Just the sort of thing the blogosphere is good at. Seems that Hezbollah’s version of what happened at Quran is unravelling. I don’t have time for pretty formatting, so I give you a bunch of links, starting with Jonah Goldberg and Mona Charen on The Corner.
Know anybody who reads Arabic? I’d like to know what the poster says: See here and here.
Then just look at the links here, here, here, here, and here.
And who is this man?
That’s today’s oxymoron. Stuart Buck asks the musical question, “Are liberals more empirical than conservatives?”
The saddest quote is this one from Andrew Greely:
I often regret that I ever became engaged in this area of scholarly investigation. It has been a waste of time. Doctrinaire slogans, conventional wisdom, shallow ideology, pessimism, and nonsense have dominated the discussion of Catholic education for so long that I have little hope that mere findings, no matter how solid, will be taken seriously. Certainly my own work and that of the research heritage I have described has had no impact at all.
It’s a deadly mistake, as is made clear by the man who translated al Quada’s manual. His thoughts are in this column.
In “The Management of Savagery,” Naji argues that the jihadis failed in the past to establish an Islamic state because they were focused on toppling local regimes. These efforts were fruitless, he argues, because jihadis were seen as fighting their own people, which alienated the masses. Moreover, the local governments proved impervious to revolution as long as they were supported by the U.S. Based on his understanding of power politics, Naji says that the jihadis had to provoke the United States to invade a country in the Middle East.
This would 1.) turn the Muslims against local governments allied with the U.S.; 2.) destroy the U.S. aura of invincibility, which it maintains through the media, and 3.) create sympathy for the jihadis, who would be viewed as standing up to Crusader aggression. Moreover, the invasion would bleed the U.S. economy and sap its military power, leading to social unrest at home and its ultimate withdrawal from the Middle East.
Naji had hoped that Afghanistan would play out in this manner for the U.S., as it did for the Soviets. Now, Naji places his hopes on Iraq. Once the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, he contends, the jihadis must quickly move to invade neighboring countries.
Read the translated manual here. And keep this in mind every time the MSM opens its yap about the war.
England, described by an English immigrant as the country where freedom was lost so long ago that the English don’t even realize they aren’t free. Yet it finally seems to be dawning on some just how corrosive multiculturalism is.
Brick Lane is a glorious streak of neon and curry, of clubbers and fundamentalists, of old Jewish immigrant stories and new Muslim ones, in the guts of the East End. It is my home, and over the past week I have been sharing it with a little news story – and with another small sign that free speech in Britain is slowly sandpapered down by reactionary mini-mobs.
Read it and despair.
Whenever the elites promise to “reform” or “streamline” something, especially taxes, count the spoons. Heed the warning of California’s voice in the desert, Ray Haynes.
[T]here is an effort nationwide, in which California is participating, to develop the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP). The SSTP would force businesses that do mail order and internet sales to collect sales taxes from citizens of other states. SSTP would require Congress to enforce the system and would use an organization called the Multistate Tax Commission to collect and audit the sellers. Congress is being asked to force all sellers, even if they operate in a state that does not participate in the SSTP to collect taxes from buyers in states that do participate.
“Not guilty by reason of insanity” has always bothered me. “Guilty, with mitigated punishment by reason of insanity” would make more sense. Mona Charen agrees, and points out who else was guilty in the gut-wrenching case of Andrea Yates.
Two juries have had to decide to what degree Andrea Yates was responsible for her behavior. But no juries have ever been asked to consider Rusty’s guilt. The word negligent doesn’t even begin to describe his malfeasance. How is it possible that a man who knows his wife’s sanity has been compromised by childbirth can nonetheless impregnate her five more times (she miscarried once)?
How could he leave her alone when he knew she was, at the very least, suicidal — and when her failure to care for the children (and feeding is pretty elemental) revealed a clear case of endangering the welfare of a child? What was he thinking when he urged Andrea to home school all four of their children (the fifth came later) in the converted school bus they were living in?
who is expecting a White Rabbit to scamper by any minute. Charles Krauthammer asks the logical question about the “disproportionate response”, in What Moral Universe?
What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?
What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?
From the heart of Jolly Olde we bring you this representative of the oxymoronically-named Institute of Islamic Thought, courtesy of LGF.
Guess what year this cartoon was published.
Visit Michelle Malkin for the shocking answer.
Meanwhile, Michelle is also all over the story I heard this morning about those UN “observers” who got hit by Israel. One of them, a Canadian solder, had been emailing a general back home about how Hezbollah was “all over” their position in an obvious attempt to draw Israeli fire. Prepare yourself for another shock: According to Lee Rodgers this morning, the only person who could order them out of that position was… Go on. Guess.
Of course he’d be profusely and publicly grateful if, say, the IDF were to save the life of a UN soldier. Right?
Michael Yon links to this story in the Washington Post (of all places – congrats to the MSM on this one) about a young man who almost became one of the 911 hijackers, but has since gone straight.
Thabit continues to receive death threats. “They are like a mafia, a gang, and I am revealing their secrets. They want to silence me,” he says.
It’s encouraging to see that not all the reaction has been negative.
Since his book came out, Thabit has gotten favorable fan mail, and in March Prince Khalid al-Faisal, governor of Asir province, where the majority of the Saudi hijackers came from, bought 50 copies of “The 20th Terrorist” in Lebanon. The prince then invited the heads of Asir’s education departments to his weekly salon and distributed it to them as mandatory reading.
Read the whole thing to learn about how the Islamofacists manipulate young men.
One of my favorites, from a movie chock-a-block full of great lines:
“We’re not saying anything new here today. We’re just saying what needs to be said, again and again, with fierce conviction.”
According to Myrna Blythe, Senator Rick Santorum has enough of the right stuff to say what needs to be said.
There was no buoyant “campaign speak” that the group might have expected to hear. Instead, he was sober and very intense as he talked about what he said was “the biggest issue facing our children’s future, the world war we are now fighting, which, at its heart, is just like the previous three global struggles.”
Unlike the president, he said, he does not call our current conflict the War on Terror. That, he maintained, would be like saying the Second World War was just “a war against blitzkrieg.” Rather, he said we should name the enemy we are fighting, not the tactics they employ. “Our world-wide enemy is Islamic Fascism.” But, he also said, “we are unable to come to terms with this terrible reality.”
And K-Lo calls him Senator Do-the-Right-Thing.
He could have fewer headaches — and less public ones at that — as a well-paid lobbyist or lawyer. But when you ask him why the heck he wants a job that entails so much abuse and so much frustration — some of the latter caused by his own party — he responds knowingly, but with an obvious humility: “Right now is an important time in the history of our country,” he explained to me recently, with a sense of something bigger than himself he is participating in and being guided by. He believes he has made a positive contribution as a senator and has something more to offer. Going from Iraq discourse to just talking American to American, he explained that, for him, political service is just the right thing to do. And that’s what he knows he ought to do. Because that’s what we do.
Michael Yon likes him. So does BLACKFIVE.
So, naturally, Buttle’s World had to check him out. He’s a filmmaker from Hollywood, but on our side. He’s doing documentary filmmaking right with the troops in Iraq. I mean close enough to be able to give a first-hand account of an IED attack.
With a warning for language (you expected soldiers to talk like Kindergarten teachers?) Buttle’s World invites you to bookmark:
As Orwell put it, “[W]e have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
Whether Bush remembers it or not, we need to remember that this World War is a religious war. It doesn’t matter that we don’t want it to be one. It takes willful blindness not to see that, to the enemy, that’s precisely what it is.
Religion can’t be reasoned with. That’s why religious wars are the longest and bloodiest.
“A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.”
–Edward De Bono
Every time I see an Islamist wearing glasses, or talking on a TV or, for that matter, using a car, I’m reminded of a very entertaining book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: Footfall.
In it a civilization of under-evolved, elephantine creatures overrun a much more advanced civilization by force, and inherit their advanced technology. They proceed to use it to clumsily conquer every planet they find.
It’s not spoiling the ending to say that things don’t go as expected for them on Earth. And the book has one of my favorite descriptions ever. A space ship is lifting off, a large one. It is lifted by a series of atomic bombs going off under it. (This was a real idea called Project Orion.) The authors describe the launch as experienced by the passengers:
“God was knocking on the door. And He wanted in real bad.”
Anyway, I often think of those space barbarians when I see cretins from a culture totally incapable of producing anything like eye glasses or the internet using the technology of its enemies. Here’s hoping things don’t get quite as bad as they did in Niven and Pournelle’s book before we win.
As we shall. Some day.
UPDATE:
Dan Simmons thinks they’ll get that bad. And worse. (Caution: language)
UPDATED UPDATE
Speaking of terrifying technology in the hands of savages, how did I miss the bomb?
Old. Slow. Deadly.
And about to get deadlier. The warthog is back.
The aircraft, which is known for flying low and slowly over battlefields in support of ground troops, will be upgraded to the A-10C configuration. The upgraded aircraft will have more computer technology and precision-guided weapons and the ability to shoot from higher altitudes in all weather.
Bad news for Jihadists everywhere.
Just today I was reflecting on the mental acuity of those who don’t realize that it’s all the same war, and wondering what it’s like to see one’s own colon from so close up. Michelle Malkin has had similar, if less scatalogical, thoughts prompted by watching buffoons on the MSM who don’t think Hezbollah is our problem.
And Jeff Jacoby took care of the Chicken Hawk straw man, prompting this from Cliff May.
There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas.
They are not just inter-related, they are interdependent. They are equally consequential. When we get the ideas wrong, when we misunderstand the problem, we end up with the wrong solution and all that follows from that.
I have a confession to make. I was never comfortable telling my daughter the Santa Claus lie. It’s really important to me that I always tell her the truth. And that one bugged me. Last August she figured it out, and accepted my apology for the story. I was very proud of her.
So why am I blogging about this now? Because I really wonder how I get so worked up about Santa in a world where people do this to their children.
I’ve said for years (even before the first one blew up, I think) that the Shuttle is a dog. It’s the 1975 panel-sided Mercury station wagon of space. And that’s on a good day, when it doesn’t kill its crew. On Idle Words is an article which lays out the case in delicious detail that it’s time to stick a fork in it. (And in the ISS, too.)
The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons – it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.
Why?
While Jews consider the paper an ally in their battle against prejudice, they seem to ignore the paper’s treatment of their own community. Anti-Semitism is an awkward subject for many people, Jews included, to consider. Many might regard those who touch upon it as hyper-sensitive and too focused on their own well-being.
However, American Jews celebrate and support the self-regard that other groups display when they campaign to be fairly treated. Such self-regard is a fundamental principle of self-preservation. If blacks or Hispanics were treated the way Jews have periodically been treated by the New York Times, some Jewish readers would be outraged. So why the apathy regarding principles that Jews have always held dear: civility, justice, and equal treatment?
Is such a betrayal of principles a double standard? Aren’t double standards themselves a sign of anti-Semitism?
The indespensible Thomas Sowell points out why pacifists bring war.
One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.
“Peace” movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called “peace” movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.
Or, as Orwell put it:
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other.”
The Register is on the discovery, in China, of a very strange military base.
If you happen to live on the Chinese/Indian border, you may choose now as the time to be concerned. About what, nobody can tell you.
I’m sorry. That’s an inexcusable pun. I just couldn’t resist. But his article seriously remonstrates Israel for their Unnecessary War.
To undo this damage of thirteen years requires Israel returning to the slow, hard, expensive, frustrating, and boring work of deterrence. That means renouncing the foolish plans of compromise, the dreamy hopes for good will, the irresponsibility of releasing terrorists, the self-indulgence of weariness, and the idiocy of unilateral withdrawal.
Andy McCarthy bemoans the demise of what I had at the top of the very short list of things Bush has done right.
Of course, the underlying logic of the Bush Doctrine was that rewarding terrorists and their rogue state benefactors with negotiations and concessions inevitably encourages more of their barbarism. Firmness is the only language they understand. As top terror recipients of Iran’s largesse wage war with Israel, it’s worth asking whether we’ve forgotten that.
Found this on LGF. Seen this photo?
You’ll be shocked – shocked! – to learn it was set up by foreign journalists.
You gotta hand it to the MSM. If they get too close to the truth, they just back off.
In fact, editors have grown increasingly resistant to embedding reporters with combat units, something they demanded be done before the invasion in March 2003. The purported reason: They think contact with U.S. service members hurts the reporters’ objectivity.
“They come to see the world through the eyes of the troops,” said the retired officer’s e-mail. Now, newspapers and magazine rely heavily on Iraqi stringers who telephone in reports from various combat scenes.
“We are clearly winning the fight against the insurgents, but we are losing the public relations battle, both in the war zone and in the States,” said the e-mail.
People not familiar with Mexican politics and history may not appreciate the significance of this close presidential election. It’s easy to wring our hands about how “Peje Lagarto” (Lopez Obrador) got so many votes, and decry the leftward shift in Latin America. There’s no real surprise there, since Mexico has really been a Marxist state with a thin veneer of democracy since 1939. To quote Evelyn Waugh in Robbery Under Law (a book I highly recommend even if you’re not interested in Mexico, just because Waugh is incapable of being dull) there are no conservatives in Mexico.
No, the great news is the closeness of the election. During the old single-party-rule days of the PRI there was no such thing as a close election. If they “lost” an election, they merely did their own “recount” – and arranged for the ballots to tragically be destroyed in a fire. Or an inconvenient candidate might just turn up dead. A close election can only happen when elections are honest.
While Vicente Fox turned out to be even more Clintonian than I feared during the last campaign, and has been a disaster as a president, his election was a giant step forward for Mexico. And the man who deserves credit for not rigging the election is Ernesto Zedillo.
So while Zedillo may not get credit elsewhere for honestly losing an election, Buttle’s World salutes him for it.
Meanwhile, we would do well to learn something from Mexico’s election system. There you must present your voter card, which is a photo ID, before being allowed to vote. In California poll workers aren’t even allowed to ask for any kind of proof that you are who you are.
In Israel, the Prime Minister stands up and says, “Enough. We have to prevail.” And then the leader of the opposition party gets up and says:
The prime minister must “not do half a job, he must finish the job” against Hizbullah, said Netanyahu. “Israel must learn their lesson this time – a decisive victory without concessions to eliminate Hizbullah once and for all.”
I wonder what it’s like to live in a country where “opposition” means opposed to the other party and not to the country itself.
It was funny.
The first jokes about the Russian revolution surfaced immediately after October 1917. In one, an old woman visits Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time. “Look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!” she exclaims. As the system became harsher, a distinctive communist sense of humour emerged—pithy, dark and surreal—but so did the legal machinery for repressing it. Historian Roy Medvedev looked through the files of Stalin’s political prisoners and concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes, such as this: Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”
This is pretty funny. And I’m linking to it to keep it number one on Google.
