Ralph Peters
DUDE, WHERE’S MY CIVIL WAR?
BAGHDAD. I'm trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it.
Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills. And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn't stoop in such an hour of crisis.
Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops.CONDI TAKES RUSSIA TO THE WOODSHED
This Monday, March 6, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Washington to discuss the Middle East. Today, March 3, a high-ranking delegation of Hamas will visit Moscow at President Vladimir Putin's invitation, to meet with Lavrov. A coincidence? Hardly.
Russia aggressively courts Iran and Hamas. Last week, Russia negotiated in Tehran on establishing a uranium-enrichment joint venture, which will supply nuclear reactor fuel to the Islamic Republic.
A nuclear-armed Iran, allied with and armed by Russia and China will become a regional challenger hostile to the US, its interests, and its allies in the region.
This is why, during Mr. Lavrov's visit, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will inform her Russian counterpart that Moscow's actions in the Middle East are jeopardizing its presidency of the group of eight (G-8) leading industrial nations, its position in the Middle East Quartet, and its international role.
BREAKING OUR CULTURE’S BACK
Let's see, what shall I do this Sunday night - watch the Academy Awards or rearrange my sock drawer? That's a no-brainer: it's the sock drawer hands down. I'll pass on ridiculously-costumed America-hating egomaniacs spewing praise of homosexuality, tolerance for terrorists, and ridicule of everything normal Americans hold dear.
Hollywood thinks it is so avant-garde, courageously blazing new cultural trails, when the reality is that it is so behind the cultural curve. It will spend most of Oscar night praising itself for making a movie about homosexual sheepherders and pretend it's about happy cowboys.
Cowboys herd cattle, not sheep. "Gay" means happily carefree, as in the 1934 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie, The Gay Divorcee. That homosexuals have hijacked the term in an act of linguistic thievery does not mean we should let them get away with it.
It turns out they haven't.THE DEAL ON DUBAI
In Dubai, everyone refers to their ruler, Emir Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, as "MBR." Just to give you an idea of how he is into tourism not terrorism, here's a quick story.
He has closed circuit television in his private office. And what are the cameras trained on? Immigration/passport control lines at the airport. If MBR sees the lines are getting too long, he picks up the phone and orders more personnel to reduce the lines. Again, his focus is tourism not terrorism.
The US Navy docks its ships at Dubai more often than at any other non-US port in the world. 25,000 Americans (and 100,000 Brits) live and work in the Emirates now.
The realization that Dubai and the UAE is the most pro-American Arab country on earth is sinking in to fevered Congressional brains as their spasm of knee-jerk xenophobia dissipates.
The shame in this is that Conservative Republicans in Congress, by allowing themselves to get suckered into Bush-bashing Democrat xenophobia, blew their chance to make a deal with GW.Chapter Twenty-Two: BETWEEN THE SMOKING MOUNTAIN AND THE SLEEPING WOMAN
The next morning, Cortez assembled the Cholulan caciques, commanders, nobles, and priests, together with the Tlaxcalan commanders, in the freshly swept courtyard. Mounted on his horse, he had the Mesheeka ambassadors standing on one side, and Malinali on the other. Behind him were arrayed his officers, resplendent in polished armor, and a contingent of Totonac warriors led by Mamexi, all in their finest feather headdresses. Cortez began speaking to the Cholulans sternly:
"Two days ago, the king of Cholula was guilty of a great treachery, which he and his followers paid for with their lives. The entire city of Cholula deserves to be destroyed for this treachery, and your enemies of Tlaxcala wished to do so. But you are subjects of the Lord Montezuma, and it is out of my respect for him that I will forgive Cholula. I will pardon and forgive Cholula on one condition: that the Cholulans make peace with Tlaxcala. Nobles and leaders of Cholula: have you chosen one among you to now be your king?"
A tall man stepped forward, enrobed in a beautifully feather-embroidered mantle.YES, VIRGINIA, HOLLYWOOD REALLY DOES HATE AMERICA
During the last few weeks some movies have come out that are, in effect, a plea for the case of terrorists. Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is one of them. (A little known fact is that there was a 1986 TV movie, ‘Sword of Gideon,' based on the same book, Vengeance, that Spielberg borrowed from freely.)
In "Munich," the murders of the 11 Israeli Olympians are treated as, well, sort of understandable, given the feelings and anxieties of the Palestinians who committed the terrorist act.
Forgive me for not finding the current explanation for treating terrorists with kid gloves very convincing. Instead, I suspect that what is going on is precisely a tad too much sympathy with terrorists. Why? Among other reasons that come to mind I would place on top the fact that terrorists are all thoroughly anti-American.
NO CIVIL WAR: IRAQ DISAPPOINTS THE NEW YORK TIMES ONCE AGAIN
The Associated Press reported Monday (2/27) that Sunni Arabs in Iraq are prepared to end their boycott of talks to form a national unity government, thus disappointing yet again those journalists who've been telling us for two years civil war is imminent.
It seemed last Wednesday (2/22) as if the pessimists might finally be right after terrorists destroyed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Shia militias attacked more than a dozen Sunni mosques in retaliation. An unprecedented three day curfew was imposed in Baghdad in order to curb sectarian violence in which more than 100 people were killed.
To the grave disappointment of the New York Times, both Sunni and Shia religious leaders have called for calm. "We have much more evidence of a strong national unity movement in Iraq," says Iraqi Web logger Haider Ajina of the weekend demonstrations. "This attack was supposed to plunge Iraq into sectarian mayhem and senseless massive killing. This did not happen."
These peaceful demonstrations for peace drew little attention from a news media that is eager to report on a civil war, even if it isn't happening.
ILLEGAL WIRETAPPING WON WORLD WAR II
As a former intelligence officer who spent 23 years at the CIA, I am an intelligence history buff. So it is that the current media frenzy over "illegal NSA telephone taps" has an interesting precedent.
The New York Times and the Democrat Party are waging a campaign against Bush Administration electronic surveillance (misnamed "taps," by the way) of Al Qaeda communications with its contacts here in America. Their goal is for the Democrats to gain control of Congress this November, and impeach President Bush for the "crime" of "domestic spying."
Let's ask the New York Times editors if they would have President Roosevelt impeached for crimes that resulted in America's winning World War II?
CHRISTIANS FIGHTING BACK
Finally, finally, finally, at last. Christians are fighting back against rioting rampaging Moslem violence and oppression.
In Egypt back in the 7th century AD, most all Egyptians were Christians. Then Arabs swarmed out of the eastern deserts like human locusts to conquer Egypt and impose Islam. The native Egyptians were not Arab, and a few of them held on to Christianity in the face of enormous intolerance for centuries. These are the Copts.
Copts often have to hold their church services in secret, given all the government restrictions on building a church (there are no such restrictions on building a mosque). So when Moslems found out that an "unlicensed" building was being used as a Coptic Church in Odayssat, a village near Luxor on the Nile, a mob of them rioted, set fires, and tried to burn the building down.
The Moslems expected the Copts to just passively take it as always. But this time, January 18, 2006, the Copts fought back.TO THE POINT WASHINGTON CONFERENCE
It is my great pleasure to announce our First Annual To The Point Members' Conference, to be held in Washington DC from April 21-23.
I'll be your host and master of ceremonies. It's a marvelous opportunity for folks in our To The Point family to get to know each other.
Friday evening, April 21, we'll assemble at the Doubletree Inn in Pentagon City overlooking the Potomac River for a reception and dinner in the revolving restaurant with an extraordinary view of Washington. Yep, I'll give a speech.
Saturday morning, April 22, is devoted to panels and speeches by our To The Point writers - with lots of Q&A. You'll meet Dr. Joel Wade, Neal Asbury, Jack Kelly, Michael Ledeen, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation, Enders Wimbush of the Hudson Institute, and Alex Alexiev, one of the world's grandmasters of geopolitics.
Your mind will be stretched wide and crammed full of insights about what's really going on in the world.
A JURISPRUDENCE OF PREVENTION
Next week a vastly important book will be published: Preemption, A Knife That Cuts Both Ways by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the hyper-liberal Harvard Law School professor.
Yet it is only for the lack of his legal scholarship that there is nary a sentence in the book that I - a very conservative editor of The Washington Times and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich - couldn't have written.
The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and preemptive military action, including full-scale preventive war.
IS IT SMART TO ATTACK ALL MOSLEMS?
What do the arrests of three suspected Moslem terrorists in Ohio have to do with the purchase by an Arab company of the firm that manages facilities at six U.S. seaports?
Nothing...and everything.
The Justice Department indicted Tuesday Mohammad Zaki Amawi, 26, of Toledo; Marwan Othman al-Hindi, 42, of Toledo, and Wassim Mazloum, 24, of Cleveland, on charges of plotting to kill U.S. military personnel.
So what does this have to do with the purchase by Dubai Ports World of the British firm that manages commercial operations at ports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and New Orleans?DISRAELI IN DUBAI
The 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) once commented on accusations that a political opponent of his was lying regarding an important issue before Parliament: "It is worse than a lie - it is a blunder."
We can be sure that the Earl of Beaconsfield (the peerage awarded to Disraeli by Queen Victoria) would make the same observation today over the travails of George Bush and the port scandal.
There is no secret deal here. CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that vets these things, ran it through 12 agencies including Defense, Treasury, State, Homeland Security, and the White House National Security Council. Their approval was unanimous. Had just one objected, it would have been put on a 45-day investigative hold.
Bush was blindsided on this out of sheer naiveté. He still can't accept as real the bottomless mendacity of Democrats. For Barbara Boxer and Chuck Schumer to foment in protest over a deal with America's closest Arab ally, when they have gone far more ballistic at any suggestion that Arabs be profiled at US airports - well, I guess it's standard liberal chutzpah.
Outdoing Bush in naiveté are Republicans in Congress being led with rings in their noses by Boxer and Schumer into an orgy of Bush-bashing. It would be nice if they all took a deep breath, switched on their brains, and began thinking of how to take advantage of this fiasco.THE GREATEST ONE WEEK ADVENTURE IN THE WORLD
This is K2, the second highest mountain in the world at 28,741 feet (8762 meters), and harder to climb than Everest. It isn't in the Himalayas, but an even remoter mountain range in Central Asia called the Karakorum.
In the center of the Karakorum range is a confluence of massive glaciers, a legendary uninhabited spot known to mountaineers as Concordia. Legendary because it is by consensus of professional mountaineers and adventurers to be the single most spectacularly scenic place on planet Earth.
At Concordia there are 41 peaks over 21,000 feet within a radius of nine miles. The highest mountains in the world are called "eight-thousanders," higher than 8,000 meters or 26,250 feet. There are 14 such giants, all in either the Himalayas or the Karakorum. At Concordia you can see four all at once. It is unique on earth.
It takes ten days of trekking from the last outpost of civilization - called Skardu - to reach Concordia. Then ten days back. But this July, I am going to take a dozen adventurers to Concordia in a single day - by helicopter.
And that's not all.
MOHAMMED MUST NOT BE THE PROPHET OF TERRORISTS
As a Moslem, I've followed with great agony and embarrassment the buildup of religious frenzy across the Moslem world in response to the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.
On the one side the show of force by Islamists underlined the extent to which Islam has been hijacked by radicals and on the other side it emphasized the vulnerability of open societies to the growing influence of militant Islam.
The demonstration of violence by the Islamists forced the democratic societies to face up to the reality that Moslems who do not reject some of the basic precepts of political Islam can never integrate in a secular society. They will always remain a hurdle in the development of a pluralist setup and intellectual progress.
The dance of insanity performed on the streets in the name of Prophet Mohammed's love and honor has also forced many Moslems to come out of their slumber and ponder as to why their faith and their prophet have suddenly become a subject of criticism and ridicule by non Moslems.THE PILLAR GANG
Today's (2/17) Wall Street Journal has an op-ed by a CIA intelligence officer, Guillermo Christensen, entitled Un-Intelligence. The article exposes the self-serving attack on President Bush and the War in Iraq by a fellow CIA officer named Paul Pillar in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
Pillar is now being lionized by the left for his anti-Bush screed - but you first learned about him here at To The Point in October 2004.
Porter At The Pass revealed that Paul Pillar and his left wing cabal at the CIA, which I named The Pillar Gang, was conducting a covert campaign of leaks and disclosures to damage George Bush's chances of re-election and help John Kerry's.
As explained in "Porter At The Pass":
YOGI IN IRAN
It's beginning to sink in to a lot of folks - from the State Department to the French Foreign Ministry to Egyptian intelligence - that Iran's Ahmadinejad is far more dangerous and wacko than the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Perhaps most interesting is that France is bellying up to the anti-Iran bar. There has been a major fallout, for example, between France and Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored terrorist outfit. Chirac is so worried now about a major Hezbollah terrorist attack in Paris that he threatened Iran he would retaliate with nuclear missiles.
Finally we have arrived at Yogi Berra's fork in the road. Yogi advised that, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." When both France and the US agree that the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran has to be removed, you know we've arrived.AL GORE: CRAZY, STUPID, TREASONOUS, OR ALL THREE?
Former Vice President Al Gore is bitterly disappointed he was not elected president. Periodically, he expresses his disappointment in ways that gives us reason to be thankful he wasn't.
The most recent was last weekend, when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to make a speech denouncing the United States. The occasion was the annual Jeddah economic forum, which is sponsored in part by the family of Osama bin Laden (which claims to have distanced itself from the family black sheep).
Mr. Gore has not disclosed how much he was paid for his words of wisdom. It probably is less than the $267,000 former president Bill Clinton was paid for speaking to the group in 2002, but odds are his fee was in six figures.
Whatever Mr. Gore's speaking fee was, his hosts likely thought it a bargain, considering what the former vice president had to say.Chapter Twenty One: THE TRAP OF CHOLULA
The Jade Steps
Chapter Twenty One: The Trap of Cholula
They spent most of the siesta, the Spaniards' period of rest after the mid-day meal, having fun turning Spanish words into Nahuatl. Malinali was having so much fun it made her forgetful. She shook her head. "I must leave," she told them. "Our Mesheeka guests have come for their daily ceremony of complaining to Captain Cortez, and I must be there, for it is through me that they address their complaints."
"Have fun," Aguilar joked. Malinali sighed. "Our talking - that was fun. But ‘fun' and ‘Mesheeka' are two words that don't go together - in Spanish or Nahuatl."
Today is the nineteenth day here in Tlaxcala, she thought as she walked to Cortez's quarters, and for every one of those days, the Mesheeka emissaries who had accompanied them from Xocotlan had come to complain to Cortez about what terrible people the Tlaxcalans were, how they were all traitors and thieves and poor and wicked and not fit even to be slaves. It was so tiresome to hear and translate, and how Cortez could pretend to always be courteous and polite, or even stay awake, during the daily moaning, she didn't know.
When she saw the crowd of soldiers in front of Cortez's quarters, she realized something was different.
GLOBAL WARMING FREEZES UP
On the heels of record freezing weather in Europe, there was a story this week (carried by the Drudge Report and WorldNetDaily so you may have seen it) about a Russian scientist predicting global cooling. Russian astronomer Khabibulo Absudamatov expects a “decrease in the flow of the Sun’s radiation,” over the next several years which will lead to cooling, not continued warming of the planet. While his prediction may be right, he is wrong about the cause. As discussed in Solar Warming last September, it’s not the sun’s heat radiation causing a warmer earth, it’s the sun’s magnetic activity. In Solar Warming, we discussed the cost-free solution to global warming: Let the world’s airlines use high-sulfur jet fuel while flying at cruise altitude. The solution to global cooling is the mirror image of this: Have international jetliners burn their fuel “rich” at altitude. Give them a tax credit as an inducement.
LIBERTY VS. DEMOCRACY
Would you prefer to live in a country that has: (1) The rule of law with an honest civil service, strong protection of private property and minority rights, free trade, free markets, very low taxes, and full freedom of the speech, press and religion, but not a democracy? (2) Democracy and a corrupt court and civil service, many restrictions on economic freedom, including very high taxes, with limited rights for minority religions, peoples and speech? Many mistakenly believe democracy means liberty, but a quick review of world democracies show that is not true. Almost all democracies restrict economic liberties more than necessary. Many have corrupt court and civil service systems, inhibit women's rights, constrain press freedom and do not protect minority rights and views.
YELLOW-BELLIED LILY LIVERED US MEDIA COWARDS I
The New York Times had an editorial Tuesday, February 7, on the controversy triggered by publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. "The New York Times and much of the rest of the nation's news media have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them," the editors said. "That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols..." The very next day, Wednesday, February 8, the Times published, gratuitously, an image of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. And the New York Times was one of many newspapers which in 1989 published a photograph of Christ on a crucifix submerged in a vat of urine. Washington Post executive editor Len Downie told Editor & Publisher he wouldn't publish the Danish cartoons because of "general good taste." Had Mr. Downie developed his good taste a week earlier, the Post might not have published a cartoon of a quadruple amputee soldier so vile all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a letter to the editor protesting it. Most in the news media don't mind offending people who express their outrage by writing letters to the editor. But when the offended threaten to cut off the editor's head, editors become more "culturally sensitive."
YELLOW-BELLIED LILY-LIVERED US MEDIA COWARDS II
In Czechoslovakia under communism it was common to see signs reading "Workers of the world, unite" in the windows of fruit and vegetable stores. Vaclav Havel, in his book, "Living In Truth," discerned the significance of those signs. As elaborated by Stanley Hauerwas, professor of Theological Ethics at Duke School of Divinity, Mr. Havel knew the shopkeeper does not believe the sign. He puts it up because it was "delivered from the headquarters along with the onions." The grocer thinks nothing is at stake because he understands that no one really believes the slogan. The real message, according to Mr. Havel, is "I'm behaving myself... I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." But Mr. Havel shrewdly points out that even a modest shopkeeper would be ashamed to put up a sign that literally read, "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient." He is, after all, a human being with some sense of dignity. I would argue that this Czechoslovakian parable of the self-deceiving green grocer goes a long way to explaining the decision of most American news outlets not to republish the Danish cartoons currently stirring up so much of Islam.
INSTILLING DOUBT
As we discussed last week in The Cartoon Religion, Moslems have made a colossal blunder in exposing a fatal weakness of their religion to the world: that it melts under the heat of ridicule. The ongoing crisis has now exposed an even graver weakness: that it crumbles under the scrutiny of doubt. Islam is a mechanistic religion (an awful pun could be made here about it being Mecca-nistic, but let’s not go there). It is a shame religion. It is a religion of appearance rather than substance. Everything is about outward appearance, humiliation and shame, robotically and unthinkingly repeating the same exact word-for-word prayers five times a day at precisely the same times. The Koran is not a book to be read, it is a chant to be robotically recited in order to put one into an unthinking trance. As such it is an impersonal religion, an un-individual religion in which the Moslem believer has no personal relationship with God – as the Christian believer does. This is the great gulf between Christianity and Islam.
THE DEMOCRATS’ DISASTROUS DEFINING MOMENT
During an election campaign, political operatives are fond of seeking to induce in their opponent a negative "defining moment." That is to say a highly publicized moment when their opponent portrays everything that is wrong with him. In 2004 John Kerry provided that moment when he said he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Surely, at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others, they wildly applauded President Bush's statement that Congress failed to pass Social Security reform last year. As the party of reactionary inertia — as the party that not only doesn't have any solutions to today's dangers and problems, but denies that such problems exist — the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self. The Democrats' wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.
Chapter Twenty: THE LEGEND IN CUBA
The Jade Steps Chapter Twenty: The Legend in Cuba “Señor Aguilar!” Malinali shouted with a bright smile. She had spotted him sitting under a large ceiba tree at the edge of Tlaxcala’s market eating his mid-day meal. He returned her smile. “Doña Marina!” he called back. “Would you care to join me?” She sat down next to him. “It seems so long since I saw you last,” she said. “Yes – well, you learned Spanish so fast, while I have been slow at learning Nahuatl, that there was little need to help you translating for Captain Cortez,” came his reply. “What I really needed to do was learn to be a soldier again after being a Mayan slave for those long eight years. So I have been with the soldiers.” “Would you like to learn Nahuatl?” she asked. “I can teach you.” Aguilar considered it for a moment, then answered, “I would like that – Nahuatl is very different from Mayan, but I should try. If I can find the time, that is, for a soldier is kept very busy.” “You don’t look very busy to me,” came a nearby voice. “Bernal!” both Malinali and Aguilar exclaimed at the same time. “Do I understand that now Doña Marina is going to be your teacher instead of the other way around?” Bernal asked Aguilar with a grin. Aguilar shook his head. “I’m afraid so.” They chatted happily for a while, then Malinali had a thought. “Bernal, I have a question for you.” Her eyes had a mischievous twinkle. “Why are Captain Cortez and Diego Velasquez – the governor, as you call him, of your island of Cuba – enemies?”
THE MOTHER OF ALL COVERUPS: Saddam Did Have WMD
Last week a man who had been deputy chief of Saddam Hussein's air force claimed Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war began. Special Republican Guard brigades loaded yellow barrels with the skull and crossbones sign on each barrel onto two airliners from which the seats had been removed, Georges Sada said. There were 56 flights in all. Mr. Sada's is only the most recent of a series of accounts by people in a position to speak with authority who say (some of) Saddam's chemical and biological weapons wound up in Syria.
THE CARTOON RELIGION
By now, everyone is aware of the Great Mohammed Cartoon Fiasco – but you learned about it way back in October in To The Point’s Blasphemous Cartoons. As the controversy gained steam, we talked about it again last month in Standing Up To Moslem Bullies, which noted: The question we need to ask Moslems is: Until you start showing respect and tolerance for our values, religion, and civilization, why should we show any respect and tolerance for yours? Since then, a number of newspapers in Europe have stood up to Moslem bullies and published the cartoons – even the BBC showed them! (All 12 of the original cartoons, plus the original article publishing them in Jyllands-Posten, are here.) It’s interesting that Europeans are rejecting the Moslem bullies, while no US newspaper has so far had the guts to do so. The world’s biggest honorary Euroweenie turned out to be Bill Clinton, who condemned the “totally outrageous cartoons against Islam.” As the fat kid who wore the Big Boy jeans while his mom ran a call-girl service back in Hot Springs, and who is so under-endowed his girlfriends in Arkansas called him Little Willie, he has a pathological compulsion to be popular – even with Islamofascists. So we can dismiss him. For the battle has finally been joined. Who would have guessed the Clash of Civilizations would be comedic? Finally, Islam has picked a fight with the West in which the West will actually fight back, has picked a fight it will lose. Finally, folks are figuring out that Islam has a fatal weak spot: it is so insecure that it can’t take the heat of ridicule.
GOOGLE AND THE CIA
Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Human Rights, is so mad at Google for capitulating to the Chicoms he is going to hold hearings next month on the operating procedures of US Internet companies in China. He can expect to be getting a call from CIA Director Porter Goss politely requesting that he shut up. He’ll tell Smith he can vent for a little while longer, enough to make Google execs sweat and be receptive to the call they’ll be getting from Langley. But as soon as the Google boys turn cooperative, Smith had better turn quiet. Google’s Chicom Collaboration presents a marvelous intelligence opportunity.
BLACK DEMOCRAT POTS
It was no way to treat a lady. Washington Post ombudswoman Deborah Howell wrote a column praising her paper for exposing lobbyist Jack Abramoff. She was deluged with so much obscene email from outraged liberals the Post had to shut down one of its Web sites. Mr. Abramoff pled guilty earlier this month to defrauding his clients (Indian tribes who owned casinos) and the Internal Revenue Service. Ms. Howell's critics were in high dudgeon over a distinction without a difference. In the 7th paragraph of her story lauding reporter Susan Schmidt, she wrote: "And (Abramoff) had made substantial contributions to both major parties." "I heard that I was lying, that Democrats never got a penny of Abramoff-tainted money, that I was trying to say it was a bipartisan scandal," a stunned Ms. Howell wrote in her column last Sunday. All of Mr. Abramoff's personal contributions went to Republicans. But the big money was what Mr. Abramoff directed his clients to contribute.
CELEBRATING HAMAS
Dennis “The Wizard” Turner only sleeps on the Jewish Sabbath. Every other day and night he spends at the Aroma Café in Jerusalem with his laptop, sending me a never-ending stream of emails telling me how wrong I am about things. About twenty-seven times a day, I get an emailed article from him with a note, “Jack, you are so wrong about Sharon… Jack, you are so wrong about Gaza… Jack, you are so wrong about Olmert and Kadima…” So I can just imagine how totally wrong Dennis will say I am about Hamas winning the Palestinian elections. For I don’t think it’s a disaster at all. I think it’s an opportunity. I’m happy Hamas won. (Dennis has now collapsed into a twitching heap on the café floor. I hope he didn’t let his laptop crash on the floor as well.) It’s time to celebrate the end of moral goo, the end of pretending Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority were “people we could work with,” the end of all the evasion and desperate avoidance of reality. At last, it’s the End of Pretend.
WHAT THE ARAB WORLD THINKS OF TORTURE
Torture is accepted and even expected in the Arab world. Might makes right. Arab men – not those nice Arab men you may know who have immigrated to America, but Arab men living in the Arab world – prove their manhood by the way they treat their enemy. After all, it's what Mohammed did to the nonbelievers - Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians in the Koran - the 'holy book' allegedly mishandled in Guantanamo prison. Arab Moslem men gain honor by shaming, belittling, abusing and torturing their enemy in the most horrific ways. As someone who came from the Arab world and knows how they think, it frustrates me to see self-appointed self-righteous politicians and media pundits, oblivious to Arabic culture and thinking, criticizing America's actions at Guantanamo. Actually Gitmo is a joke as far as the Arabs are concerned. Prison? You call that a prison? You know what prisoners call Guantanamo among themselves? Al muntazah al-dini lilmujaheden al Moslemin, The Religious Resort for Islamic Militants.
OBL: STILL DEAD
We’ve gotten a number of queries regarding the corporeal status of Osama Bin Laden, given that Michael Ledeen, in Who’s An Iraqi?, reported that OBL croaked in December, yet he came out with an audiotape in January. Here’s the deal.
ACHIEVING PROSPERITY IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE
Suppose you were appointed global economic czar, and your task was to bring the world's per capita income up to the level of Ireland – which is almost that of the US. Would you: (A) Insist the world's rich nations transfer substantial wealth though massive foreign aid to the poor nations? (B) Insist all nations adopt policies that would make them as economically free as the top 10 freest economies today?
THE WORLD’S STUPIDEST MILLIONAIRES
The world’s wealthiest exiles are the Iranians – folks who fled Iran after Jimmy Carter betrayed the Shah and let him be overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini. The Cubans who fled after Castro took over Cuba and amassed fortunes in Miami are financial pikers compared to the Iranians. Cumulatively they are worth billions. There are thousands of millionaires among them. And they are the stupidest millionaires on the planet. Because of their stupidity, they now face the extinction of their country.
DOES AL GORE WANT OSAMA BIN LADEN TO SUCCEED?
In an audiotape broadcast Thursday on al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden said al Qaeda is preparing to strike the United States again. Last month Italian authorities arrested three Algerians with al Qaeda connections. They were plotting attacks on ships, railway stations and stadiums in the United States, said Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu. Some Democrats think President Bush should be impeached for trying to keep them from succeeding. Like Al Gore.
SHOPPING AT THE WASHINGTON MALL
Here’s a question: Would you go shopping for shoes at a grocery store? Why not? Oh, yes, grocery stores don’t sell shoes. You only go to a particular store because it’s selling what you want to buy. You don’t go to a store that doesn’t sell what you want to buy. Right, boys and girls? This Kindergarten lesson came to mind when I saw the Democrats over at the Library of Congress yesterday (January 18) ostentatiously signing what they called their “Declaration of Honest Leadership and Open Government.”
CONNECTING CHINESE DOTS
It’s an interesting exercise to connect the dots between news stories – especially when the dots are hidden. Take the headline story appearing last Friday, China Gains $60 Billion in Foreign Investment in 2005. Reuters opened the story with this line:
BEIJING (Reuters), January 13, 2006 - China attracted more than $60 billion in foreign direct investment in 2005 for the second year in a row as firms flocked to take advantage of the country's low wages and fast-growing market of 1.3 billion people.Every news outfit from the Financial Times to the Wall St. Journal to CNN crowed about how “foreign investors” and “multinationals” were pouring their money into China to get a piece of China’s “booming economy.” None of them revealed the story is a sham. None of them told you that over half of that $60 billion in “foreign investment” is laundered money from China, not foreign investors.
STANDING UP TO MOSLEM BULLIES
Remember when you were a kid in grade school, and if you really want to show contempt for someone you’d say, “He can dish it out but he can’t take it”? Moslems are like that. They can dish out insults to infidels, arrest Christians for praying in Saudi Arabia, confiscate their Bibles and throw them in the trash, call Jews pigs and monkeys, and spit on the whole human race that isn’t Moslem. But they go into frenzies of righteous outrage at the slightest criticism of their history and beliefs. Because a newspaper in Denmark, the Jyllands-Posten, circulation 158,000, published a dozen cartoons of Mohammed, the Organization of the Islamic Conference representing 57 Moslem countries issued a statement on January 1st, 2006, claiming “hundreds of millions of Moslems around the world” are offended. Last week, the foreign ministers of the 22-nation Arab League demanded an apology from the Danish government. Not only did Danish Prime Minister Anders Rasmussen refuse to apologize, he refused to meet with a delegation of eleven Ambassadors from Moslem countries who wanted to “discuss” the controversy. Now there’s a hero for the Western World – the kind of guy you wanted beside you in a confrontation with schoolyard bullies.
THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL LUNATIC THUG
The good news is we're unlikely to be as obsessed with the war in Iraq in 2006 as we were in 2005. The bad news is we may soon have much more to worry about. Mahmoud Amadinejad is the president of Iran, picked by the aging mullahs of the Guardian Council who hold the real power in the land. Since his election last August, Mr. Amadinejad has been replacing elderly clerics in senior government positions with colleagues from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian version of the Nazi SS, which he once commanded. Mr. Amadinejad is a thug, a religious lunatic, and may soon be armed with nukes.