Courage comes in many forms. But the rarest form of courage, it seems to me, is for a true addict to give up his (or her) New York Times. That seems to go double or triple for the NYT's Jewish readers, who cling to its daily prophetic utterances with truly Biblical fervor: "absolute truth." 

My sample is biased, obviously, since I hang around with conservatives and such (yech!), but I can think of only one Jewish friend who has ever confessed to dumping All the News You Are Fit to Read.

And he's a conservative, so he doesn't count.

Jews get a contradictory press. Judging by the MEMRI website, which does a heroic job of translating the Muslim media, a billion of the Faithful on Earth devoutly believe  that Jews are running the world, which is why there's so much Evil around these days. 

Then there are those who believe that Jews are running the world, and that's why it keeps staggering along regardless, come hell or high water. Some people even think Jews are not running the world.

It's confusing.

The there's the old joke that "Jews are just like everybody else, except more so."

That sounds about right.

The crazy-making  puzzle for conservatives, including Norman Podhoretz, who wrote a book about it, is the following:

(a) Jews are supposed to be intelligent. (Yes, yes, with glaring exceptions. Like Paul Krugman.)

(b) Most Jews (and most American Christians) seem to care for the fate of Israel.

(c) Nevertheless, four out of five American Jews and zillions of liberal Christians keep voting robotically for folks like Jimmy Carter and Barack Hussein Obama.

And  

(d) Then Jimmy and Barry passionately try to tear down Israel by aiding and abetting not just normal, comparatively sensible Muslim regimes, but the most suicidal, genocide-threatening, female-oppressing, child-enslaving, hate-propagandizing, Christian-persecuting, medieval clowns in the world, like Hamas, Hezb'allah, the Islamofascisti of Iran, and the forthcoming ruler of Egypt, who will rise to power courtesy of one Barack Hussein Obama.

After all, it was Obama who told the last President of Egypt to "Get out now!" Without Obama, Hosni Mubarak would still be in power and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty would still be alive.

Intelligent people might have noticed that.

Unless, of course, they were too deeply sunk in their NYT to notice anything else.

The last time something like this happened in full public view was in 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev sent battalions of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful "Prague Spring" uprising. Whereupon Brezhnev landed his Smersh 001 Ilyushin at Brno airport and smashed the smiling leader of  "communism with a human face" smack dab in the face, right there on the tarmac where even the reporter from The New York Times had to take notice.

Brezhnev was a big, fat, thuggy drunk, if you remember, and if he really slammed you, you were down for the count. But that doesn't matter, probably, because the peaceful Czechs protesters no doubt woke up next day in Siberia. If they woke up at all.

Quite an undiplomatic gesture, you might say. But Barack Hussein Obama did the same thing (without the physical drama) to Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, the man who kept the only Israel-Arab peace treaty in history alive and working for thirty years.

Your actual intelligent person might take notice of that.

Mubarak didn't get an actual KO punch from Our Hero, who is much too sophisticated and slight of frame for such crudity, but he received the diplomatic equivalent: A repeated, public, and relentless demand to resign as President of Egypt.

Mubarak actually did end up in the hospital with a heart attack or a stroke. Or both. He may have to stand trial with a possible death sentence at the end, for ordering his police to fire on the peaceful Tahrir Square Muslim Brother demonstrators, who are all for democracy, love and peace. On their own peculiar terms, of course.

Lots of other Middle Eastern regimes keep shooting down protesters by the thousands, but Mubarak was the only one to shock the conscience of Obama, or maybe The New York Times.

Odd, how that happens.

Intelligent people might take notice.

The Egypt-Israel peace treaty may now be in worse shape than ex-President Mubarak, and a lot more lives depend on it.

The last time a Democrat helped an Islamist dictator take over a major regional power in the Middle East, a million people died in the subsequent Iran-Iraq War.

A much-forgotten fact.

I wonder if anybody remembers? Ahmadinejad does, because he got all his experience of martyrdom warfare in the Iran-Iraq War.  They sacrificed thousands of young boys to clear the minefields with their own bodies, wearing green plastic "Keys to Paradise" around their necks. Ahmadinejad remembers that for sure, which is why he is preparing nukes and missiles for the next round against the Little Satan, Israel, and the Big Satan in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

Jimmy denies any responsibility, of course.

So does our Current Occupant.

What Arab Spring?

Oh, that one! I thought that was all over!

I'm just too busy right now, gotta run for reelection!

Sayonara!

Four More Years, Baby!

It's the dance-away president.

The NYT dogmatically fails to see the evil that the rest of us see right in front of our eyes. The NYT hardly noticed the Twin Towers going up in fire and smoke on 9/11/01, and has been telling its mind-numbed readers to forget about it ever since. New York's Pravda and Izstvestiya commands the faith that passeth mere human understanding.

This is not new. The NYT also missed the worst of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Its editors forgot to tell its readers about Stalin's genocidal famines, and they still possess the Special Pulitzer for Mass Disinformation from that time. I don't know if they got a Pulitzer for burying the genocide of the Jews under Hitler, but they certainly got lots of applause from the Left for missing Saddam and Ahmadinejad's nuclear industry. Saddam had a warehouse full of yellowcake, but the NYT missed that somehow. It didn't count. Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs have been going for nukes and long-range missiles for decades, but the NYT denied all that reality when Bush was president, and only reluctantly came around with Obama in power.

You see, Bush might have done something about it. You never know with these crazy Texans. Obama sure won't. Thank  heavens. We're safe!

The NYT's many faithful followers just don't get the rise of genuinely evil, soon-to-be-nuclear regimes in the world, because their minds are limited to what they read. Everything else is taboo, and they unanimously avert their eyes. They don't believe anything outside of Holy Writ, and the Times jealously commands its readers never, ever to open their minds. When its readers speak, they just repeat the latest talking points from On High. New ideas are strictly forbidden.

This is not "intelligence." It is a narrow-minded, dogmatic faith, leading to mass ignorance in the face of clear and present danger.  It's the biggest suicide of the intellect in human history. The Weimar Republic was like that, and pre-War Europe. Mass denial of murderous danger is a fearful thing to see, like a herd of deer freezing in the headlights.

The Moo Bro candidate for President of Egypt is now Al Awa, who has just demanded that when gets into power, Egypt will "affirm its emnity" for Israel. That's the end of thirty years of negotiated peace.

You might imagine that intelligent people would notice all that.

But not if they read the New York Times!

Obama's demand for President Mubarak to resign "Now means Now!" was right unfriendly to the sovereign and friendly nation of Egypt, you might say. Especially 'cause Egypt used to be a pillar of whatever peace the Middle East manages to have.

But not to The New York Times.

Nor to its many faithful readers.

Among them are atheists (lots!), Christians, Muslims, Amish, Quakers and Jews. And all the mediots in the world.

But the Jews would seem to have a special responsibility to history.

Don't you think?