Whither Osama

Like a bad penny, stories of the whereabouts of our arch-enemy, Osama bin laden, keep circulating anew. Recently Monsoor Ijaz, a usually reliable observer of the scene, claimed to have information that OBL is a guest of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. Now the Financial Times has run a story saying the same thing.

Personally, I believe that OBL has been dead for two years, but, there DOES seem to be some coherence to the sightings, i.e. in a small area on either side of the Afghanistan border, either in the Tribal trust Lands on the border with Pakistan, or along the border with Iran. I've been there, and there is no great structural edifice delineating this border. The Durrand line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, was constructed by the British Empire, and in no way respects the reality of the people living on that ground. Colonel Durrand was concerned merely with the military defensiblity of the line, not cultural congruence. The border with Iran, on the other hand, has been firm for less than fifty years, and was decided by people living far from the border area. Much of the border is a trackless waste, with no landmarks for miles, or even a tree. On either border, the tribe or family which controls the land on one side of the line usually controls the land on the other.

You must understand the religious-historical background of the region as well: Muslims attacked and subjugated these areas over a millennium ago, and as a result the local population became Muslims, and pretty devout Muslims at that. In many ways, Osama bin Laden represents the bloodline of Mohammad to many of these people. Thus he enjoys the status of almost a demigod among some Muslims there, and he has exploited this history to make himself into something of a cult leader, especially among the Pashtuns, who could be expected to protect him - or to conspire to convince others that he is still alive. Those who don't know very much about it may make too much of the enmity between the Shia and the Sunni. The relationship is a lot more complicated than a mere feud.

We may never know what happened to Osama. If he is dead, his legend will go on forever. If he is alive, however, we can expect to see him, sooner rather than later. If he has made a deal with the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, he has bound up his future in Iranian politics. One thing is for sure, though: if he IS alive, he won't be for long. Living on the run in that part of the world, with a twenty five million dollar price on your head, is not congruent with long life.

"Unilateral": Newspeak for "Sovereign"

Unilateral - Newspeak for Sovereign

George Orwell had a way with words. His explorations of the use and abuse of power are necessary to the modern undestanding of politics. Newspeak, now more often referred to as "code words," is quite common in our political discourse, as pundits and candidates abuse the language to insert their ideas into the audience's mind. The latest abuse of the English language, used by the Left to brainwash the public, is the way that they, and I refer here especially to Howard Dean, are using the term "unilateral."

As any kid in grade school can tell you, "unilateral" means "one-sided," or "acting alone." This is somehow to be considered a terrible way for a nation to act, but how can he accuse us of being "unilateral" when we have 60 other nations at our side? Clearly we have to look further to see what is meant when he uses the term "unilateral." Clearly he is condemning us for acting as a sovereign nation. He gave the show away when he, in the question and answer period after his speech at the Pacific Council, said the he would have gone to war only if the United Nations had given us "permission" to act. Since they had already given us broad power to act, under Security Council resolutions starting with S.C.R. 678 in 1990, but made absolutely clear with S.C.R. 1441 in 2002, he was waiting for some really, really specific "permission."

To reveal his thinking this way was a major mistake by the presumptive Democrat nominee. Thus revealing his Transnational agenda, and his belief in a one world government, shows that he uses "unilateral" when he means that we acted as a "sovereign" nation, without "permission." Why the secrecy? Why obfuscate his real agenda? Because one world government is an antidemocratic concept. There can be no democracy when the scope is world-wide. Not if the citizens of America have their vote devalued into nothingness. This two hundred fifty million person nation will never allow itself to be submerged within the five billion (and rising) on the planet. India and China alone control the World under this form of government. So the only way for the Tranzis and Dean to ever gain their dream is by secrecy, and backing the nation into the deal with blinders on. Concepts like "international law" are used to inure the people to the idea that we must allow the rule of those who are far away, since the truth, that the twenty five million of Afghanistan should be able to outvote the twenty two million of California, will surely never fly if the people have their eyes open. Thus the strategy to slide these concepts past us, until they can present us with a fait acompli, an inevitable fact, the way they tried to slip the Kyoto protocol past us.

Now, you can call me a wild eyed lunatic for my ravings today, and I hope that you are correct. I would sleep better if I did not believe that the Utopian movement is still alive. You might point out that it is illogical for any American to favor a single government for the planet. And you would be right. But all Tarnzies are atheists, and Transnational Progressivism is their religion. It seems that we humans are hard-wired for Faith, and those who talk themselves out of a belief in God are left vulnerable to crackpot ideas, like TP, or Environmentalism, which they believe in with a zeal that any fundamentalist could recognize. No logic is required, where faith is involved.

So keep an eye on Dean and the rest of the crowd who use "Unilateral" to describe the actions of the U.S.A., and see for yourself if they are really accusing America as merely acting like a sovereign nation, or are they accusing us of acting ALONE. The COWBOYS! How unsophisticated those Americans are!

Uncommon Knowledge

It is no secret to my regular readers that I hold the common knowledge in disdain. The problem with common knowledge is that it is always wrong. This tendency for masses of people to get things wrong is compounded by our news media, who in their zeal to make every human event into a crisis, misinform us as a matter of course. And that which they can not make a crisis they make a mystery.

Like the mystery of the democrat nominee. As my regular readers know for over a month now, Howard Dean already has enough votes to get the nomination. Absent a horrendous misstep by his campaign, he's the loser-designee. Anything you hear about a "race" in the democrat party is being told by either someone with an agenda or someone who doesn't know. Yet everywhere you turn, the race is depicted as being in doubt, with Dean in the lead. Not so. It's already over.

Global Warming. While anyone who has been paying attention knows that global climate today is somewhere in the warmer range of historical climate, but nowhere near historic highs; this debate, and others driven by junk science, threatens to overwhelm us. Yet the hubris of the belief that we puny humans can, by altering our behavior, change planetary climate, is a juggernaut that seemingly can not be stopped.

And now we have Mad Cow Disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. A disease of a new type, caused by replicating proteins called Prions, that thrive in brain tissue. Now that a single case, in a single cow, has been found in America, the hysteria has begun. Every person and organization with an agenda is beating the bushes to create a crisis. The fact that the entire world-wide extent of Mad Cow disease in humans runs to just over a hundred cases, and you must eat cow brains to get it, will not stop the foretellers of doom. Nations will now embargo American beef, and dietary habits will change. All for what?

To bring down the cost of my T-Bone steaks, or course! Happy Holidays!!

Some Democrats ARE Unpatriotic

Yesterday the inevitible democrat nominee gave a speech at Warren Christopher's Pacific Council in an attempt to prove that he could expound upon foreign affairs and not merely excoriate the President. He failed.

Whatever happened to CSPAN? They used to be the most impartial presenter of current political affairs, but, alas, those days are gone. In their attempt to give Dean the best boost that they could, they showed Dean's speech last night at least three times. Luckily, however, those extra viewings allowed those of us who were paying attention to see how Dean's most strident whimperings were kept out of the official transcript, which I have linked above. The transcript omits his claim that "Bush is single-handedly responsible for the fact that North Korea has become a nuclear power" aa well as a few other choice statements, but what else could be expected from such an unserious candidate? While his present primary battle is against others of his ilk, soon he must face the mass of the American electorate and, without some tragedy that might befall Bush's administration, such easily detected tricks will all see the light of day.

In today's Wall Street Journal a democrat, Orson Scott Card, offers his plea to his party to attempt to occupy the mainstream, and glumly concludes that this effort will have to take place after the Dean defeat. Yet some of his prose is so precious, it almost brought a tear to my eyes.

There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.

But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might--because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure--even though by every rational measure it is not.

And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him--which means that if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us.
....
Reuters recently ran a feature that trumpeted the "fact" that U.S. casualties in Iraq have now surpassed U.S. casualties in the first three years of the Vietnam War. Never mind that this is a specious distortion of the facts, which depends on the ignorance of American readers.
....
In other words, the Iraq campaign isn't over--and President Bush has explicitly said so all along. So the continuation of combat and casualties isn't a "failure" or a "quagmire," it's a "war." And during a war, patriotic Americans don't blame the deaths on our government. We blame them on the enemy that persists in trying to kill our soldiers.
....
Am I saying that critics of the war aren't patriotic?

Not at all--I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil.

Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they "support our troops" all they like--but it doesn't change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage.

Think what it will mean if we elect a Democratic candidate who has committed himself to an antiwar posture in order to get his party's nomination.

Our enemies will be certain that they are winning the war on the battleground that matters--American public opinion. So they will continue to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can, because it works.

Our soldiers will lose heart, because they will know that their commander in chief is a man who is not committed to winning the war they have risked death in order to fight. When the commander in chief is willing to call victory defeat in order to win an election, his soldiers can only assume that their lives will be thrown away for nothing. That's when an army, filled with despair, becomes beatable even by inferior forces.
....
When did we lose the Vietnam War? Not in 1968, when we held an election that hinged on the war. None of the three candidates (Humphrey, Nixon, Wallace) were committed to unilateral withdrawal. Not during Nixon's "Vietnamization" program, in which more and more of the war effort was turned over to Vietnamese troops. In fact, Vietnamization, by all measures I know about, worked.

We lost the war when the Democrat-controlled Congress specifically banned all military aid to South Vietnam, and a beleaguered Republican president signed it into law. With Russia and China massively supplying North Vietnam, and Saigon forced to buy pathetic quantities of ammunition and spare parts on the open market because America had cut off all aid, the imbalance doomed them, and they knew it.

The South Vietnamese people were subjected to a murderous totalitarian government (and the Hmong people of the Vietnamese mountains were victims of near-genocide) because the U.S. Congress deliberately cut off military aid--even after almost all our soldiers were home and the Vietnamese were doing the fighting themselves.

That wasn't about "peace," that was about political posturing and an indecent lack of honor. Is that where we're headed again?

And that's just a sample. Every American should read this cogent, comprehensive examination of democrat and liberal tactics, and their consequences.

Urgent Action on a Non-Problem

Human history is replete with wasted energy and failed diplomatic initiatives, but surely the Kyoto Protocols are the most grievous example. In order to address a problem that may or may not exist, and, if it exists, it may or may not be a problem, the Kyoto protocols were born. But, the one thing that most scientists can agree upon is that there is nothing that humans can do that will make an iota of difference to human climate. Yet 4000 delegates from 188 countries have been convened since December 1 in Milan at the ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The delegates will be joined later this week by at least 74 environment ministers from around the world.

The real joke of the exercize is that it is well within the capability of the human race to curtail the emission of Carbon Dioxide, yet the solution is expressly barred from consideration. Yes, the solution, if one is needed, is nuclear energy. Only nuclear energy can lift Hydrogen from being an idea that will generate even more CO2 into a solution to the energy problem that the proponents of Kyoto claim that they are concerned with. But a solution is far from what these myrmidons of a failed ideology seek. They have seized an issue, one that they wish to use to transfer wealth from "the North to the South." And even as the scientific community debates the issue, the one possible effective solution is expressly barred from consideration.

What the World needs is to unfetter Science from politics. Kyoto will not advance that agenda. And as long as America is led by men and women who refuse to commit national suicide, Kyoto will be merely a venue for a complete waste of time, energy, and money on a grand scale.

Storm Clouds Over Europe

A friend sent me this and asked that I pass it along. After checking it for factual accuracy, I present it here. It is a warning, and an action plan.


I ask each of you to read this and perhaps reflect how lucky we are here in the US, but what are we doing about the rest of world. I am beginning to dislike the French very much! Rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.

In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him "a dirty Jew."

Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapon fire.

In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack.

Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead."

A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus.

"Anti-Semitism", wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become respectable . . . at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."

In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?"

In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulcher. The caption: "Non resurrexit."

In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Hereford: "Six million were not enough."

In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.

In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Loannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.

In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and "Jews into the sea."

In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.

But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France:

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted.

In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.

According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews."

The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve "family honor."

The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked -- and did not apologize -- when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "...that shitty little country, Israel."

"At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence. . . Hatred of the Jews has returned to France." But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe.

Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.

To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the reemergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency.

"Stop saying that there is anti-Semitism in France," President Jacques Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. "There is no anti-Semitism in France."

The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.

They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians. A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews.

Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11.

The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze. Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.

French Anti-Semitism Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless." Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian author.

A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France. The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France. This was in the past week.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, from September 9, 2000, at the start of the intifada, through November 20, 2001, there were some 330 acts of anti-Semitism just in and around Paris. In addition to literally scores of firebombings of synagogues, just before Rosh Hashanah, 200 Arabs attacked Jews on the Champs Elysees. The pace has only picked up since then:

In December, a French cinema in Paris refused to allow a Hanukah showing of
Harry Potter to 800 Jewish children because of French-Palestinian threats (the threats were confirmed by French police who then went on to do nothing, not even giving details). It was one incident in an eventful month when synagogues continued to be firebombed and a Jewish kindergarten was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti and set ablaze.

We can understand anti-Semitism among the French people. There is nothing the French love like their traditions and, on the question of hating Jews, they certainly have tradition galore. What, however, can explain the sometimes muted, sometimes defensively outraged reaction of French officials?

Simple. There are approximately 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 Muslims presently living in France and many more arrive daily. There are only about 600,000 Jews still living in France. Moreover, France has been the number one European exporter to Iraq, totaling over two billion dollars per year in exports since 2000. To those who are at a loss to explain why French elected officials seem "helpless" to stem the tide of anti-Semitism, I say that something smells awfully Vichy around here.

You already know that Israel is at war against a fearsome enemy, which has brought the fight to its streets. Much of the civilized world (well, at least on this side of the Atlantic), finally understands this fact.

What is not being acknowledged, however, is that this is not a war against Israel, or as propagandists and demagogues worldwide would have it, occupiers.

This is a war against each and every individual, Israeli or not, religious or not, Zionist or not, right, left or center, who identifies himself or herself as Jewish. Israel is only the publicized front line and if you are not in Israel, and the fight has not arrived at your front yard, just wait. Or, perhaps, we shouldn't wait. Perhaps history has finally taught us, of all people, that waiting and hoping for succor and sympathy from the nations of the world will lead only to more burned synagogues, pogroms, and, down the road, grim-faced dignitaries mouthing "never again" while dedicating yet another memorial museum. We cannot wait inactively and hope to have security or peace for our children or ourselves. We dare not privately rail against irrational, virulent hatred while letting the world believe that we remain disinterested, accepting our lot with equanimity or, worse, resignation. We can and must do more than simply grieve.

So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:

First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.

Second, boycott France. Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes. Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies. Definitely boycott their shores. If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are as a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well directed pressure.

Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your coworkers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them know that you and the people that you care about need their help.

The number one best selling book in France is "September 11: The Frightening Fraud," which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.

Our only strength is the strength of our community and there can be no community without communication.

This is really scary stuff, Read it very carefully and thoroughly. We cannot allow this to continue. You MUST pass it on to as many people as you know, so we can curb this hideous anti-Semitic wave and squelch it ... before it grows and engulfs us all.

Peace or Piece

I don't know whether to laugh or cry this morning. Some Israeli dissidents, without even a strong minority of Israeli support, have offerred a peace plan that gives away even more than the fantasy plan advanced by Barak, yet the Palestinian shills involved can't even agree that this plan offers enough. More territory, including the Temple Mount, coupled with less security guarantees for Israel, means that this plan has absolutely no chance of passing any Israeli plebiscite. Yet even this is not enough for the Palistinian enemies of humanity.

Anyone with fantasies that the Pali leadership is serious about wanting any sort of peace that includes living Jews remaining in the Holy Land should have had their bubble burst, yet nobody expects the "antizionists" to discern any such thing. Even though their military strength is marginal at best, and even their terrorist reach has failed to kill more Israelis than automobile accidents, it is more clear than ever that they will choose no plan that limits their freedom to kill and die in the pursuit of Jewish blood.

Yet the atmospherics of the plan are comical. Almost all of the "World Leaders" who are associated with the plan are no longer able to wield power in their own countries. Famous has-beens starting with, of course, our own national joke Jimmy Carter, followed by such notables as Lech Walesa and former Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and F.W. de Klerk of the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Yossi Beilin, the Israeli who is spearheading the effort has become so marginal in his politics that he no longer even qualifies (as, now, a member of the fringe Meretz party) for the Israeli Knesset. Yet the Palestinians who had allowed their names to become associated with the plan are now trying to end that association. About 700 guests, including many intellectuals and celebrities from both sides of the divide are due to attend. I haven't seen a guest list, but the Master of Ceremonies is said to be the noted self-hating Jew Richard Dreyfuss. I don't doubt that his buddy and fellow self-hater Noam Chomsky and the rest of that evil crowd will attend as well, but that is just my surmise.

The Palestinian position is so craven, so phony, that I will quote a news article that is sympathetic to the plan:

Ahead of his departure to Geneva, Rajoub underlined that his presence did not necessarily signify that Arafat was giving it his official seal of approval. "This decision reflects a desire by the Palestinian leadership to encourage the Israeli peace camp," Rajoub told AFP.

The decision by Arafat to despatch Rajoub and Fares to Switzerland came shortly after the Fatah central committee formally rejected the accord. But Fatah deputy Hatem Abdel Qader said that Arafat did not want to toss away the chance of gaining the upper hand over Sharon in their battle for international support. "President Arafat does not want to sacrifice the gains that the Geneva Initiative can bring him," Qader told AFP. "This is the reason why the Palestinian leadership has adopted an ambiguous rather than a clear-cut official position."

According to Fatah heavyweight Sakher Habash, Arafat is looking to seize the intiative as a chance to appear as a man of peace, thus portraying Sharon as an obstructionist for his rejection of the project.

To sum up - even though the Palestinian leadership has officially rejected the plan, they believe that the credulous international "community" will allow them to use their "acceptance" of the plan to their advantage. If they are right, and I believe that they are, it will be a sad moment in the history of the Jews. That's why I have to laugh. Or cry.