Is the ground staff at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris rife with hundreds of Islamist radicals, acting as sleeper cells and preparing to launch devastating terror attacks? That was the striking allegation from Philippe de Villiers,head of the anti-immigrant Movement for France (MPF) party late last month.
The candidates for France's next presidential election (tentatively April 2007) have begun jockeying for position, and Mr. de Villiers debuted with a bang with a new book "The Mosques of Roissy." Obviously, the mind and pulse race at the thought of potential al Qaeda infiltration of de Gaulle, which has been a recurring battlefield in the war on terror. It is largely forgotten that a precursor to the September 11 attacks occurred just before Christmas 1994 when Air France Flight 8969 was hijacked shortly after it took off from Algiers en route to de Gaulle. It was flown to Marseille, where hijackers wanted it to be refueled in order to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. The plot ended when French commandos raided the plane and shot the hijackers dead.
Also, it was on a flight from de Gaulle to Miami in December 2001 that al Qaeda's Richard Reid tried to ignite explosives hidden in his shoes onboard American Airlines Flight 63, before being subdued by passengers. In 2002, airport police arrested a baggage handler, a French citizen of Algerian origin, after a search of his car revealed a handgun, a machine gun, five bars of plastic explosives and two detonators.
Shortly before Mr. de Villiers' book was published, France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and Justice Minister toured the airport and assured the public that Mr. de Villiers was vastly overstating the threat. Mr. Sarkozy said only 122 of about 83,000 ground staff were being watched and that airport security had already dealt with the matter. Islamic columnists now claim that Muslim workers avoid the airport's prayer room for fear that the police may see them as "potential terrorists."
The early splash by Mr. de Villiers suggests that the upcoming French elections will be dramatically different than the ones in the United Kingdom and Germany last year, where the candidates focused nearly entirely on economic issues. Al Qaeda was barely mentioned in Tony Blair's reelection campaign; the Liberal Democrats were left grousing about Iraq. Similarly, Germany's center-right candidate Angela Merkel sporadically and quietly rebuked Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's America-bashing, but rarely focused on foreign policy. The closest any German candidate came to addressing the broader war on Islamist terrorism was an anti-Iraq-war Social Democrat candidate who obnoxiously and callously used images of American-flag draped coffins in his campaign ad.
It's odd that after the themes of security, protection of innocent lives and aggressive pursuit of terrorists put President Bush over the top in 2004, so few foreign political candidates have tread that ground in their own campaigns. But next year, France might be the exception.
In the most recent Ipsos poll of 939 French adults Mr. Sarkozy would qualify for the runoff against Segolene Royal, the Socialist. The two further-right candidates who have campaigned on vigorously anti-immigration platforms, Jean-Marie Le Pen gets 10 percent, and Mr. de Villiers gets 5 percent.
But if Mr. Sarkozy is not the nominee of the ruling center-right Union for a Popular Movement party, and instead the currently widely disliked Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is, the poll looks dramatically different. Ms. Royal is the top winner with 34 percent; Mr. de Villepin barely makes the runoff with 15 percent, and Mr. Le Pen gets 14 percent -- a statistical tie. (Mr. Le Pen made the runoff against Jacques Chirac last time; French political elites contended his surprising performance was a fluke that would never occur again. Well, c'est la vie.) Mr. de Villiers also jumps to 10 percent in this array of candidates. The poll found that in a head-to-head matchup, Ms. Royal holds a two-point edge over Mr. Sarkozy, and a 24-point advantage over Mr. de Villepin.
To many thoroughly dissatisfied French voters, the election can't come soon enough. The last year has seen a widespread collapse in the public's confidence in its elected leaders, from the surprising referenda rejection of the EU constitution, to the chaotic, frightening car-burning riots of last fall, to the disturbing "Clearstream" political scandal, which day by day unraveling political intrigue and corruption of Byzantine complexity. Perhaps the straw that broke the camel's back was the recent national paralysis spurred by young people protesting violently to stop a law that would permit employers to fire them at will until they're age 26.
In this mess, Mr. Sarkozy appears to be the only elected official with the bravade to take on these problems directly. He called the French rioters "scum" (it says much about French politics that this label is considered controversial) and ordered those who were not citizens deported, even if they had residency visas. He backs a tougher immigration law that would aim to attract skilled workers while keeping less skilled ones out; the law easily passed the National Assembly and will be taken up by the Senate shortly.
There is some belief in France that Mr. Chirac may dump Mr. de Villepin this summer and make Mr. Sarkozy prime minister -- perhaps when all of France is obsessed with the chances of their national team in the World Cup. That change would make Mr. Sarkozy a de facto incumbent, akin to Al Gore following Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush following Ronald Reagan.
As the poll results suggest, Mr. Sarkozy doesn't quite have an easy road. But he's demonstrated a willingness to confront threats that have struck fear in the hearts of his countrymen. And one has to wonder if the French electorate would turn to a socialist to root out a terrorist threat, at Charles de Gaulle airport and elsewhere.
Jim Geraghty is a contributing editor at National Review.
#4
That was not meant as a critiscism of the poster, just my feeling.
Nothing short of a real crisis will make France change, so that kind of political infighting is just self-serving members of a close-knit elite jockeying for power, with the possible exception of the national right candidates, and I'm not even sure.
We're heading toward it, some kind of convulsion, though, small consolation. Not so sure the "good guys" will prevail, given France's socio-politics (thanks, national education, for having brainswashed generations into liberalism).
She catered to the worst prejudices about Muslims, Islam says Haroon Siddiqui
The sudden fall from grace of Dutch Muslim MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali offers a cautionary tale about Western gullibility in these Islamophobic times.
She has been exposed as the equivalent of such Iraqi exiles as Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi. They told the tall tales the Bush administration wanted to hear to wage war. She told the stories the Dutch, and many Europeans, craved, to confirm their anti-Muslim prejudices.
Like the Iraqi exiles, she knew exactly which buttons to push.
She was an abused wife who had fled a forced marriage and also her vengeful family and clan. An "ex-Muslim," she was out to liberate Muslim women and tame Islam to her liking and those of her benefactors.
She wrote and narrated the Theo Van Gogh documentary Submission about the subjugation of Muslim women that led to his murder and to death threats against her, placing her under 24-hour guard.
Along the way she let it be known she had lied about her name, age and how she had entered Holland in 1992, not directly from her homeland of Somalia but via Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Germany, a fact that would have undermined her claim, rather than expedited it.
The Dutch didn't mind. Many refugee claimants embellish their stories. Besides, she was a heroine they had embraced, a "moderate" Muslim waging war against "fanatical" believers.
To her detractors, hers was a case, at best, of bitter personal experience passed off as the norm for all Muslims, and, at worst, relentless self-promotion that had won her fame and invitations from such places as Toronto during the so-called sharia debate and to the U.S. to bask in the company of Dick Cheney and Bernard Lewis.
Her well-ordered world came crashing down recently when a TV documentary suggested her entire claim to stardom was a fraud; not only had there been no forced marriage and no family vendetta but that she enjoyed good relations with her family and husband, both before and after settling in Holland.
Professor Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University, author of The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe, who knows Hirsi Ali and has followed her case closely, said in a telephone interview Thursday:
"She wasn't forced into a marriage. She had an amicable relationship with her husband, as well as with the rest of her family. It was not true that she had to hide from her family for years."
Why, then, has her estranged/former husband not spoken up?
"Because Hirsi Ali has asked him not to. They parted company amicably."
The revelation, Klausen said, proved the last straw for Ali's colleagues in government.
The ruling right-wing VVD party was already running out of patience with her, not because it had discovered multicultural tolerance or political correctness but because "it was just tired of her jumping up like a jack-in-a-box" anytime anyone poked holes in her neatly knitted tale or differed with her.
For example, when a government think-tank issued a report last month puncturing the prevailing anti-Islamic orthodoxy, she accused its authors of "sticking their heads in the sand."
The Scientific Council for Government Policy had simply stated the obvious: Islam, like any religion, has many strands, conservative to liberal, with varying attitudes toward gender parity, and that Muslim nations "do not satisfy contemporary international standards on democracy and human rights, (but) in this, they do not differ from many other developing countries."
The council also condemned "the climate of confrontation and stereotypical thinking," the turf Hirsi Ali plays on.
The jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland. She may move to the U.S., as a fellow at the neo-con American Enterprise Institute.
She would be welcomed in certain circles, which, Klausen warned, "want to see in American politics the development of a kind of Islam-bashing we've seen in Europe for a while."
The American ambassador to The Hague has already met her to pave the way.
She and the Bush administration may deserve each other.
Also, it goes without saying that she is fully entitled to her views, however provocative.
The problem lies elsewhere in the readiness of the paranoiac post-9/11 world to hear and believe the worst about Muslims and Islam. Hirsi Ali is just one of many to cater to that demand.
#1
Oh, look, more bullshit from Muslims. Blame the messenger and turn a blind eye to the evil committed in your name -- when you're not funding it and praising it.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
05/23/2006 7:47 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Considering the fates of Pym Fortyne and Theo van Gogh, she's lucky to be a naturalized citizen who can be expelled.
#3
"The problem lies elsewhere in the readiness of the paranoiac post-9/11 world to hear and believe the worst about Muslims and Islam."
Close but no cigar.
Lets reword this PROPERLY - just move a couple words and cut a couple of words, and the truth pops right out!
The problem lies elsewhere in the readiness of the paranoiac Muslims to support radical Islam that we have seen demonstrated in violence in the post-9/11 world.
#4
"The problem lies elsewhere in the readiness of the paranoiac post-9/11 world to hear and believe the worst about Muslims and Islam."
Close but no cigar.
Lets reword this PROPERLY - just move a couple words and cut a couple of words, and the truth pops right out!
The problem lies elsewhere in the readiness of the paranoiac Muslims to support radical Islam that we have seen demonstrated in violence in the post-9/11 world.
Holland's latest insult to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. By Christopher Hitchens
In the two weeks since I wrote about the increasing isolation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian, her isolation has markedly increased. Dutch courts have already required her to vacate her home as a result of her neighbors' petition to have her evicted, and she was on the verge of resigning her seat in the Dutch parliament and of requesting the right of residence in the United States. But this was not enough to satisfy her critics. A leftist news team in the Netherlands has broadcast an item about the way in which she had initially entered the country, and now the immigration minister has proposed stripping her of citizenship (and thus of her seat in parliament) as a result of the irregularities involved.
The Hague is a much less surreal place than Prague, but there are elements of this proceeding that might have made Franz Kafka smile. Unlike Joseph K, Hirsi Ali is very well aware of the evidence against her; indeed, she is the author of it. She has several times explained, in public and in print, that, among other things, she changed her name to get political asylum in the Netherlands. This was partly to prevent her familyher father being a well-known Somali politicianfrom discovering her whereabouts after she had fled an arranged marriage to a distant relative. The minister in the present casea former prison warden named Rita Verdonkcomes off less as a Kafka figure than as a cross between Nurse Ratched and Capt. Renault in Casablanca, who was "shocked, shocked" to find out what was going on at Rick's Cafe. A prisoner of her own rectitude, she has decided that now is the time to display zero tolerance for refugees who falsify their biographies. She has also decided that someone who was quietly leaving anyway must also be kicked out. It reminds me of those cults and sects from which it is impossible to resign, because if you say you want to quit, you will instead be expelled.
Writing in the New York Times last Friday, Ian Buruma said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali ought to have spoken out more for those who had been denied asylum in the Netherlands. (He is the author of a forthcoming book about the murder of Theo van Gogh, who was Hirsi Ali's partner in the making of a film about the maltreatment of women in the Muslim ghettos of Dutch cities.) This point doesn't seem to me to carry much weight. If she had become the spokeswoman for other refugees, her own story of making a partially false application could (and would) have been used against her even more. Instead, she pointed out that many perfectly legal immigrants to Holland were trying to import dictatorship rather than flee from it, and for this she attracted lethal hatred. If it had not been this charge, it would have been something else. She has already been made the object of a murder campaign, put under virtual house arrest in the name of her own "protection," evicted from her home, and accused of all manner of incitement. I hardly think that her numberless enemies would have left it at that. And they have now chosen to invoke the full and literal letter of the law, with exactly the same consistency with which they used to overlook it.
In point of fact, as was said several times in heated debate in the Dutch parliament, the discovery of a false statement on an immigration form (even when the proof is not provided by the person concerned, as in this case) is not automatic grounds for the removal of citizenship. The minister has discretion in the matter. Perhaps the fact that Verdonk and Hirsi Ali are members of the same party has something to do with it: Verdonk is thereby avoiding any insinuation of favoritism toward a colleague. But all this pedantry and bureaucratic legalism cannot obscure the main point, which is that an elected politician with an important and individual message has been hounded to the point where she feels that she must resign and told that whether she resigns or not, she will be dismissed. The Dutch voters who elected and re-elected her are mere spectators to the process.
Once again to mention her excellent new book The Caged Virgin, this is an author and a politician who has made the transition from early Islamic fanaticism (she initially endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie) to a full-out acceptance and advocacy of secularism and of Enlightenment ideals. Hirsi Ali calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected but where the law does notin the name of some pseudo-tolerancepermit genital mutilation, "honor" killing, and forced marriage. One might have expected a more robust defense of this position from the Dutch, and indeed the international left, but instead there has been a response of extraordinary and sullen ungenerousness, as if a lone woman defying taboo and standing up to violence has in some way let down the side and become a menace to multiculturalism.
It will be delightful to have Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Washington. But the American Enterprise Institute, which has offered her a perch, is not the place where she is most needed. In Holland, every day, extremist imams preach intolerance and cruelty, and, when they are criticized, invoke the help of foreign embassies to bring pressure on the Dutch authorities. They face no risk of expulsion. In my youth, the action of lighting one person's cigarette with another was calleddon't ask me whya "Dutch f***." I once heard a young lady, offered a light in those terms, respond loftily by saying, "Doesn't say much for the Low Countries, does it?" No, it didn't, and neither does this mean and petty harassment of a woman who has also redefined that old expression "Dutch courage."
Last week, I attended the funeral for Daniel Wultz, the young boy from Weston, Florida, who was the unfortunate victim of a suicide bombing that took place in Tel Aviv, Israel, one month ago. I stood there, amongst hundreds of people, to pay my respects to the friends and family of this beautiful boy. Sadness and anger welled up inside me sadness for what Daniels loved ones had to go through and anger for the event that took this 16-year-olds life and for the powerful who allow those responsible both directly and indirectly to walk free on this earth, including within the United States. One organization, in particular, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), demands attention for its past and current history connecting it to the main group involved in the attack Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Two Sundays ago, an e-mail was sent out by CAIR denouncing the website, Little Green Footballs (LGF), for what CAIR said were two threats aimed at Muslims found in the comments section of a blog entry on the site. One of the comments was no doubt a threat. It stated, The next time someone in a truckstop or a Starbucks or a library or any public place says ANYTHING even resembling support for the Muslim cause WILL be sent to either the hospital or worse. . .just waiting to bash someones face in. no more games. To the websites credit, the dangerous comment was removed. The other quote, which was a strongly worded statement against the religion of Islam and those the author referred to as Muslim savages, was allowed to stay and was later debated.
While CAIR proudly displayed the offending quotes and, at the same time, unjustly and irresponsibly labeled LGF an internet hate site, a vital piece of information was missing from the e-mail. The blog entry, from where the quotes came, was an announcement of the death of Daniel Wultz, who had passed soon after waking out of a nine-day coma. The entry was titled, US Teen Murdered by Palestinians.
Many of the blog comments offered prayers to the Wultz family. Others dealt with the terrorist groups reactions to Wultzs injuries. In an interview with Aaron Klein from World Net Daily, Abu Ayman, a PIJ leader, said, Our hero believed in Allah and died while fighting for Allah but your pig was killed in a restaurant in an area full of prostitution. And Abu Nasser, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the other group responsible for the attack, stated, This is a gift from Allah. We wish this young dog will go directly with no transit to hell. With comments such as these and others made before them, posters on LGF were understandably upset.
CAIR strangely left all of that out. Why?
CAIRs parent organization, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) was incorporated in Chicago, Illinois, in November of 1981. [CAIR would later be created in 1994.] One of the IAPs founders, Sami Al-Arian, was, at the time, a doctoral student at North Carolina State University. According to a news report from the Palestine Chronicle, Dr. Al-Arian was the primary advocate for IAP's work to be the focus of efforts for the Palestinian cause Under the IAP he developed the Arabic magazine Tareeq Filistine (Road to Palestine)
In addition, Al-Arian had, a couple years prior, been involved with a group of Palestinian students in Cairo that had formed a violent breakaway faction from the Islamic Society (a.k.a. Muslim Brotherhood Palestine) called Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). In 1981, the same year Al-Arian helped found the IAP, PIJ was expelled from Egypt, due to the groups close relationship with those that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
After the onset of the Intifada in 1987, Al Arian created an entire infrastructure for PIJ, within a house, an office complex and a childrens school, all based in Tampa Bay, Florida. During a 1991 Cleveland fundraiser, one of these PIJ fronts, Al-Arians Islamic Committee for Palestine (a.k.a. Islamic Concern Project), was labeled the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine.
Over a decade later, when Al-Arian would be taken into custody by the U.S. government, Ahmed Bedier, the Communications Director for CAIR-Florida and the Director of CAIRs Tampa office, would act as Al-Arians chief spokesperson in the media, which has been the case to this day. As evidence of this, last April, when Al-Arian agreed to a plea agreement and eventual deportation, Bedier called a press conference to discuss Al-Arians familys situation and how Al-Arian has stayed true to his convictions.
As spokesman, Bedier has used his position to advocate moving Al-Arians trial out of Tampa and to lament to the media about the treatment of Al-Arian by the U.S. government and the judge that was presiding over Al-Arians case, James Moody. Concerning Judge Moodys courtroom remarks a few weeks ago, during which time Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison, Bedier described the judges words as a political speech and said Moodys comments were biased and unfair.
On his radio show, True Talk, Bedier has used his forum as a mouthpiece for Al-Arian and his PIJ colleagues. Since November of 2005, he has had on his show: Al-Arians co-defendant, Ghassan Ballut; co-defendant, Sameeh Hammoudeh (interviewed from his Bradenton, Florida prison); Hammoudehs daughter, Weeam; Al-Arians wife, Nahla; Al-Arians daughter, Leila; Al-Arians son, Abdullah; and numerous other Al-Arian supporters and shills.
Besides Bedier, Sami Al-Arian has received much support from CAIRs Executive Director, Nihad Awad. Last February, Awad, along with Eric Vickers, a man that had called the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster an act of divine retribution against Israel, spoke at a fundraiser for Al-Arians release. The event was held at Masjid Al-Qassam (a.k.a. Islamic Community of Tampa), the mosque Al-Arian helped found, which was named after the infamous PIJ mosque in Gaza. The next day, Awad and Vickers were listed as speakers at a vigil for Al-Arian, outside the Hillsborough County Orient Road Jail, where Al-Arian was being detained. Pictures from the vigil were found on the website belonging to Bediers assistant in the Tampa-CAIR office, Danya Shakfeh.
There is a feeling, within those in CAIR and its well traveled circles, that what Al-Arian and his cohorts have done amounts to nothing more than legitimate political expression that they are being persecuted for merely being Palestinian activists. As stated by Nihad Awad, on Ahmed Bediers January 6, 2006 radio program, Were talking about Free Speech in America, and Sami Al-Arian, now, is being punished and penalized for his association and for his views on politics in the Middle East... Sami Al-Arian should not be the victim of political misunderstanding
This delusional attitude towards PIJ from CAIR was even more blatant, in December of 2005, when Ahmed Bedier appeared on a local Tampa television show, Your Turn with Kathy Fountain. After being asked by the host if he believed there was anything immoral about Al-Arians connection to PIJ, Bedier said that, before 1995, there was nothing immoral about it.
But Mr. Bedier is wrong. There was and always will be something immoral about it. The fact is that, prior to 1995, PIJ had taken credit for five terrorist attacks, including one suicide bombing, which resulted in the deaths of eight innocent people. Only those with no capacity for emotion would believe otherwise.
And with regard to Mr. Awads statement that Al-Arian is being punished for his political views, Sami Al-Arian was a founder and leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an organization responsible for hundreds of murders, usually via the most cruel and inhuman means possible. [A list of these murders can be found on the website of the Jewish Virtual Library. The last name on the list, as of this writing, is that of Daniel Wultz.] Murder, unbeknownst to Nihad Awad, does not equal Free Speech.
In 1991, Sami Al-Arian had sponsored the visa of a man named Ramadan Abdullah Shallah to enter the United States. Soon, Shallah would get involved in one of the PIJ fronts Al-Arian created, the World Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE). In the Spring of 1994, Al-Arian had successfully convinced the University of South Florida (USF), where Al-Arian was teaching, to hire Shallah. In the Summer of 1995, Shallah suddenly left town in Tampa, soon to reemerge as the new head (Secretary General) of PIJ. [The previous head, Fathi Shiqaqi, had been executed, in Malta.]
According to former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, Al-Arian barely missed becoming Secretary General of PIJ, himself. Because of this, a question must be asked: What would CAIR and groups like it have said about Al-Arian, if the roles were reversed, if Shallah had stayed home and Al-Arian had left for Gaza or Damascus to become the head of PIJ? And instead of Shallah orchestrating the suicide bombing, in Tel Aviv, that ended Daniel Wultzs life, it was Al-Arian. Would CAIR then say that Al-Arian was practicing Free Speech or was the subject of a political misunderstanding?
Of course, these questions dont have any real bearing, because the given scenario never occurred. However, there is one question that does need to be answered, and that is this: If it were not for Sami Al-Arian, or PIJ for that matter, would CAIR even exist?
He loved life, and those were his last words to the doctor who took him in, I want to live. - Tuly Wultz, about his son Daniel Wultz (1990-2006)
In the course of a little link-surfing, I ran across this analysis of the "martyrdom" of Rachel Corrie, written the day after the incident by a blogger who appears to be a bit of an international law geek (using "geek" in a good way). Not new, and not really apropos of any of today's news; posted as a public service to greater Rantburg because the link may come in handy someday.
EFL & money quote emphasized.
ISM has the text of the Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War up on its site; I believe the suggestion is that foreign nationals in Israel or the Disputed Territories are Protected Persons under the Convention, and that the IDF would make itself guilty of war crimes by harming them. This is a questionable assertion, to put it mildly, even though UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/54/77 affirmed the applicability of the Geneva Convention (IV) to the "Occupied Territories" (which is questionable enough in and of itself).
Firstly, Article 4 of the Convention states:
Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
Any Western activist is therefore not a Protected Person for the purpose of the Convention.
Secondly, even if "internationals" were Protected Persons (which, I hasten to reiterate, they are not), Article 5 states:
Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.
By serving as human shields for Palestinians, including militants, the "internationals" may be argued to be "engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State" (in this case Israel, since the Palestine Authority is not a recognised state); that case could certainly be made in the Rafah incident, where the houses were being demolished to facilitate the blocking of smuggling from Egypt.
On top of that, there is Article 8:
Prote
cted persons may in no circumstances renounce in part or in entirety the rights secured to them by the present Convention, and by the special agreements referred to in the foregoing Article, if such there be.
Use of human shields is a war crime, because it forces one's opponent to fight with one arm tied behind his back (if the opponent has any shred of decency). Even the use of human shields who volunteer is a war crime. It is therefore also illegal to volunteer to be a human shield.
It should be noted that ISM states that it seeks to use non-violent resistance to the Israelis, even while affirming the Palestinians' right to "armed struggle." That's trying to have it both ways; it boils down to standing in the middle of a firefight, while only trying to make only one side (in this case, the IDF) hold their fire. And that, dear reader, is the essence of a human shield.
At best, ISM is wilfully ignorant of international law; at worst they're lying scum who dupe well-meaning kids into getting themselves killed by the IDF in order to make political capital from it. Whatever the case, they had no right to waste Rachel Corrie's life.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/23/2006 12:12 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
These two religions, and as far as I am aware, no others in the world, believe that their truths are not only universal but also exclusive. They believe that they are the fortunate recipients of God's final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves like the Jews or the Hindus, but to bring to the rest of mankind, removing whatever barriers there may be in the way. This, between two religiously defined civilians, which Christendom was at that time, with the same heritage, the same self-perception, the same aspiration, and living in the same neighborhood inevitably led to conflict, to the real clash of rival civilizations aspiring to the same role, leading to the same hegemony, each seeing it as a divinely ordained mission.
We can date it precisely with the advent of Islam, which spread very rapidly by conquest. If you have ever been to Jerusalem, you must have been to the Dome of the Rock. That in itself is a mark of the conflict. It is built on a place sacred to both Jews and Christians. It is built in the style of the early Christian churches, the Church of the Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre and others. And the inscriptions on the wall are very explicit: He is God. He has no companion. He does not beget. He is not begotten in other words, a clear challenge to Christianity. (Laughter.) The caliph who built that place in the late seventh century was sending a message. He put the same message on the gold currency. In other words, he is saying to the Christian emperor, your religion is superseded; your time has past; move over; we are taking over the world.
That was the beginning of a conflict that has been going on ever since. Now, we in the Western world, and particularly in the United States, don't seem to attach much importance to history. And even what happened three years ago has become ancient history. I find, for example, people seriously arguing that 9/11 was the result of our invasion of Iraq. This kind of reversal cause and effect is quite common.
[...]
MR. LEWIS: I am inclined to believe in the sincerity of Ahmadinejad. I think that he really believes the apocalyptic language that he is using. Remember that Muslims, like Christians and Jews, have a sort of end-of-time scenario in which a Messianic figure will appear. In their case, in the case of the Shiites, the hidden imam who will emerge from hiding, who will fight against the powers of evil, the anti-Christ in Christianity, Gog and Magog in Judaism, and the Dajjal in Islam, a role in which we are being cast now. And he really seems to believe that the apocalyptic age has come, that this is the final struggle that will lead to the final victory and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Others in the ruling establishment in Iran may share this belief. I am inclined to think that most of them are probably more cynical and regard it as a useful distraction from their domestic problems and also a useful weapon in their external relations, because he has been doing very well and he seems to be succeeding, for example, on the question of nuclear weapons. And every time they make an advance, we move the point at which we won't tolerate it anymore, and this has happened again and again. Each time, we say, the next step we will not allow. We have shown ourselves to be, shall we say, remarkably adaptable in this respect, and this is no way to win friends and influence people.
I think that the way that Ahmadinejad is talking now shows quite clearly his contempt for the Western world in general and the United States in particular. They feel they are dealing with, as Osama bin Laden put it, an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance. And they are proceeding on that assumption. Remember that they have no understanding or experience of the free debate of an open society. Where we see free debate and criticism, they see fear, weakness and division; they proceed accordingly, and every day brings new evidence of that from Iran.
I think it is a dangerous situation. And my only hope is that they are not right in their interpretation of the Western world. I have often thought in recently years of World War II you were told earlier that I'm ancient myself. The most vividly remembered year of my life was the year 1940. And more recently I have been thinking of 1938 rather than of 1940. We seem to be in the mode of Chamberlain and Munich rather than of Churchill.
[...]
The second, really deadly phase came and here I can date it precisely in the year 1940. In 1940, the government of France decided to surrender and, in effect, changed sides in the war. The greater part of the colonial empire was beyond the reach of the Axis, and the governors therefore had a free choice: Vichy or de Gaulle. The overwhelming majority chose Vichy, including and this is what concerns us specifically the governor, high commissioner, he was called, of the French-mandated territory of Syria-Lebanon. So, Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, and they moved in on a large scale, not with troops, because that would have been too noticeable, but with propaganda of every kind. It was then the roots of Ba'athism were laid and the first organizations were formed, which ultimately developed into the Ba'ath Party.
It was then that the Nazi style of ideology and government became known, eagerly embraced simply because it was anti-Western rather than because of inherent attraction. From Syria, they succeeded in spreading it to Iraq, where they even set up a Nazi-style government for a while, headed by Rashid Ali. It was possible to deal with that, and they were driven out of the Middle East. But after the war, the Western allies also left and the Soviets moved in, taking the place of the Nazis as a champion against the West. To switch from the Nazi to the communist model required only minor adjustments.
[...]
MR. LEWIS: Well, a lot of what is being done is certainly a perversion of Islam, simply in the light of their own texts. Take, for example, the suicide bomber. Now, the classical Islamic legal and religious texts are quite clear on the subject of suicide. Suicide is what Christians would call a mortal sin. Even if a man or a woman had lived a life of unremitting virtue, by committing suicide they forfeit paradise and go straight to hell, where, according to the sacred texts, the eternal punishment of the suicide consists of the eternal repetition of the act of suicide. So, if you poison yourself, an eternity of bellyache; if you strangle yourself, an eternity of strangling; and presumably for these people, an eternity of exploding fragments.
We ask, well, why do they do it? How does it happen? This is a very recent development. It came in stages. Stage one is a question that was asked quite a long time ago: Is it permissible to throw oneself against a superior enemy, knowing that this will lead to certain death? Is this permissible or does it count as suicide, which is forbidden? And the jurists consider this permissible. And that was where it stood for centuries and centuries. Even the famous Assassins of the Middle Ages never died by their own hands and never killed anyone but the marked target.
[...]
Regarding the Muslim populations of the Western world, I spoke a few moments ago about the Wahhabi menace. This is particularly strong among the Muslim communities in Europe and America. And just think, for example, for a Muslim living in Hamburg, Birmingham, Los Angeles, or whatever it may be, it is very natural that he should want to give his children some sort of grounding in his religion and culture. So he looks around for evening classes, weekend schools, holiday camps and the like. These are now almost entirely controlled, financed, funded by the Wahhabis, so that you get, among the Muslims in the Diaspora more than among the Muslims in Muslim countries, an intense indoctrination from the most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam.
I'll give you a specific example. In the German constitution there is strict separation of church and state, but Germany, unlike the United States, allows time in the school curriculum for religious instruction. The way they do it is this: Time is provided in the curriculum of the German schools for religious instruction. Attendance at these classes is entirely optional, and the state provides neither teachers nor textbooks. The religious communities said, if they want this, provide the teachers and the textbooks.
The Muslim community in Germany is largely Turkish, and when they reached sufficient numbers they went to the German authorities and asked if they could have religious instruction in Islam in the German school curriculum. The Germans said, yes, you're entitled to that, according to the law, but you will have to provide the textbooks. And the Turks said, no problem, we have excellent textbooks, which are used in Turkish schools and we can use those. And the German authorities said, no, that you cannot do. These are government-controlled textbooks. We cannot have government textbooks on religion. You have to produce them from your own community, with the result that Islam, as taught in Turkish schools, is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast. The last time I looked, 12 Turks had been arrested as members of al Qaeda. All 12 of them were born and educated in Germany, not in Turkey. Does that answer your question?
[...]
PAUL STAROBIN, NATIONAL JOURNAL: Professor, what, in your opinion, would be the impact on the mindset of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran if they actually possessed an atomic weapon?
MR. LEWIS: I think that they would become impossibly arrogant. Remember that Ahmadinejad in particular, and his circle, as I said before, are in an apocalyptic mood. They believe in the end of time; it's imminent, and, therefore, the use of a nuclear weapon would not bother them in the least. And they would not, of course, use it in an aerial bombardment. What preserved us from nuclear warfare during the Cold War was what was known as MAD mutually assured destruction. If they use it, it won't come with a return address on it; it will come from terrorist action. And that, I think, is the most likely way that they would use a nuclear weapon if they get one no return address.
This is an important and fascinating press conference with Bernard Lewis, perhaps the most erudite and objective Western observer of Islam. Did the press hear him? RTWT.
Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.
Sunday's vote in Montenegro, a tiny land of fewer people than the Washington, D.C., this writer grew up in, voted Sunday to secede from Belgrade, establish a nation and seek entry into the European Union.
In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into a Serb and a Croat-Muslim sector.
After the 78-day U.S. bombing of Serbia by the United States and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the province in the wake of the NATO war, Kosovo is 90 percent Muslim and Albanian. Loss of this land that was the cradle of the Serb nation seems an inevitability.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations many of which had never before existed seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written.
The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.
Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished. The British and French, greatest of the Western empires, are long gone. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Irish, though its sons had fought to erect and maintain the Victorian "empire on which the sun never set" and defend it in World War I fought relentlessly to be free of it. They wanted, and in 1921 won, a small nation of their own, on their own small island.
The Irish preferred it to being part of the British Empire.
The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations."
Transnational institutions, the embryonic institutions of a new world government to which the elites of the West and Third World are transferring allegiance and power, include the United Nations, the EU, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Seabed Authority, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank.
The sub-nations, or ex-nations, struggling to be born or break free include Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, Corsica, northern Italy and Quebec in the West. Iraq, as we have seen, is a composite of peoples divided by tribe, ethnicity and faith as are Iran, Pakistan and India. Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs, with a minority of Bedouins.
Lind argues that not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by "non-state actors" that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.
Among the more familiar non-state actors are the Crips and Bloods, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the racial nationalists of MEChA, the white supremacists of Aryan Nations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Maoists of Nepal and the Tamil Tigers.
Among the central questions of our time is a central question of any time: Who owns the future?
Of late, the transnational vision has lost its allure. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and most of Latin America reject the NAFTA vision of Bush and Vicente Fox. The French and Dutch voted down the EU Constitution, which now appears dead. The Doha round of world trade negotiations is headed for the rocks. Hostility is rising to bringing Turkey into the EU.
Arabs and Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith they have in common and the countries whence they came, not the one in which they live and work.
So, too, do millions of illegal aliens in the United States. They march defiantly under Mexican flags in American streets demanding the rights of U.S. citizens while an intimidated political class rushes to accommodate and appease them, assuring itself this is but the latest reincarnation of Ellis Island.
As the Old Republic trudges to its death, less and less do we hear that incessant blather about the American Empire, "the world's last superpower" and "our unipolar moment."
#1
Pat sees everything through lenses of traditional American isolationism. He has never seen any purpose at all in "international engagement", other than the Monroe Doctrine, and then just to keep strong foreign powers out of "our" hemisphere.
Other than that, foreigners can stay in their countries, and the US should be content to stay in ours. And never the two should meet. Especially if it involves sending US troops across our borders to somewhere else, for some "unwanted entanglement" overseas.
In any event, Pat ignores the obvious extrapolation from his theory. That being, if it is true, then Red State America and Blue State America should break apart into two nations.
Our cultural divide is as great as many others that have divided, and as Pat argued, history together doesn't act as a glue anymore. He does mention the sand fleas of racial divide, but they have been around, and laughable, for many years.
If Mississippi was made a separate nation, even like an Indian Reservation, but for African-Americans, as was proposed by some of their self-appointed "leaders", in past, how many African-Americans would want to live there?
Unless it was a parasitical regime, feeding off of the rest of the nation, it is obvious to most that it would soon devolve into a much more civilized version of Zimbabwe.
Very few respectable and successful African-Americans would be so foolish as to embrace such a fools errand, except those who would follow the public fools who proclaim themselves "leaders".
He is mistaken about organizations like MS-13 becoming nationalist. Historically, it is backwards. Nationalist movements, such as the Mafia, Camorra, Zionism, etc., first are created for a nationalistic purpose before then becoming criminal organizations (in the latter case, referring to the Stern gang, et al.)
Organizations that begin as criminal enterprises almost never become nationalistic, because it is bad for "business".
Finally, Pat made no mention of the collapse of much of organized religion in the world, followed by the re-emergence of primitive cults and early religions. His own beloved Protestantism is as fragile as many nation-states, with respect to both other religions and primitivistic superstition.
All told, things change. It may or may not forbode some sea-change in the world, but it will find its own balance point.
#2
Pat's other problem is that he's a blood-and-soil nationalist, and he views this country like a blood-and-soil nationalist. The United States is not, and essentially never has been, a blood-and-soil ethnic state.
Let me illustrate: I'm not ethnically Japanese. I could learn to speak flawless Japanese, develop a strong preference for tea and cherry blossoms and teriyaki and rice, study Japanese customs, memorize all 30,000 kanji, move to Tokyo, become a naturalized Japanese citizen, and I'd still be a gaijin. On the other hand, a Japanese person who adopts American ideals can move here, become naturalized, and be just as American as me.
"But where are we going?" I asked.
"We are going to America," my father said.
"Why America?" I prodded.
"Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place," he replied.
#5
I like Buchanan, I was offered a copy of "the death of the West", I browsed it, and I think I'll like it. True, the b&s nationalism is more european than american.
Posted by: Matt ||
05/23/2006 20:07 Comments ||
Top||
#9
STEVE FORBES > INDIA cannot progress or survive if it continues to promote and protect the autonomous or near-sovereign ethnic-specific or faith-specific Cantonization/Enclavization of its various ethnic groups, i.e. autonomous or Regulatory-independent, stratified State(s) within a State, Culture(s) within a Culture, Faith(s) within a Faith, etc - what the US-Western Lefts likes to disguise under the feel-good but despotic labels of DIVERSITY and alleged TOLERANCE.
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.
