lg colloquium

2009-09-21T10:38:00.000-04:00

This is only a test.
Or maybe more, depending...

Syria pwned.

2007-10-06T17:37:00.000-04:00

Assuming the information in this article is accurate, Israel did more than attack Syria: it also sent a message to Tehran.

OpFor:

Ahhh makes me think of Patton: "Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man." Integrated anti-air defenses haven't really been all that effective since the Vietnam era, and I'm starting to think that they're obsolete technology.

They're talking about this article in Aviation Week:

The big mystery of the strike is how did the non-stealthy F-15s and F-16s get through the Syrian air defense radars without being detected? Some U.S. officials say they have the answer.
U.S. aerospace industry and retired military officials indicated today that a technology like the U.S.-developed “Suter” airborne network attack system developed by BAE Systems and integrated into U.S. unmanned aircraft by L-3 Communications was used by the Israelis. The system has been used or at least tested operationally in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last year.
The technology allows users to invade communications networks, see what enemy sensors see and even take over as systems administrator so sensors can be manipulated into positions so that approaching aircraft can’t be seen, they say. The process involves locating enemy emitters with great precision and then directing data streams into them that can include false targets and misleading messages algorithms that allow a number of activities including control.
A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have paid for the Syrian acquisitions."

No kidding. I'll bet the Iranian regime thugs are crapping their pants, and the Russians too. "The process involves locating enemy emitters with great precision and then directing data streams into them that can include false targets and misleading messages algorithms that allow a number of activities including control." Sounds like Star Trek stuff, don't it?

The system in question is thought to be the new Tor-M1 launchers which carries eight missiles as well as two of the Pachora-2A system. Iran bought 29 of the Tor launchers from Russia for $750 million to guard its nuclear sites,

and I'll bet they want their money back. Oh well. Caveat emperor, or whatever.

Debka seems to believe there's a dirty bomb in the works. For whatever it's worth (and yeah, I know, it's Debka, the guys who breathlessly reported a nonexistent Turkish-Iraqi war last summer), their latest DNW [paid subscription service] claims:

Iran, Syria and North Korea are believed to be the first nations in history to have acquired dirty bombs as operational weapons, stowing their main stock in northern Syria. This discovery has injected fresh urgency into the Bush administration’s approach to the nuclear issue. Policy-makers have been running around in circles for a strategy and options to scotch the new threat at source.

The Sept. 6 air strike over Syria was the first result; it also carried a warning to Tehran, Pyongyang and Damascus that they had better hurry up and do away with any stocks of such weapons they may have or else incur the treatment meted out to Damascus at its “agricultural research center.”

Syria was targeted for the air strike both as the hiding place of the bulk of the RDD stock and because there is no way its presence could be hidden unbeknownst to the ruler. The buck clearly stopped at the presidential palace in Damascus. No one therefore believed President Bashar Assad’s hasty message to Washington through undercover back doors denying he had any personal knowledge of the nefarious operation at the Beir al Harj site and had ordered it investigated.
I'm not going to excerpt any more lest I bring down the wrath of the Debka Copyright Mossad, but you get the idea.

Anyway, that about sums it up. So who do you think is gonna win this thing - the guys who can barely manage to put their toxic waste on a rocket or plane, or the guys who can "include false targets and misleading messages algorithms that allow a number of activities including control"?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Mad In America

2007-07-03T18:09:00.001-04:00

"They keep sending our jobs away."

Here's a great song from the brother of an old friend of mine.

Troubled by the rising tied of offshoring around the country musician and CSEA Local 2001 member Steve Dube put pen to paper and wrote an anthem called “Mad in America” for his band ETX.

[Dube]: The song was written as a protest basically, just because of all of the engineering and IT jobs going away.

Dube is now trying to bring that protest via song to music lovers everywhere by landing on ITunes top 100 on July 4. How? Dube is calling on everyone to log into their ITunes player on the Independence Day holiday and download the song. If enough people do it, the song should hypothetically find a place among the Avril Lavignes and Fall Out Boys of the world.

[Dube2]: We’d like to just get a grassroots effort going where the song could become like an anthem for American workers just to show Washington in an election year that we don’t want the middle class to go away and we want jobs in the United States.

I've just downloaded the song to iTunes and I can personally and enthusiastically recommend it. "Mad in America" raises important questions about globalization and the outsourcing of American jobs. And it's a great song, too.

My friend Chuck comes from a family of patriots and is also a musician, having performed with Leigh Gregory. Go have a listen to Mad in America by ETx - and you can download the whole thing for just 99 cents.

Memorial Day

2007-05-27T21:52:00.000-04:00

The day that America has set aside to commemorate our fallen warriors is upon us. To those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for our country and the world I can not adequetely express our gratitude. For the widows and orphans I don't have the eloquence to properly console. I can only ask that my fellow citizens take one day to properly honor those who have fallen. Be respectful of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who have laid down their lives so that you can enjoy your life, and don't use it in an attempt to make political points.

Israel, the Palestinians, and the Cyber-Donks (Part One)

2007-05-10T15:27:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Charles Johnson linked to a Daily Kos diary in which the diarist – an Israeli - calls it quits, with one of the best door-slammer endings ever: “I came to this site with Leftist Zionist Environmentalist Pro-Peace ideology (Meretz style). I leave it with a heavy doubt of the entire ‘Progressive’ ideology, morals and goals.”

I briefly skimmed the comments to this diary and something caught my eye. I don’t usually read the comments at Kos, partly because the signature lines tend to be longer than the comments and it is very annoying to be subjected to the same tag-line slogan over and over. But what caught my eye was this:

“Israel/Palestine is not a germane topic for this site to begin with. The Kos himself has said so many times, and I agree with him. … It's been said here many times - it is a THIRD RAIL that blogsites touch at their peril. Kos blocks diaries that try to bring this topic up … Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian arguments HAVE NO PLACE HERE. Most people here, frankly, are not interested in discussing this chronically intractable subject.”

It’s a stunning admission for “progressives” who claim to speak credibly on world events to say that they are not interested in talking about Israel and the Palestinians. Besides being a salient feature of the international landscape, it is a very important part of American political culture – the culture that the progs are trying to harness and ride for a saddle-pony. The comment claims that “The Kos himself” tries to steer Kos away from such discussion, even to the point of deletion. And I found that very strange.

I already knew, as most people who read the blogs know, that one does not turn to the left for detailed discussion of Israel and the Palestinians. As the departing Kos diarist noted, there are an unnerving number of people over there who seem to assume that Noam Chomsky has said the last word on the subject. Still, the left has articulated lots of pro-Israeli - and even pro-Zionist - opinion in the past. For many decades there has been a lot of left and center-left interest in a positive future for Israel, so why does it suddenly and emphatically HAVE NO PLACE HERE? And above all, SAYS WHO?

More to come.

Civics 101: The Logan Act

2007-04-09T22:11:00.000-04:00

Should our elected representatives know where their authority begins and ends, or does that only apply to Republicans?

I know, rhetorical question, but humor me.

Today I stumbled upon and article written by Robert Turner that was published by OpinionJournal.com. In the article, Mr. Turner asks the question, "Did Nancy Pelosi commit a felony when she went to Syria?"

The answer is, yes, she did.

He goes on to inform the reader about the history and reasons behind the Logan Act, the very law Nancy Pelosi broke.

In our litigious society, that is also keen on making excuses for law-breakers when it suits their world view, the press, democrats, and sadly the current administration are all looking the other way in an effort to avoid the hot potato issue that is burning a hole in the carpet of our political society.

First question. Did she knowingly break the law? We are often instructed and reminded that ignorance of the law is no excuse, and as a "law maker" she should know the law, or at the very least, be informed about the law by her staff or do her own homework.

Mr. Turner goes on to explain the non-to-subtle difference between the perfectly legal "fact finding mission" and what she did... actively carrying out foriegn policy discussion (negotiations) without permission of the Executive branch of our government (i.e. President Bush's permission/blessing) and making a royal mess of it. I guess Nancy is so used to being able to manipulate public opinion and having her "world view" blessed and accepted by the press and her supporters, that she must have thought she could do the same with the Israeli Prime Minister and Syrian President Assad.

Second question. Will this administration refer the matter to the Attorney General for investigation? Somehow I doubt it. And I doubt the press will make an issue of it either, unless of course the matter is refered and then it will be deemed a retalliatory witch hunt (at least they will get the witch part right). I doubt anyone that reads this blog will be surprised by any of this either.

I'm wondering when will the Republicans grow a set and do what is right regardless of how it looks; politics be damned. When a federal law has been broken by an elected member of the US Congress we should not look the other way, especially when that representative made the promise to oversee the most ethical US congress in history. So far the democrats have a dismal record and we haven't even gotten through their first year in office. Representative Steele's freezer money, Feinstein's conflict of interest that dwarfs any allegations of wrong-doing on the part of Haliburton, Delay, Chenney, Gingrich, and Abramoff combined. But the press isn't interested because the parties involved have a "D" after their names.

Well, you learn something new every day. At least I did, but I don't think the press is capable of learning anything new, least ways not until they take off their blinders.

The War Within and the War Without

2007-03-05T02:02:00.000-05:00

We are at war. Our enemies are within and without. Without, we have the global islamic jihad against Western Civilization. Within, we have the traitors on the left........
http://herbertsobel.blogspot.com/2007/03/war-within-and-war-without.html

Torture By Any Other Name...

2007-02-26T20:41:00.000-05:00

What is torture? Or should I ask, what would you classify as torture?

If you ask Eric Fair, torture is:

Depriving a detainee of sleep during a 12 hour shift by opening his cell door every hour.
Forcing the detainee to stand in a corner.
Stripping a detainee of his clothes.

Hum... this is torturing someone. Oh, and I guess I should mention this "abuse" or should I say "these horrors" were inflicted upon a suspected Baathist party member and associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province, and not some unsuspecting innocent by-stander civilian Iraqi.

Oh the horror of it all.

Eric states he has nightmares and visitations from this man whom he "tortured" and that he (Eric) cannot forgive himself for having... "failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and to uphold the standards of human decency." He goes on, "I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself."

Let us pause for a moment and ask ourselves a few questions. When did the above become equated with torture? When did the above become an example of exceeding the bounds or standards of human decency? When did this man, and anyone that of similar disposition, become such candy-assed girly-men? What the hell is wrong with this picture?

Let us attempt to gain some perspective, shall we.

The men in question were and are very much involved with the insurgency, and at the very least were part of Saddam's ruling class; a ruling class that inflicted real torture on the people of Iraq. Anyone remember the home movies Saddam took of the tortures he and his elite inflicted on the populace including: cutting out tongues, beatings, tossing people off buildings, putting people though a plastic shredder, raping and maiming the women and children of those who went against him or merely offended him; hell, just because he could do it and it would scare the rest of the populace into submission?

Okay, anyone remember what the Marines who liberated Fallujah found in some of the buildings they entered? Anyone remember people chained to walls, beaten, starved, deprived of water or basic hygiene (bathroom facilities), given no treatment for the cuts and trauma their captors inficted on them, and who were left to die? Why were they treated so badly? Because the jihadis wanted to keep the population of Fallujah in line, to punish those who did not go along with them, and just because they are sadistic fascist who get off on inflicting pain and suffering on others.

Did America, as this man who has nightmarish visitations, violate the Geneva Convention? Were the detainees deprived food, water, or the "facilities?" No, they were embarrassed and forced to stand naked in cold cells all night. Their "severe" treatment, which did not equate to 3 hots and a cot, this inhuman treatment, reduced our enemy (who has vowed to kill every last one of us) to pleas of help from their captors because they were cold and naked, and sleepy. Hell, Seals endure a week of this sort of stuff during Hell Week don't they? Again, let's get a healty dose of perspective here. As I recall, jihadi captors ignored the pleas of many of their "detainees" (kidnap victims) to not kill them. Nope, they didn't embarass them or make them stand naked and shivering all night long, nope, they raped the women, beat the men, then brutally chop, hack, saw and otherwise remove their heads from their bodies... while the video cameras rolled.

Torture... I'll let you be the judge. As for me, I think Eric needs to grow a set, grow up, get some help for his emotional problems, and stop whining.

Is it any wonder our enemy thinks we are weak?

Lessons Not Learned... A 60's Redux

2007-02-16T19:37:00.000-05:00

Today, in an unsurprising move, the US House of Representatives passed their "resolution" against the war in Iraq. I'm quite sure they are all busily patting each other and themselves on the back over this bold step of sending a message to President Bush and the evil Karl Rove, but in true ingorance they've missed the point entirely. The they have sent message to:

To our enemy (Islamofacists, jihadis, haters of freedom in this country who lend sympathy and direct support to our enemies) that the US Congress is ready to cut and run, and had them a victory they cannot win by any other means.
To our BRAVE, Heroic, and Self-sacrificing troops, that they cannot count on the US Congress to back them. That they are turning them and their fight, into another Vietnam in the same way that the US Congress, and Democrats did in the 60's (by under funding and undermining our troops in everyway possible, and turning them into political pawns and poryias in civilian society).
To President Bush that he'll have just ignore them and exercise his Presidential powers through Executive Orders (the way Bill Clinton did during his two terms).

The forces of revolution and anarchy that tore this country apart in the 60's are at work now, and most of them have gotten themselves elected to public office.

Be careful America. While what they say may sound good and right, just, and sensible, many who joined the White Knights of the KKK were deceived into thinking they were joining a patriotic, God-fearing, law-abiding organization that was going to make American a stronger, and a better place to live. After reading the literature the Klan put out during that time, I can see why they believed it was a good thing, but what they said was a far cry from what they actually did and who they really were. Just look at what the Klan did, and at how many people were deceived, killed, threatened, and had their lives destroyed behind the rhetoric. Actions do speak louder than words, and those in charge, the force and brains behind the Klan were far more dangerous and interested in ceasing power and keeping it, than they were in making America a better and stronger place to live.

All that glitters is not gold. Socialism was not the answer in Eastern Europe and Russian, and it won't be the answer here. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, but be especially cautions of Democrats (and Repubilicans) bearing anti-war resolutions.

Sic Semper Tyrannus, Baby

2006-12-30T15:58:00.000-05:00

Our public intellectuals are struggling to explain Saddam’s demise to us folks in the bleachers. This is important to them, because they think that we believe everything they tell us.

Historical parallels with Nuremberg have been suggested. But Saddam’s situation was nothing like that of the Nuremberg defendants. They were tried by a multinational court (not an international court as it is often miscalled) which employed unique and unprecedented legal procedures. The Soviet members of that court were unabashedly prejudiced against the defendants, and voted to convict and execute nearly all of them – they even insisted on charging them with a crime the Soviets themselves had committed: the Katyn Forest Massacre. (Much to the annoyance of our gallant Soviet allies, the Nuremberg defendants were exonerated on that particular charge.)

Saddam, on the other hand, was convicted of pure and simple murder by a national court of his own countrymen. Although it is characterized as a “war crime” or a “crime against humanity”, those terms are mostly rhetorical. These abstract definitions were introduced by Nuremberg in order to establish an unusual culpability, but they were unnecessary in Saddam’s case. Saddam was convicted of the murder of specific people, for which he was directly responsible. No one can claim he was subjected to any kind of “Victor’s Justice”.

What makes Saddam’s case unusual is that a dictator was deposed, tried in a court of law by his own people, and humanely executed. This is far from being typical. Most fallen dictators escape into exile; if they are captured, they are dealt with in a summary and often brutal fashion. Mussolini and Ceausescu were shot after being sentenced by tribunals that convened just long enough to pronounce the death sentence.

Slobodan Milosevic was not a dictator of Saddam’s stature, but his fate was exactly what some liberals would have awarded to Saddam. He was trundled through an international trial at the Hague, which was magnificently bungled, and finally died in custody. Until the day they die, his partisans will believe that he was murdered in prison, just as Napoleon’s followers did. Just as radical leftists believed that the Baader-Meinhof terrorists were murdered in prison. There’s a lesson in that, boys and girls. You don’t get a single iota of credit from the enemy for coddling their heroes. Unless we had figured out a way to make Saddam Hussein live forever, we’d get blamed for killing him anyway.

Unfortunately, the most typical career trajectory of all for a dictator is this: kill your enemies, loot your country, bask in the absurd flattery of your foreign apologists, and die in your bed at a ripe old age. The number of dictators who manage to do this is obscene.

When historians look back on us, they won’t be shocked at the one dictator that got hanged, but at the scores of them that weren’t. How, they will ask, could we believe that the life of one brutal man is worth more than the life of an entire nation - decimated, enslaved, and robbed of decades of normal human existence? Could there be a greater crime than inflicting the living death of totalitarianism on millions of people?

Tyranny, lay thy foundations sure, for goodness dare not check thee – but maybe the times are changing.

Saddam to Die Soon

2006-12-29T13:18:00.000-05:00

Mohammed at Iraq the Model:

Year 2007 will definitely be without Saddam walking on the ground….
It's very imminent now and might become a fact at any minute.
The situation in Baghdad is tense now and US and Iraqi forces are heavily deployed on the streets.

We're hearing and reading more confirmations that US military has already turned Saddam in to the Iraqi authorities and I don't think the government is willing, or able, to keep him in custody for too long. ...

Go to ITM for the rest, with updates.

Why it matters:
The Iraqi Holocaust

The Best Man We Never Elected

2006-12-27T14:09:00.000-05:00

As a boy, I remember hearing adults make this "joke" several times: "You know, I don't know how that guy got to be president, because I've never met anybody who voted for him."

They were talking, of course, about Gerald Ford. They took a lot of cheap shots at Ford. He was clumsy, he was dumb, he was boring. His critics presumed themselves to be intelligent and adroit, I suppose, even when they were disgracing themselves and their country. They replaced him with Jimmy Carter, which is surely one of the dumbest fall-on-your-butt blunders that a free nation has ever made. God protect us from the intelligent people, because they won't be happy until they get us all killed.

Gerald Ford was a good man who faithfully served his country in war and in peace. He was never elected to the highest office he held, but he never demeaned or besmirched that office - not while he held it, not for as long as he lived. He was a major public figure for 40 years of tumult and controversy, and it's remarkable how few bad things people can say about him now. That has to be one of the most graceful performances in American history. Go with God, Mr. President.

THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD: HOW TO LIE ABOUT CHRISTMAS

2006-12-27T02:47:00.000-05:00

So, how was your Christmas? Tired of hearing that? Tired of explaining how the cat climbed the Christmas tree and knocked it over on top of your aunt, and how the kids poured the punch bowl down the laundry chute? If people insist on sticking their noses into your Christmas business, pick one of the following lies and see if they ever ask you about your holiday again.

An old friend you haven’t heard from in years invites you to spend Christmas with him, on his 200-foot yacht anchored off the Florida Keys. He’s a major investment broker and all of his best clients are on board for the holiday, including Nicole Kidman, Richard Petty, and the Beach Boys. The Braes of Glenlivet send a boatload of French Oak Reserve as a Christmas present.

The party is so great that people from the Keys try to swim out to the ship, but a nasty rip current keeps the crashers at bay. You see Katie Couric clinging to a lounge chair, just before a freakish three foot swell hurls her back onto the beach.

On Christmas morning you are awakened by the Coast Guard, who are responding to noise complaints from the US Naval Station at Guantanamo. Fortunately, the anchor cable parted during the festivities and the yacht has drifted out past the three-mile limit. Unable to arrest you, the Coast Guard joins the party.

On the way back, the Coast Guard offers to race you with their cutter. Your friend has had so much to drink that he’s sneezing Egg Nog, and when he declines the Coast Guard makes chicken-clucking noises at you. So you take the helm, and totally make that cutter eat your wake.

You were just about to sit down to turkey and cranberry sauce with the whole family, when you get an urgent call from your best buddy. He’s been trying to repossess Burt Reynolds’ car for six weeks with no luck, and the finance company has been slam-dancing on his butt. He’s finally located the car, parked in front of Burt’s lawyer’s house in Oakland. He wants you to drive him out there so he can nab it. He knows it’s Christmas Eve and he wouldn’t ask if you weren’t such a great friend, but damn it, he needs you.

So you and your friend head out to Oakland in your Dodge Viper. Sure enough, there’s the lawyer’s house and there’s the car: a twelve-cylinder Pagani Zonda. Even before the car comes into view you can smell the analine leather interior, and see the bottle-fly green paint job reflected in the night sky like the Aurora Borealis.

Unfortunately, there’s lots of other cars parked there, too, and an under-strength platoon of bodyguards are walking around with MAC-10 submachine guns in full view. “Don’t worry,” your friend assures you. “We’ll do this fast. Just follow me. No matter what happens or where I go, just stay on my tail lights.”

Your friend rolls out in the alleyway and jacks that Pagani right out from under their noses. As he speeds away and you pull out to follow, you can see the security guys piling into their Cadillacs, which you figure are probably armored and relatively slow. As long as you stick to the upscale residential areas they won’t be able to shoot at you very much.

So you head south out of Oakland faster than a raped ape, and you start getting the idea that the Pagani is a little too much for your friend to handle, because he's bobbing and weaving all over the road. (Later you will learn that he had to break off the wheel to jack the car, and he's trying to steer it with a pair of Vise-Grips.) Finally he misses a curve completely and goes tear-assing right through somebody's huge Christmas display. You ramp the curb and follow him, figuring that he did it on purpose to throw off your pursuers. So now you're crashing through a fake Winter Wonderland, dragging strings of lights and the lower torso of Frosty the Snowman behind you, when a life-size Santa sleigh with all twelve reindeer looms in front of you. Guiding the sleigh is a kangaroo with a blinking red Rudolph nose. You figure it's just plastic, and it's too late to swerve anyway, so you punch it.

Big mistake. The damn thing is mounted on a steel and concrete framework. You ramp five feet into the air as your undercarriage is shredded like cheese in a grater right under your butt. When you come down again all four of your tires are flat, so you sled along in the grass until enough turf piles up to bring you to a stop, leaving a forty-foot smoldering trail of oil and transmission fluid behind you.

You friend doubles back and scoops you up. Shaking the last of your pursuers, you finally roll into the repo yard, where an angry confrontation ensues between your friend, the finance company, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, and - for some reason - Mel Gibson's groundskeeper.

Just as there seems to be no hope for Peace on Earth, in walks Burt Reynolds. Burt takes full responsibility for the entire incident, apologizes to the finance company for falling behind on the payments, and he writes them out a fat check right then and there. He also promises to buy you a new Dodge Viper.

"Merry Christmas, everybody," Burt Reynolds says.

"God bless us, every one," you add, and the guys from the finance company start crying.

You all pile into the Pagani and head to Union City for pancakes. You get pulled over three times on the way, and Burt Reynolds talks the Chips out of giving you a ticket every single time.

It's Christmas Eve and your relatives are due to arrive any minute, so your wife dispatches you on an emergency run for last-minute relative supplies: deodorant, Kaopectate, beer, and cheap Frothy Sputum champagne. But on the way home, while you're waiting at a stop light, two guys run out into traffic and jump into the back of your Buick. One of them sticks a gun in your ear and says, "Drive!"

You quickly calculate that you can't unbuckle your seat belt and kick their butts before they shoot you, so you drive. As you head down the road, they explain the situation to you. They are contract agents for the CIA. Top Secret intercepts have just revealed that former President Jimmy Carter is a commie-terrorist spy. They apologize and promise that they will not expose you to any more danger than is absolutely necessary, but national security demands that they commandeer you and your vehicle to drive them to Atlanta, Georgia. They have to watergate the Jimmy Carter Library and secure vital evidence.

So you drive all night to Atlanta, singing Handel's Messiah, with the CIA guys backing you up on the chorus parts. You know you sound really great, too, because everybody you pass is honking and blinking their lights at you. The beer runs out on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line, but miraculously you find a liquor store in Georgia that's open. This reminds you of the very first Christmas, when Joseph managed to find an open manger in Bethlehem. It's like history repeating itself.

A few hours before dawn you reach the Jimmy Carter Library, which looks like a UFO that crash-landed on a Greek ruin. Security is totally pathetic and you easily breach the north perimeter of the compound. Your target is the Arafat Microfiche Vault on the lower level, so one of the CIA agents kicks in a basement window with his cowboy boots and you're in like Flynn. Everything is going according to plan until you turn a corner and run face-first into a totally naked woman, who starts screaming her enormous lungs out.

As luck would have it, the General Reference staff is having an unauthorized Christmas party on the premises, complete with strippers and a brass band in Santa suits. Fortunately the CIA has professional expertise in these matters, and the agents quickly figure out a way to turn this unexpected setback to your advantage. They explain to the naked woman that the three of you are also festive librarians, who just ran out to get more Frothy Sputum. You infiltrate the party for the next several hours, while the CIA guys stuff microfiche into empty champagne cases.

As you're trying to find your car the next day, who should you run into but Jimmy Carter! Carter tells you that he is on his way out of the country for good, and he just stopped by the library to get some Chapstick he left in the restroom. The former president sadly explains that he is tired of being an outrage to decent folk everywhere, and he has decided to spend the rest of his life in Tibet, bugging the Chinese. Before he goes to Tibet, however, he plans to address a special session of the Knesset, in which he will apologize to the entire human race for being such a jerk.

You give Carter a ride to the airport, and he pays for the gas. Plus, you get a fat reimbursement from the CIA for the use of your vehicle, including a triple per diem for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. You wind up making over $1500 out of the whole deal.

Joyous Tidings of this Holiday Season!

2006-12-24T14:52:00.000-05:00

To all, may this holiday season be filled with happy memories, love, and the true spirit of the season.

Infantile Liberalism Vs. Mary Cheney’s Baby

2006-12-22T17:03:00.000-05:00

This is what I get for being on the New Republic’s e-mail list. An idiot-gram entitled “Mary Cheney’s Baby”:

Dick Cheney's daughter is an open lesbian-and now she is pregnant. Her presence would seem to pose a problem for conservatives. How can they decry gay unions and then fail to decry Mary Cheney's lifestyle? In this week's cover story Andrew Sullivan explores the conundrum represented by Mary Cheney and then dissects the conservative reaction to her pregnancy.

Here is my open letter of retaliation:

Dear TNR:

I did not know that Mary Cheney was going to have a baby. Still less did I know that this baby presented a personal problem for me – a conundrum, no less. In a time of war and momentous ideological struggle, thank you for taking a moment to warn me of this fresh unforeseen threat. Forgive me if my reaction seems ungrateful.

Mary Cheney’s baby is none of your damn business. Who the hell do you people think you are, the Gay Standards & Practices Committee? Why don’t you keep your sheet-sniffing ferret noses out of other peoples’ laundry?

However many things I have failed to decry in this life, and however profound my baby-induced existential crisis is, I must decline your offer to have Andrew Sullivan dissect me for nine bucks and some change. In fact, if Andrew is looking for something to do, why don’t you tell him to get his own head and ass wired back together into some kind of functional apparatus? If he did he might start making occasional sense again.

Feel free to contact me if you have anything to say that isn’t utterly moronic.

It’s not the fact that the New Republic has decided to pester a baby that makes me mad, per se. It’s the fact that so many responsible liberals, for whom TNR once served as a flag ship, still insist on retreating into frivolities like this one. It is for this reason that our Popular Front against terrorism, which held so much promise a few years ago, has so far failed to keep that promise.

Not everybody turned out to be a gutless wonder, of course. Democrats, liberals, and even the left have contributed some real paladins to this fight. Their efficacy is demonstrated by the hysterical hatred that the anti-American mosh pit shrieks at them. Their moral courage is second to nobody’s.

But for too many, the petty little world of Democrats and Republicans - locked in eternal metaphysical struggle over some stupid-ass remark somebody made on Face the Nation last week – remains the ruling paradigm. Everything else is unserious.

We’ll get to Appomattox some day. Right now we’re still in a bar in Washington after First Bull Run, bitching at each other like cranky children.

Robert Altman's Latest Death Trip

2006-12-10T03:48:00.000-05:00

There aren't too many directors I would immediately recognize if I walked into the middle of one of their films, but there are a few. If two characters use the word "n-gger" thirty-seven times in one conversation, it's Quentin Tarantino. If David Mamet's wife is in it, it's David Mamet. If I've already seen it, it's Joel and Ethan Coen. And if it has a HUGE ensemble cast of utterly unsympathetic characters, zero plot, and is totally devoid of anything resembling either comedy or drama, it's Robert Altman. And even though I've walked into the middle of it, it's probably going to last another three hours.

I'd like to salvage something from all the hours of Robert Altman I've seen, but it's not going to be easy. Start with his most popular film, M*A*S*H. M*A*S*H is, in fact, a perfectly vile piece of work. It's cynical, mean-spirited, misogynistic, and doesn't have three jokes in it that are actually funny. The idea of a comedy set in a blood-soaked surgery in Korea is supposed to be a fine artistic juxtaposition, I suppose. But the endless television series that followed proved that a military surgery is no different from a Boston bar, or Seinfeld's living room. And it's disturbing how easily the corrupt and cynical characters of the film were so easily transformed into conventional Hollywood liberals on television. Just as the dismal, barren scrub hills of Korea were perfectly mimicked by the dismal, barren scrub hills of central California. Overall the effect is ultimately depressing, but being depressing is not the same thing as being profound.

Moving right along to Altman's critical masterpiece, Nashville. Here we are invited to think that we are experiencing a parody - of Nashville, of course, but Nashville as an effigy of Amerika. The clues start right at the beginning with the first of the hundred characters we'll meet: Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a nudie-suit nightmare with Elvis hair who is in his studio recording a bicentennial song called "We Must Be Doing Something Right (To Have Lasted 200 Years)". This is a canned-laughter cue for liberals to jerk their knees - patriotic country music? Bleeeech! Afterwards Haven warns his piano player to get a haircut. "You don't belong in Nashville (Amerika)." Once again Altman picks a big, fat, slow-moving bogeyman and aims low.

Maybe I'm reading too much into Nashville. Or too little. At the end of the film, singer Barbara Jean (a Loretta Lynn stand-in, played by Ronee Blakely) is senselessly gunned down during a performance by a guy who looks like Clark Kent. "Thank yuh, thet song was fer Mommy an' Daddy ---" BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! A hippy and a soldier wrestle Clark Kent to the ground. As Loretta Lynn's body is carted off the stage, Barbara Harris takes the microphone and sings a pretty, meaningless tune: "You may say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me." Everybody happily claps and sings along. Roll the credits.

That has to mean something, right? After all, Nashville was nominated for four Oscars in 1975, and is a perfect fossilized specimen of the Seventies: brainless music, brainless clothes, brainless art, high gas prices, Arabs running amok, crazed gunmen running amok, Jimmy Carter running amok, cynical films with no plot - okay, maybe that's what's happening right now. Maybe that makes it prophetic, or timeless. I find it hard to care. I just want my six hours back - at least, it seemed like six hours. Maybe I want that whole decade of my childhood back, without the sordid details. Without this goddamn picture in the middle of it.

But I gave Altman another chance, with Short Cuts. When dealing with a Robert Altman film, it's best to focus on one of the thirty different storylines and spend the rest of the time taking cigarette breaks and replenishing the Milk Duds supply. The part of the film I chose to watch dealt with a small boy who is accidently hit by a car (driven by Lily Tomlin). The boy seems to be unhurt, but he collapses a short time later and eventually dies. This unpleasantness is reinforced by the appearance of the boy's grandfather (Jack Lemmon), a painful failure of a man who threw his life away with a marital infidelity, and by a twisted pastry chef (Lyle Lovett, minus the Large Band) who harasses the dying boy's mother with nasty phone calls. All of this is every bit as much fun as it sounds, and I don't know if I can take any more cinematic experiences like that one.

Ingmar Bergman supposedly said, "I could always live in my art, but never in my life." I guess Altman finally achieved in his life what he did in his art: Death by sheer indifference. I can't think it will be much of a change for him. Resquiat in Pacem, friend.

Squid Music Videos

2006-12-08T09:55:00.000-05:00

There's a whole genre of art coming from the combo of bored service people and vid cameras.
Here's a nice use of one of those big, grey, floaty things:

Those crazy squids pumpin it

Thanks for linking those, Dave.

All we had last year was an MWR tent with one side open to a very cold and wet Louisiana winter. Mud & rain & snow. Snow! There ain't supposed to be snow on the Gulf of Mexico.......oh yeah, booze and pyrotechnics (off-post, of course): New Year's Eve

Changes ahead

2006-12-04T18:20:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about lgc and what it means to me and what I think it is. After some time away from a computer, because I don't own one and I access the web now using public computers at the library, I have decided to make some big changes.

It will be some time before I am able to get a computer, so, what I envision for lgc is a little while off. But briefly, I intend to greatly diminish the size of the contributors list. Many on the list haven't contributed and a couple don't think to highly of me, so, I'm going to trim down the list. Then I intend to grow the list again. Some of you know that I have made a lot of friends in the Middle East/Muslim world. These friends have points of view and insight that I believe is important for all of us to view. I want to invite a few of these friends to contribute as members.

I don't like the way the page looks so I'll probably make changes there and also grow the link list into something that isnt so LGFcentric. I love lgf and will continue to see lgc as a kind of tribute sight to LGF. But I dont think it has to be so busy in tribute.

Okay well theres some of my thoughts. Stay well everyone.

Get Us Out of Iraq

2006-11-05T20:56:00.000-05:00

This statement seems to be the driving issue in this 2006 election cycle. When and how do we get out of Iraq.

The Repubilcans say we'll leave when the job is done. That we must stay the course. Some even readly acknowledge that we need to change our stategy, because what we are doing now isn't working, but that doesn't mean leaving.

The Democrats also say we need a change in strategy, but they say we need to leave now, or give a time table (2 years at the most) for our leaving. That's it. That's the plan. Leave.

President Bush says leaving before the job is done would embolden the enemy, and we'd be leaving a bigger mess. Why doesn't anyone seem to believe him?

Nancy Pelosi and her ilk say, "The jihadists (are) in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there." Of course, after her 60 Minutes interview she dropped off the radar and has not been seen nor heard from in the national press.

More moderate Democrats seem to be echoing the same sentiment. I hear Democrat after Democrat insist we are off base being in Iraq, we've taken our eye off the ball, and that we are in more danger now than before; they just love quoting that briefing as proof. One can easily see and understand their meaning -- if we leave Iraq, the threat to us goes away. Right. And I have some swamp property in Louisiana for sale for anyone dumb enough to believe them.

It seems no one wants to listen to what the jihadis are saying themselves.

This past weekend, Fox News bravely aired "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," which laid out the intention and objectives of radical Islam towards the west and American in specific. It is clear to anyone with any sense at all, that appeasement and "backing away" is not a viable option for dealing with them. Yet that is what the Democrats want to do.

WND.com published an article Mideast terror leaders to U.S.: Vote Democrat which includes the following comments by several jihadi and terrorist leaders:

Regarding our election and how the terrorist want us to vote:
"Of course Americans should vote Democrat."

"This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud."

Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America)."

"Therefore, a victory in Iraq would be a greater defeat for America than in Vietnam."

Jaara said vacating Iraq would also "reinforce Palestinian resistance organizations, especially from the moral point of view. But we also learn from these (insurgency) movements militarily. We look and learn from them."

Jihad Jaara, Senior member of Al Aqsa martyrs Brigade, leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity

Regarding the Democrats talk of withdrawal from Iraq:

"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk.Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."

Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."

He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."

"Unfortunately I think those who are speaking about a withdrawal will not do so when they are in power and these promises will remain electoral slogans. It is not enough to withdraw from Iraq. They must withdraw from Afghanistan and from every Arab and Muslim land they occupy or have bases."

He called both Democrats and Republicans "agents of the Zionist lobby in the U.S.."

Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin
Regarding the policy of withdrawal from Iraq:

"[it] proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation."

"We warned the Americans that this will be their end in Iraq. They did not succeed in stealing Iraq's oil, at least not at a level that covers their huge expenses. They did not bring stability. Their agents in the [Iraqi] regime seem to have no chance to survive if the Americans withdraw."

Abdullah argued a withdrawal from Iraq would "convince those among the Palestinians who still have doubts in the efficiency of the resistance."

"The victory of the resistance in Iraq would prove once more that when the will and the faith are applied victory is not only a slogan. We saw that in Lebanon (during Israel's confrontation against Hezbollah there in July and August); we saw it in Gaza (after Israel withdrew from the territory last summer) and we will see it everywhere there is occupation."

Abu Abdullah commented once Democrats are in power "the question is whether such a courageous leadership can [withdraw]. I am afraid that even after the American people will elect those who promise to leave Iraq, the U.S. will not do so. I tell the American people vote for withdrawal. Abandon Israel if you want to save America. Now will this Happen? I do not believe it."

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip and one of the most important operational members of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades
On the comparison of Iraq to Vietnam:

Abu Ayman, is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam.

"[The mujahedeen fighters] brought the Americans to speak for the first time seriously and sincerely that Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam and that they should fix a schedule for their withdrawal from Iraq."

Abu Ayman, Islamic leader in Jenin

I'm not saying all Democrats are traitors, nor am I saying they are in league with the terrorists, but after hearing the statements of these terrorists, Democratic party leaders wanted to dismiss it as unimportant and would not budge off their stated position.

This Tuesday is election day.

It is true that the Republicans have squandered the opportunties given to them and, in some cases, spit in the faces of those who voted them into office. The guilty have been punished, while the rest have been tainted by the scandal, but, the platform of the Democrats is not going to keep us safe. It is not going to improve the situation in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. Sadly, the only real choice appears to be to hold our noses and pull the lever for the Republicans.

If by some miracle the Republicans maintain control of the House, or Senate, or both, then we need to be in their faces and on their cases to get it right this time.

For anyone reading this that is disgusted and disinterested in voting, please, vote like your life depends on it, because it does.

Bring a clothes pin for you nose or a perfumed hankie, but get in that booth and vote for your best chance for our Nation's security... vote for the Repulican. Then keep on their lazy butts to make sure they do it right this time.

Who Are The Most Beautiful Women In The Middle East?

2006-10-25T09:23:00.000-04:00

The Middle East is filled with ugliness. Wars rage, Dictators dictate, Terrorists terrorize. Human rights are few and far between. So worrisome and wearisome are the issues eminating from the region, we have to take a break every now and then and look for beauty in that part of the world.

And Great Beauty there is. The Women in the Middle East are Beautiful.

To decide for yourself and check out the many lovely ladies of the Middle East go here...

The Al-Durah Trials, Part 1

2006-10-24T21:32:00.000-04:00

The image of Muhammad al Durah, "gunned down in a hail of Israeli bullets at the very beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada", was one of the most potent icons of the recent Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Belmont Club explains:

The Augean Stables tells the story of how French bloggers are now on trial for questioning France2's account of the murder of Muhammad al Durah, who the network portrayed as having been murdered by IDF soldiers. At the time the charges were filed there was widespread French public approval of the action. But new information which emerged since has shifted the ground. ... The Augean Stables notes that whatever the charge sheet says, the media is a defendant too. "In the final analysis, these are not arcane French legal matters at stake, but tests of the French ability to meet 21st century challenges." In fact, a constitutional challenge. Without anyone noticing, in the years between World War 2 and the present the Press has acquired the power to be the arbiter of a great many events: the success or failure of public enterprises, the guilt or innocence of the accused and even the power to declare defeat or victory in war.

A media watchdog group founded by Philippe Karsenty alleged that the images were staged, with the knowledge or participation of France's France2 network. More questions followed:

By 2002, two investigative documentaries, one German and one French, had raised questions about the veracity of the tightly-shot footage and the claims accompanying it. Raw footage from that day was released and separate instances of the staging of injuries were clearly seen. The documentaries alleged that there was no sign of blood on the ground where the father and son were supposed to have bled for 20 minutes and questioned why there was no footage of an ambulance evacuation or records of an arrival at the hospital or autopsy for the boy.

France 2 refused to air the German documentary, but the French one sparked a demonstration in Paris outside the company’s offices. At that point, Karsenty wrote an article calling for France 2’s Enderlin and France 2 chief Arlette Chabot to resign. In response, Enderlin and France 2 itself sued Karsenty and two others.

Many of those who followed the first trial expressed optimism that the case would be judged in Karsenty's favor. The Belmont Club:

Nidra Poller completes her coverage of the Mohammed al-Dura libel trial against France2 at Pajamas Media. France2 comes off very, very badly in the evidence. And the prosecutor has already recommended that France2's suit against the first defendant, Karsenty, be dropped. Personally I don't think the trial is so much about the relative justice of Israeli and Palestinian causes so much as the absolute depths to which the modern broadcast media may have plunged.

Here's an excerpt from Nidra Poller's coverage of the September trial:

Philippe Karsenty takes the stand. The judge’s questions are pertinent, Philippe’s answers are clear and compelling. Does he personally think the scene was staged or simply questionable? Philippe replies that he was initially convinced by the Schapira film, but realized after further investigation that the incident had to be staged. He gives an example: when it became clear from ballistics tests that the al-Duras could not have been hit by direct fire from the Israeli position, it was claimed they were hit by ricochets. But the father says he was hit 9 times, and the boy 3 times. Twelve ricochets? It’s impossible.

Then comes the ten-gun question: why don’t Israeli officials protest? Karsenty’s answer is plausible: they think it would do no good to bring the image back to the forefront. Even if the truth could be established, it would turn against them.

Q: Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte, who viewed the 27-minute outtakes, said (Radio Communauté Juive) all the scenes were staged except the al-Dura scene. Jeambar cited a video of the father displaying his scars, a new element of proof shown by France 2 at a press conference.

A: I did not see the film because I was not allowed to attend the press conference. Leconte told me he was interested in the affair, and intended to investigate it. But Arte [French-German-Spanish cultural TV channel] warned him they would not work with his production company, Doc en Stock, anymore if he didn’t drop the subject. Jeambar was under pressure from inside l’Express, notably Jacques Attali. Alexandre Adler told me that Charles (who is his brother-in-law) was tricked by his fixer. Many people have told me privately that they know the scene was staged, but they won’t say it in public.

The judge’s features tighten as if he is trying to hide his surprise…or distress. ...

But despite what observers saw as a strong performance by the defense and a weak one (or none at all) by France2, the court ruled in favor of French TV:

Four years later, the trials have begun and the first verdict was received Wednesday. At his trial, Karsenty presented four expert witnesses backing up his claim that not only were Al-Dura and his father not killed by the IDF, the entire scene was most apparently staged with the knowledge of the cameraman.

The procureur de la republique, a court-appointed officer in the French legal system charged with assessing the case in the interests of civil society, recommended that the case be ruled in Karsenty’s favor. He said that Karsenty had offered enough evidence to make such assertions a legitimate part of public discourse. The judge ruled that Karsenty had not checked other sources thoroughly and had used unwarranted strong language.

Nobody from France 2 even showed up for the trial. The TV station’s lawyer called no witnesses to the stand and declined to cross-examine any of Karsenty's witnesses or comment on the evidence displayed. The plaintiff’s summation asserted that the honor and reputation of France 2 is beyond reproach and submitted a letter of praise from President Jacques Chirac.

The court ordered Karsenty to pay Enderlin 3,000 Euro and awarded a symbolic 5 Euro to France 2 Television. He plans to appeal the decision and the next trial is due to begin on October 26th.

The Augean Stables reflects:

To say that the decision was disappointing is obviously putting it mildly. But it was not unexpected. Numerous people wrote me to say, watch out. As one American blogger who lives in France wrote:

I followed closely your reports on the first part of the trial. I’m still pessimistic. The reason I’m pessimistic is because they’re only asking for the symbolic euro. France2 wants the case just so they can say the courts ruled in their favor, not in order for sanction actually to be applied. I’m afraid the French courts are so politicized that they will give them what they want.

Others noted that the absence of any effort on the part of France2 — no witnesses, no questions for hostile witnesses, no presence of either Enderlin or Chabot — could indicate not a lack of preparation (alone), but a secure knowledge that they need do nothing since they knew they’d win. Several people who claimed to know, informed me and Karsenty independently, that the fix was on before the trial. When I suggested that to an Israeli lawyer I know after the first trial but before the decision, she responded indignantly, “No. The French judiciary is really independent.” I wanted to believe that.

The Augean Stables has a comprehensive introduction to the Al Durah affair at this link.

All of TAS's Al-Durah-related posts may be found at this category link.

Neo-Neocon will be covering the second part of the Al Durah / France2 defamation trial.

If the Guard Doesn't Change, Will They Change the Guard?

2006-10-24T00:42:00.000-04:00

I have a much more in depth post on this at my own blog, (linked to here), but in the event that the Democrats don't take over the House of Representatives, will they change their leadership? In 2002. they had a disappointing showing, and Dick Gephardt "resigned" as minority leader. So, do the Dems similarly throw Pelosi under the bus if they don't take over the House? If Pelosi is gone, do they choose a more moderate minority leader, or will they go to another leftist like Murtha?

That makes me think, if the Republicans do hold on, is Hastert still the Speaker? I would surmise that Hastert's days in leadership are soon to be over, but Pelosi keeps her leadership role no matter how the election turns out.

The In T View: Bill Putnam, Combat Photographer On Iraq, War, Photography, And Blogging

2006-10-19T09:31:00.000-04:00

Bill Putnam from Portland, Oregon, today's guest in the In T View, served for eight years as a photojournalist with the American military in both Kosovo and Iraq. After his tour of duty with the Army's 122nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment in Iraq ended, he returned to the country as an embedded Photojournalist working for the Zuma
Press and as a freelancer for Time Magazine.

Bill, who has written for newspapers, journals, and magazines, besides doing radio reports for North Country Public Radio, is also the proud proprietor of the very fine An independent look at Iraq blog, where you can peruse his wide range of beautiful photographs and his thoughts about Iraq. Bill will soon be moving to a new photographic assignment in Washington D.C., where he'll be covering the White House and Capitol Hill.

THE JOURNEY THERE

Mister Ghost: Should the United States have gone to War against Iraq?

Bill Putnam: That's a hard question to crack. I never thought about the grand political schemes or conspiricies that drove the war. I just know from the trench level, where I spent 99 percent of my time, that the Iraq was wasn't what we were told. So the question of whether we should've gone to war or not really, to me, is unanswerable. Everyone has their own opinion on the subject. The tough answer whether we like it or not is that we're there, we're stuck and we have to do what we can.

Mister Ghost: In one of your blog entries, you said your tour of duty in Iraq was over in about five months and you were never returning to Iraq. You were pretty emphatic about it. And yet, there you were, less than a year later, back in Iraq as a civilian photojournalist. What motivated you to return to the country?

Bill Putnam: I went back to cover the biggest war of my generation. It took a chance meeting with a veteran war correspondent to motivate me. Then I started thinking about photographing war. My first bit of conflict photography came during my deployment to Kosovo in 1999. I just felt like I was photographing something real, something tangible. Having the opportunity to photograph the war wasn't an easy one to decide upon. So the decision to come back was a big one that only happened after a bit of luck and a lot of thinking.

Mister Ghost: How difficult was it to actually return to Iraq? What obstacles did you face?

Bill Putnam: Going back wasn't too difficult. The only obstacle I faced was getting the mental stamina to go back. I'd been there for a year before and was thoroughly exhausted by it.

Mister Ghost: Had you had any prior combat photography experience in a War Zone before you got to Iraq?

Bill Putnam: The only experience I had in a war zone was my two deployments to Kosovo in 1999 and 2001. But I can't really count that second trip as a war zone. Kosovo was calm by then.The first trip though, I think, prepared me mentally for the stresses of it very early in my career.

IMPRESSIONS OF IRAQ

Mister Ghost: Did the Iraq of reality match up to the Iraq of your fantasies or dreams?

Bill Putnam: Fantasies or dreams... I never had dreams or fantasies of Iraq.

Mister Ghost: Iraq, the Hot. You were there in the Heart of the Dragon's Breath. Describe the Heat to us?

Bill Putnam: Ok, I can sink my teeth into this answer. The heat is unimaginable to anyone from the West. Imagine sitting in a sauna set at 140F. You're wearing anywhere from 25-50 pounds of gear. Now, hold up a hair dryer going full blast to your face. You're obviously sweating, a lot. The sweat chafes your skin almost raw. Your face, hands and feet swell up from the heat too. You drink water and gatorade all the time but the sweat never ends. Now put a 5-pound kevlar helmet on. Soon your head gets hot. Yes, it really is hot and I'm not sure I can even adequetly describe it. Hopefully this answer does it some justice.

Mister Ghost: You were a Corporal in the Army's 122nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment. Can you tell us what your role in Iraq was and how it was different from your experience in Kosovo?

Bill Putnam: Comparing Kosovo and my first time in Iraq is hard. Both missions were different. Most of the Kosovars loved NATO's presence. Most Iraqis don't want Americans or foriegners there. Job wise it wasn't that different. I covered the military and dealt with the civilian media a lot.

Mister Ghost: Baghdad is?

Bill Putnam: A Hobbesian landscape of the strong eating the weak.

Mister Ghost: Mosul was?

Bill Putnam: A place where the fault lines of Iraq lie completely naked. Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Christians... all groups live there and all are vying for control. I only regret not being able to stay longer and explore them.

Mister Ghost: You mentioned garbage, garbage, everywhere in the neighborhoods of Baghdad. Piling up next to tidy houses, blowing in the hot breeze, children jumping over it, trash being burnt by the Iraqis... and the Raw Sewage wafting out in the open.. So, what type of impression did this leave on you?

Bill Putnam: The immense amounts of garbage... was a sign of the war and the collapse of Iraqi society. Its also a sign that humans can adapt to almost any situation. At first I wondered why anyone could live hat way. Its obviously unhealthy so why not clean up your block? But the ironic thing was every home's courtyard was clean. Some even had a small patch of grass. Then after a time I understood the trash and sewage outside was a sign of Iraqi society. It had devloved into something like anarchy. In other words it had become "I don't care about you, just about me and mine." That understanding helped me deal with it. That trash was also a sign the Coalition was swimming against the current.

Mister Ghost: Bill, Iraq receives such negative publicity: bombings, killings, unrest, kidnappings, civil strife...It's sort of portrayed as Hell on Earth by the Media. Having experienced Iraq from both a soldier's and photojournalist's perspective, what did you like about the country?

Bill Putnam: My experiences with Iraqi civilians was fairly limited at first. Either they worked for the Coalition or I met them during a raid on their homes. It wasn't until I came back as a civilian and lived downtown that I really met them. So I can say I miss the people I met over there.

Mister Ghost: And conversely, what did you dislike about Iraq?

Bill Putnam: The fact I could be kidnapped and murdered simply because I'm a westerner.

Mister Ghost: What didn't you have in Iraq, that you had in the States?

Bill Putnam: I didn't have a lot of alcohol in Iraq.

Mister Ghost: In the end, do you feel that Iraq was worth your time and effort?

Bill Putnam: I do feel Iraq was worth the time and effort. It was the biggest war my country has fought since Vietnam. Covering it, even if my bit of it was small, means I'm part of the historical record.

Mister Ghost: You said in an interview with David Sommerstein on NCPR that, "I just wanted to tell the story of Iraq." Do you think you succeeded?

Bill Putnam: I think I told one small part of the story. Unfortunately I couldn't move around downtown and talk with individual Iraqis and photograph them going about their lives. I believe I would've done a better job telling the story of Iraq as it goes through this war if movement around the country didn't make me a target.

IRAQ AND ITS PEOPLE

Mister Ghost: Are the Iraqis a likeable people?

Bill Putnam: Yes, I like the Iraqi people.

Mister Ghost: Tell me about someone you met in Iraq who impressed you and why?

Bill Putnam: The Iraqis who really impressed me were the journalists or those who worked with Western journos. They risked a lot to tell the story of Iraq.

Mister Ghost: The Iraqis are known to be hospitable. Can you give us an example of this?

Bill Putnam: Sure. One day in January I was out with an infantry platoon from 1-10th Mountain north of Abu Ghraib. We arrived at a house in the ville and this old man, he said he was the ville sheik, invited us in for tea. We sat in his house for a couple of hours talking with him about his home, his family and the recent elections. A couple of months before that in Mosul, I was out on an operation with squad from 2nd of the 1st Infantry. We were out on a rooftop and the family came up and offered us tea and cookies. Little things, sure, but worthwhile to remember and experience.

Mister Ghost: You were worried about the Interperetors or "Terps" and other Iraqis that worked with the Coalition forces. The insurgents were threatening them and killing them off. You had a good, brave Iraqi friend Leon, who served as an interpretor for your unit and you tried to help him and his family emigrate away to a safer place. Can you give us an update on Leon?

Bill Putnam: I've lost track of Leon and its impossible for me to figure out where is right now.

Mister Ghost: Bill, you're a big guy at 6-5, 250 pounds, do you think your size intimidated the Iraqis you encountered, since they lived and still live, in a fear and respect-based society?

Bill Putnam: Mmmm, you know that's a good question. My hope is no, my size didn't intimidate anyone. I liked to talk with the Iraqis and made my body language open to them. I smiled and laughed with them as well. I also tried speaking very, very rudimentary Arabic. If they said something to me I would say "na'am, na'am" or 'yes, yes.' Or I would say 'mer-haba' or which usually means 'welcome' or 'hello' This, I think, helped me talk with them.

Mister Ghost: During your time in Iraq, you had a chance to meet with American and Iraqi soldiers, but because of the security situation, you felt you would be a big target if you tried to interact with Iraqi civilians. Do you regret that you weren't able to have a friendly relationship with the regular Iraqis?

Bill Putnam: Yes, very much so. I have a whole list of things I want to do with Iraqis that I couldn't because of the security situation. Maybe one day I'll be able to do that stuff. The locals have a saying for that hope too: "insha' allah."

IRAQI WOMEN AND CHILDREN

Mister Ghost: You said in an early post in your blog, Grown women in this society are ghosts, seen and not heard; they seem so relegated, sadly, to nothing in this society. Did you find this was the case throughout Iraq, or were the Iraqi women in the larger cities like Baghdad a more visible open presence?

Bill Putnam: Iraqi women were always visible but speaking to them wasn't really an option. The only time I did talk to them was the random encounter I had with women journalists.

Mister Ghost: Didn't you mention that the Coalition forces were going out of their way to be kind to the Iraqi women, trying to win them over, because they possessed a great deal of influence in the domestic sphere?

Bill Putnam: The relationship I saw between men and women was a skewed one. Much of the time I was around regular Iraqis the men were sheltering the women to protect them.

Mister Ghost: "La chokalota - la chokolata," the Iraqi kids screamed out, as the American soldiers handed them candy. "Mistah! Mistah! Give me chockalot! Give me Pepsi!" they said to you. Did you get the sense the Iraqi children were starved for attention and niceties?

Bill Putnam: It depended on where I was but I had a sense kids were starved for attention and niceties, espcially in places around Baghdad like al-Dora, a generally poor mixed neighborhood.

Mister Ghost: In Baghdad's al-Rashid neighborhood, you saw a father with his child's blood on his hands. It was the night of the church bombings, and the Iraqi man apparently panicked and ran his car through the military checkpoint. The soldiers opened fire and one of the bullets grazed the child's temple, causing a blood clot and eventual death. Bill, what can you say about something like that? Is it a memory that haunts you, or after witnessing so much violence, you become desensitized to another death?

Bill Putnam: Its funny you ask that question. I was just looking at those photos last night. Sure, that night does haunt me to a degree. What I remember most are the sounds. Of men trying to save this boy's life. Of a father wailing in anguish. Of radios. Of Humvees idling. I don't think I'm desensitized to death. I've seen a lot of it and its all tragic. What bothers me, what haunts me really, is the seeing this boy fighting a losing and ultimately unnessacary fight.

Mister Ghost: Are you optimistic about the future of Iraq's children?

Bill Putnam: No, I'm afraid not. Life for them in the forseeable future is going to be hell.

A Photo of Bill in Staff Sgt. Aaron Lefeat's sunglasses April 25, 2006, during Operation Swift Sword, Day 3. by Bill Putnam

EMBEDDED

Mister Ghost: You spent time embedded with the 1st Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, I believe in Mosul. How many different units were you embedded with in Iraq and did you have a favorite?

Bill Putnam: The 1-10 Mountain was around northwest Baghdad. My first embed was in Mosul with the 172nd Stryker Brigade. I was embedded with... *counting on my fingers* five different units of brigade (about 3,000 soldiers) or battalions (about 600 soldiers). My favorite, if I had to pick one, was the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. Most of the grunts were veterans of the March 2003 invasion. A few of the first deployment into Afghanistan in late-2001. One battalion commander I met jumped into northern Iraq during the 2003 invasion with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. I spent about four months with one company, Abu Company, 1-187th Infantry, who were stationed in and around Bayji, Iraq.

This unit really understood counter-insurgency warfare and approached it with a good vision. Instead of just patrolling, which is something most units are guilty of, they actually got out and interacted with the locals. It resulted into a situation that could've been a very hard insurgency in the middle of the Sunni Triangle into something more manageable. Of course, there was some bang bang and that made life interesting. But I believe it could've been a lot worse and the unit did everything they could to difuse the situation.

Mister Ghost: How much freedom were you given as an embedded photojournalist? What restrictions were placed on you?

Bill Putnam: I was given pretty much open access to the units I embedded with. Obviously I could hear but not talk about certain things because they would violate operational security. Other times photographed detainees and couldn't transmit photos with their
uncovered faces; that would violate the Geneva Conventions.

Mister Ghost: As a former soldier yourself, how tough is the job the soldiers do?

Bill Putnam: The job these guys and gals face over ther is incredibly difficult. It was very, very difficult in 2004. By late 2005 and early 2006 the situation had become almost untenable. Sectarian violence had reared its ugly, distorted head. The individual grunt down in the trenches sees all this going on and is trying his best to stop it. Whether this Herculean effort can stop all the violence won't be decided down at their level. That's to be decided by the Iraqi people.

Mister Ghost: From your own perspectives as first a soldier, and then a member of the Media, do you feel your fellow members of the American Media are doing a good job of accurately portraying what's happening with the American Military in Iraq?

Bill Putnam: Yes, I think they are. Its a tough tough situation for both sides and covering that isn't easy. I still marvel that it still gets done.

Mister Ghost: Can you tell us what your scariest experience in Iraq was? What gave you serious heart palpitations?

Bill Putnam: My first raid as a civilian journo was by far the scariest. During my time as a soldier-photog, I carried a weapon. This time I was naked. Nothing. Approaching that house in the dark with just my cameras was the scariest thing I'd ever done.

Mister Ghost: You were staying near the Al-Hamra Hotel in Baghdad when it was bombed. When you are close by to a large explosion like that, what do you feel at the time? What thoughts are racing through your head?

Bill Putnam: The first reacion I had was "what the fuck was that?" Then I woke up and walked out into the living room of the house. The local staffers were there and kept telling me to go into my room. I was about to turn when the second -- and much bigger -- bomb went off. My only thought when the shock wave hit and the room brightend up considerably was "hoooollly fuuuck!"

At that point, with gunfire going off in the near distance, I ran into my room threw on some clothes, grabbed my cameras and ran out the door. I was one of the first two photogs on the site. As you can imagine, it was incredibly chaotic. I just wanted to capture what was going on around me. Doing all that I had one thought running through my mind like a tape reel: "this is unbelievable..."

I still think about this first minutes after the bombing and wonder who we got out of it alive.

BLOGGING

Mister Ghost: Could you tell us about the genesis of your blog, An independent look at Iraq? How did it come about, and why you became interested in blogging?

Bill Putnam: I first started blogging in 2004 during my time in Baghdad as a soldier. I kept it very low-key and didn't tell anyone in my unit about it. It was interesting to me because it was the advent of a new type of journalism, something immediate and what I thought was pure.

How I found them originally is something I'm not sure about.

Mister Ghost: When you were in Iraq, did you have a chance to read any of the Iraqi blogs? If so, did you think their perceptions of life there, concurred with your views of the situation?

Bill Putnam: I had a chance to read some blogs occassionally. But nothing on a regular basis.

Mister Ghost: Back in 2004, the US Military cracked down on Military Bloggers like Colby Buzzell of My War, because they were allegedly revealing sensitive information. Did this have any effect on your blogging? Was it an overreaction by the DOD and do you think they were trying to filter the news coming out of Iraq?

Bill Putnam: Yes, I do think this was DOD over-reacting. But I don't think this was direct attempt to filter the news coming out of the war. That was just an unintended benefit.

I remember reading about Colby's blog, reading it myself and liking it immensely. Here was a guy who trully reflected life in a war for what it was: brutal and boring.

The problem with shutting blogs down is the justification is its entirely subjective. Cobly's blog went against the grain... ie "this war sucks ass" then someone who believes in the war and is a position of power can shut you down. This happened to Colby.

What I don't think has been discussed is this reaction by DOD might be an echo of Viet Nam. In Colby's case he was actively saying what war was like. His command probably saw this is a threat to good order and discpline in the unit.

After all, if he felt this way how many others did?

What commander would want a bunch of guys breaking down the order of a unit in the middle of a fight, even if the fight was probably unjustified? This happened in Viet Nam. This may sound simplistic but commanders saw this happening in Viet Nam. The Army didn't want that happen. So they cracked down on it the first time something similar came up. They justified it by saying ti was about operational secrity. If they were really concerned about "op sec" they'd censure our emails and listen to our phone calls.

Mister Ghost: Do you have any favorite blogs you like to read and can recommend?

Bill Putnam: The one I actively followed was Chris Allbritton's blog www.back-to-iraq.com. Chris has moved on to Lebanon so there's not so much Iraq coverage anymore. Other times I'd run into blogs and read them but nothing like dedicated reading because I didn't have the time. Now I have the time and NBC News' blog is a good one. I've also read Bill Roggio's blog too. Iraq The Model is a good one as well. Recently I started tuning into The Angry Arab News Service.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Mister Ghost: How did you hook up as a free-lancer with Time Magazine?

Bill Putnam: This is pretty funny story. About five or six days before the Jan. 30, 2005, elections I was on Camp Liberty where the rest of my unit was stationed. Coming back from a detail I saw Michael Ware and Franco Pagetti standing by a Humvee. They'd just been picked up after a long embed with the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade. I walked up to Michael and introduced myself.

"I liked your stuff with the insurgents," I told him. He looked geniunely surprised to hear that from an American soldier. That was when I had the brilliant idea of wanting to come back. I'd kicked the idea around a bit but never thought about just asking someone for help. So I did.

Michael said he could help me out so I could come back and photograph for the magazine. A few weeks later a letter arrived from Michael. So I went back with that one and my agency letter.

Mister Ghost: What do you think you are saying through your photography? What exactly are you trying to tell us?

Bill Putnam: My approach to photography is to make people think about war and conflict. I want people to think about what we're doing to ourselves.

Mister Ghost: Good Photography. A Science? An Art? Hard Work? Intuition? Experience?Or all of the above?

Bill Putnam: Definitely all of the above and I'm still learning it. I'll never stop learning it because no image is perfect. Nor is any photographer.

Mister Ghost: Is there an act of creation involved in taking a photograph?

Bill Putnam: Yeah, I think there is an act. You're capturing one/one-thousandths of a second of time. It takes a bit of preperation and luck to capture that time.

Mister Ghost: You carried about 45 pounds of equipment and three cameras while on assignment in Iraq. Did you really need all those cameras? Is combat photography really that rough on the equipment?

Bill Putnam: I definitely needed all that equipment and it really was rough on my gear. I've spent around $1,500 cleaning and readjusting it all.

Each of my cameras did a different job. One was my Leica M6; I shot film with it. Shooting it caused me to think a different way and try and capture moments the differently. My main body was my Nikon D1x with a 17-35mm lens. I used that in close in moments. The other body was my Nikon D2h with an 80-200. I hardly ever used it.

Mister Ghost: The last thing the insurgent saw before he died was you taking a picture of him. Were there some photographs that you didn't make public, and could you tell us why?

Bill Putnam: I didn't release that photo for personal reasons. Early in my career I read about photogs who'd done that very act and wondered how they could live with themselves. I never intended to take that man's last moments alive.

There were also other photographs I took that couldn't be released because they'd violate my embedding ground rules.

Mister Ghost: Combat photography is a dangerous occupation. Would you put your life on the line to get the perfect shot, say a "Pulitzer Prize" winning photograph?

Bill Putnam: I don't know if I would risk my life for a shot like that. Most Pulitizer winning shots aren't readily apparent. Its only during the post-processing work that you realize that.

FUTURE ENDEAVORS

Mister Ghost: So, what does the future hold for Bill Putnam?

Bill Putnam: I'm moving to Washington, D.C. this winter to finish up my degree in History. I'll continue my photography there by covering Capitol Hill and the White House for my agency, ZUMA Press.

Mister Ghost: Would you like to go back to Iraq?

Bill Putnam: I never say never but the chances of me going back to Iraq are slim.

Mister Ghost: Will you be covering any more wars?

Bill Putnam: My next trip will be to Afghanistan next summer in between semesters.

Mister Ghost: Final question Bill, and thanks very much for a gracious In T View: Do you have any advice for a crazy person like myself, who would like to go to Iraq unembedded and blog from all around the country?

Bill Putnam: Yeah, don't do it unless you have a lot of money for security and just general living. Thanks for having me.

Debka: Terrorists Planned Synagogue Massacre in Prague

2006-10-06T09:21:00.000-04:00

Here's the report:

Arab terrorists planned mass murder of Jews in a Prague synagogue after taking them hostage, according to Czech intelligence

October 6, 2006, 10:28 AM (GMT+02:00)

This plot, according to the Prague Daily Monitor, triggered the special security measures announced in the Czech capital for the first time two weeks ago. According to the sketchy information released, unidentified “Arab extremists” planned to penetrate a synagogue during a Jewish holiday, pose unspecified conditions that would not be fulfilled and then blow up the synagogue with explosives they would have had ready for use. They intended killing scores of Jewish worshippers inside. On Sept 23, the Czech government deployed armed guards around dozens of buildings and on the streets of the capital after security services announced an unspecified attack was imminent. They have not divulged any further information. The country’s once flourishing Jewish community was decimated by the Nazis during World War II.

What is it going to take for Western liberals to get a clue?

Arutz Sheva:

According to a report appearing in the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes on Friday, Islamic terrorists in Prague planned to abduct tens of Jews and then execute them.

According to the newspaper, the leading paper in Czech Republic, the terrorists planned to kidnap the victims, hold them hostage in a synagogue and make outrageous demands that would not be met. The hostages would then be killed.

Quoting unnamed intelligence community sources, the report indicated the terror plot was foiled.

Czech Chief Rabbi Ephraim Sidon stated the terrorists planned to strike Central Prague’s Jerusalem Synagogue, not the Jewish Quarter, a popular spot for tourists.

A Special Place In Hell

2006-10-04T10:09:00.000-04:00

Should be reserved for the likes of Fred Phelps and his sheeple of the Westboro Baptist Church plan, who plan to protest the funerals of the Amish school shooting to... teach the Governor a lesson. Yes, these decieved and disturbed people, who commit sin after sin after sin in the name of "Christ" are planning to stage a protest that has nothing to do with the event. Like a flock of vultures, they plan to pick at the carcus in an effort to gain another 15 minutes of fame. Disgusting.

It is not dispicable enough that they protest at the funerals of fallen soldiers, but now they want to inflict more pain on the families of this tragedy and the community, by bringing their "mission" to this somber event. Attempts to gain access to the flyer posted on their website have failed; the PDF file won't open. Perhaps a little devine intervention is in play... I sincerly hope so.

Fred Phelps and his congregants don't have a clue, but as the shepard of this church, he'll still be held to account on judgement day for leading others to the path of destruction.

Hey Fred... God hates sin, but loves sinners. And your idolitry and rebellion (which is akin to witchcraft) is an abomination before GOD. You'll be burning in HELL right along with those you hate. You are no minister of the gospel.

I just hope the Patriot Riders show up in force to block the WBC and sheild the families from this vile and putrid demonstration that comes straight from the pit of hell.

I pray peace and comfort for the Amish community, the families of all involved, and of course for the community. I pray that the LORD of all will pour out his mercy and grace, and comfort the afflicted.

Fred Phelps and the WBC need a serious wake up call.

Remembering Merideth Howard, The Oldest American Servicewoman Killed In Combat

2006-10-02T08:40:00.000-04:00

Photo of Merideth Howard courtesy of Seattle Times

Merideth Howard, died a heroine.

She was the oldest servicewoman killed in the annals of American Combat.

52 years old.

Old enough to be your grandmother.

A gray-haired woman in a helmet...

She was all of 5-4.

She had to stand on a box to see over the turret to man the .50 caliber machine gun on the Humvee she rode shotgun on in Afghanistan.

Sgt. 1st Class Merideth Howard died in Kabul, Afghanistan on September 8 of this year, when a Suicide Jihadist drove a Toyota Corolla into her Humvee, and detonated his bomb, killing her friend Staff Sgt. Robert Paul, who was driving and Meredith, manning the machine gun in the back.

And 14 Afghanis.

It was tremendous explosion.

Left a crater, six foot wide in the road of the infamous Jalalabad Road, Kabul's suicide-bomb alley.

It took a big bomb to diminish the likes of a dynamic woman such as Sgt. 1st Class Merideth Howard.

And dynamic, Howard was, the native of Corpus Christi, Texas strove far in life and accomplished much. While at Texas A& M University, she was a member of the first women's tennis team there, and became the second woman to graduate from the University's Brayton Fire School.

She went on to become the first woman to join the Bryan, Texas Fire Department, working at Fire Station 1 as an engine driver for about 3 1/2 years. While there, she gained the respect of her collegues, no easy task, being the lone woman in an all male department, but she was more than up to the challenge. Innovative, she developed a way to recharge the department's respiration tanks on site. Compassionate, Howard helped start a car wash to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association and "Jerry's kids." A go-getter, Merideth moved on and became a fire-risk-management specialist with insurance companies, eventually helping set up a consulting company in California.

She decided to join the military in 1988 at the age of 34, as a medical equipment repairer for the Army Reserve. David White, Howard's instructor at the Brayton Fire School tells us why, "She joined the Army because she thought it was something she should do..." In 1996, because her medical unit was disbanded, she was assigned to the Individual Ready Reserves, for soldiers without a unit.

It was as a member of the IRR, that Merideth was called up for active duty in Afghanistan in the spring of this year. Before she left, Howard, cognizant of the dangerous nature of her assignment, married her long time partner Hugh Hvolboll, wanting to make their relationship official. Hugh explains why, "As a boyfriend, I would have no status with the Army...As a husband, I did."

Arriving in Afghanistan, Sgt. 1st Class Howard was part of a provincial-reconstruction team, assigned to a Civil Affairs unit at the the Mehtarlam base in eastern Laghman province. As one of 24 provincial-reconstruction teams in Afghanistan, their task was to help rebuild roads and schools and other infrastructure needed in the war torn and depleted country.

At first, Howard handled paperwork at the Mehtarlam base, tracking projects and applying for money. She was an industrious soldier, often going to the "Home Depot" area of the base, where the wood was stored and engaging in some basic carpentry with her hammer, which is still sitting in her room on base. She built a side table, a rudimentary armoire, and eventually the box, which she used to stand on, to man her machine-gun on the Humvee.

Merideth was good at her job, but disliked being confined within the parameters of the base. She wanted more, she wanted to be let out, to interact with the Afghani people, to go out on missions.She wanted to be a gunner.

It is not part of official Pentagon policy for women to serve in Combat units, but Sergeant Howard got her wish and found herself in Combat missions, because her Civil Affairs team was short-handed. One soldier went home after a noncombat injury, another was sent to Nuristan and the gunner to Jalalabad. The way was open for Merideth's wish to be granted.

And Sergeant Howard seemed to have embraced her new role with her customary gusto. She told her husband that one day she realized she enjoyed it. In August, she said she was thinking of extending her tour. Hugh provides us with an insight into his wife's enthusiastic acceptance of her new endeavors, despite the danger, "Merideth liked to live life as an adventure..."

And an adventure it was.

Riding shotgun on the Humvee, as her friend Staff Sgt. Robert Paul drove the vehicle. Merideth, standing on her box, the trigger of the .50 caliber machine gun clutched in her hands, alert, adrenaline flowing, a grayed hair woman in a helmet,in a land of Burkha-clad women, constantly scanning the countryside for signs of trouble.

And trouble did arive that day of September 8, when a Suicide Jihadist took Merideth and others lives.

But he did not take from us Merideth's memory.

We honor her, she died a Heroine.

Rebekah Bridges-Tervydis shares her thoughts with us about Merideth

MG: Hi Rebekah, how did you come to know Merideth?

Rebekah Merideth had just moved from Texas to relocate to the SF Bay area, while looking for a home to purchase she moved into what we affeciately came to call 'the home'. It was a clean, respectable, residence club for Women, near the heart of downtown San Francisco.

Many of the women were in transition, like Merideth relocating, I had just finished College and was moving from another state, to live in the 'big city'.

I met M., as I came to call her, passing in the hallways, perhaps at dinner or breakfast, even possibley the huge Women's restroom located on each floor. One thing, anyone will tell you, was Merideth has/had a one of kind, incredible laugh. (In fact, that's the one comment I continue to hear from folks "you mean, I'm never going to hear her laugh again?"

Anyway, it was the first week of July and our little Miss Firecracker was about to celebrate her birthday in the big city, I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate. It was there, that Meredith and I realised, we had a very similiar somewhat ribauld, irreverant senses of humor despite our nearly 10 year age difference.

When I heard of Merideth passing, after wailing some two or more hours, crying more tears than I thought my body could produce, what struck me was two things " Not only had a I lost the woman that I had grown up with, who without any doubt in my mind was as much my blood family as could be conceived. But, I had in facted lost one of three persons in the world, who actually could appreciate our wacky senses of humor, our take on life". My sorrow was completely selfish, I couldn't comprehend how the most intelligent woman I had the priviledge of knowing, the kind of woman that I wish I could have been, could have been taken so senselessly. What a waste, what a horribly, pitiful waste our Country had just suffered.

MG: It seems that Merideth was a very upbeat person, someone who was not afraid to take on another challenge. Is that how you found her?

Rebekah: Upbeat... that's just one word you could use. Merideth was never a 'label' but she absolutely knew she could play with the big toys and on the big boys playground. I think Hugh (Merideth's husband) said it recently in an interview "life was an adventure to Merideth." She was never in competition with anyone else except herself. She didn't need to be the best, she just needed to be the best that she could be. And she never expected you to be anything more than what you were, however we became close enough in our lives, that she would not sit by and watch me allow myself to shrivel, wallow in self pity. Even her emails from her deployment... nope, I wasn't going to get away with that behaviour even if she was half a world away.

I used to call her my 'touchstone' because I had a tendency to fly about life, alighting from one fun thing to the next, but if I started to feel weary or out of touch I'd go back home to M. and with one of her wondeful hugs she'd say exactly what my Mother (had she been alive) or my big sister would have said "Snap out of it, be responsible and be yourself."

Her wit and intelligence always made me take a double time step to catch up with her thought process, after about two years of this, I finally gave in and realised to follow her lead in most instances. There were areas's that she simply relied on me to take the lead, but I'm not sure if that wasn't just generousity on her part.

MG: Did you have a chance to see her before she left for Afghanistan?

Rebekah: Yes, M. made a special trip back to Alameda, to finish up some business. By then my husband and I had relocated two hours North, near Sacramento. Meredith called and said she'd be there by dinner. We had one night of laughter, fun, luckily the same as we always had. (It's difficult for me to realise that was the last time I saw her. She traveled so much for her job, that my mind continues to tell me she's in Hartford doing some inspection.) That evening we just laughed at some of the silly things we had done, said, seen or witnessed. I won't forget that last hug she gave me. Some tears on my part, M. wasn't prone to tears...unless the room was dark and we were watching some sappy show on tv. Hugh was very good at knowing exactly when she needed a hanky!

MG: Did she express any unhappiness or misgivings about going to Afghanistan?

Rebekah: Never unhappiness, despite my rantings and ravings about how our Government would send a 51 year old, highly educated with a Master Degree, reservist to the front! Notice, I did not say WOMAN. To Meredith we were all the same Man or Woman, it was our resposiblity to be the best we could be and explore those areas where we excelled.

As for misgivings.... I have two things to say to this. There have been reports by someone in M. s family (someone, I don't recall in over twenty years, ever having heard of) that she felt she was unprepared and that she hadn't been trained well enough by the military to go there. Knowing M. what she meant was, she hadn't been able to absorb the training entirely that was offered. She took it upon herself to finish the training as she felt would best serve her unit and her unwaivering desire to be her best.

Once over there, I think the reality of the situation certainly woke her up. This was no longer just an adventure, this was an opportunity to do what she had been trained to do and on some very serious missions. Merideth was always bright, cheery, positive but could be deadly serious when it was required. It became required.

MG: Did you have a chance to communicate with her when she was in Afghanistan?

Rebekah: Oh yes! Thanks to the Good Lord for the internet. Mail would take three weeks to get there, but the written word is so lovely by hand, that letters and packages did get exchanged. But we emailed quite often. I almost feel jealous now seeing how many folks/friends she was chatting with while there.

I'm somewhat ashamed to say it, but in the depths of my waxing and waning depression with the loss of M., I still write her email address. I do this just when I know my head will explode if I really, really have to realise she's not coming back.

MG: Did she like the country and the people?

Rebekah: Oh very very much. A few weeks before she died, Meredith sent us photos' of the land. Where there was water, the land was wonderfully green. Where water was not present the backdrop could have been the moon for all I would have known.

As for the people, M truly truly enjoyed the children and the elders she met. There were never specifics about different folks, but the regard and hospitality of the people were truly extraordinary to her. She relayed a time when her CO (I think that's the rank, I'm afraid I'm an event planner by trade... military grade is completely lost on me) was made to sit outside a typical Afghan home, while she and another woman were admitted inside to have tea and melon for an hour or two. I know M. must have enjoyed that tremendously, having a chance to get to talk with the women and be in a typical home. Again, it was an adventure.

MG: Is there anything you would like to say to Merideth's fellow servicemen and women, the brave soldiers that served with her?

Rebekah: You know Mister Ghost, please read this entry entirely before feeling I've sullied the choice of being a solidier. Because that is not my aim at all.

I'm ashamed to say I maybe the typical, stupid American, that just doesn't truly understand the process of war....we tear down, just to rebuild to our specifications? Is that it? Why is our country on another country's land, I don't get it. I don't have any misgiving's except my own ignorance of the situation. I can't truly judge until I truly understand all sides. How does it relate to 9/11/2001? How does this act ensure we are any safer, by putting our own people in harms way?

And I simply don't know who to trust for the honest word about why, is it the media I should trust? Our current Government seems to be so out of touch with reality at times, that it appears they don't have to hold themselves accountable, I mean the Suits in Wash. D.C., not the fatiques in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It wasn't until Merideth went there and began relaying that her job was to help obtain native folks to rebuild their comuunities. To help give care packages out to the children and families in desperate need. That, it no longer mattered what our Country was doing there in Afghan, I was honored and proud to be an American, to support our troops, knowing they were the good guys trying to help. I'm very proud that her service and that of Sgt. Paul and the others that serve there and in Iraq, I'm so grateful that your presense has made me the Proud American, instead of just the befuddled American!

MG: Can you share with us a favorite memory of Merideth?

Rebekah:I honestly wish I could, but there are too many. When you spend your life with someone, groving up (my parents died while I was quite young and I had little family to rely on) with someone like Meredith as your role model, your confident, your best friend, I cannot fathom choosing one memory to share. I'm afraid my journal is going to have to keep all those funny, stoic, honorable times private because Merideth was bigger than life to me. One memory just won't do.

MG: Thanks very much Rebekah. How best should we remember Merideth?

Rebekah: AH.... I hope the world will remember her for so much more than just being the oldest female soldier to die in the two wars. Her age, her sex, never held her back and I would hope that what people hear about her life is that it was a life well lived, service to the poor both in heart, spirit and poverty. Honor her memory by always trying to be your best in whatever capacity that is.

Merideth Howard was Rebekah Bridges-Tervydis best friend and served as Maid of Honor at her wedding in 2004. We kindly thank Rebekah for sharing her thoughts about Merideth, despite the difficult circumstances.

Roses from Robert by Missyasmina - Flickr

Merideth Howard In Her Own Words

To her boyfriend -- and future husband -- Hugh Hvolboll who manufactured fireworks.

"You set them off, and I'll decide how much damage they cause..."

On Her Connection with the Afghan People

"We have a good relationship with the people here in the village and, of course, as everybody in Afghanistan they are in need."

On Rebuilding Afghanistan's roads, schools, and water system

"The very basic things that we in America take for granted all of the time."

Improving the Lives of Afghan's Children

"We wanted to do a humanitarian drop here so we can help the kids out. We're giving them some backpacks for school. Most of the kids are in school, even if it's just a few hours a day."

On The Afghani People and Afghanistan's Future

"The people of Afghanistan are very warm and friendly people. And there are millions of children here, and I think this is the key to the future of Afghanistan."

On why she was in Afghanistan (as told to Command Sgt. Major Daniel Wood, U.S. Army)

"...she was here for the people of this land, and she realized that the only way this long war could be won is by interacting and engaging with the children of Afghanistan, as well as with the young adults and the women."

Those Who Knew Her Speak Out

Words cannot express how sad we are about Merideth's passing. My Wife, Lori and I were blessed and honored to know and love Merideth. She was 'one of a kind'. We got to know her through work, but we soon became friends. She loved to play tennis and her love of life and travel were second to none. She had the most infectious laugh...She would start laughing and then we would laugh, and then she would laugh, and so on.

The last and most heart-breaking correspondence we had with her was we discovered she and Hugh got married, just before her deployment to Afghanistan. I asked her when, oh when were we going to have a reception for their wedding! She said just as soon as she got back home to the U.S.A.

We will all miss her. God bless her.
Jeff Arita

Merideth had a wicked sense of humor. Every time I saw her she had a smile on her face. May all couples have the joy her and Hugh had together. Even though she will be missed she will always be in our memories.
AM Ledbetter

The world was a better place for having Merideth in it. I know I am a better person for having her for a friend for a quarter of a century. I will miss her. And am oh so glad we went paragliding. Keep them in line in heaven Merideth.
Amy Downing

Meredith lived, "…What we do for others is our legacy, and lives on forever…." Having worked with Meredith for a dozen years, I have nothing but grateful and happy remembrances of her as a person, her chosen profession, her dedication to our Country, and extend my sympathy to her family for your loss. As I write this brief note, I will never forget her identifiable laugh, which will last in my memory forever. Sincerely,
Brach Schmidt

"She was just one of those people who inspires you."

David White, Howard's instructor at at the Brayton Fire School.

I met Merideth at Fort Bragg, we were in training together for several months for this deployment. Our ranks are close and we both worked for a Fire Dept so we had a few things to talk about. She was instantly likeable by anyone she met. She was always smiling. I will miss her very much.
Robert McLaughlin

I'm currently deployed in the unit that SFC. Howard was a part of when she passed away. This in undoubtedly the worst tragedy to have befallen this unit. SFC. Howard was, without question, the kindest and most sincerest of people I have ever met. She treated us all with respect, regardless of rank, and on many occasions, she seemed like a mother making sure I had everything I needed to do my job (comfortably). I can think of no one else that did not deserve this less than she did.
PFC Stephen Mondaca

I had the honor to serve as SFC Howard's Commander at Mehtar Lam for two months and work with her for an additonal month before I departed Laghman Province for Nuristan Province where I still continue to serve.

She came onto my Forward Operating Base with the new group of Provincial Reconstruction Team personnel at the end of April and I was to change command with her Commander. He broke his wrist and I remained in command for an additional two months working closely with SFC Howard and the rest of the new Team.

To say she was a phenomenal soldier is an understatement. She was responsible for managing the Commander's Emergency Response Fund (CERP) in addition to her Civil Affairs job. She replaced a high speed Civil Affairs NCO who had developed an excellent approach to how we managed CERP at the PRT. SFC Howard came in and made the best CERP Program in Afghanistan even better. She was organized and detailed. She made our program one to envy but more importantly one that delivered millions of dollars in development to Laghman and Nuristan Provinces. She was one of a kind and an absolute pleasure to work with.

I am a career Infantry Officer with over 20 years of continuous service on active duty in defense of our nation. The hardest day I've ever had was the day she and SSG Paul died in Kabul. It was a black day for me. I have been in Afghanistan now for over 21 months continously and I have never felt so frustrated or angry than on that day. I am genuinely optimistic about Afghanistan's future but her death took even my optimism away. I recovered after thinking back on the many talks she and I had about what CERP, the PRT, and the Coalition presence was doing for Afghanistan. I mentally dedicated my last few months in this country to her memory.

I will leave Afghansitan, lord willing, in November. My last act will be to celebrate Thanksgiving with my Team in Eastern Nursitan. I will give thanks for how the lord has blessed me and my various team mates since my arrival in Afghanistan in January 2005. I will give thanks for SFC Merideth Howard. I am a better person for having served with her. She made a difference in the lives of many people and for that she will always be remembered.

LTC Anthony Feagin Infantry - Past Commander Mehtar Lam PRT and current Commander Nuristan PRT

We thank you Merideth for your duty and sacrifice.

Sources

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: At 52, soldier was distinctive in how she lived, and died

CNN Transcripts

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4185169.html

http://www.theeagle.com/stories/091406/opinions_20060914041.php

North Shore Journal

Legacy.Com

On my mind

2006-09-30T10:35:00.000-04:00

For the last 16 months, since the death of my mother, I have been struggling to touch the ground. I haven't once felt at "home" since then. I understand the term "feet haven't touched the ground" is used to represent good things, but in this usage it represents a very bad thing. I get motion sickness very badly and the sense of not touching the ground causes nothing but sickness and discomfort for me.

After a failed attempt to get grounded in Fayetteville NC, I moved back to Lexington Ky Wednesday before last, 10 days ago. I came to Lexington with no place to stay and no job and just hoped and wished that I could remedy those two nightmares quickly. I found a safe place to stay and I'm welcome there untill I can get work and save to move out on my own. Well this past week I was offered a job, and hired and I begin that job on Monday.

The point in divulging all of this personal info is this, I have been spending time here at the library, scanning online job ads, staying in touch with my three or four dearest online friends. As a result of spending time here I have spent a lot of time talking with and observing the homeless men who gather in the park out front and also in the library. By the skin of my teeth I did not, or have not yet, become one of those men. The mental emotional distance between myself, "the homed" and "them", the homeless, nearly completely evaporated. They became not just fellow Americans whom like others I shared little in common, they became to a huge extent my brothers. They aren't just on the periphery of my world now, they are very much inside my world, inside my space, on my radar.

So this morning I'm at the library and Im thinking about the reality of these men, my brothers who were alomst and may one day be my room mates. So I found these stats on the web, are they accurate, maybe not completely, buty I dont doubt them. And people, we need to do something. What? I don't know but it must be done whatever it is. These men are our fellow citizens and we can't allow the continued failed attempts to do something to numb us to the reality that we as a society are failing them, and by doing so we are failing ourselves.

From The National Coalition for the Homeless,

Homeless Statistics

The first thing to note about homeless statistics is that there are more homeless people today than at any previous time in U.S. history. In the past, "Skid-row bums" were the only homeless people in America on the street. However, nowadays those bums are not the only homeless people in America on the street. Ordinarily people fallen under hard times are now homeless people and some are with homeless children. This new wave of homeless people and homeless children in America now has them competing with the 'old fashioned bums' for space on bridges, benches, and parks to sleep.

Homeless Statistics - the number of homeless people in America

Although it is impossible to count the number of homeless people in America accurately, experts on homeless people estimate that there are more than three million homeless people in America at this time. Also, the number of homeless people increases every year.
The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there are more than:

70,000 homeless people in New York;
50,000 homeless people in Los Angeles;
25,000 homeless people in Chicago;
4,000-14,000 homeless people in Dallas;
10,000-15,000 homeless people in Washington, D.c.;
10,000 homeless people in Miami; and
6,500 homeless people in Phoenix.

I know this is an issue that has been talked to death over the last so many years. I know it is a common republican response to simply state, "They need to pull theirself up by their boot straps". The issue of homelessness is so often a liberal talking point that I have rarely heard the word spoken by any of my fellow Republicans.

Thats what is on my mind. Peace and love to all good lizards, past and present.

Is An Iraqi Jihadist Coming To A Nice American Neighborhood Near You?

2006-09-25T11:32:00.000-04:00

American Sheep... Led To Slaughter? - 2004 Photo by MG

Is an Iraqi Jihadist coming to a nice American neighborhood near you? Read on, to find out...

The outspoken and erudite Hugh Fitzgerald from Jihad Watch let loose with some strong thoughts about Iraq and Islam in an article he wrote back in June entitled, Concede victory.

Hugh argued the following:

We won in Iraq; we've inadvertently created a situation which will inevitably lead to demoralization and division within the Camp of Islam. If only we have the good sense to recognize it and stop trying to prevent the result that is devoutly to be wished.

Forget about the Iraqis, for god's sake, stop talking and stop thinking about "what's good for the Iraqis." Stop being influenced by the handful of plausible, nice, heartwarming "Iraqis" you have had contact with in Iraq -- many of those "Iraqis" serving as the staff (cooks, waiters, cleaners) in the Green Zone, or as translators, are the completely atypical Christians.

For Infidels, the permanent instability within Iraq, and the worry that has created in both Iran and Saudi Arabia (and other Arab states) is a welcome, and to the Bush Administration still uncomprehended, unappreciated, development...

Some deplore the idea of civil war. Why? Wasn't the Iran-Iraq War a good thing from the viewpoint of Infidels? Wasn't the Egypt-Saudi Arabia proxy war in the Yemen? The hostilities over Polisario between Morocco and Algeria? The dislike of Khaddafy for Egypt, and the expulsion from Libya of all those Egyptians? The brief Syrian incursion into Jordan? (...)

But there it is: the Shi'a have the power, the Sunnis will never accept it, the Kurds are drilling for oil and appropriating, as they have every right to do so, the oil of Kirkuk and Kirkuk itself. Concede Victory, and get out...

If we leave, the right result -- those sectarian and ethnic divisions -- will start to work their magic. And it will be magic as far as we, the Infidels, are concerned, even if the result does not please even those very nice, very plausible, Shi'a Muslims whose interests diverge from ours...

Hugh's thoughts have somewhat, but not entirely paralleled mine, since the Iraqi Constitution mirrored democracy with Sharia Law. I am much more sympathetic to the plight and loss of the Iraqis than Hugh is, and would rather not see innocent people be hurt or killed, but I can see where Hugh is coming from. He is arguing that a Proxy War is ongoing in Iraq between the minions of Iran, the Shia Militias and Death Squads and the al Qaeda-Sunni groups funded by the Saudis, and that is good for the United States.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are indeed the two biggest official and unofficial state sponsors of terrorism. Iran does it through their State-sponsored totalitarinism, Militant activities around the globe, as well as their support for Hezb'allah and other terrorist groups. The Saudis, weave their Religious Apartheid across the planet, through their exportation of Wahabbist philosophies, funding of Madrassas and Mosques, along with Islamic charity donations, which are siphoned off or given wholehardly in some cases to terrorist groups. If those two Nations are using their petrol dollars in Iraq to combat each other's influences, there is less wealth around to fund Radical Islam against us.

And this would not be the first time a Proxy War has benefitted the interests of the United States. After all the US supplied and funded the Mujahdeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and I don't recall many saying it was a bad thing, despite whatever casualties the Soviets inflicted on the Afghani citizenry in the course of their battles.

And we need to stop talking PC nonsense. We are not in a War Against Terror, or even waging a War Against Islamo-fascists, athough we are certainly warring with them, for sure. No let's be honest, we L'Etats Unis are at war with the many facets of Islam, which are in collision with the precepts of Western Democracy, pure and simple, because Islam has been waging a vicious campaign against the West and its freedoms for the last 1400 years of its conquering ways.

The War in Iraq has indeed been won. Saddam Hussein is defeated and the Iraqi military has been mitigated. Iraq can no longer do us or anyone else any harm.

So, my thinking was along the lines of, now is the time to remove American troops from Iraq proper and set up American bases in Kurdistan - it would be just as easy to take care of the Iranians from Kurdistan, since most of the combat will be conducted by the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf fleets, than it is to have forces in Iraq, subject to Iranian reprisals, perhaps even WMD reprisals.

But then I saw this letter in the New York Times by Robert Lockwood, a former councel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and changed my mind:

Keeping Terrorists Out

Published: September 11, 2006
To the Editor:
"Iraq's Endangered Journalists," by Ali Fadhil (Op-Ed, Sept. 6), evokes a third-rail issue that receives little public attention: the accommodation of refugees and asylum seekers who are victims of political upheavals, including civil war. These are grounds under United States statutes for the resettlement of as many as two million Iraqi refugees who are associated with American operations in Iraq...

Mark Krikorian writing at the National Review has a clarification of Lockwood's letter with even more chilling news:

From a letter by a former congressional staffer in yesterday's NY Times: "These are grounds under United States statutes for the resettlement of as many as two million Iraqi refugees who are associated with American operations in Iraq."

Actually, the number that could be admitted is unlimited. And, practically speaking, the majority would be Sunni, because if things fall apart and we hightail it out of Mesopotamia, the Shia will take over and start slaughtering the Sunnis. In other words, if we don't "win" in Iraq, whatever that might mean, we'll end up taking in huge numbers of people who supported (and still support) our enemies.

An Unlimited Number Of Iraqi Refugees, The Majority Sunni. That is not a good thing at all. We are in a War with the fundamentals of Islam. We can not absorb millions of Muslims into our country at this time, and effectively fight a war against the principles of very people, we would be taking in.

Millions of Raed Jarrar types or worse, American-hating Jihadists and Islamists entering the U.S. Think, even if only a small percentage of those Iraqi Sunnis, who resettled in this country, say 15 to 30 percent of the total Sunni population are Islamists, we are still talking about hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Islamic radicals for the government to deal with and we American citizens to face the Lethal Consequences of this mass importation of Democracy deniers.

Baby, we really need to win that war in Iraq, for the Iraqis, and most importantly, for us Americans.

Remembering Oriana Fallaci - The Largest Tribute In The Blogosphere

2006-09-18T08:48:00.000-04:00

Anguish photo by Thomas Hawk - Flickr

Oriana Fallaci (1929 - 2006) was called a leftist. Oriana Fallaci was called a fascist. I do not believe in the Left or the Right. I believe in the wet grass under my stockened feet soaking my skin. That is very much reality; that is not the symbolism of semantics. Labels are what men and women pin on each other as they seek to define the truth in their own minds. Fallaci was very much herself, whatever she believed in, and like most of us, her beliefs likely changed over time, with the ebb and flow of crisis and chaos, in her personal life and the world.

Mister Ghost - September 15, 2006

Who Was Oriana Fallaci?

The Pioneer Of Modern Journalism

From the book, Immortality, author, Milan Kundera writes, "...who is the pioneer of modern journalism? Not Hemingway who wrote of his experiences in the trenches, not Orwell who spent a year of his life with the Parisian poor, not Egon Erwin Kisch the expert on Prague prostitutes, but Oriana Fallaci who in the years 1969 to 1972 published a series of interviews with the most famous politicians of the time. Those interviews were more than mere conversations; they were duels. Before the powerful politicians realized that they were fighting under unequal conditions--for she was allowed to ask questions but they were not--they were already on the floor of the ring, KO'ed."

A Great Interviewer
Though she has written novels and memoirs, Italian author Oriana Fallaci remains best known as an uncompromising political interviewer, or, as Elizabeth Mehren puts it in the Los Angeles Times, "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no." Her subjects include Henry Kissinger, Willy Brandt, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the late Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, from whom she extracted such criticism of India's Indira Gandhi that a 1972 peace treaty between the two countries almost went unsigned. Courtesy of the Biography Resource Center

Showcased By Her Writing Style
A final area which must be given attention is Fallaci's writing style. As one researcher describes it, "What makes her approach different is the degree of commitment and passion that she brings to journalism" (Arico, 1986, p. 587). It is this commitment and passion which makes her style so unique. Rather than focus only on the questions and answers of an interview, Fallaci tells the reader everything she is thinking, seeing, hearing and feeling. In other words, she gives the reader the experience of the interview.
Courtesy of: Oriana Fallaci: Words, Power, And Style by Jill M. Duquaine

Leading American And British POWs To Safety
As a teen-ager, Fallaci did clandestine work for the anti-Fascist underground—she had her own nom de guerre, Emilia, and she carried explosives and delivered messages. After Italy surrendered, in September, 1943, and American and British prisoners began escaping from prison camps, one of her tasks was to accompany them "past the lines" and to safe refuge. Fallaci was chosen because she wore her hair in pigtails and looked deceptively innocent. "It was so scary, because there were minefields, and you never knew where the mines were," she recalled. "When my mother read that in a book later, she said, to my father, 'You would have sacrificed newly born children! You and your ideas.' And then she said, 'Well, but I had a feeling you were doing something like that.' "

Remembering Those Who Had Made The Ultimate Sacrifice
"Can anybody guess how many cemeteries of Allied soldiers there are in Italy? More than sixty. And the largest, the most crowded, are the American ones. At Nettuno, 10,950 graves. At Falciani, near Florence, 5,811. Each time I pass in front of it and see that lake of crosses, I shiver with grief and gratitude."

Telling The Story Of Dakel Abbas, An Iraqi prisoner of war
His name was Dakel Abbas, and he was a 21-year-old Iraqi soldier drafted in a village where along with his wife he lived raising cucumbers, onions, eggplants. A village near As-Samawah, central Iraq. Rather than a soldier, however, you would have thought him to be a survivor from a concentration camp. His head looked like a skull with a nose and a mouth and two eyes. His chest, a bas-relief of ribs hardly covered by skin. His biceps, tiny bones that could fit inside the palm of a child. (Saddam Hussein does not feed the troops very well.) He had been captured at the end of the Gulf War by members of the Kuwaiti Resistance who, supposedly by mistake, had opened fire on his group while it surrendered. In fact he appeared badly wounded and the doctors didn't know whether he would recover.

Lamenting The Fall Of The West
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!"--a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. "In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour--Europe needs a Cavour." Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent." She professes to "cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow."

On Jew Hatred In Europe
I find it shameful that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews. And who, in order to see Jews once again in the extermination camps, in the gas chambers, in the ovens of Dachau and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen et cetera, would sell their own mother to a harem... I find it shameful that in France, the France of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, they burn synagogues, terrorize Jews, profane their cemeteries. I find it shameful that the youth of Holland and Germany and Denmark flaunt the kaffiah just as Mussolini's avant garde used to flaunt the club and the fascist badge... I find it shameful that they are on the side of the very ones who inaugurated terrorism, killing us on airplanes, in airports, at the Olympics, and who today entertain themselves by killing western journalists. By shooting them, abducting them, cutting their throats, decapitating them. (There's someone in Italy who, since the appearance of Anger and Pride, would like to do the same to me. Citing verses of the Koran he exhorts his "brothers" in the mosques and the Islamic Community to chastise me in the name of Allah. To kill me. Or rather to die with me. Since he's someone who speaks English well, I'll respond to him in English: "Fuck you.")

On The London Bombing
Now, I ask myself: “What do you say, what do you have to say, about what happened in London?” They ask me face-to-face, via fax and email; often scolding me because up until now I have remained silent. Almost as if my silence were a betrayal. And each time I shake my head and murmur to myself: what else should I say?!? I’ve been saying it for four years--that I fight against the Monster that has decided to eliminate us physically and, along with our bodies, to destroy our principles and values. Our civilization. For four years I’ve been talking about Islamic Nazism; about the war against the West; about the death cult; about European suicide. About a Europe that is no longer Europe, but Eurabia, and that with its feebleness, its inertia, its blindness, its servitude to the enemy is digging its own grave. For four years, like another Cassandra, I’ve been shouting until I’m hoarse “Troy is burning! Troy is burning!” and I despair of the Danaids for whom, like Virgil in the Aeneid I weep for a city entombed in its torpor. [A city] that, through its wide-open doors receives fresh troops and joins complicit parties [inside]. For four years I’ve been repeating to the wind the truth about the Monster and its accomplices...

In Her Own Words: Freedom, Faith, And Europe
• The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions.

• The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

• The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive.

• Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.

• You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

• The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

• In obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest fashion of Political Correctness, the usual opportunists exploit the word Peace.

• In France, the France of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, they burn synagogues, terrorize Jews, profane their cemeteries.

• I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.

• I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

• Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.

• Because our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years, we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us, who aim to absorb us.

The Love Of Her Life: Alekos Panagoulis
In A Man, Fallaci attempts to immortalize the martyred poet and Greek resistance leader Alekos Panagoulis, the great love of her life. Though she calls the book a novel, A Man recounts the real story of Panagoulis's fight for Greece's freedom--a fight he continued until his death. In 1967, Panagoulis attempted to assassinate the fascist Greek dictator Georgios Papadopoulos by planting a series of bombs along the roads he traveled each day. The plan failed, and Panagoulis was captured and imprisoned almost immediately. During the next five years, the revolutionary was subjected to physical abuse as well as psychological torture in an effort to break his spirit and will. Despite the inhuman treatment, Panagoulis refused to succumb, and his repeated escape attempts and uncompromising rebelliousness finally led him to be isolated in a specially constructed cell, not much larger than a double bed, with no windows and only three paces' worth of standing room. He remained there until he was freed under a general amnesty in 1973. Two days after his release, Panagoulis was interviewed by Fallaci, and, firmly convinced that their meeting was an act of fate, the two became lovers within a few weeks.

For the next three years, Fallaci and Panagoulis shared a tempestuous relationship. According to Marcia Seligson in the Los Angeles Times, "he told her: `I don't want a woman to be happy with. The world is full of women you can be happy with... . And I want a companion. A companion who will be my comrade, friend, accomplice, brother. I'm a man in battle. I always will be.' She became all those things, surrendering her own full and independent life to follow this difficult, maddening, towering man. She lived an emotional pendulum of anguish/bliss; there was no serenity, no future, only thrills and chills." Panagoulis was killed by political enemies in an ambush made to look like an auto accident in 1976. Within months of his death, Fallaci began work on the book she would dedicate to him, and, in 1979, published what she considers her most important work,A Man.

Wanting To See The Sea One Last Time Before She Died
Riccardo Nencini... who was present in front of the Santa Chiara clinic to give his last goodbye to Oriana Fallaci, who died the day before yesterday, then mentioned his last meetings with the writer. "I spoke with her three time. The first time in New York in February, but she told me 'I am dying I want to return to Florence to die.' The second time in mid-June in Florence during a meeting that last all afternoon until late at night and she told me 'I won't make it to the end of summer, I want to go back to NY but I want to return to die here. I want to return to see the big Cupola, the river, and especially the tower of Manelli because that is where I brought the parachuted bombs from the allies in a salad basket. Find me a house here.' Then the last time I heard from her, a few days before she arrived in Florence, was a very brief telephone all. She told me, 'I have to hang up, I am about to die. I want to remember you like the last time we saw each other' and then she hung up.

Her Final Resting Place In Florence
By a twist of faith, the controversial writer, who fought some hard battles against the Islam faith, will be buried in the evangelical cemetery, the same one that is the final resting place of atheists, Orthodox Jews and also Muslims. Everything is now ready for her to go to the family tomb, the same one in which her parents and other close relations are lying. A small plot of land inside the 18th century private cemetery. Close by is a stone dedicated to her grand love, bearing the words, "In memory of Alekos Panagulis, with love from Oriana".

Oriana Fallaci's Books
I sette peccati di Hollywood (title means "The Seven Sins of Hollywood"), preface by Orson Welles, Longanesi (Milan), 1958.

Il sesso inutile: Viaggio intorno all donna, Rizzoli (Milan), 1961, translation by Pamela Swinglehurst published as The Useless Sex: Voyage around the Woman, Horizon Press (New York City), 1964.

Penelope alla guerra (novel), Rizzoli, 1962, translation by Swinglehurst published as Penelope at War, M. Joseph (London), 1966.

Gli antipatici, Rizzoli, 1963, translation by Swinglehurst published in England as Limelighters, M. Joseph, 1967, published as The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews , Regnery (Chicago), 1968.

Se il sole muore, Rizzoli, 1965, translation by Swinglehurst published as If the Sun Dies, Atheneum (New York City), 1966.

Niente a cosi sia, Rizzoli, 1969, translation by Isabel Quigly published as Nothing, and So Be It, Doubleday (New York City), 1972 (published in England as Nothing and Amen, M. Joseph, 1972).

Quel giorno sulla Luna, Rizzoli, 1970.

Intervista con la Storia, Rizzoli, 1974, translation by John Shepley published as Interview with History, Liveright, 1976.

Lettera a un bambino mai nato, Rizzoli, 1975, translation by Shepley published as Letter to a Child Never Born, Simon & Schuster (New York City), 1976.

Un uomo: Romanzo (novel), Rizzoli, 1979, translation by William Weaver published as A Man, Simon & Schuster, 1980.

Insciallah, Rizzoli 1992, translated by James Marcus, published as Inshallah, Doubleday, 1992.

Rage and Pride, published as La rabbia e l'orgoglio, Rizzoli, 2001.

The Force of Reason, published as La forza della ragione, Rizzoli, Nov 2005.

List courtesy of the Biography Resource Center

The Blogosphere And Others Remember Oriana Fallaci

Robert Spencer - Jihad Watch: She was one of the most fearless and courageous defenders Western civilization had in these latter days, and the West rewarded her by hounding, persecuting and vilifying her.Such is the state of the society and culture she loved and tried to save from itself. Many times in her last months, after she did me the honor of calling me her friend, I thought to myself, What can I do for Oriana? Of course, the only answer was to do exactly what I am doing here at this site, and in my books, and in traveling around the country speaking, trying to alert people to the reality and magnitude of the global jihad.

R.I.P Oriana.: Here's a poignant paragraph from "Rage and pride"--

"In this world there is room for everybody, I say. In one's own home, everyone is free to do what they please. If in some countries the women are so stupid to accept the chador, or the veil where they have to look through a thick net at eye level, worse for them. If they are so idiotic to accept not going to school, not going to the doctor, not letting themselves be photographed etcetera, well worse for them. If they are so foolish as to marry a prick that wants four wives, too bad for them. If their men are so silly as to not drink beer, wine, ditto. I am not going to be the one to stop them. Far from it! I have been educated in the concept of liberty, and my mother used to say: "the world is beautiful because it is varied". But, if they demand to impose these things on me, in my house… and they do demand it. Osama Bin Laden affirms that the entire planet Earth must become Muslim, that we must convert to Islam, that either by convincing us or threatening us, he will convert us, and for that goal he massacres us and will continue to massacre us. This cannot please us. It has to give us a great desire to reverse roles and kill him. However, this will not resolve itself, it will not be exhausted with the death of Osama Bin Laden. This is because the Osama Bin Ladens number in the tens of thousands now and they are not confined to the Arabic countries. They are everywhere, and the most militant are in the West. In our cities, our streets, our universities, in the nerve centers of our technology. That technology that any obtuse can manage. The Crusade has been underway for a while. It works like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a malice which compares only to the malice of Torquemada when he led the Inquisition. In fact it is impossible to deal with them. To reason with them, unthinkable. To treat them with indulgence or tolerance or hope, is suicide. Anyone who believes the contrary, is deluding himself"

Giselle Fernandez, Journalist and Filmaker: We suffer the sad loss of an icon today in the passing of Oriana Fallaci in her native Florence. This passionate and powerful voice of the 20th Century was forever bold and brazen in her dissection of politics, power and ego, and their devastating effects on democracies everywhere. She wrote with an integrity and force of character that defined her life's work up until the very last days. Fallaci was perhaps my greatest inspiration as a journalist. Her dynamic, dramatic and distinct point of view on the demise of democracies, especially in her latest works that evoked death threats against her, did nothing to silence her conviction or her writings. She died as she lived -- with passion, conviction, purpose and power. They don't make writers like her anymore.

Debbie Schlussel: Fallaci's essays, columns, and articles over the last several years were so spot on and well written that my father would constantly send them to me, even though we knew that before this new era of her enlightenment she was the Islamofascists' useful idiot in friendly interviews with the likes Yasser Arafat--she called the terrorist murderer "charming" (though, at least, in an interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, she attacked Islam's lack of women's rights). Fallaci's newer work was the truth she had denied for so long. For that, Islamofascists repeatedly tried to silence her, stop the publishing of her material in countries like France, and she was put on trial. They don't have the free speech in Europe that we have here. It's ironic because Fallaci-- at the age of 10 in 1939--joined her father in the anti-fascist freedom fighter resistance against the Nazis. She lived to see them defeated early in her life. But she did not live to see the new Nazis--Islamofascists--defeated. And she warned that they may win, in her books, "The Rage and the Pride," and "The Force of Reason."

A Second Hand Conjecture: Fallaci was one of those figures who at some point in time could not have failed to inspire you and yet enrage you at another time. Anyone who says differently never read or listened to her. She offended everyone and inspired us all who paid attention. No one who remembers can forget her interview ripping off her Chador in the presence of Khomeini. She fought against the Nazi's, covered wars from Vietnam to the Middle East and was beaten in Mexico city during the protests of 1968.

David Horowitz - Front Page Magazine: A great warrior is gone... Oriana Fallaci has died after a long struggle with cancer at the age of seventy-seven. Her last years were spent in the United States in part because she was hunted in her own beloved Italy because of her war against the Islamic jihad. A fatwa calling for death was issued an Islamic jihadist; an Italian judge attempted to put her in jail for offending the invaders. She found refuge in the United States. But she also embraced America as her homeland in exile because she understood that America was the global center of resistance to the Islamic threat.

Victor Davis Hanson: Rarely has the death of a public intellectual affected me as much as the passing of Oriana Fallaci. I never met her, and only received a brief note once from her accompanying a copy of The Rage and the Pride. The story of her career is well known, but her death, at this pivotal time, was full of paradoxes and yet instruction as well... Her fiery message was as timely as it was caricatured and slandered: Muslims who leave the Middle East to live under the free aegis of the West have a moral duty to support and protect the civilization that has welcomed them, rather than romanticize about what they have forsaken; Christianity is more than a religion, but also a powerful emblem of the force of reason, in that it seeks to spread belief by rational thought as well as faith; and that affluent and leisured Westerners, bargaining away their honor and traditions out of fear and for illusory security, have only emboldened radical Islam that seeks to liquidate them. I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.

Stephania: The Italian writer Oriana Fallaci has died in her Florence.Although I found some of her expression too exaggerated and tended to disagree on some of her statements, I admired her so much for her courage in denouncing Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism.She has never feared to say what she thought. She stood up for her rights in saying what she thought. She was a target of the Islamic fascists. But she has never refrained from denouncing the dangers of multiculturalism and unassimilated immigration. She spoke directly to the consciences of the European rulers, who opted for silencing her by inventing show trials organized by notorious Islamic fundamentalists (for example, the Italian Adel Smith, a Muslim convert who adores Bin Laden and had thrown a crucifix outside a hospital's window, other than offending Jesus Christ). I'm sure the Islamic fundamentalists are celebrating as they celebrated when the 9/11 atrocities occurred and as they celebrate when innocent civilians are killed by their "militants", a term invented by the mainstream media.Because they love death, as they themselves say.

Michael Ledeen: Orianna was one of those bigger-than-life personalities who dwarf everyone around them, and there wasn't much grey in her world, things were always sharply defined. This made friendship a challenge, since at any given moment you were either dearly beloved or this week's dolt. But it didn't really matter, since she prized friendship, and last week's idiot was invariably destined to return as tomorrow's beloved; you had to accept that it would happen, and it would pass, and we were fortunate to know her and be provoked, stimulated, embraced and insulted. She was a hell of a lady.

The Anchoress: Fallaci was an unapologetic woman of the left who - like Christopher Hitchens - had the brains, moral courage and obstinacy to depart from leftist orthodoxy when intellectual honesty demanded it. She was no one to simply "fall in line" with the prevailing thought-of-the-day. She dared the left to honor its pretensions to liberalism and open-mindedness by speaking her mind in dissent. And the left never forgave her for it, either.

Publius Pundit: The great Oriana Fallaci, a clear-eyed journalist and universal freedom fighter for democracy, has died. We all knew she had cancer but this is very sad and affecting news. Her impact on world events cannot be underestimated. The Italian journalist went places no one else would go and saw through everything. No dictator could fool her. She exposed and clarified clowns like Khaddafi and others so that we could see what the real tyrannical enemy was like. At the end of her life, she denounced Islamofascism and extolled the value of civilization, with the courage of a lion. This makes me so so sad.

Wretchard: At the time of her death Oriana Fallaci was facing a suit in Italy for daring to suggest that her country and culture were under threat from radical Islam. In her youth she did not bow to Hitler; and in her old age she hurled defiance at yet another tyranny. The darkness came and yet the darkness claimed her not.

Tigerhawk: Oriana Fallaci died, and the West has lost one of its great warriors... Her vision was startling, and if you have not read The Force Of Reason and The Rage And The Pride , now's the time... They are the first two books of a completed trilogy, a cri de coeur really, over the degradation of Western culture in the face of resurgent Islam. We await the English translation of the third book with great anticipation. Fallaci always did her own English translations; I hope she finished it before she died.

The Jawa Report: She was in exile from a country which has enacted draconian hate speech laws.
Fallaci's crime was for "defaming Islam". She will be missed."

Aussie Jim at Tim Blair: God damm that woman had bigger balls than 99% of blokes that I know, she might have been half crazy but I admire that. To paraphrase Colonel Kurtz, if I had two divisions made up of women like her, this war would be over within a year.

Anti-idiotarian Rottweiller: Oriana Fallaci Dies at 76…and a guiding light in the fight against Islamic Fascism and the creeping conquest of the West goes out. I first learned about her shortly after 9/11, when her book "The Rage and the Pride" came out, a book that no home should be without a copy of. Oriana was a kindred spirit, somebody who understood that, in order to have any hope of defeating an enemy, you must first acknowledge its existence and realize the true nature of it, without excuses, squeamishness and the cowardly unwillingness to face reality that the modern West has become infamous for. And she did.

Jeremayakovka: They called her aggressive, abrasive -- racist, even. Her mind was the fierce, gifted offspring of a most felicitous marriage of reason and emotion: each book an assault on the citadel of postmodern European presumption, each sentence a cavalry charge. Were we to conduct an intellectual autopsy on Fallaci, were we to behold her brain we would have to compare it to a cannonball; her sex we would have to compare to its etymological source, to a sword's or dagger's sheath.

Michelle Malkin: Deeply saddening news at the end of this 9/11 anniversary week. The outspoken lioness Oriana Fallaci has died of cancer... She refused to candycoat her criticisms of Islam. She refused to submit to jihadi thugs. Her books, her life, her rage and her reason serve as fiery inspirations in an era of flinching dhimmitude.

All Things Beautiful: I must take a moment to pay tribute to one of my greatest heroines, and one of the most renowned journalists of our modern era, Oriana Fallaci, who died of cancer today aged 77. Relentlessly opposing Islamic extremists until her dying breath, she lived a life of passion and died a courageous death, always fighting for what she believed in. An inspiration to us all, I loved her deeply not only for everything she bravely stood for, but for having the magnificent courage to say it. I am greatly saddened by her departure form a world which needs her now more than ever. Constantly forewarning us of the inevitabilities of an "Islamic colony" formerly known as Europe, she predicted much of the decay we see all too evident today.

OS - Objectively Speaking: Heroes get harder and harder to find. If you have not discovered this one, do so. They help to fuel the soul.

Vanishing American: Always passionate and outspoken, she powerfully articulated the rage which has been so suppressed throughout the West; in spite of the constraints of Political Correctness, or perhaps also because of it, she became more harsh and more insistent in her later years. Her voice was a much-needed one in an emasculated and passive Europe, and throughout the West. Of course her bluntness provoked controversy in a world which prizes 'sensitivity' and hypocritical niceness over truth, but her eloquence and passion spoke for many people whose voices are silenced in today's PC-strangled atmosphere.

Zrinyi's Last Stand: To the last warrior of Europe, the Florentine fighter of fascism, Oriana Fallaci, I wish you well, and thank you for your printed page. Your rage is mine and reason has its force only through its conduits. I wonder if a merciful God would grant you repose in Heaven, or allow you to return to haunt your civilization still. Beware the ghost of Europe past, oh cowards of this day, when brave souls still fought against fascism, rather than submitted to it. Europe, you shameful land of cowards. Today died a woman who as a young girl demonstrated more fortitude, more of that peculiar Florentine idea of virtu, than the all the men there today. Have you no spirit, have you no soul, have you nothing in your sack!

Eamonn Fitzgerald Rainy Day: It is tragic that Oriana Fallaci died during the week when the world is remembering 9/11, and it is a further tragedy that she is not here now to add her voice to the debate surrounding the Pope's address in Regensburg. Back in May, Margaret Talbot created a memorable portrait of Fallaci in the New Yorker. In The Agitator, Talbot writes that "Fallaci's virtues are the virtues that shine most brightly in stark circumstances: the ferocious courage, and the willingness to say anything, that can amount to a life force." We shall miss that life force.

M in Boston: I first came to know the work of Oriana Fallaci through her Vietnam memoir, "Niente, e cosi sia", which I found at random while shelving books as a work-study student in my university library. I leafed through it, then took it home to read it non-stop - and have admired her writing ever since. In a way, Oriana was our Cassandra, in the classical sense, not the colloquialism. She didn't want to be right about the threat, but she was, and there is no denying events have proved her right. Wishing her peace and rest.

Clarity and Resolve: She was an extraordinary giant of a woman with a courageous soul. Her defense of Western values and freedoms was unparalleled and will surely inspire many generations to come.

Roger L. Simon: One of my personal heroes is dead. What can you say about Fallaci except that she was a human being of tremendous courage? She was also an extraordinarily beautiful woman and a great writer. To say that she will be missed is a vast understatement. She was crucial to our times and leaves a void. Her death makes me cry as if I had lost a family member.

Dinocrat: Oriana Fallaci's life stands for many things. Among them is the proposition that reason should govern the thoughts and actions of men. As such, there never can be such a thing as "the only accepted religion on earth," and Fallaci battled that idea for many years. But reason did not make her the enemy of religion.

Shining full Plate and a good broadswoard: There is no doubt that in our circle, she is a hero beyond description. She is a true martyr, who gave her remaining years to a cause she thought worth fighting. She could have whiled away happily and counted her blessings peacefully while making "her peace" with the world, but she didn't. She put up one of the hardest fights which has inspired millions of us. Her face belongs on a T-Shirt and her name belongs in pop culture.

Neptunus Lex: Fallaci had scored an interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, shortly after the triumph of his Islamic Revolution. Asked to wear a chador for the interview, Fallaci complied but asked increasingly direct questions about why an Italian woman, or any woman at all for that matter, must be obliged to cover her hair because of someone else's faith. Eventually enraged by the Ayatollah's pat answers, she ended up ripping off the chador right in front of the astonished Ayatollah, who stalked out of the room, effectively ending the interview. She managed to calm herself down, and extracted a promise from Khomeini's handlers to conclude the interview on the following day, subject to the condition that she ask no more questions about the chador. Sitting across from the old man at her next interview, her first question was on the issue of the chador. I don't care what you think about women's rights, you have to admit to her courage.

Sissy Willis :As we noted, the celebrated and reviled Italian journalist, indicted in her native Italy for criticizing the Religion of Peace,™ was for years a voice in the wilderness trying to warn the West of the gathering forces of darkness... Perhaps sensing her time was running out, she gently but firmly chided her soulmate in an essay last summer on the London bombings... urging the Pope not to whitewash the "illiberal and anti-democratic -- no, cruel --essence of Islam" in the name of interfaith "dialog." Benedetto's uncompromising words this week would have reassured and comforted Fallaci...

Red State: Not speaking Italian - and not being one for political books - my only experience with her work was what showed up online. I found her sometimes objectionable, sometimes insightful, often polemic and always interesting: I am not entirely certain that if we had ever met that she would not eventually damn me for a optimistic fool wrt Islam - a group with which she had epic battles. The world of letters will be lessened by her absence.

Claudia: That's so sad, she was my favourite writer and one of my heroes too (I've had the pleasure to meet her more than once)...and..let's not forget she was a great woman...GREAT...really.
Rest in peace my dear. You will not be forgotten and I will miss you, endlessly.

Cao's Blog: She will be missed. She had no husband and no children. She told it like it is, which is no small feat.

Tammy Bruce: With her death, we have lost a woman who reminds us what our voices are for. Her books on the scourge of Islam, "The Rage and the Pride" and the follow up volume, "The Force of Reason," put into remarkable perspective the nature of our enemy, and the righteousness of our outrage against their savagery.

Anna's Clue Tank: Friday saw the death of a courageous woman, Oriana Fallaci, of cancer at the age of 77. What a life she did lead. Interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeni in Tehran, making Henry Kissinger look unprepared, and capturing the odiousness of Yasser Arafat. To being beaten and shot in 1968 during student protests in Mexico. Being threatened with violence by radical Islam for her books calling upon Europe and the West to wake up. But I think the absolute zenith of her thought provoking journalism has to have been when Switzerland wanted to put the handcuffs on her and arrest her for what she has written. Shades of the Inquisition there, practiced by the Swiss no less.

Life As If: Oriana Fallaci... Died yesterday. She had cancer. I love her. I am so sad.

Atlas Shrugs: Oriana passed away in her beloved Firenze (which she said was destroyed and stolen by the barbarians.) My heart is broken. A warrior in the fight against militant Islam. G-d bless her soul. Phyllis Chelser pointed out to me that despite Fallaci selling millions of books, she was not heroized by the Italian intellectual establishment who turned against her (and in her view became “fascists”.) She could not risk returning to either Italy or Switzerland due to the Islamic lawsuits against her which might have meant her imprisonment upon landing. Europe is dead and Fallaci fought to revive the corpse.

Maggie's Farm: Brains, spirit, beauty, hutzpah, grace, toughness, and writing talent. Not bad with a camera, either, but a Lady of Letters. A loss for the Italy which persecuted her, and for the world.

Cross Connections: I do love Oriana for doing what she did. She risked her life and so many people in the media do. I have often been harsh on the profession and will continue to do so, but sometimes one has to grudgingly admit that it's like capturing the world in a few words. I'd love to see how Oriana Fallaci would interview god...

Sam Houston - Throwing Heat: We have lost a good soldier in the fight against Islamist fascism, a voice belonging to a woman who was not afraid to tell the truth about the threat to Western culture to which she refused to submit. For almost all of the last ten years, she fought the cancer that eventually killed her...but it hardly slowed her down. May you now rest in peace, Oriana.

Noisyroom.net: A sad, sad day indeed. May she find peace - the world has lost a wonderful voice and soul today.

Rand Simberg: A Brave Woman And a great journalist. Oriana Fallaci, rest in peace. Don't know where she'll end up--she was a devout atheist, but unlike many of her (non)religious cohorts, she was able to make the distinction between modern Christianity and the medieval Islamists with whom we are war.

Her Blog - Kim Pearson: Oriana Fallaci, 77, who died today, brooked no compromises and took no prisoners... Since September 11, 2001, Fallaci has been best known as a strident -- or some might say, rabid -- critic of Islam. But years before, she made her mark as one of the most extraordinary interviewers in journalism -- so extraordinary that in 2004, she interviewed herself about her own impending death.

Marta: "I sat at the typewriter for the first time and fell in love with the words that emerged like drops, one by one, and remained on the white sheet of paper ... every drop became something that if spoken would have flown away, but on the sheets as words, became solidified, whether they were good or bad." Oriana Fallaci Italian author, journalist and uncompromising political interviewer. Person that I truly admire.

PC Free Zone: Oriana Fallaci, a former Resistance fighter and war correspondent, writer, journalist, and warrior passed away. She is a Hero to those seeking the truth. Oriana Fallaci was one of the few journalists in the world who dared to attack Islam and the fact that Europe had surrendered to terror...

Lawhawk: Oriana Fallaci, an indefatigable Italian woman who repeatedly issued warnings over the clash of civilizations taking place in Europe and the failure of Islamic immigrants to assimilate into European culture has died in Florence at the age of 76. She was apparently the first to coin the term "Eurabia" to describe the situation of Europe sliding into an Islamic mess.

Faustas Blog: Fallaci's own words: A Sermon for the West : "the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion."

Our Children Are The Guarantoors: I strive to commemorate her as Mr. Spencer has now suggested: by emulating her actions. The more people do as she did, the less chance there will be for the arrival of the dreaded condition in which it will be unexpected, surprising for any non-Muslim to die in bed. Into the company of G-d's Righteous you go, Oriana Fallaci. Rest in peace.

Liberty and Justice: Oriana is one of the women, in that small list of outspoken critics of Islam, who have had a great impact on the way many people think about before mentioned subject. She was an inspiration to many. Although she now has died, her books / writings will live on. She has left a gigantic legacy, one that will continue to have an impact on millions and millions of individuals.

Anja Partenon - Sweden: She was brave and honest woman, a real anti-fascist. Strange that she dies just as the anti-Benedictus madness rises. Btw- When I have been to England and went to some bookstore i found lots of David Icke' anti-semitic filth there but no any Oriana Fallaci's book. I asked WHY no Oriana Fallaci but lots of David Icke's They answered ;''David Icke is a free speech but Oriana Fallaci is a hate-speech''

Protein Wisdom - Dan Collins: Today I mourn and celebrate the passing of Oriana Fallaci, who finally succumbed to her cancer. Fallaci was in some respects the Christopher Hitchens of Italy. Once celebrated by the left, she recognized the danger to her civilizational values posed by radical Islam, and for speaking out her understanding was made a pariah by the European socialist news apparatus and the Western lefty blogosphere. I owe Fallaci this debt: when I studied in Italy I learned her Letter to a Child Never Born as a model for how to write clear, concise Italian. She was an interviewer (and interviewee) of devastating intellect, and although an atheist herself understood the importance to Europe of its Christian heritage.

Political Musings: I knew this day was not that far off but it still leaves me saddened. A hell of a woman and a hell of a cook.

Kesher Talk: Fallaci is best known since 9-11 as a fervent champion of Western civilization, foe of Islam, and severe critic of multiculturalist ideology. Her proud passion for European culture planted a flag in the ground that a depressed and confused people could rally around, if they chose. A few did, most were ambivalent, some tried to have her flag torn out and destroyed.

fleursDUmall: My pedestal is empty, again… Oriana Fallaci, the famous Italian journalist, died, last night…She passed graciouly, the way she lived I admired her for her interviews she did with Yasser Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi or the ayatollah Khomeiny. But more than that, for 'The Rage and the Pride'...

Environmental Republican: The very brave and brilliant writer and resistance fighter Oriana Fallaci has died...Fallaci enraged the Muslims and leftists (but I am redundant) in Europe by speaking out about the Muslim threat to western ways. She also got the lefties in America worked up as well... She was what journalists should be and will be missed.

Blogmeister USA: It took cancer to silence the woman who would not be silenced by her critics. Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist who penned books "The Rage and the Pride" and "The Force of Reason" (both highly critical of Muslims and Islam), died today... Fallaci refused to be cowed by Islamic fascists and their supporters, whose main goal is to silence any who would dare to go against them. We should all follow her lead.

Israpundit: Oriana Fallaci provided exactly the kind of rhetoric that we need to save our civilization from being overrun by mindless hordes of savage barbarians whose openly-stated goal is to either convert us to their violently-primitive beliefs or slit our throats. When a horde of bloodthirsty savages encamps outside your walls– or even worse, has already infiltrated your cities and countryside– you raise the call to arms with the most direct and explicit language you can find. "The Redcoats are coming!" cried Paul Revere as he rode through the countryside. "Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor!" proclaimed two-inch (at least) newspaper headlines on 8 December 1941. "Nazis Invade Poland!" the same headlines had screamed in 1939. "Militant Islamic Invaders Cut Theo Van Gogh's Throat, Rape European Women!" We must state the facts bluntly and even brutally if we are to save our culture and indeed our lives.

Red Hot Cuppa Politics: I don't know that Oriana Fallaci dwelt very much on her own spirituality or the afterlife, but if there's any justice in the world, the Lord will find a place for her among the other warrior angels.

Sma' Talk Wi' T: I write this post to perpetuate the memory of one of the most outspoken, bravest women in the global fight against Islamo-fascism. Oriana Fallaci died today at the age of 77 from a long battle of cancer. With outside beauty of renowned Italian women, and beauty inside of the most tenacious 14th century saints who would travel thousands of miles to harangue the Pope into making righteous decisions, Oriana took on Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVII. How fitting on the week she passes into eternity, Pope Benedict XVII steps up to the plate and denounces the evil regimes of Islamo-fascism.

Relapsed Catholic: Thoughtful Catholics will have noted that Oriana Fallaci died on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. And recalled that she was one of the first laypeople to whom the new Pope granted a private audience, much to the amazement of those who are forever "amazed" by the bloody obvious. And that, coincident with her passing, the Pope is literally under attack by Bronze Age Fanatics.

Alarmingnews: The terrorists have won just a little bit today. Oriana Fallaci dies in Italy

Marathon Pundit: Journalist Oriana Fallaci died today in Italy. The world is a lesser place without her in it. She was a foe of political-correctness, and late in her life she was not afraid to confront the intolerance of Islamo-fascism.

Committees of Correspondence: The Passing Of A Warrior - On Friday September 15, 2006 Oriana Fallaci ended a Lifetime of Battle against the Forces of Intolerance, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Oppression. She now rests at the Heart of All That Is In The Land Of Dreaming Thunder. Though she may not have been of the Ani Yun Wiya (the Total of All Real People) I am certain Sky Father will receive her with all honor due such a valiant warrior.

Ania: cried this morning when i found out oriana fallaci died my dad forgot to tell me yesturday and i found out this morning she did have cancer and i knew it was going to happen but she was so passionate and feirce and her death made my heart the more heavy today.

Woman Honor Thyself: A brilliant, outspoken woman who was always under the gun for her fiery statements and what many considered “controversial views” on relations between the western world and Izlam. I am humbled by her strength, which was her trademark. Always on the forefront of fights to defend women’s rights, and never backing down in the face of threats. Rest in Peace Oriana. You blazed the trail.

Babalu Blog: Fallaci, a journalist of the left, was a life-long foe of Italian Fascism. She was very well known before 9/11, having confronted and interviewed many powerful people, not the least of which was the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was not pleased with a woman being so bold and uppity with him. I had heard and read Fallaci many times before. I can't honestly say I agreed with her on many things, she was a leftist after all, but what I did know was that she was a fiercely honest interviewer, a person of integrity who had no agenda other than her deeply held convictions. She was one of the last of our great warriors.

Technomancy For Fun And Profit: Oriana Fallaci passed away in her home town of Florence, Italy... She was considered a troublemaker, a firebrand, a racist, a hatemonger and all sorts of other crass terms used against people who refuse to behave. Her most acidic pieces that criticized Islam earned her death threats and even a frivilous lawsuit in her home country. And yet she never stopped and never backed down no matter what. We lost a voice of reason. Hopefully there will be others that take her place.

Chicago Boyz: Ms. Fallaci was an Atheist who valued the cultural heritage of the West, and correctly saw that it was in grave danger from Islamic violence and terrorism. She met with Pope Benedict XVI, to discuss these matters not long before her death. The Pope is willing to say things Muslims don't like, without apologizing for it, either. Good.

Freedom Fan - LGC: As the great Oriana Fallaci passes into the next life, lovers of freedom throughout the world mourn, but we find hope and courage for the future. Eventually the timorous and rudderless flawed souls among us will grasp the wisdom and humanity of the noble giant named Oriana Fallaci.

Tomsdich: In Praise of Oriana Fallaci - She died yesterday in Florence. Before I became a fan of hers, for her fiery anti-Islam book "The Rage and the Pride" (2002) Charlie had admired her for her novel , "A Man," about her lover who was (probably) assassinated by Greek rightwingers in 1976. She has been virtually the only high-profile writer to say what everyone thinks about the Islamis but is too chickenshit to say.

Boker tov, Boulder: Oriana Fallaci has died. I mourn the loss of one of my greatest heroes and a brutally honest, clear and courageous voice for freedom. May G-d bless and keep her holy soul. When the going got tough, she stood with Israel, she stood with the Jews. She was a fighter. I will always be deeply grateful to her, and I will miss her terribly... "... in my country house, in Tuscany, there is a tiny little chapel. It's always closed. No one goes there since my mother died. But I go there sometimes, to dust, to make sure the mice haven't made a nest, and despite my secular upbringing I feel comfortable there. Despite my priest–hating tendencies, I move there with casual ease...." from The Rage and The Pride of Oriana Fallaci, zt"l (the memory of the righteous)

In the final chapter of The Force of Reason, Oriana calls us to hope and to renewed faith by bearing courageous witness in words that reflect, even if unknowingly, a Christian typology. She says there:
"I think: we cannot lose. We cannot lose because Islam is a pond. And a pond is a cavity full of stagnant water. Water that never moves, never runs, never purifies itself, never becomes clean. The pond does not love Life...The West, instead, is a river. And rivers are courses of living water. Water that runs, that flows, and in flowing it purifies itself (and) renews itself."

Oriana Fallaci - Citizen of the World

2006-09-17T16:43:00.000-04:00

Oriana Fallaci looses her battle with breast cancer September 15, 2006

We suffer the sad loss of an icon today in the passing of Oriana Fallaci in her native Florence. This passionate and powerful voice of the 20th Century was forever bold and brazen in her dissection of politics, power and ego, and their devastating effects on democracies everywhere. She wrote with an integrity and force of character that defined her life's work up until the very last days. Fallaci was perhaps my greatest inspiration as a journalist. Her dynamic, dramatic and distinct point of view on the demise of democracies, especially in her latest works that evoked death threats against her, did nothing to silence her conviction or her writings. She died as she lived -- with passion, conviction, purpose and power. They don't make writers like her anymore.
-Giselle Fernandez, journalist and filmmaker

Citizen of the World - Prophet of Decline
WSJ, June 23, 2005

NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

...The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! ... Europe needs a Cavour."

Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent." She professes to "cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow."

..."You cannot survive if you do not know the past. We know why all the other civilizations have collapsed--from an excess of welfare, of richness, and from lack of morality, of spirituality." ...

"The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." ...

"I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI ]." ... "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

Ms. Fallaci, who made her name by interviewing numerous statesmen (and not a few tyrants), believes that ours is "an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century." Of George Bush, she will concede only that he has "vigor," and that he is "obstinate" (in her book a compliment) and "gutsy. . . . Nobody obliged him to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did." ...

John Paul II--"Wojtyla"--was a "warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America," but she will not forgive him for his "weakness toward the Islamic world... The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself," from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me:

"The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure."
TUNKU VARADARAJAN, WSJ

As the great Oriana Fallaci passes into the next life, lovers of freedom throughout the world mourn, but we find hope and courage for the future.

Eventually the timorous and rudderless flawed souls among us will grasp the wisdom and humanity of the noble giant named Oriana Fallaci.

Islam: Pope Sparks Controversy With Jihad Remarks

2006-09-16T12:23:00.000-04:00

[Pope] Benedict, in a speech in his native Germany, quoted a medieval Christian emperor who said Islam had only brought the world "evil and inhuman" things," such as "the command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Speaking on September 12 at Germany's Regensburg University, where he taught theology in the 1970s, the Bavarian-born pope chose to quote a written criticism of Islam by Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus. Manuel ruled the Orthodox Christian empire from what is now Istanbul in the 1300s.Benedict quoted a conversation that the emperor wrote about having with "an educated Persian."

The quote read: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."...Benedict then repeatedly quoted Manuel's argument that spreading the faith through violence is unreasonable, adding, "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

Wow, the Pope has balls! What a "ChristoFascist" as liberals would say. Of course, Muslim leaders were quick to go hysterical, because spreading the Islamic faith by violence is central to Islam. Violence is hardly "unreasonable" to a Muslim; it's called "Jihad", which is the duty of every Muslim.

It is also the Muslims' duty to speak taqiyya and deny that violence is their mission just before they kill you shouting "Allah Akbar!".

This was indeed a very important event. True, reform of radical Islam must come from within, but it is up to the West to keep pressure on Muslims until they are shamed by their silence as their Islamist buddies routinely murder in the name of "Allah".

Instead, look for goofy Muslims to start rioting and killing innocent people in protest of the Pope's message that faith should not be spread by violence. Just be glad that the Pope did not draw a silly cartoon of Muhammad.

Maybe a chat with Robert Novak...

2006-09-15T21:14:00.000-04:00

All day, whenever thinking about Maverick McCain, a certain thought kept dancing through my head, and when I perused Taranto's Best of the Web, I found it there very well articulated.

If the restrictions on interrogations that Powell and McCain
advocate result in another 9/11, then they will have sacrificed the lives of women and children in order to protect soldiers. Isn't it supposed to be the other way
around?

Yes, James, it is supposed to be the other way around. One can only hope that the House version of the bill prevails in the committee and that the President holds firm. We need to be able to use some more coercive methods to gleam information from these terrorists... we can't expect them to be as chatty as Richard Armitage (though that is an entirely different post)... or we will have to be willing to suffer the consequences.

Of course, I do not think that we should give carte blanche to our interrogators, because getting truly medieval is a bit too much to ask of them, but there are some effective methods of interrogation that mean making the guests at Club Gitmo a little uncomfortable. We do owe our interrogators a set of guidelines as to how far they can push the envelope while we protect them from being subject to prosecution our lawsuit themselves.

little green footballs - september 11, 2001

2006-09-11T14:36:00.000-04:00

dark day

I don't have words for what I feel.

Shock and incredible rage.

We are at war.

by charles at 08:04 AM PST

Four September Good-Byes

2006-09-10T19:15:00.000-04:00

I’ll take the subway from here, she said, or you’ll be late.
She leaned towards him quickly, beautiful in her sexless b-suit,
and they kissed quickly before she stepped out onto the curb.
See you, they said. She walked away from him,
past the brownstones where the men wait all day in limousines,
and disappeared forever into Manhattan’s impersonal shuffle.

His wife was still asleep when the carpool arrived.
His mother was up as usual, making breakfast for the kids.
She gave her son the little lunch she had made for him,
feeling guilty as always that it was so plain and thrown-together.
She lifted the kids onto the window seat so they could wave good-bye.
If she said good-bye herself, she could never remember afterwards.

Last night she told him that she was unhappy, with no love in her voice.
She still smelled drunk. He touched her bare shoulder and kissed it.
In the dark hallway he put one hand on the kids’ door for a moment.
He could picture them through the door, asleep in the rubble of childhood.
He wanted to stay home, but what had she said? Time to grow up.
So he grabbed his gear and went to the station, feeling strangely charged.

She woke as she always did: early, alone, and still tired.
The emptiness and sameness of her apartment felt unbearable that morning,
so she cleaned off some of the crust of age and left for work early.
She passed through Harlem on the way, and she remembered seeing it
last Easter, when people were walking to church, the little girls in Easter bonnets.
She smiled at the memory. Without knowing it, she said her last good-bye.

Remembering Samira Bellil

2006-09-07T14:23:00.000-04:00

Samira Bellil honored as one of 12 Mariannes representing the face of France - Wikipedia

You never really die, if your memory's still alive."

Samira Bellil died on September 3, 2004, at the young age of 31, from stomach cancer.

You may not have heard of her, so I will tell you about her life.

She was a beautiful woman who didn't deserve what befell her. You wonder why fate hands down such brutal judgements against some and spares others.

Samira, a blue-eyed Algerian girl, was born on November 27 1972 in Algiers, and moved to Seine-Saint-Denis, an immigrant enclave outside of Paris, France with her parents.

Her home life appeared troubled from early on, as her father was arrested and jailed for what Samira called, "stupidities". She was sent off during this period to a foster home in Belgium, a peaceful and happy place for her, a time of contentment away from home.

She returned unhappily to her family after five years, summoned back to her parents "like a parcel" she said, and found her freed father, distant and violent.

You have to imagine what her home life was like for Samira. She lived in the Projects, the French version of the Ghetto, or HLMs.

These enclaves or Quartiers were originally set up by the French, to provide cheap housing for North African and Turkish Muslims, and other poor immigrants who provided unskilled labor, doing the jobs, like collecting the trash, that the French abhored.

But over the years, the Quartiers degenerated in to prison blocks, high rise bastions of unemployment, non-assimilation, and despair, intermixed with strict Islamic customs. Women and girls bore the brunt of these hostile conditions, inhabiting a no-man's land of crime, rape, and hopelessness.

In this environment, the "Message" was given to all Muslim females like Samara. As Rebecca Hillauer tells us in Sight and Sound, the "Message" was: take on traditional female roles, dress chastely, don't go out and most importantly, remain a virgin until you marry.

It was during her teenage years, that Samira started rebelling against the "message", going out, meeting boys, standing up against the tight societal structures of her Muslim background and the Quartier. They were acts of defiance on Samara's part, and acts of courage, because girls that went against the norm suffered dire consequences.

One such dire consequence happened to 18 year old Sohane Benziane of Vitry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris. As Rebecca Hillauer tells us, on October 4, 2002, Benziane,

the daughter of Kabyle immigrants, was burned alive. The perpetrators were two men her age of North African descent. They lured the girl, who refused to submit to the "norms of the neighbourhood", into a cellar. While one kept watch outside, the other poured gas over Sohane and set her on fire with a lighter.

Sohane died.

Samira, I think, probably wished she too would have died, than face what happened to her.

She was raped.

Repeatedly.

As Samira sorrowfully noted in an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes: "I was gang raped by three people I knew, and I couldn't say anything, because in my culture, your family is dishonored if you lose your virginity," says Bellil. "So I kept quiet, and the rapes continued. The next time, I was pulled off a commuter train and no one lifted a finger to help me. Everybody turned their head away. They were all looking out the window."

Rose George writing in The Guardian, has an even more graphic description of what happened to Samira: Samira was first gang-raped when she was 14, when her boyfriend handed her over to three of his friends. They beat her viciously, raped her all night, and then made her breakfast. A month later, the most violent rapist, K, dragged her off a train by her hair, while other passengers looked the other way, and she was gang-raped again.

In all, Samira bore the agony of three gang rapes, or what the French call "tournates," or pass-rounds, because the girl was passed around like a joint.

Raped by multiple youths and men. And not uncommon.

As Samira said in a CNN Interview, There was a trial in Lille where a 13- year-old girl was gang raped by 80 men. Yes. Sometimes it's 80 or 50 or 10. It's absolutely terrible.

Samira further told CBS' 60 Minutes about a case in Argenteuil, "In the case of Argenteuil, it was horrible. A young woman was raped in a school. Of course, everybody knew, but they're so afraid of these young men that they prefer to close their eyes. That's the price of peace in the ghettos."

After the rapes, most of the victims remained silent. Silenced by custom. Silenced by their faith. Silenced by fear. Silenced by their families.

There was and is a real fear for the victims of these rapes to report such horrible deeds. The danger of reprisals in the Quartier is great. Apartments have been burned down, family members threatened with further rapes, the victim killed. Those are the physical effects. The mental anguish these girls faced, came from reporting a rape and bringing shame and humiliation to themselves and their custom-laden Muslim families, with the victim being cast out, tossed aside by their humiliated families and sentenced to a life of degredation on the streets.

These same fears plagued Samira and she too remained silent.

Until she found out, in talking with two of her friends, that one of her attackers K had raped them too.

Samira had had enough. She was furious.

She filed charges against K, who was found guilty, and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Results were predictable.

Her Muslim family threw Samira out on the streets - her neighborhood, the Quartier rejected her.

Foster homes followed for Samira, squatting in abandoned buildings, life on the streets, hopelessness, self-loathing, years of drug abuse.

Time passed, and Samira found a sympathetic psychologist, a kind person to confide in, who helped her, as she underwent years of therapy to restore her spirit and self-worth.

She made a decision to write a book about her experiences, to show other young women that there was a way out. In 2002 her courageous book, Dans l'enfer des tournantes or In the hell of the tournantes (gang-rapes) was published. It was an autobiographical look at the horrors and degradations that she and other women encountered in the French ghetto and how she survived them. As she said in the book's dedication, to her fellow sisters in trouble, about coping with and surviving such horrific experiences, "It's long and it's difficult, but it's possible..." She also bravely used her real name in the publication of the book and a picture of herself on the cover, despite the fact that she was once again living in the same Quartier as her attacker, K.

It was in the same year of 2002, that Samira rallied for her fellow sisters in trouble after becoming infuriated upon learning of the torturous death of Sohane Benziane, who as mentioned earlier, was doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned alive by a gang leader. Said Samira to CNN, Before, they would rape us. Now, they're burning us alive. Sohane can't speak anymore, so I'm going do the talking.

And talking she did, as Samira became a patron of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, which in English translates to, We're neither whores nor doormats, a movement that sprang out of the ghettos, made up of mostly immigrant women who fought back against, the gang rapes and violence that plague their neighborhoods. In her role with Ni Putes Ni Soumises, Samira led demonstrations and marches across France, speaking out against the violence and rapes, and lobbied to, set up shelters to help protect the women at risk.

However, it was a heavy toll for Samara. As she told Rose George, "I can't carry all that violence forever".

Still, she seemed to have finally turned a corner with her life. She was close once again with her two sisters and reconciled with her mother. She had moved back to her Quartier, working there as a youth worker and doing drama, which she loved...and she even decided that not all men are bastards, as she put it...and she wanted to fall in love.

And then she was struck down with stomach cancer.

She died two years ago, this month.

We wish her the peace, she was denied in life.

Postscript: To honor her courage, the French government chose Samira, as one of the new Mariannes, the new faces of France.... In 2005, to honor her memory, France named a school in l'Île-Saint-Denis after her, the Ecole Samira Bellil.

Sources

Samira Bellil - Wikipedia

The Guardian - Obituary - Samira Bellil: Courageous writer who forced France to confront the outrage of gang rape

CBS News, 60 Minutes: The New French Revolution - Population Of France Is Almost 10 Percent Muslim

Sign And Sight: Neither whores nor submissive

CNN: Insight - Muslim Women Rebel In France

Washington Post: Samira Bellil, French Author and Rights Activist, Dies

Edited out on LGF

2006-08-30T14:37:00.000-04:00

Several days back, in response to this post, http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22156&only
I posted a comment (#120) which so pissed off Charles Johnson that he deleted it (his blog, his rules).
I do try to stand by my public statements, so here is the comment, IIRC.........Edited out on LGF

A Blast From The Past

2006-08-25T01:35:00.000-04:00

(Click on logo above to view Flash animation)

This Flash animation was created using Photoshop to overlay successive frames of the 1996 Reuters Television video filmed by Reuters reporter Najla Abu Jahjah purporting to show a Lebanese ambulance being struck by a missile from an Israeli helicopter gunship after it passes through the UNIFIL Amriyya checkpoint near the village of Hinniyeh in southern Lebanon on April 13, 1996. Each frame was extracted from the CNN Quicktime movie using MPEG Streamclip, and placed in its own layer in Photoshop, with images aligned using the Difference layer mode. They were nudged into alignment, and then animated in Adobe ImageReady. As shown, the position of the ambulance at the time of the explosion is mapped to a position considerably above the road level in the subsequent scene, indicating that editing has occurred between the time we last see the ambulance, and the explosion.

(As shown, the yellow tower, the guard shelter, and the red car depicted in the scene just prior to the explosion are much closer to the camera than the smoke from the explosion. The ambulance car in the prior scene was located between the red car and the yellow tower, and now a white car and some black and white barrels block the road. Click on the image at right for additional Flash animation demonstrating this. This frame from the CNN web video has been enlarged 250%, and the color saturation boosted +70 using Photoshop. For some reason, the color in CNN's video is quite desaturated, despite it having been a sunny day.)

The CNN video (and a substantially similar video aired by Hizballah's Al Manar TV apparently also derived from the Reuters Television footage) purports to show the explosion hitting the ambulance, but it undoubtedly took at least a few minutes for the black and white barrels and the white car we see in the subsequent scene to be positioned across the road in the spot that we've just seen the ambulance car drive through.

The CNN narration concerning the explosion says:

"In the confusion and panic of the civilian rush to escape the Israeli onslaught, an ambulance weaves its way through the chaos... his vehicle filled with passengers. In the blink of an eye, it vanishes in a cloud of dense smoke ...targeted by an Israeli helicopter gunship."

THE WHITE CAR

The explosion, we are lead to believe, has just occurred, and the men running from the white car are presumably fleeing in fear from the Israeli assault, yet where was their car in the previous scene? And how did it get from there to where it is now in the presumably mere seconds that it took the ambulance car to drive the short distance down the road to where it was presumably struck, and where the smoke now is?

Even if the white car was where we see it parked now, and either just out of frame or hidden by the red car in the earlier scene, the last place we see the ambulance car before the explosion is between the red car and the yellow tower, and the smoke from the explosion in this next scene is farther down the road. Even accounting for the effects of a zoom lens, which makes the red car and the yellow tower appear to be in the same depth of field with the ambulance car, the smoke is unmistakably in a different place.

Immediately following the explosion, two guys in the white car jump out and run to the left --and close the car doors behind them? As the camera zooms out for a wider shot, we see another figure to the right of the white car running between the white car and the yellow tower in the direction of the camera. He, too, it appears, has bailed out of the white car and shut his door behind him. At the end of this shot, someone (it looks like a woman in a dark pantsuit) who's been standing next to the red car opens that car's door to get in.

FAMILY RUNNING

In the next scene, we see the family running towards the camera from down the road. As they approach, there are several things to notice. One, the smoke from the previous scene is completely dispelled, again showing that a significant number of minutes have been edited out. The white car that was parked near the tank trap and the black and white barrels is gone, again indicating that some time has elapsed.

In the background of this shot, particularly in the higher resolution still frame shown below (obtained from a jihadi site called jeeran.com), there appear to be two potholes or craters in the road that are in the approximate location where the smoke was seen originating from in the previous scene. And indeed in the previous scene, there appear what looks like two distinct plumes of smoke originating on the road. The craters in the road appear roughly in line with the overturned barrel in the foreground that is leaning against a post. We can see that this is the same post in the later scene because there is yet a third version of the Reuters Television video on the Web, which appears to contain much uncut footage, and which is downloadable in Real Video format from a jihadi site called salaheddine.net (Saladin) here.

Click on image at right to view a Flash animation demonstrating these points.

I will be examining the Saladin version of the video in greater detail later, as it shows scenes not present in the CNN or Al Manar footage. On the Saladin site's homepage, this video is featured in a sidebar titled "CAUGHT ON TAPE Israeli Terrorism on Tape CHECK IT OUT".

TWO MISSILES?

Not many of the news accounts, not even the contemporaneous written account by Najla Abu Jahjah of Reuters, claim that there were two missiles fired in this incident, but in a July 1998 interview with Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive magazine, British journalist Robert Fisk elaborated on the story of what has come to be known as the "Mansouri massacre":

Q: You also have done a lot of reporting on an Israeli attack on a Lebanese ambulance full of people. What was that story?

Fisk: It was the thirteenth of April, 1996. Abbas Jiha was a farmer and a volunteer ambulance driver for the village of Mansouri in southern Lebanon. On this day, he'd taken two trips to Sidon--first with a wounded man, then with a wounded baby. When Abbas returned to Mansouri, there was panic, shells were failing all around. People were saying, "Take us to Sidon, take us to Sidon." He put four of his children in the vehicle, he put another family in, and another guy, a window cleaner--in all there were fourteen people in the ambulance. He'd gotten up to the U.N. Post 123 on the main coast road. He was one-third of the way to safety in Sidon. So he goes through the checkpoint, and Reuters photographer Najla Abujahjah is standing there and sees the car go through and sees two helicopters. One of them comes down and starts chasing the car up the road. When helicopters start flying at vehicles, you know you're in trouble. They're coming up behind to fire a missile into the back of the vehicle. That's the way they do it.

Q: There'd be no denying that the helicopter wanted to hit this ambulance?

Fisk: Oh, absolutely not. They intended to hit it, they absolutely did. They fired two missiles. One didn't explode, the other did. It exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it twenty meters through the air. Abbas Jiha stood in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking, "God is Great." He held up his fists to the sky and cried out, "My God, my God, my family has gone." He saw his two-month-old baby, Mariam, lying outside the ambulance, her body riddled with holes and her head full of metal. His five-year-old, Hanin, "was cut through with holes like a mosquito net," he told me. The Reuters photographer saw her collapse on the broken window frame, her blood running in streams down the outside of the vehicle. Abbas Jiha also lost his nine-year-old daughter, Zeinab, and his wife, Mona. "She was so terribly wounded, I couldn't recognize her face," he told me. Two other passengers died, a sixty-year-old woman and her eleven-year-old niece.

William Rivers Pitt of Truthout.org retold the story this way in a September 2004 web posting:

On April 13, an ambulance driver named Abbas Jiha was rushing patients to a hospital in Sidon. Civilians caught in the crossfire of 'Grapes of Wrath' begged him to take them to Sidon, and so he squeezed his wife, his four children and ten others into his ambulance. An Israeli helicopter targeted his ambulance and fired two missiles. The ambulance was blasted sixty feet into the air, and Jiha was thrown clear. When he made it back to the remains of his rig, he found his nine year old daughter, his wife, and four others dead within the flaming wreckage.

In her contemporaneous report on April 13, 1996, headlined "Six killed as Israeli rocket hits ambulance," reporter Najla Abu Jahjah, who filmed the incident for Reuters Television, described the scene she saw:

An Israeli helicopter rocketed an ambulance packed with refugees fleeing south Lebanon on Saturday, killing two women and four young girls.

The helicopter blasted the white Volvo stationwagon carrying people fleeing Israel's bombardment of the south in full view of Fijian troops of the U.N.'s UNIFIL peacekeeping force at this checkpoint in south Lebanon.

I saw the ambulance engulfed in a huge ball of fire about 20 metres (yards) from where I stood with a group of journalists at the checkpoint, followed by a powerful blast.

The rocket exploded beside the car, hurling it 20 metres off the road, through a garden and into the front room of a house, destroying the room in an avalanche of falling stone and rubble.

Another report, also dated April 13, 1996 and headlined "Israeli rocket kills four children in ambulance," filed by Reuters reporter Andrew Tarnowski from Beirut gives a slightly different account, paraphrasing Jahjah:

"Four children were killed and six were wounded when an Israeli helicopter rocketed the ambulance they were travelling in to flee Israel's blitz of southern Lebanon on Saturday, witnesses said. Reuters reporter Najla Abu Jahjah, who witnessed the attack, saw the blood-covered bodies of four dead children being pulled out by rescuers from the ambulance which received a direct hit. She saw at least six wounded children. The attack took place near the village of Hinniyeh, eight km (five miles) south of the port of Tyre."

In addition to showing us the apparent craters in the road, the higher-resolution photos at the jeeran.com website allow us to identify the individuals running towards the camera in the "family running" scene. Based upon press accounts, we see self-described farmer and part-time ambulance driver Abbas Jiha (or Jihah, also called Abbas Mdeihli in one AP report by Doug Struck of the Baltimore Sun on April 14, and, inexplicably, called Khoder Ghazal, in a UPI report on April 13 that conflicts with most later written accounts and the Reuters Television video, see below), who is shown carrying both the body of his two-month old daughter Mariam (or Miriam), and his surviving son Mahdi (or Medhi), age 6. The other man shown running is either Abbas Jiha's cousin, Ali Ammar (or Amar), also reportedly a farmer, or, as identified in this report by the Hariri Foundation [PDF download], Mohamad Hisham, a window repairman. The girl running, unnamed despite being prominently featured in news reports, is probably 13-year-old Manar Fadi al-Khalid, based upon information in the Hariri report.

Click on the image at right for Flash animation identifying the family.

In her April 13 account, Reuters camerawoman Najla Abu Jahjah describes the scene:

We were taking pictures of villagers fleeing the village of Mansouri. They were among some 250,000 people forced to flee south Lebanon by Israel's three-day blitz of south Lebanon villages.

As the ambulance drove past the checkpoint, packed with refugees, an Israeli helicopter appeared in the sky. When it headed towards the checkpoint, journalists hid behind the checkpoint wall with the Fijian U.N. troops.

After the blast we looked for the ambulance but could not see it so we thought it had driven on. But moments later a man ran up, blood drenching his face and carrying a child in his arms.

He was followed by another man whose face was also covered in blood. Then we saw the ambulance thrown into the house beside the road.

HINTS OF HIZBOLLYWOOD?

Do these men look wounded to you? Does anyone here look like they've just been in a serious automobile accident, much less escaped from the burning wreckage of an ambulance targeted by two (or even one) Israeli missiles?

Abbas Jiha has wounds or blood on his face in later scenes, but when he first appears, running up the road, the blood on his face is absent. Jiha may have blood on his face in the later scene as a result of embracing the bloody body he's carrying, but Jahjah's written account also says "blood poured from the men's faces". Where? Neither of the men look wounded.

On April 14, Doug Struck of the Baltimore Sun, reported for the Associated Press:

Earlier in the day, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired on an ambulance near the southern Lebanon city of Tyre, killing six civilians, including at least three children...

"It all happened in a second," said the ambulance driver, Abbas Mdeihli, who was treated for shoulder wounds. "I heard a wooshing sound. I was sucked out of the vehicle."

Abbas Mdehli, presumably the same individual as Abbas Jiha, is said to have been treated for shoulder wounds, yet there's no blood on his shirt in the later scene, and he seems to have no difficulty carrying bodies around, indeed he carried both his young son, and infant daughter for some considerable distance down the road. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are certainly capable of extraordinarily feats of strength under stress, but one would expect that if he were wounded in the shoulder, there would at least be some blood.

Abbas Mdehli is at least a close name to Abbas Jiha, but an early UPI report on April 13 by Mohammed Darweesh, headlined "Lebanese ambulance driver tells horror" gives the ambulance driver's name as Khoder Ghazal, says he was interviewed not at the scene, but at a hospital in Tyre, and makes no mention of his being related any of those who were killed! This story also identifies the UNIFIL soldiers as Nepalese, rather than Fijian, and Ghazal claims they stood by and did nothing to help.

"Ambulance driver Khoder Ghazal thought he was doing a good turn by transporting villagers fleeing Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon. He never believed that Israeli helicopters would not even spare his ambulance. Ghazal, 35, was evacuating nine people from Mansouri, a village east of the southern port of Tyre, when an Israeli attack helicopter fired a missile at his vehicle. Ghazal, who was unharmed but shocked, said at a Tyre hospital that he only had time to dive out of the ambulance. His passengers were not so lucky. Six of them were killed and three were wounded. Among the dead were three sisters, aged 3, 5 to 10 years old. Since Israel began its offensive Thursday, it has repeatedly said its forces are trying to limit attacks to the Iran-backed Hezbollah guerrillas. But nearly all casualties have been inflicted on civilians, mainly women and children, Lebanese security sources said. Ghazal said the ambulance attack occurred near a post manned by Nepalese soldiers with the U.N. peacekeeping force. ''They did nothing,'' he said of the peacekeepers. ''There were at least two other people bleeding on the road and other dead people, but nobody sent an ambulance to rescue them.''"

The Saladin video shows UNIFIL soldiers helping to retrieve the bodies, and UN vehicles dispatched to the scene (not to mention the man identified in press reports as Abbas Jiha the ambulance driver and bereaved father helping alongside the UN troops to move the bodies), so one suspects at the very least whether Ghazal was at the scene at all. One wonders as well whether the hospital in Tyre where Ghazal was interviewed is the same one where, ten years later, a mysterious man named Abu Shadi would be showing off bodies to the press from his refrigerated truck...

What's more, on April 15th, Doug Struck of the Baltimore Sun filed a report from Samariye, Lebanon, headlined "Lebanese flee Israeli bombardment; 400,000 rush to Beirut on fourth day of assault," that includes this curious passage:

The Israeli effort seemed intended to minimize the public relations damage when a civilian-filled ambulance was hit by an Israeli missile Saturday. Graphic film broadcast internationally showed three dying children and three dead mothers, but Israel's unsupported claim was that the ambulance contained a Hezbollah guerrilla.

"Where is the Hezbollah in these children?" asked Dr. Jawad Najem, at a small hospital south of Tyre, as he pulled open the doors of the morgue where five of the victims lay yesterday. The bodies of the tiny children were entwined on one drawer shelf. No relatives remained uninjured to bury them.

Well, how about their father, ambulance-driving farmer Abbas Jiha, or Abbas Mdehli (or possibly even Khoder Ghazal) who was videotaped uninjured and carrying the bodies around only two days earlier, and whom you interviewed only yesterday, Mr. Struck?

THE HANDOFF

As seen in the apparently unedited Saladin video, why does Abbas Jiha stop running when he gets to the roadblock while the other man and the girl continue on ahead? Is it just because Jiha is at last tired from carrying both the infant and his son all the way down the road? Or is it because he's reached his "mark" for the next scene, in which he hands the infant off to the men in the white car and they proceed back down the road in the direction the family has just come? The infant, Mariam Jiha, has no bleeding that is visible even in the enlarged higher-resolution images from jeeran.com. Note also that, as shown in both the al-Manar and Saladin videos, baby Mariam inexplicably has the top of her coat pulled up over her face! From the way the baby's head is lolling, one might surmise that her neck is broken, but if it is, Abbas Jiha shows litle concern for cradling the baby in such a way as to protect her from further injury. Perhaps the baby is already dead and Abbas Jiha has covered her face for that reason, but if so, why the apparent rush to get her in the white car and presumably to a hospital?

See the Flash animation: Is this the way to treat a wounded baby?

Also, note that the white car that appears from nowhere in this handoff scene from the Saladin video is apparently the same one that was shown earlier with the men bailing out of it (see comparison at right). While they took care to close their cars doors behind them as they fled for their lives, they seem to have forgotten to close them completely this time, as the doors of the white car are already partially open when the car appears from out of frame on the right. If this is the same car as in the earlier scene, the car's appearance here at least explains its disappearance in the "family running" scene, and possibly the shutting of the car doors as well, as it apparently had to be turned around so that it could head back down the road.

And what of Abbas Jiha's son Mahdi, whom Jiha has carried for some reason down the road? A photo (from http://free.prohosting.com/poluld/Libanon.htm) shows what could be blood on Mahdi's leg. Apparently, Mahdi couldn't walk the distance. But like his namesake, the hidden 12th imam of Shia Islam, Mahdi vanishes before our eyes in this handoff scene, never to be seen again.

THE ISRAELI VERSION

Israeli military sources at the time said the vehicle was carrying a Hizballah terrorist. Chief of the Israeli Army's Northern Command, Major-General Amiram Levine, was quoted by Colleen Siegel of Reuters, in a report filed April 13 from the Israel-Lebanon border:

"The vehicle was sighted by the Israeli army and the terrorist was killed. According to reports by the other side there are children who were killed too. If children were killed I regret that but repeat and stress they were in an area from which the Hizbollah fires Katyushas and they were warned not to be there. We will continue hitting anyone who goes around in the places from which Hizbollah fires."

Colleen Siegel's story also contains this description of the video:

Reuters Television footage of the incident showed first a car clearly marked as an ambulance, then the vehicle engulfed in smoke, and finally the car wrecked and full of dead and dying women and children. The front seats were empty.

(More analysis forthcoming...)

Faux Johnson ?

2006-08-20T18:06:00.000-04:00

After seeing the lovely "Saturday Night Spheres" photograph/open thread post from Charles last night, I got a little suspicious, so as is my nature I dug a little deeper. Finding my way into the private LGF image bank I made a chilling discovery. Here is a animated gif I made to illustrate what I found:

Summer's End

2006-08-18T12:01:00.000-04:00

Well, today it's Friday, and it's the last day of summer for me--ignore the calendar that says that technically summer ends next month. Pre-service begins next week, and school begins on August 28. That sounds like the end to me!

This year I am, as I did last year, teaching all 9th grade general science, with one of the sections being special ed. It's a class I have taught so many times I can do it in my sleep--and I think last year when I was ailing I probably did teach it in my sleep. It is not the most interesting class for 9th graders, but they'll be tested on it at the end of the year, so we have to teach it.

So I have been going into my classroom since the end of summer school, getting ready to get ready for the first day of school. My colleagues who are teaching the same class want to totally revamp the curriculum, supposedly tieing it more closely to the standards and hopefully making it more 'fun'. We had a meeting about it in May, and they are full of great ideas. We were supposed to meet from time to time over summer break to plan. We never did.

So I don't know what I am supposed to be doing in my classroom on the 28th. If I have my druthers, I'd just keep teaching what I have been teaching, as it has always worked fairly well for me. But I know that during the first couple of weeks of school I am going to have to sit down with the principal and tell him what my goals for the year are...I thnk this year's 'theme' is literacy (we have a new one every year). I always want to tell him that I just want to continue to be the great teacher I am, but that never flies--he always wants some kind of pseudo-humility, and I'm not good at that. Real humility I can handle, but that pretend stuff is garbage as far as I am concerned.

So I am asking you. If you have children in high school, or if you can imagine you have children in high school, what would you want their teachers' goals to be for the year? Put your thoughts in comments and maybe I can use some of 'em to wow my principal.

Extra credit for suggestions that include literacy. :)

The Art Of Human Spirit

2006-08-16T16:25:00.000-04:00

He lost his arms in Iraq, now he paints with his heart and wants to help others...

Injured soldier Peter Damon works on one of his pastel paintings... Photo courtesy of Brockton Enterprise

Peter Damon, a former Sergeant in the National Guard, had a less than pleasant experience while serving in Iraq. While working on a Blackhawk Helicopter in 2003, the former electrician lost both his arms, and saw his military buddy from Alabama, Paul Bueche killed, after a tire on the helicopter exploded.

The explosion created a world of hurt for Damon, necessitating his removal from Iraq and a lengthy rehabilitation at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Maryland, where he was fitted with a prothesis on his left arm and the process of healing mind and body began for him.

Peter was having a difficult time while recuperating at Walter Reed, coping with the loss of his arms and the limitations he suddenly faced. As he told Alice C. Elwell of the Brockton Enterprise, I was bummed out, I couldn't do anything I liked to do...

Even in the most trying of circumstances, the ingenuity endowed with the human spirit, the drive to overcome can shine through, and Peter found himself with an inspiration, One day I practiced writing... I thought, If I can write, why can't I draw?

And draw he did, though his first efforts were shaky. Peter had to relearn to draw and eventually paint with his prosthesis, a slow going process, but progress was made and he produced his first picture, a pencil drawing of a stuffed bear.

Peter Damon's "County Crossing" depicts a railroad crossing in Middleboro's Rock Village - Photo courtesy of Brockton Enterprise

His wife Jenn almost cried when she saw the drawing, and it became one of her most precious possessions. For her, it symbolized that her husband was getting better. As she said in a recent interview, He doesn't want to be known as the guy with no arms...

After his rehabilitation was completed at Walter Reed, Peter and Jen, and their two children Allura and Danny moved from their native Brockton to a house in South Middleboro, Massachusetts, which was given to them by Homes for our Troops, a group that provides houses for injured Iraq war veterans.

The Damons also benefitted from his government pension, an insurance policy he took out before the war and cashed in, and legislation approved by Congress that provided a lump sum payment to service people injured in Iraq or Afghanistan.

With his family and finances secure, there was no need for Peter Damon to work another day in his life. Still at age 33, he was restless. As his wife Jen asks, Where's the satisfaction in sitting back and watching the world go by? As Peter notes, I didn't have to go back to work, but I wanted to...I couldn't see sitting around, but I knew I had to work for myself. Certain times of the day I have to sit. I get tired easy, and that would make it hard working for someone else.

Clearly hungry for something more in life, and with a burgeoning interest in drawing and painting, old Architecture, and his wife's background in retail business, Peter and his family purchased the former Prescription Pharmacy on Center Street in Middleboro, a historic building originially constructed in 1880, with the goal of transforming it in to an art gallery by the Fall of 2006.

As Peter told the Middleboro Gazette, We want to create an outlet for area artists to display and sell their work...We hope to get a lot of up and comers here, people who weren't sure they were good enough to offer their work for sale or exhibit...

And there is the added pride for Peter, whose artistic muse is Ray Ellis, a painter from Martha's Vineyard, of owning his own gallery, allowing him to showcase his own works,There's a huge sense of 'Now I can still do something.' A sense of worth and the extra drive to get better...

Photo of Peter Damon & Family in front of
Middleborough Art Gallery building - Appears courtesy of Jane Lopes, Middleboro Gazette

Anyone interested in submitting artwork for an exhibition at the gallery can visit the Middleborough Art Gallery website here or email Peter Damon at: contactus@themiddleboroughartgallery.com for more information.

Sources:

Boston Herald: Artistic touch keeps disabled vet inspired

Brockton (MA) Enterprise: Injured National Guardsman plans to open art gallery By Alice C. Elwell, Enterprise correspondent

Middleboro (MA) Gazette, 8-3-2006: Art and Restoration: Town gets an art gallery, the Damons a new career by Jane Lopes

The Myth of Hisballah Charity

2006-08-15T19:51:00.000-04:00

The establishment media has a nice lazy spin on the biggest terrorist organization in the world: Charity Wins Deep Loyalty for Hezbollah. Reporters eagerly collect anecdotes about Hisballah’s gifts to the adoring Lebanese people. Olive oil, small business loans, rebuilt homes, medical treatment, and cash hand-outs. Hisballah’s penchant for terrorism, assassination, war-mongering, subversion, kidnapping, and anti-democratic fascism? Small price to pay, apparently.

What about the billions in Western aid to Lebanon, from both public and private sources, which dwarfs Hisballah’s expenditures by several orders of magnitude? All this is in vain, the old theory goes, because Western nations are only interested in imperialism and colonialism and Jews. Hisballah showers largesse on people because their hearts are just bursting with love.

The media spends little time wondering about where the money in Hisballah’s free-flowing coffers comes from. Whose stuff are they giving away? Charitable organizations have to get their money from earnings, donations, or taxes. The source of an organization’s funds is definitely relevant to their status as a charity. Mafia crews who generously spread their stolen loot all over the neighborhood are not considered charities, though they might be very popular with people who don’t get in their way.

Unlike most terrorist organizations, Hisballah has legitimate bank accounts. Like most criminal organizations, they also have legitimate investments and income from legal businesses. Like most terrorist and criminal organizations, though, one of their foremost sources of income is drugs. They own the brisk drug trade in Lebanon, much of which is supplied by poppy fields in the Beqaa Valley. Hisballah spies and operatives are often paid with opium or heroin. There is no love like the love of a heroin junkie for his connection, if you consider that sort of thing love.

The Lebanese traffic is probably only a small part of Hisballah’s drug earnings. The DEA has traced methamphetamine smuggling in the United States and Canada to Hisballah bank accounts. Methamphetamine abuse has reached such proportions that Native American health services are struggling with huge numbers of addicted newborns, and even larger numbers who are born with traces of crystal meth in their systems. Hisballah’s contribution is the supply of the pseudoephedrine ingredient, which is increasingly difficult to obtain legally.

That’s a pretty steep price to pay for an olive oil giveaway in Beirut.

Hisballah is also hip-deep in the extremely nasty illicit trade in diamonds and black-market gold. But like the Mafia, their biggest cash cow is probably ordinary theft. Hisballah has been connected to car theft rings in Canada and cigarette smuggling in the United States. Hisballah operatives in Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina have made millions from pirated intellectual property alone. Hijacking, insurance fraud, Nigeria scams, extortion, loan-sharking, money laundering, and burglary keep Hisballah’s cash register ringing. So does money from illegal immigrant smuggling rings, which are not operated by kind-hearted people.

Like other criminal organizations, Hisballah shears the sheep closest to home. Arabs and Muslims are high on the list of their victims. The Mafia got its start shaking down other Italians, while posing as a social service organization that supposedly protected its own kind. Critics were accused of ethnic prejudice. Hisballah’s “charity” is in that dismal vein.

Hisballah steals or soaks millions every year, often from the poorest and most wretched people on earth. (The meth-poisoned inhabitants of some Indian reservations might well envy the lifestyle of the average Lebanese, bombs and all.) They hand out a small fraction of it to dupe people into kissing Don Corleone’s ring. This is above and beyond their naked acts of terrorism and murder, which is their main occupation.

The difference between the Mafia and Hisballah is that the Mafia bribes politicians, authorities, and reporters to protect itself. Hisballah’s deluded fans are giving it away for free.

Collateral Damage: The Associated Press Defends "Green Helmet"

2006-08-15T01:05:00.000-04:00

The Associated Press (AP), and its foreign correspondent Kathy Gannon, are standing by their man, and more importantly to them, standing by Gannon's reporting from Qana, Lebanon, where last month, Lebanese "veteran civil defense worker" Salam Daher and his crew shamelessly exploited dead bodies for the press in the hours following an Israeli airstrike. Gannon and the AP are now on the defensive, with Gannon recently writing a profile of Daher, known to the blogosphere as "Green Helmet." Gannon's profile of Green Helmet was later adapted by the AP as a Flash slideshow with narration by AP reporter Lauren Froyer.

Both Gannon and AP have reason to be concerned by the possibility of collateral damage to their own reputations as a result of the intensive bombardment the legacy media reporting on the Israel-Hizballah war has recently been subjected to in the blogosphere.

As first reported on Little Green Footballs, the revelation that a Lebanese photographer, Adnan Hajj, working for AP's rival news agency, Reuters, had improperly (read ineptly) "enhanced" a couple of his photos with Adobe Photoshop software prompted Reuters to recall over 900 of the photographer's photos, and got Hajj his pinkslip. Reuters had little invested in Hajj, and so could cut him loose without much fuss, but the LGF lizards that helped bring down CBS's Dan Rather and his phony Texas National Guard memos have caught the scent of another, wider, scandal.

Much has been learned concerning the events at Qana since August 2nd when I first noted my suspicions on LGF, and now the role of Salam Daher, the green helmeted man at the center of the coverage, is becoming apparent. Yet AP continues to avoid answering the difficult questions about Kathy Gannon's reporting, and why she apparently chose to overlook Daher's behavior, in favor of reporting his message.

Once again, here are some questions unanswered (and avoided thus far) by AP:

1.) AP's Kathy Gannon, the same reporter whose recent profile of Salam Daher forms the basis for this Flash slideshow narrated by AP's Lauren Frayer, filed a contemporaneous report from Qana in which she reported quotes from someone Gannon described as a "veteran civil defense worker" from Tyre named "Abu Shadi Jradi," who, based upon what we know about Salam Daher, sounds very much like the same individual.

Is Green Helmet, now called Salam Daher, the same person as "Abu Shadi Jradi"?

(Identifying "Abu Shadi Jradi" as Green Helmet is important because...)

2.) Mark MacKinnon, correspondent in Lebanon for the Toronto Globe and Mail, filed a story from Tyre that was published online on July 26 (link requires registration) in which he quoted extensively from a man identified as "Abu Shadi" who was described as "a mortician at the government hospital in the city" of Tyre, who told MacKinnon that

[h]e's processed 100 bodies -- many of them grotesquely mangled and burned -- and on his pickup runs has been forced to leave behind many more that he can't recover from cars and destroyed buildings.

"It's much more [than the official count]," he says. "There are many trapped under the rubble. The death toll will reach 1,000."

Abu Shadi showed MacKinnon a refrigerated truck of decaying corpses described thus:

Mr. Shadi was standing in front of a refrigeration truck that was packed with 20 bodies, days after he helped bury 74 bodies in a mass grave. When he opened the door to show the black body bags haphazardly piled on top of each other, a staggering stench came out, despite the refrigeration.

Abu Shadi went on to make such inflammatory statements as this:

"The last two days have been the worst. Yesterday and the day before, the bodies that came in were completely burned. Charred. It was a shipment of burned bodies."

and this

Of the dead he's seen, Mr. Shadi says, "maybe 3 per cent" were men. The rest were women and children. "They're [the Israelis are] not targeting fighters."

Is MacKinnon's "Abu Shadi" the mortician from Tyre, the same individual AP's Kathy Gannon interviewed as a "veteran civil defense worker" named "Abu Shadi Jradi"?

3.) Qatar's Al Jazeera television aired an interview in Arabic with Green Helmet, whom they identified as "Abdel Qader". In that footage, Green Helmet's interview is interrupted when a stretcher carrying another corpse rounds the corner of a building at the bottom of the hill. Both Green Helmet and the al Jazeera correspondent jerk their heads around to look, and almost simultaneously, the al Jazeera cameraman does a "panic zoom" past them to get a closeup of the stretcher. Two press photographers are shown hovering around the stretcher as it's being carried uphill. The stretcher bearers then stop briefly, and set the stretcher down on the ground so the body can be more easily photographed, before resuming their climb. This footage established, among other things, that Green Helmet uses at least one other name in talking to the press, and that the scene in Qana was set for the benefit of the press getting pictures of the dead bodies.

Journalists who were on the scene that day, like AP's Kathy Gannon, had to know that corpses were being displayed and exploited for the benefit of the press, yet in her earlier article she only briefly alludes to this staging

The arm of a child slipped from beneath the dirty gray blanket that covered him. On the same stretcher, toes painted with bright red polish peeked out. A rescue worker lifted the blanket to show two shattered children who were curled up looking asleep except for the thick dried blood at their noses.

and in her profile of Salam Daher she tries to defend the practice:

To many in the West, such photographs are surprising; but they are not unusual in the Middle East, where grief and drama are often intertwined, and that can include displaying of bodies.

Bloggers have accused rescue workers and volunteers of showing off victims for the media. The Lebanese make no apologies for wanting the world to see the civilian suffering in the Israeli onslaught aimed at uprooting Hezbollah.

If posing with the corpses doesn't seem like a big deal to Gannon, and, as the longtime AP foreign correspondent writes, it's "not unusual in the Middle East," perhaps it's because Gannon's original story from Qana is unreservedly the message of Green Helmet himself, with passages like this from her lede paragraph

Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours _ two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck. Somewhere in the middle, Jradi slumped beneath a tree and wept.

"There are so many children, so many children," the veteran civil defense worker said Sunday, barely able to get out the words.

(More later about the blue pacifier that figured so poignantly in images from Qana and Gannon's report...)

and this

One body was wrapped in a child's bed sheet covered with Raggedy Ann and Andy figures.

and this

On Sunday, rescue workers dripped with sweat in the blistering heat as they pored through the wreckage, tossing out a baby carriage and moving hunks of concrete and brick.

and this

From his hospital bed in Tyre, Mohammed Ali Shalhoub said that from their graves, his wife and children "were all saying God bless Sheik Hassan Nasrallah," the Hezbollah leader.

In Qana, resident Mohammed Ismail waved at seven dead lined up on the ground, saying President Bush "laughs when they ask him about the dead bodies."

Gannon's article sounds like the message of MacKinnon's "Abu Shadi," doesn't it? "They're not targeting fighters," says Abu Shadi. Here, look at these bodies!

(This becomes even more clear and grotesque in view of the next question...)

4.) The German television network Nordeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) aired video of "veteran civil defense worker" Green Helmet directing the "rescue effort" at Qana in an even more literal sense. In the video, Green Helmet is shown instructing the cameras to keep rolling, and later the body of a boy is shown being removed from the ambulance that it had earlier been placed in and the head propped up so that the cameras can get a better look. Green Helmet is clearly interested in more than just getting the bodies out of the rubble, and his role is more than just as a "veteran civil defense worker." Like the stretcherbearers in the Al Jazeera video (who were presumably under his direction), Green Helmet has no problem exploiting the bodies of the dead for the benefit of an eager press. It's his job, and as the photos from 1996 show, he's been doing it for years.

5.) Disgraced Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj took one of the most poignant shots from Qana, that of the dust-caked body of an infant, held aloft for display to the press by none other than Salam "Green Helmet" Daher. This is the child Kathy Gannon described as "a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck." But the curious thing about that pacifier is, it was not dirty at all, despite being clipped to the dusty body. The reason? It was apparently added later, as earlier photos from the scene allegedly show. Nor were the clothes of the "rescue workers" including Salam "Green Helmet" Daher himself noticably dirty, despite their reportedly digging through the rubble for hours. This poor baby boy, reportedly named Abbas Hashem, whose body was exhibited for the media by Daher, is about the only person shown at Qana that looked to have any dirt on them at all. Kathy Gannon was there to see the pale blue pacifier on this child's body, but evidently missed the part where someone clipped it on him for added pathos. Gannon described the veteran civil defense worker from Tyre, "Abu Shadi Jradi," as having been digging in the rubble for hours, but if Abu Shadi Jradi was covered with dust from his excavation efforts, we certainly haven't seen it in the photographs from Qana.

6.) Suppose it didn't require hours of digging to uncover these corpses in Qana, then where did they come from? Did the mortician from Tyre, Abu Shadi, who Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon spoke to beside his refrigerated truck piled high with decaying bodies supply some or all of them? MacKinnon's interview with Tyre mortician Abu Shadi was published July 26th, a few days before Kathy Gannon's July 30th report filed from Qana, in which she talked with "veteran civil defense worker" from Tyre, Abu Shadi Jradi. One photojournalist in Lebanon, Bryan Denton, has even publicly alleged that bodies are being dug up for propaganda photos in some instances. We don't know yet whether Abu Shadi is Abu Shadi Jradi, or whether Abu Shadi Jradi is Salam Daher, who also goes by the name Abdel Qader when speaking to Al Jazeera reporters. We do know that AP's Kathy Gannon was on the scene, with an opportunity to report on the truth of Salam "Green Helmet" Daher's choreography of the news from Qana, but she evidently didn't notice, or didn't want to notice, anything out of the ordinary.

"What Are You Going To Do -- Shoot Me?"

2006-08-14T10:51:00.000-04:00

A 32 year old woman, Ashwak Saleh, sat on the curb in front of the White House this past Sunday, took out a 13-inch machete and began to sharpen it. Minutes before this, the President returned to the White house from his stay at his ranch in Crawford, TX. Passersby reported her to the Secret Service who did their job -- drew their firearm, pointed it at her and asked her repeatedly to drop the weapon. Her response... "What are you going to do -- shoot me?"

They did not shoot her, but did take her into custody when she wouldn't comply.

There are about 15 news hits on this story when you search Google. What I want to know is:

Who is this woman?
Why has no major new feed other than CNN picked up on it?
Is she Muslim? Why did no one bother to find out?
Is she Palestinian?
Is she a leftist, anti-American Bush-hater?
What delusional thought process made this woman think she could brandish a banned weapon in front of the White House and sharpen it without reprecussions? Especially after the recent terror busts in England?
Was she trying to get the Secret Service to shoot her? Why?

and
Why didn't anyone else think of these questions, or care enough to get the answers to them?

Personally, I believe there is more to this story than just some woman's defianant attitude. Guess our media doesn't really care. What a surprise.... NOT!

Voice from Israel part III

2006-08-13T14:03:00.000-04:00

Charles vs. Assorted Ankle-biters and Bed-wetters, Part 137

2006-08-08T23:55:00.000-04:00

This USA Today article is mostly okay, though any writer that contacts Glenn Greenwald for a comment is either blog-illiterate or a twisted Nazi freak who makes snuff films in his basement. Anyway, this sentence caught my jaundiced eye:

Critics, however, say he has an agenda of his own — one that's anti-Muslim, pro-Israel, and full of hate.

This is the sort of sentence that MSM drones pound out of their goofy-looking ergonomic keyboards every day, of course. "Pro-Israel" is ranked alongside "anti-Muslim" and "full of hate", as if these were comparable characteristics. Note that "critics" accuse Charles of being pro-Israel. Of course, so do his best friends. Anybody with the reading comprehension skills of a blind hamster knows that Charles is pro-Israel. Even a professor of journalism, after much excruciating effort, might manage to squeeze out this insight. He might have to call Glenn Greenwald for hints, but eventually he would discover this to be a brazen fact, not a shameful secret.

Sigh.

LGF in a "Quagmire' (again)

2006-08-07T13:25:00.000-04:00

Talk amongst yourselfs..
(fake but cat-urate)

(I have no idea who this kid is or who owns the site the picture appears on)

Our Friends from the north

2006-08-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

Did you ever wonder what it is like living in a war zone ? I received an email from a friend describing it.

I'll post and run in case "PJ" thinks I am going to post an anti Israel piece.

Don't just read this post, read the link also.

Living in northern Israel is completely intolerable. Can anyone imagine what it's like having 144 katyusha rockets a day targeted at civilian centers? The hospital in Nahariya was targeted (how do you target a hospital????). It took a direct hit, but the patients had been moved into the makeshift underground clinic. The same hospital had a near miss the next day.

Imagine Al Qaida setting up camp near Tijuana, Mexico, firing katyusha rockets at La Jolla and, at the same time, crossing the border and kidnapping 2 U.S. soldiers. So the United States would send planes to bomb the areas from which the rockets were fired. Then Al Qaida would unleash a barrage of katyushas - over a hundred a day - on Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs. How would America respond?

Almost one third of our population is currently paralyzed. There are almost a million citizens who have spent the past 3 weeks in bomb shelters. Some of these shelters are accommodating up to 30 people with a single toilet and in appalling conditions. Toddlers and young children can't understand why they can't go outside. The government is too involved in funding the war in Lebanon, so volunteers and some non profit organizations have taken it upon themselves to send food to these people in shelters.

Israel's celebrities (and Knesset members) are going around the shelters to visit with and to entertain people. Those who could leave to go south have left. I just read in today's Ha'aretz newspaper that the Reform Movement took many of the disabled people from up north and paid for them to stay down south in Mitzpe Ramon. Jerusalem is full of northerners. We decided to open our home to a needy family. We were supposed to get a family from Nahariya - a blind father, a mother and 2 children. The day before they were due to come to us, there were 56 katyushas fired (all in one day) on Nahariya. While running down the stairs to their private shelter, the father fell and broke his leg, so he was hospitalized and now needs a place without steps.

This past Sunday we began hosting our "new northern family". They will be with us for the duration of the war. The family is: Elinor, the mother, Lotam (aged 3) and Lidar (aged 1 1/2). Elinor's husband, Shlomi Mansura, was killed in the Haifa train station when a katyusha rocket landed on it 2 weeks ago. Elinor's mother, Yaffa Alfon, is also staying with us.

The day the rockets started, the Mansuras quickly left their home in Nahariya and went to Jerusalem for the day and night. But Shlomi's work required that he return so the family came back to live with Elinor's parents in their home in Kiryat Ata. The next day the rocket fell and Shlomi was killed. The shiva was in Shlomi's mother's home in Kiryat Yam (also in the Haifa area).

The story is even more tragic. Shlomi's father had died of cancer just about one year ago and he was still saying kaddish. The shiva finished for Shlomi the day of the yartzeit for his father. When the family got up from shiva and went to the cemetery to say kaddish for Shlomi's father, there was a rocket that hit that very home where they were sitting shiva and, though it didn't explode, it ruined the home. So, the fact that the family actually went to the cemetery to say kaddish probably saved their lives.

After the shiva, Elinor and her kids, together with her parents, came to Jerusalem and were put up at Ramat Rachel guest house by the government for a few days. We had notified our Reform Movement that we wanted to host a family from the north. The Movement opened a "hotline" and had several applicants. The Mansura family heard about the opportunity and requested a place and we are happy to have them. We have an area in our home which is very private where they can feel safe away from the katyushas in Nahariya.

Our friends (and total strangers) have helped with a high chair, portacrib, dishes, pots, toys, clothes, everything. Some people even gave us money to give them because they wanted to do something to help - the family will need food, taxi money and all the regular facets of life.

The girls are having a hard time and are crying for their father. A social worker was here yesterday to help them explain to the girls what happened. They don't sleep well and every loud noise scares the kids. Elinor is going to a psychologist tomorrow to help her to deal with the girls.

Last night's news showed a report of a 20 year old soldier who was seriously injured in last week's clash with Hizbollah. He lost both of his legs. He said that if what he did in Lebanon will make it just a little bit safer for the citizens of northern Israel, then it was worth losing his legs for. The country is almost unaminous in wanting this war to continue until the citizens of northern Israel can safely return to their homes. Even the people living in bomb shelters in unspeakable conditions are patiently waiting for the army to get the job done.

The In T View: Israeli Bloggers On The Israeli - Hezb'allah/Lebanon Conflict: Eliesheva from Lizrael Update

2006-08-02T14:39:00.000-04:00

Pure and Simple Water Color Collage by Stebbi - Flickr

Millions of words have been written by bloggers on the conflict between Israel and Hezb'allah/Lebanon. But what do people really know? Those in the United States, protected by the geographical barriers of two great oceans, lack from the immediacy of this war. To know a conflict is to truly grasp its immediacy and intimacy.

Thus we sought out, through a series of varying questions, the opinions of those affected by this war, the Israeli bloggers, their homeland subjected to uncontrolled missile attacks and barrages, damage and destruction, lives lost, innocents dead, and a Israeli response to the Hezb'allah threat by bombings and incursions into Lebanon to seek out the purveyors of this latest round of Mideast hostilities..

In this In T View we present a young Israeli blogger Eliesheva from Merkaz, Israel who does a fine job at Lizrael Update, and is just about to get married. We wish Eliesheva the best of luck on her upcoming nuptials.

MG: How does your routine or perception change during a crisis like this? Do you become a news junky, call frequently to check on your family members and friends, worry a lot, spend more time with your loved ones?

Eliesheva: I became a news junky. I craved family time. I thought about it consistantly and it interfered with my focus at work and at playtime. At least at first I did. I think Israelis know they need to fight for their survival, they need to protect their lives, and they need life to go on.

It's a cliche but it's true. In the beginning when I lived here, everytime I got on a bus I thought about where the safest seat was. I watched who was getting on. I stayed away from the big crowds pushing to get on at once.

I don't do that anymore either. You live your life, you go to work, you have family dinners, you dance at clubs, you pray at the Kotel. You do what you have to do because that's half the battle of surviving here.

You always keep things conscious, they are always in your head because you have no choice. You also try to help in ways that you can.

MG: When or where do you think this current conflict will end?

Eliesheva: Sigh. I don't know. I was wrong in some of what I originally thought of the Iraq war and I know I'm no political analyst.

I think it's the next step in a process that's been developing for a while. Unfortunately, the 'Western world' tends towards the luxuries of laziness, ignorance, and being blinded by 'shtuyot' (nonsense). But the process is moving along whether everybody's aware or not.

Iran has finally gotten it's hands directly into the attacking Israel business. The Islamist movement is moving. It's growing, and it's only getting bigger. I think things will only move deeper and deeper into trouble, and it may not be tomorrow or next month, but we are definitely getting there.

People need to realize that not everyone in the world has the same values as they do - not everyone has money, not everyone is comfortable, not everyone has things - or even their lives - at stake. For a large part of the world the bigger picture matters - collectivism vs. idealism. It's about total belief.

It's about ancient belief. Not everyone views themselves as an 'indivdual' with 'humanitarian values'. It's time to take different cultures seriously and realize that they are different cultures to ours - and act accordingly.

Maybe we've (Westerners) woken up to it, but it's time to wake up before we're stabbed in our drowsy, yawning awareness.

MG: Does it take a special quality to be an Israeli? You seem to be surrounded by groups that want to drive you into the sea, subjected to bombings and rocket attacks, participate frequently in wars - Does it ever get to the point where you say, I've had enough, get me out of here? In other words, what keeps you in Israel?

Eliesheva: I think being 'Israeli' is a continuation of lifetimes, generations, centuries of being pursued as a Jewish nation. Now we're called Israelis, then we were Juden, before that Children of Israel and Hebrews. Whatever the name, we've been running this race to get to the finish line of freedom before 'they' catch up and destroy us forever. I'm not so sure there is even a finish line at all; this is an ultimate test of spiritual stamina for this tiny nation of historic people.

And I don't really get why we've always been targeted; why we can never be left alone. But that's how it is.

And why would a small people return to their biblical land in the conditions they find themselves in?

What keeps me in Israel is knowing that I'm a part of what needs to be done, surviving. I'm safer admitting that I'm Jewish and hope for a better Jewish life in Israel than hiding out abroad. Living in the States was great and very comfortable, but I didn't want to be comfortable somewhere else. I'm hoping one day, I'll be absolutely comfortable here, along with the rest of the Jews who are living here. For now, though, I need to help us hold our place.

MG: The Iranian government and the Mullahs and the religious junta that rule Iran have basically stated that they want to obliterate Israel, nuke Israel - When you hear about another country wanting to destroy you, what goes through your mind?

Eliesheva: When I lived in the States, I'd get horrified, angry, frustrated, sure.Now, it's different. I didn't think it could be, but it is. My heart burns. My head pounds. I can't see past myself and Israel for a few seconds, and just get ridiculously frustrated and hurt and angry. Then I come back to the 'real' world and realize, a lot of people think this all the time and don't say it.

I know that, and hearing it out loud just makes it worse but I should always remember that this is the case for a good chunk of the world. The other element of this is, with the Iranian president, it seems more of a reality and call for action. On some level, I see him pursuing this. He's behind Hezbullah. He's getting behind Hamas. There's the nuclear angle. This is reality.

And that is absolutely terrifying.

MG: Has Ehud Omert been a strong leader during this crisis? Do you have confidence in him or do you think Benjamin Netanyahu would have been a better choice to lead Israel during this period of war?

Eliesheva: I definitely don't think Bibi would have been a better choice. I don't think he's a good frontman where diplomacy and leadership are concerned. He's better at doing what he's good at.

As far as Olmert; look, I think we all miss Sharon. We'd all prefer him right now over anyone. And since that isn't an option, Olmert's there, and that's it.

I have no choice but to have confidence in him, otherwise, what can I believe? I think he's doing an alright job. At first I was definitely more worried with Peretz in the picture. Now, Olmert is growing into it. I hope he doesn't become jaded, though.

I think Olmert is a peacetime socio-economic prime minister. He wasn't meant for war. But this is Israel, the Middle East, and you don't always get to choose your future or your role or your fate here.

MG: Americans, other than when natural disasters strike, have no concept of what a shelter/bomb shelter is and living in one of them - if you've spent time in a shelter, could you describe the experience for us?

Eliesheva: Don't have this experience first hand...

Thanks.

MG says: Our thanks go out to Eliesheva.

Hezbolla: Cowards To The Last

2006-07-31T16:07:00.000-04:00

The Australian Herald Sun has exclusive photos of what we all know to be true... the "men" or should I say males of Hezbolla have not only been hiding behind women and children, but civilan dress while they wage war against Israel.

This is of course no surprise. It is a well-known tactic of the islamofacists who also hid in hospitals, schools, and residential areas in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In doing so, they immediately garner the sympathies of the uninformed and ill-informed world who decry the US and Israelis as brutal war-mongers who target women and children, hospitals, and UN workers.

Be we all know that only cowards hide behind the skirts of women (women they hate) and the toys of children.

Yalla ya Nasrallah

2006-07-31T12:42:00.000-04:00

Buy the IDF a pizza or maybe some burgers. You can't hunt the devil on an empty stomach.

The In T View: Lebanese Bloggers on The Lebanon/Hezb'allah - Israeli Conflict: Lebanos

2006-07-31T09:28:00.000-04:00

Beirut's Martyr's by pbo31 - Flickr

Millions of words have been written by Bloggers on the conflict between Israel and Hezb'allah/Lebanon. But what do people really know? Those in the United States, protected by the geographical barriers of two vast oceans, lack from the immediacy of this war. To know a conflict is to truly grasp its immediacy and intimacy.

Thus we sought out, through a series of varying questions, the opinions of those affected by this war, first the Israeli bloggers and now their Lebanese counterparts, their homeland under attack by Israel. The Lebanese, a very hospitable people, coping together in very inhospitable times. Will there ever be peace in Lebanon?

In this In T View we present Lebanos, who maintains a strong presence in the Lebanese blogging community, appearing in such blogs as: Kadmous, Hamid Aouad, Sasar, Photo Lesson, Roula Awach, and ZouNazar.

MG: Why do you think Hezb'allah acted now?

Lebanos: Alan M. Dershowitz, a Jewish I presume, the Professor of Law at Harvard and the author of "Preemption" wrote today at jpost.com that Israel was attacked from areas that it does not occupy. And that last sentence says a lot about the situation. Hizbullah indeed attacked inside the Israeli borders, but Israel is occupying a 40 km2 of silver land, sending it's warplanes and sea destroyers to Lebanese territories, prisoning 3 Lebanese captives from earlier operations inside Israel lead by the Palestinians, and refusing to hand out the mines maps to the UN. Those points I stated above are the reasons which Hizbullah is exploiting to keep on it's political agenda, if any.

But (I) read again some lines from your interview with an Israeli citizen called "Amechad". Amechad answers to your question and says that Historian Dr. Michael Oren, another Jewish I presume, senior fellow of the Shalem Center, has written a convincing argument in favor of invading Syria. Not out of joy but out of necessity. Syria and Iran are arming Hizbollah so that they can murder our children.

So Israel, knowing that Hizbullah is merely a tool, or an entity financed and armed by Syria and Iran, choose to destroy Lebanon, the only democratic country in the Mideast, with entirely moderate groups and elites who want only to live in peace and harmony with the rest of the free world. Choosing to send us back to violence and counter violence, after freeing us from the most rogue occupation in 30 years: Syrian occupation.

Hizbullah created 1982 after the Israeli invasion, and since then they launched numerous attacks against the Israeli army. But year 2000, Israel left Lebanon. Syria then feeling that the heat is coming later on her to leave the country as well, supported the idea that Israel is still occupying a silver land called Shebaa farms. Thus Hizbullah under the slogan "Lebanese resistance" made it clear that they will not lay arms until Shebaa farms is liberated and the Lebanese prisoners are released from the Israeli jails.

In 2005, the Lebanese people, sensing that the international community is supporting them, specially the US, went in a one and half million demonstration against the Syrian occupation. Knowing that there is no need to any Syrian existence after the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon.

Without firing one bullet, and after constant demonstrations, the Syrian army left humiliated Lebanon after 30 years of occupation. Israel in July 2006 with the silence of the same international community destroyed Lebanon.

Did we give Hizbullah any more alternatives. Israel still occupy a part of my country and still has Lebanese prisoners and still violating our skies and seas, and the international community wants us to disarm Hizbullah and lead us to civil war. Is that an alternative? What act is left to Hizbullah and to us the Lebanese?

MG: Some would say, Lebanon is held hostage by the actions of Hezb'allah. Can you give us your opinion on this?

Lebanos: Lebanon is not held hostage by the actions of Hizbullah ONLY. This is half of the truth. Lebanon is held hostage by Hizbullah, Israel, Syria, Iran and the Arabs, specially the Saudi Arabia.

Israel and Syria are stopped by a ceasefire agreement signed 1973 which prevented them resuming the militarily actions on their OWN territories. Israel made one mistake: they forgot to include Lebanon's territory in this truce. Therefore Lebanon was the hostage, the battlefield in 32 years now. No bullet fired from Israeli-Syrian border since then. That is why we are not surprised to see both the Syrian army and the Israeli army flexing their muscles over this battlefield.

Iran followed the war games after the Islamic revolution lead by Khomeini, a revolution exported to Lebanon first due to the free open passage to an occupied Lebanon by both Syria and Israel. The receiver of this importation was obvious, the Shiaa Lebanese.

Saudi Arabia, the extreme Sunni Muslim regime followed the stream in defending the Sunni gains in the Arabic world, and fighting the Shiaas revolution, fearing a revolt by the Shiaas huge population in Saudi itself. The revolution exportation winnings in Lebanon meant to the corrupted Saudian regime one thing: our turn is coming. So they sided against Hizbullah.

And what this hostage can do against his kidnappers: wait and see. Maybe the international community and the US in particular can understand that we the hostage can do nothing. Instead we got the current crazy war.

MG: How has the Conflict personally affected you?

Lebanos: Like any human being during a war. Very sad and very frustrated. I feel helpless, specially when I see those chattered bodies of the kids who has nothing to do with this madness. I feel very desperate to read on the Internet that there is human beings expressing themselves like no human beings, justifying the killings of unarmed kids, stating that it's necessary to create pain to let those on the other side to understand.

Squeeze yourself in the arm and then tell me how much you can hold without releasing of pain. Imagine a piece of a 500 kg bomb is hitting your kid, your wife or your mother.

I am very angry because everybody knows that Lebanon and the Lebanese could do nothing against all this. We are a nation coming from a 30 years of different occupations, alone trying to build our country to regain our place on the world map. Instead everybody by silence or cooperation or bombing is smashing our dreams for a just free world where every nation live in peace and harmony. We never hated just to hate, we never been angry just for the sake of angriness, but to seek justice and freedom. What you think is happening now with our dreams, why destroying the love and lounge for life, what are they planting in our hearts.

MG: Does it take a special quality to be a Lebanese? You've been wracked by civil war, occupied by by foreign powers, seen a diaspora of your peoples... Do you ever say to yourself, "Oh God, this is enough for me, I'm out of here?"

Lebanos: NEVER tired, never giving up. Come again to this interview when this war ends and read these coming words: We will come again on our feet and we will build again our country. There is no power nor silence which can destroy our will or take our resignation to give up. This is not the first war launched on us. This is not the first occupation, first the Palestinians, then the Syrians and the Israelis. Why or how do you think we survived those 30 years of wars and occupations. We cant afford to loose this hope. We mastered the art of survive as our historians told us.

And I will tell you why. Because we are a nation who never asked or made a war. We love life. We love to live in peace. We love to love the beauty and the art. We make wonders in peace. We have proofs that we are a very great peaceful nations. Our diaspora and citizens sit on the top of huge companies, we have presidents with Lebanese roots, NASA scientists, prime ministers, Nobel prize winner, and the world is full of Lebanese successful in their jobs and places.

As the Jamaican journalist, Ian Boyne has said yesterday : " It's a pity that a country which has contributed so much to civilisation is being destroyed through an overdose of fanaticism and Great Power excesses. The first law school in history was located in Beirut by Ad 196. It had a depository of written constitutions where the oldest constitutions of the Roman Empire were safeguarded. The Phoenicians invented the alphabet, introduced the institution of the senate and by the tenth century BC had developed written constitutions which Aristotle cited as the model for all states. Jesus preached His message of peace to Southern Lebanon.

As we told the Syrians before when they left our land, again we tell Israel: We want to live in peace. Leave our country alone, respect our nation, don't violate our sea land sky, let us rebuild our relations based on mutual respect to our interests and rights, respect each other strive for life and prosperity. Stop the killings. Lets embrace the path for peace.

MG: So what's your biggest complaint with the Lebanese government's handling of this crisis?

Lebanos: Do you know that the majority of the Lebanese government consists of ministers belongs to political parties which cooperated with the Syrian occupation during the last 30 years. And those same political parties cooperated with the Israeli occupation in 1982-1983.

Snowy Sunset, Laklouk, Lebanon - by LouisL - Flickr

MG says: Our thanks go out to Lebanos.

Joe McCain speech The Jews and Israel

2006-07-28T18:22:00.000-04:00

From Joe McCain-brother of John MccainSenator

John McCain's brother on The Jews & Israel.

There is a lot of worry popping up in the media just now -- "Can Israel Survive?" Don't worry about it. It relates to something that Palestinians, the Arabs, and perhaps most Americans don't realize -- the Jews are never going quietly again. Never. And if the world doesn't come to understand that, then millions of Arabs are going to die. It's as simple as that.

Throughout the history of the world, the most abused, kicked-around race of people have been the Jews. Not just during the holocaust of World War II, but for thousands of years. They have truly been "The Chosen People" in a terrible and tragic sense.

The Bible story of Egypt's enslavement of the Jews is not just a story, it is history, if festooned with theological legend and heroic epics. In 70 A.D. the Romans, which had for a long time tolerated the Jews -- even admired them as 'superior' to other vassals -- tired of their truculent demands for independence and decided on an early "Solution" to the Jewish problem. Jerusalem was sacked and reduced to near rubble, Jewish resistance was pursued and crushed by the implacable Roman War Machine -- see 'Masada'. And thus began The Diaspora, the dispersal of Jews throughout the rest of the world.

Their homeland destroyed, their culture crushed, they looked desperately for the few niches in a hostile world where they could be safe. That safety was fragile, and often subject to the whims of moody hosts. The words 'pogrom', 'ghetto', and 'anti-Semitism' come from this treatment of the first mono-theistic people. Throughout Europe, changing times meant sometimes tolerance, sometimes even warmth for the Jews, but eventually it meant hostility, then malevolence. There is not a country in Europe or Western Asia that at one time or another has not decided to lash out against the children of Moses, sometimes by whim, sometimes by manipulation.

Read the entire speech

The In T View: Israeli Bloggers On The Israeli - Hezb'allah/Lebanon Conflict: Chayyei Sarah

2006-07-28T08:09:00.000-04:00

cells. seed and thread by Moon Rhythm - Flickr

Bahai Gardens Above Haifa by Ark 47 - Flickr

MG: Do you feel that the U.S. shackles Israel? Does it let Israel operate at full capacity against terrorist groups like Hezb'alla and Hamas?

Sarah: That is a very difficult question to answer. Israel has often done things that displeases America. We're not exactly a puppet of the West . . . not exactly. Still, there is no question that Israel would like to stay on America's "good side," and may otherwise act more forcefully.

I realize that it may be very difficult for our neighbors to believe this, but I do believe that one thing that "checks" Israel's aggressiveness is the will of its people. Most Israelis are extremely sensitive about NOT killing innocent people, NOT creating "collateral damage." There is a tremendous population of Israelis who very much see Arabs, including Palestinians, as regular people who just want to live productive lives, and we ourselves are conscious of not wanting to hurt other people. Like I said, Israel has made grave errors, but the overall feeling I get from most Israelis (and I encounter all sorts of Israelis) is that they really just want to be left alone, and would gladly withdraw to the 1967 borders and mind their own business if only they knew with absolute certainty that they, too, would be left alone to live productive lives. Unfortunately, as evidenced by Hezballah, we have no such promise.

MG: If you had the chance to watch any of the international coverage of the conflict like CNN, BBC, or Fox, do you think their coverage has been fair and objective?

Sarah: I get all my news online. However I have many friends in America who watch CNN, and they tell me that it is grossly biased in favor of Lebanon, painting Israel as the bully who is indiscriminately killing people -- without providing enough context to explain why this war is happening. They also do not report, for example, in giving over the casualties statistics, that one of the reasons so few Israelis have died is that Israel long ago invested in early-warning systems, and bomb shelters for all residents. And also, that the North has basically emptied out. The low number of Israeli casualties is not due to a lack of effort on Hezballah's part, but because Israelis were extremely prepared for attack.

Woman by Nimbu - Flickr

MG: Will there ever be peace in the Middle East in our lifetime?

Sarah: Oh, how I wish I could say yes! I dream of someday renting an RV and traveling to Beirut, to Baghdad . . . I have been to the Israel-Lebanon border, and it is so beautiful up there . . . . surely Lebanon must be gorgeous. The mountains and the sea do not end where the border does.

But, no, barring what we call in Judaism a "revealed miracle," I do not believe that there will be peace between Israel and its neighbors in our lifetime. My personal feeling is that it will take approximately 300 years. I hope I am wrong. And maybe I am. Who would have imagined, 50 years ago, that Israel would have working (more or less) peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt? It may be a cold peace, but it's better than nothing.

I cannot give any estimates about when there will be peace BETWEEN the Arab states. That is for you guys to figure out, though unfortunately I don't think Israel will be left alone until the Arabs make peace, real peace, between themselves.

I wonder, also, when you say "peace," what does that mean to you? I have heard it said that one reason there is no peace is that we define it differently, that to the Arab states, peace with Israel means "we won't attack you any more, we'll put up with the fact that you are there," and to Israelis it means "we'll promote tourism between our countries and form mutually beneficial trade agreements." When you say "peace," do you mean "we'll agree to swallow the bitter pill of Israel's existence," or do you mean "I want to see Tel Aviv on my next vacation"?

(Most Israelis would do practically anything to get the former, but in an ideal world it would be the latter.)

Thanks very much for giving me a chance to express my views...

Thanks,
Sarah
aka Chayyei Sarah

MG Says: Our thanks go out to Sarah.

The In T View: Israeli Bloggers On The Israeli - Hezb'allah/Lebanon Conflict: Rahel From Elms In The Yard

2006-07-27T16:16:00.000-04:00

Darren by Dan Stringle - Flickr

MG: One thing Israel would seem to need is a good anti-missile system. Should the Israeli government have made the acqusition of such a system a stronger priority before this confict?

Rahel: We had a successful test of the Arrow missile some time ago, and we have deployed batteries of Patriot missiles. But since this doesn't seem to be helping the north very much right now, then yes, I would like to see our government do more in that department.

MG: How does your routine or perception change during a crisis like this? Do you become a news junky, call frequently to check on your family members and friends, worry a lot, spend more time with your loved ones?

Rahel: My routine hasn't really changed at all because I live in Jerusalem, which is nowhere near the front lines of this conflict. In fact, I'd like to suggest that you interview as many people who are living on the confrontation line as you can in order to get a more balanced picture. About being a news junkie: Since I translate news from the Hebrew press several times a week, I have to deal quite closely with the news whether I want to or not. Also, since I ride the bus, and since Israeli bus drivers turn up the volume of the bus radio when the hourly news broadcast begins, I'll hear the news if I'm on a bus. But other than that, I try not to watch it too much. I feel that it is important to be aware of what's going on, but within healthy boundaries. Yes, I worry. Some of the soldiers out there are my friends' children. And yes, I have been in greater connection with friends and family since the war began. Thank you very much. I hope this helps. Best, Rahel

MG Says: Our thanks go out to Rahel.

Wafa Sultan: A Voice of Reason In An Insane World

2006-07-27T14:27:00.000-04:00

This clip was played on Al Jizz.

I don't know how long this link will last, or Wufa for that fact.

She really knows how to tell it like it is!

[Hattip: Dov]

More on this amazing woman:

Must See Video... Wafa Sultan Takes on Alegerian Islamist In A Great Debate about Islam
Posted on 07/29/2005 6:23:41 AM PDT by ElisabethInCincy

LA Psycohologyst Wafa Sultan Clashes with Algerian Islamist Ahmad bin Muhammad over Islamic Teachings and Terrorism

The following are excerpts from a debate between Wafa Sultan, a psychologist from Los Angeles and Dr. Ahmad Bin Muhammad, an Algerian professor of religious politics. Al-Jazeera TV aired this debate on July 26, 2005.

Wafa Sultan: Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up? How and why does he blow himself up in a bus full of innocent passengers?
In our countries, religion is the sole source of education, and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched. He was not born a terrorist, and did not become a terrorist overnight. Islamic teachings played a role in weaving his ideological fabric, thread by thread, and did not allow other sources – I am referring to scientific sources – to play a role. It was these teachings that distorted this terrorist and killed his humanity. It was not (the terrorist) who distorted the religious teachings and misunderstood them, as some ignorant people claim.
When you recite to a child still in his early years the verse: "They will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off," regardless of this verse's interpretation, and regardless of the reasons it was conveyed or its time – you have made the first step towards creating a great terrorist...

Bin Muhammad: The guest from America asked how a young man could blow up a bus. If only she had asked how a president could blow up a peaceful nation in Iraq. How does a president help the arch-killer of occupied Palestine? Why doesn't she ask from where Hitler was brought up – Hitler, who murdered 50 million innocent people. Why doesn't she ask where the people who dropped two atom bombs on Japan were educated? Who killed three million innocent Vietnamese? Who annihilated the Indians? Who maintained imperialism to this day? Who waged the Spanish civil war, which exacted a toll of 600,000 in 36 months? Why don't we ask these questions? Who has over 15,000 nuclear warheads – Muslims or the non-Muslims? The Muslims or the Americans? The Muslims or the Europeans? We want an answer. Where was Bush educated – if education is really what makes a person a criminal?...

Wafa Sultan: Murder is terrorism regardless of time or place, but when it is committed as a decree from Allah, this is another matter...
The Crusader wars about which the professor is talking – these wars came after the Islamic religious teachings, and as a response to these teachings. This is the law of action and reaction. The Islamic religious teachings have incited to the rejection of the other, to the denial of the other, and to the killing of the other. Have they not incited to the killing of Jews and Christians? If we had heard that a tribe in a distant corner of China has a holy book and religious teachings calling to kill Muslims – would the Muslims stand idly by in the face of such teachings?
The Crusader wars came after these Islamic religious teachings. When these Islamic teachings were delivered, America did not exist on the face of the earth, nor was Israel in Palestine...
Why doesn't he talk about the Muslim conquests that preceded all the wars he is talking about? Why doesn't he mention that when Tariq bin Ziyyad entered Andalusia with his armies, he said to his people: "The sea is behind you, and the enemy is in front"? How can you storm a peaceful country, and consider all its peaceful inhabitants to be your enemies, merely because you have the right to spread your religion? Should the religion be spread by the sword and through fighting?...

Bin Muhammad: Who invented slavery in recent centuries? Who colonized the other – us or them? Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We are the victims...
I am not saying that killing innocent people is nice. I say that all innocent people should be protected. But at the same time, we must start with the innocent among the Muslims. There are millions of innocent people among us, while the innocent among you – and innocent they are – number only dozens, hundreds, or thousands, at the most...

Wafa Sultan: Can you explain to me the killing of a hundred thousand children, women and men in Algeria, using the most abominable killing methods? Can you explain to me the killing of 15,000 Syrian civilians? Can you explain to me the abominable crime in the military artillery school in Aleppo? Can you explain the crime in Al-Asbaqiya neighborhood of Damascus, Syria? Can you explain the attack of the terrorists on the peaceful village of Al-Kisheh in Upper Egypt, and the massacre of 21 Coptic peasants? Can you explain to me what is going on in Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt, even though these are Islamic countries which opposed the American intervention in Iraq, and which don't have armies in Iraq, yet were not spared by the terrorists? Can you explain these phenomena, which took place in Arab countries? Was all this revenge on America or Israel? Or were they merely to satisfy bestial wild instincts aroused in them by religious teachings, which incite to rejection of the other, to the killing of the other, and to the denial of the other. When Saddam Hussein buried 300,000 Shiites and Kurds alive, we did not hear a single Muslim protesting. Your silence served to acknowledge the legitimacy of these killings, didn't it?...
What do you want from me? To speak evil of the American society? I've never said that America is the eternal city of Plato, but I did say it was the eternal city of Wafa Sultan. The idealism of American society was enough to allow me to realize my humanity. I came to this country with fear.

Bin Muhammad:Along with the Indians? Along with the Indians? What was left of the Indians? What do you have to say about the Indians?

Wafa Sultan: Christopher Columbus discovered American in 1492. America was founded in 1776, approximately 300 years later. You cannot blame America – as a constitution, a regime, and a state – for killing the Indians.

More voice from Israel

2006-07-26T21:52:00.000-04:00

Psalm 83

2006-07-26T09:04:00.000-04:00

(AP Photo/ National Museum of Ireland, HO)

Ancient Book of Psalms Unearthed in Irish Bog
From: Shawn Pogatchnik
Of: The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 26, 2006; Page C08
washingtonpost.com

DUBLIN, July 25 -- Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while working in a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to 800-1000 A.D. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive being buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

He said an engineer was digging up bog land last week to create commercial potting soil in Ireland's midlands when, "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something." Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site.

"The owner of the bog has had dealings with us in the past and is very much in favor of archaeological discovery and reporting it," Wallace said.

Crucially, he said, the bog owner covered up the book with damp soil. Had it been left exposed overnight, he said, "it could have dried out and just vanished, blown away."

The book was found opened to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.......

(click the title of this post to see a flash presentation I found about Psalm 83)

Also, from the site gracethrufaith.com is this post of and about Psalm 83:

Psalm 83
Bread From Heaven

O God, do not keep silent; be not quiet, O God, be not still. See how your enemies are astir, how your foes rear their heads. With cunning they conspire against your people; they plot against those you cherish.

"Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more."

With one mind they plot together; they form an alliance against you- the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, of Moab and the Hagrites, Gebal, Ammon and Amalek, Philistia, with the people of Tyre. Even Assyria has joined them to lend strength to the descendants of Lot.

Do to them as you did to Midian, as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, who perished at Endor and became like refuse on the ground. Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna, who said, "Let us take possession of the pasturelands of God."

Make them like tumbleweed, O my God, like chaff before the wind. As fire consumes the forest or a flame sets the mountains ablaze, so pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your storm. Cover their faces with shame so that men will seek your name, O LORD. May they ever be ashamed and dismayed; may they perish in disgrace.

Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD-that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.

This psalm speaks of nations who, at various times, tried to defeat Israel and drive the Jewish people from the Land God gave them. All their attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. And where are these nations now? People occupy lands that were once theirs, but not one of those listed here remains as a nation today. Not even after you take into account the fact that nations change their names from time to time, can you point to a group and say, "These are the ancient Moabites, or there are the Amalekites." They're all gone, having learned the painful lesson that comes from defying God's promise to Abraham. "I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you." Only Israel remains, a testimony to the power of a promise from God.

Has God made promises to you? "Surely I am with you always," He said, "Even to the end of the age (Matt 28:20). Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. But seek first His Kingdom and His Righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well (Matt. 6:25, 33). I tell you the truth it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away the Counselor will not come to you, but if I go I will send Him to you (John 16:7). And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am (John 14:3). Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come upon the whole world to test those who live on the earth (Rev. 3:10)."

Each one of these is straight from the Lord's mouth to our ears. Each is as clear as His promise to Abraham. "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday today and forever," we're told (Hebrews 13:8). God's promise to Abraham carried no expiration date. Over 4,000 years later, nations who curse the descendants of Abraham still risk the wrath of God.

And it's the same with His promises to us. As a shepherd's first priority is protecting His sheep, so the Lord's first priority is protecting us. It's a sacred trust, placed with Him upon His descent to Earth.

"I have come down from Heaven not to do my own will," He said, "But the will of Him Who sent me. And this is the will of Him Who sent me; that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I shall raise him up at the last day." (John 6:37-40)

Oh Lord, let the disposition of these ancient nations who sought to defy your promise to your chosen people serve to strengthen our faith in your promises to us today.

An Open Letter to the World

2006-07-21T18:11:00.000-04:00

Dear World,

I understand that you are upset with us, here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?)

Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily. Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish people - upset you.

We upset the German people who elected Hitler and upset the Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.

We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.

For centuries, we upset the Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we decided to come home - home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.

Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.

In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron.Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.

Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?

And when you, dear world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that "upset" caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud"
(Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not "repress" them.

Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.

You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction. And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

[Hattip: PDM]

I don't know who the author of this open letter is, and I don't really care. The points are valid. The history is accurate. The author is fully entitled to express their feelings, opinions, and thoughts, and to share them with whomever cares to read them.

As for me, I stand with Israel.

A voice in Israel

2006-07-19T11:26:00.000-04:00

A Very Special Thank You

2006-07-18T12:43:00.000-04:00

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Grayson Gile of Marion returned from his mission in Afghanistan with a very special gift for President Bush in his possession. The man who created this beautiful rug wanted to say thank you in the best way he could, so he hand-knotted this rug as a thank you and tribute to President Bush for his intervention in Afghanistan and for putting an end to the Taliban's brutal rule.

Click the title link for the whole story.

I know many who think we should have bombed Afghanistan and the Taliban into oblivian. I can agree on the latter, but not the former.

I know that our enemy is radical Islam, but not all Muslims are our enemy. I heard it quoted this past weekend that, "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims." I hope we can remember that in the hard days ahead, and I hope the Muslim communities around the world and here in the States take hold of this and do something about the cancer growing in their midst.

And to the elderly Hazara man from Kabul who created this beautiful tribuite, thank you for talent, your gift, and for being one more example of good that can and does exist in a Muslim land.

[Hattip: Elcid]

An eye in Israel

2006-07-17T08:36:00.000-04:00

My heart goes out to all Israelis. Why can't they be our 51st state?

UPDATE: Israeli television news channel 10 live !!

Time Gets Snowed

2006-07-14T20:11:00.000-04:00

We have a ~~Press Secretary~~ Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives who can quote Monty Python. The future of civilization is assured.
PIMF - Tony Snow wasn't the genius responsible for this, it was Peter Wehner. According to the fine print, "Peter Wehner is Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives." I will abstain from my thimbleful of cognac in penance.

For Time's thesis to have merit, the magazine would have rewrite most of the history of the past five years. It would have to erase virtually all of the day-to-day activity on the war on terror, which as a practical matter consists of unprecedented levels of cooperation and integrated planning across scores of countries, both long-time allies and new partners. Time would have to ignore virtually all of the day-to-day activity on curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, our work with Russia, and so forth). Time would also have to ignore our trade policy, our development policy, and more.

All of this calls to mind the scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which the Judean "guerrillas" debate whether the Roman Empire has brought any good to the Holy Land. The John Cleese character asks rhetorically what good the Romans have done. After his men point out one benefit after another, the Cleese character is obliged to say: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Apart from the vast number of multilateral foreign policy initiatives from 2001 to the present, when has the Bush Administration ever worked in partnership with other countries?

The "Liberty Belle" B 17 Flying Fortress

2006-07-13T16:36:00.000-04:00

Freedom is not Free

When I take my lunch hour to rest and relax I usually tour David Wayne Hook’s airport. I enjoy taking my motorcycle and touring the runways, hangers, etc. They have some pretty special planes there and it is interesting to see what’s where.

A tour of the hangers is like riding through air history. There are "Texas Air Aces" who regularly put on dogfight exhibits. The planes vary from, Migs, Corsairs, Messerschmits, to Lear Jets and at one time ever 6 privately owned Blackhawks. (After they get so many hours they are decommissioned and sold)

The airport is still a private airport and those of us that are familiar there are allowed to run the ramps, taxiways etc as long as we go slow, respect the planes and always give them right of way and plenty of room.

About 60 days ago I was blessed with running upon the “Liberty Belle”

She was made as a 5 engine B17 and was completed after the war had ended therefore the government sold her as scrap. The buyer of this brand new “scrap” flying fortress climbed on her wings, looked in her fuel tanks and saw she was full of fuel so he bid $ 1,000.00 and won her.

She was than sold to Pratt Whitney for testing and Pratt Whitney cut her nose engine off. Originally she could fly with either her 4 wing engines or her nose engine or both.

After testing and modifications she went back to the private sector.

When she cranks her engine it is a sight to see. Crank one engine at a time so that the engine that is running keeps the batteries charged to start the next one. Smoke billows everywhere and you would think she is going to blow up as she shakes the ground.

And when she flies it is a sight and sound to see.

The B-17 was my fathers “starter bomber” and he progressed to the B29. And after doing stints in TAC and SAC wound up in the B-47’s. The air is another world. He chose his own funeral plot. Right underneath the landing pattern within sight of Bush Intercontinental Airport.

I was lucky to get some real good shots of the “Liberty Belle” and if you note she looks like she’s suspended as if her motors turn the engines so slow that they look like they are not running.

Go to her site and watch the videos and enjoy.

As per David Wayne Hooks " Mans destiny is in the air" http://www.hooksairport.com/pg.htm#

Israel - Lebanon and the Regional Conflict: Casus Belli?

2006-07-12T20:05:00.000-04:00

A swiftly tilting planet. The dispute over Iran's nuclear program seems to drag on forever. But events unrelated to the mullahs' nukes could force a confrontation sooner rather than later ... whether the UN and the IAEA like it or not.

Washington's strong language against Syria, Iran. The Belmont Club notes the exceptionally strong language in a recent White House press release: 'The United States condemns in the strongest terms this unprovoked act of terrorism, which was timed to exacerbate already high tensions in the region and sow further violence. We also hold Syria and Iran, which have provided long-standing support for Hizballah, responsible for today's violence. ... Hizballah's terrorist operations threaten Lebanon's security and are an affront to the sovereignty of the Lebanese Government.' As they say in the language of international relations: Them's fightin' words. Wretchard also quotes Israel calling the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers "an act of war by the state of Lebanon against the state of Israel" which would bring a "very painful and far-reaching" response. Wretchard doesn't like the sound of this: 'If Israel strikes at the Lebanese government it will be very damaging, I think, to all the efforts made to kick Syria out.'

Mah ha-matzav? Also via Wretchard, Israel Matzav quotes a knowledgeable source: 'RUMORS FLYING THAT EHUD OLMERT WILL BE DECLARING WAR TONIGHT ... IN GAZA, MOHAMMED DEIF, LEADER OF HAMAS, LOST OTHER LEG AND ARM, NOT DEAD YET FROM LAST NIGHT'S IAF AERIAL BOMBING ON A NON EMPTY BUILDING (RABBIS SAID ''SHEHACHAYINU" ' Contrary to what's reported here: 'A missile strike on the building killed nine, including a senior Hamas official, his wife and seven children. But according to Israeli sources, Deif escaped with injuries.' But AP says: 'The top fugitive, Mohammed Deif, could end up paralyzed, Palestinian security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his condition. Wednesday's blast marked the army's fourth attempt to kill Deif, held responsible for suicide bombings in Israel. In a 2002 missile strike, he lost an eye.' Mahatma Gandhi could not be reached for comment.

Debka on Iran/Syria contacts. Latest bulletin from Debka:

Iran’s national security adviser Ali Larijani flies to Damascus aboad special military plane Wednesday night as war tension builds up around Hizballah kidnap of 2 Israeli soldiers. Larijani is also Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator. He will remain in Damascus for the duration of the crisis in line with the recently Iranian-Syrian mutual defense pact. His presence affirms that an Israeli attack on Syria will be deemed an assault on Iran. It also links the Israeli hostage crisis to Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West. The White House released a statement holding Syria and Iran responsible for Hizballah abduction and demanding their immediate and unconditional release. The Syrian army has been put on a state of preparedness. DEBKAfile’s military sources add that the Iranian air force, missile units and navy are also on high alert. DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report Hizballah acted on orders from Tehran to open a second front against Israel, partly to ease IDF military pressure on the Hamas in the Gaza Strip. This was in response to an appeal Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal made to the Iranian ambassador to Damascus Mohammad Hassan Akhtari Sunday, July 9. DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report Tehran’s rationale as composed of three parts: 1. Iran shows the flag as a champion and defender of its ally, Hamas. 2. Sending Hizballah to open a warfront against Israel is the logical tactical complement to its latest order to go into action against American and British forces in southern Iraq. 3. Tehran hopes to hijack the agenda before the G-8 summit opening in St. Petersberg, Russia on July 15. Instead of discussing Iran’s nuclear case and the situation in Iraq along the lines set by President George W. Bush, the leaders of the industrial nations will be forced to address the Middle East flare-up. ...

Commentary. Well, we know that Iran and Syria have a strategic partnership, and presumably each is expected to regard an attack on the other as an attack on itself. So if Syria becomes formally involved in a shooting war with Israel, Iran probably won't be far behind; but as our Government has been at pains to point out lately, we are prepared to defend Israel. What could very easily happen is that the parties will square off into an Iran/Syria vs Israel/US war - and this could happen very fast. Notwithstanding the IRI's projections, Washington could use this as an occasion to launch strikes directly against Iran - rendering the UN and its blather irrelevant. If there's one thing George W. Bush ought to have learned by now, it's not to stake the rationale for a war on the discovery of WMD. An open Israeli-Syrian conflict could provide him with a whole other rationale.

Okay, how many guesses will it take

2006-07-10T17:51:00.000-04:00

to tell me what this was in January of this year ?

Abnormal Psychology 201 – Introduction to Dr. Deborah Frisch

2006-07-08T22:29:00.000-04:00

At the time I write this, the esteemed Jeff Goldstein is still off-line. A DoS attack took Protein Wisdom down shortly after Jeff and his two year-old son were subjected to an incredibly vile and sinister string of comments by Dr. Deborah Frisch, an adjunct Psycho-Prof from the University of Arizona.

We’ll treat this DoS attack as a coincidence for now. Later, we’ll treat it as the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from the kind of people who did it.

I won’t reprise Dr. Frisch’s creepy sado-pederastic hate speech, except to note a few of its peculiar characteristics. For our aim here is psychological examination. Psychology is a job which traditionally belonged to writers (like Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard) rather than Piled-Higher-and-Deeper Doctors-Of. Alas, I am no Kierkegaard, but going up against the likes of Dr. Frisch is a task for lesser minds. It would be far beneath the great Dane to chase this particular greased pig all over the fairground. Besides, if Dr. Frisch’s profession admits the likes of Dr. Frisch, then it is time for writers to reclaim the task which we once humbly ceded to the social so-called sciences. We can’t do much worse.

I’ll let the doctor introduce herself, in this comment at Left2Right (note that the post that drew this comment was a tepid note “on blogosphere manners”):

My name is Deborah Frisch. I live in Tucson, Arizona. I teach in the psychology department at the YOUkneeversity of AIRYzona.

You want to come find me, see that I'm real, hold a .357 magnum in my face, i say:

BRING IT ON.

A few minutes later, Dr. Frisch added:

One day, some cheeky blogger is going to be offed by a psychopathic blogger. Will it be a scuffle@left2right? idunno.

i hope to hell it ain't me, i gotta tell ya.

but i feel kind of guilty for not blowing myself up on the steps of the lincoln memorial when i lived in d.c. while i was doing out pork for sam..so in a way, i WANT some futhermucker A-hole to off me because i pissed him off in the blogosphere.

BRING IT ON, FUTHERMUCKERS!!!!!!!!

A regular panorama of pathology invites our examination here. The comment about psychopathic bloggers killing other bloggers is of obvious interest. As is the totally irrational display of hostility, the aggressive use of profanity to intimidate, and the references to violence, guns, and even suicide bombing. Note how capitalization suddenly deteriorates right after “.357 Magnum”. When an educated person who normally uses passable grammar suddenly ceases to do so, it is of course an indication of an excited mental state.

In the Spike Lee film Clockers (if you don’t pay attention to Spike Lee films, you’re being an insufferable Dan Quayle) there is a scene where the protagonist Ronald (played by Mekhi Phifer) shows his pistol to a young boy. Normally meek and articulate, Ronald undergoes a physical change when he handles the gun. In real life Ronald is a hapless punk with a weak stomach who is easily dominated by everyone around him, but when he holds his gun (which he has never actually used) he is taken over by a power fantasy. His face twists into a sneer and his speech devolves into crude ‘hood-gangster argot. The transformation is both frightening and pathetic.

Just thought of that, for some reason. Being a staunch defender of the right to bear arms, it saddens me to see people for whom a gun is an ersatz penis. But it also amuses me to see the way some supposedly gun-hating liberals get all gooey at the idea of fondling a firearm of their own. That’s what you get for indulging crude materialistic superstitions.

Dr. Frisch managed to more or less retain the use of her caps key during her assault on Jeff’s family, but her little inner bitch-slapping pimp just wouldn’t shut up:

I don’t give a rat’s ass whether the pissant’s progeny live or die, but I have no intention of snuffing the mofo’s chillen myself … Wanna escalate this game. Fine wit me. Bring it on, hombre. Bring it on.

I should point out that Dr. Frisch is not black, if it is not obvious from her horrible Steppin-Fetchit-from-Hell ebonics. It’s bad enough that prepubescent suburban punks fantasize about gangsterism. Dr. Frisch’s porcupine display is doubly embarrassing, whether it’s intended to frighten others or to make Dr. Frisch feel like … well, a man.

Does Dr. Frisch want to be a man? Or to borrow some “scientific” psychology, is Dr. Frisch a man trapped in the castrated and insufficiently hairy body that is the normal biological manifestation of gentle women-folk? Is it therefore necessary for her (him, whatever) to augment her penis-less corporality with a psychological construct that simulates the absent appendage? In order to reinforce this construct (which is under constant assault by social conventions, not to mention common f—king sense) is it necessary for her to acquire a physical object to symbolize (or reify) her penis? Like a high-powered handgun, for example? How much more of this can I stand before I’m as moonbat as she is?

Stepping away from the abyss for a moment, I’ll let Dr. Frisch describe her mental furniture, in another thread from Left2Right:

I'll cop to be Christophobic. I'm abrahamaphobic, more generally - I have utter contempt for and anger toward the trinity of guy in the sky religions (judaism, christianity, islam). I think they are much less sensible than other religions (Buddhism, pantheism) because they are sexist and speciesist (god's a guy, god's a person). My tax dollars are being used to kill Iraqis, maim Marines, mangle Humvees and destroy a poor nation's infrastructure because of this pathological worldview.

I am a Christophobic lesbian. The way I feel toward Christianity is exactly the way many fundamentalist Christians feel toward me. If you offered me the deal to live and let live - they'll stop judging me if I stop judging them, I'd say no way. I reckon they'd say the same thing.

….

I think we are in the endgame. I think the time for civility and politeness is over. I think there is a very good chance the US will be at war (either a civil war or the target of a worldwide coalition that recognizes what a cancer we've become) within the next ten years.
So to me, the only hope is to duke it out with words with the slim hope that this will preempt the need to duke it out for real.

…

Oh - and for the record, I don't hump my dogs or cats, I don't have any piercings and the only leather I wear is on my Birkenstocks.

Reading through Dr. Frisch’s numerous posts in that thread, I notice that her capitalization wobbles at the thought of God, just as it previously prostrated itself before the stirring mental power-image of the .357 Magnum. Again we must diagnose mental agitation, though probably of a different sort. Whereas gun-wielding imagery caused her to hurry breathlessly along a sort of orgasmic plateau, the eternal countenance of the Almighty has a castrating effect, inducing impotent rage. She takes God to be symbolic of male endowment, which attacks her own genital pretensions. It circumcises her right up to her pencil neck. Even guns are no good against God.

In retaliation, Dr. Frisch resorts to a variety of emotional tactics. She diminishes God to “baby hay suess”, but the infant incarnation of God fills her with even greater fear and loathing. To some persons of the feminist persuasion, a baby is an even more oppressive tyrant than a grown man is. In Dr. Frisch’s twisted “Penis = Power” world-view, a baby is a wound that men inflict on women with their penis/weapon. Judaism mocks Dr. Frisch by over-awing her with a hopelessly superior masculine image, while Christianity sneaks up behind and completes her humiliation by symbolically impregnating her with Baby Jesus. The virgin Mary also offends her – but “the virgin” is her own despised self-image; the mocking reflection of her own frustrated sexuality.

To reassert this sexuality, Dr. Frisch – apropos of nothing – alludes to humping things. Especially small helpless things; i.e., animals and children. Note her obsession with “ephing” and impregnating, which irrationally dominates her anti-Goldstein comments.

She also alludes to conspiracies, conspiracies, conspiracies. This is apparent in her blog, which is full of 9/11 sick-think, and in her recent comments in which she portrays herself as the victim of Jeff Goldstein’s “minions”. She constantly indulges in interpreting well-earned criticism as orchestrated persecution, and insists on viewing the logical consequence of her own actions as unjust punishment. This is, of course, a dead give-away for sexual inadequacy and frustration. These little conspiracies are mere adumbrations of the grand metaphysical conspiracy that deprived Dr. Frisch of the penis she so desperately desires, and which she heroically struggles to construct in spite of the cruel reality that daily castrates and renders her powerless.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha hah ha ha. Okay, I’m almost out of scotch. Time to stick a fork in Dr. Frisch’s lily-white ass, because I’m done with her.

So maybe the idea of taking back Dostoevsky’s profession from the modern so-called psychologists was not such a great one. A sane and healthy mind has the life expectancy of a Colombian judge in this business.

Also, to continue with this might reinforce Dr. Frisch’s delusion that she is under assault by Jeff Goldstein’s minions. I am not Jeff’s minion, only his constant admirer. It doesn’t make me mad when people attack Jeff, because he can defend his own lunch money. But attacking his family, however obliquely … that just fries my cheese to a crisp. (Note the barely repressed hostility in all the preceding paragraphs.)

I think Jeff, and Jeff’s loved ones, have little to fear from Dr. Frisch. Or from Dr. Frisch’s imaginary phallus. Else I would not have made light of a situation that has grieved him. Peace out, boys and girls.

Viola Elder "America's Mom" 1924-2006

2006-07-07T23:36:00.000-04:00

Viola Elder, the mother of radio and television talk-show commentator Larry Elder who became a beloved figure on her son's syndicated radio program, died June 13 in Los Angeles. She was 81.
-L.A. Times

Viola was a common-sense, no-nonsense person with unfaltering, inspirational Conservative values, who raised a brilliant, articulate son with the same rock-solid foundation. According to a nameless "staff writer" at the L.A. Times, she was a Democrat who sparred with her son on the air, however I am an avid listener of KABC 790 in Los Angeles, but I never heard this happen -- c'mon what do you expect from the lib Dino-Media? How often do you suppose they catch the Larry Elder radio show?

At any rate, rest in peace, Sweetie. You will be missed by many.

Happy Independence Day

2006-07-04T22:48:00.000-04:00

Freedom for Egyptians (Egyptian-American):

I had never seen such a great love. There were two young girls next me cheering the bands as if they were in a staduim according to my Egyptian standards. They did not look as if they were celebrating a major national occasion. It is a country that gave a lot to its citizens. They take pride in being U.S. citizens and being part of this nation. One of the things that I have noticed in U.S. parades that some nationalities who became Americans take the chance to celebrate. I saw the Taiwanese and filipino Americans in the parades with the both flags saying Happy Birthday to the U.S. The last thing I can say it about American parades that it is about the love; the love of the crowds and the paraders. It is so in the air and no one can miss it. The last real parade in Egypt took the life of our late President Anwar Sadat on October 6,1981. Sometimes the Egyptian government pretent to do parades during spring time but nobody cares. So really I cannot compare the American parades to anything I have ever experienced in my life in Egypt. ...

Lebanon.profile (Lebanese):

Too often, Lebanese desire uniformity in education. The assumption is that the same national curriculum will breed a similar nationalism. This model is restrictive and oppressive, and it has not been proved to work in any environment.

Americans took a different tack in educating children. Instead of pushing a national syllabus, schools must come to their own educational solutions with very general guidelines from the state. To this end, the intellectuals and writers of textbooks become more powerful than the teachers themselves. From year to year, course to course, children are bombarded with different ideas that give them the opportunity to come to the best conclusion themselves.

Neither the teacher nor the state has hegemony over the children’s minds. ...

ActivistChat (Iranian):

Happy Birthday America.

Happy 4th of July to all.

Happy 4th of July to the people of America.
Happy 4th of July to the oppressed nations
and the freedom loving people of the world.

We honour the 4th of July, 1776,
and solute Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston,
the members of the committee which drafted the
Declaration of Independence on that memorable day.

We salute the great people of America in their courageous move to kick the greedy British out of their great country
and we solute the people of America

for their contribution to end that filthy tyrannical empire.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

4th of July was officially declared as public holiday by the US congress in 1941,

but in reality it is truly an international event that should be honoured by all. ...

On December 25, 1776, General George Washington led his troops in a surprise attack against the British, who had settled into winter quarters in New Jersey. The American forces crossed the Delaware River at night and defeated the British troops first at Trenton and then at Princeton. These victories, although minor, dramatically improved the morale of the American forces.
Iranian people should be prepared for final battle of freeing their homeland ....

Nadz (Palestinian-American)

I grew up hearing more bad things about America than good, and even though I have always been an American citizen, I used to join in on the blame-America-first rhetoric in order to avoid ugly arguments. Not anymore.

I'm proud to say that I'm a citizen of the greatest country on earth. It is a country of ideas, and universal ones at that. Whether it is a monarchy, a communist state or a democracy, China will always be China, Germany will always be Germany and so on. In the case of the United States, it started with principles and ideas on which the nation was then founded. America is unique in that regard - our democracy is what makes America.

No matter how many American flags people burn from Karachi to Mardrid, people know this and are itching to benefit from the opportunities they create. We are not always perfect. We make mistakes. But we should not apologize for being the greatest country on earth and I'll drink an extra beer to that. ...

Happy Fourth of July!

The In T View: American Soldiers: Was Iraq Worth Your Time And Effort?

2006-07-04T09:09:00.000-04:00

Tank Silhouette - Photo Appears Courtesy of Dave's Not Here

Happy Fourth of July - Today We Are All Americans.

The Iraqi Conflict.

The Media, in an Ideological Confrontation with the Bush administration, of whom, they don't regard as possessing the legitimacy to lead the nation, has framed the Iraqi Conflict as an unjust action, a dispirited cause, a quagmire of bombings and killings among the Iraqi citizenry, and an ever present collection of Grim Milestones of American Soldiers lives forfeited in Iraq: 500 gone; 1,000 killed; 1,500 lost; 2,000 dead; 2,500 extinguished, trumpeted throughout news headlines, in an unceasing meme of death and destruction.

But the American Servicemen and women, who are currently stationed in Iraq or whom have already served there, are not merely statistics to be bandied about by the Media, seeking to influence the American Public on their perceived unjustness of the conflict. No, these American Soldiers have their own opinions and ideas of the Iraqi War and aftermath, having first-hand experience of the conflict, unlike the majority of the Media.

In this In T View, we sought out American Soldiers perspectives of the Iraqi conflict, rather than the Media's biased and flawed portrayal of events in Iraq, asking the servicemen and women:

In the end, do you feel that Iraq was worth your time and effort? And could you tell us why?

And here are their responses...

Mister Ghost,
Thanks for the e-mail. I'm out of the sandbox now, and while security is always important, I have no problem with revealing my name, etc. now.

I'm 1st Lieutenant Lee Kelley, and I was in Ramadi for a year.

To answer your question:

In the end, do you feel that Iraq was worth your time and effort? And could you tell us why?

I do think Iraq was worth my time, for a lot of reasons. To put it simply, any way I can take part in the fight of my generatiuon, this global conflict against terrorists which is currently most predominant in thge Middle East, I am happy to help. I think it's important that we remember the truth of our history - that we had to carve America into what it is today, and that it came at no small price and no small amount of war or blood - and to keep in mind that the military is a necessary evil. And someone has to do it. I was more than happy to be one of them, and I'm proud of the work I did with my unit, and the work that all branches of the military continue to do.

I won't say it was easy. Often the work is thankless and sometimes quite shocking and frightening. Being separated from family for months, 12 of which were spent in Iraq, was the biggest mental challenge of all. I personally believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Army is shooting itself in the foot for deploying National Guard, citizen soldier units for so long. Recruiting and retention will not be able to keep up with the losses. I myself am considering an end to my military career in the next few years. I spent four years on active duty, and I fully expected to get deployed, just as the Actice Army does today, but I do believe in the concept of citizen soldier and I think 18 months is too long.

Iraq was worth my time and effort because of the humanitarian missions I was able to participate in. We're giving a country in need a chance at a type of freedom they may naver have had, and that's a truly humane thing to do. I could go on and on, but I'll just say Yes, I think the war in Iraq is necessary, and I'm glad I went.

I wrote about this subject at the following link:

http://www.wordsmithatwar.blog-city.com/essay2.htm

Thanks for all you do, Lieutenant K

Lieutenant K blogs at the renown Wordsmith at War

Hi just thought I would answer your questions since they seem well worth the time to answer because this is a question that alot of people who have been over there get asked...

In the end, do you feel that Iraq was worth your time and effort?

In a way I do but for the most part I think that it was stupid.... this is my own opinion and as no reflect on the military at all.... I lost one of my best friends on April 22 2005 outside of Tal Afar and I was in the truck with him when it happened... so I do think that it was a waste look at all the families and soldiers that have lost loved ones over something that the government cant even prove. Maybe it was Iraq that started 9-11 but how can you prove that they werent working for some other country... alot of the Iraqi people are happy that America is there and then you have the ones that arent. Same as Americans. I don't think it was worth it at all. it is a waste of time effort and human life being over there.

Iraq is such a beautiful country, it has loving people in it that love America and are wondering why we are destroying their lives. I once talked to an Iraqi soldier who asked me "Why is America doing this to our families?" He lost his wife and kids when a bomb fell on his house. see how sad is that.. we go over there blowing shit up and kill innocent civilians tring to get one man... who I think is not even in Iraq since we attacked. So yes it is a waste to be there..

But than again it is good we are there.. they know that we mean business when you decide to fuck with America on our soil.... we are showing them that they messed with the wrong people and that we are going to punish those who were in charge of fucking with us.

Name Witheld By Request

Mister Ghost,
Thanks for your email! Every generation has a war in their lives, something hthat either the public is for or against. I lost a friend on Sept 11th, who flew KC 130's with me in the Marines. To me, this Jihad stuff is personal and I will do everything in my power to help put an end to it. Would I do it again? Yes in a heartbeat!! Would I go over to stop a country like Iran if we had to? Yes, and twice on Sunday. Take care and thanks for writing.
Semper Fi,
Taco

Taco aka Tacobell is located at Sandgram, formerly al AnBar, Iraq.

Armour - Photo Appears Courtesy of Dave's Not Here

Iraq wasn't worth my time nor my effort because my talents were not used and I didn't even perform the job the Army trained me to do. I was called back from the IRR and extended beyond my terminal ETS date to do something that anybody with any MOS could have done. I don't feel I was used to help in any significant way. It bothers me because I know I could have done more.
Thanks, Bobby LaRon

Bobby LaRon is at
Gypsy Life.

Mister Ghost,
Happy to oblige.

In the end, do you feel that Iraq was worth your time and effort? And could you tell us why?

I was a strong supporter of our efforts against Saddam Hussein specifically as a supporter of terror against the US, and in his defiance in the face of repeated injunctions by the UN Security Council. I knew he had weapons of mass destruction, and a proven willingness to use them against ethnic minorities and opponents. I never expected to be part of that effort in the National Guard, but I was proud to be called upon to serve in this way.

I think of my time in Iraq as service. I served my country, which I believe is the responsibility of all of our citizens. I also performed a service for the Iraqi people. This service involved sacrifices, on the part of me and my fellow soldiers, but also from our families, friends, and communities. It also has involved great sacrifice and expense from the Iraqi people themselves.

They were, are, and will be worth the sacrifice. They deserve the opportunity for freedom from brutality and oppression no less than any citizen of the world. They have shown remarkable courage in the face of grave dangers, and they have risen to all the challenges they've faced, from surviving one of the world's most brutal and corrupt regimes, to ignoring a largely ambivalent world audience, to forming the a new Democracy in the heart of the Middle East when few gave them any hope of doing so.

They will be great allies in the Middle East, against the many enemies we still have there, who's days are numbered in less quantity, thanks to the Iraqi People.

Personally, my time in Iraq was a time of tremendous spiritual growth for me and my family. I started to spend more time with the Bible, and shared thoughts and insights on Holy Scripture with friends and family and fellow believers back home. I found gifts I never knew I had. My wife grew in faith as well; not having me to lean on in a physical sense, while we were in regular contact, she found strength and ways to minister to others. My son also came to a better understanding of God's faithfulness and provision, and even the absence of his earthly father caused him to rely on our Heavenly Father in a way he had not known before.

We are a stronger, more knit together family, more focused on God's Will for our lives.

My job in Iraq was relatively safe, and we were blessed to serve 10 months in Iraq and bring the 200 soldiers in our unit home without injury or death. Some return with physical problems, most related to the hardships and stress, given that the average age of our (National Guard) unit was about 38, with a few Vietnam Veterans among us.

But I did complete about a dozen or so convoys. I remember those vividly, I wouldn't call them a "best" memory, just vivid. You take things like the pre-convoy brief very serious, you practice drills, how to respond to accidents or injuries, and of course improvised explosive devices (IED). You are never more alive as you sit in the seat, loaded down, locked and loaded, weapons ready, scanning every piece of trash, every person, every vehicle for potential threats. Then, getting where you're going, pealing off the layers, soaked in sweat, standing there alongside the clearing barrels or later over at the post exchange (PX, or military store), just breathing deep with "we made it" satisfaction.

That was part of God's provision, as well. I read and was reminded often of Psalm 91 in the Old Testament, where the Psalmist says, "I will say of the Lord, 'He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust." (Psalm 91:2)

Beyond that, my time in Iraq was the impetus for me to start blogging. I posted an article about Why I MILBLOG. I explained that MILBLOGGERS like Greyhawk, Citizen Smash, and Blackfive had an excellent opportunity to comment on all things military from their blogs. Most importantly, their perspectives, insights and commentary stood in sharp contrast to what passes for "Journalism" on the part of mainstream (news) media (MSM).

In my view, the most important function of the MILBLOG is to provide information. On-the-ground reporting, and the perspective of those closest to and part of the action. Relatively few soldiers conduct direct combat operations, although more and more are subjected to potential conflict and violence. Still, everything that happens can potentially be a part of history. In many ways, we have only scratched the surface on capturing what it means to be a soldier, sailor, airman, marine.

Somewhere along the way, early on in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), I realized that I would have few opportunities to do the "shock and awe," real-time, heart pounding and heat of battle war correspondent kind of reporting. I could, however, pay attention to the many fine men and women around me in combat service support roles, serving their country with quiet honor, dedication, and a fair amount of good humor. Thus were Dadmanly Profiles born.

I believe it is times of sacrifice, of trials, of taking risks for purposes greater than our own comfort or physical well-being, in which God allows us to experience more fully His power.

So was my time in Iraq worth it? Absolutely, for in it and through it and out of it, flow blessings too numerous to count. My heart desires that God will bring the good Iraqi people through their long struggle and tribulation of these many decades, and bless them for their courage and faith with a brighter, free, more peaceful and prosperous future.

Dadmanly

Dadmanly is the very fine blogger at
Dadmanly.

Do I think Iraq was/is worth it? Pardon my use of the language, but, FUCK NO. These kids are forced to say that shit when a camera is stuffed in their face, or when the media is speaking to some FOBBIT who never once left the damn compound. I was a DUSTOFF pilot who threw a 16 ½ year career away because of my beliefs. I officially left the military this month. So that should tell you how strong my conviction to this question is.

Robert R.

Blackhawk Cabin - Photo Appears Courtesy of Dave's Not Here

In the end, do you feel that Iraq was worth your time and effort?

Absolutely

And could you tell us why?

There is no doubt in my mind that the Iraqi people appreciate what we have done for them. The people I talked to and encountered on the streets of Baghdad were fearful of us leaving prematurely.

Iraq when I left was a different country than when I arrived. The Iraqi Army had made substantial improvements... both in numbers and performance. The Iraqi people began siding with the Coalition Forces. Zarqawi's biggest mistake was to target the Iraqi populace. He only strengthened our relationship with the people of Iraq. I am extremely proud of what I did in Iraq and the progress we made there. Iraq is improving daily. I cannot believe we have accomplished as much as we have in only a few years. The people of Iraq will stay with me forever. Their perseverance in the face of adversity and their continuous resolve has changed the way I look at life.

Hope this helps.

Mark Miner can be found at Boots In Baghdad.

To Read More

Not Born for Wars Alone ...

2006-07-04T01:30:00.000-04:00

Lt. Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, in a message to his men only hours before his death on July 4th, 1976:

I believe in the responsibility of commanders: a good commander is one who feels a sense of full responsibility for everything done under his command.

I believe in going into details. Anyone who doesn't do it, and who tries to save himself work, will miss the main objective of preparing the unit for war.

I believe that there can be no compromise with results. Never compromise with results that are less than the best possible, and even then look for improvements.

I believe, with absolute faith, in our ability to carry out any military task entrusted to us, and I believe in you.

I believe in Israel and in the general sense of responsibility that must accompany every man who fights for the future of his homeland.

The basic assumption in our work is to prepare for war in the best possible fashion, in order to stand quietly on the day of judgment, when it comes, in the knowledge that we did everything we could in the time that we had.

The time that Yoni Netanyahu had on this distracted globe was not long; just over thirty years. In that short time he fought in two major wars, one minor war, and participated in at least three decisive operations with the elite Sayeret Matkal special forces unit. All that plus the endless day to day warfare of the professional Israeli soldier.

Death is the special companion - the shadow wife - of the military professional. At age 17, Netanyahu wrote:

Death — that's the only thing that disturbs me. It doesn't frighten me; it arouses my curiosity. It is a puzzle that I, like many others, have tried to solve without success. I do not fear it because I attribute little value to a life without a purpose. And if I should have to sacrifice my life to attain its goal, I'll do so willingly.

Maybe that's as much philosophy as a soldier can afford, and all that he needs. It's the difference between a soldier and a fanatic. To the fanatic the world is meaningless, life has no value, and the only purposeful action is to destroy as much as possible before you yourself evaporate - either to mix your atoms with the void or to greet a bloody grinning god of death. What the difference? But a soldier fights precisely because he recognizes the meaning in things that thoughtless and superficial people cannot understand.

In another week I'll be 23. On me, on us, the young men of Israel, rests the duty of keeping our country safe. This is a heavy responsibility, which matures us early. I do not regret what I have done and what I'm about to do. I'm convinced that what I am doing is right. I believe in myself, in my country and in my future.

There is no self-pity in these words, only a note of understandable regret - again, the mark of the humane man who must grow up fast and live a soldier's life. The nihilist wants nothing better than the struggle he throws himself into; he is precisely struggling against everything that is or might be better. He has nothing to lose and nothing to give. The bloody revolutionary is celebrated as a tragic and romantic figure, when he is nothing except an aberration. The tragedy belongs to the civilized men who must dream of peace while standing endless guard against its enemies.

Not a day passes, literally, without a border incident, sabotage, mine explosion, murder, ambushes, shootings and setting fire to fields. During all the years of my service and of my living here the situation has never been so tense. In the army, everyone is impatient — when are we finally going to strike back?!! We have complete confidence in our strength. We are capable of anything.

That was written in the months before the Six Day War. Unfortunately too many of Israel's civilian leaders, including the great David Ben Gurion, did not share the confidence of her soldiers. They clung to the belief that Israel must survive by alliance and negotiation, because they were afraid that the world would not tolerate Jews who defended themselves by force of arms.

The Wars of the Jews are always the ugliest and hardest of all. These are the wars of apologetics and futile bickering, suppression or distortion of facts, and procrastination in making decisions. There is no doubt that what's called for is new leadership, a more correct perception of the realities, a sound recognition of the enemy's aims, and clear, definitive strategic-political planning. There must be no fumbling in the dark and no more tactical expedients, for these will get us nowhere.

It's the great obscenity of modern history that the mantle of "peace" is worn by those those murder peace inch by inch, either deliberately or by neglect. Those who would act decisively in defense of peaceful society must wear the "pro-war" label, while so-called pacifism demands that the endless attrition of terrorism, tyranny and murder be tolerated and tolerated and tolerated. Maybe the human race will wake up and maybe it won't, but Yonatan Netanyahu will stand quietly on the day of judgment, with nothing to apologize for.

The real cause is the sense of helplessness in the face of a war that has no end. For the war has not ended, and it seems to me that it will go on and on… This is the 'quiet' before the next storm. I've no doubt that war will come. Nor do I doubt that we will win. But for how long? Until when?

We're young, and we were not born for wars alone.