Classic Liberal Soldier

More bulldshit from the CBC cow

2010-05-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100519/national/bank_firebombing

Banks have frequently been the targets of vandalism at recent summits, especially in the wake of the global financial crisis.

First part true, last part not true = bullshit. CBC? Please make sure your reporters are informed before spouting bullshit.

Claudia Calabro of the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the umbrella group organizing protests around the meetings, said it would neither condemn nor support the firebombing because it is "not interested in speaking about tactics."
In a statement, the network said: "One burnt RBC bank branch pales in comparison to the death and devastation that the G20 policies create worldwide, and the Tar Sands create in Canada."

Bullshit, Claudia: you support the firebombing. "One burnt RBC bank branch pales in comparison to the death and devastation that the G20 policies create worldwide, and the Tar Sands create in Canada."

The conversion of an abortion agnostic

2009-08-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

I have never been particularly exercised over the abortion issue. I've been content to let the two sides fight it out. But something James Taranato covered today made me think:

Writing in Slate, Meredith Simons suggests what seems an expedient remedy: keep abortion out of government insurance, and let private philanthropy fill the breach. But she notes:

Progressives hate the idea of a private abortion fund. They argue that abortion is a medical procedure like any other and should be covered by any insurance plan, public or private. Nobody has to set up charities for appendectomies--why do it for abortions?

An abortion is not an appendectomy. A burst appendix is a threat to life. Pregnancies lead to life. Pregnancy is, in fact, not an illness of any kind and, if not an illness, why are doctors "treating" it to "restore health" to the patient?

It's interesting. My view has now changed completely. Since pregnancy is not only healthy but super-healthy: the way in which all of us are born, doctors have no right to interfere. If the woman can't afford a baby, how is that a doctor's business? Since when is a doctor a social worker? A doctor's job is the physical health of his patient and, having taken the Hyppocratic Oath which instructs him to do no harm, to save life and alleviate suffering, doctors practising abortion should probably have their licenses to practise medicine revoked.

What a conversion from an abortion-neutral agnostic to a full-bloown Pro-Lifer! And why? Because the Left just doesn't know when to shut up and stop lying through its teeth.

Julia!

2008-08-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

I really love this blog for some reason. I can't get anyone to my site and look at what she's achieved! It's a phenomenon worth studying!

In case anyone is reading this

2008-08-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

CTV news would have it that the bus passengers who escaped with their lives were brave. It must be so because CTV news said they were brave over and over. I think they did that in case some old fool still believes that a brave person would have disarmed the murderer and tried to save someone else's life. How old school! I'm not saying there's anything wrong with people fleeing. I'm not judging them, I'm judging CTV news. 300 Spartans held off tens of thousands of Persians at Thermoplyae: now that was brave! But then that was an act common to a great culture while our culture is a tiny turd slowly spiralling down a toilet. Is it too bad CTV advertises our shame or is it a good thing to have notice of it so we can fix the problem?

And the photographers have shown such a remarkable delicacy, not to mention a puzzling lack of common curiosity about the appearance of the accused man, Vince Weiguang Li. Now why is that? Curiosity is what journalism is about, is it not? And yet the BEST photo we can get is here? It's fascinating to note the hyperlink name to this story, which has the headline: "

Bus attack suspect appears in Manitoba court

Read this link very closely:

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080731/Manitoba_victim_080801/20080801?hub=Canada,.

You see? This is a photograph of the "Mantiboba_victim," not the suspect. Get it? The guy with his head cut off is a victim and the guy who cut it off is a victim. So it's a draw. Let's get a soda.

I blew up a closeup and am posting it here. It doesn't give us much more information, unfortunately. This is the news team who I once watched interview a young girl, a victim of an horrific tragedy; they sadistically goaded her about her loss to capture every tear flowing down her pretty face. Their lack of curiosity about this killer is breathtaking. Are they afraid of being accused of racial stereotyping. Please! Tell me it ain't so! And why 2nd degree murder? An enormous knife brought on board for what? picking at his fingernails? Exhibiting the head to the passengers? Gee. Maybe it ought to have been common assault, huh?

Karsenty and the France 2 Al-Dura Hoax

2007-11-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

I'm in love

2007-06-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

Who should care? I don't care!

Truth or Fact?

2007-06-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

God I hate this argument! Yesterday James Taranto brought up the issue of Creationism vs Evolution and today published a letter from a reader.

Science has to do with fact, not truth; religion has to do with truth, not fact.

It's so simple. It's true that God created the Universe in 7 days, Adam from mud and Eve from his rib and mud: this truth speaks to our understanding of the nature of man, woman, life, sex; it gives a sense of wholeness to human experience; it grounds us in a necessary mytho-poetic form through which we create the social and moral order in which we participate and uphold by our actions. But it's a fact that humankind evolved from lower life forms. One is an emotional understanding of life without which our lives would be empty; the other an exercise in imagination and logic without which our existence would be fruitless. If you don't understand why, I pity you.

What else is there to say about the "Human Rights Council?"

2007-06-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

Israel's kindness mistaken for weakness

2007-04-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting post by a commenter at the Jerusalem Post:

30. #21 - Thank you but Hamas is not a serious threat /
redmike - Israel
04/24/2007 15:06

Hamas/PA are totally out of touch with reality Their attacks, although they could kill someone, are in the greater scheme of things like some annoying insect that could be swatted whenever Israel decided to do so. Israel could kill its members today and bring Gaza to its knees - water, electricity military incursion etc in 48 hours. They fail to understand that they are allowed to continue thanks only to Israel's benevolence. Presumably their distorted view stems from religious fervor.

That's quite true. The Israelis are a humane people and the Palestinians sending Qassams into Israel are real delusional cases. Where are the Psychiatrists Without Borders?

Unimpeachible is irresponsible

2007-04-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

What does AP (Associated Press) think it's doing? Here's its report:

Nine Palestinians were killed in the latest violence in the West Bank and Gaza, including two militants and a 17-year-old killed Sunday in the West Bank. The fighting also included a Palestinian rocket attack on the southern Israeli town of Sderot that damaged a home there.

"Also included?" Which came first? Was the rocket attack in response to the attack in Gaza or the other way around? What interests do Israelis have in Gaza? Are there any settlements there that have not been dismantled? When did Israel leave Gaza? If Israel has left Gaza, why would they need to invade Gaza? Why are Qassam rockets being fired into Israel? How often? How many have been killed or injured by Qassams? If a group were firing rockets near your home, would you accept that?

For a calendar of Qassam attacks for April, 2007click here.

AP continues:

Israeli officials defended the latest moves as part of operations that have been effective in drastically reducing the number of attacks against Israelis. But Palestinian officials charged that the new deaths jeopardized their efforts to expand the truce in Gaza to the West Bank.

What is a truce? In what way has a truce “largely held” if Gaza “militants have frequently fired rockets into Israel and have attacked Israeli patrols along the border fence?” If Canadians in Windsor were firing rockets into Detroit or vice versa and attacking border station with gunfire, would Canada or the US accept that as a truce that has “largely held?”

This kind of verbiage is an insult to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israelis are told that violence is what they're owed, what they deserve. Where have we heard this before? Isn't this the message to the Jews for the past 2,000 years, from the Roman expulsion to the European expulsions and massacres leading up to the Holocaust? And wasn't that the reason for the creation and necessity of the State of Israel, to prevent the Jews from annihilation?

As for the Palestinians, the press holds them accountable and responsible for none of their actions. So is it any surprise that they act irresponsibly? The Palestinians were offered a state beside Israel in 1937 and rejected it. See here for the Peel Commission Report of 1937. Note how tiny is the land allocation for the State of Israel in Plan A, which the Jewish Agency for Palestine accepted in return for security guarantees from the International community. The Palestinian Arabs continue to reject any compromise.

More AP:

The Gaza truce has largely held, though militants have frequently fired rockets into Israel and have attacked Israeli patrols along the border fence.

Again: what is a truce?

More from AP:

The Palestinian unity government, which includes Hamas, has called for an expanded truce, and Hamas officials in the government have often tried to separate themselves from the fiery pronouncements of the group's military wing. Israel and the U.S. State Department consider Hamas to be a terrorist group.

What is the “political wing” of Hamas? What is a “military wing?” What does the Hamas Charter say about the existence of Israel? Does the “political wing” foreswear the destruction of Israel? No.

Here is an excerpt from the Hamas Charter, which no member of Hamas has foresworn to this day:

Part III - Strategies and Methods

Article Eleven: The Strategy of Hamas: Palestine is an Islamic Waqf

The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it. No Arab country nor the aggregate of all Arab countries, and no Arab King or President nor all of them in the aggregate, have that right, nor has that right any organization or the aggregate of all organizations, be they Palestinian or Arab, because Palestine is an Islamic Waqf throughout all generations and to the Day of Resurrection. Who can presume to speak for all Islamic Generations to the Day of Resurrection? This is the status [of the land] in Islamic Shari’a, and it is similar to all lands conquered by Islam by force, and made thereby Waqf lands upon their conquest, for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection. This [norm] has prevailed since the commanders of the Muslim armies completed the conquest of Syria and Iraq, and they asked the Caliph of Muslims, ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab, for his view of the conquered land, whether it should be partitioned between the troops or left in the possession of its population, or otherwise. Following discussions and consultations between the Caliph of Islam, ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab, and the Companions of the Messenger of Allah, be peace and prayer upon him, they decided that the land should remain in the hands of its owners to benefit from it and from its wealth; but the control of the land and the land itself ought to be endowed as a Waqf [in perpetuity] for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection. The ownership of the land by its owners is only one of usufruct, and this Waqf will endure as long as Heaven and earth last. Any demarche in violation of this law of Islam, with regard to Palestine, is baseless and reflects on its perpetrators.

Note what bin Laden said in this context regarding Spain and Portugal. Note also that bin Laden’s talking about the humiliation of the past 80 years. Therefore he is NOT talking about the State of Israel (1948) but the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in 1919.

Shall we make a list of Muslim conquests which, according to religious fanatics, are Islamic holdings until the Day of Resurrection? Why not? Let’s start with Muhammed’s first military operation to found Islam. He started in Medina and he and his followers took:

1. Mecca
2. the rest of Saudi Arabia
3. Palestine
4. Jordan
5. Egypt
6. Syria
7. Lybia
8. Algeria
9. Morocco
10. Turkey
11. Iraq
12. Afghanistan
13. Russia
14. Spain
15. Portugal
16. Europe right up to the gates of Vienna
17. France right up to Poitiers.
18.Pakistan
19.Kazakhstan
20.Uzbekistan
21....

All the above are considered holdings of Islam by religious fanatics and Israel is the front line, not the thing that will appease these insane backward psychopaths who live in the 7th century. Israel is the Czechoslovakia of the 3rd World War.

Climate Change?

2007-04-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

What is climate? What is nature? Has climate ever been stable? What defines climate stability? At The New Statesman they're asking the question "Has climate change passed the point of no return?"

There are a lot of assumptions in the question. A number of posters correctly point out that warming and cooling are natural facts. Is it possible for man to gain control over his environment and to what extent? This is an old question and it is natural to man: it is human nature to want to control as much space around us as possible. This is why we build houses, why we plant and preserve foodstuffs, why we save money and invest it. It's not so crazy to want to control the environment too. Wouldn't it be nice?

Yet those who claim man is controlling the environment seem to see it only in the most negative light, as if our control of nature could only be a Dr. Frankenstein abortion or, rather, an abortion that continues to live and haunt us, a vampire, indestructible since made by the human mind. Their tone is both hysterical and depressed.

But look at what our control of nature has wrought on the positive side. Do I really need to do an accounting from the drop in infant mortality rates to transplants? from sea voyages to space voyages? from starvation to constant year-round supplies of a variety of foods no king could imagine just a few hundred years ago? ubiquitous central heating? cleaner environments by far that the Greeks who threw their garbage in the streets?

Some posters see it this way, in a positive light and are prepared to argue against the assumptions in The New Statesman's question. One poster points out that science isn't made by consensus anyway:

Science does not earn its proofs by majority votes but by theories tested by experiment. If the theory is capable of prediction, it's a good theory.

Another upbeat poster says:

i think of oil spills when the initial reports say, "It'll take hundreds of years for this landscape to regain its natural beauty," and 8 years later the oceans have managed to clean up what our screw-ups have wrought. so many examples of humans giving themselves more credit than they deserve.

A good point. There's a bit of delusional thinking here and it oscillates with a feeling of impotence. That's a fascinating juxtaposition of two seemingly opposed feelings and it resembles nothing so perfectly as a nightmare.

And this was another reasonable response:

Climate has changed since Earth was created. We already have witnessed 4 climate change since 1895, and alawys [sic] alarmists predicted the world was reaching a point of no return, either from warming or ferom [sic] cooling. Earhs [sic] was warmer than now between 800-1300 AD and much cooler from 1400-1715 AD. So relax, keep working and enjoy life!

I've left this one for last:

...the absence of religious faith (and even vehement opposition to it) has led to the present "return of the repressed content" of Christianity. In the late 60s there was an ice-age scare but it didn't take since it had no cultural resonance. "We've been bad, we will burn" has obvious cultural resonance.

The "return of the repressed" comes from Freud. It would be interesting to see a study done to test my theory that more atheists, agnostics and anti-religious types are seized by Global Warming hysteria than those who are secure in their religious faiths. Since we know that a larger proportion of political conservatives are religious than those who are politically liberal and that fewer political conservatives "believe in" global warming as an unstoppable man-made train than liberals, the hypothesis has promise and needs to be tested.

Get Wolfie!

2007-04-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

From the Wall Street Journal:

The World Bank released its files in the case of President Paul Wolfowitz's ethics on Friday, and what a revealing download it is. On the evidence in these 109 pages, it is clearer than ever that this flap is a political hit based on highly selective leaks to a willfully gullible press corps.

Mr. Wolfowitz asked the World Bank board to release the documents, after it became possible the 24 executive directors would adjourn early Friday morning without taking any action in the case. This would have allowed Mr. Wolfowitz's anonymous bank enemies to further spin their narrative that he had taken it upon himself to work out a sweetheart deal for his girlfriend and hide it from everyone.

The documents tell a very different story--one that makes us wonder if some bank officials weren't trying to ambush Mr. Wolfowitz from the start. Bear with us as we report the details, because this is a case study in the lack of accountability at these international satrapies.

Please read the whole thing here.

As Melanie Phillips sees it:

The truth of the matter, however, is that faced with an obvious conflict of interest he asked to be removed from Ms Riza’s case altogether — but his request was turned down by the bank’s ethics committee (sic), which itself advised him that she should leave the bank and be compensated for this blow to her career. [my emphasis]

In other words, in this respect Wolfowitz behaved honourably; the Bank itself was responsible for Ms Riza’s promotion but chose to smear Wolfowitz — who has been campaigning against corruption at the Bank — by claiming falsely that this was the outcome of his secret machinations.

See the last post for more of the same.

The Chosen People

2007-04-16T19:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Landes went on holiday today and left his laptop at home. Good for him. He posted this before he left. Scroll down for my comment. It's interesting that Finkielraut didn't point out that if the Palestinians are the Left's chosen people, they must think they're God.

Progress in the War

2007-04-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Please read: Houzan Mahmoud's essay, "We say no to a medieval Kurdistan," here.
An excerpt:

The demand for secularism - and a movement that fights for it as a cause - is now a reality in Kurdistan. It has divided the society between two poles: those who want a secular society with space and freedom accorded to all religions and schools of thought, and those who have a programme of the imposition of political Islam on every aspect of our lives.

Our campaign for the removal article seven has opened a new chapter in the fight for secularism and against the medievalism and obscurantism of sharia law.

This struggle marks a particularly bright period in Kurdistan's contemporary history. It is an historic movement for human dignity, for freedom of religions and other forms of thought, for women's equality and human rights.

It is worth mentioning that without international support and solidarity, our campaign would simply not have been as successful as it has. Therefore, I call on all freedom-loving people worldwide to give consistent and unconditional support to important fights of this kind.

Our unity and worldwide solidarity does make a huge difference. It always leaves an impact. My thanks to all who stood with us in our struggle. We will continue with our fight until we win and push sharia law back to where it belongs - in the dark ages.

And Charles Krauthammer's "The Surge: First Fruits, " here.

An excerpt:

The news from Anbar is the most promising. Only last fall, the Marines' leading intelligence officer there concluded that the United States had essentially lost the fight to al-Qaeda. Yet just this week, the Marine commandant, Gen. James Conway, returned from a four-day visit to the province and reported that we "have turned the corner."
Why? Because, as Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, has written, 14 of the 18 tribal leaders in Anbar have turned against al-Qaeda. As a result, thousands of Sunni recruits are turning up at police stations where none could be seen before. For the first time, former insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi have a Sunni police force fighting essentially on our side.

It's OK to bring your own laws with you

2007-04-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

From Kathryn Jean Lopez:

In a German case in which a Muslim, Moroccan-born 26-year-old mother of two was petitioning for an expedited divorce from a man who had beaten her and threatened her life, Judge Christa Datz-Winter denied the woman’s request, a woman who already had a restraining order on her husband after police were called last May because he attacked her. The reason for the injudicious divorce denial? The Koran, the judge said, instructs that “men are in charge of women.” She explained further that the couple hails from a “Moroccan cultural environment in which it is not uncommon for a man to exert a right of corporal punishment over his wife.”

For the the story at the New York Times, click here.

Not A Bad Sign

2007-04-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

Civil rights march in Islamabad.

An Island Kingdom

2007-04-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

At Works And Days:

One can make all sorts of clever arguments—indeed the Brits have, from blaming us to blaming their own—about why this crisis was someone else’s fault, due to a misunderstanding, due to media exaggeration, due to an accident. But what is missing is the simple fact that THIS IS THE BRITISH NAVY. Who would care if the Iranians had embarrassed the Italian Navy, the Russian Navy, or the Chinese Navy? But the Brits? We forget that the entire history of Western navies is predicated on the British experience at sea. The Brits had the greatest admirals, the Brits invented the Man-of-War, dreadnought, battleship, heavy cruiser, and aircraft carrier. The Brits created the very notion of modern seamanship and discipline, and its pantheon of naval heroes like Drake, Cook, Anson, Vernon, Nelson, and Fisher still resonates. So like the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center this was an iconic act that sent a message that the descendents of Xerxes finally upped Lord Nelson.

Please read the whole post.

Exeunt Christ, Enter Mohammed

2007-04-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

From CBC: The sailors and marines are to be freed. Good that the wrong has been righted at least. But note the language that accompanies the release of the British sailors:

"On the occasion of the birthday of the great Prophet (Muhammad) … and for the occasion of the passing of Christ, I say the Islamic Republic government and the Iranian people — with all powers and legal right to put the soldiers on trial — forgave those 15," Ahmadinejad said, referring to the Muslim Prophet's birthday on March 30 and the Easter season. [my bold]

Obviously, Christians take the meaning of the holiday to be the resurrection, not just the crucifiction of Christ. Muslim supercessionism is the big drum being banged here.

The only surprise here was that he didn't blame the Jews. That was to keep the message as black and white as possible.

Looks Like War

2007-04-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

No posts for quite a while. One tires of yelling into a void, more tired of trying to educate people who would rather pull the covers over their heads. How people like Melanie Phillips can keep her sanity is beyong my understanding. I do it by ignoring politics for a time. But there's a war on and many people don't only not know which side they're on, they don't even know which side is even in their best interest to support.

I've argued to friends all the way through this Iraq quandary, the invasion of Iraq was to get Iran outflanked. Now they have them east and west. You can't move a quarter million troops on aircraft carriers and you can't attack a country as large as Iran from the Persian Gulf. I've never believed Iraq was about Iraq. It is only the second stage in a very long war against Islamic imperialism.

Oh, I know: it's only imperialism when the West pushes back, not when Islam attacks. That's just natural. That's immigration. Well, that's true enough and so long as you can live with amputations for minor theft, you can just say bring it on. If you don't even like ten years for a loaf of bread, amputation should tell you which side you're on. If you don't think it's fair to keep gays from marrying each other you're not likely to agree to their being stoned to death. Same for adulteresses and abortions. Clearly the left and right need to unite against a common enemy and that means not only compromises but a solid agreement on basic principles. There aren't enough on the left though it's improving. Hitchens understands the war, as do a couple of bloggers like neoneocon, a lifelong liberal Democrat who woke up on 9/11. Many prefer to sleep.

It looks like the kidnapping of the British sailors is the first shot. My crystal ball goes blank here. Mr. Blair does not have Ms. Thatcher's backbone or there would be hell to pay already. James Lyons, former commander-in-cheif for the US Pacific fleet suggests the British take Kargh Island, a major shipping port for oil according to James Taranto's March 30 column. His point that Iran has indirectly attacked America by attacking her ally is true but clever on Iran's part. The pressure is put on Blair and not Bush this way. I have no doubt what President Bush's course would be.

I'd sure love to read the diplomatic mail between Washington, London, Canberra and Ottawa these days.

But I predict allied troops in Iran before the 1st day of summer. That will put the Democrats on a veritable spit.

Update August 2, 2008: I was wrong and I'm going to stop predicting now. But I'll post from time to time.

The Independent's Christmas Cheer

2006-12-26T08:49:00.000-08:00

It's nauseating. Here's the gist of it:

In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

Mary was not a Palestinian refugee, nor was the fruit of her womb, Jesus, though in today's world, third generation Palestinians living in Arab states are, thanks to UNRWA, perversely still considered refugees. Such an "honour" as UN slavery forever is conferred on no other unlucky people, thank God. As for Jesus, "He was born of the flesh and the seed of David," wrote Paul, born at Bethlehem, in the Roman province of Judea, which would be renamed Palestina 160 years later after the Philistines, not the Arab Palestinians who live there today. The Philistines, judging from their pottery and ironworking skills came from Mycenae. There is no racial relationship between the Philistines and the Palestinian Arabs who, like the Palestinian Jews, share the same ancestor, Abraham, who the Arabs call Ibrahim.

Anyway, read the whole nauseating thing here
.

Straight Talk About War

2006-11-18T19:55:00.000-08:00

Victor Davis Hanson, author of A War Like No Other and The Soul of Battle, among others, has this concise analysis of the present situation. I can think of no other essay that so entirely addresses every important point upon which our futures all depend. Please read it here.

2006-11-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

More Cock Robin Defections

Melanie Phillips, who should be read often, has some interesting information about the expansion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This reminds me to go into the several reasons for Cock Robin’s recent Sky is falling obsession: human caused "Global Warming" See also here for her link to this interesting site about former believer and now enviroskeptic Claude Allegre, a French geophysicist.

Phillip quotes Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, saying that

[O]ver the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been cnstructed [sic]in this country - the phenomenon of ‘caastrophic’[sic]climate cange. It seems that mere ‘climate change’ was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be ‘catastrophic’ to be worthy of attention.
The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers 'chaotic’, ‘irreversible’, ‘rapid’ - has altered the public discourse around climate change. This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as 'climate change is worse than we thought’, that we are approaching 'irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate’, and that we are ‘at the point of no return’.
I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric…

I would add that the alarmists have other agendas. Firstly, to redistibute both power and money to multinational political institutions which can be controlled by a large number of undemocratic and anti-democratic states, to the loss of the Americans above all and to any European state that bucks the general trend to humble the US. If Kyoto were really about the environment, why would the Russians not be forced to pay instead of being recipients of "bad environmental citizens?" Look at a nighttime view of the Urals. See all those bright lights? They aren’t cities: they are 24/7 natural gas burn-offs. This stuff could be moved to market but for a pipeline. Where will they get the money if capitalists (boo!) want 50% for their risk (the gas belings to the Soviet — oops — the Russian people)?

Another one is even more amusing. Freud got a lot wrong but he’s right about this: we are witnessing his "return of the repressed content:" i.e. Christianity of the most primitive pre-scientific kind. Though about 93% of "Greenhouse gasses" are water vapour, the infinitessimal contribution of humans is said to be the thing pushing us into unavoidable chaos. We humans are evidently back at the center of the universe, as in the time of Galileo, and our actions determine the events of the universe! We have been bad and WE WILL BURN! Sound familiar?

2006-10-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

Justice in france

From Richard Landes at Augean Stables:

L’Express, a major French weekly had the decision up at it’s website within two hours, able to cite verbatim from a document that in principle cannot be released until signed by the court.... I remind readers that I do not have the judgment yet, so I cannot judge either the article or the Judges on the basis of any more than what’s written here. It may be that the language of this article has been cherry-picked to put Karsenty in a bad light. But harsh it is.

Unfortunately Landes’ link to L’Express doesn’t work; the closest I can get is this arrow at their site: http://www.lexpress.fr/recherche/default.asp , but it doesn’t go anywhere. Sorry, but here’s what they said as quoted by Landes:

The image of a Palestinian child felled by bullets, diffused by the French station France2 in 2000, and become the symbol of the Palestinian Intifada, cannot be considered a montage or a staged scene, the correctional tribunal of Paris judged.
Against the advice of the floor [i.e., the Procureur] who recommended dropping the charges, the judges condemned Philippe Karsenty, the animator of the websit Media Ratings (www.M-R.fr) for "public defamation" of Charles Enderlin and France2.
Philippe Karsenty is also condemned to pay one symbolic Euro of damages to each of the plaintiffs, as well as 3000 Euros of court costs. He announced to the journalists that he intended to appeal the process and promised that he will present the "proofs" of his claims would be up at his website in the coming days.

An extraordinary judgement since the procureur recommended dropping the charges because Enderlin did nothing whatever to make his case. He produced no witnesses and refused to produce the rushes on which Karsenty’s criticisms (and Landes’s) are based. The procureur was angry about that and thus her (ignored) recommendation. Since all Enderlin produced was a letter from Jacques Chirac, we can conclude that justice in France depends on who, not what, you know. The law in France has ever been in thrall to aristocratic brutality punctuated only by brief murderous episodes of mob revenge. Sue me.

Check out Landes's website, www.seconddraft.org

2006-10-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

Life's a... bitch?

According to Mark Holland, Liberal Poodle of Canada, Peter MacKay answered a colleague of his in the clean air debate who'd said, don't you care about clean air for humans and animals? What about your dog? And MacKay pointed to Belinda Stronach's chair and said "You already have her." A clever crack, I thought, and I'm not talking about Belinda.

But is Belinda Stronach a bitch? Bitches are made that way by nature; Stronach is more cunning. When she crossed the floor was she a whore? Whores rent their pudenda, they don't sell their souls. She is, therefore, neither a bitch nor a whore.

Accusations of sexism abound, naturally but what’s really sexist is that women like Belinda hide behind their sex and dismiss all opposition to their wills with that catch-it-all accusation. And the fact that Jens can say this kind of stuff but Johns can’t. Here's Jen Z, for example, from www.thepinkseats.com, a great post:

The Canadian Press confirmed today that recently retired Maple Leafs enforcer Tie Domi and Liberal MP Belinda Stronach are linked. As we mentioned last week, it was reported that they were seen together at the Toronto International Film Festival. And now Stronach has been named as the "other woman" in a divorce application filed by his wife Leanne.
One of the incidents cited in the document is that a friend of Leanne's saw Domi and Stronach walking holding hands down Madison Avenue in New York. None of this has been proven in court yet, but if it is true, shame on them. Domi's a dummy - not only for cheating on his wife and three kids, but for being disrespectful enough to be seen in public doing it too. And Stronach's a homewrecker - becoming involved with a married man...we love politicians with outstanding ethics, don't you?!
We were pondering what these two could possibly have in common and it occurred to us that maybe it's chewing men up and spitting them out - Domi with his fists on the ice and Stronach with her man-eating ways -she's been married twice and broke up with MP Peter Mackay when she crossed the floor in the House of Commons and became a Liberal). Like we said before, Domi better watch out. She'll leave him for the opposition ... a retired Montreal Canadiens player.

Love that last paragraph so much I emphasized it.
Here’s another bit I like, right from the horse’s mouth:

"I have chosen a public vocation and I recognize the scrutiny and attention that comes with that. At the same time, I am an individual citizen and I respect the right of everyone to privacy in their personal life."

Exactly! She wants it both ways. Actually it's even more simple than that: She wants it her way.

2006-10-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Kim-il-ding-dong

I nominate this picture as the weapon of choice against the choicest dingbat on the planet. Copy, laminate, drop on Pyonyang in the millions.

2006-10-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

Stomach-churning

From Augean Stables this awful story:

I have heard from Paris that Philippe Karsenty was found liable for insulting Charles Enderlin and France2 to the sum of 3000 Euros to Enderlin and 5 symbolic Euros to France2. I do not have the judgment and only a vague account of the reasoning, which criticizes Philippe for not having done more research.
The implications of this reversal of Madame le Procureur’s clear recommendations, for what appears to be — we’ll have a translation and analysis of the judgment ASAP — a critique of Philippe that somehow absolves Enderlin of all of his journalistic failings, failings that came out abundantly in court, are deeply troubling.

It's pretty strange to claim that Karsenty didn't do enough research since that's the gist of his criticism of Enderlin. How much criticism of the press, of political figures, of ideas is allowed in nominally free and democratic France? Were I there, would I be liable for making such a statement and "insulting the institutions of France?" Better shut me mouth then!

Here in North America, you'd have to prove, not that Karsenty was wrong but that he knowingly lied and did it maliciously in order to hurt Enderlin. Enderlin would also have to prove damages. Was he fired from his job, for instance? If Karsenty criticized Enderlin's decisions and coverage because he felt the story was wrong, that would clearly place him outside the laws of libel.

It shows how strongly aristocratic France is, despite its democratic pretensions. It's not just this story: there are plenty of issues where the ruling elite simply ignore the will of the people. The EU constitution is dead, for instance, but the bureaucrats go on, interpreting a no vote as a "yes-if-we-were-only-just-educated-enough-to-understand-it" vote. Who was the Frenchman who said that no-one really understands the whole document? That's a blueprint for autocracy and we've seen its smudged fingerprint today.

Or perhaps the justice just couldn't get a particular image out of her head: that of the Jew soldier standing at the foot of the Cross, a nail and hammer in his hand.

2006-10-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

Witch Trials Ahead

I've always felt there was something missing in the global warming debate and that's the debate part. When proponents dismiss thousands of dissenting opinions and proclaim that there is a "consensus of opinion" on warming, there's something wrong.

I've always felt that the thing was a classic UN redistribution scam. Russia burns a dozen, dozen and a half natural gas fires east of the Urals 24/7. Look at a nighttime map of Russia. Yet they don't have to pay, they have to be paid - one of the world's greatest polluters. Why? no bread.

The whole thing seems to me a classic case of the return of the repressed content Freud spoke about. Having denied the consequence of action in the moral (and especially religious) sphere, it comes back into "science." Stripped of all the artificially scientific clothing, the emperor looks like this: "We've been bad and because we'ver been bad we will burn." It's the most primitive of terrors in the guise of science.

And what of the science? Can someone explain to me why different methods were used to determine relative temperatures in the centuries leading up to our day? No one has to my satisfaction and I don't need to believe something because someone else believes the sky is falling.

MelaniePhillips.com has an excellent piece on the fascist green movement and their plans to hold "war crimes" trials over those who refuse to accept their inquisition. I'm quoting the whole thing, it's so good.

The green witch-hunters
A charming new idea from the delightfully imaginative green lobby. David Roberts in something called Grist magazine writes:
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.
Such is the contemporary progressive thinker. In an excellent article on Spiked OnLine, Brendan O'Neill rightly expresses horror and disgust at te obscene use of the phrase "climate-change denial" by the green lobby to demonise and vilify climate sceptics and thus shut down debate in totalitarian fashion:
Some take the moral equivalence between climate change denial and Holocaust denial to its logical conclusion. They argue that climate change deniers are actually complicit in a future Holocaust - the global warming Holocaust - and thus will have to be brought to trial in the future.
Green author and columnist Mark Lynas writes: "I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put [their climate change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial - except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don't will one day have to answer for their crimes." (11)
There is something deeply repugnant in marshalling the Holocaust in this way, both to berate climate change deniers and also as a convenient snapshot of what is to come if the planet continues to get warmer.
First, the evidence is irrefutable that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis; that is an historical event that has been thoroughly investigated, interrogated and proven beyond reasonable doubt. (Although as the American-Jewish academic and warrior against Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt, has pointed out, even the Nazi Holocaust is not above debate and re-evalution; it is not a "theology".) There is no such proof or evidence (how could there be?) that global warming will cause a similar calamity. Second, it is, yet again, a cynical attempt to close down debate. The H-word is uttered as a kind of moral absolute that no one could possibly question. We are all against what happened during the first Holocaust, so we will be against the "next Holocaust", too, right? And if not - if you do not take seriously the coming "global warming Holocaust" - then you are clearly wicked, the equivalent of the David Irvings of this world, someone who should possibly even be locked up or certainly tried at a future date. At least laws against Holocaust denial (which, as a supporter of free speech, I am opposed to) chastise individuals for lying about a known and proven event; by contrast, the turning of climate change denial into a taboo raps people on the knuckles for questioning events, or alleged events, that have not even occurred yet. It is pre-emptive censorship. They are reprimanded not for lying, but for doubting, for questioning. O'Neill's article might be read in conjunction with a fascinating piece from 1999 by Wolfgang Behringer who points out a historical conjunction between witch-hunting and irrational anxiety about the weather -- particularly during the Little Ice Age in the 15th and 16th centuries. Behringer homes in on the year 1560, when a combination of exceptional coldness and wetness led to witch-hunts against women suspected of weather-making. The strange weather conditions were thought to be not the work of God but the work of mankind:
The resumption of witch-hunting in the 1560ies was accompanied by a debate about weather-making, because this was the most important charge against suspected witches. Though witches were certainly made responsible for all kinds of bad luck, in an agrarian society weather is especially important. Crop failure caused increases in prices, malnutrition, rising infant mortality, and finally epidemics. Through sources we can observe that while individual "unnatural" accidents resulted in individual accusations of witchcraft, in case of "unnatural" weather and collective damage whole peasant communities demanded persecution. In comparison to individual accusations, which tended to lead to trials against individual suspects, collective demands for persecution - when accepted by the authorities - regularly resulted in large-scale witch-hunts (Behringer 1995). Without going into details, the fundamental interdependance of meteorologicaldisaster, crop failure, and a popular demand for witch-hunts can be demonstrated by two further examples: the largest witch-hunt of the sixteenth century, and the largest witch-hunt of the seventeenth century, which occurred between 1626-1630 and was the climax of European witchcraft persecutions. The mechanisms detected in the background of these persecutions can be applied to all large witchcraft persecutions in traditional EuropeÂ It can be shown from many individual witch-trials that meteorological events contributed decisively to many individual suspicions and accusations, and as we know now from climatic history, these events often had super-local, super-regional, or "super-national" character. Areas of low pressure could cover large regions; the advance of arctic air could harm at least the northern part of the continent or even the northern hemisphere. What we can learn from this is that contemporary lamentation about decreasing fruitfulness of the fields, of the cattle, and even of men where far from being just rethoric devices, but rested on empirical observation (Lehmann 1986). The rising tide of demonological literature did in no way ridicule such lamentations, but was written by members of the contemporary élites like the famous French jurist Jean Bodin, the suffragan bishop of Treves Peter Binsfeld, the chief public prosecutor of Lorraine Nicolas Rémy, or the King of Scotland James VI. who was about to become James I. of England. They all shared the idea that witches could be responsible for the weather theologically based on the theory that on the basis of the evil compact, the devil could exercise his wishes (Clark 1996). According to the status of scientific theory, however, these demonologists did not draw their theories from dogma, but from experience.
Sound familiar?

2006-10-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Insane!

North Korea has announced that it will test a nuclear device but has not given a time frame. That the "Dear Leader" thinks this kind of threat would get nations to drop sanctions says everything about his irrationality. Let me bomb or I’ll bomb! It’s blackmail and nothing less.

What is even more appalling is the reaction at the BBC News comments pages. (No wonder Melanie Phillips [read everything she’s written here] is in such despair, just as was Prophetess Oriana Fallaci) Here’s what the communist- and terrorist-sympathyzing news agency had to say about the events leading up to the present crisis:

Sept 2005: Hailed as an historic breakthrough, North Korea agrees to give up nuclear activities
Next day, N Korea says it will not scrap its activities unless it gets a civilian nuclear reactor
US imposes financial sanctions on N Korea businesses
July 2006: N Korea test-fires seven missiles
UN Security Council votes to impose sanctions over the tests
Oct 2006: N Korea threatens nuclear test

There's hardly a single word here that isn't an outright lie. But OK, believe the BBC, whose very lifeblood has been the lie: it all started in 2005. Well, as usual, in the penultimate paragraph, they mention that the Psychotic Leader kicked out IAEA inspectors in 2002. They didn’t bother explaining how they already had the "civilian nuclear program." No need to go back before devil Bush, right? Well, it was Jimmy Carter who let them have their reactor on a promise. The Dear Saint remembers the quandary in which he found himself: I paraphrase from memory:

I had to believe him. Not believing him would be like calling the man a liahh.

But this has to be read to be believed! The reaction of Britons and others on BBC’s comments on this story is absolutely mind-boggling! I posted but doubt they will publish it. Here’s an example of the utter nonsense: I haven’t cherrypicked: I’ve chosen messages in order of publication to give you the picture:

Added: Wednesday, 4 October, 2006, 14:58 GMT 15:58 UK
Let´s remember which country actially USED a nuclear weapon - only a country that feels it should RULE THE WORLD and everyone else should bow down to them would have done so.Everyone NEEDS weapons because the biggest bully of all USA has them AND WILL USE THEM as they have in the past!!!
Carol Moss, TORREMOLINOS, MALAGA, Spain
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Added: Wednesday, 4 October, 2006, 14:58 GMT 15:58 UK
If a country such as Pakistan, Taliban and AL Qaeda's chief supporter, has the right to nuclear arms then why not North Korea? Hamed Etebar, Virginia, United States Hamed, not that long ago, about the time when Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons, America was also a major backer of the Taliban. Now that USSR does not exist Americans have found other priorities and other enemies to keep running their Ammunations industry. I think N Korea, like Pakistan has a right to nuclear weapons.
rizwan k, ohio, United States
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Added: Wednesday, 4 October, 2006, 14:57 GMT 15:57 UK
Yeah, sure! Many other countries have nukes and everyone has the right...Why should some countries have the right but not others? Why should the US police the whole world?
Ray Amaya, Little Rock, United States
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Added: Wednesday, 4 October, 2006, 14:56 GMT 15:56 UK
I think all countries, including the US and Russia should put a stop to their nuclear weapons programs and destroy those weapons. It isn't exactly fair to tell others they don't have a right to something that you have in abundance and hold over the entire world. The fact is that the US is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against another nation and on its own people for testing purposes.These weapons are just too dangerous to exist.
[AndreeaNYC], New York City, United States
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Added: Wednesday, 4 October, 2006, 14:51 GMT 15:51 UK
If a country such as Pakistan, Taliban and AL Qaeda's chief supporter, has the right to nuclear arms then why not North Korea? The international community feels threatened at the prospect of North Korea having nuclear capabilities yet remain completely inactive towards Pakistan's already manufactured nuclear arsenal. It is not if but when Pakistan's nuclear weapons fall in the hands of Taliban and/or AL Qaeda it will be end of humanity as we know it.
Hamed Etebar, Virginia, United States
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Well, at least the last part of Hamed's piece is rational. "the right to nuclear arms"?

Update: Kaaaboomb!

2006-10-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

Overpass collapse kills 5

From CBC.ca

Five people were killed when a highway overpass collapsed in Laval, north of Montreal, sending tonnes of concrete onto two cars, police said on Sunday.

In 2000, an overpass under construction collapsed, killing one man. Inspectors are now checking all bridges in the area to make sure they are sound.

The Quebec government will hold a public inquiry into the incident and has announced it has closed a second overpass of similar design and age.

But the same story says the collapsed overpass was just inspected!

And now, a look back: from 2000:

A highway overpass in Quebec was so weak when it crumbled last June, killing one, that the wind could have blown it over, according to a report.
An engineering report on the incident, tabled by Quebec Transport Minister Guy Chevrette, concluded that anything from high winds to vibrations from passing traffic could have caused the overpass' eight concrete supports to cave in.
A structural system should have been installed to prevent the shifting of supports during construction, the study stated.
The accident killed one and injured two others. The report stopped short of placing blame, however.
Beaver Asphalt, the City of Laval and a supervising company were all involved in the overpass' construction. While determining who was ultimately responsible will be up to the coroner and judicial authorities, politicians are already assigning blame.
Thomas Mulcair, a member of the Liberal Opposition in Quebec, said the Bloc Quebecois government helped Beaver Asphalt get the contract when it contacted its main creditor, the National Bank.
Premier Lucien Bouchard has denied the charge.

I'd like to know what was in the concrete and whether core samples were taken in 2000? Will they do so now? Who was the unnamed supervisory company and is it the same company that pronounced the just-collapsed overpass fit just a month ago?

It rouses my suspicions. Is someone pocketing money and using substandard material? Did the same companies get the contracts for all the overpasses being looked at? Did the 2000 collapse change the way contracts were awarded?

2006-10-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

What? No Outrage?

Imagine if Jews did this:

Two people were killed, including a 15-year-old boy, and at least 32 were wounded when militiamen from the ruling Hamas party used guns and clubs to break up protests over unpaid government salaries near the parliament building in Gaza City and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip.
The wounded included three schoolchildren and a TV cameraman...

"Protests" stretches the meaning of the word doesn't it? If there are guns, shooting and death involved, aren't words like, "riot," "insurrection," or "battle" more fitting?

2006-10-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

Predictable

Is this the end of S.African democracy?

I guess when you have an ignoramus like Thabo Mbeki saying that AIDS isn't spread by sexual contact and only a myth invented to make Africans look like they have no self-control, this kind of thing is bound to happen.

Congratulations to the Cape Town mayor-elect, Helen Zille, from the opposition Democratic Alliance, and best wishes at surviving the onslaught. Why can't the DNC see that her victory is a signpost of their political health and just accept the defeat?

By the way, the Telegraph blogsite says:

South Africa needs a serious debate on crime
No less than 18,528 people were murdered between April last year and March this year. By way of comparison, Britain has about 800 murders a year – and its population is 50 percent greater than South Africa’s.

My brother, who works in the movie business, recently came back from South Africa with stars in his eyes I could discern through his rose-colored glasses. South Africa is wonderful he said, people there are really trying. I asked him, rather coldly, whether or not they were still pulling 2 or 3 bodies off the train to Johannesburg each and every morning. I guess the numbers above give the answer.

2006-09-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

Musharraff: Canada's Losses Trivial

According to CBC News, Musharraff has told Canadians that this is war and they must toughen up. Harper is silent.

No doubt, Pakistan's military ruler is right. The losses are not only tiny, they are nearly nonexistent compared to the 1,500 Taliban our troops have taken out.

I wonder what the death count looks like for Canada in traffic accidents in the same period of time.

But it does put Harper on the spot. I wonder if that was the plan.

2006-09-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

Unhappy? We'll Kill You! (for a fee)

See CQ for: Assisted Suicide: It's Not Just For The Ill Anymore. Many comments are mind-bogglingly stupid (except mine, of course).

2006-09-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

What A Post!

From a reader at DanielPipes.com in response to "Finding Allah in Unlikely Places." He calls himself, believe it or not, Chayim Yenkel! My grandmother would've loved that! It is response to Pipes' story about Muslims getting Nike to recall Nike Air sneakers because "offended Muslims" claimed to see the name "Allah" where "Air" is written. Pulled out of the air indeed. I have a few posts there too. The whole string is interesting. But here is Chayim Yenkel's brilliant post:

Submitted by Chayim Yenkel, Sep 13, 2006 at 11:24
God alone is holy. Not His name, not His prophets, but God alone. Holiness that spreads from God first to this great prophet, then to this lesser one, thus to this king or this cleric, this teacher, this imam to this promising student to that student's beloved gerbil in his cage is a primitive and corrupt debasement of all that is holy.
Nothing is holy but God. Put his name in the bottom of your sneakers, write it with ketchup in a urinal! God is still holy no matter what. His holiness is independent of ours. We can choose to come near or to stay away. It's our decision, our loss, our gain. This Nike complaint is all irrational primitive gibberish. Worship the Haram al Sharif or the Temple Mount, worship the bones of the saints, worship the images of your prophets: you are all idolaters locked away from God with no way in to His presence. Submit to God, not to His creatures or any representation of God or His creatures! God's name defiled on a Nike? What nonsense!

Isn't that glorious!

2006-09-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Rose Redux

At The Muslim Question, Lance has an interesting comparison between WW2 Japanese propagandists and Democrats. Here's a quote from David Horowitz:

"During World War II, the Japanese...gave their psychological warfare script to their famous broadcaster 'Tokyo Rose' and every day she would broadcast this same message packaged in different ways, hoping it would have a negative impact on American GI's morale. What was that
demoralizing message? It had three main points:
Your President is lying to you.
This war is illegal.
You cannot win the war."

—David Horowitz

2006-09-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Thank God For Fools

because without them we wouldn't have excellent arguments like that provided by Joel Pollak, who has had his article, "Kasrils and South Africa: apologists for Iran" published in the Mail & Guardian. Pollack responds to Kasril's shrill denunciation of Israel on September 1, titled "Rage of the Elephant"

Pollack chastised Kasrils for his stupid catagorization of Israelis as "Nazis."

Kasrils is right to invoke the Nazi era; however, he has got the labels the wrong way round. Like Hitler’s Germany, Iran is bent on regional domination at any cost, and is imprisoned by an official ideology of anti-Semitic hatred. (The very name "Iran" means "Aryan" and was bestowed on the country in 1935 by Reza Shah Pahlavi, an ardent admirer of Hitler and his racial theories.)
Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is determined to pick up where Hitler left off. Not only does he wish to destroy Israel, he also yearns for the collapse of what he calls "liberalism and Western-style democracy." Israel is playing the role of Czechoslovakia, circa 1938: a lone, vulnerable democracy encircled by hostile, totalitarian powers. Like Czechoslovakia, Israel is at risk of being abandoned by fellow democracies, such as South Africa, for short-sighted reasons.

And what are those reasons?

Lately, South Africa has become the chief apologist for Iran in the democratic world. During the war, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad attempted to deny the fact that Iran has been funding and supplying Hizbullah. Worse, our government has tried to shield Iran’s nuclear programme from action by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council.The minister’s contribution is to paint "the axis of Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria and Iran" as benign forces, merely seeking to restore a regional balance of power.
These are the primary sources of violent instability in the Middle East today, which have long sponsored terror in the region and across the globe. In Africa, for example, Hizbullah has been blamed for fuelling bloody civil wars in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kasrils, predictably, condemns Israel’s response to Hizbullah. We should not, however, indulge the self-righteousness of a man whose human rights record is indelibly stained by association with Quatro and the Bisho massacre. Last year Kasrils signed an intelligence and defence pact with Zimbabwe in the wake of Operation Murambatsvina, which saw about 700 000 Zimbabweans forcibly removed from their homes by their own government. That is roughly the same number of Palestinians who became refugees during the 1948 war, but Kasrils has nothing to say about the tragedy on South Africa’s doorstep. And while Kasrils professes sympathy for the displaced Palestinians, he fails to mention that Lebanon imprisons these refugees and their descendants in Apartheid-style separation from the rest of Lebanese society. [my emphases]

Sounds like a combination of guilt and ambition sans moral scruples. Please read the whole thing here.

2006-09-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

Like Terrorism

Bloor and Ossington area, in front of a sports bar, less than an hour ago I witnessed a brutal assault and battery on a defenseless man whose friends did nothing but watch. I also did nothing but called the police when they were at a safe distance. I have medical reasons but I guess everybody does.

The suspects, all in their twenties:

1) a fat black guy with a blue baseball cap, dark pants and jacket, white t-shirt, about 230 pounds, mid-brown complexion;
2) a tall man, mid-brown complexion but redder, smooth long oval face with prominent dark eyes and cornrow hair, about 6 ½ feet tall;
3) a short black girl with a mid-brown complexion tending toward the grey, about five feet to 5’2", a triangular shaped face, no more than 120 pounds, wearing dark boots, jeans and a jean jacket.

The victim: about 55 years old, white and grey hair, paunchy, white roundish face.

The victim, so far as I could see, did nothing provocative but then I came on the scene when they were at the eyeballing phase. But I saw no provocation. The taller man delivered at least two or three vicious blows without the slightest look of any kind of feeling. The blows were in no way defensive but were intended to cause injury. When the man was good and down, the young "lady" ran up and kicked the man three times, once landing with her boot in his face. A last kick stomped his face from above. The fat guy went back for his knapsack waving his hands in defence, showing he meant nothing aggressive. In fact, I did not see him participate in the battery.

2006-09-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

More Muslim Rage

Third Party and Independents debates the pope and politics.

Dawn posted this, among other things (but read the whole thing):

The man was discussing something that happened in the past.He is trying to understand how Islam works.He is not the only one who wants to know how people who claim Islam is peaceful, can also say that it is their duty to slit someone's throat in the 'name of Islam'.

David Remer answered:

Words have meaning, and those meanings conjure images of past events and experience, and words too, can be swords of their own. At this sensitive time between Muslims and Islam and the Western cultures, any leaders who proclaim to represent large numbers of the world’s population should discharge their words with forethought and acknowledgement of how those words may be perceived.
The Pope speaks to a wide audience. The first rule of public speaking is to identify who your audience is, and speak to their level of understanding to establish a bond, before seeking to change their minds and preconceptions.
The Pope screwed up, in this regard, just as Bush did when calling the war a Crusade. Such words have meaning, and those meanings conjure images of the past and experience. All words point to the past. Anyone who fails to understand this, will not be an effective public speaker capable of guiding public opinion.

Can he really be suggesting that a pope, speaking to German Catholics, should consider how a Muslim in Saudi Arabia would feel? Does he really suggest that the pope has some kind of interest or responsibility to "guide public opinion" in Islam and that they would acknowledge his leadership? Wow!

Paul Siegel wrote this:

I have no idea what the Pope’s intentions were. The first rule for a speaker is to know his audience. Yes, he was speaking directly to Germans. But he knew very well that what he said would be heard all over the world. The entire world was his audience.
If the Pope had thought about this at all, he would have known that Muslims would be offended. But he said Muslims were prone to violence anyway.
The Pope has a failing the vast majority of us have: we are sure we are right and everybody else is wrong. And, do you realize that what he said pushes many Muslims toward terrorism?
It may help a lot if the Pope apologizes to all Muslims for his remarks.

I posted this response:

People who absolve Muslims of responsibility for their violent actions do them no favours nor pay them any compliments. Muslims aren’t machines like guns whose responses can be “triggered” (to use the words Khatami’s spoke at Harvard) by this and that trivial word or image. To suggest so is to imply they are not human but some unstable chemical compound in our clumsy hands; to argue that they are above responsibility is to suggest a Muslim supercessionism that insults the rest of us. Those who excuse the behaviour of others that they would not tolerate in their neighbours and friends are nothing beneath their fine talk and polished principles but cowards.

2006-09-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

Theocracy+Fascism=Peanut Butter Cups!

The Liberals sent Canadian troops but they just meant it for show. Now that troops have died they wanted to bring them home: the pretense is over. I guess a couple of dozen troops is what Canada's vaunted rights and freedoms are worth. I guess those women in Afghanistan will just have to stay indoors for the rest of their lives. So much for the deeply caring Left. I get it: these rights are for us, not them; to them we just increase foreign aid, buy them off, seat endless committees whose purpose is to show off our purported concern. What repulsive hypocrites!

Just because Harper isn’t duplicitous he’s insulted. As for Layton, who a lifelong (2nd generation) NDPer told me the other day is a buffoon, he wants to negotiate with a theocratic fascist terrorist party! What on earth makes him think they want to negotiate with him?

Layton's duplicity is especially striking. Don't socialists claim to be opposed to theocrats and fascists? Oh, I guess not. As I've said before: theocracy=yuck! fascism=yick! but together they're mm-mm-GOOD!

2006-09-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

Canada's Weird War

What a way to fight a war! Report all the deaths and none of the victories! See this commentary by David J. Murrel. Hat tip to Dan.

2006-09-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT FISKING

Terrific post at Augean Stables: An Open Letter to Jostein Gaarder. The very finest post about European anti-Zionism and its many roots deep in anti-Semitic supercessionist fantasies.

2006-09-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Ground Kofi Dumped

Kofi Annan was left hanging in the wind by the president of Iran, that blessed man who talks to the hidden imam (though he's been dead—oops: in "grand occulation"—since 941) and dreams of a chaos great enough to bring him back and end history. Captain's Quarters has it here. Amedinijad was asked not to go on about Holocaust denial (there's an exhibition in Teheran with cartoons to belittle Jewish suffering) and the nutter went to the mic and announced a new conference to "study" the "exaggerations."

Well it looks good on him! Any useful (if not treacherous) idiot who says Syria will guard the Syrian-Lebanese border to ensure weapons don't get to Hiz'b'allah, deserves to be snubbed and publicly humiliated. He also deserves it for saying "I believe the Holocaust is a fact..." He believes? It's a matter of belief? He's already well on his way to Amedinijad's position anyway. And look at the result: he gets stranded there because he didn't come all the way. Anyone thinking compromise is possible with such as he is deluded.

2006-09-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

Khatami Insults Muslims

Jihad Watch has some of Khatami's speech last night in Chicago. Here's the business end:

"Public opinion can be rescued from the grips of ignorance and blunder and the domination of arrogant, warmongering and violence-triggering policies will end," said Khatami,...

Muslim are guns? we hold them to our heads and fire them? Is he really telling us Muslims have no free will? that they are machines and not human? that their actions are "triggered" by our actions, as if they were some unstable explosive compound in our clumsy brutish hands? Has any Islamophobe ever said a more insulting thing about Muslims?

2006-09-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

Mental Illness Epidemic

Captain's Quarters blogs that "[t]he State Department and the National Institue of Stantards and Technology both released reports this week to stem the tide of conspiracy theorists eager to deny they are targets of terrorism and the whole thing is George W. Bush's fault. Terrye posted this:

I think fear drives a lot of this, After all if it is Bush and a few other dangerous people, then all of this will be over when he is gone. It is safe to go after Bush.

I kind of agree with Terrye, who says a lot of this is just fear, though I would call it cowardice. It's a lot like Holocaust denial. Part of that is the sheer terror that someone could just drag you and your family to a death camp because you were fool enough to pick your mom's womb to gestate in.

Of course, this falls hard on reality even with a cursory glance. As the NYT points out, it would take many thousands of explosives to bring the towers down by design, especially if one rejects the science behind the heat of jet-fuel fires and its effect on steel girders. When exactly were these explosives planted, and how did they get planted with no one's notice? And if the building was primed for demolition in this manner, how did the explosives keep from detonating at impact, or at least in the heat of the jet-fuel fire? For that matter, why design a demolition from the top down when building demolitions always take place from the ground up?

Conspiracists refuse to believe Americans were targeted because they are Americans, Israelis because they're, well, Jews actually, and that Death stalks us all just because we are alive which is true, though the characterization of Death as a personnage is, not so much crazy as a necessary imaginative tool. What do their imaginative tools tell us about the conspiracy theorists? What are those tools supposed to help them face? Well, nothing - they are shovels to dig themselves a hole to hide in so as not to face reality. In those holes they'll die, stalked by their terrors. If that ain't insanity, I don't know what is!

But is mental illness communicable? I'd say so! After all, my neighbor watched Michael Moore and "believes in it," to quote her, and believes capitalism is evil 'cause of a documentary ("The Corporation") she saw. "I believe in it," she says again. Are these shades a substitute for the religious mumbo-jumbo they reject as "irrational" and "controlling?"

Is this funny or tragic? and where is the W.H.O. when you need 'em?

2006-09-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

CBC's Peanut Butter Cups!

IAEA finds highly enriched uranium! CBC turns and coughs!

Why is it that, when there is a real news story out of Iran, the CBC would rather publish this questionable piece of pro-Iranian propaganda? Note the ridiculous (even if it were true) assersion of the reason for the crash:

While air crashes are infrequent in Iran, Tehran says U.S. sanctions against the country have prevented it from buying new aircraft parts to repair their American or European-built planes.

CBC, seeing the sanctions-against-Iran-writing on the wall, is quickly taking its default anti-American position. Why is it that so many on the Left who profess to despise fascism and theocracy separately seem to think that, together, they're better than peanut butter cups?

2006-09-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

Annan Must Go!

Fox to guard henhouse. See here.

2006-09-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

Anti-Semitism and its causes

Captain's Quarters has an link to a der Spiegel interview with Charlotte Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust and became head of the German Jewish Council. More evidence that anti-Zionism is the acceptable (and legal) way of expressing anti-Semitism. Scroll down for my post, in which I write:

Lots of people have armies and defend themselves. There's a reason why Israelis, under attack constantly since the founding of their state, are perceived, not as defensive but "militaristic." There's a reason why the Israeli is seen as a persecutor of the innocent.

These reasons are at the very basis of our culture and acts of defence by Israelis (Jews have long had self-defence restrictions in both the West and Islam) reverberate so powerfully. Arafat and others since have succeeded in portraying the Isreali as the persecutor and the Palestinian as Christ (he even went so far as to suggest that Jesus was not a Jew but a Palestinian) because it's an image that lies at the core of Western culture. That core is a Christendom long denied in order to pursue internal peace.

Everyone bought the fraud that a missile was fired right through the center of the red cross on the roof of an ambulance ("in Qana, where Jesus turned water into wine, and now it's blood," as the helpful CTV news anchor said), thus proving how effective Muslim propaganda plays in Christian lands.

The blood libel against the Jew starts at the cross and it flows down to our day. The armed Israeli is perceived as the Jew with a spike and hammer, standing at the foot of the Cross.

No, you don't have to be anti-Semitic to be anti-Israeli but it sure helps. The interview with Knobloch, I think, proves that, or at least gives powerful evidence.

2006-09-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

Hopes of Peace Dashed?

Those of us hoping for a moderate Islam to use muscle against radical Islamic fascists must be dismayed by the babblings of Miss England. See also here.

2006-08-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

The Media War

Please see Melanie Phillips's blog here for her analysis of the media's mishandling of the war. She only leaves out two things, firstly, that the media guys in Lebanon are junkies. More important is the war of symbolism.

Why does everyone want to believe every bad thing they hear about Jews? The reason is cultural.

A hole right in the center of the Red Cross. A missile targets an ambulance, fisked thoroughly at zombietime. Why did the fraud work? Symbolism.

Here is an earlier attempt to use Christian symbolism to turn Christian populations against Israelis.

It is important to note that the rise of secular culture in the West, formerly known as Christendom, has not erased the basis of Western culture, which is founded on its myths: it is still Christian and attempts to eradicate it and its values through nationalism and other systems have failed spectacularly. Christian imagery channelled through the unconscious is stronger, not weaker than that apprehended consciously within its own, recognizable, context.

Secular institutions are projections of the faith institutions upon which the culture is grounded but with all reference to their origins expunged. The institutions subsume the content of their origin and become holy in themselves. This, I think, explains the perverse near-holiness of abortion and buggery to the Left. After all, gay rights & feminism have weakened the legal and popular basis of their own ideas by failing to reproduce at a rate necessary to keep their ideas afloat. Blue states in the US are bleeding voters and, therefore, representation in the House of Representatives. Their success has been phyrric. When I asked a friend in the arts whether this points to a flaw in democracy or that the ideas themselves were unsustainable, she did what leftists do best: she avoided reality and embraced the dream which, it must be pointed out, leads to elitist undemocratic rule by an effete pseudo-intellectual class.

But back to the point: the Israeli with a weapon in his hand is a Jew with a spike and hammer at the foot of the Cross. Muslim warriors know very well how to pluck these strings. They know us better than we know them. That's trouble.

2006-08-29T18:06:00.000-07:00

Cultural Vandalism

Is the new Hallmark production of Gulliver’s Travels an act of cultural vandalism? Not literally. After all, not a single copy of the book is burned. But if this is the only Gulliver people are exposed to—and to many it will be—those people will not get anything like what Jonathan Swift intended. Were Jonathan Swift alive, Hallmark could be sued for moral rights violations and they'd lose. That's a good way to think before starting a project using someone else's ideas.

Swift’s masterpiece is an extraordinary vision of humanity. Through his hero, Gulliver, he travels to places that make him feel big, small, shat on and… human. The little people in Lilleput are small in every way. Petty and stupid, they fight, the big-enders and little- enders, interminable wars of annihilation over which end of their soft-boiled eggs are opened at the breakfast table. Sounds a bit like us.

I forget most of the rest: it’s been years since I read it. The TV show reminded me of a few things and, on the bright side, it made me want to read it again.

This gift to mankind has been shat on, like Gulligan under the boughs beneath the vulgar yahoos, and Danson, Steenbergen and especially two great actors, Peter O’Toole and Edward Fox, ought to be thoroughly ashamed. Some "Creative Person" got the bright idea to put the focus on "the star:" Gulliver, played by Ted Danson, whose acting is just plain bad. He portrays Gulliver as insane. All his travels were made up. Weeeeel. Yeeeaaah! Of course Swift made up Gulliver! Naturally, the lands he visited were imaginary: that's called fiction. His purpose was to talk about humankind and our, often awful, relations with each other. The travels of his imaginary character to imaginary lands is his method. But these people treat imagination as a disease and anyone who has a moment that Hallmark couldn’t turn into one of its anodyne cards is suspect.

I can sure see why Hallmark would produce this shit—and I mean shit. It’s so bad that O’Toole, always profound, seems as little as his Lilliputian character. He’s in character, of course, while commenting on the character simultaneously, as many, if not all great actors do. Informing the character sheds light on it. Our light completes the character. It becomes three dimensional through this act of psychic triangulation. Most actors do this very subtly, like Hopkins in "The Remains of the Day." Others, like Nicholson, in most things in the last twenty years, play the two parts pretty broadly apart. Nicholson actually plays on the relationship of his two points and with us too: with him it’s all cat’s cradle and he, chuckling away, holds all the strings. Great fun, as is O’Toole. But something here is lacking. He is shouting into a megaphone (as great as ever) and all one senses is a hollow shell standing under him.

That’s because it is. Look up "anodyne" and there ought to be the word "Hallmark" as a synonym. Harmless, bland, inoffensive: Hallmark is the doll who can’t pee because she has no genitals: it is the norm, the average, the person of no distinction. Hallmark’s hallmark is to have no hallmark. I never suspected that such people despise those who have imagination quite so much. Suddenly, Pound’s "Disney against the metaphysicals" stands out in bold type. Or Einstein’s "Men of genius always will be violently opposed by mediocre minds."

Indeed, anyone, to this mediocre type, who has an answer to any question other than "a)" or "b)" is suspect. Who more distinctive then that a man who journeys to the darker places of the human soul and shines his little flashlight to illuminate what can be found there?

Hence the act of vandalism. The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas in Afghanistan, the Palestinians the oldest synagogue in the wortd at Jericho, the barbarians the great statuary of the Classical age and these things are obviously vandalism. Hallmark endeavours to protect us from foreign foes by undermining our own culture; the one that feeds and sustains them. And us.

Please buy a copy of Gulliver’s Travels wherever you live, and read it. Or order it online. I like to use ABE Books. I own no stock in the company and they aren’t paying me for the plug. How could they? As far as I know, no one reads this stuff.

2006-08-28T15:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the crocodile doesn't eat you last!

2006-08-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

Does Japan have a right to exist as a Japanese state?

2006-08-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

Ostentatious Caring In Toronto

The cab driver wanted to know if I had been part of the AIDS conference as he drove me from my home to the airport. It was over and a lot of people were leaving town that day.

No, I told him, I hadn't partaken in the glitzy concernfest though it had been active just down the street at the glorious Tent City the night before.

I hadn’t known what to say to my neighbour when she asked me if I’d been to see it, her eyes wide and steamy, as if she had perhaps just caught sight of either of Moses on the Mountain or Jesus rising from the Crypt.

"Um, no," I said, awkwardly.

What I wanted to say was that never had so many performed so many feats of ostentatious caring in so short a time. If any one has the injury reports of dislocated shoulders from patting themsleves on the back, let me know.

And how perverse it all is too! The progress of AIDS represents the greatest public health failure in human history. Unlike the plague, we knew how the disease was spread and we had the opportunity to stop it. We chose to quarantine the helathy instead of the ill and now, millions of dead later, we still want to quarantine the well and let the ill get on with infecting or not infecting—it’s the honour system—as many as taste and opportunity permits.

Let me be brutally frank on two points. Firstly, if we had ignored the human rights ninnies and quarantined the sick in the 80s we might have stopped this illness in its tracks. Secondly, from a purely epidemiological point of view, there is no percentage in prolonging the lives of people who may spread the disease.

Quarantine is primary, treatment is secondary. But the "activists" have turned reality on its head. Drugs are being withheld, people are being killed. By whom? The government, of course. That same government that failed to protect its population from AIDS when it mattered.

AIDS, according to another neighbour, was started by "the government." It is surprising how many conspiracy theories there are these days that otherwise intelligent beings seem to be prey too—a kind of intellectual AIDS it might be called—existential doubts about the very worth of our societies, our form of government, our lives. We exagerate every flaw of reasonably-but-not-absolutely- good cultures and romanticize very dangerous and destructive cultures based on a strage notion that all cultures are created equal.

My neighbour has a grain of truth here but it's just a grain: Governments, by not quarantining the ill, certainly participated in the spread of the disease. Ditto for the World Health Organisation and the UN.

My cab driver had a memory I thought conveyed pretty well my general sense of what the mob (as David Peterson might describe the unwashed body of non-Liberal Party cognoscenti) really thinks in spite of the opinions of the cowed crowd that poses as the illuminated. He told me he remembered a City TV interview wth a man who had AIDS but didn’t want to make love with a piece of rubber and didn’t see why he ought to give up his God-given right to his pleasures.

My cousin (who I was being taken to the airport to travel to) said, when I told him and his wife the story, "He should be arrested." Nice guy, my cousin, and always partly right (sometimes wholy): they should all have been "arrested," which was the misleading way human rights advocates misrepresented quarantine.

For how many years now have so many avoided sex because of AIDS? How badly has it coloured our world? If the only way to be free of the illness is abstinence or prophylactics and the infected die, it doesn’t take a genius to see that, between life and death here, something’s got to give.

I had a great weekend with my cousins and aunts and, upon return, as I ran with my suitcases to catch the bus, the driver, seeing I was a mere 5 feet away, gunned the engine and peeled away. The AIDS conference being over, the caring is put back in the cupboard and the everyday cups are brought out. Tannic acid, anyone? [spit] Welcome to Toronto.

UNSCR 1701: Munich, 2006

2006-08-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

In 1938, Neville Chamberlain arrived in London waving a piece of paper upon which Herr Hitler had affixed his signature. Chamberlain, beaming, proclaimed "peace in our time." Within months, the Germans had taken all of Czeckoslovakia. Knowing England would not go to war to protect the Sudeteland or even all Czeckoslovakia, Hitler tried his luck with Poland. No reaction but diplomatic condemnation. Austria was soon annexed and within a year of the Munich pact, Germany invaded the low countries and was within striking distance of England.

Many tens of millions dead later we hail UN Security Council Resolution 1701 a diplomatic success because we have deluded ourselves into thinking that it has stopped a war . The international community has expressed its resolve to disarm Hiz'b'allah. But who will do it?

Not the USA! Condi Rice says:

I don't think there is an expectation that this force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah. I think it's a little bit of a misreading of how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of a militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily. [my italics]

see also here.

and....

confirmation of how bad this "resolution" is:

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy made clear in an interview with Le Monde newspaper that the mission of the larger UNIFIL would not include disarming Hizbollah by force: "We never thought a purely military solution could resolve the problem of Hizbollah," he said. "We are agreed on the goal, the disarmament, but for us the means are purely political. [my emphasis]

So Hiz'b'allah will not be disarmed. Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

RAFSANJANI SAYS MUSLIMS SHOULD USE NUCLEAR WEAPON AGAINST ISRAEL [December 14, 2001]

also here.

Denial is a river in Iran too!

IRAN DENIES WILLING TO NUKE DOWN ISRAEL [December 30, 2001]

And now, presenting, the madman pursuing [oops! allegedly pursuing nukes!] nukes, communicating with the dead:

Last Monday, just before he announced that Iran had gatecrashed "the nuclear club", President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours. He was having a khalvat (tête-à-tête) with the Hidden Imam, the 12th and last of the imams of Shiism who went into "grand occultation" in 941. -Amir Taheri, April 16, 2006 in the Telegraph.

1701

2006-08-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Open letter by Dan Goorevitch at Overful to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs here hits all the right notes on the diplomatic piano. See my next post for its utter futility at avoiding war. Here's the big bell:

How can non-state actors who use violence to either destroy fellow states or coerce their policies be stopped if the nations in which they operate can not be held responsible? Lebanon, and all nations, have to be held responsible and accountable for every act, no matter by whom, that is initiated from within its borders. What otherwise is the meaning of national sovereignty but the right to make law, balanced by the responsibility not to harm others outside its jurisdiction? It is this contract that lies at the heart of the nation state and why it works.

That's right! A state has a border and within that border it has laws. We respect their national borders and they respect ours. That's how it works. Then we cooperate and help each other against common threats. Lebanon was let off the hook at the UN when UNSCR 1701 was passed.

2006-08-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Crystal Clear

from Powerline:

According to Netanyahu, that situation is that the Sunnis and the Shiites are competing to create an Islamic empire. Both understand that this objective starts with the destruction of Israel. Shiite Iran, by moving to arm itself with nuclear weapons, has become the primary threat.
The proper division of labor for dealing with the threat is as follows: Israel should dismantle Hezbollah and the U.S. should disarm Iran. As to the latter, President Bush has emphasized his commitment to preventing a nuclear Iran, and Netanyahu believes that Bush is truly committed to that imperative. As to Hezbollah, the recent war was only the first round in a protracted battle that Israel will win.

Read more here.

2006-08-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

A Masterpiece of Deceit!

Below is A Washington Post opinion piece by the prime minister of Lebanon in full, with my fisking in italics.

End This Tragedy Now
© Washington Post
Israel Must Be Made to Respect International Law
By Fouad Siniora
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; Page A17
BEIRUT
A military solution to Israel's savage war on Lebanon and the Lebanese people is both morally unacceptable and totally unrealistic. Israel's attack on Hiz'b'allah in self defence is neither against Lebanon and the Lebanese people, nor is it savage, morally unacceptable or unrealistic. Hiz'b'allah crossed an internationally recognized frontier, murdered eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more, which it continues to hold for ransom. Self-defence is always morally defensible; it is the only realistic option to wars of aggression. Time and again, Israel has sent leaflets warning civilians to get out of the way of attempts to destroy Hiz'b'allah rocket launchers which are being used to send thousands of missiles into Israel, a favour Hiz'b'allah does not extend to its victims in Israeli cities and towns which it targets mercilessly. Mr. Siniora is confused about who is being savage. Hiz'b'allah purposefully places its missiles and missile launchers on and in apartment buildings and other residential neighbourhoods because it knows Israel doesn't take life with pleasure: it is Hiz'b'allah who is guilty of savagery, both to Israel and to their own people who they hold hostage. We in Lebanon call upon the international community and citizens everywhere to support my country's sovereignty and end this folly now. Lebanon has two armies with two commanders: the only threat to Lebanese sovereignty is Hiz'b'allah and its commander Nasrallah: this terrorist militia, which precipitated the present war, is never mentioned in the following (except in its alternate role as one political faction among many) in this long article. We also insist that Israel be made to respect international humanitarian law, including the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, which it has repeatedly and willfully violated. Crossing international frontiers to kidnap and hold soldiers for ranson is undoubtedly a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Siniora has not named a single instance of Israel's violations though that should be easy for him since he claims that they have been repeated and willful.
As the world watches, Israel has besieged and ravaged our country, created a humanitarian and environmental disaster, and shattered our infrastructure and economy, putting an intolerable strain on our social and economic systems. Israel has not beseiged Lebanon: Hezbollah has! Israel's sole purpose is to get their kidnapped soldiers back and to disarm Hiz'b'allah so they can’t attack Israel again. The Lebanese government had plenty of opportunity to disarm this terrorist group but it didn’t. Claims of damage are wildly overstated and made to look deliberate. In Beirut, water flows and lights go on precisely because Israel has gone out of its way to spare Lebanese infrastructure Fuel, food and medical equipment are in short supply; homes, factories and warehouses have been destroyed; roads severed, bridges smashed and airports disabled. This is indeed unfortunate and we all feel for the people suffering in this war on both sides of the border. One million people have been displaced in Israel and many more have been shut into bomb shelters for a month. No mention of Israeli suffering is ever mentioned in what follows.
The damage to infrastructure alone is running into the billions of dollars, as are the losses to owners of private property, and the long-term direct and indirect costs due to lost revenue in tourism, agriculture and industrial sectors are expected to be many more billions. This ought to be a lesson to all states: look at what happens when any state allows a challenge to their rightful monopoly of men under arms! Lebanon's well-known achievements in 15 years of postwar development have been wiped out in a matter of days by Israel's deadly military might. A nation unable to disarm a terrorist organization that holds its country hostage has no achievements worth talking about. Wisely, he hasn't.
For all this carnage and death, and on behalf of all Lebanese, we demand an international inquiry into Israel's criminal actions in Lebanon and insist that Israel pay compensation for its wanton destruction. The destruction has not been wanton but defensive. Is Hiz'b'allah not responsible for the much larger bill for its destruction in Israel?
Israel seems to think that its attacks will sow discord among the Lebanese. One nation, two armies and two commanders: no, there’s no discord in Lebanon and only the evil Jewish empire is attempting to create it; if you believe this, you’ll believe anything. This will never happen. It already has. Israel should know that the Lebanese people will remain steadfast and united in the face of this latest Israeli aggression -- its seventh invasion -- just as they were during nearly two decades of brutal occupation. The Lebanese people are not united and have been wracked by inter-religious civil war for decades. Israel's response, I must repeat since the lie is repeated, is defensive and not aggressive: it is a response to Hiz'b'allah’s aggression. Each and every Israeli invasion has been precipitated by attacks on Israeli towns from south Lebanon. The people's will to resist grows ever stronger with each village demolished and each massacre committed. There has not been a single village "demolished" (though some have been damaged) and not a single massacre: not one civilian has been targetted, in contradistinction to the Hiz'b'allah attacks on Israeli cities and its people: a purposefully murderous attack. The Lebanese are in a state of civil war. The army is unable to disarm Hiz'b'allah because half the army is on Hiz'b'allah's side and half are against, divided on religious lines. The announcement last night on CTV news by Emile Lahoud that the Lebanese army will fight alongside Hiz'b'allah is proof of a coup d'etat by Islamist forces. The Lebanese people have never been more divided or more brutally abused by their warring leaders.
On July 25, at the international conference for Lebanon in Rome, I proposed a comprehensive seven-point plan to end the war. It was well received by the conference and got the unanimous and full backing of the Lebanese Council of Ministers, in which Hezbollah is represented, as well as of the speaker of parliament and a majority of parliamentary blocs. This is the only mention of Hiz'b'allah in the entire essay: there is not even a hint of its military power. Representatives of diverse segments of Lebanese civil society have come out strongly in favor, as has the Islamic-Christian Summit, representing all the religious confessions, ensuring a broad national consensus and preserving our delicate social equilibrium. If it had a broad national consensus there wouldn't be two Lebanese armies run by two different men.
The plan, which also received the full support of the 56 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, included an immediate, unconditional and comprehensive cease-fire and called for:
· The release of Lebanese and Israeli prisoners and detainees through the International Committee of the Red Cross. thus rewarding the murder and kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers.
· The withdrawal of the Israeli army behind the "blue line." That was done in 2000. It was Hiz'b'allah which crossed that line.
· A commitment from the U.N. Security Council to place the Shebaa Farms and Kfar Shouba Hills areas under U.N. jurisdiction until border delineation and Lebanese sovereignty over them are fully settled. The blue line has already been decided and Israel withdrew beyond it in 2000. Shebaa Farms has never been Lebanese territory: the dispute is between Israel and Syria. Note that the author doesn't entertain any other possibility except Lebanese sovereignty over the dispute areas. Is the UN therefore to act as Lebanon's proxy army?
Further, Israel must surrender all maps of remaining land mines in southern Lebanon to the United Nations.
· Extension of the Lebanese government's authority over its territory through its legitimate armed forces, with no weapons or authority other than that of the Lebanese state, as stipulated in the Taif accord. Rubbish! "The extension of the Lebanese government's authority over its territory through its legitimate armed forces, with no weapons or authority other than that of the Lebanese state, as stipulated in the Taif accord" has only one power of opposition: Hiz'b'allah, which the Lebanese government has refused to disarm, leading to the present crisis. We have indicated that the Lebanese armed forces are ready and able to deploy to southern Lebanon, alongside the U.N. forces there, the moment Israel pulls back to the international border. Oh! They are ready and able, are they? This is a bald-faced lie. A successful coupt d’etat has occurred and Hiz'b'allah now rules Lebanon.
We in Lebanon call upon the international community and citizens everywhere to support my country's sovereignty and end this folly now. You needn't call so far! Why not just place a call to Nasrallah and ask Hiz'b'allah's commander to support your country's sovereignty? Is it possible to have a sovereign state with two armies led by two different men? The disarming of the terrorist Hiz'b'allah militia is the only item on Lebanon's agenda if it is truly interested in recapturing its sovereignty.
· The supplementing of the U.N. international force operating in southern Lebanon and its enhancement in numbers, equipment, mandate and scope of operation, as needed, to undertake urgent humanitarian and relief work and guarantee stability and security in the south so that those who fled their homes can return. The only stability the UN force guaranteed was the buildup of Hiz'b'allah arms, leading to the present war. As for its "mandate and scope of operations," this is all mud: what is clear is that the UNIFIL force didn't even make a move to fulfill their present obligation under Security Council Resolution 1559. Could it be that the author means, by a new mandate, one that strikes down 1559?
· Action by the United Nations on the necessary measures to once again put into effect the 1949 armistice agreement signed by Lebanon and Israel and to ensure adherence to its provisions, as well as to explore possible amendments to or development of those provisions as necessary. By changes in the 1949 armistice, does he mean, perchance, the diplomatic elimination of the state of Israel?
· The commitment of the international community to support Lebanon on all levels, including relief, reconstruction and development needs. Get Iran to pay the bill. They bought the missiles that Hiz'b'allah sent into Israeli towns and cities. Not one word in this whole essay of destruction wrought against Israel.
As part of this comprehensive plan, and empowered by strong domestic political support and the unanimous backing of the cabinet, the Lebanese government decided to deploy the Lebanese armed forces in southern Lebanon as the sole domestic military force in the area, alongside U.N. forces there, the moment Israel pulls back to the international border. Nonsense! If Lebanon had been interested in (or capable of) "deploy[ing] the Lebanese armed forces in southern Lebanon as the sole domestic military force in the area," why on earth haven't they done so? It is not Israel who prevented the Lebanese army to be the sole military force in the area -- or any area of Lebanon -- it is Hiz'b'allah and only Hiz'b'allah.
Israel responded by slaughtering more civilians in the biblical town of Qana. Such horrible scenes have been repeated daily for nearly four weeks and continue even as I write these words. Israel responded, not to the "deci[sion] to deploy the Lebanese armed forces as the sole domestic military force in the area" but to missiles send from the "biblical town of Qana," from where dozens of rocket attacks were initiated against Israel. Israel attacked the rocket launchers and allegedly killed a number of people in the act. There is nothing illegitimate about self-defence. (Note the "biblical" crack: a typical sideswipe at the Christ-killers, like Arafat's Norma Desmond impersonation in 2002: "They're crucifying [H]im again!" in response to Israel's attempt to end the Palestinian siege of the Church of the Nativity.)
The resolution to this war must respect international law and U.N. resolutions, not just those selected by Israel, a state that deserves its reputation as a pariah because of its consistent disdain for and rejection of international law and the wishes of the international community for over half a century. There is a UN resolution that calls for the disarming of Hiz'b'allah, isn't there? Since this is the greatest threat to Lebanese sovereignty, the absence of the mention of the militia is glaring. Israel's pariah status comes from its insistence on survival against half a century of attempts to destroy it.

Lebanon calls, once again, on the United Nations to bring about an immediate cease-fire to relieve the beleaguered people of Lebanon. Only then can the root causes of this war -- Israeli occupation of Lebanese territories and its perennial threat to Lebanon's security, as well as Lebanon's struggle to regain full sovereignty over all its territory -- be addressed. Israel left in 2000: it was not in possession of a single inch of Lebanese territory before this unwarranted attack on Israel. It is tiresome to repeat this but since he repeats the lie, I must repeat the truth: sovereignty depends on one nation having one army and a single authority. None of this is Israel's fault. As to Israel's perennial threat, every single incursion of Israel's has been defensive: the Arab states have been trying to destroy Israel for about 60 years now.

I believe that a political resolution rooted in international law and based on these seven points will lead to long-term stability. If Israel would realize that the peoples of the Middle East cannot be cowed into submission, that they aspire only to live in freedom and dignity, it could also be a stepping stone to a final solution of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, which has plagued our region for 60 years. "[A] stepping stone to a final solution". Yes, no doubt. They aspire to live in dignity and live instead under governments that afford them neither. This is really a hard swallow. In the end, all people are responsible for their governments and probably get the leadership they deserve. It is the Arab world that has tried to beat Israel into submission. The word "Islam" in fact, means "submission." The state of Israel always has been violently opposed for one reason only: it's Jewish.
The 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, which called for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace based on the principle of land for peace, showed the way forward. (The "All the land or we kill you all" principle.). A political solution cannot, however, be implemented as long as Israel continues to occupy Arab land in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights and as long as it wages war on innocent people in Lebanon and Palestine. As Jawaharlal Nehru said, the only alternative to coexistence is co-destruction." Israel, for the umpteenth time, left in 2000. It also completely withdrew from Gaza. All these lands were occupied in a defensive war against a dozen Arab nations who waged wars of annihilation against Israel in 1948-9, 1967 and 1973. The author reveals the deep racism inherent in all his arguments by characterizing all these lands, not as Syrian, Jordanian or Lebanese but as "Arab land."
Enough destruction, dispossession, desperation, displacement and death! Lebanon must be allowed to reclaim its position in this troubled region as a beacon of freedom and democracy where justice and the rule of law prevail, and as a refuge for the oppressed where moderation, tolerance and enlightenment triumph. Amen to the first part: disarm Hiz'b'allah and stop trying to destroy Israel and there will be peace. "[A] beacon of freedom and democracy where justice and the rule of law prevail, and as a refuge for the oppressed where moderation, tolerance and enlightenment triumph?" Full marks for an excellent description of Israel!

The writer is prime minister of Lebanon, now ruled by Nasrallah's Hiz'b'allah.

2006-08-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

Lebanese Coup d’etat

In a CTV interview with Emile Lahoud tonight , a catatonic journalist lobbed a couple of softballs which allowed the Lebanese president to act tough and save face. He stated that the Lebanese army will fight beside Hiz'b'allah if the Israelis don’t leave Lebanon.

The interviewer might have asked if he thinks it possible for a sovereign state to maintain its sovereignty with two armies controlled by two different men?

It might have been interesting to ask if his pledge to throw the Lebanese army behind Hiz'b'allah didn't signify his surrender to a coup d'etat led by Hassan Nasrallah?

Since Hiz'b'allah leads a small parliamentary party and a large army, one would think the inevitable comparison could have been made between the current Lebanese situation and the Fascist Blackshirts and Nazi Brownshirts of 1930s Italy and Germany.

One would have thought to ask if this represented the rise of Fascism or the rise of a second Islamic republic?

But she didn’t. Nor did she ask if his pledge of support means Nasrallah is de facto head of the Lebanese state.

Hassan Nasrallah is the de facto leader today, a fact the brain-dead media haven’t cottoned onto. Would America allow a militia of a hundred thousand men wanting to rescind the constitution in favour of some other kind of law?

In February 23rd, 2005,

Lahoud told the Sada al-Balad newspaper that the government "cannot succumb to opposition demands," adding that the only way to solve problems is through dialogue.
"I say to the opposition if you want the government's downfall, you
can work for that in Parliament," Lahoud said.

Apparently, Mr. Nasrallah of Hiz'b'allah has opted for another route. Will the left recognize a theocratic fascist dictatorship and condemn it? Don’t hold your breath.

2006-08-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

Opposition Muzzles CIDA, Red Cross, Lebanese

Alexa McDonough is psychic! She can judge before hearing witnesses. But they all come from a certain point of view, she says, and so their credibility is shaky. Hmm. Don't agree with me? Must be a liar. Yup! That's why I don't vote NDP anymore! Read the post from Canadian Coaltion for Democracies here.

Ottawa, Canada - The Opposition Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois parties called for the convening of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development during Parliament's summer recess for the purpose of challenging the government's Middle East policy and the evacuation of Canadians from Lebanon. Such a committee requires that notice be given on the internet, and any potential witnesses can contact the Clerk of the Committee to request standing to provide testimony.

Several groups applied to be witnesses and were accepted by the Clerk of the Committee. These witnesses travelled to Ottawa from across the country on short notice and at considerable personal expense.
The committee met on August 1. In the morning, the committee MPs had an opportunity to question the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Peter MacKay. In the afternoon, the Opposition MPs, mainly led by Alexa McDonough of the NDP, put forward a procedural motion calling for committee business to be dealt with before the witnesses were heard. The government MPs responded that concluding the committee business before hearing from the witnesses was like passing a verdict in a trial before calling witnesses.

Ms McDonough went further, stating that the witnesses were identified with a single well-defined, narrow position, and challenged their credibility. It should be noted that Ms McDonough made these damaging allegations against witnesses approved by the Clerk of the Committee while knowing neither the witnesses nor the content of their testimony.

Below is the list of witnesses scheduled to give testimony that afternoon whose right to speak was effectively revoked by Ms McDonough and other Opposition MPs:

Canadian International Development Agency
Canadian Red Cross
Canadian Lebanese Human Rights Federation
World Lebanese Cultural Union
Monastery Saint Anthony the Great
Canadian Assembly for Lebanon
Canadian Coalition for Democracies
Khal Ishraki, as an individual evacuee
The subject matter for the hearing was specifically Lebanon, yet Opposition MPs passed a procedural resolution that effectively denied all Lebanese witnesses the right to speak. These witnesses included people with family members in the southern war zone of Lebanon and those directly affected by the evacuation. The Opposition used a procedural motion to silence these voices. As a result, Opposition MPs, with no first hand knowledge of the situation, were able to criticize the government without fear of contradiction from Lebanese witnesses or by CIDA and the Red Cross who were directly involved in the evacuation and humanitarian effort.

2006-08-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

Why civilians are dying

in Lebanon: pictures of Hiz'b'allah firing missiles into Israel from residential neighbourhoods. Read it in the Herald Sun

2006-07-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

Shylock Draws Blood!

Like Shylock, Israel has a right to justice. It withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and UNIFIL was charged to disarm Hiz'b'allah and ensure Israel's security. The contract was broken and Israel, unprotected from unprovoked assault, has a right to self-defence. But, like Shylock, who could take a pound of flesh but couldn’t spill a drop of Antonio's blood, Israel may disarm Hiz'b'allah only if it doesn’t kill anyone, according to the EU and prevailing media.

Kfar Kana is a town from which, for many years, many rockets have been launched at Israeli farms, towns and cities. Israel warned the residents of the impending bombing to knock out Hiz'b'allah positions well in advance. Has Hiz'b'allah ever warned residents that a bomb was coming?

News agencies all over the world have gone back to New Testament times and call Kfar Kana "Qana." The rage over this particular killing of innocents has been pretty intense and, with a CTV newsreader on Wednesday night beginning his report: "Qana, where Jesus attended a wedding and turned water into wine. Today it’s blood." One can’t help wondering if there isn’t some unconscious anti-Semitism here that’s stewing the minds of reporters. Or is it just that Hiz'b'allah knows how to offer news junkies (such is the beast) the junk that bleeds and leads? Or are there other motives, conscious or unconscious in the culture of the West?

All three. Clearly the Jew card is been played again, as it was in Nazareth when Palestinian gunmen took over and trashed the Church of the Nativity. Somehow the Israelis got blamed for that while subtil Arafat provided the soundtrack: "See? They’re killing Jesus again!" his eyes bulging like a silent screen star’s.

There can be no doubt as to the expertise of Hiz'b'allah propaganda. Hamas too. Many staged events are distorting the picture and issues of the middle east. The boy killed in the crossfire was staged. The bombing of the beach in Gaza was staged. The photo of the "Palestinian youth on the Temple Mount" was staged. And the news from Beirut is staged.

But the most interesting and possibly most important thing going on here is the Western proclivity for order, for proportion. Israeli response has been, it has been charged, disproportionate. It is this same feeling for proportion that leads so many to believe that there must be a cause for Arab hatred for Jews and so it’s assumed that the hatred is mutual. To the Western mind this is a reasonable expectation and any other possibility is rejected because it is simply too painful to contemplate.

Horror movies are full of all kinds of characters (Freddie, Jason,…) who stalk and murder for no reason whatever. This is the greatest terror, that death stalks us for no reason and, good or bad, we all die in the end. Kafka’s great novel, The Trial, is precisely about this. The reason why it’s so frightening is that it’s so true. Death has no favorites; he takes us all and the reason why horror movies are horrible is because we repress that fact. The horror movie brings all this to the surface.

So does war, and just as the death of a loved one must have a "cause," i.e. cancer, heart attack, too much butter, too much sun, too much fun, so hostilities must have their cause. It is so unimaginable and repugnant to the Western mind that there are people who bring up their children so that they will kill themselves in order to kill the enemy. Good people assume that the same must be true on the other side because if it isn’t, the world is a world full of Freddies and Jasons.

The world is full of Freddies and Jasons and they are checked only by the rule of law. Today we hear renewed calls to remove the Old Testament from the Christian Bible. Decisions taken more than 16 centuries ago are now under debate again. Separating the two books is an odd way to ask the question, "Shall we throw the Jews to the wolves?" How, without the Old Testament, could such a thing be done? What justification for such an act could be found in the NT? It was the OT and, most of all, its concept of law, that allowed a real world Church and real world nations to survive history.

These new musings are ominous for the Jewish people. But there is a silver lining. At least these biblical musings show that, unconsciously at least, the West is not so far from its roots. As secular as it appears, the West still has a foundation and, as terrorists strip away its polite fictions, it, the West, is beginning to feel those foundations pressing against the soles of their shoes.

It would be a mistake, in the Crusade that is starting and stopping today, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The Jew and Muslim have been historically lumped together by the Christian when, in fact, they needn’t be. The Christian stands to the Muslim as brother, to the Jew as son. Kronos and Zeus, El and Baal, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau: History is an endless repetition of the same problems. Do we have the wisdom yet to — not to solve them: I don’t ask for that much — but at least to see our problems clearly through our natures, our natures clearly through our problems?

2006-07-31T12:22:00.000-07:00

Who's Responsible?
(for the war)

As of 3:21 PM EDT, The Globe and Mail poll stands as follows:

Hezbollah (36%) 50922 votes
Iran (8%) 12169 votes
Israel (34%) 48580 votes
United Nations (1%) 1764 votes
United States
(10%) 15036 votes
Lebanon (10%) 14805 votes
Total votes: 143276

If we assume the US vote is anti-Israeli and the UN vote pro-Israel, it breaks down roughly to 55% support Israel, 45% the enemy. Considering the expertise of Hiz'b'allah's propaganda, that's not too bad.

2006-07-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

"...apparently deliberate" attack

Kofi Annan accuses Israel of an "apparently deliberate" attack of a UNIFIL position. Since UNIFIL has hidden terrorists for years and allowed terrorists to hide behind them, who cares? This same UNIFIL was responsible for allowing Hiz'b'allah agents to cross the Lebanon/Israeli border and kidnap Israeli soldiers while dressed as UN peacekeepers. The UN had a videotape of the kidnapping that it denied existed for more than six months. Then they admitted it but wouldn't let the Israelis look at it for fear of giving away intelligence information. The UN was frightened that its tiny toy soldiers might be in trouble from the big bad terrorist group they were commanded to disarm. I think I've just discovered one of the reasons why their mission has been so fruitless for anyone but the terrorists.

Then there's corruption. Terrorism pays, and it pays the UN more than almost anyone in the world. Child prostitution? Gotta pay the UN its cut! Oil for food? Check! And how 'bout Rwanda? "Let's go!" wrote General Romeo Dallaire, the UN chief officer who wanted to grab the weapons and prevent the slaughter. "Let's not," was the masterfully terse response from Kofi. So almost a million Tutsis were butchered to death with machetes and Kofi got to be top pimp at the sewer it pleases us to call the UN.
Paul, from Henderson, Nevada, U.S.A. writes in the comments (comment #3) on this report from Arutz Sheva:

Maintaining an office in a declared war zone is proof enough that the UN is deliberately impeding Israel's battle against terrorism. Kofi Annan sits snug in his free luxury salon while pontificating about casualties, but he is the one person who is responsible for the death of the UN reps because he refused to demand their evacuation and instead used them as human shields for Hezbullah.
Olmert does not owe anyone an apology. He is defending his people against Islamic terrorism. Kofi Annan is the one who should get down on his knees and beg forgiveness. His corruption and immorality is in good measure responsible for the war brought to Israel by his Hezbullah friends. Kofi's pious mouthings are to laugh. Viva to the Patriots of Israel from the NON-evangelical Christians for Zion.

Amen, brother! The last thing we need is more UN toy soldier-pimp-drug dealer-intelligence salesmen. Israel should obliterate the real culprit, Syria, thereby liberating Lebanon and isolating Iran.

2006-07-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

Duped!

Much of the world is seeing what Hiz'b'allah wants them to see. Check out this article about Anderson Cooper’s story, filed from Beirut.

We'd come to get a look at the damage and had hoped to talk with a Hezbollah representative. Instead, we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah….

Read the whole thing here.

2006-07-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

Proportion

Richard Cohen, who I criticized very harshly in this blog for what I felt was a stupid argument (and I stand by that), has written an excellent article for the London Times, reprinted at RealClearPolitics, attacking the notion of proportionality in this war. I would argue that proportionality in war is preposterous in every event for reasons Cohen points out. I can’t help feeling Cohen took some of my post to heart, since he includes so many of my arguments against him. Not that I take credit: he may not have even read my response; but I don’t doubt many others wrote to express the same arguments. In any case, it’s nice to see.

Richard Cohen writes:

Israel has been in dire need of such deterrence ever since it pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 and, just recently, the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, it effectively got into a proportional hit-and-respond cycle with Hezbollah. It cost Israel 901 dead and Hezbollah an announced 1,375, too close to parity to make a lasting difference. Whatever the figures, it does not change the fact that Israeli conscripts or reservists do not think death and martyrdom are the same thing. No virgins await Jews in heaven.
Gaza, too, was a retreat. There are many ways to mask it, but no way to change the reality. The government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon concluded that Israel was incapable of controlling a densely populated area full of people who hated the occupation. Israel will in due course reach the same conclusion when it comes to the West Bank, although the present war has almost certainly set back that timetable. The fact remains that for Israel to survive, it must withdraw to boundaries that are easily defensible and hard to breach.
It's clear now that those boundaries -- a wall, a fence, a whatever -- are immaterial when it comes to missiles. Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed suicide bomber over the border -- all that is needed is the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it's either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.
Readers of my recent column on the Middle East can accuse me of many things, but not a lack of realism. I know Israel's imperfections, but I also exult and admire its achievements. Lacking religious conviction, I fear for its future and note the ominous spread of European-style anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world -- and its boomerang return to Europe as a mindless form of anti-Zionism. Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood. But the world is full of dislocated peoples and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that -- oh, what irony! -- the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. As for Europe, who today cries for the Greeks of Anatolia or the Germans of Bohemia?
These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only state in the Middle East that is a democracy. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel's enemies want that, they can have it in a moment.
(c) 2006, Washington Post Writers Group

Right on, Mr. Cohen. My only disagreement: the anti-Semitism flowers at Israeli weakness, turns into admiration when they are strong.

2006-07-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

A State Within A State

Amir Taheri writes in the London Times, reprinted online at NRO Online:

Hezbollah is a state within the Lebanese state. It controls some 25% of the national territory. Almost 400,000 of Lebanon’s estimated 4 million inhabitants live under its control. It collects its own taxes with a 20% levy, known as "khoms", on all incomes. It runs its own schools, where a syllabus produced in Iran is taught at all levels. It also runs clinics, hospitals, social welfare networks and centres for orphans and widows.
The party controls the elected municipal councils and appoints local officials, who in theory should be selected by the central government in Beirut. To complete its status as a virtual state, the party maintains a number of unofficial "embassies": the one in Tehran is bigger and has a larger number of staff than that of Lebanon itself.

Hezbollah also has its own media including a satellite television channel, Al-Manar (the lighthouse), which is watched all over the Arab world, four radio stations, newspapers and magazines plus a book publishing venture. The party has its own system of justice based on sharia and operates its own police force, courts and prisons. Hezbollah runs youth clubs, several football teams and a number of matrimonial agencies.

This is hardly proper democratic behaviour. Would the Democrats create its own army, a series of schools teaching with foreign syllabi (now be quiet, Ann!), embassies in other countries? Hiz'b'allah is a cancer.

2006-07-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

Civilians As Weapons

Great post here at TCS Daily; an excerpt:

Those who have visited any Hezbollah installation in Lebanon over the years always remark on the fact that there are families, women and children, in and around the place. "Secret" bases are usually hidden in plain site. Houses or apartment buildings become weapons storage or even operations centers. An innocent shed or garage may contain a Toyota or a missile launcher.

It seems callous to be so dismissive of the deaths of so many civilians but one must keep in mind the fact that, in a war of attrition with Israel, Israel would have to kill 60 Arabs for every Jew in order to survive. Even then, there would be a diminishing rate of returns. One Jew left, for instance, would not beat the 60 remaining Arab. The Arabs have 300 millions; there are only 5 million Jews in Israel. The Muslim world has 1.2 billions. Therefore a "proportionate response" would mean 240 Muslims would need to be killed for every Jew in Israel. All this is quite true if only we accept the theory that the Arab and Muslim world wants to annihilate Israel and the various causus belli that have been used are designed for the prosecution of a war (of annihilation) in stages. It would be easier to feel pity for the Arab mothers of their dead children if only they didn't alternately mourn and celebrate their deaths, depending on whether or not they took Jews with them.

2006-07-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

Get A Grip!

Kids signing missiles? Not nice, for sure. Kids being missiles? Palestinian children are indoctrinated to become human bombs by schools, their "government" and their parents, who celebrate when their children die while killing Jews.

It would be easier for me to be sympathetic to the deaths of children in the Arab world if Arab parents didn't alternate between grief and elation over their children's deaths, the difference being whether or not they killed Jews or were killed with them.

The Palestinians are the most morally twisted people on the planet. They got that way mostly through the indifference of their Arab neighbours, who refusaed to allow them to emigrate to their nations. They even, to this day, while professing love for them, refuse even to allow Palestinians born within their borders the rights of citizenship.

The most pressing part of the Palestinian problem is solvable with a single event: an international declaration that all peoples are automatically citizens in the nations of their birth and entitled to all the rights, priviledges, responsibilities and duties of citizenship. Ten minutes later, the incubators of terrorism, the Palestinian "refugee camps" (in business for an obscene 60 years) should be closed. The UN will just have to get its money by selling more child sex slaves: something they're expert in.

Another idea: build something nice but not particularly impressive right across the street from Turtle Bay. Hold regular meetings of the World Democratic States, democracy being the prerequisite for membership. Which way will traffic flow? Which way will prestige flow? It's a no-brainer.

2006-07-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

Democrat Two-Step

A thought on Democrat and MSM reaction to George Bush’s NSA telephone data-mining programme. It’s like some kind of Latin American dance step, isn’t it?

Oh no! He didn’t connect the dots. Oh no! he wants to collect the dots!
Oh no! He didn’t connect the dots. Oh no! he wants to collect the dots!
…

2006-07-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

Christ Killers!

In a masterpiece of perversion, the Mail & Guardian Online has published an obscenity titled Orgy Of Destruction, implying that Israel's attacks on Hiz’b’allah targets in Lebanon is not only disproportionate (arguable) but that it represents a degenerate feeding of a sexually sadisitic appetite (a lie it implies by the title itself and by comparison to the outstanding psychopathic sadistic regime of all time: Nazi Germany). Similar libels are traditional: early Christians were accused of incestuous orgies, bestiality, blood libels. And the Mail & Guardian is using the same blood libel used against Jews from time immemorial, and repeated in our day by high officers of many Arab nations (like the Syrian Foreign Minister); that Jews feed off the bodies of the young and innocent Christian or Muslim, depending upon the place of origin of the libel.

Whenever the Jew decides not to live under another’s boot, he is accused of killing or denying God and therefore a just target for extermination. I will fisk this deicide myth in this post. But first, a look at the Mail & Guardian’s editorial:

In May 1942, one of the Nazi regime's most notorious mass murderers, Deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated by Czech partisans. The Nazi response was to demolish the nearby village of Lidice house by house and either shoot its inhabitants or send them to death camps.
What, in principle, is the difference between the collective punishment visited on Lidice and the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanese roads, bridges, homes and apartment blocks, telecommunications and power infrastructure, airports, factories, food warehouses and medical facilities by Israeli armed forces?

Not that the Mail & Guardian is interested, but there are a few differences:

The Germans had invaded a sovereign nation: Hizb’allah invaded sovereign Israel in an act of war.
The Germans were not in hot pursuit; the Germans were not trying to free two of their kidnapped people.
The bombings of Israel by Hizb’allah are indiscriminate: the bombings of Hizb’allah’s strongholds by Israel are not. (this is an outright lie in the editorial)
The assassins did not live in Lidice; the aggressors of Israel do live, and attack Israel, from Lebanon.
The Israelis are not going house to house to murder anybody anywhere. (again: this is an outright purposeful lie.)
The Nazis had expressed an explicit desire to destroy an entire race of people and used the power of their state to do so. The Israeli state has never made any such attempt and never will.
People (in the Nazi story, remember, it's people who are deliberately killed) are not roads, bridges, homes, telecommunications and power infrastructure, airports, factories, food warehouses, medical facilities...

Charging Israel with acts of genocide are a constant of the feces-throwing crowd. If Israel wanted to commit genocide it could have done so easily. In 1967 the population of the West Bank was 1.5 million. It is now 3.7 million. Clues for identifying genocide: drops in population, not the doubling of it.

It doesn’t surprise me to hear this kind of perverted antisemitc garbage come out of South Africa. Apartheid may have ended, but South Africa is still the moral toilet of the world, though now it's packaged in a new and improved self-righteous variety. In Durban, just days before 9/11, The genocidal "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was freely distributed at a destroy-the-Jews conference that scrupulously avoided any mention of human rights violations by any other country.

The orgy of destruction that was the so-called Human Rights Conference culminated in the ultimate psychopathic sadistic act of our time: the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. From the West Bank to the New Jersey shores, Arabs and Muslims celebrated their Orgy of Destruction. That the Mail & Guardian fishwrap (online version) continues to obsolve terrorists to beat up on the Jews is neither surprising nor edifying. Even the witless knows the smell of blood coming from the pen of a butcher.

But these Jews aren’t likely to lay down and die so that you will love—no—worship them. This is the hypocricy of the Jew hating Christian (if, indeed, such be Christians): "The only good Jew is a dead Jew and he happens to be my personal saviour." The Jews may have had Jesus killed but, clearly, they killed what they took to be a man. "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do." They took him to be an apostate, a usurper of rabbinical authority, perhaps even of priestly power, but it is self-evident that they did not take him to be God.

Christians have, for two millenia, blamed Jews for two mutually exclusive things: for failing to recognize that Jesus was that saviour promised them by their own prophets, and for killing God. Obviously, they cannot be blamed for both. Indeed, it is the "Christian" Jew-hater who lets Jesus--not as-man, but Christ, die in vain every day. It is they who are the deicides, they who are blind Sauls, persecuting, labouring on roads that lead away from Damascus.

Here’s a better "What’s the difference?" question for the twisted anti-Semites on the Mail & Guardian's editorial board: What’s the difference between "Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!" and "Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!" ? It sounds like the same bloodlust to me.

2006-07-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

What War Is

From a posting by Bill Faith on Old War Dogs from an e-mail written by "Gene Harrison," (a nom de guerre, like Abu Nudnik). Note what Sergeant Harrison reports on the Basil Faultyesque British education system: "Right. Nothing about the War!" This is how perverted pacifism can get: only by teaching about war do children see the downside of it. The pantywaist education ninnies worldwide eviscerate their very best argument: that war is its own best deterrent!

First of all War is not the resolution of conflict by threat or use of deadly force; that is police work. War is not the final stage of diplomacy. That is diplomacy. War is not establishing defenses against attack—there are no defenses that cannot be breached. Stronger defenses simply change the cost to the enemy of the breach.
War is a national response to a threat of death or destruction to the people or structure (in every sense) of a nation. The purpose of war is to eradicate and so completely destroy the enemy that the threat to the nation disappears. The destruction of an enemy by war includes destroying every asset of the enemy, political, social, religious, economic, psychological, biological, and human. You may choose not to destroy a hospital, but only because it uses the enemies resources that could otherwise be directed toward you. [i.e. used by you later -AN]
Not only must you kill the enemy, you must render it incapable of recovery in any form that had led to the threat or deed that brought war on. The devastation the enemy faces must force complete compliance by the entire enemy polis; civil and military, to our demands that lead to total surrender. I can’t count the number of Churches we shelled into oblivion in Germany. They were terrific artillery observation posts. I can hardly remember whether we killed 150,000 or 200,000 civilians in Dresden, and that was the work of the Greatest Generation. Nagasaki and Hiroshima demonstrated that in the face of overwhelming destruction, an Empire could be brought to heel.
We aimed to destroy every avenue of communication that fostered resistance by the civil population. My battalion alone would have silenced al Jazeera on the first day of an attack. No news reporter who had not been screened and whose reports had not been reviewed by censor were transmitted, either to our homeland or to the enemy. As one of my culture heroes, Winston Churchill said, "we will make them bleed and burn." I wore that patch. My regimental motto was "Death before Defeat."
I note, here in England where I visit my daughter and my five grandchildren, that none of the children have learned in their schools of the Battle of Britain. They find it hard to believe that children like them living in London, where sent away to the North to escape dying by the Blitz, the buzz bombs and V2s of 1940-41, so that a remnant of a great nation would remain. They thrill to hear me speak with praise and reverence of young British airmen, flying their Spitfire "kites," against Messerschmitts and Heinkels.

2006-07-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Honest Broker

Further to Haroon Siddiqui’s absurd and dishonest essay in the Star a couple of days ago (dishonest because it pretends to care about Mr. Harper’s electability), I thought I should say a thing or two about Canadian diplomacy under the last two Liberal governments.

Under the guise of attempting to be an honest broker in the Middle East, the Canadian government did indeed take sides, and decisively on the side of terrrorists against Israel, for they refused to even consider, even as a motivating factor in Israeli actions, the theory that the Arab states and their proxy armies were determined to exterminate the Jews of Israel and create a Jew-free Palestine.

Axworthy, Manley and Graham all insisted that everyone’s version of the history of the region is equally valid: Israel's, Hizb’allah’s, the PFLP’s, Hamas’s, and they only way forward to peace was by compromise.

But when one side wants all the Jews to be pushed into the Mediterranean and drowned, what is the compromise position? Arrange a UN force to compassionately drown half of them?

The only theory the Candian foreign ministers refused to consider seriously is the genocidal one which history proves to be the accurate one: The Jews, hunted from state to state for centuries, butchered in Europe with either the tacit consent or gleeful participation (brave Denmark excepted) of the entire world (including the Arabs and other Muslims), finally settle in the land of their origin. A compromise to allow them their own state fails through Arab intransigence. The British betray them by setting up the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as the future head of the Palestinian state they are now to live under: the man helped organize the Bosnian SS, the man who lived in Berlin under Hitler’s wing, who promised the Jews of Palestine to Hitler should he win in Europe: that guy. The guy who, in 1940, asked the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right: "... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy." Naturally, the Jews declare unilateral independence and fight for their lives against the British and all the Arab nations.

The Jews continue their fight against a genocidal enemy to this day. The Liberal governments of Chrétien and Martin were far from honest brokers. By denying entirely the Jewish perspective they took a definite side against Israel. The only reason the Liberal governments of the past even recognized Israel was to assuage the national conscience and as a public relations stunt: too sell the idea that Canada was a "moral superpower." All that was to make everyone forget that, when Jews were trying to escape the Holocaust, Canada did nothing.

Mr. Harper has only straightened out the track. Now Canada really is an honest broker.

2006-07-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Does Pacifism Bring Peace?

Thomas Sowell at Townhall.com has a great article called Pacifists versus peace. [article moved to archive; requires membership to access]

As always, Sowell's writing hasn't an ounce of fat and he makes his case simply and clearly. As usual, he's absolutely right. And he's too much of a gentleman to suggest that vanity feeds the delusions of unconditional pacifists: he just thinks they're ignorant because the educational system isn't what it ought to be.

But people educate themselves in spite of schools, not because of them. Schools are mere tools in the hands of the curious. If one wants to know things, one can find them out with a little work, a lot of thought, a bit of moral courage and complete honesty. From Sowell's superlative essay:

If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.
There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia -- not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion"...

and more

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.
"World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent....

Deterrent: there's the operative word. What deterrence is there to war today? No sooner does one party gain an advantage than diplomatic ninnies call for a ceasefire. What for? For the animosity to seethe? For the two sides to reload? Do develop more devastating weapons? Today, Germany and Japan are peace-loving nations, precisely because they know first hand the cost of waging war. And because their defeats were decisive. Israel must do more than clear Hizb'allah to a point beyond their present military abilities -- they must crush them utterly.

The truth is, that the Arab world has been babied by diplomats. They fought on the wrong side of both world wars and for it they expect the spoils of the victors. The Germans haven't asked the French for Alsace and Lorraine because they were soundly beaten and knew it. The Arab world needs, more than anything else, the kind of shellacking that drives home the point that they will never prevail against Israel and that there is a permanent cost to war which one must be prepared to accept before one begins. Only then will the killing end.

2006-07-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

Oh No! Political Principle!

Haroon Siddiqui writes his usual pro-terrorist crap in the Toronto (Red) Star in an article titled PM's pro-Israeli tilt could cost him at polls.

Firstly, it’s not a tilt. The POV is straight up: terrorists invade a sovereign state. That state has the right to protect itself. That doesn’t sound tilted to me.

Secondly, since when is a Prime Minister supposed to decide foreign policy based on his election chances? Churchill got nowhere beating the drum before Neville Chamberlain was played the fool by Hitler. Then he got elected. He didn’t beat the drum to get elected but to wake up Chamberlain. It doesn’t matter whether you are elected or not. That’s the beauty of liberal democracies: you can achieve as much out of office as in: by influence.

Here’s an interesting paragraph from the Star:

By falling in lockstep with George W. Bush, the Prime Minister is either displaying his ideological commitment to the president or trying to please him, at any cost — from Afghanistan to Israel. Either way, he is compromising Canadian sovereignty and our reputation for even-handedness, as well as exposing our soldiers to grave risk in the questionable Afghan mission.

overfull, at little green footballs, blogs this response:

Siddiqui is and always has been a terrorist apologist. His sentence:
"Either way, he is compromising Canadian sovereignty and our reputation for even-handedness, as well as exposing our soldiers to grave risk in the questionable Afghan mission." [my emphasis] perverts the meaning of sovereignty. The idea that the PM's statements might put our soldiers at risk from the enemy, and therefore he shouldn't do it, is a statement that seems to posit Canadian sovereignty, not in Parliament, not in the PM, but in the hands of a violent enemy, an enemy that will use violence precisely as a weapon to terrorize people into pressuring governments into enacting policies beneficial to the violent instead of to their own people. His statements carry a veiled threat: they may not quite be treason but they breathe the same fetid air.

I couldn’t hardly say it better myself.

But not to worry; I’ve read Siddiqui for years and he’s never been right before. Hum a tune, brush your teeth, have a sandwich. Harroooooon, haaaahaaaaaaaa, harrooooooon, sing a little song of Harroooooooooooon Siddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiqui.

Oh--one more thing: he's dead wrong: for centuries the policy of Canadian government relations with the US has been formed by a consistent rule: The PM spits out in public what he sucks in private. Dat's for da votes!

2006-07-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

Tears for Lebanon

There are a lot of stories about Lebanese suffering these days but not much of it has much context. The Lebanese were victims of a horrible civil war followed by a long occupation by Syria. Israel occupied its south to prevent missiles being fired into its northern towns and farms. It withdrew six years ago. Now Hiz'b'Allah, an Iranian proxy army, has worked toward making the once liberal and fun-loving, tolerant Lebanon into a theocracy after the model of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who founded this group of murderers. Their kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers has now called Israel's wrath upon Lebanon's people.

Israel is defending its country from agression. My guess is that the present aggresion is a missile test Iran has fashioned to prepare for its much anticipated and often-announced nuclear attack on Israel. The kidnapping was a ruse to draw enemy fire. With such fire comes blood. With blood comes propaganda. In the war with Israel, every death has propaganda value in a perverted and psychotic culture where parents celebrate their childrens' deaths in acts of murder.

It's not just a test of weapon systems: it's a test of Israel's will and the international community's support for liberty against fascism and religious tyranny.

The media hasn't seemed to see it this way. It should keep in mind that the best way to avoid civilian casualties is to shorten the duration of war. The worst thing that could happen now is for Israel to let Hiz'b'allah off the hook so that it can reconstitute itself down the road, this time with more dangerous weapons.

Hiz'b'allah must be crushed entirely and its flight followed, if necessary, first to Syria, then to Iran. Many world leaders understand this, even Arab leaders, who have criticized Hiz'b'allah -- an unheard of event.

The prize for moral clarity goes to Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. No other leader has expressed himself so convincingly, so clearly and has analyzed the situation as well. Hiz'b'allah is the agressor and it must tbe crushed. A far cry from the "balanced" point of view of his Liberal predecessors! It's rare that the politicians are ahead of the people, but this time they seem to be.

Go Israel, go. The crushing of Hiz'b'allah is the greatest gift that could possibly be given to the Lebanese people.

2006-07-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

An Historical Mistake or an Historian's?

The Washington Post has published an Op-Ed piece so stupid you've got to read it to believe it.

According to Richard Cohen, history is a one-horse horserace. There's only one reason for anything happening, as if history itself were not a debate about whose story would be accepted in the end!

Israel, he writes in his essay called Hunker Down With History, is an historical mistake.Well, I guess the USA is a mistake too. By what right did European Christians come to the Americas?

Oh, what about the Arabian nation of Muhammed's time and since, Mr. Cohen? What right did Muhammed and his followers have to go to Palestine, North Africa, Anatolia, Iberia Russia, France, the Balkans, Austria, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia?

Cohen, unbelievably, seems to be saying that racial purity is the only legitimate raison d' être for nations. Faith is an OK reason for Islam to continue its occupation, its colonialization, its imperialism but Israel? Better hunker down Jew-boy, and take your lickin’, chicken!

Wrong Jew, wrong history. Welcome to Israel: life, joy, struggle, survival. These Jew-boys ain’t waitin’ in line for a de-lousing, you louse, you!

Wow! It’s not surprising that the world gets pissed off when Jews decide to live but it sure is shocking when a Jew like Cohen says so!

2006-07-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

Debbie Schlussle, in her post today, says there are 25,000 American green-card holders, mostly dual citizens, in Lebanon. If that’s so, then Canada’s 25,000 Lebanese-Canadians is huge. Canada has only 1/10th of America’s population!

and, says, Schussel, the majority are pro-Hiz'b'allah.

Reminds me of Omar Kadr, "Al Kanadi" (the Canadian) who was Canadian in the free-medical-care sense of the word. Trained with Al-Qaeda, got shot fighting the infidel, got patched up for free in Toronto and got right back on the battlefield where, happily for our side, he died. His family insisted that, being Canadians and therefore free people, they had the right to be in favour of Al-Qaeda ("We are Al-Qaeda, we are an Al-Qaeda family. This is a free country. We can believe as we like." (I quote from memory.)

I hope CSIS has its eye on this and that the Mounties aren't assuming they come from "a broad spectrum" of political values.

How many Lebanese-Canadians who the government are straining to evacuate are Canadian in the free-health-care Omar Kadr sense?

2006-07-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Brigitte Gabriel (pictured left), who has written an essay clarifying the history of Hiz'b'allah in Lebanon. Gabriel is a Lebanese Christian, one of thousands who left Lebanon after the civil war between Muslims and Christians facilitated by the PLO and Yasser Arafat. The most interesting passage for me is:

The Lebanese army has less than 10,000 military troops. Hizbullah has over 4,000 trained militia forces and there are approximately 700 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. So, why can't the army do the job? Because the majority of Lebanese Muslims making up the army will split and unite along religious lines with the Islamic forces, just as happened in 1976 at the start of the Lebanese civil war.

It interests me because this passage explains why the Lebanese are not capable of routing Hiz'b'allah (Hiz=the Party, b'=of, allah-God) by themselves. Hence the call from Tony Blair and others to send in an international team to disarm Hiz'b'allah.

It all boils down to a war of Islamic Jihad ideology vs. Judeo-Christian Westernism. Muslims, who are now the majority of Lebanon's population, support Hizbullah because they are part of the Islamic ummah - the nation. This is the taboo subject everyone is trying to avoid.

No matter how much the West avoids facing the reality of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, the West cannot hide from the fact that Hamas and Hizbullah are of the same radical Islamic ideology, which has fomented carnage and death through terrorism, that America and the world are fighting. This is the same Hizbullah that Iran is threatening to unleash in America with suicide bomb attacks if America tries to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They are reported to have cells in over 10 cities in the United States. Hamas has the largest terrorist infrastructure on American soil. This is what happens when you turn a blind eye to evil for decades, hoping it will go away.

Read the Hamas Covenant here.

And a neighbor of mine is concerned that some US Senators get together and pray before sessions! Oy vey! Theocracy's on its way!

2006-07-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

Shiite!

Best of the Best of the Best at Opinion Journal. Here's a funny excerpt (but read the whole thing):

…Reuters reports from St. Petersburg, Russia:

A microphone picked up an unaware President Bush saying on Monday Syria should press Hezbollah to "stop doing this [scatological vulgarity]" and that his secretary of state may go to the Middle East soon.
Reuters, which considers terrorism [i.e.the word "terrrorism"] taboo, actually quotes the vulgarity, which we've omitted, in part because this Web site is published by a family newspaper and in part because we're not sure the president didn't actually say "Shiite."

These Shiite stirrings…

2006-07-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

2006-07-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

Self-congratulations!

I received the following invitation to mindless self-congratulation today, riddled with self-righteous ad hominem attacks (isn't that an oxymoron?). It's written by the Reverend - Captain, I mean - Paul Watson:

From: Paul Watson [mailto:paulwatson@earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 9:26 AMTo: Paul WatsonSubject: Re-Paying Jonah's Debt to the Whale. The importance of Israel's vote at the IWC

Re-Paying Jonah's Debt to the Whale

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

Israel arrived like the proverbial cavalry onto the beaches of St. Kitts and Nevis this year.

Thousands of years after a whale saved Jonah, Israel has returned the favor by helping to save the whales.

After years of economic bullying, bribery, cajoling and arrogant posturing, the Japanese whaling interests had thought they had the votes to form a majority bloc at this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission.

The Japanese delegation arrived in the Caribbean, booked into the best hotels and began to wine and dine their bought and paid for puppet delegates from Mongolia, Senegal, Mali, Togo, and assorted other small nations that recently joined the IWC at the behest of Japan.

The Japanese had counted the heads and were confident of the votes to finally seize majority control of the world's only whaling regulatory body.
But victory was snatched from their hands with the arrival of Israel and the defection of Belize.

Israel did not come to the table because of bribes, they came to save the whales and their enlistment as the 70th member of the IWC stopped the Japanese takeover bid in its tracks.

One of the defeated Japanese resolutions would have allowed commercial hunting of 150 Piked and 150 Byrde whales in the territorial waters of Japan, Iceland and Norway. It was defeated 31-30.

It was the Israeli vote that carried the day for the whales.

Another motion would have removed the prohibition on hunting dolphins and porpoises. The Israeli vote made the crucial difference.

The votes were cast by Esther Efrat, the head of the treaty division at the Foreign Ministry.
"The Israeli position on whaling is clear. Whaling is illegal in Israel and off of Israel's coast. We were bringing our position to the international forum," explained Mark Regev, spokesperson for the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:"Israel has a very strong commitment to environmental matters. We've got a ministry for environmental affairs whose full-time job it is to make sure the environment is looked after. Whaling is illegal in Israel and when we go to the international forum, we are making those opinions known. That's why on the whaling issue we lined up with those who believe whales should be protected," he said.

Israel joined at the last minute after an alert was sent by the US government representatives to Israel's Foreign Ministry urging Israel to join the US againthe plansans by Japan to take over the IWC.

Israel was not bribed but reacted to support an ally on an issue that the Israeli citizens firmly supported. Most of the nations supporting Japan are doing so in defiance of the polls that demonstrate that their citizens are opposed to whaling.
It also made a difference that Belize decided to switch allegiance to the whales and decided to vote against Japan after influential members of the Belize tourist industry pressured their government to vote for the whales. (See earlier posting on the Power of One)

Israel has never had a whaling industry. In fact the Old Testament is very in stating that whale and dolphin meat is prohibited by God.

By joining the IWC Israel has also assumed a position of leadership as a marine conservation nation for the Mediterranean Sea. Israel's own non profit NGO IMMRAC is devoted to protecting whales, dolphins and porpoises.Mia Elasar, a committee member at IMMRAC said that she hopes Israel's participation in the IWC will mean the country will put its heart into local issues, such as those addressed by ACCOBAMS Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area)."The recent vote against whaling is expected to put Israel on the local map. It shows us that there is a place to really vote for preserving Mediterranean marine mammals," said Elasar, who hopes Israel will take the reigns and lead awareness to marine conservation."There [at ACCOBAMS] we can really make an impact. This authority will affect seals and dolphins, which are a threatened species in the Mediterranean more because of fishing and less of hunting.""There are whales in the Mediterranean," Elasar confirms. "There are six species to be found off the Israeli coast. The main problem with conservation of marine mammals is that their reproductive rates are slow. What we are doing now we will only get back in 10 or 20 years. The animals will disappear if we don't watch it."The Mediterranean is home to the world's second highest percentage of endemic species, including the Posidonia sea grass and the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seal. Species also include 28 cetaceans, the loggerhead turtle, and the blue-fin tuna and swordfish. But currently, less than 1% of the Mediterranean is protected.
Captain Watson, Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972), Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979), Director of the
Sierra Club USA (2003-2006), Director - The Farley Mowat Institute, Director - www.harpseals.org, Director - Ocean Outfall Group of California Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film Festival Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine

Whom when I asked from what place he came,
And hoheight hi himselfselfe he did ycleepe shepherdheard of the Ocean by Name,
And said he came far from the
main-sea deepe.
- Edmund Spenser A.C.E. 1590

www.Seashepherd.org Tel:
360-370-5650; Fax: 360-370-5651

Address: P.O. Box 2616, Friday Harbor,
Wa 98250, USA ______________________________________

My Response:

Gee. I sure hope we don't break our arms patting ourselves on the back.

Interesting to note that Captain Paul Watson, Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977, Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972), Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979), Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006), Director - The Farley Mowat Institute, Director - www.harpseals.org, Director - Ocean Outfall Group of California, Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film Festival, Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine spends most of his article impugning the reputations of each and every state that voted with Japan while completely ignoring claims that the moratorium on whale hunting is no longer necessary, that the growing populations of whales threaten the krill stock on which they depend, and that the number of new whales allowed to be hunted represents a reasonable number not threatening to the species as a whole, culls and improves the stock while providing benefit for people. If these arguments are true, should the whales die from lack of food or should the herd be culled?

I'll be damned if I know if any of this is true and that's just the point: I'd prefer to see a reasoned argument based on science than this kind of self-congratulatory nullity whose purpose is clearly to circumnavigate the reason and go straight to where unquestioning pride lurks. I hate being played.

I'm no expert but it's pretty clear what effects the growing seal populations have had on fish stocks and the Canadian fishery. Maybe the cod stock did diminish solely (!) due to human overfishing and maybe it didn't. All I know is that the Sea Shepherd Society et al take a pretty consistent view that all activity of humans to feed themselves must of necessity adversely effect the environment. This missive should be looked at keeping this bias in mind and the aforementioned one: ad hominem attacks instead of sound scientific questions and answers should be taken suspiciously as purposeful attempts to sway the reason through the emotions.

I'd copy the Reverend Watson -- I mean Captain Watson -- but I don't see an address.

___________________________________________________

Oops! Wrong about the last sentence: his email is at the top of the email!

2006-07-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

Conservative Voice has blogged an over-the top encomium to Canada to which I take exception. Here is the link and my reply.

Don’t thank us for what we ought to be doing. The war is not half a world away, it is the heartland of Canada; in Toronto, Al Qaeda cells fester. I saw them in the weeks approaching 9/11 on the sidewalks half a block from me, going to and from the Islamic Centre in Parkdale, increasingly haughty, increasingly arrogant. “Who the hell do they think they are?” I remember muttering to myself. They knew, I tell you. They knew. And when it was done they rejoiced, not as in Gaza with guns, but quietly, like a miser who has scored a windfall but doesn’t want his neighbours to know. Any nation who refuses to fight such a callous and disgusting enemy with every weapon at its disposal is not worthy of the name.

Canada is not a loyal ally of the US and did not go anywhere, much less Afghanistan, without fanfare. With great bitchiness, I remember the prime minister (Jean Chretién) complaining that George Bush didn’t mention Canada in his speech but only England and Australia. Canada came late to the table because it wanted Americans first to fawn over us for opening up our airports to your stranded planes, and our homes to the passengers. Since when is common decency something to be lauded? What a world! What was the alternative? Let the planes fall to earth? Let people starve at the airport? Sure, Newfoundlanders are the best. Salt of this earth, man, I tell you. But all you gotta be for them to love you is human. It was nothing special. They’re always like that and that’s why it’s an insult to praise them for just being themselves, for being daysant (=decent in Newfie).

Canada (at the time of which we speak—there have been undeniable signs of hope since the Conservative minority government under Stephen Harper took over) has been more like a bitchy auntie than an uncle — the crazy one who lives in the basement and complains about the smells and every coming and going — mostly about being left alone and ignored. But who shuts her up in her room? She herself. She could have a life but she doesn’t. Instead she sits in the moral centre of the universe and contemplates “what makes us us,” to quote a line from an Air Miles commercial that expresses the shallowness, the narcissism of this nation. Did I say nation? Country, rather: a country without a song that sends shivers up your spine, without a God, without an army worth speaking of (admittedly that is improving, thank God). We were real players once, with the 4th largest army in the world and an unblemished record of courage, boldness, fearlessness and honour. I weep with rage and frustration to think of it! Once she lived. Now she passes judgement and rots.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate your sentiment; I appreciate that you mention our fallen soldiers but other than that, dammit, you soil our honour with your praise!