Predictions Wrong on Both Counts
More Articles
June 12, 2007
By Tom DeWeese
Global warming alarmists are a clever bunch. They have very carefully changed the issue from "global warming" to "climate change." Now any change in weather, be it mild winters or cool summers can be attributed to "climate change." Whatever the weather, the news is very bad.
One claim threatens massive storms thrashing our communities. Such a threat was an easy sell in 2005 as Katrina was blamed for nearly destroying New Orleans in a hurricane season that seemed without end. Surely it could not be denied that climate change Armageddon was upon us.
To make the point, in September, 2005, Bjorn Carey, Staff Writer for the website, LiveScience.com reported that the "Increase in major hurricanes (was) linked to warmer seas." Said Carey, "the number of severe hurricanes has doubled worldwide even though the total number of hurricanes has dropped over the last 35 years." Carey continued, "The increase in major storms like Katrina coincides with a global increase of sea surface temperatures, which scientists say is an effect of global warming."
Based on such "scientific" studies and having just experienced such a horrific hurricane season, the world braced for the 2006 season. Nothing happened. No severe storms. All was quiet on the oceanfront.
Were the alarmists wrong? Could the predictions be mistaken? Was this the end of the hysteria? Of course not. With huge monetary rewards and government grants at stake, the climate change artists knew just what to do – switch gears. No muss. No fuss.
In April, 2007, Andrea Thompson, another staff writer for the same website, LiveScience.com wrote, "Global Warming could hinder hurricanes." Said Thompson, "Global Warming might not fuel more intense hurricanes in the Atlantic after all. Despite increasing ocean temperatures that feed monster storms, climate change may also be ramping up the winds that choke off a hurricane’s development…" Nothing, not even facts stop the dedicated climate change alarmist.
The truth is, global warming and climate change have nothing to do with how severe the hurricane season is. Those who have documented hurricanes since we had the tools to study them report that how severe the season is depends on a well-known natural phenomenon which comes in two parts – El Nino and its evil sister La Nina.
Every few years certain elements in the weather cause the oceans to either warm or cool. An El Nino is a warming of the water temperature and actually tends to produce a milder storm season. An El Nino is the reason for last year’s mild hurricane season. A La Nina, on the other hand, is a cooling of the mid-Pacific equatorial region causing ocean temperatures to cool resulting in greater storm activity and velocity.
Storm watchers issued a prediction that the 2007 hurricane season will possibly be a severe one because indications are a La Nina is forming. Forecasters admit they don’t know how severe the weather will be because they don’t know how strong the La Nina is. However, it typically means more hurricanes in the Atlantic, fewer in the Pacific, less rain and more heat for the southern U.S. and a milder spring and summer in the north. Conrad Lautenbacher, NOAA Administrator, the federal agency responsible for hurricane watching further explained, "The central plains of the United States tend to be drier in the fall during La Nina, while the Pacific Northwest tends to be wetter in the late fall and early winter.
So this year, if your region is experiencing unusually dry weather, perhaps a drought, or a cool spring, or a mild summer, rest assured it’s completely natural and has nothing to do with the wit or wisdom of Al Gore. He’s just trying to scare you into giving him another Oscar. Don’t be fooled. It’s not "climate change," it’s just weather.
© 2007 American Policy Center (http://www.americanpolicy.org/)
Monday, June 25, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
An Excellent Speech by Fred Thompson
Remarks to Policy Exchange in London (19June2007)
By Fred Thompson
Thank you very much. Charles Moore, Anthony Browne, Dean Godson, distinguished guests: I appreciate the cordial welcome to London. I always look forward to visiting the United Kingdom, and this time around I couldn't ask for a better host than the Policy Exchange.
We have a few policies back home that we'd like to exchange, and think tanks like this are the place to come. After just five years, the Policy Exchange ranks among the best, and the fine reputation of your work has reached Washington as well. I congratulate all of you, and I thank you for the hospitality.
Your kind invitation brings me here just as Great Britain prepares to greet an incoming prime minister.
Back in the U.S., we're able to watch the House of Commons' "Prime Minister's Question Time," which Mr. Brown will now endure. I've thought that America needed a weekly question and answer period between the President and Congress. But in the past few months I've decided it isn't such a good idea.
Your system also allows a change in the head of government at a moment's notice. Even your general election campaigns are mercifully brief.
Of course we believe in long presidential campaigns in the U.S. Most American politicians are afraid they won't be considered serious candidates until they've made a promise a hundred times and spent a hundred million dollars. Though every now and then you still get some slow-poke who takes his time before announcing.
I congratulate Mr. Brown, and I wish him well as the 53rd prime minister of the United Kingdom. And if you'll allow me a word about the 52nd ... we'll miss him. There are disputes of party here that are strictly British affairs. But sometimes the better points of statesmen possibly are seen more clearly at a distance.
We are profoundly grateful for the friendship of the British people, and in America we'll always remember Mr. Blair as a gallant friend, even when it did him no good politically.
When we in the States take the measure of your leaders, their party affiliation doesn't really count for a whole lot. It's been this way for a while now, at every moment when it mattered. It was true in the days of Churchill and Roosevelt ... of Thatcher and Reagan ... and Blair and Bush.
Differences of party and domestic policy are incidental, compared to the bigger considerations that define Britain and America as allies. On both sides of the Atlantic, what matters most are the commitments we share, and the work we are called to do in common. This work is based upon the principles we hold - primarily, the right of free people to govern themselves. We also believe that the rule of law, market economies, property rights, and trade with other nations are the underpinnings of a free society.
When historians of the modern era speak of the great democracies, of civilization and its defenders, that's us they're talking about - we and our democratic friends across Europe and beyond.
In the long progress of the world toward liberty, it was not by chance that this lowly province of the Roman Empire became a great teacher of democracy and the model of self-government. And it wasn't just luck that turned a troublesome British colony into the inspiration for all those who seek freedom. There is a reason why Britain and America were thrown together as partners in this world. The things that unite the American and British peoples? They don't change with the names of leaders or with the passing of years.
It was Harold MacMillan who best summed up the shared experiences of British and American leaders in the last century. In his later years, Lord Stockton was asked what he considered the greatest challenge in all his years as a statesman. And in that English way, he put it in a word: "Events, my dear boy, events."
Events often have a way of intruding upon the plans of free people. As a rule, people in democratic societies prefer to take care of the business of life. They raise families. They work and they trade. They create wealth and they share it. Above all in free societies, we live by the law - and, at our best, we look after one another, too. Yet in every generation, "events" can be counted on to change the plan, sometimes in tragic ways.
Often the cause of our grief is a misplaced trust in the good intentions of others. In our dealings with other nations, people in free countries are not the type to go looking for trouble. We tend to extend our good will to other nations, assuming that it will be returned in kind. No matter how clear the signals, sometimes in history even the best of men failed to act in time to prevent the worst from happening.
The United States and the United Kingdom have learned this lesson both ways - in great evils ignored, and in great evils averted. We learned it from a World War that happened and, in the decades afterward, from the World War that didn't happen.
We must conclude that the greatest test of leadership - in your country or mine, in this time or any other - can be simply stated. We must shape events, and not be left at their mercy. And in all things, to protect ourselves and to assure the peace, the great democracies of the world must stick together. We must be willing to make tough decisions today in order to avert bigger problems tomorrow. We must be prepared to meet threats before threats become tragedies.
These are not considerations relevant only to the people of Great Britain and the United States. The relationship between the United States and all of Europe is valued by both sides and has benefited the world. NATO has not only been an effective tool for our efforts, it symbolizes our commonality.
Changes in leadership on both sides of the Atlantic will give us new opportunities. Often in the history of nations, leaders rise to meet the times. These times require those with the wisdom and courage to see past the next election cycle.
The United States and our European allies must begin to forge a new understanding that matches the times we live in. This must be an understanding based upon candor if we are to come closer to agreement as to the nature of the challenges we face.
I have great hope for such a new understanding among NATO allies. We would never want to look back on a campaign we'd undertaken to realize we'd fallen short for lack of commitment or material support. Today our enemies do not doubt our military strength. They do question our determination. Our efforts will require ongoing dialogue based upon mutual respect and mutual interests.
For many Americans, there is a concern that even among our friends, some people are instinctively uncomfortable with U.S. power. Some on the Continent speak of the need for Europe to balance U.S. influence. Americans worry that this sentiment could, over time, lead to an uncoupling of the alliance. And if constraining U.S. power is that important, would our European friends be comfortable with other powers serving as a counterweight to the United States?
Some who seek to check U.S. power believe that legitimacy may only be conferred by international consensus as represented by the UN Security Council. They ask, "If a country can invade another nation for its own good reasons, what is the logical stopping point?"
The American response is to ask how, then, does one justify non-Security-Council-sanctioned actions, such as Kosovo? What are nations allowed to do when the UN cannot muster the political will to act? How many countries must be involved in an action before legitimacy is conferred? Is it just European countries that count? And, how do we deal with problems in concert when many of us don't agree on the extent or nature of the problem?
For our part, we in the United States must make a better case for our views and our actions. It is possible that things that are perfectly obvious to us may not be so obvious even to those who wish us well. We must be willing to listen and we must be willing to share our intelligence to the maximum extent appropriate.
We must be prepared to make our case not just privately, but to the people of Europe and the world in order to build political support for cooperation. The world is not stronger if America is weaker - or is perceived to be weaker. The same is true of Britain and truer still of our NATO alliance. And we must be capable of making that case.
In return, it is fair to expect that our allies will not put their trade and commercial interests above world security. It is also fair to ask that Europeans consider the consequences if they are wrong about the threat to the Western world.
Many in Europe simply have a different view from that of the United States as to the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism. They think that the threat is overblown. That despite September 11th, and July 7th and other attacks in Europe and elsewhere, America is the main target and therefore the problem is basically an American one. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq at a particular point in time resolves the matter for them. Also, they see no meaningful connection between terrorist groups and countries like Iran.
Admittedly, even some in America think that the threat is overblown, and that if we had not gone into Iraq, we'd have no terrorism problem.
However, most Americans feel differently. We understand that the Western world is in an international struggle with jihadists who see this struggle as part of a conflict that has gone on for centuries, and who won't give up until Western countries are brought to their knees. I agree with this view. I believe that the forces of civilization must work together with common purpose to defeat the terrorists who for their own twisted purposes have murdered thousands, and who are trying to acquire technology to murder millions more.
When terrorists in their video performances pledge more and bigger attacks to come, against targets in both Europe and America, these are not to be shrugged off as idle boasts. They must be taken at their word.
When the president of Iran shares his nightmare visions before cheering crowds, those are not just the fanatic's version of an empty applause line. The only safe assumption is that he means it. If we know anything from modern history, it is that when fanatical tyrants pledge to "wipe out" an entire nation, we should listen. We must gather our alliance, and do all in our power to make sure that such men do not gain the capability to carry out their evil ambitions.
Of course, diplomacy is always to be preferred in our dealings with dangerous regimes. But I believe diplomacy, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, is more than "note writing." The words of our leaders command much closer attention from adversaries when it is understood that we and our allies are prepared to use force when force is necessary.
The campaign in Afghanistan is a prime example of this, both as a largely successful effort against a terrorist state and as a logical extension of the mission of NATO, which now reaches far beyond the boundaries of Europe.
As in Iraq, the effort has involved great sacrifice from the brave sons and daughters of Britain. By their valor, and by the sustained action of NATO in Afghanistan, we have shown our seriousness of purpose against terrorism ... an ability to move beyond the military models of Cold War days ... and a capacity to shift tactics and technology to fight an enemy who defends no state and observes no code.
Even in the midst of all the divisiveness with regard to our actions in Iraq, the United States, Great Britain and our coalition should be proud of what we have averted. Imagine Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons in power today successfully defying the international community and free to pursue weapons programs.
Of course political realism is back in the ascendancy since the difficulties in Iraq. It's true that we have learned that geography, history, and ethnicity are important factors to consider in making decisions regarding today's enemies.
We've also been reminded of the importance of preparation, of alliances, and the continuing support of our people.
But that does not change the fact that we sometimes must address events in far-away places that endanger our people. Or that we believe in universal values that do not allow us to ignore wholesale human suffering.
Realism? Yes. But also idealism, which is what makes us different from our enemies.
We should also remember that beyond the War on Terror, there are other threats we must meet together that extend well into the future. One way or another, the challenges we face today will recede. Other challenges to our shared interests and security have not been waiting patiently in line for our attention.
Some cannot yet be seen, but it is obvious that our energy needs for example are not going away. Disruptions in energy supplies, sharp price increases and thuggish behavior by energy suppliers are threats to all democracies with growing economies. Also, rapid military build-ups by non-democratic nations should be of concern.
More and more, if things go wrong in disputes that were once considered just regional problems, there will be no "over there" or "over here." We'll all be affected. Globalization is not limited to economic matters. As we go through these perilous times, we must keep firmly in mind the things that bind us together, not disagreements.
We've been through a lot together, our two nations - and not just in the storied exploits of our parents' generation. Though there are many moments in British political history from which leaders today can take instruction, there is one in particular that I've always admired in the career of Sir Winston Churchill.
It was when Neville Chamberlain died in November 1940. In memorializing in the House of Commons his longtime adversary, Churchill pronounced the bitter controversies put to rest. He said, quote, "History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days."
In the end, he reflected, "The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions." We are "so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour."
Maybe it's the actor in me that admires this scene so much. It's a moment that no script-writer could improve upon. I am struck by its spirit, the magnanimity and generosity of the man ... the willingness to let old arguments go, and move on to great objectives held in common.
We in this alliance have had our own share of hopes mocked and plans upset. And now it is time to shake off the disappointments, to let go of controversies past, and to press on together toward the great objectives. To ensure security for our people. To be a force for stability in the world. To remain the stalwart friends of freedom.
For our part, we in the United States have never had occasion to doubt the fortitude and faithfulness of the British people. As much as ever, we count ourselves lucky to call the United Kingdom our closest ally, and we are proud to call you our finest friend.
Thank you.
(also read this)
Fred Thompson is an actor and former Senator. His radio commentary airs on the ABC Radio Network and he blogs on The Fred Thompson Report.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/06/remarks_to_policy_exchange
By Fred Thompson
Thank you very much. Charles Moore, Anthony Browne, Dean Godson, distinguished guests: I appreciate the cordial welcome to London. I always look forward to visiting the United Kingdom, and this time around I couldn't ask for a better host than the Policy Exchange.
We have a few policies back home that we'd like to exchange, and think tanks like this are the place to come. After just five years, the Policy Exchange ranks among the best, and the fine reputation of your work has reached Washington as well. I congratulate all of you, and I thank you for the hospitality.
Your kind invitation brings me here just as Great Britain prepares to greet an incoming prime minister.
Back in the U.S., we're able to watch the House of Commons' "Prime Minister's Question Time," which Mr. Brown will now endure. I've thought that America needed a weekly question and answer period between the President and Congress. But in the past few months I've decided it isn't such a good idea.
Your system also allows a change in the head of government at a moment's notice. Even your general election campaigns are mercifully brief.
Of course we believe in long presidential campaigns in the U.S. Most American politicians are afraid they won't be considered serious candidates until they've made a promise a hundred times and spent a hundred million dollars. Though every now and then you still get some slow-poke who takes his time before announcing.
I congratulate Mr. Brown, and I wish him well as the 53rd prime minister of the United Kingdom. And if you'll allow me a word about the 52nd ... we'll miss him. There are disputes of party here that are strictly British affairs. But sometimes the better points of statesmen possibly are seen more clearly at a distance.
We are profoundly grateful for the friendship of the British people, and in America we'll always remember Mr. Blair as a gallant friend, even when it did him no good politically.
When we in the States take the measure of your leaders, their party affiliation doesn't really count for a whole lot. It's been this way for a while now, at every moment when it mattered. It was true in the days of Churchill and Roosevelt ... of Thatcher and Reagan ... and Blair and Bush.
Differences of party and domestic policy are incidental, compared to the bigger considerations that define Britain and America as allies. On both sides of the Atlantic, what matters most are the commitments we share, and the work we are called to do in common. This work is based upon the principles we hold - primarily, the right of free people to govern themselves. We also believe that the rule of law, market economies, property rights, and trade with other nations are the underpinnings of a free society.
When historians of the modern era speak of the great democracies, of civilization and its defenders, that's us they're talking about - we and our democratic friends across Europe and beyond.
In the long progress of the world toward liberty, it was not by chance that this lowly province of the Roman Empire became a great teacher of democracy and the model of self-government. And it wasn't just luck that turned a troublesome British colony into the inspiration for all those who seek freedom. There is a reason why Britain and America were thrown together as partners in this world. The things that unite the American and British peoples? They don't change with the names of leaders or with the passing of years.
It was Harold MacMillan who best summed up the shared experiences of British and American leaders in the last century. In his later years, Lord Stockton was asked what he considered the greatest challenge in all his years as a statesman. And in that English way, he put it in a word: "Events, my dear boy, events."
Events often have a way of intruding upon the plans of free people. As a rule, people in democratic societies prefer to take care of the business of life. They raise families. They work and they trade. They create wealth and they share it. Above all in free societies, we live by the law - and, at our best, we look after one another, too. Yet in every generation, "events" can be counted on to change the plan, sometimes in tragic ways.
Often the cause of our grief is a misplaced trust in the good intentions of others. In our dealings with other nations, people in free countries are not the type to go looking for trouble. We tend to extend our good will to other nations, assuming that it will be returned in kind. No matter how clear the signals, sometimes in history even the best of men failed to act in time to prevent the worst from happening.
The United States and the United Kingdom have learned this lesson both ways - in great evils ignored, and in great evils averted. We learned it from a World War that happened and, in the decades afterward, from the World War that didn't happen.
We must conclude that the greatest test of leadership - in your country or mine, in this time or any other - can be simply stated. We must shape events, and not be left at their mercy. And in all things, to protect ourselves and to assure the peace, the great democracies of the world must stick together. We must be willing to make tough decisions today in order to avert bigger problems tomorrow. We must be prepared to meet threats before threats become tragedies.
These are not considerations relevant only to the people of Great Britain and the United States. The relationship between the United States and all of Europe is valued by both sides and has benefited the world. NATO has not only been an effective tool for our efforts, it symbolizes our commonality.
Changes in leadership on both sides of the Atlantic will give us new opportunities. Often in the history of nations, leaders rise to meet the times. These times require those with the wisdom and courage to see past the next election cycle.
The United States and our European allies must begin to forge a new understanding that matches the times we live in. This must be an understanding based upon candor if we are to come closer to agreement as to the nature of the challenges we face.
I have great hope for such a new understanding among NATO allies. We would never want to look back on a campaign we'd undertaken to realize we'd fallen short for lack of commitment or material support. Today our enemies do not doubt our military strength. They do question our determination. Our efforts will require ongoing dialogue based upon mutual respect and mutual interests.
For many Americans, there is a concern that even among our friends, some people are instinctively uncomfortable with U.S. power. Some on the Continent speak of the need for Europe to balance U.S. influence. Americans worry that this sentiment could, over time, lead to an uncoupling of the alliance. And if constraining U.S. power is that important, would our European friends be comfortable with other powers serving as a counterweight to the United States?
Some who seek to check U.S. power believe that legitimacy may only be conferred by international consensus as represented by the UN Security Council. They ask, "If a country can invade another nation for its own good reasons, what is the logical stopping point?"
The American response is to ask how, then, does one justify non-Security-Council-sanctioned actions, such as Kosovo? What are nations allowed to do when the UN cannot muster the political will to act? How many countries must be involved in an action before legitimacy is conferred? Is it just European countries that count? And, how do we deal with problems in concert when many of us don't agree on the extent or nature of the problem?
For our part, we in the United States must make a better case for our views and our actions. It is possible that things that are perfectly obvious to us may not be so obvious even to those who wish us well. We must be willing to listen and we must be willing to share our intelligence to the maximum extent appropriate.
We must be prepared to make our case not just privately, but to the people of Europe and the world in order to build political support for cooperation. The world is not stronger if America is weaker - or is perceived to be weaker. The same is true of Britain and truer still of our NATO alliance. And we must be capable of making that case.
In return, it is fair to expect that our allies will not put their trade and commercial interests above world security. It is also fair to ask that Europeans consider the consequences if they are wrong about the threat to the Western world.
Many in Europe simply have a different view from that of the United States as to the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism. They think that the threat is overblown. That despite September 11th, and July 7th and other attacks in Europe and elsewhere, America is the main target and therefore the problem is basically an American one. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq at a particular point in time resolves the matter for them. Also, they see no meaningful connection between terrorist groups and countries like Iran.
Admittedly, even some in America think that the threat is overblown, and that if we had not gone into Iraq, we'd have no terrorism problem.
However, most Americans feel differently. We understand that the Western world is in an international struggle with jihadists who see this struggle as part of a conflict that has gone on for centuries, and who won't give up until Western countries are brought to their knees. I agree with this view. I believe that the forces of civilization must work together with common purpose to defeat the terrorists who for their own twisted purposes have murdered thousands, and who are trying to acquire technology to murder millions more.
When terrorists in their video performances pledge more and bigger attacks to come, against targets in both Europe and America, these are not to be shrugged off as idle boasts. They must be taken at their word.
When the president of Iran shares his nightmare visions before cheering crowds, those are not just the fanatic's version of an empty applause line. The only safe assumption is that he means it. If we know anything from modern history, it is that when fanatical tyrants pledge to "wipe out" an entire nation, we should listen. We must gather our alliance, and do all in our power to make sure that such men do not gain the capability to carry out their evil ambitions.
Of course, diplomacy is always to be preferred in our dealings with dangerous regimes. But I believe diplomacy, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, is more than "note writing." The words of our leaders command much closer attention from adversaries when it is understood that we and our allies are prepared to use force when force is necessary.
The campaign in Afghanistan is a prime example of this, both as a largely successful effort against a terrorist state and as a logical extension of the mission of NATO, which now reaches far beyond the boundaries of Europe.
As in Iraq, the effort has involved great sacrifice from the brave sons and daughters of Britain. By their valor, and by the sustained action of NATO in Afghanistan, we have shown our seriousness of purpose against terrorism ... an ability to move beyond the military models of Cold War days ... and a capacity to shift tactics and technology to fight an enemy who defends no state and observes no code.
Even in the midst of all the divisiveness with regard to our actions in Iraq, the United States, Great Britain and our coalition should be proud of what we have averted. Imagine Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons in power today successfully defying the international community and free to pursue weapons programs.
Of course political realism is back in the ascendancy since the difficulties in Iraq. It's true that we have learned that geography, history, and ethnicity are important factors to consider in making decisions regarding today's enemies.
We've also been reminded of the importance of preparation, of alliances, and the continuing support of our people.
But that does not change the fact that we sometimes must address events in far-away places that endanger our people. Or that we believe in universal values that do not allow us to ignore wholesale human suffering.
Realism? Yes. But also idealism, which is what makes us different from our enemies.
We should also remember that beyond the War on Terror, there are other threats we must meet together that extend well into the future. One way or another, the challenges we face today will recede. Other challenges to our shared interests and security have not been waiting patiently in line for our attention.
Some cannot yet be seen, but it is obvious that our energy needs for example are not going away. Disruptions in energy supplies, sharp price increases and thuggish behavior by energy suppliers are threats to all democracies with growing economies. Also, rapid military build-ups by non-democratic nations should be of concern.
More and more, if things go wrong in disputes that were once considered just regional problems, there will be no "over there" or "over here." We'll all be affected. Globalization is not limited to economic matters. As we go through these perilous times, we must keep firmly in mind the things that bind us together, not disagreements.
We've been through a lot together, our two nations - and not just in the storied exploits of our parents' generation. Though there are many moments in British political history from which leaders today can take instruction, there is one in particular that I've always admired in the career of Sir Winston Churchill.
It was when Neville Chamberlain died in November 1940. In memorializing in the House of Commons his longtime adversary, Churchill pronounced the bitter controversies put to rest. He said, quote, "History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days."
In the end, he reflected, "The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions." We are "so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour."
Maybe it's the actor in me that admires this scene so much. It's a moment that no script-writer could improve upon. I am struck by its spirit, the magnanimity and generosity of the man ... the willingness to let old arguments go, and move on to great objectives held in common.
We in this alliance have had our own share of hopes mocked and plans upset. And now it is time to shake off the disappointments, to let go of controversies past, and to press on together toward the great objectives. To ensure security for our people. To be a force for stability in the world. To remain the stalwart friends of freedom.
For our part, we in the United States have never had occasion to doubt the fortitude and faithfulness of the British people. As much as ever, we count ourselves lucky to call the United Kingdom our closest ally, and we are proud to call you our finest friend.
Thank you.
(also read this)
Fred Thompson is an actor and former Senator. His radio commentary airs on the ABC Radio Network and he blogs on The Fred Thompson Report.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/06/remarks_to_policy_exchange
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Admitting That Black Culture Causes Black Crime and Violence
A wave of black teen on black teen murders that swept over London earlier this year finally forced politicians to face up to the truth behind the cause. ( April 12) Tony Blair claimed that "the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem."
"It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.
"Some people working with children knew at the age of five whether they were going to be in "real trouble" later, he said.
"Mr Blair is known to believe the tendency for many black boys to be raised in families without a father leads to a lack of appropriate role models.
"He said: "We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold."
All I can say is Hallelujah! Heather Mac Donald wrote an article Blair Breaks the Black Crime Taboo and sums up rather nicely the reason why there has been no solution to this rampant crime of black on black in both London and many cities in the US.
"The victim lobby of course struck back hard, denouncing Blair’s call for more assertive policing and demanding more antipoverty funding. Yet in a sign that Britain may contain pockets of sanity still unthinkable in the U.S., the ordinarily PC Commission for Racial Equality stood by Blair’s remarks, saying that people “shouldn't be afraid to talk about this issue for fear of sounding prejudiced.”
Could there be money in maintaining the status quo in the black ghettos of America? Could it be that the gangsta rap culture with it's violence and all around nastiness lines the pockets of music industry moguls, politicians and the like? But money aside the most important cause is the currently held philosophical ideas of a culture.
When our thinkers claim that all cultures are equal and that political correctness dictates that we not criticize other cultures because all cultures are equal it is just a matter of time before culture breaks down and evil doers take over. It's happening with the violence in black communities and it's happening with the increasing Islamic terrorism. When the good does not stand up and demand justice then something will fill the vacuum and that something will always be evil.
"It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.
"Some people working with children knew at the age of five whether they were going to be in "real trouble" later, he said.
"Mr Blair is known to believe the tendency for many black boys to be raised in families without a father leads to a lack of appropriate role models.
"He said: "We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold."
All I can say is Hallelujah! Heather Mac Donald wrote an article Blair Breaks the Black Crime Taboo and sums up rather nicely the reason why there has been no solution to this rampant crime of black on black in both London and many cities in the US.
"The victim lobby of course struck back hard, denouncing Blair’s call for more assertive policing and demanding more antipoverty funding. Yet in a sign that Britain may contain pockets of sanity still unthinkable in the U.S., the ordinarily PC Commission for Racial Equality stood by Blair’s remarks, saying that people “shouldn't be afraid to talk about this issue for fear of sounding prejudiced.”
Could there be money in maintaining the status quo in the black ghettos of America? Could it be that the gangsta rap culture with it's violence and all around nastiness lines the pockets of music industry moguls, politicians and the like? But money aside the most important cause is the currently held philosophical ideas of a culture.
When our thinkers claim that all cultures are equal and that political correctness dictates that we not criticize other cultures because all cultures are equal it is just a matter of time before culture breaks down and evil doers take over. It's happening with the violence in black communities and it's happening with the increasing Islamic terrorism. When the good does not stand up and demand justice then something will fill the vacuum and that something will always be evil.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Bureaucrats Managing Our Seas
In the Review and Outlook section of the Wall Street Journal of June 2 there is an editorial about Bush's desire for the US to ratify "The Law of the Sea Treaty". (Read)
"Launched by the United Nations in 1982, the Law of the Sea Treaty creates a new global bureaucracy to manage the ocean and its resources, with disputes settled by a new global court. Twenty-five years later, with Oil for Food and other U.N. follies behind us, the prospect of handing management of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to another unaccountable international body is, if anything, even less attractive."
"....It is not in the national interest of the U.S. to have its maritime or economic power subject to the whims of a highly politicized U.N. bureaucracy often driven by an anti-American agenda. Nor is it in its interest to be a party to another treaty that other signatories might flout with impunity. Unlike some nations -- think Iran or North Korea and the IAEA or the Nonproliferation Treaty -- the U.S. takes its treaty obligations seriously."
...it "could also get in the way of fighting the war on terror, for which the U.S. needs maximum flexibility." The article goes on to remind us how this issue could be used by the Animal-rights activists who "already object to underwater sonar as injurious to whales or dolphins and would be only too happy to have another legal tool at their disposal."
Although about 152 nations are signatories to the Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.S. should NOT sign this treaty as it would tie its hands in many situations where maximum flexibility and autonomy would be crucial. The real question is why would anyone want bureaucrats managing our seas? Don't we have enough history with corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats?
"Launched by the United Nations in 1982, the Law of the Sea Treaty creates a new global bureaucracy to manage the ocean and its resources, with disputes settled by a new global court. Twenty-five years later, with Oil for Food and other U.N. follies behind us, the prospect of handing management of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to another unaccountable international body is, if anything, even less attractive."
"....It is not in the national interest of the U.S. to have its maritime or economic power subject to the whims of a highly politicized U.N. bureaucracy often driven by an anti-American agenda. Nor is it in its interest to be a party to another treaty that other signatories might flout with impunity. Unlike some nations -- think Iran or North Korea and the IAEA or the Nonproliferation Treaty -- the U.S. takes its treaty obligations seriously."
...it "could also get in the way of fighting the war on terror, for which the U.S. needs maximum flexibility." The article goes on to remind us how this issue could be used by the Animal-rights activists who "already object to underwater sonar as injurious to whales or dolphins and would be only too happy to have another legal tool at their disposal."
Although about 152 nations are signatories to the Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.S. should NOT sign this treaty as it would tie its hands in many situations where maximum flexibility and autonomy would be crucial. The real question is why would anyone want bureaucrats managing our seas? Don't we have enough history with corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats?
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
U.S. Should Shut Down Al Hurra TV
Ayn Rand Institute Press Release, May 30, 2007
Irvine, CA--The U.S.-financed TV channel Al Hurra, broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East, has come under fire for failing to win popular support for America in the Arab world--a goal Washington calls "public diplomacy." Critics attack the channel for providing "friendly coverage" to Islamist groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaeda.
According to Republican and Democratic critics, better oversight is needed to ensure that in the future the channel will not, as it did recently, broadcast a 30-minute speech by Hezbollah's leader or devote coverage to Iran's Holocaust-denial conference. But the very premise of this TV channel is preposterous and immoral, said Elan Journo, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand institute. "America's self-interest demands not that we fix Al Hurra; but that we scrap it--along with all 'public diplomacy' initiatives.
"The goal of this channel, and of the State Department's other 'public diplomacy,' is to appease the hostility of the Arab world and thereby supposedly discourage Muslims from 'radicalizing.' To that end, Washington funds Islamic radio and TV shows, cultural workshops, the restoration of mosques, the building of Islamic schools. But this is perverse. Our goal should be to defend American lives and uphold our own values, not to apologize and pander to hostile peoples.
"Contrary to the administration's evasions, the enemy is an ideological-political movement--Islamic totalitarianism--that is widely endorsed and supported in the Arab-Islamic world. The only rational means of eliminating the threat from Islamic totalitarianism is to defeat its state representatives--Iran and Saudi Arabia--by military force--and thus demoralize its many supporters.
"Doing that will demonstrate to hostile peoples in the Arab-Islamic world that the cause of jihad is lost--and that fighting for this cause can bring them only destruction. Only demoralized people will reject the ideals and leaders that inspired their belligerence and promised victory; only humiliating defeat will drive them to renounce the fight as hopeless.
"America's fawning 'public diplomacy' in the Middle East is self-destructive, because it can only strengthen the appeal of Islamic totalitarianism by lending plausibility to the charge that the United States is cowardly and morally bankrupt. It is high time Washington declared that America stands for--and will defend to the death--the ideals of individualism, reason and freedom. Our lives depend on bringing our enemies defeat, not an Arabic version of 'Sesame Street.'"
Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Irvine, CA--The U.S.-financed TV channel Al Hurra, broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East, has come under fire for failing to win popular support for America in the Arab world--a goal Washington calls "public diplomacy." Critics attack the channel for providing "friendly coverage" to Islamist groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaeda.
According to Republican and Democratic critics, better oversight is needed to ensure that in the future the channel will not, as it did recently, broadcast a 30-minute speech by Hezbollah's leader or devote coverage to Iran's Holocaust-denial conference. But the very premise of this TV channel is preposterous and immoral, said Elan Journo, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand institute. "America's self-interest demands not that we fix Al Hurra; but that we scrap it--along with all 'public diplomacy' initiatives.
"The goal of this channel, and of the State Department's other 'public diplomacy,' is to appease the hostility of the Arab world and thereby supposedly discourage Muslims from 'radicalizing.' To that end, Washington funds Islamic radio and TV shows, cultural workshops, the restoration of mosques, the building of Islamic schools. But this is perverse. Our goal should be to defend American lives and uphold our own values, not to apologize and pander to hostile peoples.
"Contrary to the administration's evasions, the enemy is an ideological-political movement--Islamic totalitarianism--that is widely endorsed and supported in the Arab-Islamic world. The only rational means of eliminating the threat from Islamic totalitarianism is to defeat its state representatives--Iran and Saudi Arabia--by military force--and thus demoralize its many supporters.
"Doing that will demonstrate to hostile peoples in the Arab-Islamic world that the cause of jihad is lost--and that fighting for this cause can bring them only destruction. Only demoralized people will reject the ideals and leaders that inspired their belligerence and promised victory; only humiliating defeat will drive them to renounce the fight as hopeless.
"America's fawning 'public diplomacy' in the Middle East is self-destructive, because it can only strengthen the appeal of Islamic totalitarianism by lending plausibility to the charge that the United States is cowardly and morally bankrupt. It is high time Washington declared that America stands for--and will defend to the death--the ideals of individualism, reason and freedom. Our lives depend on bringing our enemies defeat, not an Arabic version of 'Sesame Street.'"
Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Study of Troops' Mental Health, Ethics Indicts Bush's Selfless War
Press Release by the Ayn Rand Institute on Wednesday, May 16, 2007
"IRVINE, CA--A recently disclosed Pentagon study on the impact of the Iraq war on U.S. combat troops suggests that many are stressed and hold views at odds with official ethics standards. Critics view this as evidence that more must be done to ensure troops comply with those standards. But in fact the study provides evidence for a searing indictment of Washington’s immoral battlefield policies--policies that entail the sacrifice of American troops for the sake of the enemy."
"The study reports, for example, that less than half of the soldiers and Marines surveyed would report a team member for unethical behavior. It also finds that “soldiers that have high levels of anger, experienced high levels of combat or screened positive for a mental health problem were nearly twice as likely to mistreat non-combatants” as those feeling less anger and screening negative for a mental health problem.
"Although many military personnel may support the Iraq war, and although war is inherently distressing, Washington’s immoral policies necessitate putting our troops in an impossible situation. The reported attitudes of combat troops in Iraq can be understood as the natural reaction of individuals thrust into that situation.
"U.S. troops were sent, not to defend America against whatever threat Hussein’s hostile regime posed to us, as a first step toward defeating our enemies in the region; but instead the troops were sent (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers,” putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. Bush sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers--a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.
"Consistent with that immoral goal, Washington enforced self-sacrificial rules of engagement that prevent our brave and capable forces from using all necessary force to win, or even to protect themselves: they are ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants, and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities.
"According to the report: "More than one-third of all Soldiers and Marines continue to report being in threatening situations where they were unable to respond due to the Rules of Engagement (ROE). In interviews, Soldiers reported that Iraqis would throw gasoline-filled bottles (i.e., Molotov cocktails) at their vehicles, yet they were prohibited from responding with force for nearly a month until the ROE were changed. Soldiers also reported they are still not allowed to respond with force when Iraqis drop large chunks of concrete blocks from second story buildings or overpasses on them when they drive by. Every group of Soldiers and Marines interviewed reported that they felt the existing ROE tied their hands, preventing them from doing what needed to be done to win the war."
"When being ethical on Washington’s terms means martyring oneself and one’s comrades, it is understandable that troops are disinclined to report "unethical" behavior. When they are in effect commanded to lay down their lives for hostile Iraqis, it is understandable that troops should feel anger and anxiety. Anger is a response to perceived injustice--and it is perversely unjust for the world’s most powerful military to send its personnel into combat, prevent them from doing their job--and expect them to die for the sake of the enemy. Our troops are put in the line of fire as sacrificial offerings--and it would be natural for an individual thrust into that position to rebel with indignation at such a fate.
"The study not only indicts the self-crippling rules of engagement that liberals and conservatives endorse; it brings to light the perversity of the moral code of self-sacrifice on which those rules of engagement are based. "
"IRVINE, CA--A recently disclosed Pentagon study on the impact of the Iraq war on U.S. combat troops suggests that many are stressed and hold views at odds with official ethics standards. Critics view this as evidence that more must be done to ensure troops comply with those standards. But in fact the study provides evidence for a searing indictment of Washington’s immoral battlefield policies--policies that entail the sacrifice of American troops for the sake of the enemy."
"The study reports, for example, that less than half of the soldiers and Marines surveyed would report a team member for unethical behavior. It also finds that “soldiers that have high levels of anger, experienced high levels of combat or screened positive for a mental health problem were nearly twice as likely to mistreat non-combatants” as those feeling less anger and screening negative for a mental health problem.
"Although many military personnel may support the Iraq war, and although war is inherently distressing, Washington’s immoral policies necessitate putting our troops in an impossible situation. The reported attitudes of combat troops in Iraq can be understood as the natural reaction of individuals thrust into that situation.
"U.S. troops were sent, not to defend America against whatever threat Hussein’s hostile regime posed to us, as a first step toward defeating our enemies in the region; but instead the troops were sent (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers,” putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. Bush sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers--a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.
"Consistent with that immoral goal, Washington enforced self-sacrificial rules of engagement that prevent our brave and capable forces from using all necessary force to win, or even to protect themselves: they are ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants, and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities.
"According to the report: "More than one-third of all Soldiers and Marines continue to report being in threatening situations where they were unable to respond due to the Rules of Engagement (ROE). In interviews, Soldiers reported that Iraqis would throw gasoline-filled bottles (i.e., Molotov cocktails) at their vehicles, yet they were prohibited from responding with force for nearly a month until the ROE were changed. Soldiers also reported they are still not allowed to respond with force when Iraqis drop large chunks of concrete blocks from second story buildings or overpasses on them when they drive by. Every group of Soldiers and Marines interviewed reported that they felt the existing ROE tied their hands, preventing them from doing what needed to be done to win the war."
"When being ethical on Washington’s terms means martyring oneself and one’s comrades, it is understandable that troops are disinclined to report "unethical" behavior. When they are in effect commanded to lay down their lives for hostile Iraqis, it is understandable that troops should feel anger and anxiety. Anger is a response to perceived injustice--and it is perversely unjust for the world’s most powerful military to send its personnel into combat, prevent them from doing their job--and expect them to die for the sake of the enemy. Our troops are put in the line of fire as sacrificial offerings--and it would be natural for an individual thrust into that position to rebel with indignation at such a fate.
"The study not only indicts the self-crippling rules of engagement that liberals and conservatives endorse; it brings to light the perversity of the moral code of self-sacrifice on which those rules of engagement are based. "
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Iran Goes Nuclear While Bush and Congress Play Politics
"John Bolton, who still has close links to the Bush administration, told The Daily Telegraph that the European Union had to "get more serious" about Iran and recognise that its diplomatic attempts to halt Iran's enrichment programme had failed.
Iran has "clearly mastered the enrichment technology now...they're not stopping, they're making progress and our time is limited", he said. Economic sanctions "with pain" had to be the next step, followed by attempting to overthrow the theocratic regime and, ultimately, military action to destroy nuclear sites.
Mr Bolton's stark warning appeared to be borne out yesterday by leaks about an inspection by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iran's main nuclear installation at Natanz on Sunday.
The experts found that Iran's scientists were operating 1,312 centrifuges, the machines used to enrich uranium. If Iran can install 3,000, it will need about one year to produce enough weapons grade uranium for one nuclear bomb.
Experts had judged that Iran would need perhaps two years to master the technical feat of enriching uranium using centrifuges - and then another two years to produce enough material to build a weapon.
But the IAEA found that Iran has already managed to enrich uranium to the four per cent purity needed for power stations. Weapons-grade uranium must reach a threshold of 84 per cent purity.
Mohammed ElBaradei, the IAEA's head, said the West's goal of halting the enrichment programme had been "overtaken by events". Iran had probably mastered this process and "the focus now should be to stop them from going to industrial scale production". (read)
Saturday, May 19, 2007
The Good Must Defeat Evil Occasionally to Keep it at Bay
I read a very insightful article by Frederick W. Kagan in The Weekly Standard (5/28/2007) called "Don't Abandon the Iraqis - The high stakes of the war".
In it Mr. Kagan makes the case for winning in Iraq.
"From time to time, nations face fundamental tests of character. Forced to choose between painful but wise options, and irresponsible ones that offer only temporary relief from pain, a people must decide what price they are willing to pay to safeguard themselves and their children and to do the right thing. America has faced such tests before. Guided by Abraham Lincoln, we met our greatest challenge during the Civil War and overcame it, despite agonizing doubts about the possibility of success even into 1864. The Greatest Generation recovered from the shock of Pearl Harbor and refused to stop fighting until both Germany and Japan had surrendered unconditionally. A similar moment is upon us in Iraq. What will we do?
"America has vital national interests in Iraq. The global al Qaeda movement has decided to defeat us there--not merely to establish a base from which to pursue further tyranny and terror, but also to erect a triumphant monument on the ruins of American power. Al Qaeda claims to have defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and its recruiting rests in part on that boast. If America flees the field of battle against this foe in Iraq, al Qaeda will have gained an even more powerful recruiting slogan. That is why al Qaeda fighters from across the Muslim world are streaming into Iraq and fighting desperately to retain and expand their positions there. Al Qaeda does not think Iraq is a distraction from their war against us. Al Qaeda believes Iraq is the central front--and it is. To imagine that America can lose in Iraq but prevail in the war against jihadism is almost like imagining that we could have yielded Europe to the Nazis but won World War II.
"Al Qaeda is not our only enemy in Iraq, however. Iran has chosen to fight a proxy war against us there, determined to work our defeat for its own purposes. Iranian weapons and even advisers flow into Iraq and assist our enemies, both Sunni and Shia, to kill our soldiers and attempt to establish control over Iraq itself. This Iranian support is not the result of a misunderstanding that could be worked out if only we would talk to the mullahs. It is the continuation of nearly three decades of cold war between Iran and the United States that began in 1979 with an Iranian attack on the sovereign American soil of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The states of the Arabian Gulf are watching closely to see who will win. If Iran succeeds in driving America from Iraq, Iranian hegemony in the region is likely. If that success is combined with the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, then Iranian hegemony is even more likely. Dominance of the Middle East by this Iranian regime would be very bad for America. And a nuclear arms race in which Arab states tried to balance against Iranian power would also be very bad for America." (Read) for the rest of the article.
"This article is reprinted with permission of The Weekly Standard, where it first appeared on 05/28/2007. For more information visit www.weeklystandard.com."
In it Mr. Kagan makes the case for winning in Iraq.
"From time to time, nations face fundamental tests of character. Forced to choose between painful but wise options, and irresponsible ones that offer only temporary relief from pain, a people must decide what price they are willing to pay to safeguard themselves and their children and to do the right thing. America has faced such tests before. Guided by Abraham Lincoln, we met our greatest challenge during the Civil War and overcame it, despite agonizing doubts about the possibility of success even into 1864. The Greatest Generation recovered from the shock of Pearl Harbor and refused to stop fighting until both Germany and Japan had surrendered unconditionally. A similar moment is upon us in Iraq. What will we do?
"America has vital national interests in Iraq. The global al Qaeda movement has decided to defeat us there--not merely to establish a base from which to pursue further tyranny and terror, but also to erect a triumphant monument on the ruins of American power. Al Qaeda claims to have defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and its recruiting rests in part on that boast. If America flees the field of battle against this foe in Iraq, al Qaeda will have gained an even more powerful recruiting slogan. That is why al Qaeda fighters from across the Muslim world are streaming into Iraq and fighting desperately to retain and expand their positions there. Al Qaeda does not think Iraq is a distraction from their war against us. Al Qaeda believes Iraq is the central front--and it is. To imagine that America can lose in Iraq but prevail in the war against jihadism is almost like imagining that we could have yielded Europe to the Nazis but won World War II.
"Al Qaeda is not our only enemy in Iraq, however. Iran has chosen to fight a proxy war against us there, determined to work our defeat for its own purposes. Iranian weapons and even advisers flow into Iraq and assist our enemies, both Sunni and Shia, to kill our soldiers and attempt to establish control over Iraq itself. This Iranian support is not the result of a misunderstanding that could be worked out if only we would talk to the mullahs. It is the continuation of nearly three decades of cold war between Iran and the United States that began in 1979 with an Iranian attack on the sovereign American soil of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The states of the Arabian Gulf are watching closely to see who will win. If Iran succeeds in driving America from Iraq, Iranian hegemony in the region is likely. If that success is combined with the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, then Iranian hegemony is even more likely. Dominance of the Middle East by this Iranian regime would be very bad for America. And a nuclear arms race in which Arab states tried to balance against Iranian power would also be very bad for America." (Read) for the rest of the article.
"This article is reprinted with permission of The Weekly Standard, where it first appeared on 05/28/2007. For more information visit www.weeklystandard.com."
Friday, May 18, 2007
Number of Man-made Global Warming Skeptics is Growing
"Here is the real inconvenient truth. These are not quacks or politicians" - Richard Winkler from www.capitalismnow.com
"Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming—Now Skeptics," Marc Morano, The Inhofe EPW Press Blog, May 15
Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven "consensus" on man-made global warming.
The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released US Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.
In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007.
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the "prophets of doom of global warming" of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" "Glaciers' chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious," Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS….
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a "Kyoto house" in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol's goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled "The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming." A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel's conversion while building his "Kyoto house": "Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and 'red flags,' and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures."… Wiskel also said that global warming has gone "from a science to a religion" and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy….
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye," Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article…. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006, that a colleague of his believed that "CO2 should have a large effect on climate" so "he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views." Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. "I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views," he wrote….(read).
"Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming—Now Skeptics," Marc Morano, The Inhofe EPW Press Blog, May 15
Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven "consensus" on man-made global warming.
The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released US Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.
In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007.
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the "prophets of doom of global warming" of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" "Glaciers' chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious," Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS….
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a "Kyoto house" in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol's goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled "The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming." A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel's conversion while building his "Kyoto house": "Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and 'red flags,' and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures."… Wiskel also said that global warming has gone "from a science to a religion" and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy….
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye," Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article…. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006, that a colleague of his believed that "CO2 should have a large effect on climate" so "he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views." Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. "I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views," he wrote….(read).
Saturday, May 12, 2007
"Reason Without Religion" by Richard Winkler
This article was first posted at Capitalismnow.com on September 11, 2006
When the Koran or a Mullah asks followers to subjugate or kill those who do not uphold the ideas of Islam, the line from civilized dialogue to rule by force is crossed. Someone who is required to "accept" Islam at the point of a gun has not made a moral choice.
Those who initiate force are not in the same category as those who use reason to persuade. Reason requires voluntary agreement while a gun allows no argument. There is no discussion, negotiation, or compromise possible with someone holding a gun. Only surrender to that person's demands, die, or attempt to kill him first.
Force is the only way for men to deal with each other when they choose not to live by reason. When animals are forced by circumstances to compete against each other for territory or some other value, their only resort is to attack or run away. Reason is not an option for them; that is why we do not call an animal a "murderer" when it kills.
Recent remarks by pope Benedict quoted in two separate articles in the Wall Street Journal: "Benedict the Brave" and "Pope Provocateur", frames this issue clearly, even as he commits to the same mistaken ideas that weaken the West in the battle of ideas against Islam.
“…Without the right balance between [reason and religion], the pontiff said, mankind is condemned to the "pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason" -- in short, political and religious fanaticism."
"In Christianity, God is inseparable from reason. In the beginning was the Word," the pope quotes from the Gospel according to John. "God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word," he explained. "The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of history of religions, but also from that of world history. . . . This convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe."
"The question raised by the pope is whether this convergence has taken place in Islam as well. He quotes the Lebanese Catholic theologist Theodore Khoury, who said that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent; his will is not bound up with any of our categories." If this is true, can there be dialogue at all between Islam and the West? For the pope, the precondition for any meaningful interfaith discussions is a religion tempered by reason: "It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures," he concluded."
"This is not an invitation to the usual feel-good interfaith round-tables. It is a request for dialogue with one condition -- that everyone at the table reject the irrationality of religiously motivated violence. The pope isn't condemning Islam; he is inviting it to join rather than reject the modern world."
The Pope acknowledges the impact of reason in the development of a civilized Western culture. Due in to the reformations in Western thought initiated by Thomas Aquinas’ writings on reconciling Christianity with reason, the bloody religious wars of the Middle Ages gave way to the Western renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. The elevation of reason gave to those parts of the world that accepted it a modern and largely secular industrial society. Religion, no longer supreme, unleashed the magnificent forces of creativity and made possible the discoveries of men like Galileo, Einstein, and Christopher Columbus. Discoveries which when translated into material products by businessmen like Rockefeller and Bill Gates, made men aware that reason could offer them happiness here and now on earth, at least in the material realm, by giving them the power to control nature for their own benefit.
Contrary to what the Pope says though, there is no possibility of reconciling reason with faith. Perhaps this can be made clearer to the reader by restating what the pope is actually saying so that the terms are defined:
Belief in the unknowable and un-provable (faith), can lead to violence unless men also use their knowledge of reality based on sense perception (reason).
This is the untenable compromise the West has attempted to live by for the last 700 years.
The issue here concerns the realm of moral values. The stand that needs to be taken is to fully embrace reason and discover the moral principles reason demands in order for man to live on earth. Unfortunately, almost all of the secular theories of values have been as irrational as the religious ones. The West has been reduced to choosing between Christian universal absolutes such as “love thy neighbor” and the relativism of ideas like multiculturalism from the more secular intellectuals. One is just as arbitrary as the other; neither is grounded in reason and reality.
Attempting to reach a compromise between the contradictory principles of reason and faith, and unable to formulate a rational alternative to mysticism, the West is hesitant before the uncompromising but blind certainty of the Islamists. Blind certainty can only “convince” through unthinking belief or force.
What Islam and the West both desperately need to discover is a set of moral principles grounded in the bedrock of reality. That bedrock will grant real certainty to men’s actions. Not the false certainty offered by the religious view of man is a disembodied spirit, nor the equally false uncertainty offered by current secular views of man as an unconscious automaton. Bedrock certainty can only result from viewing man as he really is, as a biological entity possessing a unique type of consciousness – i.e. as man the rational animal.
Admittedly, if one had to choose between Islamism and a culture where reason had at least as much respect as it does in the West, i.e. the kind of culture advocated by the Pope, I would choose the later. But, then at best, one would get the United States, whereas if reason alone reigned supreme, the West as it currently is would be a shadow of the culture that would exist.
If you would like to discover such a bedrock, read any of the books by Ayn Rand. Islam has grasped the banner of irrationality; let those who love life here on this earth grasp the banner of reason.
When the Koran or a Mullah asks followers to subjugate or kill those who do not uphold the ideas of Islam, the line from civilized dialogue to rule by force is crossed. Someone who is required to "accept" Islam at the point of a gun has not made a moral choice.
Those who initiate force are not in the same category as those who use reason to persuade. Reason requires voluntary agreement while a gun allows no argument. There is no discussion, negotiation, or compromise possible with someone holding a gun. Only surrender to that person's demands, die, or attempt to kill him first.
Force is the only way for men to deal with each other when they choose not to live by reason. When animals are forced by circumstances to compete against each other for territory or some other value, their only resort is to attack or run away. Reason is not an option for them; that is why we do not call an animal a "murderer" when it kills.
Recent remarks by pope Benedict quoted in two separate articles in the Wall Street Journal: "Benedict the Brave" and "Pope Provocateur", frames this issue clearly, even as he commits to the same mistaken ideas that weaken the West in the battle of ideas against Islam.
“…Without the right balance between [reason and religion], the pontiff said, mankind is condemned to the "pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason" -- in short, political and religious fanaticism."
"In Christianity, God is inseparable from reason. In the beginning was the Word," the pope quotes from the Gospel according to John. "God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word," he explained. "The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of history of religions, but also from that of world history. . . . This convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe."
"The question raised by the pope is whether this convergence has taken place in Islam as well. He quotes the Lebanese Catholic theologist Theodore Khoury, who said that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent; his will is not bound up with any of our categories." If this is true, can there be dialogue at all between Islam and the West? For the pope, the precondition for any meaningful interfaith discussions is a religion tempered by reason: "It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures," he concluded."
"This is not an invitation to the usual feel-good interfaith round-tables. It is a request for dialogue with one condition -- that everyone at the table reject the irrationality of religiously motivated violence. The pope isn't condemning Islam; he is inviting it to join rather than reject the modern world."
The Pope acknowledges the impact of reason in the development of a civilized Western culture. Due in to the reformations in Western thought initiated by Thomas Aquinas’ writings on reconciling Christianity with reason, the bloody religious wars of the Middle Ages gave way to the Western renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. The elevation of reason gave to those parts of the world that accepted it a modern and largely secular industrial society. Religion, no longer supreme, unleashed the magnificent forces of creativity and made possible the discoveries of men like Galileo, Einstein, and Christopher Columbus. Discoveries which when translated into material products by businessmen like Rockefeller and Bill Gates, made men aware that reason could offer them happiness here and now on earth, at least in the material realm, by giving them the power to control nature for their own benefit.
Contrary to what the Pope says though, there is no possibility of reconciling reason with faith. Perhaps this can be made clearer to the reader by restating what the pope is actually saying so that the terms are defined:
Belief in the unknowable and un-provable (faith), can lead to violence unless men also use their knowledge of reality based on sense perception (reason).
This is the untenable compromise the West has attempted to live by for the last 700 years.
The issue here concerns the realm of moral values. The stand that needs to be taken is to fully embrace reason and discover the moral principles reason demands in order for man to live on earth. Unfortunately, almost all of the secular theories of values have been as irrational as the religious ones. The West has been reduced to choosing between Christian universal absolutes such as “love thy neighbor” and the relativism of ideas like multiculturalism from the more secular intellectuals. One is just as arbitrary as the other; neither is grounded in reason and reality.
Attempting to reach a compromise between the contradictory principles of reason and faith, and unable to formulate a rational alternative to mysticism, the West is hesitant before the uncompromising but blind certainty of the Islamists. Blind certainty can only “convince” through unthinking belief or force.
What Islam and the West both desperately need to discover is a set of moral principles grounded in the bedrock of reality. That bedrock will grant real certainty to men’s actions. Not the false certainty offered by the religious view of man is a disembodied spirit, nor the equally false uncertainty offered by current secular views of man as an unconscious automaton. Bedrock certainty can only result from viewing man as he really is, as a biological entity possessing a unique type of consciousness – i.e. as man the rational animal.
Admittedly, if one had to choose between Islamism and a culture where reason had at least as much respect as it does in the West, i.e. the kind of culture advocated by the Pope, I would choose the later. But, then at best, one would get the United States, whereas if reason alone reigned supreme, the West as it currently is would be a shadow of the culture that would exist.
If you would like to discover such a bedrock, read any of the books by Ayn Rand. Islam has grasped the banner of irrationality; let those who love life here on this earth grasp the banner of reason.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Making the Case for Lowering Taxes Everyday
"You wouldn't think that you'd have to make the lower tax case again but you have to make it every day in Washington" Fred Thompson, possible Republican presidential candidate.
With states like Indiana and Ohio cutting taxes and experiencing growth you'd think that states like Michigan and Pennsylvania which are teetering on bankruptcy would follow their example. But not the Governor of Michigan Mrs. Granholm. She wants to raise taxes in order to meet expenditures. The legislature has suggested that she work on cutting expenditures. Gee what a good idea. As Fred Thompson said in a recent speech - you have to make the case every day in Washington.
There should be more citizens enraged and making the case to our politicians here in Michigan - CUT SPENDING - and STOP OVERTAXING US.
With states like Indiana and Ohio cutting taxes and experiencing growth you'd think that states like Michigan and Pennsylvania which are teetering on bankruptcy would follow their example. But not the Governor of Michigan Mrs. Granholm. She wants to raise taxes in order to meet expenditures. The legislature has suggested that she work on cutting expenditures. Gee what a good idea. As Fred Thompson said in a recent speech - you have to make the case every day in Washington.
There should be more citizens enraged and making the case to our politicians here in Michigan - CUT SPENDING - and STOP OVERTAXING US.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
The Mental Cage of Islamic Women #2
A New York Time article shows how females are treated in the Muslim world "...When one woman, Nazanin, 28, was stopped last month in Vanak Square, she thought she had dressed more modestly than usual, she said. But she was told that her coat was tight and showed the shape of her body.
“I just joked with them and tried to stay calm, but they told me to sit so that they could see how far my pants would pull up in a sitting position,” said Nazanin, a reporter. She was told by the police officers that they wanted to help her look modest so men would not look at her and cause her inconvenience, she said.
"She received a warning about her large sunglasses, her coat, her eyeliner and her socks, which the police officers said should be longer. She was allowed to go after she signed a letter, which included her name and address, saying she would not appear in public like that again. The police have said the letters will be used against violators in court if they defy the rules a second time.
"Another woman, Niloofar, 28, who responded angrily to the police when she was told to fix her head scarf because too much of her hair was showing, said she was kept in a bus for five hours.
"Somayeh, 31, who was crying after she was stopped at the Mirdamad subway station, said, “They want to intimidate us.” She was asked to call home and get her national ID number, the equivalent of a Social Security number, for the letter she had to sign, promising not to wear makeup in public again.
"The women who were interviewed refused to give their full names because they feared they could be identified by the police."
Where are all the supposed feminists in the US? Where are your protests against this humiliating and debasing treatment of your Muslim sisters?
“I just joked with them and tried to stay calm, but they told me to sit so that they could see how far my pants would pull up in a sitting position,” said Nazanin, a reporter. She was told by the police officers that they wanted to help her look modest so men would not look at her and cause her inconvenience, she said.
"She received a warning about her large sunglasses, her coat, her eyeliner and her socks, which the police officers said should be longer. She was allowed to go after she signed a letter, which included her name and address, saying she would not appear in public like that again. The police have said the letters will be used against violators in court if they defy the rules a second time.
"Another woman, Niloofar, 28, who responded angrily to the police when she was told to fix her head scarf because too much of her hair was showing, said she was kept in a bus for five hours.
"Somayeh, 31, who was crying after she was stopped at the Mirdamad subway station, said, “They want to intimidate us.” She was asked to call home and get her national ID number, the equivalent of a Social Security number, for the letter she had to sign, promising not to wear makeup in public again.
"The women who were interviewed refused to give their full names because they feared they could be identified by the police."
Where are all the supposed feminists in the US? Where are your protests against this humiliating and debasing treatment of your Muslim sisters?
Sunday, April 22, 2007
"Nuclear Iran" by Victor Davis Hanson
The following is portions of a speech that Dr. Hanson delivered on February 13, 2007 in Fort Myers Florida at the Hillsdale College National Leadership seminar on "National Security: Short-and Long-Term Assessments.
“The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” So rants Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is understandable why Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. It would allow him to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, pressure the Arab Gulf states to lower oil production, pose as the Persian and Shiite messianic leader of Islamic terrorists, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region—and, of course, destroy Israel. Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.
In all his crazed pronouncements, Ahmadinejad reflects an end-of-days view: History is coming to its grand finale under his aegis. In his mind, he entrances even foreign audiences into stupor with his rhetoric. Of his recent United Nations speech he boasted, “I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.” The name of Ahmadinejad, he supposes, will live for the ages if he takes out the “crusader” interloper in Jerusalem. As the Great Mahdi come back to life, he can do something for the devout not seen since the days of Saladin.
For now, however, Ahmadinejad faces two hurdles: He must get the bomb, and he must create the psychological landscape whereby the world will shrug at Israel’s demise.
Oddly, the first obstacle may not be the hardest. An impoverished Pakistan and North Korea pulled it off. China and Russia will likely sell Tehran anything it cannot get from rogue regimes. The European Union is Iran’s largest trading partner and ships it everything from sophisticated machine tools to sniper rifles, while impotent European diplomats continue “ruling out force” to stop the Iranian nuclear industry. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing, for all their expressed concern, will probably veto any serious punitive action by the United Nations.
As for the United States, it has 180,000 troops attempting to establish some sort of democratic stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention a growing anti-war movement at home. An unpredictable President Bush has less than two years left in the White House, with a majority opposition in Congress that is calling for direct talks with Ahmadinejad and urging congressional restraints on the possible use of force against Iran. It is no surprise that so many in Iran see no barrier to obtaining the bomb.
But the second obstacle—preparing the world for the end of the Jewish state—is trickier.
Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust
True, the Middle East’s secular gospel is anti-Semitism. State-run media in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan broadcast endless ugly sermons about Jews as “pigs and apes.” Nor do Russia and China much care what happens to Israel, as long as its demise does not affect business. But the West is a different matter. There the history of anti-Semitism looms large, framed by the Holocaust that nearly destroyed European Jewry. Thus the Holocaust is now Ahmadinejad’s target just as much as downtown Tel Aviv.
Holocaust denial is a tired game, but Ahmadinejad’s approach is slightly new and different. He has studied the Western postmodern mind and has devised a strategy based on its unholy trinity of multiculturalism, moral equivalence and cultural relativism. As a third world populist, he expects that his own fascism will escape proper scrutiny if he can recite often enough the past sins of the West. He also understands the appeal of victimology in the West these days. So he knows that to destroy the Israelis, he, not they, must become the victim, and Westerners the aggressors who forced his hand. “So we ask you,” he said recently, “if you indeed committed this great crime, why should the oppressed people of Palestine be punished for it? If you committed a crime, you yourselves should pay for it.”
Ahmadinejad also grasps that there are millions of highly educated but cynical Westerners who see nothing exceptional about their own culture. So if democratic America has nuclear weapons, he asks, why not theocratic Iran? “Your arsenals are full to the brim, yet when it’s the turn of a nation such as mine to develop peaceful nuclear technology, you object and resort to threats.”
Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. Who is to say what are facts or what is true, given the tendency of the powerful to “construct” their own narratives and call the result “history”? So he says that the Holocaust was exaggerated, or perhaps even fabricated, as mere jails became “death camps” through a trick of language in order to persecute the poor Palestinians. We laugh at all this as absurd. We should not.
Money, oil and threats have gotten the Iranian theocrats to the very threshold of a nuclear arsenal. Their uncanny diagnosis of Western malaise has now convinced them that they can carefully fabricate a Holocaust-free reality in which Muslims are the victims and Jews the aggressors, setting the stage for Ahmadinejad’s “righteously” aggrieved Iran, after “hundreds of years of war,” to set things right.
In the midst of all this passive-aggressive noisemaking, the Iranian government pushes insidiously forward with nuclear development—perhaps pausing when it has gone too far in order to allow some negotiations, but then getting right back at it. Nuclear acquisition for Ahmadinejad is a win/win proposition. If he obtains nuclear weapons and restores lost Persian grandeur, it will remind a restless Iranian populace how the theocrats are nationalists after all, not just pan-Islamic provocateurs. And a nuclear Iran could create all sorts of mini-crises in the region in order to spike oil prices, given world demand for oil.
The Islamic world and the front line enemies of Israel lost their Middle Eastern nuclear deterrent with the collapse of the Soviet Union; no surprise, then, that we have not seen a multilateral conventional attack on Israel ever since. But with a nuclear Iran, the mullahs can puff themselves up with a guarantee that a new coalition against Israel would not be humiliated or annihilated when it lost—since the Iranians could always, Soviet-like, threaten to go nuclear. And there are always enough crazies in Arab capitals to imagine that at last the combined armies of the Middle East could defeat Israel, with the knowledge that in case of failure, they could recede safely back under an Islamic nuclear umbrella.
Reasons for Action
How many times have we heard the following arguments?
“Israel has nuclear weapons, so why single out Iran?”
“Pakistan got nukes and we lived with it.”
“Who is to say the United States or Russia should have the bomb and not other countries?”
“Iran has promised to use its reactors for peaceful purposes, so why demonize the regime?”
In fact, the United States has at least six reasons for singling out Iran to halt its nuclear development program—and it is past time that we spell them out to the world at large.
First, any country that seeks “peaceful” nuclear power at the same time it is completely self-sufficient in energy production is de facto suspect. Iran has enough natural gas to meet its clean electrical generation needs for two centuries. The only rationale for its multi-billion-dollar program of building nuclear reactors—and for its spending billions more to hide and decentralize them—is to obtain weapons.
Second, we cannot excuse Iran by acknowledging that the Soviet Union, communist China, North Korea and Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons. In each of these cases, anti-liberal regimes gained stature and advantage by the ability to destroy Western cities. But past moral failures are not corrected by allowing history to repeat itself.
The logic of this excuse would lead to a nuclearized globe in which wars from Darfur to the Middle East would all assume the potential to go nuclear. In contrast, the fewer the nuclear players, the more likely deterrence can play some role. And if Iran were to go nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt and other Arab autocracies would follow suit in order to preserve the prestige and security of largely Arab Sunni nations. That would ensure, again, that almost any Middle East dispute involving Shiite-Sunni tension, from Lebanon to Iraq, might escalate to a nuclear confrontation.
Third, it is simply a fact that full-fledged democracies are less likely to attack one another. Although they are prone to frequent fighting—imperial Athens and republican Venice, for instance, were in some sort of war about three out of every four years during the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century, respectively—consensual governments are not so ready to fight each other. Thus today there is no chance whatsoever that an anti-American France and an increasingly anti-French America would, as nuclear democracies, go to war. Likewise Russia, following the fall of communism and its partial evolution to an elected government, poses less of a threat to the United States than before.
It would be regrettable should Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or Germany go nuclear—but not nearly as catastrophic as when Pakistan did so, which is what allows it today to give sanctuary to bin Laden and the planners of 9/11 with impunity. The former governments operate with a free press, open elections and free speech, and thus their warmaking is subject to a series of checks and balances. Pakistan is a strongman’s heartbeat away from becoming an Islamic theocracy. And while democratic India is often volatile in relations with its Islamic neighbor, the world is not nearly as worried about its nuclear arsenal as it is about autocratic Pakistan’s.
Fourth, there are a number of rogue regimes that belong in a special category: North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba. These are tyrannies whose leaders have sought global attention and stature through sponsoring insurrection and terrorism beyond their borders. If it is frightening that Russia, China and Pakistan are now nuclear, it is terrifying that Kim Jong Il has the bomb, and that Ahmadinejad might soon. Islamic fundamentalism and North Korean Stalinism might be antithetical to scientific advancement, but they are actually conducive to nuclear politics. When such renegade regimes go nuclear, they have an added edge. In nuclear poker, the appearance of derangement is an advantage.
Fifth, Iran presents a uniquely fourfold danger: It has enough cash to buy influence and exemption from sanctions; it possesses oil reserves to blackmail a petroleum-hungry world; it sponsors terrorists who might soon be enabled to find sanctuary under a nuclear umbrella and to be armed with dirty bombs; and it has a leader who talks as if he were willing to take his entire country into paradise—or at least back to the 7th century amid the ashes of the Middle East. Just imagine the recent controversy over Danish cartoons in the context of Ahmadinejad with his finger on a half-dozen nuclear missiles pointed at Copenhagen. (Emphasis mine.)
Sixth, the West is right to take on a certain responsibility to discourage nuclear proliferation. The existence of such weapons grew entirely out of Western science and technology. In fact, the story of global nuclear proliferation is exclusively one of espionage, stealthy commerce, or American-and European-trained native engineers using their foreign-acquired expertise. Pakistan, North Korea or Iran have no ability themselves to create such weapons, any more than Russia, China or India did. And any country that cannot itself create such weapons is probably less likely to ensure the necessary protocols to guard against their misuse or theft.
What Is To Be Done?
We can argue all we want over the solution. Would it be wrong to use military force? Are air strikes feasible? Will Iranian dissidents rise up, or have most of them already been killed or exiled? Will Russia and China help us or sit back and enjoy our dilemma? Is Europe our ally in this matter, or is it simply triangulating? Will the UN ever step in, or is it more likely to condemn the United States than Tehran?
Clearly a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed. It is certainly not behaving like the hegemon or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and his ilk. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, no administration will wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years, with its endless hysterical accusations of arrogant unilateralism, preemption, inaccurate or falsified intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility towards Islam.
What, then, should the United States do, other than keep offering meaningless platitudes about “dialogue”? There are actually several measures that, taken together, might work to exploit Iran’s weaknesses and maintain a nuclear-free Gulf.
First, keep pushing international accords and doggedly work to ratchet up the watered-down United Nations sanctions. Even if they don’t do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the politically correct United Nations, he only loses further support.
Second, keep prodding the European Union, presently Iran’s chief trading partner, to apply pressure. The so-called EU3—Britain, France and Germany—failed completely in its recent attempt to stop Ahmadinejad’s nuclear plans. But out of that setback came a growing realization in Europe that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could hit Europe just as easily as Israel. Next, Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent all Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology.
Third, keep encouraging Iranian dissidents. We need not ask them to go into the streets where they would be shot. Instead we should offer them media help and access to the West. Also highlight the plight of women, minorities and liberals in Iran—the groups that traditionally appeal to the Western left.
Fourth, we should announce in advance that we don’t want any bases in Iran; don’t want its oil; and won’t send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.
Fifth, and crucially, we must complete the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese and Turks voting and speaking freely could form a critical mass of democratic reform to overwhelm the Khomeinists.
Sixth, keep reminding the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than to the United States or Israel—and that America’s efforts to contain Iran depend on their own to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.
Seventh, say nothing much about the presence of two or three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes, at which the United States excels.
Eighth, make it clear that Israel, as a sovereign nation, has a perfect right to protect itself. The United States should keep reminding Iran that 60 years after the real Holocaust, no Israeli Prime Minister will sit by idly while 7th century theocrats grandstand about wiping out the state of Israel and obtain the nuclear means to do it.
Ninth, keep the rhetoric down. Avoid threats to bomb many who could be our friends—while at the same time ignoring therapeutic pleas to talk with those who we know are our enemies.
Finally, Americans must gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill for more petroleum and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum. At $60 a barrel for oil, Ahmadinejad is a charismatic third world benefactor who throws cash at every thug who wants a roadside bomb or shoulder-fired missile—and has plenty of money to buy Pakistani, North Korean or Russian nuclear components. But at $30 a barrel, he will be despised by his own people, who will become enraged as state-subsidized food and gas prices skyrocket, and as scarce Iranian petrodollars are wasted on Hezbollah and Hamas.
In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history—and, yes, a certain craziness as well.
The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature—which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it—whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.
So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”
“The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” So rants Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is understandable why Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. It would allow him to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, pressure the Arab Gulf states to lower oil production, pose as the Persian and Shiite messianic leader of Islamic terrorists, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region—and, of course, destroy Israel. Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.
In all his crazed pronouncements, Ahmadinejad reflects an end-of-days view: History is coming to its grand finale under his aegis. In his mind, he entrances even foreign audiences into stupor with his rhetoric. Of his recent United Nations speech he boasted, “I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.” The name of Ahmadinejad, he supposes, will live for the ages if he takes out the “crusader” interloper in Jerusalem. As the Great Mahdi come back to life, he can do something for the devout not seen since the days of Saladin.
For now, however, Ahmadinejad faces two hurdles: He must get the bomb, and he must create the psychological landscape whereby the world will shrug at Israel’s demise.
Oddly, the first obstacle may not be the hardest. An impoverished Pakistan and North Korea pulled it off. China and Russia will likely sell Tehran anything it cannot get from rogue regimes. The European Union is Iran’s largest trading partner and ships it everything from sophisticated machine tools to sniper rifles, while impotent European diplomats continue “ruling out force” to stop the Iranian nuclear industry. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing, for all their expressed concern, will probably veto any serious punitive action by the United Nations.
As for the United States, it has 180,000 troops attempting to establish some sort of democratic stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention a growing anti-war movement at home. An unpredictable President Bush has less than two years left in the White House, with a majority opposition in Congress that is calling for direct talks with Ahmadinejad and urging congressional restraints on the possible use of force against Iran. It is no surprise that so many in Iran see no barrier to obtaining the bomb.
But the second obstacle—preparing the world for the end of the Jewish state—is trickier.
Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust
True, the Middle East’s secular gospel is anti-Semitism. State-run media in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan broadcast endless ugly sermons about Jews as “pigs and apes.” Nor do Russia and China much care what happens to Israel, as long as its demise does not affect business. But the West is a different matter. There the history of anti-Semitism looms large, framed by the Holocaust that nearly destroyed European Jewry. Thus the Holocaust is now Ahmadinejad’s target just as much as downtown Tel Aviv.
Holocaust denial is a tired game, but Ahmadinejad’s approach is slightly new and different. He has studied the Western postmodern mind and has devised a strategy based on its unholy trinity of multiculturalism, moral equivalence and cultural relativism. As a third world populist, he expects that his own fascism will escape proper scrutiny if he can recite often enough the past sins of the West. He also understands the appeal of victimology in the West these days. So he knows that to destroy the Israelis, he, not they, must become the victim, and Westerners the aggressors who forced his hand. “So we ask you,” he said recently, “if you indeed committed this great crime, why should the oppressed people of Palestine be punished for it? If you committed a crime, you yourselves should pay for it.”
Ahmadinejad also grasps that there are millions of highly educated but cynical Westerners who see nothing exceptional about their own culture. So if democratic America has nuclear weapons, he asks, why not theocratic Iran? “Your arsenals are full to the brim, yet when it’s the turn of a nation such as mine to develop peaceful nuclear technology, you object and resort to threats.”
Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. Who is to say what are facts or what is true, given the tendency of the powerful to “construct” their own narratives and call the result “history”? So he says that the Holocaust was exaggerated, or perhaps even fabricated, as mere jails became “death camps” through a trick of language in order to persecute the poor Palestinians. We laugh at all this as absurd. We should not.
Money, oil and threats have gotten the Iranian theocrats to the very threshold of a nuclear arsenal. Their uncanny diagnosis of Western malaise has now convinced them that they can carefully fabricate a Holocaust-free reality in which Muslims are the victims and Jews the aggressors, setting the stage for Ahmadinejad’s “righteously” aggrieved Iran, after “hundreds of years of war,” to set things right.
In the midst of all this passive-aggressive noisemaking, the Iranian government pushes insidiously forward with nuclear development—perhaps pausing when it has gone too far in order to allow some negotiations, but then getting right back at it. Nuclear acquisition for Ahmadinejad is a win/win proposition. If he obtains nuclear weapons and restores lost Persian grandeur, it will remind a restless Iranian populace how the theocrats are nationalists after all, not just pan-Islamic provocateurs. And a nuclear Iran could create all sorts of mini-crises in the region in order to spike oil prices, given world demand for oil.
The Islamic world and the front line enemies of Israel lost their Middle Eastern nuclear deterrent with the collapse of the Soviet Union; no surprise, then, that we have not seen a multilateral conventional attack on Israel ever since. But with a nuclear Iran, the mullahs can puff themselves up with a guarantee that a new coalition against Israel would not be humiliated or annihilated when it lost—since the Iranians could always, Soviet-like, threaten to go nuclear. And there are always enough crazies in Arab capitals to imagine that at last the combined armies of the Middle East could defeat Israel, with the knowledge that in case of failure, they could recede safely back under an Islamic nuclear umbrella.
Reasons for Action
How many times have we heard the following arguments?
“Israel has nuclear weapons, so why single out Iran?”
“Pakistan got nukes and we lived with it.”
“Who is to say the United States or Russia should have the bomb and not other countries?”
“Iran has promised to use its reactors for peaceful purposes, so why demonize the regime?”
In fact, the United States has at least six reasons for singling out Iran to halt its nuclear development program—and it is past time that we spell them out to the world at large.
First, any country that seeks “peaceful” nuclear power at the same time it is completely self-sufficient in energy production is de facto suspect. Iran has enough natural gas to meet its clean electrical generation needs for two centuries. The only rationale for its multi-billion-dollar program of building nuclear reactors—and for its spending billions more to hide and decentralize them—is to obtain weapons.
Second, we cannot excuse Iran by acknowledging that the Soviet Union, communist China, North Korea and Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons. In each of these cases, anti-liberal regimes gained stature and advantage by the ability to destroy Western cities. But past moral failures are not corrected by allowing history to repeat itself.
The logic of this excuse would lead to a nuclearized globe in which wars from Darfur to the Middle East would all assume the potential to go nuclear. In contrast, the fewer the nuclear players, the more likely deterrence can play some role. And if Iran were to go nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt and other Arab autocracies would follow suit in order to preserve the prestige and security of largely Arab Sunni nations. That would ensure, again, that almost any Middle East dispute involving Shiite-Sunni tension, from Lebanon to Iraq, might escalate to a nuclear confrontation.
Third, it is simply a fact that full-fledged democracies are less likely to attack one another. Although they are prone to frequent fighting—imperial Athens and republican Venice, for instance, were in some sort of war about three out of every four years during the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century, respectively—consensual governments are not so ready to fight each other. Thus today there is no chance whatsoever that an anti-American France and an increasingly anti-French America would, as nuclear democracies, go to war. Likewise Russia, following the fall of communism and its partial evolution to an elected government, poses less of a threat to the United States than before.
It would be regrettable should Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or Germany go nuclear—but not nearly as catastrophic as when Pakistan did so, which is what allows it today to give sanctuary to bin Laden and the planners of 9/11 with impunity. The former governments operate with a free press, open elections and free speech, and thus their warmaking is subject to a series of checks and balances. Pakistan is a strongman’s heartbeat away from becoming an Islamic theocracy. And while democratic India is often volatile in relations with its Islamic neighbor, the world is not nearly as worried about its nuclear arsenal as it is about autocratic Pakistan’s.
Fourth, there are a number of rogue regimes that belong in a special category: North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba. These are tyrannies whose leaders have sought global attention and stature through sponsoring insurrection and terrorism beyond their borders. If it is frightening that Russia, China and Pakistan are now nuclear, it is terrifying that Kim Jong Il has the bomb, and that Ahmadinejad might soon. Islamic fundamentalism and North Korean Stalinism might be antithetical to scientific advancement, but they are actually conducive to nuclear politics. When such renegade regimes go nuclear, they have an added edge. In nuclear poker, the appearance of derangement is an advantage.
Fifth, Iran presents a uniquely fourfold danger: It has enough cash to buy influence and exemption from sanctions; it possesses oil reserves to blackmail a petroleum-hungry world; it sponsors terrorists who might soon be enabled to find sanctuary under a nuclear umbrella and to be armed with dirty bombs; and it has a leader who talks as if he were willing to take his entire country into paradise—or at least back to the 7th century amid the ashes of the Middle East. Just imagine the recent controversy over Danish cartoons in the context of Ahmadinejad with his finger on a half-dozen nuclear missiles pointed at Copenhagen. (Emphasis mine.)
Sixth, the West is right to take on a certain responsibility to discourage nuclear proliferation. The existence of such weapons grew entirely out of Western science and technology. In fact, the story of global nuclear proliferation is exclusively one of espionage, stealthy commerce, or American-and European-trained native engineers using their foreign-acquired expertise. Pakistan, North Korea or Iran have no ability themselves to create such weapons, any more than Russia, China or India did. And any country that cannot itself create such weapons is probably less likely to ensure the necessary protocols to guard against their misuse or theft.
What Is To Be Done?
We can argue all we want over the solution. Would it be wrong to use military force? Are air strikes feasible? Will Iranian dissidents rise up, or have most of them already been killed or exiled? Will Russia and China help us or sit back and enjoy our dilemma? Is Europe our ally in this matter, or is it simply triangulating? Will the UN ever step in, or is it more likely to condemn the United States than Tehran?
Clearly a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed. It is certainly not behaving like the hegemon or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and his ilk. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, no administration will wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years, with its endless hysterical accusations of arrogant unilateralism, preemption, inaccurate or falsified intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility towards Islam.
What, then, should the United States do, other than keep offering meaningless platitudes about “dialogue”? There are actually several measures that, taken together, might work to exploit Iran’s weaknesses and maintain a nuclear-free Gulf.
First, keep pushing international accords and doggedly work to ratchet up the watered-down United Nations sanctions. Even if they don’t do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the politically correct United Nations, he only loses further support.
Second, keep prodding the European Union, presently Iran’s chief trading partner, to apply pressure. The so-called EU3—Britain, France and Germany—failed completely in its recent attempt to stop Ahmadinejad’s nuclear plans. But out of that setback came a growing realization in Europe that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could hit Europe just as easily as Israel. Next, Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent all Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology.
Third, keep encouraging Iranian dissidents. We need not ask them to go into the streets where they would be shot. Instead we should offer them media help and access to the West. Also highlight the plight of women, minorities and liberals in Iran—the groups that traditionally appeal to the Western left.
Fourth, we should announce in advance that we don’t want any bases in Iran; don’t want its oil; and won’t send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.
Fifth, and crucially, we must complete the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese and Turks voting and speaking freely could form a critical mass of democratic reform to overwhelm the Khomeinists.
Sixth, keep reminding the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than to the United States or Israel—and that America’s efforts to contain Iran depend on their own to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.
Seventh, say nothing much about the presence of two or three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes, at which the United States excels.
Eighth, make it clear that Israel, as a sovereign nation, has a perfect right to protect itself. The United States should keep reminding Iran that 60 years after the real Holocaust, no Israeli Prime Minister will sit by idly while 7th century theocrats grandstand about wiping out the state of Israel and obtain the nuclear means to do it.
Ninth, keep the rhetoric down. Avoid threats to bomb many who could be our friends—while at the same time ignoring therapeutic pleas to talk with those who we know are our enemies.
Finally, Americans must gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill for more petroleum and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum. At $60 a barrel for oil, Ahmadinejad is a charismatic third world benefactor who throws cash at every thug who wants a roadside bomb or shoulder-fired missile—and has plenty of money to buy Pakistani, North Korean or Russian nuclear components. But at $30 a barrel, he will be despised by his own people, who will become enraged as state-subsidized food and gas prices skyrocket, and as scarce Iranian petrodollars are wasted on Hezbollah and Hamas.
In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history—and, yes, a certain craziness as well.
The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature—which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it—whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.
So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The "Mental Cage" of Islamic Women
It is not often that one learns of a person with the capacity to totally change their way of thinking, their cultural habits, their actions and their philosophy. Such a person is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of "Infidel" and "The Caged Virgin". Her book "Infidel" is her autobiography-the history of the development of her mind. She traces for us how she was born and raised in the traditional Muslim environment, of Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya African when 2 of these countries were in civil war.
At the age of 5 she and her sister (age 4) were excised-the female version of circumcision-for details you'll have to read the gruesome part yourself. Her sister never really recovered from this trauma and as a young adult she died of mental illness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was made of stronger stuff and survived by enveloping herself in the religion of Islam as well as in a headscarf and huge blackcloak. She assumed the role of a meek, modest lowly female. But her destiny changed when in her early twenties she was on her way to Canada to a forced marriage.
The book is filled with first hand observations of life in a Western world and we can follow her transformation from submission to the tribe to indiviualism. For example newly arrived in Frankfurt she observes that white men and women "were sitting together, not at bars but with easy familiarity, as if they were equal. They held hands in broad daylight, not hiding from anyone, and everyone else seemed to find this completely normal".
After a while she takes off her big coat so as not to stick out so much and she felt anonymous. There was no "social control" and as she puts it: "no eyes silently accused me of being a whore." In the rigid Muslim nations of the world women are always suspect of being whores and therefore must be covered up to avoid tempting males. Even if she is raped it is not the man's fault but the woman just for being female. It's in the Quoran.
Ayaan continues in "Infidel" marvelling at the city she has fled to.
"I walked till my feet hurt. Everything was so well kept. The grooves between the cobbles on the street were clean. The shopfronts gleamed. I remember thinking, "This is amazing, how can it be so?" I was used to heaps of stinking rubbish and streets pockmarked with huge potholes, where the dirt comes at you and nothing ever stays clean. In Nairobi, apart from a few wealthy enclaves reseved for the super rich government officials and millionaire businessmen, people live on top of each other, in slum houses made of bare cinder block or cardboard and metal sheets. There are beggars and bag snatchers and orphans living on rubbish heaps; ...I felt as though I had been thrown in to another world, calm and orderly, as in the novels I'd read and certain films, but somehow I had never really believed them before."
Ah, the novels. Even as she "studied and practiced to submit" there was "a spark of will" inside her She was an avid reader of western novels. She read anything she could get her hands on as she was growing up. Sexy, Romance Novels, Thrillers, Nancy Drew novels, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wuthering Heights, Cry the Beloved Country, Valley of the Dolls etc. "All these books, even trashy ones, carried with them ideas-races were equal, women were equal to men-and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me. Even our plain old biology and science textbooks seemed to follow a powerful narrative: you went out with knowledge and sought to advance humanity."
If you want to catch a glimpse of the horror that is Islam read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel". Then you will also glimpse the mindset of a thousand years ago still alive and well today for women in the Muslim world - that of a "caged virgin" which is just as much a mental cage as a physical cage.
At the age of 5 she and her sister (age 4) were excised-the female version of circumcision-for details you'll have to read the gruesome part yourself. Her sister never really recovered from this trauma and as a young adult she died of mental illness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was made of stronger stuff and survived by enveloping herself in the religion of Islam as well as in a headscarf and huge blackcloak. She assumed the role of a meek, modest lowly female. But her destiny changed when in her early twenties she was on her way to Canada to a forced marriage.
The book is filled with first hand observations of life in a Western world and we can follow her transformation from submission to the tribe to indiviualism. For example newly arrived in Frankfurt she observes that white men and women "were sitting together, not at bars but with easy familiarity, as if they were equal. They held hands in broad daylight, not hiding from anyone, and everyone else seemed to find this completely normal".
After a while she takes off her big coat so as not to stick out so much and she felt anonymous. There was no "social control" and as she puts it: "no eyes silently accused me of being a whore." In the rigid Muslim nations of the world women are always suspect of being whores and therefore must be covered up to avoid tempting males. Even if she is raped it is not the man's fault but the woman just for being female. It's in the Quoran.
Ayaan continues in "Infidel" marvelling at the city she has fled to.
"I walked till my feet hurt. Everything was so well kept. The grooves between the cobbles on the street were clean. The shopfronts gleamed. I remember thinking, "This is amazing, how can it be so?" I was used to heaps of stinking rubbish and streets pockmarked with huge potholes, where the dirt comes at you and nothing ever stays clean. In Nairobi, apart from a few wealthy enclaves reseved for the super rich government officials and millionaire businessmen, people live on top of each other, in slum houses made of bare cinder block or cardboard and metal sheets. There are beggars and bag snatchers and orphans living on rubbish heaps; ...I felt as though I had been thrown in to another world, calm and orderly, as in the novels I'd read and certain films, but somehow I had never really believed them before."
Ah, the novels. Even as she "studied and practiced to submit" there was "a spark of will" inside her She was an avid reader of western novels. She read anything she could get her hands on as she was growing up. Sexy, Romance Novels, Thrillers, Nancy Drew novels, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wuthering Heights, Cry the Beloved Country, Valley of the Dolls etc. "All these books, even trashy ones, carried with them ideas-races were equal, women were equal to men-and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me. Even our plain old biology and science textbooks seemed to follow a powerful narrative: you went out with knowledge and sought to advance humanity."
If you want to catch a glimpse of the horror that is Islam read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel". Then you will also glimpse the mindset of a thousand years ago still alive and well today for women in the Muslim world - that of a "caged virgin" which is just as much a mental cage as a physical cage.
Protesting The Creeping Putin Dictatorship
I've been wondering for a while now how is it that the Russians are so complacent in the face of the mounting dictatorial behavior of Mr. Putin. Finally some news that there is a small group willing to take to the streets in protest to Putin policy. One of these protesters on Saturday was Garry Kasparov a former chess champion. The following is how the New York Times reported the event in today's newpaper.
"The rally, the third so-called Dissenters’ March held by a loose antigovernment coalition known as Other Russia, was noteworthy because authorities aggressively pursued the organizers, including President Vladimir V. Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, whom the police jostled but did not arrest. Mr. Kasparov was later fined and released.
"The rally was principally supported by Mr. Kasyanov and Mr. Kasparov, who leads a group here called the United Civil Front.
"Essentially barred from access to television, members of Other Russia have embraced street protests as the only platform to voice their opposition ahead of parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections next March. Early this month, Mr. Kasyanov’s and Mr. Kasparov’s Web sites were blocked, though it was unclear by whom.
"The marches have become a test both of the determination of the opposition and the willingness of the government to use force to prevent it from gaining traction in street politics in the big cities.
"...Mr. Kasparov said: “Today the regime showed its true colors, its true face. I believe this was a great victory for the opposition because people got through and the march happened.”" (Read)
"The rally, the third so-called Dissenters’ March held by a loose antigovernment coalition known as Other Russia, was noteworthy because authorities aggressively pursued the organizers, including President Vladimir V. Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, whom the police jostled but did not arrest. Mr. Kasparov was later fined and released.
"The rally was principally supported by Mr. Kasyanov and Mr. Kasparov, who leads a group here called the United Civil Front.
"Essentially barred from access to television, members of Other Russia have embraced street protests as the only platform to voice their opposition ahead of parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections next March. Early this month, Mr. Kasyanov’s and Mr. Kasparov’s Web sites were blocked, though it was unclear by whom.
"The marches have become a test both of the determination of the opposition and the willingness of the government to use force to prevent it from gaining traction in street politics in the big cities.
"...Mr. Kasparov said: “Today the regime showed its true colors, its true face. I believe this was a great victory for the opposition because people got through and the march happened.”" (Read)
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Pelosi's Shame for all Seasons
Has this woman no shame! Has she no love of country! How dare she go about parading around in a garish head cover kowtowing to the likes of the Syrian dictator! The American people did not elect her to be our representative abroad or to speak for us. There's already someone to do that and that is PRESIDENT BUSH. She should be labeled a traitor to our country. What else can you call having tea or whatever they drink in Syria with a dictator and supporter of terrorists.
The Savannah Morning News writes this about Pelosi's little side show. (Could she have done this because she's eyeing a run for the 2012 election?)
"HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi did Congress and the country a grave disservice this week by traveling to Damascus and meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad.
"The Bush administration, and rightly so, has rejected direct talks with Syria. That nation has a long, bloody history of supporting terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
"Until Mr. Assad renounces these groups and takes steps to cut all ties with them, U.S. diplomats shouldn't step into Syria.
"But Ms. Pelosi apparently couldn't care less about forcing a state sponsor of terrorism to change its ways.
"Instead, this self-appointed foreign minister is taking the "Pelosi Doctrine" on the road. This doctrine calls for undercutting U.S. foreign policy and the Bush administration whenever possible.
"First, she and House Democrats approve legislation that handcuffs U.S. commanders by setting a pullout date for American troops in Iraq. Then she leaves the country and meets with a key ally of ruthless car-bombers, killers and other extremists who use violence to score political points.
"Talk about giving aid and comfort to one of the civilized world's enemies." (Read)
The Greatest Swindle - Global Warming
Recently, the news reported that due to the freeze this past week Michigan cherry, blueberry and other fruit farmers will have reduced harvests. This means fewer fruits and higher prices for our delicious cherries….bummer… meanwhile the saviors in the Michigan legislature will witness our Mayors signing the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement on April 14. With this agreement “participating cities commit to strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets by reducing carbon dioxide emissions”.
I’m so relieved that this is where our focus and energies are going because I’m so worried about all that CO2 that we exhale affecting our climate!! Thank God for these luminaries in government and especially for Al Gore. Why, who is calling him a hypocrite living in a mansion that consumes more energy in one day than a family does in one year. And all that meat he eats! I’m sure if we follow the money trail there are big bucks to be had for those who get in on the “Great Global Warming Swindle” (see this documentary put out by the BBC on Utube).
Honesty in politics and apparently in science is old fashioned. Remember that big fireball in the sky – the sun? Used to be a time when the sun was the cause of warming and cooling of our planet. Really what’s warming and cooling our planet is the amount of hot air coming out of Hollywood self-appointed know-it-alls and our corrupt politicians.
I’m so relieved that this is where our focus and energies are going because I’m so worried about all that CO2 that we exhale affecting our climate!! Thank God for these luminaries in government and especially for Al Gore. Why, who is calling him a hypocrite living in a mansion that consumes more energy in one day than a family does in one year. And all that meat he eats! I’m sure if we follow the money trail there are big bucks to be had for those who get in on the “Great Global Warming Swindle” (see this documentary put out by the BBC on Utube).
Honesty in politics and apparently in science is old fashioned. Remember that big fireball in the sky – the sun? Used to be a time when the sun was the cause of warming and cooling of our planet. Really what’s warming and cooling our planet is the amount of hot air coming out of Hollywood self-appointed know-it-alls and our corrupt politicians.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Politicians Fiddle While Iran Goes Nuclear
Please tell me if we're in some parallel universe where up is down and wrong is right. While our lovely Democrats invent issues with which to bring down our president, Iran is cooly building it's nuclear weapon of MASS DESTRUCTION! Nero fiddling while Rome burned. The total disregard for our 'clear and present danger' is simply astonishing - the hyprocisy, anti-Bush hate mongers and appeasers of the beginning of the second millenia will go down in our history books as the American evolution from a strong-willed people who fought the mighty British army and won to a lame, weak-willed and cowardly populace who refuses to face the dangers of our times.
Thankfully there are some clear-eyed leaders showing how we can deal with Iran, a country which has been a major thorn in the West's side for over twenty years. Thomas G. Mcinerney puts forth his views on how we can take down Iran in the Wall Street Journal article "Iran Escalates"(read).
"The obvious punishment for a defiant Iran could be an air strike that aims to destroy its nuclear development facilities and overt support for Iranians working to overthrow their government. This is where the discussion of taking stringent actions against Iran usually breaks down…
"This is where President Reagan in confronting the Soviets is instructive. The Gipper was elected in 1980 at a time when it appeared inevitable that the Soviet Union would dominate world affairs and just as inevitably that the U.S. was unable to do anything about it short of waging a bloody, military campaign that would have few allies in fighting and not every chance of success. In the end, as they say, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
"We have similar options now. One of which is to enact drastic economic sanctions that, oddly, would involve forcing a gasoline crisis in Iran. Tehran is kept afloat on oil revenues, but it has done so at the expense of its oil industry. While it exports large quantities of crude oil, Iran imports 40% of its domestically consumed gasoline, and each gallon at the pump is heavily subsidized. Shutting off or even restricting the supply of gasoline flowing into the country would put the regime in a crunch and drive up public discontent without creating a corresponding humanitarian crisis."
The question is what can we do as citizens of the United States to demand the likes of Pelosi and Reid to stop fiddling with sideshows, to try to contain their hatred of our President and to get down to the task at hand and the reason why we have a government - They need to be reminded that their primary mandate is - TO DEFEND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ITS CITIZENS.
Thankfully there are some clear-eyed leaders showing how we can deal with Iran, a country which has been a major thorn in the West's side for over twenty years. Thomas G. Mcinerney puts forth his views on how we can take down Iran in the Wall Street Journal article "Iran Escalates"(read).
"The obvious punishment for a defiant Iran could be an air strike that aims to destroy its nuclear development facilities and overt support for Iranians working to overthrow their government. This is where the discussion of taking stringent actions against Iran usually breaks down…
"This is where President Reagan in confronting the Soviets is instructive. The Gipper was elected in 1980 at a time when it appeared inevitable that the Soviet Union would dominate world affairs and just as inevitably that the U.S. was unable to do anything about it short of waging a bloody, military campaign that would have few allies in fighting and not every chance of success. In the end, as they say, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
"We have similar options now. One of which is to enact drastic economic sanctions that, oddly, would involve forcing a gasoline crisis in Iran. Tehran is kept afloat on oil revenues, but it has done so at the expense of its oil industry. While it exports large quantities of crude oil, Iran imports 40% of its domestically consumed gasoline, and each gallon at the pump is heavily subsidized. Shutting off or even restricting the supply of gasoline flowing into the country would put the regime in a crunch and drive up public discontent without creating a corresponding humanitarian crisis."
The question is what can we do as citizens of the United States to demand the likes of Pelosi and Reid to stop fiddling with sideshows, to try to contain their hatred of our President and to get down to the task at hand and the reason why we have a government - They need to be reminded that their primary mandate is - TO DEFEND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ITS CITIZENS.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Global Warming- "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong"
Before it was snails and whales that were the big preocupation of the left. They lost that battle - remember the one where the fight was about the destruction of Gaia? Now the left has adopted a new strategy - one that is difficult to follow and fight against because it is so complex. The theory for the past couple of decades is that humans are causing change in the climate. (Let's forget about that big fireball up in the sky - THE SUN). But finally people are actually starting to stand up to the nonsense and life destroying idea of "Global Warming". The following are some excerpts which were originally compiled by Robert Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist.
"As the House Energy and Commerce Committee prepares to question former Vice President Al Gore tomorrow morning about global warming, Czech President Vaclav Klaus is warning congressmen that environmental extremism is the modern equivalent of communism.
"Responding yesterday to U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and former House Speaker Denny Hastert, R-Ill., the Czech leader said: "It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment, but a clash of views about human freedom."
" As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants," said Klaus, responding to questions posed by the two lawmakers. "Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism." (Read)
Martin Durkin produced an excellent documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (view) for Daily Telegraph on March 17.
"On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an "old" graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a "new" graph—one used by Al Gore, known as the "hockey stick," because it looks like one.
"But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period….
"The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide "drives" the earth's climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot….
"Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.""
Global warming is wrong, wrong wrong - but we better get it right because if we don't we will be paying higher taxes and become poorer- all for what?
"As the House Energy and Commerce Committee prepares to question former Vice President Al Gore tomorrow morning about global warming, Czech President Vaclav Klaus is warning congressmen that environmental extremism is the modern equivalent of communism.
"Responding yesterday to U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and former House Speaker Denny Hastert, R-Ill., the Czech leader said: "It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment, but a clash of views about human freedom."
" As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants," said Klaus, responding to questions posed by the two lawmakers. "Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism." (Read)
Martin Durkin produced an excellent documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (view) for Daily Telegraph on March 17.
"On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an "old" graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a "new" graph—one used by Al Gore, known as the "hockey stick," because it looks like one.
"But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period….
"The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide "drives" the earth's climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot….
"Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.""
Global warming is wrong, wrong wrong - but we better get it right because if we don't we will be paying higher taxes and become poorer- all for what?
Sunday, March 11, 2007
"Never Bother to Examine a Folly; Only Ask What it Accomplishes"
(Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead.)
It occurred to me on this beautiful Sunday that the two greatest evils of our time are both based on irrational ideas layered on a melting foundation of lies, evasions, half-truths. Their ultimate goal being: control and power (which loosely translated means: money).
Environmentalists want to foist a bizarre idea on us that the earth is warming due to man's activities. For the past 40 years they have not been able to convince most regular people that living in an airconditioned house, driving a gas fueled car and pumping oil out of the ground is bad for us. Why? because we can obviously see that it is not true. We all live longer, healthier and wealthier lives because of inventions and discoveries made by smart people.
In the 1970 the scare tactic was that the earth was entering into a "Global Cooling" era. Since the 1990's it's fashionable among our elite to believe in the religion of Global Warming. So in a span of just thirty years, the mainstream consensus shifted from one theory to its complete opposite. But we all know (I hope) that CONSENSUS IS NOT SCIENCE. You need evidence to prove your point. Also, of great interest and very under-reported in our lovely news media is the fact that important weather scientists have spoken out against this theory of the man-made global warming.
A super interesting documentary (see here) on U-tube called THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE explains everything you ever wanted to know about this movement. It is very well done and understandable to even the most non-scientific of minds. The short of it is that Global Warming is one of the biggest hoaxes ever put over on mankind. I just hope it's not too late to reverse all the damage it has done to world economies.
So what is it that these global warming types want to accomplish? There's a pot of gold out there for anyone who jumps on the bandwagon of global warming. Al Gore (read) and scientists looking to fund their research comes to mind. Yes there are even hypocrits among scientists.
If you truly want to understand what is going on with the less than 1 degree rise in temperature that is affecting our planet then watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle".
It occurred to me on this beautiful Sunday that the two greatest evils of our time are both based on irrational ideas layered on a melting foundation of lies, evasions, half-truths. Their ultimate goal being: control and power (which loosely translated means: money).
Environmentalists want to foist a bizarre idea on us that the earth is warming due to man's activities. For the past 40 years they have not been able to convince most regular people that living in an airconditioned house, driving a gas fueled car and pumping oil out of the ground is bad for us. Why? because we can obviously see that it is not true. We all live longer, healthier and wealthier lives because of inventions and discoveries made by smart people.
In the 1970 the scare tactic was that the earth was entering into a "Global Cooling" era. Since the 1990's it's fashionable among our elite to believe in the religion of Global Warming. So in a span of just thirty years, the mainstream consensus shifted from one theory to its complete opposite. But we all know (I hope) that CONSENSUS IS NOT SCIENCE. You need evidence to prove your point. Also, of great interest and very under-reported in our lovely news media is the fact that important weather scientists have spoken out against this theory of the man-made global warming.
A super interesting documentary (see here) on U-tube called THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE explains everything you ever wanted to know about this movement. It is very well done and understandable to even the most non-scientific of minds. The short of it is that Global Warming is one of the biggest hoaxes ever put over on mankind. I just hope it's not too late to reverse all the damage it has done to world economies.
So what is it that these global warming types want to accomplish? There's a pot of gold out there for anyone who jumps on the bandwagon of global warming. Al Gore (read) and scientists looking to fund their research comes to mind. Yes there are even hypocrits among scientists.
If you truly want to understand what is going on with the less than 1 degree rise in temperature that is affecting our planet then watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle".
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Ali Hirsi - A Woman Fighting against Evil Ideas
Ali Hirsi, we all now who she is by now, is alone crying in the dark; a soft spoken, yet utterly courageous woman who is fighting alone the evil that is Islam. She is the warrior, pitted against a world filled with men who blow themselves up for their "prophet", weakling politicians cowering behind bland statements afraid to utter the idea that another culture is bad, and a Western population unable to confront the fact the this is yet one more momentous occasion when another evil must be stopped before it's too late.
Mr. Rago at the Wall Street Jr. points out many of her statements where she relentlessly tries to convince us that the Islam religion is the backbone of the Islamo terrorists. 'Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous." '
'The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history." '
' "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." '
'This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. "I have my ideas and my views," she says, "and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically." As to the charges that she is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.'
'And yet contemporary democracies, she says, accommodate the incitement of such behavior: "The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don't improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place." '
'She says the West must begin to think long term about its relationship with Islam--because the Islamists are. Ms. Hirsi Ali notes Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping those elsewhere (particularly in Western Europe) and believes this is a conscious attempt to extend the faith. Muslims, she says, treat women as "these baby-machines, these son-factories. . . . We need to compete with this," she goes on. "It is a totalitarian method. The Nazis tried it using women as incubators, literally to give birth to soldiers. Islam is now doing it. . . It is a very effective and very frightening way of dealing with human beings." '(read).
Mr. Rago at the Wall Street Jr. points out many of her statements where she relentlessly tries to convince us that the Islam religion is the backbone of the Islamo terrorists. 'Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous." '
'The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history." '
' "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." '
'This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. "I have my ideas and my views," she says, "and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically." As to the charges that she is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.'
'And yet contemporary democracies, she says, accommodate the incitement of such behavior: "The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don't improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place." '
'She says the West must begin to think long term about its relationship with Islam--because the Islamists are. Ms. Hirsi Ali notes Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping those elsewhere (particularly in Western Europe) and believes this is a conscious attempt to extend the faith. Muslims, she says, treat women as "these baby-machines, these son-factories. . . . We need to compete with this," she goes on. "It is a totalitarian method. The Nazis tried it using women as incubators, literally to give birth to soldiers. Islam is now doing it. . . It is a very effective and very frightening way of dealing with human beings." '(read).
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Ancient Lies No Basis for a Policy by Jonathan S. Tobin
Two seemingly unrelated events in the waning days and hours of 2006 pretty much summed up everything you need to know about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Their meaning can be characterized simply: The Arab world's obsession with eradicating the State of Israel and the West's willingness to deceive itself about the character of Arab leaders and their intentions both are based on lies.
The more famous of the two events was the hanging of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In his final moments before he got his just desserts, the doomed Iraqi once again played the card that he and other Arab despots have always used with impunity: Israel.
Thus, among his final comments on the gallows came this declaration: "Palestine is Arab!"
Why invoke this cause with his last breath? Because even at that moment he still thought it worth a try to deflect discussion of his comeuppance to that of the conflict with Israel.
All-Purpose Excuse
The Arab world has used the fight against Zionism as an excuse for every problem that exists within its societies. Whether it is the domination of tyrants like Saddam or the lack of economic progress and the rest of the standards by which they lag behind the West, the answer is always the same: It would be different if only there were no Israel.
Saddam Hussein
That this thesis is nonsense has been no deterrent to its frequent use. This diversionary tactic is so deeply ingrained in the culture of the Arab world that it is routinely repeated not just by spokesmen for the regimes that run roughshod over their own people but also by their intellectuals and would-be reformers who ought to know better.
By focusing on the external enemy -- and a state ruled by a despised minority of dhimmi Jews at that -- the Arabs have given themselves as well as their leaders a ready-made excuse for all of their failures.
Though he spent his career terrorizing his own people, Saddam was always careful to pose as a pan-Arab anti-Zionist. When his troops were evicted from Kuwait in 1991 with little resistance on the part of his army, it was no surprise that he used his SCUD missiles to attack Israel. Though Israel had nothing to do with Saddam's looting of Kuwait and was excluded from the international coalition organized to oppose him by the first President Bush, it was imperative for him to make it appear as if Israel was actually a belligerent in that war.
This earned him the cheers of Palestinians, who took to their rooftops to cheer the missiles headed for Tel Aviv. He reinforced that impression with his subsequent payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
But this was, like everything else he did, a lie. Like the rest of the Arab world, Iraq did nothing useful for the Palestinians other than to encourage them to continue in a pointless war. But by doing so, he deflected criticism from Muslims who still prefer to embrace canards about the Jews rather than to examine their own faults. And by saying "Palestine" before the trap door opened, Saddam gave Arabs another excuse to ignore the truth about the campaign to remove his regime.
All this also helps to feed the fallacy -- still widely believed in the West -- that the Arab-Israeli dispute is the source of all the region's problems. But as Saddam's life and death proved, intra-Arab warfare and atrocities have little to do with the Jews.
Another event that was received with far less fanfare took place only days before Hussein's death. It was the release of a 33-year-old classified document by the United States State Department. It confirmed what had long been rumored: that the late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat personally ordered the murders of two kidnapped American diplomats in March 1973.
Members of a PLO-front group called "Black September" gunned down the two, Cleo Noel, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and the embassy's Charge d'Affaires George Moore, along with Guy Eid, a Belgian envoy, in cold blood. The supposed separate identity of the group -- which was also responsible for the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich -- from that of Arafat's Fatah was a cover story intended to separate the Palestinian mainstream from its more egregious crimes.
Arafat denied any role in these murders to the day of his own death in 2004. Though he was the godfather of modern terror, he sought to burnish his mythical image as a statesman to the West. But this was nothing compared to the self-deception of Western governments who knew better, particularly the employers of Noel and Moore, the United States State Department.
Though the Sudan murders were invoked by critics of America's policy of engagement of Arafat throughout the era of the Oslo peace process, the State Department always denied there was any proof of Arafat's direct involvement. But, as the document released late last month proved, this denial was as brazen a falsehood as any ever uttered by the Palestinians. In fact, the National Security Agency had intercepted a transmission from Arafat's headquarters in Beirut to Khartoum, Sudan, ordering the murders of the Americans.
Evidence of Murder
Thus, even though the United States had in its possession direct evidence of his responsibility for the murder of twoo f its diplomats, Arafat not only was never charged with these crimes but also enjoyed the hospitality of the White House more than any other foreign leader during the Clinton administration.
Yet with Arafat now as dead as Noel and Moore, is there any point in rehearsing this sorry chapter of history? Yes, because the State Department cover-up of this crime (a whitewash that ought to have prompted at least a fraction of the outrage that the contemporaneous Watergate cover-up did) was an act of policy.
It was important to generations of American diplomats and their political masters not to publish the truth about Arafat because they believed making deals with him was more important than combating terror. Their subversion of the truth was for a cause they thought to be nobler than justice for slain Americans -- peace. And in the name of this illusion a long list of cabinet secretaries and a president of the United States willfully ignored not only the lies that Arafat told during peace talks but abandoned their duty to apprehend and punish a terrorist.
Hussein's last words and the Arafat transcript both illustrate how lies told by Arab despots have been abetted by the lies of their willing dupes. Those willing to embrace future deceptions, whether on the part of "moderates" such as Mahmoud Abbas (Arafat's longtime deputy) or his "extremist" Hamas rivals, would do well to study both incidents and realize that peace will never be built upon falsehoods.
This article was first published in www.jewishexponent.com on 04January07.
Contact Jonathan S. Tobin via e-mail at: jtobin@jewishexponent.com.
Their meaning can be characterized simply: The Arab world's obsession with eradicating the State of Israel and the West's willingness to deceive itself about the character of Arab leaders and their intentions both are based on lies.
The more famous of the two events was the hanging of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In his final moments before he got his just desserts, the doomed Iraqi once again played the card that he and other Arab despots have always used with impunity: Israel.
Thus, among his final comments on the gallows came this declaration: "Palestine is Arab!"
Why invoke this cause with his last breath? Because even at that moment he still thought it worth a try to deflect discussion of his comeuppance to that of the conflict with Israel.
All-Purpose Excuse
The Arab world has used the fight against Zionism as an excuse for every problem that exists within its societies. Whether it is the domination of tyrants like Saddam or the lack of economic progress and the rest of the standards by which they lag behind the West, the answer is always the same: It would be different if only there were no Israel.
Saddam Hussein
That this thesis is nonsense has been no deterrent to its frequent use. This diversionary tactic is so deeply ingrained in the culture of the Arab world that it is routinely repeated not just by spokesmen for the regimes that run roughshod over their own people but also by their intellectuals and would-be reformers who ought to know better.
By focusing on the external enemy -- and a state ruled by a despised minority of dhimmi Jews at that -- the Arabs have given themselves as well as their leaders a ready-made excuse for all of their failures.
Though he spent his career terrorizing his own people, Saddam was always careful to pose as a pan-Arab anti-Zionist. When his troops were evicted from Kuwait in 1991 with little resistance on the part of his army, it was no surprise that he used his SCUD missiles to attack Israel. Though Israel had nothing to do with Saddam's looting of Kuwait and was excluded from the international coalition organized to oppose him by the first President Bush, it was imperative for him to make it appear as if Israel was actually a belligerent in that war.
This earned him the cheers of Palestinians, who took to their rooftops to cheer the missiles headed for Tel Aviv. He reinforced that impression with his subsequent payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
But this was, like everything else he did, a lie. Like the rest of the Arab world, Iraq did nothing useful for the Palestinians other than to encourage them to continue in a pointless war. But by doing so, he deflected criticism from Muslims who still prefer to embrace canards about the Jews rather than to examine their own faults. And by saying "Palestine" before the trap door opened, Saddam gave Arabs another excuse to ignore the truth about the campaign to remove his regime.
All this also helps to feed the fallacy -- still widely believed in the West -- that the Arab-Israeli dispute is the source of all the region's problems. But as Saddam's life and death proved, intra-Arab warfare and atrocities have little to do with the Jews.
Another event that was received with far less fanfare took place only days before Hussein's death. It was the release of a 33-year-old classified document by the United States State Department. It confirmed what had long been rumored: that the late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat personally ordered the murders of two kidnapped American diplomats in March 1973.
Members of a PLO-front group called "Black September" gunned down the two, Cleo Noel, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and the embassy's Charge d'Affaires George Moore, along with Guy Eid, a Belgian envoy, in cold blood. The supposed separate identity of the group -- which was also responsible for the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich -- from that of Arafat's Fatah was a cover story intended to separate the Palestinian mainstream from its more egregious crimes.
Arafat denied any role in these murders to the day of his own death in 2004. Though he was the godfather of modern terror, he sought to burnish his mythical image as a statesman to the West. But this was nothing compared to the self-deception of Western governments who knew better, particularly the employers of Noel and Moore, the United States State Department.
Though the Sudan murders were invoked by critics of America's policy of engagement of Arafat throughout the era of the Oslo peace process, the State Department always denied there was any proof of Arafat's direct involvement. But, as the document released late last month proved, this denial was as brazen a falsehood as any ever uttered by the Palestinians. In fact, the National Security Agency had intercepted a transmission from Arafat's headquarters in Beirut to Khartoum, Sudan, ordering the murders of the Americans.
Evidence of Murder
Thus, even though the United States had in its possession direct evidence of his responsibility for the murder of twoo f its diplomats, Arafat not only was never charged with these crimes but also enjoyed the hospitality of the White House more than any other foreign leader during the Clinton administration.
Yet with Arafat now as dead as Noel and Moore, is there any point in rehearsing this sorry chapter of history? Yes, because the State Department cover-up of this crime (a whitewash that ought to have prompted at least a fraction of the outrage that the contemporaneous Watergate cover-up did) was an act of policy.
It was important to generations of American diplomats and their political masters not to publish the truth about Arafat because they believed making deals with him was more important than combating terror. Their subversion of the truth was for a cause they thought to be nobler than justice for slain Americans -- peace. And in the name of this illusion a long list of cabinet secretaries and a president of the United States willfully ignored not only the lies that Arafat told during peace talks but abandoned their duty to apprehend and punish a terrorist.
Hussein's last words and the Arafat transcript both illustrate how lies told by Arab despots have been abetted by the lies of their willing dupes. Those willing to embrace future deceptions, whether on the part of "moderates" such as Mahmoud Abbas (Arafat's longtime deputy) or his "extremist" Hamas rivals, would do well to study both incidents and realize that peace will never be built upon falsehoods.
This article was first published in www.jewishexponent.com on 04January07.
Contact Jonathan S. Tobin via e-mail at: jtobin@jewishexponent.com.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
"There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century"
There is at least one person from the Middle East who is willing to take a stand about Islam and call it like it is. Wafa Sultan is that woman - courageous and inspiring. Let's hope that others in the Muslim world take courage as well and stand up against an evil religion that has caused them so much harm, death and destruction.
Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006.
Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete. (For the rest of the interview go to read and enter Wafa Sultan in the search box.)
Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006.
Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete. (For the rest of the interview go to read and enter Wafa Sultan in the search box.)
Saturday, December 16, 2006
When Your Purpose in LIFE is to DIE
What is wrong with the Muslims? Why can't they live a normal life - one filled with goals for a better life for their children? Robert Tracinski reminds us that these people, perhaps best exemplified by the Palestinians, are not like the rest of Humanity that have ever lived on the face of this earth.
"Our enemies, as I keep saying, have problems of their own. For example, imagine yourself in the shoes of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, stopped at the border of Gaza by the Israelis, who want you to relinquish the $35 million in Iranian cash that you need to keep your supporters fed—but also knowing that the longer you stay out of Gaza, the more a civil war between your faction and Fatah escalates outside of your control. Then you enter Gaza, only to have Fatah try to shoot you.
"Haniyeh's problem is the problem of the Palestinians: they have so thoroughly embraced the morality of sacrifice that they worship blood, death, and the suicide bomber—and so they will pass up no opportunity to sacrifice themselves, even when it means systematically destroying their own society.
"There have been countries where millions have been massacred and economies have been plunged into subsistence-level poverty by the arrogance and power-lust of a ruling clique. But I don't know if there has ever been a society that has pursued its own destruction as a matter of broad-based, decentralized popular will. That is the distinction of the Palestinians." (read).
"Our enemies, as I keep saying, have problems of their own. For example, imagine yourself in the shoes of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, stopped at the border of Gaza by the Israelis, who want you to relinquish the $35 million in Iranian cash that you need to keep your supporters fed—but also knowing that the longer you stay out of Gaza, the more a civil war between your faction and Fatah escalates outside of your control. Then you enter Gaza, only to have Fatah try to shoot you.
"Haniyeh's problem is the problem of the Palestinians: they have so thoroughly embraced the morality of sacrifice that they worship blood, death, and the suicide bomber—and so they will pass up no opportunity to sacrifice themselves, even when it means systematically destroying their own society.
"There have been countries where millions have been massacred and economies have been plunged into subsistence-level poverty by the arrogance and power-lust of a ruling clique. But I don't know if there has ever been a society that has pursued its own destruction as a matter of broad-based, decentralized popular will. That is the distinction of the Palestinians." (read).
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