A German opera house is to unveil a provocative new production staged in the ruins of New York's World Trade Centre. It features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators.
Wagner never looked so good ...
The self-consciously outrageous September 11th staging of Verdi's 'A Masked Ball' has been dreamed up by Austrian director Johann Kresnik. He has described the concoction as a populist critique of modern American society, aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor, which attracting a large audience.
"It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre," he told reporters before Saturday's premiere. The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who dont have anything anymore."
Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik's anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety. Some of the cast are dressed in soldiers uniforms, or in the red white and blue of Uncle Sam, or in day-glow pink Elvis costumes, slashed to the waist. Many, however, appear to spend their time on stage not wearing anything at all.
They include dozens local pensioners, recruited by the opera house in Erfurt, eastern Germany, to appear naked wearing nothing but plastic Mickey Mouse masks. "Its a very beautiful, poetic scene," said Guy Montavon, the theatres general manager... Tasteless, grotesque and bitterly hateful. Thus proving once again that Germans hate culture and art above all things.
#1
aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor
Which is based upon the fairy tale MSM pens for them about America. Lets recheck it -
Most of America's "poor" live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago.
The following are facts about persons defined as "poor" by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:
â Forty-six percent of all poor households own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and porch or patio.
â Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
â Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person. â The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
â Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.
â Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television. Over half own two or more color televisions.
â Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
â Seventy-three percent own a microwave oven, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.
Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family isn't hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, activists and politicians.
The Specter of Poverty in America, Tuesday, September 21, 2004, By Robert Rector
The image the poor deluded Euro has of America is the much smaller chronic poverty which is driven by human free will to 1-abuse drugs and alcohol, 2-creating families before establishing skills to support them, 3-blowing off one's education opportunities, and 4-keeping to the old ways. That is a self inflicted wound not created by the people or their government.
#2
Ooooh. An Austrian coreographer is staging an opera to tell us what's wrong with America! Maybe the wine critic that whined about Petraeus can take him to dinner?
Nice pics. I guess fat ugly naked people gotta work too..
#3
The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who dont have anything anymore."
Indeed, though the production looks unlikely to win many prizes for the nuance of its message, Mr Kresnik has succeeded in his other aim, selling out the Erfurt opera house for the premiere.
Nope. None of that "victims of capitalism" shit for Herr Kresnick...
#5
the opera sounds totally tasteless, Im hoping some clever New Yorkers can stage an over the top protest against it of their own. Id try to contact my orthodox J contacts, but the nudity would scare them off.
OTOH this
"The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)"
Isnt apples to apples - most folks in Euroland dont live in the capital cities, which (Paris especially) are notorious for being places where upper middle class folks trade off space for the benefits of being in the center of town.
Based only on my own observation the average living space in England is significantly less on any plane of comparison you choose. Also, those American poor are mostly in the cities too.
#7
It's gonna be in the opera house in Erurt, Germany not NYC. A European "artiste" wouldn't have those kind of balls.
If it was here, and especially at Ground Zero, there'd probably be a beatup Austrian coreographer and some fat, ugly, naked Germans bleeding next to him. And that's if people were in a good mood...
#8
Tasteless, grotesque and bitterly hateful. Thus proving once again that Germans hate culture and art above all things.
It's not just a German thing. Recent opera productions, especially EUropean, are in a race to the bottom of the well of depravity. Here's a link to an article if anyone's interested.
Actually, there is a lot more to say. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a humorous tale of the capture of a group of Europeans by a Turkish pasha, who tries to win the love of one of them; Mozart lavishes joyful, driving rhythmsled by piccolo, triangle, and cymbalson its Turkish themes, and adds a rich lode of elegant solos, particularly for tenor. Bieito transferred the Abduction to a contemporary Eastern European brothel and translated the dignified pasha of Mozarts sadly irrelevant tale into the brothels sick pimp overseer.
#14
In one representative moment, the leading soprano, Constanzewho has already suffered digital violation during a poignant lamentis beaten and then held down and forced to watch as the pashas servant, Osmin, first forces a prostitute to perform fellatio on him and then gags the prostitute and slashes her to death.
It takes place as Constanze is singing one of the most difficult arias in the soprano literature, Martern aller Arten (Tortures of Every Kind). Martern is an obstacle course of leaps and trills accompanied by melting winds and propulsive harmonies, all meant to convey Constanzes nobility in refusing the pashas demands for her love. It belongs in the long literary tradition of tragic rhetoric; its mention of torture is not a stage direction.
Mozart immediately follows the number with a buoyant aria by Constanzes maid and a return to the lightest farcemaking clear that nothing untoward has happened to Constanze or to anyone else in the opera.
The great Iowahawk cleans up the moonbat droppings that fell on Gen. Petraeus's uniform yesterday:
[ed. note - found in a dumpster behind a West Hollywood antique shop: first draft of wine critic / Mr. Blackwell wannabe Matthew DeBord's gripping op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. h/t: Uncle Jimbo at BlackFive]
by Matthew DeBord
Gen. David H. Petraeus may be as fabulous a military professional as the United States has developed in recent years, but let's face it, girlfriend - when it comes to the Fashion Theater, this showy soldier needs to call in the Makeover Marines. Oh snap!
Witness his congressional testimony on the state of the war in Iraq. There he sits in gaudy Army regalia, four stars glistening and glittering on each shoulder, nine camp rows of chintzy ribbons on his left breast, and various other brooches, patches and appliques scattered across the rest of the available real estate on his uniform. Talk about 'fruit salad!' Hel-loooo, General Garanimals: the 1950s called and they want their uniform back! To top it all off, the DC paparazzi photos show our dowdy doughboy sporting a name tag, a lone and incongruous hunk of cheap plastic in a region of pristine gilt. Looks like this ostentatious officer was playing hooky during West Point's Accessorizing 101!
That's a lot of martial bling, especially for an officer who hadn't seen combat until five years ago. Girlfriend, I've seen more violent hand-to-hand action during a Jimmy Choo clearance sale on Rodeo Drive. Unfortunately, brazen preening and "ribbon creep" among the Army's modern-day upper crust have trumped the time-honored military virtues of humility, duty, and fab personal style. Fashion Medic!
Think about any of the generals you've seen in recent years -- Norman Schwarzkopf, Buck Turgidson, General McBragg from Tennesse Tuxedo, General Hawk from the G.I. Joe action figure team, and others -- and the image you'll conjure no doubt includes a chest full of shimmering decorations. But if they're going to share the collectible display case with your mint-in-box 1965 Malibu Barbie, you also expect them to have working kung fu grip to go along with the glitter.
In Petraeus' case, most of the ribbons don't represent actual military action as much as they do the mutual devotion between the general and the U.S. Army. Get a private cabana, you two! According to an annotated photograph produced by Women's Wear Daily last year, the majority of ribbons on Petraeus' off-the-rack "rack" were earned for various flavors of distinguished service. As brave and butch as he may be, is this any way to present the situation in Iraq to an increasingly war-skeptical, and fashion-forward, public?
Of course, Petraeus' goal is not just to make simple, soldierly arguments before Congress -- it is to dazzle, to bewitch, to be cock o' the walk, at least initially, with the blazing imagery of rank. I suppose it's only natural to want "all-eyes-on-me" at the techno club or cruise ship. What, after all, are the drab Brooks Brothers and ghastly Valentino pantsuits on the members of Congress in the face of a butch fighting man's laurels? Sure, some of the showiness can be attributed to regulations, but if military history and Coco Chanel have taught us anything, it's that fashion rules are meant to be broken.
Medals and decorations have a long history with a slightly cynical tinge. This goes back to their inception, during the Napoleonic era, when the sawed-off strategic genius from Corsica discovered that gaudy fashion baubles handed out to the combatants helped ensure loyalty. "An army travels on its stomach, and its bling," he said. In more contemporary times, these tacky trinkets have suffered a fraught reputation among fashionista rank and file: nice to get, but embarrassingly awkward to display. My guess is that most Iraq war veterans end up returning their medals to H&M for cash credit or gift cards, or bring them out at dinner parties as ironic conversation pieces.
The greatest military figures have often conspicuously (and sexily) modified the official requirements of the uniform, even in the most public of settings. Burly bear Ulysses S. Grant wore unbuttoned Union blues and muddy boots when he provocatively asked Robert E. Lee to give up his sword (Oh no he din't!) "Diva Doug" MacArthur rocked the South Pacific fashion scene with his khakis and corncob pipe and uberbitchy demands for unconditional surrender. Flamboyant George Patton, whose outrageous wardrobe included jodhpurs and riding boots, earned a reputation as "Elton John of the 2nd Armored Division."
Perhaps the best example, however -- and one that Petraeus and his cadre should look to for inspiration -- was set by two of the most politically savvy generals America has produced: Dwight Eisenhower and George Clooney. In a photo spread for Esquire following World War II, Ike redefined combat couture with his rakish waistjacket & shaved head ensemble. It was a look so elegant and daring that many suspect that Mamie was "a beard." As for Clooney, what else can be said about the man who single handedly resurrected classic Hollywood style and international politico-military relevance?
Sherman was right: "War is Hell -- on taste." When you've saved the world and managed the lives and deaths of millions, it obviously compels a certain level of modesty, and shape-slimming basic black. So before you hit the premiere night red carpet at the Senate Hearing Theater, take a tip from Joan and Melissa Rivers: spend a few bucks at Armani, and leave the General costumes to the fetish club boys.
Memo to Petraeus: When you're making the case for more patriotic gore, go easy on the glitter.
Follow up Memo to Petraeus: Oh snap!
Matthew DeBord covers military strategy, wine, fashion, interior decorating, geopolitics, and Barbie collecting for the Los Angeles Times.
#5
Excalibur - you are right - I clicked on the moonbat droopings link and read the real LA Times article. It was such a joke that I thought these were one and the same. It was veery early in the morning for me.
The candidates from American Idol last night. McCain had a good zinger in there and, IMHO was the most "real" and non-staged of the three. We also wait for your new immagration policy senator. Maybe you learned something from the last time, and if so, fully won my vote.
By now no one is surprised by what is said by a Rev. Wright (KKK of A, Israel is a dirty word, etc.) or a Rev. Meeks (white people as slave-masters), or that they have figured prominently among Obama supporters.
Now the latest is apparently Rev. Eric Lee (What other kind of Rabbis are there, but Jews? The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us.), one of the designated co-sponsors of a Feb., 2008 ObamaGet Out and Vote Rally in Los Angeles, who on April 4th went on a public unhinged anti-Semitic rant about Daphna Ziman, the recipient of the Tom Bradley award.
The point is not to what degree Rev. Lee is directly involved in the Obama campaign (the usual official distancing will follow), but rather three other considerations:
First, once Obama failed to condemn Wright and offered contextualization, the flood gates of extremism were thrown wide open. Now any hate-monger, it seems, can go on a public racist rant, with the expectation that there will be no credible and absolute public condemnation. You see, our potential next President has already weighed in on Rev. Wrights hate speech by citing his past good works, the commonality of such talk among all our religious figures, the special nature of the black church, and the unfair snippets that are replayedall of which, of course, will offer the same context of mitigation for the Eric Lee hatred. We can imagine the accolades to come in the next few days concerning Lees public benefactions.
Second, when one collates what Wright, Meeks, Lee, and Sharpton have said, and then compares those snippets and loops with the cheery characterization of the unique protocols of the black church by Obama, then one realizes that the public is supposed to accept that African-American pastors are exempt from the sort of no-go speech zones that everyone else rightly accepts. It seems that we are rapidly reaching a sort of scary situation in which the black pastor will say whatever he wishes, no matter how anti-Semitic and racist, and then almost dare anyone to challenge that hatred, knowing that his congregation will support him, African-American intellectuals will contextualize him on television, and politicians like Obama (cf. Hillarys past hugs of Sharpton) will defend him.
Three, these incidents will only continue until someone of stature in the civil rights community issues a zero-tolerance speech of the sort Obama should have given but failed at. In isolation, each subsequent outburst is explicable; in the aggregate they paint a picture of a deep-seeded racism and hatred that have been encouraged by the absence of any censurethe appeasement that we know so well from the Obama/Wright controversy.
Three weeks ago I wrote, in a number of postings, that we would see more of such Wright-like hatred in response to the widely-praised Obama race speech, which was, in fact, one of the great regressions in civil rights history. I dont think that anything I have written has received more angry emails in response; but the Lee case, I think, shows that I was correctand we can expect more still to come in the next six months. I also stand by my second prognosisthat in Obama we are witnessing the slow formation of a McGovern candidacy, a disaster to come that wont be fully appreciated by now starry-eyed Democrats until September or October when, as in 1972, it will be too late.
#1
I think VDH is, as usual, dead on. I WANT Obama as the Dem candidate. I think the campaign will not only get the ASSES whipped bad, but will show the rest of America that it's long past time we stopped cutting blacks slack for violent and offensive behavior.
It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators on both sides of the aisle who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.
The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com."
Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.
Some people charge that we have merely "rented" the Sunni tribesmen, the former insurgents who now fight by our side. This implies that because we pay these people, their loyalty must be for sale to the highest bidder. But as Gen. Petraeus demonstrated in Nineveh province in 2003 to 2004, many of the Iraqis who filled the ranks of the Sunni insurgency from 2003 into 2007 could have been working with us all along, had we treated them intelligently and respectfully. In Nineveh in 2003, under then Maj. Gen. Petraeus's leadership, these men many of them veterans of the Iraqi army played a crucial role in restoring civil order. Yet due to excessive de-Baathification and the administration's attempt to marginalize powerful tribal sheiks in Anbar and other provinces including men even Saddam dared not ignore we transformed potential partners into dreaded enemies in less than a year.
The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big "kinetic" military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.
The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.
This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.
We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.
Over the past 15 months, we have proved that we can win this war. We stand now at the moment of truth. Victory and a democracy in the Arab world is within our grasp. But it could yet slip away if our leaders remain transfixed by the war we almost lost, rather than focusing on the war we are winning today.
#1
I suggest something even better. Iraq has a whole bunch of young men and boys who have seen the US military way of doing things and like it a lot.
So why not create a bunch of (temporarily) US-run military training academies, *parallel* to those who train the Iraqi military, but whose purpose is to create an Iraqi "force projection military" as well.
That is, there are demands all over the world for well-trained light infantry personnel for all kinds of important missions, such as peacekeeping, disaster response, disarmaments, etc. Especially in Muslim countries that have a serious problem with non-Muslim foreign troops.
The Iraqis have both Shiites and Sunnis, so they would be perfect for such duties. The jobs would be well paying, often with UN command, and would have something akin to lateral duty transfer with the Iraqi military. That is, it would be led by Iraqi officers, and directed by the Iraqi government, but would be oriented to conducting operations *outside* of Iraq, instead of defending Iraq.
This has tons of advantages. First of all, the appeal would be of Iraqis helping other, mostly Muslim, nations, which would be a major ego boost to not just Iraqis, but Arabs as a whole.
Second would be that they would be doing it the "American-International" way, to high quality standards of professionalism and performance.
Third, it would be good employment in respectable jobs, a way for an ambitious young man to climb the social ladder.
And for some of their missions, Iraq might be paid handsomely for their use as well. Right now, several small countries rent out their military to the UN, strictly for the money. But these are just small handfuls of soldiers. Iraq could provide brigades or even a division of more soldiers at premium prices.
The US is pushing Iraq to have 300,000 men in uniform as soldiers and police. Upping that number by another 10-20,000 would be relatively easy.
The big advantage to the US is that even we could pay these Iraqis to do jobs that we would otherwise have to do ourselves, but the Iraqis would cost only a fraction of the amount, and with a lot less acrimony if it was in a Muslim area. So everybody wins.
#2
Not a bad idea. I remember the ROK Marines as having an excellent record in Vietnam. Sometimes folks really close to a problem can avoid being blinded by teh propoganda and nonsense that blinds others.
Hindus in Pakistan have suffered grievously since the founding of the nation in 1947. Recently, in the southern province of Sindh, a Hindu man was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by his co-workers. This comes at the heels of the abduction and dismemberment of a Hindu engineer.
A little while earlier, the military removed 70 Hindu families from lands where they had been living since the 19th century. To this day the temples that Pakistanis destroyed in 1992 in response to the destruction of the Babri mosque in India have not been restored.
Pakistan, according to many accounts, was founded as a way to protect the rights and existence of the minority Muslim population of Colonial India in the face of the larger Hindu majority. Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is reported to have said in 1947: "In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims - not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state." It is therefore a travesty of Pakistan's own founding principles that its Hindus - and not to exclude Christians and Ahmadis - have suffered so grossly.
There are two levels of prejudice in Pakistan with respect to Hindus - the cultural and the legal.
While it is difficult to say which one is more pernicious, cultural prejudice is certainly more difficult to uproot because it is perpetuated by religious supremacism, nationalism, stories, myth, lies, families, media, schooling and bigotry.
Cultural prejudice has become part and parcel of language itself. Hindus are referred to as "na pak." Na means "un" and pak means "pure." So, Hindus are turned into the impure, or unclean. Given that the word "pak" is part of the word "Pakistan" - which means Land of the Pure - somebody's impurity suggests that they are not really Pakistani.
To make matters even worse, Pakistani mullahs teach a very supremacist version of the Islamic creed, the kalima. Usually, the kalima reads simply: "There is no god but God and Muhammad is His final messenger." The version that children are taught, however, reads as follows: "The first kalima is Tayyab; Tayyab means Pak (Pure); There is no god but God and Muhammad is His final Messenger."
Do you see how the word "Pak" - which denotes both purity and connects to citizenship in Pakistan - is smuggled into the Islamic creed? Since in Urdu this little ditty rhymes very effectively, this is the version of religiosity that most children repeat their entire lives. As a result, while they grow up, they psychologically equate Hindus with impurity, with uncleanliness, as not Pakistani, and therefore less than, both Islamically and as citizens.
The only two parties that can begin to bring some change in this arena are the state and the liberal clerics.
Last year Pakistan's prime minister did greet Hindus during Diwali and a prominent Hindu nationalist leader - who had to quit his party because of his outreach - that was born in Karachi did come back and pay respects to his birth-city.
Cricket diplomacy, which began in 2004, helped a little (but not really, because the focus was on cricket and not on religion). Also, there are a few prominent Hindus here and there - one is a justice of the Supreme Court and one is the leading leg-spinner for the cricket team. Yet, as the Pakistani exile Tarek Fatah points out, Justice Bhagwandas had to take the oath on the Quran. Meanwhile, Kaneria is regularly excluded from the Pakistani cricket team's congregational Islamic prayer.
As bad as the cultural prejudice is, legal prejudice is the one that must be more urgently dealt with, because it is what allows cultural prejudice to acquire institutional power.
Two laws in particular have been very problematic for the Hindu community.
The first one was promulgated under the 1973 constitution which made Islam the state religion of Pakistan and established a separate electorate for Muslims and non-Muslims so that Hindus could only vote for Hindu candidates. Musharraf abolished this in 2002. I think Muslims who support the idea of Islamic states around the world really need to stop and think about this for a second. It took an American-backed dictator in the year 2002 for a Muslim state to abolish unequal voting? As a wise man once said: are you kidding me? This is a deplorable commentary on the state of equality in today's Islam.
The second law is the infamous blasphemy law passed under Islamist dictator Zia ul Haq in the 1980s. Designed specifically to punish the Ahmadi minority, the blasphemy law now provides convenient protection to anyone who ever wants to kill, murder, maim, beat up, mug, abduct, or punish any religious minority. All you really have to do is carry out your brutality and then point at the victim and say that he was blasphemous.
This law needs to be repealed immediately: no reform, no fixing, no tweaking, but total abolishment. Efforts to repeal it under Musharraf failed in the Senate. The secular parliament in session now is probably not going to touch it unless it is told to do so by international groups (who frankly aren't really interested). The UN, EU, US, and International Council of Jurists must make some noise about repealing Pakistan's heinous blasphemy law.
There are little more than three million Hindus in Pakistan (a nation of 160 million). They are still part of Pakistani life and need to be treated with respect and dignity. According to some sources, at the founding of Pakistan, Hindus comprised nearly 15% of the country's population and now number barely 2%. Many have left, many have been killed, and many have converted to other religions to protect themselves. All in all, a travesty for a state that was created with the intended purpose of protecting minorities.
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04/11/2008 06:31 ||
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Does anybody remember Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, who was assassinated on September 14, 1989, in Srinagar? Not many! That marked the beginning of the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from their homeland. Did his family get justice? Similarly, justice has eluded the relatives of Taranath Sen, murdered in Bangladesh on December 15, 2007, for protesting the take-over of a Hindu cremation ground by local Muslims.
At another level, the much talked and written about judgement in the Bilkis Bano case is an occasion to reaffirm our trust in the capacity of the Indian system to mete out condign punishment to the guilty and restore peoples' faith and trust in our investigative agencies. But is our system conditioned by the exigencies of the political culture?
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04/11/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
I wish we had history professors like this in our universities.
#2
Even before Raja Rammohun Roy, the Cornwallis Code (1793) was the first conscious attempt in modern times to de-communalise the state and a bold step to establish the rule of law in India
Yep... the same Cornwallis who surrendered at Yorktown
Posted by: john frum ||
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#3
"Decietful Progressives"
Are there any other kind?
Posted by: Mike ||
04/11/2008 8:29 Comments ||
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By Barry Rubin
On April 9, Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip attacked the Nahal Oz fuel terminal in Israel near the border. Two Israeli workers were killed. Shortly before, a shipment of diesel fuel for the Gaza power plant, paid for by the European Union, had left there.
What makes this attack especially significantand horribleis that the only reason the terminal was open and the workers were present was to supply the needs of the Gaza Strips population. In previous months, the international media and many governments criticized Israel for not doing enough to help Gaza, despite the fact that the area is ruled by an openly anti-Semitic regime which makes clear its goal of destroying Israel, and also daily fires mortars and rockets into Israel. Indeed, as part of this attack, several mortar shells were fired at the terminal.
IMO, this guy has the right of it. HT LGF
On Tuesday, Iran announced it was installing 6,000 more centrifuges -- they produce enriched uranium, the key ingredient of a nuclear weapon -- in addition to the 3,000 already operating. The world yawned.
It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration's attempt to halt Iran's nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road.
The president didn't have much of a chance given that most of Europe, the UN and much of our own country was working against him.
The president is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the Middle East, threaten the moderate Arabs with Iranian hegemony and leave Israel on hair-trigger alert.
This failure can, however, be mitigated. Since there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by pre-emption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence to prevent the mullahs, some of whom are apocalyptic and messianic, from using nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, we prevented an attack not only on the U.S. but also on America's allies by extending the American nuclear umbrella -- i.e., declaring that any attack on our allies would be considered an attack on the United States. Such a threat is never 100 percent credible. Nonetheless, it made the Soviets think twice about attacking our European allies. It kept the peace.
We should do the same to keep nuclear peace in the Middle East. It would be infinitely less dangerous (and therefore more credible) than Cold War deterrence because there will be no threat from Iran of the annihilation of the United States. Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, would have a relatively tiny arsenal incapable of reaching the U.S.
Deterrence doesn't work if your opponent's strategy is 1) commit a truly horrific act that kills lots of infidels so that 2) Allah is sufficiently pleased to open the heavens and finish the job.
How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush should issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy's language while changing the names of the miscreants:
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran.
This should be followed with a simple explanation: "As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people." Rest at link
A large percentage of Americans would not be willing to risk a nuclear attack on our own country to defend Israel. I don't agree with that, but that's how it is.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
