December 29, 2008  Another year and the effects of lots of money spent by Iran on its special politics of hatred, also called Hezbollah and Hamas.

This author calls the perpetrators of this hatred for hire- Iran- the real cause of this week's hatred toward the Jews:
 
 
The Rosett Report
The Real Crisis in Gaza — and It Isn’t Israel By Claudia Rosett On December 27, 2008

Having served another round as a target range for Hamas, Israel finally attacks the rocket-firing terrorists in Gaza. Does the democratic world say “Thank You” to Israel for taking on the overlords of this nest of terror and repression? Not a chance.

Instead, here comes the usual Western group wallow in Palestinian terrorist propaganda.

We all know the script: Palestinian terrorists attack Israel, again and again and again — as in, Hamas firing some 3,000 mortars and rockets from Gaza into Israel over the past year, some 200 of these since the expiration last week of a six-month “ceasefire.” Finally, Israel strikes back, targeting the terrorists.

And the cogs of the middle-eastern cuckoo clock grind into action. Arab states issue denunciations of Israel. Diplomats lament the imperiling of the “peace process.” The despot-heavy UN takes time out from its day-to-day trashing of Israel to issue calls for “all parties” to end the violence. The U.S. officially backs Israel, but simultaneously undercuts Israel by issuing calls to rush humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, and then joins the gang of appeaseniks pressuring Israel into another “ceasefire” –which gives the terrorists a chance to regroup and attack again. From the media, out roll the articles and broadcasts lambasting Israel for use of “disproportionate force”; out come the photos and the [1] fauxtography; and the further vilification of Israel proceeds under headlines such as this gem from the Washington Post: “[2] Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Strip Imperil Obama’s Peace Chances.”

What a heap of hooey. What’s actually imperiling Obama’s “peace chances” in this sorry landscape is the presence of a terrorist haven operating in broad daylight right next door to Israel, in the form of the Hamas-run Gaza strip. And the continuing [3] exaltation of terrorism by the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. And another terrorist haven in the form of Hezbollah-infested Lebanon to the north. And yet more terrorist havens right nearby in the form of Syria and Iran, which harbor and help both Hamas and Hezbollah. And terrorist funders such as – according to the U.S. State Department – “private benefactors in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states” (”benefactors” being a strange choice of word, though unfortunately a good indicator of the State Department mindset).

In this configuration, it’s not the Gaza Strip that is the “[4] besieged enclave” (as press reports like to describe it). It’s Israel — a democratic state beset by terrorists, terrorist havens, terrorist supporters and terrorist funders.

These terrorist havens threaten not only Israel, but Europe and America. They threaten any state in which democratic freedoms are inimical to the kind of political thuggery that for decades has beggared and poisoned the Palestinians themselves (who just last year took time out from killing Israelis to make headlines for a while by mudering each other in a manner too public for even the press to ignore).

Israel is not the cause of this terrorism; but it does sit on the frontlines. As Sept. 11 should have made clear, in today’s globalized world these things don’t stay local. And as year after year of “peace process” should have taught the world by now, there are some killers — and the leaders of Hamas richly fit the bill — who are not going to be “talked” into peace. They pocket any gains from the “process,” and attack again.

One might well wonder: If Hamas or its terrorist brethren were to set up enclaves next to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York and Washington, and fire 3,000 rockets and mortars at such democratic neighbors — what, exactly, would the inhabitants of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York and Washington judge to be the appropriate response?

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And more news about ridiculous CHE! worship, as notable across Quito:

The Wall Street Journal
OPINION: THE AMERICAS
DECEMBER 29, 2008
Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara
But it makes no films about the Cuban resistance movement.
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hollywood hotshot Benicio Del Toro is not a stand-up comic, but he seemed to be playing one earlier this month when he said he found the role of Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara, in the new film "Che," like Jesus Christ.

The Ladies in White march in front of Havana's Capitol building to protest the jailing of political dissidents, Dec. 10.

"Only Jesus would turn the other cheek. Che wouldn't," Mr. Del Toro explained. Right. And Bernie Madoff is Mother Teresa, only she wasn't into fraud.

With next month marking the 50th anniversary of the Castro dictatorship, it's no surprise that the film industry is trying to cash in by celebrating pop-culture icon Guevara. As one of Fidel Castro's lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and a Castro enforcer in the years following the rebel victory, his name is synonymous with the Cuban Revolution.

Interesting films are hard to come by these days and "Che" is a good example of the problem. Rebel glamour sells T-shirts and coffee mugs so why not another airbrushed rerun of Guevara's life? Or, more precisely, some mythical version of it, sanitized for the mass market. Meanwhile the real marvel of the past 50 years in Cuba -- the steady stream of heroic nonconformists who have risked all in their aspiration to think, speak and act freely -- remains the untold epic of our time.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady reflects on the ongoing resistance in Cuba against the Castro dictatorship.

If Mr. Del Toro's "Christ" comment is foolish, it's nothing compared to film director Steven Soderbergh's explanation of why we should care about Che. Bad things happen in society when "you make profit the point of everything," the movie director told Politico.com. Che's "dream of a classless society, a society that isn't built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology."

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh's personal revulsion with profits, the "methodology" that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a "homicidal idea of justice," Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental," Che spoke these words: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine."

The results of Che's utopian agenda aren't much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their "morality" on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba's privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims -- artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience -- would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, which collected more than 11,000 signatures calling for free elections and civil liberties in 2002, says that in recent months there has been a crackdown, "with a fierce persecution against Varela Project activists, other members of the opposition, and the ongoing scandal of not freeing the prisoners of conscience."

Among Castro's captives is Oscar Elias Biscet, an Afro-Cuban doctor who is renowned for his commitment to peaceful resistance and is serving a 25-year sentence. Fifty-eight journalists, writers and democracy advocates rounded up in March 2003 also languish in Fidel's deplorable jails. The total number of political prisoners is not known but is undoubtedly much higher.

State security and rapid-response brigades -- aka thugs paid to rough up dissidents -- have been fully employed this year. But, despite the terror and the threat of imprisonment, the Cuban spirit still struggles for freedom.

At least five resistance publications now circulate in eastern Cuba. Thirty-two-year-old blogger Yoani Sánchez has been warned to keep quiet, but she still chronicles the ridiculousness of Che economics, giving a voice to ordinary Cubans who live lives of desperation. The Ladies in White -- wives, sisters and mothers of prisoners of conscience -- still walk quietly in Havana on Sundays. Rock bands mock the old dictator.

This is the wonder of the revolution: Fifty years of state terror hasn't silenced the resistance. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film about it.

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The Wall Street Journal's author of the CHE! piece is Mary Anastasia O'Grady who has been writing about Latin America in the AMERICAS column in that newspaper for over a decade. She notes today several superbly honest features about Cuban communism, among them to point out the superb work on one of our favorites Yoani Sanchez.

We will know that evil has departed Cuba when Dr. Biscet openly practices Christian virtues of the commitment to life which he, as with so many dissidents of moral conscience are cruelly imprisoned for in Havana. As yet, evil has not departed Cuba and remains a subsidized way station for real evil because ridiculously immoral nations gift Cuba shamefully as yet. Today Cuba is not much more than a predatory sex tourist station- a way station to Hell. No one seriously goes to Cuba any more unless as a pedophile, a weapons or drug launderer or homosexual traveler or an intellectually vapid German or Canadian who believes that watching TV all day from a sanitized Cuban hotel room or taking the sun in a machine gun protected beach zone for white tourists helps "the poor" in Cuba when it does not. Cuba keeps its near death somnamulence through the charity of evil doers and gifts from morally vacated fellow travelers. Cuba keeps its own as slaves through on going terror strikes and statist controls. Ecuador's Rafael Correa has spent his entire life, including his less than two years supposedly educating in the USA's University of Illinois system for non-education but rabid political brain washing for useful Marxist dummies such as its educator Bill Ayers would have you know, in self reinforcing Marxist ideology propaganda. Correa's own so called combine Masters and Ph.D. thesis- an intellectual fraud if ever existed, gifted to him by the graces of the U.S. taxpayer  out of the money making Marxist enshrining educational system in Illinois, confirms Correa's commitment to Marxist-communism. Correa was never a USA educated economist. Correa was always a USA political operative to cheer on more Marxist socialist buffoonery, also called educational astroturffing for upping the Revolution, whatever that means to criminals like Bill Ayers of the University of Illinois educational machine for essential dummies and functional illiterates. Correa was not educated in the USA- he was gifted with a fake shopping mall degree for which he neither delivered serious or honest academic research nor deserved.  No native American born student would be gifted a joint Masters and Doctoral degree in 18 months as was Correa for flawed, dishonest research, if one can call it that, wrapped up in flowing mathematical equations supposedly to hide his essentially dishonest data. The people of the USA subsidized and  paid for Correa's jiggered/fake/intellectually vacated advanced degree so that the University of Illinois could make some money off this scam and send forth even more neo Marxists and gifted Correa meaningless degrees which are dishonestly based on jiggered data which does not hold up in a combined 2 tier degree scam which shows faked data and a document which no sane academic panel would accept for its false data and chock full of typos text. This is shameful and is academic fraud for money. Correa learned nothing- zero- about the USA in his short sojourn in the USA and did not want to learn nor respect the USA during his time in the USA. Instead he used his so called academic time in the USA to build his own fake view of the world, self justifying his utterly incorrect conclusion that only communism will save this planet with the end of true freedoms. Bill Ayers of the University of Illinois would call Correa, who is a criminal and an academic fraud a "fellow traveler." We call Correa a disgrace and Needs-To-Be-Gone.

Today Correa's Quito venerates the murderous CHE! Just look around Quito- how many portraits of CHE! do these CHE! lovers plaster around town? Too many to count now and  too many to leave any doubt in your mind what the real Ecuadorean state religion is all about. You can and should take down these billboards and posters. We know. We know. You tell us you are afraid. Afraid of DISIP and Cuban intelligence, the real paramilitaries running Ecuador as a proxy today.

We know. You tell us you are too nervous to act correctly and you make excuses for your nervousness, as if being nervous, timid, unmanned, morally and mentally vacated and vapid gifts you with the mandate to abandon all courage, all values, all morals. As if. What we know is this: you reveal your cowardice by promoting your selfish excuses to never stand up for anything. Stand up, we suggest for integrity.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis