The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”. In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”…A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security…Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist –- we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”
For what it’s worth, nineteen audio cassettes of Abu Qatada’s sermons were found in the apartment of one Mohamed Atta some years back.
The US lost a security council vote on Syria. Russia has a Syrian naval base, among its many other ties to the Assad regime, so it was going to veto the measure all along. China opposed the resolution against Iran’s ally for reasons of its own. And the US response to all this was to complain about being held hostage. We fail to understand what purpose is served by the US losing a diplomatic battle so publicly and then whining about it. Please explain.
CNN reports on the Vetters getting on a train in Charlotte, NC:
they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…
The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.
To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…
Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…
A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense
Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!
Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America’…Despite telling officials the term ‘destroy’ was British slang for ‘party’, they were held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes’ and had their passports confiscated…
Leigh was also quizzed about another tweet which quoted hit US comedy Family Guy which read: ’3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up! Federal agents even searched his suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming Emily was planning to act as Leigh’s ‘look out’ while he raided Marilyn’s tomb.
Bar manager Leigh, from Coventry, and Emily, 24, from Birmingham, were then quizzed for five hours at LAX before they were handcuffed and put into a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight. They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells…’They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. ‘I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.
Leigh’s charge sheet, alongside a police mug shot and finger print, added: ‘He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.’
A modest lede from CBS: “A military judge has recommended no time in confinement for a Marine sergeant.” The underlying story can’t have been such a big deal, but then why then did it take seven years to adjudicate? (Bruce Kesler has been covering this story since it began so long ago in 2005. It looked pretty fishy to us too, way back when.) Again, why such a long time to get to a conclusion? Among other things, a US congressman went on the record in November 2005: “they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” And the clock began to tick.
the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas….Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.
Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.
Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.
Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.
This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes…
In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.
The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.
The Post offers no explanation for the litany of failures it cites. Remarkable enough that a Democrat wrote the piece. We’ll leave it to VDH to provide a rationale: “American foreign policy is now becoming an extension not of classically liberal values, but of progressive suspicions of constitutional government, capitalism, and the historical role of the United States in particular and the West in general. The bowing to foreign potentates, the sad historical fabrications in the Cairo speech, the self-serving nonsense that arose in the first Al-Arabiya interview, and the so-called ‘apology tour’ were simply superficial manifestations of a deeper ambiguity about America.” He’s being charitable.
it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting…as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.
Flashback: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”
The drawdown is not occurring in a vacuum, but is the bookend of a loud new ‘reset’ / ‘lead from behind’ strategy that deprecates traditional allies like Britain and Israel while failing miserably in outreach to supposedly new neutrals like Syria and Iran — all in a landscape of bowing, apologizing, and Cairo speechifying. All of these developments serve as force multipliers to the military retrenchment and confirm the impression of our enemies that the world is now entirely negotiable in a way not true four years ago.
The unspoken irony is that the military and our anti-terrorism protocols served Obama well when he arrived: he found a quiet Iraq with almost no monthly American casualties, a decimated al Qaeda (largely destroyed in Iraq), anti-terrorism measures that had foiled over 30 plots against the mainland (and were all demagogued by candidate Obama before President Obama embraced them), major powers like China, Russia, and Iran wary of pressing the U.S., allies like Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and South Korea secure under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and the most seasoned and experienced U.S. military in generations…
The new $500 billion cuts must be considered against the nearly $5 trillion Obama has borrowed since assuming office, in addition to what he will borrow this next year. A defense budget that was tolerable prior to 2008 becomes apparently unsustainable with expenditures for Obamacare, vast new green projects like Solyndra, expansions in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and vast increases in the size of the non-military federal government. At least with the military our money earns safety and deterrence
The college professor continues his work. It’s as though the country elected not Jimmy Carter, but George McGovern. In any event the choice couldn’t be clearer this year. An America that might choose a McGovern administration is both unfathomable to us and, sadly, possible.
The Guardian’s front-page headline this morning was ‘NHS cuts have affected patient care say four out of five doctors’. So just how severe are these ‘cuts’? Ten per cent of the budget? Five? Here are the official figures from the Department of Health. At a time when other ministries are indeed under pressure, spending on the NHS will continue to grow year on year throughout the parliament – as it has almost uninterruptedly since 1948. Expenditure will rise from £103.8 billion to £114.4 billion in 2015. It’s true that, once inflation is factored in, the increase is slight – around 0.4 per cent. It’s true, too, that there is a reallocation of funds within that budget from administration to the actual provision of healthcare. Still, in no system of mathematics does this represent a ‘cut’. What, then, is the Guardian talking about? Read far enough and you’ll see that the whole story is based an online survey of, er, 664 self-selected respondents
Consider the New York Times’ coverage, as reported by Adam Nossiter, in an article titled “Nigerian Group Escalates Violence With Church Attacks”: The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…
This sentence is fraught with problems. For starters, Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Considering that just last Christmas Eve, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing nearly 40 Christian worshippers, the New York Times’ characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only unconscionable, but unprofessional.
Boko Haram — whose full name in Arabic is “People of Sunna for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad [Holy War]” — has, for a decade, been representing a very “religion-tinged front,” that is, an Islamic front, one that is hostile to all things non-Muslim, with Christians at the very top. In just the last couple of months, Boko Haram has carried out attacks on dozens of other churches, bombing some, torching others. In one instance, they opened fire on a congregation of mostly women and children, killing dozens; they executed two children of an ex-terrorist because he converted to Christianity
A cut is properly defined as an inadequate increase. A clear religious-political strategy of violence is properly defined an unfortunate religion-tinged tactic that might result in some random man-caused disasters. What about clear writing don’t these whiners understand?
Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.
Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline, and some villages will simply disappear.”
If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: it’s run out of other people, period…
In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple – or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.”
In China and India, the birthrate of boys to girls is as high as the unnatural ratio of 1.2-to-1, a formula for mischief up to and including war. So Western Europe is broke and disappearing, and the two largest countries on the planet are overdosing on testosterone. We don’t know what this adds up to, but it doesn’t look too good.
Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted…
In 1258, the Mongols burned the immense library in Baghdad known as the “House of Wisdom.” It held rare writings that have disappeared forever, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the other cornerstones of Western civilization. All we know today is that these books existed, yet following the terrible fire in Baghdad they were burned forever. The Mongols sought to secure the same objective as Egypt’s Salafis: Erasing the past and keeping only their present.
Earlier this year: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Yeah, right.
The above is a “path to renewal” that “inspires” Americans to a new beginning? Really? (We’ve explained in some detail that, romantic illusions of the media notwithstanding, OWS is unlike the pragmatic anti-draft protests of the sixties that covered themselves in fancy talk if only to hide the naked self interest of many of the protesters.) Still, OWS does have its creative moments, and the Meow Chant seems to be one of them.
One, Two, Three is airing on TCM. It stars James Cagney as a Coca Cola executive in Berlin just prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall. It’s hilarious if you are of a certain age, and it caricatures both America and the Soviet bloc well. After about an hour of watching it, we became aware of its shortcoming: the East Germans are all funny. The movie was made in a free country, and it makes light of the terrible reality of living in a the Societ bloc where making such a satire would be punishable by a long prison sentence. The central fact of the movie is that Billy Wilder never could have made it on the wrong side of the Brandenburg Gate.
Remember that really strange bit about the US needing a “civilian national security force” from the 2008 campaign? It was supposed to be just as strong and well-funded as the military. The idea was both disturbing and bizarre. Of course the press didn’t follow up on it. (What if Rick Perry or Herman Cain had said it?) Well, all of a sudden we have a civilian volunteer movement today. It is composed of buffoons, criminals, the deranged and the addicted, and is led by community organizers and other professional troublemakers. Maybe that is the fulfillment of a campaign promise and dream. If so, we may have skipped the tragedy bit and gone straight to the farce. It’s unlikely, but here’s hoping!
In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. There they sat, eight of them, feet tied so they could not move, quivering with fear as they were beheaded one by one. As soldiers fired rifles in the air, members of the cheering crowd held up the severed heads as trophies. They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. But away from the square, the birthplace of the revolution was not in party mood. The streets were fairly quiet. And in the cafes, people were watching TV pictures -– more graphic than any shown in Britain –- of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head. The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull.
We’ve heard OWS compared to the anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies. Let’s revisit a little bit of history from that earlier time to see whether the comparison is apt. As you know, the Vietnam War was a decade long conflict in which over 2.5 million Americans served, and 58,000 Americans died. Vietnam era draftees numbered 1.7 million (and they accounted for 30% of deaths in Vietnam).
From the early days of the Vietnam War, there was a small anti-war movement, perhaps similar in size to the small groups that today gather in public parks in various cities. It included some people sincerely troubled by the war, but as David Horowitz said, it was led by “Marxists and radicals who supported a communist victory.” Until 1967, the Vietnam anti-war movement was something of a sideshow. After that it began to grow significantly in numbers and organization, as a result of changes in the draft. The growth of the Vietnam anti-war movement was in large measure grounded in self-interest; a lot of college students didn’t want to go into the military after they graduated.
The protest movement became intense only after the draft expanded substantially in the young adult population (first to 29,000 a month and then to 42,000 a month by spring 1968), and after the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1967. That Act made it more difficult to get a draft deferment, and in fact created the violent and intense war protests at prestigious institutions, since it cancelled graduate school deferments, beginning with the fall 1968 student year. That gave rise to the takeovers at Columbia and elsewhere, and led to the huge marches on Washington and other protests. There is no similar catalyst for OWS.
As contemporaneous reporting in the Harvard Crimson demonstrated, the end of the deferments threw elite university students and professors into the frenzy of sit-ins, takeovers, and demostrations that began in 1968. The students were given cover by the biggest of big guns in the media, Walter Cronkite. He said in February 1968 that it was “increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Who’d want to sign up for Cronkite’s version of the war?
So, despite rhetoric that claimed all sorts of moral high ground, a lot of the protesters simply wanted not to get drafted. You can agree or disagree with that sentiment, but it is clear from the numbers that many of the young people had a simple objective. It was realized in 1973 when the US ended the draft.
By contrast, what specific thing do the OWS people want? Mark Steyn’s guess is that “the ‘Occupy’ movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment…One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in ‘environmental restoration.’ Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.” Since there is no clear demand for anything, the demands of this tiny group, such as they are, can never be satisfied. It’s hard to see what increased volume and hooliganism can lead to other than bad outcomes. (Jeff at Protein Wisdom says that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)
Final point. It’s worth noting that while the mostly young protesters were pursuing their anti-draft goals forty years ago, the oldsters weren’t taking things lying down. Things didn’t out so well for George McGovern in 1972, though he did carry Massachusetts. So what’s the administration’s secret plan to avoid another disaster next year like the one they had last year?
In New Haven jury selection at the trial of Bobby Seale had started. There was a mass Mayday demonstration. Jean Genet, Benjamin Spock, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, William Kunstler and others spoke and yelled. Jerry Rubin took the prize for leading a chant about Yale’s President. It went: F*** Kingston Brewer! At night, National Guardsmen lined the streets and tear gas filled the Old Campus. Somewhere close by, Allen Ginsburg chanted something, possibly Howl, over an echoing sound system.
Things went from bad to worse in the period of October to May back then, even before Kent State. We note that it was not just the kids. You see all the adults above who climbed aboard the Mayday Revolution to oppose Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and many other things. Even more than that, it’s our opinion that the student strike at Yale that May never would have happened had not the faculty taken a vote encouraging the students to strike. What role will university faculties take this time around? Will 2011-2012 resemble 1969-1970?
Final point: by November of 1970, according to Kingman Brewster, an “eerie tranquility” had descended on college campuses. This was said to have been brought about by a “drought in the job market, disenchantment with political protest, and scorn for established authority.” Fast forward: November 2012 can’t come soon enough.
A heretofore secret cable dated Sept. 3, 2009, was recently released by WikiLeaks. Sent to Secretary of State Clinton, it reported Japan’s Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling U.S. Ambassador John Roos that “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘nonstarter.’”
Tom Friedman in the NYT some months back: “to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Note: the author of that comment called Rick Santelli an idiot on CNBC. (For those of you who don’t understand the photo, read this)
