With mounting Canadian combat deaths in Afghanistan, most recently the four killed last week, then rocket attacks on Canada's base at Kandahar airport on Saturday and Monday, not to mention a warning from a Taliban spokesman on Sunday that the rate of attacks will increase, it's beginning to look like the last thing we expected a mission of containment.
In the beginning, after all, we thought it was peacekeeping. Then, with a resurgence of the Taliban in the south early this summer, it looked more like combat, but still, combat in a war that could be won locally. All we had to do, it seemed, was to pacify southern Afghanistan up to the southern border with Pakistan.
The problem is that there isn't any southern border with Pakistan. And it's from that area in the south that most of the Taliban are coming in. It's a part of Pakistan called Baluchistan, a place with a lot of resources for insurgents, a rugged, isolated region where Pakistan doesn't have a lot of control.
The southern border between Pakistan and Afghanistan was scratched out through tribal lands by the British in 1893 and named the Durand line. When Pakistan got its independence from Britain in 1948, Baluchistan also wanted independence. Baluchis considered themselves a single people divided between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Pakistan took control and put down several Baluchistan rebellions.
In the 1980s, Pakistani Intelligence found restive Baluchistan useful as a base from which to help the Taliban throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Then, in 1993, the Durand line "lapsed." Pakistan moved Pashtun tribesmen into the borderless area to form a bulwark between separatist Baluchistan and Afghanistan. But the Pashtuns, instead of forming a border, have made a conduit between the two regions for Taliban recruits and the heroin traffic that supports them. To make matters worse, Pakistan's ISI, the intelligence arm that helped the Taliban against the Soviets, may have gone back to helping them again this time against the Coalition.
Baluchi separatists have little interest in helping the Pakistani army to assert itself and secure the border. Conversely, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is more interested in dealing with Baluchi separatism than he is in the added burden of clearing out the Taliban.
As a consequence, southern Afghanistan and Baluchistan are, for all practical purposes, a single "nation" neither under the control of Kabul nor of Islamabad. The Taliban gets support from local tribes for whom Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, is too far away to be of any benefit; tribes whose links of trade, locality and culture are with Baluchistan.
Baluchistan is also home to poverty, radical Islam, Madrassa schools, drug trafficking and 231,000 Afghan refugees, all of which supplies the Taliban. What's more, the smuggling routes, both for drugs and Islamist guerrillas, run from Pakistan through Baluchistan and neighbouring Iran to Iraq. There couldn't be a better expression of the area's effective autonomy than the attendance, not long ago, of six Baluchistan politicians at the funeral of a Taliban commander.
Now, Canadian troops sit at the heart of the problem. Helmand province to the west, where the British are stationed, and Kandahar Province in the south-centre, where the Canadians have their base, both border on Baluchistan. A single road runs from Quetta, Baluchistan's capital, north to Kandahar, where it joins an east-west road that runs from Kabul in the East to Herat in the west. The Canadians have to defend Kandahar, which, if captured, would open the way for the Taliban to Herat and Kabul. And like the rest of the NATO and Afghan forces, they have to win over local sympathies, bring in the infrastructure that will link the area to Kabul and win Afghan farmers away from growing the heroin used to fund the Taliban. They have to do all this in the face of an enemy backed by the bottomless resource of Baluchistan.
As long as we don't mention Baluchistan, our victories over the Taliban look noble, our casualties the price for ground gained, the Taliban's more numerous casualties the sign of a desperate and foolhardy enemy. But the Taliban don't care a lot about taking casualties. They care mostly about wearing down NATO's morale and making reconstruction costly and hopeless. Supply from Baluchistan is allowing them to fight that very war of attrition at any cost.
It follows that the war in Afghanistan must be recognized as a geopolitical problem and not simply a military problem. And unless the international community persuades Pakistan to control Baluchistan, there is little hope of depriving the Taliban and its cousin, Al Qaeda, of a base. Not to mention, of rescuing Afghanistan itself.
Posted by: john ||
08/11/2006 16:54 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[4 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Pakistan still hopes to have Afghanistan as its strategic depth, for a war with India.
It is not in its interests for NATO to succeed and Afghanistan become a strong, stable nation.
The jihadi camps are operating to provide fighters for the wars in both Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir.
Musharraf and the Pak military will not close them down. They are funded by the ISI and trained by Pak army officers masquerading as Taliban.
Posted by: john ||
08/11/2006 17:49 Comments ||
Top||
#2
John! you knowledgable cynic!
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/11/2006 17:54 Comments ||
Top||
#3
John when you talk about "strategic depth" what do you mean? An ally? Maneuvering room? It seems like Afghanistan is on the wrong side of Pakistan for good strategic depth.
The concept of the 'strategic depth' doctrine is not new: it was first articulated by the army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg and tried out in the high-profile Zarb-I-Momin military exercise in 1989-90.
Simply put, the doctrine calls for a dispersal of Pakistan's military assets in Afghanistan beyond the Durand Line and well beyond the current offensive capabilities of the Indian military. This would ensure the protection of Pakistan's military hardware.
However, to be really effective the doctrine calls for Pakistan having the ability to field these assets at a time and place of its choosing, which in turn requires not just neutralareas around the Durand Line but Pakistan-dominated areas well within Afghanistan.
Posted by: john ||
08/11/2006 19:05 Comments ||
Top||
#5
J: Musharraf and the Pak military will not close them down. They are funded by the ISI and trained by Pak army officers masquerading as Taliban.
My feeling is that the Pak government has established red lines beyond which the jihadis aren't allowed to cross - post 9/11, and the consequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, i.e. future attacks against the US can't be of the same scale. This is the meaning of Pak cooperation with the West over the airline plots. Pakistan feared major American military retaliation.
James Lileks has some words on terrorists and the media:
And now I rest. Sorry I had many things to discuss, but at the end of the day they all seem obvious. Terrorists = bad. People who think the arrests were a PR move = foolish. Likelihood substantial portions of the business fliers will subconsciously adopt the nuke em from orbit, its the only way to be sure posture after learning they cant take their laptops on the flight = high. Seriously, when I learned that they were confiscating books today, I had a vision of a plane full of people all staring straight ahead, hands in their laps, waiting, waiting, waiting for it all to be over. No books. Because, you know, they might overwhelm the cockpit crew with a dramatic reading.
Go read the rest, I'll wait.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/11/2006 15:20 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
A comprehensive overview of the four types of photo fraud committed by Reuters, August, 2006
The recent discovery that the Reuters news agency released a digitally manipulated photograph as an authentic image of the bombing in Beirut has drawn attention to the important topic of bias in the media. But lost in the frenzy over one particular image is an even more devastating fact: that over the last week Reuters has been caught red-handed in an astonishing variety of journalistic frauds in the photo coverage of the war in Lebanon.
This page serves as an overview of the various types of hoaxes, lies and other deceptions perpetrated by Reuters in recent days, since the details of the scandal are getting overwhelmed by a torrent of shallow mainstream media coverage that can easily confuse or mislead the viewer. Almost all of the investigative work has been done by cutting-edge blogs, but the proliferation of exposés might overwhelm the casual Web-surfer, who might be getting the various related scandals mixed up. In this essay I hope to straighten it all out. Rest at link; Zombie does a swell job, as usual.
Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
Updated 8/10/2006 10:44 AM ET
By Peter Schweizer
Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."
Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.
For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)
Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.
Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.
But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.
Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.
Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.
Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.
Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.
Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.
The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.
Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.
THERES A familiar ritual each time an operation to thwart a putative terrorist incident dominates the news. After the publics initial expressions of relief and shuddering contemplation of what might have been, a rising chorus of sceptics takes over, with a string of questions and hypotheses.
Was it really a serious terrorist plot, or only a bunch of misguided, alienated Muslim kids larking about with a chemistry set and a mobile phone? Sometimes, unfortunately, as with this summers ludicrously overplayed Miami plot to blow up buildings in Chicago, in which the plotters had got as far as purchasing some boots but not much else, overzealous authorities bring this sort of suspicion on themselves. But you can guarantee that every incident now, whatever the evidence, will be treated with such derisive doubt. If the police had got to the 9/11 hijackers or the 7/7 bombers in time, a sizeable chunk of respectable opinion would have dismissed them as idealistic young men with no real capacity or intent to cause harm.
The scepticism is then embellished by the conspiracy-as-diversion theory. How convenient, cluck the doubters, with rolled eyes and theatrical sarcasm, just as the Governments got some new bonfire of civil liberties planned; or just as President Bushs poll numbers are collapsing; or just as Israel is stepping up its ground attacks in southern Lebanon.
Then, of course, whether real or imaginary or government-authored, the cynics will say the plot inevitably has its roots in our own culpability. If we hadnt invaded Iraq, if Tony Blair werent George Bushs agent of oil-fuelled imperialism, if Israel werent killing innocents in Lebanon, this wouldnt have happened.
It is a neatly comprehensive schema of cynicism. If the plot turns out to be a damp squib, or the police have made some ghastly error, the sceptics will triumphantly claim that it was deliberately overdone to scare us. If the plot is real, or God forbid, as with 9/11 or 7/7 it isnt foiled in time, then they can switch seamlessly to the claim that weve only ourselves to blame.
In this internally pure worldview, the consistent theme is denial denial of the reality of the mortal threat we face, denial of the reasons we face it. The villain for these people is not the jihadist, with his agenda of destroying our very way of life. It is, as it has always been, that malign continuum of institutions of our own authority that begins with the aggressive police officer and goes all the way up via the credulous media and craven officials to No 10 and the White House.
Its too early to say with any confidence yet, but it looks as though yesterdays plot to blow up US-bound aircraft from the UK was closer to the 9/11 tragedy than the Miami-Chicago farce. If the police and intelligence authorities have succeeded in foiling such a murderous plan, the correct response is one of immense gratitude to them, pride in our security institutions and continued vigilance against future plots.
But we should also remember that our continuing existence lies not just in inconvenient security measures and uncomfortably intrusive intelligence activities, but in a grand global strategy. Success requires, in addition to the tiresome banalities of long check-in queues and tighter limits on hand luggage, a commitment, whatever the costs, to eradicate the deep global political causes that threaten us.
And for this it just wont do to claim its all about bad US foreign policy. It is repetitive but necessary to point out that we didnt start this war when we invaded Iraq. The attacks on 9/11 were planned not only before we invaded, but during a time when the US was expending extraordinary effort to try to forge a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
And if our actions have radicalised the jihadists we should remember that they are animated at least as much by our ridding Afghanistan of their spiritual brethren, the Taleban, as they are by whatever crimes the US may have committed in Baghdad.
The same applies to Israel and Lebanon. Not only is the current war the direct result of Hezbollahs aggression, its deeper causes lie in the continued determination of Israels enemies, increasingly emboldened by Tehran, to liquidate the Jewish state.
Few can look at events in Iraq or Lebanon today with optimism, but it would be dangerous folly to assume, as some do, that the West should retreat, beating its breast and promising never to offend again.
Events such as yesterdays near-miss should remind us that September 11, 2001, gave birth to a radical and dangerous new world. It required the US an imperfect country to be sure, but the only one with the power and the will to defend the basic freedoms we too easily take for granted with its allies to remake the international system. It provided a terrifying harbinger of much larger atrocities to come, when terrorists and their state supporters get hold of weapons with which they can kill millions, not thousands. This new enemy is not like old enemies. It is fundamentalist and suicidal and apocalyptic. The old system, rooted in a liberal philosophy that relied on patient diplomacy and made a virtue of being slow to respond to attacks, was unequal to this new challenge. The new system required rapid action to open up the Middle East, the festering root of all these threats to modernity.
I will grant you that the Iraq war has been characterised, in conception and execution, by blunder after blunder. And it is certainly possible that, in their failures there, the US and Britain have made the world more unstable, not less. But we should not, in our frustration, confuse the real enemies here. We should not mistake the unlooked-for dangers caused by blunders and arrogance in Washington for the targeted threats posed by nihilism and hatred in much of the Middle East, and in some of our own cities.
Yesterday provided us with yet another glimpse of the awful reality of our long war and associated miseries. We must be very careful not to ascribe their creation to our own errors.
This morning's press is abuzz with talk of TATP (acetone peroxide), a liquid explosive favoured by Middle Eastern bombers that is "easy to make and hard to detect." With advantages like that, surely there's some catch? Just so--TATP is easy to make, but far, far easier to blow one's limbs off with in the making. In its high-explosive form it's even less stable than nitroglycerin. And after five years' experience with the New Transport Security, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the scenes of security officials pouring hand lotion, hair gel, and bottled water into giant waste bins apparently represent a spectacle every bit as irrational as a witch-dunking. It didn't blow up, therefore it was safe all along! Have a nice day!
TATP is popular amongst disaffected Arab nihilists because the necessary ingredients are uncontrolled and virtually uncontrollable. It's literally a matter of putting acetone and peroxide together in the presence of any of a number of catalysts (I've seen sulfuric acid mentioned). If you're willing to invest some manpower to cover the risk of accidents, it is "easy" to fabricate.
But concealing an amount large enough to bring down an airliner in flight might be another matter. If TATP has been a threat all along, why hasn't it been used to target aircraft before? Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down over Lockerbie with Semtex. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was found with TATP in his shoes, but only as a detonator for Semtex. ABC News is reporting:
The suspected terror plotters arrested in Britain had planned to conceal their liquid or gel explosives inside a modified sports beverage drink container and trigger the device with the flash from a disposable camera. ...the plotters planned to leave the top of the bottle sealed and filled with the original beverage but add a false bottom, filled with a liquid or gel explosive. The terrorists planned to dye the explosive mixture red to match the sports drink sealed in the top half of the container.
So you tell me: we're talking about maybe 200 or 300 mL of an explosive that's not under serious compression, and that isn't quite TNT-equivalent even when it's not in liquid suspension? I realize airframes are fragile because of the annoying necessity to leave the ground, and that's certainly enough TATP to cause some death and carnage in the cabin. I'm not sure it would reliably breach the skin of the aircraft, let alone guarantee that it crashed. Even assuming you didn't bump into anything on the way through the security inspection. Or attract a whole bunch of attention by carrying a bottle of Gatorade like it was a carton of sparrow's eggs. Or get the dye job not quite right.
Obviously there is much more yet to be disclosed about this thwarted plot. What I want to hear is a sensible threat model. I'm not concerned about an advance justification of the current madness going on in American and British airports. A temporary overreaction is perhaps excusable--assuming that the resources diverted to examining carry-ons haven't been taken away from security screening of checked baggage, which all our experience tells us is more dangerous to aircraft. In fact, if I were Osama bin Laden and I wanted to smuggle something dangerous onto an airplane in 2006, I think my exact first step would be to get a couple dozen movement "goofballs" to risk their freedom and hides on the biggest diversionary action imaginable.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/11/2006 12:27 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Interesting article. Here's a question in relation to this part: So you tell me: we're talking about maybe 200 or 300 mL of an explosive that's not under serious compression, and that isn't quite TNT-equivalent even when it's not in liquid suspension?
Would that much be enough to blow open the reinforced cockpit door?
#2
PanAm 103 (747) was blown out of the sky with 300 grams (11 ounces) of semtex. The shoe bomber had 3-6 ounces of TATP and PETN in his shoes. The video where the feds blew up the exposives in a plane on the ground showed it was enough explosives to destroy the plane.
Posted by: ed ||
08/11/2006 22:17 Comments ||
Top||
Americans went to work yesterday to news of another astonishing terror plot against U.S. airlines, only this time the response was grateful relief. British authorities had busted the "very sophisticated" plan "to commit mass murder" and arrested 20-plus British-Pakistani suspects. As we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11 without another major attack on U.S. soil, now is the right moment to consider the policies that have protected us--and those in public life who have fought those policies nearly every step of the way. . . .
"This wasn't supposed to happen today," a U.S. official told the Washington Post of the arrests and terror alert. "It was supposed to happen several days from now. We hear the British lost track of one or two guys. They had to move." Meanwhile, British antiterrorism chief Peter Clarke said at a news conference that the plot was foiled because "a large number of people" had been under surveillance, with police monitoring "spending, travel and communications."
Let's emphasize that again: The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.
And almost on political cue yesterday, Members of the Congressional Democratic leadership were using the occasion to suggest that the U.S. is actually more vulnerable today despite this antiterror success. Harry Reid, who's bidding to run the Senate as Majority Leader, saw it as one more opportunity to insist that "the Iraq war has diverted our focus and more than $300 billion in resources from the war on terrorism and has created a rallying cry for international terrorists."
Ted Kennedy chimed in that "it is clear that our misguided policies are making America more hated in the world and making the war on terrorism harder to win." Mr. Kennedy somehow overlooked that the foiled plan was nearly identical to the "Bojinka" plot led by Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to blow up airliners over the Pacific Ocean in 1995. Did the Clinton Administration's "misguided policies" invite that plot? And if the Iraq war is a diversion and provocation, just what policies would Senators Reid and Kennedy have us "focus" on?
Surveillance? Hmmm. Democrats and their media allies screamed bloody murder last year when it was leaked that the government was monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA wasn't designed for, nor does it forbid, the timely exploitation of what are often anonymous phone numbers, and the calls monitored had at least one overseas connection. But Mr. Reid labeled such surveillance "illegal" and an "NSA domestic spying program." Other Democrats are still saying they will censure, or even impeach, Mr. Bush over the FISA program if they win control of Congress.
This year the attempt to paint Bush Administration policies as a clear and present danger to civil liberties continued when USA Today hyped a story on how some U.S. phone companies were keeping call logs. The obvious reason for such logs is that the government might need them to trace the communications of a captured terror suspect. And then there was the recent brouhaha when the New York Times decided news of a secret, successful and entirely legal program to monitor bank transfers between bad guys was somehow in the "public interest" to expose. . . .
In short, Democrats who claim to want "focus" on the war on terror have wanted it fought without the intelligence, interrogation and detention tools necessary to win it. . . .
The real lesson of yesterday's antiterror success in Britain is that the threat remains potent, and that the U.S. government needs to be using every legal tool to defeat it. At home, that includes intelligence and surveillance and data-mining, and abroad it means all of those as well as an aggressive military plan to disrupt and kill terrorists where they live so they are constantly on defense rather than plotting to blow up U.S.-bound airliners.
As the time since 9/11 has passed, many of America's elites have begun to portray U.S. government policies as a greater threat than the terrorists themselves. George Soros and others have said this explicitly, and their political allies in Congress and the media have staged a relentless campaign against the very practices that saved innocent lives this week. We doubt that many Americans who will soon board an airplane agree.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/11/2006 07:59 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Something just occurred to me: Let us assume for the moment that the Democrats actually gain a majority in Congress and begin impeachment proceedings against W. While I shudder to think of what it would mean (namely, that we're screwed and doomed six ways from Sunday), let us further assume that they succeed in convicting him. This will . . . put Dick Cheney in the White House, will it not? Would they seriously try and take down both elected officials? And, in the absence of anything except sophistry, how likely is it that they'd succeed before most Americans got pissed enough to exercise either recalls or their Second Amendment rights?
Posted by: The Doctor ||
08/11/2006 16:32 Comments ||
Top||
Its that old generalization bugaboo that annoys. I try not to generalize in long-form stuff, because too many crass reductive accusations dont help to persuade. On the other hand, persuasion is overrated. A good friend broke with me, apparently forever, because I had Changed; I once sought consensus as the ultimate goal, and always argued everyone towards the middle, and now I had become Hard and Adamantine in my views. . . . As a bar exercise, as a way of whiling away the hours, its fun to play the middle against the extreme, and see if an unrepentant hard leftie will admit there were actually Communists in the US in the fifties, but in the end the Rosenbergs will matter more than 10 million starved Ukranians. So Ive come to subscribe to Pragerism: clarity matters more than agreement.
Anyway. That said, generalizations can be useful, or not. Depends. The statement that Democrats have a national-security image problem with many swing voters is reasonable; saying Democrats want to negotiate with terrorists less so, but not entirely unmoored from reality, since you could make the case that the Democrats seem to be adopting a posture of mediation, international conclaves, and addressing the root causes of modern Muslim rage, which can be traced to either the invasion of Iraq by the US or the invasion of Lebanon by Israel or the Palestine by Romans, depending on who you talk to. Its a partisan statement, but a smart Democrat can bat it back in a way that makes for a good argument, if everyone agrees to operate in good faith. Saying that all Democrats are cut-and-run surrender gibbons who want to leave the field so they can fine-tune the National Compulsory Sodomy Act is patently false, and not exactly helpful to the overall debate. Of course, sometimes unfair and cruel exaggeration can be used to make a point, but a steady diet is as intellectually nutritious as a bag of Doritos. It gets tiresome to have to point out that not all Democrats believe what Howard Dean says, just as few Republicans are gung-ho about some of President Bushs more regrettable utterances. But in the end you go to war with the party you have, and you have to make a few generalizations based on what the luminaries and theoreticians of a party are saying.
While this works with political parties, however, it doesnt work with the media. I had an interesting argument on the Hewitt show with his fill-in host, the estimable and tenacious Jed Babbin, over the medias performance in the war. I ended up defending the media and it seems almost absurd to use a single word to describe so many people in so many places in so many organizations because I dont believe they are consciously, willingly, aiding the Dark Side to achieve the defeat of Bush. I think Mike Wallace gave a post-interview tongue bath to the Iranian President because Mr. Wallace is a vain old fool who has soaked his brain for decades in the holy water of Objectivity, and believes that putting a nice gloss on a fellow whos been castigated in some quarters makes Mike Wallace look like the smart, canny iconoclast he knows he is. . . .
Its possible some CBS editors decided it was necessary to send Mike to Iran to get the Real Iranian President and calm everyone down, because the editors think that too many Americans believe he spends his mornings kicking puppies with steel-toed boots, and therefore we must invade. I dont know. Theres a certain historical value in interviewing these guys. If some pro-Nazi group in the 30s had sent a camera crew to follow Adolph around for a week, and the footage surfaced tomorrow, CBS would bid for it and not because they thought he was a swell fellow. Bottom line: its possible that the CBS producers believe that the Iranian president is a great guy, misunderstood, and that Irans government is made up of genial humane hirsute guys who behave as they do because of American pressure. But I doubt it. More likely they subscribe the usual notions common to the class contempt for the mullahs, brusquely stated to establish their bonafides, followed by a reminder of US meddling, so no one thinks they dont see the Whole Picture. Theyre all about the Whole Picture.
The trouble is that the Whole Picture obscures the particulars of the moment, and those particulars are crucial. Earth, viewed from space, is united. Zoom in a bit, and the story gets complicated. What irritates me about many in the media isnt some imagined desire to DESTROY THE WEST, because thats nonsense. Its the disinclination to acknowledge that they have a pervasive mindset whose underlying preconceptions are subjective, not objective. Thats all. Hell, thats enough. Look: Ive been in newsrooms for thirty years. Ive been to enough meetings, enough editorial conferences, enough planning sessions, enough news huddles. People who think that the editors and writers get together to figure out how to twist the news and hide the inconvenient truths would be greatly disappointed. It doesnt work that way. It doesnt have to. No one at Reuters, I am sure, hired a Middle Eastern stringer to cover the Israel Hezbollah War and asked him to make Israel look bad. When the pictures were bad or even worse, poignant they fit the mindset: war is bad, and its badness trumps all, including the causes. Hezbollah may have been wrong to send rockets into Israel, but look at this picture of a childs toy in the rubble and tell me you still support the war. Any war.
If anyone in Reuters wondered whether the photographer might have sympathies that would make his work worth a second look, they kept it to themselves. Im not saying that they should have refrained from hiring the lousy photoshopper because he was apparently a Middle Eastern Muslim. Im saying that the fact he was a Middle Eastern Muslim provided him automatic insulation, because the idea that there was anything about those characteristics that might affect his objectivity is anathema to some newsroom cultures.
I know this seems like hair-splitting, but its important to me. Clarity, and all that. (He said, after writing 1200 lugubrious words.) If I was still in consensus mode, Id try to get some editors to agree that it was highly unlikely theyd ever have a reporter stuck in a Mossad dungeon with a knife to their throat while the interrogator demanded to know if they were a goy. And it was not impossible that some reporter might find himself on the brink of a tracheal shave while an angry man demanded to know if he was a Jew. Right? So perhaps that the other side sees things differently, and hence our entire script of cycles of violence and youths radicalized to militant Islam by the deposition of a secular butcher might, perhaps, be insufficient to explain why young men want to blow up planes over the Atlantic?
Can we agree on that?
Well, good. Consensus.
Hush- dont spoil it with a but. Lets just enjoy the moment.
Hit the link for embarrassing photos of Mike Wallace and James Lileks in their younger days.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/11/2006 07:16 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[5 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Allways seeking consensus forces people to extremes in order to move the argument their way.
#2
Not to go all Leninist and everything, but the subjective attitude of pacifism is objectively anti-West. The refusal to take sides is objectively anti-West. The belief that the West is always the 6'4", 220 lbs. dude and every potential enemy is always the tiny dog tugging at our pants leg is objectively anti-West and racist.
The "West" is a set of shared values about government, collective defense, rights of citizens, sovereignty, inviobility of borders, etc. When you throw out Westphalia and the right to self-defense, and and start hiring large numbers of stringers that don't support your self-professed code of of journalistic ethics (and refuse to edit their submissions since that might be racist), you are being ant-West.
#3
Lileks is right on with this. It's a shorter, more concise version of what Goldberg wrote in "Bias".
The media "thing" regarding their distaste for western exceptionalism isn't a conspiracy, it's a confluence of purpose of a million journalists. Nobody met in a dark alley to come up with a plot. Nobody had to.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/11/2006 14:43 Comments ||
Top||
#4
NMU: Can't remember who coined the phrase, but I believe the phenomenon is called "the herd of independent minds."
Posted by: Mike ||
08/11/2006 14:57 Comments ||
Top||
by Dean Barnett ("SoxBlog"), posting at Hugh Hewitt
As you all know by now, a terrorist plot in England was foiled in the last 24 hours. The plan was to blow up something like a half dozen passenger planes, perhaps over American cities. The British authorities characterized the plot as an effort to commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale.
What a poignant choice of words that is. One of the most important conclusions of the 9/11 forensics was that 9/11 was partly caused by our lack of imagination. . . .
HERES WHAT IVE LEARNED from personal experience. As Soxblog readers know, Im a 39 year old man with Cystic Fibrosis. For those of you not familiar with CF, 39 is pretty old for someone with the disease. Im doing quite well now, but Ive had some extremely rough patches and some very dark days in the not too distant past.
When you go through such times, the first instinct is to resist imagining the unimaginable. Our human instinct is to recoil from the worst; if theres something that makes recoiling easy, it becomes all the more likely that youll choose to not face your unpleasant reality.
If you have a serious disease, you eventually wind up going one of two routes: One is that you confront your problems, deal with them in a hard-headed way and make peace with the hand youve been dealt. I call this dealing with your New Normal; the old normal was better, but the New Normal becomes your reality. It may be less than optimal, it may be downright dreadful, but its your new reality and you find a way to deal with it.
The other choice is to deny the situation. There are tons of ways to rationalize such a decision without using the pejorative term denial. You can defiantly say that you wont let your condition rule your life. If you do, people will applaud your toughness. These are often the same people who always tell you how healthy you look, even when you look and feel like death warmed over.
So you live your life without accepting or dealing with your New Normal. And you reap terrible consequences.
AS FREE SOCIETIES, the Western democracies have a choice of whether or not face up to the existential challenge they face from Radical Islam. The lure of seeking an easy way out is almost irresistible. The siren song of sitting down and reasoning with the Hezbollahs and Ahmadenijads of the world is powerful. If we could just do something to convince ourselves that all is well and that theres nothing to fear, life sure would be easier.
Just as is the case with an illness, there are a lot of people willing to tell us that are fears are overblown. If you want to believe that George W. Bush and the Patriot Act are the greatest threats to our way of life, you wont have much trouble finding a professor on a nearby college campus to buttress your theory. If you want to think that there was nothing really going on in London to warrant any concern and all the news this morning is just Karl Roves response to Joe Liebermans defeat, youll easily locate a prominent blogger to offer his concurrence.
But its past time we face the facts and realize that this is our New Normal. Its worse than the old normal, the one that we had before 9/11 when we felt completely safe even though we werent.
This is the one small point on which I would disagree -- the Old Normal was worse, even though it didn't feel like it, because we were just as unsafe as now, but we were almost wilfully ignoring it. Osama knew he was at war with us, but we didn't.
Its time we stop having a sphere of things that are unimaginable. Lets imagine airliners exploding over our cities. Lets imagine a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv. Lets imagine a mushroom cloud over New York.
Lets imagine how such things might happen. And then lets resolve to stop them.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/11/2006 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Another good article. It seems a major realization is occuring. Years late for us, but important nonetheless.
André Glucksmann on reactions to the war in Lebanon: From surrealistic geopolitics to apocalyptic delusion.
The outrage of so many outraged people outrages me. On the scales of world opinion, some Muslim corpses are light as a feather, and others weigh tonnes. Two measures, two weights. The daily terrorist attacks on civilians in Baghdad, killing 50 people or more, are checked off in reports under the heading of miscellaneous, while the bomb that took 28 lives in Qana is denounced as a crime against humanity. Only a few intellectuals like Bernard-Henri Lévy or Magdi Allam, chief editor of the Corriere della Sera, find this surprising. Why do the 200,000 slaughtered Muslims of Darfur not arouse even half a quarter of the fury caused by 200-times fewer dead in Lebanon? Must we deduce that Muslims killed by other Muslims don't count - whether in the eyes of Muslim authorities or viewed through the bad conscience of the west? This conclusion has its weak spots, because if the Russian Army - Christian, and blessed by their popes - razes the capital of Chechnian Muslims (Grosny, with 400,000 residents) killing tens of thousands of children in the process, this doesn't count either. The Security Council does not hold meeting after meeting, and the Organization of Islamic States piously averts its eyes. From that we may conclude that the world is appalled only when a Muslim is killed by Israelis.
Should we thus presume that the public at large implicitly endorses the ideas that Ahmadinedjad shouts at the top of his lungs? And yet so many of those sceptics who display consternation over bombings in Lebanon seem shocked if you suspect them of anti-Semitism. I want to trust them. We don't want to imagine that the entire planet is mired in anti-Jewish paranoia! But then the matter becomes even more puzzling. What is the source of this hemiplegia? Why is the world frightened by Israeli bombs alone?
Perhaps the reason why the deaths in Lebanon are so disproportionately shocking as compared with the starving people of Darfur and the ruins of Chechnya is that they are seen as a surrealistic geopolitical signal. Anyone who follows the news in Gaza or Qana does not simply count the dead on a particularly violent day - rather, the coffins of these victims encircle the aura of a fatal promise - a promise that the hundreds of thousands of corpses from Africa and the Caucasus have no chance of approaching. Haven't legions of experts - for decades now - identified the Mideast conflict as the centre of the world's chaos and the key to its pacification? Is there any diplomat who does not repeat ad nauseum the formula about the gates to a hell of future wars versus the gates to world harmony, all of which open in Jerusalem? A never-changing script haunts 21st century minds. The script maintains that everything is decided on the banks of the Jordan. In its most grim version, that means: As long as four million Israelis and as many Palestinians are facing off against one another, 300 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims are condemned to live in hate, bloody slaughter and desperation. And the rosier version: We just need peace in Jerusalem to put out the fires in Tehran, Karachi, Khartoum and Baghdad and to set the course for universal harmony.
Have our sages gone crazy? Do they really believe that sans Israeli-Palestinian conflict nothing bad would have happened, neither the deadly Khomeini Revolution, nor the bloody Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq, nor the decade of Islamic terrorism in Algeria, nor the Taliban in Afghanistan, nor the angry warriors of God the world over? The sad, reverse hypothesis is seldom posed, but it is actually much more likely: Every truce along the Jordan is fleeting, as long as the palaces and streets, the majority of the intelligentsia and the officials of the Muslim world hang on to their anti-western passion. Globalization (which entails the dismantling of economic barriers but more importantly all social and mental barriers) necessarily leads to tough and terrible defensive reactions. The development of anti-western ideologies in Germany, from Fichte to Hitler, does not depend on the foundation of the Zionist state. The anti-western affect is constantly renewed in Russia, from the tsars to Stalin and on up through Putin. And it would be naive to presume that the Iranian lust for power, in search of its Khomeinistic force de frappe, uses the "Jewish question" as anything more than a pretence for a universal Jihad. Does anyone think that the green subversion, after erasing Israel from the map, will mark its success by laying down its weapons?
A hypocritical geopolitics, which ordains the Mideast as a basic pillar of the world order, has become the religion of the European Union, the belief of the unbelievers and of the doubters of the west. Post-modern thinkers have no justification in proclaiming the end of all ideologies. In fact, we are swimming in an ideological illusion and have secretly exchanged our deceptive hopes for a final battle with a fearful incantation conjuring a catastrophe to end all catastrophes, that is just as absolute. While our head swarms with surrealistic ghosts, our heart perceives, in every photo from Lebanon, the death of humankind. Jerusalem is only the centre of the world because it is considered the centre of the end of the world. Our illusions feed on apocalyptic notions.
And so every Mideast conflict is like a rehearsal for the end of days. Just look at the undefinable war of cultures, if you need convincing. And anyone taking that position is resigned to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The years of bombing of Israeli cities by the rockets of the Party of God become a foretaste of the Iranian godfather's promised destruction. And so, as Clausewitz already noted with irony, it is not the aggressor who starts the war. Instead it is he who steps in to stop the aggression. So Israel is guilty. Guilty of a collectively fomented fantasy of the end of days. From surrealistic geopolitics to delusion - just one step.
This article first appeared in Figaro on 8 August, 2006.
André Glucksmann is a French philosopher and writer.
Translation: Toby Axelrod.
I couldn't have said it better myself. A few weeks back it was my birthday, and my equally non-Jewish journalist friend Chas Newkey-Burden took his life in his hands and presented me with a cuddly toy. Now, normally I feel that people who bother with cuddly toys over the age of eight are either mad and/or prostitutes, but this little sweetie stole my heart. A honey-brown camel with a heart-melting smile and a jaunty cap, he proudly wore an Israeli Army uniform with a fetching hole cut out for his hump. "I've named him Bibi," Chas told me, obviously in honor of our mutual crush.
Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.
One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.
Ehud Olmert may decide to accept the French proposal for a cease-fire and unconditional surrender to Hezbollah. That is his privilege. Olmert is a prime minister whom journalists invented, journalists protected, and whose rule journalists preserved. Now the journalists are saying run away. That's legitimate. Unwise, but legitimate.
However, one thing should be clear: If Olmert runs away now from the war he initiated, he will not be able to remain prime minister for even one more day. Chutzpah has its limits. You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power. You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month, wear down deterrent power, bring the next war very close, and then say - oops, I made a mistake. That was not the intention. Pass me a cigar, please.
There is no mistake Ehud Olmert did not make this past month. He went to war hastily, without properly gauging the outcome. He blindly followed the military without asking the necessary questions. He mistakenly gambled on air operations, was strangely late with the ground operation, and failed to implement the army's original plan, much more daring and sophisticated than that which was implemented. And after arrogantly and hastily bursting into war, Olmert managed it hesitantly, unfocused and limp. He neglected the home front and abandoned the residents of the north. He also failed shamefully on the diplomatic front.
Still, if Olmert had come to his senses as Golda Meir did during the Yom Kippur War, if he had become a leader, established a war cabinet and called the nation to a supreme effort that would change the face of the battle, a penetrating discussion of his failures could be postponed. But in blinking first over the past 24 hours, he has become an incorrigible political personality. Therefore, the day Nasrallah comes out of his bunker and declares victory to the whole world, Olmert must not be in the prime minister's office. Post-war battered and bleeding Israel needs a new start and a new leader. It needs a real prime minister.
An article in a leading Norwegian newspaper last weekend lambasted Israel and Judaism and said Israel has lost its right to exist in its present form.
Entitled "God's chosen people," the article by author Jostein Gaarder in Aftenposten is raising a storm in Norway. Gaarder, author of the book "Sophie's World," links the Israel Defense Forces' acts in Lebanon to Jewish history and foresees the coming dismantling of the state as it exists today, with the Jews becoming refugees.
In an interview with Haaretz Gaarder said Thursday that he was misunderstood. "As John Kennedy declared in Germany 'I am a Berliner', I say now 'I am a Jew'", he said.
The article compares Israel's government, the Afghan Taliban regime and South African apartheid, and states, "We no longer recognize the State of Israel" and "the State of Israel in its current form is history."
"We call child murderers 'child murderers,' and will never accept that they have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages," Gaarder writes. "Shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hezbollah or the State of Israel!"
Gaarder repeatedly refers to the role Judaism plays in Israel's territorial aspirations, writing, "We don't believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this nation's fancies and weep over its misdeeds."
He writes, "It is the State of Israel that fails to recognize, respect or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God's assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem."
The article has triggered off thousands of comments and dozens of stormy debates in the Norwegian media. It also has sparked off a debate about Gaarder's alleged anti-Semitic tendencies and the right to criticize Israel.
The Jewish journalist and music critic Mona Levin spoke out in public against Gaarder and said she was shocked by the Norwegian government's silence. She blasted the cabinet for not denouncing what she described as "the most appalling thing I've read since 'Mein Kampf.'"
"We're dealing with an ignorant man, a hate-filled man who derides Judaism," she said in an interview from Oslo. Levin said it was unacceptable that a man of such international repute (26 million copies of his book have been sold) could attack an entire ethnic group and that politicians would remain silent.
"This is a classic anti-Semitic manifesto, which cannot even disguise itself as criticism of Israel," said Professor Dina Porat, head of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University.
"The writer does not address the conflict in its contemporary context but reaches back thousands of years to assert that the Jewish people have traits of cruelty that have remained unchanged and account for the current war," she says.
Porat says that according to the European Union, denying Israel's right to exist -- arguing that its existence is racist -- is an anti-Semitic statement. She also finds in Gaarder's text the use of classic anti-Semitic symbols, like infanticide.
"I've been head of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism for 15 years and it's not every day that I get to read such a radical document, in terms of its content and rhetoric," she said.
Gaarder writes, among other things, "We do not believe that Israel mourns 40 killed Lebanese children more than it has lamented for more than 3,000 years 40 years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as 'fitting punishment' for the people of Egypt."
He writes that the first Zionist terrorists started operating in the days of Jesus.
Speaking to Haaretz on Tuesday, a day before he stopped talking to the media, Gaarder said he was misunderstood and emphasized that he is a friend of Israel and the Jews.
"I think what Hezbollah is doing is terrible," he said, adding that he supports Israel's right to exist as a national homeland for the Jews since 1948.
Gaarder said he does not question Israel's right to exist, "but not as an apartheid state." He said he could understand how his article could be interpreted as "anti-Jewish" and admitted that if he were to rewrite it, he would change a few things.
He is aware he has hurt the Jews in Norway, he said, adding that he would make sure the article is not translated into other languages. However, Gaarder refused to retract publicly his main theme.
Aftenposten's political editor Harald Stanghelle said he saw no problem publishing Gaarder's article.
"Of course I don't agree with what he says," he said. "But an open debate on the issue is better than a covert one.
"Gaarder's voice is important in the Norwegian discourse and it was right to publish the article," he said.
Meanwhile, the furor over Gaarder's article coincides with a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Norway, including the desecration of an Oslo Synagogue and cemeteries and the assault and battery of a skullcap-wearing youngster.
#2
Gaarder said he was misunderstood and emphasized that he is a friend of Israel and the Jews.
Was he riding shotgun with Mel Gibson? Looks like they've got their stories straight.
You lose the right to exist when you aren't willing to fight for it. Israel knew that from the beginning. The Europeans appear to have forgotten it and, unfortunately for them, will probably realize it the hard way soon.
This must be the best selling book by a Norwegian by at least an order of magnitude. I wonder who bought it?
Otherwise, if Israel has lost it's right to exist in its present form then the solution is a bigger Israel. At least more Arabs will get to enjoy legal due process and civil rights.
#5
That's because Israel = zionism, zionism = racism, and racism = nazism.
Hence, israeli are nazis, paleos are WWII jews, and this free us europeans from the neurotic Holocaust guilt we've been forcefed... thus allowing progressives to be antisemite again, even though this is a big no-no (rightwing antisemitism is a serious thoughtcrime, but antizionism is not, in fact it's progressive).
#6
The Jewish journalist and music critic Mona Levin spoke out in public against Gaarder and said she was shocked by the Norwegian government's silence. She blasted the cabinet for not denouncing what she described as "the most appalling thing I've read since 'Mein Kampf.'"
No offense to the other posters here, and I agree with you, but I'm a LOT more concerned with the antizionism of Ahmadinijad. He actually intends to do something about it. I guess his speeches aren't "written down" so that doesn't count like this goon's book.
Posted by: BA ||
08/11/2006 14:54 Comments ||
Top||
#7
Sophie's World has to be the most tedious book I've given up on.
Not to bore you with the details, but all the previous problems in the world existed because there wasn't a United Nations and women didn't have rights.
#8
Norwegian author says Israel has lost right to exist
That's why Israel has a formidable military and a second strike nuclear capability - so that its citizens don't have to rely on the protection and help of Norwegians to survive...
Posted by: john ||
08/11/2006 16:45 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Um, no. Israel has not lost the right to exist.
A state has the right to exist for as long as it can defend itself. The moment that it can no longer do so, the moment that someone else's army is able to march in and take over - that's when a state loses the "right" to exist. You cannot take that right away, and it is intrinsic to all states - despicable ones like Iran included.
Posted by: The Doctor ||
08/11/2006 16:49 Comments ||
Top||
#1
Hezzballah could not put 12,000 rockets in Lebanon without the full cooperation, complicity and knowledge of the Lebanese government. Hezzballah has indeed hijacked the Lebanese governmemt. It is no longer a fledgling democracy because of Syria and Iran.
I particularly like the bomb magnet lady (she's the really unlucky lady that was bombed out of two places she lived in within a few days of each other);
Image is at
"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4081/944/400/263308.jpg" - I give up, I keep getting the Roadside America site
But they're all good!
Posted by: Tony (UK) ||
08/11/2006 4:13 Comments ||
Top||
#3
You can even get Green-Tshirt-Guy T-shirts, coffee mugs, and coasters. Collect the whole set!
#5
I understand that Green Helmet Guy is the founder of First Responders Without Borders. His group uses ambulances, stretchers, and camera crews to furnish cadavers and propaganda where needed, throughout the world.
#8
Man what a site! I for one hope this makes the big blogs and out to the Hannity/Rush crowds. This needs to be spread far and wide! Oh, the propaganda, lol!
Posted by: BA ||
08/11/2006 14:48 Comments ||
Top||
This Muzz uses every lie in the book to pretend he is refuting inherent Muzz disloyalty. If you read his responses to the following, you will read that Muslims can marry Christians and Jews. What he doesn't say is: only as long as the Muzz is male. FeMuzzies have been put to death for physical contact with a "kaffir."
Theologically, No - Because their allegiance is to Allah, the moon god of Arabia. Muz cannot accept universal values, because these don't derive from the unholy koran.
Religiously, No - Because no other religion is accepted by their Allah except Islam. Their allegiance is to the five pillars of Islam and the Koran. The purpose of the wretched life of a Muz, is to enslave worshippers for the Moon-god
Geographically, No - Because their allegiance is to Mecca, to which they turn to in prayer five times a day. Islam is a political ideology, and democracy and nationality are anathema to a Muz.
Socially, No - Because their allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews. Plus their men are instructed to marry four women and beat his wife when she disobeys him. Polygamy is for men only, and wife beating is compulsory (unholy koran 4:84) for a Muz
Politically, No - Because they must follow the mullah (spiritual leaders), who teaches annihilation of Israel and destruction of America. Muzz believe that non-Muzz polities promote evil, and prevent good. That is what the Wahabi' Muttawa practises
Intellectually, No - Because they cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt. Muzz will not touch a Bible unless taqiyah dictates that they do so.
Philosophically, No - Because Islam, Muhammad, and the Koran do not allow freedom of religion and expression. Democracy and Islam cannot coexist. Every Muslim government is either dictatorial or autocratic. Muzz have to belief that the Moon-God alone is sovereign
Spiritually, No - Because where as we declare our country to be "one nation under God," and believe God to be loving and kind, their God, Allah, does not allow allegiance to a Christian God and does not promote love and kindness. Muzz believe that non-Muzz cannot properly perceive the Moon-God.
I think that the most obvious answer is in the way Muslims are referred to within the article itself: They're not Paki-Americans, or Arab-Americans, or even Middle-Eastern- or Persian-Americans, but Muslim-Americans. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that I absolutely despise the *YOUR SPECIAL IDENTITY GROUP HERE*-American title (just be satisfied with being an American, dammit!), notice that this is the only group which is explicitly identified not with a geographical or national area, but with a religion. Every other faith allows for a man to have multiple loyalties even if the loyalty to God is the most important (and Christianity's own Paul even emphasizes this, I believe - although I haven't read anything by him in a while, so I might be wrong), but Islam doesn't - and it's right there: You're a Muslim first and an American a poor second.
Posted by: The Doctor ||
08/11/2006 16:44 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe 
