March 3, 2006
The Washington Post
Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign film is "Paradise Now,'' a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is "Munich,'' a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.
But until you see ``Syriana,'' nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.
``Syriana's'' script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: ``The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40's, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge'' (Page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: ``Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. ... Corruption ... is how we win'' (Page 93).
But that's run-of-the-mill Hollywood. The true distinction of ``Syriana's'' script is the near-incomprehensible plot -- a muddled mix of story lines about a corrupt Kazakhstan oil deal, a succession struggle in an oil-rich Arab kingdom and a giant Texas oil company that pulls the strings at the CIA and, naturally, everywhere else -- amid which, only two things are absolutely clear and coherent: the movie's one political hero and one pure soul.
The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy.
What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less -- at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish ``oilman of the year'' celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.
What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today is its excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote -- against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism -- local leaders like the Good Prince. Who in the greater Middle East is closest to ``Syriana's'' modernizing, democratizing paragon? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary -- and quite nonfictional -- personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament. Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern. On the very night the Oscars will be honoring ``Syriana,'' American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that ``Syriana'' shows America slaughtering.
It gets worse. The most pernicious element in the movie is the character who is at the moral heart of the film: the physically beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous ... suicide bomber. In his final act, the Pure One, dressed in the purest white robes, takes his explosives-laden little motorboat head first into his target. It is a replay of the real-life boat that plunged into the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 American sailors, except that in ``Syriana's'' version, the target is another symbol of American imperialism in the Persian Gulf -- a newly opened liquefied natural gas terminal.
The explosion, which would have the force of a nuclear bomb, constitutes the moral high point of the movie, the moment of climactic cleansing, as the Pure One clad in white merges with the great white mass of the huge terminal wall, at which point the screen goes pure white. And reverently silent.
In my naivete, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone's ``JFK,'' a film that taught a generation of Americans that President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries. ``Syriana,'' however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world.
Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. ``Syriana'' is of a different species entirely -- a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.
© 2006, Washington Post Writers Group
Friday, March 03, 2006
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Kenneth Timmerman: Homeland Transparency
Kenneth R. Timmerman
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 2, 2006
The Bush administration played catch-up this week as it belatedly presented some of the facts behind its assessment that the Dubai Ports World takeover of six U.S. container terminals does not present a threat to U.S. national security.
It sent top officials to the airwaves and to Congress to explain exactly how security in American ports is handled – something the bright lights among our elected representatives should have known had they paid attention to the scores of hearings over the past four years where this has been discussed. Senator James Inhofe (R, Ok), joked at the attention now showered on the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, the obscure inter-agency group that approved the deal, known by its acronym, CFIUS (pronounced Sif-ee-us). “Up until a month ago, if you’d mentioned CFIUS to any member of the U.S. Senate, they’d have thought you were talking about a communicable disease,” he told me.
There has been so much hyperventilation over Dubai Ports World that the first thing we all need to do is stand back and take a deep breath.
No, this deal is not going to allow bearded Islamist fanatics to swarm over our ports with AK-47s or to bring in a nuclear bomb. U.S. government agencies do and will continue to handle security checks of all port personnel. “We are not about to waver on something as fundamental as port security,” Chief Kevin McCabe, the top U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in charge of the Port of Newark told me. If DPW starts sending UAE or other Arab nationals into the United States to work in the ports, they will have to go through numerous security checks – just as any foreign nationals coming to the United States to work in a port would incur. “Just because you’re an Arab, doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist,” McCabe said.
And no, allowing a British company to sell their operator’s contract of container terminals to a Dubai-government owned company does not signify the end of national sovereignty as we think we know it. That ended a long time ago, whether we like it or not. And no again, Treasury Secretary John Snow, who worked for CSX Terminals – another port operator that was bought out last year by Dubai Ports World – is not pursuing a secret plan to sell our ports to Arab sheikhs. He was not part of the CFIUS deliberations and only learned of them belatedly, as did other cabinet secretaries. Nor is Neal Bush, the president’s brother, secretly running interference for the deal, despite the fact that he exercised monumental bad judgment (and that’s putting it politely) by accepting a speaking engagement at the grossly anti-Semitic Zayed Center in the United Arab Emirates.
Democrats who have raised such conspiracy theories – and much more - had no problem backing the Chinese communist takeover of the entire Port of Long Beach during the Clinton years. Nor did they object when another Chinese-government owned firm bought out Magnaquench in 1999, and so gained control of our entire national supply of rare earth materials, which are critical for manufacturing exotic defense technologies, as well as liquid-crystal displays and fiber optics cables .
At least 90 terminals at America’s largest ports are today operated by foreign companies, according to an excellent survey by the Washington Times that appeared on Feb. 22. The largest operators are China Ocean shipping Company, APM Terminals (Denmark), APL (Singapore), Hanjin Shipping (South Korea), and three Japanese companies, Kawasaki, Kisen, Kaisha Ltd, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, and Ceres Terminals.We may not like this foreign ownership of our container terminals. Indeed, Kevin Kearns, whose U.S. Business and Industrial Council represents thousands of small and mid-sized U.S. businesses, believes Congress needs to walk back the foreign terminal agreements so we can “take back control of our ports.” USBIC has been arguing for years that we need real national security controls on the sale of U.S. businesses unless we want our entire industrial base to be “hollowed out.” Senator Jim Inhofe has sponsored legislation – S.1797 – that moves in this direction by extending the CFIUS review period and mandating greater transparency and Congressional oversight.
But the question of foreign ownership of container terminals is a long-term industrial base problem more than an immediate national security problem. The U.S. Coast Guard, in tandem with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the local ports authorities, handles security at U.S. ports. As one senior Department of Homeland Security official told me yesterday, “This deal presents no practical vulnerability. Why? I’ve got ships, and I’ve got guns. If I say that a terminal operator is not getting a cargo, he is not getting that cargo.”
His formula, while simple on the surface, expressed a complex reality that has been years in the making.
I spent three months last autumn touring U.S. ports and learning about port security for a cover story I was writing for Newsmax magazine. When I began my investigation, I believed as do many Americans today that we were at grave risk of terrorists bringing a nuclear weapon into a container port.
As I interviewed the men and women who are handling our goal-line defense, I learned the extraordinary efforts undertaken over the past four years by the Bush administration to push our borders outwards, so that security checks are done thousands of miles away from our shores.
This part of the Dubai Ports World debacle is a good news story that the White House and the rest of the administration has done a terrible job telling to the American people. Are we 100% secure in our ports today? Of course not. But as former Customs commissioner Robert Bonner told me, Washington tends to specialize in the “anything is possible” scenario, and then dreams up new and more expensive ways of defending against it. All infrastructure in the United States is potentially vulnerable to terrorist attack. But instead of looking at vulnerabilities alone, Bonner believes we need to look at the threat. “Our goal has been to prevent our enemy from getting terrorists or terrorist-weapons into the United States,” he said. “If you do that, you won’t have any attacks.”
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff has testified that his department has spent $10 billion since 2004 on port security. That figure includes installation of Radiation Portal Monitors to screen containers entering and leaving U.S. ports, overseas deployments of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, the modernization of the U.S. Coast Guard, and much more. By the end of this fiscal year, DHS expects that 65 percent of containers will be screened for radioactive or radiological materials at our seaports, while 80 percent will be screened at our land border points of entry. These are facts that rarely get mentioned in this debate.
Bonner spent four years implementing practical measures that have transformed the way port security is handled in the United States. “I am sick and tired of hearing that nothing has been done to improve cargo security since 9/11,” he said.
Like Mark Twain’s famous quip concerning reports of his own death, Bonner said the security concerns over Dubai Ports World “are greatly exaggerated.”
Critics complain that U.S. Customs and Border Protection physically inspect just 2 percent of containers. The actual percentage of containers actually unpacked in the United States is slightly higher, but it is simply irrelevant.
In fact, as Chief McCabe told me, “100 percent of containers coming into the United States from overseas go through our screening process. It begins 24 hours before they are ever loaded at a foreign port.”
Customs has built up an extensive data base of shipping companies, shippers, freight forwarders, importers, container terminal operators, and other actors involved in the movement of goods, as well as other criteria, that allow them to make a preliminary assessment of the potential terrorist risk from any given container. Every single container is run through this Automated Tracking System. At risk containers are then singled out for further passive or intrusive inspections.
Thanks to the Container Security Initiative (CSI), which Robert Bonner helped bring to life, forty-two ports around the world that account for 80 percent of the cargo coming into the United States now allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to inspect cargo before it ever leaves for the United States. Bonner signed a CSI agreement with Dubai in December 2004, making it the only port in the Middle East to allow such intrusive U.S. inspections.
All containers – no exceptions – that are identified as a potential security threat are inspected, most of them before they ever reach the United States. Customs and Border Protection uses radiation detectors, gamma ray inspection equipment, and X-ray systems to identify suspicious cargo without opening the containers and immobilizing global trade. Container terminals “are the end of the line,” Bonner says. “We’ve pushed our borders outwards. If they get a weapon into one of our terminals, it’s all over.”
So in one sense, who owns a container terminal operating contract makes little difference to the security of our ports. The same longshoremen will be loading and unloading the ships, and the same security procedures will be in place that exist today.
But there are real concerns with the Dubai Ports deal that cannot be brushed away – and they do not stem from “Islamophobia,” the disease some have alleged has infected the deal’s critics. A U.S. Coast Guard analysis, released in part by Senator Susan Collins on Monday, raises three areas where the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center has assessed that “intelligence gaps” in our knowledge of Dubai Ports World are so serious that they “preclude an overall threat assessment” of the container terminal contract takeover.
“The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities,” an unclassified portion of the classified assessment reads. It identifies three major areas of concern:
“Operations: What is the security environment at all the DPW and P&O port or terminal operations; to include the methods of conveyance and the personnel management of related ports and terminal operations?
“Personnel: What are the backgrounds of all associated personnel working for or associated with DPW and P&O?
“Foreign Influence: Is there foreign influence on DPW or P&O operations that affect security and other major decisions? If so, what countries and to what degree?”
The Coast Guard contends that these passages were “taken out of context” from “a broader Coast Guard Intelligence analysis that was performed early on as part of the due diligence process,” and “do not reflect the full, classified analysis performed by the Guard. That analysis concludes ‘that DP world’s acquisition of P&O, in and of itself [emphasis mine], does not pose a significant threat to U.S. assets in [continental United States] ports.’”
Chief Kevin McCabe and senior DHS officials dismissed concerns over who will load and unload containers. They also dismissed fears that DP World officials will learn anything about port security procedures. “I can’t think of anything we’ve ever given the terminal operators that would give them a tip-off as to our security procedures,” McCabe said. “We tell them what containers we want to see, and we get them. They have nothing to do with what containers we screen or inspect.”
But the italicized weasel words in the Coast Guard analysis are not reassuring. Nor was the testimony on Tuesday by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.“On the basis of our inquiry we assess that the threat to U.S. national security posed by DP World to be low,” he told the Senate Armed Services committee. “We didn’t see any red flags come up during the course of our inquiry.”
Negroponte’s office wouldn’t comment on what might constitute a “red flag,” nor on the specific assurances DP World has given the U.S. government to mitigate the concerns raised by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Just who owns Dubai Ports World? We are told it is the government of Dubai, Chertoff and other U.S. officials say. But DP World is said to have raised most of the $6.8 billion it needed for the buyout on international capital markets, and has not publicly disclosed which investors bought into the deal.
How would the administration respond should it turn out, say, that the son of a senior Iranian government official was a significant investor in Dubai Ports World? Would that raise a “red flag?”
And then there’s the whole issue of the Arab League boycott on doing business in Israel, which the Dubai Ports Authority, part of the holding company that owns DP world, openly told Jerusalem Post reporter Michael Freund it was enforcing. U.S. companies that comply with the Arab League boycott are subject to stiff penalties under U.S. law.
Clearly, more transparency is required here if the administration holds out any hope of convincing Congress – let alone a jittery public – that this deal should stand.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, New York), and Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 2, 2006
The Bush administration played catch-up this week as it belatedly presented some of the facts behind its assessment that the Dubai Ports World takeover of six U.S. container terminals does not present a threat to U.S. national security.
It sent top officials to the airwaves and to Congress to explain exactly how security in American ports is handled – something the bright lights among our elected representatives should have known had they paid attention to the scores of hearings over the past four years where this has been discussed. Senator James Inhofe (R, Ok), joked at the attention now showered on the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, the obscure inter-agency group that approved the deal, known by its acronym, CFIUS (pronounced Sif-ee-us). “Up until a month ago, if you’d mentioned CFIUS to any member of the U.S. Senate, they’d have thought you were talking about a communicable disease,” he told me.
There has been so much hyperventilation over Dubai Ports World that the first thing we all need to do is stand back and take a deep breath.
No, this deal is not going to allow bearded Islamist fanatics to swarm over our ports with AK-47s or to bring in a nuclear bomb. U.S. government agencies do and will continue to handle security checks of all port personnel. “We are not about to waver on something as fundamental as port security,” Chief Kevin McCabe, the top U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in charge of the Port of Newark told me. If DPW starts sending UAE or other Arab nationals into the United States to work in the ports, they will have to go through numerous security checks – just as any foreign nationals coming to the United States to work in a port would incur. “Just because you’re an Arab, doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist,” McCabe said.
And no, allowing a British company to sell their operator’s contract of container terminals to a Dubai-government owned company does not signify the end of national sovereignty as we think we know it. That ended a long time ago, whether we like it or not. And no again, Treasury Secretary John Snow, who worked for CSX Terminals – another port operator that was bought out last year by Dubai Ports World – is not pursuing a secret plan to sell our ports to Arab sheikhs. He was not part of the CFIUS deliberations and only learned of them belatedly, as did other cabinet secretaries. Nor is Neal Bush, the president’s brother, secretly running interference for the deal, despite the fact that he exercised monumental bad judgment (and that’s putting it politely) by accepting a speaking engagement at the grossly anti-Semitic Zayed Center in the United Arab Emirates.
Democrats who have raised such conspiracy theories – and much more - had no problem backing the Chinese communist takeover of the entire Port of Long Beach during the Clinton years. Nor did they object when another Chinese-government owned firm bought out Magnaquench in 1999, and so gained control of our entire national supply of rare earth materials, which are critical for manufacturing exotic defense technologies, as well as liquid-crystal displays and fiber optics cables .
At least 90 terminals at America’s largest ports are today operated by foreign companies, according to an excellent survey by the Washington Times that appeared on Feb. 22. The largest operators are China Ocean shipping Company, APM Terminals (Denmark), APL (Singapore), Hanjin Shipping (South Korea), and three Japanese companies, Kawasaki, Kisen, Kaisha Ltd, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, and Ceres Terminals.We may not like this foreign ownership of our container terminals. Indeed, Kevin Kearns, whose U.S. Business and Industrial Council represents thousands of small and mid-sized U.S. businesses, believes Congress needs to walk back the foreign terminal agreements so we can “take back control of our ports.” USBIC has been arguing for years that we need real national security controls on the sale of U.S. businesses unless we want our entire industrial base to be “hollowed out.” Senator Jim Inhofe has sponsored legislation – S.1797 – that moves in this direction by extending the CFIUS review period and mandating greater transparency and Congressional oversight.
But the question of foreign ownership of container terminals is a long-term industrial base problem more than an immediate national security problem. The U.S. Coast Guard, in tandem with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the local ports authorities, handles security at U.S. ports. As one senior Department of Homeland Security official told me yesterday, “This deal presents no practical vulnerability. Why? I’ve got ships, and I’ve got guns. If I say that a terminal operator is not getting a cargo, he is not getting that cargo.”
His formula, while simple on the surface, expressed a complex reality that has been years in the making.
I spent three months last autumn touring U.S. ports and learning about port security for a cover story I was writing for Newsmax magazine. When I began my investigation, I believed as do many Americans today that we were at grave risk of terrorists bringing a nuclear weapon into a container port.
As I interviewed the men and women who are handling our goal-line defense, I learned the extraordinary efforts undertaken over the past four years by the Bush administration to push our borders outwards, so that security checks are done thousands of miles away from our shores.
This part of the Dubai Ports World debacle is a good news story that the White House and the rest of the administration has done a terrible job telling to the American people. Are we 100% secure in our ports today? Of course not. But as former Customs commissioner Robert Bonner told me, Washington tends to specialize in the “anything is possible” scenario, and then dreams up new and more expensive ways of defending against it. All infrastructure in the United States is potentially vulnerable to terrorist attack. But instead of looking at vulnerabilities alone, Bonner believes we need to look at the threat. “Our goal has been to prevent our enemy from getting terrorists or terrorist-weapons into the United States,” he said. “If you do that, you won’t have any attacks.”
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff has testified that his department has spent $10 billion since 2004 on port security. That figure includes installation of Radiation Portal Monitors to screen containers entering and leaving U.S. ports, overseas deployments of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, the modernization of the U.S. Coast Guard, and much more. By the end of this fiscal year, DHS expects that 65 percent of containers will be screened for radioactive or radiological materials at our seaports, while 80 percent will be screened at our land border points of entry. These are facts that rarely get mentioned in this debate.
Bonner spent four years implementing practical measures that have transformed the way port security is handled in the United States. “I am sick and tired of hearing that nothing has been done to improve cargo security since 9/11,” he said.
Like Mark Twain’s famous quip concerning reports of his own death, Bonner said the security concerns over Dubai Ports World “are greatly exaggerated.”
Critics complain that U.S. Customs and Border Protection physically inspect just 2 percent of containers. The actual percentage of containers actually unpacked in the United States is slightly higher, but it is simply irrelevant.
In fact, as Chief McCabe told me, “100 percent of containers coming into the United States from overseas go through our screening process. It begins 24 hours before they are ever loaded at a foreign port.”
Customs has built up an extensive data base of shipping companies, shippers, freight forwarders, importers, container terminal operators, and other actors involved in the movement of goods, as well as other criteria, that allow them to make a preliminary assessment of the potential terrorist risk from any given container. Every single container is run through this Automated Tracking System. At risk containers are then singled out for further passive or intrusive inspections.
Thanks to the Container Security Initiative (CSI), which Robert Bonner helped bring to life, forty-two ports around the world that account for 80 percent of the cargo coming into the United States now allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to inspect cargo before it ever leaves for the United States. Bonner signed a CSI agreement with Dubai in December 2004, making it the only port in the Middle East to allow such intrusive U.S. inspections.
All containers – no exceptions – that are identified as a potential security threat are inspected, most of them before they ever reach the United States. Customs and Border Protection uses radiation detectors, gamma ray inspection equipment, and X-ray systems to identify suspicious cargo without opening the containers and immobilizing global trade. Container terminals “are the end of the line,” Bonner says. “We’ve pushed our borders outwards. If they get a weapon into one of our terminals, it’s all over.”
So in one sense, who owns a container terminal operating contract makes little difference to the security of our ports. The same longshoremen will be loading and unloading the ships, and the same security procedures will be in place that exist today.
But there are real concerns with the Dubai Ports deal that cannot be brushed away – and they do not stem from “Islamophobia,” the disease some have alleged has infected the deal’s critics. A U.S. Coast Guard analysis, released in part by Senator Susan Collins on Monday, raises three areas where the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center has assessed that “intelligence gaps” in our knowledge of Dubai Ports World are so serious that they “preclude an overall threat assessment” of the container terminal contract takeover.
“The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities,” an unclassified portion of the classified assessment reads. It identifies three major areas of concern:
“Operations: What is the security environment at all the DPW and P&O port or terminal operations; to include the methods of conveyance and the personnel management of related ports and terminal operations?
“Personnel: What are the backgrounds of all associated personnel working for or associated with DPW and P&O?
“Foreign Influence: Is there foreign influence on DPW or P&O operations that affect security and other major decisions? If so, what countries and to what degree?”
The Coast Guard contends that these passages were “taken out of context” from “a broader Coast Guard Intelligence analysis that was performed early on as part of the due diligence process,” and “do not reflect the full, classified analysis performed by the Guard. That analysis concludes ‘that DP world’s acquisition of P&O, in and of itself [emphasis mine], does not pose a significant threat to U.S. assets in [continental United States] ports.’”
Chief Kevin McCabe and senior DHS officials dismissed concerns over who will load and unload containers. They also dismissed fears that DP World officials will learn anything about port security procedures. “I can’t think of anything we’ve ever given the terminal operators that would give them a tip-off as to our security procedures,” McCabe said. “We tell them what containers we want to see, and we get them. They have nothing to do with what containers we screen or inspect.”
But the italicized weasel words in the Coast Guard analysis are not reassuring. Nor was the testimony on Tuesday by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.“On the basis of our inquiry we assess that the threat to U.S. national security posed by DP World to be low,” he told the Senate Armed Services committee. “We didn’t see any red flags come up during the course of our inquiry.”
Negroponte’s office wouldn’t comment on what might constitute a “red flag,” nor on the specific assurances DP World has given the U.S. government to mitigate the concerns raised by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Just who owns Dubai Ports World? We are told it is the government of Dubai, Chertoff and other U.S. officials say. But DP World is said to have raised most of the $6.8 billion it needed for the buyout on international capital markets, and has not publicly disclosed which investors bought into the deal.
How would the administration respond should it turn out, say, that the son of a senior Iranian government official was a significant investor in Dubai Ports World? Would that raise a “red flag?”
And then there’s the whole issue of the Arab League boycott on doing business in Israel, which the Dubai Ports Authority, part of the holding company that owns DP world, openly told Jerusalem Post reporter Michael Freund it was enforcing. U.S. companies that comply with the Arab League boycott are subject to stiff penalties under U.S. law.
Clearly, more transparency is required here if the administration holds out any hope of convincing Congress – let alone a jittery public – that this deal should stand.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, New York), and Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
An Appreciation: Don Knotts
February 27, 2006
The New York Times
Don Knotts, Ever Proud to Be a Bumbler
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Don Knotts was a high-status comic who played low-status roles. Actors who worked with him almost universally deferred to him as a comedic grandmaster, yet his characters were not jokers but the butts of jokes. He was absolutely flappable. No one had a better tremor or double-take, and with his unmistakable homeliness — bulging eyes, receding chin, stooped shoulders, broad hips — he didn't bother to play the wise fool; he wisely stuck to just the fool.
Of Barney Fife, Mr. Knotts's character on "The Andy Griffith Show," Billy Bob Thornton said, "Don Knotts gave us the best character, the most clearly drawn, most perfect American, most perfect human ever."
Mr. Knotts, who died Friday, grew up during the Depression, in Morgantown, W.Va., where his mother leased a house and took in boarders. He slept in the kitchen. His older brothers, Sid and Shadow, were funny, but they also drank and fought, and Shadow died of an asthma attack while Don was a teenager. Their father, who had suffered hysterical blindness and a nervous collapse before Don was born, rarely left his bed.
The Depression was a high time for Mr. Knotts's act. He practiced magic and ventriloquism for the neighbors and the boarders, many of whom were students or jobless and welcomed satire.
When World War II came, his friends thought the Army wouldn't take him, since he looked unwell and undernourished, but he ended up serving out his duty as a comedian in the Stars and Gripes, a revue that played in the South Pacific. At first, he performed only with his ventriloquist dummy, Danny, but one day he caught Red Ford, an older Texas comic, staring at him and laughing. "You know something?" Mr. Knotts remembered Ford saying in "Barney Fife, and Other Characters I Have Known," his 1999 autobiography. "You're a funny little son of a bitch."
He was a generous performer who liked to share the stage, and he thrived in duets, teams, variety shows, ensembles. Back in New York, he noticed a man whose hands shook and who spilled water; he combined that with Robert Benchley's famous apologetic speaker from the monologue "Treasurer's Report," and the nervous character, who went on to fame on "The Steve Allen Show," was born.
Mr. Knotts plainly stole stuff, and other comics didn't mind lending him material. He was wonderfully unthreatening to other male comics, all of whom could think of themselves as one step closer to leading men than Mr. Knotts was. It's hard to think of an actor, in fact, who got more helping hands than Mr. Knotts in his early days. Male actors were forever offering him parts, trying to get him to join their acts. Sharing the stage with this skinny, spazzy guy could only make them look more commanding.
Among these mentors was Andy Griffith, whom he met when they were both cast in the play "No Time for Sergeants" in 1955. Mr. Griffith and Mr. Knotts cracked each other up. A few years later, when Mr. Knotts proposed himself as a deputy to Andy Taylor on Mr. Griffith's sitcom, Mr. Griffith went for it. Andy's crinkly, deep-set eyes conveyed calm and sagacity, while Barney's popped ones expressed pure anxiety — something akin to horror at the demands of ordinary life.
Mr. Knotts's popular movies, "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken," "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," "The Reluctant Astronaut" and "The Shakiest Gun in the West," put him on a winning streak. To comedy geeks, especially the preteen kind, his send-up of 60's superheroism came as a delight and a relief.
One by one, Mr. Knotts mocked the pretenses of the comic actor who often has his eye on nobler pursuits. In the nervous man, he reveled in the discomfort that most comics tend to pass off as indignation or savoir-faire. As Barney, he satirized swagger and self-importance. Finally, on "Three's Company" in the late 70's and 80's, he sent up the comedian's hypersexuality, which is often his pride. Mr. Knotts, over and over, was willing to play the desperate, pathetic low-man-on-every-pole. He did it so well — never forsaking his persona and trying to seize the lead, as nearly all major comedians do these days — that his talent for abasement became a source, paradoxically, of great authority. By revealing but never indulging these pretenses, he enlightened everyone he worked with, and his audiences.
And once in a great while he even got to be the hero. On "The Loaded Goat," a winning episode of "The Andy Griffith Show," it's Barney who saves the day. Playing an achingly melancholy song on his harmonica, he leads a dangerous goat, which has swallowed dynamite, out of town.
Paul Sperry: CAIR's Dubai Sugar Daddy
[Yet another story that makes me wonder what the heck is going on in with our tough-minded, war-on-terror-fighting, evangelical President...part of the "war on terror" is to hire these clowns to run some of our ports?...the same clowns that allowed a number of the 9/11 terrorists to hang out before heading over here....the same clowns that gave those same terrorists financial backing? I'm going way out on a limb and suggesting that maybe we should hire people from some other country to do this job.]
Paul Sperry
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 1, 2006
When the Council on American-Islamic Relations parrots White House talking points, you know there's something very wrong inside the Beltway.
CAIR spokesman Arsalan Iftikhar agrees there's no reason to get in a lather over the United Arab Emirates taking over just about every major shipping terminal along our Eastern Seaboard. The UAE is harmless, and if you're alarmed about the deal, well, you're an Islamophobe caught up in the post-9/11 "industry of fear."
"What's important to understand here is that all this is doing is demonizing the entire world Muslim population," Iftikhar complained on MSNBC.
And besides, he says the UAE won't have anything to do with port security -- not that it matters if they did. "We have to clarify a few things here," he asserted, sounding more like a White House spokesman. "First of all, none of these port security operations are being given over to this country. The Department of Homeland Security is still going to have full autonomy when it comes to security at the ports."
So relax.
Iftikhar, like President Bush, says he sees no difference in risk between the UAE or the U.K. operating the docks where millions of cargo containers enter New York and Baltimore and Miami. What about UAE's terror record? Pshaw! "These are knee-jerk responses" borne of anti-Arab racism, he says.
As a Muslim-rights pressure group, CAIR's own knee-jerk response in defending the UAE is not surprising -- after all, it's populated by Muslims. But the group has more at stake in this case. In fact, it has a direct financial interest in defending the UAE -- a financial relationship that has never been reported in the mainstream media and never publicly disclosed by CAIR, even as it claims to receive no foreign support.
Truth be told, CAIR has an otherwise glaring conflict of interest in speaking out about the White House-approved deal to give UAE-owned Dubai Ports World control of six of our ports effective March 2. And it's something that producers at FOX, CNN and NBC should know before they ever book another CAIR flack. Here's what CAIR is hiding: The U.S.-based executives of Dubai Ports World report to the emir of Dubai, who owns controlling interest in the Dubai-based company. His name is Gen. Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum. It just so happens that Sheik Maktoum also owns the deed to CAIR's headquarters located practically in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. As I first reported in my book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," CAIR's deed is recorded in the name of his foundation, the Al-Maktoum Foundation. It put up more than $978,000 for the property and holds the rights to sell it, manage it and collect rents from other tenants in the multistory red-brick building on the CAIR property, located at 453 New Jersey Avenue, S.E., in Washington. (You can view the relevant pages of the documents on the book's companion website, sperryfiles.com.)
CAIR's landlord, Sheik Maktoum, doubles as UAE defense minister. Before 9/11, he provided UAE military C-130 cargo planes to supply al-Qaida hunting camps in Afghanistan with all the amenities they needed when he and other high-level UAE officials and princes took hunting trips there. On one tripin 1999, roughly half the UAE royal family was the guest of Osama bin laden at his camp near Kandahar. They flew in on an official UAE aircraft, according to a recently declassified CIA memo dated Feb. 19, 1999, and titled, "Recent High Level UAE Visits to Afghanistan." The memo also determined that Dubai officials had lied to U.S. officials about visiting the camps. And they were believed to have even tipped off bin Laden about a coming strike on his camps. Mind you, this was just months after bin Laden blew up the two U.S. embassies in Africa (a plot which was financed in part through Dubai banks), so they knew they were in bad company. Just like CAIR knows it's in bad company.
The Dubai officials also had a cozy relationship with the Taliban. By now you've probably heard that the UAE was one of only three countries in the world -- the others being Saudi Arabia and Pakistan -- to formally recognize the Taliban in diplomatic circles. What you haven't heard is that Dubai was one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world. Dubai booked flights for them and acted as their banker. But CAIR doesn't care about that, either (nor apparently does the White House).
So with all the bonding that bin Laden did with Dubai royals before 9/11, it's little wonder that he deployed 13 of his 19 hijackers from Dubai to hit America. That's right, all 13 entered the U.S. from Dubai (and that's not even counting the original 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Katani, who also entered through Dubai before an alert INS inspector at Orlando airport sent him packing). Or little wonder that two were Emirates, and that one -- Marwan al-Shehhi -- in fact served under Sheik Maktoum in the UAE Army. He no doubt made the general proud by crashing his plane into the South Tower.
It's also not surprising, given Dubai's cozy ties to bin Laden and Taleb leaders, that the hijackers were able to use Dubai as their financial base in addition to their forward staging base. As they came through Dubai, they were outfitted by the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with credit cards, cash, bank accounts and American-style clothing. More than $100,000 in al-Qaida funds were funneled through Dubai banks. One single transfer from Dubai into al-Shehhi's and his pal Mohamed Atta's Florida checking account totaled $70,000.
The day before crashing his hijacked United Airlines jet, al-Shehhi wired $5,400 in leftover al-Qaida funds back to Dubai. Other hijackers also wired residuals there. After the attacks, investigators traced al-Shehhi phone calls back to the UAE, where he is now celebrated as a hero in mosques and other local gathering places outside the gaze of Western investors, who are too intoxicated by glittering high-rises and other signs of modernity to understand that the desert oasis is still haunted by ancient demons.
Sheik Maktoum's reaction to the mass murder of 3,000 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was shockingly unsympathetic (as was CAIR's). In fact, he reserved his sympathies for Palestinians. Two weeks after 9/11, Sheik Maktoum warned Washington not to attack "innocent" Muslims in Afghanistan and to instead focus on "Israeli terrorists" in its war on terrorism. He argued that they are the only real terrorists."
The Arab and Muslim communities have paid dearly for terrorism, especially the state terrorism practiced by the government of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and extremist groups in Israel," he bellowed. "Regrettably, the powers in the international community [read: America, "the Great Satan"] have done nothing but watch the Israeli terrorists, a matter which has angered Arabs and Muslims [including most assuredly Sheik Maktoum]." He added, "Confrontation of terrorism must cover Israeli terrorism."
Sheik Maktoum defines Palestinian suicide bombings as "legitimate acts of resistance," and not terrorism (which makes you wonder how he defines 9/11), and he has held Dubai telethons to support the families of suicide bombers. Also, the sheik has been accused of winking at al-Qaida money-laundering in his city-state, and helping an ailing bin Laden receive care at a Dubai hospital when he was on the lam.
This is CAIR's main sugar daddy (it also get funds from Saudi benefactors), and the Arab ruler with whom the White House has entrusted our vital port security.
Making matters worse, the CEO who answers directly to Maktoum at his Dubai Ports operation -- Mohammed Sharaf -- studied in Arizona in the early 1990s at the same time al-Qaida was setting up an American beachhead there. Several prominent al-Qaida leaders emerged from the Arizona universitysystem. In addition, one of the 9/11 pilots, Hani Hanjour, studied English there in 1990, and later took flying lessons in the Phoenix area.
This is a red flag the Treasury group that supposedly vetted the port deal more than likely overlooked. If officials really didn't rubber-stamp the deal, they would have called the FBI agent who wrote the famously prescient "Phoenix memo" before 9/11. I'm sure he could fill them in on any troubling connections Sharaf may have in Arizona.
CAIR, which has an operating budget of more than $5 million a year, has its own connections to terrorism. Formed by two ethnic-Palestinians from a Hamas front, it has had at least five officials on its payroll or board convicted of terror-related charges or tied to terrorism. They include: Randall "Ismail" Royer, Ghassan Elashi, Bassem Khafagi, Rabih Haddad and Siraj Wahhaj. So it's not exactly the best character witness for Arab officials who say they are cooperating with us in the war on terror.
Problem is, the White House also says we can trust UAE leaders, that they've been a "a very good ally" in our war on terror and, why, they're even letting our Navy dock in their port (which is no real comfort since Yemen did the same thing). Truth is, like the Saudis, they've done next to nothing to help us track down bin Laden or track his finances through their banks. That's why the administration took the extraordinary move of demanding in writing, as part of the secret port deal, that they cooperate in counterterror investigations. There'd be no need to ask for such security concessions if they were already cooperating fully as claimed, and weren't still a serious terror risk (which makes you wonder even more why the White House is pushing so hard to add risk to our already risky port situation).
But then, the administration knows all this. The U.S. Border Patrol has designated UAE as one of the 35 (all Muslim) "special interest countries," according to sensitive Department of Homeland Security documents I've obtained. And UAE shows up on the Customs and Border Protection Intelligence and National Targeting Center's list of 69 "countries of interest for potential terrorist activities." What's more, UAE is one of only five countries where DHS has stationed Visa Security Officers, putting to rest any notion that UAE does not still pose a terror threat.
And think about it: If UAE leaders were friends with bin Laden enough to hunt with him before 9/11, why would they suddenly become our friends after 9/11? They wouldn't, of course, and they aren't. And CAIR, whose real agenda is to Islamize America, isn't either. So no one should care what the hell it thinks on the subject. Just as we shouldn't trade with the enemy, we shouldn't legitimize the terror-tied groups they bankroll.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He can be conacted at Sperry@SperryFiles.com.
Paul Sperry
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 1, 2006
When the Council on American-Islamic Relations parrots White House talking points, you know there's something very wrong inside the Beltway.
CAIR spokesman Arsalan Iftikhar agrees there's no reason to get in a lather over the United Arab Emirates taking over just about every major shipping terminal along our Eastern Seaboard. The UAE is harmless, and if you're alarmed about the deal, well, you're an Islamophobe caught up in the post-9/11 "industry of fear."
"What's important to understand here is that all this is doing is demonizing the entire world Muslim population," Iftikhar complained on MSNBC.
And besides, he says the UAE won't have anything to do with port security -- not that it matters if they did. "We have to clarify a few things here," he asserted, sounding more like a White House spokesman. "First of all, none of these port security operations are being given over to this country. The Department of Homeland Security is still going to have full autonomy when it comes to security at the ports."
So relax.
Iftikhar, like President Bush, says he sees no difference in risk between the UAE or the U.K. operating the docks where millions of cargo containers enter New York and Baltimore and Miami. What about UAE's terror record? Pshaw! "These are knee-jerk responses" borne of anti-Arab racism, he says.
As a Muslim-rights pressure group, CAIR's own knee-jerk response in defending the UAE is not surprising -- after all, it's populated by Muslims. But the group has more at stake in this case. In fact, it has a direct financial interest in defending the UAE -- a financial relationship that has never been reported in the mainstream media and never publicly disclosed by CAIR, even as it claims to receive no foreign support.
Truth be told, CAIR has an otherwise glaring conflict of interest in speaking out about the White House-approved deal to give UAE-owned Dubai Ports World control of six of our ports effective March 2. And it's something that producers at FOX, CNN and NBC should know before they ever book another CAIR flack. Here's what CAIR is hiding: The U.S.-based executives of Dubai Ports World report to the emir of Dubai, who owns controlling interest in the Dubai-based company. His name is Gen. Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum. It just so happens that Sheik Maktoum also owns the deed to CAIR's headquarters located practically in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. As I first reported in my book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," CAIR's deed is recorded in the name of his foundation, the Al-Maktoum Foundation. It put up more than $978,000 for the property and holds the rights to sell it, manage it and collect rents from other tenants in the multistory red-brick building on the CAIR property, located at 453 New Jersey Avenue, S.E., in Washington. (You can view the relevant pages of the documents on the book's companion website, sperryfiles.com.)
CAIR's landlord, Sheik Maktoum, doubles as UAE defense minister. Before 9/11, he provided UAE military C-130 cargo planes to supply al-Qaida hunting camps in Afghanistan with all the amenities they needed when he and other high-level UAE officials and princes took hunting trips there. On one tripin 1999, roughly half the UAE royal family was the guest of Osama bin laden at his camp near Kandahar. They flew in on an official UAE aircraft, according to a recently declassified CIA memo dated Feb. 19, 1999, and titled, "Recent High Level UAE Visits to Afghanistan." The memo also determined that Dubai officials had lied to U.S. officials about visiting the camps. And they were believed to have even tipped off bin Laden about a coming strike on his camps. Mind you, this was just months after bin Laden blew up the two U.S. embassies in Africa (a plot which was financed in part through Dubai banks), so they knew they were in bad company. Just like CAIR knows it's in bad company.
The Dubai officials also had a cozy relationship with the Taliban. By now you've probably heard that the UAE was one of only three countries in the world -- the others being Saudi Arabia and Pakistan -- to formally recognize the Taliban in diplomatic circles. What you haven't heard is that Dubai was one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world. Dubai booked flights for them and acted as their banker. But CAIR doesn't care about that, either (nor apparently does the White House).
So with all the bonding that bin Laden did with Dubai royals before 9/11, it's little wonder that he deployed 13 of his 19 hijackers from Dubai to hit America. That's right, all 13 entered the U.S. from Dubai (and that's not even counting the original 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Katani, who also entered through Dubai before an alert INS inspector at Orlando airport sent him packing). Or little wonder that two were Emirates, and that one -- Marwan al-Shehhi -- in fact served under Sheik Maktoum in the UAE Army. He no doubt made the general proud by crashing his plane into the South Tower.
It's also not surprising, given Dubai's cozy ties to bin Laden and Taleb leaders, that the hijackers were able to use Dubai as their financial base in addition to their forward staging base. As they came through Dubai, they were outfitted by the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with credit cards, cash, bank accounts and American-style clothing. More than $100,000 in al-Qaida funds were funneled through Dubai banks. One single transfer from Dubai into al-Shehhi's and his pal Mohamed Atta's Florida checking account totaled $70,000.
The day before crashing his hijacked United Airlines jet, al-Shehhi wired $5,400 in leftover al-Qaida funds back to Dubai. Other hijackers also wired residuals there. After the attacks, investigators traced al-Shehhi phone calls back to the UAE, where he is now celebrated as a hero in mosques and other local gathering places outside the gaze of Western investors, who are too intoxicated by glittering high-rises and other signs of modernity to understand that the desert oasis is still haunted by ancient demons.
Sheik Maktoum's reaction to the mass murder of 3,000 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was shockingly unsympathetic (as was CAIR's). In fact, he reserved his sympathies for Palestinians. Two weeks after 9/11, Sheik Maktoum warned Washington not to attack "innocent" Muslims in Afghanistan and to instead focus on "Israeli terrorists" in its war on terrorism. He argued that they are the only real terrorists."
The Arab and Muslim communities have paid dearly for terrorism, especially the state terrorism practiced by the government of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and extremist groups in Israel," he bellowed. "Regrettably, the powers in the international community [read: America, "the Great Satan"] have done nothing but watch the Israeli terrorists, a matter which has angered Arabs and Muslims [including most assuredly Sheik Maktoum]." He added, "Confrontation of terrorism must cover Israeli terrorism."
Sheik Maktoum defines Palestinian suicide bombings as "legitimate acts of resistance," and not terrorism (which makes you wonder how he defines 9/11), and he has held Dubai telethons to support the families of suicide bombers. Also, the sheik has been accused of winking at al-Qaida money-laundering in his city-state, and helping an ailing bin Laden receive care at a Dubai hospital when he was on the lam.
This is CAIR's main sugar daddy (it also get funds from Saudi benefactors), and the Arab ruler with whom the White House has entrusted our vital port security.
Making matters worse, the CEO who answers directly to Maktoum at his Dubai Ports operation -- Mohammed Sharaf -- studied in Arizona in the early 1990s at the same time al-Qaida was setting up an American beachhead there. Several prominent al-Qaida leaders emerged from the Arizona universitysystem. In addition, one of the 9/11 pilots, Hani Hanjour, studied English there in 1990, and later took flying lessons in the Phoenix area.
This is a red flag the Treasury group that supposedly vetted the port deal more than likely overlooked. If officials really didn't rubber-stamp the deal, they would have called the FBI agent who wrote the famously prescient "Phoenix memo" before 9/11. I'm sure he could fill them in on any troubling connections Sharaf may have in Arizona.
CAIR, which has an operating budget of more than $5 million a year, has its own connections to terrorism. Formed by two ethnic-Palestinians from a Hamas front, it has had at least five officials on its payroll or board convicted of terror-related charges or tied to terrorism. They include: Randall "Ismail" Royer, Ghassan Elashi, Bassem Khafagi, Rabih Haddad and Siraj Wahhaj. So it's not exactly the best character witness for Arab officials who say they are cooperating with us in the war on terror.
Problem is, the White House also says we can trust UAE leaders, that they've been a "a very good ally" in our war on terror and, why, they're even letting our Navy dock in their port (which is no real comfort since Yemen did the same thing). Truth is, like the Saudis, they've done next to nothing to help us track down bin Laden or track his finances through their banks. That's why the administration took the extraordinary move of demanding in writing, as part of the secret port deal, that they cooperate in counterterror investigations. There'd be no need to ask for such security concessions if they were already cooperating fully as claimed, and weren't still a serious terror risk (which makes you wonder even more why the White House is pushing so hard to add risk to our already risky port situation).
But then, the administration knows all this. The U.S. Border Patrol has designated UAE as one of the 35 (all Muslim) "special interest countries," according to sensitive Department of Homeland Security documents I've obtained. And UAE shows up on the Customs and Border Protection Intelligence and National Targeting Center's list of 69 "countries of interest for potential terrorist activities." What's more, UAE is one of only five countries where DHS has stationed Visa Security Officers, putting to rest any notion that UAE does not still pose a terror threat.
And think about it: If UAE leaders were friends with bin Laden enough to hunt with him before 9/11, why would they suddenly become our friends after 9/11? They wouldn't, of course, and they aren't. And CAIR, whose real agenda is to Islamize America, isn't either. So no one should care what the hell it thinks on the subject. Just as we shouldn't trade with the enemy, we shouldn't legitimize the terror-tied groups they bankroll.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He can be conacted at Sperry@SperryFiles.com.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Hamas Will Accept Phased Destruction of Israel
By Ryan Jones
JNewswire.com
February 28, 2006
The Hamas terrorist organization is not impatient, and will accept a long-term elimination of the Jewish state, rather than seek its immediate demise, the new masters of the Palestinian Authority have graciously offered.
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, PA Prime Minister-designate Ismail Haniyeh said what was taken by many to mean Hamas is ready to sign on to the “two-state solution” being imposed upon Israel by the international community:
"If Israel withdraws to the '67 borders, then we will establish a peace in stages."
In its mad dash to make Hamas appear anything but the dedicated killers and would-be annihilators of the Jewish state that they are, much of the international press jumped on Haniyeh's words as evidence the terror group is coming around to the idea of living at peace with Israel.
This despite the fact Haniyeh deflected every attempt by his interviewer to get him to say Hamas is ready, now, to recognize and accept the State of Israel as part of a final peace settlement.
The Jews, who last week were invited to live in Islamic "Palestine" as second-class citizens, are not the problem, said Haniyeh, but their current sovereignty over this narrow strip of land is unacceptable.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri later explained to reporters that the Post had apparently made an error in translation, noting that rather than "peace in stages" Haniyeh had said Hamas is prepared to seek a "solution in stages."
This policy mirrors that spelled out by former PLO chief Yasser Arafat when he was criticized in 1993 for signing an agreement with Israel. At that time, Arafat clarifed that he was implementing a phased destruction of the Jewish state.
If the international community is as willing to turn a blind eye to Hamas' phased plan as it was to disregard the PLO's version, we will soon see pressure mounting on Israel to cooperate with the Hamas Authority as it was expected to cooperate with Arafat's.
JNewswire.com
February 28, 2006
The Hamas terrorist organization is not impatient, and will accept a long-term elimination of the Jewish state, rather than seek its immediate demise, the new masters of the Palestinian Authority have graciously offered.
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, PA Prime Minister-designate Ismail Haniyeh said what was taken by many to mean Hamas is ready to sign on to the “two-state solution” being imposed upon Israel by the international community:
"If Israel withdraws to the '67 borders, then we will establish a peace in stages."
In its mad dash to make Hamas appear anything but the dedicated killers and would-be annihilators of the Jewish state that they are, much of the international press jumped on Haniyeh's words as evidence the terror group is coming around to the idea of living at peace with Israel.
This despite the fact Haniyeh deflected every attempt by his interviewer to get him to say Hamas is ready, now, to recognize and accept the State of Israel as part of a final peace settlement.
The Jews, who last week were invited to live in Islamic "Palestine" as second-class citizens, are not the problem, said Haniyeh, but their current sovereignty over this narrow strip of land is unacceptable.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri later explained to reporters that the Post had apparently made an error in translation, noting that rather than "peace in stages" Haniyeh had said Hamas is prepared to seek a "solution in stages."
This policy mirrors that spelled out by former PLO chief Yasser Arafat when he was criticized in 1993 for signing an agreement with Israel. At that time, Arafat clarifed that he was implementing a phased destruction of the Jewish state.
If the international community is as willing to turn a blind eye to Hamas' phased plan as it was to disregard the PLO's version, we will soon see pressure mounting on Israel to cooperate with the Hamas Authority as it was expected to cooperate with Arafat's.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Joe Kaufman: The Islamist Port of Miami
Joe Kaufman
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 28, 2006
When the Deputy Director of the Port of Miami, Khalid Salahuddin, was asked about the purchase of his port by a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), he defended the transaction. He stated, “They are not buying the Port of Miami. They are buying part of one of the operators at the port.”
But while Salahuddin is not concerned about the sale, many Floridians are shaking their heads. They question the terrorist ties of the UAE. They question why their representatives in the White House have been so quick to praise the deal. However, possibly the most important question hasn’t been raised, and that is the one about Salahuddin himself.
Khalid Salahuddin is no stranger to controversy. In November of 2001, he was embroiled in a scandal, as an NBC 6 investigation exposed the Port of Miami as being a haven for criminal activity. According to the report, convicted felons - with cases ranging from attempted murder to pedophilia - were hired to work at the port.
Salahuddin, similar to his reaction to the UAE purchase, wasn’t deterred by the station’s findings and, likewise, defended the hirings. He stated, “From our standpoint, what benefit would it do to kick him out on the street? We see none.”
As shameful as this attitude may seem, when painting a full picture of Khalid Salahuddin, one has to wonder how – more than five years later – this man is still minding the port and not being extradited from it.
Khalid Salahuddin has gone through different phases in his life. Before becoming an ‘Orthodox Muslim,’ Salahuddin was a member of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan’s notoriously anti-Semitic organization. Today, he heads his own mosque in North Miami, Masjid Al-Ikhlas.
As a leader in the South Florida Islamic community, Salahuddin has traveled circles that leave little to be encouraged about. Indeed, his ties to radical Islam are many.
In February of 2002, Salahuddin officiated a fundraiser for the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), entitled ‘Celebrating Past, present and future Leadership for Humanity.’ AMANA is headed by Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, an individual who was the Vice President of a now-defunct, Hamas-related “charity,” the Health Resource Center for Palestine (HRCP). The website of AMANA has promoted links and articles denouncing Jews, Christians and Hindus and at least one link discussing the murder of homosexuals. The site also contained a link to the Al-Haramain foundation, an organization that has had its offices closed for acting as a main financier to Al-Qaeda.
In September of 2002, Salahuddin was a participant at an event sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), entitled ‘A United and Secure Florida for all.’ CAIR’s connections to terrorism are well documented; the group has lost a fundraiser, a civil rights coordinator, a director of community relations, and a co-founder of its Texas chapter all to conviction or deportation. Also featured at this event was Zulfiqar Ali Shah, the South Asia Division Coordinator for KindHearts, a “charity” whose funds were frozen this month by the U.S. government for giving millions of dollars to Hamas.
In November of 2002, Salahuddin gave a memorial talk for Hamid Iqbal Siddiqui, at Masjid Al-Ansar, where he (Salahuddin) had previously resided as imam. Before his death, Siddiqui had acted as an East Zone Representative for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a group tied to the violent Muslim Brotherhood.
Evidently Salahuddin’s words have importance beyond these speaking engagements, because videos with his name and likeness are in distribution.
One speech made by Salahuddin (‘Belief in the Unseen’) is available through the MeccaCentric Da'wah Group, an organization that sells videotaped speeches made by numerous Islamic radicals; this includes Siraj Wahhaj, a man whose name appears on the U.S. Attorney's list of potential co-conspirators to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Also featured on the video with Salahuddin is Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, the imam of Darul Aloom (Pembroke Pines, Florida) and the former teacher of ‘Dirty Bomber’ Jose Padilla.
There are those that would liken the above information to nothing more than guilt by association. However, when one considers the amount of associations involved – with regards to Khalid Salahuddin’s exposure to radical Islam – one must conclude that there is reason for alarm.
It is certainly a valid concern as to who is purchasing the ports that control commerce to and from our country, especially when that purchase is carried out by a country with as many ties to terrorism as the UAE. Yet isn’t the concern that much greater, when one has to worry about those that are actually charged in defending the ports from the enemy?
In this case, our designated defender may very well be our downfall.
Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism radio show.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 28, 2006
When the Deputy Director of the Port of Miami, Khalid Salahuddin, was asked about the purchase of his port by a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), he defended the transaction. He stated, “They are not buying the Port of Miami. They are buying part of one of the operators at the port.”
But while Salahuddin is not concerned about the sale, many Floridians are shaking their heads. They question the terrorist ties of the UAE. They question why their representatives in the White House have been so quick to praise the deal. However, possibly the most important question hasn’t been raised, and that is the one about Salahuddin himself.
Khalid Salahuddin is no stranger to controversy. In November of 2001, he was embroiled in a scandal, as an NBC 6 investigation exposed the Port of Miami as being a haven for criminal activity. According to the report, convicted felons - with cases ranging from attempted murder to pedophilia - were hired to work at the port.
Salahuddin, similar to his reaction to the UAE purchase, wasn’t deterred by the station’s findings and, likewise, defended the hirings. He stated, “From our standpoint, what benefit would it do to kick him out on the street? We see none.”
As shameful as this attitude may seem, when painting a full picture of Khalid Salahuddin, one has to wonder how – more than five years later – this man is still minding the port and not being extradited from it.
Khalid Salahuddin has gone through different phases in his life. Before becoming an ‘Orthodox Muslim,’ Salahuddin was a member of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan’s notoriously anti-Semitic organization. Today, he heads his own mosque in North Miami, Masjid Al-Ikhlas.
As a leader in the South Florida Islamic community, Salahuddin has traveled circles that leave little to be encouraged about. Indeed, his ties to radical Islam are many.
In February of 2002, Salahuddin officiated a fundraiser for the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), entitled ‘Celebrating Past, present and future Leadership for Humanity.’ AMANA is headed by Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, an individual who was the Vice President of a now-defunct, Hamas-related “charity,” the Health Resource Center for Palestine (HRCP). The website of AMANA has promoted links and articles denouncing Jews, Christians and Hindus and at least one link discussing the murder of homosexuals. The site also contained a link to the Al-Haramain foundation, an organization that has had its offices closed for acting as a main financier to Al-Qaeda.
In September of 2002, Salahuddin was a participant at an event sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), entitled ‘A United and Secure Florida for all.’ CAIR’s connections to terrorism are well documented; the group has lost a fundraiser, a civil rights coordinator, a director of community relations, and a co-founder of its Texas chapter all to conviction or deportation. Also featured at this event was Zulfiqar Ali Shah, the South Asia Division Coordinator for KindHearts, a “charity” whose funds were frozen this month by the U.S. government for giving millions of dollars to Hamas.
In November of 2002, Salahuddin gave a memorial talk for Hamid Iqbal Siddiqui, at Masjid Al-Ansar, where he (Salahuddin) had previously resided as imam. Before his death, Siddiqui had acted as an East Zone Representative for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a group tied to the violent Muslim Brotherhood.
Evidently Salahuddin’s words have importance beyond these speaking engagements, because videos with his name and likeness are in distribution.
One speech made by Salahuddin (‘Belief in the Unseen’) is available through the MeccaCentric Da'wah Group, an organization that sells videotaped speeches made by numerous Islamic radicals; this includes Siraj Wahhaj, a man whose name appears on the U.S. Attorney's list of potential co-conspirators to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Also featured on the video with Salahuddin is Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, the imam of Darul Aloom (Pembroke Pines, Florida) and the former teacher of ‘Dirty Bomber’ Jose Padilla.
There are those that would liken the above information to nothing more than guilt by association. However, when one considers the amount of associations involved – with regards to Khalid Salahuddin’s exposure to radical Islam – one must conclude that there is reason for alarm.
It is certainly a valid concern as to who is purchasing the ports that control commerce to and from our country, especially when that purchase is carried out by a country with as many ties to terrorism as the UAE. Yet isn’t the concern that much greater, when one has to worry about those that are actually charged in defending the ports from the enemy?
In this case, our designated defender may very well be our downfall.
Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism radio show.
Mark Steyn: Needing to wake up, West just closes its eyes
February 26, 2006
BY MARK STEYN
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."
Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.
Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.
This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.
This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''
At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture.
A lot of folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace." Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews. As Paul Oestreicher, Anglican chaplain of the University of Sussex, wrote in the Guardian the other day, "I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee."
It's not surprising when you're as heavily invested as the European establishment is in an absurd equivalence between a nuclear madman who thinks he's the warm-up act for the Twelfth Imam and the fellows building the Israeli security fence that you lose all sense of proportion when it comes to your own backyard, too. "Radical young Jewish men" are no threat to "Arab-run groceries." But radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond. If you don't care for the Yids, big deal; look out for yourself. The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history's coal mine.
Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:
''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.''
Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that's been going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media.
What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claiming jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them -- as it did to Salman Rushdie's translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes, the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural "respect" by Bill Clinton, the United Church of Canada, European foreign ministers, etc.
The I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing-in-perfect-harmonee crowd have always spoken favorably of one-worldism. From the op-ed pages of Jutland newspapers to les banlieues of Paris, the Pan-Islamists are getting on with it.
© Mark Steyn 2006
BY MARK STEYN
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."
Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.
Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.
This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.
This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''
At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture.
A lot of folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace." Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews. As Paul Oestreicher, Anglican chaplain of the University of Sussex, wrote in the Guardian the other day, "I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee."
It's not surprising when you're as heavily invested as the European establishment is in an absurd equivalence between a nuclear madman who thinks he's the warm-up act for the Twelfth Imam and the fellows building the Israeli security fence that you lose all sense of proportion when it comes to your own backyard, too. "Radical young Jewish men" are no threat to "Arab-run groceries." But radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond. If you don't care for the Yids, big deal; look out for yourself. The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history's coal mine.
Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:
''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.''
Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that's been going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media.
What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claiming jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them -- as it did to Salman Rushdie's translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes, the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural "respect" by Bill Clinton, the United Church of Canada, European foreign ministers, etc.
The I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing-in-perfect-harmonee crowd have always spoken favorably of one-worldism. From the op-ed pages of Jutland newspapers to les banlieues of Paris, the Pan-Islamists are getting on with it.
© Mark Steyn 2006
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Obituary: Don Knotts
Don Knotts, star of 'The Andy Griffith Show,' dead at 81
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills.
By Scott Collins,
The Los Angeles Times
2:30 PM PST,February 25 2006
Don Knotts, the saucer-eyed, scarecrow-thin comic actor best known for his roles as the high-strung small-town deputy Barney Fife on the 1960s CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show" and the leisure-suit-clad landlord Ralph Furley on ABC's '70s sitcom "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.
Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at UCLA Medical Center, according to Sherwin Bash, his longtime manager.
Family members said that his longtime friend Griffth was one of his last visitors at Cedars on Friday night.
Despite health problems, Knotts had kept working in recent months. He lent his distinctive, high-pitched voice as Turkey Mayor in Walt Disney's animated family film "Chicken Little," which was released in November 2005. He also did guest spots in 2005 on NBC's "Las Vegas" and Fox's "That '70s Show." He occasionally co-headlined in live comedy shows with Tim Conway, his sometime co-star in Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang." Knotts also appeared as the TV repairman in director Gary Ross's whimsical 1998 comedy "Pleasantville," and voiced the part of T.W. Turtle in the 1997 animated feature "Cats Don't Dance."
As he grew older, Knotts became a lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.
Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album entitled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.
During the mid to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.
"Limpet," the tale of a meek man who is transformed into a fish, has particularly won recent acclaim. Its early mix of live action and animation was a forerunner of such later films as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "Space Jam."
At one point, Jim Carrey was said to be considering starring in a "Limpet" remake, although the project has yet to materialize. Once, when Knotts visited the set of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Carrey paid tribute. "I went to him, and I was just like, 'Thank you so much for "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,"' Carrey later told an interviewer. " 'I watched it a hundred times when I was a kid.' "
Martin Short has likewise hailed Knotts as a major influence, and at least one of Short's recurring characters, shifty-eyed lawyer Nathan Thurm, owes a debt to Knotts' "nervous man" character, created for "The Steve Allen Show" in the 1950s.
Many TV viewers remember Knotts as Ralph Furley, the ascot-wearing middle-aged landlord who mistakenly viewed himself as a swinger on ABC's hit sex farce "Three's Company." The series starred the late John Ritter as Jack Tripper, a chef who pretended to be gay in order to share an apartment with two attractive young women. The plot of many episodes hinged on Tripper struggling to keep his secret from an ever-suspicious (and homophobic) Furley. Knotts introduced the character in 1979, during the show's fourth season, when the original landlords (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley) had departed for their own spin-off, "The Ropers."
For Knotts, who typically worked in Disney comedies and other family-friendly fare, appearing in a sex comedy — then decried by critics as "jiggle TV" -- constituted a major departure. But he stayed with "Three's Company" until it went off the air in 1984 after eight seasons.
However, it was his portrayal of Barney Fife — a role for which he won five Emmy Awards -- that immortalized Knotts to TV viewers. Deputy Fife, an inveterate bumbler, was not in the series pilot, and was at first intended simply to be part of a large ensemble that would surround Griffith, who played Sheriff Andy Taylor in Mayberry, a fictional North Carolina town near Raleigh.
But not long after the series debuted in October 1960, Knotts stole the show. Griffith, who was meant to be the series' comic focus, shifted to playing straight man. The writers began beefing up Fife's role and creating episodes that depended on the sheriff rescuing Fife from his latest predicament. "Andy Griffith" was the most popular comedy on television during its first season, and never dropped from the Top 10 for the rest of its eight-year run.
In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.
Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."
Jesse Donald Knotts was born in Morgantown, W.Va., on July 21, 1924, the youngest of four brothers. His family life was troubled; Knotts' father twice threatened his mother with a knife and later spent time in mental hospitals, while older brother Earl — nicknamed "Shadow" because of his thinness -- died of asthma when Knotts was still a teenager.
Years later, the actor did not recall his childhood fondly."I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."
Knotts turned to performing in his early teens, doing an Edgar Bergen-inspired ventriloquism act with a dummy he named Danny.
He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and served in the Pacific, receiving the World War II Victory Medal among other decorations. After the war, in 1948, he graduated from West Virginia University with an education degree.
He soon borrowed $100 and moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He auditioned for several radio gigs but was turned down. One of his earliest TV roles was on the CBS soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," where he played Wilbur Peterson — a neurotic young man so troubled he communicated only with his sister -- from 1953-55. It was the only non-comedic role he ever played.
But Knotts did not receive widespread attention until he appeared on Broadway in Ira Levin's 1955 comedy "No Time for Sergeants." Based on Mac Hyman's novel, the play concerned a hillbilly — played by a then-unknown Andy Griffith -- who was drafted into the Air Force. Knotts won plaudits as an overly tense military evaluator.
From 1956-60, Knotts further cemented his reputation on NBC's "The Steve Allen Show," where he would play a character named Mr. Morrison, aka "the nervous man." Interviewed on the street, Morrison was asked whether something was making him nervous and would inevitably offer a terse, anxiety-wracked "No!"
In the meantime, "No Time for Sergeants" was made into a feature film in 1958, with Griffith and Knotts reprising their roles. The two actors kept in touch, and when Griffith signed to do the TV series as a rural sheriff, Knotts half-jokingly suggested that the lawman would need a deputy.
Knotts left "Andy Griffith" in 1965, later explaining that he believed the producers had always intended for the series to last just five seasons. In a 1967 Times interview, he said, "The grind gets to you in television, and that's primarily the reason I'm concentrating on pictures."
Griffith stayed with the program for three years after Knotts' departure, however, and Knotts agreed to revive his role as Fife in a number of guest spots. Even without Knotts, "Andy Griffith" remained popular, and the show was ranked No. 1 in its final season, 1967-68. Episodes remain syndication favorites and still appear in frequent rotation on cable network TV Land.
But many fans now believe "Andy Griffith" fizzled creatively without Knotts' manic energy — a point that even Griffith himself has conceded. On the TV fan site http://www.jumptheshark.com, one viewer wrote, "When Barney Fife left town, 'The Andy Griffith Show' changed from a television classic to just another 60's TV show."
After "Griffith," Knotts stayed busy, although he never quite matched the success he had seen as Barney Fife. An NBC variety hour, "The Don Knotts Show," premiered in 1970 and lasted just one season. The actor subsequently appeared in several live-action Disney features: as a bumbling bandit in "The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975), a would-be safecracker in "No Deposit, No Return" (1976) and an auto-racing veteran in "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo" (1977). He also reprised his role as Fife in "Return to Mayberry," a nostalgic TV movie that delivered enormous ratings for CBS in 1986, and had a recurring role in "Matlock," CBS' courtroom drama starring Griffith.
A self-described hypochondriac, Knotts suffered numerous health reversals in recent years. He developed vision problems that made driving and some other tasks difficult. In the fall of 2003, he injured his Achilles tendon while starring in "On Golden Pond" at the New Theatre in Overland Park, Kansas, and had to wear a brace onstage.
Two of Knotts' three marriages ended in divorce. The first, to Kathryn Kay Metz, lasted from 1947 to 1964 and produced two children, Karen, an actress who co-starred with her father in a 1996 stage revival of "You Can't Take It With You," and Thomas, both of whom survive him. From 1974 to 1983, Knotts was married to Loralee Czuchna. He was married to actress Francey Yarborough at the time of his death.
"He saw poignancy in people's pride and pain and he turned it into something endearing and hilarious," Yarborough, who is also an actress, said in a statement Saturday.
Knotts received a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame in January 2000.
In the foreword to Knotts' 2000 memoir, "Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known," Griffith wrote that Knotts personally had little in common with his most famous creation. "Don was not Barney Fife," Griffith wrote. "I know Don to be a bright man and very much in control of himself. As everyone knows, Barney Fife had very little control of himself. In the comedy scenes we did, I was often closer to Don than the camera and I could look at him before we started those scenes, and through his eyes, I could see him become Barney Fife."
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer
By DOUG THOMPSON
http://www.capitolhillblue.com
Feb 22, 2006, 07:35
Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.
According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.
We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consume far more than the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."
One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.
Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger. Doctors tell me that someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one drink.
If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.
But we will never know for sure because the owners of the Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting occurred, barred the sheriff's department from the property on the day of the shooting and Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III agreed to wait until the next day to send deputies in to talk to those involved.
Sheriff's Captain Charles Kirk says he went to the Armstrong Ranch immediately after the shooting was reported on Saturday, February 11 but both he and a game warden were not allowed on the 50,000-acre property. He called Salinas who told him to forget about it and return to the station.
"I told him don't worry about it. I'll make a call," Salinas said. The sheriff claims he called another deputy who moonlights at the Armstrong ranch, said he was told it was "just an accident" and made the decision to wait until Sunday to investigate.
"We've known these people for years. They are honest and wouldn't call us, telling us a lie," Salinas said.
Like all elected officials in Kenedy County, Salinas owes his job to the backing and financial support of Katherine Armstrong, owner of the ranch and the county's largest employer.
"The Armstrongs rule Kenedy County like a fiefdom," says a former employee.
Secret Service officials also took possession of all tests on Whittington's blood at the hospitals where he was treated for his wounds. When asked if a blood alcohol test had been performed on Whittington, the doctors who treated him at Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial in Corpus Christi or the hospital in Kingsville refused to answer. One admits privately he was ordered by the Secret Service to "never discuss the case with the press."
It's a sure bet that is a private doctor who treated the victim of Cheney's reckless and drunken actions can't talk to the public then any evidence that shows the Vice President drunk as a skunk will never see the light of day.
(Updated at 7:21 p.m. EST to reflect new information)
Comment on this story
© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue
Who the hell is this Thompson guy anyway?
We welcome reader comments: Discuss this story and other issues in ReaderRant.
http://www.capitolhillblue.com
Feb 22, 2006, 07:35
Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.
According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.
We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consume far more than the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."
One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.
Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger. Doctors tell me that someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one drink.
If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.
But we will never know for sure because the owners of the Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting occurred, barred the sheriff's department from the property on the day of the shooting and Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III agreed to wait until the next day to send deputies in to talk to those involved.
Sheriff's Captain Charles Kirk says he went to the Armstrong Ranch immediately after the shooting was reported on Saturday, February 11 but both he and a game warden were not allowed on the 50,000-acre property. He called Salinas who told him to forget about it and return to the station.
"I told him don't worry about it. I'll make a call," Salinas said. The sheriff claims he called another deputy who moonlights at the Armstrong ranch, said he was told it was "just an accident" and made the decision to wait until Sunday to investigate.
"We've known these people for years. They are honest and wouldn't call us, telling us a lie," Salinas said.
Like all elected officials in Kenedy County, Salinas owes his job to the backing and financial support of Katherine Armstrong, owner of the ranch and the county's largest employer.
"The Armstrongs rule Kenedy County like a fiefdom," says a former employee.
Secret Service officials also took possession of all tests on Whittington's blood at the hospitals where he was treated for his wounds. When asked if a blood alcohol test had been performed on Whittington, the doctors who treated him at Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial in Corpus Christi or the hospital in Kingsville refused to answer. One admits privately he was ordered by the Secret Service to "never discuss the case with the press."
It's a sure bet that is a private doctor who treated the victim of Cheney's reckless and drunken actions can't talk to the public then any evidence that shows the Vice President drunk as a skunk will never see the light of day.
(Updated at 7:21 p.m. EST to reflect new information)
Comment on this story
© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue
Who the hell is this Thompson guy anyway?
We welcome reader comments: Discuss this story and other issues in ReaderRant.
William F. Buckley: Iraq is Lost
It Didn't Work
February 24, 2006, 2:51 p.m.
http://www.nationalreview.com
"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists."
It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.
A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed. One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence. This last did not happen.
And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia.
The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take?
It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements.
His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy. He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies. Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
(c) 2006 Universal Press Syndicate
February 24, 2006, 2:51 p.m.
http://www.nationalreview.com
"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists."
It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.
A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed. One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence. This last did not happen.
And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia.
The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take?
It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements.
His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy. He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies. Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
(c) 2006 Universal Press Syndicate
Friday, February 24, 2006
Ann Coulter: So, Three Muslims Walk Into a Port...
Ann Coulter
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 24, 2006
The idea that the Democrats have any meaningful interest in America's national security is a joke, so I'm perfectly willing to believe there's more to this port story.
But Bush is going to need a better justification for turning over management of our ports to an Arab country than he's come up with so far – especially now that Jimmy Carter has said it's a good idea. Judging from his life's work to date, Carter's definition of a good idea is "an idea likely to hurt America and/or help its enemies."
Bush's defense of the port deal is to say that "those who are questioning it" need to "step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."
First of all, it's not "all of a sudden." The phrase you're searching for, Mr. President, is "ever since the murderous attacks of Sept. 11." The Bush administration's obstinate refusal to profile Middle Easterners has been the one massive gaping hole in national security since the 9/11 attacks – attacks that received indirect support from the United Arab Emirates.
There are at least 3,000 reasons why a company controlled by a Middle Eastern Muslim emirate should be held to a different standard than a British company. Many of these reasons are now buried under a gaping hole that isn't metaphorical in lower Manhattan.
Even four years after 9/11, I note that we don't hear Tony Blair condemning some cartoons in a Danish newspaper as "a cultural extremism," or saying their publication represents a "dreadful clash of civilizations."
That was UAE Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs Mohammed Al Dhaheri's recent comment on the great Danish cartoon caper.
So maybe Bush could defend his port deal without insulting our intelligence by asking why anyone might imagine there's any conceivable difference between a British company and a United Arab Emirates company.
President Bush has painted himself into a corner on this issue, and he needs a face-saving compromise to get out of it. Here's my proposal: Let Harriet Miers run the ports.
Isn't it enough that we're already patronizing the savages over the cartoons? Do we have to let them operate our ports, too?
The Bush administration defended Muslims rioting over cartoons, saying, "We certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive." Hey, while they're at it, why don't they invite some Muslim leaders with well-known ties to terrorism to the White House for a reception? Oh wait, I forgot...They did that right after 9/11. Yes, now I see why we must turn over our ports to the United Arab Emirates.
The University of Illinois has suspended editors of the student newspaper, The Daily Illini, for republishing the cartoons – even though the kiss-ass editors ran a column accompanying the cartoons denouncing them as "bigoted and insensitive."
That was still not enough for Richard Herman, the chancellor of the university, who wrote a letter to the editor saying that he was "saddened" by the publication of the cartoons. You want sad? The University of Illinois' sports teams are known as the "Fighting Illini." Now they're going to have to change it to the "Surrendering Illini."
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly refuses to show the cartoons on "The O'Reilly Factor," saying he doesn't want to offend anyone's religion. Someone should tell him those endless interviews with prostitutes from the Bunny Ranch and porn stars aren't high on Christians' list of enjoyable viewing, either. (How about adding Prophet Muhammad cartoon T-shirts and fleece tops to his vast collection of "Factor gear"? Isn't Father's Day right around the corner? I'd buy those.)
Needless to say, the Treason Times won't show the cartoons that have incited mass rioting around the globe. At least the New York Times has a good excuse: It's too busy printing national security secrets that will get Americans killed. Its pages are already brimming with classified information about our techniques for spying on terrorists here in America – no room for newsworthy cartoons! The Pentagon Papers and a top-secret surveillance program are one thing; cartoons that irritate Muslims are quite another.
Two days after the Times editorial page justified its decision not to reprint the cartoons as "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words," the Times ran a photo of the Virgin Mary covered in cutouts from pornographic magazines and cow dung – which I seem to have just described using a handful of common words! Gee, that was easy!
Taking to heart the lesson that violence works, I hereby announce to the world: I am offended by hotel windows that don't open, pilots chattering when the passengers are trying to sleep, and Garfield cartoons. Next time my sleep is disturbed by gibberish about our altitude over Kansas, the National Pilots Emirate embassy is going down. And mark my words: One minute after "Garfield II" goes into pre-production, some heads are gonna roll. Oh – and I'll take the San Diego port, please.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 24, 2006
The idea that the Democrats have any meaningful interest in America's national security is a joke, so I'm perfectly willing to believe there's more to this port story.
But Bush is going to need a better justification for turning over management of our ports to an Arab country than he's come up with so far – especially now that Jimmy Carter has said it's a good idea. Judging from his life's work to date, Carter's definition of a good idea is "an idea likely to hurt America and/or help its enemies."
Bush's defense of the port deal is to say that "those who are questioning it" need to "step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."
First of all, it's not "all of a sudden." The phrase you're searching for, Mr. President, is "ever since the murderous attacks of Sept. 11." The Bush administration's obstinate refusal to profile Middle Easterners has been the one massive gaping hole in national security since the 9/11 attacks – attacks that received indirect support from the United Arab Emirates.
There are at least 3,000 reasons why a company controlled by a Middle Eastern Muslim emirate should be held to a different standard than a British company. Many of these reasons are now buried under a gaping hole that isn't metaphorical in lower Manhattan.
Even four years after 9/11, I note that we don't hear Tony Blair condemning some cartoons in a Danish newspaper as "a cultural extremism," or saying their publication represents a "dreadful clash of civilizations."
That was UAE Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs Mohammed Al Dhaheri's recent comment on the great Danish cartoon caper.
So maybe Bush could defend his port deal without insulting our intelligence by asking why anyone might imagine there's any conceivable difference between a British company and a United Arab Emirates company.
President Bush has painted himself into a corner on this issue, and he needs a face-saving compromise to get out of it. Here's my proposal: Let Harriet Miers run the ports.
Isn't it enough that we're already patronizing the savages over the cartoons? Do we have to let them operate our ports, too?
The Bush administration defended Muslims rioting over cartoons, saying, "We certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive." Hey, while they're at it, why don't they invite some Muslim leaders with well-known ties to terrorism to the White House for a reception? Oh wait, I forgot...They did that right after 9/11. Yes, now I see why we must turn over our ports to the United Arab Emirates.
The University of Illinois has suspended editors of the student newspaper, The Daily Illini, for republishing the cartoons – even though the kiss-ass editors ran a column accompanying the cartoons denouncing them as "bigoted and insensitive."
That was still not enough for Richard Herman, the chancellor of the university, who wrote a letter to the editor saying that he was "saddened" by the publication of the cartoons. You want sad? The University of Illinois' sports teams are known as the "Fighting Illini." Now they're going to have to change it to the "Surrendering Illini."
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly refuses to show the cartoons on "The O'Reilly Factor," saying he doesn't want to offend anyone's religion. Someone should tell him those endless interviews with prostitutes from the Bunny Ranch and porn stars aren't high on Christians' list of enjoyable viewing, either. (How about adding Prophet Muhammad cartoon T-shirts and fleece tops to his vast collection of "Factor gear"? Isn't Father's Day right around the corner? I'd buy those.)
Needless to say, the Treason Times won't show the cartoons that have incited mass rioting around the globe. At least the New York Times has a good excuse: It's too busy printing national security secrets that will get Americans killed. Its pages are already brimming with classified information about our techniques for spying on terrorists here in America – no room for newsworthy cartoons! The Pentagon Papers and a top-secret surveillance program are one thing; cartoons that irritate Muslims are quite another.
Two days after the Times editorial page justified its decision not to reprint the cartoons as "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words," the Times ran a photo of the Virgin Mary covered in cutouts from pornographic magazines and cow dung – which I seem to have just described using a handful of common words! Gee, that was easy!
Taking to heart the lesson that violence works, I hereby announce to the world: I am offended by hotel windows that don't open, pilots chattering when the passengers are trying to sleep, and Garfield cartoons. Next time my sleep is disturbed by gibberish about our altitude over Kansas, the National Pilots Emirate embassy is going down. And mark my words: One minute after "Garfield II" goes into pre-production, some heads are gonna roll. Oh – and I'll take the San Diego port, please.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Robert Spencer: Bush's Port Jihad
Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 23, 2006
It’s shaping up to be a major political battle: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner have all lined up against President Bush’s plan to turn over operation of six major American ports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates.
The President is threatening to veto any attempt to block the plan. Referring to the fact that the company in question, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, has been British-owned up to its impending sale to Dubai Ports World, he said Tuesday: “I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I am trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, ‘We’ll treat you fairly.’” This is staggeringly unrealistic, and reflects the dangers of the Administration’s continuing unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the full dimensions of the jihad threat. That Bush feels compelled to say “to the people of the world, ‘We’ll treat you fairly’” betrays a peculiar insecurity where he should display a robust and unapologetic self-confidence. He is trying to demonstrate to a world awash in anti-Americanism that America is not as bad as all that, but in doing so he only lends credence to the anti-American charges (for if there weren’t substance to them, after all, why would he feel the need for the gesture?) and manifests the mistaken belief that “they hate us” because of something we have done, which we can undo with the proper display of good will. In this he again shows complete unawareness of the jihad ideology which remains constant while the pretexts and grievances that fuel it shift. No amount of good will can possibly efface the jihad imperative to subjugate the world under the rule of Islamic law, which is the avowed program of jihadists everywhere.
The UAE may be the most reliable ally the United States has ever had (and of course it isn’t remotely that) and there would still be no way for it to ensure that Dubai Ports World hires no one with jihadist sentiments. The situation in the Islamic world makes it quite likely that Dubai Ports World will be sending at least a few mujahedin to work in these American ports, and that they will be able to work there unhindered. The 9/11 hijackers used the UAE as a base of operations and source of financial support; have Emirati authorities cleared the country of jihad sentiment since then? On what basis can this be assumed?
After all, no one even in Washington is yet even asking the right questions of self-proclaimed moderates about where they really stand on jihad and Sharia issues. Officials in Washington and Europe have shown no awareness of the fact that it isn’t enough to have no ties to terror groups; a Muslim who nonetheless believes in the jihad ideology of Islamic supremacism and the subjugation of infidels is still susceptible to jihadist recruitment. Is it possible to determine whether such recruitment is likely or not in the case of any particular individual? No -- and that’s why turning over any ports to Dubai Ports World is ill-advised: the potential for jihadist infiltration is just too great. Why is a Middle Eastern company held to a standard different from that to which a British company is held? Obviously a British firm these days could employ a jihadist also, but the likelihood of this is smaller, as British Muslims still constitute a small minority of the population.
Some have argued that this deal has been blown way out of proportion, and that security for the ports will remain in American hands. Even if that is true, however, the arrangement with Dubai Ports World should be ended immediately, if only for its symbolic value. Rather than bend over backward to show the Muslim nations of the world that he trusts them, President Bush would do more for American national security by explaining why such trust would be misplaced at this time, and calling upon those nations to manifest their trustworthiness with forthright and unambiguous anti-jihad actions within their borders -- including an ending of all discrimination against non-Muslims and of the teaching of the idea that the Islamic social order must be imposed by force over Jews, Christians, and others. If the President were calling for the UAE to adopt such measures, he would be under no illusions about where that country really stands.
Frist, Hastert, and Boehner are right. Why would Bush want to be so obstinate on this? Doesn’t he realize that it does immense damage to his position as being tougher on Islamic terrorism than his opponents? On cue, Hillary Clinton has already spoken about introducing legislation to stop the deal. The President risks allowing the Democrats an opportunity to show that they are tougher on terrorism than he is – which, since it isn’t true, if a Democrat is actually elected in 2008, could lead to the destruction of the entire anti-terror resistance, as imperfect as it has been.
If this deal goes through, will the United States have the luxury of undoing it before it undoes us?
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 23, 2006
It’s shaping up to be a major political battle: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner have all lined up against President Bush’s plan to turn over operation of six major American ports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates.
The President is threatening to veto any attempt to block the plan. Referring to the fact that the company in question, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, has been British-owned up to its impending sale to Dubai Ports World, he said Tuesday: “I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I am trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, ‘We’ll treat you fairly.’” This is staggeringly unrealistic, and reflects the dangers of the Administration’s continuing unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the full dimensions of the jihad threat. That Bush feels compelled to say “to the people of the world, ‘We’ll treat you fairly’” betrays a peculiar insecurity where he should display a robust and unapologetic self-confidence. He is trying to demonstrate to a world awash in anti-Americanism that America is not as bad as all that, but in doing so he only lends credence to the anti-American charges (for if there weren’t substance to them, after all, why would he feel the need for the gesture?) and manifests the mistaken belief that “they hate us” because of something we have done, which we can undo with the proper display of good will. In this he again shows complete unawareness of the jihad ideology which remains constant while the pretexts and grievances that fuel it shift. No amount of good will can possibly efface the jihad imperative to subjugate the world under the rule of Islamic law, which is the avowed program of jihadists everywhere.
The UAE may be the most reliable ally the United States has ever had (and of course it isn’t remotely that) and there would still be no way for it to ensure that Dubai Ports World hires no one with jihadist sentiments. The situation in the Islamic world makes it quite likely that Dubai Ports World will be sending at least a few mujahedin to work in these American ports, and that they will be able to work there unhindered. The 9/11 hijackers used the UAE as a base of operations and source of financial support; have Emirati authorities cleared the country of jihad sentiment since then? On what basis can this be assumed?
After all, no one even in Washington is yet even asking the right questions of self-proclaimed moderates about where they really stand on jihad and Sharia issues. Officials in Washington and Europe have shown no awareness of the fact that it isn’t enough to have no ties to terror groups; a Muslim who nonetheless believes in the jihad ideology of Islamic supremacism and the subjugation of infidels is still susceptible to jihadist recruitment. Is it possible to determine whether such recruitment is likely or not in the case of any particular individual? No -- and that’s why turning over any ports to Dubai Ports World is ill-advised: the potential for jihadist infiltration is just too great. Why is a Middle Eastern company held to a standard different from that to which a British company is held? Obviously a British firm these days could employ a jihadist also, but the likelihood of this is smaller, as British Muslims still constitute a small minority of the population.
Some have argued that this deal has been blown way out of proportion, and that security for the ports will remain in American hands. Even if that is true, however, the arrangement with Dubai Ports World should be ended immediately, if only for its symbolic value. Rather than bend over backward to show the Muslim nations of the world that he trusts them, President Bush would do more for American national security by explaining why such trust would be misplaced at this time, and calling upon those nations to manifest their trustworthiness with forthright and unambiguous anti-jihad actions within their borders -- including an ending of all discrimination against non-Muslims and of the teaching of the idea that the Islamic social order must be imposed by force over Jews, Christians, and others. If the President were calling for the UAE to adopt such measures, he would be under no illusions about where that country really stands.
Frist, Hastert, and Boehner are right. Why would Bush want to be so obstinate on this? Doesn’t he realize that it does immense damage to his position as being tougher on Islamic terrorism than his opponents? On cue, Hillary Clinton has already spoken about introducing legislation to stop the deal. The President risks allowing the Democrats an opportunity to show that they are tougher on terrorism than he is – which, since it isn’t true, if a Democrat is actually elected in 2008, could lead to the destruction of the entire anti-terror resistance, as imperfect as it has been.
If this deal goes through, will the United States have the luxury of undoing it before it undoes us?
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Thomas Sowell: Postponing Reality
February 21, 2006
Thomas Sowell
Let's face it: Reality can be stressful and can sometimes get very rough. Everyone has an incentive to postpone it. Most of us, however, learn the hard way that postponing reality only makes it far worse than facing it early on.
The problem gets more complicated in politics, where one set of people has the power to postpone facing reality and a different set of people have to pay the price later on.
Our educational system is a classic example. Nothing is easier than to lower the standards today, avoiding all sorts of problems that arise with students and their parents when higher standards are imposed.
Today's "educators" can simply pass the students along to the next grade and eventually send them out into the world with nice-looking diplomas and little else to enable them to cope with the complexities and challenges of work and of life. These students then pay big time for the rest of their lives.
California is one of a number of states that has belatedly begun to recognize what a disaster this policy has been. In 1999 a law was passed saying that students would receive a diploma only if they could pass a standard test to show that they had some real knowledge, instead of just an acceptable attendance record.
These tests do not require genius. We're talking basic math and English. We're talking multiple choice questions where the passing grade is 55 percent -- and you can get 25 percent by just guessing.
Like other states with high school graduation exams, California has postponed forcing students to pass that exam as a condition for receiving the diploma. This year, the state has decided that it is finally going to enforce this law passed in 1999.
Maybe it will and maybe it won't. Attorney Arturo Gonzalez has filed a lawsuit to stop this graduation requirement from being enforced.
The requirement is not "fair," Mr. Gonzalez says. The schools where a high percentage of the students don't pass the test are predominantly low-income and minority schools.
This is not to say that most of the students in predominantly low-income and minority schools do not pass. It is just that the schools where fewer than 70 percent pass are predominantly low-income minority schools.
Are these tests "fair"? Of course not. Life itself is not "fair" in the sense of offering equal chances of succeeding in any kind of endeavor.
It is hard even to imagine how life could conceivably be "fair" in the sense of equal chances of doing specific things, when there are so many factors at work differently for each person.
Different families and different cultures produce different habits, different values, different behavior patterns. They don't even want the same things to the same degree, much less have a willingness to sacrifice to the same extent to get those things.
The only kind of fairness we can hope for is applying the same rules and the same standards to everyone.
It certainly wasn't fair, in Mr. Gonzalez's sense of the word, for the schools I attended as a child to require me to take the same tests as children from families with more than twice as much education and several times as much income.
What would have happened if the schools had been "fair" to me in that sense? I would have learned less, had a much easier time in school -- and would have gone out into the world not even knowing enough to realize how little I knew.
By now, I might have been on welfare or in prison. But my teachers would have felt good about themselves for giving a poor boy from the ghetto a break.
Admittedly, at the time I didn't always appreciate all the heavy stuff my tough teachers were laying on me. But, at the time, I also didn't know that the world was going to be a lot tougher than school if I didn't learn.
Fortunately, those teachers were not into "fairness" and there was no Mr. Gonzalez around to file lawsuits to protect me from having to meet the same standards as everybody else.
Reality had to be confronted early on, not postponed.
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Thomas Sowell
Let's face it: Reality can be stressful and can sometimes get very rough. Everyone has an incentive to postpone it. Most of us, however, learn the hard way that postponing reality only makes it far worse than facing it early on.
The problem gets more complicated in politics, where one set of people has the power to postpone facing reality and a different set of people have to pay the price later on.
Our educational system is a classic example. Nothing is easier than to lower the standards today, avoiding all sorts of problems that arise with students and their parents when higher standards are imposed.
Today's "educators" can simply pass the students along to the next grade and eventually send them out into the world with nice-looking diplomas and little else to enable them to cope with the complexities and challenges of work and of life. These students then pay big time for the rest of their lives.
California is one of a number of states that has belatedly begun to recognize what a disaster this policy has been. In 1999 a law was passed saying that students would receive a diploma only if they could pass a standard test to show that they had some real knowledge, instead of just an acceptable attendance record.
These tests do not require genius. We're talking basic math and English. We're talking multiple choice questions where the passing grade is 55 percent -- and you can get 25 percent by just guessing.
Like other states with high school graduation exams, California has postponed forcing students to pass that exam as a condition for receiving the diploma. This year, the state has decided that it is finally going to enforce this law passed in 1999.
Maybe it will and maybe it won't. Attorney Arturo Gonzalez has filed a lawsuit to stop this graduation requirement from being enforced.
The requirement is not "fair," Mr. Gonzalez says. The schools where a high percentage of the students don't pass the test are predominantly low-income and minority schools.
This is not to say that most of the students in predominantly low-income and minority schools do not pass. It is just that the schools where fewer than 70 percent pass are predominantly low-income minority schools.
Are these tests "fair"? Of course not. Life itself is not "fair" in the sense of offering equal chances of succeeding in any kind of endeavor.
It is hard even to imagine how life could conceivably be "fair" in the sense of equal chances of doing specific things, when there are so many factors at work differently for each person.
Different families and different cultures produce different habits, different values, different behavior patterns. They don't even want the same things to the same degree, much less have a willingness to sacrifice to the same extent to get those things.
The only kind of fairness we can hope for is applying the same rules and the same standards to everyone.
It certainly wasn't fair, in Mr. Gonzalez's sense of the word, for the schools I attended as a child to require me to take the same tests as children from families with more than twice as much education and several times as much income.
What would have happened if the schools had been "fair" to me in that sense? I would have learned less, had a much easier time in school -- and would have gone out into the world not even knowing enough to realize how little I knew.
By now, I might have been on welfare or in prison. But my teachers would have felt good about themselves for giving a poor boy from the ghetto a break.
Admittedly, at the time I didn't always appreciate all the heavy stuff my tough teachers were laying on me. But, at the time, I also didn't know that the world was going to be a lot tougher than school if I didn't learn.
Fortunately, those teachers were not into "fairness" and there was no Mr. Gonzalez around to file lawsuits to protect me from having to meet the same standards as everybody else.
Reality had to be confronted early on, not postponed.
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Monday, February 20, 2006
P. David Hornik: Terror Takes Office
P. David Hornik
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 20, 2006
The swearing-in of a Hamas legislature in Ramallah on Saturday can be seen as symbolizing Israel’s and the West’s failure to preempt the Islamist threat, instead letting it grow to emergency proportions through various kinds of temporizing and self-delusion. Britain, France, and Germany were assigned to use “soft power” and hold endless talks with Iran until a particularly lunatic and dangerous leader was elected while Iran’s nuclear program advanced to the point of no return. Israel, after drubbing Hamas militarily during 2004, accepted a ceasefire, handed Hamas a territorial base in Gaza, allowed it to run for office, and now faces a Nazi regime on the outskirts of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
A particularly amazing case of prevarication and passivity emerged last week when Israeli security officials warned of a “large-scale disaster,” and urged emergency preparations, in case Kassam rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza hit sensitive facilities, including chemical storage tanks, in nearby Ashkelon. Seemingly, the best way to cope with a threat of thousands of people being burned or gassed to death through an artillery strike is not passive preparations, but military action against the threat. But since effective action entails reinvading Gaza and this is considered politically inexpedient for many reasons, it is considered preferable to gamble with the lives of thousands.
Meanwhile, only weeks after it was elected, Hamas’s legitimation by the world community continues. President Putin, having already invited Hamas leaders for talks while reportedly considering weapon sales to the organization, has taken the lead in signaling that an Islamist terror group—even one known to be closely allied with “his own” Chechen rebels—is different from all others if it is mainly anti-Jewish. Turkey, often cited as a successful case of Islamic secularization and democracy, has already wined and dined Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, whom Israel tried to assassinate in Amman in 1997. The message is the same: whereas Muslim anti-Turkish terror leader Abdullah Ojalan sits in a Turkish prison for life, Mashaal only kills Jews and is an honored guest.
Meanwhile Europe, while making proper noises about the “unacceptable” nature of a Hamas government, is continuing financial aid to the PA while it “waits and sees” what sort of regime takes shape—which means, in translation, finding ways to keep paying the jizya to Europe’s Islamic attackers/protectors. And while America, to its credit, has stopped direct aid to the PA and is encouraging other countries to do the same, it is also urging that highly fungible “humanitarian” aid be continued—suggesting that Palestinians must always be coddled even when they elect an overtly genocidal government, and that the PA, unlike the Taliban or Saddam regimes, always has to be nurtured and sustained, never invaded and dismantled by its mortally endangered neighbor Israel.
The constant posing of conditions to Hamas of recognizing Israel, disarming, and changing its charter, in which Israel’s caretaker Olmert government goes along with the Quartet, also signals that Hamas is a potentially rational, constructive force, steadily dilutes awareness of its real nature, and gives it a bonanza of opportunities to exploit Western useful idiocy. It was, after all, Yasser Arafat’s “recognition” of Israel in 1988, and continued skillful pandering to Israeli and Western dreams and delusions, that allowed him to attain land, weapons, aid, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a launching pad to wage a savage terror war against Israel. Hamas is already said to be considering cosmetic changes in its charter, and in PA president Mahmoud Abbas—an iconic “Palestinian moderate”—has an ideal fig leaf to make use of. What is already clear is that Hamas somehow has a different status than the Taliban or Al Qaeda as an organization always on the verge of “reforming” and reaping the rewards.
From President Carter’s support for the Khomeini regime to Israel’s creation and cultivation of the PA with President Clinton’s fervent encouragement, it’s the same story of the West tolerating, excusing, and even bolstering enemies in the hope of achieving an ideal world where one not only has freedom and comfort but never has to fight for them. Although even the relatively realistic Bush administration cannot quite treat Hamas as the irredeemable, unchangeable Nazi movement that it is, there are rumors and hopes that the U.S. has no such nuances about the Ahmadinejad regime and is preparing to take effective action. But even if America, or Israel, should act, fanatic Islam is now so well positioned and has so many power bases that it may exact terrible vengeance.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
February 20, 2006
The swearing-in of a Hamas legislature in Ramallah on Saturday can be seen as symbolizing Israel’s and the West’s failure to preempt the Islamist threat, instead letting it grow to emergency proportions through various kinds of temporizing and self-delusion. Britain, France, and Germany were assigned to use “soft power” and hold endless talks with Iran until a particularly lunatic and dangerous leader was elected while Iran’s nuclear program advanced to the point of no return. Israel, after drubbing Hamas militarily during 2004, accepted a ceasefire, handed Hamas a territorial base in Gaza, allowed it to run for office, and now faces a Nazi regime on the outskirts of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
A particularly amazing case of prevarication and passivity emerged last week when Israeli security officials warned of a “large-scale disaster,” and urged emergency preparations, in case Kassam rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza hit sensitive facilities, including chemical storage tanks, in nearby Ashkelon. Seemingly, the best way to cope with a threat of thousands of people being burned or gassed to death through an artillery strike is not passive preparations, but military action against the threat. But since effective action entails reinvading Gaza and this is considered politically inexpedient for many reasons, it is considered preferable to gamble with the lives of thousands.
Meanwhile, only weeks after it was elected, Hamas’s legitimation by the world community continues. President Putin, having already invited Hamas leaders for talks while reportedly considering weapon sales to the organization, has taken the lead in signaling that an Islamist terror group—even one known to be closely allied with “his own” Chechen rebels—is different from all others if it is mainly anti-Jewish. Turkey, often cited as a successful case of Islamic secularization and democracy, has already wined and dined Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, whom Israel tried to assassinate in Amman in 1997. The message is the same: whereas Muslim anti-Turkish terror leader Abdullah Ojalan sits in a Turkish prison for life, Mashaal only kills Jews and is an honored guest.
Meanwhile Europe, while making proper noises about the “unacceptable” nature of a Hamas government, is continuing financial aid to the PA while it “waits and sees” what sort of regime takes shape—which means, in translation, finding ways to keep paying the jizya to Europe’s Islamic attackers/protectors. And while America, to its credit, has stopped direct aid to the PA and is encouraging other countries to do the same, it is also urging that highly fungible “humanitarian” aid be continued—suggesting that Palestinians must always be coddled even when they elect an overtly genocidal government, and that the PA, unlike the Taliban or Saddam regimes, always has to be nurtured and sustained, never invaded and dismantled by its mortally endangered neighbor Israel.
The constant posing of conditions to Hamas of recognizing Israel, disarming, and changing its charter, in which Israel’s caretaker Olmert government goes along with the Quartet, also signals that Hamas is a potentially rational, constructive force, steadily dilutes awareness of its real nature, and gives it a bonanza of opportunities to exploit Western useful idiocy. It was, after all, Yasser Arafat’s “recognition” of Israel in 1988, and continued skillful pandering to Israeli and Western dreams and delusions, that allowed him to attain land, weapons, aid, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a launching pad to wage a savage terror war against Israel. Hamas is already said to be considering cosmetic changes in its charter, and in PA president Mahmoud Abbas—an iconic “Palestinian moderate”—has an ideal fig leaf to make use of. What is already clear is that Hamas somehow has a different status than the Taliban or Al Qaeda as an organization always on the verge of “reforming” and reaping the rewards.
From President Carter’s support for the Khomeini regime to Israel’s creation and cultivation of the PA with President Clinton’s fervent encouragement, it’s the same story of the West tolerating, excusing, and even bolstering enemies in the hope of achieving an ideal world where one not only has freedom and comfort but never has to fight for them. Although even the relatively realistic Bush administration cannot quite treat Hamas as the irredeemable, unchangeable Nazi movement that it is, there are rumors and hopes that the U.S. has no such nuances about the Ahmadinejad regime and is preparing to take effective action. But even if America, or Israel, should act, fanatic Islam is now so well positioned and has so many power bases that it may exact terrible vengeance.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
Mark Steyn: Cheering tidbits lighten otherwise grim week
February 19, 2006
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
In an otherwise grim week -- at least on unimportant peripheral matters like Iranian nukes -- three things cheered me up. The first was the decision of Iran's bakers to rename Danish pastries "Roses of the Prophet Muhammed pastries.'' Has a ring to it, don't you think? If they're looking for a slogan, how about "Iranian pastry: There's nothing flakier. Except our president."
The second cheery sight was the destruction of a McDonald's in Lahore by the usual excitable young lads from the religion of pieces. Apparently the lively Pakistanis had burned every single Danish target in the city -- one early Victor Borge LP left behind by the last British governor -- and had been obliged to diversify. So they dragged Ronald McDonald out of the joint, torched him in the street and danced around his flaming remains shouting "Death to America! Death to Britain! Death to Tony Blair!"
I'm not sure I even get that. Ronald and Tony seem kind of similar from a distance but even on the all-infidels-look-alike-to-me-especially-when-they're-alight thesis you'd think they weren't that easily confused.
The third jolly event of the week was those other excitable fellows -- the Big Media White House reporters -- jumping up and down shouting "Death to Dick Cheney!" NBC's David Gregory, the George Clooney of the press corps, was yelling truth to power about why the Elmer-Fudd-in-gun-rampage story was released to "a local Corpus Christi newspaper, not the White House press corps at large.'' I know how he feels. I remember, like, four or five years ago -- early September, maybe second week -- there was this building collapse in New York and I had to learn about it from the TV because this notoriously secretive paranoid administration couldn't even e-mail me a timely press release. For an NBC guy discovering that some hicksville nowhere-burg one-stop-light feed-price sheet got tipped off before he did is like a dowager duchess turning up at the royal banquet to discover the scullery maid's been seated next to the queen.
So anyway David Gregory's going bananas and yelling "I will yell!" and "Don't be a jerk!" at the White House press secretary, and there's more smoke coming out of his ears than from Ronald McDonald in Lahore, and I'm thinking, you know, maybe Karl's latest range of Rovebots that he planted in American media corporations are just a wee bit too parodically self-absorbed to be plausible. And then this lady pipes up and asks, "Would this be much more serious if the man had died?"
Well, maybe. And maybe it would be even ever so much more serious still if, after peppering him with birdshot, Cheney had dragged him into a safe house in the Sunni Triangle and decapitated him with a rusty scimitar while shouting "Allahu Ahkbar!" and then sold the video to al-Jazeera.
Fortunately, the Washington Post had that wise old bird David Ignatius to put it in the proper historical context: "This incident," he mused, "reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy's delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969."
Hmm. Let's see. On the one hand, the guy leaves the gal at the bottom of the river struggling for breath pressed up against the window in some small air pocket while he pulls himself out of the briny, staggers home, sleeps it off and saunters in to inform the cops the following day that, oh yeah, there was some broad down there. And, on the other hand, the guy calls 911, has the other fellow taken to the hospital, lets the sheriff know promptly but neglects to fax David Gregory's make-up girl!
One can only hope others agree with Ignatius' insightful analogy, and that the reprehensible Cheney will be hounded from public life the way Kennedy was all those years ago. One would hate to think folks would just let it slide and three decades from now this Cheney guy will be sitting on some committee picking Supreme Court justices and whatnot.
Meanwhile, from Malaysia to Jordan to Scandinavia, it was a bad week for journalists increasingly constrained -- not to mention fired and otherwise humiliated -- in their ability to cover the big story of our time. If I had to pick a single moment to contrast with the hilariously parochial narcissist buffoons of the Washington press, it would be another press conference in another government building, this time in Oslo, called by Norway's minister of labor.
Surrounded by cabinet ministers and a phalanx of imams, Velbjorn Selbekk, the editor of an obscure Christian publication called Magazinet, issued an abject public apology for reprinting the Danish Muhammed cartoons. He had initially stood firm in the face of Muslim death threats and the usual lack of support from Europe's political class, but in the end Mr. Selbekk was prevailed upon to recant and the head of Norway's Islamic Council, Mohammed Hamdan, graciously accepted the apology and assured the prostrate editor that he was now under his personal protection. As the American author Bruce Bawer commented, "It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom."
In Canada, by contrast, the Western Standard (for which I also write) stood firm in its decision to publish the cartoons, and as a result is suffering legal harassment from Muslim lobby groups and has been banned from both Air Canada and two of the country's leading bookstore chains, Indigo-Chapters and McNally Robinson. Paul McNally of the latter defended his action this way: "We feel there is nothing to gain on the side of freedom of expression and much to lose on the side of hurting feelings." Not exactly Voltaire, is it? "I disagree strongly with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it as long as it doesn't hurt anybody's feelings." Maybe it could be Canada's new national motto.
It's easy to be tough about nothing. The press corps that noisily champions "the public's right to know" about a minor hunting accident simultaneously assures the public that they've no need to see these Danish cartoons that have caused riots, arson and death around the world. On CNN, out of "sensitivity" to Islam, they show the cartoons but with the Prophet's face pixilated so that he looks as if Cheney's ventilated him with birdshot and it turned puffy and gangrenous. C'mon, guys, these are interesting times. Anyone can unload the umpteenth round of blanks into the bulletproof Chimpy Hallibushitler, but why not take a shot at something that matters?
Or perhaps it would just be easier to change the term ''free press'' to the ''Roses of the Prophet Muhammed press.''
Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
In an otherwise grim week -- at least on unimportant peripheral matters like Iranian nukes -- three things cheered me up. The first was the decision of Iran's bakers to rename Danish pastries "Roses of the Prophet Muhammed pastries.'' Has a ring to it, don't you think? If they're looking for a slogan, how about "Iranian pastry: There's nothing flakier. Except our president."
The second cheery sight was the destruction of a McDonald's in Lahore by the usual excitable young lads from the religion of pieces. Apparently the lively Pakistanis had burned every single Danish target in the city -- one early Victor Borge LP left behind by the last British governor -- and had been obliged to diversify. So they dragged Ronald McDonald out of the joint, torched him in the street and danced around his flaming remains shouting "Death to America! Death to Britain! Death to Tony Blair!"
I'm not sure I even get that. Ronald and Tony seem kind of similar from a distance but even on the all-infidels-look-alike-to-me-especially-when-they're-alight thesis you'd think they weren't that easily confused.
The third jolly event of the week was those other excitable fellows -- the Big Media White House reporters -- jumping up and down shouting "Death to Dick Cheney!" NBC's David Gregory, the George Clooney of the press corps, was yelling truth to power about why the Elmer-Fudd-in-gun-rampage story was released to "a local Corpus Christi newspaper, not the White House press corps at large.'' I know how he feels. I remember, like, four or five years ago -- early September, maybe second week -- there was this building collapse in New York and I had to learn about it from the TV because this notoriously secretive paranoid administration couldn't even e-mail me a timely press release. For an NBC guy discovering that some hicksville nowhere-burg one-stop-light feed-price sheet got tipped off before he did is like a dowager duchess turning up at the royal banquet to discover the scullery maid's been seated next to the queen.
So anyway David Gregory's going bananas and yelling "I will yell!" and "Don't be a jerk!" at the White House press secretary, and there's more smoke coming out of his ears than from Ronald McDonald in Lahore, and I'm thinking, you know, maybe Karl's latest range of Rovebots that he planted in American media corporations are just a wee bit too parodically self-absorbed to be plausible. And then this lady pipes up and asks, "Would this be much more serious if the man had died?"
Well, maybe. And maybe it would be even ever so much more serious still if, after peppering him with birdshot, Cheney had dragged him into a safe house in the Sunni Triangle and decapitated him with a rusty scimitar while shouting "Allahu Ahkbar!" and then sold the video to al-Jazeera.
Fortunately, the Washington Post had that wise old bird David Ignatius to put it in the proper historical context: "This incident," he mused, "reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy's delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969."
Hmm. Let's see. On the one hand, the guy leaves the gal at the bottom of the river struggling for breath pressed up against the window in some small air pocket while he pulls himself out of the briny, staggers home, sleeps it off and saunters in to inform the cops the following day that, oh yeah, there was some broad down there. And, on the other hand, the guy calls 911, has the other fellow taken to the hospital, lets the sheriff know promptly but neglects to fax David Gregory's make-up girl!
One can only hope others agree with Ignatius' insightful analogy, and that the reprehensible Cheney will be hounded from public life the way Kennedy was all those years ago. One would hate to think folks would just let it slide and three decades from now this Cheney guy will be sitting on some committee picking Supreme Court justices and whatnot.
Meanwhile, from Malaysia to Jordan to Scandinavia, it was a bad week for journalists increasingly constrained -- not to mention fired and otherwise humiliated -- in their ability to cover the big story of our time. If I had to pick a single moment to contrast with the hilariously parochial narcissist buffoons of the Washington press, it would be another press conference in another government building, this time in Oslo, called by Norway's minister of labor.
Surrounded by cabinet ministers and a phalanx of imams, Velbjorn Selbekk, the editor of an obscure Christian publication called Magazinet, issued an abject public apology for reprinting the Danish Muhammed cartoons. He had initially stood firm in the face of Muslim death threats and the usual lack of support from Europe's political class, but in the end Mr. Selbekk was prevailed upon to recant and the head of Norway's Islamic Council, Mohammed Hamdan, graciously accepted the apology and assured the prostrate editor that he was now under his personal protection. As the American author Bruce Bawer commented, "It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom."
In Canada, by contrast, the Western Standard (for which I also write) stood firm in its decision to publish the cartoons, and as a result is suffering legal harassment from Muslim lobby groups and has been banned from both Air Canada and two of the country's leading bookstore chains, Indigo-Chapters and McNally Robinson. Paul McNally of the latter defended his action this way: "We feel there is nothing to gain on the side of freedom of expression and much to lose on the side of hurting feelings." Not exactly Voltaire, is it? "I disagree strongly with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it as long as it doesn't hurt anybody's feelings." Maybe it could be Canada's new national motto.
It's easy to be tough about nothing. The press corps that noisily champions "the public's right to know" about a minor hunting accident simultaneously assures the public that they've no need to see these Danish cartoons that have caused riots, arson and death around the world. On CNN, out of "sensitivity" to Islam, they show the cartoons but with the Prophet's face pixilated so that he looks as if Cheney's ventilated him with birdshot and it turned puffy and gangrenous. C'mon, guys, these are interesting times. Anyone can unload the umpteenth round of blanks into the bulletproof Chimpy Hallibushitler, but why not take a shot at something that matters?
Or perhaps it would just be easier to change the term ''free press'' to the ''Roses of the Prophet Muhammed press.''
Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)