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Thursday, June 12, 2003 I've started a new project, to document media bias at the LAT. Posted 5:53 PM by Privateer Thursday, May 08, 2003 New Blog I've joined the Irvine Review collective blog. It will be mostly about UCI-related stuff, so most of you won't be interested in it. Posted 11:08 PM by Privateer Saturday, February 22, 2003 Not an Update, Just an I-told-you-so Law enforcement agencies are warning about loner terrorists: The possibility of war with Iraq could unleash acts of anti-American violence in the United States or overseas by individual extremists who do not belong to Al Qaeda or other Middle Eastern terrorist groups but sympathize with their grievances, intelligence and law enforcement officials say. A classified F.B.I. intelligence bulletin, issued on Wednesday to state and local law enforcement agencies throughout the country, warned the authorities to be on the alert for lone terrorists who are not directed by organizations like Al Qaeda. I said the same thing nine months ago. Suicide bombs (or suicide gunmen) are the perfect warrior for small groups, or for individuals inspired by terrorist leaders. If one Muslim carries out a shooting or bomb attack, expect copycats to start happening, pronto. This is a situation that will snowball if it ever starts. It's also pretty much unavoidable, it's going to happen at some point. (note that I wrote this a month before Hesham Mohammed Hadayet's attack on the El Al counter at LAX). The upside: I was wrong about the snowball effect. At least, so far I've been wrong. I hope Muslims realize if there is a sustained campaign of low-level violence by American Muslims that it will have extremely negative consequences on their community as a whole. I'll go out on a limb here and make a second prediction: if there is another terror attack by a loner American Muslim, there are pretty good odds he will be a college student. Posted 6:27 PM by Privateer Friday, January 03, 2003 Not Really an Update, this doesn't count Someone just called and asked if I spoke Chinese. When I responded in the negative, she said she must have a wrong number--and then wished me a Happy New Year. Which reminds me: Happy New Year to all of you people out there in blogland! Gung hay fat choy! P.S.: is Chris Patten in jail yet? Why won't he approve an audit of the EU money sent to General Yasser Arafat? Because he KNOWS DAMN WELL it's going straight into the coffers of Fatah and the Al-Aksa Murder Brigades. If the EU wants to use tax dollars to fund terror groups, it's no better than Saudi Arabia. Posted 9:17 PM by Privateer Thursday, October 24, 2002 The last update, ever Yeah, I quit, I just don't have the time, so I should end it for good. But a few last things: the leaderless resistance I was worried about continues (first Hadayet, now Mohammed the Sniper)... not on the scale I thought it would, but this sniper incident could open the floodgates by providing so much publicity. The guy I saw wasn't Hadayet. The guy who made terrorist threats continues to attend or work for the university (or just come to a lot of Muslim Student Union events). The bestest peace plan ever for the mideast: Israel should withdraw completely from the Palestinian areas, and not cross the border to attack or even gather intelligence. It should hand the territories over to the UN, and tell Kofi Annan he has 4 or 5 years to straighten things out. Israel will only take military action against terrorists on the other side of its borders if the UN asks. Israel won't interfere at all in the Palestinian areas, unless the UN asks. And when 4-5 years are up, and the terror hasn't ended, and the new Palestinian government (or UN dictatorship) wasn't making a geniune effort for peace, Israel should take as much of the Palestinian territory as it needs for security. (hint: the proximity of the West Bank to the middle of Israel means NONE of it can remain in Palestinian hands if terrorists are launching Katyusha rockets from it; Israel would have to take the whole West Bank). So Israel could give the Palestinians one last chance, and then end the whole problem for good. There is no way ANYONE could realistically accuse Israel of sabotaging the peace plan, because Israel would completely extricate itself from the territories and leave it up to the UN to run. Israel would suffer a lot during those 4-5 years, but it would build up an immense resolve during that time, the resolve necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing, and the rest of the world (the UN) would not be able to criticize Israel because they would be the ones in charge of stopping Palestinian terrorists. It's such a beautiful plan, and the best part is, it actually has a chance of working, because Palestinians might get so scared of losing their Last Chance (they know they're not going to get any more after that), so they might actually make peace, which would be even more incredible. Posted 4:14 PM by Privateer Wednesday, October 09, 2002 State Censorship by the Ever-so-Sophisticated French The book Rage and Pride by Orianna Fallaci is on trial. I doubt censorship is going to stop her book from being read, it's currently ranked 28th at Amazon.fr. Posted 12:45 PM by Privateer Monday, October 07, 2002 Useless Idiots This article (via AS) reminds me of this column: America has divided into two factions: those who fight evil and those who do not believe in evil. The dividing line is religion. Both are instances in which a kid is used to say something the adults really want to say, but are afraid to say themselves, because they know how stupid, divisive, morally crapulent, or just plain pathetic it is. And they know they would catch hell for it. So they use a kid instead, in the hopes s/he won't be criticized, because of his/her youth. But we in the anti-idiotarian realm of the blogosphere aren't afraid to call them crude hurtful names after ripping their arguments to shreds. If Andrew Sullivan called me an idiot, I think I would cry myself to sleep... Eric Tuan in a way reminds me now of this kid (scroll to the bottom right), because he's going to be scarred for life. (okay, I was kidding about the crying thing, but I would be really unhappy) Posted 12:24 AM by Privateer Sunday, October 06, 2002 Why the French? Why blow up a French oil tanker, and not another country's? Maybe the terrorists were just trying to attack anything they could that was remotely Western. Maybe the French ships are less guarded than American tankers. Or maybe, they know France is one of the countries they can intimidate through acts of terror (blowing up an American oil tanker just before the midterm elections would be a bad, bad idea for Muslim terrorists). France has shown weakness, and invited attacks on itself. And all the while, they say we are inviting attacks on ourself for showing strength and resolve... Posted 5:33 PM by Privateer Was it Terrorism? When a mentally disturbed man stabbed the mayor of Paris (via IP) in the stomach, was it an act of terror? I would say yes. He might not have had ties to any groups, but that doesn't prevent someone from being a terrorist. He was apparently mentally ill, but that doesn't mean his attack was not a terrorist attack. Even if he was so delusional he couldn't be held accountable for his actions, it would still be a terrorist attack. Where did he get this idea, that the mayor of Paris deserved to die? From attending radical mosques. If an insane person can be brainwashed like this, what prevents a child from becoming warped? The French are going to have to deal with the extremist Muslims within their midst sooner or later. Because things like this aren't going to stop any time soon. Posted 5:32 PM by Privateer Friday, October 04, 2002 First gun control, then thought control. It's not about guns, it's about control. I think it's time for regime change in Canada. If the Canadian people take it on themselves, I wouldn't be disappointed. [update (3:00pm): This is outrageous, Canada is trying to take away the charitable status of the Israeli Red Cross. Canadians should be ashamed, moreso than on an average day.] Posted 1:50 PM by Privateer Friday, September 13, 2002 Rector, Rectum, what's the Difference? Eugene Volokh is criticizing the brownshirts at Concordia for banning all Middle East-related speech, as he should be. But he misses the point, the Rector isn't going to take any action against the rioters. He's going to wait for the whole thing to blow over, and he's banning these events to prevent the Jew-hating thugs from making the news again. If they pull any stunts like this again, the public might get upset and he might actually have to punish them. Universities that don't prevent hateful riots in the first place are not universities likely to punish the perpetrators after the fact. Just look at SFSU, they did almost nothing. Posted 10:07 PM by Privateer Wednesday, September 11, 2002 Well, the whole flurry of individual attacks thing didn't happen I doubt these dorks were from al Qaida or any other organization, so they would count as copycat terrorists (assuming they're guilty, which I heartily will). But three goofballs does not make for a big wave of terror. I predicted there would be massive terror on a very small scale, and very little of it has actually happened, even on this anniversary. If there are enough deranged Muslims in England to throw a party like this in public, why aren't they out roaming the streets, looking for Jews and Americans to stab? Why haven't more of them built bombs and bought guns on the black market, to carry out horrendous attacks? We know more than a handful of Muslims living in the West travelled to Afghanistan to fight on behalf of the Taliban, so there is no shortage of dedication on their part. Johnny bin Walker was outside the US when the attacks happened, but a few other Muslims went to Afghanistan after 9/11 in order to defend Mullah Omar's dystopia. Why didn't they stay here, buy a few rifles and shotguns, and do some real damage to America, instead of just becoming fodder for B-52s? You might remember den Beste's post about soldiers and warriors, where warriors lost out to soldiers because they were focused on honor instead of efficiency. I think the answer is that these Muslims are ultra-religous, and it interferes with their thinking. Instead of fighting the war in the most efficient manner possible (as we did), they wanted to fight the war in a manner they thought would please Allah (and thus bring them victory). Even they must think on some level the 9/11 attacks were wrongful, because instead of trying to emulate them, they went to fight in a normal shooting war, with trenches and lines and artillery. Obviously, there are a whole bunch of creeps who try to carry out terror attacks here (see the link in the first sentence of this post), but most of the fundamentalist Muslims must have thought shooting it out with American soldiers was they way to pursue Jihad. Johnny bin Walker, who could have been a very effective al-Qaida agent here chose to sign up with ordinary Taliban forces instead of training at an al-Qaida camp for terrorists. Now the question is: 9/11 succeeded in hurting America, but shooting it out with American soldiers didn't. Are the fundamentalist Muslims going to see this as a sign of Allah's divine favor towards terrorism and against fighting conventional battles? Or are they going to see the Taliban's fall as a sign of divine disfavor with fundamentalism? My guess is answer #2, because we won the war there and people tend to tag along behind winners. Even if the terrorists hit us again, even if they win a few battles, we will still be able to overcome them. Winning militarily will go hand-in-hand with winning politically. (the sophisticated reader will notice how skillfully I turned a post about how I was wrong into a post calling for more violence and militarism. okay, I did it by accident) Posted 8:55 PM by Privateer Monday, September 09, 2002 Helen Thomas gets a Fisking And she really deserves it, too. In the early days after our siege, President George W. Bush found a sympathetic world anxious to help. Foreign leaders seemed willing to overlook his earlier appalling approach to foreign policy -- repudiating some environmental and collective security agreements. For a time, Bush became an internationalist in search of allies. Soon, however, with his conservative advisers egging him on, he proclaimed a new doctrine that smacks of old imperialism -- that we have the right to strike militarily anywhere without provocation. When did Bush immediately after 9/11 say anything other than that he was going after the terrorists? When did he trip-flop (triple flip-flop) from unilateralist-to-multilateralist-to-unilateralist-to-imperialist? How does the policy of pre-emptively attacking our enemies constitute "imperialism?" We are not establishing colonies (we're establishing democracies), stealing resources (we're opening them up for the peoples' use), enslaving populations (we're setting them free from dictators and Shari'a). How broadly has the word "imperialism" been twisted, so that Bush's policy could possibly fall under its meaning? Why can't the far Left define a few of their pet words and use them accurately? And why the "smacks of" qualifier? One could just as easily say Helen Thomas's political stance "smacks of treason," and it would be just as worthless. Political writers should strive to communicate effectively and be as precise as possible. Smacking is for rabble-rousing and partisan sniping, not for mature discourse with the other side. She doesn't write her columns to sway conservatives, they're written for people already in agreement with her. This policy of preemption -- might is right -- is antithetical to what America has always stood for -- "magnanimity in victory," as Winston Churchill once put it, helping our former enemies and rejecting policies dictated by vengeance. How is this policy which "smacks of old imperialism" now equal to "might is right?" How could anyone possibly get that idea? We don't believe we have the right to defend ourselves is predicated on our might--that's irrelevant, everyone has the right to defend themselves! The part about "helping our former enemies," is especially laughable. We helped the Germans after WWII, but we didn't help or even spare the top Nazi officials. We are currently helping Afghan villages that were aligned with the Taliban at the beginning of the war, and even villages whose sympathies still lie with bin Laden (they just have to not shoot at Karzai's forces, and not give actual aid to the Taliban). Since that fateful September day, we attacked Afghanistan and destroyed the inhumane Taliban regime, hoping to erect a democracy in its place. Yet, I keep remembering Bush's ominous New Year's message. "This is the first war of the 21st century," he said. Is that any way to inspire the nation? Bush is not supposed to give speeches for the sole purpose of inspiring us. That's part of his job, if he wants us to follow him, but he should also level with us. And he has done that, this war was different from previous wars, and the difference between future wars and wars of the 20th century will continue to increase. I think what Thomas is trying to say is that we should be more "inspired" by the idea of a 21st century without wars. Suffice to say, I am not "inspired" by the idea that a madman like Saddam could continue to rape, torture, and kill his subjects in the worst manner so long as he does it within his own borders. There are things worse than war. Bush claims the terrorists are motivated by hostility to our freedom. Others see them impelled by religious zealotry. Newsflash: the terrorists hate freedom for religious reasons, they think freedom is the opposite of "submission" (the literal English meaning of the Arabic word "Islam") and Democracy is the opposite of the Caliphate proscribed in the Koran. Of course, not all Muslims agree with Osama's interpretation (most don't). When Bush says they hate our freedom, he isn't playing word games or using dumbed-down politically correct language, he's just acknowledging a simple truth. But the motivation for such virulent hatred obviously deserves more probing. And we need to hear what our government, which has interrogated so many suspects, has learned. Maybe Helen could go visit a Saudi-sponsored madrassa (hopefully they will force her to don a burqa, saving us all a lot of ocular trauma). There she could learn all about Jews and Crusaders and the Zionist-eaters-of-Arab-children and the innocent martyr Osama bin Laden who was framed by the mossadciafbishinbetvaticanraytheon. For a time, fear gripped children who saw on television the blazing ruins of the World Trade Center towers and one side of the Pentagon and soon learned that these scenes were not just a surreal horror movie. But they're not afraid anymore. Time to move on, and forget about 9/11. We have more important things to do than dwell on the horror. Many people of all ages found their natural self-confidence temporarily shattered. Significant segments of the population -- particularly Arabs and Muslims -- are viewed with suspicion: Stereotyping and racial profiling are back in style. For some of us, it never went out of style (at least, with respect to defending our nation). I don't walk across the street just because I see a black person, I don't assume Hispanics are illiterate, or that Arabs are terrorists. But I wouldn't let my daughter ride to prom in a limo driven by an Arab Muslim I didn't know if he came to me and offered to do it for a really low price (that's sort of hypothetical, because I don't have a daughter, but sort of not-hypothetical, because Hesham Mohammed Hadayet made that offer to a Jewish man, who wisely declined). Federal officials are more tightly scrutinizing would-be immigrants. GASP! THE HORROR! THE HORROR! And the government is employing wholesale deportations, ruling out appeals to the courts by detainees found in violation of visa laws. We have neither the time nor the resources to allow for endless legal challenges. And we've been burned often enough in the past allowing people to violate visa laws. If I recall correctly, some of the hijackers on 9/11 had overstayed their visas. What other arrows do Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft have in their quivers? Who or what might stop them? Maybe the courts will. They seem to be more combative as more constitutional rights are being set aside. In this atmosphere, many Americans have become wary of dissent and criticism of the administration. Many Democrats, in particular, have lost their voices as the loyal opposition. I will acknowledge there is an atmosphere of wariness towards dissent. I know, because I'm part of it, I'm wary of the motives of dissenters (although after delving deeper into their arguments, I've found most of them to be fundamentally decent people). But this atmosphere wasn't created by John Ashcroft, it was created by Osama bin Laden. It's amazing how she can claim Ashcroft is responsible for the fallout of 9/11. 3,000 people were murdered, and we're wary of people who don't support the president in taking action against preventing such an attack from occurring again (they want to take a radically different course of action, one that radical Muslims agree with, which makes us wary). We don't silence them, we don't harass them, we just look at 'em funny and Fisk their arguments and call them names like "appeasers." I will also acknowledge that many Democrats have failed to act as the "loyal opposition." But that's a failure of their own character, not John Ashcroft's. In the post-Sept. 11 era we have ventured into uncharted territory. But I don't believe we have to lose our traditional spirit of tolerance or undermine the primacy of our constitutional rights to win the war on terrorism. In fact, if that happened, we would lose much more than we would gain. But what's this, then? Is Helen really advocating we limit part of our constitution in order to make the country safer? Why does she feel comfortable clamping down on the Second Amdendment but not on the First (or Fourth, or whatever)? Could it be that she doesn't respect all of our constitutional rights, just the ones she likes? P.S.: I don't think mandating background checks before gun sales violates the Second Amendment (I'm not a scholar on this issue, but it seems like a reasonable enough restriction), but it's well-known that Thomas wants far, far more gun control than just that. The fact she doesn't criticize Diaz, who wants to scrap the Second Amendment entirely, shows she has no respect for this portion of the constitution. Portraying him as a moderate only proves she isn't. P.P.S.: that column contains the lie that Osama purchased a bunch of .50 caliber sniper rifles in America. In fact, they were purchased by the CIA, and donated to the Mujahedin, and it contains the misstatement that Diaz was a CIA agent. Posted 9:28 PM by Privateer Get Ready The copycat attacks are coming. Small groups and deranged individuals across the world will be attempting terror attacks soon. Posted 5:48 PM by Privateer Wednesday, September 04, 2002 Thank Goodness for the Lobbyists! This never would have happened in America, thanks to Our Friends the computer lobbyists. I never thought I would be praising lobbyists, but they actually do serve a beneficial function in our democracy sometimes, by preventing really stupid laws like this from being passed. Posted 11:04 PM by Privateer Tuesday, September 03, 2002 Violence and Morality I am not a pacifist. I do not believe nonviolence is always morally superior to taking "direct action" to solve a problem. Obviously, Alley Writer Yack is not a pacifist either. Calling for the death of innocent Muslims to get a point across about terror isn't just barbaric, it's also futile. A major justification for the intifada is that it was to convince Israel to notice the Palestinians' suffering. But it only strengthened Israeli resolve to do what was necessary to achieve security. Killing Israelis has not achieved the goal of making them more open and understanding and left-wing. Quite the opposite has occurred, and there is no reason to believe different would happen by killing Muslims. Killing a large number of innocent Muslim civilians won't show them that terror is wrong. On the contrary, it will show them that terror is RIGHT, that terror is employed not just by them, but by their enemies. That they are in a terrorist war and that all means are justified. Terrorizing Muslim civilians would only push them towards supporting the terrorists, there isn't a chance it would teach them the evils of terror. That's my purely utilitarian argument, as any other would probably fail to reach Yack. Taking a moral stance against him would only give him the opportunity to proclaim himself a brave dissentor from rigid politically correct orthodoxy martyred for his direct nature etc. etc. etc. Posted 10:55 PM by Privateer Homer Blogs It's true. I saw it myself, on the TV. Posted 10:28 PM by Privateer Do Not... Mix Soyo motherboards and Western Digital hard drives. They're both fine products, apparently, but they don't work well together. Put too much coolant compound on your CPU--when you take the fan out, it will come out of the ZIF socket with it. Bother to straighten the pins on the bottom of your CPU and re-insert it into the motherboard. It won't work Do: order new motherboard BEFORE breaking the first one (check) order new CPU BEFORE breaking the first one (did not do) But I showed that computer for letting me break it. I ordered a better motherboard and a better CPU and bought a new hard drive. So there. And in a couple years, I'll put the cash down for an 8x AGP graphics card, and a couple serial hard drives for RAID. (it should be sort of obvious, but the lack of postings is due to my ongoing computer troubles) Posted 10:19 PM by Privateer Thursday, August 29, 2002 This is what I've been saying... Moshe Ya'alon is the best man to speak for Israel. He's direct like Rumsfeld, he doesn't waste your time with obfuscations or politicalspeak. (I have said that the Palestinian threat was like a cancer, that democracy is necessary, and that Oslo was not entirely bad, because it gave us all moral clarity about the situation) (but just because you've read my blog, don't think you shouldn't read the article, he says a lot of other stuff, too. go read it.) Posted 7:07 PM by Privateer Saturday, August 24, 2002 Barbarians Strike Again How were the terrorists able to plant a bomb in Hebrew University? They used an Arab who worked there. And many other Arabs who live there are cheering on the terror attacks. Israel will never be reasonably safe, so long as it has a large Muslim population inside it. The answer is simple: Let the Arabs have 99% of the Middle East, and let the Jews have Israel. There is no hope for living peacefully alongside such a barbaric culture (even if not every Arab shares that culture, enough of them do to be dangerous. and children of non-terrorist Arabs could still be recruited, some of them will rebel against their parents and support the extremist Muslims, just like some stupid Jew kids rebel against their sane parents by supporting Meretz). Until the Palestinians change their culture, and stop oppressing gays, women and non-Muslims, and start embracing Democracy and nonviolence, there will be no hope for peace. And right now, those values are associated with Israel and America, making them very unpopular. In short: the Palestinians aren't going to change any time soon, so the Israelis are going to have to choose between waiting another 50 years for their neighbors to come around, or expelling them now, and gaining instant security. Why wait? Will the Arab states be so different in the future? Without extensive American intervention, the answer is clearly "no." Posted 12:48 AM by Privateer Friday, August 23, 2002 Wow. Yeah, this is why you read Oxblog and not Privateer... (via InstaPundit, of course) Posted 10:46 PM by Privateer Thursday, August 22, 2002 Honest Reporting is watching them The rest of this post is copied from the email I get from Honest Reporting, an organization dedicated to exposing lies in the media about Israel. They go overboard sometimes (Eric Alterman isn't an "extremist" on the issue of Israel/Palestine, he's just extremely stupid). But this email was particularly good: HonestReporting Communique 21 August 2002 "COVERING UP FOR FATAH" * * * Dear HonestReporting Member, This week, Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed to a security arrangement calling for Israeli troop pullbacks in Gaza and Bethlehem, in exchange for a crackdown by Palestinian security services to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians. Many Palestinian groups -- including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction -- all issued statements rejecting the deal, while vowing to continue their campaign of terror. Palestinian groups once again prove that when presented with the option of regaining land, they choose instead the path of violence and terror. However, HonestReporting's survey reveals that most major media mentioned ONLY Hamas and Islamic Jihad as rejecting the truce -- while inexplicably failing to mention the third rejectionist party, Arafat's Fatah. The media has a sordid history of protecting Arafat and covering up his terror activities. This case is a blatant omission of fact. The Jerusalem Post reports that Fatah's military wing, the Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, vowed that "the jihad will continue" and that Fatah-Aksa will carry out "massive attacks" against Israeli soldiers and civilians -- "and if there is a necessity in the next phase, there are no borders for the resistance." ===== THE WORST OFFENDERS ===== THE NEW YORK TIMES: Serge Schmemann completely omits mention of any Palestinian opposition to the deal -- though he details right-wing Israeli opposition. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/277.asp Comments to: letters@nytimes.com * * * THE INDEPENDENT: Phil Reeves writes a classic case of moral equivalence: "The agreement's chances of success were already being undermined by strong opposition from extremists on both sides." http://honestreporting.com/a/r/278.asp The "Israeli extremists" Reeves refers to is one Israeli party threatening to leave the government coalition. The Palestinian extremists Reeves refers to are all the major Palestinian militias rejecting the agreement outright. Comments to: newseditor@independent.co.uk ===== TWO HONEST REPORTS ===== Of the major news agencies, we spotted only two who included Fatah in the list of deal rejectionists. BBC reports: "The security deal, struck on Sunday, has been rejected by key Palestinian elements, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even from within Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, whose members said it was a poor substitute for full Israeli withdrawal." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2205149.stm BOSTON GLOBE: "Several Palestinian factions, including a militia linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, yesterday declared that they were against the initiative." http://honestreporting.com/a/r/279.asp ===== THE FATAH-LESS PACK ===== HonestReporting encourages members to write to the following news agencies and ask why they omitted Fatah from the rejectionist list. HonestReporting also encourages members to monitor your local media to see how they reported Fatah's rejection of the Israeli-PA agreement. * * * ASSOCIATED PRESS notes Hamas, but not Fatah. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/280.asp Comments to: feedback@ap.org * * * BALTIMORE SUN notes Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but not Fatah. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/281.asp Comments to: letters@baltsun.com * * * CNN notes Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but not Fatah. http://cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/08/20/mideast/index.html Comments to: allfeedback@cnn.com * * * GUARDIAN (UK) notes Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but not Fatah. http://guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,777418,00.html Comments to: letters@guardian.co.uk * * * LA TIMES notes Hamas and PFLP, but not Fatah. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/282.asp Comments to: letters@latimes.com * * * LONDON TIMES notes Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP -- but not Fatah. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-389403,00.html Comments to: worldnews.editor@the-times.co.uk * * * MSNBC notes Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP -- but not Fatah. http://msnbc.com/news/677951.asp?0dm=C19ON Comments to: world@msnbc.com * * * NEWSDAY notes Hamas and Jihad, but not Fatah. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/283.asp Comments to: http://cf.newsday.com/newsdayemail/email.cfm * * * REUTERS notes Hamas, but not Fatah. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/284.asp Comments to: editor@reuters.com * * * SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE notes Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP -- but not Fatah. http://honestreporting.com/a/r/285.asp Comments to: letters@sfchronicle.com * * * WASHINGTON POST notes Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP -- but not Fatah. http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41937-2002Aug20.html Comments to: letters@washpost.com (I shouldn't insult Alterman without explaining why: he is an idiot because he thinks Fatah is made up of freedom fighters. But they oppose this peace deal with Israel. Does that mean the peace deal is anti-freedom? Maybe Eric could explain why Sharon's offer (which has been accepted) of Gaza and Bethlehem first is somehow so evil that Fatah should oppose it. Or he could explain how the members of Fatah are "freedom fighter[s]" when they are fighting against peace agreements.) Posted 1:18 AM by Privateer Wednesday, August 21, 2002 J-E-W-S That's okay, Bill. We're not so fond of you, either. But now maybe people will have a better understanding of why Jews from around the country rallied to raise money for Artur Davis and Denise Majette. Anti-Semitism is alive and well among certain segments of the population (Muslims, Palestinian sympathizers, whites-who-hate-minorities, minorities-who-hate-whites, etc.) Most blacks aren't anti-Semites, even if a few of their "leaders" give them a bad name. Some people want to see racial conflict between blacks and Jews, but it just isn't there. Posted 12:20 AM by Privateer Sunday, August 11, 2002 It is a Left-Right Issue Atrios says the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a left-right issue. But the largest camp in support of Israel gives either religious reasons (and they belong mostly to conservative-leaning religions), or neoconservative/libertarian moralistic arguments. And the largest camp opposed to Israel whines endlessly about colonialism, oppression, racism, and treats terror the same way they treated Lenin's Red Terror so many years ago. It's a conflict between one side upholding Western values and the other side a lot of barbarian third-world fanatics. Who fetishizes third-world barbarians? Not the right. Who loudly proclaims the importance of Western values? Not the left. Both the right and the left contain schools of thought favoring individual rights and communal rights. But they are still very, very different. The individual-rights rightists demand the right of people to live in peace and security. The individual-rights ACLU leftists are more concerned with the individual rights of terrorists and terror supporters. They complain more louldy about suspected terrorists being imprisoned by the Israelis and about the targeted killings of terror leaders than about the Israelis killed while shopping in the supermarket. The communal rights leftists constantly bang on about group oppression, racism, and colonialism. The communal rights conservatives are generally more religious (as opposed to the libertarian individual-rights conservatives). They tend to believe in order and acting properly: the idea of the Palestinian people in neverending rebellion against the non-tyrannical Israelis does not appeal to them. Of course, this is simplifying things, because for a long time it was the left that supported Israel, while the right shied away from it, making "national interest" arguments. Just because the people who come out to man the protest lines tend to right-for-Israel and left-for-Palestine does not tell us anything about the mainstream left and right. How can one debate the legitimacy of Israeli checkpoints without looking at it from a human rights (individual and communal) perspective? The left/right ideas of human rights make up the framework for all moralistic debate of Israel and Palestine. Only when it is looked through from another view (historical, national interest, etc.) can the left-right debate be sidestepped. Moral arguments are by nature philosophical, and they are an integral part of political philosophy. Of course, most Americans lean conservative morally. Most Democrats hold up the "right-wing" views of individual and communal rights, and not so much the "left" views. America is a "conservative" nation in that sense (of course, the founding fathers would have called those values "liberal"). Most Democrats are not considered to be leftists in places like Europe. Only extreme leftists here fit in with the Guardian and al-Independent types. The moral dimension of the Israel/Palestine debate is not a Democrat/Republican debate, but it is a contest between differing worldviews, most of which happen to fall into right- and left-wing categories. Posted 6:14 PM by Privateer Now this Makes me Angry What the hell is Osama bin-Fairrington (the artist) trying to say? That it's okay to kill atheists, and the September 11th attacks would have been justified if there were no Christians in the twin towers? That it's better to be a radical Muslim terrorist than an atheist? That the 9th Circuit is worse than al-Qaida? Let me get this straight, if we acknowledge the separation of church and state, then Osama bin Laden is right about us being godless infidels? Fairrington must be one of those right-idiotarians like Falwell or Robertson. Posted 5:20 PM by Privateer Friday, August 09, 2002 The New York Times is Biased to the Right Just kidding! I hate it when people say silly things like that. Just look at this article, entitled "Sharon Calls Palestinians 'Corrupt Terrorists'" in which Sharon refers to the Palestinian Authority, not the Palestinian people, as corrupt terrorists. Headlines are written by the editors, not the reporters, so they are the best indicator of bias in a newspaper. Could you imagine the NYT writing a headline like that about a Palestinian instead of an Israeli? They wouldn't. They write slanted headlines to make Sharon look like a racist. He wasn't attacking all Palestinians, just the Palestinian Authority, the headline is grossly misleading, to the point where I would not believe it has an honest explanation. Now run along you little commies and anarchists and whatever else you are and stop trying to claim the NYT is biased to the right because it's a corporation. The NYT corporation is held very closely by a few families, it's more a mafia than a private enterprise. Posted 8:06 PM by Privateer Thursday, August 08, 2002 The Ultimate Smackdown When I first read "what we're fighting for," I dismissed it as common sense and wondered if it really said anything at all. Who doesn't believe in the "just war" doctrine? I know some people don't, but I can't take them at all seriously, I really couldn't care less what they think, so a whole essay defending freedom, opposing fundamentalist murder, and supporting the just war doctrine seemed... worthless. Who cares what a bunch of whacked-out college professors think? But it wasn't a futile act, because it provoked a response, which the authors were able to rebut magnificently. Which sort of surprised me. It shouldn't have, of course. Just because I don't take the nutty professors seriously doesn't mean they don't take themselves seriously. The authors of "What We’re Fighting For" are, like Instapundit says, delivering an ultimate Fisking. They are masters, the way they are able to take a complex phrase like "as a consequence of the instability of the balance of power in the present unipolar world order," untwist it, and then mercilessly mock the loonies, who don't have a leg to stand on once their prose is rewritten in plain English. I was surprised they wrote a response (I shouldn't have been); I'm not surprised they wrote it in a convoluted manner and dodged WWFF's arguments. But the Fighting For people don't let them weasel out of anything. Posted 10:25 PM by Privateer Saturday, August 03, 2002 News from Israel The family deportation plan must be a good idea, two suicide bombers surrenderred to Israeli officials citing fear their family home would be harmed. Two explosives laboratories were found and destroyed by Israel when it reoccupied occupied Nablus (only Israel could be guilty of a sin so heinous as double occupation!) A three-hundred pound bomb was found and destroyed by Israeli security forces. That would easily have destroyed a Merkava tank. Posted 12:03 AM by Privateer Wednesday, July 31, 2002 It's not Ineptitude if they meant to do it Instaman calls the Palestinian terrorists inept for their failure to kill any Israelis, netting only foreigners. But why did they plant the bomb then in an area frequented mostly by foreigners? Why did they carry out one of their last bombings against foreign workers? (I remember a Romanian saying he was taking his family back to his home country, after being near the blast). These are not accidents, they are deliberate. The terrorists are targeting non-Israelis, to drive them out of the country. Israel's strength comes from her links with the rest of the world; alone Israel is without the natural resources needed to sustain itself as a high-tech economy. It doesn't even have oil. It relies on trade with other nations. I would say "expect the next attack to be against foreign businessmen," but most suicide bombing attempts end in failure, so I'll bet the Palestinians have already tried to do that, and are still trying. And foreign businessmen know they are in danger, I assume they don't congregate anywhere without a lot of security. Posted 11:06 PM by Privateer Tuesday, July 30, 2002 Should I be Surprised? Because I'm not The "Reverend" Jackson is going to meet with Sheik Ahmed Yassin of HAMAS. At least he says he's going to beg the Palestinians to stop being terrorists. Will they listen to him? If they won't listen to Sharon's F-16s, they're not going to listen to a blowhard like Jackson. Posted 11:12 PM by Privateer Muahahaha Part 2 Okay, don't be jealous of me. Though I've got my new computer running (I'm posting from it now using a wireless keyboard), it's not working as well as it could, and I've had quite a time installing it. Did you know if you want to use Highpoint RAID on your boot drive(s) you must install the drives into IDE port 3/4 and then edit your Bios telling the computer to boot up from SCSI? Isn't that fascinating? At least I can run the thing, even with about a 25% loss in performance from what it should have. I think I've still got a few complicated BIOS issues to deal with... Posted 10:57 PM by Privateer Monday, July 29, 2002 Muahahaha I'm not going to cannibalize my old computer. We're going to keep that one. Which means... I get to buy a lot more for my new computer. Are you jealous yet? I can't understate just how nice the shiny aluminum case looks. It beats the plastic ivory any day. I also can't understate how lucky I was, picking the right components. The 645DX is perfect for me, it's fast and has lots of the features I was looking for, and it was cheap, the only downside is that it doesn't overclock very well (which I never intended to do). I also accidentally bought an ATX case (which it turns out I needed). I knew I wanted a big case, but I didn't know I needed one. Now the only big things left are a CPU and a graphics card. I'm off to scour the web to see what kind of card Doom III will want me to have. I can't wait for that game, I saw three screenshots somewhere and now I'm building a computer for it... [update (12:41am) "go buy GeForce 3 or better" That's it? I'm almost disappointed, I wanted an excuse to get something top-of-the-line.] Posted 12:24 AM by Privateer Friday, July 26, 2002 Does Anyone Really Believe the Palestinians were close to a Ceasefire? I don't buy it for a second. For starters, even if they had been close a ceasefire, it would have been worthless because they wouldn't have honored it. From this follows logically that agreeing to a ceasefire would only hurt the Palestinians, because when they carried out their next attack, the world would turn on them (and they would carry out more attacks eventually). Which is why I doubt they were really going to sign one. Other people doubt it, too. Posting has been Light But my computer is still dead, and I'm cannibalizing the whole thing for parts, and building a new one... with a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks set to mode 1 (two hard drives that mirror each other, so even if one dies, I keep my data). Well, maybe "inexpensive" is the wrong word, they were $100 each, but they each had 8MB of buffer. I don't know exactly what that means, but the box says it's fast. Posted 11:21 PM by Privateer Why Israel Took Out Shehada He was planning a "Mega-Attack." They had to take him out, sooner rather than later. If we could have taken out bin Laden before September 11th, and we knew it was coming, we would have. We would have done everything possible to stop them. Posted 10:05 PM by Privateer Monday, July 22, 2002 Better to Escalate than become Trapped In a low-level cycle of violence. Israel's assassination of a big-shot terrorist pig, including massive (by Israeli standards) collateral damage, is a grievous escalation in the intensity of the violence. Before, Israel would have accepted the terror bombings as minor events, and retaliated with minor strikes. But now Sharon is sending a message to the Palestinians: No amount of terror is acceptable. Sharon's determination and forcefulness will save Israeli lives, which, frankly, is all that matters now. There's no point in trying to spare the Palestinians, they've brought all this on themselves, they can at least face the consequences of their little intifada, instead of constantly being cushioned by the Israelis. When Israel wants to take out a terrorist cowardly hiding behind civilians, it should. Let the civilians learn not to stand next to terrorists. Posted 11:50 PM by Privateer One Month Ago I called bin-Eliezer an "idiotarian" for claiming suicide bombers were motivated by "despair." Maybe he's gotten better, since then he's changed his story. Now he says every single failed suicide bomber he interviewed claimed to have been inspired by Yasser Arafat. He could have, you know, brought this up, um, maybe a month ago? Better late than never, though. Posted 11:42 PM by Privateer Sunday, July 21, 2002 Make Them an Offer They Can't Refuse The Al-Aksa Murder Brigades have threatened to kill family members of Israeli politicians, if the Israelis forcibly move the families of suicide bombers to Gaza. But I am a big believer in reciprocity. For example, when Palestinian terrorist pigs attack an Israeli wedding or funeral, the Israeli leadership should request an apology from the group that committed the act, and public denunciations of the act from all other terror groups. If this did not take place, the Israelis would declare Palestinian weddings or funerals to be "fair game" for security forces to hunt terrorists. If the masked terrorists wanted to cynically use children as human shields as they marched through the streets carrying the corpse of a killer... well, 500-pound gravity bombs have a tendency to go right through them, and still take out the terrorists. What would the terrorists do? Get down on their knees and apologize? Of course it would be a hollow and meaningless apology, but that's not the point. When a terrorist says once he wants to kill Jews, and ten times that he wants to live in peace, the Israelis assume he's a terrorist. But if he says ten times that he wants to kill Jews, and once that he wants to make peace, the Europeans assume he's a peacemaker, and the Arabs assume he's a sellout. Making the terrorists issue apologies is more a means of getting the terrorists onto their knees, than anything else. Humiliating the terrorists would hurt their stature in the Palestinian areas (when Arafat gave in to Israel and handed over the terrorists in exchange for his release from Ramallah, his popularity plummeted). Still, it would be funny if a few of Shimon Peres's relatives were taken out. Like I said earlier, the man needs to experience some consequences for his actions. Maybe he wouldn't be so quick to offer the terrorists another chance at entering Israel if it were his relatives' necks on the line. If he wants to be high priest of the cult of human sacrifice, he can at least have the decency to sacrifice his own family, instead of other peoples'. Posted 9:18 PM by Privateer See? Kill Enough of them, and... Military resistance to Islamofascism? It works. Posted 5:27 PM by Privateer Now this is just Disgusting Eeeeewww.... Posted 5:24 PM by Privateer The Danger Within Israeli Arabs were apparently involved in a bombing attempt, when a car exploded prematurely in an Arab neighborhood of Jaffa (via the LGF news ticker), a town just south of Tel Aviv. Israeli Arabs have traditionally not aided terrorists beyond marching in demonstrations against Israel. But as Israeli security tightens, terrorists might make greater use of Israeli Arabs as a way of bypassing the wall between Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas (I said below they would expend more effort in trying to sneak bombers in, rather than on sheer volume or quality of the bombers). Posted 4:38 PM by Privateer The Cult of Human Sacrifice Now the bloodsucking vampire Peres wants to kill a few more Jews in order to prove to the world that Israel is the good guy in all this. Of course, it's not a big deal for Peres, because he doesn't have to take the bus like all the little people. He doesn't have to live with the consequences of his decisions. Israel was born fighting cults of human sacrifice, and thousands of years later, the only thing that's changed is that now Jews practice it too. Everyone knows the Muslims who call for suicide bombers to appease Allah are members of a cult of human sacrifice, but so are Sharon and Peres. Peres thinks the more Jews he can sacrifice, the more he can show the Europeans Israel is in the right. Sharon the politician is willing to sacrifice a few soldiers in Jenin rather than bombing it from the air for the same reason. But we shouldn't worry, the PA is serious about coming down hard on terror. It says it's asking Hamas and Islamic Jihad to halt terror attacks. Asking, not telling. Posted 4:26 PM by Privateer Saturday, July 20, 2002 "You will never be safe..." The idiot left-wingers pull out slogans like "Israel will never be safe while the Palestinians are oppressed." Palestinian sympathizers in Israel and in Arab countries mimic them (Eurinals love it when they hear third-world types talking like them). But Arab actions speak louder than Arab words. The Palestinians' actions scream out, "you will never be safe unless we are oppressed." The curfew was lifted in the suicide bombers' hometown. The curfews must remain. And, if necessary, more draconian measures must be taken. The Palestinians have to come on their knees, begging Israel for peace, instead of the other way around. Just like we had to whip the Nazis, instead of begging them for a peace treaty during WWII. Could you imagine the Allies being told by a third party they should beg Adolf Hitler for peace? (Yeah, I just broke Godwin's Law. But I don't care. Replace the Nazi analogy with any other big war analogy, and imagine the victorious country, during the middle of the war, suing for a peace that was not a surrender. It's absurd historically. And it's absurd in Israel's case). Posted 6:12 PM by Privateer Friday, July 19, 2002 Now they Won't kill Jews With two suicide bombers, the terrorist pigs were only able to kill 3 Israelis. This is not to minimize their suffering, the three dead left behind many family members, and there were dozens wounded. But it could have been worse, much worse. The bombs they were using must not have been made very well. Before Operation Defensive Shield, a singe bomb could kill twenty Israelis, if it was made with high-grade materials (the Passover Massacre even claimed 29, but most of the victims were elderly). But the real issue is that foreign workers were attacked. It's bad enough the Palestinians try to kill Jews, but to kill non-Jewish guests? That's beyond their usual level of reprehensibility. It's an attack on the Israeli economy. Israel needs the foreign workers, because the Palestinians can't be trusted to work for them (they use the access to Israel to carry out attacks). It's a no-win situation for Israel, when it lets them work, it's accused of "exploiting" them, and when it doesn't, it's accused of starving them. But attacking foreign guests, the terrorists hope to drive them out (and I can't blame them for leaving, they should not be expected to risk their lives for Israel, any more than Jews should be expected to risk their lives for Romania). If attacks continue to drive down the Israeli economy, Israel might reach a point where it would be cheaper to carry out mass expulsions of Arabs and face European boycotts than to live with the terror. And when transfer becomes economically viable, it will happen. Palestinians are too stupid to realize this, and hold back with their attacks. But, then again, they're not smart enough to hurt Israel to the point where transfer would become economically viable. The current equilibrium could last indefinitely, the current situation won't change any time soon. Posted 9:56 PM by Privateer How Could I Have left Kesher Talk off my list of top-flight blogs? It's got all your esoteric Jihad-in-America news, like the story about Abdurahman Alamoudi threating a journalist's health. And other stuff. Posted 9:38 PM by Privateer Monday, July 15, 2002 Please Help! My computer died I on me! (I've been posting today from another computer, but now I think my problems are more severe) I can't load Windows Me. Even when I boot in Safe Mode. Even when I have the Intall CD in the drive. It says I can't reinstall Windows Me, because when I run scandisk, it says FAT cluster 0 or whatever is corrupted I can't install Windows XP (I went out and bought it in hopes installing that would solve my problems) without wiping out all of my files, because it says my drive has to be formatted! And when I can get into DOS (by putting the WinMe install CD in the drive when I boot up), it looks like my entire "program files" folder has been deleted. ???????? What the hell is going on? Do I have a virus or worms or whatever? How can I fix this? Please help! (please post responses to the comment section below, and not into my email). Thanks. [update (10:51pm) Figures... That the minute I need help, YACCS dies and I can't receive comments. Please email me if you have any special insight into this.] Posted 5:50 PM by Privateer How the War on Terror will appear in High School History Books Fifty years from now, what will the War on Terror have looked like? I would bet in a half a century, a lot of the hate and ignorance within the Muslim world will have abated, and they will have joined us in freedom. And the high school history books will treat the hate as if it never existed. The people who opposed ignorance and prejudice in the Muslim world and rallied for military action outside Afghanistan will be portrayed as backwards and bigoted against Muslims. We're going to be royally screwed by the left-wing historical revisionists who write the textbooks... Still, being slandered in history books is not so bad a fate as not being right. Posted 3:01 PM by Privateer Sunday, July 14, 2002 Hadayet had Money Trouble Apparently, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet was having financial problems. This will no doubt be hyped by the media and justice department, which wishes to portray his terrorist rampage as an "isolated incident" and not part of a decades-long campaign of terror. But what does it prove that he had money trouble? Why would that lead him to shoot up the El Al ticket counter? Unless he blamed Israel and Jews for his financial woes (which would make him a lunatic anti-Semite), his decision to attack El Al was purely political (which would make him a lunatic anti-Semite). Either way, a lunatic anti-Semite specifically targeted Israelis. Is that a "hate crime" or is it "terrorism?" I would suggest they are almost one and the same. I would feel perfectly comfortable using the term "terrorism" to describe the Klan's behavior in the American South, and their crimes were what we today call "hate crimes." The sine qua non of a "hate crime" is that it is part of a targeted campaign of violence against a specific group, that's why we consider even a minor attack like a stabbing to be so much more serious if it is a "hate crime" than a random criminal stabbing (this one is only news because the victim is famous). I am deeply suspicious of people trying to draw distinctions between the two. Posted 10:14 PM by Privateer AN OPEN LETTER IN SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE OF IRAN FROM THE WEBLOGGING COMMUNITY We are not politicians, nor are we generals. We hold no power to dispatch diplomats to negotiate; we can send no troops to defend those who choose to risk their lives in the cause of freedom. What power we have is in our words, and in our thoughts. And it is that strength which we offer to the people of Iran on this day. Across the diverse and often contentious world of weblogs, each of us has chosen to put aside our differences and come together today to declare our unanimity on the following simple principles: - That the people of Iran are allies of free men and women everywhere in the world, and deserve to live under a government of their own choosing, which respects their own personal liberties - That the current Iranian regime has failed to create a free and prosperous society, and attempts to mask its own failures by repression and tyranny We do not presume to know what is best for the people of Iran; but we are firm in our conviction that the policies of the current government stand in the way of the Iranians ability to make those choices for themselves. And so we urge our own governments to turn their attention to Iran. The leaders and diplomats of the world's democracies must be clear in their opposition to the repressive actions of the current Iranian regime, but even more importantly, must be clear in their support for the aspirations of the Iranian people. And to the people of Iran, we say: You are not alone. We see your demonstrations in the streets; we hear of your newspapers falling to censorship; and we watch with anticipation as you join the community of the Internet in greater and greater numbers. Our hopes are with you in your struggle for freedom. As dictatorial as your regime is today, democracy is within reach, because you want it. You, the people of Iran, must want democracy if it is to come about, you must be prepared to fight for it (hopefully nonviolently), and even suffer in order to achieve it. But it appears your suffering may not last much longer, if the regime is as weak as it appears. [changed at the end by me, the original form letter is here as part of the Iranian Freedom Blog Burst] Posted 6:31 PM by Privateer Assassination Attempt on Chirac: Was it "Terrorism?" Of course not! The neo-Nazi youth never received any direct orders from any leaders of established terror groups. He was acting on his own, it was an isolated incident. He was probably just having family problems. In fact, he might not even have done it at all. He might have been framed by the French police, who are notorious for persecuting neo-Nazis. (this was all sarcasm) Posted 2:28 PM by Privateer Interesting Parallel Contrast this article about Turkey with the one I posted below about Israel. Posted 2:23 PM by Privateer Saturday, July 13, 2002 "Israeli forces have intercepted no less than 14 would-be suicide bombers in the past three weeks" At least, according to the New York Post. The hatred never stops. What changes is Israel's ability to defend itself. Israel will not have good neighbors any time soon, but good fences make for safe houses. If we assume, under the Barak administration, half of the suicide bombers made it into Israel, and we assume on average each killed five Jews, that would be thirty-five Israelis saved. And when you factor in the wounded, maybe a hundred people were not maimed, because Sharon put the Palestinians under curfew. If the suicide bombers were using advanced explosives in their vests (like the Passover bomber), Israel might have been spared a hundred deaths and two hundred maimings (although I doubt the Palestinians are still using a lot of high-grade explosives). But this new security isn't going to last. The Palestinians, faced with the prospect of their bombers not succeeding, will put a lot more effort into sneaking them into Israel. That will be their main focus, instead of recruiting or building bombs. And eventually they will suceed. The key is for Israel to keep hunting them, relentlessly, forcing them to make survival a priority, instead of giving them the luxury of being able to plan a new attack. The best defense is a good offense. Posted 11:47 PM by Privateer Isolationist Feelings in Israel A very good article about the changes in Israeli attitudes towards the world (via Life After Cal). What they really need is a stridently secular hawk party, so ordinary Israelis wouldn't have to side with the religious extremists just to be safe. That would also get the Euros' attention, they like to pretend the Israelis are misbehaving out of religious impulses, and not defending themselves with good reason. Posted 8:14 PM by Privateer Yet Another Call from MCI The slimeballs called me back again later last night. I think they're using telemarketing to harass me because I'm mistreating their callers. So I told the guy, "put me on your do not call list." He went on about how he could save me money, and I said again, "put me on your do not call list." I don't know what the law is elsewhere, but at least here in California, you can tell telemarketers not to call you. Ever. Again. I should not have had to ask him twice. If they call again, I'll scream at them and file a complaint with the appropriate government body. Posted 8:12 PM by Privateer Friday, July 12, 2002 Another Call from MCI During their first call, I was polite. But this time, I let the idiot telemarketer have it. When he said he was from MCI, I asked him about WorldCom. He started spewing facts and figures, so I came back by asking him how many employees were laid off. When he said 10%, I asked him if that meant I would get fewer phone calls. He said no. He went on about what a great deal MCI was, and how I was selected for my "credibility" (anyone who says I have credibility has none). I took a cheap shot, asking if his company was credible, and he finally hung up. I won! [I really do feel bad for the employees who were laid off. After all, they aren't the ones calling me. [I am almost never this rude in real life, I reserve this vitriol for telemarketers. If there is a telemarketer reading this, I don't actually hate you, I know you're just doing your job. But don't hate me for being a jerk.] Posted 6:48 PM by Privateer Wednesday, July 10, 2002 Time to Get Fisky This awful screed from al-Independent caught my eye, because it was so full of lies and distortions and pig feces. Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of KPFA Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in America. Each one left the people in the church – Muslims, Jews, Christians – in a state of shock. "You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!" Bernstein's sin was to have covered the story of Israel's invasion of Jenin in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated the killings that took place there – including Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler of The Independent – for his Flashpoint programme. Bernstein's grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence but neither his family history nor his origins spared him. "Read this and weep, you mother-fucker self-hating Jew boy!!!" another e-mail told Bernstein. "God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats." Fisk uses interesting language here. "The killings that took place there"–is he suggesting Israel carried out "killings?" Does he really believe there were massacres? It's also interesting that Fisk forgets to mention these allegations turned out to be lies (does he still believe there was a "Jenin massacre" with a death toll in the hundreds?) Isn't it sort of relevant that the story Bernstein was "investigating" turned out to be a Nazi-type lie? He was criticized as a self-hating Jew and a Nazi because he was spreading Nazi lies. Bernstein is an anti-Semite, because he spreads blood libels about Jews. Not about Sharon, or any other individual, but about all Jews in Israel. I get upset when I hear Nazi Arab lies; apparently a lot of other people do to. The truth is, Bernstein is a little Nazi shit. He links on his font page to "Bendib's cartoons," which depict Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian children (as well as other Jews doing the same) and Zionist control of the American media and government. The sad thing is, there will always be a market for Jew-hating Jews, for the other haters to hide behind. Anyone hiding behind Bernstein is an anti-Semite in denial. Yet another: "I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel." Lubin is also Jewish, the executive director of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but now one of Israel's fiercest critics. Her e-mails are even worse. Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how brave this small but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first to acknowledge that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists have in effect censored all free discussion of Israel and the Middle East out of the public domain in the US. "Everyone else is terrified," Bernstein says. "The only ones who begin to open their mouths are the Jews in this country. You know, as a kid, I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But now we are horrified by a government representing a country that we grew up loving and cherishing. Israel's defenders have a special vengeance for Jews who don't fall in line behind Sharon's scorched-earth policy because they give the lie to the charge that Israel's critics are simply anti-Semite." This dipstick is on the radio claiming he's being censored. He's really just whining that nobody wants to listen to his stupid tripe. There's a difference between being shouted down, and not having an audience. A big difference. And if Fisk describes this woman as one of the "fiercest" critics, you know she's got to be even more full of it than Bernstein. This is the standard left-wing martyr crap Fisk pulls, telling us all how hard it is to be as principled as he, while he sets up straw men he doesn't even need to rebut, just chastise. When will he publish intelligent criticism of himself, rather than just mean emails? Visiting Lubin's web site, we're treated to Chomsky, the National Lawyers Guild, and a defense of Lynne Steward, the lawyer who was sending messages for a jailed terrorist. Fierce, indeed. Fiercely stupid. As far as it's the "Middle East Children's Alliance," I didn't see anything about Israeli children being deliberately targeted. She was more interested in warning of "The Coming of a Police State in the U.S.?" Adam Shapiro is among those who have paid a price for their beliefs. He is a Jew engaged to an American-born Palestinian, a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement who was trapped in Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the spring while administering medical aid. After telling CNN that the Sharon government was acting like "terrorists" while receiving $3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and his family were savaged in the New York Post. The paper slandered Shapiro as the "Jewish Taliban" and demeaned his family as "traitors". Israeli supporters publicised his family's address and his parents were forced to flee their Brooklyn home and seek police protection. Shapiro's father, a New York public high-school teacher and a part-time Yeshiva (Jewish day school) teacher, was fired from his job. His brother receives regular death threats. Shapiro was not providing medical treatment, that's total bullshit. That's a damn lie. Shapiro has no medical background. He was merely hiding in an ambulance (just like a suicide bomber) to sneak into the Mukata. And it's not slander if it's true. Fisk also forgets to mention Shapiro refuses to condemn Palestinian terrorism. In other words, he likes Jews being blown up. Other Jews don't like this. If you want to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan, that's your legal right–but don't come crying to me when you're run out of a black neighborhood! Israel's supporters have no qualms about their alliance with the Christian right. And Fisk has no qualms about siding with the Saudis and the Taliban. Indeed, the fundamentalists can campaign on their own in Israel's favour, as I discovered for myself at Stanford recently when I was about to give a lecture on the media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, part of a series of talks arranged largely by Jewish Americans. A right-wing Christian "Free Republic" outfit posted my name on its website, and described me as a "PLO butt-kisser" and asked its supporters to "freep" my lecture. A few demonstrators turned up outside the First United Methodist Church in Sacramento where I was to speak, waving American and Israeli flags. "Jew haters!" they screamed at the organisers, a dark irony since these were non-Jews shrieking their abuse at Jews. They were also handing out crudely printed flyers. "Nothing to worry about, Bob," one of my Jewish hosts remarked. "They can't even spell your name right." True. But also false. "Stop the Lies!" the leaflet read. "There was no massacre in Jenin. Fiske [sic] is paid big bucks to spin [lie] for the Arabs..." But the real lie was in that last sentence. I never take any payment for lectures – so that no one can ever claim that I'm paid to give the views of others. But the truth didn't matter to these people. Nor did the content of my talk – which began, by chance, with the words "There was no massacre" – in which I described Arafat as a "corrupt, vain little despot" and suicide bombings as "a fearful, evil weapon". None of this was relevant. The aim was to shut me up. Free Republic is not a religious web site. Even naughty disbelieving atheists like me are allowed to post there. There are a lot of Jewish members. It's gracious of Fisk to finally admit "there was no massacre" (of course, he probably claimed Israel did everything else up to that point), but at the time, his columns were claiming there was a massacre. Fisk is paid by al-Independent, he gets money from somewhere. He's paid for his views, and he spins for Arabs. Al-Independent likes to spin for Arabs. It is not illogical to assume Fisk is paid to spin for Arabs. Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply: "Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite." In fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks than pro-Israeli groups initiated an extraordinary campaign against some of the most pro-Israeli newspapers in America, all claiming that The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle were biased in their coverage of the Middle-East conflict. In other words, if they report the same way Bernstein does (believing every anti-Semitic lie that comes their way), they will be attacked as biased. Just how The New York Times – which boasts William Safire and Charles Krauthammer, those giants of pro-Israeli bias, among its writers – could be anti-Israeli is difficult to see, although it is just possible that, amid its reports on Israel's destruction in the West Bank and Gaza, some mildly critical comments found their way into print. The New York Times, for example, did report that Israeli soldiers used civilians as human shields – though only in the very last paragraph of a dispatch from Jenin. None the less, the campaign of boycotts and e-mails got under way. More than 1,000 readers suspended their subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times, while a blizzard of e-mails told pro-Israeli readers to cancel their subscription to The New York Times for a day. On the East Coast, at least one local radio station has lost $1m from a Jewish philanthropist while other stations attempting to cover the Middle East with some degree of fairness are said to have lost even more. When the San Francisco Chronicle published a four-page guide to the conflict, its editors had to meet a 14-member delegation of local Jewish groups to discuss their grievances. According to Michael Futterman, who chairs the Middle East strategy committee of 80 Bay Area synagogues, Jewish anger hit "boiling point" when the Chronicle failed to cover a pro-Israeli rally in San Francisco. Needless to say, the Chronicle's "Readers' Representative", Dick Rogers, published a grovelling, self-flagellating apology. "The paper didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally," he wrote. "This wasn't fair and balanced coverage." Fisk forgets again to put this in context. The SF Chronicle covered a much smaller pro-Palestinian rally, but ignored completely a pro-Israel rally. Their excuse: the Chron actually said they didn't expect any violence at the rally, so it wasn't newsworthy. I don't know whether that's the truth or a lie, but either way, the SF Chronicle is really pathetic. See, when all this is put in context, Fisk is shown to be nothing but a raving loony. But he can get away with distorting the truth when it takes place 5,000 miles away, at least as far as his regular readership is concerned. They have no way of knowing just how much Fisk distorts things. Another objection came from a Jewish reader who objected to the word "terror" being placed within inverted commas in a Chronicle headline that read "Sharon says 'terror' justifies assault". The reader's point? The Chronicle's reporting "harmonises well with Palestinian propaganda, which tries to divert attention from the terrorist campaign against Israel (which enjoys almost unanimous support among Palestinians, all the way from Yasser Arafat to the 10-year-old who dreams of blowing himself up one day) and instead describes Israel's military moves as groundless, evil bullying tactics." The Chronicle is also one of those papers that withholds the word "terror" for describing Palestinians who murder Israeli civilians indiscriminately in public places, in order to terrorize them so they would give in to Palestinian demands. This is what the complaint is predicated on, not just one instance of the Chronicle's word choice in headlines. But Fisk gets to pick and choose the letters he quotes from, and then pick portions of those letters he likes. He's just setting up straw men to knock down. And so it goes on. On a radio show with me in Berkeley, the Chronicle's foreign editor, Andrew Ross, tried to laugh off the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby – "the famous lobby", he called it with that deference that is half way between acknowledgement and fear – but the Israeli Consul General Yossi Amrani had no hesitation in campaigning against the Chronicle, describing a paper largely docile in its reporting of the Middle East as "a professionally and politically biased, pro-Palestinian newspaper". The Chron was only "docile" in reporting suicide bombings. The Chronicle's four-page pull-out on the Middle East was, in fact, a soft sell. Its headline – "The Current Strife Between The Israelis And The Palestinians Is A Battle For Control Of Land" – missed the obvious point: that one of the two groups that were "battling for control of the land" – the Palestinians – had been occupied by Israel for 35 years. Fisk wants the word "occupation" in the headline. If the word "terror" had appeared in the headline, he would have had an aneurism (even though Zionists have been fighting off terrorists since before they had a state, long before the "occupation." But he wants the paper to phrase everything in terms of the Palestinian viewpoint. Anything less, you see, would be biased. [skipping three paragraphs of stuff that makes me happy] But, of course, a fundamental problem – fundamental in every sense of the word – lies behind this strange partnership. As Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom, the most courageous Israeli peace group, pointed out in a typically ferocious essay last month, there is a darker side to the alliance. "According to its [Christian Zionist] theological beliefs, the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its territory" – an idea that would obviously appeal to Ariel Sharon – "so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible." But here comes the bad bit. As Avnery says, "the evangelists don't like to dwell openly on what comes next: before the coming [of the Messiah], the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who don't will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but who cares, so long as they support Israel?" That is not an anti-Semitic teaching! If the Christians are right, they we should all convert! If they are wrong, there will be no Messiah coming, so there's no need to worry about an apocalyptic battle. It's not "anti-Semitic" to think your religion is the right one. And Gush Shalom isn't so much brave as it is dishonest. It's not a "peace" organization, it's a terrorist-loving organization (the slogan on their page used to be "it all started when Achmed hit back"). And as I showed earlier, it's not really interested in seeking the truth honestly so much as bashing Israel. The power of the Israeli lobby in the United States is debated far more freely in the Israeli press than in American newspapers or on US tele- vision. There is, of course, a fine and dangerous line between justified investigation – and condemnation – of the lobby's power, and the racist Arab claim that a small cabal of Zionists run the world. Those in America who share the latter view include a deeply unpleasant organisation just along the coast from San Francisco at Newport Beach known as the "Institute for Historical Research". These are the Holocaust deniers whose annual conference last month included a lecture on "death sentences imposed by German authorities against German soldiers... for killing or even mistreating Jews". Too much of this and you'd have to join the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC – to restore your sanity. But the Israeli lobby is powerful. In fact, its influence over the US Congress and Senate calls into question the degree to which the American legislature has been corrupted by lobby groups. It is to an Israeli voice – Avnery again – that Americans have to turn to hear just how mighty the lobby has become. "Its electoral and financial power casts a long shadow over both houses of the Congress," Avnery writes. "Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If the AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel." Again, Avnery is with Gush Shalom, he is a terrorist-lover, and he's disheartened by American support for Israeli self-defense. So he claims a cabal of Zionists, while not actually running the government of America, just have de facto control over everything that takes place on any issue they want to influence. Fisk is just hiding behind a Jew to make this anti-Semitic claim. Avnery could have looked no further than the Democratic primary in Alabama last month for proof of his assertion. Earl Hilliard, the five-term incumbent, had committed the one mortal sin of any American politician: he had expressed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians. He had also visited Libya several years ago. Hilliard's opponent, Artur Davis, turned into an outspoken supporter of Israel and raised large amounts of money from the Jewish community, both in Alabama and nationwide. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that among the names of the first list of contributors to Davis's campaign funds were "10 Cohens from New York and New Jersey, but before one gets to the Cohens, there were Abrams, Ackerman, Adler, Amir, Asher, Baruch, Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman, Bernstein and Blumenthal. All from the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles. It's highly unlikely any of them have ever visited Alabama..." The Jewish newspaper Forward – essential reading for any serious understanding of the American Jewish community – quoted a Jewish political activist following the race: "Hilliard has been a problem in his votes and with guys like that, when there's any conceivable primary challenge, you take your shot." Hilliard, of course, lost to Davis, whose campaign funds reached $781,000. It would be nice if Fisk would remember to mention Hilliard was getting a huge amount of funding from out of state as well, from radical Muslims. This election was turned into an Israel/Arabs issue, with full support of Hilliard. If he had refused the Arab money, he might have won, and so many Jews certainly would not have written checks for Davis. The AIPAC concentrates on Congress while the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations (CPMAJO), made up of the heads of 51 Jewish organisations, concentrates on the executive branch of the US government. Every congressman knows the names of those critics of Israel who have been undone by the lobby. Take Senator J William Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee detailed how five million tax-deductable dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution to organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour of Israel; this cost him the chance of being Secretary of State. He was defeated in the 1974 Democratic primary after pro-Israeli money poured into the campaign funds of his rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, following a statement by the AIPAC that Fulbright was "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this country". Paul Findley, who spent 22 years as a Republican congressman from Illinois, found his political career destroyed after he had campaigned against the Israeli lobby – although, ironically, his book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out was nine weeks on The Washington Post bestseller list, suggesting that quite a number of Americans want to know why their congressmen are so pro-Israeli. And what was the number one bestselling book in France a few months ago? The Frightening Fraud, by Thierry Meyssan (sp?), suggesting that quite a number of Frenchmen want to know why the Americans blew up the World Trade Center. Just two months ago, the US House of Representatives voted 352 to 21 to express its unqualified support for Israel. The Senate voted 94 to two for the same motion. This is not true, they were not the same version. The house version was much more bloodthirsty. It was only because Bush asked that the House version did not call for Palestinians to be run out of the West Bank. Even as they voted, Ariel Sharon's army was continuing its destructive invasion of the West Bank. "I do not recall any member of Congress asking me if I was in favour of patting Israel on the back..." James Abu Rizk, an Arab-American of Lebanese origin, told the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee afterwards. "No one else, no average American, has been asked either. But that is the state of American politics today... The votes and bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything to do with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that $6bn flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year." Within days, 42 US governors turned up in Sacramento to sign declarations supporting Israel. California governor Gray Davis and New York governor George Pataki – California has the largest Jewish population of any state except New York – arranged the meeting. Of course, the AAADC would have no problem with the American Congress issuing declartions of support for Hizzbullah and Hamas, so his words ring a little hollow. Sometimes the support of Israel's loyalists in Congress turns into farce. Tom Delay – reacting to CNN founder Ted Turner's criticism of Israel – went so far out of his way to justify Israeli occupation of the West Bank that he blurted out on MSNBC television that the Palestinians "should become citizens" of Israel, an idea unlikely to commend itself to his friend Ariel Sharon. Texas Republican Richard Armey went the other way. "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave... to have those people who have been aggressors against Israel retired to some other area." Do the people of Texas know that their representative is supporting "ethnic cleansing" in the Middle East? Or are they silent because they prefer not to speak out? If they watch the news, they know he supports it. And they voted for him. (they would be among the fundamentalist Christians Fisk decries in the paragraphs above; has he already forgotten them?) Censorship takes many forms. When Ishai Sagi and Ram Rahat-Goodman, two Israeli reserve soldiers who refused to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, were scheduled to debate their decision at Sacramento's Congregation B'nai Israel in May, their appearance was cancelled. Steve Meinrath, who is chairman of the Israel Affairs Committee at B'nai Israel, remarked bleakly that "intimidation on the part of certain sectors of the community has deprived the entire community of hearing a point of view that is being widely debated in Israel. Some people feel it's too dangerous..." Waaah. They can meet somewhere else. If the congregation finds Jewish nonresitance to terror to be as offensive as Jewish nonresistance to Naziism (both of which are designed to slaughter Jews), they won't want the cowards to speak at their place of worship, just like they would have censored Ghandi, for telling the Jews to go willingly to their deaths to preserve their moral high ground. I don't think this column ever ends, Fisk is something of a gasbag. Email: Barbara Lubin Dennis Bernstein Posted 11:35 PM by Privateer Does Anyone Else Find this Headline to be Strange? Bloodshed in Middle East After Talks Lift Hopes Hopes of what exactly, that there might be another suicide bombing, casting doubt on Israel's ability to halt the terror? Hope that the intifada might continue, in all its violent fury? Remember, these headlines are written by the editors of the Times, not by Reuters, and not by normal journalists. If you want to know what the editors are thinking, look at the headlines. Posted 8:26 PM by Privateer Israeli-Palestinian Peace is Impossible Now Peace between Israel and the Arabs isn't going to happen any time soon. Not only is a Palestinian state not inevitable, but peace is almost inevitably doomed to failure. The only "peace" that exists today is the peace of purely rational short-term interests. Jordan needs trade with Israel to stay afloat, because it's one of the weaker Arab countries, and it's afraid Israel will push all of the Palestinians into Jordan, which was cause the Hashemite Dynasty to fall from power. Egypt wants money from the US, and knows it would be soundly defeated in a war with Israel, and the Aswan High Dam could be blown, killing 60,000,000 Arabs (yes, sixty million, ninety percent of the population of Egypt, which is clustered mostly around the Nile). There is no real Arab love for Israel. The Palestinians will be happy with nothing short of Israel's destruction. The issue of "right of return" for the Palestinians who fled or were kicked out in the 1948 war of independence will not go away, unless Israel lets them all return, destroying itself as a Jewish state. The Palestinians will never cease to use this grievance as an excuse to hate Israel. Nothing Israel does will be able to appease them, short of allowing itself to be destroyed Zimbabwe-style. So if peace is impossible, Israel needs to forget it. No amount of appeasement will work. So Israel should go to the opposite extreme. Right now, the situation is fine, there is peace because Israel is strong. If violence starts up, Israel must take action against it. If the violence comes from a specific region of the Palestinian area, that region must be shut down and put under siege. A few days of that would clear everything up. If violence comes from East Jerusalem into the Jewish area, Israel needs to seize East Jerusalem and expel the Arabs. And if violence comes from Israeli Arabs, they need to be expelled. Not all at once, but if a village is being particularly bothersome, it should be excised, and the villagers sent into the Palestinian area. If Katyushas are fired from Palestinian areas into Israel, Israel might have to seize and occupy them outright. But only by strangling any violence by responding quickly and to the local area will Israel be able to achieve a state of non-violence. It won't be "peace," but it will be like an endless ceasefire, sporadically broken. (which is better than the so-called "Peace Process," which looked a lot bloodier than Sharon's war process). That would be much more favorable to Israel, and would promote feelings of "let's not attack the Israelis becase we'll get our heads handed to us" in the Palestinian areas, which is also conducive to uneasy but uneventful coexistence. That's as close to peace as the region is going to come in the near future. Who knows, maybe if that is achieved the Palestinians would look to Israel for greater peace. But Israel should not be pounding on Palestine's door begging the Arabs for peace. When it does that, the Palestinians think peace would benefit Israel more than the Arabs. Israel should make the Arabs come to it, and say, "hey, I've got a great idea, how about we work something out and live together happily ever after?" Until the Arabs are willing to ask Israel for peace, instead of making one demand after another for it, there will be no peace. Until the Arabs want peace, there will be no peace. Maybe that is possible, maybe they will give up their grievances stemming from 1948 and 1967. Maybe they won't wage endless war on Israel. But only when they want peace will that happen. They don't want peace now, which is why it's impossible. So there will be no peace. So Sharon will continue to bulldoze them. Instead of trying to convince all of the Palestinians at once that peace is a good idea, which would be incredibly difficult—and incredibly easy for terrorists to sabotage—Israel should work on trying to convince one Arab village at a time. Israel should shatter the Palestinian area and remove all Arab control on the "national" level. Then it could work for peace with individual villages, and when they come around, it could reopen traffic from that village into Israel, to allow them to work and become prosperous. When enough Arab villages and cities wanted peace, Israel could give them a demilitarized state, and let other Arab villages and cities join in on either good behavior on their part, or on the promise of the Palestinian government to control them. When Palestinians want peace, it will be possible, Israel has to convince them peace is a good idea, by taking it from them and not constantly trying to sell them on the idea. Let them come to the idea themselves. Democracy on the national level would be a nicer way of doing things than creating "Bantustine," but it's just not going to happen. For democracy to work, it has to be fair everywhere. If you think Bush stole the election, you probably think he stole it in one specific place (if you think Gore was trying to steal the election, the same thing basically applies). Can you imagine all of Palestine being democratic enough to hold meaningful national elections? Not at this point in time, when Arafat's lackeys are threatening to kill anyone who runs against him. So small pieces are the only level at which Israel can have—and has had—success at making peace with Arabs. Posted 8:12 PM by Privateer Anti-Semitism in America A very good article in Slate today (isn't there always one or two of those?) about how the ADL's methodology in determining anti-Semitism is terribly flawed. I think Jews need to get over their Christophobia and realize most Christians don't hate Jews. Most don't even especially dislike us. On the other hand, some left-wing Jewish doves want to ignore Arab anti-Semitism (or at least pretend it will all disappear when the Palestinian issue is settled, which they think is possible). The real anti-Semitism to be afraid of comes not from whites, hispanics, blacks, or Asians, it comes from Arab Muslims and non-Arab Muslims. It infuriates me when the ADL or any other organization overstates its case. It diminishes our ability to say "hey, look at those crazy, Jew-hating Arabs!" Which is what we need to be saying. Peace will be impossible so long as the Arab states promote anti-Semitism. [And please, nobody write in the comments section that "Arabs are Semites too," because it only shows your ignorance. The term "anti-Semitism" was coined by a Jew-hater to mean "Jew-hatred." We didn't pick the word, we don't care that it isn't perfect, that's the word that's been in use for more than a few decades. If you must use an alternate term, just refer to it as "Jew-hatred."] Posted 7:45 PM by Privateer Tuesday, July 09, 2002 "You will only be safe when we are oppressed" That's the general message the Israelis get from the Palestinians. When the occupation was in force, there was very little terror. The first intifada was much less damaging to Israel than the Oslo War (this latest intifada, which might be over). When Rabin gave Arafat control of the PA, the terror bombings began to pick up speed. When Netanyahu took control of the Israeli government, the terrorism almost ceased entirely. Under Barak, Arafat started the second intifada. And now under Sharon, the intifada has been ended by taking progressively stronger measures. The Palestinians have been holding themselves hostage, hoping the world would intervene against Israel when they suffered. It was true up to a point, but the Israelis snapped for the second time and elected Sharon (the first time, they elected Netanyahu). The Palestinians told the Israelis "you will only be safe when we are oppressed," and the Israelis replied that "that can be arranged." Why the Eurinals have Shut Up about Israel The left-wing hypothesis was that oppression leads to terror. This was their marching song, "end the oppression, and the terror will end." When Sharon invaded with Operation Defensive Shield, and ended the terror, the leftists told him to retreat. He did, and in response the terror returned. So Sharon went back in, and the terror has stopped again. The left-wing intellectuals don't want to confront the fact they were proven wrong, and they unfairly villified Sharon, so they're ignoring the issue. But the Arabs will never let go of this issue, because they don't make any pretensions to always being right like the hard Left, they don't care if they're a bunch of liars. Of course, this means in a few months, when the Eurinals forget about being wrong (which they are apt to do), they will return to criticizing Israel. Oh well. Posted 11:09 PM by Privateer Forget Moderate Muslims I'm sick and tired about hearing how important it is to find moderate Muslims. You can find them anywhere there are Muslims. The problem is, they're worthless. They won't stand up to the mad Mullahs, they just quietly acquiesce and let some of their children be recruited. They're willing to let the extremists take over their faith. What we need is not more moderate Muslims, we already have plenty of those. We need passionate, extremist Muslims. We need Muslim liberals. Posted 10:50 PM by Privateer Sunday, July 07, 2002 Human Rights Worker Denied Human Rights A B'Tselem flunky was arrested by the PA. B'Tselem is a left-wing organization that is sharply critical of Israel. So this is a pretty funny story. And I just wrote over at LGF that "As long as leftists are going to beat each other up, I don't care how they do it." Friendly fire is fun to watch, when it's not your side getting hit. Posted 7:21 PM by Privateer Brian Linse attacks Glenn Reynolds, claiming the Unabomber wasn't left-wing, and Palestinian "nationalists" could be right-wingers, too. As proof for the first claim, Linse reaches into the Unabomber Manifesto, and pulls out a small criticism of the left. But if you read the manifesto, Kaczynski also criticizes conservatives. Kaczynski wanted to create a utopian society by instituting revolutionary change (by doing away with technology). That sounds to me more like "left" than "right." The radical environmentalist movement can also only be described as "left," and he was acting in their name. As far as Kaczynski being "authoritarian," he demanded no technology be created or used. His ideal society would resemble the anarcho-syndicalists' (in which anyone claiming ownership private property was committing a crime against humanity and could be killed), except technology would be the enemy of the people instead of private property. He demanded society follow his rules, he was not a laid-back individualist, like libertarians. The idea that the anti-Israel protesters at SFSU could have been right-wing is equally strange. True, there might have been one or two old-right conservatives who still hate Jews. But even that is doubtful. The crowd was made up of the extreme left-wingers and Muslims. To drown out the Jewish speakers at the pro-Israel rally, they banged on tribal drums. Those are left-wing musical instruments! They shouted all sorts of left-wing slogans. They were lefties, for Linse to claim otherwise is downright weird. But trying to catch Glenn Reynolds in an error seems to be the national sport of the left-wing blogsphere. Posted 11:03 AM by Privateer Friday, July 05, 2002 And the Killer is... Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, a 41-year-old Egyptian (via the LA Examiner) I wonder if he attended the same lecture as I did? That would be creepy. (From the photo and information posted on CNN, there's a slight chance he could be "Mr. Green." Now that would be creepy. He does look to be about the same age, and has a somewhat similar face. But I really can't tell right now, and I last saw him a few months ago, and from what I remember, he had a blunter nose.) I always had the feeling there were at least a few terrorists in Irvine. [Update (7/5 9:27pm): the color picture posted on the Drudge Report looks a lot more like "Mr. Green:" I think there's more than just a slight chance I was sitting a foot from Hadayet when he said he wanted to carry out a terror attack. I have filed a tip with the FBI, I only wish I had done so sooner. It didn't even occur to me to report him back then. Maybe Mr. Green wasn't Hadayet. But he's still a dangerous creep.] [Update (7/6 8:01pm): actually, I don't think Hadayet is "Mr. Green," even though they look a bit similar. I still think Green needs to be watched by the FBI, he would fit the same profile as Hadayet (older, impatient, devout, and extreme), and he's willing to say in public that he wants to carry out terror attacks.] [Update (7/7 8:17pm): several months have degraded my memory, but now I've swung back to thinking Mr. Green probably was Hadayet. I don't know if I've just looked at the photo one too many times, if it's poisoned my memory. But he really looks an awful lot like Mr. Green. One would have to analyze the video taken by the Muslim Student Union to see if that was him.] Posted 12:20 AM by Privateer What are the Odds? Actually, They're Quite Good! There was a plane crash near Los Angeles, killing four people, and wounding several others. What are the odds this would have happened on the very same day as the shooting at LAX? Actually, they're quite good. Small aircraft crash happen all the time, it usually doesn't make the news, because there's not much to report. But this was newsworthy, because people on the ground were hurt. But why were there people on the ground? Because it was the Fourth! More people came out to the park, because of the holiday, which is the same reason the gunman attacked when he did. And in the words of the pilot's wife, "they were going to go flying today for something fun on a holiday." So that was also the reason the plane was in the air in the first place. This is how coincidences happen, they're often not so extraordinary. Posted 12:08 AM by Privateer Thursday, July 04, 2002 What the Heck Happened? So far, we haven't been told much. We don't know the race of the perpetrator, or anything about his possible motives, although one witness said he could have been an Arab. What we do know is this: he brought two handguns and a knife to the El-Al ticket counter, suggesting premeditation, and he may have gotten into an argument with El Al staff. What I think happened, if there was an argument: A mentally unstable Arab Muslim man planned to hijack an El Al flight. His plan was to walk up and buy a ticket, and then hope he could make it past security (this is where the "mentally unstable" part comes into play, it's a really stupid plan). When he couldn't get the ticket without showing papers proving who he was (an Arab and not a Jew), he opened fire. If there was no argument, then it was a planned terror attack where the primary targets would be the people at the counter. Either way, Israelis were the target, and it was a terror attack. The fact that it was premeditated, and that there would be no possibility of escaping alive, suggests this was a political act, and thus a terror attack. Some details from what I said above might be wrong, they're just my best guess. Maybe the killer was a Hispanic Muslim, maybe it was a Christian Arab. In any case, I think the FBI is withholding the identity of the killer in order to prevent drunk idiots from attacking Arabs on the 4th of July. Once we've sobered up on the 5th, they won't have any problem telling us. Posted 11:31 PM by Privateer Death by a Thousand Cuts The Norwegian Blogger has an analysis of the strategy of a large number of small attacks, as opposed to Osama's apparent current strategy, which is to carry out massive strikes. Three Dead, Including the Gunman I am already so sick of hearing this phrase. The gunman killed two before being put down. He was not a victim like the other two. He belongs in a separate category. Posted 11:11 PM by Privateer Now, an Important Question Were the National Guardsmen at the airport carrying loaded M-16 assault rifles, or did they have to stop to load them, giving the terrorist extra time to keep shooting? Did unloaded weapons lead to the death or injury of a guardsman? [update (7/5 12:17am): I guess guardsmen don't even factor into this, because it was an Israeli security officer who shot the terrorist] Posted 2:38 PM by Privateer I can't say I didn't predict this Terror attack at LAX, 3 shot dead One month ago, I said this would happen. This is the beginning of a wave. How big will the wave be? It depends how successful the individual gunmen are. It's not coordinated, the gunmen are just inspired by previous gunmen, like the school shootings. Which means any Muslim or white supremacist anywhere in America could pick up a rifle. There's no way to stop this sort of thing except shooting the terrorist on scene (note: this is not the "cell-based terror," Demosthenes and I argued about, which is preventable by security forces, this is completely individual terror). Posted 2:34 PM by Privateer Tuesday, July 02, 2002 A Good URL to have Handy Whenever you get a Nigerian scam email, just copy the text from this post and mail it back to them. I just did that today... Posted 6:27 PM by Privateer Monday, July 01, 2002 Media Fundamentalists An exhaustive KTVU investigation has—gasp!—turned up tapes of Bill Simon—on TV! While I agree TBN is a whacked-out station and Simon never should have appeared there, the "investigation" is nothing but hyperbole. They try to claim Simon says God told him to run--in actuality, he just said he asked God if God wanted him to run. Two very, very different things. The Chronicle also breathlessly proclaims: Just days before the primary, Simon appeared on "Behind the Scenes," expressing gratitude for the opportunity to appear on TBN. In other words, he said something like "thank you for inviting me to your show." The San Francisco Chronicle is every bit as much a fundamentalist media outlet as TBN. Posted 1:19 PM by Privateer Sunday, June 30, 2002 Yarr! This is probably the first time we've threatened to kill United Nations personnel. I can't say I disagree. A kidnapper is a kidnapper, even if you dress him up in a fancy blue helmet. (via Drudge) Posted 11:54 PM by Privateer Bye, Bye MCI I meant to blog this earlier, but I never got around to it. A couple days ago, a telemarketer called me up to ask if I'd like to save money by switching to MCI. I asked him, aren't you guys still partnered with WorldCom? And he said, "not really." That was when I flew off the handle. "NOT REALLY? What do you mean by that?" He said WorldCom was the part of the company with the scandal, and MCI was the part that was making money. I was laughing, and I apologized for wasting his time, but he kept asking me if I'd like to switch, I had to hang up on him. I feel sorry for him, I really do. Posted 12:41 PM by Privateer Bashing the Right Normally, us right-wing bloggers don't bother to bash idiot right-wingers because they're an embarrassment to us, whereas idiot lefties are cannon fodder. But when someone says something extremely offensive, we're sort of obligated as pundits to say something. I'll also answer Tapped's call for right-wing bloggers to bash Cal Thomas. This guy is a whack-job. The 9/11 attacks were more traumatizing than the 9th Circuit's ruling on the pledge. If you don't believe that, you should give serious thought to leaving this country, because you cease to be an American when you put your religion over Americans' physical safety from foreign terrorists. And this was way over the line. Yesterday a court in America made a ruling that I want to comment on. America is a nation that is -- a nation that values our relationship with an Almighty. Declaration of God in the Pledge of Allegiance doesn't violate rights. As a matter of fact, it's a confirmation of the fact that we received our rights from God, as proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence. I -- I believe that it points up the fact that we need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench. Our rights do not come from God, they are derived from our natural and objective right to exist free, and our willingness to defend that. (via Atrios) [update (12:46pm): rereading the quote, I was struck by this phrase, which could only have been uttered by George W. Bush: "a nation that values our relationship with an Almighty"] Posted 10:54 AM by Privateer Thursday, June 27, 2002 I'd Like to Take Back what I said Earlier About "Islam" being an evil religion. It's not. Certainly many strains of Islam are. What I would like to do is not backpedal much, I would just like to replace "Islam" with "Koran." Because the current version of the Koran is a bloodthirsty, ultraviolent, intolerant document. Because despite the Koran's claims to being the perfect copy of the original, there is some doubt about this. There used to be much more internal doubt about the perfection of Islam and the Hadiths in Islam—and during that time, Islam was much more peaceful. When the Koran is kept at arm's length, Islam can be a fine religion. When I said Sufism adds "fluff," that was a derisive term, and it was incorrect to say it moved further away from "Islam," because nobody has a monopoly on what "Islam" means. But Sufism does place less priority on the literal interpretation of the Koran than Wahabbism, I doubt anyone would disagree with me on this. This distinction is a real and important one: if Islam itself was evil, there would be no hope for the billion Muslims worldwide short of Coulter's invade-kill-convert. But that's not the case. There are peaceful strains of Islam, and they're no less "Islamic" than Wahhabism. If anyone has a monopoly on "Islam," it certainly isn't bin Laden. And if we play our cards carefully, we can influence Islam bring more modern influences to it. Islam could certainly benefit from an injection of skepticism, tolerance, pacifism, liberalism, and individualism. It's the reformists who will have to do it, though, we can only give them the push they need. At the heart of this matter is the question of whether the Koran is truly infallible, or whether it was altered at one point in history (most likely when several different versions of the Koran which were floating around were merged to create one authoritative version). If the Koran today is believed to be imperfect, and if the Hadiths are believed to be incorrect about many things, the more violent teachings in them could be disregarded. For instance, there is a debate within Islam whether the Hadiths were correct when they said Mohammed took a nine-year-old Aisha to be his wife (I forget where I saw this, it may have been Instapundit, but I can't find it on his blog). Eric Raymond also has some things to say about Islam. He notes especially that we are being lied to by Muslim apologists when they claim most Muslims are of the peaceful variety. That's another thing Islam could use an injection of: appreciation for the objective truth. In short, "Islam" is too broad to demonize, but the current version of the Koran is a very specific target, and it's easy to call it "evil." [update (6/27 11:04pm): upon further reflection, the Torah (Old Testament) contains some vile things as well, which don't damn it to being "evil." The idea of annihilating the Amalekites was certainly something accepted in its time, but not today. The key is that Jews don't accept the Amalekite solution to their problems, and haven't in the modern world, even before Naziism was born. If the atrocities in the Koran (such as the murder of a famous poet, and then a woman songstress) are rejected by Muslims, then I can't say the Koran is evil. I think the real problem is the lack of individualism within Islam, especially within the peaceful strains. Islam places a very high value on submission (in fact, that's what the word "Islam" means in Arabic). The radicals are organized, and the moderates are not. The dearth of moderate voices isn't proof most Muslims are really on the side of the radicals. Asking for moderate Muslims to get angry, and take back their faith is asking for something that's not only difficult, but revolutionary. It would change their culture a large amount for moderate Muslims to strike back at the fundamentalists. And that's a good thing.] Posted 9:55 PM by Privateer Civility and Stuff Ann Salisbury has linked to my blog (because I linked to her, this could be the start of a vicious cycle). She, uh, probably disagrees with me on most things. I originally linked to her site when I found it through Welch's warblog, I was intrigued by the importance she placed on civility, which I too felt was underrated. Then I got into an argument with Demosthenes. Civility went out the window, I felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall. Summary: He said it was impossible for Arafat to stop cell-based terror, so he shouldn't even be expected to try. But cell-based terror did stop, for several years, when the "peace" process was moving at its slowest, under Netanyahu, even though it's impossible to stop. All Netanyahu had to do was threaten to dismantle the PA if the terror continued, by threatening Arafat, he got what he wanted. Demo said Arafat would never destroy Rachel's Tomb. Well, his forces allowed Joseph's Tomb to be destroyed, if he had ordered them to save it, they would have. So even though Arafat would never destroy a Jewish holy site, he already has. Then he tried to claim I'm just not nuanced enough, I was lumping Arafat's terrorists in with the religious ones. Arafat, you see, doesn't really want Israel destroyed, he actually wants a state, according to Demo. Which is why he rejected Oslo and Taba. Which is why he created a whole new terror organization, the Al-Aksa Martyr Brigades, which is basically indistinguishable from HAMAS in its actions. And he claimed I was lumping together the Palestinian civilians along with the terrorists into one big collective. When two thirds of Palestinian civilians support suicide bombings, I can't consider them passive victims of this entire conflict.) I went off on a bit of a rant there, but back to the main point. I left the Two Tears in a Bucket link up, because I do like to read intelligent liberal opinions. I especially like civility when I'm reading something I disagree with, nothing puts me off faster than Atrios' alleged parody of right-wing web sites. Does he really have to lower his site to the level of Democratic Underground just to make a point about civility? I doubt it, I think he just likes being so rude. I will try to be civil in the future, because I know it's right... Posted 8:39 PM by Privateer Wednesday, June 26, 2002 MEMRI is Good And so is WorldNetDaily. Posted 11:30 PM by Privateer Bad News GeekPress points out a Village Voice article about small arms attacks on Americans. I pointed out how bad this would be a month ago: Broohaha is right, Al Qaida won't send conventional suicide bombers against us, they're much too flashy for that. Al Qaida and the PFLP are "warriors" whereas HAMAS and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades are "soldiers" (see this post by Denbeste) But he's also wrong. There are other groups in the US, and they could easily carry out suicide bombings. It's even been tried before. It's wrong to blow off Rummy's warning. Suicide bombs (or suicide gunmen) are the perfect warrior for small groups, or for individuals inspired by terrorist leaders. If one Muslim carries out a shooting or bomb attack, expect copycats to start happening, pronto. This is a situation that will snowball if it ever starts. It's also pretty much unavoidable, it's going to happen at some point. The copycat attacks wouldn't even require advance planning, they would be carried out by American Muslims inspired by what the terrorists were able to do with simple small arms. It would be like the school shooting spree, where copycat attacks were fueled by the media attention given to regular attacks. Despite what I've said about Islam, I'm not insinuating all, most, or even many American Muslims would follow Al Qaida and carry out rifle attacks on public places. It would only be a small number. But only a small number of terrorists are needed to carry out an attack, and sow fear. Only a tiny fraction of American high school students shot up their schools and murdered their classmates. I'm pessimistic about this, but I agree with Paul Hsieh: legal concealed weapons should play an important role in defending against these attacks. This is just another reason to be thankful for a Republican presidency: Gore would use these hypothetical attacks to increase gun controls, and would use it as a political club to beat Republicans with. [I spelled Den Beste's name wrong, it should not be "Denbeste"] Posted 6:11 PM by Privateer Star Wars Parody Watto: "Oh, Anny, I recognize that punim, it is you. You always were a mensch, Anny, but is that a lightsaber? A jedi knight! What a job for a nice Tatooine boy. Hey! Have I got the deal for you! How about--" Annakin: "Shut up, you greasy-bearded hook-nosed black-hat-wearing slave-trader, and tell me where I can find my mother" Watto: "I'm afraid she's the schlmazel and I'm the schlemiel. I've forgotten completely where I sent her..." Is there anyone out there who's going to claim Watto isn't an incredibly racist stereotype of a Jew, complete with hook nose, flies, a greasy beard, and a black hat? But maybe it really was a subconscious accident on Lucas's part. After all, Watto didn't have pellas. Posted 12:23 AM by Privateer Tuesday, June 25, 2002 Another Good Reason for Regime Change Aside from preventing a horrendous nuclear conflict, a regime change in Iraq would also stop this sort of thing from happening. Posted 12:07 AM by Privateer Monday, June 24, 2002 Hot Damn! This is great news! (via Tim Blair) Put that up against this (via Joe Katzman), and it looks like Bush is willing to fight the destroy-Israel mentality in Palestine, because he sees how destabilizing it is to the whole region. If the Palestinians are allowed to continue their war against Israel, it will lead to nuclear war. Whether they are stopped by being deported or by actually committing to a real peace process makes no real difference. Either way, their war has to end. If enough political leaders put enough pressure on the Palestinians, and bring about reforms, peace is possible. This move by Bush is very encouraging. I don't like the "deport them all" solution, I just see it as being the most likely to succeed. But if Bush can bring about peace (and let's be honest, Bush is basically the only world leader doing anything to promote peace there, the rest are just engaging in the political equivalent of masturbation), deportations (and the large number of civilian deaths which would inevitably accompany such a plan) won't be necessary. This has certainly brightened my outlook on the world. As has this: Introducing the Best Tank in the World In a few hours, the best main battle tank in the world will be revealed. The Merkava Mk-IV will replace the Merkava Mk-III as the holder of that title. No other country's MBT even comes close. Posted 11:20 PM by Privateer Lots of Good Stuff Over at USS Clueless today, relating to my debate with Demosthenes and Israel in general. Posted 2:04 AM by Privateer Sunday, June 23, 2002 The Most Important Issue You've been Ignoring Den Beste brings up the important but little discussed issue of damage to Israel's economy. As I noted last month, the Arabs are keenly aware of this. While the military action is expensive, the real blow to Israel's economy comes from the lack of tourists. Pacifying the territories through reoccupation would allow them to return safely. Reoccupation would also give Israel complete access to any resources in the territories, including cheap Palestinian labor. Israel could cut off foreign aid to the Palestinians, forcing them to work. Or, better yet, it could seize control of that foreign aid (it would still have to go to Palestinians, but Israel could direct it). With the combination of no food aid and all travel cut off for villages that sponsor terrorists, they would be brought to their knees extremely quickly. Add to that the bulldozing of their orchards and cutting off electricity, and the Palestinians would have quite literally nothing. They could be brought under Israel's heel with devastating speed, allowing her economy to return to normal within weeks. Unfortunately, this would jeapordize trade with Europe, which could really hurt Israel, so it might not be possible. Israel would have to figure out some way to get the Europeans to not cut off trade. Sharon's plan might be the best way around this. Instead of seizing all of the territory at once, creating an international outrage, Sharon will do it piece by piece. The Europeans won't be able to get so angry. I trust Sharon to do the right thing for Israel. I'll say again I don't hate the Palestinians. I just gave up caring about them. If they want to wage an all-out terror war, they can have one. It's their choice, they can live with the consequences. All Israel is asking them to do is stop killing Israelis. When If they can manage that, they can have a demilitarized but otherwise fully independent state. This is not like asking Hungarian freedom fighters to lay down their arms and surrender to the Soviets. Israel has a long track record of wanting peaceful coexistence. Occupation is not the end goal, only a phase for as long as the Palestinians make it necessary. I called Rabin a traitor for Oslo, and I should not have. Despite the huge number of Israelis who died because of his actions, the way Oslo failed proves the Israelis are willing to make peace and the Palestinians are not. The Oslo Accords are no longer followed by either side, but they are still very relevant. Now Oslo is an Arab-killing license. Israel can kill as many as she wants to get security, because she's proven she isn't the impediment to peace. Posted 5:46 PM by Privateer Was Wright Right? Kausfiles quotes Robert Wright's prediction: ... we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. I would still stand by what Krauthammer wrote. This is the end of his column: Palestinians will now have to recalibrate their thinking about Israeli will, rethink the impunity they imagined the "international community" would provide them, recalculate the efficacy of terror. Looking at the ruin -- moral and material -- that terror has brought them, some Palestinians might begin thinking that the road to Palestine lies through an option they rejected at Camp David 22 months ago: peace. It's true Krauthammer overestimated the success of Operation Defensive Shield. But it was successful, just to a lesser degree. This means a military response to terror is a viable solution, it just needs to be a bigger military response. If Operation Defensive Shield could have created a week or two of calm, Operation Reinstate the Occupation Permanently would provide protection from terror indefinitely. Some small attacks would break through. There would be bombings. But not so many as there are now. The terrorists would be on the run, permanently. The value of reinstating the occupation is that it would be a much larger version of Operation Defensive Shield, permanently. Yes, the Palestinians would be miserable. But that's the point. Surely there were enough good times under Oslo that they would want to go back. Surely they would prefer freedom to terror. And if not, if they refuse to end the terror, then they can live under occupation forever. The Palestinians' destiny is in their own hands, what more could they ask for? Posted 1:24 PM by Privateer Saturday, June 22, 2002 This is a Race War Jews are in a death struggle with the majority of the Muslim world, especially Arabs (and a small number of non-Muslim Arabs). This is obvious. There is nothing surprising or counter-intuitive about this statement. I am not calling for a race war, I am merely acknowledging that one exists. Jews did not want one, it was thrust on us. Jews, of all people, should know when they are being targeted for extermination. When he was outfitting his Einsatzgruppen, Jews were told Hitler didn't really mean to slaughter them all. After all, he couldn't, the Germans were near the pinnacle of Western Civilization, the Glorious and Good Civilization that could do no wrong. Now the Muslims are sharpening their scimitars, raising little children to hate Jews, and preaching that the end times would not come until Muslims exterminated the Jews. And Israel is told to ignore the Muslims. They don't really mean it, you see. After all, the Muslims are non-Western, they're just misunderstood by Orientalists and bigots, they have a wonderful culture that would never do anything so awful as genocide. The Muslims are setting about to acquire nuclear weapons, they're developing biological and chemical weapons, they're preparing for a final battle with Israel. They've been funding terrorists to distract Israel, to keep it busy, and to undermine it while they prepare for their final strike. It's time for another thought experiment. Imagine the world without Jews. It's not so hard, is it? When the Muslims have their way, it's going to happen. Not completely, but if they can destroy Israel, they can cut us down to half. And then random acts of terror against the remaining Jews would bring us down even further. And the rest will intermarry, preserving Jewish DNA, but at the cost of diluting it (I'm not a race purist, I'm just pointing out that an independent Jewish ethnic identity will be lost, and with it, an independent Jewish culture). Based on population sizes during the time of the Roman empire, there should be about 120M Jews alive today. Are Jews doomed to death? If so, at least we should be able to take the filthy, evil religion of Islam with us. I'll bet we could. With the right nuclear strikes, we could wipe out all Muslim holy sites, all major Arab cities, irradiate the entire Middle East, and kill Muslims as far away as Indonesia and Malaysia (maybe even salt their countries with radiation. Islam would almost cease to exist. The Muslims in Europe would go apeshit and riot, and riot, and riot, until they were expelled. Christian missionaries would convert most of the few remaining believers. Oh, the world would not miss us, left with so many radioactive scars and so much human suffering. But that's okay. I'd rather the world hate us than remember us fondly, if it is going to let us be exterminated (and it is). No more Holocaust Museums. I'd rather we leave the world with "The Great Arabian Glass Desert International Wildlife Refuge Park" where tourists can go on safaris to see five-legged camels and such. Imagine the world without Jews. Because that's the path history is on. It's not inevitable, but we've got to do more to avoid it. It would be nice if more people acknowledged that this is the ultimate goal of the vast majority of Muslims (who can't be bothered to criticize the Saudis when they run a TV show with a three-year-old girl calling Jews "apes and pigs"). Imagine the world without Jews or Muslims. That's still depressing, but not quite so much so. Posted 11:35 PM by Privateer Poor Me, Misunderstood by Mean Liberals Demosthenes accuses me of being a hysterical racist and paranoid about anti-Semitism: Then again, they're Arab animals. They deserve whatever they get. And anybody who thinks otherwise is a filthy terrorist-lover. And an Anti-Semite to boot. For the record, I never said Muslim Arabs were subhuman. Just a malignant threat to Israel's existence. And I don't think most non-Muslim hatred of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism. I think the idiot Europeans are taking out their post-colonial guilt on Israel. They're looking at Israel as if it's some sort of colony or imperialist venture. This is patently false, until the influx of Russians, most Israeli Jews were Asian Sephardim and not the "white" Ashkenazi. But that's what they believe, Israel is the "white" oppressor and Palestinians are the "people of color." It's political correctness and idiot leftism, but it's not anti-Semitism. There is anti-Semitism in Europe, but it's not the primary driving force of hatred against Israel. Ignorance and stupidity are. Not that I'm drowning in self-pity (the title is not serious). I knew the cancer thing would provoke. But I don't care. It has to be said. Arab Muslims in Israel are an existential threat. Many of them have to be driven out. This has nothing to do with race, it is entirely a question of religion. If there were a large number of ethnically-Jewish Muslims, and they were carrying out suicide bombings against Israel, I would want them removed as well. To rephrase my point, Islam is a cancer on Israel. It is an evil religion, a religion of murder (Mohammed had a singer murdered for making fun of him, just one of the countless examples). While there are pleny of examples of evil behavior by Jews in the Old Testament, it is recognized as the work of fallible human beings. Moses is not held up as a perfect role model, Jews are instructed to learn from his mistakes. But Islam holds Mohammed up as "The Prophet," God's last, incorruptible messenger. His wanton killing and acts of mass murder (wiping out whole tribes of people) are not questioned, they are celebrated. For a Muslim to even express doubt about Mohammed's behavior would be to invite extreme retribution by other Muslims. When Salman Rushdie parodied Mohammed as "Mahound," he was Fatwa'ed. When Mel Brooks parodied Moses as bringing the "Fifteen—Ten Commandments," we laughed. When some left-wing jerks put on a play portraying Jesus as having hot gay butt sex with his disciples, our government of this mostly Christian nation defended their right to be royal pricks. When Andres Serrano dunked a crucifix in a bathtub full of urine, American taxpayers footed the bill. There are a few truly sane strains of Islam, Sufism is the largest one. And there are more moderate Muslims outside the Middle East. But Islam at its core—fundamentalist Islam—is evil, evil, evil. Adding a bunch of saints and other fluff, as Sufism does, largely dilutes this, and brings in positive elements. But Sufism is only good to the extent that it's not true to traditional Islam. Moderate Muslims are only good to the extent that they are lax regarding traditional Islamic teachings. Islam has manifested itself in many ways as a great religion, there have been many great Muslim conquerors and architects and scholars, but its core is rotten in a way that Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism are not. I realize this is all politically incorrect and whatnot, but I'm so far beyond caring what anybody else thinks. I couldn't care less when Demosthenes caricatures my position (it's just too easy to call someone a racist). [update (6/27 10:53pm): I expand on these comments today] Posted 1:12 AM by Privateer Friday, June 21, 2002 The Red Cross is Complicit in the Southern African Famine While demanding money for food aid to the Southern Africans, the Red Cross blames the situation on bad weather, and does not mention at all the political instability in Zimbabwe, which used to be the breadbasket of Southern Africa. It's tacitly understood among left-wingers that no one should ever criticize a left-wing black tyrant like Mugabe. The Red Cross is complicit in this famine because it's done nothing to prevent it from happening in the first place, it's just decided to provide food aid after the fact. It never criticized Mugabe's insane farm-seizing plans, it never warned of the consequences of Mugabe's actions. The Red Cross doesn't exist to allieviate human suffering, it exists to take your money and make people dependent on it. Mugabe is only doing the ICRC a favor by creating this entirely artificial famine. Ben-Eliezer, the Idiotarian Israeli Minister of Defense Ben-Eliezer visited a couple of failed suicide bombers to try to understand them. What did he come away with? ``If you ask me what is, in fact, the code that connects them, it is the despair that people come to,'' Ben-Eliezer told Israel Radio on Thursday. ``I don't justify it. I tried in the conversations to go deep, to try and understand the internal processes.'' But in any society, there will always be some desperate, despairing individuals. There are suicides in every single fucking country in the world. Every single one. Even the socialist paradises (actually, their suicide rates are sky-high). But there will be especially high rates of despairing people in rigidly Muslim societies, where even being raped is a death sentence for a woman. Where social isolation is one of the strongest tools for forcing conformity. Widespread despair isn't the issue at all. There have been about 70 suicide bombings so far, which is a large number, but 70 despairing Arabs in all of Israel is a relatively small number, out of a population of four million inside and outside of the territories. You could find 70 despairing kids in any large American high school. It wouldn't be hard, if you had control of society, to condition them all to become suicide bombers (suicide bombers go through a long period of cult-like indoctrination for their act, to ensure they will be able to carry it out). It should also be noted that both of the bombers motivated by despair were failures. More typical is Mohammed the Ghoul, who was a graduate student at a Palestinian university. Was he "desperate?" No. He thought his death would advance his political cause. "How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy. How beautiful it is to kill and to be killed - not to love death, but to struggle for life, to kill and be killed for the lives of the coming generation" Even for the bombers who are motivated by desparation, that alone isn't enough. Bombers don't operate alone, there is a whole bureaucracy of terror to provide them with explosives and instructions for their target. To talk about despair without talking about the sophisticated terror machinery which recruits and arms bombers is to miss the issue completely. Ben-Eliezer is encouraging terror against Israelis by downplaying the hate behind terrorist strikes (even while claiming he isn't doing just that)—and he's their Minister of Defense. It certainly explains a lot about the Israeli situation. If Labor was out and a Moledet man was in that position, imagine how safe Israelis would be! Posted 10:46 PM by Privateer Semites as "Cancer" What I said was that Israeli Arabs are a threat to Israel, in that their presence makes terrorist attacks much easier to carry out, and they also present a demographic threat. So I want most of them moved out. But what do the Saudis think? They think Jews are a cancer on the whole world. They want all Jews dead and gone. I just want Arabs out of one specific country, in which they have behaved atrociously, and to which they represent an existential threat. I understand for a Jew to liken any people in the world to "cancer" is obscene, after the Holocaust. But as I said earlier, I'm beyond caring. If you want to call me a Judeo-Nazi (as C. self-identified), go ahead. I won't be offended, I know what the word really means, it means a Jew who would rather kill than be killed. It means a Jew who would rather repeat Deir Yassin than repeat the Passover Massacre. Nobody should be ashamed to fight for the right to be alive. Israel should only be ashamed to have such hate for "Judeo-Nazis" like Irgun and LEHI, who chased the Arabs out. As I said, I don't want anyone to die, I just want them moved out. But I won't cry over spilled Arab blood. The Palestinians aren't fighting for the right to live in their half of Palestine, they're fighting to rid "Palestine"—and the world—of Jews. The terrorists aren't interested in "peace"—only an idiot Frenchman would think something like that. If the terrorists want peace, why did Fatah (Arafat's group) bomb a medical station outside Efrat established by Jews to treat Arabs? (read that article, it's critical to the rest of this post) The terrorists do everything they can to prevent peace, and I would include Arafat in this grouping. The problem of Palestine, as illustrated by the ambulance example above, is that it's ruled by terrorists who don't want peace. Arafat has just agreed to the Clinton/Barak plan. But who cares? The whole premise of the "peace process" is Land for Peace. Israel has shown its willingness to give land, Palestinians have never tried to make peace. The leadership has done everything it could to stall and sabotage the peace process, including Arafat's group carrying out a terror bombing the day before Powell arrived in Jerusalem. My Peace Proposal The only solution is to completely reinstate the occupation, in a form more severe than ever before. It must be brought under Israel's heel, every village totally isolated from the next, with Arabs chosen and appointed by Israel to serve as the local government figureheads. Religious leaders who preach war against the Jews must also be arrested. Why is free speech so important for the Palestinians if it's not necessary in Europe? How can Europeans complain if Israel adopts their draconian race hate laws and forces them on the Palestinians? Is that "occupation?" If so, all of Europe is occupied. If the Palestinians never change, they should be occupied forever. They can pay the price for their own love of terror, Israel should not be ashamed to defend itself. But when individual villages and cities begin to show signs of sanity, they might be granted greater autonomy. Curfews would be cancelled, roads would be reopened. As the Palestinians came to want peace, they would be allowed to live in peace. When the process of reforming them was complete (this could take generations, but so what?) they could be given their own state along something resembling the '67 borders. If the occupation is unsuccessful in stopping terrorism (it won't be, it will be more pervasive than Operation Defensive Shield, and it will be round-the-clock, permanently), they could be transferred (that's the euphemism for ethnic cleansing, pushing the Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt). But Israel should at least try to make peace before expelling them. It's time to return to the occupation, to make one last attempt at peace, before doing what Israel should have done in '67. Just ask yourself: why was there an occupation? Because Israel didn't expel the Palestinians, it let them stay! The occupation is proof of Israel's good will. The people who became "settlers" did not choose to occupy Palestinian land, they wanted it entirely for Jews. That the occupation ever happened is evidence of Israel's brain-dead left-wing do-gooderism, not any malice or right-wing tendencies. The entire idea behind the occupation was that a free society could be created for Arabs, within which they would come to love Israel. That's clearly a wild left-wing delusion. What I am proposing is not a free society (the Israelis before refused to arrest Imams who called for the genocide of Jews, but allowed them to speak freely). What I am proposing is that the Palestinians be brought into line, and forced to make their choice, between occupation and freedom (I make no illusions about the benevolent nature of the occupation, its brutality should be its main peacemaking virtue). Surely there were enough good times under Oslo that the Palestinian people would prefer peace to a permanent unwinnable war with Israel. If not? Well, that's their loss, not Israel's. Israel has suffered enough in its neoimperialist quest to "save" these filthy savages. It's an imperialism of values. It's the condescending belief that left-wing Israelis have, that they could make the Arabs love them. "The Jewish Man's Burden," if you will, to civilize the Middle East. It's time to respect that the Arabs have their own filthy death-loving culture, and that they can't be redeemed by love. Israel needs to stop pretending to be Jesus and start acting more like Mohammed. Posted 10:17 PM by Privateer Wednesday, June 19, 2002 The End of the Oslo Illusion Most Israelis thought, for the past decade, that a Palestinian state was inevitable, and that policy should be focused on bringing this about in the best possible way, and accepting necessary sacrifices towards this end. Even I was thinking this way for the past few months. But I've become disabused of this false notion. (of course, the title of this post is a reference to Krauthammer's speech, which has had a strong effect one me.) I've also stopped worrying about the Palestinians' rights. I think this is the Lileksian phenomenon known as "The dog ate my care" (in other Lileks-related news, he mentions in his bleat today something I talk about later in this post) Israel tried creating a just society with the occupation, giving the Palestinians more freedom than ever before. But that didn't work. Israel tried Oslo. But that didn't work. Israel tried Operation Defensive Shield. But that isn't working in the long term. The next step is to slowly resume the occupation, piece by piece, which is what I hope Sharon is doing (related bloggage: USS Clueless) There's only one solution to the Israel/Palestine issue, and that's to push all undesirable Arabs within the borders of Israel out, into Jordan and Egypt. No Arabs means no terrorism, it means heightened security and control over natural resources like water and holy sites like Tomb of Joseph (which was destroyed by Arab animals, they would destroy every other Jewish site if they could). It means defensible borders, and the ability to purchase a cup of coffee without fearing for their lives. There's only one solution, and that's the Kuwaiti Solution. After the Gulf War, the Kuwaitis ethnically cleansed their country of several hundred thousand Palestinians. Smart move. Even the other Arabs know they don't want Palestinian filth in their countries. Why do you think Jordan is so friendly to Israel? Because it doesn't want Israel to do exactly what I'm suggesting, and because it's so weak militarily. And Jordan is Israel's best Arab friend. Israel's only other "friend" is Egypt, which isn't attacking because it's still being paid off by Jimmy Carter. Every day Americans go off to work, and every day a portion of our paychecks is being stolen by the government to prop up the dictatorship in Egypt. And aside from not outright attacking Israel militarily, Egypt does nothing for Israel. Its government-controlled press prints things praising Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. This is the extent of Arab "friendship" and the Arabian wish for "peace"—they're a bunch of cowardly, Jew-hating opportunists who for now pretend to be peacemakers, but would turn on Israel in a heartbeat. Israel will never receive love or even tolerance from the Arabs. If this does eventually come about a thousand years from now, that's all well and good, but for practical purposes Israel should stop trying to appease them. Why appease Egypt and Jordan by not forcing the Palestinians onto them? What would Jordan do, attack Israel? Its armed forces would be slaughtered. What would Egypt do? Its army would fare better, but Israel could destroy the Aswan high dam, creating a flood of biblical proportions, killing 60 million Egyptians with one strike. With 90% of the population gone, the country would fall apart. Israel has nothing to fear from either country. It should be only afraid of Iraq and Iran, and their unconventional weapons. Who wants Palestinians in their country? Nobody. So why should Israel have to have them? As I said above, Kuwait expelled two to three hundred thousand Palestinians after the Gulf War (they had sided mostly with Saddam, as had Arafat). But it's not just Kuwait. Egypt doesn't want them. It refused Israel's offer to take control of the Gaza Strip. Jordan doesn't want them (they were expelled after they tried to overthrow King Hussein). Lebanon doesn't want them, it won't let them work, it keeps them trapped in refugee camps. Saudi Arabia doesn't want them (except maybe as servants). Nobody wants Palestinians in their country, and there's a damn good reason. The Coming Change in Left Thinking About Israel / Why I Love Hamas Sharon's plan is to continue to expand Israeli control over Palestinian areas until the occupation is resumed. But only if the terrorism continues; if it stops, he will withdraw. I would like to be able to say this is the Palestinians "last chance" to save their state, but only a fool would believe that. Israeli leftists will never stop giving them chances to kill Jews. That left thinking will never change. But the way left-wingers describe the Israeli/Palestinian dynamic will. While right now left-wingers love to turn a blind eye to Hamas' bus bombings, in the future, they will blame Hamas as "dupes" of Sharon who gave him the ability to sieze Palestinian land. They will blame Israel for creating and funding Hamas, and claim Israel used Hamas to destroy the Palestinians. Of course, Israel funded Hamas to weaken the PLO. It thought (correctly) that a weak PLO would be more likely to negotiate a peace agreement. It thought (incorrectly) that the peace would be honored. Israel's critics will never put this in context. Instead, they will adopt the Michael Rivero stance of claiming Hamas is the tool of an Israel that uses bombings to seize Palestinian land. They will never admit Israel expect Arafat to wipe out Hamas. They will also stop mentioning the fact that Arafat's Al-Aksa Murder Brigades carried out most of the bombings during this current Intifada. They will "forget" this. So when Israel restarts the occupation, the whack-job left-wingers will claim Israel likes Hamas. Remember this, the next time you hear some filthy terrorist-lover spouting off about how much they love Hamas. Support for Hamas is support for a return to Occupation, and possibly for "transfer." So, conservatives, get ahead of the curve. Start supporting Hamas today, before the lefties start denouncing it! Hmmm... as I write this, I'm beginning to have doubts. Would left-wingers ever come out against anyone killing Israelis? They're not going to let Israel trick them into taking up an anti-terror position. They love terror because it violates conservative norms and has a stunning emotional impact on its victims. They love terror because of its "revolutionary" power. I don't think they'll ever come out against terrorism by their favorite groups. I do know that Israel will have to cleanse itself of the Islamic cancer, forcing the Muslim Arabs and other undesirables into other countries. If there is a return to the occupation, Israel will be accused of acting like South Africa. Segregation is the only way for Israelis to be safe (every Muslim is a possible bomber, so screw them all), but Israel cannot exist as an apartheid state. Of course, the difference between Israel and South Africa are many. The South Africans created their system to exploit the blacks, the Israelis created theirs for security. The South African system was based on racism, the Israeli occupation was entered into very reluctantly, and Israel made a real and voluntary effort to get rid of the occupation and make peace. I'm not saying Israel is anything like South Africa, but that's already the left's favorite analogy. Just getting rid of the Palestinians entirely would make things a lot easier. Why didn't they do it in '67 or '73? Because they were do-gooder liberal jerks, instead of steel-hearted Arab-killers like Sharon and C., the self-described "Judeo-Nazi," two real Israeli heroes. Even though the link says the interview is with Sharon, it is a Muslim lie. Sharon and the person interviewed are two separate people, according to the interviewer Amos Oz, a founding member of Peace Now. Left-wing Israelis will be the death of Israel. What is needed is real leadership from Sharon. Someone has to say it, Muslim Arabs are a cancer on Israel, they must be excised. Not exterminated, not eradicated, and not uncompensated for their being forced out (okay, the Europeans can compensate them, Israel shouldn't give them a dime). But they've got to go. Kahane was Right. [oh, and please don't point me towards any cliched articles from Ha'aretz about some Israeli Arab Muslim doctor who treats all patients, Jews and Arabs, without respect to their ethnicity or religion, as proof that Israelis and Palestinians can live together. Please don't tell me "peace is the only answer," because that's bullshit. Absolute and total bullshit. Peace is not the only answer, Israel has many options, and living with regular suicide bombings, as any "peace" would entail, is not "peace." Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, and all that, but there is no peace. And there won't be. Please also don't send me any trite anti-racism propaganda. I am not a racist, and I am not a religious bigot. I have no hostility towards Arabs who aren't trying to kill me, and great respect for the non-evil strains of Islam, such as Sufi mysticism.] Posted 9:03 PM by Privateer Monday, June 17, 2002 Scott Shuger is Dead I always liked what he wrote. This is terrible. (via Instapundit) Posted 10:34 AM by Privateer Sunday, June 16, 2002 People from the Airguns Website I think the post you're looking for is here. Posted 9:50 PM by Privateer Friday, June 14, 2002 I'm Back I'm finished with finals, and I've got a few things to blog. 1) In addition to what I said below about Electronic Intifada, I should add this to the refutation of their first true "myth." Someone recently crunched the numbers to show more than three times as many Israeli women civilians died over a certain time period than the number of Palestinian women civilians (about 130 to 40). Unfortunately, I can't find this article, even though I know it's been posted up on the blogosphere somewhere. 2) What I said earlier about Calvin's dad and deregulation, I should add that airline deregulation has saved thousands of lives. By making air travel more affordable, fewer people drive. Air travel is safer, hence lives are saved. But it's not so direct or frightening as death at the hands of a disease, so the people who pushed for airline deregulation generally don't get much credit from the general public for saving lives. So deregulation gets a bad rap because of one overzealous politician, while on the whole it's actually doing a lot of unseen good. Posted 2:46 PM by Privateer Tuesday, June 11, 2002 Today is the Nine-Month Anniversary Not that I'm a fan of constant anniversarizing, but this is an important anniversary. Because in a few days, the terror babies will start popping out. I was thinking about that this morning, and this afternoon, I saw a very pregnant woman. They're on their way... Posted 6:42 PM by Privateer Monday, June 10, 2002 HonestReporting Smackdown HonestReporting shows just how biased the BBC actually is. Posted 12:56 PM by Privateer Really Bad News Dawn is reporting a smallpox outbreak in Pakistan (via Instapundit) The terrifying possibility is that the terrorists are running a test of their new weapon. Assuming this hasn't been spread by terrorists (which seems unlikely), it's still extremely bad news. Now the terrorists will have an easy time collecting samples of smallpox for their own use. We need large amounts of the smallpox vaccine. Posted 10:06 AM by Privateer Sunday, June 09, 2002 When Diversity becomes Politically Incorrect I haven't said anything about the attempted bowdlerizing of New York public school exams (scroll down to "grapes of annoyance") to remove any and all traces of ethnic or cultural identity, even though it really annoyed me. But a thought worth blogging finally occurred: why did they expend so much effort to "diversify the cannon" and pick writers like Annie Dillard, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov or William Maxwell if they were then going to remove all traces of ethnicity? Would it still be important to pick a diverse collection of literature if all traces of its diversity were going to be removed? Or could they go back to picking just white males? Posted 11:23 PM by Privateer Posting May be Sparse, Indefinitely I've got finals to attend to, and then over the summer I'll have to find a job, which means I won't have all this free time to post and such. Posted 11:15 PM by Privateer My Sullivan Number has gone Down I now have a Sullivan Number of two. Sort of. You see, I don't technically have a permalink on Virginia Postrel's weblog, but because she won't be posting much for the summer, my link will stay near the top of her page. That's good enough for me. Posted 11:13 PM by Privateer Arafat the Peace-Loving Moderate From the Jerusalem Post (via Drudge): In a speech broadcast today, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat threatened that if Israel does not retreat from PA-ruled areas that there will be a "disastrous explosion that will impact stability of the whole world." This guy is a madman and a terrorist, attempting to hold the whole world hostage. Bush is right to stand up to him, where other "leaders" won't. Posted 12:06 AM by Privateer Friday, June 07, 2002 True Myths They've put out a supposed list of myths about the Intifada. I promised over on Diana Hsieh's blog that I'd issue a point-by-point rebuttal to this. Myth 1: There is no moral equivalence between suicide bombings on the one hand, and Israel's killing of Palestinians on the other Their response to this "myth" was a condemnation of suicide bombings, which threw me off. Clearly, this document was meant for more widespread dispersal than the rest of the garbage on their website. What they are claiming is that there is moral equivalence, and that Israeli forces are incredibly evil. They cite a report for Harper's magazine by Chris Hedges, in which he claims the Israeli forces deliberately lure in children(!) and then murder them(!) with silenced weapons(!). It's quite a dramatic claim, and aside from being an anti-Semitic stereotype, it's ridiculously false. I don't know where to start: It is the greatest irony that Hedges uses the words, "see it with your own eyes," since Hedges worst accusations are based on incorrect assumptions. Hedges admits in the Harper's article that he did not see the boys shot -- they were "out of sight." Hedges also says he didn't hear the shots being fired, which he (incorrectly) assumed meant that Israeli soldiers were using silencers. Furthermore, Hedges offers no corroborating evidence -- no photos, no videos, no outside verification. Myth 2: Israel's invasion of Palestinian cities and refugee camps is self-defence against suicide bombings Operation Defensive Shield brought weeks of calm, and ever since, the terror attacks have gone down dramatically. Myth 3: Arafat Refuses to Condemn Suicide Bombings in Arabic I collected a list of everything Arafat had done to undermine his statement. As proof Arafat condemned suicide bombings, they drag out a few quotes of Arafat doing just that. But there is absolutely no mention of his constant support for suicide bombings, both in personal statements and in the general attitude of the media run by his government. For every time he has criticized suicide bombings, he has praised them at least a dozen times. What are we supposed to believe? That Arafat really means what he says when he condemns terrorism, but not when he supports it? When someone cheers on a terrorist bombing, and then denounces terrorism, which statement are you more likely to believe? In any case, our complaint is not that Arafat refuses to condemn terrorism, but that he refuses to condemn it honestly, and that he's constantly celebrating it, praising the mass murderers as "martyrs." Myth 4: Arafat has not done enough to stop terrorism The basic assumption behind the Israeli claim that Arafat "must do more" to stop attacks on Israel is that the primary role of the Palestinian Authority is not to work for the security and well-being of the Palestinian people, but rather to guarantee the security and safety of Israeli occupation forces, settlers and civilians, even while Israel rules millions of disenfranchised Palestinians, and continues to seize their land by force. Actually, that was the whole point of the Oslo Accords, which peacenik types love to claim Israel violated (I took it upon myself to refute that here) Over the past 18 months, Israel has systematically attacked all the facilities of the Palestinian Authority, including police stations, prisons and intelligence headquarters, and killed and assassinated many Palestinian security officers. Hence while crippling and killing the Palestinian security forces, Israel makes the ludicrous demand that these same forces go out and work on Israel's behalf. Israel only carried out targeted killings against individuals it knew to be engaged in terrorism. Israel has only attacked police facilities in response to Palestinian terror attacks, as a punishment to Arafat for not stopping the bombings. If the Palestinian Police Force is going to be negligent to an extreme degree, Israel might as well attack them in an attempt to force them to act. It certainly makes more sense than simply absorbing terror attacks and expecting the police to spontaneously reform themselves. The suicide bombings which have followed the brutal Israeli re-invasions of almost every major West Bank town since late March 2002 prove conclusively that there is no level of violence or ruthlessness that either Israel or the Palestinian Authority can employ that will eliminate those determined to answer the suffering of millions of Palestinian civilians under decades of Israeli military occupation by inflicting suffering on Israeli civilians. I thought the Electronic Intifada condemned suicide bombings (that's what they said above), but this doesn't sound like it. It sounds more like boasting. Myth 5: Arafat Spurned Barak's generous offer at Camp David and broke off negotiations with Israel This subject has already been beaten to death, I can't add anything to it. And of course, when discussing the negotiations, Electronic Intifada leaves out any mention of the intifada: In January 2001, the talks moved to Taba, Egypt, where they reportedly continued to make progress. They broke off at the end of January, and were due to resume but Barak canceled a planned meeting with Arafat. Shortly thereafter, Barak lost the election to Ariel Sharon, and the talks have never resumed. Why would Barak have pulled out of these negotiations, if they were making such progress? He pulled out because they weren't making progress. There were three car bombs and one bus bombing between November of 2000 and January of 2001. Arafat wasn't doing anything to control the terrorists, he was making war on Israel, to pressure it into giving him more concessions. Myth 6: Arafat started the Intifada A public speech by Palestinian Minister of Information 'Imad al-Faluji would suggest otherwise: Whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is wrong, even if this visit was the straw that broke the back of the Palestinian people. This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton. [Arafat] remained steadfast and challenged [Clinton]. He rejected the American terms and he did it in the heart of the US. There's absolutely no doubt this was planned in advance. Anyone who wants to claim otherwise has to address the fact that a Minister in Arafat's cabinet has said otherwise. But Electronic Intifada prefers to ignore this completely. As far as the insinuation Sharon visited a Muslim holy site, that's true. But the site is also the most holy site in all of Judaism. And Sharon never visited any of the sites holy only to Muslims (such as the Al-Aksa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock). He even coordinated his visit in advance with PLO security forces. But the Arafat-controlled media played up the visit, and many groups were calling for a "day of rage." The government-run Palestinian schools were closed down for the day, so kids would be out to riot. As for the lack of shooting coming from the rioters, they were still throwing rocks, which can be very dangerous, when they're thrown from the top of the Western Wall down at worshippers below. And they were also throwing firebombs, which are very dangerous. As far as the soldiers knew, anyone could have been carrying a firearm. The soldiers have to assume every Palestinian is armed, they can't wait for the terrorists to start shooting before they defend themselves! The soldiers were also unprepared for this sort of rioting, as the last intifada had been a decade before the current one. If they mishandled the situation at all, it was out of inexperience. Strange, for a website dedicated to celebrating the intifada, that it would disassociate Arafat from it. (yes, the title of this post is a reference to this book, which you should own) Posted 10:54 PM by Privateer Parkerize Yourself No, South Parkerize yourself. Do it here (via Insignificant Thoughts and What are they Saying) I'm not going to post any photos of myself on this weblog, but here's the next best thing. Posted 7:48 PM by Privateer Home

The Mythical Suicide Bomber, and the Reality Arafat's "Denunciation" of Terror Radical Islam and the Radical Left Which Biological Weapon are You? The Top-Secret Diary of General Yasser Arafat Israeli Violations of Oslo Zionists: the Real Anti-Semites True Myths Eric Alterman, Narcissusblogger (excerpt appeared on AS.com) How People are Finding My Site through Google: levy murder pictures shandra levi Shandra Levey photos of women sleeping naked free Mental acts sex pics shondra levy gary condit bondage Chandra Levy naked naked divorced sluts shandra leave murder case nude jogging pics semi nude pictures of pakistani girls sluts in egypt Paula Zahn naked pictures world+war+2+naked+pics+jews+bbc extreme grousome porn berlusconi wife nude plain woman nude pictures chandra levy ugly saudi arabian girls nude and naked pics Gruesome Pearl Pics -harbor -japan nude pack,model,hostage yasser arafat fuck ariel sharon foot fetish in syria jewish eyes removed displayed photograph 1987 suicide politician in front of cameras arab fornication nude anti-globalist arabs are savage sickest most perverted sites on the web totally gay and illegal funny pics of president bush and president musharraf and prime minister vajpayee jewish gay pics of military men of israel pics hairy chest killed bullet sonograms new york upper west side caged gay fighters pics photos from ukranian air show gruesome find out personnel web site of nude pakistani girls