Scott McDonald (Reuters)
Fear the winter, fear the Taliban warrior, fear the wrath of the Afghan. So run the refrains from Afganistan's Taliban rulers. But Taliban boasts of dealing a death blow to US ground forces in the same way that Soviet troops were driven out of their landlocked country of deserts and mountains will fall flat, military analysts said on Friday. This is because we're not doing the same things the Soviets were doing. The U.S. government is devoting a certain amount of attention to what kind of government will sit in Kabul after the Taliban is disposed of, but we really don't care. What we do care about is killing Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. If we did care about post-Taliban Afghanistan we'd be giving it more thought. We'd shut out Pakistan and try and draw in Uzbekistan -- a much "cleaner" regime without the baggage Pakistan has been carrying. If we really cared, we might look into supporting a government headed by Gen. Dostum -- who seems the most secular of the Northern Alliance leaders. What a pity Massoud is dead.
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10/19/2001 ||
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New Republic Idiocy Watch:"I read the article by David Duke and I'm not going to deny that I agreed with some of its content.... If I had known his history I would not have sent it out. If the article was written by somebody else I would've still sent it out. I feel like the article is valid. I don't feel like whether the article is anti-Semitic is something I need to explain."--Nadeen Al-jijakli, president of the Arab Students Union at New York University, quoted by Washington Square News explaining why she distributed an article by David Duke over the Internet.
"The primary reason we are suffering from terrorism in the United States is because our government policy is completely subordinated to a foreign power: Israel and the efforts of worldwide Jewish Supremacism.... Israel is the only winner in this tragedy."--The aforementioned David Duke article, September 17.
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10/19/2001 ||
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By RICHARD L. BERKE NY TIMES
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 â As he leads the country in a war on terrorism, President Bush has won over some unlikely supporters, prominent Democrats who campaigned for Al Gore in last year's presidential campaign. Many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naïve and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising his and his advisers' performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs expertise an issue in the campaign, did not win.
Sounding relieved that Mr. Gore is not president, Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia, said: "I feel comfortable with President Bush. I never thought I would utter those words." Mr. Moran continued: "Even though I'm a Democrat and think the Supreme Court selected our president, I don't think it's to our disadvantage to have George Bush as president. Sometimes you need a certain amount of braggadocio in your leaders."
Perhaps out of a desire to rally around Mr. Bush, not one of more than 15 prominent Gore loyalists interviewed said their candidate would have done a better job. The bluntest assessments were from Democrats who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. Several said the nation was fortunate to have Mr. Bush in power, and they questioned whether Mr. Gore would have surrounded himself with as experienced a foreign policy team as Mr. Bush did. Citing Mr. Gore's sometimes rambling speech in Des Moines on Sept. 29 in which he praised Mr. Bush, some Democrats also questioned whether the former vice president would have been as nimble at communicating to the public.
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10/19/2001 ||
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NY POST
October 19, 2001 -- A New York Post employee becomes the seventh anthrax case nationwide in recent weeks and the fourth in New York, all involving media companies. "The employee is being treated and is doing well," New York City health officials said in a memo distributed to employees of the newspaper. The memo said it is "likely the employee may have been infected while opening the mail."
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10/19/2001 ||
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AndrewSullivan.com
SONTAG HEDGES: David Talbot's interview with Susan Sontag, conducted, so far as I can tell, on his knees, starts with a preposterous amount of throat clearing and excuse making and silly swipes at alleged "censorship." These pampered journalists, who have never seen a moment of real censorship in their lives, and who have marginalized conservative voices for their entire careers in their own organs and field of influence, take the occasion of the massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens to worry about themselves - and preen self-righteously at the same time. Then there's the sheer pretentiousness of it all. I'm particularly fond of Talbot's use of the word "texts" to discuss Sontag's works. (I'm not the first weblogger to notice this). Not books; not pieces; not articles; not essays - but "texts." Ooooh. That must mean she's a real intellectual. The silver lining is that Sontag has now stated her belief in the notion that we are indeed confronting a jihad and that there can be no compromise with these murderers. But the rest of the interview completely belies this view. Item one: if there is no negotiating with these killers, what do we do? According to Sontag, we don't bomb. The Taliban soldiers are just "a lot of kids." We don't even drop food packages, which, in her eyes, are a cover for an unholy war. In fact, you can read this interview again to see whether she has any practical recommendations for our response, and you will come up empty. Like Katha Pollitt, she has absolutely nothing to say, except that we all need to read the latest "text" by Stanley Hoffmann in the New York Review of Books. I'm sorry, but this is self-parody. Her only practical recommendations are that we should stop military action against the Taliban and urge a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Gee, that will terrify the terrorists. They won't dare murder us again after that. She dismisses out of hand the notion that the anthrax attacks could be the work of al Qaeda. She refers to them as "what I think are 99 percent certain to be just domestic copycat crazies on their own war path." Why does she have such certainty? No reason given. When you're that brilliant, why bother with reasons? She further complains that the media has "censored" pictures of grisly horror at the WTC site because it would demoralize the people. Is she kidding? Pictures of severed hands and tangled limbs would not demoralize this country. It would enrage this country. If such pictures have been held back, it is out of respect for the dead and their families, and precisely in order to restrain possible anger. That piece of loopy judgment alone should tell us all we need to know about what planet Sontag is living on. Throughout it all, she denigrates the Brits for their support of the United States and calls president Bush "ridiculous." No, Ms Sontag. It is you who are ridiculous.
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10/19/2001 ||
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NRO By David F. Forte
Last week, the Upper Sharia Court in Gwadabawa, Sokoto State, in northern Nigeria sentenced a 30-year-old pregnant woman to be stoned for premarital sex. Human-rights organizations immediately protested the sentence. The human-rights problems in imposing a 1,000-year-old codification of law are not confined to tribalistic Nigeria. Muslims and non-Muslims alike suffer under some of the extreme provisions of the Sharia (Islamic law) applied, directly or indirectly, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and other areas. But these actions are not the essentialist Islam. In fact, most contemporary fundamentalist impositions do not even observe the strict procedural protections the Sharia provided, and under which few if any of today's attacks on human rights could be accomplished. They violate the provisions of the very law they claim to be following. Furthermore, today's application of the criminal provisions of the Sharia are as ahistorical as they are problematical for human rights. The Islamic empire in its various forms more often substituted its own criminal courts and criminal decrees for that of the qadi (judge), leaving the criminal-law provisions of the Sharia among the least developed areas of classical Islamic law. Of course religion isn't the enemy; culture is the enemy. Unfortunately, religion is deeply intertwined with culture, and cultures are often imperialistic. Islam in non-Arab settings produces a version of the religion that's relatively tolerant -- for instance, as Indonesia was until quite recently, or Malaysia. Islam in the Arab setting can be just as easy-going, the Sufis for instance, or it can be ineffably brutal, as in Afghanistan and (dare one say it?) Saudi Arabia. This brutal version, exemplified by the Wahhabi sect, is the one that's being exported, and everywhere it's been exported violence and intolerance has followed in its wake. The roots of the Wahhabi are Arab, and their brutality resonates especially well in those cultures -- such as are found in northern Nigeria -- that have their own deeply venerated traditions of ignorance and brutality.
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10/19/2001 ||
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AndrewSullivan.com
ARAB ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Now, it's official. The Syrian Defense Minister has endorsed the notion that Israel was responsible for the World Trade Center massacre. Another unreliable poll in Lebanon finds a plurality believing it. Abraham Foxman has called on president Bush to debunk this rumor. I agree, but in these circumstances, an American denial would merely prove the rumor to these crazy paranoiacs. Nor should we be surprised. The man making this statement previously wrote a pamphlet called "The Matzah of Zion," whose arguments were summed up in the mainstream Egyptian newspaper al Ahram thus: "The bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews to be used in matzahs to be devoured during Passover." Yes, folks. This is the blood libel. And this text will shortly become a movie. The justification? According to the invaluable Middle East Media and Research Institute, "The producer stated that the primary goal of the film is 'to respond to all of the Zionist films distributed by the American film industry, which is backed by the Zionist propaganda apparatus. Among these films is Schindler's List, which supports the idea of the Jews' right to the land of Palestine.'" We need to be clear here. We are dealing with the moral equivalent of Nazis. And these people now have a seat on the U.N. Security Council and are being considered possible allies in the war against terrorism. Who on earth are we kidding?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/19/2001 ||
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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.
