Good news

I recently posted about Bill O'Reilly report on Special Forces soldiers charged with murder for killing one of the top 10 Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanstan.  Yesterday Old War Dogs linked to an update and Col. David Hunt's article:

Our generals are betraying our soldiers … again

Sorry, but I have to get your attention on this one. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States Army — not the much maligned “LIBERAL PRESS” or BILL CLINTON or the LIBERALS IN CONGRESS — NO, the UNITED STATES MILITARY is prosecuting its soldiers for doing their jobs. I have tried, I have yelled, I have used nasty words. I have even tried to use humor, but none of this is sticking. You either do not believe me … or much worse, you do not care.

We did one of these stories on O’Reilly last week. Two great Special Forces soldiers, along with their team, tracked down a terrorist who was on the 10 Most Wanted list in Afghanistan. The Special Forces soldiers were operating under the much-hated rules of engagement, which said to capture or kill the bad guy, who was a bomb maker and terrorist leader. The soldiers followed this killer to his house/compound, used guile and trickery and lured the waste of life out of his lair and put a bullet in his head.

It was a perfect operation — a “Nice going guys,” high fives, take the day off, “Get ready for the next one,” type of operation. So how do you think our Special Forces soldiers were rewarded — or if not rewarded, treated — after this? THEY ARE BROUGHT TO TRIAL, INVESTIGATED AND FORCED TO SPEND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR LAWYERS.

When the terrorist was first killed, the Army showed its trust in these bravest of the brave by investigating them twice. Both investigations, however unnecessary, found them innocent of any wrongdoing. So we now are so gun shy, so afraid and so massively politically correct, that we are treating combat like a police shooting. In most cities in this great country, if a police officer even shoots his weapon, he or she must face a board of inquiry. It makes the police officers crazy and causes all to look over their shoulders and to not trust their leaders -- but that is in a peaceful city, not a damn war zone.

Thank G-d, today there was a wonderful news (from Black Five, via LGF):

Woo Hoo! While Kev and I were gearing up to talk football, the phone rang. It was the best of news, all charges dropped against MSG Anderson and CPT Staffel for the shooting of a known terrorist in Afghanistan (emphasis mine - Eric-Odessit). This was swift justice and sent a clear message about the actions they took. Our troops must know they have the support of their command when they make life and death decisions based on the rules of that same command. Enjoy your weekend BBQs gentlemen you earned them. We will follow up on just how charges of murder came up in the shooting of a terrorist.

Still read Col. David Hunt's article.  He makes very good points, in particular that you can't treat combat like police shootings in American cities.  And, as a matter of fact, I would like to see some heads roll as a result of this whole story: heads of those who brought the murder charges in the first place.

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It could happen to us

Some time ago Glenn Beck reported on possible Al Qaeda plans to attack multiple American schools, in effect repeating the horror of Beslan on American soil.  Now Bookworm posted a good historical analysis of Islamo-Fascist attacks on schools and posts this link:

Al Qaeda Targets Our Schoolchildren

By Marc Sheppard

While Democrats prepare witless campaign slogans blaming Republicans for millions of children not protected by health insurance, al Qaeda's blatant threat to exterminate 2 million American kids remains unheeded.  And it will likely continue to be, notwithstanding mounting evidence that there exists no peril on Earth our young need greater protection from today than merciless jihadist monsters.

Not lack of a national insurance plan. Not global warming.  Not racial or cultural disparities. Not even the Patriot Act, any of its overplayed incursions into individual liberties, or any of the other countless silly and diaphanous liberal causes célèbres, but rather that which would abruptly and savagely end their innocent short lives.

Nearly 6 months have passed since I first challenged the inexcusable refusal by DHS and FBI authorities to publicly connect the obviously connectable dots representing an unnerving number of alarming events -- particularly in the wake of the Beslan school massacre. These include:

• Videotapes confiscated in Afghanistan showing al-Qaeda terrorists training to takeover a school [newly available Video]


• Spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith‘s declaration of al-Qaeda's "right" to kill 2 million American children


• An Iraqi national with known terrorist connections caught with a computer disk containing information detailing Department of Education crisis planning for U.S school districts. 


• Two Saudi men - one wearing a black trench coat despite the Florida heat -- terrifying a busload of Tampa schoolchildren by boarding a school bus and remaining for the entire ride to school, all the while laughing and speaking Arabic.


• A March FBI/DHS bulletin noting "recent suspicious activity" by foreigners who drive school buses, are licensed to drive them, or have actually managed to purchase them right here at home. Including "members of the unnamed extremist groups" who have obtained commercial drivers licenses with school bus endorsements.


• Osama bin Laden's promise that the 2004 terrorist attack at Beslan will happen many times over in the United States.

In that time, little or nothing has been done to relieve parents' understandable anxieties, despite the fresh dots which continued to accrue on this disturbing non-puzzle.

Dots like the seventeen full-sized yellow school buses reported stolen from charter schools, business schools and private bus companies in Houston, Texas, over the past few months. Connect to that and previous disturbing stories the fact that thousands of school bus radios have also been stolen (2000 in California in 2005 alone), and the images shaped should be triggering earsplitting alarms throughout all branches of media and law enforcement.

Read it all.

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“The World According to UNGA.”

Here is a good article by Oliver North:

Washington, D.C. — In 1982, Robin Williams and Glenn Close starred in a quirky R-rated movie entitled “The World According to Garp.” The offbeat “comedy” — honest, that’s what Tinsletown critics called it — was loosely based on John Irving’s dark novel with the same title. Those who missed the humor in the book and film now have a chance for some real belly laughs. Next week the Big Apple will host another “gut buster” — “The World According to UNGA.” If it were a flick, it would be a dark and depressing documentary combining the conspiratorial rantings of Oliver Stone, the eerie horror of Alfred Hitchcock and the antics of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

But it’s not a movie or an “off Broadway” show. And it isn’t a television program which will simply go away with the press of a button on your remote. Instead, it’s an annual extravaganza which “We the People” have subsidized with billions of our tax dollars for six decades. It could be called — with apologies to Barnum & Bailey — the “Most Ridiculous Show on Earth.” But next week it will be called “UNGA” — short for the United Nations General Assembly.

Read the whole thing.

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That Israeli raid on Syria...

... becomes more and more interesting.  I found this story via a Youtube commenter PureLuk:

From The Sunday Times

September 23, 2007

Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid

Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

Israeli special forces had been gathering intelligence for several months in Syria, according to Israeli sources. They located the nuclear material at a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in the north.

Evidence that North Korean personnel were at the site is said to have been shared with President George W Bush over the summer. A senior American source said the administration sought proof of nuclear-related activities before giving the attack its blessing.

Diplomats in North Korea and China believe a number of North Koreans were killed in the strike, based on reports reaching Asian governments about conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials.

Syrian officials flew to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, last week, reinforcing the view that the two nations were coordinating their response.

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Academic insanity

A lot of people are now talking about Columbia University speaking invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  As it turns out, this kind of academic insanity is not a new phenomenon.  This is via Little Green Footballs:

Columbia University has invited a representative of the world’s most antisemitic regime to speak on its campus. This week’s news? Try 1933.

Seventy years before this week’s invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Columbia rolled out the red carpet for a senior official of Adolf Hitler’s regime. The invitation to Iran’s leader may seem less surprising, but no less disturbing, when one recalls that in 1933, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler invited Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, to speak on campus, and also hosted a reception for him. Luther represented "the government of a friendly people," Butler insisted. He was "entitled to be received ... with the greatest courtesy and respect." Ambassador Luther's speech focused on what he characterized as Hitler's peaceful intentions. Students who criticized the Luther invitation were derided as “ill-mannered children” by the director of Columbia’s Institute of Arts and Sciences.

Columbia also insisted on maintaining friendly relations with Nazi-controlled German universities. While Williams College terminated its program of student exchanges with Nazi Germany, Columbia and other universities declined to do likewise. Columbia refused to pull out even after a German official candidly asserted that his country’s students were being sent abroad to serve as “political soldiers of the Reich.”

Read it all.  While you are at it, bookmark the History News Network site.  It will provide valuable historical perspective to the world events today.

Update via LGF:

The leftists at Columbia are against protesting Ahmadinejad.

Update via LGF and Hot Air:

Columbia Dean says: "We'd certainly invite Hitler".

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"Winston Churchill in a baseball cap"

Apparently this is how Winston Churchill's granddaughter described Rudy Giuliani.  This is via Atlas:

LONDON - Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to include Israel (emphasis mine - Eric-Odessit) and warning that if Iran's leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power "we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years."

The former New York City mayor also rejected the possibility that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be allowed to visit Ground Zero accompanied by the New York Police Department, calling the idea "outrageous."

Giuliani's implied threat of a U.S. or allied attack on Iran's nuclear capabilities goes further than the hard line against Iran by most other Republican presidential hopefuls, and even exceeds the stern warnings of the Bush White House.

Invited here by British conservatives, Giuliani took advantage of every opportunity to burnish his image as an international leader, meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing St., his predecessor Tony Blair and iconic conservative Margaret Thatcher.

At a time when his presidential campaign poll numbers have dipped as U.S. conservatives search for a standard bearer, Giuliani reveled in his description by Winston Churchill's granddaughter Celia Sandys as "Winston Churchill in a baseball cap" (emphasis mine - Eric-Odessit) and accepted an award named for Thatcher from the U.S.-U.K. think tank Atlantic Bridge.

Last night, to a roomful of Tories that included the Iron Lady herself, Giuliani delivered a major foreign policy address that compared the war on terror to the Cold War.

America and Britain, with their special relationship, should lead the fight against radical Islamists threatening terror by creating stronger intelligence cooperation among Western nations, a massive U.S. military build-up, an expanded NATO and a redoubled effort in the "war of ideas," Giuliani said.

I consider Winston Churchill to be one of the greatest statesmen of all times, so I like this comparison very much.  I hope it is accurate and I hope that our next President will be someone like Winston Churchill.

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O'Reilly report (link updated)

Here is the link to Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo tonight:

http://www.foxnews.com/oreilly/index.html

Update:

This Talking Points Memo is now posted on the Fox News web site here:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297456,00.html

...Now I have to tell you about a very disturbing situation. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, two Green Berets, Captain Dave Staffel and Master Sergeant Troy Anderson have been accused of murder. On October 13, 2006, the soldiers were in Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan. Sergeant Anderson is a sniper. And his gun was trained on a terrorist named Nawab Buntangyar, a bomb maker who was on a terrorist top 10 most wanted list.

At Captain Staffel's order, Sergeant Anderson shot and killed Buntangyar. An investigation by the Army's criminal investigation command concluded the shooting was justifiable because the terrorist was a killer.

However, Lieutenant General Francis Kearney ordered murder charges against the two Green Berets, saying the man, the terrorist should have been captured, not killed.

I also found this article on the subject:

FORT BRAGG, N.C., Sept. 17 — From his position about 100 yards away, Master Sgt. Troy Anderson had a clear shot at the Afghan man standing outside a residential compound in a village near the Pakistan border last October. When Capt. Dave Staffel, the Special Forces officer in charge, gave the order to shoot, Sergeant Anderson fired a bullet into the man’s head, killing him.

In June, Captain Staffel and Sergeant Anderson were charged with premeditated murder. On Tuesday, in a rare public examination of the rules that govern the actions of Special Operations troops in Afghanistan, a military hearing will convene at Fort Bragg to weigh the evidence against the two men, both Green Berets.

The case revolves around differing interpretations of the kind of force that the Special Forces team that hunted and killed the man, Nawab Buntangyar, were allowed to use once they found him, apparently unarmed.

To the Special Forces soldiers and their 12-man detachment, the shooting, near the village of Ster Kalay, was a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement. They said those rules allowed the killing of Mr. Buntangyar, whom the American Special Operations Command here has called an “enemy combatant.”

Mr. Buntangyar had organized suicide and roadside bomb attacks, Captain Staffel’s lawyer said. (emphasis mine - Eric-Odessit)

But to the two-star general in charge of the Special Operations forces in Afghanistan at the time, Frank H. Kearney, who has since become a three-star general, the episode appeared to be an unauthorized, illegal killing. In June, after two military investigations, General Kearney moved to have murder charges brought against Captain Staffel and Sergeant Anderson — respectively, the junior commissioned and senior noncommissioned officers of Operational Detachment Alpha 374, Third Battalion, Third Special Forces Group.

…………………………………………………………………………….

On Oct. 13, 2006, when Captain Staffel learned that Mr. Buntangyar could be found in a home near the village where his detachment was guarding a medical convoy, he ordered a seven-man team to investigate the tip.

Driving toward Ster Kalay in two government vans, the Americans called the Afghan national police and border patrol officers to assist them, Mr. Waple said. Mr. Buntangyar had already been “vetted as a target” by American commanders, as an enemy combatant who could be legally killed once he was positively identified, Mr. Waple said.

After the Afghan police called Mr. Buntangyar outside and twice asked him to identify himself, they signaled, using a prearranged hand gesture, to Sergeant Anderson, concealed with a rifle about 100 yards away, Mr. Waple said.

From a vehicle a few hundred yards farther away, Captain Staffel radioed Sergeant Anderson, Mr. Waple said. “If you have a clear shot,” he told the sergeant, “take it.”

Confirming the order, Sergeant Anderson fired once, killing Mr. Buntangyar. The American team drove to the village center to explain to the local residents, “This is who we are, this is what we just did and this is why we did it,” Mr. Waple said.

So, a sniper kills an enemy and gets prosecuted for that? What the hell is happening?  Are we really bent on losing the war?

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Scapegoats Yet Again

This is a title of an article by Victor Davis Hanson:

Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel." Some holdover Nazi?

Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as "bacteria" — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in September 11 [2001] cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs." A conspiracy nut? Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: "I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel.... It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery."

And finally, who claimed at a U.N.-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was "much worse" than the former apartheid South Africa and that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming"? A radical environmentalist wacko? Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British Parliament and Tony Blair's international development secretary.

Read it all.  Jews are like a canary in a mine.  I have to repeat: it is like 1939 all over again.

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On the trail of WMD

Here is an interesting story, thanks to Atlas:

Proof of cooperation between Iran and Syria in the proliferation and development of weapons of mass destruction was brought to light Monday in a Jane's Defence Weekly report that dozens of Iranian engineers and 15 Syrian officers were killed in a July 23 accident in Syria.

According to the report, cited by Channel 10, the joint Syrian-Iranian team was attempting to mount a chemical warhead on a Scud missile when the explosion occurred, spreading lethal chemical agents, including sarin nerve gas.

Reports of the accident were circulated at the time; however, no details were released by the Syrian government, and there were no hints of an Iranian connection.

The report comes on the heels of criticism leveled by the Syrians at the United States, accusing it of spreading "false" claims of Syrian nuclear activity and cooperation with North Korea to excuse an alleged Israeli air incursion over the country this month.

According to globalsecurity.org, Syria is not a signatory of either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), - an international agreement banning the production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons - or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

Syria began developing chemical weapons in 1973, just before the Yom Kipper War. Globalsecurity.org cites the country as having one of the most advanced chemical weapons programs in the Middle East.

I wonder whether some of those chemical weapons came from Iraq.  Incidentally, there was an earlier report from London Times about Israeli jets attacking shipment of nuclear materials from North Korea to Syria (via LGF):

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

This is very plausible.  Here is Jerusalem Post article on former Ambassador to UN John Bolton's view on the subject (via Atlas):

Amid reports in the American media that the alleged Israeli raid into Syria 10 days ago targeted a North Korean-Syrian nuclear facility, John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend that "simple logic" suggested North Korea and Iran could have outsourced nuclear development "to a country that is not under suspicion" - namely Syria. Tellingly, he added: "Why would North Korea protest an Israeli strike on Syria?"

Bolton suggested that Syria, which he said has long sought a range of weapons of mass destruction, might have agreed to provide "facilities for uranium enrichment" on its territory for two allied countries which are being closely watched for nuclear development.

…………………………………………………………………………….

Bolton said he was also struck by the "hesitant way" in which Damascus had complained to the United Nations Security Council. "They have not pushed as hard as I know they know how to do in New York for condemnation. They have still not explained the nature of the attack. If it had been an attack on a Syrian military facility or civilians, they would have no problem explaining."

I am a World War 2 history buff.  So, I can't get over a feeling that it is 1939 all over again.

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LGF's flying pig stayed in the hangar

Little Green Footballs reported about this story:

TEHRAN, Iran - It is Iran's version of "Schindler's List," a miniseries that tells the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape the Holocaust — and viewers across the country are riveted.

That's surprising enough in a country where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust even took place. What's more surprising is that government media produced the series, and is airing it on state-run television.

The Holocaust is rarely mentioned in state media in Iran, school textbooks don't discuss it and Iranians have little information about it.

Yet the series titled "Zero Degree Turn" is clearly sympathetic to the Jews' plight during World War II. It shows men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes being taken forcibly out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers.

"Where are they taking them?" the horrified hero, a young Iranian diplomat who works at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, asks someone in a crowd of onlookers.

"The Fascists are taking the Jews to the concentration camps," the man says. The hero, named Habib Parsa, then begins giving Iranian passports to Jews to allow them to flee occupied France to then-Palestine.

Based on a true story
Though the Habib character is fictional, it is based on a true story of diplomats in the Iranian Embassy in Paris in the 1940s who gave out about 500 Iranian passports for Jews to use to escape.

The show's appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran's leadership to moderate its image as anti-Semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make — that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish people.

About 25,000 Jews live in Iran, the largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel. They have one representative in parliament, which is run mostly by Islamic clerics.

The series could not have aired without being condoned by Iran's clerical leadership. The state broadcaster is under the control of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, who has final say in all matters inside Iran.

As LGF said, the pig almost came out to fly, but not quite (from Hot Air):

Update: Reader Niko K. writes below that a Spiegel story on the miniseries sharply contradicts the AP’s account. So sharply, in fact, that I’m wondering now if the AP story is a deliberate whitewash. Writes Niko:

The article has it all wrong, and also the Wall Street Journal article that appeared earlier.

Mohammed Reza Kazemi cleared up the matter in a recent SPIEGEL article (link in German only, sorry). Main points:

* the major point of the series is that it was allegedly the German Jews themselves who collaborated with Hitler to kill those Jews who opposed the re-settlement of Palestine
* for example, a plot line shows that a Jewish researcher is in possession of documents that prove the connection between Hitler and Zionists
* the credits of each episode feature the work of anti-Semite Roger Garaudy as a “historical source”
* “historical adviser” to the series is Holocaust denier Abdollah Shahbazi who openly admits in his blog that he’s a denier
* director and screenwriter Hassan Fatthi alleged to SPIEGEL that according to “historical evidence” a majority of Hitler’s victims were those who opposed the re-settlement of Palestine

Niko on September 16, 2007 at 10:11 PM

So, basically it looks like Iran is trying to tell the story the way I've heard it back in the Soviet Union: the Zionists conspired with the Nazis.  Indeed, the Soviets always proclaimed anti-Semitism to be wrong (even though they practiced it routinely).  They always said that they were anti-Zionist, not anti-Semites.  They even had so called Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, chaired by a token Jew, General David Dragunsky.  Incidentally, here is an article on the ideology of this kind of leftist anti-Semitism from Front Page Magazine:

...In that regard, two distinctly Soviet libels stand out, both of which still claim adherents on the contemporary left. The first concerns the Holocaust. Soviet revisionists engaged, not in the denial of the extermination itself, but in the transfer of responsibility for the extermination. The Zionist movement was accused of collaborating with the Nazis in the implementation of the Final Solution to such a degree that the Holocaust became “the autogenocide of the Twentieth Century.”[6] This ugly distortion was echoed in parts of the Western left, most famously in the form of a play entitled Perdition, which almost came to the London stage in the 1980s and remains in active circulation among anti-Zionists today. Based on the 1954 libel trial in Israel involving Rudolf Kastner, who had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis in order to rescue Jews in occupied Hungary, Perdition was, in the words of its late author, Jim Allen, a tale of “privileged Jewish leaders” collaborating “in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which itself is racist.”

The second libel concerns the insidious essence of Judaism and, flowing from that, the global reach of Jewish and Zionist influence. The writings on Zionism churned out by the Soviet state apparatus, camouflaged as social science, portrayed the movement as an organic outgrowth of Judaism’s racist doctrines, notably the concept of the “Chosen People.” Although the Soviets developed and popularized this inversion of Jewish theology, one does not have to delve into Soviet archives to find examples of it. During the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in July 2006, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published an article by Jostein Gaarder,[7] a popular Norwegian author, alleging that Israel’s military actions in Lebanon were a demonstration of the conceit and hubris that comes with the status of “Chosen People.” From the Soviet Union’s standpoint, this notion of chosenness elevated Zionism into a transnational foe, along with “racism,” “imperialism,” and “militarism.” Standing in its way, however, were the peoples of Africa, the Arab states, Asia, and Latin America.

Read the whole thing.

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Now and then

I am a World War 2 history buff.  So I often compare the current war to World War 2.  Commenter xgaijin at LGF points to this comparison at Red State: What is MoveOn.org existed 65 years ago?

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Anti-Semitic lobby

Republican Jewish Coalition linked to this important article about anti-Semitic anti-Israeli lobby:

A crop of Israel's critics--most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"--have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by pre-emptively predicting that "the Jewish lobby" will accuse them of it.

Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, in particular, have been heralded by Israel's critics for their "courage" in attacking American Jews, who have allegedly "strangled" criticism of Israel. Their case seems one part laughable, and one part eyebrow-raising.

An anecdote from my own experience with the anti-Israel lobby may shed some light on the absurdity of the Walt-Mearsheimer offensive. Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, I received a call from a major defense contractor asking for a favor. I was serving as president of the Boston chapter of the World Affairs Council, a national organization that debates foreign policy, and the defense contractor was one of the Council's principal sponsors.

The Saudi Arabian government was sponsoring a national public relations campaign to cultivate American public opinion, and was sending Saudi emissaries around the country to make the case that Saudi Arabia was a tolerant, moderate nation worthy of American support. Would the Council organize a forum of Boston's community leaders so that the Saudis could make their case?

While this was patently no more than a Saudi lobbying effort, we organized the forum, and it was well-attended by precisely the slice of Boston's political and corporate elite that the Saudis and their defense contractor benefactor had hoped for. The Saudis maintained that their kingdom should be regarded as a promoter of Middle East peace, and that the abundant evidence that Saudi Arabia was in fact promoting a virulent brand of extremist Islam should be discounted.

Saudi Arabia paid for the trip of its emissaries to Boston, for the Washington-based public relations and lobbying company that organized the trip, and for the Boston public relations and lobbying company that handled the Boston part of the visit. And it drew upon the resources and relationships of the defense contractor, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, to support and orchestrate its public relations effort.

Read the whole thing.

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Lieberman's article

Senator Joseph Liberman wrote an article on 9/11/2007.  It is pretty short, so I'll just copy it here:

Washington’s Civilizational Choice
The freedom to survive.

By Joseph Lieberman

Today we remember those who lost their lives on that horrible day six years ago. We also honor the sacrifices of Americans in uniform who have bravely fought in the war that began on September 11, 2001.

The fact is that all freedom-loving people throughout the world are engaged in a struggle against the barbarism of Islamist extremism. This is not a battle between civilizations, but rather a battle for civilization.

The cause which we are fighting for is not a Republican cause or a Democratic cause. Our cause is the cause of defending liberty and freedom against a totalitarian movement that is the evil heir to the twin totalitarian threats of the 20th century. Islamist extremism, like fascism and communism, seeks to eliminate all of the ideals that free peoples cherish.

Just as during the World War II and the Cold War, our challenge today, is not to relent in this fight for liberty. And the central front in this war today is Iraq. You cannot be serious and strong in defeating those who attacked us on 9/11 if you counsel retreat in Iraq.

To pull the plug on progress in Iraq would hand our two most dangerous enemies in the world — al Qaeda and Iran — an extraordinary military and strategic victory. These are fateful days and critical decisions we are making about Iraq. We must make them with our eye on the safety of America's next generation. It is to the credit of President Bush that he has done that in the war against Islamist extremism. He has shown the courage and steadfastness to stand against the political passions of the moment.

As Ronald Reagan once said, now is the time for choosing. If we stand united through the months ahead, if we stand firm against the terrorists who want to drive us to retreat, the war in Iraq can be won and the lives of millions of people can be saved. But if we surrender to the barbarism of suicide bombers and abandon the heart of the Middle East to fanatics and killers, to al Qaeda and Iran, then all that our men and women in uniform have fought, and died for, will be lost, and we will be left a much less secure and free nation.

That is the choice we in Washington will make this fall. It is a choice not just about our foreign policy and our national security and our interests in the Middle East. It is about what our political leaders in both parties are prepared to stand for. It is about our soul as a nation. It is about who we are, and who we want to be.

Will this be the moment in history when America gives up — when al Qaeda breaks our will, when our enemies surge forward, when we turn our backs on our friends and begin a long retreat from our principles and promise as a nation? Or will this be the moment when America steps forward, when we pull together, when we hold fast to the courage of our convictions, when we begin to turn the tide toward victory in this long and difficult war?

History tells us that appeasement of evil leads to disaster. Our cause is freedom’s cause. Together, we must prevail.

 — Joseph Lieberman is a United States senator (I.) from Connecticut.

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Alternative history

Alternative history is pretty much the only kind of science fiction that I like.  It is a bit unusual for an engineer, but that's the way it is.  I like history, and I like analyzing "what if?" scenarios.  One of authors specializing in alternative history is former Speaker Newt Gingrich.  On September 10, 2007, he gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on an alternative scenario of what might have happened had we took overall Islamist threat more seriously and confronted it more aggressively after September 11, 2001.  Read it here.  Or listen to it by clicking this image:

There is nothing to excerpt.  Just read it or listen to it.  It is very important in order to understand the fight we are in.

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Remember...

September 11, 2001 - another date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the Islamo-Fascist forces of Al-Qaeda.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Al-Qaeda on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, a state of war has existed between the United States and the followers of Islamo-Fascist ideology along with their supporters.

Look at this memorial.  Take a look here.  And then try to do something.

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Jew-Hatred and Jihad

That is the title of an article in The Weekly Standard, sent to me by a friend.  To be fair, the historical links between the Nazis and the Islamists are well documented.  But this article was written by a German.

Jew-Hatred and Jihad
The Nazi roots of the 9/11 attack.
by Matthias Küntzel
09/17/2007, Volume 013, Issue 01



The idea of using suicide pilots to obliterate the skyscrapers of Manhattan originated in 1940s Berlin. "In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame," wrote Albert Speer in his diary. "He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky."

Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan of action foreshadowed September 11: He envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft packed with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan skyscrapers. The drawings for the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber from the spring of 1944 show giant four-engine planes with raised undercarriages for transporting small bombers. The bombers would be released shortly before the planes reached the East Coast, after which the mother plane would return to Europe.

Hitler's rapture at the thought of Manhattan in flames indicates his underlying motive: not merely to fight a military adversary, but to kill all Jews everywhere. Possessed of the notion that the whole of the Second World War was a struggle against an imaginary Jewish enemy, he deemed "the USA a Jewish state" and New York the center of world Jewry. "Wall Street," as a popular book published in Munich in 1919 put it, "is, so to speak, the Military Headquarters of Judas. From there his threads radiate out across the entire world." From 1941 on, Hitler pushed to get the bombers into production, in order to "be able to teach the Jews a lesson in the form of terror attacks on American metropolises." Towards the end of the war this idea became an obsession.

Sixty years later, it so happens, the assault on the World Trade Center was coordinated from Germany. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who piloted the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center; Marwan al--Shehhi, from the United Arab Emirates, who steered the plane into the South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, from Lebanon, who crashed United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and their friends Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, and the Moroccan student Mounir al-Motassedeq had formed an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, where they held regular "Koran circle" meetings with sympathizers.

What ideas propelled Atta and the others to act? Witnesses provided part of the answer at the world's first 9/11-related trial, the prosecution of al-Motassedeq, which took place in Hamburg between October 2002 and February 2003. One participant in the Koran circle meetings, Shahid Nickels, said Atta's Weltanschauung was based on a "National Socialist way of thinking." Atta was convinced that the Jews were striving for world domination and considered New York City the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy No. 1. Fellow students who lived in Motassedeq's dormitory testified that he shared these views and waxed enthusiastic about a forthcoming "big action." One student quoted Motassedeq as saying, "The Jews will burn and in the end we will dance on their graves."

Amazingly, neither the American media nor the international press took much notice of this testimony, largely refusing to report on Atta's and Motassedeq's explicit Jew-hatred. The above quotations come from the weekly Der Spiegel and from the detailed notes of the trial taken by journalist Michael Eggers, who attended every session and wrote about it for Reuters. If this had been the trial of a Ku Klux Klan member or someone from the far right such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, reports of Nazi-like dreams of exterminating the Jews would probably have made the headlines. But in this case, involving attackers of Arab background, journalists apparently found the issue irrelevant. Moreover, this Jew-hatred was no quirk of the Hamburg cell. Osama bin Laden himself declared in 1998, "The enmity between us and the Jews goes back far in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between us is inevitable. . . . The Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews."

Even the 9/11 Commission Report, the summation produced by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in July 2004, falls short in this regard. Its chapter on "Bin Laden's worldview" makes no mention of his hatred of Jews. This silence is all the more surprising in that the commission quotes documents in which bin Laden unambiguously expresses his hatred of Jews. For example, in the "Letter to the American People" of November 2002, which the report repeatedly cites, bin Laden warns: "The Jews have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense." Osama goes on: "Your law is the law of rich and wealthy people. . . . Behind them stand the Jews who control your policies, media and economy." Yet the report's authors inexplicably fail to see the significance of these words and the ideology behind them. The report also ignores the history of Islamism. It accords the entire pre-1945 period just five lines. Yet it is precisely this period that fostered the personal contacts and ideological affinities between early Islamism and late Nazism--the linkage between Jew-hatred and jihad.

Read it all.  While the author clearly shows the Nazi roots of Al Qaeda, he never explains why the Western media ignores those roots.  He does hint to it though.  In my personal view, which seems to coincide with the Mr. Kunzel's view, the reason for Western media ignoring the Nazi connection is that acknowledging this connection would mean that no appeasement is possible and that we are in the fight for our very lives.  Acknowledging the Nazi-Islamist connection would also be politically incorrect.  Our "blame America first" media cannot do anything that is politically incorrect.

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World War IV?

This is a title of an article by William F. Buckley.  The article is pretty short, so, rather than excerpting a portion from it, I will just go ahead and copy the whole thing here.  You can comment here, or, if you want to comment on the original site, here is the link.

World War IV?
By William F. Buckley
Thursday, September 6, 2007

Some set the matter aside as being nothing more than verbal play for the benefit of word-men. What term properly designates what we are doing, and what we are enduring, in many parts of the world, the symbolic center of which is the Twin Towers site in Manhattan? Sometimes the words chosen can mean the justification of an additional measure of military power. Always they calibrate the public mood and the public perception of what is going on.

I am informed that French pacifists, ensconced in the French Academy in 1939 and determined to understate Nazi military exercises (even those being done as close by as Czechoslovakia), refused to acknowledge such a creature as a "bombardier." Right, "bombardier" would have meant "bomber pilot." The pacifists were prepared to use the word bombardier, but only as the flying instrument -- an airplane from which one drops bombs. Since no such creature as a pilot who drops bombs from such an airplane was acknowledged to exist, the schoolmen of the academy at first refused to authorize that use of the word.

Norman Podhoretz, a gifted writer and analyst, does not cavil in these matters, and his new book is called "World War IV." By Podhoretz's calculations, World War II ended with the surrender of Berlin and Tokyo. This was followed by another and very serious war, which we termed the Cold War. That pretty well ended when the Soviet Union allowed the gates in Berlin to open and, two years later, abandoned the Soviet flag. But the end of World War III did not augur an end to global warfare. The new enemy is referred to in certain quarters as Islamofascism. And Podhoretz is the chief taxonomist of that awful combine.

He quotes in his book Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. Pipes is off to a rollicking and reassuring start in what becomes the deadliest paragraph in town. Begin with our military superiority, which would appear to make victory inevitable. "Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?"

A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:

-- A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

-- A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

-- An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.

-- An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians."

Add to the above "a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived."

Recognition, then, of the scale of the pretensions of the Islamist enemy has to precede substantial measures against it. In the matter of Iraq, for instance, the ambiguity of our engagement and the enlarging political cry against it would alter dramatically if one accepted the premises of the Fourth World War so ineluctably spelled out in Podhoretz's little volume, which takes time here and there to demolish such arguments as were mounted in protest against President Bush's mention in his 2003 State of the Union address of yellowcake hunting in Niger.

Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review, the prolific author of Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography.

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Protest Warrior action in Poway

Every Sunday a bunch of leftists gather at the corner of Pomerado Road and Twin Peaks Road and demonstrate "against the war".  Apparently they are encouraged to do that by some Air America-affiliated radio show.  A week ago on Sunday I and a couple of my fellow Protest Warriors staged a counter-protest.  Later I was able to get an e-mail forwarded to a lady who is one of the organizers of the leftist demonstration, just to see her reaction and check whether she might be willing to debate based on facts.  Below is that e-mail:

So, this nice lady actually suggested to you that people in Iraq were better off under Saddam? Because he maintained order and government services functioned? Wow! It always amazes me that people on the Left resort to "Under Mussolini trains ran on time" argument. I wonder if she calls herself "liberal". How can one be liberal and resort to this kind of argument? So, she read that some Iraqis said that life was better under Saddam. Well, I am sure there were a lot of Germans in 1945 that thought that life was better under Hitler. In the late 1980s, when Soviet Union was disintegrating, there were people who were nostalgic for Stalin. "Stalin maintained order", they would say. Does she think that they were right?
Now Iraq is a mess for a number of reasons, screw-ups of our administration being one of them. So, these people think that we should just pick up and leave that place to Al-Qaeda and Iran. Do they think there will be peace once we leave, or they simply don't care? They keep saying that Al-Qaeda was not there before we went there. Although there are evidence to the contrary, including some findings by 9/11 Commission, for the sake of argument I will stipulate to that. But Al-Qaeda is there now. And it's not propaganda: I personally talked to people who served in Iraq. Do so-called "anti-war" people think that abandoning the place to Al-Qaeda is a good idea? Now, when finally something is going right?
Last Sunday there was one lady there. She was very condescending to me. She wore a T-shirt with an Israeli and a Palestinian flags and a word "Dialog" under the flags. I think she was Jewish. She also mentioned some of her family members who were killed in wars and was blaming America for it. I wonder if World War 2 was one of those wars. So, I guess, while her family was safely in the US, she would suggest that my family should have a "dialog". I guess, she would suggest it to my grandma's father who was hunted down and shot in occupied Odessa. Or to my wife's great-grandparents who were murdered in Salaspils. Or to my first grade teacher who was lucky to survive the ghetto in Odessa. That lady probably simply does not want to know about all that. Would she join Charles Lindberg's "America First" party? I'd love to ask her all these questions, but she did not really want to engage in conversation. As a Jew, I have to say that there is only one thing worst than Nazis: the suicidal Jews who enable them.
One of the signs I was holding had this George Orwell quote on it: "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." The anti-victory people said that it was facetious. Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But I happen to agree with it. There is only one way to make facetious: if you believe that in reality there are no bad guys who want to kill you. But as soon as you realize that there are people who wish us harm, then this quote becomes very accurate. Orwell's "1984" was based on the Stalin's Soviet Union. Don't take my word for it, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Orwell.27s_inspiration
It is no wonder that "1984" was not available in the old Soviet Union. Neither was "Animal Farm". But I have been living in this country long enough, so perhaps I should have read "1984" by now. Why haven't I? Well, first of all, I already know what life is like in a totalitarian society. Thus, there is very little for me to learn from this book. So, I've been concentrating on history books like Dan Kurzman's "The Bravest Battle" or Winston Churchill's World War 2 memoirs. I've been also concentrating on current event's books like Yossef Bodansky's "Secret History of the Iraq War" and 9/11 Commission Report. I think I can be forgiven for not reading "1984".
Anyway, I don't want to sound like I am looking for excuses for not reading some book. My point is that, unlike the leftists, I always question my views and arrive to them based on the information I dig out from various sources.
So, this is what the people daring to call themselves "liberals" advocate: "Mussolini got the trains to run on time", appeasement and 1930s-style isolationism. That is very far from true liberalism, if you ask me.
You know what, I have an idea. Send this e-mail to that lady you got those e-mails from. It is unlikely that she will change her mind. But at least she might understand where I am coming from. At least maybe she will think of consequences of withdrawing our troops from Iraq now. While you are at it, send her also these links:
http://conservativlib.wordpress.com/why-conservative-liberal/
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/hitler.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,499154,00.html
http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/pollack20070730.htm
http://conservativlib.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/yeltsins-lessons-for-america/
And my e-mail: eric_odessit@yahoo.com.
Let's see what this lady has to say, or whether she will even follow my links.

Update:

Regarding that "dialog" with people who want to kill us: here is a "nice" story (via LGF):

...In total, seven Kassam rockets landed in and around the western Negev town as Sderot children started their second day of the new school year. The Islamic Jihad said they had fired nine Kuds-3 rockets, saying on their internet site that the attack was “a present for the start of the new school year.”

So, how do you talk to these people?

Update 2:

Apparently the nice peace-loving lady admitted that she would like to cut our losses and pull out, regardless of the consequences.  And, being "liberal" and "open-minded", she decided not to engage in any debate or at least take a look at the links I sent her.

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Better later than never

This article by Senator Joseph Lieberman was published some time ago.  Still, it is worth posting about it here.

The United States is at last making significant progress against al Qaeda in Iraq--but the road to victory now requires cutting off al Qaeda's road to Iraq through Damascus.

Thanks to Gen. David Petraeus's new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, and the strength and skill of the American soldiers fighting there, al Qaeda in Iraq is now being routed from its former strongholds in Anbar and Diyala provinces. Many of Iraq's Sunni Arabs, meanwhile, are uniting with us against al Qaeda, alienated by the barbarism and brutality of their erstwhile allies.

As Gen. Petraeus recently said of al Qaeda in Iraq: "We have them off plan."

But defeating al Qaeda in Iraq requires not only that we continue pressing the offensive against its leadership and infrastructure inside the country. We must also aggressively target its links to "global" al Qaeda and close off the routes its foreign fighters are using to get into Iraq.

Recently declassified American intelligence reveals just how much al Qaeda in Iraq is dependent for its survival on the support it receives from the broader, global al Qaeda network, and how most of that support flows into Iraq through one country--Syria. Al Qaeda in Iraq is sustained by a transnational network of facilitators and human smugglers, who replenish its supply of suicide bombers--approximately 60 to 80 Islamist extremists, recruited every month from across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, and sent to meet their al Qaeda handlers in Syria, from where they are taken to Iraq to blow themselves up to kill countless others.

Obviously, read it all.

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Crazy Hugo

A friend e-mailed me this:

IN a new outburst of antiwestern sabre-rattling, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has threatened Britain with “revenge” for the Falklands war of 1982. The belligerent Latin American leftist warned last week that his recent build-up of sophisticated Russian and Iranian weapons would be used to destroy the British fleet if it attempted to return to the South Atlantic.

Speaking on his weekly television show Alo Presidente (Hello, Mr President), Chavez denounced what he described as Britain’s “illegal occupation” of the Falklands and repeated his call for a regional military alliance against Britain and the United States.

“If we had been united in the last war, we could have stopped the old empire,” Chavez said, as he gesticulated to maps showing how Venezuelan aircraft and submarines would intercept British warships. “Today we could sink the British fleet.”

Chavez has often expressed support for Argentina’s claim to the Falklands, but his latest broadside was notable for both its antiBritish vitriol and its unprecedented threats. He declared that British history was “stained with the blood of South America’s indigenous people” and demanded revenge for the “cowardly” sinking of the General Belgrano, the Argentine cruiser.

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The more things change, ...

...the more they stay the same.  This article by William Grimm was published on Front Page Magazine:

I'm not Jewish. No one in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that happens to someone else.

But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until May of 1945 was named Adolf Hitler Strasse. I work in Munich, a pleasant metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement.

Every day when I go to work, I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived in, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops paraded and people were executed. The proximity to evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.

Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up to something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes around Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who respond by saying "coooool!" He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland) of The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels."

A few weeks later, I'm at a business meeting with four young highly educated Germans who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject matter changes to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils flair, their demeanor attain a threatening mien and one of them actually says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is that the Jews have all the money." They start laughing and another one says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."

This is not good.  The way things are going, we might have to fight another war in Europe, in addition to the Middle East.

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Free The Rushes!

That is the title of the post by Yaacov Ben Moshe of Breath of the Beast.  He also e-mailed it to me.  I'll just copy the whole thing here:

Free The Rushes!

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/france2/petition.html

Friends,

Some of you have been wondering why the Breath of the Beast blog has been quiet for the past few weeks. One of the reasons is that I have had the pleasure and honor of being involved in helping with an initiative of tremendous importance.

Before the Pope's remarks, before Gaza Beach, before the Mohammed Cartoons there was Muhammad al Durah, the 12 year old boy the allegation of whose death was one of the first triumphs of the Islamo-rage-aholic/Pallywood/humiliation-a-thon that has sucked in and manipulated the Western Media.

Richard Landes of Second Draft http://www.seconddraft.org/index.php and Augean Stables http://www.theaugeanstables.com/ who, many of you know, is a pioneer debunker of media complicity in the Arab/Islamist/Palestinian offensive of misrepresented and staged news has refocused attention on this prototypical travesty with a new effort to try to get France2 to release all of their video tapes from that fateful days activities.

Here is what we know:

On September 30, 2000, Charles Enderlin alleged that Israeli soldiers intentionally targeted and killed a Palestinian boy at Netzarim Junction. Enderlin, Middle East Correspondent for France2 television, used the footage and testimony of cameraman, Talal abu Rahmah as “proof” of what he claimed to be Israeli savagery

That allegation spread all but instantaneously around the world, sparking explosions of hatred and violence against Israeland Jews. It has been alluded to by Jihadis the world over, from Palestinian suicide bombers to Osama Bin Laden to the executioners of Daniel Pearl, to assorted radical Islamists in Europe.

Landes and others have succeeded in casting serious doubts about the reliability of the France2 report, including exposing compelling evidence that what is claimed to be the child's death in the sequence is mere playacting. There is also evidence of the habitual and unashamed dishonesty of the photographer Talal abu Rahmah .

France2 immediately has released only the 3 minutes of their cameraman's rushes they thought “relevant”, they have consistently refused to release the full "rushes" (all the footage shot by their cameramen) for inspection. They have blocked efforts in the courts to gain their release, and have allowed only screened viewers to see the tapes at their offices. Even some of those hand-picked viewers who have seen these "rushes" think that major sections of their “action sequences” are staged, and that a close look reveals unprofessional journalistic standards both for the cameraman and for the news broadcaster who used his work.

Charles Enderlin’s defense for running the story – "it corresponded to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank" – recapitulates the “False but accurate” attitude of many towards the Dan Rather forgery- a weak rationalization of disingenuous journalistic bias.

Keeping the full rushes of an event like this one secret can serve no conceivable purpose, other than to protect a guilty media outlet from being exposed in the act of fraud and libel. The honor and safety of the Israelis and everyone who wish for their fair treatment are endangered thereby.  They and their embattled homeland are deprived of the chance to vindicate themselves without the evidence that France2 is withholding.

Richard has introduced a powerful and simple petition at the url below. Its wording and intent is broad and neutral enough that it should attract the sympathy (and deserve the signature) of any but the most blatantly anti-Semitic or radically Islamist reader. Anybody with a sense of fair play has to see the merit in this request. I believe it is of the utmost importance that we get behind this petition. Send it to your friends! Post it on your web sites! Sign It!

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/france2/petition.html

So, go ahead and sign this petition.  This modern day Dreyfus Affair has to be stopped.

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