That’s kids for ya
This sophomore MIT electrical engineering student is one crazy gal:
According to an MIT Web site, Simpson is from Kihei, Hawaii, and a sprinter on the school’s swim team. A personal website that purports to be hers includes this description: “In a sentence, I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student, I love to build things and I love crazy ideas.”
Like this one, for example: she shows up at Logan airport
wearing a board with nine lights over a hooded black sweatshirt, and carrying a putty substance that turned out to be Play-Doh, when she went to meet a friend at the airport at about 8:40 a.m., officials said.
Experts say she is lucky she wasn’t shot dead.
Israel, incoming!
We’ve found the WMDs … in Syria … surrounded by Iranian engineers, many of whom are now dead. Iran wasn’t kidding the other day when it said that its escalating investments in Syria were “strategic.”
Jane’s Defense Weekly said the July 26 explosion took place at the site of a joint Iranian- Syrian project to fit short-range ballistic missiles with chemical warheads. It cited Syrian defense sources as saying that fuel caught fire during a test to fit a Scud C missile with a mustard-gas warhead.
“The blast dispersed chemical agents across the storage facility and outside,” the publication quoted the sources as saying. The chemicals included VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent.
On the day of the explosion, Sana, Syria’s state news agency, said [lied, claimed, alleged, asserted?] the blast struck a military complex outside the city of Aleppo, killing at least 15 soldiers and wounding 50. The agency said the blast was caused by “the combustion of sensitive, highly explosive material caused by extremely high temperatures” at a military weapons depot.
Jane’s said that in addition to the 15 Syrian troops killed, “dozens” of Iranian weapons engineers died. It said the chemical weapons program was part of a strategic cooperation accord between Syria and Iran that was signed in November 2005.
But then, as the Left keeps telling us, Iran is not fomenting violence in Iraq and Syria does not present an immediate threat to Israel. I suppose it’s time to get Nancy Pelosi back out to Damascus in her hijab to see if she can leverage her botox smile and talk the off the ledge. Because it never hurts to talk …
[Note above that when the rogue Syrian regime announces what Janes Defense Weekly exposes as a lie –about chemical weapons, no less — the Syrian statement is “said.” But when a U.S. official announces that violence is down in Iraq, and no one offers any data to counter it, the U.S. statement is “claimed.”]
Germans compromised on Iran
Germany is a huge economic partner of Iran, and is struggling to respond to pressure to clamp down that relationship in sanctions against the Mullahs. Some are incredulous that a country with Germany’s past wouldn’t be more sensitive to the ethics of dealing with one that has Iran’s announced ambitions:
“Germans either can’t, or won’t, see the kinds of people with whom they are doing business,” said Nasrin Amirsedghi, an Iranian writer and critic of the Tehran regime, who distributed protest leaflets outside the meeting. “How can this country, with its history, ignore such things?”
Chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned Ahmadinejad, saying in a speech in February 2006, “A president that questions Israel’s right to exist, a president that denies the Holocaust, cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany. We have learned our history.”
But the human mind is almost infinitely malleable when self-interest is at stake. As long as there is a shred of shadow of ambiguity for German business men to hide behind, expect them to drag their feet.
Meanwhile, of course, China and Russia will flout the civilized world with glee.
Syria knocks off another one
It ain’t easy being an anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon. Not advisable. That’s the message Syria is sending, rather emphatically:
An anti-Syrian lawmaker who had just returned to Lebanon two days ago from refuge abroad was killed today along with six other people by a bomb that rocked a Christian neighborhood of the capital, security officials said.
Antoine Ghanem is the eighth prominent anti-Syrian figure to be assassinated since 2005.
Which explains why Nancy Pelosi visited Damascus, rather than Beruit. Much safer there.
We’ll take it
Middle East: Palestinian politics a “menopause”
Heh, with the Everyready Rabbit of terror running Gaza, we’ll take any pause we can get.
Isn’t this where we came in?
9/10 Democrats continue to downplay the risks of terror attacks while steadily seeking to back us into the same intelligence corner — think Gorelick and “The Wall” — that led to 9/11. After suffering buyer’s remorse from the approval of the FISA eavesdropping law this summer, hardcore Dems are trying to pull some it back. Meanwhile, the new U.S. intelligence chief wants even more:
While many Democrats angle to roll back what they consider the excesses of the new law, McConnell and Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L. Wainstein are pushing Congress to make even more changes to FISA.
Among the changes they seek is a new definition for “electronic surveillance.” Unlike a dictionary definition, the legal definition includes not just which technologies are used to conduct the surveillance, but also who is targeted, what communications are collected, where the target is and where the eavesdropping takes place. The definition is critical because it limits the government’s power. FISA generally requires court orders for any activity deemed to be “electronic surveillance.”
History will judge, but I suspect its long term judgment will favor more over less.
You don’t say?
Iran is going to invest heavily in Syria. They consider it a strategic relationship. Duh.
Teheran, 17 Sept. (AKI) - The Iranian authorities are to pump 10 billion dollars of fresh investments into Syria over the next five years, acting industry and mines minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian announced on his return from a three-day visit to the country.
“Our relations with Syria are strategic, and our economic presence there will be too,” Mehrabian said.
Iran > Syria > Lebanon > Gaza > Israel
Anyone for leapfrog?
Come again?
Prepare for war with Iran, France warns
France has caused anger in Iran and delight in Israel today with a hawkish statement saying that the world should be ready to go to war to stop Tehran getting nuclear weapons.Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said in a radio interview last night that if Iran got the bomb, the world would be in real danger, and that the current stand-off with the country’s Islamist regime was the greatest crisis of the time.
Negotiations should carry on until the last possible moment, said Mr Kouchner, in an interview with RTL radio.
But he went on: “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”
It’s a big duh to anyone without their head in the sand, but remarkable coming from France. Makes it all the more puzzling why Mitt should even have to bother about advocating the South Africa isolation treatment for Iran. Did anyone ever say “prepare for war with South Africa”?
Romney vs. Ahmadinejad
Mitt not only talks the talk. He walks the walk. As governor, he ordered state agencies, including police, not to provide any services to the former president of Iran when he visited as a “dignitary” at Harvard. Again, he’s getting tough on the creeps:
“If President Ahmadinejad sets foot in the United States, he should be handed an indictment under the Genocide Convention,” Romney added, reiterating his point. He also urged the U.N. to revoke any speaking invitation.
Romney routinely talks about the threat the United States faced from “radical jihadists,” and he has staked out a hard-line position against Iran in particular.
In January, he called for economic sanctions against the Central Asian nation “at least as severe” as those imposed on South Africa during its apartheid era, aiming to isolate the country and convince it to give up its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
What’s remarkable about what Romney is saying here is how unremarkable it ought to be. Here we have a country that fuels terror throughout the region. Indeed, it is the engine of terror, with it’s fingerprints all over Lebanon, Iraq and Gaza. It’s governing regime has publicly declared it’s intention to destroy the state of Israel, and is pursuing nuclear weapons with glee and abandon.
Yet it remains worthy of note when a presidential candidate suggests they should get the South Africa treatment from the civilized world?
Gotta love Mark Steyn
How is America responding to 9/11 six years later? Like the self-indulgent overgrown children we are, Mark Steyn writes:
And what of those for whom the events of six years ago were more than just conspiracy fodder? Last week The New York Times carried a story about the current state of the 9/11 law suits. Relatives of 42 of the dead are suing various parties for compensation, on the grounds that what happened that Tuesday morning should have been anticipated. The law firm Motley Rice, diversifying from its traditional lucrative class-action hunting grounds of tobacco, asbestos and lead paint, is promising to put on the witness stand everybody who “allowed the events of 9/11 to happen.” And they mean everybody — American Airlines, United, Boeing, the airport authorities, the security firms — everybody, that is, except the guys who did it.
According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one’s death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they’re after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they’ll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen. But that’s the American way: Almost every news story boils down to somebody standing in front of a microphone and announcing that he’s retained counsel. Last week, it was Larry Craig. Next week, it’ll be the survivors of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear test in Westchester County. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out, a legalistic culture invariably misses the forest for the trees. Senator Craig should know that what matters is not whether an artful lawyer can get him off on a technicality but whether the public thinks he trawls for anonymous sex in public bathrooms. Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child’s death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth.
You’ll see it only on channel 7
Lebanese medical student dressed in black with face black caught in a city park in Dearborn with a loaded AK47. It’s quickly learned that he has an extremist website pledging allegiance to Hezbollah. Sensationalist news media can’t leave it alone. It’s all over CNN and MSNBC and the morning news shows. Right? Uh, no.
With unintentional irony, this local news report emphasizes that you will only see this news on their station. How right they were. So far as we know, the story has been completely ignored in the national news media. Also note the curious observation at the end of the report, where the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan [aka Damascus-West] says he wanted to try to prevent people from making a connection between this incident and the anniversary of September 11.
Silence implies consent
Bet this latest from the Religion of Peace comes as a surprise:
The purported head of al-Qaeda in Iraq has offered a reward for the murder of a Swedish cartoonist over his drawing depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The $100,000 (£49,310) reward would be raised by 50% if Lars Vilks was “slaughtered like a lamb” said the audio message aired on the internet.
The speaker, said to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, threatened a new offensive during the holy month of Ramadan.Last month’s cartoon showed Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for all the “moderate” Muslims around the world to march in the streets chanting “not in our name” to dissociate themselves from this.
Supposedly II
I’ve noted before that reporters are paid to know the nuances of language, and I noted in particular an AP report in which convicted terrorist Jose Padilla was referred to as “supposed” rather than “alleged.” The same AP reporter appears to be on the beat again, this time regarding the anti-terror work by Michael Mukasey while a federal judge. This piece refers to Mukasey’s involvement in the Padilla case:
Mukasey also had a hand in one of the most hard-fought post-Sept. 11 terror cases: that of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in 2002 on a supposed mission to detonate a “dirty bomb.”
As I noted before, the proper neutral term in this case is “alleged,” or “allegedly.” A firm tilt toward favoring the accusation is “apparently,” and a firm tilt toward skepticism is “supposedly.”
You cannot use “supposedly” without casting editorial doubt on the veracity of the charge. I do not believe it is an accident that the AP keeps doing this. If it is an accident, they need to hire reporters better attuned to the nuances of language.
Al Qaeda doesn’t get it. Neither does the AP.
Once in awhile–say, 3 or 4 times a day–I come across a piece of dumb attack journalism so obviously biased and ignorant I want to puke. Here’s the AP in some weird little story without a byline — so it must be straight news, right? — apparently some kind of handy dandy sidebar.
The headline is “A look at Bush’s assertions about Iraq.” Note the objectivity, the respect, the shred of benefit of the doubt there? Neither did I. Then here’s the substance:
BUSH SAID:
“Anbar province is a good example of how our strategy is working,” Bush said, noting that just last year U.S. intelligence analysts had written off the Sunni area as “lost to al-Qaida.”
FACT CHECK:
Early Thursday, the most prominent figure in a U.S.-backed revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida in Iraq was killed by a bomb planted near his home.
It blathers a bit from there, but the clear implication is that this tragic assassination of the allied Sheik means that Al Qaeda just made some progress by knocking him off. That somehow their ability to kill one man negates all the good will generated in Anbar during the surge.
Memo to AP: the Sunnis turned against the terrorists precisely because of this kind of crap. Do you really think that more of the same is going to cower them now? Gee, doesn’t sound like it: Mourners seek revenge for death of Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi in Iraq
More than 1,500 mourners marched along the highway near the home of Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, who was killed along with two bodyguards and a driver Thursday by a bomb hidden near his house just west of Ramadi.Scores of Iraqi police officers and U.S. military vehicles lined the route to protect the procession as it followed the black sports utility vehicle carrying the coffin of Sattar, 35, who was also known as Abu Risha.
“We will take our revenge,” the mourners chanted along the 10 kilometer, or six mile, route to Sattar’s family cemetery, many of them crying. “We will continue the march of Abu Risha.”
I don’t think the Al Qaeda SOBs will be smirking about this one for long. But don’t expect the AP smirkers to know the difference.
Krauthammer: Al Qaeda in Iraq IS Al Qaeda
Great column here by Krauthammer slicing many key points with his cold psychiatric scalpel. Key take away for me: the canard that Iraq is not about terror and Al Qaeda has got to go:
Having poisoned one country and been expelled from it (Afghanistan), al-Qaeda seized upon post-Hussein instability to establish itself in the very heart of the Arab Middle East — Sunni Iraq. Yet now, in front of all the world, Iraq’s Sunnis are, to use the biblical phrase, vomiting out al-Qaeda. This is a defeat and humiliation in the extreme — an Arab Muslim population rejecting al-Qaeda so violently that it allies itself in battle with the infidel, the foreigner, the occupier.
Anti-war dems [like that laughable lightweight Obama] hammer, hammer and hammer on the notion that because Iraq was not a center for Al Qaeda in 2003 that the battle in Iraq today is not war on terror.
They are still fighting and refighting the decision to go into Iraq. And they are so intent on finally winning that battle, they categorically refuse to recognize facts on the ground. It’s a psychopathology that calls for a psychiatrist. Fortunately, Krauthammer is in the house.
Iran’s meddling in Iraq: substance vs. symbol
The substance, as anyone watching carefully has known for many months, is that Iran is meddling heavily in Iraq, intent on undermining our mission there. General Petraeus confirms that in striking testimony:
“The evidence is very, very clear,” Petraeus said. He cited documents discovered during the capture in March of Qais Khazali, a Shiite Muslim militant with ties to the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the arrest of a deputy commander of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group supported by Iran. Petraeus said the evidence links Iran to an attack in Karbala in January that resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.
Under interrogation, Khazali was asked if he could have carried out that attack without Iranian support, Petraeus said in the news conference. “He literally throws up his hands and laughs and says, ‘Of course not,’ ” the general said.
The symbol, for the rabid anti-war left, is that Iran cannot be meddling in Iraq, because if they were it would serve as a rationale for U.S. action against Iran and that cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed. So in their tail-wagging-dog logic, they simply stipulate away the uncomfortable and obvious facts.
Are we at an impasse with Pakistan?
New poll out shows that a majority of Paks object to Americans hunting for terrorists in their country. [I didn’t see the polls internals, so I can’t tell you what percentage of those responding are, themselves, terrorists.]
Haven’t checked lately, but I’m betting most Americans object to Pakistan harboring terrorists who are preparing to kill us. Just one of our little preoccupations.
So we’re at an impasse. Reminds me of the classic exchange in Pirates of Penzance:
Gen. Stanley: I object to pirates as sons-in-law!
Pirate King: Well, we object to major generals as fathers-in law! But we waive the point. We do not press it. We look over it.
Hyperbolic demagogues, left and right
The difference between our hyperbolic freaks (Ann Coulter) and the Left’s is that their’s sit front and center at CNN (Keith Olbermann), and no one every breathes a word regarding their gross and routine excesses. Read and ponder the following deep thought from Olbermann:
Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda — worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.
I think that many African-Americans might take umbrage at this casual effort to re-legitimate the KKK. As might many of the 9/11 families object to his demoting in the pantheon of evil the man who murdered 3,000 Americans.
But Olbermann does us a favor, of sorts, to tip his hand so heavily. He obviously thinks that expressing views contrary to his is a more serious threat to the country than the machinations of murderers who would behead any one of us if given the chance.
How does one begin to respond to such sophomoric excess?
Bin laden press conference
Jules Crittendon has the transcript from the bin Laden press conference, which followed the successful release of his video last week. It’s nice to know that they deal with a cynical and hostile press corps on their side as well. Here’s an excerpt:
Achmed, improvised explosive affairs correspondent, BBC (Baquba Bomb Corp.):
Mr. Sheikh, it is now six years since the blessed events of Sept. 11, and yet, within the borders of the Great Satan, we have seen no follow-on attacks. In fact, even in our vassal states of al-Britainiyah and al-Alemaniyah, we see only evidence of bumbling, ineptness, stupidity. Is it not true that you embarked upon jihad without a plan, and with insufficient mujahideen?
SIC:
Thank you, Achmed, that’s a good question, and I’d just like to say that no one expected the infidels, traditionally soft and weak like women, to resist in the manner they have, invading Muslim lands. But jihad is hard. It’s very hard. It’s also difficult and not easy, Achmed. That is why I have developed this new strategy. ”The Beard of the Prophet.” What do you think, does it look good?
Why does bin Laden sound like a kos kid?
I know this is tendentious to point out, but every time bin Laden emerges from his cave, he immediately starts reading talking points that sound, shall we say, like they were generated by the left wing of the Democratic party:
A videotape addressed to the American people apparently recorded in recent months by Osama bin Laden on Friday appeared on the internet, criticising Democrats for not stopping the war in Iraq, attacking the White House for not observing the Kyoto accord and suggesting the US could soon suffer the fate of the Soviet Union.
Easy for you to say Osama, since your carbon footprint in your cave must be pretty small.
One talking point notably missing is criticism of Republicans for their harsh immigration rhetoric. Given that the 9/11 hijackers made ample use of our lax immigration enforcement, this has to be a matter of concern to him.
Oh, and so far he has refused to read the one about the Republicans being hateful homophobes.
