#7 This is cowardice. It is moral anesthesia and ethical abdication, and if we do not root it out we will never be able to defend ourselves against the evil of totalitarian Islam.
That's it in a nutshell, Dave D. This is a war in which the home front morale, which is constantly being undermined by the MSM, is the most vulnerable point of our defense. And instead of trying to help plug the dike, the BBC et al are having at it with jackhammers and bulldozers.
Via Wretchard:
"the father of an Afghan Special Forces soldier wrote privately to say:
Mr. Bin Laden did not miscalculate, not if his calculation was based on things other than the professionalism of the US combat soldier. Neither the west's elected officials nor many of its citizens may be counted on to hold when all about them is falling apart. However, the US - and for that matter Australian - combat soldier is another matter entirely. During a phone conversation this weekend, my son noted a Navy SEAL has never surrendered. It will reassure him that such is still the case.
There was, in this deeply moving private email, the unstated fear that national leadership might not keep the faith -- or as Michael Ledeen suggests -- be imprisoned by myopia -- the tyranny of the soundbite, the goad of the public fixation du jour. The Jihad after all, does not seem similarly vulnerable to the vacillations of their leadership. Even if Osama Bin Laden were arrested today or were he to convert to evangelical Christianity the Jihad would be unlikely to die down. He could not "sell out" his cause in the same sense that Spain's Prime Minister Zapatero could."
And there you have it. All the bravery and sacrafice on the battlefront will count for nothing if the soldiers are undercut by a lethal combination of enemy-sympathist MSM coupled with clueless and/or spineless leadership. |
The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as "terrorists", it was disclosed yesterday. Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as "bombers". The BBC's guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the "careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments". Consequently, "the word 'terrorist' itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding" and its use should be "avoided", the guidelines say.