Wednesday
I was driving through Sandpoint today listening to the BBC. The weather was perfect, warm cloudless skies, light breeze, no humidity. As I listened to one of the BBC’s typical in-your-face Kim Philby impersonators, I had a vision of the truly evil conspiracy against Israel and the Jews that is being hatched at the UN, at the BBC, and in the White House and its latrine, The Department of State.

The “world” community is asserting, with the connivance of Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry, that Israel is purposely killing civilians in Gaza. The White House is calling recent deaths in Gaza “appalling” and “inexcusable” to attempt to get across the idea that when civilians die as a result of Israeli action, that action was intended to kill civilians.

Naturally, there is not one shred of evidence of such an intent. Naturally, this line of argument, that Israel is a terrorist state, is the Islamist/Palestinian/BBC line. Of course, it’s the exact opposite of the truth. Israel is trying to avoid killing civilians despite Hamas’s use of children and hospital patients as human shields. It is Hamas who has made civilian deaths inevitable by shooting rockets against Israeli civilian centers from schools, homes, relief centers, displaced persons’ camps, mosques, and hospitals. Of course Israel will harm civilians if the rockets targeting Israel are coming from places where civilians shelter. This is not a war crime. This is pure self-defense.

But in a world where you are born criminal by being born a Jew and especially an Israeli, logic has no place. Facts have no place. The only place is given to Jew hatred. It is in the soil in Europe and the Middle East, its ugly smell blows all over the world.

What’s new is that Mr. Obama, the first openly anti-Israel President since the pitiful Jimmy Carter, is signing up America onto this blood libel bandwagon.

The goal is to get the whole world to agree that when Israel seeks to defend itself, that, by itself, is a war crime. And the goal has been reached. The “world,” a wretched collection of haters and bigots and slobs, is now signed on to deny Israel the most basic right of a state: to defend itself.

At this point, Israel basically has only one friend: The United States Congress. That’s because the Congress is not made up of snobs and racists and haters as the State Department is. The Congress is made up of men and women from the real America who do not hate, who love Israel, and can smell injustice miles away. And that’s because the Congress is Republican in the House, and often small town Republican, and these people are Christians… not snooty mainstream New England Christians, but Christians who love Israel.

The Senate has many Jews, and it’s pro-Israel, too. So there on Capitol Hill is the real basis of Israel’s legitimacy on the world scene. It is changing but so far it’s solid — and the Senator from South Carolina could not possibly care one damn about what a fool in The Hague or in Pretoria says about Israel.

Will this change if and when Rand Paul — by a million miles the most anti-Israel major candidate since George McGovern — becomes President? Maybe, but probably not a lot. Congressional Democrats still support Israel despite Obama’s sucking up to Hamas. Congressional Republicans will probably back Israel even with an anti-Israel Rand Paul in the White House.

If the next President is Hillary, so much the better for Israel, and that goes double if it’s Marco Rubio.

But I had a good thought and now I am wandering: the good thought is that with no evidence at all, the whole world is now calling Israel a war criminal and Obama is not leading from the front, and he’s done some fine things for Israel. But his native Chicago Black Muslim connections, his Bill Ayers Weather Underground connections, are just starting to glimmer ever so slightly and it comes across as a lewd wink to the terrorist Hamas. Any man who can publicly say he sees a moral shame in a nation of laws, of democracy, of social justice, who sees moral equivalence between the only nation in the Mideast to give equal rights to all Arabs of every background — namely Israel — and terrorist states and movements is from the moldy mold of Bernardine Dohrn far more than from Eleanor Roosevelt.

So, the world is thoroughly off kilter.

It will get worse, Russia will probably be invading Ukraine in force by the time you read this. The stock market will be in turmoil. The news networks will be running crazy.

Who is the only President who could have handled it all smoothly, who would have a plan already? Richard Nixon. But he was forced out of office for the legal equivalent of a jaywalking ticket. Nice work, American media. You then made fun of a good man, Gerald Ford. We got a two-bit con man as President instead, Jimmy Carter. And now you have served up a well-tailored suit filled with jealousy, resentment, and confusion.

It is all right. Here in Sandpoint, people I don’t even know stop me to tell me they are praying for Israel. So there is hope. “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.” (James Russell Lowell.) But the truth is so cruelly far from what the BBC says or what the UN says. Your world, sir, is a beast. How right you were, Lord Wellington.