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The
Cornell Coalition for Animal Defense (CCAD) — the campus chapter of
People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA) — recently
sponsored a student-funded event in which victims of the Holocaust were
compared to starving cows and chickens. The event, called “Holocaust on
Your Plate,” is part of PETA’s nationwide attempt to gain sympathy for
the animal rights movement. CNN first reported on PETA’s insanity in
February 2003, when the fringe group’s anti-Semitic campaign commenced.
The CCAD demonstration, which took place in front of Cornell’s student union, was highlighted by the presence of several 60-square-foot panels with photos of concentration camp prisoners alongside pigs, chickens, and cows. One such placard explained the group’s moniker:
"During the seven years between 1938 and 1945, 12 million people perished in the Holocaust. The same number of animals is killed every four hours for food in the U.S. alone. The Holocaust is on Your Plate."
"The very same mind-set that made the Holocaust possible — that we can do anything we want to those we decide are 'different or inferior' — is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day."
Prescott went on to tell the Ithaca Journal:
"[During the Holocaust] people were beaten, abused, and herded to death. Today, 28 billion animals a year in the United States are subjected to similar treatment."
CCAD members Racheal Wechsler and Amy Icodae handed out literature containing such lovely sentiments as:
“Decades from now, what will you tell your grandchildren when they ask whose side you were on during the ‘animals’ holocaust’? Will you be able to say that you stood up against oppression?”
Their pamphlets also quoted German Jewish “philosopher” Theodor Adorno:
“Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”
The day after the Holocaust event, the Cornell Daily Sun published a column by Alex Bomstein, a student at Cornell and a member of the local Green Party, in which he wrote:
“The difference between you and a lizard is just a massive exaggeration of the difference between you and me... So let us not judge others by the base pairs of their DNA, but by the content of their beings. By something that really matters.”
Mr. Bomstein may be quite a
bit closer to the lizard than the rest of us. Would he — or any of the
individuals associated with PETA — have considered a comparison between
slavery and animal captivity? Would they have supported bringing giant
posters to Cornell that compared black slaves to caged hampsters?
Never. But Jews are a group that is easily targeted because
anti-Semitism is en vogue on America’s college campuses.
While many Cornell students expressed shock and dismay at the CCAD’s demonstration, they really should not be too surprised. When the rights of animals are equated with the rights of man, man is diminished. The animal rights coalition’s equating of the Holocaust with the killing of farm animals is a logical conclusion for a movement that has no belief in God or in the moral superiority of man. In the animal rights universe, a cockroach exterminator is just an updated version of Heinrich Himmler. There is no reasoning with these people because they are kooks.
Still, a number of Jewish students tried to get into sophisticated arguments with CCAD members. These discussions generally devolved into debates over the similarities between the respective digestive tracts of cows and humans. A few enraged students even started screaming, “Jews are not pigs!”
While their outrage is understandable, these students did not do themselves any favors. When kooks are making jackasses of themselves in public, the best strategy is to get out of the way and let them destroy themselves. Laughing at, shunning, or ostracizing these people are all fine strategies. But when a sane person gets into a public shouting match with a lunatic, passersby can’t tell who is who.
The CCAD’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” rally achieved three major goals. First, the event demonstrated how morally bankrupt the animal rights movement is. Second, it showed that some young people have no conception of what the Holocaust was. And third, it revealed that in the absence of God, evil reigns. PETA’s evil placards serve as an important reminder of the inevitable conclusions of moral relativism.
Joseph J. Sabia is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Cornell UniversityThursday, May 1, 2003 5:30 p.m. PST
HollywoodHalfwits.com
The web site Boycott-Hollywood.us was shut down today due to legal measures brought by attorneys on behalf of the William Morris Agency, which represents various Hollywood celebrities. The web site was known for providing a platform for the public to exercise their free speech rights by commenting on actors who criticize President Bush and the war efforts. Apparently, free speech is a one way street in Hollywood.
The law firm Rintala, Smoot, Jaenicke and Rees appealed to domain registrar Dotster.com and NamesDirect.com to discontinue service to the web site. Before their demise, the site managed to publish an image of the letter sent by the law firm, which threatened that the “persons responsible for the www.boycott-hollywood.us website may be liable, both criminally and civilly, for a variety of offenses."
Just before being brought down, the website's home page stated, "Apparently, our domain registrar (namesdirect.com - subsidiary of Dotster.com) has caved to the pressures of the William Morris Agency giant. On April 29, 2003, Dotster.com received a letter from the William Morris Agency in regards to this website. Their complaint accused us of libel and potentially other civil and criminal offenses."
Where are Tim Robbins and the ACLU when you need them?
The message continued, “I can say only this - - the fact that we're being shut down because of the William Morris Agency tells me that we truly touched a raw nerve in someone, somewhere. At the very least, it tells me that our message was received by the people that it was intended for. The very fact that we cannot express our opinions regarding the views of these stars/celebs shows me, yet again, the double standard that exists in Follywood.”
Boycott-Hollywood’s owner continued, “This is another fine example of how Hollywood feels that their opinion and view is the only one that matters. Average citizens are disallowed the free expression of our point of view because they don't like being challenged for their views. I stand firm on the belief that we have done nothing wrong at this website - - The celebrities have expressed their views, and we have responded in kind by expressing our views regarding the thoughts and ideas that they have, publicly, expressed.”
It seems there was a “legal” technicality that allowed Dotster to inactivate the domain name. The site owner explains on the web page: “Dotster.com has suspended our update information at this domain and have informed us that the DNS information of this domain has been changed and the website will be down within the next 24 hours and our contract with them is now null and void. They are doing this because we did not provide accurate contact information in their public database.
“When I explained that the reason we did not provide accurate contact information is because we have received multiple death threats and I did not wish for just anyone to have my personal information - and asked them for suggestions on what to do - Dotster was unmoved. They did not give me the chance to update the information with accurate information and keep the domain. That's not an option - - they are just simply going to shut down our domain - no explanation needed.”
Hollywood Halfwits spoke with the owner via e-mail today and she insisted that she never received a warning, which she indicated was required according to her agreement. We checked their agreement on their site and it stated that a domain name owner has 15 days to respond to a request to update the contact information. In addition, Dotster did not give the domain owner time to move the registration to a competing registrar; they have effectively prevented them from moving the registration for as much as 60 days.
The discussion forum at www.HollywoodHalfwits.com was buzzing today after the news was announced. The general feeling is that William Morris Agency has just caused the critics of Hollywood to be more vocal than ever. One member’s post was representative: “You know I’m sure they think they've won some sort of ‘victory’ not knowing they have only fanned the flames of outrage even higher.”
Copyright 2003
HollywoodHalfwits.com
Hollywood Halfwits LLC
NewsMax.com
Monday, April 28, 2003 6:45 p.m. EDT
Al Franken Goes Fox Hunting at Correspondents Dinner
The increasingly unfunny Al Franken blew a gasket Saturday night at Washington, D.C.'s White House Correspondents Dinner, where he accosted a table full of Fox News Channel personalities, causing a scene that threatened to erupt into physical violence.
"He saw Shepard Smith and Alan Colmes and he came over to incite," "Fox & Friends" morning host Brian Kilmeade reported Monday.
"He said he didn't like the way Alan challenges Sean," the top morning cable talker said, referring to FNC's hit nighttime team "Hannity & Colmes."
Kilmeade said Franken's behavior was so deranged that some thought he was drunk, but that wasn't the case.
Still, the obstreperous comedian got so out of line that Kilmeade asked him to leave, saying, "I personally thought we'd end up coming to blows."
According to Internet scribe Matt Drudge, when witnesses spotted the liberal ranter later he was bleeding from the chin. But Kilmeade said the altercation stopped short of throwing punches.
At the same gathering, Franken was heard to shout in the direction of Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - "Clinton's military did pretty well in Iraq, huh?"
Wolfowitz's response? "F*** you."
The incident isn't the first time Franken has come gunning for Fox News personnel - and he seems to have a particular problem with "Hannity & Colmes."
Earlier in the year, after Franken's name came up as a possible star attraction of a Clinton-backed liberal talk radio network, Hannity told his radio audience that he once had to call security on Franken when he refused to stop haranguing him after a guest shot on "H&C" - following the TV talker down the hall until guards interceded.
Perhaps Fox News Channel honcho Roger Ailes needs to get a restraining order against the belligerent and uncontrollable left-wing comic.
Hollywood anti-war set needs some new lines
April 8, 2003
TO: Jennifer Aniston, George Clooney, Sheryl Crow, David Duchovny, Janeane Garofalo, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Woody Harrelson, Jessica Lange, Michael Moore, Edward Norton, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, Eddie Vedder, et al.
RE: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Dear Celebrity Anti-War Activist: Over the last several weeks and months, you have used your status as a person of fame to tell the world you're against the war with Iraq, which you believe to be unwarranted, unethical, unconstitutional and un-American. Some of you have said you "hate" President George W. Bush (hello, Jessica Lange!), while others have expressed mere contempt for the president and his policies.
Even though you are among the luckiest and best-rewarded human beings in the history of civilization, you have moaned long and loud about life in the oppressive United States of America. And you have complained that free speech is practically an endangered species--though it's not as if you've been kidnapped, bound and gagged for expressing your views.
You have talked about how ashamed you are to be an American. You have said you believe this is a war for oil conducted by a power-hungry simpleton in the White House.
You have given speeches at awards ceremonies. You've marched in the streets and held forth at anti-war rallies. You've gone on talk shows and you've written op-ed pieces and you've signed letters and you've flashed the peace sign every time you've gone out in public.
Even after the fighting began and U.S. troops started risking their lives to fight for the very freedoms you've been enjoying--including the right to speak out against government policies--you refused to let the drumbeats of war drown out your voices of dissent.
Fine. You've made your point. And if you want to keep on with the the marching and the protesting and the grandstanding and the speech-making, well God bless America, that's your right.
But I'm just wondering: If you're such a crusader for kindness and decency and the rules of fair play, when are you going to say something about the atrocities committed by Iraqis since this war broke out?
Stop right there. I can already hear you launching into your well-practiced diatribe about how none of these things would be happening in the first place if not for that warmonger Bush--but that doesn't answer my question. My question is, why are you not condemning the unconscionable acts of terrorism committed by Iraqis?
Since the fighting began, American troops have conducted themselves with much honor and courage and have engaged in the traditional rules of war. We've seen story after story about U.S. troops coming to the aid of wounded enemy soldiers, image after image of Americans comforting Iraqi children, quote after quote from American troops expressing deep regret after killing soldiers and civilians who would not surrender or kept charging, even after repeated warnings.
On the other side, some Iraqi soldiers have posed as civilians and faked surrender in order to ambush allied forces. Then there are the suicide terrorists, like the noncommissioned Iraqi officer in civilian clothes who pretended to be a taxi driver and waved to U.S. soldiers for help--only to blow himself up and take four American soldiers with him. We've also seen American POWs mistreated on Iraq TV.
The Fedayeen have been known to use civilians, even children, as human shields. They stage military operations from hospitals. In one incident, Iraqi soldiers fired at a U.S. helicopter that was evacuating wounded Iraqis.
Even if you believe we have no business being in Iraq, you can't possibly endorse any of the tactics used by a significant percentage of Iraqis. They are cowards and they are scum and they are war criminals.
So, Ms. Garofalo and Mr. Sheen and Mr. Moore and Mr. Robbins: Why not hold a press conference to condemn these acts? How about taking out ads in USA Today and the New York Times so you can sign your names to a petition expressing your outrage at this behavior? How about donating your talents to a fund-raiser for the families of fallen American soldiers? At the very least you can update your anti-war speeches to include words of praise for the likes of Jessica Lynch, and words of protest against the Iraqi thugs.
I'm not asking you to march in the streets of Baghdad to protest these atrocities. You can make your point from the comfort and safety of your home turf--the same launching point for all your verbal missiles against the American government.
It won't mean you're against the war. It'll just mean you have a sense of perspective and honor, and that your hatred and contempt isn't reserved exclusively for the president of the United States.
War criminals need loathing, too. Don't be afraid to say it.
Sincerely,
Richard Roeper
DEARBORN, Mich. — An
initiative to recruit Iraqi exiles in the United States to help topple
Saddam Hussein has been gaining support in Dearborn, Mich.
The Iraqi National Congress — a London-based umbrella group of various organizations opposing the Baghdad regime — is spearheading a project to assemble a pool of Iraqis to help coalition forces gain the trust of the country's people.
Emad Alkased of the Iraqi Youth Reunion — an educational group that wants to rebuild a post-Saddam Iraq — has been leading a recruiting drive in Dearborn, which has the largest ethnic Iraqi community of any U.S. city.
The drive is part of an all-out appeal to Iraqi-Americans who want to return to their homeland to help the U.S.-led coalition topple the dictatorship.
"I don't want American people to die for my country — I want me to be the first one," Alkased said. "I appreciate what American people are doing for my country, but I don't want them to spend their blood. I am ready to spend blood for my country."
Meetings are being held in Dearborn, where potential recruits fill out applications and give their address, date of birth, Social Security number and the name of the nearest airport.
Other Iraqi exiles are ready to shed their blood, too.
The Department of Defense has asked the Iraqi National Congress to find 250 volunteers who are willing to return to Iraq on 48 hours' notice.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently traveled to Dearborn to meet with hundreds of members of the city's Iraqi-American community.
"I heard one wrenching story after another about Saddam's systematic brutality," Wolfowitz said during a Friday press briefing at the State Department's Foreign Press Center.
The Pentagon has been training thousands of Saddam's opponents, including former Iraqi military officials, since last fall. President Bush gave the Pentagon $92 million for the program.
Dave Alwatan needs no convincing.
"As an American Iraqi, all our people here want to go in the front of the American military to fight Saddam's regime," he said.
Alwatan's nephew has brain damage and facial scars after Iraqi soldiers kicked him in the face when he was a year old in order to get information during the first Gulf War. Alwatan said the military was searching for him and his brother.
"I want to fight Saddam's regime, not our people," he said. "Saddam will never, ever go away without fighting. We know that. Saddam, he must go very soon."
Another Iraqi-American, Thea Alemari, said there's no doubt it's time for the dictator to go.
"You can't breathe. If you need to breathe, you have to have approval from government to say something," he said. "If you say something about the government, you be in jail or you'll be killed."
"We can speak to the people of Iraq, we have connection with the people of Iraq," Alemari added. "They feel not safe right now, but when we talk to them, I think we have large support inside Iraq."
Alemari said many Iraqis were afraid to speak out or aid coalition forces because they feared the current regime would survive this war, as it did the first Gulf War.
Exiles said they had not yet been briefed on when or where they might be needed in Iraq. Some of them are former Iraqi soldiers and want to head to the front lines.
At the very least, they said, they could be used as translators to help negotiate the surrender of Saddam's Fedayeen militia and Baath party members.
"It's my backyard. It is my city. It is my village. It is my people," said Casey Mahuba of the Iraqi Youth Union. "I know who is Fedayeen, who is Baath and who is honest people."
She said many people in Dearborn were willing to fight.
About 75 Iraqi-Americans who trained with U.S. forces at a military base in Hungary are now on the ground with coalition troops in Iraq. They're called the Free Iraqi Forces and primarily supporting humanitarian operations.
It was unclear whether the Dearborn exiles would be joining those forces. But they emphasized they were ready to do whatever was necessary to bring peace to Iraq.
"We will liberate our country. We will free Iraq no matter which it is going to cost us," Alkased said. "This is the last choice for us and this is what we are going to do."
Mahuba said fighting for her country would be worth her life.
"For me it is the freedom. It is my country. I want to sacrifice myself there," she said. "I want to die there if that is what it is going to cost. The price is the freedom."
Fox News' Jeff Goldblatt and Liza
Porteus contributed to this report.
*Will's Comments*
I want to point out one thing about these true heroes.
Notice, the article called them, "Iraqi-Americans". But
they called themselves, "American Iraqis". Why can't we take a
lesson from these heroes? In America we all call ourselves "Asian
Americans" or "African Americans" or "European Americans"... Why
can't we be Americans first like these great examples of human beings
and Americans? My hearts and prayers are with them. I wish
them only the best and will always carry them in heart as something I
should aspire to.
Thwack!
Another nail drives into the coffin of Bill Clinton’s legacy.
Dereliction
of Duty is the personal account of Lt.
Col. “Buzz” Patterson while he served the nation during the Clinton
administration as one of the carriers of the “nuclear football.”
As
President, Bill Clinton’s actions with regard to military preparedness
speak for themselves. In less than three years, deployments increased
while
manpower decreased from 2.1 million to 1.6 million. That was, of
course,
Al Gore’s dirty little secret about the “reinvention” of government. As
Patterson recounts, out of the 305,000 employees removed from the
federal
payroll, 286,000 (or 90%) of those were military cuts.
While
the U.S. military was used as a ‘meals on wheels’ service by the
Clinton administration in its nation building adventures, the military
had its own humanitarian crises at home on its own bases. Patterson
points out that
the pay freeze instituted by Clinton was imposed on a military in which
80% of our troops made $30,000 or less.
Despite
the dearth of good news contained in his book, Col. Patterson is not
motivated by a personal vendetta against his former boss but a
conviction that such a man should never reside in the White House again
as commander-in-chief.
Character
Flaws
Character
flaws often show up in the minutia of life. Take, for example, the golf
cheat sheet which Patterson wrote down while following Clinton on the
golf
course. Patterson and the White House doctor kept the real score, which
was 92, but Clinton awarded himself a 79 that day.
The
nuclear football goes everywhere with the President. Several days after
testifying in the Paula Jones deposition, Patterson went to exchange
the
codes for the football with the president only to find that he didn’t
have
them. “I don’t have mine on me. I’ll track it down, guys, and get back
to
you.” They turned the White House upside down and still didn’t find
them.
Patterson
continued to serve in an administration which was “renowned for its
lack of professionalism and courtesy.” Hillary Clinton was no exception
and was known for her temper, her own personal “football” (a box of
files) and for attempting to keep Bill in line. Patterson also paints a
less than flattering portrait of the Rodham brothers who also used the
White House staff as their personal servants.
Botched
Opportunities
Along
with the lack of respect for the military went a failure to understand
its purpose. One of Hillary’s staffers remarked on a drive through
South
Africa that she was appalled by the poverty. Didn’t they have a
military
to do something about this? The Clintons saw the military primarily as
a
humanitarian organization, not as a professional force to defend the
country.
CNN diplomacy meant that if human suffering was on CNN, American troops
would be there.
In
one of his most damning quotes Patterson opines, “This lost bin Laden
hit typified the Clinton administration’s ambivalent, indecisive way of
dealing with terrorism. Ideologically, the Clinton administration was
committed
to the idea that most terrorists were misunderstood, had legitimate
grievances and could be appeased, which is why such military action as
the administration authorized was so halfhearted, and ineffective, and
designed more for ‘show’ than for honestly eliminating a threat.”
"U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."
Those words were spoken last week by Nicholas De Genova, a professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Columbia University. De Genova went on, in words that will long shame his university, to call on U.S. soldiers to "frag" (i.e., murder) their officers and to wish "for a million Mogadishus," referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead and 84 wounded.
He wants 18 million dead Americans?
Columbia's administration distanced itself from De Genova (he "does not in any way represent" the university's views) and other professors criticized him - but his remarks are hardly the rude exception to the usual discourse of the faculty at that university. For one: Tom Paulin, a visiting professor at Columbia this academic year, has stated that Brooklyn-born Jews "should be shot dead" if they live on the West Bank.
More broadly, plenty of other Columbia professors share De Genova's venomous feelings for the United States, though they stop short of calling for the deaths of Americans.
* Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton professor of American history, sees the U.S. government as a habitual aggressor: "Our notion of ourselves as a peace-loving republic is flawed. We've used military force against many, many nations, and in very few of those cases were we attacked or threatened with attack."
* Edward Said, university professor, calls the U.S. policy in Iraq a "grotesque show" perpetrated by a "small cabal" of unelected individuals who hijacked U.S. policy. He accuses "George Bush and his minions" of hiding their imperialist grab for "oil and hegemony" under a false intent to build democracy and human rights.
Said deems Operation Iraqi Freedom "an abuse of human tolerance and human values" waged by an "avenging Judeo-Christian god of war." This war, he says, fits into a larger pattern of America "reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust."
* Rashid Khalidi, who will hold the Edward Said chair of Middle East Studies starting in the fall, used the term "idiots' consensus" to describe the wide support for reversing Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and called on his colleagues to combat it. After 9/11, he admonished the media to drop its "hysteria about suicide bombers."
* Gary Sick, acting director of the Middle East Institute, alleges that Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 by conspiring with the Ayatollah Khomeini to keep the U.S. hostages in Iran. He apologizes for the Iranian government (it "has been meticulous in complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty") and blames Washington for having "encouraged Iran to proceed" with building nuclear weapons.
Sick opposes letting U.S. victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism collect large damages against Tehran. More generally, he sees the Bush administration as "belligerent" and his fellow Americans as "insufferable."
* George Saliba, professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, routinely interrupts his class with political rants, leading one student to observe that it is "continuously insulting" to attend his lectures and another to complain about his course (on the subject of an "Introduction to Islamic Civilization," of all things) degenerating into a forum for railing against "evil America."
* Joseph Massad, assistant professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, seems to blame every ill in the Arab world on the United States. Poverty results from "the racist and barbaric policies" of the American-dominated International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The absence of democracy is the fault of "ruling autocratic elites and their patron, the United States." Militant Islamic violence results from "U.S. imperialist aggression."
Such sentiments coming from leading lights of the Columbia professorate suggest that De Genova fits very well into his institution. He just made the mistake of blurting out the logical conclusion of the anti-Americanism forwarded by some of his colleagues.
This self-hatred points to an intellectual crisis at a school long considered one of the country's best. Alumni, parents of students and other friends of the university should first acknowledge this reality, then take steps to fix it.
The Fieldsboro, N.J., borough council has unanimously voted to ban commemorative yellow ribbons from public property, causing a uproar with residents who want to honor U.S. troops fighting in Iraq.
Mayor
Edward "Buddy" Tyler supports the decision, reports the Trentonian
newspaper.
"I'm shocked and outraged," Diane Johnson told the paper. "I can't believe the mayor would force me to take down ribbons put there in honor of American troops, fighting for our freedom in Iraq."
According to the report, Johnson and her husband own a liquor store near an official welcome sign on the town's main road. She placed one dinner-plate-sized ribbon on the sign and one on a nearby tree.
Said Johnson, "They were made of all-weather ribbon, and they looked really nice. They didn't obstruct the sign in any way, and a lot of people with family members in the war came into the store to tell me how seeing the ribbons gave them a lift."
Yesterday, said the Trentonian report, Johnson got a mayoral directive delivered by a township maintenance man: "Take down the ribbons, or I'll do it for you."
"I didn't want to get fined, so I took them down," Johnson told the paper. "There are mothers in town who have sons over there. You think [the mayor would] be a little bit sensitive to them."
The Fieldsboro Borough Council approved the ban last week, but Tyler said it does not prohibit residents from placing memorials on their own property, reported the Associated Press. Four of the council members voted unanimously to force Johnson to remove the ribbons after the mayor reportedly received one complaint.
Tyler defended his decision.
"Where would you draw a line if you started allowing the use of public property to exhibit whatever cause anyone wanted?" Tyler told the Trentonian. "Suppose someone wants to tie pink ribbons, or black flags, or a Confederate flag or a Nazi flag on public property?
"We certainly recommend that people should exhibit their support," he said. "Just do it on your own property, not on borough property."
Tyler, a Democrat, does not support the U.S. military action in Iraq, believing U.N. approval should have been secured before going in. While he insisted the decision was not partisan politics, he pointed out to the Trentonian that the Johnsons "are Republicans."
All six members of the borough council are Democrats.
"The whole thing absolutely gets me in my gut," Johnson said. "As far as I know, we're not a Gestapo police state, but they're sure acting like it."Radicals Speak Out
At Columbia 'Teach-In'
By Ron Howell
Staff Writer
March 27, 2003, 7:29 PM EST
At an anti-war "teach-in" this week, a Columbia University professor
called for the defeat of American forces in Iraq and said he would like
to see "a million Mogadishus" -- a reference to the Somali city where
American soldiers were ambushed, with 18 killed, in 1993."The only true
heroes
are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military," Nicholas
De Genova, assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University
told the audience at Low Library Wednesday night. "I personally would
like to see a million Mogadishus."
The crowd was largely silent at the remark. They loudly applauded De Genova later when he said, "If we really believe that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine."At least two of the speakers who followed De Genova distanced themselves from his comments. One of them was teach-in organizer Eric Foner, a history professor, who disagreed with De Genova's assertion that Americans who called themselves "patriots" also were white supremacists. In a telephone interview Thursday, Foner went further in his criticism, calling De Genova's statements "idiotic." "I thought that was completely uncalled for," Foner said, referring to De Genova's allusion to the Mogadishu ambush and firefight, portrayed in the film "Black Hawk Down" and known for the graphic image of a slain American soldier being dragged through the streets. "We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers." Foner said that because of the university's tradition of freedom of speech, it was unlikely De Genova would suffer professionally in any way because of what he said. "A person's politics have no impact on their employment status here, whether they are promoted, whether they are fired or whether they get tenure," Foner said. Foner said he did not know whether De Genova had tenure. De Genova was not available Thursday for an interview.
More than 3,000 students and faculty attended the Wednesday teach-in, which lasted from 6 p.m. until about midnight, and featured more than two dozen professors and other scholars. The applause at De Genova's call for the defeat of U.S.-led forces in Iraq reflected widespread frustration at the inability to reverse President George W. Bush's Middle East policies, Foner said.
"A kind of
flamboyant statement like that will get an applause in the heat of the
moment," the history professor said. By turns, the speakers Wednesday
night said the Bush administration's actions in Iraq were bullying,
illegal, deceitful, corrupt and murderous. Some argued that Bush
administration officials had ties to companies that stand to profit
from the war. Using a reference to Nazi Germany, a history professor,
Barbara J. Fields, said like-minded Americans should vigorously oppose
Bush. "The 'good Germans' of the Nazi era were the
few who said, 'No,'" Fields declared.
The ASSHOLE Professors Phone Number in NY is 212-864-7103
"We are a very tolerant state and people in the military also expect to be treated with the same courtesy and respect that we show to others," Lt. Col. Scott Stirewalt, director of security at the Vermont National Guard, told WCAX news.
The teens blocked the sergeant as she went into a store and again on the way out, yelling obscenities at her along the way, Roosevelt said. The group also threw small stones at her car as she drove away, he added.
The sergeant said she believed the protesters had taken part in an anti-war demonstration in Montpelier that day. National Guard troops are often deployed to such events to help keep the peace.
"There were various profanities directed in her direction, along the line of '[expletive] murderer, [expletive] baby killer,'" Stirewalt said. "It culminated with some of the individuals throwing rocks at her, and as testament to her disciplined professionalism, she got in her car and left the area."
Roosevelt called it an "isolated incident."
"For every one that takes place there are hundreds of good deeds being done for Guard members," he said.
Roosevelt said other guard members were told in an e-mail to be careful in public. "It was kind of a heads-up to stay alert. We send warnings like that out all the time."
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chastised the stone throwers, calling the incident "disturbing."
"The process leading to the war in Iraq has generated strong feelings across the nation," said Leahy, co-chairman of the Senate National Guard Caucus. "I know that the great majority of Vermonters would never participate in this type of disrespectful behavior because it is not the Vermont way.
"It is important, especially now, for Vermonters of good will on both sides to show that the Vermont way is to respect one another, regardless of our views about the war."
Leahy noted that the state's National Guard helped thousands of residents there during a huge ice storm in 1998 and in the period following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They also played key roles in both World Wars, the Korean War and Operation Desert Storm.
After news of the Sept. 11 attacks, Vermont's 158th Fighter Wing of the Guard scrambled many of their F-16 fighter jets. Over the next 122 days, at least two of the units patrolled the skies over Washington, D.C. and New York City.
But Friday's incident isn't the only case of a Guard facing harassment in the Green Mountain State.
"A car drove up alongside and honked his horn and stuck his hand out the window and gave us the old proverbial, 'hey, you're No. 1 finger,'" Guardsman Brian Tomblee told WCAX news, referring to an obscene gesture. "I just waved back and said, 'Hey thanks for the support,' and drove on."
Protesters at Friday's anti-war demonstration converged at the statehouse in Montpelier to lobby the governor and the legislature. Just as the anti-war rally started, they were met with more than 30 Republican lawmakers lined up on the upper statehouse steps to sing "God Bless America."
Former Gov. Howard Dean -- who left his post to make a run for the Democratic ticket for president in 2004, regularly and loudly criticizes the Bush administration war effort. He has also criticized fellow Democratic candidates for backing the war.
Under Vermont law, assaulting or abusing a soldier because of membership in the military is a hate crime. Conviction could bring up to five years in prison.
About 15 Vermont Air National Guard security personnel will soon be sent overseas to help fight the war on terror, officials said, and could be deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The deployment will bring the number of Vermonters currently deployed to about 200.
The state's volunteer Guard now has about 4,000 members between the Army and Air National Guard. With a population of just 600,000, that figure represents one of the highest Guard per capita participation rates in the country.
Fox News' Liza Porteus and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
At 12:30 P.M. Thursday, over 1,000 students and faculty of Harvard University walked out of classes and assembled in Harvard Yard to protest the war of Iraqi liberation. Unconvinced by the usual antics of peacenik protesters, I made my way to the rally in search of intelligent reasons to oppose war. Surely 1,000 Harvard minds could produce such reasons.
I encountered a motley assemblage of worthies. Aside from the students, there was the Spartacus Youth League, gracing us with a poster: "For Class Struggle Against U.S. Capitalist Rulers." The Socialist Workers party distributed its weekly newsletter. Rita Hamad, a Harvard senior, reminded us of the evils of Zionism in a speech ("the Israeli government will use the Iraqi war as a cover for committing future atrocities [in Palestine]"). In a touching display of multiculturalism, one sign proclaimed "Finland Against This War" — while another bore the Chinese characters for "Fandui Shiyou Zhanzheng": Oppose the Oil War.
Searching harder, I found this trenchant injunction: "Healthcare Not Bombs." I asked the woman holding the sign to explain exactly how health-care will stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. "If we use our wealth to provide health-care and solve problems like AIDS," she answered, "we will have better relations with other countries, who will help us solve problems like weapons of mass destruction." Q.E.D.
At this point, I had an epiphany: Maybe I was listening to the wrong people. Not all of these peaceniks were affiliated with Harvard, and those who were, were mostly students. Perhaps their powers of reasoning were as yet unrefined. If so, then surely it was to their refiners that I should turn. So I listened to a speech by Brian Palmer, lecturer on the study of religion, whom I expected to be a paragon of rationality.
Palmer began by assuring us that the war would be a massacre. He added that "the Iraq war is a skirmish in the war between the Bush administration and the rest of the world." For those unaware of this war, Palmer offered some details. First, Bush is "at war against other democracies, international law, and global institutions." As evidence for this claim, Palmer repeated the statement of the current president's father that "the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation," and construed this to mean that there must be "an SUV in every garage." Next, Palmer waxed metaphorical: "Ghosts of angry Cold Warriors are emerging from the dead ranks of the Reagan administration to wage war against the working classes." As if that weren't spooky enough, Palmer warned that Bush is at war "against us in the universities. We produce inconvenient results, such as that the Bush brothers pushed and bullied their way through the Florida elections."
Here, at last, was the immorality of the war made manifest. Let's summarize: George W. Bush, aided by a handful of ghouls, is removing Saddam Hussein from power so that he can put an SUV in every garage, oppress the poor, and commit election fraud. This was precisely the sort of serious thought I had hoped for.
What I had not hoped for, however, was a revelation from God. Yet Timothy P. McCarthy, lecturer in American history and literature, delighted the crowd by providing one. In a sermon on the topic of "dissent and God," McCarthy announced in his lordly baritone (think of Charlton Heston as Moses) that President Bush has a policy of "waging war against anyone at any time when the Spirit moves [him]." Silly Bush. He should know that the Spirit only moves anti-war protesters — who must, in McCarthy's words, "reclaim the authority of God as we, the prophets of peace, keep doing what we are doing" — namely, opposing the war "in order to save every last one of our souls."
Let me assure the reader that each of the above quotations is real. This is what antiwar intellectuals are saying today. I haven't made up a word.
What is most vexing about these peaceniks isn't the falsity of their claims, but the utter irrelevance of those claims, even if true. A few examples:
"Saddam Hussein Is Not the Iraqi People," read one poster. This is
trivially true, but utterly useless as an argument unless one is making
the ridiculous assumption that targeting a regime requires targeting
an entire people. (Of course, many did make this assumption.
Matthew Skomarovsky, the student emcee, accused the U.S. of planning to
"shock
and awe Baghdad the way Osama bin Laden shocked and awed New York City
on September 11.")
American support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s was roundly condemned,
as though the United States were responsible for having failed to
divine the horrors Saddam would commit. But suppose the U.S. did
bear partial (or total) responsibility for the humanitarian disaster in
Iraq? The
peacenik argument would still be getting the idea of moral
responsibility
backward by assuming that to cause a problem is to free oneself of the
duty to resolve it.
Endless venom was spat at George W. Bush, as though to insult the man
was to discredit his policies. What if President Bush were
stupid, or did steal the election, or really wanted to
gain access to Iraq's oil? The war is not being justified on those
terms, but on grounds of national security and humanitarian concern.
The sufficiency of those
justifications doesn't rest on claims about Bush's intelligence,
political
activities, and personal motivations, and you don't need a background
in
formal logic to understand this.
The utter irrelevance of these arguments only exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the antiwar movement. Any serious criticism of the war must rely on one or both of two claims: First, that it is not in the security interests of the United States forcibly to remove Saddam from power; or, second, that a war to rid the Iraqi people of a psychopathic dictator is worse for that people, in humanitarian terms, than letting them continue to suffer under him.
Rather than make these claims, Harvard's high-minded intellectuals recite their usual litany of complaints about capitalism, about globalization, and above all, about George W. Bush. Yesterday's protest was an exercise in many things: vanity, condescension, evasion, arrogance, and smug self-righteousness. But it failed miserably as an effort at persuasion. This should come as no surprise to those of us who recognize that war is tragic, but who also know that life under tyranny, or life overshadowed by the danger of apocalyptic slaughter, is more tragic still.
— Jason Steorts is a senior at Harvard University.
When Fox asked me to write a column about the war
this week, I was a bit at a loss. For about six months now, I’ve
advocated
against the war. But I also decided that once the bombs start falling,
the debate ought to end. And last week, for me, it did end. Now
that we’re in the thick of the mission, it’s time to unite, and to pull
for a swift, decisive victory that’s as bloodless as it can be.
Given my precarious position, I’ve found myself regularly frustrated by hysterics coming from either side of the debate. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to list and address some of the more egregious examples.
1) The World War II Analogies.
Saddam Hussein is not Hitler. He’s certainly not worse than Hitler (as Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens once said on the floor of the U.S. Senate). He’s likely every bit the moral midget Hitler was, but he hasn’t the means, the capacity, the wealth, the support or, frankly, the charisma Hitler had. Hitler was a threat to the world. He conquered most of Europe. He killed six million Jews.
Saddam Hussein is a threat to his own people, and, at most, a neighboring country or two.
Likewise, Basra isn’t Normandy. You’re free to believe that this is a just, moral war, but it’s insulting to say that it presents a moral imperative on par with World War II. Retired General Barry McCaffrey said recently that the allies in Iraq risk 3,000 dead before the mission is over. That number ought to turn your stomach. You might still think it’s regrettably acceptable, but it ought to at least get you queasy. That’s another September 11’s worth of dead Americans, a voluntary one, in an effort to prevent another September 11, one that may or may not happen, and may still happen once (or even because) we topple the Iraqi regime.
Three thousand dead to topple Saddam Hussein is a travesty. Three thousand dead in the effort to liberate Europe and the Pacific would have been a blessing.
2) Moral Relativism
Much as this war troubles me, there is no moral equivalency between the Bush administration and Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. Our president occasionally enacts policies that I find troubling as an advocate for civil liberties. Saddam Hussein has thrown dissenters into vats of slow-acting acid. The two aren’t comparable.
There is no moral relativism between invading U.S. forces and Al Qaeda operatives. And, in fact, there’s no moral relativism between U.S. forces and the Iraqi forces we’re fighting.
I’ll give you some examples.
As we’ve seen, when U.S. forces have conquered Iraqi villages in the past week, they’ve handed out chocolate and bottled water to Iraqi children. When Iraqi soldiers invaded Kuwait in 1990 and encountered Kuwaiti children, they killed them.
When U.S. forces capture Iraqi soldiers, they abide by international treaties, and often grant the enemy better accommodations than they have themselves. When Iraqi forces capture U.S. soldiers, they humiliate and then reportedly execute them on videotape, then feed that footage for broadcast to the world.
No country that I can think of in the history of warfare has gone to the lengths our military has in this conflict to avoid civilian casualties. We’ve spent billions on "smart bomb" research and development, we’ve altered our military strategy, and, some have argued, we’ve even risked the safety of our own forces at times to avoid unnecessary civilian carnage. Iraq, on the other hand, has willingly endangered its own civilians by deploying them as human shields, by camouflaging soldiers as civilians, and by instructing soldiers to fight under the white flag. There’s no moral equivalence here. We’re doing more to protect Iraqi citizens than Iraq is.
3) Objection to This War Makes One "Subjectively Pro-Iraq"
This argument was put forth most recently by Rush Limbaugh, who said he’d yet to meet an antiwar protester who could answer the question "If we do go to war, do you hope America wins?"
I can only speak for myself, of course. But I can answer that question unambiguously.
I originally opposed this war. And yes, I hope we win. Decisively.
There are lots of other thoughtful, patriotic people who originally opposed the current war for reasons not rooted in anti-Americanism, people not named Michael Moore or Susan Sarandon or Chrissie Hynde. Some of us even voted for President Bush.
And we, like you, get goosebumps when Iraqi civilians greet American troops with cheers and flowers; we, like you, get nauseous when we see photographs of the bodies of American soldiers; we, like you, choke up when we see interviews with those soldiers’ families; and we, like you, would like nothing more than to see a Marine emerge from a Baghdad bunker with Saddam Hussein’s head on a stick.
I have no desire to let loose with "I told you sos" after this war is over. I’d much rather say, "I was wrong."
4) Uni- vs. Multi-lateralism
Another one from the antiwar crowd, unique in that it’s wrong on two levels. The argument says:
1) We’re acting unilaterally.
2) That’s a bad thing.
Well, first, we aren’t acting unilaterally. We’re acting against the objections of France, Russia, China and Germany.
We all, of course, know well of Germany’s pacifist tradition (that’s sarcasm). Russia’s still in its own brutal war with Muslim rebels in Chechnya, even as it threatened a U.N. veto. China’s still suppressing Muslims in its Xinjiang province. And, as former undersectretary of defense Jed Babbin said recently, "Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion."
Thirty countries are on record as supporting the war effort, including Italy, Spain, Britain, and most of Eastern Europe.
More importantly: So what?
Our national sovereignty is too important to place in the hands of a body of international bureaucrats -- a body that exalts brutal dictators like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, that allows a country with an active slave trade (the Sudan) to sit on its human rights commission, and that allows Libya to chair it.
I’m not happy that we went to war. But if we had to, I think take solace, not umbrage, that we did it over the objection of the United Nations.
All of these arguments are rather ridiculous, a couple of them down right hysterical. I feel silly even attempting to refute them. But they’re being thrown out by otherwise serious people, and so it’s important to put them into context.
Radley Balko is a writer living in Arlington, VA. He also maintains a weblog at www.theagitator.com.
For weeks, we've watched and listened as the
so-called anti-war movement has stepped up its efforts to vocalize its
message through demonstrations, newspaper ads and celebrity
spokespersons.
Last Wednesday here at the University of Kentucky (UK), about 200 students joined thousands nationwide in a day of rallies to protest the upcoming war with Iraq.
The event was sponsored by an array of groups that one would probably expect: Leftist Student Union, Feminists' Alliance, UK Green Party and the like.
As I have watched more and more of these events, I have become convinced that the majority of these folks are not really anti-war, but, in fact, anti-Bush.
Take, for example, two of the signs used during Wednesday's rally: "Save America, Spare Iraq, make Texas take him back" and "W stands for 'Wrong for America.'"
Something tells me that if president Al Gore were in the same situation, many of the people at these "peace" rallies would be throwing war parties.
I am not pro-war. I don't know anyone who is. I do think that in some situations, war is necessary. I heard some people at the protest say that war can never be justified. Professor Pat Cooper said peace can never be gained through violence.
Both of these statements are fundamentally wrong. Who would claim that war was not justified after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? Or after the Sept. 11 attacks? In the first case, peace was achieved through war, and for 50 years, Japan has been one of our strongest allies. In Afghanistan, our armed forces and those of other nations have terrorist leaders on the run, a violent and repressive regime has been dismantled and Al Qaeda associates are being arrested left and right, just as we saw last week.
Other protesters claimed the humanitarian costs of a war with Iraq far outweigh any objectives that the United States might have in fighting.
They say the civilian lives that will be lost and the refugees the war will create should force the Bush administration to reconsider its plans. What they don't seem to take into account are the thousands of civilian lives that Saddam Hussein's government has taken and the thousands more who have been beaten or tortured, many of them children.
There are human costs in any war. They are always terrible results of miscalculations or simple mistakes, and they are always inevitable, especially when the brutal leader of the nation under attack places human shields at strategic sites he knows will be bombed.
Still others attending the rally claimed President Bush has not taken the diplomatic road to solving the crisis. I guess they have been ignoring the past two months of news.
The Bush administration has done more than enough to try to solve the situation through diplomatic means.
Whether Germany and France -- two of our "allies" -- support us in the war is unimportant. From what you hear on the news, you might believe that Britain is our only supporter. Yet there are over 20 European nations supporting the war, as well as several Middle Eastern nations.
The Left thinks that if we don't have the support of France, we’re acting unilaterally. This is simply not the case.
The protesters at the rally seemed to be nice people, some of whom might actually be anti-war.
Those whose beliefs are not formed by the fact that the president is a Republican should be commended for their courage in demonstrating their views. They are rock-solid in their beliefs.
Yet they are wrong. If Saddam Hussein is left in power, he will only become more and more dangerous, not only to Middle Eastern nations, but to the United States as well. That is something we cannot stand for.
Wes Blevins is a senior at the University of Kentucky where he majors in history. He is a contributing columnist for The Kentucky Kernel, the campus newspaper where this column originally appeared. Students at the University of Kentucky watch the Fox News Channel on their campus cable system.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam’s troops set 600 Kuwaiti oil wells ablaze "creating a toxic smoke that choked the atmosphere and blocked the sun," according to news reports. The smoke was so thick for a time that the temperature in Kuwait was 10 degrees below normal.
Iraqi troops dumped an estimated 50 million barrels of oil into the Kuwaiti desert, forming huge oil lakes and contaminating aquifers.
Another 4 million barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf — an act of eco-sabotage some 25 times larger than the accidental Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska.
The environmentalists almost gleefully have persecuted Exxon. Saddam, though, gets a free pass.
All the Sierra Club has to say about Saddam is that it supports the United Nations inspection process as a means of disarming him. Does that include taking away Saddam’s matches so that he can’t start any more oil well fires?
Coalition forces, after all, have only secured about 600 Iraqi oil wells. There are 900 others left to be secured.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, both of which fret that carbon dioxide emissions from SUVs are contributing to global warming, have had nothing to say about removing Saddam — even though the Kuwaiti oil well fires emitted an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to the annual emissions from about 500 million SUVs.
The environmental groups’ silence is deafening — but understandable. Fenton Communications, their chief PR firm and former adviser to Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinistas, has advised the environmental groups not to Dixie Chick themselves.
"Don’t issue a press statement about the war… Don’t hold a press conference," advises Fenton.
Not all of Fenton’s clients listen very well, though.
Greenpeace is actively protesting the war, even going so far as to mimic U.S. attempts to persuade Iraqi troops not to fight. Greenpeace used a hot air balloon to drop anti-war leaflets over a British air force base shortly before U.S. B-52 bombers took off for Iraq.
I wonder what would have happened had Greenpeace tried that over an Iraqi air force base.
Though Saddam is prepared to sabotage Iraq’s oil wells and oil pipelines and has already ignited oil-filled ditches surrounding Baghdad, some environmentalists seem to think we’re the bad guys.
"Environmentalists say that U.S. fighter jets, tanks, armor-piercing shells and ground-shattering Massive Ordinance Air-Burst (MOAB) bombs likely will destroy or seriously damage Iraqi water and sewage treatment plants and dams; ruin archaeological sites and harm what little remains of the Mesopotamian Marshlands, the primary source of freshwater in southern Iraq…," reported the Washington Post.
I guess they missed all the reports of our precision bombing capabilities, intention not to destroy key public works and commitment to rebuilding Iraq after the war.
Hard as this is to fathom, the real environmental criminal in the minds of environmentalists is not Saddam — it’s President Bush.
Environmentalists, who tend to range from the politically liberal to outright Marxists, react viscerally to President Bush, whose environmental policies, particularly withdrawing the U.S. from the Kyoto global warming treaty, have only added fuel to the fire.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, for example, has gone to great effort on its Web site to track and castigate President Bush’s record on environmental issues. Saddam, however, doesn’t rate any criticism from NRDC.
The environmentalists certainly hope that Operation Iraqi Freedom results in the removal of a president — but apparently that would be President Bush in the 2004 elections, not Saddam in Spring 2003.
They won’t admit that publicly, though. With 70 percent of Americans supporting President Bush and Operation Iraqi Freedom, "attacking Bush may be a no-go for awhile," advises Fenton.
While the environmentalists bide their time for a more appropriate opportunity to attack our President, going after the real threat to the environment, President Saddam Hussein, isn’t even on their agenda.
Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | "Coming into Basra as part of a massive military convoy, I encountered a stream of young men, dressed in what appeared to be Iraqi army uniforms, applauding the U.S. Marines as they swept past in tanks," David Willis, the British Broadcasting Corporation's correspondent in southern Iraq, reported Saturday night.
It must have pained him to do it. No Western broadcast news organization outside of France has been as vociferously anti-American as has the BBC. Andrew Sullivan calls it the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corp."
The Independent and the Guardian are two of the most left-wing of British newspapers. Their editorial pages and columnists strongly have denounced President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and war with Iraq. But their reporters "embedded" with U.S. and U.K. troops are reporting the same things Willis saw:
"As a huge British convoy crossed into Iraq yesterday, hundreds of children came to greet it," the Independent's Paul Harris reported Sunday. "As the troops moved past small boys ran up to the windows smiling and grinning. Older men stood and watched. Occasionally they gave a thumbs-up signal." "Iraqi civilians lined the streets and cheered American and British forces moving up from the south," the Guardian acknowledged.
"You're late. What took you so long?" the Guardian quoted one Iraqi as saying. "God help you become victorious...I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand."
The Telegraph's Olga Craig witnessed the Iraqi surrender at Um Qasr. "We never wanted to fight - only the diehards did," she quoted one Iraqi soldier as saying. "We hate Saddam, but we are scared," said another.
These reports come from southern Iraq, populated overwhelming by Shi'ia Muslims long oppressed by Saddam. Support for the regime likely is stronger in Baghdad and its environs, populated chiefly by the Sunni Arab minority that has run Iraq since its creation after World War I.
But reports that Saddam is just about as unpopular with his base as he is with the Shi'as and the Kurds has come from an unlikely source: repentant former "human shields."
"A group of American anti-war demonstrators, part of a Japanese human-shield delegation, returned from Iraq yesterday with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present, with Iraqis eager to tell of their welcome for American troops," the Washington Times' Arnaud de Borchgrave reported from Amman, Jordan Sunday.
Rev. Kenneth Joseph said some of the Iraqis he interviewed "told me they would commit suicide if the American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny." "I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam," wrote Daniel Pepper, who went to Iraq with a British anti-war group, in the Telegraph Sunday.
Pepper's awakening began, he said, in a conversation with a taxi driver who was taking him back to his hotel in Baghdad:
"I said, as we shields always did, 'Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good.' He looked at me with an expression of incredulity," Pepper said.
"As he realized I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime," Pepper said. "Until then I had only heard the president spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family."
Pepper asked another taxi driver, who took him and five others from Baghdad to Jordan, if he feared American aerial bombardment.
"Don't you listen to Powell on Voice of America radio?" the cab driver said.
"Of course the Americans don't want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb the government and Saddam's palaces. We want America to bomb Saddam...All Iraqi people want this war."
Back in London, Pepper attended an anti-war rally last Thursday. This time, he was disgusted by it.
"Anyone with half a brain must see that Saddam has to be taken out," he said. "It is extraordinarily ironic that the anti-war protesters are marching to defend a government which stops its people from exercising that freedom."
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Mr. Moore is naturally a big hit among the French. The jury at the Cannes Film Festival created a special, one-time only award to honor his film and then gave it a 13-minute standing ovation. "Not since Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer have we seen such a successful export of anti-Americanism," observes Andrew Sullivan in London's Sunday Times.
Mr. Moore plays into all of the worst stereotypes and distortions about America. "Bowling for Columbine" attempts to explain interventions by the U.S. military as rooted in an inherently violent domestic culture. "I agree with the National Rifle Association when they say, 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people,' " he told NBC's "Today" show. "Except I would alter that to say, 'Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people.' We're the only country that does this, and we do it on an personal level in our neighborhoods and within our families and our schools, and we do it on a global level. The American attitude is that we believe we have a right to just go in and bomb another country. This is where Bush is going right now, right?"
To make this strained connection, Mr. Moore tries to make us believe that the two mentally disturbed high school students who massacred their fellow students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., grew up in a community that has a sinister connection to the military-industrial complex. A Lockheed Martin factory in Littleton manufactures "weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Moore claims. The factory actually makes rockets that carry TV satellites into space. And the very title of Mr. Moore's film is based on a deception. It refers to the bowling class that the Columbine killers supposedly took the morning they committed their murders. The only problem is that they actually cut the class.
Forbes reports that an early scene in "Bowling" in which Mr. Moore tries to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain guns in America was staged. He goes to a small bank in Traverse City, Mich., that offers various inducements to open an account and claims "I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, I walked out with my new Weatherby," a rifle.
But Jan Jacobson, the bank employee who worked with Mr. Moore on his account, says that only happened because Mr. Moore's film company had worked for a month to stage the scene. "What happened at the bank was a prearranged thing," she says. The gun was brought from a gun dealer in another city, where it would normally have to be picked up. "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period," she says. Ms. Jacobson feels used: "He just portrayed us as backward hicks."
Mr. Moore makes the preposterous claim that a Michigan program by which welfare recipients were required to work was responsible for an incident in which a six-year-old Flint boy shot a girl to death at school. Mr. Moore doesn't mention that the boy's mother had sent him to live in a crack house where her brother and a friend kept both drugs and guns--a frequently lethal combination.
Some of the fact-bending and omissions of "Bowling for Columbine" could charitably be chalked up to really sloppy research. (I called the chief archivist for Mr. Moore's film, Carl Deal, yesterday, but he hasn't called back.) Others show a willful aversion to the truth. Mr. Moore repeats the canard that the United States gave the Taliban $245 million in aid in 2000 and 2001, somehow implying we were in cahoots with them. But that money actually went to U.N.-affiliated humanitarian organizations that were completely independent of the Taliban.
David Hardy, a former Interior Department lawyer who delights in debunking government officials and pompous celebrities, has uncovered even more evidence of Mr. Moore's distortions. The film depicts NRA president Charlton Heston giving a speech near Columbine; he actually gave it a year later and 900 miles away. The speech he did give is edited to make conciliatory statements sound like rudeness. Another speech is described as being given immediately after the Flint shooting . In reality, it was made almost a year later. All of these and more inaccuracies can be found at Mr. Hardy's comprehensive Web site.
Ben Fritz ofSpinsanity.org also notes that Mr. Moore has "apparently altered footage of an ad run by the Bush/Quayle campaign in 1988" to buttress his claim that racial symbolism is frequently misused in American politics. His leading example is the case of Willie Horton, a murderer who became a major issue in the 1988 presidential campaign. Mr. Moore shows the Bush ad that generically attacked a prison furlough program in Michael Dukakis's Massachusetts . Superimposed over the footage of prisoners entering and exiting a prison are the words "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." While the caption appears to be part of the original ad, Mr. Moore actually inserted it; the ad made no mention of Horton. (Another ad, sponsored by the National Security Political Action Committee, a conservative group independent of the Bush campaign, did mention Horton; it aired only briefly in a few cable markets.) The phony Moore caption also is inaccurate; Horton brutalized a Maryland couple and raped the wife, but didn't kill anybody while on furlough.
In print, too, Mr. Moore plays fast and loose with the facts. In his "Stupid White Men," his best-selling book, he blithely states that five-sixths of the U.S. defense budget in 2001 went toward the construction of a single type of plane and that two-thirds of the $190 million that President Bush raised in his 2000 campaign came from just over 700 individuals, a preposterous assertion given that the limit for individual contributions at the time was $1,000.
When CNN's Lou Dobbs asked Mr. Moore about his inaccuracies, he shrugged off the quesiton. "You know, look, this is a book of political humor. So, I mean, I don't respond to that sort of stuff, you know," he said.
"Glaring inaccuracies?" Mr. Dobbs said.
"No, I don't. Why should I? How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?"
Mr.
Moore would deserve an Academy Award if there were an Oscar for Best
Cinematic Con Job. If "Bowling for Columbine" is a comedy, most of its
fans don't know it. They actually believe they're watching something
that is in rough accord with reality.
Copyright © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By Chad Groening
March 20, 2003
(AgapePress) - A media watchdog group is calling ABC News to task for what it calls "consistent anti-American war coverage."
The Media Research Center examined more than 230 World News Tonight stories between January 1 and March 7. MRC spokesman Tim Graham says the network has championed the French and U.N. positions, but has questioned the Bush Administration's ideological and economic motives for war.
"Generally what you have [on ABC] is tough, skeptical, cynical coverage of the United States -- and easy-going, 'cheerleading' coverage for France and the United Nations," Graham says.
According to Graham, ABC consistently championed France and the U.N. over the U.S. "They were constantly bemoaning the hard line of the Americans against the U.N.; the ideological biases of the [Bush] Administration -- but nothing about the U.N.; [and] the greed for oil of the United States -- but nothing about the economic relationships France may have with Iraq," Graham explains.
And Graham says ABC presented the Administration's pronouncements with great skepticism, while not challenging what was clearly Iraqi propaganda. "They've had a reporter in Baghdad [Dan Harris] who's done several reports that were just 'here's what the Iraqis want you to see and hear.'"
Harris, he says, has been nothing more than a channel for Iraqi propaganda.
Graham says despite what he calls CBS anchor Dan Rather's "pathetic interview" with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein a few weeks ago, he still considers ABC World News Tonight the most biased of the evening news programs.
© 2003 AgapePress all rights reserved.
MRC
Study: Despite Pledge of Objectivity, ABC Spent
Pre-War Period Undermining Support for Bush
World
News Tonight’s Anti-War Agenda
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Subtlety is for other networks. ABC advertised its editorial slant in the title of its three-hour news special on the coming war with Iraq: When Diplomacy Fails. While United Nations’ approval was stymied by a French veto, the U.S. is poised to dislodge Iraq’s dictator with the help of 17 other nations, but midway through Monday’s show, anchor Peter Jennings asked a guest, “Can you recall a time when the United States has been quite so alone?”
Unfortunately, ABC’s supposedly objective news staff has been displaying their dissatisfaction with Bush’s anti-Saddam policies for months. MRC analysts reviewed 234 Iraq stories from World News Tonight between January 1 and March 7, plus ABC’s live coverage of breaking news during the same period. They found a pervasive pattern of bias on four fronts:
• Blaming Bush, not allies. Despite UN incompetence and French intransigence, ABC reporters insisted that the lack of a compromise was Bush’s fault. “I think a lot of people got the impression this week that maybe the Bush administration doesn’t mind if the Western alliance as we’ve known it in the post-war period breaks up,” Jennings argued during a February 14 special report.
On World News Tonight five days later, he charged “the administration is prepared to jeopardize its relations with several of its oldest and best friends in order to get its way about Iraq.” Jennings would not say that several of America’s “oldest and best friends” were jeopardizing relations with us to get their way about Iraq.
• No doubting the dictator. While ABC treated U.S. claims skeptically, comments from Saddam’s Iraq were usually relayed to American audiences without question. On February 28, ABC’s Baghdad reporter Dan Harris aired an Iraqi nurse’s claim that U.S.-led military action would be a disaster. “For sure there’ll be premature labors, and for sure there’ll be a high percentage of miscarriages. For sure it will be like that,” she told ABC’s camera, in English.
•
Sanitizing the radical “peace” movement. As with the last Gulf War
a dozen years ago,
organized protests against U.S. military action have been led by
radical
groups such as the Workers World Party, a Stalinist organization. But
as they did in 1991, this year ABC went out of its way to show
reasonable
“peace activists,” who mainstream Americans could identify with. “More
and more these crowds are filled with middle-class Americans who have
never demonstrated before,” ABC’s Judy Muller touted on January 12.
ABC omitted the radicalism of organizers and extremism of many anti-American speakers from sympathetic protest news. “So many voices, filling the streets, struggling to be heard,” ABC’s John McKenzie gushed on February 16. Of the three broadcast anchors, only Jennings stooped to promote the gimmicky “virtual” march on Washington on February 26, where no one gathered or spoke.
• Playing with polls. ABC stressed polls finding reservations about Bush’s strategy, and downplayed surveys showing public support. On February 24, for example, ABC found support for war at 63%, steady from the previous period. But Jennings painted the public as anti-Bush: “We find that 56% of Americans want the administration to take it slower and try harder to get more UN support.” Astonishingly, the same poll revealed Americans’ low opinion of the UN — only 38% approved of its handling of Iraq, vs. 55% for Bush.
During a Nightline/Viewpoint special in January, ABC News
President David Westin pledged his network’s Iraq news would “be
objective and give just the straight facts to the American people.” So
far, ABC’s coverage hasn’t fulfilled Westin’s promise. -- Tim
Graham and Rich Noyes
03/24/2003
Last week, the Media Research Center released a report demonstrating
that Peter Jennings has offered the most consistently anti-American,
pro-evil dictator reporting of any U.S. news broadcast. Not
surprisingly, he continues unabated.
Friday night, March 21, at approximately 10:45pm EST, ABC presented a taped interview of four Iraqi women by Barbara Walters. These women, now living in the United States, told horrifying tales of Saddam Hussein's cruelty. Walters finished the interview with agreement by all the women that Iraqi citizens will be "rejoicing when the Americans arrive."
Following the taped interview, Walters joined Jennings live: "One of these women took part in the uprising in 1991 and waited for help, the help did not come, and she finally escaped to this country. So she has somewhat mixed feelings, you know don't ask us to rise up and then not help us."
A legitimate complaint, yet the primary focus of the women's message was an evil dictator's use of torture to keep people subjugated by fear. Rather than expand on their point that Saddam Hussein is a despicable and heinous monster, hated by the Iraqi people, Jennings had this to say:
"Yeah, I think, you know, who's to guess the future, but I think a lot of Iraqis have some mixed feeling. It's often been said by the Iraqis, we'll be greeted by bullets, the U.S. forces, that the U.S. thinks it will be greeted by flowers. But the truth is the United States enabled Saddam Hussein to stay in power for a very long period of time, led the campaign to keep sanctions on him for a long period of time which hurt the Iraqi people and when there was the uprising to which you refer in 1991, the United States, at least in their mind, encouraged them to go and then didn't support them as they had anticipated. So these are issues for the future."
Here are a few points for pompous Peter:
Apparently no low is too low for 'Appeasement Pete'. No matter how cruelly inhumane Saddam proves to be, Jennings finds the United States far more distasteful. I invite you to contact him with your thoughts. Below is the contact information. And further, encourage your friends, relatives and neighbors to get their news from someone who doesn't openly despise our country.
World
News Tonight
ABC
77 West 66th Street
New York, New York 10023
Phone
212-456-4040
Fax 212-456-2795
Read more here:
MRC
Special Report - Peter's Peace Platoon: ABC's Crusade Against
"Arrogant" American Power
Executive
Summary
Full
Report
MRC Media Reality Check - World News Tonight's Anti-War Agenda
When you feel your personal media bias tolerance gauge rising into the red zone, don't throw stuff at the TV screen! Send your suggestion to outrage@fairpress.org! Each week, one hideous example of media bias will be selected for closer examination. Hmmmmmm . . .
DAN RATHER
& CBS NEWS: OUTRAGE OF THE HOUR, DAY, WEEK, MONTH.....
by The Iconoclast
March 22, 2002
According to the London report, this exclusive interview was conducted "under great secrecy with a nightscope, which illuminated the armed and scowling figures in an unearthly pallor."
Some of the choice quotes from the militant interviewees included: "Revenge is in the air" and "Disappearing from the battlefield does not mean that the Taliban has gone." And the theme of this anti-American chatfest was that the al-Qaeda and the Taliban weren't quite finished yet, and that Americans could expect a terrible defeat in the future (so all you worrywarts out there in TV Land, write your Congressman to bring our boys back home before they're wiped out in another VietNam-style disaster).
Well, thanks Dan for that informative, patriotic update last night. Obviously, your main intent was to embarrass the Pentagon, and secondarily the Bush administration, by unsubtly suggesting that Pentagon officials engaged in some hypebole when they described the Anaconda operation as a huge success in eliminating the al-Qaeda threat in that region. And secondarily it gave you and your cohorts yet another chance to provide some free publicity for your latest anti-American idols, all those plucky al-Quaeda freedom fighters from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom defending the Afghan people against the nasty American invaders.
Oh dear, that does raise another troubling issue, doesn't it? After the events of 9/11, and the murderous al-Qaeda assault on thousands of unarmed civilians in New York City, aren't those gritty al-Qaeda fighters the enemy of the United States? Isn't the United States currently at war with these hate-filled henchmen of Osama bin Laden?
What? Oh, I see. You still don't get it. After all, in your mind, you were just trying to do your job of reporting the news and showing what might have been a somewhat different slant on the war in Afghanistan. After all, it would never have occurred to you or CBS News, after tracking down these fleeing al-Quaeda and Taliban fighers, to quickly alert the United States military command in Afgahnistan (or even in Washington) -- so that the U.S. military could scramble some aircraft and bomb the hell out of the cave these terrorists were hiding in, before these hate-filled fanatics got a second chance to ambush American military personnel in the region, or perhaps be recruited for a future terrorist assault on defenseless American cities.
Just like the brain-dead CNN journalists who pioneered this kind of fifth-column collaboration with the enemy during the Gulf War, you just don't seem to get it: that you should be Americans first and journalists second when dealing with avowed enemies of your country, armed combatants who are dedicated to killing American soldiers and civilians. After all, would Edward R. Murrow have thought it appropriate to fly to occupied France after D-Day and broadcast an exclusive radio interview with a contingent of irascible Nazi soldiers on the run, on why American forces should withdraw from Europe (and save American lives) before the invincible Nazi military machine rolled them back into the sea?
Of course not. But then you're not Edward R. Murrow. You're Dan Rather and you live by another journalistic ethic -- that the enemy of your ideological enemy must be your friend. And we know who your ideological enemy is: none other than the President of the United States who has had the gall to hold onto a set of conservative values that just drive you up a wall.
And so, in your muddled mind, if the remaining al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan have turned out to be the last hope for politically embarrassing this popular Republican president, then the al-Qadea and Taliban must be your friends. And hence they must get all the free publicity they can get, along with a public forum for their fanatical, hate-filled anti-American views.
A bit of advice, Dan. You appear to have gotten a little senile lately anway. So maybe it's time to retire your own personal war on America and go fishing or something. These days, nothing will suit you so well as permanent retirement. ***
© 2002 The Iconoclast
IT BECAME CLEAR the nation was finally going to war with Iraq this week when the New York Times pulled two dozen reporters off the Augusta National Golf Club story. In a speech to the nation on Monday night, President Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of Baghdad, warning that the American military was poised to remove him forcibly.
Many still held out hope that Saddam would abandon power without a fight, primarily so we could listen to liberals explain how a peaceful resolution was brought about by their urgent demands that we work through the United Nations, and had nothing to do with the fact that Saddam was surrounded by 200,000 American troops.
In response to Bush's ultimatum, Saddam's son, Uday Hussein, said Bush was stupid. He said Bush wanted to attack Iraq because of his family. And he said American boys would die. At least someone is finding the New York Times editorial page helpful these days.
In angry harangues largely indistinguishable from the one by Uday Hussein, the Democrats were also hopping mad at Bush. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., spent 40 minutes detailing Saddam Hussein's manifest cruelties and violations of all human norms. Without breaking a sweat, Lieberman then said he could understand why the French were not bothered by these indisputable barbarisms: It was Bush's failure of "diplomacy." Bush, the clod, had failed to convince the inconvincible.
Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said: "I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country." Mostly, the Democrats were saddened that America was about to win a war.
With the nation on the verge of a glorious military triumph, liberals have had to put their predictions of a Vietnam "quagmire" on the back burner for a few weeks. Instead, they have turned with a vengeance to attacking "American arrogance." The day after President Bush's speech, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius spoke of self-defeating "American arrogance." The Post quoted "a senior U.S. official" (newspaper jargon FOR:"a janitor at the Pentagon") who warned of "a degree of hubris unprecedented in American history."
The New York Times' lead editorial on Tuesday also bemoaned American "hubris." One front-page article called Bush trigger-happy and another bitterly accused him of breaking a campaign pledge to preside over a "humble" America. In the 19 months since the 9-11 attack, the Times has used the phrase "American arrogance" nearly as many times (17) as in the entire 96 months of the Clinton presidency (24). Instead of American arrogance, the Times yearns for Clintonian flatulence.
There was no more eloquent testimony to what liberals mean by "American arrogance" than an article in the March 10 New Yorker, which nonchalantly quoted a Nazi in support of the proposition that Americans are jingoistic, imperialist rednecks. Amid page after gleeful page of European venom toward Americans, Columbia University professor Simon Schama quoted the anti-American bile of Norwegian writer and renowned Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun.
Schama admiringly cited Hamsun's contempt for American boosterism, neglecting to mention that Hamsun went for Hitler boosterism in a big way. Beginning in the early '30s and until his death in 1952, Hamsun was absolutely smitten with Adolf Hitler. He exchanged gifts and telegrams with Goebbels and Hitler. Indeed, so enamored of Joseph Goebbels was he, that Hamsun gave Goebbels his own Nobel Prize medal.
When the Nazis invaded Norway, Hamsun wrote a newspaper column saying: "NORWEGIANS! Throw down your rifles and go home again. The Germans are fighting for us all." Tearful upon news of the Fuhrer's death, Hamsun was quoted in an obituary on Hitler saying: "I am not worthy to speak his name." He never equivocated and he never apologized.
While he issued tributes to Hitler, Hamsun wrote the ironically titled book "The Cultural Life of Modern America," which, as professor Schama sniggeringly writes, was "largely devoted to asserting its nonexistence." Hamsun called America "a strapping child-monster whose runaway physical growth would never be matched by moral or cultural maturity." It must have been a relief for Hamsun to find such genuine "cultural maturity" in Nazi Germany.
Hamsun hated America for all the reasons liberals hate America. To the delight of New York sophisticates, Hamsun once sneered at pathetic Americans marching in veterans' parades, "with tiny flags in their hats and brass medals on their chests marching in step to the hundreds of penny whistles they are blowing." America's little patriotic parades apparently compared unfavorably to a stirring Nazi war rally.
This is the essence of liberal admiration for Europeans and their pompous cultural snobbery. For proof that Americans are immature hicks in an ugly jingoistic mood, they cite a Nazi.
Geoff Metcalf
Thursday, Jan. 9, 2003
Fat, slovenly, left-wing radical big-mouth Michael Moore pontificated to a London audience that the victims of 9/11 on the hijacked planes were wimps and if only more bad-ass black gangstas had been on board … "If the passengers had included black men," he claimed, "those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes, who as we all know take no disrespect from anybody."
Notwithstanding Moore's myopic and inaccurate stereotyping, he seems to have overlooked the real hero passengers who DID attack the hijackers and aborted one of the terrorist missions with a Pyrric victory that cost them their lives.
Teddy Roosevelt noted:
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
Brown writes, "God save us from such stupid white men, especially now, when in the US and the UK, black people's lives are being ripped to shreds by drugs, lawlessness, fear and frightful violence plus the endless circle of racism, exclusion and incarceration. This is not awesome, Mr. Moore; it is a calamity, for descendants of slaves unimaginably more so."
Using Moore's monumentally flawed reasoning, every black ghetto and high-crime area suffering the epidemic of drugs, lawlessness, fear and violence must be the fault of gutless black men? Scaredy-cats intimidated into sheep-like submission by inarticulate bullies and gangs lacking the stones to confront their tormentors.
As Moore rants about "how the passengers on the planes on 11 September were scaredy-cats because they were mostly white," he conveniently ignores the obvious collorary that residents in high-crime areas must be wimpy scaredy-cats to allow criminals to rule with unchecked violence.
You can't have it both ways, Mikey (you sanctimonious bubble of pus).
Talk about racist bovine excrement! Classic double standard liberal claptrap. Can you imagine if Clarence Thomas or J.C. Watts had even suggested anything so outrageous? ABCCBSNBCBBCCNNNewYorkTimesWashingtonPost et al. would flog the outrage for a month. However, when a left-wing radical darling pukes racist, stereotypical falsehoods, he gets a pass? It is sufficiently reprehensible to gag maggots.
It defies reason that this pretentious hack has somehow positioned himself into any prominence based on one semi-professional documentary about his inability to interview Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors.
Roger Ebert in his 1989 review of "Roger and Me" wrote: "Moore has struck a nerve with this movie. There are many Americans, I think, who have not lost the ability to think and speak in plain English – to say what they mean. These people were driven mad by the 1980s, in which a new kind of bureaucratese was spawned by Ronald Reagan and his soulmates – a new manner of speech by which it became possible to "address the problem" while saying nothing and yet somehow conveying optimism. Ebert apparently considered Moore a "genius." I do not share that opinion. However, opinions are like sphincters … we all have them. Well, Mr. Ebert, this is my modest attempt to think and speak (write) in plain (arguably too plain) English to say what I mean.
However, what is most galling is the inimitable yet chronic double standard the darlings of the left enjoy. The selectivity of the mainstream media in choosing to showcase 'celebrity idiots' when they endorse the liberal left's doctrine and to completely ignore the hypocrisy of the defenders of the downtrodden living high and cheap-shotting anyone who has the misfortune to be even modestly successful by merit of hard work.
Michael Moore should be placed in stocks at Ground Zero (right next to Sen. Patty Murray) and free rotten vegetables and animal offal should be provided to families of 9/11 victims.
Visit Geoff Metcalf's Web site at http://www.geoffmetcalf.com. He may be contacted at geoff@geoffmetcalf.com.
PONTEFICATIONS
WITH WAR ONLY
HOURS AWAY, THREE DEMOCRATIC “Progressive Caucus” members of Congress on
Wednesday via television hookup addressed the European Union Parliament
and shared Left-eyed views with their fellow socialists across the
Atlantic.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich
(D.-Ohio) preached that President George W. Bush’s “case for war is a
sham” based on “untrue, unfounded and disproven allegations.” This presidential aspirant, whose loony
Leftist eccentricities this column recently documented,
wants America disarmed and our Department of Defense renamed “the
Department of Peace.”
“We [who advocate no war
against Saddam Hussein] are severely punished inside the borders of
this country through the media,” said Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D.-Ohio) Kaptur has refused to retract or apologize for
her recent speech favorably comparing 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden
to George Washington and America’s other revolutionary founding
fathers. Leftist House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-California)
refused to punish Kaptur for these pro-bin Laden remarks.
“We have not seen a
propaganda campaign in the world like this in about 70 years,” said
Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-Washington State) to the European legislators. “This government has controlled the media and
it does not allow a voice to be raised.”
McDermott six months ago
visited Baghdad, embraced fellow socialist Saddam Hussein, and declared
from the Iraqi capital that President George W. Bush was a liar. He
received tons of media coverage, both here and abroad.
Accompanying McDermott was
Rep. David Bonior (D.-Michigan), who did not seek re-election last
November. Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily.com this week reported
that Bonior as a leading congressional Democrat used his influence
prior to September 11, 2001, to stifle an FBI investigation into
potential Arab terrorists in Detroit, and that Bonior as Democratic
Whip in the House of Representatives pocketed thousands of dollars from
Arab donors with links to terrorist groups.
Other leading Democrats
have been
equally eager to support Saddam Hussein by attacking America’s
Commander-in-Chief.
Rep. Pete Stark
(D.-California) told his and Rep. Pelosi’s local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, that the Bush policy towards
Iraq was “extreme terrorism” and that going to war with American
weapons would be “a terrorist act.”
At the time of the 1991
Gulf War,
Rep. Stark reportedly put special blame for the war on his “Jewish
colleagues,” especially then-Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.), describing
him as “Field Marshall Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.”
For remarks no more
anti-Semitic than this, Rep. Jim Moran (D.-Virginia) was recently
stripped of his very minor post of party leadership.
It might be worth asking Rep. Stark if he now recants his own
anti-Semitism, now increasingly fashionable among Left-wing fascists.
“I’m saddened, saddened
that this
President failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to
war,”
said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle days before war began,
“saddened that
we have to give up one life because this President couldn’t create the
kind
of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country.”
Sen. Daschle might have
been better
advised to condemn his Democratic colleagues such as Kucinich, Kaptur,
McDermott,
Bonior and Stark whose words and actions encouraged Saddam Hussein to
believe
he had strong political support inside the U.S. Congress.
The defects in Daschle’s
reasoning are many. Even Leftist
commentators have generally agreed that France and Saddam Hussein are
to blame for diplomatic problems, not President Bush, and that a
diplomatic success would also have led to war.
But Daschle’s stupidity is
exceeded by his hypocrisy, as Jonah Goldberg of National
Review Online discovered in a 1998 Daschle speech defending a
preemptive strike
against Iraq by Democratic President Bill Clinton:
“Look,” said Daschle in
1998, we have exhausted virtually our diplomatic effort to get the
Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law.
Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so?….
This is the key question. And the answer is, we don’t have another
option. We
have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily.”
Playing politics to gain
petty partisan advantage is tawdry enough. Playing politics in ways
that encourage Saddam Hussein to defy both United Nations demands and
an American President’s ultimatum could lead to war and to American
soldiers dying – and that is clearly what Mr. Daschle has done. No wonder that so many thousands of South
Dakotans call their Senator “Tom Dashole.”
Daschle’s words attacking
the Commander-in-Chief come “mighty close” to giving comfort to U.S.
enemies,” said House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.
“I think Senator Daschle
clearly articulated the French position…. I, frankly, don’t even think
that’s how most Democrats here in the United States Senate see it,”
said Senator Rich Santorum (R.-Pennsylvania).
“In expressing his views,
Tom Daschle is being patriotic,” said House Minority leader Nancy
Pelosi. “The Republican leaders are being partisan.”
In the shell bursts of this
conflict, we can see clearly illuminated a large faction of the
Democratic Party that shares the French desire to weaken, belittle,
damage and perhaps destroy the United States.
This faction deserves a
name to
distinguish it from the waning number of Democrats of a party founded
by
Thomas Jefferson who still love America.
Saddemocrats is what I call
these clearly anti-American Leftists who attack President Bush and are
as eager as the French to keep Ba’athist socialist Saddam Hussein in
power.
Some will dismiss them as a
fringe, the loony extremist wing found in any political movement, and
if we look only at wacko egomaniacs such as Kucinich and McDermott this
seems apparent.
But if the Democratic Party is not the Saddemocratic Party, why are its congressional leaders Saddemocrats Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle? Why are these reckless extremists in control? And when, for the safety of America, will we see a regime change in the once-honorable party of the donkey?
Sabotage: The Peace
Movement's Plans for War
THE THREAT: On the day after the U.S. military action in Iraq begins, the so-called peace movement will begin their own war at home. The plan is to cause major disruptions - illegal in nature - in cities across the country to disrupt the flow of normal civic life. These actions will tie up Homeland Security forces and create a golden opportunity for domestic terrorists. The Fifth Column left is also planning to invade military bases. Here is a report from Salon.com's Michelle Goldberg:
[Camp] Vandenberg is about 50 miles north Santa Barbara, Calif. In a few days, activists will start converging on a nearby four-acre plot of land…. They're going to camp there and train to breach the base's security and possibly vandalize some of its equipment. The [leader of the activists] describes the base as "the electronic nerve center of the global-surveillance-targeting, weapons-guidance, and military-command satellites that will largely direct the war." The base is 99,000 square acres, with a perimeter running through rugged, wooded terrain. "If people are committed and determined and in halfway decent physical shape, it is possible to get in, because it's enormous and much of the land is still fairly wild," he says. Within the base, [the action leader] says, are "major off-limits security zones," that, when breached, "set off a series of responses in their own security procedures which require disruption and partial shut down of regular activities," which means the base can't operate at full capacity. 1
Here is the Internet call to arms for New York City from a group calling itself "No Blood for Oil" (caps in original)-
The No Blood For Oil! Resistance Campaign is calling on all those who oppose the war, to join us in making the first day of concentrated US attack on Iraq an International Day of Civil Resistance! We'll be rallying in New York's Times Square at 5 p.m. that day - or 5 p.m. the next day, if the US assault begins at night - to inaugurate a campaign of civil resistance that will continue as long as U.S. aggression does. THIS MEANS NO BUSINESS AS USUAL! WE JOIN WITH MILLIONS ACROSS THE COUNTRY WHO CALL FOR A 'WORK STOPPAGE' ON THIS DAY! NO WORK, NO SCHOOL, NO BUSINESS AS USUAL! (www.nbfo.net)
Similar actions are planned for San Francisco (actagainstwar.com), Los Angeles (www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos11441.html), and the nation's capital, Washington DC (dc.indymedia.org) The DC plan calls for five different actions designed to cause major domestic disruption:
These will be direct action oriented, unpermitted demonstrations to interrupt Business as Usual in the Capital of Capital and to raise the social costs of the US Government to Wage war on Iraq and the world...
THE ANARCHIST "BLACK BLOC": The above actions will be carried out by the major so-called peace organizations - the anti-America Fifth Column. The violence will be spear-headed by the anarchist "Black Bloc." (www.dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=52540&group=webcast). This is a collection of anarchist "affinity groups" (see War Room #5 for a description of "affinity groups") who dress in black with faces covered to facilitate illegal actions. (A clearing house website for the Black Bloc is www.infoshop.org/blackbloc.html) These are the groups that caused massive disruption and damage during the anti-globalizations riots in Seattle, and have wreaked civil havoc in other American cities.
There will also be larger law-breaking demonstrations timed for the "day after" our soldiers enter Iraq. The stated intent of the large communist peace organizations (United for Peace and Justice, Not In Our Name and International ANSWER) is to "interrupt the flow of normal life." Since the organizers cannot know the date when military action will begin and thus cannot get permits for their events, these are illegal demonstrations as well and their goal is sinister. If security forces are tied up, obviously the opportunities for domestic terrorist attacks increase. But organizers maintain that even though their actions are designed to tie up Homeland Security forces they will be "non-violent."
Not so the actions of the Black Bloc, who launch their guerrilla operations from the main demonstrations. Here is a sample of their thinking, taken from their website (infoshop.org/octo/wto_blackbloc.html):
Q: Why do black blocs attack the police?
A: Because they are in the way. While most anarchists oppose police brutality and seek an end to policing and prisons, our main targets are the rich and powerful. Since the police are the violent face of capitalism, in other words, the guard dogs for the rich, they are on the frontlines when the anarchists come to pursue our class war against the rich.
THE COUNTER-ACTION: The military authorities at Vandenberg Air Force base have already announced that they will use deadly force to repel the saboteurs. Legislators should take forceful measures as well. They could begin by increasing the penalties on existing legislation for this kind of civil disobedience and make them mandatory. This will deter some activists and take others out of commission for the duration of the war. THE WAR ROOM suggests making this civil disruption during a Yellow Alert a felony with a mandatory 6 months in a confined facility and $10,000 fine. If the crime involves violence or is committed during an Orange Alert, THE WAR ROOM suggests increasing the penalties to one year in jail and a $50,000 fine. If the alert is Red, 2 years in jail and a $100,000 fine. Much larger fines should be assessed on groups that sponsor these actions.
Congress should also look to reactivating sedition laws that would
meet the threat posed by the deadly seriousness of the anti-American
Fifth Column. These activists are not playing games. They have
dedicated
their lives to the service of Communist regimes and anti-American
causes.
They are the fruit of more than thirty years of leftist attacks on this
country. Now the international terrorists have provided them with their
dream: the war has finally come home.
BOTTOM-LINE: The threat of the
leftist attack is real and the time has come for Americans
to take it seriously. The attempt to sabotage America's war effort is
not dissent and should be a wake-up call to all those critics of the
Justice Department's efforts to protect us by surveilling anti-American
groups that in fact we have not done enough. Clearly, both the FBI and
our security laws are well behind the curve, since the saboteurs have
not been deterred from their deadly ambitions. Criminal subversion and
sedition are not protected by the Bill Rights and the perpetrators
should
be punished harshly enough to remove them from the field of battle.
A worker in the Richmond City Hall who
wanted to hang a flag in his office was told to take it down after
co-workers complained that it was a de-facto endorsement of war that
offended them, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Gary Burton and a friend hung a 5-foot by 8-foot American flag in their office, only to be told to take it down eight hours later. Three co-workers in the Bureau of Permits and Inspections complained about the flag throughout the day.
"The gist of [their complaints] is the flag is an attempt to make a political statement in support of the war. And they were opposed to the war," said Claude Cooper, the city's building commissioner.
Anti-American?
Students upset about an editorial cartoon in The Diamondback, the University of Maryland at College Park's student newspaper, staged a noisy sit-in at the paper's office and are demanding a public apology from the paper, reports The Diamondback.
The protestors are upset about an editorial cartoon about the death of pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie. The cartoon labeled her stupid for "sitting in front of a bulldozer to protect a gang of terrorists." Corrie died while trying to avert an Israeli Army bulldozer from razing a house in Gaza.
The students said the cartoon was indecent and anti-American. In addition to the apology, they are demanding that the paper publish an article honoring Corrie's life.
Bedrock Principles
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that a federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that a high school was wrong to suspend students for handing out candy canes with religious messages on them.
The ruling, by the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, says Westfield High School violated the kids' First Amendment rights and barred the school from enforcing similar speech restrictions in the future.
The students, members of a Bible club at Westfield, had been told that they could distribute the candy canes with a "Happy Holidays" message, but were forbidden to attach a message containing a prayer and a description of the religious origins of the candy cane.
The court rejected the school's claim that the Constitution's Establishment Clause required them to censor the religious speech of the students, holding that while school-sponsored religious speech is forbidden by the Constitution, student religious speech is constitutionally protected.
The court also rejected the school's claim that the religious messages could be barred because they might be offensive to non-Christian students. The court held that by singling out religious messages for censorship, the school had violated "a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment" that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because it might be disagreeable or offensive.
Papal Bull
Denizens of an online community bulletin board in Maplewood, N.J., report that a second-grade class in that town had to cancel a St. Patrick’s Day party after one parent complained about the religious undertones of the holiday.
The parent says a second-grade class at Clinton Elementary School planned to serve green cupcakes and cookies in a class party. The parent’s complaints, however, derailed the fest.
"Perhaps fear that the papists will descend upon the second-graders of Clinton is the cause for concern," writes the poster.
Free Speech for Some
The same officials at the University of Houston who quashed an anti-abortion rally on campus last year welcomed a gay rights rally because it was a "university-sponsored" event while the former was a "student-sponsored" event, reports the Houston Chronicle.
Administrators likened the gay rights rally to a cheerleading or band practice and therefore permissible outside designated free speech zones, while the anti-abortion rally was student-sponsored and allowed only within the confines of the zones.
Benjamin Bull, a lawyer who represented the UH student organization that fought the university over the anti-abortion rally, called the latest decision a classic example of political correctness on campus.
"The university is almost Stalinistic in permitting government-favored speech, while banning government disfavored and politically incorrect speech," he said.
Banning Buns
Schools across the United Kingdom are being told not to serve hot cross buns at Easter so as to avoid offending people of non-Christian faiths, reports the Daily Telegraph.
Administrators are being told by local school boards that the traditional Easter treat, with its trademark white cross on the top, has the potential to offend Muslim, Hindu and Jewish students.
Officials in one London school district removed the buns from menus this year after criticism over its decision to serve pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.
"We are moving away from a religious theme for Easter and will not be doing hot cross buns," said a spokesman for the Tower Hamlets District. "We can't risk a similar outcry over Easter like the kind we had on Pancake Day. We will probably be serving naan breads instead."
A Muslim group called the trend "very, very bizarre."
"I wish they would leave us alone," said a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. "We are quite capable of articulating our own concerns and if we find something offensive, we will say so. We do not need to rely on other people to do it for us."
Can't wait until next Monday for more snippets of politically correct nonsense? Head over to the daily edition of Tongue Tied at the Tongue Tied Web site.
