Charlie Sprague's Warped View of Middle East Politics

If Israel can't build apartments in Jerusalem, it can't build them anywhere.

Charlie Sprague CMC '10 has written yet another silly post in his capacity as The Forum editor. Although in the past I have taken the pain staking process of calling out his boilerplate left-wing posts, I have tried to shy away from it as of late for the simple reason that my attention on his posts seem to give him more traffic than they would be otherwise warranted. I have chosen to make an exception in this case, as I am very worried that one of the most important alliances for preserving peace in the Middle East is becoming undone by people like Mr. Sprague.

You would think that Mr. Sprague would have given up writing or speaking on Israel after he was so horribly embarassed in a debate with Jesse Blumenthal CMC '11 on that very subject last year. Alas, he has not.

I have slightly altered a response to that blog post based upon the comment I wrote on The CMC Forum. It was inspired by several articles written by Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and by Joel B. Pollak, who is running for the 9th congressional district of Illinois. Mr. Pollak's article ran here.

Here is my response to Sprague:

I'm really tempted to go line by line, explaining why Mr. Sprague is wrong yet again, but fortunately, it seems the Palestine Authority's actions have beaten me to the punch.

Last Thursday, it honored Dalal Mughrabi on what would have been her fiftieth birthday. Ms. Mughrabi has had a square named after her in Ramallah. Just what did she do to deserve such an accolade? Why, she and eleven other fellow terrorists hijacked a bus in Israel, killing 37 Israelis (including thirteen children) and one American. That's what we, the civilized world, are up against: a culture that celebrates the murder of civilian children. No wonder peace seems so intractable.

The amateurish Obama administration has turned an otherwise uneventful and expected story -- Joe Biden embarrassing himself yet again -- into a public opinion referendum on the State of Israel in the brazen attempt to create a cleavage in the coalition government. Nethanyahu's government has come to power precisely because Hamas and the Palestine Authority have proven so intractable on basic issues of Israeli self-defense. To undermine that relationship would do far more to destablize Middle East peace than any alleged deals Petraeus thinks he can get with so-called Arab moderates. Maybe this is the Obama foreign policy of abandoning friends in the hopes of getting something, but we've seen just how poorly that's gone with Russia, what makes us think it would be any better with the Middle East?

Mr. Sprague knows so little of the situation that he also embarrasses himself. Those 1600 housing units were not remote outposts, but rather mere meters from the Green Line, in a part of East Jerusalem that is just to the west of the Old City. Without a doubt that territory will be a part of any future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

Of course, as a conservative who believes in Israel's right to exist just as I do Canada's or America's right to exist, I'm dismayed by how the Left seems to be rejecting the only real human rights respecter in the Middle East.

In 2008, only 27 congressmen -- virtually all Democrats -- supported Israel's self-defense against Hezbollah. In 2009, some 39 congressmen voted in favor of the Goldstone Report. In 2010, 54 Democratic congressmen have signed a later protesting Israel's blockade of Gaza. (They seem to have forgotten that Israel is just stopping weapons from getting in -- something which seems to happen whenever they lift that alleged blockade.)

But if this be the Democrat strategy for Israel, I welcome my Jewish friends to a party that won't sell its friends short at the slightest convenience. With their help and support, I hope we can end the most anti-Israel administration's efforts as soon as this November when pro-Israel conservatives are swept to power.

Craig McPherson CMC '06's Final Statement in the Kansas 3rd Debate

For my Facebook readers, you can see it by clicking here.

Steve Grove, YouTube's Curator, on Fox News and in The New York Times

Sorry I missed this, but here it is when it debuted in late February: Chris Wallace of Fox News naming YouTube's Steve Grove "Power Player of the Week." (Clicking on the link will give you the video segment.)

Steve Grove, CMC '00 and head of YouTube politics and news certainly is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to curating the Internet. (For the record, The Claremont Conservative has switched its YouTube account to the more accessible, Vimeo, though, due to how the videos are broken up into ten minute time intervals.)

Our hapless president was rather tepid in considering how to deal with the slaughter of Iranian civilians by their government, but YouTube allowed for the citizen journalists to create some truly haunting images -- images and videos that I believe will be the equivalent of the Tank Man when the Iranian regime is finally brought down. Here's the mention of Steve Grove in The New York Times:

Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube, said the video of Ms. Agha-Soltan was “pretty instantly fragmented into hundreds of other re-uploads.”

A shorter video clip of Ms. Agha-Soltan’s death was recorded by a second person and later uploaded by a Canadian YouTube user, who in June asked not to be identified and who did not respond to a request for comment last week. Within hours, copies of the two videos were viewed by millions of people.

The man who posted the clip in the Netherlands said the doctor and the man with the camera phone were aware of the world’s reaction. They have not sent any video clips since June.

The uploader is active in the online community that supports the Iranian opposition movement, and 10 days ago, he posted a link on Facebook to a video showing someone in riot gear beating and choking a person who appeared to be a protester.

“This procedure needs time and we have time,” the man said about the opposition movement. “It is fire under the ash. It will flare up and this time is not far away, even if it is not so close.”

He added, “I wish for the outcome to be a regime where there is no violence, where there is freedom of expression and freedom after expression.”

Mr. Grove said hundreds of protest videos from Iran are posted to YouTube each month.

“There’s an element of documentation here — just documenting what takes place. But there’s also an element of communication,” he said. “These videos are almost like moving e-mails, from Iran to other countries.”