regarding Israeli democracy.

Through the Forward’s goading, the flagship Orthodox organization  and ZOA both made “on the one hand-on the other hand” statements which basically cancelled out anything positive that might be gleaned from them:

On the right, the Zionist Organization of America, which had opened a symbolic office in the Hebron building to show support for the settlers, remained silent for a week before issuing a long statement December 10. The ZOA expressed regret that the Israeli authorities, especially Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, decided to forcibly expel the militants. The group, however, stressed that it did not condone the ensuing violence.

Though the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America did not issue a statement, it aired similar views. In an e-mail to the Forward, the union’s public policy director, Nathan Diament, stated that despite its feeling that the evacuation was unwarranted, and its objection to Olmert’s use of the word “pogrom,” the O.U. leadership “does not believe this justifies Israelis attacking IDF soldiers, and it certainly does not justify acts of harassment or violence against Palestinians.”

The article quotes a non-plussed Eric Yoffie wondering why the Conference doesn’t get up off its tush and say something since so many of its constituent groups have denounced the violence.  To this I respond, why don’t the Reform movement and other liberal groups quit the group?  If you wait for the Conference to reform itself so it truly represents American Jewry you’ll be waiting for the Messiah.  And even then, Malcolm Hoenlein would find some reason to delay.

As I read The Forward’s overall coverage of the Hebron affair (with multiple stories covering seemingly every aspect of the incident) I was filled with admiration.  Larry Cohler-Esses recently became the assistant managing editor and while it’s very possible the coverage might’ve been similar without him there–I believe his presence really “took it up a notch.”  It went from very good previously to superb now.

One especially good story detailed the ideological leaders of the extremist settlers, focussing on Daniella Weiss.  This statement from her was chilling:

“They [the settler rioters] are not afraid of prison, they are not afraid of trials, they just express loyalty to the land,” she told the Forward.

This perfectly reflects the political pathology of the extremist settlers.  The state is something to be reviled.  Laws are meaningless.  All that matters is the mystical concept of “the land.”  This is the irredeemable contradiction between such mystical theocratic mumbo-jumbo and the State of Israel as we know it.  There can never be any commonality between the two.  All that is possible is war.

The article goes on to quote another of the movement’s leading “thinkers,” Rabbi Dov Wolpe:

As far as Wolpe is concerned, the government comprises those who “sit here and represent the terrorists.” President Shimon Peres “is representing the position of the terrorists,” he said.

The third settler leader profiled, Baruch Marzel, explains the new “price tag” policy thus:

A government official who orders a settler evacuation, he said, “commits a crime against your people [and] they have to pay a price, and [with] a heavy price they will think twice about committing the crime.”

How is it possible to govern a country with such an attitude?  Any action by said government that violates Marzel’s “conscience” becomes not just politically objectionable, but a crime.

Interestingly, Marzel twists the aspiration of liberal western democracy for tolerance and against racism into a concept that is useful to him:

Marzel argues it is the government that is racist for hampering Jewish settlement. The Hebron evacuation, he told the Forward, was “pure racism. It is…part of the move by the liberal leftist people of Israel against those loyal to the land.”

Much like the KKK, Marzel deliberately seeks to create racist provocation within Israel.  Here he comments on why he will march with his followers in an Israeli Arab village:

“We have a cancer in our body capable of destroying the State of Israel: people who support terrorism, Hamas, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], and these people are in the heart of Israel, a force capable of destroying Israel from the inside. I am going [in order] to tell these people — the Land of Israel is ours.”

If Olmert, Barak or Livni think these people can be dealt with or finessed or ignored, they are sadly mistaken.  There will, at some point, have to be a showdown.  The State must supersede them and impose itself on them or there will be disaster.

And let them call it by whatever names they wish.  Those who reject Israeli democracy must never be allowed to realize the Jewish ayatollah-riddled state with which they would replace it.

Social conservatives who have dominated the Republican Party for the last decade define those core issues in harshly didactic terms deriving from religious roots.  Abortion, gay marriage, and a more nebulous but passionately held commitment to “family values” are what they see as the heart of the Republican Party.  They tend to resent calls by “moderates” to compromise as they see such calls as nothing less than an effort to read God Himself out of the party.  More pragmatically, social conservative leaders note the longstanding success of such principles in successfully building and maintaining a movement with strong double roots in both rural and suburban regions.

In recent years, social conservatives have been reinforced by an alliance of convenience with some rather questionable characters arising from the migration of Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. With strong roots in the South, these cultural conservatives have supplemented social conservatism with disdain for immigration as a threat to American cultural identity.  Stopping “amnesty” and demonizing any cultural or educational institution not encapsulated by a NASCAR race is the core issue for cultural conservatives.

Cultural conservatives also linked together with national security conservatives left over from the Cold War.  These national security conservatives were reinvigorated by 9/11 and place the strong pursuit of the global war against Islamic extremism as the core cause of the party.

In the aftermath of electoral meltdowns in both 2006 and 2008, however, this tripartite hegemony has come to be identified as pathological by old-style fiscal conservatives, usually dubbed as “moderates” due to their dissent from social and cultural conservatives.  The argument from the fiscal conservatives is that both events and demographic trends have intervened to destroy the viability of the tripartite coalition.  The myriad failures in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have served to undermine Republicans’ claim to be the safest stewards of national security.  This whittled down the numbers and enthusiasm of the national security conservatives.  Meanwhile, shifts in the cultural and moral ethos of younger generations have eroded the numbers that could be marshalled by social conservatives even while intensifying their self-perceptions as a beseiged minority.  And the undertones of racism and intolerance that too often infest the anti-immigration movement served to make cultural conservatives toxic, further driving away younger voters and centrists.  Fiscal conservatives thus argue that to renew the commitment to any of the tripartite groups’ preferred core is a suicide pact for the party, condemning it to permanent minority status regardless of the particular virtues of their moral claims.

The only option left, say the fiscal conservatives, is therefore to return to the party’s generational roots in pro-business, low-tax, pro-growth economics.

The trouble is how to craft that into a workable message during times of economic meltdown, necessary-evil government bailouts running into the trillions of dollars, and spiraling deficits in the midst of two continuing wars.  No horror movie hack writer could top this monster of a political problem.  But it is exactly the monster that the Republican Party will have to find a way to slay if it is to be able to function as an effective opposition, let alone a credible challenger in future elections.

The fundamental truth here is that Steele and the fiscal conservatives are right — the key issues of the day are economic and demographics make cultural and social conservatism secondary bases for the party anyway.  Any new Republican coalition will have to be built around responses to economic issues, not attempts to reconstitute the crumbling social or cultural bases.  In selecting which issues are “mandatory” for Republicans versus those with which the party needs to accept compromise and dissent, Republicans will need to take lessons from Democrats’ successes in dealing with their peacenik elements — accommodating and including, but not allowing them to control and purify everything.

And time is short.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Quite a lot of build up just to end by blaming America for the world’s problems.  Same sad song, Nth verse.

Although it would be wrong to say that the U.S. blameless in regard to its current low level of esteem around the globe, the nearly 20 years since the end of the Cold War have caused a lot of people living in countries that should remember the very real danger they passed through thanks to Uncle Sam’s protection to forget the world security dynamics of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Yes, during the Cold War the U.S. supported bad people in Iran, Chile, and Nicaragua, among others, and fought bloody, ambiguous wars in Korea and Vietnam that prematurely ended or shattered many innocent lives.

But an objective observer has to question the degree of injury the U.S. dealt directly to Muslims even during the height of its obsessive Cold War zeal.  Arguably the worst thing the U.S. has done to followers of Islam was to set up the scenario through which the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979 and set up a totalitarian Islamic state that is still controlling speech and thought in Iran today while ensuring that no economic or social progress can be made there. 

As for America’s recent folly in Iraq, it’s a matter of common knowledge that the vast majority of Iraqi dead were killed by other Iraqis and imported Muslim terrorists and not by American troops.  True, we probably should not have deposed Saddam Hussein; however, that doesn’t change the facts about who did what to whom afterward.

No, Muslims’ anger toward the U.S. is primarily about Israel - the Jews who must be destroyed for Islam to be satisfied.

Understand that while the Palestinians in Israel have been aligned with Muslim nations and terrorists groups for several decades, there was not a great deal of Islamic fervor among residents of Palestine prior to that strategic alignment.  Neither is Jerusalem of any particular consequence to Muslims, historically speaking.  Its value is as a ransom, the prized possession of another faith held hostage.  Fundamentally, it’s America’s support for the Jews makes that us the enemy of Islamic radicals, not our actions in the world, though those often hurt relations as well.

MPACUK’s claim that America has made Islam violent is a fabrication.  Where are the murderous Vietnamese, who by rights should be setting off bombs in New York with all the fervor of a radical Wahabi?  They don’t exist.  Radical Muslims chose the path of violence deliberately, because they believe in it and that it can achieve their aims for them. 

But suppose you are a 16-year-old Muslim male with an opportunity to consider your potential futures and make a logical decision about how to spend the next 6 years of your life.  What makes more sense, becoming a foot soldier in the mullahs’ terrorist army or getting an education and making a place for yourself in civilized society?  The latter option is clearly more advantageous for you and your progeny save for one consideration:  Islam.

This is particularly obvious when one reads articles like this one in which the Houston Chronicle reports that many Egyptians are too poor to afford meat during the Eid al-Adha.

Their lives don’t have to be that way.  There’s nothing inferior about Arabs’ genes, intellect, or abilities.  But they, like the Iranian and Iraqi people, are hobbled by their governments and the prison of their religion.

“What does it say about me, and this country, when I have to ask the butcher to give me bones that he used to throw to the dogs?”  An Egyptian woman asked rhetorically.

What indeed.  One thing is certain: the rhetoric that terrorist apologists like MPACUK push on Muslims everywhere does absolutely nothing to help them ensure better lives for their children.  Quite the opposite.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s Rick’s FOX commentary:

Hannity: Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, wants to wipe Israel off the map, is seeking nuclear weapons…I think we need to take him out.

WARREN: Yes.

HANNITY: Am I advocating something dark, evil, or something righteous?

WARREN: Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped. And I believe…

HANNITY: By force?

WARREN: Well, if necessary. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers…

Maybe, Rick can claim that Sean drugged him before the interview and that he was undergoing some kind of Manchurian Candidate brainwashing experience that turned him into a Muslim-bashing automaton.  I’m sure he’ll some sort of cute explanation to get himself off the hook, IF he has the guts to show up.

I note that Juan Cole will be the other keynote speaker.  I don’t think Juan’s going to be so understanding of Rev. Rick in HIS remarks.  Juan, don’t let Rick off the hook.  Skewer him.

To be honest, I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand she’s got a stellar resume and seems like the type of person who would be a natural fit in the Obama administration. Also after what Obama went through, it seems a bit hypocritical to be targeting someone based on her associations.

On the other hand she was a member of the governing council of the VHP America for three years. It doesn’t seem plausible that someone who is as upto date with current affairs doesn’t know about the VHP’s radical nature, which has manifested itself in anti-Christian pogroms as well as the Gujarat riots.

As Ruchira in the 3 quarks comments thread said, Rahm Emmanuel apologised for his father’s anti-arab remarks and ‘ perhaps Ms Shah too can do the same rather than just issue carefully worded statements about her “innocent” associations with the VHP.’

Anyhow Obama knows that he is more popular than Bush in the Islamic world and thus he will use this popularity to enhance America’s damaged image. Already he should know that it is not only Bush that damaged America’s image in the Islamic world “surely he had the biggest share” ,it is an old accumulating thing from decades of unconditional support to Israel and conditional support to dictators in the region. 

Now back to the main theme or rather question in the article “Where shall Obama say his expected speech ?? “ The search for an Islamic Capital that is not danger on his security and is still influential  can be considered a dilemma.

To tell you the truth I was waiting to read the name of our capital Cairo in the report ,otherwise I would feel very sad , I feel that we are no longer important in the region. Still Cairo is Cairo ,the Jewel of Islam and the perfect secure capital for Obama.You got one of the biggest population in the Arab Islamic world.This made me happy because we are still considered important despite the fact Mubarak made us lose our position in the region. Ironically there is one obstacle in choosing Cairo that is also Mubarak and his dictatorship. Obama can neglect the fact that Mubarak is a dictator and choose Cairo as place for his message to the Islamic world but this send a wrong message in the world : He is still supporting the dictators of the Arab Islamic world. I think this is from the earliest indicator that Obama won’t be Mubarak friendly.

Well it is not only Egypt that is ruled by a dictator ,most of the Islamic world is ruled by dictators whether are with or against The U.S.

Some people especially the Nationalists will not welcome Obama just like they did not welcome Nixon, I respect their view and totally understand it but I look from the way that we lost a lot from our position as a leading influential country in the region. I do not know how to explain , it is not about supporting Obama but about knowing your country is still considered an important player in the region.Lately I feel that we are so weak thanks to Mubarak. Mubarak took Egypt and it was leading Country from Sadat and he managed to alienate us more than Sadat and the time of the Arab boycott.  It is not about being a puppet in the hands of U.S this time ,it is about delivering a message to the Islamic world. Of course because we are ally we can be considered as biased.

Seriously it is a dilemma ,you need an influential Islamic democratic country that is widely respected by the world and the Islamic world and not considered a puppet in the hands of the Americans to send from it a message to the Islamic world

Of course now in my mind I believe that Obama can say his speech in Qatar as the new face of change in the Arab Islamic Gulf world !! Qatar our little new rival but again it does not fit the profile , it is a puppet in the end.

Anyhow if Obama wants to say a speech in Cairo to addressing the Islamic world in Peace ,then he will be mostly welcomed.

Jamie’s also shrewd in noting that the 1950s nuclear family has special theological salience for Mormons:

According to Mormon dogma, marriage extends into the afterlife and couples continue to have “spirit children” who populate extraterrestrial worlds.

A secular amendment to a secular constitution was passed partly in order to protect the integrity of “spirit children.”

This mocking representation of LDS teaching is a “red flag” to those familiar with anti-Mormon literature.  In point of fact, Mormons do believe in eternal heterosexual marriage and family, but the bits about “spirit children” and “extraterrestrial worlds” are speculative extensions on the official LDS teaching at best.  Their inclusion here serves no purpose except to make Mormons look bizarre and strange in a theological sense irrelevant to Sullivan’s core concern with the church.  Sullivan is indirectly and, I am quite certain, without his knowledge drawing on a long history of anti-Mormon and self-styled “anti-cult” hatred and misrepresentation championed by fringe groups of Christianist evangelicals that are far more Sullivan’s natural enemies than the Mormons are.  In his anger over the outcome of Prop 8, Sullivan is spraying fire indiscriminately, undermining his own cause in the process.

Also, the very distorted version of the LDS teaching that Sullivan and his underlying source are mocking is far from the reason that many Mormons (tragically, I believe) supported Proposition 8.  His insertion of it in his post has no apparent relationship to the actual political issues.  Sullivan offers no evidence that such considerations were actually the motivations for any of the Mormons who gave money or time in support of Prop 8.  It is just bald religious stereotyping and bigotry against a group that Sullivan believes deserves it because of their opposition to gay rights.

I used to really enjoy Andrew Sullivan as an incisive and unusually nuanced thinker in the political blogosphere.  But his succumbing to Palin Derangement Syndrome during the campaign (Sullivan led the charge to target Palin’s daughter, among other outrages) seems to have been exacerbated by a Mormon Derangement Syndrome now.  And I think if he would take time to look around at his allies in the anti-Mormon cause of twisting and mocking Mormon theological beliefs, he wouldn’t like the company he is now in.  And his hypocritical embrace of flagrant religious bigotry here serves only to undermine his cause of promoting tolerance.  For example, where I am personally on Sullivan’s side in regards to Prop 8, I find myself unwilling to become a very active supporter of the gay rights movement as long as it continues to tarnish itself with a turn towards its own version of vile hate speech.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

There are of course those who would like to see Christian voters marginalized as a voting force. 

Democrats like the idea because it helps them win elections.  Fiscally conservative Republicans wish the religious right didn’t have so much say in the Republican party.  And many liberals reject Christianity and resent its influence in the country. 

That’s a lot of opposition.  The marginalizing of Christian voters may happen in the course of time if the decades-old trend of it’s-all-about-me social philosophy continues to erode traditional national beliefs away.  Dreher says that doesn’t have to be so:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

All political problems, traditional conservatism teaches, are ultimately religious problems because they result from disordered souls. In the era now dawning, Americans will learn again to live within limits — and together. Religious conservatives are philosophically positioned to lead the way, but we can’t do it by pouring new wine into old skins.

It’s worth noting that the extreme individualism that Dreher decries is the problem not because of the fact of individual freedom itself but rather because of the choices that individuals make with that freedom.  This contrary to the view of many religious fundamentalists of the Islamic and Christian faiths.

We have the God-given right to make our own decisions, in life and in the voting booth.  On this point, Dreher notes a truth that many conservative candidates don’t always consider when banking on Christians’ votes:

…we mustn’t err as our elders did, assuming that the culture will improve if we elect more Republicans.

Americans of all political and religious backgrounds have been ill-served by the current batch of Republicans, something social conservatives should bear in mind when choosing the next Republican party lineup. 

Like it or not, Christian voters will have a loud voice in the Republican coalition for years to come and deservedly so.  Both the origins of the United States and current demographics indicate that their views deserve to be be heavily represented in our republican government.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

For instance, 24.4% Republican voters want Governor Sarah Palin to be the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Only 13.4% of all voters agree. 

At the same time, Governor Mitt Romney ranks second among all voters, six points behind Palin, but leads among all voters (be it barely).

Among conservatives, both represent an entirely different faction: Palin is the Christian conservative while Romney is the darling of (elite and well educated) fiscal conservatives. These two battled it out earlier this year with fiscal conservatives favoring Romney, Christian conservatives supporting Governor Mike Huckabee, and the party ending up with Senator John McCain as the compromise candidate.

A compromise figure not able to make life truly difficult for now president-elect Barack Obama.

Most remarkable about the figures, however, is that there is a third candidate who does relatively better (meaning: smaller gap) among all voters than among Republicans: Governor Bobby Jindal. Jindal has quite a low profile nationally, yet he already ranks third in both categories. When all voters are included, the gap between him and Romney is only 1.2%, which is remarkable. 

Huckabee fares less well; he is fourth with only 9.7% among Republicans and 8.0% among all voters.

This while Huckabee was the favorite of the Christian conservative base.

So what happened to Huckabee? Palin. Although Huckabee could count on the support of Christian conservatives during the primaries, they all flocked to Palin during the general election campaign. Palin became their candidate, their darling even. The defeat made her more not less popular among this group of conservative voters for they consider her a martyr. 

The above means that the Republican Party could very well nominate a person who is deemed anti-intellectual, simple, naive and overly socially conservative in 2012 or that the war between the fiscal conservative and social conservative base will continue with at least one side staying home on election day, thereby ensuring Obama a second term.

That is, unless Palin can improve her image, studies hard and convince libertarian and fiscal conservatives that she is more than just a socon (unlikely). Or if Romney will succeed in courting Evangelicals and convincing them that either his Mormon faith should not be a problem to them (unlikely) or that his faith and their faith teach the same basic principles and values (less unlikely, but not altogether likely). 

Of course there is a third option, an option I consider most likely and, especially, most in the interest of the Republican Party: that conservative voters will agree on a compromise candidate who endorses conservative views in most ways. In other words, a person who is a convinced social conservative (yet not overly so, for it would make it easy to destroy a candidate who is as socially conservative and as vocal about it as Palin and Huckabee are), who also has a track record of fiscal conservatism and who sympathizes with many libertarian policies. 

At this moment, it seems to me that neither Huckabee nor Palin nor Romney fit the bill (although Romney would certainly be a better choice than the other two). Jindal, however, does.

For Jindal, 2008 and especially 2009 offer a tremendous opportunity to raise his profile nationally, to court conservatives of all stripes and to implement policies rooted in conservatism. He will have to use his time in Louisiana in order to show voters that conservative policies work and improve their daily lives. He he has already done so to a tremendous degree, but the most difficult times are ahead of him. The recession is likely to worsen in the coming months with Americans in all states suffering financially. Jindal will have to control the damage and improve his state at the same time. 

If he does, and if he reaches out to conservative aaries in 2012. ctivists, think tankers, academics and journalists, he could very well be the Republican to beat in late 2011, early 2012.

©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved.

...the president-elect, according to his more fervent campaign-season detractors, has a raft of unforgivable faults: He's a socialist, a Muslim, an actual love-child of Malcolm X. His birth certificate was missing, his book had been ghost-written by William Ayers, and his wife, "Mrs. Grievance," as a National Review cover dubber her, was perennially on the cusp of getting caught ranting against the white man. The only thing keeping the Illinois senator's infamy from going public is the quiescence of the liberal media. Perhaps you remember.

Whatever its effectiveness ahead of Election Day, the right-wing hate campaign made for a nice exercise in nostalgia. For eight years, opposition politics have mainly involved attacking the president for, like, things he's done or wanted to do in office----and not, say, secret religious view he holds or convoluted murders involving his wife. Now, after an administration in the wilderness, they were back--the conspiracy theorists, the paranoiacs, the fringe figures whose dubious relationships with the truth weren't enough to disqualify them from star turns in the right-wing media. The last Democratic president had spent his White House years in perpetual battle against well-funded crackpots peddling far-fetched theories, and now this one would, too. So much for change.

The clean-up crews were probably still sweeping confetti from Grant Park, in fact, when the first wave of paranoiac Obama-reaction hit the press: A run on gun-shops by disaffected red-staters convinced that the 44th president would do to the Second Amendment what Bill Ayers tried to do to New York City Police Headquarters. "He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force," Jim Pruett, a Houston-based radio-personality-turned-gun-dealer, told the New York Times.

Obama's political team may be trying to avoid another eight years of wrestling with presidential haters...

Peter Feaman, a Florida trial lawyer. He’s also the author of Wake Up America! about the dangers of fundamentalist Islam. Feaman has been active in GOP political circles. He has run for the Florida house and serves as the Republican state committeeman for Palm Beach County. He was a delegate to the 2008 GOP convention.

Nina Cunningham, founder of Quidlibet, a legal research consulting firm in Illinois. She has given more than $33,000 to GOP candidates and causes in the past three election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. She is the Illinois State chair of the Republican Jewish Committee’s women’s committee.

I’ve reported previously here on various Republican connections with Clarion Fund:

1. the Republican Jewish Coalition mailed free copies of Obsession to every Jewish and Christian clergymember in the U.S.
2. Clarion hired Republican consultants to arrange screenings of the film in Arizona and Michigan
3. Clarion distributed 28 million copies of Obsession in the weeks prior to the election, after one of Clarion’s websites derided Obama’s national security experience and praised McCain’s.
4. Aish HaTorah’s co-founder has extensive business and political ties with Republican national leaders, especially Tom Ridge as well as Ileana Ros Lehtinen and others.

In other words, Clarion Fund is practically a bought and paid for arm of the Jewish wing of the Republican Party.  Aish HaTorah, in turn, as Jeffrey Goldberg has noted, is practically an arm of the rightist settler movement.  All this leads one to believe that a group of far-right Israeli-American Orthodox Jews have teemed up with Republicans in order to kill two birds with one stone.  They can exploit fears of Muslims and Islam to drum up American Jewish support for a pro-settler/pro-Israel political agenda AND flay the Democrats, who allegedly are soft on terror, specifically Muslim terror.

It’s seamy and nasty, but utterly in keeping with the lies and histrionics which characterize the Republican Jewish right and the Orthodox pro-settler right.

Among the dumb concepts that George Bush created (or his speechwriters) was an “Axis of Evil” consisting of three countries.  An axis only has two ends, not three.  So rhetorically what Bush said seems a mangling of the language.  In this post, I originally wanted to include Clarion Fund, Aish HaTorah, the Settler movement, and GOP in my Jewish Axis of Evil.  But that was way too many axes, so I had to slim it down to only two.