Archives for April 2007

April 26, 2007 By Fausta

The Five Myths Of Harry

The Dem Cong’s been busy, hasn’t it?

MYTH #3:
General Petraeus Says There Is No Military Solution

SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV): “…There Is No Military Solution In Iraq. General Petraeus, The Commander On The Ground, Has Said So Himself.” (Sen. Reid, “Reid: As Situation In Iraq Worsens, America Can And Must Change Course,” Press Release, 04/22/07)

FACT:
General Petraeus Believes “Improv[ing] The Security” With “Additional Forces” Is Necessary To Achieve A Political Solution

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: “I want to assure you that Lieutenant General Odierno and I would not have asked to maintain the surge force levels in Iraq – a request that led to your tour extensions – if we did not view the additional forces as being absolutely necessary to our ability to accomplish our mission. That mission – to help Iraq improve the security for its population – is intended to provide Iraqi leaders with an opportunity to begin to tackle the crucial issues that must be resolved to achieve a sustainable outcome in Iraq.” (Gen. David Petraeus, Letter To Soldiers Serving In Multi-National Force-Iraq, 4/14/07)

David Broder:

Instead of reinforcing the important proposition — defined by the Iraq Study Group– that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can still succeed.

Meanwhile, Jeff Emmanuel‘s reporting from Iraq.

Too bad Harry can’t read Red.

Update: Harry Reid agrees with George W. Bush!

April 26, 2007 By Fausta

The Hubble anniversary, and today’s items

When I first moved to the Princeton area I had the opportunity to see parts of the Hubble Telescope being assembled. Today Maria reminds me that the Hubble is 17 years old HubbleSite.

Now, that’s real science.

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Maria also sent this link to this article about a new magazine, Salvo
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Via Larwyn, Gates of Vienna writes about Naser Khader, A democratic Muslim
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Also from Larwyn, The Anchoress wants to Stow the Summer Concerts, Save the World

April 25, 2007 By Fausta

The writing on the wall

Today Tony Blankley asks, Is There Writing on the Wall? (emphasis added)

It would appear that the great divide in both public opinion and between politicians is not Republican-Democrat, liberal-conservative, pro or anti-Bush, or even pro or anti-war (or, in Europe: pro-or anti-American). Rather, the great divide is between those, such as me, who believe that the rise of radical Islam poses an existential threat to Western Civilization; and those who believe it is a nuisance, if, episodically, a very dangerous nuisance.

Blankley concludes,

Thus, while others and I will continue to make our case in public, it seems probably inevitable that the correctness or incorrectness of our views will only become persuasive to the multitude when history teaches its cruel, unavoidable lessons. It was ever thus, which is why history is strewed with broken nations and civilizations that couldn’t read the writing on the wall. Of course, it is also strewed with sad hulks of false predictors of doom.

Dr. Sanity has been exploring these issues at her blog. In today’s post, Symptom or adaptation? she asks

Now ask yourself, is the ubiquitous, almost casual, antisemitism of the Islamic world a healthy, adaptive response to some injustices perpetrated by Jews that muslims have to deal with in the real world; or is it a projection that is symptomatic of some serious psychopathology within the muslim culture?

ShrinkWrapped:

In the Muslim mind, where there is no cause and effect, everything occurs at the whim of Allah. Such a world risks becoming a frightening place filled with seemingly unpredictable events and when bad things happen it is because Allah wanted them to happen. A tsunami is then evidence that Allah is displeased with his people…unless, you can find a suitable entity, an almost God, who caused the grief. After the Indonesian tsunami, rumors and conspiracy theories were rampant int he Muslim world that the Israelis (and sometimes the Americans) had caused the tsunami. No longer was Allah angry at his people; now there was an explanation that allowed the Muslim world to avoid looking int he mirror and asking the obvious question: When the Arab world is awash with oil money, how is it that they could not spare a tiny amount for their co-religionists and build a tsunami warning system? (Actually, they would have had to buy a tsunami waring system, a related issue.) If Israel and/or America had caused the tsunami, such a warning system was not only unnecessary but foolhardy. Instead of looking inward, fro one’s own shortcomings that have facilitated or caused disasters, one can look outward, focus one’s wrath on the feared and hated demi-God, and please Allah at the same time. No longer is a disaster a sign of Allah’s displeasure, but an opportunity to gain even more of his approval by attacking his enemies.

In a similar vein, the home grow[n] despair of failed societies, which in other nations has been redirected and used to build modern societies around the world, has no internal outlet; it must be directed outward so that the societies of the Muslim world can pretend to stay unchanged and unquestioned.

This week Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has a series of most interesting posts on the subject which you must read in their entirety since abridging will do them no justice. But one particular sentence stood out in yesterday’s post,

In any event, in the Arab world, any expression of western ideas, ideologies or beliefs are deemed ‘satanic.’ The choice of imagery and words are no accident.

Last week SC&A posted on Crime and terror, which brought to mind the Dem’s former policy of treating “terrorism as a nuisance”, as if it were a criminal matter. One of Siggy’s commenters linked to The Myth of the Invincible Terrorist (emphasis added)

Relativists do not understand the depths of their error when they pronounce that “terrorism is just a word for violence we don’t like,” or “terrorism is a Westerners’ epithet.” Terrorists are living, breathing men and women using vile but calculated means to make political gains, and it is vital that politicians and academics and police chiefs continue pointing that out. Terror is ugly, making terrorists morally ugly; this ugliness is weakness in the struggle for public opinion. More must be made of that, in the service of truth and of counterterrorism. Another lesson flows from the facts above: Groups and their leaders may well be vulnerable to psychological operations. As circumstances allow, counterterrorism can play up rivals around the leaders, or create fissures between working partners, or throw doubt over loyalties of old comrades.

So, as Tony Blankley stated, there are those who see an existential threat from a group of terrorists who have demonized all that is good in our lives and culture and are willing to drag us all to hell. And there are those who just want to ignore that threat and believe it’s such a simple nuisance that, in their grab for power, they are taking ownership of a defeat in Iraq.

They are, indeed fighting on the wrong side of the psychological war. Each of their words, each of their actions, is and will continue to be repeated by our enemies, and will embolden them and motivate them to do more evil.

Note to Harry: “Your words are killing us” now, and will continue to kill us.

And those are no “sad hulks of false predictors of doom”.

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(Note: The writing on the wall refers to Daniel 5 in the Old Testament.)

April 25, 2007 By Fausta

Michael Fumento’s in Afghanistan

And he’s been writing excellent articles,
A Blog on Warblogging

When you make a decision to go to a war zone and leave behind the comforts of home, you do just that. There are true pleasures to being out there with guys defending our country and there are true deprivations. Of course, there are war zones and there are war zones. In Iraq’s International Zone (Green Zone) or in Baghdad hotels or even a major base like Camp Fallujah and Camp Ramadi, you have a real degree of comfort and ease in going about your work. Likewise for Bagram Air Base or Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan. But join the troops at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) and comfort and ease of work plummets. Those are the places I go to and I only have two real concerns when I get there.

First, I want every chance to see combat, and hence be in a dangerous area and go on every patrol. We need reporters who work out of safe areas; I’m just not one of them. That’s why I refused to go to Tikrit in Iraq when the Combined Press Information Center (CPIC) tried to send me there. There was virtually no chance of combat and, as it happens, during the time I would have been there was none. Now CPIC is mad at me for not shelling out my own money for airfare and war insurance to spend 12 days where I knew nothing would happen and where nothing did happen.

Second, since while I do write articles when I get back but blog while here I need a degree of internet access. And a degree is all you to get. Connections are almost always mind-numbingly slow. You can wait literally 10 minutes or more just for a website to come up. Some will never come up because they’re too loaded with graphics.

A Stick in the Mud
Welcome to Mizan!
Go read all his articles.

Michael was my BLog Talk Radio guest last month, and I hope to have him back as a guest after he returns from Afghanistan.

April 25, 2007 By Fausta

Indoctrinate U, and today’s items

Indoctrinate U“
I wasn’t able to attend the screening, but Mitchell Langbert did: A Classic in the Making

On April 23 and 24 the Tribeca film festival in lower Manhattan, which is continuing through May 6, screened Indoctrinate U, Evan Maloney’s documentary about political correctness in American universities. The film depicts universities run amuck. Fascistic, intolerant leftists attack Asian Republicans, white males, libertarian females, conservative white females, conservative Sikh males (not to mention libertarian black writers and Asian libertarian conservative males). The film is funny, lively and ultimately frightening. Maloney’s delivery is witty and sharp. The film is well-edited. One is riveted to the screen. The interviewees, who include my colleagueKC Johnson and FIRE’s Glen Lukianoff, are articulate and brilliant. The film will not surprise the few conservatives in academe who work among the politically correct majority. Nor will it surprise conservative students who have been subjected to the harassment the film depicts and seen their careers ruined by liberal witchhunters, speech code advocates and a wide range of left-wing jackboots. But the public at large, the broader community, those who believe that students go to Yale, Bucknell, Cal Poly Tech, and their equivalents to be educated will be stunned.

Speaking of academia, Cinnamon posts on Brown University Workshop Speaks to Fear and Loathing in Middle East Studies After 9-11

The only problem is workshop participants are almost uniformly composed of academics who are hostile to the U.S.-led war on terrorism, its ally, Israel, and any efforts via higher education to combat radical Islam on college campuses.

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Thanks to Larwyn for today’s links
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Time for Dictators But No Time for American Generals
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Gaius fisks Naomi
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Patrick sent a nice YouTube of Giuliani in New Hampshire this week,

Patrick also sent McCain surges among New Hampshire conservatives
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Jeremayakovka sends this article, ‘Making War to Keep Peace’ is a fine tribute to Jeane Kirkpatrick

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Update: Don’t miss Cassandra’s NYTimesWatch: The Lynching Of Paul Wolfowitz

April 24, 2007 By Fausta

Late afternoon blogging: Kathleen Ferrier

During this afternoon’s class the professor played Blow the Wind Southerly a folk song made popular in the UK by Kathleen Ferrier. I couldn’t find a YouTube for it, but here are the lyrics:

Blow the wind Southerly,
Southerly, Southerly,
Blow the wind
South o’er the bonnie blue sea.
Blow the wind Southerly,
Southerly, Southerly
Blow bonnie breeze,
My true lover to me.

They told me last night
There were ships in the offing
And I hurried down
To the deep rolling sea.
But my eye could not see it
Wherever might be it,
The bark that is bearing
My lover to me.

Here’s Ferrier singing Handel:

April 24, 2007 By Fausta

Two posts on wars we’re still fighting

Beware of those rewriting history:
Armenian Martyrs’ Day

Denialists of all stripes, from US and EU officials who find turkey’s past “annoying”, to the turks themselves who believe such raids were justified to “pick up deserters” (yeah, little old men, deserters. right.) have managed to decrease the general public’s awareness of these atrocities. But they happened. There was no Photoshop in 1915. All of the horrible pictures you see here are real.

Turkey has funded the $750,000 Chair for Ataturk Studies at Princeton University. Two years ago at PU there was a debate on the subject

In FrontPage Mag: Armenia’s Tears

Q. Most readers are not familiar with the historical background, so could you briefly review the Abdul Hamit era, and the triumvirate of the Young Turks or the Ittihad, in other words, the origin of the genocide.

A. The Armenian genocide was the culmination of a decades long process of persecution of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire. That persecution was punctuated in the last two decades of the 19th century during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamit, the so-called Red Sultan.

Q. Red for blood?

A. Yes. In the period of 1894-1896, some quarter of a million Armenians fell victim, directly and indirectly, victim to a series of atrocious massacres, and what is significant about these pogroms was that there was no retribution against the perpetrators. In other words, impunity became the hallmark of the history of the Armenian persecution and it is the dominant feature of the tragedy of the Armenian people. We have yet to appreciate the incredible ramifications of the problem of impunity in international conflicts. In the most recent three volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, I have a separate article analyzing this problem in order to emphasize [its] immense destructive potential.

And what does that have to do with today’s events?

I believe that the greatest danger to Armenia comes from Islamic Turkey. I think the Turkish government that is also essentially Islamic, even though the Turkish government is going through the motions of embracing European values, I call this expedient adaptiveness. That is, to accede to the European Union, and then to use sheer demography, to become a dominant force in the future in Europe. By sheer demography, I mean by rapid population growth, Europe may be inundated by Moslem Turks, who then are bound to change the nature and design of European civilization. It should be noted that the present Turkish government is a reflection of an overwhelming ascendancy of Islam in Turkey, in particular in terms of the Islamic Turkish masses, The proliferation of mosques in Turkey today is a signpost of the ascendancy of Islam; the same proliferation is observable in those European countries with sizable and growing Muslim populations.

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Jeremayakovka looks at “The Battle of Algiers” – A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

April 24, 2007 By Fausta

And now for more propaganda from AP

Associated Press is back to shilling for the charismatic-leader-helping-the-poor-offering-free-health-care-education-adult-literacy-and-job-training-initiatives-that-help-millions-of-Cubans^tm through a lie, not that they ever stopped:

Castro, 80, is a leading example of Cuba’s healthy life expectancy

Fidel Castro may be ailing, but he’s a living example of something Cubans take pride in — an average life expectancy roughly similar to that of the United States.

Living?

Depends how badly:

Homes that were luxurious before Castro’s 1959 revolution are now falling apart and many cramped apartments contain three generations of family members. Food, water and medicine shortages are chronic.

But most prescription drugs and visits to the doctor are free and physicians encourage preventive care.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that. I also know that people who travel to Cuba to see their relatives (who are not allowed to leave Cuba) have to get them the most basic supplies, such as sanitary napkins, aspirin, Tylenol, band-aids, and first-aid ointments like Betadine and iodine. Ask my sister’s next-door neighbor, who works at a pharmacy that provides ready-made “care packages” of first-aid items to take to Cuba.

Of course Will Weisert, the AP reporter, hasn’t been told that Cubans treated in Cuban hospitals have to bring their own bed linens because the hospitals don’t have any. The linens are available in Cuban hospitals only to foreigners paying in dollars.

The article continues,

Cuba’s average life expectancy is 77.08 years — second in Latin America after Puerto Rico and more than 11 years above the world average, according to the 2007 CIA World Fact Book.

It says Cuban life expectancy averages 74.85 years for men and 79.43 years for women, compared with 75.15 and 80.97 respectively for Americans.

Here’s the CIA Factbook info on Cuban life expectancy:

Life expectancy at birth:
total population: 77.08 years
male: 74.85 years
female: 79.43 years (2007 est.)

For Puerto Rico

Life expectancy at birth:
total population: 78.54 years
male: 74.6 years
female: 82.67 years (2007 est.)

And the USA (by which they mean the 50 states, since Puerto Ricans are Americans from birth)

Life expectancy at birth:
total population: 78 years
male: 75.15 years
female: 80.97 years (2007 est.)

But back to the AP article,

A relaxed lifestyle, which prizes time spent with family over careers, helps keep Cubans healthy, Tache said.

Just ask these Ladies about their relaxed lifestyle:

Just another day of Associated Press Deficit Disorder (APDD)

Update Via Irwin, The Big White Lie
Don’t Worry, Be A Commie
Update 2: A Shredding, at Opinion Journal

If an old American lady told a reporter, “Sometimes you have all you want to eat and sometimes you don’t,” is there any doubt he would write a story bewailing our country’s shocking neglect of the elderly, poor and hungry? Why are American journalists more favorably disposed toward an America-hating communist personality cult than their own country?