From Johan Goldberg’s blog at NRO:
A murderer who believed that the U.S. is the great enemy of mankind shouldnt be anyones hero, never mind a logo for a line of baby clothes.
He’s talking about Che, of course. It’s in the context of the price people pay for their radical past - very little, it appears.
Jonah Goldberg on Radicals on the Left on National Review Online
David Ignatius writes a column for “On The Left,” a feature of the Investors’ Business Daily editorial page.
Today, he wants to make sure we understand that terrorists are really no longer any danger, but the danger they pose is because of what we’ve done in Iraq.
It’s the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman’s account, it’s a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls “terrorist wannabes.”
Unlike the first two waves, who were well-educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for action.
The first wave have been largely killed off in the war in Afghanistan - you know, the good war. At least, now it’s a good war in comparison to Iraq. Iraq is a bad war. There weren’t any terrorists there before we came. It was a safe place for everyone before we got there and started killing all those Iraqis. That’s why they want us to leave right away.
The second wave was the trainees who came to Afghanistan (still part of the good war). Many of them have been killed off, so that’s good.
The third wave is just a yowling mob of untrained people. Not really terrorists, just terrorist wannabes according to Mr. Ignatius’ expert, Mr. Sageman. Mr. Sageman is a CIA covert operative - but a good one, since he doesn’t like the war in Iraq.
We’re to blame for their continued existence and the threat they might pose to the U.S. If we would just leave Iraq, they would soon get bored with jihad and fade away.
“Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear,” he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.
The third wave of terrorism is inherently self-limiting, Sageman continues. As soon as the amorphous groups gather and train, they make themselves vulnerable to arrest.
“As the threat from al-Qaida is self-limiting, so is its appeal, and global Islamist terrorism will probably disappear for internal reasons — if the United States has the sense to allow it to continue on its course and fade away.”
We tried that - it was the mark of the 1990s. Leave the movement alone and only go after the criminals who commit, you know, crimes. Everything else will just wilt away from lack of motivation.
It didn’t work then. Why should we try it again.
Steve Chapman, writing in Reason Magazine online, demonstrates some dazzling 9/10 “logic.”
There are several paragraphs in his piece, “Who’s Still Afraid of Osama?” that demonstrate his inability to apply real logic to the discussion. This paragraph was the most blatant to me:
But remember: After Sept. 11, 2001, we all thought more attacks were a certainty. Yet Al Qaeda and its ideological kin have proved unable to mount a second strike.
Ergo, they can’t do anything anymore to hurt us!
What amazing thinking.
Two paragraphs later he adds to the argument:
The events required to make that happen include a multitude of herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia’s inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing.
Ooops! That last sentence puts the lie to this argument. Google for the answer to whether anything radioactive (note, not just a warhead with arming and triggering mechanism) has gone missing over the past few years.
The last quote I’ll add shows how Mr. Chapman fails to understand the nature, scope, risk and uncertainty of the problem:
Mueller recalls that after the Irish Republican Army failed in an attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it said, “We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Al Qaeda, he says, faces a very different challenge: For it to carry out a nuclear attack, everything has to go right. For us to escape, only one thing has to go wrong. That has heartening implications. If Osama bin Laden embarks on the project, he has only a minuscule chance of seeing it bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, he probably won’t bother. None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen. (emphasis added)
It may be unlikely to happen. It may not happen, but recall two three things that are crucial pieces of the argument:
1. The enemy has stated that they want to cause mass casualties, and using a dirty or radiological bomb is one of their goals;
2. They have friends. Many of these friends would be willing to help them with various parts of this effort.
Oh, and 3. They are patient, persistent, and don’t use our risk and casualty “calculus” to decide on which missions to pursue.
If Osama wants to increase the tension in the West by attempting a nuclear or radiological attack on any of the West’s countries, the risks, potential costs, and likely death of the trigger pullers won’t cause him to flinch one bit.
Investors Business Daily wrote an editorial about the Archbishop of Canterbury. Their lead paragraph pretty much sums up their view:
The Archbishop’s Sharia Amour
Europe: Civilization took a low blow Thursday when a pillar of its values, the archbishop of Canterbury, decided that Islamic law is now “unavoidable” in the U.K. as a matter of progress and tolerance. He’s off the deep end.
How pathetic.
From Ace of Spades guest poster (chad?) via Cold Fury:
A suggestion to the GOP (chad)
Read the whole thing. Some of it might sound a little high brow - read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and some Frenchie’s ideas? But worth the effort.
Apparently, liberal politicians in Britain also view the disabled as less than worthy of support and help.
My belief is that there are children, born at those very early ages, who are not viable people. It would be in their best interests to have been aborted.
This from a member of the House of Lords.
A sane person (from the Society for the Protection of the Unborn) retorted:
“Baroness Meacher,” Smeaton said, “clearly considers that her own capacity and achievements in life put her right to life in a different category from the right to life owed to people with cerebral palsy - that she is ‘viable person’ but ‘they’ are not ‘viable people’.”
Apparently, baroness Meacher follows the same logic as our liberal party. If you are already here, you can’t be kicked out no matter what you have done. If you haven’t entered the festivities, you CAN be kept out.
For those who miss the logic, here’s P.J. O’Rourke’s take:
“…a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.”
Britain’s Molly Baroness Meacher: Severely Disabled Children “Not Viable People” (Wizbang)
of the condition of our society.
From BLACKFIVE: Anti-Military Lawyer In Court
I received more email - full of emotion and commitment - from Viet Nam vets that essentially said in various ways:
“We will not let what happened to us, happen to you, Marine.
The story has a positive ending (guilty plea, probation and donation in lieu of $600 restitution), but it’s still one of those that makes you grind your teeth.
The legal profession needs to go after these kind of people. They don’t do themselves any good letting this kind of slime keep a license.
A truck driver wouldn’t have a DWI while in a passenger car ignored by the state licensing authorities. Why should this criminal?
The Anchoress posts about the tolerance and open-mindedness of the Left.
Benny, Jonah, Jenna & Narratives - more hot links | The Anchoress
Leftist students and professors at La Sapienza in Italy have basically shouted down Pope Benedict VXI, who canceled his plans to talk there, rather than deal with them or give them more airtime. This tendency on the left to silence what they do not agree with is getting pretty troubling.
Benny, Jonah, Jenna & Narratives - more hot links | The Anchoress
When you can’t get the regular police to do the job.
This from a Pajamas Media post about Ezra Levant’s confrontation with Islamisists:
On the very day that the Western Standard with the infamous cartoons was being printed, Levant appeared on Calgary radio to debate Syed Soharwardy, an imam trained at an anti-Semitic Saudi university, who advocates Sharia law in Canada. The debate centered around the cartoons and all the accompanying shouldas, wouldas and couldas. Soharwardy did not know that Levant was about to publish the cartoons (a.k.a. offend Mohammed), but that did not matter. Levant was the clear winner in the debate and that offended Soharwardy, who marched down to a Calgary Police station and demanded that they arrest Levant for offending him during the debate and simply discussing the cartoons in the media.
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