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June 6, 2008
Tooting …
Sorry, Jonah. I thought about, um, “blow my own horn” but that didn’t sound a whole lot better. Back to the drawing board …...
June 6, 2008
More NRO, News Central
K-Lo, not that I would ever toot my own flute, but that Times article goes on to say: Mr. McCain had previously stopped short of endorsing the view that M...
June 6, 2008
What If Today’s Media Were Reporting on June 6, 1944?
Roger Kimball thinks their D-Day headline would look something like this: Breaking news! US Army pinned down in bungled assault. Huge civilian casualties....
June 6, 2008
9/11 Plotters Are Arraigned
Unable to start a single trial in seven fitful years, much less complete one, President Bush’s troubled military commissions may be lumbering...
June 5, 2008
Re: Change We Can Believe In
I’m loving Byron’s posts about Obama’s choice of Jim Johnson for the Veep Committee — I hadn’t connected those dots. Dick Morris, meanwhile, is apparentl...
June 5, 2008
Prison Is So Confining for Terrorists
A few weekends ago, our friend Peter Robinson and I had an exchange on the Corner about why it is so difficult to prevent prison inmates from continuing their criminal activities from behin...
June 5, 2008
Yeah, and You Would Have Done … What?
Congressional Quarterly provides this excerpt from Obama’s AIPAC speech: We knew, in 2002, that Iran supported terrorism. We knew Iran had an ill...
June 5, 2008
Who Says We Can’t Find Common Ground with al Qaeda?
At his arraignment today, upon being advised by the military court of the possibility that he could be executed if convicted, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the jihadist savage who orchestrated the...
June 4, 2008
Eric Holder on Obama’s Veep Search Committee
So Sen. Obama, who is trying to distance himself from the Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, has named to his Vice Presidential Search Committee Eric Holder &he...
June 4, 2008
How to Measure al Qaeda’s Defeat
In an article published in the Washington Post on Friday May 30, CIA D...
June 3, 2008
Perfect: While We Meet with Iran the Brits Are Having al Qaeda Meet with a Shrink
There is a spot on the Obama team for Jacqui Smith (who appears to have been reading too much Bill Ayers). From the Daily Mail: Home Secretary Jacqui Smit...
June 3, 2008
Re: Iraq Again
Rich and Victor, I wonder what you think of this. I’ve just read David Horowitz and Ben Johnson’s interesting new book, Party of Defeat. They incline more to VDH&rsq...
June 2, 2008
McCain & FISA: Significant Developments and Opportunities
I’m grateful to McCain spokesman Doug Holtz-Eakin for his thoughtful answer to the questions on surveillance reform I posted last week. I’ve responded in an article on the ho...
June 2, 2008
Approaches to America’s Energy Crisis
Skyrocketing oil prices ensure that it is no longer novel to say that America faces an energy crisis. While the economic consequences of our oil dependence are the most obvious,...
June 1, 2008
The Nasrallah Speech: Hezbollah Ruled, the West is Fooled
In the next days a major battle in the War of Ideas will be unfolding worldwide and particularly through the international media. We are now witnessing a massive campaign by Hezbollah's stra...
May 31, 2008
Re: You Know They Hate Bush When a Perfectly Good Conservatives-Are-Bad Storyline Is Killed
Has there ever been a more lame-o RINO that Scott McClellan? I've got a great idea: Why don't the Lakers and Celtics just join together on a lay-up line? I mean, I know some people thin...
May 31, 2008
Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself
Back in August of last year I wrote: A shift in strategy initiated by the new U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is changing ideas about both al Qaeda...
May 30, 2008
California Bound
I’m off for a flight to LA. Should be a great weekend for Willful Blindness in California. I’ll be talking with Hugh Hewitt (taped interview, I think) tomorrow morning and...
May 29, 2008
Re: Re: The War on Terror Offends Muslims
Please excuse me while I wipe the stuff pouring out of my nose. At Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer reports on the wisdom of DHS’s Charles Allen and his objection to the phrase “W...
May 29, 2008
Re: Immunity Dispute
Not so fast. It is reassuring to read that senior McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin apparently disavows at least some of the remarks reported by the Washington Post to have been made by attorney Ch...
May 29, 2008
You Must Remember This
The Siege of Constantinople There’s an anniversary this week we might do well to recall. On May 29, 1453 – just 555 short years ago -- troops led by Mehmed II broke through the walls of the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople. Mehmed the Conqueror – as he would be known from that day forward -- rode triumphantly into the city on a white horse. Soon, churches would be converted into mosques. Constantinople would become Istanbul. “For the West this was a dark moment,” writes historian Efraim Karsh in his masterful book, Islamic Imperialism. “For Islam it was a cause for celebration. For nearly a millennium Constantinople had been the foremost barrier – physically and ideologically – to Islam’s sustained drive for world conquest and the object of desire of numerous Muslim rulers.” Mehmed cast himself as not just as a master builder of the Ottoman Empire, but also as the caliph – the supreme spiritual and temporal ruler of all the world’s Muslims, chosen to “act as Allah’s Sword ‘blazing forth the way of Islam from the East to West.’” He would go on to conquer Greece, Serbia, the Balkans south of the Danube and the Crimean peninsula. His grandson and great grandson would extend the caliphate to include the Levant, Egypt, the Arabian Hijaz including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Iraq, North Africa, and most of Hungary. The desire to conquer the world – or even just one’s neighbors -- is hardly an Islamic invention. Genghis Khan is not a name: It’s a title. It means “universal ruler.” The man history knows as Genghis Khan believed it was his divinely ordained mission to lead the Mongols to global domination. And he loved his work. “Man's highest joy is victory: to conquer his enemies,” he said, “to pursue them; to deprive them of their possessions; to make their beloved weep; to ride on their horses; and to embrace their wives and daughters.”
May 28, 2008
Re: In (Partial) Defense of McClellan
Ramesh, I don't see how McClellan's unimpressiveness is mitigated by the difficulty of the job. Being third-baseman for the Mets is a difficult job. But I've still seen lots and lo...
May 28, 2008
Remember When McClellan Saluted All those Nice “Business Professionals” Down at Hamas?
I do....
May 20, 2008
The High Cost of Oil Dependence
With the price of oil over $125 a barrel and U.S. gasoline prices hovering around $4 a gallon, our nation’s energy dependence has been a top news headline. Although the economic effect of t...
May 18, 2008
The Next Battlefield: Ceuta and Melilla?
Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No.2, makes a point to regularly mention in his broadcasts the Muslim lands that need to be "liberated." The list includes the usual suspects for every r...
May 8, 2008
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: An Evolving Challenge in the War on Terror
Last Thursday an airstrike on the Somali town of Dhusamareb, 300 miles north of Mogadishu (see W. Thomas Smith, Jr.'s report in Human Events), dispatched Adan Hashi ‘Ayro, the commander of al-Shabaab ("the youth"), the terrorist organization spearheading the bloody Islamist insurgency in the Horn of Africa, and several of his cohorts to the custody of the nineteen angels stoking the stone-fueled fires of hell (Qur'an 74:30, 66:6). The territory of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic is, however, only one front in the war on terror's African theater. Another is the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert and the Sahel, areas which are likely to play an increasingly significant role in the overall struggle against extremism.
May 7, 2008
Don’t Give Up on Energy Independence
This week in Congress, efforts are underway to roll back goals enacted just last year to encourage the development of biofuels. This could damage – perhaps irretrievably – the substantial progress we've made toward relieving the threat posed by our reliance on foreign oil.
May 7, 2008
Ships of Fools?
To fully appreciate the complications and dangers America faces in the post Sept. 11, 2001, world, consider recent actions taken by the government of one of America's strategic allies....
May 6, 2008
U.S. Should Help North Koreans Flee
'We look forward to the moment when we can celebrate the blessings of liberty with the North Korean people," President Bush said in a statement released last week....
May 6, 2008
Food vs. Fuel: A Global Myth
In recent weeks, a flood of reports and statements has claimed that the world's biofuel programs—in particular the U.S. corn ethanol effort—is starving poor people around the globe...
May 4, 2008
Foundation for Defense of Democracies Mourns Passing of Jack Kemp
Helped found FDD in wake of September 11 attacks. Washington, D.C. (May 4, 2009) -- The Foundation for Defense of Democracies mourns the death...
May 1, 2008
Pirates of Somalia: The Curse of the Failed State
On April 4, MY Le Ponant, an 850-ton three-masted luxury sailing yacht owned by CMA CGM S.A., a French firm headed by Lebanese-born businessman Jacques Saadé that is the third-largest container shipping company in the world, was en route from the Seychelles to the Mediterranean when it was seized in international waters in the Gulf of Aden by Somali pirates. A week later, after the owners had paid a ransom reported to be around $2 million, Le Ponant docked at the port of Eyl in the semi-autonomous northeastern region of Puntland and the 30 crew members – twenty-two Frenchmen, six Filipinos, a Cameroonian, and a Ukrainian – were released. French forces, however, tracked the attackers to the nearby fishing village of Jariban where helicopter-borne commandos disabled the escape vehicle with sniper fire and seized six of what is thought to have been an original band of twelve fugitives. The six prisoners were flown to Paris where they were arraigned before a French court on charges of theft, hijacking, and hostage-taking.
April 30, 2008
Feds Must Resist Push to Prosecute Cops who Killed Sean Bell
It's a recurring pattern, as familiar as Rodney King asking whether we can't all just get along. Police respond to a disturbance, the kind that's inevitable in a big, bustling city's...
April 28, 2008
Switzerland Siding with Iran?
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter went to Damascus last week to meet with Hamas' Khaled Meshaal, a man accused of terrorism by the United States, Israel and the European Union. Carter's initi...
April 24, 2008
Thinking the Unthinkable
The next time Islamist terrorists attack us it could be with a nuclear weapon. By saying that, am I “fear mongering”? If so, I’m in good company. Graham Allison is a Harvard professor who served with distinction in the Defense Department under both Reagan and Clinton. He wrote a book in 2004 arguing that “on the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable.” There has been no change of course since – on the contrary. Ashton B. Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at Harvard, said recently that the threat of nuclear terrorism has been increasing due to Iranian and North Korean proliferation and the failure to secure Russia's nuclear arsenal following the Cold War. The probability of a nuclear attack on an American city, he believes, is now “almost surely larger than it was five years ago.” Gary Anthony Ackerman, Research Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, also recently told Congress that “the prospect of terrorists detonating a nuclear device on American soil sometime within the next quarter-century is real and growing.” And Cham D. Dallas, who directs the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, says flatly: “It’s inevitable.” Testifying before a Senate hearing this month, he added: “I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years." Should a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb explode near the White House, Dallas estimates that 100,000 people would be killed. A radioactive plume would lethally contaminate thousands more. In a densely populated city such as New York or Chicago, a similar blast would result in a death toll perhaps eight times that high.
April 24, 2008
Pensando lo impensable
La próxima vez que los terroristas islamistas nos ataquen, podría ser con un arma nuclear. Al decir esto, ¿estoy siendo un “alarmista”? Si es así, estoy en buena compañía. Graham Allison es un profesor de Harvard que sirvió distinguidamente en el Departamento de Defensa durante las presidencias de Reagan y Clinton. Él escribió un libro en 2004 arguyendo que “por el camino que vamos, el terrorismo nuclear es inevitable”.
April 24, 2008
Enabling Mugabe to Cling On
Last Friday was the twenty-eighth anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence, although the country's long-suffering people of the country might be forgiven for not exactly marking the occasion with dances in the streets. Sure, some 15,000 people were bussed to Gwanzura Stadium in the suburb of Highfield, southwest of Harare, to stomp their feet and chant "Ndibaba Vanogona" (Shona for "he is an able father") as President Robert Mugabe arrived to treat them to an hour-long harangue, to which the listeners dutifully responded with cries of "Down with the British!" But overall the mood seemed to have been succinctly captured by Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who, from the safety of his refuge abroad, noted that it was "the saddest Independence Day since our liberation from colonial rule." And while the responsibility for this tragedy reposes primarily with the Mugabe regime, some of the blame must be shared by its enablers abroad.
April 23, 2008
Dems Unserious on Surveillance
It’s now been more than two months since the Pelosi Democrats — following their pied pipers at MoveOn.org and the ACLU, as well as their party’s two presidential contenders &...
April 22, 2008
Al-Qaeda Sahara Network Spurs U.S. to Train Chad, Mali Forces
Analyzing the veritable "surge" last summer in attacks launched by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), I suggested in this column space that both the rhetoric of the group and the threat it a...
April 22, 2008
Change that Sees No Evil
Who is El Sayyid Nosair? Well, I know him. I spent an awful lot of time around him. I know all about his background. So what if, upon being asked tha...
April 21, 2008
Carrying a Torch for China
London It was my four-year-old son's first demonstration. But he was getting cold, the police were manhandling the Tibetans to the point that there might be a stampede, and I wasn't sure if the bus that had just rushed by at such an unseemly speed actually carried the stupid torch, so we headed for the tube and home. My son wanted to know why people kept saying "China, stop the kitty."
April 20, 2008
Europe Facing Radicalization Over the Web
A few months ago Bernard Squarcini the head of the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire), the French equivalent of the FBI, told the French daily Libération regarding Islamic radicalization: "An ideological transformation can be done in three months on the Web. An individual can at night auto-radicalize himself via the Web and get in touch with leaders of terrorist organizations." This assessment shows how dire the situation is in Europe when it comes to al-Qaida's use of the Web.
April 17, 2008
La confusiĆ³n de Carter
Seamos justos con Jimmy Carter. Supongamos que no está entregándose al pavoneo egoísta, que no abriga una parcialidad profundamente arraigada contra Israel y que no está influenciado por los millones de dólares que los islamistas han donado a su Carter Center. Supongamos que su diplomacia independiente en busca de la evasiva paz de Oriente Medio es sincera.
April 17, 2008
Carter’s Confusion
Former US president Jimmy Carter in Ramallah. Let’s be fair to Jimmy Carter. Let’s suppose he isn’t indulging in egotistical grandstanding, that he doesn’t harbor a deep-seated bias against Israel, and that he’s not been influenced by the millions of dollars Islamists have provided to his Carter Center. Let’s suppose his freelance diplomacy is sincerely in pursuit of the elusive path to peace in the Middle East.
April 17, 2008
Botswana’s Success Sparkles amid African Gloom
While the world has been watching the pathetic spectacle being played out in Harare, Zimbabwe, as Robert Mugabe clings desperately to the levers of power he has held for nearly three decades (see my report last week), not enough attention has been paid to the truly remarkable transition taking place contemporaneously just 500 miles to the west in Gaborone, Botswana. There, on March 31st, President Festus Gontebanye Mogae stepped down and was succeeded by his vice president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama (generally known as Ian Khama).
April 15, 2008
Will Yousaf Raza Gilani change Pakistan?
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Yousaf Raza Gilani's conduct upon his ascension as Pakistan's new prime minister has been his lack of apparent vitriol toward President Pervez Musharraf.
April 14, 2008
New Book Release: Willful Blindness by Andrew C. McCarthy
By FDD Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy ...
April 12, 2008
Foreign Policy Shouldn’t be Based on U.S.-centric Coverage
"Does U.S. media coverage of world events provide a sound basis for foreign policy decision making?"
March 20, 2008
Bin Laden’s Threat Uncovers Jihadist Message for Europe
In an audiotape posted on the Internet, Osama Bin Laden threatened Europe with punishment because of its "negligence in spite of the opportunity presented to take the necessary measures" to...
March 20, 2008
The Long War
Five years ago this month, American troops liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Then came the hard part.
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