#1
"the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth," as Mr. Rosenbaum wrote in the New York Observer in 2002.
For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost.
well said, except I would have said that liberalism is obsessed with maintaining the superiority of their own values.
#2
Liberals should be subdivided into several pitiful groups, none entirely exclusive. In no particular order:
1) Socialists. People with a true herd mentality, with a true aversion to individuality. They would gladly run off a high cliff with the herd rather than stand alone and survive. They worship conformity and mediocrity, and abhor competition, failure and success. They see individuality as a threat, individuals as predators.
2) The phobic. Terrified of the concept of violence, they live in fear of drama, such as loud noises, aggression, emotional intensity, and acute pain. They seek to neutralize any extreme because they are incapable of adapting to it. When confronted by a violent or dramatic situation they cannot flee, they collapse.
3) The fanatical idealist. Far fewer than there used to be, because the 20th century was a laboratory for secular fanaticism, and blunted much of its clarity of purpose. It was tried and failed miserably so many times that it took away much of their steam.
4) The amoral. They adopt the paradoxical viewpoint that "amorality is morality", and see the "moral as corrupt". That is why they distrust and despise those who are moral and upright, and try to drag them down. They do not trust anyone who is not tainted. The Clintons are a stupendous example of this lot, and intentionally surrounded themselves with individuals of low character, known as offenders. They see moral people as just hiding their perversions and deviances, and are thus *worse* that the amoral, whose corruptions are known.
5) The haters, bigots and paranoids. These are one issue liberals, and only show themselves in a cyclic manner. Most of the time they pretend to normality, but in private and every now and then in public, they let slip what they truly believe.
A voice of common sense and patriotism from the Donk Party. He'll be marginalized and excommunicated
The Islamic terrorists or as President Bush calls them -- Islamic fascists -- are continuing their ruthless bombing campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan. The casualty numbers are staggering.
Nearly every day in Iraq alone, 50 or more civilians are found tortured and their mutilated bodies are dumped on city streets. The number of American military personnel killed in Iraq is 2,670 and 19,945 have been injured. In Afghanistan, 276 Americans have been killed and 930 injured. Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated to be between 41,000 and 46,000. Afghan civilian deaths are estimated at 3,485 with 6,200 injured.
The effect on Americans at home has been devastating. In a recent CNN survey, "58 percent of poll respondents said they are opposed to the war, compared with 39 percent who approve of it."
I believe this war of civilizations, which was brought to our shores in 2001, is one of the most important wars we have ever fought. In the Revolutionary War back in 1775-1783, we had extraordinary leaders, including George Washington, chosen as General and Commander-in-Chief and later elected President of the United States. We forget that he lost almost every battle at the time, but he ultimately won the war. But there were moments -- the harsh winter at Valley Forge -- when it all looked hopeless and Washington was sharply criticized by fellow Americans. He had the strength to ultimately prevail and overcome the military defeats and personal attacks on his abilities.
Before we entered World War II in December 1941, most of Europe with the exception of Great Britain had been conquered by Nazi armies, and Russia, then the U.S.S.R., was retreating under attack. In World War II, American casualties totaled 291,577 dead and 671,846 injured. Under the extraordinary leadership of F.D.R., the Allies ultimately won the war, despite losing a number of battles. We would not have prevailed had the British not kept hope alive by continuing the battle when all of the other European nations had either surrendered or been overrun and accepted the Nazi regime. The Russians also were key to the Allies' success, having sacrificed 10 million Soviet soldiers in liberating their own occupied lands, as well as central Europe on their way to capturing Berlin. The Soviet losses in taking Berlin alone are estimated at 300,000.
Why do I recite these historical facts? Because I believe that the U.S. is faltering in the current war against international terrorism, and we are losing our will to prevail. We are losing our fighting spirit as a result of the fighting between Republicans and Democrats on just how to prosecute the war.
The President calls the war on terror "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation." The President's speech was attacked, as usual, by a number of Democratic party leaders with Senator Ted Kennedy in the lead.
One of the worst attacks on the President came from Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, himself a presidential candidate in 2008. He demanded that the President stop referring to those engaged in terrorist attacks against us and others as Islamic fascists. He said, "Fascist ideology...doesn't have anything to do with the way global terrorist networks think or operate, and it doesn't have anything to do with the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world who practice the peaceful teachings of Islam." But what about the tens of millions who are terrorists and want to kill us? Does he have a description for them? The media rarely call those engaged in acts of terrorism "terrorists," preferring to refer to them simply as "militants."
The President believes, as do I, that Islamic terrorists pose a mortal threat to this country and the West in general. Since those terrorists have already attacked the U.S. on a number of occasions -- 9-11, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen and the army barracks in Saudi Arabia -- and have attacked commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191, and injuring 1,500, and the London subway, killing 52 and injuring 700, isn't it his duty to seek to rally and inform the nation? In attempting to prevent him from speaking out, are these Democratic Party leaders performing a public service? I don't think so.
People can disagree on whether we should have invaded Iraq. I believe on the basis of the "slam dunk" description and information provided at the time by CIA director George Tenet, the President made the right decision.
But all of that should be put aside, since we are there now. We have made major progress by ridding Iraq of a despot who is now on trial in an Iraqi court for having killed 50,000 Iraqi Kurds with poison gas, a WMD. The Iraqis have democratically elected a president and a congress. The challenge now is to prevent Iraq from further deteriorating into civil war and becoming another failed state that would be a terrorist haven and training ground.
My personal view is that if we told our regional allies -- Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan -- and our NATO allies that unless they join us with boots on the ground and share the casualties and cost of the ongoing war, we will leave; they would have no option but to come in; otherwise on our leaving the civil war would intensify and spill over Iraq's borders.
In all events, seeking as some do to make our involvement in Iraq a partisan issue and characterizing the President's efforts to protect the homeland from terrorists in an adversarial manner is endangering the country at a moment in time when we are facing an existential threat to our very survival as a nation.
Of course, the President, Vice President and Secretaries of Defense and State have made monumental mistakes in the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Great mistakes in handling the war against terror were also committed by prior administrations. Now is the time for everyone to acknowledge the enormity of the danger we face and for reasonable people in both parties to join together to formulate a unified approach to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed, to our foreign policy in the entire Middle East.
Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/17/2006 15:16 ||
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#1
dammit - missed the link, and HT to instapundit
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/17/2006 15:19 Comments ||
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#2
maybe during pro football games and Nascar races (both on right now) - the Submit button should have a confirmation: "Are you sure? Did you paste the link? Idiot"
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/17/2006 15:21 Comments ||
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#3
maybe during pro football games and Nascar races (both on right now) - the Submit button should have a confirmation:
"Are you sure? Did you paste the link? Idiot"
My biggest fear while posting an url here is to copy/past from the wrong thumbnail (using Maxthon and Firefox/Mozilla, now mostly Maxthon), always having lots open at the same time, often very varied in content.... so a RB article posted by yours truly actually links to something else...
#6
In all events, seeking as some do to make our involvement in Iraq a partisan issue and characterizing the President's efforts to protect the homeland from terrorists in an adversarial manner is endangering the country at a moment in time when we are facing an existential threat to our very survival as a nation.
Koch gets it. This is the sort of bipartisan support needed if we are ever going to win this war. What a refreshing article.
My whole family was excommunicated for 100 years after the mid-1200's...
Funny thing was they were not Cathloic and still worshiped Thor. Imagine that!
#11
I still don't get the whole "lots of mistakes" caveat that everyone accepts as axiomatic. The idea that we have made a bevy of unacceptable mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrates a total lack of understanding of military reality by the majority of Americans. Did we make more mistakes in Iraq or in Korea? You go to war with the military you have at the time in circumstances not of your choosing unless your name is Adolph or Sadaam.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/17/2006 23:03 Comments ||
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Depressing Times Oriana Fallaci, RIP, the Pope, and a Sad Age
Rarely has the death of a public intellectual affected me as much as the passing of Oriana Fallaci. I never met her, and only received a brief note once from her accompanying a copy of The Rage and the Pride. The story of her career is well known, but her death, at this pivotal time, was full of paradoxes and yet instruction as well.
Radical Islam is, among other things, a patriarchal movement, embedded particularly in the cult of the Middle-Eastern male, who occupies a privileged position in a society that can be fairly described as one of abject gender apartheid. Islamism is also at war with the religious infidel, not just the atheistand, in its envy and victimhood, fueled by a renewal of the age-old hatred of the Christian.
But so far, with very few exceptions other than the lion, Christopher Hitchens, the courageous William Shawcross, and a few others, the Left has either been neutral or anti-American in this struggle. And few Christians in positions of influence and respect have publicly defended their faith and the civilization that birthed it.
Candor, after all, can get one killed, exiled, or ostracizedwhether a Danish cartoonist, a Dutch filmmaker, a Wall Street Journal reporter, or a British-Indian novelist. So here, ill and in her seventies, returned Ms. Fallaci one last time to take up the hammer and tongs against radical Islama diminutive woman of the Left and self-proclaimed atheist who wrote more bravely on behalf of her civilization than have most who are hale, males, conservatives, or Christians.
Her fiery message was as timely as it was caricatured and slandered: Muslims who leave the Middle East to live under the free aegis of the West have a moral duty to support and protect the civilization that has welcomed them, rather than romanticize about what they have forsaken; Christianity is more than a religion, but also a powerful emblem of the force of reason, in that it seeks to spread belief by rational thought as well as faith; and that affluent and leisured Westerners, bargaining away their honor and traditions out of fear and for illusory security, have only emboldened radical Islam that seeks to liquidate them.
I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.
Bene dictum?
And what are we to make of poor Benedict XVI, the scholastic, who, in a disastrous display of public sensitivity, makes the telling point, that Christianity, in its long evolution to the present, has learned to forsake violence, and to defend its faith through appeals to reasonand thus can offer its own experience in the current crisis of Islam. And by quoting from the emperor rhetorician Manuel Paleologuswhose desperate efforts at strengthening the Morea and the Isthmus at Corinth a generation before that awful Tuesday, May 29, 1453 all came to naughtthe Pope failed to grasp that under the tenets of radical Islam of the modern age, context means little, intent nothing, learning less than zero. If a sentence, indeed a mere phrase can be taken out of context, twisted, manipulated to show an absence of deference to Islam, furor ensues, death threats follow, assassins load their beltseven as the New York Times or the Guardian issues its sanctimonious apologies in the hope that the crocodile will eat them last.
We learned the now familiar rage with the Danish cartoons, Theo Van Gogh, the false flushed Koran story, the forced change of Operation Infinite Justice to Enduring Freedom, the constant charges of Islamaphobia, and a horde of other false grievances that so shook the West, traumatized in fear of having its skyscrapers, planes, trains, buses, nightclubs, and synagogues blown apart or its oil cut off.
So, yes, we know the asymmetrical rules: a state run-paper in Cairo or the West Bank, a lunatic Iranian mullah, a grand mufti from this or that mosque, can all rail about infidels, pigs and apes, in language reminiscent of the Third Reichand meet with approval in the Middle East and silence in the West. But for a Westerner, a Tony Blair, George Bush, or Pope Benedict to even hint that something has gone terribly wrong with modern Islam, is to endure immediate furor and worse. In short, no modern ideology, no religious sect of the present age demands so much of others, so little of itself.
In matters of the present war, I have given up on most of the neoconservatives, many of whom, following the perceived pulse of the battlefield, have either renounced their decade-long, pre-September11 rants to remove Saddam (despite the 140,000 brave souls still on the field of battle who took them at their word), or turned on the President on grounds that he is not waging the perfect fight and thus is not pursuing the good war. The Paleo-right is as frightening as is the lunatic Left. My old Democratic party is long dead, their jackals trying to tear apart the solitary and stumbling noble stag Joe Liebermann, the old center taken over by the Kerry and Soros billionaires, and the guilt-ridden academic, celebrity and media cadres.
So we really are left with very little in these pivotal timesthe will of George Bush, of course, the Old Breed unchanged since Okinawa and the Bulge that still anchors the US military, the courage and skill of a very few brave writers like a Hitchens, Krauthammer, and the tireless and brilliant Mark Steyn, but very, very few others. No, this is an age in which we in the West make smug snuff movies about killing an American President, while the Taliban and the Islamists boast of assassinating the Pope.
So long may you run, Ms. Fallaci, you who by now have learned that, yes, there is a soul, and, yes, yours was indeed saved for eternity if only for its singular courage and honesty alone. And dear Pope: clarify, contextualize, express sorrow over the wrong interpretation of your remarks, but please dont apologize for the Truthnot now, not ever.
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/17/2006 14:54 ||
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#1
I should've HT'd Instapundit...damn
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/17/2006 15:14 Comments ||
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#2
abject gender apartheid
That's a keeper.
the Pope failed to grasp that under the tenets of radical Islam of the modern age, context means little, intent nothing, learning less than zero.
Quite the opposite, almost without exception Islamic countries are extremely high context societies and this is exactly the problem that we in the West face when dealing with them. So much depends upon long-standing familial and business relationships, ancient mores and religious dogma that that an outsider will find it nearly impossible not to offend Muslims on an almost routine basis.
If a farthiccupsnifflebelchsneezecoughgiggle sentence, indeed a mere phrase can be taken out of context, twisted, manipulated to show an absence of deference to Islam, furor ensues, death threats follow, assassins load their beltseven as the New York Times or the Guardian issues its sanctimonious apologies in the hope that the crocodile will eat them last.
Just what war do Sens. John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins think the United States is fighting?
Last week these four Republicans joined Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee in voting to prevent CIA officers who interrogate terror suspects from being any rougher on said suspects than Mary Poppins would be.
The four argued that allowing U.S. operatives to be rough with terrorists during questioning would put our own forces in danger of being subjected to the same treatment. They were joined by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who wrote in an open letter that Bush's plan "would put our own troops at risk."
In July terrorists in Iraq released a video showing the bodies of two U.S. soldiers they had tortured and killed. One had his jaw broken. The other, his chest cut open, had been decapitated. How much more at risk can our forces get?
We are not at war with the al-Qaida Women's Knitting Club. Even if we had all terror suspects flown first-class to Chicago and interrogated on Oprah Winfrey's couch it would not reduce by one iota the enemy's resolve to bring our civilization to a bloody end by the most barbaric means.
Furthermore, Bush is not advocating that we stoop to the terrorists' level. He wants to get U.S. interrogators around a Geneva Convention clause (wrongly applied to al-Qaida by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year) forbidding "affronts to personal dignity."
Bush still would require our operatives to abide by the bulk of the Geneva Conventions.
On the day the Armed Services Committee voted to reject Bush's proposal, the bodies of dozens of torture victims were found dumped throughout Baghdad. Earlier this month six blindfolded and tortured bodies were found floating in the Tigris River and a decapitated body was found in Musayyib. This is the type of enemy we face. But Colin Powell claims that the world would view us as the bad guys if we let our intelligence officers scream at a terrorist and maybe get physically rough with him.
As author Richard Miniter wrote last week after visiting the prison at Guantanamo Bay, "America has never faced an enemy who has so ruthlessly broken all of the rules of war -- yet never has an enemy been treated so well.
"Of Gitmo's several camps, military records show that the one with the most lenient rules is the one with the most incidents and vice versa. There is a lesson in this: We should worry less about detainee safety and more about our own."
We don't have to torture suspects to get them to tell us what they know. But softening all interrogations to remove even the slightest rough edges withdraws a potentially effective weapon from our arsenal, one that we don't even have to use for it to work.
Obviously, the United States cannot and should not throw off all of civilization's constraints in conducting this war.
But we need to understand that a very small number of those constraints, while correctly followed in a conventional war, are obsolete in this one.
If playing rough with a captured terrorist can save lives -- and there is strong evidence that it can and has -- Congress must not forbid it, no matter what the Supreme Court has said.
#1
The four argued that allowing U.S. operatives to be rough with terrorists during questioning would put our own forces in danger of being subjected to the same treatment.
Who are these damned morons? Our prisoners are being fucking beheaded or burned alive or dragged behind vehicles. It doesn't get any more "rough" than that. There is no further escalation possible. These mollycoddling baboons need to purchase aclue.
A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead -- or, as the alliterative editor put it, "Litany of the Lost." That would be a grand entry for Litany of the Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. Sept. 11 wasn't a shipwreck: The dead weren't "lost," they were murdered.
So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined "Half a Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why." Well, in that case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend": Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.
But, of course, that's not what the headline means: Instead, it's "incomprehensible" in the sense that, to persons of a certain mushily "progressive" disposition, all such acts are "incomprehensible," all violence is "senseless." Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the fellows who perpetrated it. Which is what that headline writer finds hard to "comprehend" -- or, rather, doesn't wish to comprehend. The piece itself was categorized as "Reflection" -- dread word. No self-respecting newspaper should be running "reflections" anywhere upfront of Section G Page 27, and certainly not on the front page. But it has exactly the kind of self-regarding pseudo-sophistication the American media love. The proper tone for 9/11 commemorations is to be sad about all the dead -- "the lost" -- but in a very generalized soft-focus way. Not a lot of specifics about the lost, and certainly not too many quotes from those final phone calls from the passengers to their families, like Peter Hanson's last words before Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center: "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very fast." That might risk getting readers worked up, especially if they see the flight manifest:
Continued on Page 49
Will we fight terrorism or not?
The fictional hero of the television series 24 may be the only true defense we have against terrorism in this country. We just have to hope and pray that Osama and the other cave-dwelling Muslim terror rats get Fox on their satellite service.
If they do, and they watch counter-terrorism agent Bauer interrogating murderous vermin using any means necessary, they may actually start to worry that the American people have the will and strength to defend themselves against any enemy using whatever means is necessary.
On the other hand, if they are watching cable TV news, we are doomed because they will discover that we are quivering neurotic feel-good do-nothing pansies who would rather make friends with terrorists than make them talk.
Never mind the 3,000 dead Americans from September 11. Or worse yet, never mind the 3 million dead Americans the first time we dont stop Jihad Jim from blowing up his nuke bomb in the middle of Manhattan.
All that matters if you get your world view from the politically correct folks at CNN, FNC and MSNBC is acting by the rules and behaving yourself like proper gentlemen. It kind of reminds me of the battles between France and England in the 17th century where the commanders would enjoy a tea behind the lines while sending their troops forward in neat, orderly rows to engage the enemy and die.
That gentlemanly form of slaughter worked fine until one side decided not to play by the rules. But the bloody French and Indian War on our own continent established that one man playing by his own rules could kill a dozen playing by gentlemens rules. Within a few years, the British had learned their lesson and stopped marching men to their deaths.
In simple terms, the expression Stockholm Syndrome, which came into vogue in 1973, refers to a psychological condition in which a victim of terrorism, finding himself powerless in the hands of a terrorist, starts empathising with the terrorist.
2. Our Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, seems to have been smitten with the Stockholm Syndrome ever since the Mumbai blasts of July 11,2006, in which 184 suburban train commuters were killed by suspected members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a Pakistan-based terrorist organisation, which is a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) For Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People.
3. At a time when a growing number of Western analysts and even policy-makers has started doubting the sincerity of Pakistan's President, Gen.Pervez Musharraf, and suspecting that he has been a playing a double role----openly as a front-line ally in the war against terrorism and covertly as the supporter of the Pakistan-based jihadi terrorists--- our Prime Minister has sought to play down the extent of Musharraf's perfidy with regard to jihadi terrorism directed against India from Pakistani territory with the help of organisations such as the LET, which operate under the control of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence ( ISI).
4.The growing suspicion of Musharraf's role in the West has been evident in Western and even independent Pakistani analysts' comments on his so-called peace accord with the Taliban in North Waziristan and the subsequent release of nearly 2,500 persons arrested in Pakistan after 9/11 because of their suspected involvement in acts of jihadi terrorism.
Look at that sign. "Mr. Pope be with in your limits." What limits? Classic Islamic law stipulates that Christians may live in peace in Islamic societies as long as they accept second-class status as dhimmis, which involves living within certain limits: not holding authority over Muslims, paying the jizya tax, not building new churches or repairing old ones, and...not insulting Allah or Muhammad. If they believe that a Christian has insulted them in some way, even inadvertently, his contract of protection -- dhimma -- is voided.
So are these protestors warning the Pope to behave like a dhimmi, or else? I expect so. After all, so many Christians and post-Christians in the West in recent years have been willing, even eager, to accept such limits -- witness the chastened reaction to the Cartoon Rage riots, in which Church officials, government leaders, and others solemnly pontificated against "insults to religious figures." But it wasn't really a question of blasphemy then, and it isn't a question of insult now. It is a question of whether non-Muslims will submit to Muslim standards and restrictions on their speech, thought, and behavior.
And I hope that the Pope, for one, is not willing to do so.
#1
How utterly ironic that such a line should come from those who know no limits. But then, when they take no responsibvility for self but find comfort in that prescribed coccoon of hate, greed, ingnorance and delusion, hubris is truth to them
#4
It's not that big a shock to me. Most of my way-lefty acquaintances don't have any kids at all. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since I wouldn't trust most of them to dogsit, much less do diaper duty. ;)
#5
Rightees tend ingrain in their children values like self-sufficiency, determination, competition and fortitiude. I don't think we need to worry about the next generation.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/17/2006 23:29 Comments ||
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How can 36 per cent of people polled think U.S. officials knew of or participated in 9/11?
MARK STEYN
Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter."
Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.
But what about all those phone calls, especially from Flight 93? Ha, scoffs Dewdney. "Cellphone calls made by passengers were highly unlikely to impossible. Flight UA93 was not in the air when most of the alleged calls were made. The calls themselves were all faked." Michel Chossudovsky, of Quebec's Centre for Research on Globalization, agrees: "It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8,000 feet."
So all the "Let's roll" stuff was cooked up by the government spooks. So, presumably, were the calls from the other planes. Flight 175 passenger Peter Hanson to his father: "Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements." This at a time when, according to professor Dewdney, Flight 175 was preparing to land smoothly at Harrisburg. Or Flight 11 stewardess Madeline Sweeney: "We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God, we are way too low." Two minutes later, Flight 11 supposedly crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- though, as professor Dewdney has demonstrated, by then the plane wasn't even in the state. These so-called "calls" all used state-of-the art voice modification technology to make family members believe they were talking to loved ones rather than vocally disguised government agents. In the case of Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!" the spooks had gone to the trouble of researching and identifying individual passengers' distinctive conversational expressions.
In the end, says Dewdney, Flight 93 was shot down by a "military-looking all-white aircraft." It was an A-10 Thunderbolt cunningly repainted to . . . well, the professor doesn't provide a rationale for why you'd go to the trouble to paint a military aircraft. But the point is, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white jet in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Pennsylvania crash site, so naturally conspiracy theorists regard that as supporting evidence that the plane was brought down by the U.S. military rather than after a heroic passenger uprising against their jihadist hijackers. "It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard," announced retired army Col. Donn de Grand Pre. "I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." It was Maj. Rick Gibney, who destroyed the aircraft with a pair of Sidewinders at precisely 9:58 a.m.
Ooooo-kay. We now turn to a brand-new book edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. Brad Reagan? There's a name for conspiracy theorists to ponder, notwithstanding his cover as a "contributing editor" for Popular Mechanics. First things first: Maj. Rick Gibney is a lieutenant-colonel. At 9:58 a.m. he wasn't in Shanksville, Pa., but in Fargo, N.D. At 10:45, he took off for Bozeman, Mont., where he picked up Edward Jacoby, Jr., director of the New York State Emergency Management Office, and flew him back to Albany, N.Y., in a two-seat F-16B, unarmed -- i.e., no Sidewinders. The white plane was not an attractively painted A-10 Thunderbolt but a Dassault Falcon 20 corporate jet belonging to the company that owns Wrangler, North Face and other clothing lines. It was coming into Johnstown, near Shanksville, when Flight 93 disappeared and the FAA radioed to ask them if they could look around. "The plane circled the crash site twice," write Dunbar and Reagan, "and then flew directly over it to mark the exact latitude and longitude on the plane's navigation system."
Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority. In the fall of 2001, a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11.
Oh, well. It was just after 9/11, everyone was still in shock.
Five years later, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11.
Ah, but it's a sensitive issue over there, what with Tony Blair being so close to Bush and all.
Professor Dewdney's plane-swap theory?
Come on, if you already live in Canada, it's not such a leap to live in an alternative universe.
But what are we to make of the Scripps Howard poll taken this month in which 36 per cent of those surveyed thought it "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks or had knowledge of them beforehand?
Debunking 9/11 Myths does a grand job of explaining such popular conspiracy-website mainstays as how a 125-foot-wide plane leaves a 16-foot hole in the Pentagon. Answer: it didn't. The 16-foot hole in the Pentagon's Ring C was made by the plane's landing gear. But the problem isn't scientific, it's psychological: if you're prepared to believe that government agents went to the trouble of researching, say, gay rugby player Mark Bingham's family background and vocal characteristics so they could fake cellphone calls back to his mom, then clearly you're not going to be deterred by mere facts. As James B. Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, remarks toward the end of this book, the overwhelming nature of the evidence is, to the conspiratorially inclined, only further evidence of a cover-up: "One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohammed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. 'HOW CONVENIENT!' the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory."
When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:
"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"
Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.
The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value."
Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.
#1
In the past conspiricy theories were laughed off as insane. Now, becuase they hurt Bush in some unseen ways, they are allowed to linger. The damage being done to science, civility and sanity by the useful idiots will take decades to erase.
#3
This can only be attributed to some form of dementia, whether pathologically or academically induced is another matter entirely. The people who are obsessed with these obtuse conspiracy theories are delusional and possessed with dangerous quantities of spare time.
There may come a point where nutbags like these must be executed isolated in order that they do not infect the healthy public.
#5
One look at how some of these conspiracy wingnuts are tenured university professors obliged me to come up with that little gem. Truly, a case of "another fine mind ruined by higher education".
#6
I think Dewdney has been riding his Krebs Cycle a bit hard. It is truly unfortunate that someone who thinks that the X-files was a documentary is allowed to teach others.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/17/2006 23:37 Comments ||
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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.
Look at that sign. "Mr. Pope be with in your limits." What limits? Classic Islamic law stipulates that Christians may live in peace in Islamic societies as long as they accept second-class status as dhimmis, which involves living within certain limits: not holding authority over Muslims, paying the jizya tax, not building new churches or repairing old ones, and...not insulting Allah or Muhammad. If they believe that a Christian has insulted them in some way, even inadvertently, his contract of protection -- dhimma -- is voided.
