Posted by: Mac ||
06/07/2007 17:53 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Ayoon Wa Azan ( Keep An Eye On Jihad )
Jihad el-Khazen
Al-Hayat - 07/06/07
Yeah, I think it might be a good idea to "keep an eye on Jihad". Preferably through the peephole on his padded cell.
I take it he's considered a "Muslim scholar"?
The proposal to halt academic links with Israel is blinkered and perverse
There could hardly be a motion more inimical to the purposes and ethos of a university than the call for an academic boycott of Israel, tabled at the inaugural conference of the University and College Union. Britains largest trade union for academics is to circulate a call to consider the moral implication of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions. If adopted, this will stop UCU members attending conferences in Israel or writing for Israeli journals. Yesterday Tony Blair told Parliament that the move would not help the peace process or relations in the Middle East. That is an extraordinary understatement. The move is a mockery of academic freedom, a biased and blinkered call that is as ill-timed as it is perverse.
Links between universities are often the only lines of communication open between countries when all else is obstructed. They keep alive the hope of dialogue even in nations deaf to the outside world. They appeal directly to the moral and intellectual elites who constitute the conscience of a nation. Even during the horrors of Stalinism, the universities of Cambridge and Manchester maintained links with Soviet physicists and scientists. During apartheid, the liberal conscience of South Africa was kept alive by the brave staff of its universities. And amid the despair that is Zimbabwe today, the universities, still maintaining former Commonwealth links, are able to offer the moral support of the interrnational community.
Israel is not deaf to world opinion, nor is there any threat to academic freedom. Its policies towards the Palestinians, however, may have evoked strong opposition among many academics and students in Europe. But nowhere in Israel are peace activists more strongly represented than in its universities and colleges. Such a boycott is tokenism of the worst kind a meaningless gesture that sends a message to politically correct union members but does nothing to advance the cause that they purport to uphold: the freedom of all peoples in the region to live and study in freedom and dignity.
Had the UCU taken the trouble to look at the record, they would have found that, far from condoning the aggression, as the motion naively maintains, Israeli universities have, on the whole, done much to mitigate the effects. They have opened their doors to Arab students and given both sides opportunities to discuss the roots of their mutual animosities. Only this week the presidents of four prestigious institutions, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion and Haifa universities and the Technion technology institute, called on the Israeli Defence Minister to lift the sweeping travel ban between the West Bank and Gaza so that Palestinian students could pursue their education. Israel, they said, should be a state that supports the principle of academic freedom and the right to education.
The UCU call for a boycott comes two years after the Association of University Teachers approved a similar move that was later overturned. The AUT was one of the unions that merged to form the UCU which appears to have learnt nothing from the earlier outcry at this arbitrary, misguided and discriminatory proposal. Instead, the UCU should do all it can to cultivate every contact available with Israeli universities. The academics calling for the boycott have much to learn.
I am deeply concerned about the numerous loopholes we have found in this legislation. They are more than technical errors, but rather symptoms of a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation that stands no chance of actually fixing our broken immigration system, Sessions said. Many of the loopholes are indicative of a desire not to have the system work. Jeez, does Ted Kennedy know about this?
#1
The only reason I can think of to want a flood of illiterate, unskilled immigrants is to exploit them in low paying, undesirable/dangerous jobs.
So why is it that the gracious, magnanimous, bleeding heart democrats are the ones pushing so hard to "throw open the gates" ? That would seem to be against their dogma. I'm confused, I've been confused for some time.
#2
Really ending human smuggling also ends drug smuggling and the enormous profits it brings to the mob that controls distribution routes. Unions vote Democrat.
#3
There are 100 supposedly distinguished men and women in the US Senate. Many of them have been there for years. They all have staffs of intelligent law makers, and position takers. Yet, in 2007, 231 years since our first attempt at good inclusive legislation, they cannot write a law with a clear result desired by and with the intended benefit of the citizens of the United States. I find that hard to believe. So hard, in fact that I assume members of the Senate want sloppy, ambiguous wording in their laws to provide for loop holes and law suits ad nauseum.
I question the patriotism of such senators. I question the motives of such people and their counter productive laws. The MSM has allowed them leeway by not challenging these anti-citizen rules, laws, and rulings.
Thank God for the internet. We do not need to remain uninformed, rather we are now armed with the facts and now we need an MSM which takes up our banner for an honest government. One by one we must retire the anti-patriot legislators at the polls. Beating them to a pulp jailtime is optional.
Sixty-three years ago this week, we landed on the Normandy beaches. As on each anniversary of June 6, 1944, much has been written to commemorate the bravery and competence of the victorious Anglo-American forces. All true. But as we ponder this achievement of the Greatest Generation that helped lead to the surrender of Nazi Germany less than a year later, we should remember that the entire campaign was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a near-run thing.
Our forefathers made several mistakes. They attacked nonexistent artillery emplacements. Planes dropped paratroopers far from intended targets. Critical landing assignments on Omaha Beach were missed. Once they left shore, it got worse. Indeed, D-Day was soon forgotten in the nightmare of GIs being blown apart in the Normandy hedgerows by well-concealed, entrenched German panzers.
Apparently, no American planners - from Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall down to the staff of Allied Supreme Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower - had anticipated either the difficulty of penetrating miles of these dense thickets or the deadliness of new German model tanks and anti-tank weapons. So we landed in Europe with the weaponry we had - and it was in large part vastly inferior to that of the Wehrmacht.
The most brilliant armored commander in U.S. history, George S. Patton, had been sacked from theater command for slapping an ill soldier the prior year in Sicily. Gens. Omar N. Bradley and Bernard L. Montgomery lacked his genius and audacity - and tens of thousands of Allied soldiers were to pay for Patton's absence at Normandy. We finally broke out of the mess, after using heavy bombers to blast holes in the German lines. But again, these operations were fraught with foul-ups.
On two successive occasions we bombed our own troops, altogether killing or wounding over 1,000 Americans, including the highest-ranking officer to die in the European Theater, Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair. The nature of his death was hidden from the press - as were many mistakes and casualties both leading up to and after Normandy.
When the disaster in the bocage near the Normandy beaches ended over two months after D-Day, the victorious Americans, British and Canadians had been bled white. Altogether, the winners of the Normandy campaign suffered a quarter-million dead, wounded or missing, including almost 30,000 American fatalities - losing nearly 10 times the number of combat dead in four years of fighting in Iraq.
News from the other fronts during the slaughter in Normandy was no better. Due to blunders by American generals in Italy, the retreating German army had escaped the planned Allied encirclement - and would kill thousands more Allied soldiers in Italy during the next year. Disturbing reports spread about the simultaneous advance and brutality of Stalin's Red Army on the Eastern Front. Some in the American government began to worry that a war started over freedom for Eastern Europe might end up guaranteeing its enslavement - Stalin's storm troopers merely replacing Hitler's.
While we were ground up in the hedgerows, in the Pacific theater thousands of American amphibious troops were lost during the Marianas campaign. True, we kept winning gruesome amphibious assaults, but we didn't seem to learn much from them. Instead, far worse carnage lay in store at places named Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. All these bloodbaths near the end of the war were characterized by the sheer heroism of the American soldier - who suffered terribly from intelligence failures and poor leadership of his superiors.
What can we learn, then, on this anniversary of the Normandy campaign? By any historical measure, our forefathers committed as many strategic and tactical blunders as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq - but lost tens of thousands more Americans as a result of such errors. We worry about emboldening Iran by going into Iraq; the Normandy generation fretted about empowering a colossal Soviet Union.
Of course, World War II was an all-out fight for our very existence in a way many believe the war against terror that began on 9/11 is not. Even more would doubt that al-Qaida jihadists in Iraq pose the same threat to civilization as the Wehrmacht did in Europe. Nevertheless, the Normandy campaign reminds us that war is by nature horrific, fraught with foolish error - and only won by the side that commits the least number of mistakes. Our grandfathers knew that. So they pressed on as best they could, convinced that they needn't be perfect, only good enough, to win.
The American lesson of D-Day and its aftermath was how to overcome occasional abject stupidity while never giving up in the face of an utterly savage enemy. We need to remember that now more than ever.
#2
War is blunder. It's always blunder. You have imperfect information, inadequate forces and supplies for whatever the task is, and an enemy with his own plans and ambitions. You go forward but you frequently blunder your way through.
That doesn't mean (and doesn't allow) you stop, or surrender. You push on. We did that to the Nazis and the fascists.
In fifty years time historians will review the blunders of the Iraq War. They'll also note (I hope) that we presevered and gained a worthwhile outcome, just as we did in WWII.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/07/2007 10:32 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Our forefathers made several mistakes. They attacked nonexistent artillery emplacements. Planes dropped paratroopers far from intended targets. Critical landing assignments on Omaha Beach were missed. Once they left shore, it got worse. Indeed, D-Day was soon forgotten in the nightmare of GIs being blown apart in the Normandy hedgerows by well-concealed, entrenched German panzers.
#4
Yesterday Michelle Malkin had a link to TheCombatReport.com that pointed to a podcast of how the MSM today would report D-Day. It was a beautiful sendup, with all the elements we see today - the retired generals saying that the day was lost once the Luftwaffe showed up, the scared kid in the landing craft who had seen his officers and sergeants killed, and all the gloom and doom. Go here to see the video.
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.
There could hardly be a motion more inimical to the purposes and ethos of a university than the call for an academic boycott of Israel, tabled at the inaugural conference of the University and College Union. Britains largest trade union for academics is to circulate a call to consider the moral implication of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions. If adopted, this will stop UCU members attending conferences in Israel or writing for Israeli journals. Yesterday Tony Blair told Parliament that the move would not help the peace process or relations in the Middle East. That is an extraordinary understatement. The move is a mockery of academic freedom, a biased and blinkered call that is as ill-timed as it is perverse.
