Middle East peace talks to resolve the so-called Israeli-Palestinian crisis have been coming and going most of my adult life and I’m no spring chicken — free range or otherwise. And now here they are again! But this time, as opposed to all those other times, the AP’s Robert Burns informs us, “the stakes are high.” Well, yes… but maybe not in the way Burns intended.

What’s really going on here? Let’s do a thought experiment.

The last time a hopeful world got transfixed by this roundelay (although this time it might not be paying much attention anyway) was back at the tail end of the Clinton presidency when Bill was trying to untie this Gordian knot and win himself a Nobel Peace Prize. Those discussions began at Camp David in 2000 and dribbled on to Taba in early 2001 when it all went south with the Second Intifada and an Israeli election.

Tons of books and articles have been written about this, I’ve even read and forgotten a few, but I recall enough to know that a lot of ink was spilled about just what percentage of the Palestinian demands were acceded to by the Israelis. Some said as much as 98%, while others said more like 90, or maybe even a paltry 88.

Now here’s the thought experiment part. I’m assuming most of the readers here — in this case I’d wager 99% of you — have been in negotiations themselves. When you got 98% or even 88% of what you wanted, did you walk away and start a war… okay, just walk away? And if you did, why did you do that … when you were so close to making a deal? You could obviously hang around in negotiations and get most, if not all, of what you wanted.

Well, the answer is — no fair peeking — because you never wanted the deal in the first place.

First one in with that response wins the used iPod. Sorry, it’s last year’s model because the answer is so obvious. Well, obvious to everybody but the Walt/Mearsheimer crowd (who seem to think that Israel is the rough equivalent of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge) and the Peter Beinart set (who keep advising Israel to make concessions “for their own good,” whatever that is).

Indeed, most of us realize what is even more obvious. If the Palestinians had really wanted a state of their own beside Israel, a two-state solution, they could have had one thirty years ago — or more. They don’t want a two-state solution. They want a one-state solution.

Along with “progressive” (a word that should be restricted to poker), “Islamophobia” is one of the more maddening propaganda constructs of our time. Orwell could not have done better.

Of course we all know what a phobia is — an irrational fear. It comes from the Greek phobos, meaning “fear” or “morbid fear.” Common ones are acrophobia (heights) and agoraphobia (crowds).

With very minor exceptions, I have seen little irrational fear of Islam in our society. What I have seen is a lot of serious and justifiable dislike of the religion for its ideology — notably its heinous treatment of women and homosexuals and its opposition to the separation of church and state, all codified by its all-encompassing Sharia law that seeks to legislate all facets of existence while instituting a global caliphate.

Nevertheless, soi-disant liberals and progressives or whatever they want to call themselves accuse those who dislike Islam for those reasons of irrational fear. That’s like having an irrational fear of totalitarianism. Ironically, it could also be construed, according to those same progressives, as an irrational fear of their own professed liberal values.

Crazy, no? La vie a l’envers. Life upside down.

We are back in the days of the ACLU defending the Nazis marching in Skokie, except the situation is quite different. In those times, the number of Nazis in Illinois was minuscule and the likelihood of a return to the Third Reich remote. Today there are 1.5 billion adherents of Islam, 21% of the world’s population. Achieving a global caliphate is not entirely unlikely. Irrational fear or ideological battle?

Clearly I see it as ideological battle with the word “Islamophobia” itself a weapon in that battle. It is an obvious way of avoiding debate by tarnishing the opposition.

Only it is not working very well anymore. It’s become too obvious. With 70% of the country opposing the Ground Zero mosque, a huge number of people aren’t buying it. Or don’t care. How many times can you attack someone before we’re back in grammar school and it becomes a case of “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”?

Okay, I’m an Islamophobe. Bleh.

I just came back from New York where I was attending my mother’s funeral. Ruth Lichtenberg Simon was 93.

To say that your mother had a tremendous impact on your life is almost laughably obvious, but in my case its was especially true. I became a writer in part to live out my mother’s dream of being one. Something of a bon vivant, my mother quit college in the late 1930s to go to Paris and take a job with the Chicago Tribune in the hopes of beginning a literary career on the Left Bank. For reasons you can guess, she returned home much earlier than expected. Back in New York she met a young medical resident named Norman Simon – and, in rapid succession, they got married, Norman joined the Air Force and Roger was born. And then my sisters Wendy and Martha.

Like many of her generation, Ruth Simon didn’t get back to Europe for some time and never did become a writer. But she always worshipped them, perhaps inordinately, and imparted those feelings to her son. She also gave me, I now realize, an incredible gift – the sense that I could actually be one. My father, who also admired writing a great deal, was more cautious, warning that it was too risky an occupation. Well, it was, but I seem to have skated through, so far.

Reading was my mother’s passion and her favorite pastime. Up until the last two years or so, when dementia set it, she never seemed to be without a book in her hand. That is how I will always remember her.

There is something about when a second parent passes – my father died about twenty-five years ago – that has a grimmer finality to it. Darker ramifications. You have moved up to next in line in the queue.

RIP Ruth Simon.

There is an old Hollywood expression, “Funny is money,” that explains why comedy stars like Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, etc., make so much of it. They are usually the most reliable money makers at the box office.

Lionel and I refer to that movie biz cliche in the new Poliwood which segues from the Obama-induced gridlock that teed off so much of Los Angeles — Democrat and Republican — a couple of weeks ago. The President, you may recall, came out here to shake the Hollywood money tree but wound up in the home of a…. writer? Obama – no Clinton he – was unable to land the manse of a Streisand or a Geffen for his fundraiser. Hollywood and Obama really just don’t get along.

And meanwhile, Hollywood is having troubles of its own, financially. Well, maybe not compared to the rest of us.

See and read all about it the new Poliwood — Obama’s Hollywood Gridlock. It’s the first of a new and, we hope, better produced season. Let us know what you think (politely?).

Several months ago, I gave an editorial on PJTV in opposition to our government’s apparent censorship and sanitization of the use of Islamic terminology in terrorism cases. Incredible though it seemed, the 600 or so references to such terms as Jihad, radical Islam, Hamas and Hezbollah in the original 9/11 Report had been reduced to zero in the government’s 2009 Counter-Terrorism Lexicon, a 2009  FBI document and the recent Ft. Hood report.

At that time, I called upon Senators Lieberman and Collins, who had been doing some praiseworthy work in the area on their Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, to investigate this disturbing suppression, which many of us felt distorted reality and would lead to further violent acts.

I suggested four avenues for Lieberman and Collins to investigate:

1. To what degree are government documents and reports (perhaps both public and classified documents) being sanitized regarding Islamic terminology?
2. To what degree is there a program or practice of verbal censorship? What are government employees allowed to say in their internal meetings?  And are there internal policies or what the media might call “style guides” that prevent Secretaries of Departments, their staff and even the White House Press Spokesperson from using specific Islamic terminology?
3. Who are the people or organizations inside the government that are pushing for this censorship?
4. What people or groups outside the U.S. government may have been advocating this censorship?

My initial editorial was primarily in response to the events at Ft. Hood, when the religious motivations of Major Nidal Hasan were obfuscated, although the major apparently delivered unnerving lectures on the Koran to his confused Bethesda medical colleagues and shouted “Allahu Akbar” while massacring his fellow soldiers.  The near disaster at Times Square followed with the same Islamic connections of the would be bomber similarly obscured — the use of Islamic terminology still under internal government censorship.

An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi — Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Dear Madam Speaker:

I understand you are calling for an investigation of those who oppose the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero to uncover the financial sources behind their opposition.

I am one of those people. I have attacked the construction of the mosque, sometimes quite vehemently, on several occasions, on PJM and PJTV. I hereby humbly beseech you to investigate me.

Me first, Nancy! Me me me me. Investigate me!

Maybe you’ll find some money I was paid for my opposition — I haven’t found any myself — and I could use it. I’m trying to do some home remodeling and you know how pricey that gets these days.

Frankly, I’m feeling like a schmuck. I hurled all that invective and didn’t make dime one. And, unlike you, I’m not married to a multi-millionaire financier. So have a little compassion and investigate me. At least it might generate some publicity. As a writer, I could use the PR. I might parlay it into a script deal on the Nancy Pelosi Story. (I see an aging Renee Zellweger with hair extensions.)

Okay, that’s a long shot. But I don’t want you to feel bad. People might think you’re three sheets short of a yard because you overlooked the fact your buddy Harry Reid also opposes the mosque. And you wouldn’t want to investigate him, unless you’re Sharron Angle, which, trust me, we know you’re not.

And don’t let the fact that you won’t be speaker anymore get you down. Almost everybody else is happy about that. Learn to rejoice in their happiness. And be glad you won’t be embarrassing your constituents so much anymore. Many of them, even if they are knee-jerk liberals of the most conventional sort in one of the most conventionally liberal districts in the solar system, are probably secretly wondering why they ever elected you in the first place. After all, the state of California is an economic catastrophe and even liberals have 401ks.

So investigate away, I say. And if you pick me, don’t be deterred by the fact that I’m an agnostic who, unlike you, is appalled by Sharia law and its psycho-sexually sadistic treatment of women. You were quite content wearing a head scarf in Saudi Arabia. After all, you’ve already made it through the glass ceiling. Screw the rest of them.

And don’t be bothered either by Sharia law and its treatment of homosexuals. Tolerance of other traditions is the rule. Never mind if they hang gays in Iran. They’re are all fine in San Francisco and, as Ahmadinejad told us, homosexuals don’t exist in Iran anyway.

And don’t, above all, be concerned with what that Austro-British philosopher Karl Popper said. You’ve probably never heard of him anyway, so it shouldn’t alarm you. But here it is in any case:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

Got that? No, I suppose not.

Investigate away, Nancy. I’m yours.

Cordially,

Roger L. Simon

A couple of days ago, Claudia Rosett wondered on these very digital pages “Seriously, Where is Imam Feisal…?” It seems the would-be Ground Zero mosque entrepreneur has mysteriously vanished into the Middle East (or somewhere), on a stipend from the good folks at our generous State Department, to drum up what one assumes to be mountains of cash to build his great monument to religious comity — or is it the spread of sharia — in the flight line of 9/11.

The last thing anybody wants in this instance is questions. These days even someone from the MSM might — Heaven forfend! — ask him something embarrassing. (Well, maybe not, but at least some loose cannon from those nasties at Fox News.) So no surprise that Feisal Rauf, much like Sharif Ali in Lawrence, has vanished into the desert in a cloud of dust, for now anyway, although no one could mistake the Ground Zero imam for Omar Sharif, even on Rauf’s best hair day ever.

Meanwhile, questions do abound. Just what is Rauf’s intention in building the mega-mosque within yards of Ground Zero when there is plenty of other real estate in the five boroughs for such an enterprise? What is he trying to tell us and the Islamic world? (Same thing?) And what about all those rumors that he supports Hamas or that the mosque is really a stalking horse for the infiltration of sharia, with all its misogynist and homophobic decrees, into America? (Listen up, Gloria Steinem!)

And now, suddenly, Haaretz is reporting that the Muslim community has seen the error of its ways and is looking for another venue. And then we hear that is not true and Haaretz was engaged in some form of wishful thinking.

Confusing, isn’t it? And all that without even getting into the views of our president and the execrable mayor of New York, who apparently knows less about sharia law than my dead grandmother knows about Lady Gaga.

But never fear, Pajamas Media and PJTV have decided to do something truly reckless. Ask someone who speaks Arabic.

Better yet, we have asked a former terrorist — our good buddy Walid Shoebat.

Walid has been scouring the Arabic-speaking Internet for the words of Imam Rauf. Does Rauf say the same things in Arabic as he does in English? Yes, we know that almost every politician, like, say, to pick a completely random example, Michael Bloomberg, will say one thing to a certain group and a contradictory thing to another. But usually this is just so much blather, that can do no more than, say, bankrupt us. What Rauf talks about would destroy our civilization, as you will see below. Sure, he has the right to say these things, under our Constitution. But are we imbeciles to give him a royal platform on which to proclaim them?

A kerfuffle surrounding a clandestine Jerry Brown pension is generating a lot of Drudge action on this lazy August Friday. Servers at the Watchdog blog of the Orange Country Register that broke the story are bogging down. Keep clicking on it. The report is amusing. In fact, it’s a bit more than that….

It seems California’s one-time and now aspiring governor Jerry Brown has been drawing down a healthy pension from the state — perhaps double-dipping — causing a mild embarrassment to Jerry that could grow into something more than mild. At the moment he is locked in a tight race with Meg Whitman.

What’s troubling in all this is not that Brown makes a good pension — or even than there may be some discrepancy about how much he makes versus how much he deserves. It is that the whole thing is SECRET! (rare use of caps and exclam very deliberate).

Let’s think this through for half a second. At a time when pension funds are bankrupting or potentially bankrupting states all across the country, when aging populations are forcing the reconsideration of all sorts of social security programs on practically every country on Earth (countries that have them, anyway), and when the state of California — the sixth, or is it seventh, biggest economy in the world — is about to, once again, pay its employees with vouchers because it’s got zippity-do-dah in the bank, some officials of that state are receiving pensions whose size and identity we do not know and are not allowed to see.

Yes, there are secret state pensions in California. (Sounds like Novosibirsk, doesn’t it?) And we the citizens of that state are paying for them!

There is only word for this: criminal.

This mysterious fund whose beneficiaries you are not allowed to know about (even though you are paying for them) is called the Legislators’ Retirement System. It was supposed to have been reformed, but evidently it wasn’t. Who’s responsible for that little oversight, I’d like to know.

If Jerry Brown were a public official worth re-electing, not only would he completely disclose everything about his pension at this point, he would also call for a new law that makes all — and I mean all — publicly-financed pensions totally transparent.

My friend Michael Mandelbaum has a new book out this month with the timely title and theme The Frugal Superpower. It’s also short, as if Michael were reminding us this is not a good moment to overspend on excess paper in our cash-strapped world. As an advocate of the short book in general (with some obvious exceptions), I call that a win-win.

Of particular interest is his chapter “The Return of Great-Power Politics?” (note the question mark) on China and Russia, long areas of Michael’s expertise. Mandelbaum sees China as a rising power and Russia as a declining one. Makes sense, probably, but at least Russia’s prime minister-president-or-whatever-he-is-this-week took the bull by the proverbial horns during his country’s current catastrophe and became firechief-in-chief, personally dumping water from a helicopter on the conflagrations. Ours played golf, which, besides the Nero-like implications, is not a particularly frugal sport. Michael Mandelbaum take note.

Others, check out the book here.

At this very moment, the SS America, our ship of state, is steaming headlong toward Europe as if it were on a mission to fuse itself with the old continent and its values.

Can it be stopped? Will our country return to the principles on which it was founded or continue on course to become Sweden without meatballs or France without croissants?

Stand by, Mr. and Mrs. America. You’re going to find out in November.

And Pajamas Media and PJTV — the PJ Team — will be there. In the background — while you’ve been surfing, barbecuing, and generally kicking back (okay, we’ve been doing some of that too) — we’ve been planning our election coverage.

We’re going to call the coverage The Battle for America 2010. Too melodramatic? We don’t think so. As almost everyone agrees, 2010 will be one of the most epochal elections in the history of our country — a battle for America, indeed.

So how are we going to do it? We’re not a big media company with tons of employees (many of whom are being offered buy-outs anyway). We are a small group. But our roots in the blogosphere and the tea parties give us some inkling of how to put boots on the ground.

Towards that end, through the good offices of our editors, we have put together local correspondents in several of the key battleground states. As of now, those are Maryland, Colorado, Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, Kentucky, and Virginia. You will see the first of their reports on this page today.

The objective is for these correspondents to provide us on-the-ground coverage as only local people, familiar with the issues and peculiarities of their states, can. Some of these correspondents, armed with Flip cams and other instruments of the new guerrilla television, will soon be appearing on PJTV with video coverage to compliment what you are reading here on PJM.

The aim is for the correspondents to fill the gaps in the coverage being provided by the mainstream media. What are the trends? Are the tea parties really making an impact locally? Where are the bodies buried in the campaigns? Who’s being called a racist and why? What do we do about the corruption of our system? Is there any hope to redeem it?

Our team welcomes your suggestions on how to deal with these and other questions and how to cover the election in general. We’re new at this. All of us are, because a citizen approach to reporting is new — or new again.

So help us out and join the party. That ship is sailing.