Hoothis Take Over Yemen

The situation in Yemen appears to be a mess.  We don’t really know who is in control of the country.  That’s not unusual.  For a long time, Yemen was more or less divided into two countries, North and South Yemen, with Sanaa and Aden as its respective capitals.  The Hoothis who are taking over the country in Sanaa, are a relatively unknown group, described to some extent by the NYT  

They are Shiites getting help from Iran, but apparently not your ordinary Shiites. And they are fighting al Qaida in Yemen (which sponsored the French terrorist attacks), as is the government that they are overthrowing.  Again we find the US allied with Iran against al Qaida, while Israel is killing Iranian generals in Syria.  

Strange world! 

Yemen would have been a mess in any case, but did we make it worse by intervening in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan, and encouraging government overthrows in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other countries?  We certainly did not have a beneficial effect. 

Yemen borders on Saudi Arabia.  Does the instability in Yemen bode ill for Saudi Arabia, especially if the Shiite Hoothis take over?  Although their border is mostly desert, it can’t be a good thing.  

Who Should I Worry About?

The attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris presents the question of whether I should be worried about Jews taking over America and transferring its wealth and power to Israel, or whether I should be worried about Muslim terrorists attacking Western institutions, or whether I should be worried about the increasing Hispanic nature of America due to the Hispanic influx.  Or maybe something else, like the decline of religion in America.  Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  People fight, sometimes because they have to in order to survive, sometimes because the choose to overthrow the status quo.

The fact is that I agree with the Democratic side of the Jewish establishment on most issues.  I just worry that they love Israel more than America.  Jews tend to consider Israel as a 51st state, and people in the Middle East perceive it the same way.  They see Israel with its occupation of Palestinian land as an extension of America.  They tend to see Israeli hatred of Arabs as an extension of American hatred of Arabs.  Israeli and American Jews bear a significant responsibility for Muslim hatred of the West.  It's hard to say which came first Arab hatred of Jews before Israel, or Arab hatred of Jews (and the West) due to the creation of Israel and resulting displacement of millions of Arabs.  Israel was created first, then the Arabs stated the first war.  

The Israelis have faced Arab and/or Muslim terrorism ever since the creation of Israel.  Of course the Israelis also stooped to terrorism in order to create Israel.  Now terrorism has spread to the whole world, in part thanks to cheaper, easier transportation.  The first step was high jacking airliners.  The world responded pretty well to these hijackings and now we have moved to a new tactic.  It is pretty cheap and easy to get from Yemen to Paris, much easier and cheaper than it would have been 50 years ago.  Or over the Internet you can recruit someone in Paris to do your dirty work without having to travel.  The increasing homogenization of populations another factor favoring terrorists.  A couple of generations ago, a Muslim in Western Europe would have stood out and been easy to track, but not so today.  Muslims make up a significant percentage of the French population, partly a result of a long war in Algeria, which brought many Algerians to France under unpleasant circumstances.

All of that is no excuse for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians.  If Muslims want to prevent unpleasant depictions of the prophet Mohamed, they should go about it like everybody else in democratic countries.  They could try to get a law passed outlawing such depictions.  Hopefully they would not get such a law, but that is the way you go about it in democratic societies.  We have laws against certain types of pornography and other things that offend most of the population.  If many people are offended by certain characterizations of Mohamed, then they could be outlawed or restricted.  But violence is not the way to do it.  If some Muslims are not going to act in a civilized manner, then Western society must take steps to protect itself from them.  The problem, of course, is to take steps that do not destroy the very civilization that we are trying to preserve.

That is the attack from the top, by rich Jews and militant Muslims.  What about the attack from the bottom, the increasing influence of Hispanics, who have recently arrived, and blacks, who have recently begun to acquire political and economic power.  As a while Anglo, I am sorry to see our traditional power eroded.  Rich Anglos may have been as bad as rich Jews, but I always had hope that culture and religion would be some restraint on them, which has been lost in recent years.  Rich, white bankers may have been a inwardly greedy as Jews or others, but they had to sit through Sunday services in main line Protestant churches which held them to Jewish and Christian standards set out in the Bible in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and many other places.  They at least had to publicly subscribe to these teachings in order to do business and maintain their place in the community.  That no longer seems to be true.  Thus there are fewer restraints of the worst impulses of human nature.  I often thought that blacks, especially black women, had a sincere religious faith and decency that surpassed most everyone else in society.  Much of that seems to be lost, as so many black women today end up as struggling, single mothers.

The Hispanic influx is probably much like the earlier influx of Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians, and so on.  One difference is that the influx has been so large, at least until recently, that there are not the same pressures to assimilate as there was on the previous immigrants.  They could always live in small communities where they could speak their native language, but with Spanish, they are not restricted to small communities.  You can pretty easily live a normal, active life in America speaking only Spanish.  You are hardly restricted at all.  There might be some grocery or department stores that are not Spanish friendly, but there are many that are.  If you compare Spanish immigrants to Asian immigrants, there appears to be a big difference.  Asians don't bend the community to their ways, but Hispanics do.

I guess I have to accept change, but I'm still resisting.

Don't Blindly Trust Southern Poverty Law Center

I question the Washington Post article, The current state of white supremacist groups in the U.S.,” using the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority on who self-respecting people should hate or not hate.

I don’t think people should blindly accept the pronouncements of he Southern Poverty Law Center about who is a hate group and who is not.  Although the SPLC’s main goal is defending the rights African Americans, an unstated but important goal is protecting Jews. Jews in general believe that they are superior to blacks, so that if they can protect the inferior race of blacks from discrimination, they can certainly protect superior Jews from it.  (There are of course Jews who depend black on principle, not just self-interest.)  Morris Dees. the primary founder of SPLC is not Jewish and was probably motivated by his genuine concern about protecting the rights of blacks.  His cofounder and law partner, Joe Levin, was Jewish, and was motivated by an experience he had at the University of Alabama in which a fellow member of his Jewish fraternity was mistreated and discriminated against because he had argued in favor of integration in the school newspaper.  Thus, he appears at least superficially to be motivated by Jewish self-interest rather than altruism.

My concern about Jewish attitudes toward race are due in large part to what is going on in Israel.  Israel seems increasingly to be turning into an apartheid state espousing race hatred, perhaps not surprising since it was founded by Irgun terrorists like Menachem Begin, who killed almost 100 foreign officials when they bombed the King David Hotel.  There are almost no blacks in Israel.  Israelis would say that’s because there are no black Jews, I think it’s because Jews don’t want blacks to become Jews.  In any case, Israel is lily white.  And of course Jews hate Palestinians, although race is only one factor underlying that hatred.  Now Israel is in the throes of deciding whether it should be a Jewish state or a democratic state.  It can’t be both because Arabs outnumber, or will outnumber, Jews in Israel.  Netanyahu wants to define Israel as a racist, Jewish state.

An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, “How to Fight the Campus Speech Police: Get a Good Lawyer,” about a dispute between Jewish students at Brandeis University points up the growing strength of the conservative, racist Jews in Israel.

So, the Washington Post tells us that Jews hate David Dukes.  Big deal, they hate Palestinians, Arabs in general, and lots of other people.  David Dukes has company, maybe undesirable company, but company nevertheless. The Washington Post picks sides and sides with the Jewish bigots rather than the Christian bigots.

Jewish Spies in Cuba

As this Washington Post op-ed says, Alan Gross's involvement in the US rapprochement with Cuba is a subplot that will soon fade away.  To me, however, it illustrates the enormous power of Jews in America and the Jewish lobby in Washington.  The US embargo on Cuba and related sanctions, including the Helms-Burton Act which I find horrendous, has been in place for decades and attacked by various people and groups for decades, but it took the Cuban arrest of Alan Gross, an American Jew who was working on some sort of spy mission involving Cuban Jews, to break the back of the sanctions.  The fact that Alan Gross was exchanged for three high value Cuban spies illustrates his importance and the Jewish influence behind him.  The US claimed that the three Cubans were exchanged for an unidentified American spy, not Alan Gross, but the reason the other spy was never identified is because he did not exist.  There may have been another spy exchanged, but he was nothing compared to Alan Gross and his importance to the Jewish lobby.

It's not clear to me what Gross's spy mission was.  He was setting up a clandestine internet for Cuban Jews, but I don't know if this clandestine connection was for American Jews to use to support Cuban Jews, or was to get Cuban Jews to report information about Cuba to the CIA or some other American group collecting such information.  In one case, Cuban Jews stood to benefit from outside contact, in the other they became liable to arrest as spies working for America.  The Cubans seemed to view it in the latter light, no matter what the original intent was.

Interestingly, Raj Shah, the head of USAID, resigned shortly after Gross's release, although everyone claimed there was no connection between the two events.  Shah was also accused of being involved in two other clandestine activities in Cuba, some kind of hip-hop activity and some kind of twitter set up.  The Washington Post article noted above raises the question whether Gross was an unwitting civilian contractor manipulated by USAID.  Of course the other question is whether Gross was really a CIA agent operating under USAID cover, or perhaps under the additional cover or some Jewish organization.