#2
Its interesting to note the Euro media ignored John Howard's election and he is arguably to the right of Bush. But then there is no institutonalized anti-Australian constituency in Europe.
#1
The article is informative, and the author is reasonable. True, he doesn't write about the problems caused by terrorists in the city, but he does write well about the problems caused by the US military actions. I think the characterization "dirtbag" is a bit much.
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Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
11/11/2004 8:31 Comments ||
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#2
Sorry Mikey, but the inflammatory language and lies from this dirtbag start at the beginning of the article. To quote:
"The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing âdemocracyâ in Iraq. These are lies"
1) It is a liberation - foreign fighters have terrorized the sity, imposed SHaria , ehld kagaroo courts and executions, tortured prisoners, and done kidnappings and beheadings.
2) It *IS* neccesary for this to be done to set up a lawful, authorized government control for proper elections to be held, without the ability of criminals to stuff ballot boxes, or control who votes and who doesnt. Even the UN agress on that point: fair elections cannot be held until the legitimate government of Iraq (Allawi's government) has control sufficient to guarantee fair elections.
The whole article is a whining screed about what happneed in April, with no reference to any real figures- he merely regurgitates Baathist propaganda.
Look at the conlcusion to this repetition of lies that he puts forth:
"The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to âwin,â the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops."
The first assault was 3 days away from taking the city, and was halted for *political* reasons - it was NOT a military failure, and as evidenced by current events, the criminals in Fallujah are NOT "better armed and better organized" - they are dying by the dozens, while inflicting realtively few casualties on US and Iraqi forces there.
This guy Mhajan lies constantly and continuously, citing anectdote after anectdote but no facts at all, and no current information at all, and never bypasses an opportunity to use loaded language and half truths.
He is a liar - and deserving of the "ratbag" title.
Q.E.D.
And Mikey, you are either the most stupid people on the planet to think yourself an unbiased observer if you believe that author and the bilge he spews, or else you are the most gullible person I have ever met.
If its the latter, I have some Bridge property in Brooklyn you might be interested in...
#3
The best rebuttal to the accusation that "the problems are caused by the US military actions" will lie in the alternatives proposed. OK Mike-let's hear, in objective, strategic and tactical terms, what you think should be done (and please, for the benefit of the bandwidth and the readers, don't fall into the liberal habit of regurgitating history and obsessing about what was done badly in the past when asked for concrete alternative plans for now). What are your solutions?
#4
Re #2 (OldSpook):
For a moment, ignore the article's first paragraph and review the rest, except the last paragraph. The main body of the article is a rather informative and reasonable statement about what the author personally perceived as the situation in Fallujah. He is upset about the damage caused by US military operations. He thinks the damage is unjustified, unfair and excessive.
As for his first and last paragraphs, I personally don't think they are justified by the article's body. In particular I don't think he demonstrates that the USA's stated intentions to liberate and democratize Fallujah are "lies." And the article does not cause me to support a peace movement to oppose the war.
Nevertheless, the article's main body provides a lot of good food for thought and give us a better understanding of how many Fallujan's perceive the situation. In that sense the article is well worth reading.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
11/11/2004 11:31 Comments ||
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#5
Ok - if you exclude a lot of what the guy says and thinks and writes, Mikey is right
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/11/2004 11:36 Comments ||
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Posted by: Frank G ||
11/11/2004 11:41 Comments ||
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#8
Here ya go MS, the rest of it is better.
WHEN my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its decisions.
In the last months of her sickness, I had gone to Vienna to take the entrance examination for the Academy. I had set out with a pile of drawings, convinced that it would be child's play to pass the examination. At the Realschule I had been by far the best in my class at drawing, and since then my ability had developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to take a joyful pride in hoping for the best.
From The New Yorker, a long feature article by Jon Lee Anderson. An excerpt:
.... This summer, I visited the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, which occupied two floors of a concrete office block inside the Green Zone. A poster on one wall bore the simple message "Baathists=Nazis." The director of the commission, Mithal al-Alusi, is a tall, lanky man of fifty-three who speaks English with a syrupy drawl and, even in the office, wears a pistol tucked into his belt.
The commission began its work in January, and Alusi told me that it had achieved a great deal: "Thirty-five thousand Baath Party members have left their jobs." Alusi said that the commission was interested only in Baathists from the four highest levels of the Party, some sixty-five thousand people. The top level consisted of no more than fifty or sixty people. "Level 2 is a few hundred people, Level 3 is a few thousand, and at the fourth level there are tens of thousands," he said. Level 4 Baathists were allowed to appeal their bans, and, so far, the commission had approved about half of the appeals. Alusi said that the commission was not inflexible; he described one instance in which seventy doctors had been sent back to work. "We expedited their cases," he said. "We just made sure they weren't killers."
Alusi told me that he had been a Baathist once himself, and had worked at the Party's top-secret academy for political cadres. He had fallen out with the regime in the seventies, however, and spent more than twenty years in exile, mostly in Germany. In August, 2002, Alusi and a few cohorts briefly seized Iraq's Embassy in Berlin, for which they were arrested and spent thirteen months in prison. When Alusi was released, in September, 2003, he returned to Iraq, violating his parole.
I asked Alusi what Baathism had meant to him as a young man. "It was like magic," he said. "The Baath Party gave us the opportunity to do something important." One of the opportunities enjoyed by young Baathists was access to power. Under Saddam, the Party was melded with the secret police and the state intelligence organization. Membership was a requirement for many government jobs, and Baathists were required to inform on their neighbors, their co-workers, and one another. During one of Saddam's hallmark purges in 1979, several ministers were handed weapons and ordered to kill colleagues whom Saddam had just declared to be "traitors."
One of the steps in the appeals process for former Baathists was attendance at a thirty-day de-Baathification course, and I asked Alusi what model he had used for it. "I've studied the de-Nazification of Germany," he said. "And I've e-mailed Jewish Holocaust organizations, although only one of them answered me. We've read a lot of books."
A few days later, I attended a graduation ceremony in a seminar room at Baghdad University, where a hundred or so middle-aged men and women, most of them professors and doctors, sat expectantly. Alusi walked in with a half-dozen bodyguards. He took the microphone, smiled, and began to talk in a rambling fashion about how the United States had liberated Iraqis, how the Coalition was on a par with the alliance against Hitler, and how Iraq now depended upon the good will of the U.S.
Men from Alusi's office began taping posters to the wall behind the stage. The posters showed decayed bodies and skeletons piled in unearthed mass graves, and they elicited muffled exclamations from the audience. A man raised his hand. "Why are you putting up those posters?" he asked. "Everyone here was forced to join the Baath Party. We didn't have anything to do with those crimes."
"These are the bodies of Iraqis," Alusi replied. "Why shouldn't we look at them?"
A man called out, "Mr. Alusi, I feel frightened when I see these pictures. Many people may not distinguish between the criminals who did these things and innocent people like us."
"The Iraqi people are not idiots," Alusi replied. "I know there are good citizens among you, but we cannot close the files, because the files are full of crimes. The problem is for those who committed crimes. What shall I do, put away the posters, omit the truth? No, we cannot. If we omit this, we omit our history."
The man smiled politely but didn't say anything. Alusi stood up, and the people in the room filed over to officials sitting at tables to obtain their de-Baathification certificates.
Later, Alusi told me that he had meant to be provocative. "There is a duality in Baathists," he said. "You can find a Baathist who is a killer, but at home, with his family, he's completely normal. It's like they split their day into two twelve-hour blocks. When people say about someone I know to be a Baathist criminal, 'No, he's a good neighbor!' I believe them. The Baath Party is like the Nazi Party, or like the Mafia. If you meet them, they are simpatico. And this is why it's very difficult for us to do our work, which is to change—really change—Iraqi society."
Alusi wasn't alone in drawing analogies to the de-Nazification process in Germany after the Second World War. But the comparison is less helpful than it seems. De-Nazification was marked by ambiguities, exceptions, compromises. And, to the extent that it worked, it did so because the Nazis had so catastrophically failed. Germany was utterly defeated; millions of people had died, and its cities lay in ruins. ....
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
11/11/2004 11:50:26 PM ||
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How Arafat Got Away With It The Soviets, U.S., EU and other foreign enablers helped this thug stay in power.
It is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but I will make an exception for Yasser Arafat, the pathetic embodiment of all that went wrong in the Third World after the demise of the European empires. All too many rulers of "liberated" nations in the second half of the 20th century — the likes of Mao Tse-tung (China), Sukarno (Indonesia), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Moammar Kadafi (Libya) and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) — proved to be devotees of the Louis XIV school of political philosophy: L'etat, c'est moi. Their rapaciousness knew no bounds. Neither did their cruelty.
Yet even as these rulers were torturing their own people, they were lionized in the salons of the West. European and American intellectuals, motivated by a combination of guilt for their countries' past conduct, vicarious zest for revolutionary adventure and condescension toward Africans and Asians who were thought incapable of conforming to Western standards, were willing to excuse any crime committed in the name of "national liberation." Arafat benefited from this deference ever since taking over the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969. He and his cronies pocketed billions of dollars and kept their grip on power through the cruel application of violence against various enemies and "collaborators." In return, Arafat reaped worldwide adulation and a Nobel Peace Prize.
Continued on Page 49
Found via Drudge. Hopefully a antidote to all the 'He was a GREAT MAN' bullshit the MSM is spewing forth.... EFL somewhat.
YASSER ARAFAT died at age 75, lying in bed surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves.
In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."
Arafat always inspired flights of nonsense from Western journalists, and his last two weeks were no exception.
Derek Brown wrote in The Guardian that Arafat's "undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader" was exceeded only "by his extraordinary courage" as a peace negotiator. But it is an odd kind of courage that expresses itself in shooting unarmed victims -- or in signing peace accords and then flagrantly violating their terms.
Some journalists couldn't wait for Arafat's actual death to begin weeping for him. Take the BBC's Barbara Plett, who burst into tears on the day he was airlifted out of the West Bank. "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound," Plett reported from Ramallah, "I started to cry." Normal people don't weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:
"I remember well when the Israelis re-conquered the West Bank more than two years ago, how they drove their tanks and bulldozers into Mr. Arafat's headquarters, trapping him in a few rooms, and throwing a military curtain around Ramallah. I remember how Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: `Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege.' And so was I." Such is the state of journalism at the BBC, whose reporters do not seem to have any trouble reporting, dry-eyed, on the plight of Arafat's victims. (That is, when they mention them -- which Plett's teary bon voyage to Arafat did not.)
And what about those victims? Why were they scarcely remembered in this Arafat death watch?
It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.
Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.
Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?
So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command.
#1
When I saw "Boston Globe", I almost shit. But then I saw it was Jacoby, their token conservative.
I'm sure management at the Globe will have him cleaning the toilets with a toothbrush over the weekend as his penance.
#2
"I started to cry." Normal people donât weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:
Why did she cry? Did she miss out on part of his one Billion dollars, that all freedom fighters get while his people suffer.
#4
Jacoby is an excellent writer, and, I've found, will graciously converse via email regarding his columns and thoughts
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/11/2004 13:38 Comments ||
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#5
Great post, CF--thanks.
Posted by: Dar ||
11/11/2004 14:01 Comments ||
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#6
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Denounce this monster. Denounce the lies and insanity that seek to portray him as anything but a monster.
Posted by: Edmund Burke ||
11/11/2004 15:20 Comments ||
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#7
CF - that's a great post. I've been waiting a looong time for that shitbag to die. The MSM have been *vile* in reporting his 'sainthood'. May his soul rot in hell.
Posted by: Tony (UK) ||
11/11/2004 17:49 Comments ||
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#8
I'm sure management at the Globe will have him cleaning the toilets with a toothbrush over the weekend as his penance.
I had even money on the Globe suspending him during the 2004 campaign like they did four years ago. Fascists.
Having decided that Yasser Arafat will not return to his functions since he's doorknob dead, the Palestinian leadership moved yesterday to shape the post-Arafat era. "The post-Arafat era has started," said Hannan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Legislative Council (parliament). "An interim government is in place, pending general elections."
The new leadership decided that Arafat was incapacitated, thus triggering the constitutional mechanisms for choosing a new leadership. It also approved plans submitted by the Egyptian authorities for a state funeral to be held for Arafat in Cairo. The leadership also signed an agreement with the Israeli government to have Arafat put out on the curb in a recycle bag buried in Ramallah. The site of a mosque demolished by the Israelis in 2002, was chosen as the place where a national mausoleum will be built for Arafat. The new leadership, headed by Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ahmad Qorei, quashed an effort by elements linked with Suha Arafat to amend the Basic Law, and prevent elections. The proposed amendment, backed by Farouq Kaddoumi, a favorite of Suha to become leader, would have allowed Arafat to continue as president of the Palestinian Authority for as long as he was not officially pronounced dead.
Not until he coughs up those account numbers, anyways.
The Palestinian leaders rejected suggestions that Arafat, who was even more dead in deepening coma for the fifth straight day, be subjected to euthanasia, or mercy killing, by having his life-support machine switched off. "We shall never allow that since there is no need, after all," said Tayssir Al-Tamimi, a Palestinian religious leader who visited the dying leader in his hospital room near Paris yesterday. "Mercy killing has no place in Islam."
Okay, put a bomb vest on him and pull the string. Maybe Suha could do the honors.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/11/2004 9:12:42 PM ||
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Posted by: Mark Espinola ||
11/11/2004 3:54 Comments ||
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#5
LOL at #2 image .. and just round the corner is Israeli tanks , crack troops , and air support ..
Also looks like the donkey in the forefront has been chewing on some seriously strong cannabis , no wonder it doesnt look fazed by its impending doom .
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