Did the U.S. Provoke Pearl Harbor and What Does That Have to Do With Jerusalem?

Why did we cut off war-making supplies to Japan in the 30s?
This photo of Japanese atrocities from Nanking were all the
"excuse" we needed to stop supporting them.

I saw the article listed below posted on Facebook today. By the time I'd written down my litany of outrage, the post had been taken down. This monumentally offensive argument that somehow the USA "asked" to be attacked by Japan because we refused to sell them steel and oil and aluminum for their war machine is an argument for the same sort of appeasement foreign policy that Neville Chamberlain conducted with Hitler and we all saw how appeasing that maniac worked. Today it's the same argument for how we ought to appease the Islamic aggression against Israel and the West. Obama did it by bowing to various Kings and potentates. Americans are marching in the street to protest President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The protesters claim that we will "offend" the Arab world. Then suddenly here we get a PhD history professor claiming that doing such things causes people to attack us.

The idea that we provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor without cause is a flying load of horse crap! I've heard this stupid revisionist history argument before. It's just one more argument for appeasement of bully nations. Japan was mad at us because we quit selling them steel. They were using the steel to wage war on China, Korea, Southeast Asia and to support their efforts to conquer the Pacific Islands. Can you imagine the war machine we would have face had we kept on selling them oil and steel and aluminum and other war materials? We didn't provoke war with them. If anything we kept if from being worse than it was. They attacked Pearl Harbor in part because they were in danger of running out of American steel before they finished conquering what they laughably called the Pacific Co-Prosperity Sphere. Laughable because Japan would have been the only "partner" in that sphere who wasn't conquered and the only one making any money off the deal.

Claiming that Pearl Harbor was our fault because we didn't try to mollify the Japanese is like telling the 10 year old me that I should make lower grades and stop "provoking" the bullies in my school because my making good grades and makes them look bad.

I utterly reject this incredibly stupid argument. We did the morally right thing by cutting off Japan's supplies of war materials while they were raping Nanking and running roughshod over their neighbors in Korea, Manchuria and Southeast Asia. Japan is a strong-man culture. Note how well we get along with them after we kicked their butts in WWII. Note also that the Arab culture is a strong man culture which is reflected in their religion. It suggests one should adopt a strong approach if you wish to be respected by the Muslim world. Anything less looks weak and vulnerable and strong man cultures believe weakness must by its very nature be exploited.

Trump did right by firmly recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It says clearly - "Hands off Jerusalem. You're not going to ever get it back!" It was the right thing to do. Strength is the only thing they understand in their political system.

Here's the offensive article in case you're interested:

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1930

© 2017 by Tom King

That Awkward Moment......

Ariana Grande discovered that loudly proclaiming "I hate America," doesn't protect you from people who really do hate America. Sadly for the left, appeasement is truly like feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last only to discover that he tends to bite off the hand that feeds him.

© 2017 by Tom King

Playground Bully for President - 2016

The more I read comments by Trump supporters (especially self-identified "Evangelical" Christians and conservatives) explaining their support of the man, the more I'm convinced it's time to move away from the cities into rural hideaways and start building the old end-of-the-world bunker.  

And I'm not really kidding here.

People who should know better are flocking to get behind a candidate who is essentially a playground bully, hoping he will do for them what they lack the will or access to power to do for themselves. It's sad to watch people who claim to support the Constitution and the Bill of Rights hand the reins of power to a man whose business "experience" is a sickening record of strong-arming competitors, bullying partners and stiffing those who trusted him. Trump has historically been long on hubris and confident promises and short on delivering on those promises (save the promise he made to himself to make himself richer).

I'm sorry, but however much you think Trump will protect us from the ravening hordes of Muslims and Mexicans, that "protection" will come at a price. If you seek safety and protection from a casino and strip club owning shady real estate developer who is up on racketeering charges and has ties to the Mob, you are no better than those who seek peace and safety from a mythical altruistic socialist elite who promise to give you free stuff. Don't forget how it works in the real world for those who pay for safety and protection from powerful thugs.  

First you pay for protection from outside enemies and then you pay for protection from your "protector". As in medieval times when armored feudal barons "protected" groups of serfs and peasants, those who are strong enough to protect you are also strong enough to enslave you. Like Trump, the ancient nobles were "beholden to no one". If that's what you like about Trump, that he's so rich he is beholding to no one, then you should not be at all surprised when, once he is in power, he isn't beholden to you either.

Attack dogs may give a few burglars pause, but if they have no reason to obey you, they make very poor masters. It's like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill both said. Depending on appeasing a bully or waiting for someone else to make things go right for you is like feeding the crocodile hoping it will eat you last. 

That doesn't always work so well.

Just sayin'.

Tom King © 2016

I've decided to stop humoring the lunatic fringe - both the liberal ones and the conservative ones.  They're two peas of a pod.  I am deeply conservative in my politics, but not that deep.  I'm not liberal phobic either.   Some of my best friends are liberals (in the classical sense). Actually the term "liberal" used to mean one who believed in the equality of all men and that human beings had inalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is very different from the "progressive" socialist or the manic facist right-winger who believe there are special people endowed by their genes with special privileges, among which are the right to tell everyone else what to do, the right to being richer than the rest of us and the right to take for themselves anything they think they need to in order to manage the rest of us. I even leave that stuff up if they want a nice clean debate. I'm talking about the slavering paranoid racist supremists that try to sell themselves off as "real" liberals or conservatives and only make us people with sense look like idiots.

What I find particularly distasteful is the rise of the new antisemitism, particularly when it comes from Europeans who ought to know better.  I've seen a spate of attacks recently on Jews that trouble me. They are disturbingly familiar in theme, dwelling on Jewish conspiracies, Jewish bankers and alleged stealth-Jews in positions of power.  These new attacks claim the poor innocent Muslims are victims in all the recent unrest and not in any way the cause of it, despite the overwhelming amount of in-your-face evidence to the contrary.

The only Muslims I see as being victims in Europe or anywhere else are those who actually do seek peace and freedom (and there are plenty). Unfortunately, jihad is built into traditional Islam and it is VERY dangerous for any right-thinking Muslim to speak out against them. If you are a "good Muslim" you're a dead Muslim in many Islamist dominated countries. 

The Jihadis I have no sympathy for. The guys like the one in London that took off the head of a British soldier and then rambled on about on camera telling us how the guy deserved it and threatening to bring this down on the rest of us if we didn't submit to Islam was evil. And that seems to me to be the real threat. 

I believe there's a shell game going on here that relies on moral cowardice to be successful. It's easy to accuse the Jews of all sorts of evil. I've not seen crowds of Jews drag someone out of their car and behead them in front of their family because the weren't Jews. It's easy to blame it on Tea Party members. Have you seen the old geezers who show up for those.  They even stick around to pick up their trash afterward. These are not people to fear, unless you're afraid they might not watch your TV channel or they might vote you out of office.  I've not seen Jews OR Tea Party folk attack or kill people because of their race, religion or political opinion.

I have seen Muslims do just that and do it with malice aforethought. It's little wonder people are afraid to say anything negative about them. Poor old Salman Rushdie has had to spend the rest of his life in hiding because he wrote something  Islamic sensibilities because an Iranian mullah put out a Fatwah (death order) on him. It troubles me that any religion would even have a special word for "death order).

Muslim rebels in Syria have exterminated whole villages of Christians just in the past few months and we remain silent about it. We don't even talk about it on the mainstream news channels. Muslim Brotherhood supported groups have attacked and murdered Coptic Christians in Egypt. We are silent. We even had Muslims kill a couple of Coptic Christians here in the US and chopped them up in parts. Not a word on the ten o'clock news. The Boston Marathon bombing was the work of Muslim terrorists. They killed a nine year-old kid. Jews didn't do that. But the news and the president tried to blame it on Tea-partiers, mysterious homegrown terror groups and George Bush until it became obvious it was an Islamic terrorist act. Then they went silent.

It's as if we hope that if we don't criticize Islamic terrorist outrages or if we blame all the trouble on someone else and we show the Muslim fanatics that we also hate Jews (and, by the way, all the conservatives who criticize Islamists), then we think that somehow, maybe they won't hurt us. The Jews are under attack by people who want them dead and gone and the sooner the better. The Jewish people have decided not to go quietly. I applaud that, even when they get a little testy with me. You can hardly blame them for seeing a growing threat to them in this increasingly antisemitic world.

If we don't wake up to the fact that Islam has declared war on the rest of us, we're going to wind up precisely where we were in the Autumn of 1939. The Poles of all people should remember how that went and who their friends were and yet there are increasing rumblings against Jews even in the land that saw the horror that was Auschwitz built on their own soil by the Nazis.

13 year old girl, gang-raped by Muslim males,
is stoned for "fornication"

The guys I've started boycotting are the folk are largely those whose constant, unremitting claim is that the Jews are to blame for how people treat them. It's like saying to a woman, if you were raped, it must have been your fault. And that IS is common practice in Muslim countries. A woman who is raped and complains about it can wind up stoned to death. I've seen the video. What I want to know is where in the world is the moral outrage about that????

If a conservative had denied the same woman the right to an abortion, you could have heard the howls of outrage across the planet. It would have been the subject of special news reports on the network channels and a flurry of new laws designed to put an end to the Tea Party menace. This solves two problems for our cowardly ruling class.  It allows you to attack people who are not likely to strike back by blowing you up or kidnapping and beheading you and at the same time appeases people who WILL blow you up or kidnap and behead you.

If a redneck Tea Party Patriot had showed up at Fort Hood and shouted "Praise Jesus" and started shooting people, the government would have had 500 conservatives arrested by sundown and we'd still be seeing Michael Moore documentary retrospectives on how terrible the Tea Party is to this day. Instead, the Fort Hood shooter, a Muslim psychiatrist who went into an area crowded with soldiers, shouted "Allahu Akbar" and gunned down 35 people, was arrested and to this day sits in jail, still drawing his full military pay ($275,000 to date).  He isn't even scheduled for trial.  And his crime has been reclassified as "workplace violence" to boot.

Now that gets my attention. 

The fact that there are some bankers out there who are Jewish bothers me not at all.

Tom King
(c) 2013