September 02, 2006

Waiter, There's a Jihadi In My Soup

It looks like several more British "moderate Muslims" were close to deciding to "prove themselves," as Miss England says, as 14 men were arrested in a series of overnight raids.

Armed police have arrested 14 men following anti-terror raids in London, including 12 arrests at a restaurant in the Borough area.

Two people were held elsewhere in the city in what police said was an intelligence-led operation.

Police said the arrests were not connected to the alleged transatlantic jet bomb plot or the 7 July attacks.

An Islamic school near Tunbridge Wells has also been searched as part of the same operation.

The Jameah Islameah property, on Catt's Hill near Crowborough, East Sussex, is an Islamic teaching facility for boys aged between 11 and 16.

I'm shocked, shocked that an Islamic school may have been used to help plot terror attacks. And appalled. And verklempt, and I'm not even 100% sure what that word means. Most of those arrested, however, were taken into custody at a local halal Chinese restaurant called The Bridge to China Town. Halal food is, of course, food permissible according to Islamic diet restrictions.

Sadly, you'll note that the BBC is so cowed by the "moderates" among them that they can't even directly mention the fact that these men were British-born Pakistani Muslims, preferring to let you infer the facts for the locational data provided.

Great Britain may yet be saved, but the BBC has already been lost to enemy action.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:43 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

New Republic Sockpuppet Exposed

They never seem to learn.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:55 AM | Comments (0) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 01, 2006

Gabriel Range's Clone War

The blogosphere is quite abuzz over a British-made mock documentary that envisions a world in the wake of the assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush, where an Emporer Palpatine-like President Dick Cheney institutes a totalitarian government in the United States that instigates a cascading series of wars against Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba.

While I think that filmmaker Gabriel Range made a film that he hopes is supposed to be taken quite seriously, this dark historical fantasy seems to be more of an exploration of the psychology of the darker, more twisted depths of paranoid agi-prop than an attempt to define a realistic alternative future in the event of an assassination.

Is Range truly convinced that the American people would spasmodically accept the nationality of a presidential assassin as a justifiable pretense for war? Americans have certainly had the opportunity, and yet did not try to invade Italy when Giuseppe Zangara tried to kill FDR, nor did we stage a knee-jerk invasion of Iraq in the wake of the 1993 attempt on President H.W. Bush's life by agents of Saddam Hussein.

No, Range assaults the intelligence and the individuality of all Americans, assuming we would embrace the imposition of his fictional totalitarianism and an ever-escalating series of wars without having any mechanisms, or even an inclination, to stop them from occurring. He lumps liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, into one stereotype of a bloodthirsty kill-anyone-we-can-because-we-can cartoonish monolith that has never existed in this or any other American lifetime.

We are not clones, Mr. Range.

More than any other, this country is naturally inclined to entertain radically different ideas at the same time, making this war-loving future United States of Death laughably sophomoric, and in the end, next to impossible to believe for anyone who knows the American psychology at all.

We'll learned nothing about an alternate American future from what I've read of this film, but I think we have learned quite a bit about what Gabriel Range thinks of Americans.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:39 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Air America Cuts Staff, Financial Problems Cited

An utter shocker, I know:

MIKE MALLOY FIRED BY AIR AMERICA RADIO

There will be no Mike Malloy program on Air America Radio as we have been terminated as of 8/30/06.

We are as shocked as you are, especially since as recently as last Tuesday we were told we had the go-ahead to announce our return to NY airwaves and that our contract was "on the way."

We are told its a financial decision.

Is Air America having financial problems? If so, no Boys & Girls Club in America is safe.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

"Snip the red wire. But first..."

Perhaps I'm simply confused as to the best way to dispose of unexploded ordnance, but is tipping an unexploded artillery shell forward, apparently up on its fuse, as this Lebanese soldier does, the smartest way to proceed?

Update: In the comments, my favorite ordnance expert says this soldier is not as dumb as he looks:

The thing has already functioned. And even if it is an ICM projectile, fuze function and dispensing, vice range-to-impact, means he's probably nowhere near where the cargo was ejected, either.

In other words, the Associated Press was dead wrong when they called this an "unexploded shell" in their caption to this photo.

Shocking, I know.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:18 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Yeah, That'll Work...

This is kind of like John Mark Karr reassuring you that Wayne Williams would be a great babysitter:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that Syria would step up border patrols and work with the Lebanese army to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah.

Syria will increase its own patrols along the Lebanon-Syria border, and establish joint patrols with the Lebanese army "when possible," Annan said after meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus.

Assad made no public comments after their meeting, but Annan spoke with reporters at the Damascus airport before he departed midday for Qatar.

The U.N. resolution that halted fighting between Israel and Hezbollah calls for an arms embargo on the guerrilla group, and for Lebanon to "secure its borders and other entry points."

Annan said Assad informed him that Syria would "take all necessary measures" to implement paragraph 15 of U.N. resolution 1701, which calls on countries to prevent the sale or supply of weapons to entities in Lebanon without the consent of the Lebanese government or U.N. peacekeepers.

This is the same Syria that armed Hezbollah with medium-range rockets used in the recent conflict against Israeli civilian targets, the same Syria who's leader praised Hezbollah's Pyrrhic "victory." Now more than ever, the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel merely appears to be a chance for both sides to rearm and reevaluate their tactics before the next conflagration.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:35 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pretty/Stupid

From the first Muslim Miss England:

The first Muslim to be crowned Miss England has warned that stereotyping members of her community is leading some towards extremism.

Hammasa Kohistani made history last year when she was chosen to represent England in the Miss World pageant.

But one year on, the 19-year-old student from Hounslow feels that winning the coveted beauty title last September was a "sugar coating" for Muslims who have become more alienated in the past 12 months.

She said: "The attitude towards Muslims has got worse over the year. Also the Muslims' attitude to British people has got worse.

"Even moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway. It will take a long time for communities to start mixing in more."

"...moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway."

According to Ms. Kohistani's logic, alcoholics should forego trying to get their lives back together, say, "the Hell, with it," and go ahead and drink because people expect them to be drunks.

It is a troubling mindset, and one I hope is not widespread in western Muslim communities. If Muslim moderates star to embrace terrorism as a way of "proving themselves" to radicals within the nations they inhabit, current feelings of disassociation that they seem to presently feel will only worsen, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If an embrace of terrorism becomes widespread, or more likely, an appearance of the embrace of terrorism becomes widespread, crackdowns against Muslims will only worsen. It could perhaps lead to even worse tensions and violence if the rest of the British population feels significantly threatened.

If Hammasa Kohistani wants to change public opinion and stereotypes against Muslims as she says elsewhere in the article, she needs to encourage Muslims to prove, time and again if necessary, that the violent fundamentalist way is not their own. British Muslims should respond to suspicions not by embracing terrorism, but by becoming the most vigilant fighters against it.

A widespread "we might as well do it anyway" mindset that validates these stereotypes is precisely the wrong message to be sending.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:48 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 31, 2006

Concrete Proof

In the comments of this post, Ronald Lewis, an experienced bomb damage assessment expert with 20 years of experience, states, in part (my bold):

...The nature of the hole in the roof of the Reuters vehicles is inconsistent with penetration by shrapnel. There would be more than one hole, a larger one surrounded by many smaller ones. This single hole, its shape and the initial gray color of the damage area are more consistent with a vehicle struck by a large piece of masonry striking the top of the vehicle at high velocity, possibly dislodged by a rocket blast. It is clear that the vehicle, itself, was not struck by missiles or rockets...

Mr Lewis is not the only expert to reach a similar conclusion.

Both of the armored vehicle manufacturers I corresponded with yesterday agreed that an explosive probably did not cause the damage shown on the Reuters vehicle. Old Soldier, a retired Master Army Aviator helicopter and fixed-wing test pilot also remarked based upon his 31-years experience that the damage may have been caused by (my bold):

... [a] chunk of flying concrete debris from a larger explosion (say perhaps a HELLFIRE or artillery round hitting a building nearby).

There are, of course, conflicting ideas that very may well be valid. Photo analysis alone does not seem capable of resolving this issue with any degree of certainty in the blogosphere, which is why it is quite disappointing that the professional media refuses to investigate what may have occurred.

I have one more email floating out there to an expert that might be able to shed a little more light on this incident, but as time passes, it appears that they are unlikely to return comment. The simple fact of the matter is that without a close-up inspection of the vehicle by recognized experts and perhaps metallurgical tests on any shrapnel that can be verified as being recovered from the victims and the vehicle, we may never know exactly what transpired.

I could not resist my sillier side, however, and present to you an artist's conception of the helicopter that carried out the attack.

Barring any late-breaking developments, I think this story is pretty much done.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:48 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Soros: Negotiate with Evil

I generally oppose the idea of taking moral advice from a convicted felon, and so it was with quite a bit of skepticism that I clicked on the link to today's Boston Globeeditorial by George Soros.

My skepticism was well-founded:

The failure of Israel to subdue Hezbollah demonstrates the many weaknesses of the war-on-terror concept. One of those weaknesses is that even if the targets are terrorists, the victims are often innocent civilians, and their suffering reinforces the terrorist cause.

In response to Hezbollah's attacks, Israel was justified in attacking Hezbollah to protect itself against the threat of missiles on its border. However, Israel should have taken greater care to minimize collateral damage. The civilian casualties and material damage inflicted on Lebanon inflamed Muslims and world opinion against Israel and converted Hezbollah from aggressors to heroes of resistance for many. Weakening Lebanon has also made it more difficult to rein in Hezbollah.

Precisely what further steps should Israel have taken to minimize civilian casualties, Mr. Soros? Israel warned all Lebanese civilians to leave areas where they might launch airstrikes, often days in advance. Israel primarily used precision-guided munitions from strike aircraft to strike specific targeted locations. Israel took the responsible steps any nation should by using precision weaponry instead of area weapons whenever possible, and gave up some of its combat effectiveness by announcing where strikes may occur well before an attack, so that Lebanese civilian and terrorist alike had the opportunity to leave well in advance. Apparently an advance warning wasn't enough, and Soros would have Israel provide transportation as well.

Further, Soros blames Israel for their response, but does not even attempt to address the fact that Hezbollah purposefully thrust Lebanese civilians into the conflict. Hezbollah fired rockets from residential areas, hid the rockets themselves, their launchers, and their fighters in buildings occupied by civilians. The fact that the Lebanese government was weak, ineffectual, and heavily influenced by Hezbollah's paymasters in Damascus is a fact Soros would rather skip past than address.

Another weakness of the war-on-terror concept is that it relies on military action and rules out political approaches. Israel previously withdrew from Lebanon and then from Gaza unilaterally, rather than negotiating political settlements with the Lebanese government and the Palestinian authority. The strengthening of Hezbollah and Hamas was a direct consequence of that approach. The war-on-terror concept stands in the way of recognizing this fact because it separates "us" from "them" and denies that our actions help shape their behavior.

Starting with Presidents Nixon and Ford, the United states, with the rest of the world in tow, started a pattern of appeasing terrorists by providing little or no deterrence to increasingly violent attacks. The lack of a cohesive and forceful military response to these attacks only encouraged the spread of terrorist groups, allowing them to grow virtually unchecked as they killed and injured thousands. It was this long-running pattern of relying on politics, policing, and negotiating that placed us in the situation we have today. Soros repeat a pattern that 35 years of failures has proven is impotent and ineffectual.

Hezbollah, Hamas and the governments that support them have repeatedly stated that their reason to exist is to wipe Israel off the face of the map and to force the rest of the world to accept their radical version of Islam at the point of a sword. Historically, Soros' recommended course of action has proven to be one of failure time and again. He, like the components of the Far Left that lap up his funding, are philosophically unable to face that reality, and continued a dogged pursuit of polices that encourage terrorism to continue to blossom.

A third weakness is that the war-on-terror concept lumps together different political movements that use terrorist tactics. It fails to distinguish among Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, or the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi militia in Iraq. Yet all these terrorist manifestations, being different, require different responses. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah can be treated merely as targets in the war on terror because both have deep roots in their societies; yet there are profound differences between them.

Again, Soros shows that he misunderstands the problem of confronting Islamic terrorism on a fundamental level. Theirs is not a "political” movement, and while these groups interpret Islam differently, they do not recognize a separation of theology from governance. The tenants of Sharia itself disprove his views categorically. While the specifics differ, all share a common goal of the destruction of Israel, the subjugation of the West under Islam, and death to any that hold an opposing view. You cannot negotiate with those who see their views and their views alone as Absolute Truth. You can choose to bend their will and give up your views, your freedoms, and your rights, or you must fight them to the death. This is the lesson that Islam has spread to every border as it has expanded and been forcefully repulsed over nearly 1,400 years of human history, whether to invading Muslim Army has been Sunni or Shiite in makeup. Soros and those who acquiesce to his viewpoint are woefully unprepared to take the only course of action that over a millennia of experience shows us is the only thing that works to stop or slow the spread of the violence inherent to the various fundamentalist sects of Islam.

Looking back, it is easy to see where Israeli policy went wrong. When Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Israel should have gone out of its way to strengthen him and his reformist team. When Israel withdrew from Gaza, the former head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, negotiated a six-point plan on behalf of the Quartet for the Middle East (Russia, the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations). It included opening crossings between Gaza and the West Bank, allowing an airport and seaport in Gaza, opening the border with Egypt; and transferring the greenhouses abandoned by Israeli settlers into Arab hands. None of the six points was implemented. This contributed to Hamas's electoral victory. The Bush administration, having pushed Israel to allow the Palestinians to hold elections, then backed Israel's refusal to deal with a Hamas government. The effect was to impose further hardship on the Palestinians.

Soros forgets to mention the constant failure of these groups to keep their end of a bargain. Once more, Soros places all the blame on Western states, while treating Arab states as children unable to take any initiative towards peace or betterment on their own. It betrays an inherent racism, the absolving of a proclivity towards violence as an accepted consequence of who they are. Soros belittles both the mental acuity of these actors and absolves them or wrongdoing. Though a sidenote, Soros forgets to mention what happened when those prosperous greenhouses were transferred from Israeli to Palestinian hands.

The Palestinians destroyed them. The hardships they suffer are self-imposed.

Nevertheless, Abbas was able to forge an agreement with the political arm of Hamas for the formation of a unity government. It was to foil this agreement that the military branch of Hamas, run from Damascus, engaged in the provocation that brought a heavy-handed response from Israel -- which in turn incited Hezbollah to further provocation, opening a second front.

That is how extremists play off against each other to destroy any chance of political progress.

Once more, Soros shows he cannot wrap his mind about the simplest concept; as long as terrorist groups are alive, there can be no peace.

Israel has been a participant in this game, and President Bush bought into this flawed policy, uncritically supporting Israel. Events have shown that this policy leads to the escalation of violence. The process has advanced to the point where Israel's unquestioned military superiority is no longer sufficient to overcome the negative consequences of its policy. Israel is now more endangered in its existence than it was at the time of the Oslo Agreement on peace.

Similarly, the United States has become less safe since Bush declared war on terror.

Israel's "flawed policy"--its determined will to survive-- seems to trouble Soros greatly. A tiny sliver of land in a vast Middle East, Israel only exists because its military has successfully repulsed attempts made by every single Arab neighboring state to destroy them. Israel escalates conflicts until they become unbearable for those attacking them, or it dies. Soros does not seem overly concerned about the possibility of the latter.

Soros says we are less safe now than in the past. Wars are never safe by definition, but the appeasement he preaches is far more deadly.

The time has come to realize that the present policies are counterproductive. There will be no end to the vicious circle of escalating violence without a political settlement of the Palestine question. In fact, the prospects for engaging in negotiations are better now than they were a few months ago. The Israelis must realize that a military deterrent is not sufficient on its own. And Arabs, having redeemed themselves on the battlefield, may be more willing to entertain a compromise.

There are strong voices arguing that Israel must never negotiate from a position of weakness. They are wrong. Israel's position is liable to become weaker the longer it persists on its present course. Similarly Hezbollah, having tasted the sense but not the reality of victory (and egged on by Syria and Iran) may prove recalcitrant. But that is where the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas comes into play. The Palestinian people yearn for peace and relief from suffering. The political -- as distinct from the military -- wing of Hamas must be responsive to their desires. It is not too late for Israel to encourage and deal with an Abbas-led Palestinian unity government as the first step toward a better-balanced approach.

Given how strong the US-Israeli relationship is, it would help Israel to achieve its own legitimate aims if the US government were not blinded by the war-on-terror concept.

Once more, Soros seems to be under the illusion that the Palestinians want peace. Hezbollah, Hamas, and their sponsors patently refuse to recognize Israel's right to even exist. They state in their charters that they fight for the total destruction of Israel.

George Soros seems to think that is negotiable.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:58 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Not the Way We Remember It

In an article focusing on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion Tuesday, the L.A. Times' Julian E. Barnes slipped this in near the end:

Rumsfeld's speech drew sharp complaints from Democrats, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was criticized by Rumsfeld in a speech Monday.

The elder Kennedy, who served as a U.S. ambassador to Britain before World War II, resigned that post because he opposed British and U.S. war preparations.

"Secretary Rumsfeld is the last person who should preach the lessons of history after ignoring them for the last six years," Kennedy said in a statement. "As a result of his failures, Americans are less safe."

Barnes states that the elder Kennedy "opposed British and U.S. war preparations," but it is not surprising that he glossed over just why the senior Kennedy was opposed to the preparations for war.

Wikipedia offers a clue:

Kennedy was (for a while) a close friend with leading Jewish lawyer Felix Frankfurter, who helped Kennedy get his sons into the London School of Economics, where they worked with Harold Laski, a leading Jewish intellectual and prominent Socialist.[4] While holding positive attitudes towards individual Jews, Kennedy's views of the Jews as a people were, by his own admission, overwhelmingly negative.

According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of Kennedy's embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as "kikes or sheenies." Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that "[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch."[5] When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assault on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded "well, they brought it on themselves."[6]

On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, who reported to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy."[7] Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.[8]

From Seymour Hersh's Dark Side of Camelot:

There is no evidence that Ambassador [Joseph] Kennedy understood in the days before the war that stopping Hitler was a moral imperative.

"Individual Jews are all right, Harvey," Kennedy told Harvey Klemmer, one of his few trusted aides in the American Embassy, "but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch. Look what they did to the movies." Klemmer, in an interview many years later made avail­able for this book, recalled that Kennedy and his "entourage" gener­ally referred to Jews as "kikes or sheenies."

Kennedy and his family would later emphatically deny allegations of anti-Semitism stemming from his years as ambassador, but the German diplomatic documents show that Kennedy consistently minimized the Jewish issue in his four-month attempt in the summer and fall of 1938 to obtain an audience with Hitler. On June 13, as the Nazi regime was systematically segregating Jews from German society, Kennedy advised Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, as Dirksen reported to Berlin, that "it
was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely." On October 13, 1938, a few weeks before Kristallnacht, with its Brown Shirt terror attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses, Kennedy met again with Ambassador Dirksen, who subsequently informed his superiors that "today, too, as during former conversations, Kennedy mentioned that very strong anti-Semitic feelings existed in the United States and that a large portion of the population had an understanding of the German attitude toward the Jews."

From George Mason University's History News Network:

Arriving at London in early 1938, newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy took up quickly with another transplanted American. Viscountess Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor assured Kennedy early in their friendship that he should not be put off by her pronounced and proud anti-Catholicism.

"I'm glad you are smart enough not to take my [views] personally," she wrote. Astor pointed out that she had a number of Roman Catholic friends - G.K. Chesterton among them - with whom she shared, if nothing else, a profound hatred for the Jewish race. Joe Kennedy, in turn, had always detested Jews generally, although he claimed several as friends individually. Indeed, Kennedy seems to have tolerated the occasional Jew in the same way Astor tolerated the occasional Catholic.

As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase). No member of the so-called "Cliveden Set" (the informal cabal of appeasers who met frequently at Nancy Astor's palatial home) seemed much concerned with the dilemma faced by Jews under the Reich. Astor wrote Kennedy that Hitler would have to do more than just "give a rough time" to "the killers of Christ" before she'd be in favor of launching "Armageddon to save them. The wheel of history swings round as the Lord would have it. Who are we to stand in the way of the future?" Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world."

During May of 1938, Kennedy engaged in extensive discussions with the new German Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Herbert von Dirksen. In the midst of these conversations (held without approval from the U.S. State Department), Kennedy advised von Dirksen that President Roosevelt was the victim of "Jewish influence" and was poorly informed as to the philosophy, ambitions and ideals of Hitler's regime. (The Nazi ambassador subsequently told his bosses that Kennedy was "Germany's best friend" in London.)

Columnists back in the states condemned Kennedy's fraternizing. Kennedy later claimed that 75% of the attacks made on him during his Ambassadorship emanated from "a number of Jewish publishers and writers. ... Some of them in their zeal did not hesitate to resort to slander and falsehood to achieve their aims." He told his eldest son, Joe Jr., that he disliked having to put up with "Jewish columnists" who criticized him with no good reason.

Like his father, Joe Jr. admired Adolf Hitler. Young Joe had come away impressed by Nazi rhetoric after traveling in Germany as a student in 1934. Writing at the time, Joe applauded Hitler's insight in realizing the German people's "need of a common enemy, someone of whom to make the goat. Someone, by whose riddance the Germans would feel they had cast out the cause of their predicament. It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews. The dislike of the Jews, however, was well-founded. They were at the heads of all big business, in law etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous ... the lawyers and prominent judges were Jews, and if you had a case against a Jew, you were nearly always sure to lose it. ... As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some ... ."

Brutality was in the eye of the beholder. Writing to Charles Lindbergh shortly after Kristallnacht in November of 1938, Joe Kennedy Sr. seemed more concerned about the political ramifications stemming from high-profile, riotous anti-Semitism than he was about the actual violence done to the Jews. "... Isn't there some way," he asked, "to persuade [the Nazis] it is on a situation like this that the whole program of saving western civilization might hinge? It is more and more difficult for those seeking peaceful solutions to advocate any plan when the papers are filled with such horror." Clearly, Kennedy's chief concern about Kristallnacht was that it might serve to harden anti-fascist sentiment at home in the United States.

Like his friend Charles Coughlin (an anti-Semitic broadcaster and Roman Catholic priest), Kennedy always remained convinced of what he believed to be the Jews' corrupt, malignant, and profound influence in American culture and politics. "The Democratic [party] policy of the United States is a Jewish production," Kennedy told a British reporter near the end of 1939, adding confidently that Roosevelt would "fall" in 1940.

But it wasn't Roosevelt who fell. Kennedy resigned his ambassadorship just weeks after FDR's overwhelming triumph at the polls. He then retreated to his home in Florida: a bitter, resentful man nurturing religious and racial bigotries that put him out-of-step with his country, and out-of-touch with history.

Senator Edward Kennedy has the gall to suggest some are ignoring history. Considering his family history of admiring and trying to appease fascists intent on wiping out Jews, he may count himself lucky if that is indeed the case.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:05 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I Didn't Know This Was Going To Be On the Quiz...

But Dr. Perlmutter gives me an "A" all the same:

I first talked about the blogger-driven battles over the Israel-Hezbullah war imagery in an essay for Editor & Publisher and then here and here in PBB.

And the controversy continues--with a constructive object lesson for us all.

I don't think blogs will replace big media, but the small blogger can, with moxie and smarts, shame the big boys and girls by doing the job that we trained the professionals to do in journalism school. Every good J-School teacher I know instructs her/his students to think, question and dig. Don't just accept the press release or the face value of an event. Scratch your head and ask: “Where can I go besides the usual sources to get the information that will better reveal the truth?”

Sometimes the answer is simple, and you think “Wow, why did nobody else think of that?” The answer is sadly that industrial journalism breeds laziness and routine. There are many hard working journalists out there; but the system undercuts their inventiveness and encourages them to walk the rut of what everybody else is doing.

Not so with the nimble, one wo/man blog enterprise. Consider the case of Mr. Bob Owens, aka, "ConfederateYankee."

As they say, read it all.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:55 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 30, 2006

Armored Vehicle Experts: Reuters News Vehicle Not Hit By Israeli Missile

There has been quite a bit of debate in the blogosphere surrounding this story (note: link has been deactivated) of several days ago:

An Israeli air strike hit a Reuters vehicle in Gaza City on Saturday, wounding two journalists as they covered a military incursion, doctors and residents said.

One of the Palestinian journalists, who worked for a local media organization, was seriously wounded. A cameraman working for Reuters was knocked unconscious in the air strike, one of several in the area.

The Israeli army said the vehicle was hit because it was acting suspiciously in an area of combat and had not been identified as belonging to the media.

"During the operation, there was an aerial attack on a suspicious vehicle that drove in a suspicious manner right by the forces and in between the Palestinian militant posts," army spokeswoman Captain Noa Meir said.

"This car was not identified by the army as a press vehicle," she said. "If journalists were hurt, we regret it."

Despite the Israeli acknowledgement that they did fire on a "suspicious vehicle," bloggers were inherently suspicious of the story due to apparently staged and in some cases definitively falsified information provided by Arab news stringers and photojournalists in the recent Israeli-Hezbollah War. Some were quick to cast doubts on the veracity of the story.

Other bloggers, notably AllahPundit, Ace of Spades and Dan Riehl cautioned that we should resist jumping on the "Pallywood" bandwagon without having support for the claims being made.

I wanted support to prove or disprove these allegations, and so I went to the people who should know most about the kind of vehicles damaged in the attack, armored vehicle manufacturers themselves.

I sent an email to these five armored vehicle manufacturers, asking them to look at the photo (above) that seems to be the center of the debate, and asked them two questions:

1. Is this damage consistent with what you might expect from a 70MM rocket's warhead detonating roughly a foot above an civilian-manufactured armored vehicle such as the one pictured? If not, would you expect more damage, or less?
2. People suspicious of the attack are citing the obvious rust around the impact site on the vehicle as proof that these are old markings, while the expert claims that vehicles can rust in this kind of climate in the short time mentioned. Does that sound logical, or would alloys used in civilian armored vehicles take longer to show this level of rust? Would you provide an estimate of how long it would take?
   

Within an hour, I had responses from representatives of two armored vehicle manufacturing companies.

David Khazanski of Inkas Armored Vehicle Manufacturing responded first, stating:

Looking at the picture received through the link on your email, the damage on the vehicle was sustained very long time ago and probably not by the rocket, or it was already tempered [sic] with[.]

In no uncertain terms, Mr. Khazankski doubts that the vehicle was damaged recently, or by rocket fire, and suggests that the vehicle may have been tampered with.

Chris Badsey, chairman and CEO of First Defense International Group, which has armored vehicles deployed in the Middle East and has professional knowledge of Israeli weaponry, graciously offered up a very detailed analysis of the vehicle in the photo above (minor spelling errors corrected):

1.) Firstly as an armouring company we are familiar with all weapons, weapons damage, collateral damage and the destruction of armoured vehicles from blasts and various types of rockets and ammunition.


2.) Secondly we are familiar with the Israeli weapons of choice and uses in the field as we continue to work with them and have a manufacturing relationship with them both in Israel and Iraq.


3.) Whether the Reuters vehicle was attacked by who I could not verify but In my expert opinion the damage, the hole is NOT consistent of a Hellfire Missile or a 70mm rocket nor any armoured piercing bullet/trajectory.


4.) The Reuters armoured van would only be armoured to threat level IV which would consist of 8mm of High Hard 4140 Steel armouring on the roof which you can see in the picture as peeled open somewhat. The damage to the roof looks to me very consistent with possible shrapnel penetration from an object other than a rocket or missile itself.


5.) Furthermore the armored glass would be 62mm for threat level IV protection against blasts and armour piercing rounds. The damage to the back window is certainly NOT consistent with any missile, bomb, rocket blast that would have occurred on impact if a rocket was fired around and directly at the vehicle.

Mr. Badsey went on to bring up a point that few of us seemed to have considered, and that is the primary blast effect involved in any explosive projectile used against an armored vehicle.

There are essential four kinds of blast effects (mechanisms) related to the detonation of any explosive device on the human body, and the first three carry over to the kind of damage we should expect warheads to have on vehicles.

They are:

• primary: Unique to high-order explosives; results from the impact of the overpressurization wave with body surfaces ;
• secondary: Results from flying debris and bomb fragments;
• tertiary: Results when bodies
  are thrown by blast wind;
• quaternary: All explosion-related injuries, illnesses, or diseases not due to primary, secondary, or tertiary mechanisms; includes exacerbation or complications of existing conditions

The vehicle in the picture above shows only very minor damage that some allege are consistent with the secondary, or shrapnel effect of a warhead detonating in close proximity. But a vehicle either hit by or suffering a near miss from a helicopter warhead would also sustain major primary blast damage, as shown below.

The photo above is of one of First Defense International Group's armored Ford Expeditions which was heavily damaged by an IED blast near Baghdad, Iraq. Note how the vehicle has been heavily dented by the blast. Teh hood is crumpled and the bumbers are destroyed. All bulletproof windows have been heavily damaged, with the left rear glass completely imploded (to FDI's credit, there were no casualties).

The Reuter's vehicle, however seems to show far less damage than one may expect. The sheet metal is not damaged, and the spider-webbing of the windshield would seem to be the only damage to the vehicle's glass. If a warhead detonated on or within feet of this vehicle as seems to be the claim, Mr. Badsey would have expected far more damage, what one word did he use to describe what we should see of this vehicle?

"Pieces."

It was preceded by the words, "nothing left but."

I then forwarded this link to Mr. Badsey, and asked him if what he saw was consistent with the kind of damage he might expect from a 70MM rocket explosion above the vehicle as an intelligence expert opined to Allah at Hotair.com.

He responded:

There is clearly no blast damage internally and only from some object inconsistent with any rocket or missile attack. I'm unable to see any burn or secondary explosion or markings from the picture so apologize for not been 100% able to see from this picture.

A 70mm rocket has certain features and destructive mechanisms that are not consistent in either pictures especially on entry and internal damage from what you have shown me.

The inside is too intact including the upholstery for this type of ammunition detonation on impact. It looks as if the armor was penetrated by probably flying shrapnel. Not consistent with missiles or rockets of any kind

And so here we stand, weighing conflicting stories.

Reuters says they were fired upon, and Israel agrees that they fired at a suspicious vehicle, but two armored vehicle experts state that the damage to this Reuters vehicle is not even close to being consistent with what they would expect from Israeli rockets or missiles. The first expert, Mr. Khazanski, indicated that he thinks the damage on the roof was sustained a "long time ago."

From what these experts tell me, it does not appear that the vehicle Reuters claimed was hit was hit by either a rocket or a missile, that the damage appears to be from some time prior to the attack, but that the damage may be consistent with shrapnel from something else.

Something damaged this Reuters armored vehicle, but when and how seems to be very much in doubt.

Update: Allah has another photo... no rust. that would possibly rule out the the damage being old, but what precisely hit the vehicle is still up in the air.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:22 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hit-and-Run in California

I'm admittedly late to commenting on the story of 29-year-old Omeed Aziz Popal, an Afghan native that went on a hit-and-run spree in San Francisco, wounding 14, after running down and killing a man in Freemont, California.

The immediate conclusion that some jumped to was that this was a Left Coast replay of March's Jeep Jihad in Chapel Hill, where Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar decided to run-down UNC-Chapel Hill students because he did not like how Americans were treating Muslims.

I don't think that the motives in this case are clear yet, but he had been reported missing three days ago, and there are early explanations range from saying that he was under a great deal of stress having recently gone through an arranged marriage in Afghanistan, to possibly being mentally ill by relatives.

If it is indeed the case that Popal's family sent a mentally ill man into an arranged marriage, I hope that the bride can get a mulligan. Somehow, I doubt his claimed history of mental illness was revealed to his new in-laws.

Michelle Malkin has the round-up.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:34 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 29, 2006

The Jews Did It

I'm sure it sounds better in the original German.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:50 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Will Thoretz Watch, Day One

Will Thoretz is the company spokesman for VNU Media, the company that owns Editor & Publisher and employs Editor Greg Mitchell, a man that has something of a "truth problem" according to Michael Silence, and seems to be on the wrong side of an example of "journalistic malpractice" according to Stephen Spruiell.

Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com attempted to contact Mitchell at Editor & Publisher for comment several times yesterday, but Mitchell has thus far decline to respond. Ham also tried to contact Will Thoretz of Editor & Publisher's parent company, VNU Media, and while she was able to speak to his assistant, Thoretz has not responded to Ham to date.

Color me skeptical, but evidence indicating that one of your editors has severe ethical issues should demand an immediate response of some sort, unless, of course, the decision has been made to stonewall the story and hope it goes away.

Hopeing that this would not turn out to be the case, I sent the following email to Mr. Thoretz moments ago, hoping to spur him to action:

Dear Will Thoretz,

My name is Bob Owens, and I am the blogger that noticed Greg Mitchell's 2003 editorial admitting that he manufactured elements of a story as a young reporter, was suddenly changed within hours of my having linked it. I also know that you have been contacted by Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com regarding the unacknowledged and unethical rewrite of the 2003 column, a rewrite apparently designed to cast Mr. Mitchell in a more favorable light.

I have also noticed that while the article now features a correction to the timeline elements that Mitchell got wrong, it still includes elements of the rewrite (specifically the new addition of the phrase "as a summer intern" which did not exist before 4:00 PM Friday, Aug 26).

I would like to ask why this article has not been restored to the 2003 form in which it has existed for over three years until an unfavorable light was cast on Mitchell's admitted journalistic fraud, and why these changed elements are allowed to still exist without an acknowledgement that such changes took place.

The self-serving rewrite of Mr. Mitchell's column has been described as "journalistic malpractice," and I think the public has a right to know how this happened, who was responsible, and what policies will be put in place by VNU Media to keep such incidents from occurring in the future.

To date, I have noticed that Mr. Mitchell seems to be ducking phone calls from Ms. Ham, and you have not (to the best of my knowledge) responded to her either. I certainly hope that an effort to "stonewall" this issue is not underway, as that would be quite counterproductive to all concerned.

All it takes is a simple look to the server logs to conclusively identify who rewrote Mitchell's 2003 column late this past Friday afternoon. An even application of the kind of company policies I expect in any large media organization against this kind of unethical behavior should provide the remedy.

Please let me know what steps VNU Media intends to take to resolve this matter.

Thank you very much for your time.

Respectfully,

I certainly hope Mr. Thoretz and VNU Media will choose to publicly respond to this issue sooner rather than later. By now, they should know that the longer things linger the more time people have to dig, and the worse things get, day by day.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Shooting for Truth

With the exposure of the "Pallywood" staging of events in Lebanon and Gaza recently, it is perhaps expected that we look at recent claims that a Reuters news vehicle was hit by an Israeli air strike with a certain degree of skepticism, especially as similar attacks have been claimed recently, and convincingly debunked. The fact that Reuters' own reporting of the incident attempted to hide the identity of one of the journalists doesn't exactly lend their account of story much credibility.

And so much to his credit, AllahPundit has refused to take the easy way and assume that the Reuters air strike was faked. In fact, he makes a decent case that case that not only did the strike probably occur, but that 2.75" (70MM) rockets were the likely munition used, based upon the logical comments of someone claiming to be an intel expert:

My second theory, which I think is a slightly more probable, is that the van was attacked with two 70mm unguided rockets. Apaches and other helicopters frequently carry pods with these rockets...

...Although unguided, at close range they are very accurate. This scenario would better fit the report of two rockets since they are usually fired in pairs. Although not definitive, the damage could easily have come from hit from one of these rockets. The 70mm rocket has a smaller warhead than the hellfire and is typically impact detonated. I think the damage seen is consistent with a rocket of this type.

Based upon the opinion of a long-time Army chopper jockey I know who is still active in the aerospace defense establishment, I'm not sure that Allah's expert is correct, but from where I sit, that is kind of beside the point. The point is that good bloggers keep searching for proof where others in the blogosphere and in the professional media often seem to choose a storyline and insert the facts to fit their preconceived biases.

We may never know conclusively what happened in this air strike, but Allah is exhausting every effort at his disposal to make the attempt, and it's something more of us should try to do, both media amateurs and professionals alike.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Lesson Unlearned

A battered Mardi Gras float in a Gretna, LA, warehouse destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

One year ago today, Hurricane Katrina made its second and third landfalls as a Category 3 Hurricane. While the media continues to portray Katrina as the "perfect storm" because of the destruction it caused in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the simple fact is that Katrina could have been far worse. New Orleans did not suffer a direct hit.

At some point in the unforeseen future, the perfect storm will hit New Orleans, and the billions of dollars we are pumping into rebuilding the city will be realized for the misallocation of funds that it is as it slides beneath the waves for a final time, perhaps with a far greater loss of life than the 1,836 souls that were lost when Katrina bypassed New Orleans.

We should have learned; you don't build a major city in a hole in a swamp surrounded by the Mighty Mississippi on the once side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other an expect it to last. Katrina should have been our wake-up call to relocate or abandon the Big Easy for higher ground; instead we are pumping millions of dollars into a city that the Army Corps of Engineers predicted would fall into the sea within 50 years even before Katrina chewed up an already receding Louisiana coastline.

A pre-Katrina map of what the Louisiana coastline may look like in less than 50 years.

We have not learned the lessons that this mighty near miss tried to teach us, and are now doomed to repeat our mistake in the future. It is arrogant and foolish to think Band-Aid solutions will resurrect a city so close to its natural death.

So what would have been the "proper" response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina? Rebuilding elsewhere. Surely, the millions of dollars flowing into the slowly drowning city of New Orleans would have been better spent in relocating it to higher ground further inland, where it could have a legitimate chance to rebuild and prosper, instead of looking forward to the dark further of The Next Time, when the futility of our efforts to combat the forces of nature will be realized on a stark day after.

But instead we rebuild New Orleans to fail, no stronger, weaker in many regards, and doomed to repeat as scene of massive tragedy. We have failed to learn from the recent past, and will be forced to live with the consequences in the future.

Update: In the comments, some folks are making the correct observation that not all of New Orleans flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and that some spots are indeed above sea level. To them I say, "for now."

New Orleans, on average, is eight feet below sea level, and sinking three feet per century.

The simple fact of the matter is that all of New Orleans (and the Mississippi Delta in general) is built upon a bed of silt hundreds of feet thick, and this fine material is constantly compacting. The rate of subsidence varies from spot to spot, but all of the Mississippi delta is subsiding, and all of New Orleans is sinking along with it.

That is according to the U.S Geological Survey.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:12 AM | Comments (52) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 28, 2006

Mystery Senator Exposed?

Mary Katherine Ham notes this Club for Growth article that Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) may be the "mystery senator" holding up legislation that would create "an online, searchable database to allow taxpayers to investigate all federal spending."

Is she?

Well, she certainly seems to have the right qualifications...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:54 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Editor & Publisher's Evolving Implosion

This past Friday afternoon, an unscrupulous revision to a forgotten three year-old editorial by Greg Mitchell became the bomb that threatens to blow apart Editor & Publisher, a media industry trade publication, and it's parent company, VNU Media.

Mitchell wrote a two part editorial last week, "In Defense of War Photographers," attacking bloggers for exposing Reuters news photographers as the author of two faked photos, and calling into question other events bloggers felt were possibly staged.

I hypothesized on Friday that Mitchell's stirring defense of the suspected fakers might have arisen from his own past as someone who has admitted staging the news in a 2003 editorial.

The story should have died right there, but then, in a surprisingly stupid and petty act, someone with access to Mitchell's editorial decided to change the lede of the editorial to paint Mitchell in a more favorable light. Someone at Editor & Publisher was rewriting history within hours of unwanted attention cast upon the editorial by a handful of blogs.

Suddenly, the sleepy little editorial that had lain dormant for three years had detonated into charges of "journalistic malpractice" and calls for Mitchell to resign. Surely, someone who represents an industry trade publication as its editor must be held to the same standards as other journalists, if not higher standards.

And so while other fact errors in Mitchell's editorial have been addressed, Editor & Publisher pointedly refuse to even mention the blatant rewrite of the column's lede that suddenly brought this sleepy editorial back to the nation's attention.

Editor & Publisher and Greg Mitchell could easily defuse an increasingly volatile situation by simply admitting that Mitchell "tweaked" the article because he wanted to write off his fraud as a youthful indiscretion, but instead of taking a small bite of well-deserved crow, it seems Editor & Publisher and their parent company, VNU Media, may attempt instead to act as if nothing ever happened, and hope that the storm will pass without them having to admit their ever-compounding errors in judgement.

Mary Katharine Ham is trying to reach Mitchell at Editor and Publisher for comment, but so far has had no luck. I think she should try Will Thoretz, VNU's company spokesman instead. It seems that sooner rather than later that this particular ball will be in his court as Mitchell continues to hope that his fradulent past and present won't catch up to him.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:33 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hoping for Transparency, But Expecting the Norm

Mary Katharine Ham has a new column up at Townhall.com discussing the "Fauxtography" scandals and the journalistic malpractice in Greg Mitchell's 2003 column that I highlighted over the weekend.

I should hope that Editor & Publisher's parent company VNU Media follows David Perlmutter's suggested option on how to handle similar scandals:

News picture-making media organizations have two paths of possible response to this unnerving new situation. First, they can stonewall, deny, delete, dismiss, counter-slur, or ignore the problem. To some extent, this is what is happening now and, ethical consideration aside, such a strategy is the practical equivalent of taking extra photos of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The second, much more painful option, is to implement your ideals, the ones we still teach in journalism school. Admit mistakes right away. Correct them with as much fanfare and surface area as you devoted to the original image. Create task forces and investigating panels. Don't delete archives but publish them along with detailed descriptions of what went wrong. Attend to your critics and diversify the sources of imagery, or better yet be brave enough to refuse to show any images of scenes in which you are being told what to show. I would even love to see special inserts or mini-documentaries on how to spot photo bias or photo fakery—in other words, be as transparent, unarrogant, and responsive as you expect those you cover to be.

The stakes are high. Democracy is based on the premise that it is acceptable for people to believe that some politicians or news media are lying to them; democracy collapses when the public believes that everybody in government and the press is lying to them.

While Perlmutter was specifically talking about photojournalism, the same principles apply to print journalism as well. VNU Media would be wise to opt for a transparent investigation.

We should know just how seriously they value their credibility by their action or inaction later today.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:40 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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