JANET DALEY
It was probably bound to happen â if not now, then eventually. There is an all-out war on the streets and almost inevitably somebody was going to be killed by the authorities who was believed to be implicated but then turned out not to be. Given the peculiarly ruthless tactic of suicide bombing, who could take the risk of allowing someone who seemed to be a plausible suspect to ignite himself in a public place?
Next time the police may hesitate, or give the benefit of the doubt. You can count the casualties then.
Given that we are up against an enemy who states categorically that he âloves deathâ as opposed to the weak and decadent West which so pathetically clings to life, how could anyone dare to assume that the likely man who chooses to run to the London Underground rather than stop on order is blameless? The Metropolitan police say this shooting of an apparently innocent man in Stockwell is a âtragedyâ, as indeed it is. But what would the scale of the tragedy have been if they had given him the benefit of the doubt and got it wrong? How many nanoseconds do you have in which to make the choice? And what, as a law enforcement officer, is the inescapable priority?
The public's the priority. Period.
The Muslim extremists have produced something of a genuine martyr: a victim of what â if he proves to have been Muslim â may be described as the Westâs Islamophobia, when he was a victim of the terrorist campaign itself. We must not equivocate about this. The outrage of the Muslim community will be genuine.
Except that he doesn't appear to have been a Muslim. There's probably a lot of gnashing to teeth going on down at the old Islamic center right now, wondering how they can sign him up posthumously.
The protests of the civil liberties lobby have so far been commendably muted, but the anti-war brigade, who will find yet more grounds for condemning our foreign policy, will be more vociferous than ever. But we are not to blame â that is, we as a society, we as a democracy, we as a population. We must not lose our grip on the truth: that Britain is a free, tolerant and generous country that has bent over backwards to accommodate its culturally diverse migrants.
Britain should render sincere regrets — not apologies — and do all it can for the man's family. Britain should also be just as ruthless with the next guy in the same situation.
The killing of this man is a small victory for Islamic terrorism which, like all movements that attempt to undermine societies from within, has always hoped to provoke the authorities into what could be described as persecution. (Old-fashioned communist agitation had a similar logic: cause the police to display the true ârepressive nature of the capitalist stateâ and you will win converts.) It has thrown everything â including the lives of its own young â into the battle for the minds of the Muslim population who must be made to believe that their own country is the enemy.
And it found the perfect strategy with which to do it. Not just mass murder, but self-destructive nihilism. How do you fight an enemy who is not only prepared to sacrifice his own life, but who positively wants to die? One who explicitly begs you for the opportunity to destroy himself? This is a small victory for a hatred that goes beyond politics, or nationalism, or tribal grievance, or any of the quasi-rational things that are subject to negotiation and reasonable argument. There is no debate to be had here. We are in the territory of outright madness. Those who pretend that there could be some accommodation with the aims of this movement â who see it as a new power balance in the world that must be addressed in foreign policy terms â are criminally irresponsible. There is nothing short of the extinction of democratic, secular society that would appease this enemy.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/25/2005 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[5 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Janet seems to have her head on straight. Good for you Ms. Daley!
WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.
Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.
The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"
Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."
and a quick leap to the end:
Hmm. Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lop-sided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. I would like to think that the newly fortified Age columnists are representative of the culture's mood, but, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on Kennedy: anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia's old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.
Now go read the whole thing. Steyn is wonderful, as usual. :-)
"Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight â The Only American in Britain's Cambridge Spy Ring,"
by Roland Perry
Da Capo Press, $27.50
By Arthur Herman
One great mystery remains about the Cold War: Why did Communism always find its fiercest supporters from society's upper class â the very class communism vowed to destroy? Why did so many intelligent, affluent people in America and the West embrace the greatest system for mass murder ever devised and devote themselves to undermining the freest societies ever created, namely their own? Inquiring minds want to know!
It's not just an historical question. Some are still at it today. Is it guilt? Or is it, as sociologist Daniel Bell argued, that their elite education underlines the shortcomings of democratic capitalist society, so that they learn to despise the very system that supports them? Or is it simply that, being raised to expect power and privilege, they are drawn to any ideology which, through the idea of the revolutionary vanguard, promises them both? (Maybe that's what appeals to Osama bin Laden, the billionaire's son.)
No life reveals more about these questions than that of Michael Straight. Born in 1916, his father was a Wall Street stockbroker and his mother was one of the wealthiest women in America. He was for years the powerful editor and publisher of the New Republic, which his family owned. Later, he became deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Slim, handsome and urbane, he was in every respect a pillar of the American intellectual establishment. Yet the whole time he was, according to Roland Perry, a secret Soviet agent.
The story of how this child of privilege became a revolutionary starts with the "progressive" school his mother and her second husband set up at Dartington in England in 1926, when Michael was 10. Situated on a magnificent 800-acre estate, it was the only coed boarding school in Britain. Its students heard free-thinking speakers such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and studied a curriculum liberally sprinkled with Marxist doctrine. A British madrassa? No wonder that seven of the 10 students in Straight's graduating class became members of the Communist Party, although Straight apparently was the only one who took the further step of becoming a KGB spy.
That happened in 1934, when he arrived at Cambridge University. On campus, he met another child of privilege, the brilliant and icy aesthete Anthony Blunt, who recruited him first for a clandestine trip to Stalin's Soviet Union and then into the most famous Soviet spy ring of them all. Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby all went on to weighty jobs in the British government and passed on sensitive information to their spymasters in the Kremlin. Philby ran the British equivalent of the CIA's Soviet desk, while another super-wealthy associate of their spy ring, Victor Rothschild, held various jobs in British counterintelligence alongside Blunt.
All this, or most of it, we know from Straight's own memoirs, "After Long Silence," published in 1983. The book was supposed to be Straight's effort to come clean about his hidden past. It included his assertion that he gradually lost contact with his notorious Cambridge classmates after coming to the United States and cut all his secret ties in 1941, before he became editor of the New Republic and one of America's formative voices on the liberal left.
Now Roland Perry claims that Straight remained a KGB agent at least until 1977, and lied about his covert relationship with Blunt and the others until his death in 2004. It is a plausible thesis; the problem is Perry can't offer definitive proof from any Soviet source. His accusation, which is based on interviews with former CIA and foreign intelligence officers, may be entirely correct â but until another researcher produces Soviet documentation, our final verdict has to be "case not proven."
Even so, "Last of the Cold War Spies" is fascinating and instructive. Returning to the United States to look for a job in the Roosevelt administration must have been a rude shock for Straight. At Cambridge, being a Communist spy made him part of a secret power elite. In Washington, he was a drop in the ocean. Literally dozens of Soviet agents had infiltrated nearly every department of the government. There were famous traitors like Alger Hiss, the rising young star in the State Department, as well as lesser-known ones such as Harry Dexter White, a pillar of the United States Treasury, and Lauchlin Currie, a special presidential assistant. There was also, of course, the little band of Soviet agents working on various aspects of the Manhattan Project.
Straight was keenly interested in politics; Blunt had recruited him because he knew his mother was a good friend of the Roosevelts. But after FDR politely refused to help him get a job in Washington, Straight drifted into the cultural field, first as editor of the New Republic, then as a novelist and finally as a bureaucrat for the NEA.
So even if he had remained an active spy, who or what did he have the power to betray? No one. Anyway, that job was already being done for him by the flocks of liberals and progressives in every field of American intellectual life. It must have been a surprising irony for his KGB spymasters to realize that what they had toiled for decades to achieve, to undermine faith in American capitalism and what used to be called "the American way of life," was being done effortlessly and painlessly by liberal academics, writers and artists of their own free will, from Harvard to Hollywood. And still is.
What was surprising to Moscow must have felt bitter to Straight. The man who had once envisioned himself as leading the revolutionary vanguard in America would, by 1980, be reduced to just one more voice in a progressive chorus that was starting to fade into the political wilderness. (It was Jimmy Carter, of all people, who finally removed Straight from the NEA). That bitterness came out in the verbal lashing Straight meted out to anyone who dared to doubt his own story about himself, or the version of the Cold War he had created in his mind.
In 1999, I published a book on Joe McCarthy and pointed out that one of Straight's former friends, Gustavo Duran, was a Stalinist agent during the Spanish Civil War. Straight wrote me a furious letter demanding proof of my charges. I obliged, and he responded by trying to have me fired from my teaching positions at George Mason University and the Smithsonian Institution. To their credit, my superiors never gave his complaints a moment's glance â not out of ideological sympathy with my book, certainly, but out of the clear realization that they were dealing with an angry old crank.
What a sad fate for a man who craved power all his life and sold his soul to get it. Straight had once dreamed of leading the proletarian masses to victory. He ended up being one more submission for the circular file.
Arthur Herman is the author, most recently, of "To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World." Sounds like that might be interesting, too.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2005 09:10 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[7 views]
Top|| File under:
The simple gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery look like they go on forever. Row upon row of small white crosses mark generations of military casualties. Tens of thousands of the nation's defenders lie buried on 600 heartbreakingly beautiful acres along the Potomac River. For the first time in a decade, a section overlooking the Pentagon is now being prepared to accommodate 26,000 more graves and 5,000 additional cremation niches.
But the cemetery is being expanded not so much due to mounting deaths in Iraq (1,773 U.S. troops have been killed there so far) Gag. At least they left off the "at least" before the number as to accommodate elderly World War II veterans who are dying at the rate of 1,200 per day. Soon, the last remaining eyewitnesses of Pearl Harbor, the Normandy Invasion and the battle of Iwo Jima will be gone.
A total of 405,399 Americans serving in the military died in that worldwide spasm of violence, which pitted adherents of virulent Axis ideologies against reluctant Allied nations. Hmmm...Is there a virulent ideologies theme here?
It took the German blitzkrieg on London, reducing the House of Commons to rubble less than a year after Hitler conquered Poland, to convince the British they should have gone on the offensive. It took Japanese kamikazes - that era's version of suicide bombers - to finally jolt the American public awake. And with the MSM today, we'd prolly all be calling for a quick settlement before anymore of our boys were killed by the insane, suicidal maniacs of Islam...no, no ...Japan.
And it took photographs of emaciated Nazi concentration camp survivors liberated by American troops to remind the world that it waited too long to respond to the looming threat.
Have we learned anything - or are we destined to repeat the same mistakes? Only time will tell!
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2005 09:10 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[5 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
"It took Japanese kamikazes - that era's version of suicide bombers - to finally jolt the American public awake."
Nonsense. Kamikazes came very late in the war -- not at Pearl Harbor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
I took my kids to Arlington last summer so that they could see the price of freedom. I wanted them to understand why their father does not believe in our fighting wars with one hand tied behind our back. We spent four days in Washington, and one of those was dedicated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and Arlington National Cemetery. They may not have "gotten it" in school, but they "get it" now.
Posted by: Neutron Tom ||
07/25/2005 10:44 Comments ||
Top||
#2
I agree with NT. This writer has a poor grip of history. Well before we encountered kamikazes en masse the population was suitably motivated by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One would think the 9/11 attacks would have motivation enough as well to see this through, but we seem to have a lot more apologists and appeasers now.
Posted by: Dar ||
07/25/2005 11:36 Comments ||
Top||
#3
WaPo had a nice hit piece last week that the burials from Iraq were happening so fast that the honor guards were being trained only minutes before the ceremony.
#13
Mee too Mucki. Fine place isn't it? Come visit me sometime, I'm in the chapel at Lexington for now. I think you'll like the quiet shade.
Posted by: Bobby Lee ||
07/25/2005 19:34 Comments ||
Top||
#14
Another article by someone who has not the honor to see Arlington for what it is. The resting place for those we all owe our freedom,and most of the free world owes their freedom to. This nutcase is in need of a new aluminum foil hat.
Posted by: 49 pan ||
07/25/2005 21:04 Comments ||
Top||
#15
I do pretty good for an engineer, SS 2383. I struggled to come up with a catchy title.....
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2005 21:08 Comments ||
Top||
#16
As I have always thought, the main stream media is lazy and not too bright. They also think they are morally superior to just about everyone else.
#17
I've always enjoyed developing software with / for engineers - yeah, they aren't the best spellers, but they make shit that actually does something. Pretty good tradeoff, IMHO, lol!
#18
I'm not quite sure what to think of the article. Doesn't he imply that America is NOT doing enough and should be MORE offensive (against the Islamist/terrorist threat)?
He sends a confusing message though.
WASHINGTON -- Judging from news reports and the portrayal of villains in our popular entertainment, Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.
None of these beliefs are based in fact. While many crimes are committed against Americans abroad (as at home), politically inspired terrorism, as opposed to more ordinary criminality motivated by simple greed, is not as common as most people may think.
At first glance, things do seem to be getting worse. International terrorist incidents, as reported by the State Department, increased to 423 in 2000 from 392 in 1999. Recently, Americans were shaken by Filipino rebels' kidnapping of Americans and the possible beheading of one hostage. But the overall terrorist trend is down. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, deaths from international terrorism fell to 2,527 in the decade of the 1990's, from 4,833 in the 80's.
Nor are the United States and its policies the primary target. Terrorist activity in 2000 was heavily concentrated in just two countries â Colombia, which had 186 incidents, and India, with 63. The cause was these countries' own political conflicts.
While 82 percent of the attacks in Colombia were on oil pipelines managed by American and British companies, these attacks were less about terrorism than about guerrillas' goal of disrupting oil production to undermine the Colombian economy. Generally, the guerrillas shy away from causing casualties in these attacks. No American oil workers in Colombia were killed or injured last year.
Other terrorism against American interests is rare. There were three attacks on American diplomatic buildings in 2000, compared with 42 in 1988. No Americans were killed in these incidents, nor have there been any deaths in this sort of attack this year.
Of the 423 international terrorist incidents documented in the State Department's report "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000," released in April, only 153 were judged by the department and the C.I.A. to be "significant." And only 17 of these involved American citizens or businesses.
Eleven incidents involved kidnappings of one or more American citizens, all of whom were eventually released. Seven of those kidnapped worked for American companies in the energy business or providing services to it â Halliburton, Shell, Chevron, Mobil, Noble Drilling and Erickson Air-Crane.
Five bombings were on the list. The best known killed 17 American sailors on the destroyer Cole, as it was anchored in a Yemeni port, and wounded 39. A bomb at a McDonald's in France killed a local citizen there. The other explosions â outside the United States embassy in the Philippines, at a Citibank office in Greece, and in the offices of Newmont Mining in Indonesia â caused mostly property damage and no loss of life. In the 17th incident, vandals trashed a McDonald's in South Africa.
The greatest risk is clear: if you are drilling for oil in Colombia â or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia â you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear.
Although high-profile incidents have fostered the perception that terrorism is becoming more lethal, the numbers say otherwise, and early signs suggest that the decade beginning in 2000 will continue the downward trend. A major reason for the decline is the current reluctance of countries like Iraq, Syria and Libya, which once eagerly backed terrorist groups, to provide safe havens, funding and training.
The most violent and least reported source of international terrorism is the undeclared war between Islamists and Hindus over the disputed Kashmir region of India, bordering Pakistan. Although India came in second in terms of the number of terrorist incidents in 2000, with 63, it accounted for almost 50 percent of all resulting deaths, with 187 killed, and injuries, with 337 hurt. Most of the blame lies with radical groups trained in Afghanistan and operating from Pakistan.
I am not soft on terrorism; I believe strongly in remaining prepared to confront it. However, when the threat of terrorism is used to justify everything from building a missile defense to violating constitutional rights (as in the case of some Arab-Americans imprisoned without charge), it is time to take a deep breath and reflect on why we are so fearful.
Part of the blame can be assigned to 24-hour broadcast news operations too eager to find a dramatic story line in the events of the day and to pundits who repeat myths while ignoring clear empirical data. Politicians of both parties are also guilty. They warn constituents of dire threats and then appropriate money for redundant military installations and new government investigators and agents.
Finally, there are bureaucracies in the military and in intelligence agencies that are desperate to find an enemy to justify budget growth. In the 1980's, when international terrorism was at its zenith, NATO and the United States European Command pooh-poohed the notion of preparing to fight terrorists. They were too busy preparing to fight the Soviets. With the evil empire gone, they "discovered" terrorism as an important priority.
I hope for a world where facts, not fiction, determine our policy. While terrorism is not vanquished, in a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are still aimed across the continents, terrorism is not the biggest security challenge confronting the United States, and it should not be portrayed that way.
Larry C. Johnson is a former State Department counterterrorism specialist.
me thinkerith he spaketh to sooniff. wundern watn he says now?
#3
So doesn't this prove that all the Islamic attacks (post 9-11) are because we hit back at them? If we'd just stayed home they'd have left us alone (for a while), and world terrorist threats would be mainly in Columbia and India?
No, I guess not. It looks like the 9-11 attacks alone killed more than the total of all the others for a decade.
By now, many people in America - and likely around the world - are familiar with my statements regarding a possible response to a nuclear attack on U.S. cities by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists.
Lileks did a critical column on the subject, and our Rantburg commenters have tended to be critical. I'm on Tom's side in the argument...
Without question, my comments have prompted strong reactions from many quarters, but they have also served to start a national dialogue about what options we have to deter al-Qaeda and other would-be Islamic terrorists. Many critics of my statements have characterized them as "offensive," and indeed they may have offended some.
... keeping in mind that there is a class of Professionally Easily Offended in this country, and worldwide for that matter. I think the offense taken by the normal people on the other side of the argument was that they passed by the first half of it, the part where he said that it would be in response to the use of nuclear weapons within the U.S.A...
But in this battle against fundamentalist Islam, I am hardly preoccupied with political correctness, or who may or may not be offended. Indeed, al-Qaeda cares little if the Western world is "offended" by televised images of hostages beheaded in Iraq, subway bombings in London, train attacks in Madrid, or Americans jumping to their death from the Twin Towers as they collapsed.
In fact, they consider it good advertising...
Few can argue that our current approach to this war has deterred fundamentalists from killing Westerners - nor has it prompted "moderate" Muslims and leaders of Muslim countries to do what is necessary to crack down on the extremists in their midst who perpetuate these grisly crimes.
Shiites in Pakland and Iraq have bumped off far more holy men than we have or our allies have...
That being the case, perhaps the civilized world must intensify its approach. Does that mean the United States should be re-targeting its entire missile arsenal on Mecca today? Does it mean we ought to be sending Stealth bombers on runs over Medina? Clearly not. But should we take any option or target off the table, regardless of the circumstances? Absolutely not, particularly if the mere discussion of an option or target may dissuade a fundamentalist Muslim extremist from strapping on a bomb-filled backpack, or if it might encourage "moderate" Muslims to do a better job cracking down on extremism in their ranks.
I consider the idea to be a latter-day adaptation of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). It was our policy with the Soviets that we wouldn't be the first to use nuclear weapons. At the same time, they knew their population centers were hostage if they used them. The result was an uneasy standoff that lasted 40 years, but kept World War III from going hot. There were similar caveats on the use of chemical and biological weapons; these, not just explosives, even big ones, are considered "weapons of mass destruction." The additional caveat was the the use of one type of WMD might, at the discretion of the president, be answered by the use of another type. In other words, gas on the battlefield might be answered by tactical nukes, plague in Dubuque might be answered by a very large boom over Novosibirsk. WMDs, and especially nuclear weapons, represent a red line that an enemy crosses only at his peril; he'd better be prepared to risk everything, because we've always been prepared to take everything. I see absolutely no reason that principle shouldn't apply to the Wonderful Wolrd of Jihad. The sooner and the more certainly they know it, the better, because if they don't believe it the chances are greater that they're going to goad each other into crossing that red line.
People have accused me of creating more terrorism by making these statements.
I just explained why it ain't so...
Indeed, we often hear that Western governments bring these attacks on themselves. Just days after the London subway attacks two weeks ago, for example, Tariq Ali, a prominent British Muslim activist, was quick to suggest that London residents "paid the price" for British support in the Iraq campaign.
If you stick a gun in my face and take my wallet because of what someone else did to you, it's still robbery. 52 dead in the name of a cause they may or may not have been interested in remains murder most foul...
A professor in Lebanon, Dr. George Hajjar, went even further, proclaiming, "I hope that every patriotic and Islamic Arab will participate in this war, and will shift the war not only to America, but to ... wherever America may be." Hajjar went on to say that "there are no innocent people," and referred to the victims of the attack as "collateral casualties."
They're not collateral by definition if they're targeted. But we're used to that sort of intellectual malnutrition from the Wonderful World of Jihad...
These are fairly "offensive" statements, to be sure, but the sentiments expressed by Ali and Hajjar are sadly commonplace in the "mainstream" Muslim world, where justification for terrorist attacks like the ones that rocked London, New York and Washington is never in short supply.
I've asked on a number of occasions, why do we have to please them? Why doesn't the obligation run both directions?
Fundamentalist Muslims have advocated the destruction of the West since long before the attacks of Sept. 11, long before the Madrid, London and Bali attacks, long before the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, long before the attack on the USS Cole and the 1993 WTC bombing.
That's another leftover from the Cold War, just like MAD. The Soviets left so many of these little presents lying around...
In many respects, the decision of "moderate" Muslims to acquiesce to these actions and even provide tacit justification for them is just as damaging to global safety and security as the attacks themselves. Until "mainstream" Islam can bring itself to stop rationalizing terrorist attacks and start repudiating and purging people like Ali and Hajjar from its ranks who do, this war will continue. As long as this war goes on, being "offended" should be the least of anyone's worries.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/25/2005 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
I'm thinking, though, that for the time being, we need different targets than Mecca for any MAD strategy, at least as long as we're trying to keep the two mostly Moslem countries of Iraq and Afghanistan on our side. There are a lot of candidate targets that don't involve targeting civilians, IMHO. For starters, "anomalous" power plants (likely to be tied to bomb factories) and military bases.
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
07/25/2005 0:06 Comments ||
Top||
#2
the palace in Riyadh, for example? Qom? Tehran's MM enclave?
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/25/2005 0:10 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Prudent targeting with nothing taken off the table. I saw him interviewed and he isn't spining some political crap here. He is deadly serious. We are here (mostly) too.
Again, no target should be off the table and the leaders of all Islamic countries should be aware of our policies if attacked. That will assure that they take it seriously, if they have any doubts let them ask the Russians is they harbored any such fantasy's.
#4
I do agree that it needed to be said - to make sure the envelope includes all of the possibilities.
I've wondered about this some since it initially came out... Given the Muzzy propensity to go apeshit over any perceived slight, what will they make of this? It's clear there will definitely be two camps.
An intelligent rational human, one of those who gets the cause => effect thingy, will, indeed, consider the ramifications. That the professional Muzzy seethers can't be numbered among the rational, however, prolly means there will be much made of this. I have to say that I don't really care, though - they'd find something else if they didn't have this. The over-hyped qu'uran-flushing bullshit makes that clear. So it would be the same either way for the irrationals.
For the few who have the capacity, however, I believe his statement will evoke thought - after they get over themselves. Perhaps a few nearer the apex than the base will realize we are not such pushovers and are considering the long-term endpoint - their actual destruction - and grab a clue that it's time to put the brakes on, the show is about to be over.
They use everything available to keep their Islamonutz preoccupied with external issues - rather than ask why they live in shitholes and are ruled by thugs, dictators, Royals, and Mullahs. Paleostine has been their bread 'n butter for 60 yrs. They've mish-mashed that in with Afghanistan and Iraq (Zarqi's statements prove they're all interchangeable cogs of the hate machine) and gained some windage, but they'll see the writing's on the wall. They didn't get to the top of their pile of shit without being smarter than the average nutball.
Either the Afghanistan and Iraq experiments fail - and Islam steps on it one too many times, or they grab a clue and try civilization.
Tancredo's statement simply clarifies a bit more the starkness of that choice.
#6
As I said earlier, Frank, anomalous power plants.
Fred, if they cared about Mecca, I doubt they'd be tearing it down the way they are...
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
07/25/2005 3:14 Comments ||
Top||
#7
What truly needs to happen is for Muslims to see the West wreak a massively violent revenge on them for a WMD attack. One so costly that afterward, any fool in their community who even mentioned attacking the West would, out of sheer terror of the consequences, be literally ripped apart by his coreligionists with their bare hands.
The West can get along quite nicely with no Muslims at all within its confines; the world can do without Saudi Arabia.
Posted by: mac ||
07/25/2005 5:46 Comments ||
Top||
#8
I doubt that the threat of wiping Mecca and Medina from the face of the earth would stop the fanatics, and it will definitely alienate the any moderate Muslims.
However, the threat of massive retaliation against Muslim rulers for terror attacks by Islamacists of any stripe just might cause a little crackdown here and there. It's the Pervs and the House of Saud and the Assads we should target with our threats -- and we should mean them.
Posted by: too true ||
07/25/2005 9:10 Comments ||
Top||
#9
TT: However, the threat of massive retaliation against Muslim rulers for terror attacks by Islamacists of any stripe just might cause a little crackdown here and there. It's the Pervs and the House of Saud and the Assads we should target with our threats -- and we should mean them.
The terrorists want us to take down the existing governments - so they can take over. What they're really after is Taliban-style governments built on the ruins of the existing regimes.
#10
It was our policy with the Soviets that we wouldn't be the first to use nuclear weapons.
This was a supposition we strongly led the liberals and Ruskies to believe, but my recollection is that it was never policy and that in fact no President ever categorically ruled out first use. To do so would have been a death sentence for all U. S. troops in Germany.
Tancredo is making an argument that perhaps should be surfaced, but it doesn't help him politically. We aren't going to bomb Mecca with conventional or nuclear weapons because it would serve no purpose other than to declare war on all Muslims.
Islam has its own problems, but not all Muslims are at war with us, nor do they want to be. At the present time, those who want to destroy western civilization (WC) are primarily Muslims, but not all Muslims. It is the ones who want to destroy WC that we need to destroy first. We can live at peace with the rest if they want to live at peace with us. And most do.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
07/25/2005 11:19 Comments ||
Top||
#11
The purpose of a nuke threat would not be to scare Moslem tyrants, nor to get them to "crack down" on their own fundamentalists, but to threaten all Moslems with major losses.
Only when the cost of waging war on the West is made clear will a majority of Moslems re-think their ideology of permanent jihad. Only then will they question the sanity of their imams. The change has to come from the ground up. Executing a few imams will not solve the problem of Islam.
Tancredo should be thanked as he is doing more for a future victory in WWIV than any other Congressman at the moment. No options off the table. Bush has correctly said it in various contexts -- and Tancredo has provided one concretization. We need more of this.
#12
Did the US fully develop and deploy the neutron bomb? It seems that would give/have given us more viable nuclear options when dealing with a regional threat, as (if I recall correctly) the warhead did not generate as much fallout, meaning less danger to neighboring countries.
Or is any nuke basically a neutron bomb and the only variable is the elevation of the blast?
Of course, the political fallout for any nuke would be another matter altogether, but that's another topic. And, I expect, such warheads would not be very effective against hard targets (underground complexes).
Posted by: Dar ||
07/25/2005 14:32 Comments ||
Top||
#13
It was our policy with the Soviets that we wouldn't be the first to use nuclear weapons.
That is incorrect. There was never such a posture. Matter of fact we lead the morons to believe we'd gladly trade New York for Warsaw. Skared the hell out of 'em. Chess players are usually piss poor at poker.
Posted by: Bobby Lee ||
07/25/2005 19:36 Comments ||
Top||
#14
Speak softly but carry a big stick. - Teddy Roosevelt
As far as I'm concerned, Rep. Tancredo is speaking softly. Is Islam listening, or do we need to show them the big stick?
Posted by: Neutron Tom ||
07/25/2005 21:50 Comments ||
Top||
#15
I have been very clear on that. Destroying Mecca will not deter terrorists, it will create millions more.
Will it deter those who condone, finance or preach terror? Don't know. Targeting those people DIRECTLY souns like the better idea to me.
Declaring any imam a target, confiscating oilfields and everything they own sounds like a better way to make them move and reconsider.
Bombing Mecca has so many absolutly unknown risks that no politician should talk about it.
Even if it were an option.
Last Friday, as British police frantically searched for four presumed suicide bombers on the run, the people of London had a glimpse of what the people of Israel live with daily. The explosive devices of all four men had failed to go off properly on London's transport system the day before, and the men had subsequently escaped.
Throughout Friday there were roadblocks and house searches throughout London. Closed-circuit TV footage of the four was released to the public in the afternoon, and by evening two suspects had been taken into custody. The people of London expressed the fear of "living with terror 24/7," the world expressed its sympathy, and there was much supportive and understanding coverage of Britain's plight by international media and politicians.
Palestinian terrorists have carried out over 25,000 attacks on Israelis since September 2000, resulting in thousands of deaths and injuries. Israeli security forces have thwarted thousands of attacks, and Israelis have grown used to living with manhunts of the kind seen in London on Friday; yet they are barely reported abroad.
The head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) confirmed last week that Israel presently receives some 60 intelligence warnings of potential Palestinian terror attacks every day, and this month alone several Israeli women and teenage girls â and now Rachel and Dov Kol â have been killed in various attacks.
Such was the nervousness in London on Friday that, at 10 a.m., a dark-complexioned man was shot dead on a train at Stockwell Tube station in south London. Witnesses on the train immediately said it was clear the man had been unarmed. In the words of one, he was "literally executed." He was already lying on the ground motionless, having tripped, when British police pumped five bullets into his head at close range. On Saturday evening the police confirmed what had been fairly apparent from the time of the shooting â that they had mistakenly targeted an innocent man. It turned out he was a Brazilian Catholic.
Israel has taken enormous care in its "targeted killings" of "ticking bombs," almost never killing anyone in a case of mistaken identity.
CONTRARY TO the absolute lies told in British media in recent days, the Israel Defense Forces have not instituted a shoot-to-kill policy, or trained the British to carry out one. For example, on Friday, at the very time British police were shooting the man in the Tube, the IDF caught and disarmed a terrorist from Fatah already inside Israel en route to carrying out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Israeli forces didn't injure the terrorist at all in apprehending him and disarming him of the 5-kg. explosive belt he was wearing.
And yet, for taking the bare minimum steps necessary to save the lives of its citizens in recent years Israel has been mercilessly berated by virtually the entire world.
Had Israeli police shot dead an innocent foreigner on one of its buses or trains, confirming the kill with a barrage of bullets at close range in a mistaken effort to thwart a bombing, the UN would probably have been sitting in emergency session by late afternoon to unanimously denounce the Jewish state.
By evening, 12 hours had passed since the shooting, but the BBC still hadn't interviewed a grieving family, no one had called for British universities to be boycotted, Chelsea and Arsenal soccer clubs hadn't been ordered to play their matches in Cyprus, and The Guardian hadn't yet called British policy against its Pakistani population "genocide."
As for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who is in overall control of transport in the city, including the train where the man was shot, and who strongly defended the shoot-to-kill policy as a legitimate way to prevent suicide bombings, he was not yet facing war crimes charges â as Livingstone himself has demanded Israeli political leaders should be.
Instead on Friday, Polly Toynbee, leading commentator for The Guardian, wrote that the terrorists were "deranged," "savage" and "demented" "killers" who "murder in the name of God." This is a far cry from the habitual manner in which The Guardian and others describe the suicide killers of Israelis as "fighters" and "activists."
ONE OF the London terrorists responsible for the bombings on July 7, Muhammad Sidique Khan, traveled to Israel in February 2003. He stayed in Israel for just one day, and we can surmise that he wasn't there to volunteer on a kibbutz or visit Yad Vashem.
Two months later, on April 30, 2003, two other Britons of Pakistani origin (whom Hamas has since admitted training) were involved in the suicide attack on Mike's Place, a popular bar in Tel Aviv, killing or wounding 58 people.
Khan's visit to Israel was the main international headline in The Washington Post last Tuesday. Yet most British papers have completely ignored it. The Independent and The Daily Telegraph didn't mention it at all; the Scotsman, the Times and Sun newspapers only very briefly.
There seems to be little interest in Britain in the murder of Israelis by British citizens. Many British journalists evidently have difficulty in admitting that people murdered on buses in Israel are as much victims as those murdered on London buses. Another British citizen, Richard Reid, who became known as the "shoe-bomber," also visited Israel and the Gaza strip for 10 days in July 2001.
If people in Britain want to stop terrorists they need to recognize the inspiration, and quite possibly training, that Hamas, the masters of the suicide attack, have given to would-be British and other terrorists, such as Reid. Instead British officials continue to embrace Hamas, and hold talks with them.
Britons will also need to stop listening to the lies propagated by large sections of their media. For example, the cover story of this week's New Statesman, the favored publication of many in Britain's ruling Labour party, says: "There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal, sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power."
You begin to wonder whose side some in Britain's media are on.
#1
"Imagine what would have happened if Israel had mistakenly executed a Brazilian Catholic"
LOL! Excellent question - one which whould be posed to many people.
"You begin to wonder whose side some in Britain's media are on."
Um - actually that's been obvious for a long time now, and it's not just the British media which is split between the idiotarians and the rest.
"...the cover story of this week's New Statesman, the favored publication of many in Britain's ruling Labour party, says: "There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal, sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power."
It's cover also featured a rucksack with the line "Blair's Bombs" - but the jpost choses not to mention that. The New Statesman is a screaming fruitcake of a magazine, not even friendly towards Blair's Labour any more.
#2
Im content that (some)lefty brits are talking sense in regard to terror in Britain. Id love it if they talked the same sense wrt to terror in Israel, but a journey of a thousand miles and all that. And this is NOT the time to say anything that implies "see how it feels".
Jpost is generally a good paper, but theyve got some columnists a tad far gone on the right (as Haaretz has some a tad far gone on the left)
A blog-translated column by Oriana Fallaci; second part is :
"The Enemy We Treat Like A Friend" (Part II)
http://mysteryachievement.blogspot.com/2005/07/enemy-we-treat-like-friend-part-ii.html
Hat tip LGF.
CAIRO â Sharm el-Sheikh. London. Casablanca. The men who carried out the terrorist bombings in each of these cities came from dramatically different backgrounds.
In London, the attackers were lower middle-class Britons. In Casablanca in 2003, they were all from one of the city's poor neighborhoods. And in Sharm el-Sheikh Saturday - although the investigation into the deadliest terror attack in Egyptian history is just getting under way - local officials say there are indications the attackers have links to an attack here last October carried out by a cell of working-class Egyptians.
While some counterterrorism experts say evidence may eventually link all of these attacks to the core of Al Qaeda's leadership suspected of hiding along the Pakistan-Afghan border, the diverse backgrounds of the presumed attackers underscore a shift: The culture of Islamist suicide bombers is becoming more commonplace, as is the defining of civilians as "enemies."
Even in the wave of Islamist terror attacks that destabilized Egypt for much of the 1990s, suicide bombers weren't used. Now the country has seen two major attacks of this kind in eight months, with the latest death toll now at least 88.
What concerns counterterrorism experts is that tactics that once prompted fierce ideological debates within radical circles - suicide and attacks on civilians are both classically defined in Islam as sins - are now more likely to be embraced by young men. A decade or two ago, Muslim males might have been willing to take up a rifle and risk death fighting against the Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan, but many would have balked at making the ultimate sacrifice or at blowing up civilians in a Moscow train station.
While the attacks on London and Egypt in recent days have dominated the headlines, Iraq appears to be playing a central role - in shifting views and as ground zero in a new wave in of suicide attacks.
"You can probably average it out to about one a day almost,'' says M.J. Gohel, a terrorism researcher at the Asia Pacific Foundation in London. (In June, the peak month in June 2004, there were 18 suicide bombings. This June, there were 30). "They're using them like confetti for what are frequently minor attacks, and what this shows is they have a virtually endless supply [of bombers] at this point. In the old days, suicide bombing was a rare event."
The tactical logic of the suicide bomber hasn't changed: He's difficult to stop, and equalizes the power differential between the militarily weak and the strong. But it appears, say some analysts, to have developed a momentum of its own. As it has become more common among the circles of supporters of the global jihad, taboos have been broken down creating a greater willingness among young men to take their own lives, which in turn feeds the cycle.
The Shiite group Hizbullah, which pioneered modern suicide bombings against Israel during its occupation of Lebanon, used the tactic fewer than 40 times. Palestinian militants, who adopted the tactic from Hizbullah, used suicide attackers 100 times in the 10 years until the end of 2002. Since, there have been 35 suicide attacks. And in Iraq, where suicide terrorism was virtually unknown before the US invasion, there have been 188 suicide bombings since August 2003, according to the Brookings Institute Iraq Index (although some research puts the tally as high as 400.)
That compares to 315 total suicide attacks carried out worldwide between 1980 and 2003, according to data compiled by University of Chicago professor Robert Pape in his book "Dying to Win."
Mr. Pape argues in his book that suicide attacks are far from exclusive to Muslims or religious radicals.
He points out that 76 of the attacks in the period he surveyed were carried by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, a secular separatist movement, while others point to the Japanese kamikazes of World War II.
"It's a tactic of desperation, of people who feel they're weak and have to take a stand against what they see as their enemy, so it's not just an act of fanaticism,'' says Wayne White, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and a retired senior official for the State Department's office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia.
But while he says it would be wrong to identify suicide terrorism with Islam, he says that a radical subculture has emerged within Islam that has created a spreading problem.
"Let's face it, there's an intersection of two factors here, a significant rise in the past two decades of Islamic piety which sometimes extends to radical Islamic piety and feelings of hopelessness, a sense of helplessness in the face of what's seen as Western imperialism or aggression," he says.
While many Muslim preachers are speaking out against these terror tactics, the core beliefs of Al Qaeda and other groups that favor attacks on civilians are broadcast around the world every day. "You get many clerics who say it's haram [forbidden] to do this, but they have their own clerics that will justify whatever that they want to do,'' says Mr. White.
Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism consultant and author of "Al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" says that on militant websites, stories of the bravery and heroism of suicide bombers in Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere are traded in ways that can prompt imitators.
"In the US there are young men who look up to sports stars, and in radical Muslim circles the heroes are these guys fighting in Iraq" and carrying out other attacks, he says.
#1
Can I say, no offense meant to you GS2379, that I am utterly and completely fed up with these analysis pieces? I don't really care, anymore, why they are unassimilated tumors, seething Islamonutz, and splodeydope tools. I just don't give a flying fuck anymore.
You want to commit suicide? Fine. Wave your arms and the nice man will give you a number. We will assist you in your journey in due time. If you can't wait, well, there's a sword over there in the corner. Fall on it. Doing so, quietly, all alone, harming no other, and you just might save your ideology from extinction, your friends and family from doom. Fail in this, and you take them down with you. Bank on it.
#2
Because of a culture of ignorance, hatred and domination of the "other" that arises out of a religion, there are plenty of folks who have no problem in booming anybody. The ranks of the tacit supporters, slipspeakers, and apologists are fed by THE Root Cause also. Because of THE Root Cause alot of them are left moral midgets who can't sincerely condemn or act against what is going on because to do so is to reject the religion and the culture of hatred and violence it has spawned. Because of THE Root Cause there are people in the world who idolize mass murders of innocent civilians. How much sicker can you get?
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.
By now, many people in America - and likely around the world - are familiar with my statements regarding a possible response to a nuclear attack on U.S. cities by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. 
