Friday, January 24, 2014

Hollywood’s Muslim Lies

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On January 24, 2014 @ 12:49 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 9 Comments
http://www.frontpagemag.com/

In real life, terrorists are almost always Muslim. In the movie theater, they are anything but. America’s fictional secret agents, covert operatives and rogue cops who play by their own rules have spent more time battling Serbian terrorists than Muslim terrorists. 

Before September 11, 24′s Jack Bauer was fighting the international menace of Serbian terrorism. Serbian terrorists also showed up in 1999′s Diplomatic Siege when their “Serbian Liberation Front” took over a US embassy and in 1997′s The Peacemaker with George Clooney rushing to stop a Serb from detonating a nuke in New York City.

The United States has remained unscathed by Serbian terrorism, though the same can’t be said for Peter Weller, the star of Diplomatic Siege, and Mimi Leder, the director of The Peacemaker, but not by Muslim terrorist attacks. Despite September 11, the Fort Hood Massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings, Hollywood has resolutely kept its eye on the real threat.
Serbian terrorism.

This weekend, Ride Along, which features Ice “F___ the Police” Cube playing a cop, knocked Lone Survivor out of the top spot at the box office, and once again takes on the terrible threat of… Serbian terrorism.

When the Serbs aren’t available, the Russians have to step in. The Russians are more likely to appear as villains after the fall of the Soviet Union than during the Communist era. It’s as if the end of Soviet Communism finally set Hollywood free to join in the fun of Boris and Natasha villains without any of the guilt about red-baiting.

When Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit featured a terrorist cell in Dearborn, even though Muslims  dominate the area, the villains were shown operating out of a Russian Orthodox church and getting their cues from a priest reading the bible while the terrorists cried out, “Slava Bogu” or “Praise God.”

It would have been unrealistic to show them praising Allah instead.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the latest attempt at making a Tom Clancy movie without the Tom Clancy part. Sum of All Fears, one of the first movies about terrorism to come out after September 11, jettisoned Clancy’s Muslim villains.

Its writer Dan Pyne dismissed Islamic terrorism as a “cliche”; even though a plot can’t be a cliche when it never appears in movies, only in real life. Pyne however found a more realistic villain. “I think, there was some neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and there was stuff going on in Spain and in Italy. So it seemed like a logical and lasting idea that would be universal.”

Nothing is more universal than the threat of neo-nationalists in Holland. Dutch neo-nationalism is an enduring world menace that everyone can relate to.

The neo-nationalists of the Netherlands that Pyne had discovered were probably Pim Fortuyn’s party. Fortuyn was a Sociology professor who favored drug legalization, gay marriage and less Muslim immigration. The neo-nationalist threat of the Netherlands did not prove lasting when around the time that Sum of All Fears was playing in theaters; Fortuyn was murdered by a leftist who, like Pyne, worried about the plight of the Muslims.

In an even bigger cliche, Theo van Gogh, who had just finished directing May 6th, a movie about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim immigrant from Morocco who told the victim’s mother that he could have no empathy for her because she was a non-Muslim.

It was the sort of ridiculous cliche that Dan Pyne would never have put into a script.

Instead Dan Pyne went on to write a remake of the Manchurian Candidate in which Communist China was replaced by the “Manchurian Corporation”. He’s currently working on a movie featuring a Syrian rescue worker who gets mistaken for a terrorist while trying to save lives during Hurricane Katrina.

It’s a cliche, but it’s the kind of cliche that Hollywood likes.

If a movie is made about September 11 a decade from, now, the villains will probably be Serbian nationalists. It would be a cliche to have 19 Muslim hijackers murder 3,000 people. And then the camera will linger meaningfully on a Muslim rescuer wrongly taken into custody by a bigoted NYPD cop who is overlooking the real Serbian/Dutch neo-nationalist corporate villains.

The Serbians, Russians and Netherlands neo-nationalists are only the understudies who get called in when the usual villains, right-wing extremists who want to false flag America into a war with the Muslims, are on vacation.

After 24 got done with the Serbian terror threat, it defaulted to the real threat of government warmongers trying to fake a Muslim terror threat. After 9/11, 24′s second season’s story was about an evil government conspiracy to fake a Muslim terrorist attack. Anything else would have been a cliche. And to avoid cliches, the series used variations of the same plot in three seasons.

When the Serbs went on strike last year, White House Down brought in a villainous Speaker of the House with a Jewish last name to assassinate a black president in order to sabotage his treaty with Iran. The movie lost so much money that Sony blamed its quarterly $197 million loss on it.

Serbian terrorism had struck again.

When a straightforward presentation flops, Hollywood finds ways of embedding the same old message into more fantastic fare. Last summer, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness and the Lone Ranger all had minor variations of the same story about false flag attacks that were orchestrated by governments or powerful interests connected to them. This Trutherism explosion was just another case of Hollywood carefully avoiding cliches.

Nowhere in all these tales of evil corporations and governments is there a movie about an entertainment industry so intertwined with government that it not only helped pick the country’s current leader, but it constantly releases propaganda films attempting to revise reality according to his worldview. That would be a cliché; much like the idea of that industry filming false flag movies depicting the favorite villains of the Clinton Administration carrying out ridiculously implausible acts of terror to retroactively justify its focus on the Serbs instead of Al Qaeda.

Hollywood stands as firmly against depicting Muslim terrorism as Hollywood Communists after the Hitler-Stalin pact did against anti-Nazi films. If they had been positioned further up the ladder back then, instead of mainly being relegated to writing scripts, we would no doubt have a catalog of movies featuring Yankee warmongers plotting to stage fake Nazi attacks on America.

Hollywood’s ideological hostility to reality however has not proven to be very profitable.

The Peacemaker, a movie written and co-produced by the Cockburns, whose politics are slightly to the left of Stalin, was the inaugural feature from the failed Spielberg-Geffen-Katzenberg Dreamworks studio and disappointed critics and audiences. The Cockburns would never try their hand at film fiction again unless you count American Casino, their “documentary” about the financial collapse, which had a financial collapse of its own with an opening weekend of $1,397.

Sum of All Fears, the movie inspired by the Netherlands neo-nationalist threat, was the weakest performer of the Tom Clancy movies when accounting for ticket price inflation and full budget. And it still had a much better opening weekend than Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Failure however won’t stop Hollywood from alerting the nation to the terrorist threat lurking in Orthodox Churches or the Dutch neo-nationalists trying to nuke our cities. Hollywood’s handpicked leaders were the ones who made the country vulnerable to Islamic terrorism and their industry has gone on covering up for them with movies in which the villains can be anyone and everyone except the real killers.

Benghazi and the Smearing of Chris Stevens

January 22, 2014

Last week the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The report concluded that the attack, which resulted in the murder of four Americans, was "preventable." Some have been suggesting that the blame for this tragedy lies at least partly with Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack. This is untrue: The blame lies entirely with Washington.
The report states that retired Gen. Carter Ham, then-commander of the U.S. Africa Command (Africom) headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, twice offered to "sustain" the special forces security team in Tripoli and that Chris twice "declined." Since Chris cannot speak, I want to explain the reasons and timing for his responses to Gen. Ham. As the deputy chief of mission, I was kept informed by Chris or was present throughout the process.
On Aug. 1, 2012, the day after I arrived in Tripoli, Chris invited me to a video conference with Africom to discuss changing the mission of the U.S. Special Forces from protecting the U.S. Embassy and its personnel to training Libyan forces. This change in mission would result in the transfer of authority over the unit in Tripoli from Chris to Gen. Ham. In other words, the special forces would report to the Defense Department, not State.
Chris wanted the decision postponed but could not say so directly. Chris had requested on July 9 by cable that Washington provide a minimum of 13 American security professionals for Libya over and above the diplomatic security complement of eight assigned to Tripoli and Benghazi. On July 11, the Defense Department, apparently in response to Chris's request, offered to extend the special forces mission to protect the U.S. Embassy.
However, on July 13, State Department Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy refused the Defense Department offer and thus Chris's July 9 request. His rationale was that Libyan guards would be hired to take over this responsibility. Because of Mr. Kennedy's refusal, Chris had to use diplomatic language at the video conference, such as expressing "reservations" about the transfer of authority.
At a memorial service for U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in San Francisco, Oct. 16, 2012. Reuters
Chris's concern was significant. Transferring authority would immediately strip the special forces team of its diplomatic immunity. Moreover, the U.S. had no status of forces agreement with Libya. He explained to Rear Adm. Charles J. Leidig that if a member of the special forces team used weapons to protect U.S. facilities, personnel or themselves, he would be subject to Libyan law. The law would be administered by judges appointed to the bench by Moammar Gadhafi or, worse, tribal judges.
Chris described an incident in Pakistan in 2011 when an American security contractor killed Pakistani citizens in self-defense, precipitating a crisis in U.S.-Pakistani relations. He also pointed out that four International Criminal Court staff, who had traveled to Libya in June 2012 to interview Gadhafi's oldest son, Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi, were illegally detained by tribal authorities under suspicion of spying. This was another risk U.S. military personnel might face.
During that video conference, Chris stressed that the only way to mitigate the risk was to ensure that U.S. military personnel serving in Libya would have diplomatic immunity, which should be done prior to any change of authority.
Chris understood the importance of the special forces team to the security of our embassy personnel. He believed that by explaining his concerns, the Defense Department would postpone the decision so he could have time to work with the Libyan government and get diplomatic immunity for the special forces.
According to the National Defense Authorization Act, the Defense Department needed Chris's concurrence to change the special forces mission. But soon after the Aug. 1 meeting, and as a complete surprise to us at the embassy, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed the order without Chris's concurrence.
The SenateIntelligence Committee's report accurately notes that on Aug. 6, after the transfer of authority, two special forces team members in a diplomatic vehicle were forced off the road in Tripoli and attacked. Only because of their courage, skills and training did they escape unharmed. But the incident highlighted the risks associated with having military personnel in Libya unprotected by diplomatic immunity or a status of forces agreement. As a result of this incident, Chris was forced to agree with Gen. Ham's withdrawal of most of the special forces team from Tripoli until the Libyan government formally approved their new training mission and granted them diplomatic immunity.
Because Mr. Kennedy had refused to extend the special forces security mission, State Department protocol required Chris to decline Gen. Ham's two offers to do so, which were made after Aug. 6. I have found the reporting of these so-called offers strange, since my recollection of events is that after the Aug. 6 incident, Gen. Ham wanted to withdraw the entire special forces team from Tripoli until they had Libyan government approval of their new mission and the diplomatic immunity necessary to perform their mission safely. However, Chris convinced Gen. Ham to leave six members of the team in Tripoli.
When I arrived in Tripoli on July 31, we had over 30 security personnel, from the State Department and the U.S. military, assigned to protect the diplomatic mission to Libya. All were under the ambassador's authority. On Sept. 11, we had only nine diplomatic security agents under Chris's authority to protect our diplomatic personnel in Tripoli and Benghazi.
I was interviewed by the Select Committee and its staff, who were professional and thorough. I explained this sequence of events. For some reason, my explanation did not make it into the Senate report.
To sum up: Chris Stevens was not responsible for the reduction in security personnel. His requests for additional security were denied or ignored. Officials at the State and Defense Departments in Washington made the decisions that resulted in reduced security. Sen. Lindsey Graham stated on the Senate floor last week that Chris "was in Benghazi because that is where he was supposed to be doing what America wanted him to do: Try to hold Libya together." He added, "Quit blaming the dead guy."
Mr. Hicks served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli from July 31 to Dec. 7, 2012.

Stop jerking Canada around

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
Political Cartoons by Lisa Benson
Fixated as we Americans are on Canada’s three most attention-getting exports — polar vortexes, Alberta clippers and the antics of Toronto’s addled mayor — we’ve somewhat overlooked a major feature of Canada’s current relations with the United States: extreme annoyance.
Last week, speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canada’s foreign minister calmly but pointedly complained that the United States owes Canada a response on the Keystone XL pipeline. “We can’t continue in this state of limbo,” he sort of complained, in what for a placid, imperturbable Canadian passes for an explosion of volcanic rage.
Canadians may be preternaturally measured and polite, but they simply can’t believe how they’ve been treated by President Obama — left hanging humiliatingly on an issue whose merits were settled years ago.
Canada, the Saudi Arabia of oil sands, is committed to developing this priceless resource. Its natural export partner is the United States. But crossing the border requires State Department approval, which means the president decides yes or no.
After three years of review, the State Department found no significant environmental risk to Keystone. Nonetheless, the original route was changedto assuage concerns regarding the Ogallala Aquifer. Obama withheld approval through the 2012 election. To this day he has issued no decision.
The Canadians are beside themselves. After five years of manufactured delay, they need a decision one way or the other because if denied a pipeline south, they could build a pipeline west to the Pacific. China would buy their oil in a New York minute.
Yet Secretary of State John Kerry fumblingly says he is awaiting yet another environmental report. He offered no decision date.
If Obama wants to cave to his environmental left, fine. But why keep Canada in limbo? It’s a show of supreme and undeserved disrespect for yet another ally. It seems not enough to have given the back of the hand to Britain, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic, and to have so enraged the Saudis that they actually rejected a U.N. Security Council seat — disgusted as they were with this administration’s remarkable combination of fecklessness and highhandedness. Must we crown this run of diplomatic malpractice with gratuitous injury to Canada, our most reliable, most congenial friend in the world?
And for what? This is not a close call. The Keystone case is almost absurdly open and shut.
Even if you swallow everything the environmentalists tell you about oil sands, the idea that blocking Keystone would prevent their development by Canada is ridiculous. Canada sees its oil sands as a natural bounty and key strategic asset. Canada will not leave it in the ground.
Where’s the environmental gain in blocking Keystone? The oil will be produced and the oil will be burned. If it goes to China, the Pacific pipeline will carry the same environmental risks as a U.S. pipeline.
And Alberta oil can still go to the United States, if not by pipeline then by rail, which requires no State Department approval. That would result in far more greenhouse gas emissions — exactly the opposite of what the environmentalists are seeking.
Moreover, rail can be exceedingly dangerous. Last year a tanker train derailed and explodeden route through Quebec. The fireball destroyed half of downtown Lac-Megantic, killing 47, many incinerated beyond recognition.
This isn’t theoretical environmentalism. This is not a decrease in the snail darter population. This is 47 dead human beings. More recently, we’ve had two rail-oil accidents within the United States, one near Philadelphia and one in North Dakota.
Add to this the slam-dunk strategic case for Keystone: Canadian oil reduces our dependence on the volatile Middle East, shifting petroleum power from OPEC and the killing zones of the Middle East to North America. What more reliable source of oil could we possibly have than Canada?
Keystone has left Canada very upset, though characteristically relatively quiet. Canadians may have succeeded in sublimating every ounce of normal human hostility and unpleasantness by way of hockey fights, but that doesn’t mean we should take advantage of their good manners.
The only rationale for denying the pipeline is political — to appease Obama’s more extreme environmentalists. For a president who claims not to be ideological, the irony is striking: Here is an easily available piece of infrastructure — privately built, costing government not a penny, creating thousands of jobs and, yes, shovel-ready — and yet the president, who’s been incessantly pushing new “infrastructure” as a fundamental economic necessity, can’t say yes.
Well then, Mr. President, say something. You owe Canada at least that. Up or down. Five years is long enough.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

The Heroism of Wendy Davis

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
January 22, 2014


Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator running for governor, became a liberal superhero last June when she filibustered a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. (This was the good filibuster, not that awful filibuster three months later by Ted Cruz -- that was just grandstanding.)

Apart from her enthusiasm for abortion (and you have to admit, abortion is really cool), the centerpiece of Davis' campaign is her life story. Also the fact that she's a progressive woman who doesn't look like Betty Friedan.

In a typical formulation, Time magazine said Davis was someone who could give the Democrats "'real people' credibility," based on "her own personal story -- an absent father, a sixth-grade-educated mother, a teen pregnancy, followed by life as a single mom in a mobile home, then community college and, at last, Harvard Law School."

The headlines capture the essence of Wendy-mania:

CNN: Wendy Davis: From Teen Mom to Harvard Law to Famous Filibuster

Bloomberg: Texas Filibuster Star Rose From Teen Mom to Harvard Law

The Independent (UK): Wendy Davis: Single Mother From Trailer Park Who Has Become Heroine of Pro-Choice Movement

Cosmopolitan: Find a Sugar Daddy to Put You Through Law School!

Actually, that last one I made up, but as we now know, it's more accurate than Davis' rags-to-riches life story.

The truth was gently revealed in the Dallas Morning News this week. Far from an attack, this was a puff-piece written by Wayne Slater, rabid partisan Democratic hack and co-author of the book, "Bush's Brain." (He is not an admirer of Bush's brain.) It would be like Sean Hannity breaking a scandal about Ted Cruz.

The first hint that Slater was trying to help Davis get ahead of the story and tilt it her way is his comment that Davis' life story is "more complicated" than her version -- i.e., completely the opposite -- adding, "as often happens when public figures aim to define themselves."

Actually, the truth is much simpler than her story. Also, be sure to look for that "as often happens" excuse the next time a Republican gets caught lying about his resume.

Slater's peculiar obsession with whether Davis was 19 or 21 when she got her first divorce, and exactly how long she lived in a trailer home, is meant to deflect attention from something much more problematic: the huge whoppers Davis told.

Her big lies were about the obstacles she had to overcome and how she overcame them, not about how old she was at the time of her first divorce.

She claims she was raised by a single mother, went to work at age 14 to support her family, became a single mother herself in her teens, and then -- by sheer pluck and determination -- pulled herself out of the trailer park to graduate from Harvard Law School!

The truth is less coal-miner's daughter than gold-digger who found a sugar daddy to raise her kids and pay for her education.

Point No. 1: Davis' family wasn't working-class. Her father owned a sandwich shop and a dinner theater, which puts Davis solidly into middle-class land.

Point No. 2: No one who works at MSNBC would know this, but everyone whose parents run a family business starts work at age 14, if not sooner.

Point No. 3: Her parents were separated, but that is not the commonly accepted meaning of "single mother."

Point No. 4: As for being a single mother at age 19 -- she wasn't a "single mother" in the traditional sense, either. She was married at age 18, had a child at 19 and divorced her first husband, a construction worker, at 21. (He couldn't afford tuition at Harvard.)

So she got married young? That isn't a hard-luck story. Well into the 1950s, nearly half of all first-born children were born to married women under the age of 20.

But Wendy Davis' harrowing nightmare of poverty and sacrifice wasn't over yet.

Just a few years after her first divorce, Wendy was on the make, asking to date Jeff Davis, a rich lawyer 13 years her senior, who frequented her father's dinner club. In short order, they married and had a child together.

The next thing Jeff Davis knew, he was paying off her college tuition, raising their kids by himself and taking out a loan to send her to Harvard Law School.

(Feminists rushed to the stores to buy the shoes Davis wore during her famous filibuster. I'd like the shoes she was wearing when she met her sugar daddy.)

Then Wendy left her kids with the sugar daddy in Texas -- even the daughter from her first marriage -- while she attended Harvard Law.

Slater says Davis' kids lived with Jeff Davis in Texas while she attended law school. Wendy Davis claims her girls lived with her during her first year of law school. Let's say that's true. Why not the other two years? And what was the matter with the University of Texas Law School?

Sorry, MSNBC, I know you want to fixate on how many months Davis spent in the trailer park and her precise age when the first divorce went through. And that would be an incredibly stupid thing for conservatives to obsess on, if they were, in fact, obsessing on it. But I'm still stuck on her leaving her kids behind while she headed off to a law school 1,500 miles away.

The reason Wendy Davis' apocryphal story was impressive is that single mothers have to run a household, take care of kids and provide for a family all by themselves. But Wendy was neither supporting her kids, nor raising them. If someone else is taking care of your kids and paying your tuition, that's not amazing.

Hey -- maybe Jeff Davis should run for governor! He's the one who raised two kids, including a stepdaughter, while holding down a job and paying for his wife's law school. There's a hard-luck story!

Mr. Davis told the Dallas Morning News that Wendy dumped him as soon as he had finished paying off her Harvard Law School loan. "It was ironic," he said. "I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left."

In his defense, a lot of people are confused about the meaning of "ironic." That's not "ironic." Rather, it's what we call: "entirely predictable."

It's ironic -- my car stopped running right after I ran out of gas.

It's ironic -- my house was broken into, and the next thing I knew all my valuables were missing.

It's ironic -- I was punched in the face right before my nose broke.


In his petition for divorce, Mr. Davis accused his wife of adultery. The court made no finding on infidelity, but awarded him full custody of their underage child and ordered Wendy to pay child support.

Wendy boasted to the Dallas Morning News: "I very willingly, as part of my divorce settlement, paid child support." Would a divorced dad get a medal for saying that?

In response to Wayne Slater's faux-"expose," naturally Davis put out a statement denouncing ... her probable Republican opponent, Greg Abbott. Again, Slater wrote the story. But Davis blathered on, blaming Abbott for the Dallas Morning News story and complaining that he hasn't "walked a day in my shoes."

About that she's certainly right. Greg Abbott could never walk a day in her shoes or anyone else's. He's a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.

I guess Wendy could teach him a lot about suffering.

Davis also said these attacks "won't work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women ..." Yes, for example, Anna Nicole Smith. Though at least Smith had the decency not to ask for a paid education.

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER 

Sochi 2014: IOC jeopardized safety of athletes and fans in awarding Games to Putin’s Russia

http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The five Olympic rings stand in front of the Sochi Airport.
The five Olympic rings stand in front of the Sochi Airport.
The Olympics aren’t supposed to kill people. They’re supposed to exalt them. But it’s too late to take the dangerous, despoiling Winter Games away from the thugocracy that is Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime, so the only option is to count on the man’s bulging biceps and hope it’s an adequate “ring of steel” that can keep people safe in Sochi. It’s a cold hard fact that these Olympics have become an agent of death.
Sochi already is a catastrophe, and if it becomes a tragedy too, it will be because the International Olympic Committee has become the tool of “colossal authoritarian branding,” to borrow a phrase from Russia scholar Leon Aron.
The choice is an ugly one: Removing the Games at this late date would devastate Russians who have invested national self-worth in them, and the athletes who have trained for them. Therefore the only option is to watch Sochi become a contest for prestige between two warring parties: a corrupt strongman who wants to flex his political authority, and the murderous jihadists who have vowed to strike in Sochi.
Why should the Olympics lend its prestige to either? But that’s exactly what’s happening.
Let’s be clear about something: The people most at risk in Sochi are ordinary Russians. They’re the ones being drained and even impoverished by these crooked $50 billion Games, and who are at greater risk of being killed because nationalist insurgents in the North Caucasus have promised to add blood to the tab. Scare stories about “black widows” infiltrating the village, and warships on alert, aren’t the half of it. Insurgents from Chechnya, Dagestan and Abkhazia have vowed to strike the Olympics, and they have the capacity to do it. In 2013 there were 375 deaths from attacks in the region. In 2012 Russian forces found a cache of ammunition just 24 miles from Sochi meant for attacks on the Games, including homemade bombs, land mines, mortars and grenade launchers. Then there are infuriated Syrian fighters seeking revenge for Putin’s support of President Bashar al-Assad. To put it plainly, Putin and the IOC have chosen to host an Olympics on the edge of a war zone.
“I must admit it certainly wouldn’t have been my choice,” said Russia expert Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, who is currently in Moscow. “And I can’t help wondering if you got Putin thoroughly drunk whether he’d admit it might be a mistake too.”
IOC officials have long collaborated with plunderers, and treated human rights abuses as acceptable if it meant good commerce, regardless of the harm: In Beijing, dissidents were arrested and tortured for refusing to support the Games. But the IOC’s amoral stupidity and avarice may have finally have peaked in Sochi. Activists have been jailed; homeowners evicted without compensation; 25 construction workers have died at stadium sites; illegal dumps of toxic construction waste have ruined local drinking water and caused homes to sink; and Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister, alleges up to $30 billion has been stolen in preparing for the Games. Now we can add $3 billion in security costs to the price of hosting this festival of malevolence and greed.
It may well be that Putin can secure the area with 60,000 police and special troops, and a cyber-dome of electronic spying and drone patrols. But Sochi is undeniably an inviting target, and so are areas outside of the security zone that will be stripped of police. In Volgograd, a major rail hub en route to Sochi, bombers killed 34 people last month.
“First, they have to foot this ridiculous bill for the Games; second, in order to provide all those security personnel, they have to come from somewhere else; and third, it galvanizes the insurgency,” Galeotti said. “This is a chance to really take advantage of the international spotlight. Let’s face it: There are terrorist attacks every week in the North Caucasus. Now they can do something on a platform.”
Despite Galeotti’s analysis of the region, he said interior Sochi should be safe given the enormous resources being poured into it, and he cautions against postponing or moving the Games, because it would appear to concede to terrorism, not to mention how it would insult blameless Russians.
“What the terrorists are trying to do is get everyone to talk about security and not sport, and they are succeeding,” he said. “They are keeping up pressure, with attacks on other cities, releasing threats on videos, all these things allow them to control the narrative.”
Taking the Games somewhere else won’t alter the situation in North Caucasus, or prevent attacks in, say, movie theaters.
“We cannot create absolute security for ourselves by avoiding every situation,” he said. “We just have to be resilient in how we deal with outcomes.”
Point taken. But it’s not giving in to terrorism to say that it was an act of pure folly to award the Winter Games to Sochi back in 2007, given what specialists who studied the region understood. Or to call out the IOC officials who didn’t do their due diligence, and ignored all of the warning signs. As early as 2008, when a series of bombs detonated in Sochi, it was obvious that Putin was gambling dangerously with Olympic security for his own profit and purposes.
“The interesting thing is that Putin has made these Olympics so important to himself, and how they fit into his sporty image,” Galeotti said. “He has given them his weight. And if the insurgents don’t keep up the pressure, with threats to overshadow his achievements, then they will seem to have failed. Either side has the potential to be severely damaged by the outcome.”
So the staging of the Sochi Games has become a contest of wills between Putin and the insurgents, with innocents squarely in the crossfire. The IOC is wholly responsible for this: It should have denied Putin the internal prestige he craves, while depriving the insurgents of a major target, by removing the Games when it was still politically and logistically possible. Now they will have to hope Putin can avert a disaster and make the Games safe, “insofar as you can be safe holding an Olympics inside a country fighting a serious insurgency,” Galeotti said.
The Olympics are supposed to be about “human dignity,” in the words of the Olympic charter. But in these Games, the humans are shields.
For more by Sally Jenkins, visit washingtonpost.com/jenkins.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

The strange hate for ‘Lone Survivor’

By Rich Lowry
http://nypost.com/
January 21, 2014
The movie “Lone Survivor” didn’t get any major Oscar nominations, but perhaps it should’ve been nominated for Most Unlikely Politically Incorrect Picture of the Year.
It’s based on the true story of a mission in Afghanistan that goes disastrously wrong. A four-man team of Navy SEALs hunting down a Taliban commander is stumbled upon by a couple of goatherds in the mountains of Kunar province. Deciding to let them go, even though it will compromise them, the SEALs are subsequently outnumbered in a fierce firefight. Three are killed, and a Chinook helicopter attempting to relieve them is downed, killing another 16 Americans. The only survivor is a SEAL named Marcus Luttrell, who is played by Mark Wahlberg and wrote a book about the mission.
None of this is remotely controversial material. How could anyone be offended by a movie about a Navy SEAL fighting with everything he has to save himself and his buddies and improbably surviving an epic ordeal? Yet the brickbats have been flying from the snotty left: Propaganda. Simplistic. Racist.
“Lone Survivor” has run up against part of the culture that can’t stand the most straightforward depictions of American heroism and the warrior ethic.
A reviewer in The Atlantic worries that movies like “Lone Survivor” “resemble multimillion-dollar recruitment videos — tools of military indoctrination geared toward the young and the impressionable.”
There’s no doubt that the SEALs are portrayed as noble and heroic, for good reason: They were. But if this is a recruitment film, it isn’t of the “sign up and see the world” variety. The implicit message is that if you become a SEAL, you, too, can be faced with excruciating life-and-death decisions in hostile territory. You, too, can fight a battle while falling down a mountain. You, too, can get shot up and killed.
A writer in Salon complains that the targeted Taliban commander “is presented as a terrible guy,” and we don’t learn enough about the Taliban fighters attacking the SEALs, or as he calls them, “some dudes from an Afghan village about whom we know nothing.” Yes, if only we knew whether or not the Taliban commander, Ahmad Shah, had a troubled upbringing, that would change everything.
Perhaps the Taliban version of the movie could present fuller, more sympathetic portraits of its fighters seeking to plunge their country into renewed medieval darkness — if, that is, the Taliban believed in movies.
In perhaps the most preposterous critique, a critic in LA Weekly says the attitude of the SEALs in the movie is “Brown people bad, American people good.” What a stupid smear. The proximate cause of the impossible situation of the SEALs is precisely their decision to let a few unarmed “brown people” go. Besides, not all “brown people” in the film are bad. Some of them are awe-inspiringly merciful and brave. Of course, the main thrust of the Taliban’s war is against other “brown people,” whom they intimidate and kill in their quest to dominate.
It is certainly true that “Lone Survivor” is not Fellini. What it lacks in dialogue, it makes up for in explosions and gunfire. It is about as subtle as an RPG round. But it captures something important: the otherworldly fearlessness and grit of our best fighters.
If this story — the inevitable cinematic embellishments, aside — weren’t true, you would be hard-pressed to believe it. These are extraordinary men, and the tale of their valor deserves to be told over and over again, whatever you think of the Afghan War or the broader war on terror.
Several years ago, Hollywood made a bunch of tendentious anti-Iraq War movies, all of which flopped. “Lone Survivor” is one of the few recent war movies that have been a success at the box office. It’s not hard to understand why. It takes a perverse hostility to all that is great and good in the US military not to find it gripping and inspiring.

'MCCARTHYISM' BY THE NUMBERS

by M. STANTON EVANS

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government
January 21, 2014


The orchestrated attack on Diana West’s important book, American Betrayal, has been brutal and unseemly, but in one respect at least it has served a useful purpose.

This lone positive angle--counter-intuitive at first glance--is that her iconoclastic Cold War history has sparked a barrage of charges about “McCarthyism” and the senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to a decisive epoch in America’s long death struggle with the Kremlin.
As is well-known, “McCarthyism” was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: accusations of Communist taint, without any factual basis; bogus “lists” of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.    
Such is the standard image of “McCarthyism” set forth in all the usual histories and media treatments of the era. Such is the image relied on by the critics of Ms. West to discredit her book and dismiss her as a crackpot and “conspiracy theorist.” By arguing that pro-Red elements in our government exerted baleful influence on US policy to suit the aims of Moscow, it is said, she becomes “McCarthy’s heiress,” reprising the evils of the fifties.
All of which, from my standpoint, has one beneficial feature--though it doesn’t make things less unpleasant for Ms. West. It pushes the issue of McCarthy and McCarthyism to the forefront, where it ought to be, and where it is now possible to view his cases in ways not feasible years ago when the relevant data were not open to the public.
Even today, there is much that we don’t know--documents that have vanished, ancient records still being censored, deceptions still in circulation. However, there is also a good deal of information available for those who care to view it: sizable tranches of McCarthy’s papers, and those of his opponents; reams of formerly confidential data from the FBI; thousands of pages of hearing transcripts and archives of his committee and other panels of the Congress; intercepted Soviet communications and revelations from Cold War defectors; and so on.
Looking at this mass of materials and matching them up with McCarthy’s cases, the main thing to be noted is a recurring pattern of verification. Time and again, we see the suspects named by McCarthy and/or his committee--treated at the time as hapless victims--revealed in official records as what McCarthy and company said they were--except, in the typical instance, a good deal more so.
The accompanying table provides a sampler of some of the suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or in his committee hearings, and reflects what is now known about them, based on official records (some of it was known even then but ignored or misrepresented). 
Suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or before his committee; identified in sworn testimony, FBI archives, or other official security records as Communists or Soviet agents; or took the Fifth Amendment when asked about such matters.
 1 .Adler, Solomon 26. Levitsky, Joseph *
 2. Aronson, James * 27. Lovell, Leander
 3. Barr, Joel 28. Mandel, William *
 4. Belfrage, Cedric * 29. Miller, Robert
 5. Bisson, T.A. 30. Mins, Leonard *
 6. Carlisle, Lois 31. Moore (Gelfan), Harriet *
 7. Chew Hong 32. Moss, Annie L.
 8. Chi Chao-ting 33. Neumann, Franz
 9. Coe, V. Frank * 34. Older, Andrew
 10. Coleman, Aaron 35. Peress, Irving *
 11. Currie, Lauchlin 36. Posniak, Edward
 12. Dolivet, Louis 37. Post, Richard
 13. Duran, Gustavo 38. Remington, William
 14. Field, Frederick 39. Rosinger, Lawrence *
 15. Glasser, Harold * 40. Rothschild, Edward *
 16. Graze, Gerald 41. Sarant, Alfred
 17. Graze, Stanley 42. Smedley, Agnes
 18. Hanson, Haldore 43. Snyder, Samuel *
 19. Henderson, Donald * 44. Stein, Guenther
 20. Hyman, Harry * 45. Stern, Bernhard *
 21. Jaffe, Philip 46. Taylor, William H.
 22. Karr, David 47. Ullmann, Marcel *
 23. Keeney, Mary Jane 48. Wales, Nym
 24. Lattimore, Owen 49. Weintraub, David
 25. Levine, Ruth * 50. Weltfish, Gene *
*Took Fifth Amendment as to Communist/ Soviet activity-affiliation
Solomon Adler, Chi Chao ting and V. Frank Coe would all abscond to Communist China. Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, members of the Rosenberg spy ring who worked at Fort Monmouth and related commercial labs in the 1940s, would flee to the Soviet bloc before the McCarthy Monmouth hearings started. Philip Jaffe would self-identify as a Communist in his memoirs.
Analyzing this list of 50, we find all of them either (a) identified in sworn testimony, or in FBI and other once-confidential official security records, as Communists or Soviet agents, and/or (b) plead the Fifth Amendment when asked about such activities, saying a truthful answer would tend to incriminate them.
As is self-evident from this lineup, it’s untrue that McCarthy never spotted a single Communist or Soviet agent, or--per one variation--came up with only a handful of valid cases. He in fact tracked down a small army of such people, and the roster given here is merely a sampling of the flagrant suspects who attracted his attention.
This is most obviously so of the Fifth Amendment pleaders. Our table of 50 includes 18 McCarthy cases who refused to answer questions concerning Red connections, but these were only a fraction of the total who claimed the privilege. All told, an astonishing 100-plus McCarthy suspects would plead the Fifth before his committee (the bulk of these in the Fort Monmouth/defense-supply probe that triggered the Army-McCarthy hearings).
Also, contra the standard image, McCarthy and his staffers in the usual instance did not allege that his suspects were Communists or Soviet agents--though in some famous cases (Owen Lattimore, Annie Lee Moss) this did happen--for the simple reason that the probers didn’t then know the total story. More typically, they wielded dossiers concerning adverse security findings, membership in pro-Red groups, and so on--thereby understating the scope and nature of the problem.
Thus, such named McCarthy suspects as Solomon Adler, T.A. Bisson, Lauchlin Currie, Mary Jane Keeney, and many others were not then IDed as Soviet assets, though in fact they were. McCarthy knew enough to spot them as bad actors--in many cases knew a lot--but didn’t know what we know today.
Add the fact that, in case after significant case, McCarthy suspects were linked in ever-widening circles to a host of other operatives of like nature. For example, Adler, Currie, Keeney and the egregious pro-Soviet apparatchik Robert Miller were all parts of much larger networks, each with multiple contacts in the government, press corps, and outside groups of shadowy purpose.
All told, the McCarthy cases linked together in such fashion amounted to several hundred people, constituting a massive security danger to the nation. However, numbers per se were not the central issue. By far the most important thing about his suspects was their positioning in the governmental structure, and other posts of influence, where they could shape American policy or opinion in favor of the Communist interest. This they did on a fairly regular basis, a subject that deserves discussion in its own right.
For now, there is enough to note that the standard version of McCarthy and "McCarthyism" being wielded to discredit Diana West is, throughout, a fiction. How and why it was concocted, and is being repeated even now, must be the topic for another essay.

M. Stanton Evans is the author of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and co-author (with Herbert Romerstein) of Stalin’s Secret Agents.