The Weekend Web

Who’s the greater default risk—McDonald’s or the federal government? And did you notice where Ahmadinejad delivered his latest “death to Israel” rant?
 

People are now so accustomed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic rants that barely anyone paid attention to his latest diatribe against Israel at the United Nations General Assembly last week. We should have been jarred by it, Abraham Foxman wrote in the New York Sunon Friday—not necessarily because of what he said, but because of where he said it. As Foxman observed, “No other such diatribe against any other religious or ethnic group could possibly flow from that august site.”

Regarding the speech, Foxman noted (emphasis ours throughout):

[Ahmadinejad] returned to the language that appeared in the infamous forgery, the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” that was used by Adolf Hitler to persecute and eventually murder millions of Jews.

Standing before world leaders, the Iranian president, like Adolf Hitler before him, laid blame for the world’s most serious problems on the Jews. You can read the full speech here.

“Although they [Zionist Jews] are a minuscule minority,” Ahmadinejad claimed, “they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex, and furtive manner.”

Foxman observed,

This is the classic charge against the Jewish people that is at the root of why anti-Semitism has been so enduring and so lethal. The “secret, evil power” of the Jews can be conjured up any time there is a crisis. And so we’ve seen it in our time, first with the terrorism of September 11, 2001, when Jews were accused of committing that dastardly act, then with the war in Iraq, and now with the financial meltdown on Wall Street.And it is such a lethal form of hatred because it does not merely suggest that one should dislike Jews, but rather that one needs to defend oneself against the “all-powerful, poisonous Jew.” Once one accepts the assumptions of the “Protocols” or of Mr. Ahmadinejad, then anything goes. Even the destruction of the Jewish people, as took place under Hitler, or the use of a nuclear weapon against the Jewish homeland, as is threatened by Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s focus on the Jews as the source of evil in the world sets the stage for the justification of what’s to come. That’s why his speech was not just one more diatribe from a “crazy” leader.

What makes Ahmadinejad’s remarks so ironic, as mentioned above, is that they were made before the United Nations, the very institution created in the wake of the murder of 6 million Jews, in part, to ensure such lethal hatred is never again allowed to result in another Holocaust.

“Have all the Holocaust memorials, commemorations, books, and films really sunk in?” Foxman asked. “What does ‘Never Again’ mean when the United Nations is used to reiterate the very themes that were the basis for what happened in the 1930s and 1940s?”

Here we are in 2008—and the Iranian president can stand before world leaders, blame the world’s problems on the Jews, campaign for their destruction as a nation and a race, and be applauded.

What a failure the United Nations experiment has been.

Herbert W. Armstrong attended the inaugural meeting of the UN in April 1945 and said that due to human nature and the proven inability of man to “control and resist the downward pull of his passions and nature,” that the “United Nations organization will fail.”

How prescient that prediction was.

Car Bomb Explodes in Syria

A massive car bomb exploded in Damascus yesterday, killing 17 people. Attacks like this are rare in Syria, which leaves one wondering who was behind it and why. Stratfor has some interesting observations:

… Syria’s relationship with Hezbollah has unraveled, with the latter losing trust in Damascus’s intentions for its former Lebanese ally. …Stratfor sources have indicated that this latest car bombing in Damascus was a warning by Hezbollah and its patron Iran to the Syrian regime not to move ahead with such a plan. Iran does not wish to lose a strategic partner in the Levant, and Hezbollah does not wish to see its military unit degraded by the Syrians. Intimidation tactics such as the large car bomb that exploded in Damascus on Sept. 27 fit quite nicely into the Iranian and Hezbollah modus operandi.

If Iran was behind it, this is important because of the split the Bible indicates may occur between Iran and Syria. We have written about this before.

“Give Us More Land or We’ll Kill You”

Before he leaves office, Israeli President Ehud Olmert wants to shore up his legacy by giving away as much of Israel’s land as possible. He recently offered Mahmoud Abbas Palestinian sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, as well as Israeli land within the pre-1967 borders, according to Army Radio. The deal would allow Israel to retain some settlements inside the disputed territories and would create a Palestinian state in the rest, including the vast majority of the West Bank.

Concurrent with these ongoing negotiations, the “moderate” wing of the Palestinian people continues to call for Israel’s destruction. Fatah-controlled tv currently promotes a music video that calls for a new Saladin to come and conquer Jerusalem. The video “denies any historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem” and has lyrics that “repeat the Palestinian fabrication that Israel is planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and therefore it needs protection,” according to Palestinian Media Watch (pmw).

The video has been broadcast intermittently for the past 18 months. It is part of “a prolonged hate campaign against Israel. The campaign denies the historical fact of the connection between the Jewish people, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, while infusing hatred and fear by pretending that Islam’s holy site, as well as its adherents, are in great danger,” according to the pmw.

In print media, the pa recently published a caricature of the new chairman of the Kadima party, Tzipi Livni, wielding a bloody dagger seated next to a white dove that has a noose around its neck.

Last week, Livni met with Ahmed Qurie, chief Palestinian negotiator, to assure him that negotiations would continue with Fatah even as she tries to assemble a working coalition government. Qurie left the meeting and promptly told Reuters that while the talks went well, if they ever break down, “Resistance in all its forms is a legitimate right.”

When asked by Reuters if that would include a resumption of suicide bombings, Qurie responded, “All forms of resistance.”

Then there is Hamas. Their state sponsor, Iran, celebrated Jerusalem Day by mocking the Holocaust and burning Israeli and American flags. During the celebrations in Gaza, a Hamas legislator called for Arabs “to contain the enemy and halt its [Israel’s] aggression by planning martyrdom operations.” He praised all the terror attacks of the year, including February’s murder of eight yeshiva students, the two tractor attacks and last week’s bmw attack.

Of course, this is all part of the Palestinian grand strategy, as Caroline Glick noted last Thursday. “They use terror and negotiations in tandem to squeeze Israel into giving away more and more of its land. And it works.”

Washington Reaches Agreement on Bailout

An agreement to bail out the banking sector has apparently been reached and could be voted on as soon as tomorrow. Opinion polls show most Americans are strongly opposed to the bill, but Congress is forcing it through, as this International Herald Tribune article says, by focusing primarily on soliciting votes from lawmakers who are not seeking reelection.

Republicans, under pressure from Democrats to deliver 70 to 100 votes from their side, were scouring the ranks and focusing on the two dozen Republicans who were retiring this year. …Both parties were also scouring the political map to identify lawmakers who face little or no opposition for re-election in November, knowing they would be more willing to vote yes.

No Bank Is Safe

This article cites reports saying that the U.S. Federal Deposits Insurance Commission is running out of money. In a statement that closely paralleled statements from the former ceos of Lehman, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual and others before they went bust, the fdic chairman was forced to make a remark intended to calm market fears: “U.S. banks are overwhelmingly safe and sound and the government fund used to cover insured deposits will be adequate to absorb any losses, even high losses.”

The problem is that the growing list of endangered banks has the potential to overwhelm the agency’s reserves. Christopher Whalen, senior vice president and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, said, “We’ve got a … retail bank run forming in this country.”

That said, the government would most likely step in to recapitalize the fdic if it gets to that point—but again, taxpayers would be left to take the hit.

Greenback Attack

Because of America’s ailing economy and mountainous debt, many foreign governments have understandably lost confidence in the once-mighty U.S. dollar. But as Oliver North points out in today’s Washington Times, the dollar has also suffered from the actions of enemy nations that are bent on bringing down the United States.

North writes, “[C]orrupt officials in other capitals are also hard at work undermining what’s left of the U.S. dollar—by printing and distributing their own versions of American currency.” He’s not talking about foreign gangs or Mafia bosses forging a few notes so they can buy fast cars and gold chains. This counterfeiting is part of a large, state-sponsored calculated strategy designed to undermine and ruin the American economy.

“Counterfeiting another nation’s legal tender is not only a crime,” says North,

it is also an act of aggression. During World War ii, Adolf Hitler produced British bank notes to destabilize England. Mao Tse-tung used phony money to undermine Chiang Ka-shek’s Nationalist government through inflation. The Soviets created passable replicas of African, European and other monetary instruments to damage local economies. But no one has ever engaged in this kind of economic warfare against the United States on a scale—or as effectively—as is now being waged by the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran.

Read the whole thing.

What Might Happen Under Zuma’s South Africa?

South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki is out, ousted by his own party. While this may have been a good move, there are grave concerns about what will happen to the country in his absence. His likely successor will be Jacob Zuma, an uneducated (some say barely literate) polygamist Zulu with a radical past and some serious legal issues. The Economist reports,

Ideally, a better person should succeed Mr. Mbeki. The caretaker president, Kgalema Motlanthe, may do so well in the next few months that calls could grow for Parliament to elect him as Mr. Mbeki’s permanent successor. That is improbable. The anc looks set to replace a bad leader with one who will make South Africa’s well-wishers more than a little queasy.

What this means is that this well-developed, resource-rich nation, in the absence of strong government, will likely become an even choicer target for predatory nations looking to exploit Africa’s wealth. Watch China—but even more, watch Europe, especially Germany.

Elsewhere on the Web

The quip from this article sums up America’s ailing economy perfectly: “McDonald’s has a lower risk of default, as expressed in the Credit-Default Swap market, than the United States federal government.” By blowing another $700 billion, the article notes, “We now have a higher risk of default on our national debt than a company that sells hamburgers has on their private debt.”

In a scene reminiscent of the Great Depression, a British millionaire banker took his own life by jumping in front of a train after succumbing to pressures related to the global banking crisis.

Following in the footsteps of failed British bank Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley has now been taken over by the UK government. According to a bbc report, the valuable divisions of the bank will be quickly sold off, while taxpayers will take the hit for the toxic mortgage-related portions that other banks would be unwilling to take.