January 16, 2007

Undercover Mosque

hat is happening in Western mosques?

Here is a 3-part BBC video set that rips open the veil. View them and weep for the moderate Muslims who fail to stand up against this unrelenting hate of non-muslims and women.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:


Posted by witnit at 1:44 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

Let's Talk Torture

onah Goldberg does it again with another brilliant essay: "When Push comes to Torture" explaining what torture isn't.

When confronted with the assertion that the Soviet Union and the United States were moral equivalents, William F. Buckley responded that if one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as men who push old ladies around.

In other words, context matters.

[...]

Consider killing. In every society in the world, murder is punished more harshly than non-lethal torture. If I waterboard you, or lock you in my basement with Duran Duran blasting at you 24/7, even if I beat you for hours with a rubber hose, my punishment will be less severe than if I murder you, simply because it is worse to take a life deliberately than to cause pain, even sadistically. We all understand this. Would you rather take some lumps in a dungeon for a month, or take a dirt nap forever?

Yet, according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of context, even though we’d never dream of a blanket ban on killing.

One reason for this disconnect is that we’ve thought a lot about killing and barely at all about torture.

Read the whole thing.

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August 30, 2006

Rumsfeld's Speech

f you did not hear Rumsfeld's complete speech, read it below. He's says what needs to be said as clear as can be said.

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Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention
As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Salt Lake City, Utah, Tuesday, August 29, 2006

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Thank you so very much. I appreciate that a great deal, that warm welcome. Earlier, a few minutes ago, I had a chance say hello to Senator Bennett and Senator Hatch, both of whom have provided such fine representation for this state and strong support for the Department of Defense and for the men and women in uniform. Members of the congressional delegation, I believe, are here -- Rob Bishop and Christopher Smith. We thank you for being here. The mayor, Mr. Corroon -- thank you. Distinguished guests.

Michael Peterson, if I could sing, I'd sing just like that. (Laughter.) That is very nice. (Applause.)

And to the spirit of youth, young folks, I had a chance before I came him to watch their presentations on television. We appreciate your thoughtfulness and your service.

To the Spirit of Service Awardees, congratulations. It is impressive to note what you're doing while you serve our country in uniform.

My special thanks to you, Tom [American Legion Commander Tom Bock], for your service to the military, to our veterans and to our country. It was a pleasure to meet your wonderful family over there; your son who's flown Chinooks, I guess, in Iraq, is following your proud tradition of military service.

Certainly, our country is grateful to all of you who have children, relatives, serving in our nation's military. They're in our thoughts and prayers, and please tell them that we appreciate all they do for our country.

I also want to thank each of you, members of the American Legion, for the love and the support that you provide for our troops every day. It is important, and it is deeply appreciated.

No one is more proud of these young people than their Commander-in-Chief, and I know that President Bush is looking forward to being with you later this week. It's a privilege to work with a president who is determined to protect our flag. (Applause.) We are fortunate to have a leader of strong resolve at a time of war.

Through all the challenges, he remains the same man who stood atop the rubble in Manhattan with a bullhorn vowing to fight back. The leader who told a grieving nation that we will never forget what was lost. And the President who has worked every day to fulfill his vow to protect the American people and to bring the enemy to justice or to bring justice to the enemy.

Our nation is so fortunate to have the American Legion standing up for all of those who are serving our country at this time of testing.

About a year ago, I participated in the dedication of the World War II Memorial in Washington. My father had served in the Pacific on a carrier during that war. When I looked out in the audience I could see a great many American Legion caps, not surprising, and it was a reminder of the millions who sacrificed for our country, so many of whom did not come home.

And it was also a reminder of all that the American Legionnaires do for our servicemen and servicewomen. Indeed, through nearly nine decades of service, the American Legion continues to find ways to undertake new initiatives that embody the motto: “For God and Country.”

The Department of Defense is proud to be your partner in the Heroes to Hometowns program, which is helping severely wounded veterans with job searches, with their homes, and with other activities to aid in their transition to civilian life.

Your partnership with the America Supports You program helps communities, organizations, and individuals across this nation express their appreciation to our troops and to their families. You can find it at: americasupportsyou.mil, and see all of the things that the compassionate and generous American people are doing; schools, corporations, villages, helping the families and helping the troops.

And on a personal note, I want to commend the American Legion for its sponsorship of the Boy Scouts. I know there are places where Scouting is kind of put down. Well, I was a proud Cub Scout; a Boy Scout; an Explorer Scout; an Eagle Scout; and a Distinguished Eagle Scout; and the Scouts represent, in my view, some of the very best qualities of our country, and they certainly merit our support. (Applause.)

The American Legion -- actually the members of the American Legion -- have achieved a great deal since its founding in the months following World War I, when those small number of folks got together in a hotel room in Europe looking for a way to help some of their fellow veterans who would be coming home soon.

That year -- 1919 -- turned out to be one of the pivotal junctures in modern history with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of the League of Nations, a treaty and an organization intended to make future wars unnecessary and obsolete. Indeed, 1919 was the beginning of a period where, over time, a very different set of views would come to dominate public discourse and thinking in the West.

Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of then-recent memory of World War I could be avoided.

It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else's problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

There was a strange innocence about the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

“Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided!”

I recount that history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism. Today -- another enemy, a different kind of enemy -- has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like New York and Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow and so many other places. But some seem not to have learned history's lessons.

We need to consider the following questions, I would submit:

*** With the growing lethality and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?

*** Can folks really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

*** Can we afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply law enforcement problems, like robbing a bank or stealing a car; rather than threats of a fundamentally different nature requiring fundamentally different approaches?

*** And can we really afford to return to the destructive view that America, not the enemy, but America, is the source of the world's troubles?

These are central questions of our time, and we must face them and face them honestly.

We hear every day of new plans, new efforts to murder Americans and other free people. Indeed, the plot that was discovered in London that would have killed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of innocent men, women and children on aircraft flying from London to the United States should remind us that this enemy is serious, lethal, and relentless.

But this is still not well recognized or fully understood. It seems that in some quarters there's more of a focus on dividing our country than acting with unity against the gathering threats.

It's a strange time:

*** When a database search of America's leading newspapers turns up literally 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers who has been punished for misconduct -- 10 times more -- than the mentions of Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror;

*** Or when a senior editor at Newsweek disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our armed forces -- the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard -- as a "mercenary army;"

*** When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists; and the once CNN Baghdad bureau chief finally admits that as bureau chief in Baghdad, he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein's crimes when he was in charge there so that CNN could keep on reporting selective news;

*** And it's a time when Amnesty International refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay -- which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare -- "the gulag of our times." It’s inexcusable. (Applause.)

Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and distortions that are being told about our troops and about our country. America is not what's wrong with the world. (Applause.)

The struggle we are in -- the consequences are too severe -- the struggle too important to have the luxury of returning to that old mentality of “Blame America First.”

One of the most important things the American Legion has done is not only to serve and assist and advocate, as you have done so superbly for so much of the past century, but also to educate and to speak the truth about our country and about the men and women in the military.

Not so long ago, an exhibit -- Enola Gay at the Smithsonian during the 1990s -- seemed to try to rewrite the history of World War II by portraying the United States as somewhat of an aggressor. Fortunately, the American Legion was there to lead the effort to set the record straight. (Applause.)

Your watchdog role is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global stage, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegations we see.

You know from experience personally that in every war there have been mistakes, setbacks, and casualties. War is, as Clemenceau said, “a series of catastrophes that result in victory.”

And in every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don't live up to the standards of the oath and of our country. But you also know that they are a very, very small percentage of the literally hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving our country with humanity, with decency, with professionalism, and with courage in the face of continuous provocation. (Applause.)

And that is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong, can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

Our enemies know this well. They frequently invoke the names of Beirut or Somalia -- places they see as examples of American retreat and American weakness. And as we've seen -- even this month -- in Lebanon, they design attacks and manipulate the media to try to demoralize public opinion. They doctor photographs of casualties. They use civilians as human shields. And then they try to provoke an outcry when civilians are killed in their midst, which of course was their intent.

The good news is that most Americans, though understandably influenced by what they see and read, have good inner gyroscopes. They have good center of gravity. So, I'm confident that over time they will evaluate and reflect on what is happening in this struggle and come to wise conclusions about it.

Iraq, a country that was brutalized by a cruel and dangerous dictatorship, is now traveling the slow, difficult, bumpy, uncertain path to a secure new future under a representative government that will be at peace with its neighbors, rather than a threat to their own people, to their neighbors, or to the world.

As the nature of the threat and the conflict in Iraq has changed over these past several years, so have the tactics and the deployments. But while military tactics have changed and adapted to the realities on the ground -- as they must -- the strategy has not changed, which is to empower the Iraqi people to be able to defend, and govern, and rebuild their own country.

The extremists themselves call Iraq the “epicenter” in the War on Terror. And our troops know how important their mission is.

A soldier who recently volunteered for a second tour in Iraq captured the feeling of many of his peers. In an e-mail to some friends, he wrote the following, and I quote:

“I ask that you never take advantage of the liberties guaranteed by the shedding of free blood, never take for granted the freedoms granted by our Constitution. For those liberties would be merely ink on paper were it not for the sacrifice of generations of Americans who heard the call of duty and responded heart, mind and soul with ‘Yes, I will.’”

Some day that young man very likely will be a member of the American Legion attending a convention like this. I certainly hope so. And I hope he does that and that we all have a chance to meet. And one day a future speaker may reflect back on the time of historic choice, remembering the questions raised as to our country's courage, and dedication, and willingness to persevere in this fight until we prevail.

The question is not whether we can win; it's whether we have the will to persevere to win. I'm convinced that Americans do have that determination and that we have learned the lessons of history, of the folly of trying to turn a blind eye to danger. These are lessons you know well, lessons that your heroism has helped to teach to generations of Americans.

May God bless each of you. May God bless the men and women in uniform, and their families. And may God continue to bless our wonderful country.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)


Posted by witnit at 8:02 PM | Comments (3)

August 23, 2006

More on World War IV

ne of the ways you evaluate a political pundit is to go back and read past writings to see if their political analysis stands the test of time. One such writer I've found in Normna Podhoretz. I've pointed to his World War IV writings before. Now he has a fascinating piece (and lengthy--he understands the need to explore complex ideas in detail) in the Wall Street Journal:

In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the Cold War being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain's death--which, he famously said, had been "greatly exaggerated." Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of President Bush are now at it yet again. This time, however, their ranks have been swollen by a number of traditional conservatives who were never comfortable with the doctrine bearing his name and who have now moved from discomfort to outright opposition.

Take 30 minutes and read the whole thing.

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August 21, 2006

Another Brilliant Jonah Column

onah Goldberg gives some deeper insight into the links between Nazis and Islamic jihadists in his column The Swastika and the Scimitar:

Still, the point isn’t to dredge up ancient history about Muslims and Nazis. Many Swedes got along swimmingly with the Nazis but who worries about the Swedes today? The Muslim world is another matter. Unlike the Swedes, the similarities between Nazism and Islamic fascism are not all in the past. In what may be the most important book on the Holocaust in a generation, historian Jeffrey Herf explains why.

According to the standard Holocaust narrative, the Final Solution was the product of “hate” or racism or, often, both. Anti-Semitism became popular in the 19th century; the Nazis expanded on it, constructing a pseudo-scientific biological racism that saw the Jews as a “cancer” on the body politic and the Holocaust as an attempt to excise the tumor. Herf does not so much debunk this version of history as cut through it.

In The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, he concedes that hatred and racism were important, but he argues that they don’t explain Germany’s unique efforts to destroy the Jews. It’s not as if no one hated the Jews until the 1930s.

The real answer isn’t hate, but fear. Poring through miles of speeches, private comments, journal entries, party memoranda and all 24,000 pages of Goebbel’s diaries, Herf concludes that the Nazis really believed that the Jews ran the world and wanted to destroy Germany. They believed that Jews controlled not only the Bolsheviks to the east but the capitalists to the west. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mere pawn of his Jewish friends and advisors. The British Parliament, Goebbels wrote in one diary entry, was “in reality a kind of Jewish stock exchange.” The “Jewish-plutocratic enemy” was everywhere, benefiting from, and responsible for, every piece of bad news for Germany. In fact, the Nazis were sure that the Jews had declared war on Germany first, giving them no choice but to respond to the Jewish campaign to “exterminate the Germans.” This paranoia led the Nazis to believe that rounding up millions of Jews and gassing them was an act of self-defense.

What is so frightening is how similar this is to the sounds from the Middle East today.


Read the whole thing.

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August 11, 2006

A One-Percent World

t appears more and more likely that Dick Cheney is right. Rich Lowry has a great essay on the fact that because of Jihadists we are forced to live in a One-Percent World:

Ron Suskind’s best-selling book The One Percent Doctrine refers to Vice President Dick Cheney’s axiom that if there is a one-percent chance of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, the U.S. government has to respond with all the urgency as if there is a 100 percent chance of such an event. When Suskind’s book appeared, there was much clucking about Cheney’s thinking — so dire, so dark, so unmodulated.

But Cheney’s vision can only be considered unhinged if a fog of complacency descends about the terror threat facing us. Whenever that threat becomes clear again, as it has in the wake of the breakup of a plot in Britain to blow airliners from the sky, everyone begins to think like Dick Cheney, or maybe more so: If there is a mere .0001-percent chance of a terrorist smuggling liquid explosives on a flight from Denver to Green Bay, Wis., no one can carry on hair gel, and new mothers must present their baby formula for inspection.

The fact is that we live in a one-percent world. We face a shadowy enemy who represents a threat that is unspeakably awful when it is actualized, but is too easy to discount when it isn’t. Who even remembers that suspects were arrested in Miami two months ago in the very early stages of plotting perhaps to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago? It’s always possible to let the mind wander, until thousands of innocent civilians are killed.

Read the whole thing.

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August 9, 2006

Sad But True

ad but true. Victor David Hanson always seems to hit the nail on the head:

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Just like at the end of the Roman empire, we in the West cannot raise enough courage to tell the truth about our enemy much less takes steps to fight him.

Posted by witnit at 3:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sad But True

ad but true. Victor David Hanson always seems to hit the nail on the head:

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Just like at the end of the Roman empire, we in the West cannot raise enough courage to tell the truth about our enemy much less takes steps to fight him.

Posted by witnit at 3:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 1, 2006

Here We Go Again

ichael Ledeen agrees with me in his essay, "The Thirties All Over Again?" that the West's response to Islamic jihad is similar to our response to Hitler in the 1930s.

Meanwhile, a collection of frauds, writing in places like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones, continuously recycles a story saying that a neocon (code for “Jewish”) conspiracy duped Bush into going to war in Iraq, and is now arranging the invasion of Iran. Documented lies, like those peddled by Joe Wilson to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, are treated as reliable. Fantasies about American armed forces operating covertly in Iran, like those written by Seymour Hirsh, get taken seriously. And people like me are accused of masterminding the whole thing, even though I oppose a military campaign against Iran.

No one can doubt that this is a willful disinformation campaign, aimed at paralyzing and then destroying the president. I do not think people in the White House have ever fully appreciated their peril. I think that lack of understanding goes hand-in-hand with the failure in strategic vision that underlies our unwillingness to fight the regional war that is being waged against us.

It is the Thirties again. Many of the statements above apply to Franklin Roosevelt’s first two administrations, and to the political atmosphere of those dreadful years. Then, too, the mounting power of what became the Axis was ignored. As my father often reminded me, a few months before Pearl Harbor, at a time when Nazi armies were long since on the march, the draft passed by a single vote. Apologists for Hitler and Mussolini were legion, and some of our leading intellectuals were saying that American democratic capitalism was a failure, and we would do well to emulate the European totalitarians.

Read the whole durn thing.

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July 22, 2006

Israel and Lebanon

kay, let me get this straight. In 2000, Israel went along with the U.N. resolution that promised if Israel got out of Lebanon, the U.N. and the Lebanese government would get Hezbollah out of Lebanon and neutralize it as a threat.

So Israel trusted the U.N. and the Lebanese government and vacated Lebanon. Over the next six years, Hezbollah received over 10,000 missiles from Syria and Iran, built up strength in Lebanon, and has begun launching missiles into Israel.

Furthermore, the U.N. and the Palestinians promised that if Israel got out of Gaza, the Palestinians could take over and build up a culture and businesses. Israel got out, gave Gaza to the Palestinians, and now Hamas is launching missiles into Israel from Gaza.

Okay, so why is everyone down on Israel? The U.N. lied and people died. Israel is defending itself, and recognizes that no one else will help them rid the cancer of Hezbollah and Hamas.

And sooner or later, Israel (and the West) will have to deal with the REAL source of terrorism: Syria (to a lesser extent) and Iran (to a great extent.)

The lesson of WWII and Hitler is clear. Appeasing totalitarian ideologues whose vision is world domination, and waiting while they build strength, leads to millions dying rather than thousands. If the West waits for Iran to get nuclear weapons, the world war that we are already in will lead to greater catastrophe.

But just like Europe in the 1930s, the West in these last few decades has failed to comprehensively recognize and respond to the threat. These aren't just some idiot reactionaries who are "hurting" over the evil empire of America. Their vision is world domination, a vision that goes back centuries and has now taken hold among jihadists who embrace a culture of death.

Worse than the Nazis, worse than the communists, worse than a thousand Charles Mansons and Ted Bundys.

We have been sleeping for years and years. Why not wake up this morning?

Posted by witnit at 4:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 15, 2005

Long Notes on World War IV

ommentary magazine has published a couple of indepth articles by Norman Podhoretz articulating the position that we are in World War IV. Here's my favorite picture of Norman:

I do not completely agree with all of his arguments, but I think he makes a mostly fascinating case.

If you take the time (and you will have to patiently read the first document in its entirety to grasp the argument), I think you will at least begin to understand what many in the Bush Adminstration believes to be true. This is the best explanation I have read to account for all of the Bush administration's actions. Not the wacky conspiracy theories of the Michael Moore / MoveOn.Org crowd.

One important distinction seems to be ignored by people who argue for "fair trials" and "constitutional rights" for enemy combatants during a war: Law Enforcement only comes into play under the U.S. Constitution in peace time. Warfare by definition is resorted to when law enforcement fails, when law enforcement is not enough to protect a society against extraordinary criminal activity.

Under the U.S. Constitution and law enforcement, you cannot legally execute someone without going through a proper political and legal process.

In warfare, you can legally execute someone based on the military uniform they are wearing, or the fact that they are trying to kill you, whether or not they are wearing a uniform. (The U.S. Military does have Rules of War, which trigger military law enforcement. That is entirely different from the law enforcement I am speaking of here. You've heard of Martial Law, right?)

For these reasons, warfare must be looked on as something rarely engaged in, and only in cases where law enforcement cannot stop large-scale criminal activity, especially activity that endangers the foundations and institutions of a society.

The point is, these are distinct areas that should not be mixed. That is, when talking about warfare, it's inappropriate to talk law enforcement. When people mix these two, you can bet they are either unclear in their thinking, or being politically manipulative.

Law enforcement comes back into play once war has ended.

The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, the U.N., and the European countries spent the 1980s and 90s applying law enforcement tactics against suicidal jihadists. It did not work. It encouraged the jihadists, who state clearly that they thought the West was weak, a paper tiger, easily brought to its knees, just like the Soviet Union was when it lost the war in Afghanistan.

The current Bush administration has recognized the failure of law enforcement and has moved into warfare. Right or wrong, that is the decision. We have moved beyond fair trials, and constitutional rights, except to the extent the Bush administration chooses to apply it in selective situations.

*** Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. Mark Twain

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January 7, 2005

Short Notes on World War IV

*** Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact. Richard Mitchell

UPDATE: Power Line has a post about the Gonzales hearings.


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