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Saturday, December 30, 2006

Once in a While a Good Deed Does Go Unpunished – The Real Person of the Year, Senator Lieberman

Senator Lieberman showed the country his courage and his wisdom last year. He showed the cowards, the political opportunists and the know-nothings in the Democratic Party that there are a few people of principle who understand what was at stake in Iraq in 2003 and is even more at stake today. Those who ridicule President Bush for not understanding the historic conflicts between Shi'a and Sunnis don’t get it that these groups live together in relative harmony in many Muslim countries (see below), and that the extreme violence we see in Iraq is because we were succeeding there, but did not foresee the consequences of our early success; and countries like Iran and Syria and groups like Al Qaeda have thrown everything they have into that country to stop democracy from succeeding and to end our influence in the area. When the British lost 3000 men on one troopship evacuating Dunkirk, they didn’t stop trying; neither did the Allies quit when similar losses were incurred on one day called D-Day.

Why We Need More Troops in Iraq
By Joseph Lieberman
Friday, December 29, 2006
The Washington Post

I've just spent 10 days traveling in the Middle East and speaking to leaders there, all of which has made one thing clearer to me than ever: While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States. Iraq is the most deadly battlefield on which that conflict is being fought. How we end the struggle there will affect not only the region but the worldwide war against the extremists who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.

Because of the bravery of many Iraqi and coalition military personnel and the recent coming together of moderate political forces in Baghdad, the war is winnable. We and our Iraqi allies must do what is necessary to win it.

The American people are justifiably frustrated by the lack of progress, and the price paid by our heroic troops and their families has been heavy. But what is needed now, especially in Washington and Baghdad, is not despair but decisive action -- and soon.

The most pressing problem we face in Iraq is not an absence of Iraqi political will or American diplomatic initiative, both of which are increasing and improving; it is a lack of basic security. As long as insurgents and death squads terrorize Baghdad, Iraq's nascent democratic institutions cannot be expected to function, much less win the trust of the people. The fear created by gang murders and mass abductions ensures that power will continue to flow to the very thugs and extremists who have the least interest in peace and reconciliation.

This bloodshed, moreover, is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds. It is the predictable consequence of a failure to ensure basic security and, equally important, of a conscious strategy by al-Qaeda and Iran, which have systematically aimed to undermine Iraq's fragile political center. By ruthlessly attacking the Shiites in particular over the past three years, al-Qaeda has sought to provoke precisely the dynamic of reciprocal violence that threatens to consume the country.

On this point, let there be no doubt: If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism.

To turn around the crisis we need to send more American troops while we also train more Iraqi troops and strengthen the moderate political forces in the national government. After speaking with our military commanders and soldiers there, I strongly believe that additional U.S. troops must be deployed to Baghdad and Anbar province -- an increase that will at last allow us to establish security throughout the Iraqi capital, hold critical central neighborhoods in the city, clamp down on the insurgency and defeat al-Qaeda in that province.

In Baghdad and Ramadi, I found that it was the American colonels, even more than the generals, who were asking for more troops. In both places these soldiers showed a strong commitment to the cause of stopping the extremists. One colonel followed me out of the meeting with our military leaders in Ramadi and said with great emotion, "Sir, I regret that I did not have the chance to speak in the meeting, but I want you to know on behalf of the soldiers in my unit and myself that we believe in why we are fighting here and we want to finish this fight. We know we can win it."

In nearly four years of war, there have never been sufficient troops dispatched to accomplish our vital mission. The troop surge should be militarily meaningful in size, with a clearly defined mission.

More U.S. forces might not be a guarantee of success in this fight, but they are certainly its prerequisite. Just as the continuing carnage in Baghdad empowers extremists on all sides, establishing security there will open possibilities for compromise and cooperation on the Iraqi political front -- possibilities that simply do not exist today because of the fear gripping all sides.

I saw firsthand evidence in Iraq of the development of a multiethnic, moderate coalition against the extremists of al-Qaeda and against the Mahdi Army, which is sponsored and armed by Iran and has inflamed the sectarian violence. We cannot abandon these brave Iraqi patriots who have stood up and fought the extremists and terrorists.

The addition of more troops must be linked to a comprehensive new military, political and economic strategy that provides security for the population so that training of Iraqi troops and the development of a democratic government can move forward.

In particular we must provide the vital breathing space for moderate Shiites and Sunnis to turn back the radicals in their communities. There are Iraqi political leaders who understand their responsibility to do this. In Anbar province we have made encouraging progress in winning over local Sunni tribal leaders in the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorists. With more troops to support them, our forces in Anbar and their Sunni allies can achieve a major victory over al-Qaeda.

As the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria appreciate -- at times, it seems, more keenly than we do -- failure in Iraq would be a strategic and moral catastrophe for the United States and its allies. Radical Islamist terrorist groups, both Sunni and Shiite, would reap victories simultaneously symbolic and tangible, as Iraq became a safe haven in which to train and strengthen their foot soldiers and Iran's terrorist agents. Hezbollah and Hamas would be greatly strengthened against their moderate opponents. One moderate Palestinian leader told me that a premature U.S. exit from Iraq would be a victory for Iran and the groups it is supporting in the region.

Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have bravely stood with us in the hope of a democratic future would face the killing fields.

In Iraq today we have a responsibility to do what is strategically and morally right for our nation over the long term -- not what appears easier in the short term. The daily scenes of death and destruction are heartbreaking and infuriating. But there is no better strategic and moral alternative for America than standing with the moderate Iraqis until the country is stable and they can take over their security.

Rather than engaging in hand-wringing, carping or calls for withdrawal, we must summon the vision, will and courage to take the difficult and decisive steps needed for success and, yes, victory in Iraq. That will greatly advance the cause of moderation and freedom throughout the Middle East and protect our security at home.

The writer is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.

Added by Russ Wilcox:
According to most sources, including the US Library of Congress, present estimates indicate that approximately 85-90% of the world's Muslims are Sunni and approximately 10-15% are Shi'a. Today there are roughly 216 million Shi'as (including Twelvers, Ismailis, Zaydis and Alawis) all over the world, and around three quarters of those reside in Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and India.

A large portion of the world's Shi'a live in the Middle East. They constitute a majority in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain,Oman and Azerbaijan. They remain as significant minorities in Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey and Yemen. In Lebanon Shi'as form a plurality (the largest of groups, with none forming a majority). Among smaller Persian Gulf states, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have significant Shi'a minorities, as do the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.


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Friday, December 29, 2006

A Florida County Shows the Stupidity of Kelo v. New London

One of the areas where the country may have lost ground in the last election is in the area of eminent domain. There seems to be wide agreement across political lines that the Kelo vs. New London decision, which gave local governments virtually unlimited power to usurp private property and turn it over to other, favored, private interests, was unwise and unjust. Only the far left, unfortunately represented by Supreme Court Justices Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter (and in this case, Kennedy) are in favor of granting this power to government. With a Democrat majority in the Senate now, all prospects for another conservative justice to overturn this decision appear to have gone up in smoke.

Many states, and even the federal government, have taken steps to place limits on this expansion of power, and many citizens in affected areas are engaged in effective protests that have slowed down or even stopped several projects. Up until now, most arguments against this expansion of government power have centered on its unfairness to those whose property has been taken – and on the un-American character of this disregard for the property rights of average citizens.

What I have not seen much of, however, is the point that government bureaucrats are among the worst groups to be making decisions about the best uses for parcels of real estate. When a government entity decides to take an area of land and develop it commercially, some of the worst decisions imaginable can be made.

Nowhere is this more evident than in south Florida where Charlotte County decided it didn’t like the way a particular area was developing and took it all by eminent domain for the creation by a private developer of so-called, Murdock Village. So far, they are several years into the taking, whereby hundreds of home owners and businesses were kicked out, and $93.3 million dollars in bonds was raised to fund the endeavor. The citizens of Charlotte County are now paying $5.3 million dollars a year in interest on these bonds ($14,300.00 per day), and the first developer chosen was found not to have the expertise or the resources to do the job.

A second developer has just been selected, but will end up paying only about 80% of the county’s cost to purchase the land. As of today it does not appear that a single shovel of dirt has been turned, and it may be that it never happens.

So add stupidity to the more common reasons for opposing this expansion of eminent domain we call Kelo vs. New London.

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Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Like A Bad Penny Our Worst President Keeps Popping Up

Editorial: Carter removing all doubt
The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper, The Examiner
Dec 18, 2006

WASHINGTON - There appears to be no bottom to the pit of specious vacuity in which former president Jimmy Carter has been falling since his massive repudiation by voters in his 1980 election loss to Ronald Reagan. Carter’s latest book — “Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid” — poses a ridiculous argument and commits unforgivable intellectual sins while doing so.

The ridiculosity underlying Carter’s book is his assertion that Israel is imposing apartheid on the Palestinians by such measures as constructing the West Bank fence intended to keep suicide bombers and other terrorists from crossing into Israel to kill and maim.

Carter clearly doesn’t care that Israel remains the sole true democracy in the Middle East and affords Arabs living within its borders voting rights and economic privileges unknown anywhere else in the region.

To classify anti-terrorist measures as forms of apartheid is to indicate a complete lack of understanding of the reality facing Israel every day.

Since Carter’s book appeared, it has sparked heavy and unrelenting criticism from thoughtful people across the political spectrum, as well as the resignation of Dr. Ken Stein, one of the nation’s most respected Middle East scholars, from a Carter-led academic institute at Emory University.

At the root of Carter’s Middle Eastern perspective, of course, is his unalloyed blindness toward the Palestinians in particular and the political Muslim world’s long-running antipathy towards Jews. It is that blindness that prevents him, as The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg noted in a recent review in The Washington Post, from recognizing and accounting for “the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.”

But policy blindness is at least understandable. What is not is Carter’s intellectual dishonesty, as described by Stein in his recent letter of resignation: Carter’s latest tome is “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.” Stein further claims that “aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.”

Everybody is entitled to their opinion, just not to their own set of facts. That observation has particular relevance for Carter because, as Stein noted in his letter, “being a former president does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook.”

Carter would do himself and his countrymen a favor by permanently resisting the urge to offer any further commentary on world affairs. Examiner

Breaking with a long tradition, Jimmy Carter runs around the world bad-mouthing President Bush and the USA. He seems to think that those of us who were alive and conscious during his failed presidency have forgotten. I haven’t. I remember 15 to 20% interest rates at the same time that unemployment stood at 7%. I remember inflation at 12%. We invented a new term, the ‘misery index’ that added interest rates and inflation together. He seems to think we have forgotten his gutting of the military followed by the hostage crisis and the tragic and deadly fiasco in the desert. I haven’t forgotten. If he would follow the traditions of all previous presidents and just shut up, I would let the Habitat work gradually push aside all those bad memories (I was operating a small business during his awful Presidency), but he won’t.

*********
Why won't Carter debate his book? (Excerpt)
By Alan Dershowitz | December 21, 2006
Boston.com

“YOU CAN ALWAYS tell when a public figure has written an indefensible book: when he refuses to debate it in the court of public opinion. And you can always tell when he's a hypocrite to boot: when he says he wrote a book in order to stimulate a debate, and then he refuses to participate in any such debate. I'm talking about former president Jimmy Carter and his new book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid."
Carter's book has been condemned as "moronic" (Slate), "anti-historical" (The Washington Post), "laughable" (San Francisco Chronicle), and riddled with errors and bias in reviews across the country. Many of the reviews have been written by non-Jewish as well as Jewish critics, and not by "representatives of Jewish organizations" as Carter has claimed. Carter has gone even beyond the errors of his book in interviews, in which he has said that the situation in Israel is worse than the crimes committed in Apartheid South Africa. When asked whether he believed that Israel's "persecution" of Palestinians was "[e]ven worse . . . than a place like Rwanda," Carter answered, "Yes. I think -- yes." Alan Dershowitz

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Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Welcome Aboard, Senator Boxer, You CAIR

For years, many of us have been warning about the true nature of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and that it is a terrorist-support organization and not a group dedicated only to defending the civil rights of America’s Muslims. As a minimum, CAIR has been unabashedly dedicated to the imposition of Sharia law in the United States and to pooh-poohing the idea that Muslims took part in 9/11.

Unfortunately, over the years, it has become clear that the reactions to disclosures about CAIR have often broken down along political fault lines – with conservatives generally accepting and understanding the true role of CAIR, and liberals maintaining that it is merely a misunderstood civil rights group. It is just this kind of head-in-the-sand thinking that motivated Judge Koeltl to sentence Lynne Stewart to a ridiculous period of 28 months for aiding and abetting the terrorist activities of the blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman (who is serving a long sentence for plotting the 1993 Trade Towers bombing). The thinking is, if you say you are for protecting someone’s civil rights, you can’t possibly be a really bad person or group.

I am writing this today, the day after Christmas, because something has happened that might be a breakthrough in the general level of understanding of the nature of and the danger posed by CAIR. The following announcement was made last week:

Source: JihadWatch.com, December 23, 2006

“(Coral Springs, FL) Americans Against Hate (AAH), a civil rights organization and terrorism watchdog group, appreciates the decision made by United States Senator Barbara Boxer to rescind the award her office had presented to the Executive Director of CAIR-Sacramento Basim Elkarra.

Both CAIR and Elkarra have exhibited the type of extremist behavior that is not worthy of awards or accolades. Former officials from CAIR are currently in prison, serving time for terrorist-related crimes involving Hamas and Al-Qaeda. In fact, CAIR can thank Mousa Abu Marzook, the second in command of Hamas today, for its very existence.

Unfortunately, too many in America's government, media and religious institutions have made CAIR out to be a legitimate group, rarely mentioning its numerous ties to terrorism. AAH and its subdivision CAIR Watch were created to expose CAIR and others like it for having these ties.” JihadWatch.com

If Senator Barbara Boxer, one of the most left-wing members of Congress, has reached this decision, there is hope for those of us who have been struggling for years to warn the American people that we are engaged in a war to save Western Civilization, whether we like it or not. That war is being lost in Europe and is being undermined here by well-meaning souls who seem to think that our President is a greater threat to our freedoms than those who routinely butcher women and homosexuals and anyone else who disagrees with them. They came within a year of gaining nuclear weapons in Iraq, and they seem to be getting close in Iran.

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Saturday, December 23, 2006

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

To see a heartwarming video best seen at Christmastime (the best ever Budweiser commercial), turn up your sound and click here.

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TO LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES OF ALL PERSUATIONS
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7168697243274227693&hl=en

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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Dinner With the Bushes By Ben Stein

As most of my readers know, Ben Stein is one of my favorite people and one of my favorite authors. In a world of problems and terror, we sometimes lose sight of the wonders of our country, with its incredible prosperity, unknown to the common working person 100 years ago, the security that surrounds a free people, and the fantastic choices we have in every aspect of our lives. The great talent of Ben Stein is his ability to find touching ways to remind us of our great good fortune to be Americans.

Dinner With the Bushes
By Ben Stein, The American Spectator

Published 12/13/2006 12:09:38 AM

I left New York City, which was absolutely jam packed with tourists walking fifteen abreast past souvenir stands near Times Square, looking at exactly nothing but neon, and took the Metroliner down to my home town of Washington, D.C. a few days ago. My wife met me there so we could go to Christmas Dinner at the White House with Mr. and Mrs. Bush and about a hundred of their long time friends. Most of the people there were Texans who had known the President for decades, but there were some others like Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, and Michael Steele, lieutenant governor of Maryland, who just lost an agonizingly close race to now Senator-elect Cardin.

My wife and I wandered around the East Room for a long time before the dinner, making small talk, but my mind was racing back to the tumultuous press conferences I used to see there when I worked for Richard Nixon, to social events there with Mr. Nixon and Mr. Ford, and most especially, to that excruciating day in August of 1974 when Mr. Nixon bid us farewell and I was in shock all day.

The White House looked beautiful for the holidays, with wreaths and floral work and lights and trees. Mr. Bush looked surprisingly well, all things considered, but he was clearly a changed man even from when I had been there for the holidays two years ago. A challenged, thoughtful man.

At the dinner, we all sat in the State Dining Room, under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The woman next to me said she wondered how many painful Christmas times Lincoln had gone through during the Civil War. A sobering reminder of what it means to be President.

What really got me going though, what really started the mind racing was that on the other side I was sitting next to a startlingly beautiful African-American woman, a psychologist named Dr. Swann, who is the wife of the great athlete Lynn Swann. I asked her about her childhood in Chambersburg and, as I often do, I asked my dinner partner what her father did. She looked thoughtful for a moment and said, "That's complicated. I was one of eight children raised by a single mother." She paused for a moment and then added, with a huge smile, "And now here I am at the White House."

This is America. This is the way America works.

A few minutes later, the Air Force singing group, the Singing Sergeants, came in and sang about six Christmas songs and then one Hanukah song. I had never heard it before, but it brought tears to my eyes.

What a country, what a magnificent, glorious country this is where the songs of Jews, despised and hunted and murdered for thousands of years, still intended for mass murder by some, are sung at the home of the head of state. Dr. Swann and I looked at each other. Josh Bolten and I looked at each other. The miracle that is America, being played out right before our eyes and ears.

After the dinner, my wife and I walked past the brilliantly lit White House. There was not one other person on the street in front of this home of the Chief Magistrate of the greatest invention of all time, the United States of America, but the house shone, glowed, floated in front of us, an apparition of freedom in a painful world, a sight for the sore eyes of mankind. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And, of course, Happy Hanukah.

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He also writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator's monthly print edition.

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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Katherine Kersten: The real purpose behind the imam publicity blitz

By Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune

"On Dec. 1, a curious report on the grounded-imams incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport appeared on the website of the Iranian Quran News Agency.

The report quoted extensively from Madhi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. The foundation is the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group," according to the Chicago Tribune.

Bray's initial statement about the incident had an all-American, see-you-in-court ring. He demanded "large financial compensation for the imams," adding, "We want US Airways and any other airline displaying this type of behavior against Muslims to be hit where it hurts, the pocketbook."

The report echoed statements made by the imams themselves. Omar Shahin, their spokesman, has portrayed the incident in a way that's consistent with a lawsuit and a public relations offensive. He's called for a Jesse Jackson-style boycott of US Airways, and applied classic civil-rights rhetoric to the incident: "This is prejudice; this is obvious discrimination," the Star Tribune quoted him as saying. "I cannot change the color of my skin," he told Newsweek.

But the report on the Iranian website, which has appeared on a variety of Muslim websites worldwide, had a larger primary focus. After the imams incident, it quoted Bray as saying Muslims want "new, broad-sweeping legislation that will extract even larger financial and civil penalties for any airline that participates in racial and religious profiling."

The report is optimistic that Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, will lend his support to new legislation. Ellison, it says, has expressed his opposition to "such racial and religious profiling." Ellison, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

One piece of legislation in the works is the End Racial Profiling Act. It is an important priority of Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, whose district includes one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. Conyers introduced the bill in 2004 and 2005, but it went nowhere.

Now the alignment of forces may be changing. Conyers will probably be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when the new Democratic-controlled Congress convenes next month.

Nancy Pelosi, who called herself a "proud" cosponsor of the Profiling Act in 2004, is the incoming House speaker. And in January, Ellison, who represents the district where the imams incident occurred, will take his seat in Congress
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The act, although it doesn't as yet impose large penalties, would bar any federal, state or local law enforcement agency from "relying, to any degree, on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion in selecting which individuals to subject to routine or spontaneous investigatory activities." That would include questioning, searches and seizures.

One of the act's central features is its definition of illegal profiling. Under it, if airport security personnel question passengers who are disproportionately Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent, this alone would constitute a presumptive violation of the law. Law enforcement agencies would bear the burden of proving that discrimination was not the cause.
What would the effect of such a law be?

"A law that would compel security professionals to focus on keeping their statistics within certain norms rather than on their mission keeping airline travel safe would have a devastating effect on our ability to ensure airline safety," said Daniel Horan of the Los Angeles Police Department in an interview. He worked at the Los Angeles airport on profiling-related issues for 6 years
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In the past few weeks the public relations campaign for the Profiling Act has moved into high gear. On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations advised American Muslims to beware of the dangers of "flying while Muslim." In light of recent allegations of "airport profiling," it said, the council has set up a toll-free hotline for pilgrims traveling to Mecca for the hajj, or annual pilgrimage, who believe that their rights have been violated.

The End of Racial Profiling Act has languished until now. What did it need to reinvigorate it? New congressional leadership, and that's coming in January. But it needed something else in this media age: a high-profile incident to jump-start it.

What better than the media circus at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Nov. 20?" Katherine Kersten

Some American Muslims (and groups like CAIR) complain bitterly and often that Muslims are unfairly targeted in anti-terrorism efforts. Do they not realize that attempts to handcuff security operations like those mentioned above will lead to the conclusion that American Muslims want to make it easier for terrorists to strike? Such a law will push moderates like me into joining the distrust-all-Muslims-crowd.

It must be difficult to be a Muslim-American in today’s environment. German-Americans and Japanese-Americans faced similar problems here during World War II. Many of them responded by actively joining the war effort. What are you doing except complaining?

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Monday, December 18, 2006

O’Reilly Calls Them Secular Progressives; I call Them Soreheads and Whiners

Those of us who can’t understand why the words, ‘Merry Christmas’ or the sight of a crèche or of a plaque containing the 10 Commandments can evoke such hatred and such passion can learn a bit about the mindset of an atheist from the following fine piece by Robert E. Meyer. It is equally baffling to know that many Americans hate President Bush because of his open avowal of his Christian faith, and that many American atheists hate their country and its history and traditions as well. We seem to have many millions of people who live off the fat of this land and who exercise freedoms won for them dearly – who are motivated by some bug in their bonnet to tear down the symbols and traditions on which this country was founded.

I’m afraid we pay far too much attention to such people, when they should be ignored.

Why I can't be an Atheist
By Robert E. Meyer
www.MichNews.com
Dec 6, 2006

As a Christian believer, I am quite content to let the atheist believe what he or she wants. My rationale for this and other pieces on the subject of atheism is a response to the often hostile and aggressive charges made against Christianity as a system of thought.

Some time ago, I was contacted by the proprietor of some irreverently named atheist website. Apparently he took issue with a certain piece I had written months earlier regarding my conclusions about a biblical passage from Matthew chapter 6 (one can only wonder why an atheist would want to dispute about biblical exegesis). I responded to his inquiry thinking that was the end of the discussion. The next day, I got a wave of E-mails making rather disparaging remarks, which had little to do with the topic in question. Based on what I could glean from the responses, their apparent Modus Operandi , was to roast a selected individual in an attempt to solicit an angry visceral response. If that didn't work, they would bring in their "cleaner" to finish the job, as I discovered yet the following morning. Here was his "love letter."

"As an unrepentant blasphemer, you see me and those like me as damned. Good for you! Enjoy it, Bob. But what you need to know is that all atheists see you as a delusional, intellectually inferior, weak-willed, gullible sucker who's incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and we laugh at you because of it. I would never hire an evangelical Christian. They believe in nonsense and as such can't be trusted with things of importance. If I were a customer prospect, I'd never buy a thing from you. (I wouldn't trust your ability to support your customers in an effective and intelligent manner.) If I were a loan officer, I'd never put a dime in your hand. (I wouldn't trust your ability to manage your finances or maintain a job through which you could repay me.) If you were a daycare owner, I'd never leave my child with you. (If I couldn't trust you with money, how could I possibly trust you with my child?) In fact, I wouldn't even trust you for the time of day if I had to catch a plane. Your intellect, and that of people like you, is sorely compromised, and I'd never allow your kind to affect me personally in any way shape or form. If the rest of the "god-believing" world wants to trust your intellect, then good for you. You shall have their trust, their employ, their business, their money, and their respect. Kudos!

"Enjoy your delusion."


At first, since I did not recognize the author's name, I thought it was a prank that came from an adolescent child. Then I realized how it fit in with the other comments I had received from that group. Just about every survey taken to measure the religious beliefs of the U.S population concludes that 15% or less of the total population are infidels. It made me wonder how tolerant a society we would have if such people were ever in charge. It made me ask myself if this was a display of the logic and reason atheists so often claim to have cornered the market on. It gave me no reason to think that the implementation of their "enlightened" utopia would produce a better society than the one created in spite of the "rampant religious abuses" that they so bitterly condemn.

We might ask the question, how would things be different if atheists were in charge in terms of consensus? I wonder about this: what will happen to those who dissent against the prevailing zeitgeist? Will such people end up as subjects inside asylums for the criminally insane? Will they be done away with in some other fashion? Letters such as those above, though they likely represent a vitriolic minority, don't give me pause for confidence that the virtue of tolerance will be better established under the "enlightened" canopy of atheism.

What will become of scientific investigation? Early scientists saw their inquiries as a method of "thinking God's thoughts after him." Without a construct in place which binds technology to ethics, what limits on social and scientific experimentation will inform the distinctions between what can be done, versus what ought to be done? Will we see the continued incorporation of the naturalist philosophy and dogmas girding the structure of scientific inquiry? We see this scenario placed out in the current "stem-cell" debate.

Atheists often complain that people of religious faith say that you can't have morality without religion. They will go on to say that there are many "non-religious" people who are moral. Some religious people might well make such arguments, but that's not the precise indictment against atheism's perspective on morality. The point is that the atheist has no transcendent foundation for his claims of what is moral or amoral in the first place. A materialistic universe offers no unmistakable moral absolutes of right or wrong. What happens is determined by the random movement of matter in motion, or a chain of cause and effect, the source of which is often unknown.

Of course, the atheist may stipulate a morality based on some popular construct; i.e. Natural Law, Ayn Rand's Objectivism, "Do anything as long as it doesn't hurt others" (a truncated version of what is often referred to as the minimalist ethic), a preference to pleasure over pain, etc. These are merely constructs based on some individual preference. What ultimate authority confirms their truthfulness, besides the coercive power to enforce the adaptation of a particular view? The person who discovers such morality to be fiat, such as Marquis de Sade, is positioned to promote self-serving exploitation. The sadist may get pleasure from pain, the masochist may enjoy torturing and bringing about pain, but on what basis can the atheist declare these alternative perspectives to be "morally wrong" only because they differ from his selected social construct?

The same is true when it comes to the attribution of atrocity to certain systems of thought. Christianity often is accused of mass atrocities in the past. While this is a legitimate criticism, the Christian in turn can say that non-theistic worldviews acted out, caused more mayhem in the 20th century, then all the religious misdeeds throughout history. The question is not whether atheism will always cause genocide, or whether your local atheist will wake up tomorrow and become a serial axe-murderer. The real question is on what basis can the non-theist condemn such crimes and atrocities given a lack of transcendent moral authority, and his own materialistic assumptions? The atheist will protest against such attribution of atrocities, saying people such as Mao, Pot-Pot and Stalin were fanatics, but they didn't commit atrocities because they were atheists or because of a non-believing ideology. Still, they certainly had a worldview that enabled them to carry out and justify their purges.

There is yet another distinction here between atrocities in the name of God and those of the non-theist camps. As a Christian, I can stand beside the secularist and condemn the wrongs in God's name. However, I can theoretically correct these wrongs through a proper application of the Christian worldview. On the other hand, if Lenin says, "you've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet," and Stalin accomplishes that mandate with his purges, how do you correct his evolutionary perspective on the sanctity (or lack thereof) of human life? Stalin acted consistent to his non-theistic, evolutionary prospective. The atheists who condemn Stalin and other mass murderers are simply borrowing from a Judeo-Christian perspective in order to condemn such acts.

How does someone with a metaphysical narrative depicting humanity as a meaningless speck on a clump of dust in a vast universe, suddenly derive the concept of human dignity when it comes to protesting the arbitrarily disposing of some of the specks?
I expect we will get some answers when we read the responses after this piece is published. Robert E. Meyer

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Sunday, December 17, 2006

They Don’t Make Baseball Like That Anymore Part 2

The following story (Excerpt) appeared in the Herald-Tribune in southwest Florida last week. It motivated me to repeat the article below that I published a year ago.

Charlotte deputies say parents let teens drink at son's party
Herald-Tribune, December 5, 2006

PORT CHARLOTTE -- Charlotte County sheriff's deputies charged a couple with allowing underage guests to drink alcohol at their son's 16th birthday party.

Scott Wayne Parsons told deputies that he and his wife "would rather have the juveniles drinking at the house where they could watch them instead of them drinking elsewhere on the streets," an officer wrote in his report.

Parsons, 43, and his wife, Paula Marie, 41, were released on bail Sunday.

**********************
They Don’t Make Baseball Like That Anymore part 2

A recent trip to Idaho awakened some pleasant old memories and some sadness. Growing up and spending most of my life in Massachusetts and Rhode Island provides quite a contrast to a heartland state like Idaho, where kids still love to play baseball – anytime, anywhere.

As a child I used to wear out three sets of playmates every day playing baseball. I also spent a good part of a summer on my grandfather’s farm pulling mustard weeds from potato fields just to earn my first baseball glove (it was a Marty Marion). As I look around on the jaded east coast, I don’t see many kids playing that sport anymore. If they do play, it is under the auspices of some organized activity, and the parents are there acting like it’s the end of the world if the umpire calls a strike on their kid.

It wasn’t like that for me and my friends. My parents had other, more important things to do – like survive. All our games were pickup games, with no umpire, and the kid with the ball or bat always had a chance to play. My folks never once saw me play baseball, and it never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with that. After all, I was playing. One time my best friend and I walked several miles to stand outside the left field fence where, if we stood on a little hill, we could see the Braves play an exhibition game against the minor league Providence Grays.

A Braves player hit a home run over that fence. Even though it happened well over 50 years ago, I still remember the name of that player – possibly because of what happened. The player was Danny Guardello, and my friend tried to catch the ball bare-handed, but it popped to the ground, where I grabbed it. We then decided that we jointly owned the ball, and the next day, very early in the morning and all alone, we went to the playground where I pitched this prized, major-league ball to him. He tore into it and hit it on a line way over my head. When it landed, it must have rolled forever, because we spent the entire rest of the morning looking for it, and never found it again.

Somehow I think some of those experiences helped me cope with the tragedies and disappointments that everyone faces in life. I wonder if 10 year old kids in uniforms, with professional equipment, playing on well-manicured fields in front of cheering parents and friends learn to cope as well. I have an old friend, Dave, who was my first mentor, and who worked with me at my first real job at EG&G. He was an electrical engineer who designed many new products for the company. He was not only smart, but he was street-smart and taught me things you don’t learn at Harvard. One day I was invited to his house for dinner and met his wife and their teen-aged son, who was the most monstrous, spoiled brat you can imagine. I spent a few hours at their house watching and listening to this brat mouth off to his parents and generally make himself obnoxious, and they didn’t even seem to notice. The next day, I tried, in a tactful and roundabout way, to bring up the subject to Dave. Dave’s response was almost vehement. “I vowed my kid would never grow up deprived like I did”.

Actually I feel sorry for today’s parents. Two big changes that have taken place since I was a child are 1. I never asked my parents for anything because I knew they had no money, and 2. although we were very poor, I was hardly aware of it until high school because everyone else I knew was also poor. When WWII veterans returned from military service, they all seemed to vow that their kids would never go without as they had in their own childhood, which took place during the Great Depression. Times changed, opportunities abounded, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; but the results of our prosperity haven’t been universally good. Our prosperity has been one of the factors behind the social revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, and our children have grown up with a sense of entitlement that baffles and overwhelms their parents. An extreme example of the consequences of this confusion can be seen in a current news story about a high school principal who has decided to cancel the prom because parents were setting up drinking and sex parties for their kids. My parents didn’t have to say no; today’s parents had better learn how to.

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Saturday, December 16, 2006

I Cheered for the Wrong Guys in Syriana

I finally got around to seeing a DVD of the movie, Syriana, starring George Clooney. Most of you know that it is about a greedy American oil company doing dirty deeds to regain access to certain Mideast oil concessions, and the film is definitely a hit job on American covert agencies and on American companies. It’s only a movie, a fantasy, but I'm getting very tired of the anti-war, anti-American antics of actors like Clooney and directors like Syriana's director, Stephen Gaghan, who said he saw Syriana as "a great word that could stand for man's perpetual hope of remaking any geographic region to suit his own needs." Syriana is usually associated with the brief period of peace in Syria-Lebanon from 1990 to early 2005.

I also definitely at this point want to go on record on two matters: first, I’m well aware that the geopolitics of gaining and keeping oil concessions is as dirty and as cutthroat as they come; and second, I want American oil companies to win these concessions, and if they have to be dirtier than the dirtiest to do so, so be it. When then President Carter pushed through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977 (much modified in 1988), I gagged at the naiveté and gullibility of the man. This act made it illegal for American citizens to bribe anyone in a foreign country – thus bringing to a halt any business dealings in countries where bribery is the main source of income to government employees and the lack of a gift (bribe) is often taken as an insult. Actually I gag at about everything this man, Carter, says and does - from wrecking any chance to stop North Korea's march to nuclear weapons to labeling Israel's treatment of Arabs as aparteid.

The plot of Syriana:

“Oil drives greed in Oscar-winning Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan's labyrinthine sophomore directorial effort that traces the corruption of the global oil industry from the backrooms of Washington, D.C., to the petroleum-rich fields of the Middle East. Based in part on the writings of former CIA case officer Robert Baer, Syriana combines multiple storylines to explore the complexities that befall a proposed merger between two U.S. oil giants. Reform-minded Gulf country prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) is in favor of making his nation more self-sufficient rather than U.S.-reliant, and his money-minded Western connections couldn't be less pleased. Before settling into a cushy desk job for the remainder of his career, CIA agent Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is sent on one last assignment -- to assassinate Prince Nasir and reinstate U.S. ties in the oil-rich region. Though his loyalty dictates that Barnes carry out his current mission despite lingering doubts of a previous blunder, his mission goes horribly awry when his field contact goes turncoat and Barnes becomes a CIA scapegoat. Meanwhile, up-and-coming Washington attorney Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) attempts to walk a fine line in overseeing a tenuous merger between two oil giants that's plagued with shady business dealings. Hotshot energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is in talks to form a lucrative partnership with Prince Nasir, though the death of his son during a party at the prince's estate makes him question his loyalty to business over family. Back in Washington, D.C., Bennet's boss Dean Whiting attempts to undermine Prince Nasir's attempts to make his country less reliant on the U.S. dollar by planting the seeds of dissonance between the progressive prince and his money-minded younger brother Prince Meshal (Akbar Kurtha).” ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Let’s Call It A Cancer and Get Rid of It

There are all kinds of signs that traditional anti-Semitism in Europe is growing by leaps and bounds, while the UN continues to pass resolution after resolution condemning Israel for shooting back at Arab terrorists who murder Israelis almost on a daily basis. There is really nothing new about this; similar tendencies were seen just before World Wars I and II. Since 1948, when the United Nations approved the formation of the nation of Israel (and Arabs were offered and refused their own nation-state), and the United States was the first country to recognize Israel, Americans have supported Israel as one of our most loyal allies, and, along with Turkey, the only democracy in the area.

During the recent intense conflict between Israel and the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, we continued to give Israel our support, and many members of the liberal community here actually wrote articles pointing out that the West has a moral obligation to support Israel, one of the main defenders of western civilization. On the other hand, most leading members of the mainstream media, such as the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC and the New York Times shocked us with their lies, their doctored photographs and their bias, which continually attempted to shift the blame for a conflict started by Hezbollah to Israel, and constantly showed the suffering of the Lebanese, but not of the Israelis.

With respect to Israel, the main point I wish to make is that this misreporting by western media, combined with the obvious skills Arab and Iranian terrorists have developed in manipulating the media shows very troubling signs of working. As the great Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. There are obvious signs that support among Americans for Israel is weakening. If this is true, it could lead to a disaster because either we might lose a loyal ally to a horrifying genocide, or it might push the Israelis to defend themselves with the only line of defense they would have left – nuclear weapons.

Here are excerpts from a couple of recent articles that have roused my fears:

Hunker Down With History
The Washington Post
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; A19

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.” Richard Cohen

Let's Import Israelis Before There Aren't Any!
By Alan Caruba
www.MichNews.com
Nov 29, 2006

The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, expressing the intention of the ayatollahs, has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map by killing every man, woman and child. Iran will use a nuclear weapon and is close to being able to make one any day now.

If the nuclear option is not used, the proxy armies of the Iranian puppet-masters will be Hezbollah attacking from Lebanon and Hamas from Gaza. Israel is in a pincers between armed camps sworn to destroy it. In the past it has been able to defeat its enemies. It may not be able to do so in the future.

Jerusalem has changed hands many times since the nation of Israel was established in 1321 B.C. Since King David founded it, it has been the Jewish capital for 3,300 years. There are some six million Jews living in the latest resurrection of Israel. They are, combined with all other Jews, a mere 0.02 percent of the world’s population, but they represent 40 percent of all the Jews in the world.

When the Jews declared Israel an independent state on May 14, 1948, five Arab nations immediately attacked it. Offered a state of their own by the United Nations, local Arabs said no. For nearly six decades, Israel has never had a day of real peace.

In its quest for peace, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 only to be provoked to war by Hezbollah. Israelis lived under missile attack for more than a month earlier this year. Hamas’ Palestinians are arming themselves for war despite Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza over a year ago and meaningless truces.

Over its short modern history, Israel’s primary support has come from the United States, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been unequivocal in her support for a two-state solution despite the failure of that effort. U.S. administrations have strong-armed Israeli and Palestinian leaders to sign agreements, none of which were kept by the latter.

I have a suggestion. Let’s import Israel’s Jews. Let’s offer them all passage to America and a fast track to citizenship. The United States has absorbed an estimated twelve to twenty million illegal Mexican, Caribbean, and South American aliens with hardly a whimper. Why not six million of the most talented people in the world, one of the highest concentrations of brainpower to be found anywhere?

Yes, this means abandoning Israel to the Arabs, but Israel is so small the entire landmass could sink into Lake Michigan and never been seen again. In one stroke, America would have defused the so-called “reason” that the Middle East is in such turmoil.

Consider how America would benefit.

In 2004 two Israelis received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for having discovered a process that will lead the way to DNA repair. Jews have won more Nobel Prizes than any other group.

Most of the Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft’s Israeli center. The Pentium NMX Chip technology was designed at Intel’s center in Israel. Same, too, for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ, developed in 1996 by four young Israelis. Cell phone technology was developed in Israel by Motorola’s center.

Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees per capita than any other nation in the world. It produces more scientific papers per capita as well and, except for the U.S., its people file more patents on new inventions and processes than any other nation. Similarly, per capita, it publishes more new books….

By importing Israel’s Jews, America will have a people who will not fly planes into our skyscrapers, not gun down our school children, not blow up teenagers in discothèques or commit suicide to kill strangers in restaurants, on buses and trains. They will not kill people attending weddings and funerals.

Jews love peace so much they greet each other with the Hebrew word for it, “shalom.”

As experienced as Jews are with an exodus or an exile, Israel’s Jews are likely to fight any invader. Or they will die in their ancient homeland from a malevolent nuclear attack. Either way, it will be the world’s loss, but few will see it that way.

In the words of the great Jewish sage Rabbi Hillel, “If not now, when?”
Alan Caruba

If I were an Israeli, I would also be very concerned about the rapid ascension of the Iraq Study Group. This group may turn out to be a bad joke or, possibly, the most brilliant public relations endeavor of all time, but their key members have the historical baggage of ‘forget Israel, we need the oil’. The influence of this group does not bode well for Israel - especially in the light of this evidence of a weakening of support among Americans.

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Free Speech Should Be Curtailed To Fight Terrorism

Earlier this month, on Friday, December 1, (“We Americans Need to Make Some Hard Decisions”) I argued that our nation’s military can never again win a war unless the press is censored and forced to follow rules similar to those imposed during World War II. The press totally misled us during the Vietnam War, over-hyped the disaster in Somalia, and is spreading lies and distortions and revealing secrets indiscriminately almost on a daily basis in Iraq. Our military can defeat any enemy so long as it is not undermined on the home front, but a defeat in Iraq by Iranian and Syrian terrorists would be a disaster that may eventually finish us as a free and prosperous nation.

It seems I am not alone in seeing this dangerous development. The following comments were made recently by Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives:

Gingrich: Free Speech Should Be Curtailed To Fight Terrorism
BY JOSH GERSTEIN – New York Sun
November 29, 2006

A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is causing a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism.

"We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we're unfortunate," Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. "We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat."

Speaking at an award dinner billed as a tribute to crusaders for the First Amendment, Mr. Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House in 2008, painted an ominous picture of the dangers facing America.

"This is a serious, long-term war," the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. "Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people."

Mr. Gingrich acknowledged that these proposals would trigger "a serious debate about the First Amendment." He also said international law must be revised to address the exigencies posed by international terrorists.

"We should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous," he said.

The former speaker also pointed approvingly to England, where suspects in terrorism cases can be detained for several weeks without charge. Some of Mr. Gingrich's remarks about balancing freedom and terrorism were reported by the Associated Press on Monday and the Union Leader of Manchester yesterday.

In the same speech Monday, the former speaker expressed a more expansive view of First Amendment rights in the American political arena. Mr. Gingrich picked a fight of sorts with a potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator McCain of Arizona, by branding as a failure the campaign finance restrictions known as McCain-Feingold. The former speaker said the limitations have not stemmed the flow of money into politics and failed to curtail negative political advertising.

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Monday, December 11, 2006

Second Thoughts on the Baker Boys – Brilliant??

I’ve taken several pot shots at Jim Baker and the Iraq Study Group, but after watching the appearance of Baker and Lee Hamilton on Fox News Sunday, I’m thinking of changing my mind.

There may be some real genius behind the workings and the recommendations of the ISG after all. They have made so many recommendations, and they are so wide ranging and even somewhat contradictory, that there is something in there for everyone. What we need more than anything else – more than a brilliant strategy and maybe more than more troops – is unity and time.
The liberal press and the Democrats have endorsed and highly praised the ISG, probably because it indicts the current Bush policy in Iraq as a failure, even though it endorses the strategy of stabilizing Iraq and helping to provide long-range security to that country.

The main, although unspoken, goals of the ISG may really be to gain support from most Americans for policy changes that have a better chance of succeeding, and time for President Bush to implement those changes. In accomplishing these objectives the ISG may be key in holding off a widespread clamor to get the troops out and action by the new Democrat Congress to cut off funds – like they did in Vietnam to our everlasting shame and loss of backbone.

We can indeed talk to Iran and Syria about the Middle East – as long as our spokesmen are instructed to tell both countries to drop dead.

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Saturday, December 09, 2006

The Elephant and the Embryo

Scenes and videos from the movie discussed below can be seen here.


December 01, 2006
The Elephant and the Embryo (Excerpts)
By Kathleen Parker, The Orlando Sentinel

When does an elephant become an elephant? That is the question.

At least it's the one that popped into my mind as I viewed images from an upcoming National Geographic documentary: "In the Womb: Animals.''

The film, scheduled to air Dec. 10, may be the best weapon yet for the pro-life movement. That wasn't the purpose of the documentary -- the first ever to record animals in the womb -- but these images of gestating life pack a powerful wallop.

The mind makes a natural leap to questions of how we consider and treat the pre-born.

Let's just say that the thought of aborting a baby elephant, even in the earliest gestational stages, is repugnant in a way that transcends intellectual arguments about constitutional rights to privacy.

The images were captured with 4-D ultrasound scans and enhanced with computer graphics. In the elephant's case, suffice it to say they took a backdoor approach. Niiiiice elephant.

Other stars of the film are a puppy and a dolphin. We watch the golden retriever fetus perform full-grown dog behaviors in the womb, a dolphin learn to swim inside its mother, and the elephant grow from a single cell to a 260-pound, well, elephant.

Seeing similar images of a human fetus -- blinking, sucking his thumb and responding to sounds -- is equally amazing, of course. But something about these animals in utero breathes fresh air into the life debate.

Why? Because they're so adorable, helpless and vulnerable. It's the puppy reflex. With the exception of the occasional mass murderer, people see a puppy and go Awwww. They want to cuddle it.

Most people have the same reflex with human babies, too, but as a society, we've managed to emotionally distance ourselves from the human fetus. To think of it as cute or human would make abortion a much tougher choice.

Within the context of abortion, ultrasounds of human fetuses are, in fact, controversial. Pro-life pregnancy counselors are considered manipulative and intimidating when they show a pregnant woman considering abortion an ultrasound of her fetus….

I've long argued that education is the best tool in reducing abortion. Show girls and women their child in utero and abortion will eliminate itself.

Now we have another tool. That is, if we're really serious about reducing abortion. Take "In the Womb'' to every classroom in America and let students do their own free-associating. When the tears are dry -- audiences reportedly weep at this film -- abortion will seem inconceivable. Who could destroy an unborn puppy?

We Americans are suckers for animals, often displaying greater empathy for them than for people. Be honest. In movie battle scenes, whose deaths bother you more -- men's or the horses'? Thought so….

We may not be able to define when a human being becomes a human being, but even children know this much: An elephant doesn't become an elephant without first being a single cell. Kathleen Parker

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The American Muslim Community Is Pushing Its Luck

Like many of President Bush’s supporters, I have agreed with and continue to accept the idea that most Muslims are peaceful and do not support violent jihad. I know that a very high proportion of America’s Muslims are professional people – lawyers, teachers and doctors, and that if the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world were terrorists, things would be an order of magnitude worse than they are. In this blog, I have many times referred to this in my support of the President’s attempts to keep the war on terrorists from morphing into a religious war.

Why is it then, that every time a Muslim spokesman appears on television to explain the position of America’s Muslims, my perception changes slightly for the worse? Sometimes I watch O’Reilly, and sometimes I watch Glen Beck – two programs that often have Muslim spokesmen on to point out the many times Muslim organizations have decried the use of terror. Why is it that their statements ring so hollow? Why is it that they usually appear to be spinning, distorting and obfuscating? Could it be that so many Muslim organizations in the U.S., especially C.A.I.R., have leaders and associates who have some sort of ties to terrorists? Could it be because some of these leaders have led funding drives to raise funds for foreign terrorist organizations? Could it be because some of these leaders have called for the imposition of Sharia law on the citizens of this country?

I understand why peaceful Muslims who live in areas of the world that are more-directly exposed to terrorists might be afraid to speak out and to act to rid their communities of these mass murderers, but those living in the United States cannot claim this rationale. You have to rid yourselves of those denying the role of Muslims in 9/11. You have to rid yourselves of those teaching jihad to Muslim-American children. You have to rid yourselves of imams who try to pull off the atrocious acts at the US Airway’s counter discussed again below. If you do not, the American people are going to conclude that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it’s a duck.

Muslims, others protest US Airways' removal of imams from flight called offensive
(Excerpt)
Michael Clancy
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 2, 2006 12:00 AM

A group of about 100 Muslims gathered at Tempe Beach Park on Friday, in front of US Airways headquarters, to appeal for equal treatment and justice.

Led by Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, the group prayed and listened to speeches of support from Jewish and Christian representatives as well as two talks by Bray himself.

They were there to protest the removal last week of six imams, or Islamic spiritual leaders, five of whom live in the Valley, from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. The incident has drawn national attention and could result in a lawsuit against the airline.

"Deliberate injustice is more fatal to the one who imposes it than on the one on whom it is imposed," Bray said. "We want to tell US Airways that second-class citizenship is not an option."

Only one of the affected imams attended the gathering.

Ahmad al-Shqeirat, spiritual leader of the Islamic Community Center of Tempe, addressed the group only in a final prayer.

He said in an interview that the imams are likely to file a discrimination lawsuit against US Airways next week.

****************

ABOUT THOSE IMAMS
By RICHARD MINITER
New York Post

December 2, 2006 -- THE notorious case of U.S. Airways Flight 300 gets stranger by the minute, as more facts emerge about why six traveling Muslim clerics were asked to deplane.

A passenger on that flight - I'll call her "Pauline" - has inadvertently publicized some facts via a much-forwarded e-mail; she gave me more details in an interview this week. The airport police report confirms some of her claims and holds more revelations of its own. And U.S. Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader also confirmed much of Pauline's account.

One detail that's escaped most reports is that other Muslim passengers were left undisturbed and later joined in a round of applause for the U.S. Airways crew.

"It wasn't that they were Muslim," says Pauline. "It was all of the suspicious things they did." Sitting by Minneapolis-St. Paul's Airport Gate C9, she noticed one imam immediately. "He was pacing nervously, talking in Arabic," she said.

As the plane boarded, she said, no one refused to fly. The public prayers and an Arabic phone call triggered no alarms.

But then a note from a passenger about suspicious movements of the imams got the crew's attention.

To Pauline, everything seemed normal. Then the captain - in classic laconic pilot-style - announced there had been a "mix-up in our paperwork" and that the flight would be delayed.

In reality, the crew was waiting for the FBI and local police to arrive.
Contrary to press accounts that a single note from a passenger triggered the imams' removal, Captain John Howard Wood was weighing multiple factors.

* An Arabic speaker was seated near two of the imams in the plane's tail. That passenger pulled a flight attendant aside and, in a whisper, translated what the men were saying: invoking "bin Laden" and condemning America for "killing Saddam," according to police reports.

* An imam seated in first class asked for a seat-belt extender - the extra strap that obese people use because the standard belt is too short. According to both an on-duty and a deadheading flight attendant, he looked too thin to need one.

A seat-belt extender can easily be used as a weapon - just wrap one end around your fist, and swing the heavy metal buckle.

* All six imams had boarded together, with the first-class passengers - even though only one of them had a first-class ticket. Three had one-way tickets. Between the six men, only one had checked a bag.

And, Pauline said, they spread out - just like the 9/11 hijackers. Two sat in first class, two in the middle and two back in the economy section, police reports show. Some, according to Rader, took seats not assigned to them.

* Finally, a gate attendant told the captain she was suspicious of the imams, according to police reports.

So the captain made his decision to delay the flight based on many complaints, not one. He also consulted a federal air marshal, a U.S. Airways ground-security coordinator and the airline's security office in Phoenix. All thought the imams were acting suspiciously, Rader told me.

One more odd thing went unnoticed at the time: The men prayed both at the gate and on the plane. Yet observant Muslims pray only once at sundown, not twice.

"It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to get kicked off the flight," Pauline said
.


While the imams were soon released, Pauline is fuming: "We are the victims of these people. They need to be more sensitive to us. They were totally insensitive to us and then accused us of being insensitive to them."

The flight was delayed for some 3 1/2 hours. Bomb-sniffing dogs swept the plane, and every passenger got re-screened.

"I think it was either a foiled attempt to take over the plane or it was a publicity stunt to accuse us of being insensitive," Pauline told me. "It had to be to intimidate U.S. Airways to ease up on security."

So far, U.S. Airways refuses to be intimidated, even though the feds have launched an investigation. "We are absolutely backing this crew," Rader said.

Tucked away in the police report is this little gem: One imam had complained to a passenger that some nations don't follow sharia law and had said his job in Bakersfield, Calif., was a cover for "representing Muslims here in the U.S."

What are the imams really up to? Something more than praying, it seems.

Richard Miniter is a best-selling author and a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

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Thursday, December 07, 2006

Here's the Deal: Back Off and You Can Have Israel Later

If you look closely at the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, you can see remnants of the last time James Baker traded the long term demise of Israel for favors from Arab countries. I have great respect for James Baker and his wisdom and experience. His handling of the President’s defense when the Gore team tried to steal the Florida vote in 2000 was masterful, but he has always been an Arabist first in his Middle East dealings and diplomacy.

There is only one way one could possibly think that having discussions with Iran and Syria about the future of Iraq and Lebanon would be productive is if you are willing to give them the one thing they both really want – a road to the destruction of Israel. Baker handed the Palestinians that route once before when he set in motion the events leading to Oslo, and he might just try to do it again.

I am still hoping that President Bush will reject this course and will use the breathing space the Baker group can give him as cover to throw everything we’ve got into Iraq – and remove the political restraints that have so hampered combat operations there.

Others have noticed the 'selling down the river of Israel' contained in the Baker report:

Baker panel's mention of Palestinian "right of return" raises eyebrows
Dec 06 3:43 PM US/Eastern
Breitbart.com

A reference to Palestinians' "right of return" in the report issued by the high-level Iraq Study Group broke a diplomatic taboo which sparked immediate concern in Israel and surprise among Middle East policy experts.

The reference was buried deep inside a 160-page report that urged US President George W. Bush to renew efforts to revive Israel-Palestinian peace talks as part of a region-wide bid to end the chaos in Iraq.

"This report is worrisome for Israel particularly because, for the first time, it mentions the question of the 'right of return' for the Palestinian refugees of 1948," said a senior Israeli official, who was reacting to the US policy report on condition he not be identified.

A Middle East analyst who was involved in the Iraq Study Group discussions but did not participate in drafting the report expressed surprise when the reference was pointed out to him by a reporter.

"It's hard to know whether that language got in there because of carelessness -- I know there were many revisions up to the very last minute -- or whether it was a deliberate attempt to fuse something to the Bush rhetoric which wasn't there before," the analyst said.

The 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians calls for a resolution of the issue of Israeli and Palestinian "refugees" as part of a final status agreement that would include the creation of a Palestinian state.

But they do not use the term "right of return", which is a long-standing Palestinian demand -- rejected by Israel -- that Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what was to become the Jewish state in 1948, as well as their descendants, be allowed to return home.

Bush, in a 2002 speech in the White House Rose Garden, became the first US president to formally back the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, but he also did not mention a right of Palestinian 'return'.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group's co-chairman is former secretary of state James Baker, who as the top diplomat for Bush's father in the early 1990s clashed with Israel over its handling of the Palestinian issue.

Among his group's 79 recommendations for a policy shift on Iraq, number 17 concerned five points it said should be included in a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The final point in the list was: "Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President Bush's two-state solution, which would address the key final status issues of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the right of return and the end of conflict."

"'Right of return' is not in Oslo I or Oslo II, it's not in the Bush Rose Garden speech, it's not even in UN 181, the original partition resolution -- it's part of the Palestinian discourse," said the US analyst.

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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Fighting to win in Iraq By Jeff Jacoby

Fighting to win in Iraq
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | December 3, 2006
First of two parts

AS SECRETARY of state from 1989 to 1992, James Baker was involved in some of the worst foreign-policy blunders of the first Bush administration.

One such blunder was the stubborn refusal to support independence for the long-subjugated republics of the Soviet Union, culminating in the president's notorious "Chicken Kiev" speech urging Ukrainians to stay in their Soviet cage. Another was the appeasement of Syrian dictator Hafez Assad during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War, when Bush and Baker blessed Syria's brutal occupation of Lebanon in exchange for Assad's acquiescence in the campaign to undo Iraq's occupation of Kuwait.

When Chinese tanks massacred students in Tiananmen Square, Bush declared: "I don't think we ought to judge the whole People's Liberation Army by that terrible incident." When Bosnia was torn apart by violence in 1992, the Bush-Baker reaction was to shrug it off as "a hiccup."

Worst of all was the betrayal of the Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds who heeded Bush's call to "take matters into their own hands" and overthrow Saddam Hussein -- only to be slaughtered by Saddam's helicopter gunships and napalm while the Bush administration stood by. Baker blithely announced that the administration was "not in the process now of assisting . . . these groups that are in uprising against the current government."

If Bush the Elder is remembered for a rather heartless and cynical foreign policy, much of the credit must go to Baker.

What he did for the father, Baker is now poised to do for the son.
This week, the Baker-led Iraq Study Group formally presents its report to President George W. Bush. Its key recommendations are reportedly that US troops in Iraq be gradually withdrawn and that the United States turn to Iran and Syria for help in reducing the violence. One study group member, speaking to The New York Times, summed up the bottom line : "We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out."

The president will be urged by many to waste no time implementing the Baker group's ideas. Which is indeed what he should do -- assuming that he has come around to favoring defeat in Iraq, the death of the doctrine that bears his name, and the empowerment of the worst regimes in the world. If, however, Bush prefers success to failure and would rather live up to, not abandon, the principles he has articulated in the war against radical Islam, he should politely accept the ISG report and then do the opposite of what it recommends.

Far from drawing down the number of troops in Iraq, Bush should increase them. The Rumsfeldian "light footprint" theory -- the belief that the US military presence in Iraq must be minimized so that the Iraqis learn to maintain security and stability on their own -- has been tried for more than three years. It hasn't worked. At least in the short term, there is no prospect of restoring order and stopping the bloodshed without many more American boots on the ground.

Sending in significant reinforcements would not only make it possible to kill more of the terrorists, thugs, and assassins who are responsible for Iraq's chaos. It would help reassure Iraqis that the Washington is not planning to leave them in the lurch, as it did so ignominiously in 1991. The violence in Iraq is surging precisely because Iraqis fear that the Americans are getting ready to throw in the towel. That is why "they have turned to their own sectarian armed groups for the protection the Bush administration has failed to provide," Robert Kagan and William Kristol write in The Weekly Standard. "That, and not historical inevitability or the alleged failings of the Iraqi people, is what has brought Iraq closer to civil war."

With polls showing that most Americans have soured on both Bush and the war, would a military escalation in Iraq be politically feasible? The only way for Bush to find out is to try.

But I would wager that countless Americans are upset with Bush, not because he isn't skedaddling from Iraq quickly enough, but because he seems to have no serious strategy for winning. It is losing that Americans have no patience for -- not casualties or a protracted war. Let Bush make it clear that he is serious about victory, and that he will do whatever it takes to achieve it, and the political support will follow.
By Jeff Jacoby

Today the Iraq Study Group presented its findings along the lines discussed by Jeff Jacoby. I said a prayer last night for President Bush, and included with it the hope that this group is really providing cover for a major increase in American combat operations there that take the gloves off and destroys the centers of these madmen called insurgents. Lets also not ever forget that Iraq, in becoming a magnet for terrorists, has diverted them from our own country and from our own citizens.

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

THE TRUTH ON IRAQ By JOHN PODHORETZ

THE TRUTH ON IRAQ
By JOHN PODHORETZ
The New York Post

December 5, 2006 -- THE most common cliché about the war in Iraq is now this: We didn't have a plan, and now everything is in chaos; we didn't have a plan, and now we can't win.

This is entirely wrong. We did have a plan - the problem is that the plan didn't work. And of course we can win - we just have to choose to do so.

The problem with our plan is that it wasn't actually a military plan.

We thought a political process inside Iraq would make a military push toward victory against a tripartite foe - Saddamist remnants, foreign terrorists and anti-American Shiites - unnecessary.

Yes, we'd stay in Iraq and fight the bad guys when we had to, which seemed mostly to be when they decided to attack us first. Our resolve was intended to give the Iraqi people the sense that they were being given control of their future, and to give Iraqi politicians the sense that they had a chance to forge a new kind of country in which everybody could prosper.

For this reason, we relented on several occasions when we had a chance to score a major victory over the bad guys. Because politics was more important than military victory, because playing the game was more important than killing the enemy, we chose to lose.

After the beheading of Americans in Fallujah, we had the city surrounded - but, because it seemed an attack on Fallujah would be problematic for Iraqi politics, we pulled back. We had the Shiite monster Moqtada al-Sadr in our sights as well, but let him go as well for fear Iraq's leading Shiite cleric would turn on us.

Each of these decisions seemed prudent at the time. In retrospect, they seem disastrous. Our failure to take Fallujah after the deaths of Americans gave the enemy the sense that we were weak. Our failure to kill Sadr has led to a situation in which he has excessive power over the elected government.

Still, the theory of how to prevail in Iraq made sense as a theory. What, after all, were the Saddamists and the terrorists fighting for? Clearly there would be no restoration of Saddam's cruel reign, and they couldn't score a battlefield victory against us. That's why Dick Cheney and others referred to them as "dead-enders" - because they were and are dead-enders. They had no achievable goal for securing power in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people were voting in elections - 8 million in the first, 10 million in the second, 12 million in the third. They created a new political class where there'd been none before.

Once an actual Iraqi government was up and running, we expected the political progress to choke off the oxygen of the dead-enders. With an Iraq hurtling into the future, they would melt away because there was nothing for them to gain.

What's more, there was nothing in it for the Saddamists - Sunnis all - to provoke a civil war, because they'd lose. Shiites outnumber Sunnis 2-1, and there are as many Kurds as Sunnis.

So that was the plan. We didn't have to win against our foes: The Iraqi people were going to defeat them.

In other words, we were standing the Iraqis up so we could stand down.

Sound familiar? That is the prescription for leaving Iraq that's on everyone's lips - Democrats, Republicans, the Baker-Hamilton group.

And guess who else? Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, Bush's very own defense secretary clearly believed this was the way to go. In his classified memo, leaked to The New York Times over the weekend, Rummy says it's time for the Iraqis to "pull up their socks." We should pull back so the Iraqis don't depend on us to secure their future.

That was not a new idea for him or the administration. In May 2003, a senior administration official told me it was "time for the Iraqis to step up to the plate."

That's nice. But the Iraqis can't "step up to the plate," and they can't "pull up their socks." The plan envisioned that they could do so whenever they chose. The plan said their political progress would be the way for them to reach the plate and reach their socks.

The plan failed.

So we need a new plan. But the Baker-Hamilton advice isn't a new plan. The Democrats don't have a new plan. The only plan that will work is a plan to face the tripartite enemy - the Saddamists, the foreign terrorists and the Shiite sectarians - and bring them to heel.

Kill as many bad guys as we can, with as many troops as we can muster.

If this is unrealistic, then Iraq is lost.

If we can't win, then we lose.

Political change doesn't win wars. That's what we've learned, painfully and horribly. Only winning wars wins wars.

President Bush needs to decide, as soon as possible, that he is going to win this war - that the bad guys are going to die, that we are going to kill them and that we will achieve our objectives in Iraq. That is the only way forward for him if he doesn't want to end up in ignominy.

The clock is ticking. He has only a week, maybe two, to change course dramatically. To choose to win, and to direct the military to do so.

Or we are sunk, and so is he.

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