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May 14, 2010
Posted by seamus in: Accountability, Advice, African-American, Commentary, Comments & Discussion, Communications, Congress, Creative Writing, Current Events, Democracy, Democrat, Economics, Entertainment, Freedom, Governance, Homeland Security, Inspiration & Motivation, Islam, Journalism, Life Experiences, Minorities, Morality, Motivation, Opinion, Personal Experiences, Politics, Republican, Social Aspects, Social Classes, Social Issues, Terrorism, The Economy, The Media, The Pundit's Corner, World Issues
 Amazing how many high government officals (including the Attorney General), political pundits, politicians, school officials and religious leaders comment so harshly on the immigration law in Arizona and publicly admit they haven’t read the ten page document.
The document basically states that when being stopped for a traffic violation or questioned concerning a crime that [...]
March 7, 2010
By Alan Caruba
The news on Sunday, March 7th, is that Adam Gadahn, an American who became a Muslim and then joined al Qaeda, was arrested in Pakistan by intelligence officers and the only question I have is how long will it take to ship his sorry ass back to the land of the free and the home of the brave?
This poor excuse for a human being grew up on a goat farm in Riverside County, California, converted to Islam at a nearby mosque, and found his purpose in life with the enemies of his country and, for that matter, every country. Even the Pakistanis are not keen on al Qaeda and the Taliban.
If he stays in the Middle East, the chances of his being rescued by his al Qaeda buddies or that a sizeable enough bribe will leave his cell door unlocked escalate with each day. A bunch of these jihadists were broken loose from a prison in Yemen. It apparently was constructed from sponge cake and marshmallows.
If returned to the U.S., Gadahn, age 31, should be put before a military tribunal as an enemy combatant, tried, and then taken out to face a firing squad. This is the way the U.S. used to deal with traitors, but we have become so feminized that some will surely cry out that it is cruel and unusual punishment. There is, however, nothing unusual about it. Continue reading American Al Qaeda is Captured
January 5, 2010
By Alan Caruba
The failed Christmas bomber attack was yet another wake-up call for Americans who have slipped into a self-induced coma regarding Islam’s constant threat to the nation and the West.
Despite the post-9/11 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush and now President Obama have both repeatedly asserted the absurd notion that Islam is “a religion of peace.” It is, in fact, a religion of conquest and one in which the religion and the state are one. To live in a Muslim nation is to live under Sharia law in which conversion to another religion is punished by death.
“When Asia Was the World” by Stewart Gordon is an interesting book about life in Asia during the years 500 to 1500 of the Common Era. “Buddhism and Islam arose and spread along Asia’s far-flung trade routes. So did luxury goods, such as silk, pearls, spices, medicines, glass, and simple things like rice and sugar.” Continue reading Islam’s Legacy is Constant War
January 1, 2010
By Alan Caruba
The simple fact of the matter is that the only reason the Christmas Delta flight was not blown out of the sky with a powerful explosive was that the detonator didn’t work. Does it strike anyone as ironic that, according to government officials, the “answer” to airline safety is more and better technology?
El Al, the Israeli airline has never had a terrorist incident and that is because they actually profile the heck out of everyone who wants to fly with them. Blond, blue-eyed, Scandinavian? They want to know why you’re going to a particular destination, how long you intend to be there? Do you have family or friends there? And you had better have all your visas and passports in proper order. You may be a member of the Master Race, but you better have some damned good answers.
In America, it’s now routine for passenger to have to show up a day in advance, sleep on the terminal floor, take off your shoes and all the rest of your clothes, submit to an anal cavity search, and not bring anything as dangerous as a nail-clipper with you. No liquids unless they are less than three ounces and in a zip-closed plastic bag. None of this makes anyone the slightest bit safer except the morons at the TSA that came up with these rules. Continue reading New Rules for Air Travel
December 2, 2009
Posted by Alan Caruba in: Accountability, Commentary, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Governance, Homeland Security, Islam, Military, Opinion, Politics
By Alan Caruba
As I listened to the President address the nation from West Point, I was reminded of how well he can deliver a speech. It’s like watching a slight-of-hand magician. You marvel at his dexterity, but you know he’s still skillfully fooling you.
The speech, given in the Eisenhower auditorium at West Point, reminded me of President Eisenhower, the former general who led allied forces to victory in Europe in World War Two, the man called back to serve his nation, and a man who was hard on the ears when it came to delivering a speech. It made him more human. We forgave him his blunt manner. After all, he had spent his whole adult life in the U.S. Army, taking and giving orders.
Similarly President Bush never seemed all that comfortable giving a set speech, but you knew he meant what he said. You knew he hated the evil of al Qaeda and the Taliban. You knew he despised Saddam Hussein and other enemies of America, of freedom, and human dignity. He was not smooth, not articulate, but he was genuine.
Barack Hussein Obama never spent a day in uniform and something in the area of two years out of six of his first term in the Senate before being launched on the nation as its savior, its messiah. I always found the references to spiritual powers jarring though, like most, amusing in their over-reach. Obama did nothing to discourage the image.
His West Point speech was primarily political. The military elements revealed a get-in and get-out strategy in what has already been a long engagement of the U.S. military in the Middle East. It was filled with talk of NATO partners, Afghani partners, and Pakistani partners, but it also told the enemy that, if they were just patient enough, the U.S. would leave. Continue reading The Open-Ended War
November 29, 2009
By Alan Caruba
When President Obama delivers a speech on why he is going to send more thousands of U.S. troops and spend more billions on the eight-year-old conflict in Afghanistan, it would be a good idea to better understand why so much of what is reported from the Middle East suffers a great disconnect from the truth.
In 1998, Joris Luyendijk , a Dutch student who had studied Arabic at Cairo University for a year, was offered a job as a Middle East correspondent for a Dutch news agency despite having no experience as a reporter. What followed was his real education about the Middle East and the way it is presented to the West by the news media.
His book about that experience, “People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East” was initially published in the Netherlands in 2006 and has since then it has been translated and published in Hungary, Italy, Denmark and Germany. In October an English edition was published by Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint, a Berkeley, California publisher.
Having begun my career as a journalist, I was interested to learn what Luyendijk had taken from his years hopping around the Middle East before and after 9/11 and during the two Iraq wars waged by the U.S. to resolve a problem called Saddam Hussein.
For anyone digesting the news from his morning newspaper or watching it on television, suspecting that it might be biased or wrong, this book that focuses on reporting from the Middle East is a revelation because Luyendijk strives mightily to expose the way the news is manipulated by all the parties involved. Continue reading The Middle East: Reporting an Enigma
November 16, 2009
Stephen Sangirardi The Dream Bard715@aol.com
The other night I had a vivid and disturbing dream. I was the muezzin in a Moslem country, atop the tower of a minaret, giving notice to those below that it was time to worship. But I was ignored. I cried, I moaned, I bellowed, I cajoled, I practically executed a dithyramb, and seriously considered boxing the Jesuit in an Islamic land. All to no avail. Those below gave me a passing glance, as though vaguely reminded of something they were meant to do, before ignoring me and walking on, and I could not understand the direction of their feet. Again I cried, moaned, bellowed, cajoled, and this time did perform my dithyramb with the passion of a dervish. I balanced myself along the edge of the minaret while I chanted, perhaps reminding a Buddhist or two in the crowd of the many-limbed Shiva. Still no one headed for the mosque, but opted instead for the marketing, haggling, gaming, hashish-smoking, pimping, and whoring there in the dust below.
It is embarrassing, even Kafkaesque, to be the muezzin no one listens to. One is apt to get a complex and accept his pay with remorse. I threatened to pour down the wrath of Allah, but no seemed to care. I found myself, curiously enough, speaking in English, and apparently that was the language of the land because the signs and billboards along the street and in the square reeked of late-nineties American commercial lingo: words like ‘rebate’ and ‘Bud Light’ and ‘Drive a Ford Escort Today’ and even a ‘Nobody Beats the Wiz’ display. (We all know how dreams are.) I simply knew I was being understood; that was also obvious from the scornful glance that now and then came my way. A costermonger even threw a rotten apple at me, and were it not for the lack of strength in his arm, my face would have been smeared with fruit. Continue reading The Dream
November 8, 2009
Posted by Tim Roux in: African-American, China, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, History, Homeland Security, Islam, Journalism, Latino & Hispanic, Military, Morality, Politics, Religion, Republican, Sociology, Terrorism, Women's Rights
In Britain it is now a criminal offence to make any statement which might incite racial hatred. So, if you go around saying that all Irishmen are stupid or all Welshmen are thieves, then you may well find yourself helping the police with their enquiries and facing a sharp fine or even a term of imprisonment.
Some commentators consider this law to be draconian but it does take a clear political stance and one thing I have learnt over my lifetime is that nearly all racism is neither random nor ‘naturally’ grassroots-derived but rather politically or economically motivated, indeed directed.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, black Africans were slaves or treated as slaves. They were shackled, they died in transit under inhuman conditions, they were worked to death, they were unpaid. How do you justify treating a fellow human being this way? How can it be possible even legally to rape and execute black Africans at whim?
There was a simple answer. Black Africans were not human, they were sub-human. Indeed, they hailed from another, lesser, branch of the human family altogether. And there was no shortage of commentators and pseudo-scientists who popped up to argue that black Africans were so bestial that they were really no different from a cow or a horse, that they were incapable of moral understanding (probably the most obscene argument in history), that they were beyond civilisation and, yes, if you measured their brains they were smaller and lighter than a white man’s. Continue reading Should there be a law against it?
October 16, 2009
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse in: Commentary, Comments & Discussion, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Freedom, Geopolitical Events, Heroes, History, Homeland Security, Islam, Military, Morality, Opinion, Religion, Terrorism, The Pundit's Corner
War
During America’s brutal and bloody Civil War, General William T. Sherman said, “War is cruel and you cannot refine it” and “war at best is barbarism.” Sherman is also credited with saying “War is hell.”
Alexander the Great was known to be both a wise philosopher and a fearless conqueror. In the fall of 335 BC, Alexander marched to the gates of Thebes (a Greek city that broke free from his Macedonian empire when Alexander was twenty). He let the people of Thebes know that it was not too late for them to change their minds. The next day, the Macedonians stormed the city killing almost everyone in sight, women and children included. They plundered, sacked, burned and razed Thebes, as an example to the rest of Greece. Alexander did not fight a “refined” war where women and children were spared.
After Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, he ran into trouble in Afghanistan and used the same tactics to quell the rebellious Afghans.
Genghis Khan (1165-1227 AD) was one of history’s more charismatic and dynamic leaders. During his lifetime, he conquered more territory than any other conqueror, and his successors established the largest empire in history. As an organizational and strategic genius, Genghis Khan created one of the most highly disciplined and effective armies known, and this same genius gave birth to the administration that ruled that empire. After he died in 1227, the Mongol armies dominated the battlefield until the empire stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic Sea. Genghis Khan, like Alexander, spared no one when he met resistance. When people surrendered, he was benevolent. When they resisted, his armies slaughtered everyone like Alexander’s armies did. Continue reading War
October 9, 2009
 Well, well, well. I can certainly imagine why so many media pundits and regular Americans are surprised that their president won the Nobel peace prize. They don’t watch the world news much, and our own American media doesn’t give much thought to events that happen to the rest of the Earth’s 6 billions.
Many of us hardly noticed the chain of events that led up to this well deserved honor. People in Europe are not surprised, people in the middle east aren’t either, I don’t suppose even China’s billion are surprised. That’s because he deserved it. It’s as simple as that. Barrack Obama made a campaign promise “to change the face of America” the one the rest of the world sees, and he has.
Instead of the big bully and policeman of the planet, we have suddenly gained the pleasant light of being a kinder friendlier country. How much better is that for some european who wakes up every morning to news of yet another American demand or exercise of power? Many people in the world of almost 7 billion wonder why a single country of 300 million feel they rule the planet. Continue reading Bravo! Mr. President!
September 23, 2009
Posted by Muhammad Cohen in: Current Events, Environment, Environmental Issues, Faith, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Geopolitical Events, Global Warming, Islam, Opinion, The Economy, The Pundit's Corner
The spirit of this holy season for Muslims and Jews, rather than the angry rhetoric of religious zealots on both sides, could help bring peace to the Middle East. [...]
September 20, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
Iran has been at war with the United States for thirty years.
When one’s life spans time from the beginning of World War Two, the decades of the Cold War, and the emergence of rogue regimes in Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Iraq and Iran, you develop an instinct for spotting the enemies of freedom. Russia and China never leave the radar screen.
Following World War Two, America entered into a long period called the Cold War and the stakes could not have been higher. It would last from 1945 until 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We had entered the “Atomic age.” Though the threat was great, no one believed that the leaders of the Soviet Union were ever crazy enough to actually use nuclear weapons. The strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction worked for both adversaries and still does, but that is not the case with Iran.
From the earliest days of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, its leaders were determined to acquire nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them. From the beginning, America was always identified as Iran’s greatest enemy, the “Great Satan”, while Israel was called the “Little Satan.”
It is criminally stupid, if not insane, to believe that Iran will not use its nuclear weapons. Continue reading At War with Iran for Thirty Years
September 16, 2009
In 2003, when President Bush took the U.S. into a war with Iraq, he claimed it was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” Well, obviously there were no WMDs. It’s questionable how “free” the Iraqi people are today, let alone whether or not we Americans have the right to determine what “freedom” should mean to citizens of another nation. However, it’s clear that terrorism is alive and well, regardless of who may be supporting it.
According to the United States Law Code, the term terrorism means “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents”. By that definition, what the U.S., Britain, et al., did in Iraq was war. Now, of course, the American public knows that war really WAS about oil, not to mention some family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. Now that the Iraq hoax has been exposed, President Obama is shifting our focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, where the “real” jihad-minded, terrorism-inflicting, Muslim fanatics live (and hopefully will soon die).
How many lives, how many trillions of dollars must our country sacrifice for wars against entire countries, when we fully realize that the billions of average Muslims are no more teeth-gnashing fanatics than the garden variety Christian? There are some pretty fanatical Christian groups right here at home, you know. Continue reading Using terrorism against terrorists
September 14, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
It is one of those coincidences that is, at the same time, so odd and so apt that it requires analysis.
Both Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda and Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events, have come to the same conclusion about President Barack Hussein Obama and virtually on the same day.
When two such disparate individuals, separated by half a globe, conclude that Obama has rendered himself “powerless”—bin Laden’s word and “weakened”—Babbin’s description, you have to take notice.
Commenting two days after the 9/11 anniversary, bin Laden redundantly blamed America’s relationship with Israel for attacks and promised that “all we will do is continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes,” during an 11-minute video that showed a still photo with a voice-over.
Babbin calls Obama “the incredibly shrinking president”, who has become weakened in his first eight months in office by domestic objectives to the point that he has taken his eye off the ball when it comes to international threats “at least as old as bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa of war against the United States.” Continue reading Obama’s Weakness
September 12, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
In my pre-9/11 commentary, “9/11 Eight Years Later and No Safer”, I took brief notice that the role of the Central Intelligence Agency to gather intelligence in order to avoid other terrorist attacks has been greatly circumscribed since the days when its operatives swiftly arrived in Afghanistan and organized its northern tribes to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda.
As Dr. Walid Phares recently wrote in “Seven Years of War, One Year of Retreat”, the nation’s failure to identify the enemy, Arab jihadism, includes apologies to Muslims, many of whom celebrated 9/11. “In no conflict throughout history were people still confused about the threat eight years after hostilities began,” wrote Dr. Phares. His concern is that “the bureaucratic machine didn’t fight this war; in fact it pushed to fail and eventually crumble.”
There is a raging debate in America today about how much bureaucracy we want to endure at the federal and other levels. The Founding Fathers wanted the least amount of government interference or intrusion into our lives, but enough government to defend us.
In 2008, “Homeland Insecurity” was published by the History Publishing Company. Its authors were Terry D. Turchie and Kathleen M. Puckett, Ph.D. Both had long careers in the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the former having been Deputy Assistant Director of Counterterrorism and the latter as a Special Agent focused on cases involving foreign counterintelligence and domestic and international terrorism. Continue reading Less Safe Than You May Think
September 11, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
9/11/2009 took a large psychic toll on Americans.
I am no exception. By early evening, I found myself profoundly angry watching the Mayor of New York explain why Ground Zero is still essentially a hole in the ground eight years after the destruction of the Twin Towers.
This nation fought and won World War Two in four years’ time and in two separate theatres of war in the Pacific and in Europe. By the time it was over, the major cities of Germany and Japan were rubble and both armies and civilians were among the dead because the only way to convince an enemy to stop waging war is to destroy their will to continue.
History tells us this over and over again. It is the reason the Romans laid siege to Masada.
We have been in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. What we’ve been doing there is more a police action than a war.
That’s why the Korean War is officially called a United Nations police action, not a war. We settled for a stalemate. Continue reading The Disgrace of Ground Zero
September 10, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
As one drove into New York from New Jersey in the years before 9/11, there was an ellipse of roadway that gently curved into the waiting entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel. From there you could see the Twin Towers in the distance, across the river, dominating the lower end of Manhattan.
It bespoke the nation’s economic strength, its international outreach, its capacity to build two such impressive skyscrapers, made more so by their architectural simplicity. They gleamed in the rays of the Sun. They mirrored the silver Moon.
I had occasion to dine in Windows on the World restaurant several times, high atop one of the towers. A wall of windows ringed the restaurant and one could look at New Jersey on one side and Brooklyn on the other. A walk around that restaurant took in all the boroughs from that great height and there, down in the vast harbor, one could see the Statue of Liberty. So high up were you that it seemed a small thing from that distance.
If I wanted to strike at America’s confidence, America’s bravado, America’s dominance, I would have destroyed the Twin Towers and, of course, that is exactly what Osama bin Laden did. Continue reading Surrender is Not an Option
September 10, 2009
By Alan Caruba
Has it been eight years?
What I learned from 9/11 was that a lot of Americans have concluded that it was America’s fault we were attacked. That may sound screwy to people who correctly believe that al Qaeda planned, funded and provided the men who carried out the attacks, but why deal with the facts when conspiracies are so much more fun? Why not just blame the victims?
9/11 was not the first attack on the Twin Towers. For those with any attention span, the first attack came in 1993 and was treated as a criminal act by a “gang who couldn’t shoot straight” Muslims, one of whom actually returned to the rental agency to get his money back because the truck used in the attack was destroyed.
Here’s where we are eight years later. As far as the government is concerned, it has learned NOTHING from the event and the subsequent efforts to kill the Taliban and al Qaeda lunatics who were operating in Afghanistan and badlands of Pakistan.
Not only are we still in Afghanistan, not only have we blandished billions on “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well on Pakistan, but the Obama Justice Department thinks the CIA interrogators are the bad guys and wants to extend Miranda rights, the full protection of the U.S. Constitution, to terrorists. Continue reading 9/11 Eight Years Later and No Safer
September 9, 2009
By Alan Caruba
As we approach the eighth anniversary of 9/11, it would serve this nation well if all of us would also remember:
#The Muslim bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, 1983
#The Muslim seizure of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murder of an American citizen, 1985
#The Muslim bombing, in 1986, of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen
#The Muslim bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993
#The Muslim firefight with American troops in Somalia, 1993, “Blackhawk Down”
# The Muslim bombing of Pan Am Flight 1031 in 1996
#The Muslim bombing of the U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia, 1996 Continue reading Muslim Memories
September 7, 2009
Posted by Muhammad Cohen in: China, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Geopolitical Events, Islam, Journalism, Minorities, Opinion, Politics, Television, Terrorism, The Media, The Pundit's Corner
China allows international reporting on Uighur unrest because it suits China’s interests. [...]
September 6, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
In November 2008, I wrote of Afghanistan, “Having lived through the long years of the war in Vietnam, I can tell you that Afghanistan looks and smells like Vietnam. It is the classic wrong war in the wrong place.”
I still think the U.S. should leave. I don’t like having to pack up and abandon Afghanistan to its fate, but Afghanistan’s fate has been fought over for centuries and, in the modern era, it has defied any invasion or intrusion into its affairs.
It is in a very bad neighborhood that includes Russia, Iran, and the worst basket case of all, Pakistan. The Afghans and Pakistanis mutually despise each other.
When someone like Adm. Mike Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the situation in Afghanistan has been “deteriorating” over the past few years and that the “Taliban insurgency has gotten more sophisticated”, as he did on August 23, you better pay attention. Continue reading The Afghanistan Quagmire
August 24, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
I don’t pretend to be an expert on Arabs, Arab culture, or Arab history, but I do know a bit about our own as Americans. And that worries me.
While our American values are deep-seated and enduring, our short-term memories are such that we have to be severely provoked to call on them. We tend to forget the many attacks and abuses Americans have suffered at home and abroad at the hands of Arabs and others of the Muslim faith.
I was thinking about this while watching Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, greet the returning “hero” of the Lockerbie bombing that, in December 1988, killed all 259 passengers on board, many of whom were returning college students and eleven on the ground in Scotland. A large crowd showed up to cheer for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.
As this is being written, all across the Arab world, this acknowledged Libyan intelligence officer is being portrayed as an innocent victim of the Lockerbie bombing; someone wrongly convicted of being part of the plot. That’s what the Arab press is saying. There is virtually no crime an Arab commits that cannot be explained away so long as it involves revenge for one of their long-standing grievances.
My mind went back to the images of the Palestinians who went in the streets when they heard news of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They, too, cheered. Continue reading Our Short-Term Memories
August 23, 2009
 The Foundation of Chinese Morality
by Lloyd Lofthouse
They say ignorance is bliss. If that is correct than there are many people outside of China that are very happy with their ignorance concerning Chinese culture.
I always find it interesting when the Western media talks about how Communist China prevents or represses freedom of religion as if that were unique to today’s China. The truth is, China has a history of intolerance toward God based religions that tend, by their nature, to interfere with Chinese culture and family based morality.
Religions like Buddhism, that are not as aggressive as Christianity or Islam, tend to do better, which explains why Buddhism is the dominant religion in China today.
Buddhist and Taoist influence on art and poetry have been powerful and entered mainstream Chinese tradition thousands of years ago.
Estimates say that about one hundred million Chinese follow Buddhism while the second largest religion is Taoism. Millions of followers of Islam live in the northwest. Christians claim to be the fastest growing religion, but there are no facts to support this. On the other hand, a recent survey found that eight hundred million Chinese say they belong to no religion. That does not mean that these Chinese have no morality.
There is evidence that Christian and Islamic influence goes back to the third century A.D. Even so, China has never had an organized religion dominating the culture as religions have in Western and Middle Eastern countries. Continue reading The Foundation of Chinese Morality
August 15, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
Referring to a 1990 report in The Economist, the editors recently said, “To revisit the Arab world two decades later is to find that in many ways history continues to pass the Arabs by. Freedom? The Arabs are ruled now, as they were then, by a cartel of authoritarian regimes practiced in the arts of oppression.”
The central problem affecting the Middle East and much of northern Africa where Arabs rule is Islam. The Islam of the Middle East is utterly resistant to change. Not all of the world’s billion-plus Muslims practice Islam with the same intensity as many Arabs do (and we should note, as Iran’s Persians have pursued since their revolution in 1979.)
Trying to understand Arabs is like trying to find one’s way out of one of those cornfield mazes where most turns lead to a dead end. In a recent analysis by Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post the lament was familiar. It referred to a meeting in Khartoum after the loss of the 1967 war on Israel in which the participants agreed to the “Three No’s”; no to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, and no to negotiations with Israel.
Reflecting the observations of The Economist, Keinon wrote that Syria still regards its loss of the Golan Heights and its demand for its return as “non-negotiable.” Add to that a meeting of Fatah rejected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s call for a Palestinian recognition of Israel. This reflects the position of Hamas as well. And, finally, at a recent event at the U.S. State Department Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that Israel could forget about any confidence-building measures from that nation.
In starkest terms, the Obama administration efforts to “re-set” its relations with the Middle East have hit the same brick wall that all previous administrations encountered. You cannot negotiate with people who have no intention to negotiate. The Israelis cannot find a partner for negotiations with the Palestinians because Fatah and Hamas would far prefer to kill one another than sit down together.
Continue reading The Middle East Maze
August 11, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
According to the August 6 DEBKAfile, the three American hostages that Iran is now holding are all likely to be declared “Israeli spies” and put on trial as such. That’s a hanging offense.
Frankly, my first thought was this: How STUPID do you have to be (a) American, (b) Jewish, and (c) hiking along an unidentified area close to the border or possibly in Iran?
My second thought was: Since all three have writing credits with legitimate publications, might they, like the two Chinese-American girls, also be considered “journalists”? And, if so, is there a private plane warming up to send former President Clinton to do some official or unofficial groveling on behalf of the greatest superpower in the world?
That’s not going to happen. Continue reading Hostage Taking — Part Two
July 22, 2009
By Alan Caruba
When candidate Obama was courting the “Jewish vote” he donned a yarmulke, went to the Wailing Wall in Israel, and said all the right things. He needn’t have bothered because the American Jewish community, estimated to be approximately 5.5 million, was largely in his pocket. They have voted overwhelmingly Democrat since the days of FDR.
This is, if you think about it, fairly astonishing because his middle name is Hussein, his birth father was a Muslim, and so was his Indonesian step-father who reportedly would take him on occasion to the mosque. It is even more astonishing because he was a member for twenty years in a church whose pastor was close friends with the notorious anti-Semite, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.
Any American Jew paying any attention should surely have harbored some doubts and, six months into his presidency, a lot of American Jews are asking themselves what they were thinking when they voted for Obama.
In an article in The Jerusalem Post, Anne Bayefsky wrote, “President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American President in the history of the state of Israel.” Continue reading Obama Shows His Muslim Hand
July 19, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
I recently read an interesting book by Christopher Kelly, “The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and The Fall of Rome.” Our popular image of Attila is that of a barbaric pagan, but Priscus of Panium set off to meet Attila in 449 AD and, as Kelly relates, “Attila turned out to be surprisingly civilized and a dangerously shrewd player of international politics.”
It’s always a good idea to review one’s assumptions about the world in which one lives, such as the current politically correct view that Islam is “a religion of peace” and that the barbarity of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Arab groups is an anomaly, the result of their incorrect interpretation of the Koran. Their interpretation, however, is quite accurate and the Koran is a call to arms and battle plan for the conquest of the world.
From America’s earliest years, it has had to deal with marauding Arabs and in modern times we have put our troops in harm’s way in the Middle East in Beirut in the 1980s and to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait in August 1990.
Following 9/11 we returned in 2001 to drive Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. They took refuge in the frontier provinces of Pakistan and have since returned to the killing fields of our choosing…if killing one’s sworn enemies can be called a choice. Continue reading How Empires Die
July 7, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
Bit by bit the news is getting out. First it was a news report of Israelis, Egyptians, and Saudis getting together to discuss their mutual interests and concern. In other words, Iran!
Now The Times (UK) is reporting that “The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.”
This was followed by news of an ABC News interview with Vice President Biden who said, “Look, Israel can determine for itself—it’s a sovereign nation—what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else, whether we agree or not.”
Translation: We hope they will bomb the heck out of Iran’s nuclear facilities because we do not have the guts to do it ourselves. The President then said Biden had misspoken and that no “green light” had been given. Apparently, it’s okay to “meddle” in Israel’s internal affairs, but not Iran’s.
The least likely partners in the Middle East are Israel and the Saudis, but both have a common enemy and the Saudis have always been shrewd in their judgment as to whom to back in a fight. They also prefer having others do their fighting for them. Unless you haven’t checked lately, Saudi Arabia shares a very long border with Iraq and is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, along with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Continue reading The Saudis Choose Sides
June 28, 2009
By Alan Caruba
In the more than four decades of the Cold War following World War Two, a cadre of specialists called “Kremlinologists”, academics, diplomats, and military, developed for the purpose of figuring out what the Soviet Union was doing and how best to counteract it. As often as not, they were wrong. The fall of the Berlin War came as a surprise to them, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now we are watching the same thing occur as various “experts” struggle to tell us what is happening in Iran and why.
What I really want to know is why the President of the United States thought it best not to “meddle” with a nation that had taken American diplomats hostage for 444 days, was funding two Middle East terrorists organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas, and striving mightily to become a nuclear power with which to threaten their region and the world.
President Obama’s muted and belated response to the protests in the streets of Tehran by thousands of Iranians was a national and international disgrace. If America will not speak out boldly for liberty and support a popular uprising for democracy, who will?
Continue reading Iran’s Mullahs Threaten the World
June 23, 2009
 By Alan Caruba There are ample reasons why the predominantly young population of Iran has risen up to denounce “the Dictator” otherwise known as the “Supreme Leader”, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his thuggish, incompetent regime.
The one, though, that the Obama administration and the whole of the nation’s mainstream media have overlooked or ignored is the fact that Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, is a functioning democratic state that has held elections safely and without strife for some time now.
Iraq’s citizens, who suffered grievously for three decades under the rule of Saddam Hussein, have now joined much of the rest of the world by virtue of George W. Bush’s conscious decision to transform that nation and, by extension, the Middle East by force of arms. Continue reading The Democracy Next Door to Iran
June 21, 2009
 By Alan Caruba John F. Kennedy, standing in front of the Berlin Wall, said “Ich bin en Berliner” to declare his solidarity with Western Germany, divided from its eastern half by the compromises with the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Ronald Reagan would later demand, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” as well as declare his solidarity with the Polish people seeking to free themselves from Soviet domination.
I have heard two versions of what President Obama has done in response to the Iranian uprising. One says that he was right to keep a low profile so that the United States would not be blamed for the rebellion against the tyrannical ayatollahs. This, it’s said provides “deniability” in the event the regime successfully puts down the rebellion. The other version says he should be outspoken in his support for the Iranian people.
History will decide whether President Obama has chosen the right course of action, but we know he has already made major efforts to reach out to the “Supreme Leader” and his mullah cronies. Death to the U.S. and Israel has always been the rallying call for the thirty-year-old Islamic revolution. We are the external enemies by which the mullahs assert their right to run Iran. At the same time, by distancing himself from the Israelis, President Obama has let the whole of the Middle East know he has cast his vote for Islam. Continue reading From Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama: A Horror Story
June 19, 2009
 By Alan Caruba
It sometimes seems like we have been reading and hearing about turmoil in the Middle East for our entire lives, but the facts are otherwise. For most of the last century and earlier, the Middle East was a backwater of age-old Islamic repression.
Things began to change with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. They had backed the Germans and, already in decay, it didn’t take much of a push to end it. The winners of the war, primarily England and France, met in Versailles where they took out their maps of the region and divided it between them. Nations were created, some with ancient names like Syria and Lebanon, some with new ones like Trans-Jordan. A nation called Iraq was created.
The Saudis got very little for having cast their lot with the English. They would never trust them again and when Americans came knocking with a request to search for oil, they got the nod, not the British.
It was World War Two and its aftermath that really got the pot boiling. The Middle East had not played much of a role. Initially the war had been fought in North Africa with an eye on Libya’s oil reserves and the need to protect the Suez Canal from the Germans. Continue reading The Turmoil in the Middle East
June 16, 2009
When it comes to my flag “these colors don’t run”. The banksters (gangsters) and private corporate interests are in control ( aren’t monopolies against the law?) They rob us to the brink of financial disaster, and then instead of bringing them to justice, Obama lends them money to pay back what they stole. War is big business, and these fat cats are enriching our enemies. China, (remember Tienanmen Square?) and Russia ( remember the invasion of Hungary and the recent take over of Georgia?) are among the lowest in the human rights scale. Over 57000 young American soldiers fought communism in Korea, and about another 52000 died in Viet Nam. Now we have a Marxist Muslim presiding over us. How could this happen? I will leave this answer to you.
Practically everything sold in the USA is made in China ( our money is financing one of the largest and most sophisticated navel fleets in the world.( Let us not forget the bloody lesson learned at Pearl Harbor!) The Japanese bought scrap iron from us and gave it back the hard way. When we try to intervene in the human rights issue in Tibet, we are told to mind our own business, and its business as usual. Countries like China and Russia know only one method, Blitzkrieg. By allowing commerce in such countries, we undermined our economic strength and allowed the development of the demise of our currency and economic system It was a policy of buy and sell America. It has been an economic war to break our backs and they are doing a splendid job of it. Continue reading WHAT PRICE FREEDOM?
June 15, 2009
What is normal about a religious sect that forces a woman to veil herself from the world, and also forces her to live in constant fear of castigation or imprisonment if she shows any ‘improper behavior’ according to the ignorant and fanatical rule of the religious class? What kind of devious and foul mentality [...]
June 11, 2009
 By Alan Caruba As the details about James W. von Brunn, the alleged killer of Holocaust Museum security guard, Stephen T. Jones, make their way through the media, we are sure to be told that he was “mentally ill” or at least perceived to be by those who knew him.
A deep hatred of people because of their race or religion is not so much an illness as a choice. It is a choice because it gives purpose to the life of the person doing the hating. It “explains” everything he wants to know about a very complex and often frightening world.
No doubt von Brunn, like so many others, “figured out” that the Jews were to blame for everything wrong in his life and in the world. Why stop there? He also hated Afro-Americans and, one presumes, all people of color. And, largely unreported, he hated Christians. While instantly identified in the media as an instrument of the Far Right, von Brunn was, in fact, a creature of the Far Left.
Reporting on FrontPageMag.com, Ben Johnson wrote that, “A review of his lengthy associations reveals Von Brunn hardly fits the stereotype of a Religious Right, GOP precinct captain. He denounced the Christian faith as a dastardly Jewish conspiracy, a “HOAX” invented by the Apostle Paul to “DESTROY ROMAN CULTURE” from within by undermining its pagan virility. (All screaming capitalization and grammatical errors in this piece appear in the original.) Like others on the racist fringe, the shooter proclaimed clearly: ‘SOCIALISM, represents the future of the West.’” Read the article at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35192 Continue reading The Lone Gunman
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Books by SWI Contributors
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By Alan Caruba
Arizona-Land of the Free
Amazing how many high government officals (including the Attorney General), political pundits, politicians, school officials and religious leaders comment so harshly on the immigration law in Arizona and publicly admit they haven’t read the ten page document.
The document basically states that when being stopped for a traffic violation or questioned concerning a crime that [...]