H/T to PowerLine from the always good www.MEMRI.org. While reading this, consider: If I changed the words in some lines "an Arab country" to "in America", I might be called some unpleasant names, ridiculed and perhaps even ostracized - but I could go about my business without fear for my life, my family, or my property.
The man who wrote this probably already has a death sentence on his head.
"When you cannot find a single garden in your city, but there is a mosque on every corner - you know that you are in an Arab country
"When you see people living in the past with all the trappings of modernity - do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country.
"When religion has control over science - you can be sure that you are in an Arab country.
"When clerics are referred to as 'scholars' - don't be astonished, you are in an Arab country.
"When you see the ruler transformed into a demigod who never dies or relinquishes his power, and whom nobody is permitted to criticize - do not be too upset, you are in an Arab country.
"When you find that the large majority of people oppose freedom and find joy in slavery - do not be too distressed, you are in an Arab country.
"When you hear the clerics saying that democracy is heresy, but [see them] seizing every opportunity provided by democracy to grab high positions [in the government] - do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country
"When monarchies turn into theocracies, and republics into hybrids of monarchy and republic - do not be taken aback, you are in an Arab country.
"When you find that the members of parliament are nominated [by the ruler], or else that half of them are nominated and the other half have bought their seats through bribery - you are in an Arab country
"When you discover that a woman is worth half of what a man is worth, or less - do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country
"When you see that the authorities chop off a man's hand for stealing a loaf of bread or a penny, but praise and glorify those who steal billions - do not be too surprised, you are in an Arab country
"When you are forced to worship the Creator in school and your teachers grade you for it - you can be sure that you are in an Arab country
"When young women students are publicly flogged merely for exposing their eyes - you are in an Arab country
"When a boy learns about menstruation and childbirth but not about his own [body] and [the changes] it undergoes in puberty - roll out your prayer mat and beseech Allah to help you deal with your crisis, for you are in an Arab country
"When land is more important than human beings - you are in an Arab country
"When covering the woman's head is more important than financial and administrative corruption, embezzlement, and betrayal of the homeland - do not be astonished, you are in an Arab country
"When minorities are persecuted and oppressed, and if they demand their rights, are accused of being a fifth column or a Trojan horse - be upset, you are in an Arab country
"When women are [seen as] house ornaments which can be replaced at any time - bemoan your fate, you are in an Arab country.
"When birth control and family planning are perceived as a Western plot - place your trust in Allah, you are in an Arab country
"When at any time, there can be a knock on your door and you will be dragged off and buried in a dark prison - you are in an Arab country
"When fear constantly lives in the eyes of the people - you can be certain that you are in an Arab country."
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/08/2007 09:12 ||
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#1
arab americans have come out (NYT Letter to the Editors) saying that it would not be published if it said "Jews" or "Blacks"
I WISH the NYT would publish what the arabs say about Jews.
#3
"When you see the ruler transformed into a demigod who never dies or relinquishes his power, and whom nobody is permitted to criticize - do not be too upset, you are in an Arab country."
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/08/2007 19:04 Comments ||
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#5
#2 Grumenk - "He" is a "she."
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/08/2007 19:19 Comments ||
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#6
HMMMMM... I thought the Religious Policeman had ceased commenting on the arabic insanity in order to co-author a book. He must have taken a short break from his manuscript duties.
#7
Or, GP(#3), North Korea. Learned a little interesting fact on last night's (Nat'l Geographic Channel) special on North Korea, that tells you everything you need to know:
The average 7 year old (who went through the famine in the late 90's) is something like 8 inches shorter and 22 lbs. lighter than his/her counterpart in SOUTH KOREA! Jeebus, what that man is doing to the children™ alone should be enough for invasion and overthrow. But, then the death cult like worship of Kim Jong Il started too. Stuff that's VERY hard to watch and (almost) unfathomable to the western mind.
Posted by: BA ||
03/08/2007 20:41 Comments ||
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#8
In my humble (not) opinion, the word "arab" should be replaced with "muslim". After all, all muslim countries are not arab, but all muslim countries face these dilemmas.
One or so more,
When western medicine and means are available, but denied to the average citizen while the rulers have the best medixal treatment money can provide, despair not for you are in a muslim country.
When western military technology is available to every gunbunny with a death wish, fear not for thou art in a muslim country.
When thy neighbors wife/daughter offends you for having been raped by secen men and photographed while being so violated, she will thus receive 90 lashes while the perpretrators go free, but this is as it should be for thou art in a muslim country.
When religious fear and oppression outweighs the will to better oneself and one's family, thou art in a muslim country.
This is listed as one of the most read -- and most commented on -- articles at the TimesOnline site today. Which means that even those who, in the end, disagreed with the writer's conclusions, at least were exposed to the content and the argument.
Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.
When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. Dont worry, its just a formality, my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.
In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.
In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.
I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male prison-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).
Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: Not even the British could occupy us. Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.
Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes and that such colourful tribal customs are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.
Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist Islamophobe for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.
However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.
According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth. The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new Enlightenment. The declaration views Islamophobia as a false allegation, sees a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine and demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men.
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.
Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Saids Orientalism . Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?
Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Womens Studies at the City University of New York.
#1
"To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals."
In re the big picture, it demands that Muslims turn away from communal conformity to traditional behavior patterns. This is a HUGE challenge, because of the huge risk of being identified as unIslamic (thus dooming either accuser or accused). Communal conformity is exactly what Phyllis Chesler encountered when she landed in Afghanistan with her husband; he was afraid of demonstrating a behavior different than the "normal Islamic" behavior expected by his peers. Sickening, but true.
#3
I spent the last 40 odd minutes reading the comments posted (many, not all) addressing this article. There are soooo many apologists for Islam lurking out there. I really don't come away with the impression that the West is waking up to the threat. Too many are in denial or asleep and happy to remain so (deliberately intent on doing so).
Posted by: Mark Z ||
03/08/2007 13:43 Comments ||
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#4
But first they had to read the article, Mark Z, or at least part of it. Which means that the story and the good professor's conclusions will be sitting in their subconscious, adding up other bits of data, even as they continue to consciously deny the situation. Or so I hope.
How an unscrupulous legal and PR campaign changed the way the world looks at Guantanamo.
By Debra Burlingame
He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando, was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm, then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners screaming "Allahu akbar!"
The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory suggesting he had been shot execution style.
One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.
The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know. His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups--which holds that the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance, swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the U.S. military.
Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined, is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that followed.
According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.
But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr. Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases, "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."
Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2 million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials confirmed that the government was footing the bills.
How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment? Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into the case by an oil industry client.
It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of the Kuwaiti 12--from which all of the detainees have benefited--is one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.
Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005 and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005 and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo permanently and setting their clients free.
Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."
In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."
A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-service Web site which fed propaganda--unsourced, unrebutted and uninvestigated by the media--aimed at the media all over the world. Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out yellow ribbons.
After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public and Congress.
Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that resulted from his team's media outreach.
The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information, generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world. In short, create one giant echo chamber.
Mr. Mutairi's profile is the most brazen example of Mr. Levick's confidence that the media can be easily manipulated. The Web site describes him as a member of an apolitical and peaceful sect of missionaries, and that he went to Afghanistan in October of 2000 to "minister in the small mosques and schools" in the country's poorer regions.
Everything Mr. Levick did was in partnership with Tom Wilner and the law firm of Sherman & Sterling. It was their joint litigation-PR plan, with the Guantanamo lawsuits helping the PR messaging and the PR messaging helping the lawsuits. All of this may be legal, but it is hardly ethical.
Shearman & Sterling lawyers aren't hucksters crassly promoting a cheap product; they are sworn officers of the court volunteering to represent alien enemy combatants in a time of war, interjecting themselves in cases that affect how American soldiers on the battlefield do their job. It is one thing to take these cases in order to achieve the proper balance between due process concerns and unprecedented national security issues. It is another to hire PR and marketing consultants to create image makeovers for suspected al Qaeda financiers, foot soldiers, weapons trainers and bomb makers, all of which is financed by millions of dollars from a foreign country enmeshed in the anti-American, anti-Israel elements of Middle East politics.
Although a few mistakes were made when some of the Guantanamo detainees were taken into custody in the fog of war, others were indisputably captured with AK-47s still smoking in their hands. Any one of those who have been properly classified in Combat Status Review Tribunals as an unlawful enemy combatant could be the next Mohamed Atta or Hani Hanjour, who, if captured in the summer of 2001, would have been described by these lawyers as a quiet engineering student from Hamburg and a nice Saudi kid who dreams of learning to fly.
How we deal with alien enemy combatants goes to the essence of the debate between those who see terrorism as a series of criminal acts that should be litigated in the justice system, one attack at a time, and those who see it as a global war where the "criminal paradigm" is no more effective against militant Islamists whose chief tactic is mass murder than indictments would have been in stopping Hitler's march across Europe. Michael Ratner and the lawyers in the Gitmo bar have expressly stated that the habeas corpus lawsuits are a tactic to prevent the U.S. military from doing its job. He has bragged that "The litigation is brutal [for the United States] . . . You can't run an interrogation . . . with attorneys." No, you can't. Lawyers can literally get us killed.
We may never know how many of the hundreds of repatriated detainees are back in action, fighting the U.S. or our allies thanks to the efforts of the Guantanamo Bay Bar. Approximately 20 former detainees have been confirmed as having returned to the battlefield, 12 of them killed by U.S. forces. Of the eight detainees who were rendered back to Kuwait for review of their cases, all were acquitted in criminal proceedings, including Mr. Mutairi, who has given press interviews admitting that he was shot in the November 2001 uprising at Qala-I-Jangi.
Only one Kuwaiti, Adel al-Zamel, has been sent to prison for crimes committed before his work with al-Wafa in Afghanistan. A member of an Islamist gang that stalked, videotaped and savagely beat "adulterers," he was sentenced to a year in prison in 2000 for attacking a coed sitting in her car. These are some of the men Tom Wilner was talking about when he went on national television and said with a straight face, "My guys . . . loved the United States."
The guy who really loved the United States stood and fought to protect us from radical Islamists, rather than enable them. In his job application for the CIA, Mike Spann wrote, "I am an action person that feels personally responsible for making any changes in this world that are in my power because if I don't no one else will." We owe our unqualified support and steadfastness to the warriors who take personal responsibility when no one else will.
Allowing lawyers to subvert the truth and transform the Constitution into a lethal weapon in the hands of our enemies--while casting themselves as patriots--makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by true patriots like Mike Spann. If Sens. Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, chairman and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate Judiciary Committee succeed in their plan to turn enemy combatant cases over to the federal courts, we will sorely rue the day that we eliminated "lawyer-free zones."
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
The axiom is as old as human striving: The perfect is the enemy of the good. In politics this means that insisting on perfection in a candidate interferes with selecting a satisfactory one.
Which is why the mood of many of the 6,300 people, lots of them college age, who registered at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference here, was unreasonably morose. Sponsored annually by the American Conservative Union, CPAC is the conservative movement's moveable feast. Many at CPAC seemed depressed by the fact, as they see it, that the top three Republican candidates -- John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani-- are flawed. Such conservatives should conduct a thought experiment.
Suppose someone seeking the presidential nomination had, as a governor, signed the largest tax increase in his state's history and the nation's most permissive abortion law. And by signing a law institutionalizing no-fault divorce, he had unwittingly but substantially advanced an idea central to the campaign for same-sex marriages -- the minimalist understanding of marriage as merely a contract between consenting adults to be entered into or dissolved as it suits their happiness.
Question: Is it not likely that such a presidential aspirant would be derided by some of today's fastidious conservatives? A sobering thought, that, because the attributes just described were those of Ronald Reagan.
Now, consider today's three leading candidates, starting with McCain, the mere mention of whose name elicited disapproving noises at CPAC. This column holds the Olympic record for sustained dismay about McCain's incorrigible itch to regulate political speech ("campaign finance reform"). But it is not incongruous that he holds Barry Goldwater's Senate seat.
McCain, whose career rating from the ACU is 82 (100 being perfect), voted against the prescription drug entitlement in 2003 because of its cost. He is a strong critic of corporate welfare. And since 2003 he has been insisting that the mission in Iraq requires more troops-- even more than will be there during the current "surge."
Conservatives' anger about McCain coexists with others' discordant criticism of him for "pandering" to conservatives. Astonishingly, a recent Vanity Fair profile accused McCain of "toeing the conservative line" on immigration, which shows that Vanity Fair does not know what that line is.
The journalistic rule is that conservatives pander, liberals "grow." When Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich changed from being pro-life to pro-abortion, their conversions, a price of admission into Democratic presidential politics, were often described as conscientious "growth." But when McCain, who opposed President Bush's tax cuts, concludes on the basis of the humming economy that they should be made permanent, it's called pandering.
At CPAC, Romney gave the most polished speech, touching all the conservative movement's erogenous zones, pointedly denouncing the "McCain-Kennedy" immigration bill and promising to seek repeal of the McCain-Feingold law regulating campaign speech. Romney, however, is criticized by many conservatives for what they consider multiple conversions of convenience -- on abortion, stem cell research, gay rights, gun control. But if Romney is now locked into positions that these conservatives like, why do they care so much about whether political calculation or moral epiphany moved him there?
Giuliani is comprehensively out of step with social conservatives and likely to remain so. He probably assumes two things.
First, that some of the social issues have gone off the boil because argument about them seems sterile: Democrats have scant interest in federal gun control legislation; scientific advances may obviate the need for using embryonic stem cells; cultural changes will do more than any feasible legislation could do to reduce abortion numbers; the way to change abortion law is to change courts by means of judicial nominations of the sort Giuliani promises to make.
Second, that his deviations from the social conservatives' agenda are more than balanced by his record as mayor of New York. That city was liberalism's laboratory as it went from the glittering metropolis celebrated in the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961) to the dystopia of the novel "Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987). Giuliani successfully challenged the culture of complaint that produced the politics of victimhood that resulted in government by grievance groups.
He favors school choice, he opposes bilingual education that confines students to linguistic ghettos and he ended the "open admissions" policy that degraded City University, once an effective instrument of upward mobility. The suggestion that Sept. 11 required city tax increases triggered from Giuliani four adjectives: "dumb, stupid, idiotic and moronic."
Conservatism comes in many flavors. None seems perfect for every conservative's palate; most should be satisfactory to most conservatives.
#1
This is one of the main reasons that it should be Rudy. Listen, I'm as socially conservative as they come, but it's not rocket science to see that abortion is in the hands of the Court (not the Executive Branch), Stem Cell Research will (hopefully) scientifically work it's magic w/o embryos, gay marriage will also be (ultimately) decided by an overactive judiciary, and I don't think anyone can really shove gun control down this country's throat again. Of the above 4 issues (abortion, stem cells, gay marriage and guns), 2 will be decided by the courts (Rudy has said he'd nominate judges in line with Dubya's nominations, and I take him at his word), 1 (stem cell research) will be open for spinning and yammering by "scientists" and "experts" until the population settles it, and the last one seems to be Rudy's weak point. But, even on that one, he's said he'd not take the same approach NATIONALLY that he did in the City.
That leaves 1 final issue, the WoT. NO ONE touches Rudy in that arena in my book. Add on top of all that the fact that Americans want a CEO in the Oval Office, not a Legislator, and that knocks out McCain. In fact, I believe we have to go back to JFK to find an ex-Senator who's made it to the White House. Most of the others have been Governors or served in the Executive Branch. But, this is all just my $.02.
Posted by: BA ||
03/08/2007 9:06 Comments ||
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#2
The bottom line is that ANYONE is better than Hillary The Ruthless Freak, Obama The Chameleon, Gore the Whore, Sir Edwards the Idiot or any other loser that the Democrats will shove forward.
This 'on this day in history' item caught my attention because of the four plane similarity to 9/11 and the sophistication of the operation. I googled around and no one seems to classify it as terrorism, rather it was assumed to be extortion. But bear in mind that at this time, it wasn't clear the USA wasn't going to pay ransoms. So why not combine terrorism and money making.
A bomb has exploded aboard a Trans World Airlines Boeing 707 at Las Vegas airport. No-one was injured in the blast which destroyed the cockpit of the aircraft as it stood empty on the tarmac.
The explosion happened hours after an anonymous phone caller threatened TWA with a series of bomb attacks unless £760,000 was handed over. The caller instructed airport officials at Kennedy Airport in New York to go to a locker where they found a note, which said there would be explosions at six hourly intervals on four of the company's aircraft.
Sniffer dogs found a bomb, which consisted of 3lb (1.36kg) of plastic explosives and a timing device, aboard a TWA aircraft at the airport in New York, 12 minutes before it was timed to explode. It was found in a case labelled "crew" in the cockpit. A few hours later police boarded a second TWA jet at the airport but nothing was found.
The aircraft which exploded in Las Vegas was thoroughly searched and left New York after the first bomb was discovered. It flew to Las Vegas with only 10 passengers and was searched again once it landed. The aircraft was then put under armed guard before the plane exploded seven hours later.
Debris was blown more than 100 feet (30 metres) away but two security guards escaped uninjured. One of them said: "It sounded like dynamite. I could see pieces of the plane flying through the air."
The security department at the International Air Transport Association suspects that five people, who each hold Middle Eastern passports, may have been involved in the plot.
TWA has ordered worldwide checks on all 240 of its aircraft following the initial bomb threat.
US President Richard Nixon said that the government would mobilise all resources "until the current threat is crushed."
#1
Does rather reinforce the moon god's worshippers' fixation with the 'iron bird that flies'
Posted by: Howard UK ||
03/08/2007 5:51 Comments ||
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#2
Key: The aircraft which exploded in Las Vegas was thoroughly searched and left New York after the first bomb was discovered. It flew to Las Vegas and was searched again once it landed. The plane exploded seven hours later.
I assume the searchers are more effective now. Those ten passengers on the Las Vegas flight were awfully lucky the bomb's timer didn't go off as promised.
Imagine the reaction if Western agents slaughtered a hundred Sunni pilgrims on their way to Mecca. The outrage would spark incendiary rhetoric, riots and revenge killings from Peshawar to Paris.
But when Sunni suicide bombers murdered 118 Shia pilgrims (and wounded almost 200 more) on Tuesday, Sunnis around the globe looked away: Shias only count as Muslims when America can be blamed for their suffering.
Many of those Shia victims of religious totalitarianism were traveling on foot to Karbala to honor Mohammed's grandson Hussein - who was butchered by the founders of Sunni Islam, to whom power was worth more than the Prophet's family. The hatred goes deep.
The Sunni Arab campaign against Shias isn't just a struggle for political advantage: It reflects an impulse to genocide. And it makes a grim joke of claims of Muslim unity.
The Tuesday atrocities, followed by smaller-scale attacks on more pilgrims yesterday, were meant to be as outrageous as possible. They not only underscored the hatred Sunni extremists feel toward all Shias, but had the immediate goal of provoking Muqtada al-Sadr's Shia militia to retaliate.
The Sunni insurgents and their foreign-terrorist allies are worried. The recent effort by American and Iraqi forces to pacify Baghdad has shown early signs of success. Wary of tangling with our troops again, Sadr's Mahdi Army has been laying low, while the Sunni extremists have taken heavy losses.
The Sunnis want the Shias back in the fight. Why? Because they want to disrupt the Baghdad security plan. Because they want to deepen the reawakened hatred between Iraq's religious communities. And because they yearn for a regional conflict that would "put Shias back in their place." So they slaughtered more than a hundred pilgrims - men, women and children; young and old - in Allah's name. Where was the outcry?
Human-rights groups were too busy applauding European requests for the extradition of CIA operatives (the real enemies of Western civilization, of course). Since this butchery wasn't the fault of Americans or Brits, the Europeans themselves took no interest. American leftists, who raved that Abu Ghraib was another Auschwitz, didn't offer a single word of pity for the Muslim victims of Muslims. All to be expected.
But shouldn't Muslims have denounced the attacks on the pilgrims? Shouldn't such an atrocity have sparked Arab anger that transcended Islam's internal divide? After all, those murdered Shias were fellow Arabs, not Persians. Where were the public statements of sympathy by government ministers and mullahs? Where was the noble Arab media? Where are the outraged demonstrations?
Not only is Islamic unity a sham, the Middle East's hypocrisy stinks like a shallow grave. Sunnis regard Shias as Unter menschen. No Sunni government wants to see Shias receive a fair deal - in Iraq or anywhere else.
In the short term, the question is whether Shias will take the bait and retaliate against Sunni Arab civilians in Iraq. The Baghdad government is doing its best to calm the furious Shia community. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
But the greater, long-term danger is one this column has highlighted before: The administration's rush back into the arms of the Saudis and other America-hating Sunni Arab governments is a colossal strategic mistake.
The moral issues are bad enough: To the Saudi royal family, dead Shias aren't tragedies - they're trophies. One almost expects those bloated, bigoted princes to organize Shia-hunting safaris the way they slaughter endangered species when vacationing in impoverished African countries (been there, seen that).
The strategic catastrophe that would result from a return to our wretched mistakes of the 20th century would cost us dearly. When picking allies in the Middle East, we've been on the wrong side of history for over a half-century. And now the Saudis are waging a propaganda campaign to convince American opinion-makers that they're our best pals in the whole, wide world. It works. An honorable elder statesman I respect recently got suckered during a junket to Saudi Arabia. He left Riyadh convinced he'd been sitting down with our indispensible allies.
Well, the view I've seen with my own eyes - in dozens of Muslim and mixed-faith countries - is of Saudi money spent lavishly to divide struggling societies, to block social and educational progress for Muslims and to preach deadly hatred toward the West. Until 9/11, the Saudis got away with their extremist filth in this country, too. And Saudi-funded mosques here still seek to prevent Muslims from integrating into American society.
The Saudis, not the Iranians, are the worst anti-American hate-mongers in the world today. When our dignitaries visit Prince Bandar and his buddies, they get the (literal) royal treatment. But in the slums of Mombasa or Cairo, in Lahore, Delhi and Istanbul, the Saudis do everything in their power to make Muslims hate us.
After the suicide attacks on those pilgrims, did any member of the Saudi royal family visit the kingdom's own oppressed Shias to express sympathy and Muslim solidarity?
Our relationship with the Saudis reminds me of the scene in the film "The Shining" when Jack Nicholson's character imagines he's embracing a beautiful woman only to open his eyes and find himself smooching a decomposing corpse. It's time for Washington's Saudi-lovers to open their eyes.
By the way: The two suicide bombers who killed those pilgrims were Saudis.
I think he's generally wrong about everything Islamic, and he has a bigger megaphone than I do, which makes his wrongness worse. Here's his answer to Time's March 5 cover story, which I grudgingly thought was reasonably accurate and long overdue, except for the obligatory BDS at the end.
Bobby Ghosh's March 5, 2007 cover story in Time does not justify its title, "Why They Hate Each Other," because it doesn't clearly explain why the Shia and the Sunni are fighting each other so fiercely in [Iraq].
The article does, however, support a point I've been making, that the sectarian conflict in is not a religious war between the two groups. In fact, what are the theological differences between a Sunni and a Shia? They scarcely exist. The difference is an argument over the Islamic family tree. The Shia trace legitimate descent to the Prophet Muhammad's son--in-law, Ali, while the Sunni have traditionally accepted the various caliphs and sultans who have ruled Islamic empires over the centuries as legitimately installed by Allah.
Ghosh's article has an interesting, and unintentionally amusing, list of differences between Sunni and Shia. Here's how to tell them apart.
NAMES: The Shia have names like Abdel-Hussein and Abdel-Zahra. The Sunni have names like Omar and Uthman.
PRAYER: "Typically Sunnis pray with one arm folded over the other, just below the rib cage. Shia prefer to keep their arms straight down at their sides."
MOSQUES: Sunni mosques tend to have domes and minarets while Shia worship at places "which combine the functions of a mosque and community center and don't necessarily have domes."
OUTFITS: "Shia clerics in are often more elaborately attired than their Sunni counterparts, wearing white, black or green headgear. The Sunni clergy generally wear white headgear."
HOMES: Shia Muslims like portraits, while "Sunnis tend to favor calligraphy."
ACCENTS: Since the Shia live mainly in the south of , they speak "with a pronounced southern accent." The Sunni tend to exhibit the tones associated with Anbar province where they predominate.
My conclusion? We've got to stop treating the Sunni-Shia difference as a replay of the historical conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants in Europe . The Catholics and Protestants were split over creedal differences, and at one time theose were so deeply-held that people were willing to go to war over them. But there is nothing resembling this in the Muslim world today. A new intellectual map is needed.
Mostly I don't understand why the actions of the followers of Mohammed are never their fault, it's always some outside influence that drives them to the depths of evil. Where's the accountability?
#2
Effective immediately: "Pundit" status will be reviewed monthly. Anyone with Sudden-Moron-Syndrome will lose rank.
FYI: Muslim Brotherhood members are using YouTube to advance their fascist agenda. Scroll down on this Arab post and you can read an English language post on the subject (there are 4 YouTube posts on one page):
#3
The meme that the split between Sunni and Shia is a trifling matter not worth thinking about is the latest thing. I heard the head of the Middle East (or something like that) program at Duke University interviewed on NPR yesterday. In addition to the usual blithering about how Al Qaeda is misquoting the peace-endorsing Koran, he took the same line that the only real difference between Sunni and Shia is whether their religious leaders are also the political leaders. The Sunni caliphs are both supreme ruler and final religious authority, whereas the Shiite ayatollahs restrict themselves to religious matters, leaving the tedious necessities of ordering people around to the Shah of Iran and such. At that point I switched stations, lest the car have a dreadful accident. It wouldn't have done for them to find me after, arguing that the religious wars of Europe over the primacy of the pope in the years after Martin Luther scribbled a few thoughts on the subject... well, that those wars appeared to be over an issue equally trifling to the outsider.
#4
Great summary, TW. As a Christian, I abhor death, but this Sunni-Shi'a "divide" has got me questioning...which side to root for? Kinda like the Hamas/Fatah "civil war" in Paleoland, is there a downside to this infighting?
Posted by: BA ||
03/08/2007 8:54 Comments ||
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The Asia Times gives us a lesson on ethnic problems in Iran. Pay attention, class.
By Kimia Sanati
TEHRAN - As a Shi'ite-majority country with several large ethnic groups such as the Kurds, Arabs and Balochs that follow the Sunni faith, Iran has for years been vulnerable to unrest, riots and terrorist attacks that officials routinely attribute to foreign powers. "Iranian intelligence services have acquired information that shows the United States, Britain and Israel have been behind the unrest in various parts of Iran, including Khuzestan, Kordestan and West Azarbaijan, in the past few years," Mostafa Pour Mohammadi, Iran's intelligence minister, was quoted as saying by the Aftab News Agency.
A car-bomb attack last month by the separatist Jundullah (also called Popular Iranian Resistance Movement) in the southeastern city of Zahedan, which killed 13 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, triggered clashes between security forces and guerrillas of the PJAK, a separatist Kurdish party, around the city of Khoy in northwestern Iran. "In the past one and a half years and following air raids on PJAK bases in northern Iraq, clashes with the Iranian military have increased. The clashes used to occur at border points mostly, but the recent encounter was more intense and occurred inside Iranian soil," the Aftab News Agency quoted Abed Fattahi, representative of Oroumiyeh in Parliament, as saying.
A Revolutionary Guard helicopter crashed last Friday 17 kilometers inside the Iranian border, killing its two high-ranking commanders and seven other military staff. The guerrilla group that claimed responsibility has connections with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has bases in Turkey and northern Iraq. The same group blew up the Iran-Turkey gas pipeline last September.
#2
The international community, that much vaunted body of sophisticates who claim to have the best approach for peace in the 21st century, have heads of brick. No matter how much new evidence piles up to contradict their views, they still repeat this inane mantra, like the rocking faithful reading from their book of self-hypnosis:
"Accommodate them and terrorists will lessen hostility towards us. Aggressively attack them and terrorists will increase hostility towards us."
Accommodation, attack-it makes little difference on what terrorists do; they will be hostile and attack us whenever opportunity presents itself. The only difference that exists is in the timing of our beginning to fight unrestrained and in earnest and how that timing effects our chances of defeating the enemy. The rest is mere vain, disorienting theory.
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.
