US Undersecretary of defense, Eric Edelman:
Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia...such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.Pentagon Iraq Undersecretary of Defense Edelman
I'm not making this up! From Der Spiegel:
You don't actually need a brain to work in a tax office. A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head -- yet lives a completely normal life.
MEMRI has provided an incredibly useful study on the role of the Internet and the jihad. It is a must see.
[jihad]
[Islam]
[internet]
As of July 19, 2007, there have been 3,915 coalition deaths: 3,628 Americans, 2 Australians, 157 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, 1 Czech, 7 Danes, 2 Dutch, 2 Estonians, 1 Fijian, 1 Hungarian, 33 Italians, 1 Kazakh, 1 Korean, 3 Latvian, 21 Poles, 2 Romanians, 5 Salvadoran, 4 Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, 2 Thai and 18 Ukrainians.
[Iraq] [war] [coalition] [deaths]
Jewish Current Issues has a great account of the speeches by Natan Sharansky and Hugh Hewitt before the Republican Jewish Coalition. Here's an excerpt of what Hewitt thinks will be the central issue in the coming US election:
This [election] . . . is really against fantasists -- against people who do not believe that the threat is what it is. . . . Our fellow citizens and our friends also felt as badly as we did about the events of [9/11]. But increasingly they have come to believe that it was a lucky one-off, a fluke, a tragedy, as opposed to the first massive expression of a very sinister and very powerful will . . . intent not on peaceful coexistence . . . but on the relentless expansion of their radical vision of Islam.
[T]he Republicans are going to be saying a very hard thing to hear -- that we are locked in an existential struggle . . . and that indeed it is going to be a long and difficult and often bloody 20-30 years ahead of us. That’s a very tough hard message to sell in 60 seconds . . . especially when Democrats insist on saying it’s not so, and that we can retreat from Iraq without the carnage following us home, and that we can pretend that the radicalization of the Islamic population in Europe is neither far advanced nor continuing.
[W]e are only going to win if we make a sophisticated argument, based upon facts, and we do it every single day, and we do it day in and day out.
It’s why I recommend the book “Looming Tower” to everyone who will listen to me. You’ve got to understand what Sayed Qtub was saying and how it has spread and how it has metastasized . . . and it’s not about poverty in the Middle East, and it’s not about the West Bank, and it is not about
. It is about a relentless ideological understanding of Islam that cannot be treated with. That book does it better than any. Gaza
I’d recommend “America Alone” . . . Mark Steyn’s effort to alert the world that it isn’t getting better in
Europe ; it is getting worse, and it’s getting worse in a hurry . . . .
I’d recommend Robert Kaplan’s “Imperial Grunts” . . . the story of the American military . . . an astonishing group of extraordinarily capable men and women who indeed are protecting the peace and preserving liberties -- and that is a reason for optimism.
I would also recommend the book that President Bush recommended . . . “The Case for Democracy” by Mr. Sharansky . . . It’s why the Bush Doctrine is . . . the only opportunity we have, the only rational choice, which is what Bernard Lewis said in Newport Beach Temple where I went to hear him a few weeks ago: either we will bring them freedom, or they will kill us . . . and he is right.
And finally one other book -- “Alone,” which is the story of the Thirties, the story of Winston Churchill by William Manchester -- the story of how Churchill never stopped doing one thing, which was say listen to what Hitler is saying, take him seriously, he means what he says and you cannot negotiate with him. It took a very long time and an extraordinarily terrible loss in history, for people to believe Churchill. . . .
Recently our friends at MEMRII put out a pamphlet “The Doctrine of Mahdism” and . . . I recommend you download it. It is the ideology of Mesbah-e Yazdi and Ahmadinejad. And people need to know that unlike the Thirties, horrible as they were, the next nut who gets their hands on weapons and begins offensive war is not going to have four and five years to roll out their divisions. It will be a flash of light . . . There is no Atlantic fortress to come to the rescue. . . .
That’s what we have to tell the American people repeatedly from now until November 2008. And it may not be until Election Day that we discover that they indeed were listening.
Yes, one person can make a difference in the war against Islamic fanatics. Read Shannen Rossmiller's full account of what she has done. Excerpt:
More than five years after 9-11, a growing number of terrorist movements harness the Internet and employ technology in their fight against the West. However, as Jarret Brachman, director of research for the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy, points out, "It is the strategic—not operational—objectives of the jihadi movement's use of technology that engenders the most enduring and lethal threat to the United States over the long term." He argues, "If Western governments made reading the online statements posted by Al-Qaeda ideologues a priority, they would better realize how the jihadi movement is not simply using technological tools to recruit new members, receive donations, and plan attacks. In actuality, Al-Qaeda's use of the Internet and other new technologies has also enabled it to radicalize and empower armies of new recruits by shaping their general worldview."[13]
The process that I started in early 2002 would eventually become a template for the government in the new and developing field of fighting terrorism online called "cyber-counterintelligence." It would be counterproductive, though, to ongoing investigations to comment further on the institutionalization of the field or its sources and methods.
Yet my efforts have been worth the personal sacrifice. After hundreds of cases, I continue to challenge myself to outthink and outmaneuver the terror enemy—by forging new and untested methods in the field of cyber-counterintelligence to always gain the upper hand in an operation. Whenever I set out to ensnare any terrorist operative or group, I always have one main motivating factor in sight: Simply said, I cannot and will not ever forget the painful memory of 9-11 and the death and destruction brought to bear upon the United States and the world.
If we are to defeat Al-Qaeda and all it encompasses, governments need to develop a better understanding of the ways Al-Qaeda and its affiliates use the Internet and technology. Intelligence agencies must be allowed to "think outside the box" and incorporate creative strategies that allow them to anticipate where the terrorist movements might next carve their path on the Internet. Western governments lag behind in Internet cyber-warfare with Al-Qaeda. If they do not catch up, they will not gain the upper hand in the war on terror.
HEADQUARTERS
MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE - IRAQ
BAGHDAD, IRAQ
APO AE 09342-1400
10 May 2007
Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving in Multi-National Force-Iraq:
Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we - not our enemies - occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. Al Qaeda's indiscriminate attacks, for example, have finally started to turn a substantial proportion of the Iraqi population against it.
In view of this, I was concerned by the results of a recently released survey conducted last fall in Iraq that revealed an apparent unwillingness on the part of some US personnel to report illegal actions taken by fellow members of their units. The study also indicated that a small percentage of those surveyed may have mistreated noncombatants. This survey should spur reflection on our conduct in combat.
I fully appreciate the emotions that one experiences in Iraq. I also know firsthand the bonds between members of the "brotherhood of the close fight." Seeing a fellow trooper killed by a barbaric enemy can spark frustration, anger, and a desire for immediate revenge. As hard as it might be, however, we must not let these emotions lead us - or our comrades in arms - to commit hasty, illegal actions. In the event that we witness or hear of such actions, we must not let our bonds prevent us from speaking up.
Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone "talk;" however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual (2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.
We are, indeed, warriors. We train to kill our enemies. We are engaged in combat, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly, and we must be violent at times. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight, however, is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings. Stress caused by lengthy deployments and combat is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign that we are human. If you feel such stress, do not hesitate to talk to your chain of command, your chaplain, or a medical expert.
We should use the survey results to renew our commitment to the values and standards that make us who we are and to spur re-examination of these issues. Leaders, in particular, need to discuss these issues with their troopers - and, as always, they need to set the right example and strive to ensure proper conduct. We should never underestimate the importance of good leadership and the difference it can make.
Thanks for what you continue to do. It is an honor to serve with each of you.
David H. Petraeus
General, United States Army
Commanding
[Petraeus] [Iraq] [war on terror] [torture] [values]
There's an excellent editorial in Investors' Business Daily. Here's the chilling end:
After so many decapitations — of Westerners and insufficiently fanatical Muslims — and bombings targeting children, we should have a grasp of how evil the enemy bent on destroying us is.
In case we don't, former Green Beret and independent journalist Michael Yon recently provided a blood-curdling reminder, relayed to him by an Iraqi official describing al-Qaida's takeover of a city northeast of Baghdad:
"On a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al-Qaida invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old . . . at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat.
"And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al-Qaida served the boy to his family."
As the president [Bush] has said many times, "It's important to defeat the enemy overseas so we do not have to face them here at home." Here at home — where they will murder us, and our children, in those same savage ways.
Little Green Footballs has posted the disturbing documentary from UK Channel 4 on the growing anti-Semitism in Britain. Check it out here.
[Britain] [Jews][anti-Semitism][Israel][Channel 4]
I just read an item about Polish soldiers helping children with kite flying in Afghanistan. It brought back memories of a great book I read a couple of years ago: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a beautifully written novel about friendship, secrets, betrayal and redemption.
Poland Afghanistan kite Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
A city court in Erlangen, Bavaria, gave Lutheran Pastor Johannes Lerle a one year jail sentence for comparing the annual abortion of 150,000 babies in Germany to the Holocaust. The single judge ruled that Lerle was a holocaust denier.
[abortion][Germany][Lerle][Holocaust]
The tragedy of the current debate in Washington is that while the inarticulateness and the failing performance of the Bush administration have led the American people to desire a new direction, the politics of the left insists that the new direction be less than President Bush. Yet the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Jersey, the JFK plot, the Algerian bombings, the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Lebanon and now the defeat in Gaza all point to the need for a war policy that is substantially bigger and more robust than Mr. Bush.Read it all here.
As the forces of modernity are being ground up by terrorism, our political process is not producing a Churchill or Roosevelt to rally the democracies but instead embracing advocates of surrender withdrawal and defeat. As women are being oppressed, we remain silent. Faced with the weakness, vacillation and inarticulateness of the leaders of Israel and America, the people see the violence as senseless, the bloodshed as repugnant and the current strategies as too flawed to continue to invest in them.
Gaza is the most recent example of where Western failure of imagination is being defeated by ruthlessness and determination.
...
The West will sooner or later have to confront several hard realities if it is to defeat its enemies.
First, terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah will have to be rooted out and destroyed. We do not today have the strategy, the doctrine or the techniques for defeating these kinds of organizations. In Iraq, after more than four years of effort, our current doctrine for population control and for effective local policing and intelligence is pathetic. To defeat ferocious committed and enthusiastically violent organizations like al Qaeda and the Taliban will take new energy, new drive and new determination on our part.
Second, the indirect strategies of propping up corrupt dictatorships have to give way to direct people-to-people help, securing private-property rights and direct financial assistance so we can improve their families' lives and they can be empowered to defend their neighborhoods from evil men. Hernando de Soto will be vastly more effective in designing this than all the bureaucrats at AID and the United Nations combined.
Third, the U.N. camp system of socialism with unearned anti-humanitarian charity has to be replaced with a totally new system of earned income and earned property rights to restore dignity and hope to every Palestinian.
Fourth, the current system of schools under both Fatah and Hamas control have to be replaced in their entirety with a system dedicated to genuine education and to teaching human rights rather than jihad and hatred.
Lastly, mosques can no longer be allowed to preach hatred and violence. The de-Nazification that seemed obvious in Germany in 1945 will have to be matched by a dehatred campaign today. The haters have to be defeated, disarmed and detained if the forces of peace and freedom are to win.
Mark Steyn's take on what's happening in the US with the proposed immigration bill:
There's something creepy about a political class so determined to impose a vast transformative bill cooked up backstage in metaphorically smoke-filled rooms on a nation that doesn't want it. It's an affront to republican government and quasi-European in its disdain for the citizenry. It's hard to imagine Senator Trenthorn Lotthorn as an EU Commissioner but his position on this immigration bill is basically the same as that of Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and European "president", on the EU constitution. When asked what difference the referendum result in France would make, "President" Juncker replied:[immigration] [US] [EU] [Europe] [political class] [bipartisanship] [amnesty][Juncker][constitution]
If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue’.
Same with the immigration bill. I think I say somewhere in my book that the first line of the European constitution is: "We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people." That suits the US Senate, too. They'll teach this one as a textbook definition of "bipartisanship": both parties gang up on the electorate.
We are seeing here today but another manifestation of the bitter anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish hatred which animates Arab society. Who would have believed that in this year, 1975, the malicious falsehoods of the “Elders of Zion” would be distributed officially by Arab governments? Who would have believed that we would today contemplate an Arab society which teaches the vilest anti-Jewish hate in the kindergartens?… We are being attacked by a society which is motivated by the most extreme form of racism known in the world today. This is the racism which was expressed so succinctly in the words of the leader of the PLO, Yassir Arafat, in his opening address at a symposium in Tripoli, Libya: “There will be no presence in the region other than the Arab presence….” In other words, in the Middle East from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf only one presence is allowed, and that is Arab presence. No other people, regardless of how deep are its roots in the region, is to be permitted to enjoy its right to self-determination.Read the entire speech by Chaim Herzog, former President of Israel and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN. here
Via Israpundit:
[Ambassador John] Bolton...was witheringly critical of the ongoing diplomatic contacts with Teheran, which he said were merely playing into the hands of the regime.
“The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous,” he said. “Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time…
“We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily,” he complained. “Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade… We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited.”
Bolton said flatly that “diplomacy and sanctions have failed… [So] we have to look at: 1, overthrowing the regime and getting in a new one that won’t pursue nuclear weapons; 2, a last-resort use of force.”
Murat Kurnaz is the new darling of the German mainstream media, because he is able to generate as much anti-American sentiments as needed to keep the mainstream media happy.
Read John Rosenthal's fascinating account of this former Guantanamo (Gitmo) resident.It is possible that Kurnaz is indeed, as Cmdr. Gordon suggests, playing by the al-Qaida playbook. But it is equally possible that he is playing rather to the German gallery: saying what his German handlers and interviewers -- and apparently some significant part of the German public -- want to hear. How else is one to explain the following bizarre nugget from the ZDF report as narrated by Felicitas von Twickel?: "Perfidious American soldiers [in Guantanamo] threaten to do to the Bremen-born Turk what the Nazis did to the Jews." Is it really plausible that it would occur to an American soldier to say such a thing? Or is this rather deliberately concocted balm for the German soul: encouraging the German public to draw forced analogies between wildly disparate historical events and thereby to diminish the enormity of the crimes for which Germany itself owes its sad renown?
The UK Telegraph reports that while blueberries are unlikely to cure Alzheimers, they "may provide a way to prevent, slow down or reduce the impact of such illnesses which affect the mental abilities but not the physical health of sufferers."
[blueberries] [blueberry] [Alzheimer] [mind] [mental] [abilities] [health] [memory]
Regarding "Reverend" Redding:
The female Episcopalian priest’s "story illustrates that the split in the Episcopal Church isn’t about homosexuality, as the media says. The former Episcopal parishes aligning themselves with African bishops aren’t leaving a denomination with gay clergy; they are leaving a denomination with non-Christian clergy.Read the more about this here.
Redding is simply an extreme example in the Episcopal Church. But sadly she represents the widespread, politically correct belief that all religions lead to the same place—a message which is not only dead wrong as a matter of logic, but one which denies Christ. In short, it is the ultimate heresy.
Chavez of Venezuela calls soldiers to prepare for guerrilla-style warfare against the United States.
[Chavez] [Venezuela] [demagoguery]
Former President of Poland, Lech Walesa, was honored by Peru's President, Alan Garcia.
This is what President Walesa had to say about Venezuela's Chavez, as reported by El Universal:
I believe Chávez is a huge demagogue and populist who says one thing and does a quite different thing. He likes giving away what does not belong to him and tries to take advantage of people's dissatisfaction," he added.[Poland] [Walesa][Peru][Garcia][Venezuela][Chavez]
"So far he has been successful, but the time of truth shall come and he will have to pay for what he has done," Walesa added.
Opinion Journal has a great interview with Mario Vargas Llosa.
"...in a dictatorship, wouldn't literature be censored as well? "In undeveloped countries, censorship doesn't reach that point of subtlety, as it did in Spain for example," Mr. Vargas Llosa explains. "Because in undeveloped countries, the dictators are, well, functioning illiterates that don't think that literature can be dangerous."[Mario Vargas Llosa] [Chavez] [dictator] [venezuela]
Caveat Emptor:
China, a traditional source of cheap goods, has become an alarmingly top exporter of tainted and dangerous products to the United States, triggering concerns among consumers and regulators.Read the rest of it here.
Reports of tainted pet foods, dangerous toys, fake drugs, toxin-coated monkfish and cosmetics, drug-laced frozen eel, illicit pesticide-laden mushrooms and other products have led to recalls and bans and potentially more stringent import and food safety laws.
Thousands of cats and dogs died recently after eating food made from wheat gluten spiked with melamine, a chemical used in fertilizers, prompting one of the largest pet-food recalls in US history. Made-in-China toothpaste have also been blacklisted, fearing it may contain a potentially deadly chemical reportedly found in tubes sold in Australia and elsewhere.
The concerns were compounded by the recall last week by a US company of 1.5 million of the wildly popular "Thomas and Friends" wooden train toys manufactured in China coated with potentially poisonous lead paint. Chinese-made fireworks for the July 4 US Independence Day celebrations have also made it onto the blacklist, with reports that at least two types of such explosives have been recalled amid worries they could "travel in unexpected and dangerous directions" and pose "special hazards to eyes and bystanders." "I think we have reached a point unfortunately where 'made in China' is now a warning label in the United States," said Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, a top campaigner in the US Congress for tighter food safety laws.
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