Check out this BBC video on John Paul II's comments about the Church in Poland.
Also,
This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave.
From the Gulf Times:
From the Chronicle Journals:Gunmen launched simultaneous mortar and machinegun attacks on two mainly Polish military bases in southern Iraq yesterday, after Shia militants vowed to step up pressure on Polish soldiers to force them out.
***
Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has vowed to keep Polish troops in southern Iraq despite the attack on the ambassador earlier this month.
The ambassador was wounded in a triple bomb attack on his diplomatic convoy in Baghdad in which one Polish secret service officer and a passerby were killed. Five days later a car bomb killed two people near Poland’s Baghdad embassy.
Yesterday’s attacks come days ahead of an October 21 parliamentary election in Poland in which Kaczynski, a strong US ally, faces a challenge from opposition parties who want to pull Polish troops out of Iraq.
From Catholic News Service:Poland’s main opposition leader castigated a popular ex-president in a debate Monday, accusing him of hurting the country in his past role as a communist leader and of allowing corruption to flourish in democratic times.
"You built communism and that heritage is hurting Poland very much," Donald Tusk, the head of the pro-business Civic Platform party told Aleksander Kwasniewski in the third and final televised debate before parliamentary elections Sunday.
"Throughout your entire life as an adult, you were building socialism in Poland: whether before 1989 - we all know well in which party - and as president, for 10 years," Tusk told him. "This is why it is so hard for the Poles to free themselves and to gain economic sovereignty."
Poland's Catholic bishops have urged support for candidates who uphold Catholic teaching in an upcoming parliamentary election, in which the party of the country's president and prime minister face possible defeat.
"We ask all lay faithful and clergy in our country and beyond its borders to pray for the homeland and participate in large numbers," the Warsaw-based bishops' conference said in a pastoral letter. "But we also need to vote properly, which means in accordance with moral conviction. Believers should give their vote to people whose attitude and views are close, or at least not opposed, to the Catholic faith and Catholic values."
"Iranians have already benefited immeasurably from democracy funding, especially from the Persian-language broadcasts by Voice of America television and Radio Farda ("Tomorrow"), for which a majority of the $75 million at issue now is allocated. These broadcasts offer news and perspectives to the Iranian public that they would not otherwise have, including news regarding developments inside their own country. The broadcasts are popular with millions of diverse Iranians and have successfully broken the Islamic Republic's attempt to isolate the country from external sources of information. The Iranian regime could not be happier to see its popular nemeses--VOA television and Radio Farda--exterminated by Iranian Americans and others purporting to do good.
....
American lawmakers and Iranian-Americans who would eliminate financial support for Iran's democrats need to understand the following: Supporting Iranian civil society and the nonviolent struggle toward democracy and human rights is likely the most cost-effective means to prevent a future conflict with Iran or an armed struggle within its borders. Democracy is difficult to achieve. But with its remarkably young, educated population, and a long-stifled yearning for the fruits of modernity and liberalism, Iran has many of the key ingredients for success.
With some help from their American allies, Iranian democrats are brave enough and capable enough to achieve for their country what the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Vaclav Havel achieved for theirs."
Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute is circulating an urgent petition to save Ayatollah Boroujerdi, who has been sentenced to death in Iran. As Mr. Ledeen says, The history of political prisoners indicates dramatically that those who receive external support have a much higher survival rate than those who are abandoned to silence.
It only takes 10 seconds to sign the petition.
Thanks to Gateway Pundit.
Ayatollah Boroujerdi Iran death sentence Michael Ledeen petition
turn out to be as willing and as able to bear the burden of World War IV as their forebears were in World War II and again in World War III?"
World War IV The Long War Islamofaschism terrorism jihad
"...the most successful example of globalization is not Starbucks or McDonald’s but Wahhabism, an obscure backwater variant of Islam practiced by a few Bedouin deadbeats that Saudi oil wealth has now exported to every corner of the earth — to Waziristan, Indonesia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Toronto, Portland, Dearborn, and Falls Church. You can live on the other side of the planet and, when Starbucks opens up in town, you might acquire a taste for a decaf latte, but that’s it: otherwise, life goes on. By contrast, when the Saudi-funded preachers hung out their shingles on every Main Street in the west, they radicalized a significant chunk of young European Muslims: they transformed not just their beverage habits but the way they look at the societies in which they live." Read it all here.
Mark Steyn globalization Wahabbism Islam war on terror
"Past winners have fallen into ill repute, been assassinated — and simply faded from public view."
Nobel Peace Prize curse
even though they were 2 of the 3 guests of honor at an Iran-Venezuelan sponsored conference! Why? Because the daughter, Aleida, contradicted speaker Hajj Saeed Qassemi, who said that "Che ...[was] a true revolutionary who made the American Great Satan tremble ...[and had been] a truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union."
Aleida spoke: "My father never mentioned God. He never met God."
Check out Amir Taheri's TEHRAN'S PRICE FOR 'SOLIDARITY'- MULLAHS SEEK USEFUL MARXIST IDIOTS.
Che Guevara Iran Venezuela Tehran conference useful idiots
The BBC produced a segment on what happened and actually showed the cartoons.
Hat tip: LGF
Danish cartoons Mohammed Muslim rage
"Germany's wealthy and reclusive Quandt family, a major BMW shareholder, has gone on the defensive. For decades the family repressed its Nazi past, but a new documentary film provides new photos of old revelations that have prompted the Quandts to confront their own history of using slave laborers in factories during World War II."
Read it all at Spiegel Online.
BMW slave labor Quandt World War II Germany Nazis
I just re-read a fine article written by Theodore Darlymple on how and how not to love mankind. By comparing Ivan Turgenev's poignant story of a deaf and dumb serf who destroys his beloved dog, "Mumu" (a must-read for any dog lover), to the Communist Manifesto, Darlymple blows Marx out of the water.
Here are a couple of excerpts, to whet the appetite:
Almost every intellectual claims to have the welfare of humanity, and particularly the welfare of the poor, at heart: but since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.Read both the article and the story. They are quite illuminative.
Two great European writers of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev and Karl Marx, illustrate this diversity with vivid clarity. Both were born in 1818 and died in 1883, and their lives paralleled each other almost preternaturally in many other respects as well. They nevertheless came to view human life and suffering in very different, indeed irreconcilable, ways—through different ends of the telescope, as it were. Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.
******
When we look at our social reformers—their language, their concerns, their style, the categories in which they think—do they resemble Marx or Turgenev more? Turgenev—who wrote a wonderful essay entitled "Hamlet and Don Quixote," a title that speaks for itself—would not have been surprised to discover that the Marxist style had triumphed.
By a curious twist of fate, the coldhearted Marxist utopians in Russia found a cynical use for Turgenev’s story "Mumu," which they printed in tens of millions of copies, to justify their own murderous ruthlessness in destroying every trace of the former society. Could any more terrible and preposterous fate have befallen Turgenev’s tale than that it should have been used to justify mass murder? Could there be any more eloquent example of the ability of intellectual abstraction to empty men’s hearts and minds of a sense of shame and of true feeling for humanity?
Let us recall, however, one detail of Turgenev’s and Marx’s biographical trajectory in which they differed. When Marx was buried, hardly anyone came to his funeral (in poetic revenge, perhaps, for his failure to attend the funeral of his father, who adored and sacrificed much for him). When the remains of Turgenev returned to St. Petersburg from France, scores of thousands of people, including the humblest of the humble, turned out to pay their respects—and with very good reason.
Do you know we're going to be one of the last and one of the most numerous (forces) in Iraq?" Tusk said to Kaczynski. "You say we've gained a lot from our ties with the U.S., but you don't name a thing. Where are the visas, where are the business deals?"Read the MSNBC article here.
Kaczynski, a strong supporter of the close ties with the U.S., countered that Poland has in fact strengthened its friendship with Washington, and should stick in out in Iraq.
"Once you go in and are already there, desertion is the worst and the stupidest solution," Kaczynski said. "We have gained a lot from the United States. We became a noted country. Today, that is the one country that in a pinch _ and that's happened before _ can help us, and we need that kind of alliance."
"Poles in their entire history were never deserters, were never cowards."
"Lt. Murphy was shot in the back while transmitting the call for help, dropped the radio, fell over, and got back up and continued to transmit. He then went back to his position of cover and continued to fight. He did not survive the battle."Lt. Michael P. Murphy hero Navy Seal Medal of HonorMurphy, known as “Mikey” to his friends and family, shot and wounded, managed to crawl onto a ridgeline and radio headquarters at the nearby air base for them to send in reinforcements. Taliban fighters were closing in on the team’s position, shooting their weapons and firing rocket-propelled grenades.
“Mikey was ignoring his wound and fighting like a SEAL officer should, uncompromising, steady, hard-eyed, and professional,” Luttrell wrote in his recently published book, Lone Survivor, about his military experiences, his team and the events of that day and the deaths of his teammates, his friends.
The fighting grew more intense, but the team pressed on in the close-quarters battle. At one point, Luttrell wrote, Murphy took his mobile phone, “walked to open ground. He walked until he was more or less in the center, gunfire all around him, and he sat on a small rock and began punching in the numbers to HQ.”
“I could hear him talking,” Luttrell wrote. “‘My men are taking heavy fire ... we’re getting picked apart. My guys are dying out here ... we need help.’
“And right then Mikey took a bullet straight in the back. I saw the blood spurt from his chest. He slumped forward, dropping his phone and his rifle. But then he braced himself, grabbed them both, sat upright again, and once more put the phone to his ear.
“‘Roger that, sir. Thank you,’” Luttrell heard Murphy say, before the lieutenant continued to train fire on the enemy fighters.
“Only I knew what Mikey had done. He’d understood we had only one realistic chance, and that was to call in help,” Luttrell wrote. “Knowing the risk, understanding the danger, in the full knowledge the phone call could cost him his life, Lieutenant Michael Patrick Murphy, son of Maureen, fiancé of the beautiful Heather, walked out into the firestorm.
“His objective was clear: to make one last valiant attempt to save his two teammates,” he wrote.
Not long after the call, Murphy was shot again, screaming for Luttrell to help him, but Luttrell, also hit and wounded, couldn’t reach him. "There was nothing I could do except die with him,” he wrote.
"Putin knows full well that a nuclear-armed Iran would greatly complicate everything the United States is attempting to accomplish in the Middle East, and it is always useful to remind the Americans that the Russians are in the position to either grant or deny the Iranians that capability on the eve of grand strategic talks. After all, it is Russia that is building a nuclear power plant for the Iranians at Bushehr.Go here to read the whole article (member login).
But this is not all just posturing before a major round of talks.
Putin is perfectly capable of looking at a map. Russia -- not the United States or Europe -- is Iran's neighbor, and the demonstrated 900-mile range of Iran's Shahab-3 missile brings a great many of Russia's industrial and population centers into potential striking distance. Should the Iranian missile actually reach the 1,500 miles that Tehran claims, it could even hit Moscow. Of the Western states, only those in the eastern Balkans are potentially at risk (and only if the 1,500-mile figure proves true). It is not so much that Russia believes an Iranian attack is imminent -- this would be suicidal for Iran, to say the least -- but rather that the shifts in the balance of power that a nuclear-armed Iran would cause would be far more detrimental to Moscow than to Washington.
There are very good reasons why the Russians have been dragging their feet at Bushehr, a project that was supposed to become operational nearly a decade ago. Putin is perfectly happy to take Iran's money, but if he can get a better deal from Washington on the broader dispensation of U.S. forces in the Eurasian theater, he is perfectly willing to throw Tehran under the American bus. Beep beep."
Amazing! What's going on: The beam of light is an infrared target illuminator (IR spotlight). The guys on the ground point it at the spot they want the aircraft to shoot. It is invisible to the naked eye.
Air support is provided by a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter gunship. The rapid shots are 20mm cannon, the slower shots are 30mm cannon and there are a couple of 2.75" rockets thrown in. The green twinkling lights near the target were probably muzzle flashes from enemy weapons.
The blinking lights closest to the camera are IR "good guy" lights to let the air support identify friendly forces.
combat video Mosul Iraq
Scott Johnson from Powerline asks: "How about some recognition for the scientists of Laputa discovered by Gulliver in the course of his travels? Is it too late to recognize them for their fine efforts to extract sunlight from cucumbers?"
Nobel Peace Prize Arafat Rigoberta Menchu
I missed this bit of information the New York Times reported last July 2007:
Msgr. Georg Gänswein, Pope Benedict XVI's secretary and close adviser, warned of the Islamization of Europe and stressed the need for the Continent's Christian roots not to be ignored. In comments released in advance of an interview to be published today in the German weekly Süeddeutsche Magazin, he said: ''Attempts to Islamize the West cannot be denied. The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness.'' He also defended a speech Benedict gave last year linking Islam and violence, saying it was an attempt by the pope to ''act against a certain naïveté.''Islamization of Europe Christianity Christian roots Pope Benedict XVI
The story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as told to Iranian children:
Click the picture above to watch the story or go to MEMRI.
Israel Palestinian Iranian TV
National Geographic has an interesting video regarding the restoration that Poland's beautiful Krakow is undergoing.
Krakow Poland restoration tourism
"...from Iranians building a nuclear bomb, Syrians stockpiling chemical weapons, Egyptians and Saudis developing serious conventional forces, Hizbullah attacking from Lebanon, Fatah from the West Bank, Hamas from Gaza, and Israel’s Muslim citizens becoming politically restive and more violent.Read Daniel Pipes' Zionism's Bleak Present.
World-wide, professors, editorialists, and foreign ministry bureaucrats challenge the continued existence of a Jewish state. Even friendly governments, notably the Bush administration, pursue diplomatic initiatives that undermine Israeli deterrence even as their arms sales erode its security."
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