David Warren: Do We Have Permission to Win in Iraq?
So far as I can make out — I am not writing from Iraq, but I do make a splendid effort to follow the plot there — the Americans are finally doing what they should have been doing all along. They are taking the battle to the Islamist enemy, or rather, enemies, both Shia and Sunni. They are enlisting the help of tribal lords and other local allies against these enemies, de-emphasizing the grand “Marshall Plan” giveaways, and re-emphasizing small, visible, unbureaucratic improvements on that local scale. They have become less timid about inspections and searches, and thus have taken bigger risks of offending people, in the knowledge that providing better security is the only thing that will get them loved. They not only have more men now in theatre, but are using more proportionally up front and fewer in the rear. They are patrolling frontiers more pro-actively, and turning no blind eyes to suspicious incursions. By using different techniques in different districts, they are also breaking the enemy’s ability to camouflage.
Mark Steyn: Look who’s holding hostages again
How do you feel about the American hostages in Iran?
No, not the guys back in the Seventies, the ones being held right now.
What? You haven’t heard about them?
Odd that, isn’t it? But they’re there. For example, for two months now, Haleh Esfandiari has been detained in Evin prison in Tehran. Esfandiari is a U.S. citizen and had traveled to Iran to visit her sick mother. She is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which is the kind of gig that would impress your fellow guests at a Washington dinner party. Unfortunately, the mullahs say it’s an obvious cover for a Bush spy.
Among the other Zionist-neocon agents currently held in Iranian jails are an American journalist, an American sociologist for a George Soros-funded leftie group, and an American peace activist from Irvine, Ali Shakeri, whose capture became known shortly after the United States and Iran held their first direct talks since the original hostage crisis.
Barry Rubin: A Tale of Four Op-Eds: The Media’s Cooperation with Hamas’ PR Campaign
Hamas leaders now write op-eds in the leading American newspapers either concealing completely or greatly distorting their group’s aims. The newspapers are complicit in this process by accepting articles which either have nothing to do with the real Hamas or at least are full of demonstrable lies. While it can be argued that many op-eds contain untruths or that it is not the editors’ job to make such judgments, the Hamas pieces go far beyond the other op-eds being published.
Equally disturbing is that the fact that on this matter the op-ed pages are not really balanced. While these newspapers publish op-eds which criticize Hamas as part of an analysis of U.S. policy–say, a piece by Dennis Ross urging U.S. support for Fatah’s West Bank government–they do not seem to run op-eds that challenge directly Hamas’s misstatements or which provide a comprehensive look at the true nature and activities of Hamas.
Recently, the three main city-based newspapers in America ?the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times–ran op-eds by Hamas leaders. First, an identical article by Ahmed Yousef, an advisor to the man who had headed the Palestinian Authority, appeared the same day, June 27, in the Washington Post and New York Times.
This is an extremely unusual development and it turned out, according to Washington Post editors, that Hamas’s public relations’ agent had fooled them by not informing either newspaper that the other was publishing. It was not the last time that Hamas would fool them.The idea of the op-ed article is to let an individual or group express its opinion directly, without the mediation of the newspaper’s reporters or editors. In this sense, the Yousef pieces were not op-eds and should not have been published. The reason is that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the thoughts or actions of Hamas. They were, rather, merely free advertising copy.
Clifford D. May: Know Thine Enemies
World War II was called a world war for a reason: President Roosevelt might have preferred to take on only Imperial Japan, the nation that had attacked us. Instead, he had to lead the country into battle also against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. He had to fight not only in the Pacific but in North Africa and Europe as well.
It’s astonishing how many otherwise smart people seem incapable of grasping this reality. Many have been making the peculiar argument that we shouldn’t worry too much about al Qaeda in Iraq — because it’s somehow different from al Qaeda Not in Iraq. Consider the question a reporter asked of President Bush at a recent press conference:
But, sir …what evidence can you present to the American people that the people who attacked the United States on September the 11th are, in fact, the same people who are responsible for the bombings taking place in Iraq? What evidence can you present? And also, are you saying, sir, that al Qaeda in Iraq is the same organization being run by Osama bin Laden, himself?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: “You grew-up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you do not know what it is to not have freedom. I do.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a guest on a recent broadcast of On The Map, a CBC news program hosted by the nauseatingly anti-American Avi Lewis.
Here we have a study in contrasts: on the one hand we have courage, grace, and gratitude, and on the other we have condescension, naiveté and cognitive dissonance.
Oh, and do buy Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book: Infidel.
h/t: Hot Air
Sally Pipes: More lies from Moore
In “Sicko,” Michael Moore uses a clip of my appearance earlier this year on “The O’Reilly Factor” to introduce a segment on the glories of Canadian health care.
Moore adores the Canadian system. I do not.
I am a new American, but I grew up and worked for many years in Canada. And I know the health care system of my native country much more intimately than does Moore. There’s a good reason why my former countrymen with the money to do so either use the services of a booming industry of illegal private clinics, or come to America to take advantage of the health care that Moore denounces.
Government-run health care in Canada inevitably resolves into a dehumanizing system of triage, where the weak and the elderly are hastened to their fates by actuarial calculation. Having fought the Canadian health care bureaucracy on behalf of my ailing mother just two years ago – she was too old, and too sick, to merit the highest quality care in the government’s eyes – I can honestly say that Moore’s preferred health care system is something I wouldn’t wish on him.
Christopher Hitchens: Don’t Mince Words
Why on earth do people keep saying, “There but for the grace of God …”? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.
Instead, almost every other conceivable explanation was canvassed. The June 30 New York Times report managed to quote three people, one of whom attributed the aborted atrocity in London to Tony Blair’s foreign policy; one of whom (a New Zealand diplomat, at that) felt “surprisingly all right about it”; and one of whom, described as “a Briton of Indian descent,” was worried that “if I walk up that road, they’re going to suspect me.” The “they” there was clearly the British authorities, rather than the Muslim gangsters who have declared open season on all Hindus as well as all Jews, Christians, secularists, and other kuffar or infidel filth.
UW-Madison professor emeritus Reid Bryson considers global warming a bunch of hooey
Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the “Little Ice Age,” he said in an interview this week.”However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We’ve been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It’s been warming up for a long time,” Bryson said.
Bryson is but one of many, many serious scientists that dispute the existence of Anthropological Global Warming. In fact, there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to listing these skeptics. And, there is also a great series of articles in the National Post, called The Deniers.
Considering just how many qualified scientists dispute the hysterical mainstream opinion on Global Warming, why do we see so little coverage of the other side of the story? Once again, the media’s leftist agenda is illustrated in their skewed coverage of a subject.
