Good News From Pakistan
In today's Times of London we read this:
Pakistani forces have taken control of a warren of caves that served until recently as the nerve centre of the Taleban and al-Qaeda and sheltered Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden.
“It was the main hub of militancy where al-Qaeda operatives had moved freely,” Major-General Tariq Khan, the Pakistan regional commander, said as he gave journalists a tour of Damadola yesterday.
The village, nestling among snow-capped peaks in the Bajaur region along the Afghan border, has been fought over for 16 months. It is the first time that the Pakistani Army has set foot in the village, which had long been dominated by the insurgents operating on the both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Pakistan is by no means a stable nation, but we ought to praise our allies in the War on Terror when they score a victory for our "side". There is REAL change in the attitude of the Pakistani military in terms of their willingness to help our efforts in Afghanistan.
Here is more on Pakistan's role from The Heritage Foundation.
Christopher Hitchens on Airport Security
Writing at Slate.com, columnist Christopher Hitchens explains why the over-reaction to the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253 is preposterous.
In my boyhood, there were signs on English buses that declared, in bold letters, "No Spitting." At a tender age, I was able to work out that most people don't need to be told this, while those who do feel a desire to expectorate on public transport will require more discouragement than a mere sign. But I'd be wasting my time pointing this out to our majestic and sleepless protectors, who now boldly propose to prevent airline passengers from getting out of their seats for the last hour of any flight. Abdulmutallab made his bid in the last hour of his flight, after all.
Yes, that ought to do it. It's also incredibly, nay, almost diabolically clever of our guardians to let it be known what the precise time limit will be. Oh, and by the way, any passenger courageous or resourceful enough to stand up and fight back will also have broken the brave new law.
Well said. To close out his exceptional column, Hitchens lays out the realities of the long war with the irreconcilable wing of Islam:
What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets.
The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.
We need to get serious about the enemy we face. More on that from Newt:
Cadet to Obama: I’d Rather Be Killing Bin Laden
A picture, in this case, truly is worth a thousand words.
From Reuters:
A U.S. Army cadet reads a book entitled "Kill Bin Laden" as he waits with other cadets for U.S. President Barack Obama to deliver an address on U.S. policy and the war in Afghanistan at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York December 1, 2009.
Apparently the Germans don't think too highly of The One's speech either:
Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.
Krauthammer Weighs In On Fort Hood
I would be remiss if I did not post Charles Krauthammer's thoughts on the Fort Hood terrorist attack last week.
Chuck points out that the only people having a tough time describing Major Nidal Hasan as a Muslim jihadist are members of the media.
But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.
And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as “compassion fatigue.” The poor man — pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.
Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It’s a danger, clear and present.
He continues, discussing the warning signs that Maj. Hasan clearly exhibited to his colleagues in Maryland before being shipped to Fort Hood:
Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague’s religion?
One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, the New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.
What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar!” as they squeezed the trigger.
The delicacy about the religion in question — condescending, politically correct, and deadly — is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: “Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center.”
Ah yes, those Jersey men — so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.
Can we “jump” yet?
The politically correct insanity that is crippling this country knows no bounds. Within 24 hours of the terrorist attack on Fort Hood we knew that the suspect was named Nidal Malik Hasan, was a devout Muslim, spoke openly to his clients and colleagues alike about his radical Muslm views, had given copies of the Koran away to friends and neighbors the day before the murders took place, had been a member in social networking groups which extolled the virtues of suicide bombing, and, oh by the way, according to eye witness reports, had screamed "Allahu Akbar!" (God is Great!) before and during his rampage on the innocent victims in Texas.
And with all of that evidence, every liberal in America, from President Obama to Anderson Cooper to Homeland Security Chief Janet Napalitano, insisted that no one "jump to any conclusions."
Really? Conclusions about what? Not that the man might have been motivated by his perverted view of Islam to slaughter fellow soldiers, right? Who would think such a thing?
Do you have any ketchup popsicles to sell me that might match my new white gloves?
But don't believe this sarcastic blogger that what happened at Fort Hood was most certainly terrorism. From ABC News:
U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.
The military knew this man was insane, and yet let him continue to be the person soldiers came to for counseling after fighting in a war that Hasan hated (only slightly more than Code Pink and the anti-war Left in this country).
I'm gonna let Mark Steyn take this blog-post home with an excerpt from his latest, and I dare say brilliant, column:
When it emerged early Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: "Please judge Maj. Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name."
Concerned tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that – and not just in the sense that the New York Times' first report on Maj. Hasan never mentioned the words "Muslim" or "Islam," or that ABC's Martha Raddatz's only observation on his name was that "as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer's wife told me, 'I wish his name was Smith.'"
What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.
Honestly, this might be one of the most important articles you ever read. Please finish Steyn's masterpiece right here.
We need decisions on Afghanistan
President Obama has a lot on his plate right now, but his first and most important job is not community organizing, but nation protecting. He needs to make some decisions on what he plans to do in Afghanistan, the war that he said we "ignored" in favor of Iraq during the last administration's time in office.
It is more than worth winning the war in Afghanistan. We need to find the right levels of spending to make our military work. The Heritage Foundation put this chart together to track defense spending over the past 40 years:
Again, I completely understand the immense pressure and responsibilities President Obama has to deal with, but this is what presidents are expected to do: make tough decisions. They don't just give flowery speeches trying to sell public option health care to union workers in Ohio, or grant soft-ball interviews to ABC and Telemundo.
Gitmo stays open
Here is yet another classic example of the difference between liberal utopian visions of how the world should be...and the way things really are.
President Obama is unlikely to close the much-maligned detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in time to meet the self-imposed deadline of January, as his administration runs into daunting legal and logistical hurdles in moving the more than 220 detainees still being held there.
The difficulties in completing the lengthy review of detainee files and resolving other thorny questions mean the president's promised January deadline may slip, senior administration officials acknowledged for the first time Friday to FOX News.
The truth is that no one on the Left has a better idea on how to deal with enemy combatants who are NOT under the Geneva Convention, and have yet to offer a better place to house them.
My Kind of Town (for jihad) Chicago Is…
Apparently my hometown was the most attractive spot for an Al Qaeda-linked group to hold their national "Fall of Capitalism & Rise of Islam" conference this weekend.
"Hizb ut-Tahrir is one of the oldest, largest indoctrinating organizations for the ideology known as jihadism," Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told FOXNews.com.Phares said that Hizb ut-Tahrir, rather than training members to carry out terrorist acts like Al Qaeda, focuses instead on indoctrinating youths between ages of 9 and 18 to absorb the ideology that calls for the formation of an empire — or "khilafah" — that will rule according to Islamic law and condones any means to achieve it, including militant jihad.
Hizb ut-Tahrir often says that its indoctrination "prepares the infantry" that groups like Al Qaeda take into battle, Phares said."It's like a middle school that prepares them to be recruited by the high school, which is Al Qaeda," he said. "One would compare them to Hitler youth. ... It's an extremely dangerous organization."
Phares said Hizb ut-Tahrir has strongholds in Western countries, including Britain, France and Spain, and clearly is looking to strengthen its base in the U.S.
"The aim of this conference is to recruit within the Muslim community in America," he said. "The Middle East governments go after them, but in the U.S. they are protected, so having a base here is going to help their cells around the world."
Representatives of Hizb ut-Tahrir declined to comment when contacted by FOXNews.com
I have no problem with groups from various religions or worldviews congregating on our free shores to discuss their beliefs. But what I do have a problem with, where we all should logically draw the line, is when those groups are promoting, or in any way linked to, groups and ideologies that would not return the same favor should me and my band of merry conservative evangelical free-market advocates decide to hold our next "Capitalism Rules, Islam Drools" conference in Tehran or the West Bank.
The radical, irreconcilable wing of Islam has no interest in liberty, the dignity of human life, or religious tolerance. There will always be a tension between freedom of speech and security. We can't ignore the latter, or we'll lose the former.
This Hurts America
President Obama has released four memos this week that were intended to make Bush look bad, but instead make him look petty and foolish. Worse still, their release is dangerous. This editorial in National Review goes in to further detail, thought, and explanation. Please that and then check out Rich Lowry's blog-post today which poses the question, "Are We A Torturing Nation?"
From the NR editorial:
The release of the memos alone will serve to reinforce an ethos of timidity and inaction in the intelligence community. The message to agents asked to do dangerous things to keep our country safe is: “Even if you have a presidential assurance, legal license from the Department of Justice, and encouragement from the congressional intelligence committees, you may not be safe a month from now, a year from now, or whenever the climate of threat changes or power changes hands.” It’s probably what those agents suspected all along, even as they acted, regardless, out of a sense of duty. Now they know.
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A View From The Left
As one of my intellectual mentors Dennis Prager likes to say, "Clarity over unity." In other words, we don't have to all agree...but we would do well to know what it is we disagree about, and why. I've made it a goal to frequently post the columns of thinkers and writers on the Left here at AVITW.
She's not too happy with Dick Cheney going on different Sunday Morning Talk Shows to point out the current president's less-than-inspiring policies when it comes to terrorism, and has created a fictional, hypothetical dialogue between Obama, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, and Cheney to vent out her frustrations.
It continues on from there, which you can read here, but I suppose you get the gist of it. Bush was/is dumb; Cheney is insensitive and "batty"; Obama is patient and non-ideological in his pragmatic benevolence. (Note: If you just threw up a little bit in your mouth, don't worry...me too.)
Just like Howard Dean claiming after Scott Brown's election in MA last month that it was really a signal from the electorate to get socialized medicine passed even quicker, liberal columnists like Dowd seem incapable of accepting the fact that this is still a Center-Right nation.
This last quote from her piece sums up the mantra we will continue to hear for decades after Barack Obama fails to win re-election in 2012.