Leon Uris' Novel "The Haj" and its Relevance Today

One of the great books I've read, "The Haj", is about the conflict in Palestine between the Arabs, Jews and the British after the end of WWII. The following is the response from Gideon, a Jew and one of the main characters in the book to a British officer as the battle between the Arabs and Jews erupts into all out war in Palestine. The British have started their withdrawal from those lands, abandoning the few thousand beleaguered Jews to the millions of Arabs arming themselves to wipe them out. Gideon warns the British officer that Islam is on the march. This book was written in 1984 and here we are 16 years later...with a President that does not seem to realize the dangers we confront or maybe doesn't care.

I always think that we get the President we deserve because of the way we don't consistently uphold the founding principles of this great nation. It's time to change that and realize that we live in a dangerous world with nuts on the loose governing countries that have nukes. Americans have to accept this danger and the idea that the only way we can continue on is to recognize our Founding values of small government and our individual rights to life and liberty. By making our government focus on its primary mandate - the protection of our homeland and American lives, we will have the resources to defend our land against the evil that abounds in certain places on this beautiful earth.

"Strange, isn't it, that we Jews are once again stuck with a dirty job no one else wants? You and all your snide friends in all the foreign offices know in your hearts the cruelty, the evil that emanates from the Moslem world. But you are afraid to hold Islam up to the light and tell your people, 'Look, this is what we have to live with.' No, let the Jews do it. We once again man the barricades alone, berated by our smug, so-called allies of the Western democracies. Islam is going to turn this world upside down before this century is out and you'd better have enough guts to deal with it. It's lonely here, Brompton. It's lonely." Page 213 from "The Haj" by Leon Uris (Bantam Books, the paperback edition).

Obama Cavorting With Evil Is a Loss For Us

If the good collaborates with evil and gives it a platform that is called collaboration and evil will always win. That is why when one is confronted by evil one either extinguishes the evil or runs away to protect himself. At the UN the good countries give a podium to the evil ones and that is what they crave. Libya, Iran, Venezuela the list goes on and on - what could we possibly learn from them. They are evil nations and need to be confronted by strength and force not appeasement. Mark Steyn has a good article decrying Obama's cavorting with these dictators and thugs.

..."It's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog feces and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That's the problem with the U.N."

Absolutely right, if I do say so myself. When you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn't that they'll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way.

That's what happened in New York last week. Barack Obama is not to blame for whichever vagary of United Nations protocol resulted in the president of the United States being the warm-up act for the Lunatic-for-Life in charge of Libya.

But it is a pitiful reflection upon the state of the last superpower that, when it comes to the transnational mush drooled by the leader of the free world or the conspiracist ramblings of a terrorist pseudo-Bedouin running a one-man psycho-cult of a basket-case state, it's more or less a toss-up as to which of them is more unreal.

To be sure, Col. Gadhafi peddled his thoughts on the laboratory origins of swine flu and the Zionist plot behind the Kennedy assassination.

But, on the other hand, President Obama said: "No nation can or should try to dominate another nation."

Pardon me? Did a professional speechwriter write that? Or did you outsource it to a starry-eyed runner-up in the Miss America pageant? Whether any nation "should try" to dominate another, they certainly "can," and do so with effortless ease, all over the planet and throughout human history.

And how about this passage?

"I have been in office for just nine months — though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences ... ."

Forget the first part: That's just his usual narcissistic "But enough about me, let's talk about what the world thinks of me" shtick. But the second is dangerous in its cowardly evasiveness: For better or worse, we are defined by our differences — and, if Barack Obama doesn't understand this when he's at the podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela and other unlovely polities, the TV audience certainly did when Col. Gadhafi took to the podium immediately afterward....