Jeremayakovka

An American In Israel During The War In Gaza

Fred Siegel of the Progressive Policy Institute and notable contributor to City Journal (whom NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez calls "a prince of a guy") remarks about time he spent in Israel during the Jewish State's offensive against Hamas.

From the TELOSscope Blog:

The (2005) withdrawal from Gaza had produced a new moral clarity. And the Hamas coup against Fatah meant that there was no ambiguity about the options at hand to halt the rocket fire. The BBC, which had usually been taken seriously by Israeli doves, was mocked for talking about how Hamas had come to power democratically.

* * *

Fred btw was never fooled by Barack Obama -- whom he termed "an extraordinary performance artist" -- as this piece from a year ago attests:

(Obama's record) appeals to Ted and Caroline Kennedy and the aging MoveOn.org boomers who have long nursed hopes for a renewal of Camelot. But now as then, a charismatic political personality carries more dangers than benefits. The “politics of meaning,” which emerged from the Kennedy years and has now resurfaced with Obama as its empty vessel of hope, is doomed to disappoint because it asks more from politics than politics can deliver.... The banality of Obama’s campaign is exceeded only by his unwillingness to challenge liberal orthodoxy.... It’s when Obama tries to show that he can also be tough that he most fully reveals his limitations....

"Why We Hear The Muslim World All Too Well"

Not Barry Obama, unfortunately. Instead, Professor Barry Rubin.
(posted with permission)

Why We Hear the Muslim World All Too Well

Message to New York Times: Read your own op-ed page.

The Times and other American media and educational institutions are giving increasing amounts of space to people from the Moslem-majority and Arabic-speaking states in the apparent hope of understanding better their world view. Sometimes, however, they have a hard time hearing what is being said.

Here is what the newspaper’s editorial for February 8 claims and urges:

“We don't know if there is any mixture of incentives or sanctions that can wean Iran of its nuclear ambitions. But we are certain that the Bush administration never tried to find it. This means not only direct talks, but also far more persuasive diplomatic incentives, including a credible offer of improved relations and security guarantees.”

And this, of course, is what the Obama administration is going to do with Iran and Syria. Others urge the same techniques are applies to Hamas, Hizballah, and even—though this is rarer—the Taliban and al-Qaida.

But to understand why this belief is so misguided one merely need read…the Times of February 8, within inches of the above-quoted editorial.

I’m referring here to the truly shocking op-ed by Alaa al Aswany entitled, “Why the Muslim World Can’t Hear Obama.”

A better title would be, “Why the Muslim World Won’t Hear Obama.”

The piece is overlong, convoluted, and not particularly well written. It should be noted that the author, a novelist among other things, is considered a moderate.

Alas, for moderation in the Arab world.

There are two themes: the one against Israel and the one against Arab governments. Because these have not been resolved, the author says, all of President Obama’s apologies and efforts are a big yawn.

So what would the author—and presumably all the Arabs and Muslims—want Obama and America to do? Well, to put it briefly, help overthrow all the Arab governments and help wipe Israel off the map.

I wrote the above sentence in a particularly blunt way but it really does not exaggerate the message here.

First of all, Egypt and other Arab states are dictatorships: “Here in Egypt, we don't have previous or future presidents, only the present head of state who seized power through sham elections and keeps it by force, and who will probably remain in power until the end of his days.”

Wait a minute, though! Remember the last president of the United States, the one who pushed for democracy and criticized the governmental systems? The Arab world didn’t seem too thrilled about him. Egyptian intellectuals screamed this was imperialist interference in internal affairs and so on. So after all those years of bashing Bush for—rightly or wrongly—proposing dictatorships be replaced with democracy are we to believe that they will now bash Obama for proposing to work with the existing regimes?

This, of course, is an unsolvable problem. Whatever the United States does here is going to be wrong. There is no way America can please Iran. Well, I take that back. If America helps it overthrow all those bad Arab dictatorships and replace them with Islamist regimes then Iran will probably be happy.

And Alaa al Aswany will be able to read the Times more easily, as a political refugee living in New York.

Then there’s point two:

“We expected him to address the reports that the Israeli military illegally used white phosphorus against the people of Gaza. We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth:
the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.”

Regarding “essential truth,” isn’t the Times supposed to publish things that are factually correct? Israel has already been cleared of the phony white phosphorus charge. So why is this article allowed to repeat it? Here is indeed a lesson: people in the Arab world often lie about you. No matter what you do, how much aid you give, how many concessions you offer or implement, it will be said: you didn’t do anything. Give more. Pay more. Apologize more. Change more.

But perhaps the most important and chilling sentence of the op-ed is this, and if people were paying attention to such things nowadays they would be thoroughly shocked:

“We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.”

What are the implications of this sentence: that the United States should endorse terrorism and violence in at least three conflicts. According to the terrorist forces, Afghanistan and Iraq are under foreign occupation. If Obama was to do as suggested, he would be backing attacks not only on civilians and governments there but also the killing of American soldiers.

As for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, south Lebanon, and much of the West Bank and still faces attacks. In 2000, Israel proposed to make peace based on a two-state solution with a Palestinian state having its capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian side turned it down.

Since Hamas and other radical forces assert that Israel is an occupying power, attacking it—which includes firing rockets at civilian targets—is legitimate. Moreover, if there is any occupation left, it is due to the political strategy of the Palestinian Authority in rejecting a political solution.

Yet that is far from the entire problem here. For much or most of the Muslim and Arab world views all of Israel as “occupied territory.” The only way for occupation to end is for Israel to end. The author here does not make clear what land is being discussed, though the op-ed easily could have limited the territory in question to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem. Have no doubt how most Muslims and Arabs read the phrase about occupied territory: Obama must abandon Israel altogether.

So how can Obama appease or please the Muslim-majority world? We are told by this moderate: by backing the right of Hamas and Hizballah to attack Israel.

This, then, is the supposed moderate position, the minimum way by which Obama can make friends in the region. Clearly, the author here doesn’t speak for everyone. Certainly the relatively moderate Arab regimes and their supporters want more U.S. support for themselves.

Yet there is much truth in this article’s stance. The only way for America to “win over” this public opinion and the radical groups is to surrender to them or join them. President Obama and editors of the Times, please hear what you are being told here, and despair of ever satisfying such enormous and dangerous demands by some combination of charm and concessions.

#  #  #

Thank Israeli Soldiers

Click here to say Thank You to the most moral military force in the world. Thank you, Israeli soldiers for doing the hard work most of the rest of the world refuses to do: defending the Jewish people and combating Islamic and Arab aggression head-on.

Global Caliphate Forces Anticipate, Interpret Obama's First Iraq Moves

From the Islamic Republic of Iran's Press TV: Taji Mustafa of the international, pro-global caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir Party of the United Kingdom (!) is trying to cool somebody's jets in this recent, post-American election commentary.

Says Mustafa: Barack Obama is not Vladimir Lenin. He's not a revolutionary who has come with a new system to Washington DC, planning to overthrow the current system and turn everything upside-down.

Who? What rabble? To what revolutionary squads, cadres, kooks, and thugs is Mustafa speaking?

Thankfully, Jamie Kirchick  articulated the pro-American perspective. Note very well, in the final minutes, the confrontation between Kirchick and Mustafa. Kirchick, whom I respect for going on camera there, was way too polite (calling him, "Sir") - he should have tore Mustafa's (rhetorical) head off and spit his (rhetorical) brains into the camera....

(H/T Jamie)

Warrior Whitman

In war [the poet] is the most deadly force of the war.
-- Walt Whitman

George W. Bush, Dark Knight

See Fausta's comments on the current summer blockbuster (with links).

* * *

Update: Brightening a summer San Francisco evening (note the turtleneck), Fausta and I met for the first time after her recent area appearance at the BlogHer Conference.

"Terrorists Must Be Treated Inhumanely"

Steven Plaut spits it out.

Update (07/29): Pamela jumps the shark to feed the crocodile: We cannot worry about what the world thinks about us; we have to protect our own people.

Joe Lieberman - The Last Vestige of Liberal Manhood in the U.S. Senate

While the media fans tensions over Jesse Jackson's subpar "cut [Obama's] nuts off" comment, here's footage of the last man standing among Democratic Senators. Joe Lieberman lays out the case for investigating, at the highest levels of government, enemy, jihadist Muslim cells active within the United States. The facts speak for themselves: in our time Islamic terror is "home grown," it is often engineered by fanatics who enjoy citizenship of the countries they seek to terrorize and destabilize, it is spreading rapidly in American prisons, and UK intelligence services have discovered over 200 such cells in their country. Joe tells the truth about the times we live in. He'd make a great vice president.

.

Here's the trailer from an "oppo" documentary being made by Stalinist Democrats who want to complete the purge of Senator Lieberman -- an otherwise liberal legislator -- strictly because he is committed to a strong military offensive strategy in Iraq, against Iran, against Hamas, and wherever else it may be necessary:

Lieberman endorses John McCain for president:

Israel, Heart of the Middle East

Golda Meir's famous precis of what fuels the Arabs' war against Israel is vindicated in this current English-language Muslim news article. As Meir once said, Peace will come when Arabs love their children more than they hate Jews.

But until then....

There are eleven Iraqi children being treated in Israel, sponsored by Save a Child's Heart (SACH) [link provided by JMK, not Islam Online - but, of course], a humanitarian organization founded in Israel in 1996 and supported by Christian charity groups.Some parents still fear the stigma of being treated in Israel. Mustafa, 4, has undergone two heart operations in Israel in six months.

"My only fear, which spoils my joy at my son's escape from death, is the revenge my family can expect when we go back to Iraq," says his mother.

Other parents rule out any possibility of getting help from Israel.

"We've been foes of Israel since before we were born," Shatha, whose two-year-old baby Sara needs surgery for a defective heart valve, told The Times. She has turned down an offer to get her baby treated at the Edith Wolfson medical center in Israel.

"We firmly believe that they are our enemies. You can't change this overnight."

She is now planning to have the operation for little Sara performed in Algeria whose government has agreed to pay for 14 Iraqi children to be treated there rather than be sent to Israel.

Shatha's Kurdish friend has also rejected a similar offer of a free heart surgery for her son Ahmed in Israel.

"Now I can sleep with a clear conscience," she told The Times, requesting anonymity. "I'm able to hold my head up high and not be ashamed by having my son treated in Algeria."

Ed Koch - Liberal With Sanity

Found at Chaim's blog, Freedom's Cost:

Today, according to the most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, “71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as President, an all-time high in polling.” His position can be compared with that of Harry Truman who left Washington unpopular and alone in 1953. Today, with the passage of time, most historians and certainly the American people, see Truman in a different light, primarily for his willingness to stand firm against Soviet aggression, whether against Greece or South Korea, and proclaim the Truman Doctrine, effectively defending the free world from Soviet efforts to expand their hegemony. Like Truman, George W. Bush, in my view, will be seen as one of the few world leaders who recognized the danger of Islamic terrorism and was willing with Tony Blair to stand up to it and not capitulate.
-- Ed Koch

Arms and the Bogey-Man

You're going to get on that plane, Gentle Reader,
with Victor where you belong.








[Update: Just returned from the screening. Twice Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) wishes God's blessing on Rick (Bogart). Her character, of whom we learn nothing specifically religious, effortlessly and without fanfare says to Rick, "God bless you." Well, once she writes it, once she says it. Hmmm....]

This evening I'm going to watch for the (I don't know) fifth? eighth? time Casablanca (1942). Happily, it's playing on a single, giant screen in a landmark, palatial theatre that's just a hop & a skip from where I live. This'll be the second time I've seen it on a BIG SCREEN, the first being - mirabile visu! - with my gentle father at Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theatre. How to describe tonight's anticipation? It's like scoring home-field World Series tickets. But better.

Robert McKee has called it not the best movie of all time, but the most loved. No surprise there. Rarely does Hollywood's art bridge, simultaneously and seemingly seamlessly: the dreamworld of cinema ... masculine American romantic grit ... Europa's soft sensuality ... the waking dream of remembered love ... and the call to war's nightmare wakening.  In my mind it bookends neatly Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), the slower paced but equally beautiful (not black-and-white, more like ink-and-milk), equally dreamy long goodbye to a world pushed aside by war, but sustained by Love transmogrified into Duty and Duty transmogrified into Love.

(Warning: Do NOT watch the clip if you haven't yet seen the whole movie.)

Now And Zen Cohen

I have abdicated the throne
both the temporal and the spiritual
-- Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

[Welcome, readers referred by online muses, Fausta's Blog and Atlas Shrugs and Alarming News.]

.
Yesterday I read the bestselling collection of latter-day Leonard Cohen poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. Read it start-to-finish and in silence, the way it's intended, I sense. For one thing, the bulk of it was written inside a Zen monastery.... A daintier presenter will give readers leave to "pick and choose" through this 229-page volume, but Jeremayakovka does not advise that.

.
Leonard's longing is longer than any of the Book of Longing's 100-something individual compositions and 40-something drawings. The little works smolder in the ear and/or eye, bolder than quips or limericks yet shy of odes or elegies. Taken individually in short-footed, almost sing-song cadence, their form contradicts the pretended gravity of Leonard's notoriously heat- (and wet-) seeking flesh. Some of the Book of Longing's freshest moments are stringent admissions of his own, often priapic, aporias. Out of context they would rateas just an old man's dirty dunceries. Here they ring in deadpan, almost comic relief:

still looking / at the girls / but there are / no girls / none at all / there is only / (this'll kill ya) / inner peace / & harmony (p. 207)

.
Leonard is neither gone nor forgotten of course, but either state can turn inert. Neither guarantees a just appreciation. For "appreciation" without estimation is flattery; if not, it might render one vulnerable to flattery. One thing Leonard reminds by the Book of Longing is that he's always longed for order. Not an angelic order (his order being baser), but something closer to that of Rilke who elegized Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me out of the orders of the angels?

Still, the Canadian Jew is not as transcendent as his German predecessor. Leonard's verses (as Rilke's) do not scream so much as murmur, murmuring of the heart while filtering through feminine flesh. This order is, as it must be, of Leonard's own devising. The trick (and this is every artist's acid bath) is that it also be a calling, and that the calling, if it doesn't do the devising, then revises it.

.
Whatever may be Crooner Leonard's proven power, Poet Cohen writes at times in the baffled habit of the ex-monk. The habit fits too close for confidence as well as for comfort. Wrestling not with an angel, the ex-monk eats the embarrassment of having stumbled out of that order. His witness  is always to a kind of beauty. It's just that the witness is sometimes lowly and at most just short of holy. Or holy only inadvertently (see p. 207, above):

taxes / children / lost pussy / war / constipation // the living poet / in his harness / of beauty // offers the day / back to g-d (p. 175);

Anyone who says / I'm not a Jew / is not a Jew / I'm very sorry / but this decision / is final "Not a Jew" (p. 158)

.
--Hypocrite Leonard,--mon semblable,--mon frère!
--Mon vieux,--mon pauvre,--mon debonaire!
.

the road is too long / the sky is too vast / the wandering heart / is homeless at last (p. 215)
.

* * *
.

(p. 167)

* * *

For you, Gentle Reader. Verses I jotted, and worked, since opening the Book of Longing:
. 

Fanfare

My genius is an anchor
Grappling o'er the waves.
Hauled 'weigh by steaming Rancor
The calm seabed it craves.

.
This Birthmark On My Skin

Thinking about my father
Gets in the way of thinking
About the men I admire.
Which is how he thinks
About his father.

.
California Hotel #1

Having me put out of mind
Once inscribed I on your heart,
     Your inmost rind
     Is where they'll find
Your torrents bloodying my mark.
.

California Hotel #2

Come! Nibble at my rotted heart.
Speed your tongue along wormworn trails.
Pay no heed when the thing falls apart.
     Feed then, Liebe. Bitte,
     Feed on the frittered entrails.

.
Tenderloin Hotel #1

You know it is no casting chore
     to lick you by the bushel.
Just nod a knee to bid me more
     or sigh my first initial.
How tyrant Time tricks every whore.
     Dare you defy the benevolent official?
Go, then! Anoint your imperious store
     whose lounging supple diadem
     wrings reign o'er brittle thistle.
.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 9) - "The O-Bomb Threat"

.
The O-Bomb Threat

That prickly old pear Uncle Sam
In '45 finally proved, Yes, we can
Crush foe Jap and German.
FDR's war was finished by Truman
Who acknowledged the next one
By dropping A-bombs on Japan.

Times today are as hopeful as grim
When enemies without and within
Swoon for "change" adorned by Guevara.
This makes Uncle Sam wanna holler
O America -- I ain't yo' Mama!
As all 'round Obama fallout descends.
.

* * *

Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.

Happy Presidents' Day - "War, Pestilence, Famine"

Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate "war, pestilence, and famine" than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun. The history of the defeated rebel will be honorable hereafter, compared with that of the Northern man who aided him by conspiring against his government while protected by it. The most favorable posthumous history the stay- at-home traitor can hope for is -- oblivion.

-- from the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
(18th president of the United States)

Hillary: "Security Is Not Foremost On The Agenda"

At around :30 through:

During One of American Conservatism's - And The Republican Party's - Dimmest Hours, A Very Long View

Longtime conservatives will remember how by the mid-1970s their worldview's influence had become diminished. The order of the day included: a winnable war sabotaged by domestic radicalism... Republican presidents who pushed for big-government solutions at home and coexistence with the West's totalitarian enemies... and a rejuvenated and radicalized Democratic Party.

Some observations from that time about "the big picture":

Are the retreat and the decline of the West, then, and the weakening of the Western will, so far gone by now as to be irreversible? Certainly there are few signs of reversal, or of individuals, movements, or ideologies that might inspire a reversal. If modern liberalism is the ideology of Western decline and suicide, no ideology or doctrine of Western revival is visible.... The prelude to the Western decline was the Bolshevik revolution. The main action began with World War II, from which issued the division of Europe and the collapse of the Western dominated world structure. As the drama has relentlessly unfolded over that past generation, the brief ascendancy of the United States begins to appear as no more than an incidental subplot.

It is not that liberalism, with its innate historical masochism, is flourishing. On a global scale, the liberal hope for the universalization of the representative democratic governmental form with which liberalism is most naturally correlated, has proved a fantasy.... But a renewed conservative movement, incorporating beliefs and a program consonant with the epoch's issues, challenges, and perils, and able to rally a mass following, has not taken form and is not in sight: a Ronald Reagan might conceivably be elected president, but will not lead a resurgence of the West. The movements outside of the broad liberal-conservative spectrum that exhibit vigor and purpose aim at the destruction, not the renaissance of Western society.

-- James Burnham
from the Afterword to the Second Edition (1975) of The Suicide of the West

* * *

The cycles of American presidential elections have almost as little impact on the trend of Western civilization as the Earth's revolutions do on its orbits around the sun. As the Earth's revolutions are a result, not a cause, of its orbit, so it is tempting to think (not without some reason) that American presidential elections are the mere side effects of an entire civilization's downward trend. Post facto but pre mortem, as it were. Hence, emanating from both parties in 2008 the misty mantra of  "change"....

That's why thinking in terms of Romney vs. McCain or Hillary vs. Obama (and certainly McCain vs. Hillary) is, to some degree, incidental to the big picture. Also incidental is the Republican tendency to claim to identify who most resembles Ronald Reagan, a useful calculation, perhaps, but an ultimately futile task. Reagan's presidency defined his era truly, but the flesh and blood Reagan was, like all men, a man of his time. Only legends are for all time.

Western complacency during the aggressive ascent of Islamofascism showed during the administrations that succeeded his that Reagan did not divert darker currents that ran more deeply through his era. Like a river's relentless stream that beats on, then around, then past a squat rock lodged in that river's bed, the enervation of Western culture and values and amour-propre beat upon those individuals who, rock hard, upheld them, then and now.

Romney or McCain ... Hillary or Obama ... Democrat or Republican ... we are in for a very long, very hard haul. Thankfully, Burnham's message about the West's suicide came in the form of a book, not a note.

* * *

Meanwhile, a dispirited (and dispiriting) counterculture was knock-knock-knockin' on Heaven' s door.

And Hollywood warped "God Bless America" from uplifting hymn into a damp, dismal dirge (watch to the end).

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 8) - A Propos Of Bush's Middle East Tour

.
Pakistan

Paki "democracy" bears a pall
Devoted hands can scarce recall,
Tilling soil despoiled by th'assassin's brawl
When Reaper Grim made his Bhutto call.
.
.
Israel

J-town's in western Hamastan
Quds Auntie Condi and Uncle Sam
Took a humpty-dumpty in the Holy Land.
Ehud went south, Pa. Understand?
Ain't no more cunning in his right hand.
.
.
A Smiling Airman Foresees His Epitaph

Chanting, Amrikia's days are numbered!
Jihadis think I'm just a dumb bird.
Well, thirty years on I'll be a tombstone under.
It'll read, George W. Bush: One-Term Wonder.
.
.
* * *

Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.
.
(re #3 cf. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"; "Globaloney")
.

To The Shores of Tripoli - And The Strait of Hormuz

.
For the Navy and Coast Guard craft and crews patrolling dangerous waters in that part of the world, in light of these attempted provocations a remembrance of old-time valor. More on US Navy hero Stephen Decatur.

Show Us -- Not Your Tits, Hillary -- Show Us Your Blood!

(Update 12/31) Sen. Clinton, a candidate for the leadership of the free world, apparently doesn't know the first thing about the country referred to by some as "the most dangerous place on earth."

* * *

Benazir Bhutto becomes an unwilling (including far from perfect) martyr for representative democracy, and is it just me who thinks Ms. Rodham Clinton is out of tune with the day the Muslim music died?

If she had the right stuff, if she were a great leader waiting for History and not just a politician waiting for opportunity, Ms. Rodham Clinton would be making the Speech Of Her Life about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Muslim jihad, about the sanctity of the democratic process and women's eligibility for politics, about the savagery of the mortal enemies of freedoms we habitually take for granted, and about the shining moral, political, military compass that the United States of America is (or should be) to the entire world. She'd be making the Speech Of Her Life and the whole world would be watching. Instead of frigid heiress to the highest office she'd be an avenging Amazonian androgyne -- Jack Kennedy, Maggie Thatcher, and Athena rolled into one -- if Ms. Rodham Clinton had the right stuff.

But she doesn't, so she's not.

Instead she's calling for "an international, independent investigation" into the assassination. Yes, let's investigate al-Qaeda. That'll teach 'em! The leading Democratic presidential contender is a one-worlder machine pol who once a decade will wow a women's conference in an imperial capital, but ... chug upriver into the heart of History's darkness?

Not on your life -- and not on Benazir Bhutto's death.

In the wake of Bhutto's assassination every hour that passes without a great intervention by the woman being sold to the American electorate as a genius, as a compassionate heart, as a champion of children and the disadvantaged, etc. etc. is another reason why "Hillary" is indeed a brand name, is another reason why she's a cranky, overeducated, cuckolded White Hausfrau and not a majestic statesman.

On behalf of all prospective voters, I gotta say, Show us -- not your tits, Hillary -- show us your blood!

That's what Benazir did.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

Show us what you're made of, old gal. At this arresting moment in world history, we have a right to demand of The Woman Who Would Be Potent POTUS Over Us, What the hell flows through your veins? and What are you willing to do to prove it's for real?

While she's miscalculating an answer, waiting for a cooked up cue during a cardboard Q&A, I'm gonna cue up a little Tina ...

.
... then a little T & A.

.
Aside: Found at Andy Cooper's weblog, intellectual boytoy Reza Aslan speculates that the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein -- and Ms. Rodham Clinton's initial support for it -- led to Bhutto's assassination. Says who? Says Obama's people, says Aslan.

Related: Brando via Coppolla & Milius via Conrad, "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared." (scroll down)

Lisa Schriffen @ NRO on the USSR's long shadow over, MSM's "deathwatch" in the subcontinent.

The most pitched and informative takes on Bhutto, Paki politics rounded up by Pamela and Fausta.

Bhutto Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Who Remembered Pearl Harbor This Year?

Anita Bryant, for one. Here's a swell, down home benefit she put on last summer for remaining survivors of the USS Oklahoma (sunk Dec. 7, 1941). I blogged about it previously here.

Deb Schlussel recaps the MSM's "nary a peep" lack of commemoration.

* * *

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.

-- Edward Kuznetsov, 23 September 1971
(from inside a Soviet prison)

Pamela IS The Candle

Worthy of the first night of Hanukkah is Pamela's editorial "US: State Sponsor of Judeaphobia":

Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned Jew hatred. The Jew is contemptible, inferior, ignorant, politically, socially disenfranchised. Separate entrance ways, service entrances for the Jews, refusal to  touch or shake hands with a Jew by the so called moderate members of the Arab world , refusal of members to wear the translation earphones when Olmert spoke.

Worthy of the entire tradition is Robert's "The Power of Hanukkah."

Reagan: The Struggle For Peace is Indivisible

Rummaging through an old box yesterday, I found some print articles I'd clipped back in 1983 about the Islamic Republic of Iran's and Hezbollah's suicide truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut Airport. 241 American soldiers were killed in what was, up to that time, the largest single death toll of Americans at the hands of Islamofascists.

.

Many Americans are wondering why we must keep our forces in Lebanon.

Well, the reason they must stay there until the situation is under control is quite clear. We have vital interests in Lebanon. And our actions in Lebanon are in the cause of world peace.... [W]e're part of a multinational peacekeeping force seeking a withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon and from the Beirut area while a new Lebanese Government undertakes to restore sovereignty throughout that country.

By promoting peace in Lebanon we strengthen the forces for peace throughout the Middle East. This is not a Republican or a Democratic goal, but one that all Americans share. Peace in Lebanon is key to the region's stability now and in the future.

To the extent that the prospect for future stability is heavily influenced by the presence of our forces, it is central to our credibility on a global scale. We must not allow international criminals and thugs such as these to undermine the peace in Lebanon.

The struggle for peace is indivisible. We cannot pick and choose where we will support freedom. We can only determine how. If it's lost in one place, all of us lose. If others feel confident that they can intimidate us and our allies in Lebanon they will become bold elsewhere. If Lebanon ends up under the tyranny of forces hostile to the West, not only will our strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean be threatened but also the stability of the entire Middle East....

In conjunction with our multinational force partners, we're taking measures to strengthen the capabilities of our forces to defend themselves. The United States will not be intimidated by terrorists.

-- President Reagan, from the press conference he gave on October 24, 1983

Barracks Bomber All Smiles

... all he could remember was that the guy was smiling.
-- said a surviving Marine about the sentry who watched the suicide bomber drive past his post, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1983

If It Was True Then....

One of the mistakes of the free world has been to prevent Israel from ridding Beirut of the remnants of terrorism.
-- Ariel Sharon, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1983

While Other Candidates Talk Tough On Border Security (And Act Gently), Tom Tancredo Gets Tough (And Talks Gently)

* Updated (11/16) *

"Open borders" = Closed minds

Hopefully the recent Tom Tancredo presidential campaign ad will compel not just Republican presidential candidates, but all the presidential candidates, to take complete responsibility for American borders and for laws and policies that govern all entry points into the United States.

.
Note how Wolf Sheep Blitzer plays the "fear" card -- tossing out a loose noose for Tancredo to trip upon -- rather than acknowledging that his stern response to plausible and documented terrorist threats is worthwhile on its merits.

All the candidates should be held responsible for their positions on immigration and border security, no matter how much responsibility they take (or refuse to take). When Giuliani made a San Francisco appearance last summer, that's along the lines of what I tried to ask him.

Related: What would "Ann of Arc" do?

What is Western Civilization all about? and, Are we willing to defend it?
-- Tom Tancredo
.

* Update (11/16) *

Diana West, "Tancredo's Raw Truth":
Yes, there is something surreal about the commercial, but not because of the content. What is surreal is the hysteria that has greeted it. After 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, Amman, Amsterdam, Baghdad, Bali, Beslan, Davao, Hadera, Haifa, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Nairobi, New Dehli, Sharm al-Sheik, Tel Aviv, Tunisia and more, what dolt doesn't wonder if and when jihadist cowards will attack our own trains, markets, hotels and restaurants? Tom Tancredo has only taken the mature and responsible course -- not coincidentally, also the politically incorrect course -- by raising this deadly serious issue with the American people. But for this he is castigated as a "fear-monger."

Roger Kimball Comes To Bury Mailer, Not To Praise Him (Really)

Roger Kimball must have been polishing this piece for months, if not years. He seems to have read every book ever written by and about the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and five-time marriage loser (also, one-time marriage winner).

From Kimball's "Norman Mailer, A Dissenting View":

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and [Wilhelm] Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

.
Wow! I thought I had shrewd opinions about stormin' Norman. E.g., JMK on The Castle in the Forest: Adolf Hitler was more of a genius -- and more evil -- than Norman Mailer ever was or will be. And that may make Norman jealous. Previous JMK blog entries about Mailer here and here.  

.
Most telling is to compare Mailer's recent major effort with that of one of his ex-friends and contemporaries, ex-liberal Norman Podhoretz. Norman M's final work is an exploration of the psychological formation of Adolf Hitler whereas Norman P's most recent work is the case for the destruction of Islamofascism. Mailer looks back at the 20th and even the 19th Century whereas Podhoretz focuses on the present and looks ahead to the rest of the 21st Century. It's more evidence that, post-9/11, so-called liberals are rather regressive and so-called neocons are rather progressive....

Leftist Fascism Awareness During Islamo Fascism Awareness Week - Proud Danish Activists Targeted

There's the Left for you.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Read the account posted at Stop the Islamization of Europe.

Click here for more info on Islamo Fascism Awareness Week.

* * *

Related: Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (click link to order), now available in English, beginning November 1. Review posted at Telos Press.

"They Are Ruining My Life"

Palestinian-born Nonie Darwish came to Berkeley, California to tell the truth about the blight of Islamofascism (click link for video). The only visual media organizations which covered her appearance were Incorrect University and Al-Jazeera.

Rudy's Rumbles Felt On The Left

* Update *(10/19) * Daniel Pipes clarifies his departures from the Bush Administration's policies in "Giuliani's Fresh Start": I twice voted enthusiastically for George W. Bush, am proud to have been his nominee [to the United States Institute of Peace] in 2003, and predict historians will rate his presidency a success. But presenting Rudy Giuliani and his advisors as Bush administration clones is nonsense. News magazines might consider doing some research before spouting off.
.

A prospective Giuliani nomination means a commitment to continue and refine the Bush Doctrine, to pursue a forward military and ideological strategy against Islamofascism. Unfortunately liberal opinion makers are viewing this with alarm. Scott Lemieux at The American Prospect's blog TAPPED quotes Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Michael Marshall, and Matthew Duss on the matter. In "STOP RUDY" Lemieux makes a hanky-grabbing point about the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue were he to succeed at being elected, a policy that would kill millions of people. Makes me want to grab a hanky all right, and wipe a nether region with it.

Remember Noam Chomsky's October 2001 slander that invading Afghanistan would lead to genocide? Chomsky, it says in that link (scroll down), warned that millions would die within the next couple of weeks. I recall Norman Finkelstein's radio remarks in March 2003 comparing the imminent invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Poland. Yet supposedly mainstream liberal pundits think this way -- their talking points derive from the extreme left (and the Jewish extreme left, at that). Lemieux goes on to finger Giuliani's brain trust as the culprit in the persons of Daniel Pipes, who braves implacable Islamic ideology (at home even more than abroad), and Norman Podhoretz, who consistently rectifies the errors of contemporary American liberalism, most recently in World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. (WWIV reviewed here: "a bracing read, and a necessary one.")

Lemieux also poo-poos Giuliani's lack of foreign policy experience. As if Ms. Rodham Clinton has a competitive resume to put forward in that department. And as if her brief and undistinguished Senate career weren't made possible, arguably, by the prostate cancer that forced Giuliani in 2000 to stand down from a head-to-head contest with her for the seat.

The left's stubborn refusal to concede hawkish Jewish-Americans a place at the table, to consider the grave process by which they (we) have arrived at our convictions, has been and stands to remain the death knell (morally, if not always electorally) of the Democratic Party. Just ask Joe Lieberman -- and Rudy Giuliani.

.
Previous: "Giuliani In San Francisco And His 12 (13?) Commitments For America"

AP on Laura Mansfield, Citizen Anti-Cyberjihadist

"Laura Mansfield" (a pseudonym) monitors the internet for al-Qaeda and other jihadist activity, reporting findings to the feds and writing four books along the way. The AP's Sagar Meghani made a short news video about her for Yahoo!. It's very good news, but then he caps off his coverage by referring to "the jihadist community" not being too happy about her work.

No kidding, Sagar. People who have declared war on all of us, who are not just dedicating but consecrating their time, energy, wits, money, and other resources to break any laws in order to kill or subdue non-Muslims are not "a community." They are an enemy.

Even if a case is to be made for non-violent, intellectual (or reformist) jihad, that phrase obscures and prevents it. Forget the AP, go to the source: LauraMansfield.com.

Cyberjihad: This Is What An Arab And/Or Arabic-Speaking And/Or Jihadist And/Or Jihadist-Sympathizing Hacker Looks Like

In the latest instance of cyberprankdom, criminality, and jihad, one of my best blogamigos, GM Roper has just been hacked by one "Abu Jneiah." [Update 7:15 PM: it's now fixed]
.

This is the signature picture the hacker posted (appropriate JMK commentary added).

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.

.

.

Childish, you say? Well, not as "childish" as child suicide bombers or real cyberterrorism.

* * *

The hacker advertises two hotmail accounts, hacker_vb3@hotmail.com and abo-jneiah@hotmail.com.

Do your part to prevent cyberjihad by contacting Microsoft directly:

* inform them with what criminality their good name is being associated

* urge them to report to proper authorities (per the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (full text here) and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act of 1996) all information they have on these accounts

* urge them to cancel any Microsoft services that have been extended to the hacker

Microsoft customer feedback:
Tel: 1-800-642-7676
Fax: 1-425-936-7329
and/or send written comments via MSN's feedback form.

"Al Qaeda Has Lost The War For The Hearts And Minds Of Iraqis"

Matt Sanchez speaking yesterday "Live from Anbar" on Kevin McCullough's New York-based Christian talk radio show, Musclehead Revolution.

Bring It On! - The Milblogs, That Is

* Update (09/20) *
Milblogger Sgt. Eddie Jeffers - KIA September 19, 2007

In a piece of pure good news, President Bush met for an hour this past weekend with several top military bloggers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

.
Says WaPo, "President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media." In what is (thus far) our generation's defining military effort it only makes sense that those with the most direct experience, expertise, and contacts in military operations and affairs have assigned themselves the mission of getting the stories and getting them right. "Friendly circle," I suspect, doesn't begin to describe this group. For one thing, I'm sure they didn't have time for many pleasantries or politesse.

In these times ferociously antagonistic liberal blowhards like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pontificate, generalize, exaggerate, and slander for a living while these dedicated men are providing a great public service. With nary a dime to show for their efforts, they cast through the blogosphere some of the sacred honor that is the spiritual glue binding our armed forces together. It's a sacred honor that should bind all the branches to the people, and vice versa.

From DC to Anbar, CPAC Honoree Honors Martyred Sheik

Matt Sanchez, whose media spotlight earlier this year provided a great opportunity for me to "come forward" about homosexuality in a new, critical, and appreciative way, has been reporting for several months now as an embed from Iraq, the Gulf, and Afghanistan. As more proof of the need for and rise of the New Media, Matt conducted what most unfortunately became the last interview Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi gave to the press. Sheik Sattar, who apparently craved to live in a civil Iraq and for Islam to be a civil religion, recently received media when al-Qaeda savages assassinated him. Hopefully there will be more from Matt on the martyred sheik.

Muslim Terrorist MDs Livin', Schoolin', Tranin' in the USA

* Updated * Wayne St. U. blog's pro-Hezbollah post

Islamic terror, an equal opportunity killer, is also an equal opportunity recruiter. And American medical schools are extending high-quality professional training and credentials to these killers and recruiters. Debbie Schlussel deserves a headline for this one (her post has several links and images):

Houssein Zorkot was caught, Sunday, in Dearbornistan's Hemlock park, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and dressed in black clothing with camouflage paint covering his face. He was apparently training for some sort of terrorist attack on behalf of Hezbollah and its various Shi'ite splinter groups in Lebanon, all of whose "martyrs" he honors on his website....

[Zorkot's web site] is a pro-Hezbollah, pan-jihadist recruitment site for Jabal Amel and Zrarieh (apparently two Hezbollah offshoots), based right here on our soil and in my backyard.

Reminds me why I despise nerds who escape into comic books and science fiction to simulate adventure and heroism. The opportunity for the real thing is right here under our noses -- with evil enemies named "Zorkot."

Were stories like Zorkot's featured in Newsweek's cover story this past summer, "Islam in America"...? See "al-Newsweek" for critical takes.

Soon it will be revealed: Muslim Terrorist MDs Born in the USA.

Petraeus's Congressional Testimony

Politico has the pdf for downloading.
Don't say you didn't read it, didn't know where to find it.

Jihadists Parade in NYC, Protected by Police, On Eve Of 9/11; Counterjihadists Out In Force

Summary, video, pics from the counterjihad's diva bravissima .
.
Time to get your "counterjihad face" on: .

Trust Freedom - By One Righteous Gentile - Or, The Beginnings of a Rebuttal to Osama Bin Laden's Latest Jihad Video

Every once in a while the unabashedly Christian James Baxter leaves a long comment on the blog. This one is worth reprinting as its own post. I find it a stirring rebuttal to yesterday's OBL "convert, surrender, or die" video. Explicitly, it's about fighting for freedom; implicitly, it's a point in favor of the retaliatory "nuke Mecca" position....:

Every September, I recall that is more than half a century (62 years) since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light-hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."

In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.

B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.

We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.

In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.

Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. America!

Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!

As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all, but especially for the people of Japan.

When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.

Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.

The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.

At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.

In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.

The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.

Free men should not fear the moon-god-crowd oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"

Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC 
WW II and Korean War

Job 5:23  Proverbs 3:31  I Samuel 17:40
http://www.choicemaker.net/

Al Qaeda Kills, Cooks Children, Serves Them To Parents

Says Michael Yon, per World Net Daily:

The report from Yon came while he was covering the war – and al-Qaida's involvement – in Baqubah, and he was listening to statements from an Iraqi official who asked that his name not be reported.

"Speaking through an American interpreter, Lt. David Wallach, who is a native Arabic speaker, the Iraqi official related how al-Qaida united these gangs who then became absorbed into 'al-Qaida.' They recruited boys born during the years 1991, 92 and 93 who were each given weapons, including pistols, a bicycle and a phone (with phone cards paid) and a salary of $100 per month, all courtesy of al-Qaida. These boys were used for kidnapping, torturing and murdering people," said Yon's dispatch, "Bless the Beasts and Children."

"At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al-Qaida directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that 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," Yon continued.

"As Lt. David Wallach interpreted the man's words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, 'What did he say?' Wallach said that 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."

Courts (and Blogs) Expose Islamic Operatives in U.S.

Muslim Brotherhood operative a NASA technician, Iraqi diplomat, from Debbie Schlussel. Al-Haramain Surveillance Hearing, from Zombie.

Schnitt Listed

Last weekend JMK's August 16 post advertising Islamo Fascism Awareness Week (Oct. 22-26) was linked by Todd Schnitt. Todd (or "MJ") is Clear Channel radio's popular talk show personality in the morning and afternoon drivetime slots in the Tampa/St. Pete, Miami, Charleston, Biloxi, and Birmingham markets.

Thanks, Todd, for sending readers this way. May it send more college students to Islamo Fascism Awareness week, and may this mention send more listeners your way. (ftr, "Schnitt List" is his phrase, not mine.)

See also: The Schnitt Show's "Global Warming Files"

Fringe Left Filmmaker Makes Case for War With Iran

Left-wing "guerrilla filmmaker" Roger Greenwald, whom I first heard of when reading Byron York's The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, has compiled a series of clips from Fox News Channel with all manner of talking heads warning of the threat Iran poses to the West and its regional neighbors. Greenwald's purpose is to mobilize the nutroots to pressure other MSM networks to slant their news coverage against any possibility of intervention against Iran. The funny thing is, he ends up of conveying a reasonable case for waking up to the dangers Iran poses.

Talk about a broken clock being right twice a day. Thanks, Roger.
.

Russian Revolutionary Suicide

Truth ... I love much.
-- final words attributed to a dying Christian pacifist and aristocrat,
Count Leo Tolstoy (1910)
.

* Update (8/23) * Comments on and from Fausta's podcast with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and with "Siggy" of Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred.

* Update (8/24) * We are interested in knowing the thoughts of the suicide murderer just before he detonates the explosive belt.
.

The tactic of suicide (homicide) bombing is not exclusively Islamic. Nearly all of us are familiar with Japanese kamikazes from World War II and, some of us, with other contemporary practitioners like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka who in 1999 famously assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by this tactic.

More obscure and, because it grew out of Western values and Western philosophy, more haunting (therefore more familiar) and more tragic (because the character flaws leading to it are our own, are our inheritance), is that suicide bombing, or an impulse to it, made at least one appearance among anti-Tsarist militants in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Whatever the totalitarian theories that arose in modern history -- about underground parties, managerial distinctions between agitation and propaganda, "the art of insurrection," etc. -- there was also in the Western tradition, as product or by-product, an impulse to suicide on behalf of (even intrinsic to the adherence to) a cause.

Fortunately (if that is the proper adjective for it), when the taking of no other life is at issue, suicide as a soul's clarion call to a wayward society enjoys (if that's the proper verb for it) status as one of the most passionate, ultimate statements possible. Consider the examples of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze in the 1960s, of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committing seppuku in 1970, and of vicar Roland Weisselberg setting himself afire last year to lament loudly Europe's spiritual capitulation to secularism and Islamization.

Scarcely known is that an impulse to suicide bombing revealed itself in Russia in 1907. As Whittaker Chambers relates to William F. Buckley in a letter dated August 30, 1954:

One night, a fashionably dressed young woman called at the Central Prison in Petersburg and asked to speak with the commandant, Maximovsky. This was Ragozinikova, who had come to protest the government's policy [as Chambers mentions elsewhere, "systematically beating its political prisoners" (whatever "systematically" means, exactly)]. Inside the bodice of her dress were sewed thirteen pounds of dynamite and a detonator. When Maximovsky appeared, she shot him with her revolver and killed him. The dynamite was for another purpose. After the murder of Maximovsky, Ragozinikova asked the police to interrogate her at the headquarters of the Okhrana. She meant to blow it up together with herself; she had not known any other way to penetrate it. But she was searched and the dynamite discovered. She was sentenced to be hanged [an appropriate sentence, btw]. Awaiting execution, she wrote her family: Death itself is nothing.... Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done.... How good it is to love people. How much strength one gains from such love. When she was hanged, Ragozinikovka was twenty years old.
-- from Odyssey of a Friend, published privately by The National Review, 1969, p. 77.

* * *

* Updates *

Fausta's recent podcast with Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, makes a point to not confuse the values of Judeo-Christianity with those of Islam. More precisely, to not confuse their ability (or inability) to proffer values, and for a civilization, as a consequence of those values, to develop, to innovate, to progress. In terms of that Russian revolutionary lore quoted above, consider that the impulse to sacrifice other's lives and, if necessary, one's life for a cause -- to presume to become, as Camus phrased it, one of "the just" -- has different sources, impulses, motivations than those which compel jihadist shahid ("martyrs") to their deeds and their ends.

Writes "Siggy": Robert Spencer also reiterates another unequivocal truth. It is the evolution of religion and the evolution of a believers relationship (or non relationship) with his or her faith that has powered human development. It is an absolute truth that modern society cannot exist alongside backward religious expressions. That is why nations predicated on a free and democratic Judeo-Christian ethics are producing nations and why virtually all of the Arab world are only capable of consumption. It is also an unequivocal truth that producing nations and societies are very different than consuming nations.

Islamo Fascism Awareness Week - October 22-26

* Update (8/25) * Welcome, Tampa/St. Pete readers and listeners of the Schnitt Show (93.3FM WFLZ and NewsRadio 970 WFLA)!
.

This just in from the David Horowitz Freedom Center:

Islamo Fascism Awareness Week: Is your alma mater on our list?

We are now planning what will be the largest campus demonstrations ever staged by conservative students for October 22-26. We are calling the event Islamo Fascism Awareness Week. We already have student coordinators on 150 campuses and we are hoping that the event will touch close to 200 universities and colleges across the country. We are offering these campuses a full menu of activities including panel discussions on the origins and implications of Islamo Fascism; keynote speakers such as former Sen. Rick Santorum, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Spencer, and Nonie Darwish ; and a showing of the uncut version of ABC's milestone docudrama "The Path to 9/11," and other documentaries about the threat of radical Islam, including Obsession and Suicide Killers.

In addition we are working with our student coordinators to organize protests at women's studies departments which have been shamefully silent about the violent oppression of women in the Muslim world, and to stage a memorial for the international victims of jihad. Among the campuses already committed to major activities during Islamo Fascism Awareness Week are Columbia, UC Berkeley, Penn State, Temple, Penn, Emory, UC Irvine and Ohio State. This week has the potential to be a major news event as well as a transforming political experience for our college students.

If you want further information or would like to see your alma mater or a school of special interest added to our list of targets, please email Jeffrey Wienir at jeffrey@horowitzfreedomcenter.org. This is our chance to bring the truth about the war on terrorism to campuses dominated by an unholy alliance between pro jihadists and the hardcore left.

* * *
Q: Is this crowd going to teach you anything useful about Islamo Fascism? 
A: Yes. But useful to whom?

The eyes have it. From right to left: the one-worlder bugging out on making the rounds in her global village;  a one-worlder, global villager in training; the shifty-eyed, terrorist mafioso (who would pass his poisoned blood off to 9/11 survivors); and, as history is proving, the narcissistic rapist who was along for the ride.

Can't you picture "ACT-UP Ramallah"? Say it! Millionaire terrorists get AIDS, too!

Nukes No Spook

"The Two Things To Know Before Your City Is Nuked By Terrorists"

1. Tragically, horrifyingly, but quite predictably, it’s going to happen. The only question being which American city or cities?

2. When said attack comes, you and your family are on your own. Period. My friend stressed that “our government won’t be there to help us. It is broken beyond repair and incapable of assisting those most affected by the blast.

* * *

GOP Presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo drives the discussion of how, possibly, to deter, and likely to retaliate against a nuclear attack on American soil. Said Tancredo in the lead-up to the recent Iowa straw poll: When I am president, I will never, ever, ever send anyone into harm’s way with a CYA memo drafted by a Pentagon lawyer. The only rule of engagement I’m going to have in a Tancredo administration is this: We win, you lose!

* * *

Hillaryspeak: Leftwinger Robert Scheer calls Hillary on her doublespeak about the nuclear option.

Newt on Gwot

Must see video of Gingrich's remarks at the National Press Club. H/T Mick.

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

.
Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
.
1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
.
.
* * *
.
[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

Boot And Bennett On Success Indicators In Iraq

Max Boot, author of the forthcoming War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, due out in paperback next month (reviews etc. here and here), was a guest on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" radio program, podcast through Townhall.com. Listen to Boot and Bennett:
.
BB: What's going on over there?

MB: There are some pretty astonishing measures of success ... in Anbar province, Baghdad, and in Baquba, and elsewhere as well.... The early signs are certainly positive. But unfortunately some of the progress that is being made on the ground is being undermined by the incessant calls for withdrawal from home, which basically signal a lack of resolve to our enemies in Iraq, and suggests to a lot of them that they can wait us out -- not the message we want to be sending at the very time that our troops are engaged in very high risk operations that have a decent chance of success.

BB: Is the screechiness and the volume of the calls for withdrawal getting more intense because people sense -- Is there actually maybe some sense of panic on the part of some people that we might actually be turning this thing around? I said a long time ago that it's a very odd place to be, with a number of the Democrats almost being in a position of having to root against success. If we're showing success, does this in some way explain the kind of histrionics we're seeing? [emphases added]

MB: ....The news coverage back home basically suggests that the surge is a failure.... Some of the gains that are being made on the ground, that is not part of the normal discourse of the news media. And so I think kind of casual browsers of the news media, including a lot of the people on Capitol Hill, they think that the surge has already failed.

BB: Why is it you're on to this and other people aren't?

MB: Well, there's no real secret to it.... The indicators are there if you read the benchmark report that was released by the White House last week. And I also keep pretty close touch with folks in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, and pay attention to what's going on. You have to look at the underlying trends and you can't be mesmerized by the story that there was a bombing yesterday -- terrible as it was -- or the story that three U.S. soldiers -- awful as it was -- were killed yesterday. And I think we tend to lose sight of the underlying trend which, over the past six months, with some setbacks, has been largely positive.

BB:  What's the consequence of what the Senate's debating right now -- if we pulled out and moved everything to Afghanistan?

MB: Well, for a start I think what you would see is that Afghanistan would deteriorate very quickly because al Qaeda would be able to shift resources from fighting us in Iraq to fighting us in Afghanistan. And they would be emboldened to do so because they would have this example of having defeated this superpower in Iraq. And just as they were emboldened by defeating the Russians in Afghanistan they are going to want to repeat the same trick with us in Afghanistan. So I think you would very quickly see the situation getting worse in Afghanistan as well as around the world where the jihadists would be on an upsurge. So I think if we just left right now, it would be a disaster. Oddly enough even the New York Times, which thinks that we should leave, even they have written in their editorials about what the consequences would be, and they would be pretty dire.

BB: The UN head yesterday, the Secretary General, Mr. Ban, has said that it would be a disaster.

* * *

* Update * AEI's Michael Rubin's recent Congressional testimony on prospects for success in Iraq.

Victor Hanson Fisks Every Single Word Of NY Times Editorial Demanding Immediate US Withdrawal From Iraq

.Every single word.
.(H/T Seraphic Secret)