The Jews of Venezuela

By Alan Caruba

A few days ago a friend linked me to a video about the Jews of Venezuela which I posted on my blog because, as a student of history, I know that whatever first happens to Jews anywhere eventually happens in a similar fashion to people everywhere. They lose their freedom and then they lose their lives.

Then, the same day, I received an email which said, “If you’ve never read ‘The Protocols of The Elders of Zion’, find it attached along with a current article that connects these protocols with what is happening today. The sooner we learn who our real enemy is, the sooner we can successfully fight battles.” It was signed, “Blessings, Loretta.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an anti-Semitic screed cooked up by the state police under the Russian Czar, Nicholas II. One of the first things the Bolsheviks did was assassinate him. Life in the Soviet Union did not improve for its Jews. When the opportunity arose many of them immigrated to Israel.

Despite the fact that it is an ugly piece of propaganda the Protocols remain popular, particularly in translated editions throughout the Middle East. The sole purpose is to further the gross libel that Jews secretly control the banks, the media, and the world

This is so absurd it defies logic. The worldwide Jewish population is 13.3 million. Jewish population growth worldwide is close to zero percent. Some six million live in Israel and another six million in the United States. After Hugo Chavez took control of Venezuela, many among its small Jewish population fled.

If American Jews are so smart, why did they vote in large numbers for Barack Obama in the last election? Throughout his formative years, Obama hung out with some of the worst anti-Semites in Chicago that included Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Not since Jimmy Carter has the United States had a more anti-Semitic president. Not surprisingly it was ex-President Carter who helped Chavez gain control by certifying election results that were widely regarded as rigged.

In Venezuela, synagogues in Caracas, private Jewish schools, and other identifiable Jewish community centers have been vandalized and then covered with graffiti saying, “Jews get out” and similar statements; all of which remind those with any historical recall of Nazi Germany.

It’s an old game called scapegoating as Chavez tries to distract Venezuela’s population from his gangster regime.

Anti-Semitism as government policy is a threat not just to Venezuelan Jews, but has global ramifications, not the least of which is Iran’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map.”

Israel has twice destroyed nuclear facilities, in Iraq and in Syria. Israel must attack Iran’s facilities. This may occur while the most anti-Semitic American administration in the modern era has demonstrated its antipathy to Israel. It is a dramatic policy break with all previous U.S. administrations dating back to Truman’s.

I have often written that the Jews are the world’s canary in the global coal mine. What happens to them always precedes what will happen on a larger scale to others. For now, though, Venezuela’s Jewish population needs to find sanctuary elsewhere.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Memories of Munich, Threats from Tehran

By Alan Caruba

By 1938, Hitler had already made plans for the conquest of Europe or at least the parts he could not get without firing a shot. He had annexed Austria earlier that year.

In Munich, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was handed over to Germany by England, France, and Italy. The Czechs were not invited to participate. Despite the Versailles Treaty after World War One, under the Nazis Germany had rearmed while the rest of Europe looked on.

Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, returned home to claim that he had bought “peace in our time.” Well, he had bought a little time but few had any doubts about Hitler’s ambitions. Even Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had bought a little time by signing a secret treaty dividing Poland with Hitler. A year after the Munich treaty, Germany invaded Poland and World War Two began.

History has an unfortunate, but utterly predictable, way of repeating itself. The same mistakes are made over and over again by men who have not taken the time to read history or who think that, by dint of their own personalities, they can change it. Barack Obama thinks he has been selected by the gods of Marxism to fulfill that destiny for America. When not “transforming” America, he yearns for a new world order based on diplomacy, but diplomacy has long been defined as telling lies on behalf of one’s country.

His Director of Intelligence, Dennis Blair, just got pushed out of the job for daring to tell him the truth about the world and these days Obama evokes snickers every time he ventures into the thicket of foreign policy and Hillary is no help.

In the history of the United States, no previous president has ever had less experience for the job. In contrast to George W. Bush who told nations he would invade you if you posed a threat, most of the world’s leaders have concluded Obama is an empty suit, a dunce, and an easy mark. The Iranians openly mock him while the rest have the decency to do it behind closed doors.

If you want to find those most wedded to insane notions of their role in history, just visit Tehran where the ayatollahs and their chief stooge, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, believe they must bring about Armageddon to ensure the return of the mythical Twelfth Imam who apparently lives at the bottom of a well.

Once the Islamic Revolution had solidified its grip on Iran in 1979, their top priority became the ability to make nuclear weapons. They have never ceased in this quest. As in 1938, the world looks on.

Iran is the new Nazi Germany circa 2010. It bears a lot of similarities, the most obvious of which is its intense hatred of Jews that is manifested in denying the Holocaust and with daily threats to wipe Israel off the map.

The irony of this is that Iran’s Arab neighbors—Iran is Persian, not Arab—have reached the point where they hate Iran even more than they say they hate Israel. The radical Shiite Iran is an anathema to the mostly Sunni Arab nations of the Middle East and the notion that it might acquire nuclear weapons has them casting their eyes lovingly on Israel.

The Iraqis have no love for the Iranian’s ideological extremism. That’s why Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite, along with secular Sunni political allies, won the recent elections there. Iranian bombs and terrorists have killed more Iraqis than the U.S. military.

You cannot look around the region without finding a nation, other than Syria, that regards Iran as anything other than a menace, either directly or through proxy forces such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza strip. Members of Osama bin Laden’s family are said to be guests of Iran.

The Israelis have made no secret of the fact that they do not intend to let Iran join the nuclear club. President Obama has said similar things, but his word is totally unreliable and everyone in the Middle East knows it.

He may have thought he was earning brownie points by being abusive to Israel, but all he managed to do was raise questions about his treatment of a U.S. ally. It is no secret either that Obama has long associated with notorious anti-Semites such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan.

There’s never been a whole lot of trust among the leaders of Middle Eastern and North African nations for one another, but there is likely none so far as the U.S. President is concerned.

This is why it is the Saudis have been quietly breaking bread with the Israelis for quite a while and a coalition of sorts exists to support whatever it intends to do to render parts of Iran radioactive. This is not to say that U.S. military and intelligence representatives haven’t held similar discussions with the various parties.

An extraordinary flotilla of U.S. war ships has been building up in the Persian Gulf and there no doubt there are other preparations for war occurring. One can only hope that overt U.S. policy towards Israel is a gigantic deception to make the Iranians think the U.S. will stay out of the fight.

As with Munich in 1938 when the momentum toward war was already too strong and too obvious to all of Europe and the rest of the world to ignore, the Iranian regime is begging for war. It will get it. There is simply no way to use diplomacy when you are negotiating with crazy people.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Here's Our Do Nothing Energy Policy

Energy Policy? What Energy Policy?

By Alan Caruba

When the government controls the provision of energy, it controls the lives of all citizens and the growth or failure of the nation’s economy. Everything else, including national defense, runs second when it comes to this single factor.

Recently the fourth annual survey of more than a hundred executives in the U.S. and Canadian electric and natural gas industries was released by Platts and Capgemini. Platts is a global provider of energy and metals information and Capgemini is a leading provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The objective of the survey was to determine the opinion of energy industry executives regarding the first year and a half of the Obama administration’s energy policies.

The Obama administration’s energy policy is to have as little as possible.

The administration is bent on reducing access to national energy resources, coal, oil and natural gas, combined with a bizarre emphasis on “alternative” or “renewable” sources in the form of wind and solar energy. European nations that went this course ended up with fewer jobs, insufficient energy for the money invested, and massive fraud in its carbon credits exchanges.

It is essential to understand that the nation’s utilities have all signed onto the bogus “global warming” theory that carbon dioxide emissions threaten all life on Earth because they can make gobs of money raising the rates they currently charge for electricity. They expect to do so via the bogus selling and trade of “carbon credits”, a key element of the Cap-and-Tax bill currently in the Senate. It is a massive robbery of all energy consumers and that means everyone.

Under intense pressure from the government and from environmental organizations, many utilities have wasted millions on the installation of wind and solar farms, none of which provide enough electricity to even begin to meet their consumer’s needs. Moreover, they must all maintain traditional coal-burning, nuclear, and other forms of energy generation plants because neither wind or solar provide a reliable source of electricity.

This is the big, dirty secret of the so-called “sustainable” energy from wind and solar. It is not sustainable if the wind is not blowing and the sun is obscured by clouds. Wind energy provides about one percent of all the electricity used daily in America. In 2006 solar power provided 0.1 percent! By contrast, nuclear provides about 20 percent and coal provides just over 50 percent!

The alternative energy suppliers are sustained by a combination of taxpayer subsidies (your money) and mandates imposed on the utilities to include them with nuclear, coal and other energy sources. One way the government makes so-called sustainable energy appear to be a greater source is to include conventional hydroelectric energy.

According to the survey, “some 80% are dissatisfied with the U.S. government’s energy policy performance following the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration and amid a slowly rebounding economy,” adding, “there is considerable dissatisfaction in the lack of tangible and actionable policy and legislation.”

John Christens, vice president of Smart Energy Services for Capgemini, says, “Few utility executives consider the current solutions as satisfactory either in scale or feasibility.” That’s because there are NO current “solutions” to America’s growing needs for additional energy provision and the nation’s electrical grid is aging daily and in need of major upgrades.

Not surprisingly, since they stand to make billions if the Cap-and-Tax bill is passed, many utility executives were unhappy with the progress “on CO2 legislation and action, regulations which will increase the cost of power without addressing the root issue of atmospheric carbon…”

There is no “root issue” because carbon dioxide plays NO role whatever in climate change. The bloviations of Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are a huge package of lies based on flawed and deliberately spurious computer model projections.

In November 2009, the Climategate revelations that a handful of IPCC scientists had been misrepresenting the truth should have ended the global warming fraud, but it has only intensified the effort of those behind it to impose it on the world. At some point, having taken millions in government funding for research, particularly here in the U.S. and in England, some of these IPCC scientists should be on their way to jail if there is any justice to be had.

The survey is barely useful to the public because it was taken among the very utility executives who are guilty of supporting the global warming fraud in anticipation of reaping obscene profits. The cost of energy will soar if the Cap-and-Tax bill waiting a vote in the Senate is passed and signed into law by the president.

Meanwhile, the real energy policy of the Obama administration is to do everything in its immense power to thwart the building of any new coal-burning or nuclear plants while deceiving the public into believing that wind or solar has any real potential of meeting present and future needs. Dangling promises of “green jobs” is perhaps the cruelest lie of all. Virtually all of the technology required for wind or solar is manufactured overseas.

The Obama energy policy can be summed up as no new energy, no new jobs, and a very dark future for America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Taking a Whack at Arizona

And you thought the real problem was illegal aliens entering the US?

The Absence of Competence

By Alan Caruba

Is it too much to expect the Attorney General of the United States, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the President to have actually read the law that the State of Arizona passed regarding illegal aliens?

Is it too much to expect the President not to use that law—-the same as a federal law—-as a lame joke at the recent White House Correspondents dinner?

Does anyone really think President Obama has a clue about the actual facts concerning the BP oil rig accident? When all the reports are written, here’s what they will say. It was an accident.

How can we expect the Obama administration to respond to terrorist attacks on America when they will barely use the word “terrorism” and almost never link it to Islam? Even wars are called “overseas contingencies.”

When words mask reality, reality has a nasty way of intruding.

We’re told not “to jump to conclusions” about the Fort Hood shooter even though he was a deranged Muslim fanatic. The Christmas day attempted airline bombing? Everybody did their job says Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security. Well, no, everyone except the bomber. Time Squares bomber? AG Holder wants to hold a trial of the 9/11 planner a couple of blocks away.

The whole Obama administration is shot through with people who got their tickets punched at various elite Ivy League and other universities, but who hold beliefs that are so mind-boggling that you wonder why the nice men in the white coats haven’t shown up to take them to a rubber room.

The Secretary of Transportation dislikes cars and makes no secret of it. Meanwhile, the government owns General Motors and is still trying to find ways to make selling their cars more difficult by raising mileage standards.

The Secretary of Energy thinks we should paint the roofs of our homes white to reflect back the light from the Sun in order to avoid the dreaded global warming. Apparently nobody has told him the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past decade.

The President’s science advisor thinks it would be a good idea to put chemicals into the water supply to reduce fertility. Too many people eating, breathing, and—-Oh my God—-exhaling the dreaded carbon dioxide that will kill us all! NOT!

The President pushed hard for his healthcare bill that was intended to reduce the costs of Medicare and, surprise, it will cost more if implemented. Around the nation, doctors are dropping out of the Medicare program. Try buying health insurance from any company other than the government in a few years. How stupid and Marxist is it to take competition out of this process?

As for the President himself, he is just an endless source of gaffs and pratfalls. Recall those early months when he couldn’t say a word without a TelePrompter? Remember Steve Croft of “Sixty Minutes” taking him to task for laughing inappropriately? “Are you punch drunk?” asked Croft. Or Fox News’ Bret Baier trying to get him to give a straight answer to ANYTHING?

We are now nearly a year and a half into Obama’s first and only term in office. He is still trying to blame former President George W. Bush for EVERYTHING. I half expected to hear him say that George W was seen fishing nearby the BP oil rig shortly before it blew up. It took Obama nine days to even fly over and look at the busted rig. Katrina, anyone?

Just call him President Kiss-of-Death. So far, every Democrat candidate that Obama has endorsed for election has lost. I hope he keeps it up.

Meanwhile, I pray that we last until November when we can throw the whole useless, crazy bunch of Democrats out of office and then slow down Obama’s mad race to “transform” America into something more closely resembling Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

His ultimate goal is to totally undermine the American system of governance along with the financial structure that maintains it. That is theis administration's greatest threat to the nation and is being relentless pursued.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2010

Conservative's Wishful Thinking

By Alan Caruba

One of the themes running through conservative forums and blogs these days is the question of just when Barack Obama will resign from the presidency.

Secondarily, the concern is that he would do this before or after the November midterm elections, thus leaving the nation in the hands of Joe Biden, a longtime Washington insider and goofball.

The thinking of grass-roots conservatives is that Obama is just so over-whelmed and under-equipped to deal with the daily events, foreign and domestic, that he will run home to Chicago to work on yet another autobiography.

This is not going to happen. Obama is the casebook study of a pathological narcissist and everything that happens is always about him and is always somebody else’s fault.

This is what makes the BP oil disaster so delicious at the same time it is so awful. Like a giant oil slick from which he cannot free himself, this event will indelibly stain his presidency. He was too slow to respond to it and, during his belated press conference, strove to both assert that he was in charge “from day one” and that it was up to BP to solve the problem.

Compounding his problem is his announcement a month before the rig blew up that he favored offshore drilling. In politics, timing is everything and Obama’s is astonishingly slow and tone deaf. His announcement managed to anger a big part of his base, the Greens who hate oil everywhere except at the pump when they fill up their tank. Where that gasoline comes from remains a mystery to many of them who think it is a biofuel product made from soy beans and corn.

If you look closely, you will see quite plainly that Obama’s hair is turning white. He’s been in the Oval Office for a year and a half and he is aging before our eyes. This should surprise no one because he has never really had to deal with the challenges that tend to toughen up ordinary people.

Any president’s job is a daily series of domestic and foreign crisis. The skill-set most needed is leadership, followed by management. Americans know it when they see it and, so far as Obama is concerned, they are not seeing it.

What they have seen is one big mess after another made even bigger by a president who thinks big government is the answer to every problem. Most people, except for the 30% hard core of extremist liberals, have long ago concluded that big government is the problem.

A Marxist, Obama’s instinctual response was to nationalize every sector of the economy he could. Along with fellow Marxists, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, the long-sought goal of a Democrat-controlled Congress was too golden to pay any attention to the people who showed up at town hall meetings or who gathered in the hundreds of thousands outside the Capitol building.

This is why there will be a heedless rush to impose an increase in every kind of tax imaginable before they are turned out of office and political control returns to the Republican Party. The GOP lost power precisely because it too jacked up the cost of government. They have some good people in office who, after the midterm GOP victory, will take the painful steps to save the nation. Just like Bill Clinton, Obama will take the credit.

Consider this, however. President Bush ran $2.9 trillion in deficits in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. On top of that, he was fighting two difficult wars in the Middle East. In his first twenty months in office, President Obama’s spending exceeds Bush’s one hundred months in office. Obama is spending $5 for every $1 Bush spent.

The U.S. government under President Obama has spent or lent $12.8 trillion to date and the annual GDP of the nation is just about that amount or, in other words, equal to the value of everything the United States produced last year.

As noted in a recent book, “Killing Wealth”, “the private sector comprises five million companies and 115 million employees, while the public sector comprises 89,000 taxing authorities and twenty million public servants. Private sector employees earned an average $49,935 in 2008, while federal civilian employees earned 50 percent more---$79,197 for the same kind of work.” Some would argue that it really isn’t the same kind of work because making a profit is not part of the equation.

Others might point out that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are academics or full-time government employees who have never, like himself, had to run a business, meet a payroll, or satisfy investors. They are totally ideological. They are totally clueless.

Some weeks back, I asked if the United States of America was “too big to fail?” The answer is no. Greece is close to default and Spain and Italy are not far behind. The European Union is likely to dissolve as the only nation member that has any money or the prospect of making any is Germany. Bailing out the others is not a popular option for Germans and the French will not want to either.

Bailing out the United States will eventually become an equally bad idea for China, Japan, and other sovereign investors in our treasury notes unless Congress can or will staunch the insane borrowing and spending that has characterized the past decade.

Conservatives will get their wish about Obama when the 2012 elections roll around. Until then, he’s not going away.

(a) Alan Caruba, 2010