Happy New Year!

Posted by Michael at 12:56 PM | Comments (1)

December 30, 2008

The Truth About Hamas: A Response

Israel was not and is not pushing the Palestinians into a corner. The Palestinians have put themselves into this situation. They could have had their state long ago. In fact, they were offered a state three times over a sixty year period, and they walked away each and every time and refused to find solution. The latest dismissal was in 2000, with Arafat walking away from Clinton-Barak proposals. Israel was ready to give the Palestinians everything they were asking for. But today they are asking for more than ever before, including half of Jerusalem and the return of strategic points like the Golan Heights to Syria. And don't forget, all wars against Israel have started from the Golan Heights.

Israel needs to weaken Hamas in Gaza, and by doing that, it will strengthen the Fatah in the West Bank. Then and only then, can we talk about a two state solution.

Speaking of Israel's retaliation, its army operates very differently, in a much more humane way than any other in the world. Just like in the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, Israel is throwing leaflets, warning that the area will be bombed (which, in my opinion is naive and goes against common sense). Terrorists are the first to run to yet another civilian area.

Also, civilian casualties are unfortunate in every war, but terrorists should be fought, and there is no war without civilian casualties. We carpet bombed Nazi Germany and Milosevic in Yugoslavia with a large loss of civilian casualties. These are just two examples.

I will go as far as to say that the majority of Palestinians are terrorists, if not candidates to become terrorists. There is no one nation in the world where no matter how poor it is, people turn themselves into suicide bombers and explode themselves in public places like restaurants, malls, nightclubs, and buses. This is a singular, Islamic phenomenon.

Posted by Michael at 12:53 PM | Comments (7)

December 29, 2008

Cold Hard Truths About Hamas

Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel.

For years, it launched rocket attacks out of Gaza into southern Israel. Even when it had supposedly signed truces, Hamas continued attacking. In recent weeks, the rocket attacks were intensifying. In response, Israel began a military operation against Hamas.

The world is, rather predictably, having a strong reaction against Israel for its current military campaign. Yet among the countries criticizing Israel, you will not find one that would have endured Palestinian Qassam rocket attacks without making a strong, deterrent military response. Furthermore, among the individuals criticizing Israel, you will not find one that would passively accept having Qassam rockets fired into their living room. Israel showed remarkable restraint as these rocket attacks went on for years, but finally, the time came when enough was enough, and something had to be done.

Hamas plays much of the world for a fool. They center their military infrastructure in civilian areas, and then when Israel starts taking out that infrastructure, civilians are killed, provoking an anti-Israeli backlash in world opinion. Israel by contrast takes every possible measure to separate military installations from civilian areas, in order to protect civilian life, including the lives of Arab-Israeli civilians. Hamas is of course only too happy to have non-Muslims criticizing Israel. But if those same non-Muslims think that Hamas intends to be part of a peaceful coexistence with non-Muslim societies, they should think again.

The European Union today is calling for Israel to cease its military operation against Gaza. It cites the number of civilian deaths as unacceptable and outrageous. But where was the European Union when the Qassam rocket attacks were going on, endlessly? Where were statements from the European Union telling Hamas it had to stop rocket fire into Israel? Where is the outrage that Israel is forced to spend so much on defense against an enemy sworn to its destruction? The European Union says that the current Israeli response is not “proportionate;” but just exactly what would be a proportionate response against an enemy sworn to your destruction? At present, the President of the European Union is Finland. How about if we install in Sweden a terrorist group sworn to the destruction of Finland, and then sit around with our arms crossed as they endlessly fire rockets into Helsinki?

A Eurobarometer survey in 2003 found that 60% of respondents thought Israel was the greatest threat to world peace. Never mind what goes on with Russia, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan; 60% of the Europeans surveyed thought Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A question; if Gazan Palestinians had over the past five years made no military moves and fired no rockets against Israel, would Israel today be undertaking a military campaign in Gaza? No, it would not. So why do these Europeans call Israel the greatest threat to world peace?

Another question. If Israel is the greatest threat to world peace, then why do you see people taking vacations there, and not in North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, or the deserts of Afghanistan? Why don’t they enjoy the waters of the Dead Sea within the Jordanian border instead of on the Israeli side?

While the world community is quick to organize boycotts against Israel, it never organizes boycotts against Arab countries. Why is that? The state of gay rights in the mid-east and the world’s reaction to that is helpful for revealing how hypocritical the world is in its dealings with Israel. It is putting it very mildly to say that no Arab country fully respects the rights of its gay citizens. In the Gaza Strip, so-called honor killings of gay people are commonplace. Never mind coming out; gay Gazans are terrified of being found out as gay, because in that society, that is a virtual death sentence. Let’s not forget that it’s the sons of Allah who are terrorizing the world, not Israeli citizens. This world will be a much better place without Hamas. Where is the European Union or the useless United Nations to speak up about that? (Or many other violations of human rights. See my post HERE).

To make the situation totally clear; Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction and won’t stop firing rockets into Israel, but when Israel begins an effective military deterrent to those attacks, the European Union and the United Nations condemn Israel, calling its response disproportionate. The only reason the death toll on the Israel side is smaller is because the Israeli government is actually caring and protecting their citizens, and spend billions of dollars on fighting terrorists. Hamas leaders, on the other hand, are using Palestinians as human shields.

The only conclusion to be reached is that Israel is serving as the world’s collective Jew. Irrational criticism of Israel has become a means of expressing pre-existing and deep-seated hatred of Jews.

For Israel to passively allow the establishment of a terrorist state on its border would be suicide. The Hamas charter states that Israel shall exist until Islam destroys it. What part of that do people not understand?

Meanwhile, the reason the Muslim countries hate Israel so much is that it is a democracy. In Israel, gay Arabs find a safe haven. In Israel, the opponents of the Muslim regimes find a refuge. Israel is not run by religious groups, it is not run according to the torah, the bible or the Koran. Israel is not run by ayatollahs. Israel is a democratic state in the heart of the non-democratic Arab world. The majority of Muslim states not only don’t recognize Israel; they don’t even show it on their maps. The Hamas leadership educates Kindergartners to become religious martyrs for Allah against Israel.

With all the above in mind, I ask, what is the goal here? If you think Israel has no right to exist, we have nothing more to talk about. If you think Israel has a right to exist, then why would you not be insisting that Hamas remove from its charter the vow to destroy Israel? Finally, if somebody were vowing to destroy your country, what would you want done to protect it?

Posted by Michael at 03:25 PM | Comments (6)

December 22, 2008

The Other Side of Sean Penn

As award season begins in the movie industry, many people are taking notice of Sean Penn's performance of Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's "Milk." However, despite the attention the film is drawing for gay rights, my good friend Jamie Kirchick recently wrote an excellent article for The Advocate that highlights a different aspect of the actor's political affiliations. It's a great piece and I couldn't agree with Jamie more.

A Friend to Gays and Antigay Dictators Alike
by Jamie Kirchick

[Originally featured on Advocate.com, December 09, 2008],

It’s not surprising that Sean Penn, thanks to his star turn as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, is becoming a hero to gays. His performance is moving and, judging by the archival film footage, flawless; Penn simultaneously renders Milk as a figure of historic importance and a vulnerable individual with a sparkling sense of humor. Aside from the acting prizes he will surely win (and deservingly), Penn is likely to earn himself the iconic status of “straight ally,” a heterosexual who goes out of his way to take a stand for gay rights and is thus showered with praise from gays. A GLAAD Media Award, honors from the Human Rights Campaign, and a slew of prizes from other prominent gay rights organizations are only a matter of time.

Which is a shame, because Penn’s political activism, irrespective of his views on gay rights, negates the values for which a movement based upon individual freedom must stand.

The same week that Milk premiered in theaters, The Nation published a cover story by Penn based on interviews he conducted recently with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, the dictators of Venezuela and Cuba respectively. The article is a love letter to the two men, defending them against all manner of Western “propaganda.” It hearkens back to the notorious dispatches penned by Westerners fresh from the Soviet Union who reported on the amazing progress of the workers' paradise. These worshipful epistles, often published in The Nation, neglected to mention anything about the gulag, the “disappearance” of political dissidents, the Ukrainian famine, or any other such inconvenient truths about communism. Lenin termed the individuals who delivered these apologetics “useful idiots,” and Penn and his enablers are nothing if not that.

Penn traveled to the region with the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, and while the loquacious Chavez was happy to entertain both men, the reclusive Castro was a harder get. Penn’s long-standing defense of the communist regime in Cuba, however, must have endeared him to the Castro brothers, as Raul decided to grant an interview only with the actor. The import of a communist dictator purposely deciding to sit for an interview with Penn and not Hitchens, who would have been less -- how to put it? -- deferential in his line of questioning, was apparently lost on the movie star and his readers. Reporting on his dinnertime conversation, Penn dutifully made all the standard arguments in defense of the Cuban regime, from pointing out that the Communist Party would win 80% of the vote in an open election to morally equating the United States’ Guantanamo Bay prison to Cuban jails that house the Castro brothers’ political enemies.

It’s only in the closing moments of his otherwise adulatory, seven-hour interview that Penn bothers to ask about human rights abuses on the island, and just the “allegations” of abuses at that. The lack of interest in individual liberty, hardly surprising for a far-left fellow traveler like Penn, is nonetheless ironic given the Cuban regime’s treatment of gay people, a subject that one suspects Penn might have some interest in given his critically acclaimed performance in Milk. Not long after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro ordered the internment of gay people in prison labor camps, where they were murdered or worked to death for their “counterrevolutionary tendencies.”

Over the gate of one of these camps were the words “Work Will Make Men Out of You,” an eerie homage to the welcome sign at Auschwitz instructing Jews on their way to the gas chambers that “Work Will Make You Free.” (The plight of gays in the Cuban revolution is movingly told in the novel Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas, made into a film starring Javier Bardem. Playing a gay character in a film that has both an antitotalitarian and pro-gay message, Bardem is an “ally” less morally compromised than Penn.) In the early years of the regime, Raul Castro was notorious for ordering the summary execution of its opponents, including people whose only crime was their homosexuality. This is the man with whom Penn was “in stitches” knocking back glasses of red wine.

While homosexuality has since been decriminalized in Cuba, the communist government bans gay organizations, as it does any organization critical of the regime.

“There isn’t a single individual that is taken seriously in the human rights community -- whether you’re talking about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Freedom House -- that would describe the Castro brothers and their regime as anything other than a police state run by thugs and murderers,” says Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, which focuses on Latin America. “That Sean Penn would be honored by anyone, let alone the gay community, for having stood by a dictator that put gays into concentration camps is mind-boggling.”

Penn’s credibility as an effective advocate for gay rights is also weakened by the generally illiberal policies of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes. Chavez, in spite of Penn’s apologetics to the contrary, is no democrat; the record of his rule is unmistakably authoritarian. The latest State Department human rights report cites the following government infringements in just the past few years: “unlawful killings; disappearances reportedly involving security forces; torture and abuse of detainees; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detentions; a corrupt, inefficient, and politicized judicial system characterized by trial delays, impunity, and violations of due process; searches without warrants of private homes; official intimidation and attacks on the independent media; government-promoted anti-Semitism; widespread corruption at all levels of government; violence against women; trafficking in persons; and restrictions on workers' right of association.”

Chavez has also cavorted on the world stage with individuals like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, trying to form a bloc of third-world, authoritarian regimes to stand in opposition to the West. Penn, playing the role of the apparatchik almost as well as he did the former San Francisco supervisor, doesn't bother to ask Chavez about any of these manifold abuses or associations, preferring to repeat without skepticism the crazed dictator’s claim that the United States is plotting an invasion of his country. “It's true, Chavez may not be a good man,” Penn declares. “But he may well be a great one.”

That Penn would write an homage to Latin American caudillos is nothing new, as both he and The Nation have sung the praises of anti-American dictators for quite some time. Indeed, Penn fancies himself something of a foreign correspondent.

In December 2002 he traveled to Baghdad to meet with cronies of Saddam Hussein -- the killer of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people -- to defend the Ba’athist regime against impending war. Penn hobnobbed with notorious individuals like Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister infamous as the public face of the Hussein regime, and pleaded on their behalf. This is not to condemn the notion of antiwar activism, but there were principled arguments to be made against the Iraq War and means of arguing against it that didn’t require the knowing exploitation of oneself as a propaganda tool for a totalitarian regime. While Penn nary has a word of criticism about genuine tyrants and terrorists, last year he delivered a speech naming senior American government officials as “villainously and criminally obscene people” (Chavez proudly read the letter on state television).

Why should anyone care about an actor’s politics? The bloviations of Hollywood stars tend to be ignorant and irrelevant to those interested in serious debate about the issues of the day, but Penn’s grandstanding matters due to both his role in Milk and the film’s political relevance in the context of Proposition 8 and the nationwide campaign for gay rights. Gay rights are human rights, as Milk said, and Penn discredits both when he rationalizes illiberal ideologies as “anti-imperialist” and rushes to the defense of thugs who posture as victims of the West. Penn’s ignoble political side projects taint a noble cause.

Posted by Michael at 06:00 PM | Comments (3)

December 16, 2008

Fishing on Fire Island

I was looking over photos from the past few months, and came across this. Fire Island was lucky to have great weather this year, and I was happy to have some free time to engage in one of my favorite activities.

Posted by Michael at 05:43 PM | Comments (1)

December 08, 2008

Happy Birthday mr. Pam!

If you see mr. Pam, be sure to wish her a happy birthday!

Posted by Michael at 05:57 PM | Comments (3)

RETURN TO FIRE ISLAND -- Wilfried Knight, Andy Kay & Ryan Raz

After chatting by the dock, Wilfried Knight follows twinks Andy Kay and Ryan Raz into a secluded part of the hotel. The trio strips and begins a hot and heavy makeout session. Andy and Ryan tongue Wilfried’s thick piece simultaneously, then the three men form an oral daisy chain. Andy spreads his cheeks and rides Wilfried’s meat, followed by Ryan taking his turn on the Frenchman’s cock. All three spurt gigantic loads on each other’s skin and lap it up!

Members can watch the scene right now here only at LucasEntertainment.com!

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Posted by Michael at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)