Annapolis, Lebanon, and jihad

Last month, Daniel Pipes wrote:

The Bush administration’s plans to convene a new round of Israeli-Arab diplomacy on Nov. 26 will, I predict, do substantial damage to American and Israeli interests.
As a rule, successful negotiations require a common aim; in management-labor talks, for example, both sides want to get back to work. When a shared premise is lacking, not only do negotiations usually fail, but they usually do more harm than good. Such is the case in the forthcoming Annapolis, Maryland, talks. One side (Israel) seeks peaceful coexistence while the other (the Arabs) seeks to eliminate its negotiating partner, as evidenced by its violent actions, its voting patterns, replies to polls, political rhetoric, media messages, school textbooks, mosque sermons, wall graffiti, and much else.

[…]

On the Israeli side, Ehud Olmert’s prime ministry could crash if his skittish partners abandon the ruling coalition. Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu have warned against dividing Jerusalem and other steps. Ehud Barak, head of the Labor Party, reportedly will reject any plan denying freedom of movement to the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni could bolt if a Palestinian “right of return” is not renounced. That a recent poll finds 77 percent of Israelis think their government is “too weak to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians in Israel’s name” increases the chance of defections.
These grim prospects raise the question: Why, after nearly seven years of staying aloof from Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, has the Bush administration now succumbed to the bug? Some possible factors.
Iranian threat: Rice sees an opportunity for U.S. diplomacy in a Middle East re-alignment resulting from Iranian aggression, both actual (Hizbullah, Hamas) and future (nuclear weapons).
Inaction worse: If nothing is done, Kadima’s already dismal standing in the polls will continue to fall and Fatah’s tenuous hold over the West Bank will erode. The prospect of Likud and Hamas succeeding Olmert and Abbas pleases the Bush administration no more than it does those two men.
Legacy: Zbigniew Brzezinski has articulated the foreign policy establishment’s hopes for Annapolis and its dim view of Rice: “She realizes that her legacy right now is really very poor. If she can pull this off, she will be seen as a real historical figure.”
Civil rights: Rice believes in a bizarre analogy between West Bank Palestinians and southern Blacks.
Messianism: Both George W. Bush and Rice seem to view themselves as destined to resolve Arab-Israeli hostilities. One interlocutor recounts that “she believes this is the time for the Israeli and Palestinian conflict to end.”

Meanwhile,

As the end of Mr. Lahoud’s presidential term has neared, Lebanon’s pro-Syrian politicians, including legislators from the Iranian-controlled terror organization Hezbollah, have argued that the constitution requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament to elect a new president. Otherwise, they say, they will create a separate Lebanese government, splitting the country in two.

Working with Lebanon’s top Maronite patriarch, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, the French Foreign Ministry devised a plan that Damascus signed on to: Mr. Sfeir would devise a list of several Christian presidential candidates, and Lebanon’s top Sunni leader, Saad Hariri, and his Shiite counterpart, Nabih Berri, the Parliament speaker, would agree on one. But Syria then reneged, and its Lebanese allies demanded that the decision on a new president would remain exclusively within the Christian community.

Unlike the largely pro-Syrian Shiites and the largely anti-Syrian Sunnis, the Maronites are deeply divided. Even the Free Patriotic Movement, a Maronite party, may split between sympathizers of the March 14 coalition and the currently pro-Syrian leanings of the FPM leader, the top presidential candidate and former general Michel Aoun. Mr. Aoun, who is currently allied with Hezbollah, meanwhile, is fighting with another Christian leader, Samir Geagea. The big picture has to do with Syria and Iran. Syria’s overarching interest is to undermine an international tribunal the United Nations set up to try Lebanese political assassins, who by all evidence are controlled by Damascus. Iran’s top strategic goal is to maintain an armed presence on Israel’s northern border through its proxy, Hezbollah, in violation of Security Council resolutions banning all armed Lebanese militias.

The secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a tough speech last week in which he made clear that disarming is not an option. While other forces may seek all sorts of compromise, it is hard to envision any pact that would cross the Syrian or Iranian red lines. A compromise candidate, approved by those two powers, could therefore end up halting all democracy-building in Lebanon — not to mention undermining Security Council resolutions and U.N.-backed institutions.

America should quickly crush the “Palestinians” Bush and Rice are arming; the “Palestinians” have declared war on us. (Rice is probably a KGB agent.)

We should anticipate that the jihadists will rise to the occasion and make a very bloody mess.

December 30, 2007 Update:

From Daniel Pipes:

Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.
Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.

The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year. The State Department justifies this lordly sum on the grounds that it “supports a critical and immediate need to support a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government that both the U.S. and Israel view as a true ally for peace.” At a recent hearing, Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, endorsed the supplemental donation.

Not content with spending taxpayer money, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a “U.S.-Palestinian Public Private Partnership” on Dec. 3, involving financial heavyweights such as Sandy Weill and Lester Crown, to fund, as Rice put it, “projects that reach young Palestinians directly, that prepare them for responsibilities of citizenship and leadership can have an enormous, positive impact.”

President Nicolas Sarkoxy of France (left), Middle East negotiatorTony Blair, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the Paris conference.

One report suggests the European Union has funneled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year.

Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the “Donors’ Conference for the Palestinian Authority” attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (Using the best population estimate of 1.35 million Palestinians on the West Bank, this comes to a staggering amount of money: per capita, over $1,400 per year, or about what an Egyptian earns annually.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas won pledges for an astonishing $7.4 billion (or over $1,800 per capita per year) at the donors’ conference.

Well, it’s a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict – it’s actually a steal.

[…]

Dec. 20, 2007 update [by Pipes]: Using the Stotsky materials and extrapolating to include the $7.4 billion committed earlier this week, Hal M. Switkay comes up with an estimate of 4,600 Palestinian-caused deaths per year in the three years ahead:

Extrapolation of Stotsky’s analysis for $7.4 billion over three years.
Switkay also provides commentary, noting for starters that there is one crucial missing ingredient in this analysis, the correlation coefficient, known as r.

One can run linear regressions on any two data sets with the same number of points, such as the average temperature each day in Lhasa, Tibet, versus the daily close of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and there would be a linear relationship; only the relationship would be so weak as to be statistically insignificant. That would be indicated by r close to 0. On the other hand, as the linear relationship gets stronger, r approaches 1 or -1 (depending on whether the relation is direct or inverse).

While I don’t have access to the original data, I estimated it from the graph and ran the numbers. In this case, r is roughly 0.88. That is a very strong correlation. How strong? The chances are less than 1 out of 200 that such a correlation would be observed among randomly chosen data. Put another way, r^2 represents the proportion of the variance in homicide rates that can be attributed to variance in foreign aid – in this case about 77%.

One must be cautious, as the authors are, and explain that correlation – even perfect correlation – does not imply causation. One must present a plausible explanation that could justify the claim of causation, and I have one. Most of the ignoramuses who opine or make policy regarding the Middle East and jihadists worldwide, believe that poverty causes war, just as poverty causes crime at home, and that terrorists must be given hope to stop their deadly rampage. However, we know that quite the opposite is true: poor people can choose to study hard, work hard, and lift themselves and their communities gradually out of poverty; crime causes poverty; terrorism causes poverty; and terrorists are given hope by the craven appeasement of the empty-headed Western intellectuals and politicians who come to bargain for their lives – at others’ expense, of course. My theory is justified, I believe, by the strong relationship between foreign aid and homicides that occur one year later.

Based on the strong linear correlation between foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and the number of homicides committed by Palestinian Arabs one year later, I have used extrapolation to predict the consequences of a promised $7.4 billion in aid to the Palestinian Arabs. Please understand that extrapolation is far less reliable than interpolation. Nevertheless, my model predicts approximately 4600 homicides can be expected within a year after the infusion of the pledged foreign aid. This is equivalent to the murder of some 215,000 Americans.

January 11, 2008 Update:

From The MEMRI Blog:

New Palestinian Organization Threatens To Assassinate Bush

In connection with the visit by U.S. President Bush to the Middle East, a new organization, the Army of the Ummah, has been announced in the Gaza Strip.
At a press conference, the organization’s spokesman promised that his organization would act to kill Bush as well as his helpers in the Arab countries and in the Muslim countries.

He also called the U.S. the leader of the infidels and said it was waging war against all Muslims.

Source: Al-Hayat, London, January 10, 2008Posted at: 2008-01-10

Darling “Palestinians”; your tax dollars at work.

Catholic Church aligns with tubercular black Muslims to destroy American heartland

From the Topeka-Capital Journal (Hat Tip: American Renaissance):

Torres is the case manager for about 160 Somalis in Emporia who have been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis. Hively is her supervisor at the Flint Hills Community Health Center, which also serves as the Lyon County public health department.

State health officials say the influx of refugees to Emporia could have produced a calamity. Instead, thanks in no small part to Torres and Hively, the situation has been a model for dealing with unforeseen circumstances.

“What could have been an ultimate public health crisis has really just been an increase in public health work,” said Phil Griffin, director of tuberculosis control and prevention for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Kansas usually has about 3,000 cases of latent tuberculosis a year. “Latent” means the disease isn’t contagious and responds to medication. Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that most commonly attacks the lungs. In its active state it is communicable and deadly.

It has been largely eradicated in the United States, western Europe and other developed regions. But it remains widespread in Africa and elsewhere around the globe, killing 1.5 million people in 2005, according to the World Health Organization.

Latent TB, if untreated, can become active TB.

[…]

An article posted Nov. 3 on the Emporia Gazette Web site about a state grant to Catholic Community Services to help the Somalis settling in Emporia drew scores of angry, anonymous reader reactions, including this one:

“Emporia is going to be its own 3rd world country before long because of all the damn, bleeding hearts.”

“They came post 9/11. They’re black and they’re Muslim,” Hively said, describing some of the hostility demonstrated toward the Somalis. “Emporia didn’t have many black people before. This is a small town.”

The total Somali population in Emporia is thought to be between 750 and 1,000, and the expectation is that the number will continue to grow as word of jobs spreads to Somali enclaves in Utah, Minnesota, Maine and Ohio.

Somalia has been strife torn and more or less lawless since a civil war began in 1991. Thousands of Somalis fled to neighboring countries and many are still in refugee camps in Kenya.

The burqas say it all about the Somalis.

The Catholic Church loves Islam.

It abets illegal Muslim migration to Eurabia as well as to Kansas.

Orwell wrote:

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism.

Pope Benedict met with KGB thug Putin on friendly terms.

Iran, Syria, and American weakness

From the Middle East Times:

Israel has been providing intelligence and satellite images to the U.S. about a secret Syrian nuclear program for several months, according to media reports. Discussions between Israel and the United States took place last summer regarding a possible strike. But when Israel found the matter so pressing that when they realized the U.S. was not ready to act, on September 6 they attacked a Syrian nuclear site. Hence the question: what is Syria really up to or more to the point what is Iran up to?

[…]

Another proof of what transpired came from ranking Republicans on the House Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Peter Hoekstra, who were briefed on the Israeli strike and sworn to secrecy. They wrote an op-ed in the October 20 Wall Street Journal clearly underlining the seriousness of the situation regarding both the North Korean and Iranian involvement in the Syrian arms program.

Finally, the fact that the Bush administration (including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and most notably Defense Secretary Robert Gates) has been ramping up the rhetoric and taking action against Iran (including the latest sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) in the past week, might also be linked to what really happened in Syria.

The Syrian story is far from over: in fact, on October 23, Al Seyassah ran a story about potential new secret nuclear sites in Syria. According to Western sources cited by the paper, it is possible that Syria is developing other nuclear sites with the help of North Korea, Iran and Iraqi experts, the latter who fled their country at the start of the Iraq war in 2003. In fact, observation satellites have allegedly located in Syria at least two other sites similar to the one destroyed by Israel last month.

Iran’s handwriting is all over the wall from the chemical to the nuclear arms program in Syria. Indeed, in research conducted last year as part of an article published in Washington’s The Examiner, this reporter delved into Syrian’s secret nuclear program, making the point that Syria might actually be “Plan B” for Iran. By helping develop nuclear sites in Syria, strikes on Iran might turn out to be useless. This was a smart strategy until Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear site on September 6 and made the world notice.

Meanwhile, from today’s NY Sun:

The Justice Department is urging a federal court to go easy on Iran in a legal dispute in which terrorism victims are attempting to seize valuable Iranian antiquities held by American research institutions.

“This court should exercise circumspection in light of the potential foreign policy implications of requiring broad discovery of a foreign sovereign,” a Justice Department lawyer, Rupa Bhattacharyya, wrote in a “Statement of Interest” filed in federal court in Chicago last week. The attorney urged the court to limit the terrorism victims’ ability to gather information about the antiquities because Iran is entitled to be treated with “grace and comity” in American legal proceedings.

“They’re certainly not offering anything to help the victims,” the lawyer pressing to seize the Iranian artifacts, David Strachman, complained in an interview. “Nominally at least, this helps Iran. That’s the irony of the situation.”

[…]

Mr. Strachman moved to seize the artifacts on behalf of four Americans and one veteran of the American military who were injured in a triple-suicide bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street in 1997. At least five people died and more than 200 were wounded in the attack.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing, but, according to Mr. Strachman, those who trained the bombers received their instruction in terrorism techniques from Iranian operatives in Lebanon. In 2003, after Iran failed to respond to a lawsuit over the bombing, a federal court in Rhode Island issued a default judgment against Tehran for $71 million in compensatory damages and $180 million in punitive damages.

[…]

The main issue in the case at the moment is determining the provenance, or chain of ownership, of the artifacts. The terrorism victims are seeking information from the university, the museum, and the Iranian government about how the antiquities were obtained by the American institutions.

In a bizarre twist, the Iranians may be in a better position legally if they can show that they have no ownership interest in the artifacts. That would permit the university and the museum to return items to Iran, essentially as gifts, which would be a difficult transaction for the victims to block.

However, if the items are Iranian property being maintained or restored by the American institutions, Mr. Strachman believes he has a strong claim to seize them. He also argues that where no provenance can be established, the artifacts should be deemed to have been stolen from Iran, and therefore subject to seizure by his clients.
“If they don’t have provenance on it … then it belongs to Iran,” the lawyer said. “It didn’t come from the University of Chicago’s back field.”

Nothing new here. From July:

WASHINGTON — The Navy is making plans to reduce the American presence in the Persian Gulf by the end of the summer to a single carrier group, down from the two carrier groups now in the Gulf.

The preparations to reduce the American presence in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, come as a third carrier group, the USS Enterprise, is set to arrive this week. But just as the Enterprise arrives, the USS Nimitz is planning to redeploy. Meanwhile the remaining carrier group, the USS John Stennis, is slated to leave the Gulf by summer’s end.

In the standoff between Iran and America, the decision to reduce the American carrier presence in the Persian Gulf indicates a softer line. Already, robust proposals inside the administration to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a foreign terrorist entity have run into bureaucratic resistance from the State Department and Pentagon civilian leadership. At the intelligence level, comments are now being sought on the prospects of a back channel to Iran’s former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Mr. Rafsanjani is a rival of President Ahmadinejad, who ascended to power in 2005 and has threatened to destroy Israel.

[…]

President Bush sent USS Stennis to the Gulf in February following the high-profile detention in Irbil, Iraq of five men alleged to be members of Iran’s Quds Force. The commanding general of American forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, earlier this year accused the Quds force of masterminding the assassinations of American soldiers in Karbala.

Release of the five members of the revolutionary guard has been a key demand of Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi. The State Department has also argued internally for the release of the five men, but has been refused by General Petraeus on the grounds that all five are threats to coalition and Iraqi soldiers.

In May, America’s ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, held meetings with Mr. Qomi, in part to explore the possibility of joint security cooperation between America and Iran, but also to confront the ambassador with evidence of Iran’s role in aiding the terrorist insurgency.

For now, the main focus of American diplomacy with Iran will be through the United Nations. Today the deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Olli Heinone, is scheduled to arrive in Tehran for talks with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the remaining questions the Islamic Republic has yet to answer concerning its entire nuclear program.

Iran has according to some estimates already placed at least 1,500 centrifuges at its Natanz facility and has begun the process for enriching nuclear fuel. Israel, the state most threatened by an Iranian A-bomb, now estimates that Iran could have a nuclear weapon as early as 2009.

The spinning of those centrifuges is an explicit rejection of Iran’s earlier agreement with England, France, and Germany to halt fuel enrichment during negotiations with the United Nations. This month, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, proposed a plan whereby Iran would freeze its enrichment activities in exchange for a freeze of further sanctions. The Bush administration has rejected the formula.

Then, there is this:

The State Department will forgo pushing for the release of the five Americans now held hostage in Iran’s Evin Prison at a meeting in Baghdad between America’s and Iran’s ambassadors today.

American diplomats said they expect their Iranian counterparts to repeat their demand for the release of dozens of Iranian nationals rounded up by the recent American mission to disrupt and destroy Iran’s terrorism networks in Iraq.

[…]

“It is a missed opportunity not to allow these people to leave for the past two months,” he said.

The Americans being held include the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program, Haleh Esfandiari. The Iranian-American wife of Shaul Bakhash, America’s most respected scholar of Shiite Islam, Ms. Esfandiari appeared on Iranian television last week in what Mr. Bakhash told the Washington Post was a deceptively edited, scripted “confession” that mirrored the talking points of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.

Some within the national security bureaucracy believe that the abduction and jailing of the four Iranian-Americans and a former FBI official, Robert Levinson, are in response to America’s campaign against Iran’s network in Iraq, American intelligence sources said. When Iran’s Revolutionary Guard took British sailors hostage in March, the crew was released only after an Iranian second secretary from the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad was returned from his detention in an Iraqi-American detention facility, they noted.

Iran has already won the right to check in on five men rounded up by the Americans in January at an Iranian building in Irbil, Iraq.

The Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, has described the five men as diplomats working at one of Iran’s consulates. Coalition forces have said the men were senior Iranian operatives working with local terrorists.

Inside the administration, Secretary of State Rice has previously pressed the top American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to agree to release the men in exchange for concessions, according to a Washington diplomat. The general, still pressing on with his rollback of the Iranian network, has declined her request.

[…]

“Now, after the first meeting, we haven’t seen really any appreciable change in their behavior, certainly not for the positive,” Mr. McCormack said.

“We had gone into this with the thought in mind that perhaps more than one meeting would be required. So the secretary, in consultation with the White House, decided that there another one more meeting was merited, so that we could underscore for the Iranian government directly the importance of their changing behavior, if they truly do want to match their actions with their words.”

Mr. McCormack made reference yesterday to an Iranian network supplying sophisticated roadside explosives to militias and terrorists in Iraq.

On Sunday, coalition forces announced the arrest of a man they claimed was an Iraqi arms dealer connected to the Iranian Quds Force in eastern Iraq, near the border with Iran.

Additionally,

[…]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s meetings last week with President Bush further underscored differences in Europe over the course of action to be followed. Unlike recent statement by French and British leaders, German leaders have continued to express their reticence to restrict banking activities, commercial deals and investments in Iran. Merkel again stressed Germany’s position that the Security Council, rather than the EU Council, is the proper forum for seeking agreement on further sanctions. She also insisted that the current round of negotiations be allowed to run through before new sanctions are considered. And, even in the likely event that such further negotiations go no-where, she committed herself only to having “a closer look again at {sanctions} and possibl(e) need to work together with our German business community. I will talk with them again on further possible reductions of those commercial ties.” At the other end of the spectrum, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a worldwide ban on all companies developing Iran’s oil and gas fields if Iran fails to curb its nuclear ambitions.

[…]

America should bomb Iran and Syria beyond recognition, before we are destroyed.

Lee Harvey Oswald: Communist martyr

A must-read new article by Daniel Pipes is excerpted below. The article discusses the origins of the dominance of anti-Americanism in “liberal” thinking.

[…]

In a tour de force, James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute offers an historical explanation both novel and convincing. His book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter), traces liberalism’s slide into anti-Americanism back to the seemingly minor fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was neither a segregationist nor a cold warrior but a communist.
Here’s what Piereson argues:

During the roughly forty years preceding the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, progressivism/liberalism was the reigning and nearly only public philosophy; Kennedy, a realistic centrist, came out of an effective tradition that aimed, and succeeded, in expanding democracy and the welfare state.

In contrast, Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower lacked an intellectual alternative to liberalism and so merely slowed it down. The conservative “remnant” led by William F. Buckley, Jr. had virtually no impact on policy. The radical right, embodied by the John Birch Society, spewed illogical and ineffectual fanaticism.

Kennedy’s assassination profoundly affected liberalism, Piereson explains, because Oswald, a New Left-style communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba from the president who, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, brandished America’s military card. Kennedy, in brief, died because he was so tough in the cold war. Liberals resisted this fact because it contradicted their belief system and, instead, presented Kennedy as a victim of the radical right and a martyr for liberal causes.

This political phantasm required two audacious steps. The first applied to Oswald:
Ignoring his communist outlook by characterizing him as an extreme rightist. Thus, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison asserted that “Oswald would have been more at home with Mein Kampf than Das Kapital.”

Reducing his role to insignificance by (1) theorizing about some sixteen other assassins or (2) spinning a giant conspiracy in which Oswald was a dupe of the mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Castro Cubans, White Russians, Texas oil millionaires, international bankers, the CIA, the FBI, the military-industrial complex, the generals, or Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

With Oswald nearly deleted from the narrative, or even turned into a scapegoat, the ruling establishment – Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others – proceeded to take a second, astonishing step. They blamed the assassination not on Oswald the communist but on the American people, and the radical right in particular, accusing them of killing Kennedy for his being too soft in the cold war or too accommodating to civil rights for American blacks.

Here are just four of the examples Piereson cites documenting that wild distortion:

Chief Justice Earl Warren decried the supposed “hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield raged against “the bigotry, the hatred, prejudice and the arrogance which converged in that moment of horror to strike him down.”
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell advised, “Weep not for Jack Kennedy, but weep for America.”

A New York Times editorial lamented “The shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down President John F. Kennedy.”

[…]

Viewing the United States as crass, violent, racist, and militarist shifted liberalism’s focus from economics to cultural issues (racism, feminism, sexual freedom, gay rights). This change helped spawn the countercultural movement of the late 1960s; more lastingly, it fed a “residue of ambivalence” about the worth of traditional American institutions and the validity of deploying U.S. military power that 44 years later remains liberalism’s general outlook.

[…]

Orwell wrote in 1945 (Hat Tip: Dirck the Noorman):

Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

Oswald was apparently ordered by the KGB to assassinate JFK, and the John Birch Society speaks glowingly of sharia, of jihad, and of Ron Paul.

Ian Smith R.I.P.

A must-see video tribute to Ian Smith, the last Prime Minister of Rhodesia, has been released by The Telegraph.

An op-ed about him, also from The Telegraph, is excerpted below:

[…]

Smith earned his place in history by leading the first revolt against Britain by white settlers since America’s declaration of independence in 1776.

As prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, he caused one of the great post-war crises by unilaterally declaring independence – known as UDI – on Nov 11, 1965.

At a stroke, Rhodesia severed all ties with Britain and became a renegade republic, led by a treasonable regime, recognised by no-one save apartheid South Africa.

To understand UDI is to understand Smith. He was born to take this momentous and ultimately catastrophic decision. Even at the time, few outsiders grasped why Smith of all people – a wartime Spitfire pilot and Empire loyalist – had declared independence and committed treason.

The answer lies in the mindset of white Rhodesia which Smith personified. He was a child of Empire, born to settler parents in Rhodesia in 1919 and raised to believe in the civilising glory of imperialism.

“We Rhodesians were more British than the British and we were proud of that,” Smith once told me. “We were brought up to respect the Union Jack.”

[…]

Nothing can convey UDI’s monumental folly. Even in 1965, the reasoning behind Smith’s decision was obviously absurd. First, Smith assumed that white Rhodesians – a dwindling minority of four per cent in 1965 – could monopolise political and economic power into the indefinite future. “I don’t believe in majority rule ever for Rhodesia, not in a thousand years,” he famously declared.

If UDI was to survive, Rhodesia needed allies, notably Portugal which then ruled neighbouring Mozambique. The two countries shared an 800-mile frontier which had to be kept secure.

So Smith gambled that Portugal’s African empire would last for another thousand years or so.

South Africa provided Rhodesia with oil and electricity. Smith assumed that Pretoria’s apartheid regime, dominated by Afrikaners with a deep suspicion of British settlers, would support Rhodesia forever.

Lastly, Smith presumed that Rhodesia’s black majority – 96 per cent of the population – would accept their status as second class citizens.

These assumptions were so wildly unrealistic that only a fantasist could have believed them.

Portugal’s shambolic empire predictably collapsed in 1975. South Africa stopped backing Rhodesia one year later and the black majority began waging a guerrilla war in 1972.

Smith’s worst trait was his limitless capacity for self-delusion. Thanks to UDI, black nationalists were radicalised and a brutal war began. Wars produce terrible leaders. This one gave the world Robert Mugabe.

Ultimately Smith was forced to the negotiating table at the Lancaster House conference in London in 1979. By then, Mugabe had achieved dominance over the black liberation movement and Rhodesia was fighting an unwinnable war.

Thanks to Smith, white Rhodesia dealt with its most dangerous enemy at the moment when its hand was weakest. The outcome was a transfer of power to independent Zimbabwe in 1980 on terms far worse for the white minority than could have been achieved before UDI.

Far from preserving what Smith called “decent, responsible, Christian standards”, UDI was the making of Mugabe.

Without Smith’s folly, Mugabe may never have come to power. It is impossible to avoid the verdict that Smith was the co-author of Zimbabwe’s tragedy.

Another, wiser op-ed from The Telegraph is excerpted below:

Ian Smith only once doubted the wisdom of his decision to declare UDI and lead Rhodesia into a 15-year civil war to protect white rule.

That moment of doubt occurred in April 1980, during a meeting with Robert Mugabe, who the previous day had taken office as the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe had summoned Smith to Government House and Smith was surprised to be greeted with a warm handshake and a broad smile; after all, the country’s new Marxist leader had promised his people that, come liberation, he would have Smith publicly hanged in Harare’s main square.

At that meeting, Mugabe told Smith he was acutely aware that he had inherited from his old adversaries, the whites, a jewel of a country, and he praised its superb infrastructure, its efficient modern economy, and promised to keep it that way.

[…]

Let us not forget the context of Smith’s determination to hang on to white rule in the 1960s.

At the time that he claimed to be defending “civilised standards”, Rhodesians had already witnessed the flight of Belgian refugees from the Congo; Idi Amin had trashed Uganda, and Mobutu Sese Seko was about to introduce an even more brutal and dysfunctional regime in neighbouring Zaire; immediately to the north of Rhodesia, Kaunda’s Zambia was in a mess, riddled with corruption and economically mismanaged, and Malawi was being similarly misruled by the eccentric despot Hastings Banda. So why, Smith argued, would Mugabe be any different? Why, indeed.

Smith was a simple man and it was his rather humourless, one-dimensional Rhodesian-ness that at once made him a hero among his own people and a figure of derision among his enemies. I spent hours interviewing him for a book I was writing in the early 1990s and he never once smiled or told a joke. He was the same dour, Calvinistic character whom I had so strongly opposed as a young white liberal growing up in Rhodesia, and who at the time represented all that was wrong about white minority rule in Africa.

At our meetings, he spoke endlessly about how Rhodesians had been more British than the British, how Churchill – had he been alive – would almost certainly have emigrated from corrupt, liberal England to Rhodesia, and how this small community of decent, fair-minded whites had been betrayed by, well, just about everybody he could think of – the Tories, Labour, the Afrikaners, the OAU, the UN. Not surprisingly, he called his ponderous autobiography The Great Betrayal.

It was easy to mock Ian Smith, but he was right – both about the betrayals and about the quality of most African politicians.

[…]

Although the first 20 years of Mugabe’s rule saw a slow, somewhat even-paced decline, the calamitous collapse has been achieved in little more than half a decade, an extraordinary feat of self-destruction when one considers that it took more than a century for Ian Smith’s white antecedents to carve a modern, functioning, European-style society out of raw African bushveld.

But that has been the story of post-colonial Africa and, although this week’s obituaries will largely dismiss Smith as a colonial caricature, a novelty politician from another age, if you were to go to Harare today and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader – Smith or Mugabe – the answer would be almost unanimous. And it would not be Mugabe.

It is perfectly ironic that Mugabe’s deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, when told of Smith’s death this week, described him as a man “who brought untold suffering to millions of Zimbabweans”. Those words surely apply more to his own leader than to Ian Smith.

Smith probably would have been betrayed by the socialist English and overwhelmed by the Russians in any case. His views were accurate, and his plight was hopeless.

R.I.P.

Iran, Russia, and Syria in Lebanon: to war or not to war

By Amir Taheri:

WITHIN the next week or so, we’ll know whether Iran (acting through proxies in Beirut) will trigger a new civil war in Lebanon.

The issue is the choice of a replacement for President Emil Lahoud, imposed by Syria during its occupation of Lebanon. His term of office expires Nov. 23.

Tehran’s favorite for the job is ex-Gen. Michel Aoun, a maverick Maronite Christian politician. He is allied with the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah – whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has publicly threatened violence if the Iranian candidate does not win.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamic Republic president, sees the Lebanese election as a showdown with the United States and a potential blow at the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

But a majority of the members of the Lebanese National Assembly – the parliament that has the task of choosing the president – refuse the Iranian choice. The so-called 14 March coalition of moderate forces backs two candidates, former diplomat Nassib Lahoud and ex-Defense Minister Butros Harb. (The moderates have also indicated that they might consider other compromise candidates, such as banker Joseph Tarbayh and former Finance Minister Damianus Qattar.)

[…]

“This is something that cannot be spun or fudged,” says one politician whose name appears on Sfeir’s list. “Everyone will know who has won: Iran or the United States. Tehran hopes to write the tombstone of the Bush Doctrine in Lebanon.”
A win by Iran in Lebanon would do three things:
* It would compensate for the political setbacks the Islamic Republic has suffered in Iraq. Pro-Tehran forces have failed to seize control of southern Iraq and have been pushed on the defensive in Baghdad.
* It would confirm Ahmadinejad’s claim that the United States is preparing that “last helicopter” in which to flee from the Middle East as soon as President Bush is out of the White House.
The Islamic Republic’s intransigence on the nuclear issue and its decision to ignore two resolutions of the UN Security Council are based on that assumption.
* It would strengthen Ahmadinejad in his power struggle against rivals in the Khomeinist establishment just four months before a crucial general election.
Syria, France and a number of moderate Arab states want neither the United States nor Iran to win and are hoping for a draw – which would mean the election of a neutral, and possibly ineffectual character, as Lebanon’s next president. That, however, would be a loss for Lebanon and its democratic aspirations.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, given Russia’s support for Hezbollah, Russians — including at least one ethnic Russian — have been arrested as members of Fatah al-Islam, an apparent hybrid of Syrian intelligence and al-Qaeda. Lebanon has a substantial non-Muslim (largely Maronite Catholic and Antiochian Orthodox) population. Once Lebanon has been subdued by Iran-Russia-Syria or burned to the ground and Israel has been incinerated by an Iran we won’t face, there will be nothing to the East of Eurabia but Eurasia-Islam.

As for the Bush Doctrine, it’s tattered — and was always a terrible, suicidally stupid idea.

educrats gone wild

Fox 4 News reports (Hat Tip: American Renaissance):

Accusations of racism in a Lee’s Summit high school have lead to suspensions, but now the parents say their kids were unfairly punished.

There’s apparently been some racial tension in the band at Lee’s Summit West, specifically on the drum line. Students were talked to a couple weeks ago because both the black and white kids were using the “n word” and the band director told them to stop. But then talk about a noose landed a couple kids in big trouble.

Travis Grigsby loves playing drums, but he and his friend Alex Coday weren’t able to play for two weeks after they were suspended. It started after the band’s performance at a football game. Some kids on the drum line said they were talking about the best knots to use to tie up the drum equipment.

“Someone asked if anybody knew how to tie a noose and Travis did admit he knew how to tie a noose,” Kim Grigsby said.

Travis’ mom said her son is almost an Eagle Scout, he knew how to tie it, but told his friends he wouldn’t because you could get in trouble for that. Later, a black student on the drum line told the teacher he was offended.

“Travis was accused of using a racial slur for saying the word ‘noose.’ Then he was suspended for 10 days,” Kim said.

She said the school district accused the boys of having a racially charged conversation about nooses, but Travis and Alex insist that’s not what happened.

[…]

The school did shorten the kids’ school suspension to only five days, but it will affect their grades.

[…]

The school district said it can’t comment because of privacy issues, but said no one is aware of any racial tensions at the school. The administrators said they did investigate it thoroughly.

It would be better if the race/s of the suspended students was/were revealed.

This sort of anti-American, anti-white, anti-achievement progressivist, educratic abuse is sad and familiar; educrats are vile creatures.

al-Qaeda leader elected leader of "Kosova"

From The Age:

FORMER Kosovo guerilla leader Hashim Thaci, whose party favours speedy independence from Serbia, claimed victory after crucial parliamentary elections in the disputed province.

“The citizens of Kosovo sent the world a message that we are a democratic country ready to join the European family,” Mr Thaci told a celebration of his Democratic Party of Kosovo, which an unofficial tally showed had won 35 per cent of Saturday’s vote.

“The strongest message was that Kosovo is ready (for) independence,” he told thousands of cheering supporters.

“My government will be the address for solving all the problems of this society. I begin my mission from tonight,” the 39-year-old former leader of the political wing of the Kosovo Liberation Army said.

[…]

He walked away from the pacifist approach of late president Ibrahim Rugova and joined the Kosovo Liberation Army.

[…]

The Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) is a euphemism for al-Qaeda’s Balkan division.

This is to some extent America’s fault as well as the barbarians’.

Which brings us to The People’s Cube.

According to Olga Koulieri of the UK National Defence Minister’s Staff, the reason for supporting the jihad is:

In its most extreme version, the Eurasian heartland is presented by the Russian geopolitical school as the “geographic emanation field” for the realisation of an objective that longs for the “expulsion of
the Atlantic (or even more specifically the “American”) influence from Eurasia. In contradistinction with the principles of the Slavophiles which call for the unification of all the Slavs, Eurasianism is orientated southwards and eastwards and envisages the merger of the Orthodox and Muslim populations. As a geopolitical vision, Eurasianism is a curious medley in which communist ideology, nationalism and
orthodox fundamentalism coexist. Although their principles are often contradictory and dogmatically confusing, these three ideologies, incorporated into the field of the geopolitical Eurasian vision constitute for many people Russia’s “third way”, building a bridge between extreme political parties.

The term “Eurasianism”, expressing a geopolitical theory which has made possible a
political alliance between Left and Right in Russia, was elaborated during the postsoviet period, from 1993 and afterwards, thanks to the consistent advocacy of the newspaper “Zavtra” (“Tomorrow”). Its publisher, Aleksandr Prokanov, clearly dissociated the “imperial dimension” promoted by the Eurasianists from the attitude of the traditional nationalists, maintaining that: “The Eurasian idea is the idea of incorporation. Russian nationalism is Eurasianism’s opposite. The two ideologies are absolutely not compatible”.

The positions of the intellectual Aleksandr Dugin, who together with Prokanov became known as the main proponents of Eurasianism, are moving at parallel level. More specifically, Dugin, a former executive of the newspaper “Zavtra”, published in 1997 his book “The Principles of Geopolitics: The geopolitical future of Russia”. This book is considered by many to have benefited from significant contributions
from officers of the Military Academy of the Russian General Staff. In this work Dugin writes down the components of the specific distinction between the societies orientated towards the sea and the societies orientated towards the land, pointing out once more the correspondence of the West with maritime strength and of the East with land strength. More specifically, he maintains that an anti-west formation between Russia, Germany, Japan and Iran could become a barrier to the American penetration of Europe and Asia.

In contemporary Russian politics, Eurasianism has become a very influential concept reflecting the ideals and objectives of various political parties and not only of the nationalist Zirinovskiy, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, who in any case is an increasingly marginalised figure, whereas Putin can be seen as trying to balance between the western orientation and the Eurasian model.

One supporter of the Eurasian model is the former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov, whose policy has been identified by many people with the promotion of the ideas of Orientalism from as early as 1983, when he published a book entitled “The East after the fall of the colonial system”. In this work he argued that Russia’s role was to be the trustee of the rights of the “oppressed East”. This idea may have been reflected in his policy as Prime Minister, of promoting the “deepening” of Russia’s relations with the so-called “rogue” states of the Middle East.

Another strong supporter of the concept of Eurasianism is the leader of Russia’s communist party, Gennadiy Zyuganov. In 1995, he published his book “Beyond the horizon”, in which he argued that there is a historical connection of the Russian interpretation of the term “community” with the “communalism” of the orthodox dogma. From this perspective he advocated a role as “defender” of all the traditional societies, which for Zuganov are – as a consequence – socialist ones. In his most recent book “The Geography of Victory” (whose title is strongly reminiscent of the book “The Geography of Peace” by the American geopolitician and inspirer of the NATO strategy Nicholas Spykman), it is worth noting that he strengthens his pre-formulated arguments by arguing that there is a basic “incompatibility” betweenthe Western civilisation and Russia. The deeper reasons for the non-convergence of the two civilisations is detected in the political infrastructure of the Western countries, which reflects the Athenian democratic form of government. The latter however, as Zyuganov stresses, also incorporates a non-desirable feature of classical Greek democracy, that of society’s division into citizens and slaves.

Concerning Russia’s orientation towards the East his suggestions are clearly expressed: “At the end of the 20th century it becomes more and more noticeable that Islam’s route is an alternative to the hegemony of the western civilisation”. Under this prism, Russia must form a compact coalition where the orthodox populations, aiming at the creation of close relations with radical Islam, would harmoniously coexist with it. For Zyuganov, a fundamental principle is the belief that in the current era the implementation of geopolitical principles has become imperative. Russia should therefore have a clear geopolitical strategy. He uses the Eurasian vision in order to give the communist party a crucial political role as a major political force founded on a new basis. It is worth noting that Zyuganov plays the role of bridge-builder between the “white” and the “red” elements of Russian society, trying to combine nationalism, orthodoxy and Marxism.

These geopolitical views are well known to western governments who have so far proven their ability to manage in a more or less successful way the geopolitical concerns of the Russian bear. Several western analysts, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski insist on Russia’s presentation as a potentially Eurasian superpower
that wishes the total management of Eurasia and draw attention to the dangers for the West that may arise from any successful Russian-Chinese convergence – as was almost achieved during the cold war period and as Eurasianism currently preaches. Significantly, it can be argued that the most important recent
American publication on this issue has the following key characteristics:

1. It was published in the journal “Foreign Affairs”, which is generally perceived to
be a semi-official print of the American foreign policy establishment.
2. Its author Charles Clover, is the Director of the “Financial Times” office in
Ukraine, which is a reliable partner of the West at Russia’s gate.
3. It was published in the March-April 1999 issue, at a time when Washington was
making the decision on the launching of the air attack against Yugoslavia. This
attack had as an ulterior goal the complete dissolution of the geopolitical
dynamic field that Russia intended to (or could) activate together with Serbia in
the Balkan area and in the subsystem of the Adriatic “warm sea”.

So we can make Russia miserable by supporting al-Qaeda, or we can let Russia be happy. We must not let the Russians use the Saracens against us, nor let the Russians merge with them in one great Islamomarxist stew, which latter they probably will, given the Russian demographic crisis.

Friday, February 29th Update: If America draws Russia into a guerrila war against al-Qaeda, then these measures may be vindicated.

more on narco-terrorists

From Douglas Farah:

The Justice Department recently unveiled a case that demonstrates the growing nexus between criminal and terrorist organizations.

The case involves corrupt Colombia police officials facilitating the travel of informants purporting to be from the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the Western Hemisphere’s oldest Marxist guerrilla movement and designated terrorist organization. The FARC has, over the past decade, devolved into an organization that concentrates heavily on kidnappings, extortion and the protection of the drug trade rather than any ideological motivation.

What is interesting in the case is that criminal groups are willing to knowingly transport terrorist to the United States, and not simply using the “coyote” route through Central America and Mexico.

Rather, the criminal groups offered false passports from Spain with all the supporting documents, to those posing as terrorists seeking safe passage to the United States.

This reinforces the point I have been making in recent talks to the military and elsewhere-that that pipelines matter, and control of the pipelines is one of the key concepts of the new, flat world of transnational criminal organizations. These pipelines are increasingly necessary to terrorist organizations who need many of the things these pipelines offer.

[…]

Read it all.

This is an excellent addition to prior coverage of the narco-terrorist (Islamomarxist) nexus by Counterterrorism Blog contributors, especially by Douglas Farah.

Stalin, Andropov, Putin, Israel, and the United States

The Soviet Union under Stalin was critical in the creation of Israel, and continued to support Israel until 1952:

The Soviet perception of international relations was based on profound hostility to the capitalist world, grounded in the dualistic friend/enemy categories of the Soviet leaders’ conflict-based political culture. Soviet foreign policy was thus based on a desire to compete with the enemy camp for global hegemony on all levels. Because of all of these factors, during the first years of the Cold War, the Zionist movement
appeared to be Moscow’s best possible ally in the Middle East. The Soviet-Israeli alliance thus continued until 1949, after which it began to slowly deteriorate until a deep crisis in 1952 led to the severing of diplomatic relations in the very last days of Stalin’s life. However, the end of the alliance was a consequence of Soviet internal factors more than a new strategy of alliance in the Middle East, which would be formed only in 1955 through rapprochement between Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev and Egyptian president Abdul Nasser.

Russia has since sought to destroy both nations (as opposed to America only). Yuri Andropov was especially important in inflaming the Middle East against America, through operation Zionist Governments.

Putin is a great admirer of Yuri Andropov, and imitates his policies.

Putin is the first Russian leader since Stalin who has visited Teheran; he went there in the course of planning for the destruction of our nation’s influence in the Middle East, which will follow from the probable obliteration of the entity that is no longer Zionist.

According to Alan Ingram of Cambridge University:

Moscow–Tehran

Iran is selected as the optimal ally for the integration of the Eurasian south around an anti-Atlanticist project. For Dugin, Iran is distinguished by its large size, close links with Central Asia, radical anti-Americanism, and traditional approach to society and religion. It also offers Russia the prospect of the strategic prize of an outlet to warm seas, and Iran and Russia are to cooperate in solving problems in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Turkey’s pro-Western orientation is regarded as a threat, as is the ‘Wahabi’ form of Islamic puritanism, associated with pro-American Saudi Arabia and anti-Eurasian resistance in Afghanistan. Dugin advocates an alliance with ‘traditional’, ‘Eurasian’ forms of Islam that recognize the affinities with Russian Orthodoxy
and share antipathy towards the West.

Not surprisingly, Alexander Dugin’s website hosts an interview with Ahmadinejad-loving pseudo-conservative Pat Buchanan, and recommends that Americans 1) commit treason in support of Russia and 2) spurn the only non-Muslim country in the Middle East when it is otherwise likely to be incinerated.