German Chancellor Angela Merkel received an extraordinarily warm reception in Israel last week during her three-day visit to the Jewish state. Though some Israeli mps were unhappy with her wish to speak in German during her Knesset address, the speech earned Merkel a standing ovation. Germany would “never abandon Israel, but instead will remain a loyal partner and friend,” Merkel told a packed audience that included more than 1,000 guests.

Spiegel Online said the landmark Knesset speech—the first ever for a German chancellor—marked a “shift in the nature of German-Israeli relations.”

We have closely followed the diplomatic ties between these two states because of its relevance to Bible prophecy. With America’s global power and influence in rapid decline, look for Israel to turn to a German-led Europe for help with its security concerns. But don’t expect this short-term alliance to keep a lid on the deep-seated animosity that exists between these two historic foes.

In a heartfelt apology to her Knesset audience, Merkel said, “The mass murder of 6 million Jews, carried out in the name of Germany, has brought indescribable suffering to the Jewish people, Europe and the entire world.” She said Germans were “filled with shame” over the Nazi Holocaust.

But there have been a number of disturbing signs in recent years, indicating that not all Germans are filled with shame. At the Jerusalem Post, the day after the German chancellor’s speech in the Knesset, Manfred Gerstenfeld wrote a column titled, “What Angela Merkel couldn’t say out loud.” He wrote,

Few in Israel realize that a majority of Germans probably disagree with several key statements she made here about her country’s past—including the mention of shame and guilt.

Recent surveys in Europe indicate that Gerstenfeld is right. A study in 2002, for example, found that 58 percent of Germans believe Jews “talk too much about the Holocaust.” As Alvin H. Rosenfeld wrote in “Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism: A New Frontier of Bigotry,”

In the Muslim world, Jew-hatred is now pervasive, but in Europe and elsewhere, anti-Semitisms of every imaginable kind—political, social, cultural, theological, economic—are no longer held in check by the taboos that have restrained them in recent years but circulate openly and broadly.

Gerstenfeld continued in his column,

In contemporary Germany there are significant expressions of anti-Semitism and racism. This includes attacks on Jews, their cemeteries and Holocaust monuments, together with ongoing anti-Semitic prejudice toward Jews among significant parts of the population. In eastern Germany particularly, there are no-go areas for non-white people in several cities, major racist incidents and sometimes even murders.At the same time, there are efforts in Germany to rewrite the past. Books by historian Jörg Friedrich, who compares the Allied actions to his nation’s atrocities during the war, are best-sellers. They promote “Holocaust equivalence” by using Nazi semantics to describe the Allied bombings of Germany during wwii. Another aspect of the same attitude is expressed by the many Germans who think that Israel is showing Nazi-like behavior toward the Palestinians. What they mean to say is, “If everybody is guilty, then nobody is.”

In his conclusion, Gerstenfeld can’t fault Israel’s desire to look toward the future in its diplomatic dealings with other nations. “But the past must be remembered, and for this symbolic acts are important,” he intoned.

Dissecting Obama’s Big Speech

Mainstream media and politicians are determinedly downplaying the significance of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama relying upon a racist, government-bashing pastor as his spiritual adviser for the past 20 years, and refusing even now to distance himself from him. However, plenty of strong voices of concern and dissent are out there, particularly on the Internet.

A few of our favorite news analysts provided some excellent commentary on Obama’s speech, delivered Tuesday and widely considered a “major address” on the issue of race in America.

Charles Krauthammer’s analysis is worth a read. He first dissects the moral equivalence Obama put forward:

Sure, says Obama, there’s Wright, but at the other “end of the spectrum” there’s Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, “who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?”I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother.” What exactly was Grandma’s offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. … Does [Obama] not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one’s time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

Victor Davis Hanson took up the same theme. In two separate articles—here and here—he made several noteworthy points.

The message? Wright’s motives for espousing hatred are complex and misunderstood; your motives for worrying about Obama and his Pastor are simple and suspect.When Obama the magician was all done this morning, Obama was no longer under examination for terrible judgment in subsidizing a racist by his association and purse, nor was even the racist Wright under doubt; instead almost everyone else, from the system to his grandmother, to talk radio, to corporate culture, to your rabbi or priest suddenly was. …The tragedy of Obama’s speech and the mindless endorsement of it was the rejection of any constant moral standard—an absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars. And once one jettisons such absolutes, they won’t be there when one wishes to seek refuge in them in a future hour of need.When he failed to “disown” Rev. Wright, and then brought in parallels of things purportedly as bad, or offered excuses that Wright had done good things to balance the bad, or that there were certain mitigating circumstances that explain his hatred, then the universal wrong of Wright’s racism and lying disappears and with it any ethical standard by which we have moral authority to condemn such vitriol. …

We gain an interesting perspective on Obama’s willingness to excuse Wright despite his vitriol by comparing it to a statement Barack Obama made last October about Don Imus after the talk-show host made a single race-related remark on air and was promptly fired for it:

“I understand msnbc has suspended Mr. Imus. But I would also say that there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude. … He didn’t just cross the line. He fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America. The notions that as young African-American women—who I hope will be athletes—that that somehow makes them less beautiful or less important. It was a degrading comment. It’s one that I’m not interested in supporting.”

After quoting this remark, Hanson drew attention to the obvious double standard Obama is applying in the present circumstances:

The new sophistic Obama, however, would recount to us all the charity work and good that Imus had once done and still does, that we don’t understand the joshing of the shock-jock radio genre that winks and nods at controversy in theatrical ways, that Imus was a legend and pioneer among talk show hosts, that Obama’s own black relatives have on occasions expressed prejudicial statements about whites similar to what Imus does, that we all have our favorite talk shows, whose hosts occasionally cross the line, and that he can’t quite remember whether he’d ever been on the Imus show, or whether he ever had heard Imus say anything that was insensitive—and therefore he could not and would not disown a Don Imus.

Finally, Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard drew this conclusion regarding Obama’s leadership abilities from the affair:

After watching Obama’s generally maladroit handling of the Jeremiah Wright matter, it’s safe to conclude that he is indeed a lot more passive than the typical politician. The clock began ticking on this scandal thirteen months ago when Rolling Stone published an article on the Meshuganeh Minister. Obama resolutely did nothing. He didn’t leave the church, nor did he make a statement that would put the matter to bed long before the voting began. He apparently had the audacity to believe that hoping the matter would disappear was tantamount to a plan. … As the scandal intensified over the last couple of weeks, Obama remained resolutely indecisive. Initially, he split hairs about whether he was in the pews for Reverend Wright’s greatest hits. Then he lashed out at “voices of division.” … As the talk refused to dispel, Obama finally wound up where he did yesterday—giving a “major address” on the matter. For those looking for indications of what kind of resolution and rapid response the Obama administration might show at a time of crisis, the handling of the Reverend Wright affair provides a teachable moment. …He made no attempt to explain his relationship with Wright and why he hung around a man who habitually offered such hateful rhetoric. Obama instead offered a non-sequitur on race relations. … Obama’s relationship with Wright warranted a serious treatment. The voting public deserved as much. It says something about the candidate and his willingness to take on the tough issues that he declined to take on the challenge.

It will be very interesting to see how this issue plays out. A cbs poll showed that in the wake of these events, the number of registered voters who believe Obama would unite the country dropped from two thirds to just over half.

Will the Global Warming Bubble Burst?

On national radio in Australia, Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, dropped a bombshell on those who support global warming: While CO² levels have risen for the last 10 years, the Earth has cooled, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows it. Marohasy said,

The head of the ipcc (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it [that the Earth has cooled since 1998]. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognizes that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued. … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up.

According to Marohasy, the head of the ipcc has suggested natural factors, such as solar activity, are countering global warming. These are the same factors that global warming proponents deride when skeptics suggest that they may be the deciding factors in global warming rather than carbon dioxide. The new discussion is a result of data gathered from nasa’s Aqua satellite launched in 2002:

What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapor, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the nasa Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.

Marohasy thinks the entire global warming paradigm will collapse as a result of this bombshell. But we wouldn’t count on it. Science has worked against the global warming community for years now without result. Here is one example of why: In his article, “Junk Science: The Global Warming Bubble,” Steven Milloy writes about a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal and largely comprised of global warming advocates.

In the interlude between presentations by the ceos of Dow Chemical and Duke Energy, for example, the audience was shown a slide … of the diverging relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and average global temperature since 1998.That slide should have caused jaws to drop and audience members to ponder why anyone is considering regulating CO2 emissions in hopes of taming global climate. Instead, it was as if the audience did a collective blink and missed the slide entirely. When I tried to draw attention to the slide during my presentation, it was as if I were speaking in a foreign dialect.The only conclusion I could come to was that the audience is so steeped in anticipation of climate profiteering that there is no fact that will cause them to reconsider whether or not manmade global warming is a reality.

He also observed a poll at the conference where attendees were asked to select society’s most pressing problem from a list of five including infectious disease, terrorism and global warming. Infectious disease, which kills millions and infects billions every year, received 3 percent of the vote. Global warming won out with a solid 31 percent.

It doesn’t look like the bubble will burst any time soon.

Life After Bear Stearns

Credit troubles that wiped out Bear Stearns last week are not over, despite the multi-billion-dollar Federal Reserve bailout. The crisis in the credit markets is now threatening cit Group, the International Herald Tribunewrote on Friday:

The CIT Group, a century-old company that lends money to small businesses and midsize corporations, drew on $7.3 billion of emergency bank credit lines on Thursday, causing its shares and bonds to plummet.CIT, whose businesses range from making student loans to financing purchases of airplanes and railroad cars, announced that it would try to sell some assets or businesses to raise cash and repay its debts. Analysts said the tightening credit squeeze could drive the entire company into the arms of a bidder.

In related news, the economic slowdown that has been particularly brutal for real-estate epicenters like Florida and California is now spreading into other parts of America that, only a few months ago, seemed insulated from the crisis. The International Herald Tribunequoted a chief economist on Friday as saying, “It’s not hard to construct very dark scenarios, primarily because the financial system is in disarray, and it’s not clear how to get it all back together again.”

Yesterday, an Associated Press headline asked if Mom and Dad were the last hope for America’s weak economy. “Taking shelter with parents isn’t uncommon for young people in their 20s,” ap wrote, “especially when the job market is poor. But now the slumping economy and the credit crunch are forcing some children to do so later in life—even in middle age.”

Blind to Economic Jihad

America should welcome capital investments from sovereign wealth funds, asserted President Bush on March 14. “It’s our money to begin with,” he claimed, referring to the $95 trillion in the pockets of opec states, “[and] it seems like we ought to let it come back.”

Such thinking is naive and seriously flawed, say Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa Lappen in the Washington Times. “Dollars may be ‘coming back,’ but they do so with strings attached, giving foreigners huge leverage and control over the U.S. currency and economy.” Oil trading at near all-time highs is putting roughly $2.4 billion per day in the pockets of Middle East oil producers. Such leverage is unprecedented, and Islamic oil producing states motivated by a religious creed mandating economic jihad know it. The Times continues:

What will it take for the United States to recognize the far more dangerous and important part of that jihadeconomic warfare (financial jihad, or al-jihad bi-al-mal)-which the Saudis and Gulf States now aggressively also pursue? Shari’a mandates that Muslims fund jihad: Qur’an 61:10-11, ‘strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives ….’ And Qur’an 49:15, ‘(true) believers are only those who…strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah.’ ‘Financial Jihad [is] … more important … than self-sacrificing, says Saudi Islamic cleric and Muslim Brother Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi.’

Since 9/11, U.S. foreign policy has been shaped by the recognition that this nation is at war with radical Islam. Today America’s massive economic instability has created a need for foreign intervention so great that it is blinding the American government to the reality that economic jihad is another theater of Islam’s broader war against America. U.S. economic policy, like its foreign policy, ought also to be shaped by this recognition.

While the U.S. currency weakens and Saudi and Gulf interests continue their binge buying of strategic U.S. assets and financial institutions, their petrodollars lure more and more ignorant, and even desperate American bankers and investors into the purported glimmer of shari’a banking—a gold-plated Islamic money pit. … [But] without emergency measures to redirect U.S. economic policy and market regulations, the petrodollar- and shari’a-driven takeover of America will indeed endanger national and global security.

Taiwan’s New Pro-Chinese Leader

Taiwan has elected its most pro-Chinese president ever. Ma Ying-jeou rejects Taiwanese independence and desires the political status quo to remain the same as Taiwan improves economic and cultural relations with Beijing. As the alliance between America and Taiwan crumbles, the Taiwanese are looking for security by making up with Beijing. Timewrites,

Ma Ying-jeou, the new president of Taiwan, has been handed a mandate to radically alter his country’s relationship with China in a way that can potentially redraw the political map of east Asia. … A main plank of Ma’s campaign platform is to improve ties with Taiwan’s chief rival, China. … Ma … is proposing a wide-ranging program aimed at greatly reducing tensions between the two countries. He wants to expand Taiwan’s economic ties with China by launching direct transportation links, lifting restrictions on Taiwan businessmen operating in China and opening Taiwan to Chinese tourists and investors. Ma, a Harvard-trained lawyer, also broaches the idea of setting in place “confidence-building measures” to scale back the military build-up along the Taiwan Strait. “The more we open ourselves up,” Ma recently told Time, “the more we interact with the mainland, the chances of war will be less.”

Taken in combination with Ma Ying-jeou’s election, Taiwan residents’ rejection of a referendum on UN membership shows that they are abandoning their confrontational approach to mainland China. They may not want to reunify, but they don’t want de jure independence either.

Beijing must be very pleased.

BBC Bloopers

The bbc recently apologized for two significant errors it broadcasted in reports from Israel. The Jerusalem Postreported,

In a news item on March 7, following the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva attack, the bbc showed a bulldozer demolishing a house, while correspondent Nick Miles told viewers: “Hours after the attack, Israeli bulldozers destroyed his family home. Later, mourners set up Hamas and Islamic Jihad banners nearby.”

The house, however, was not demolished, as revealed by other reports which showed the east Jerusalem home intact and the family commemorating their son’s actions. In its apology the bbc admitted to using footage of another house being demolished. The Jerusalem Post continued,

In a second incident, in a news item entitled “Israel jets strike northern Gaza” on March 14 on their News Web site, the bbc reported that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians in an operation targeting Kassam rocket launch sites in Gaza, and claiming that the United Nations secretary-general had described it as an attack on civilians.

In its apology, bbc said, “We accept we should have made reference to what [Ban] said about Palestinian rocket attacks as well as to the ‘excessive use of force’ by Israel. We have amended the report, also removing the reference to Israeli ‘attacks on civilians.’”

Elsewhere on the Web

Five years ago, the United States presented what it said was proof that Iraq harbored biological weapons. Some of that proof was tied to a source revealed by German intelligence. But that source turned out to be bogus. To this day, Germany denies any responsibility for the faulty intelligence. Read what Spiegel Online writes about it here. You can also read what we wrote about the biased media coverage of this story here.

Israel’s opposition leader Benyamin Netanyahu “warned Sunday that an Israeli withdrawal from any part of Jerusalem would lead to the creation of an Iranian base in the heart of Israel.” Read more here.

Russia is one on the few states that deals directly with Hamas. Its proposed sequel to Annapolis, Stratfor says, is drawing a lot of enthusiasm from states like Syria, who were skeptical about the original United States conference. The bottom line is that Putin really could not care less about Israel, Fatah or Hamas. This conference is his way to undermine the United States and escalate tension in the Middle East. High tension means high oil prices and high oil prices are how Putin runs Russia.

Drug-resistant, superbug deaths have passed 10,000 per year in the United Kingdom, according to the Times. “While strict hygiene measures have ensured low infection rates in other countries, microbiologists here are privately admitting that Britain’s problem is so out of control, it will be impossible to prevent the high level of deaths from continuing.”

And Finally …

For those worried that Hamas might undermine negotiations between Israel and Fatah for a new Palestinian state, worry no more! According to the Jerusalem Post, “Hamas and Fatah signed a statement in San’a Sunday saying that they ‘accept the Yemeni initiative as a framework for resuming dialogue’ to restore the normalcy that existed in Gaza before Hamas’s takeover of the coastal region last June.”