Little green Kevin lives big

Odd news for a man worried about rising sea levels. 

Global warming alarmist, anti-poverty/homelessness crusader and frequent traveller, former Prime Minster Rudd, likes to live big:

The Rudd family has purchased a holiday house at Castaways Beach, south of Noosa.

According to the selling agents, Kevin Rudd and his wife, Therese Rein, have chosen well, describing the property as a "stunning contemporary" home. For $3.1 million you would expect nothing less.

Churchill: the greatest Jewish ally?

Conservatives can walk and chew gum at the same time. In entertainment news, Martin Knelman:

Millions of people credit Winston Churchill, Britain’s inspiring wartime prime minister during its darkest hours, with saving the world from Hitler.

But was Churchill also — as we’ve rarely heard — the greatest ally the Jewish people have ever had?

The answer is a passionate yes, according to Barry Avrich, whose compelling documentary — An Unlikely Obsession: Churchill and the Jews — will have its premiere at 10 p.m. Monday on the Vision channel.

The Left don’t how to deal with him (still). Anti-Semitic comrade Stalin, by way of contrast, was adored by Leftists, especially Hollywood. But their task is becoming harder:  

The starry commentators tell the story of how at a time of casual anti-Semitism at the highest social and political levels of post-Victorian British society, Churchill took inspiration from Old Testament tales, aspiring to become a latter-day Moses.

Denouncing pogroms in Russia even while British voters wondered what events so far away had to do with them, Churchill hobnobbed with influential Jewish leaders and articulated the view that the foundations of modern civilization and ethics came out of Jewish history — for which he felt the rest of the world should show its gratitude.

Hitler, by way of contrast, hobnobbed with Arab dictators and Palestinians (just like communist dictators, come to think of it). And, many now recognise that the conservative’s Conservative supported Israel more than Obama’s hero, FDR:

“Churchill’s support for a Jewish homeland may have wavered now and then over the years,” Avrich says. “But mostly he was giving the cause huge support when no other world leader was doing so. Not Franklin Roosevelt in the U.S. and certainly not William Lyon Mackenzie King in Canada.”

 The truth: He understood Moses.  

Q&A: On Churchill's relationship with Islam

Some important questions and no-nonsense answers:

Q: How did Churchill see Islam?

A: Churchill saw misogynistic Islam for what it was. In a word: totalitarian. Whereas Obama likes to feel facts, Churchill didn’t care for fantasy describing the so-called religion of peace in the frankest and therefore most politically-incorrect terms. Of Islam he said:  “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.” Today, CNN would censor Churchill, without doubt.

Q: What shaped Churchill’s views?  

A:Experience. But also his compassion. Over the years, Churchill, who was well travelled, had witnessed firsthand the realities of life for the individual under Islam. “A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men,” he wrote.

Q: Why did Churchill warn us about Islamo-fundamentalism?

A: Churchill argued in The River War, First edition, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), pp. 248-250, that Muslims could display splendid qualities: “Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.” To Churchill, however: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.” Women and children were and still are vulnerable, a reality, many feminists haven’t dealt with.

Q: Where did he see Islamism heading?

A: Churchill thought militant Islam like Nazism was a cancer. “It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.” Later too, he was well aware of Hitler’s close relationship to radical Islam, a truth our campaigning journalists are not ready (or willing) to acknowledge now. Mein Kampf is still popular in the Middle East.