Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Apologists for Palestinian terrorism often claim that Zionists are terrorists too--citing acts such as the July 22, 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin. James Taranto comments:
Now, it's probably fair to characterize the attack on the King David Hotel as terrorism. But the question is at least somewhat murky. The Irgun, the group that carried out the bombing, selected the hotel as a military target, since it was the headquarters of the British military command. And, as the Jewish Virtual Library points out:
Irgun leader Menachem Begin stressed his desire to avoid civilian casualties and said three telephone calls were placed, one to the hotel, another to the French Consulate, and a third to the Palestine Post, warning that explosives in the King David Hotel would soon be detonated.
On July 22, 1946, the calls were made. The call into the hotel was apparently received and ignored. Begin quotes one British official who supposedly refused to evacuate the building, saying: "We don't take orders from the Jews." As a result, when the bombs exploded, the casualty toll was high: a total of 91 killed and 45 injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews. Few people in the hotel proper were injured by the blast.
In contrast to Arab attacks against Jews, which were widely hailed as heroic actions, the Jewish National Council denounced the bombing of the King David.
Taranto continues:
If the attack on the King David was terrorism, surely Palestinian Arab massacres of bus passengers or disco revelers--whose purpose is to murder civlians--qualify for the term.
Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Daniel Pipes:
"I Had a Good Time at Guantanamo, Says Inmate."
So reads the jaw-dropping headline in today's Sunday Telegraph (London). It tells the story of Mohammed Ismail Agha, 15, an Afghan boy who spent 14 months in detention as a terrorist suspect at the Guantánamo Bay base. In the first interview with one of the three juveniles held there, Mohammed spoke to a reporter in southern Afghanistan, close to his home village:They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons. … At first I was unhappy … For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer.
The American soldiers taught him and the two other underage captives to write and speak a little English and supplied them with books in their native Pashto language. As the three boys departed the base, U.S. soldiers gave them a send-off dinner. "They even took photographs of us all together before we left," Agha said.
As the Sunday Telegraph notes, these words of praise echo those of Faiz Mohammed, an elderly Afghan farmer released in October 2002 after spending eight months at Guantánamo: "They treated us well. We had enough food. I didn't mind [being detained] because they took my old clothes and gave me new clothes."
These testimonies need to be remembered at a time when so-called human rights agencies insist that the U.S. detention of prisoners in Guantánamo is immoral, contravenes international law, and so on.
Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
A good example of the injustice of unearned forgiveness, and of its destructive effects:
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned the father of Pakistan's nuclear program Thursday for giving technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, heading off a showdown with hardliners....Musharraf also lashed out at fellow Muslim nations Iran and Libya for cooperating with international inspectors and turning over documents on their nuclear programs. "Muslim brothers did not ask us before giving our names," he said....He said Pakistan would not submit to any U.N. supervision of its weapons program, and that no documents would be handed over to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also ruled out an independent investigation of the military's role in proliferation. [USA Today]
Feb 8, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
And the educrats who defend programs like these call their opponents "ideologues" who are out of touch with reality:
The number of students in city bilingual education programs who passed English proficiency exams plummeted to less than 4% last year--an 82% drop from the year before. [NY Sun]
New York Sun columnist J.P. Avlon has more details about the source of "The Scandal in Bilingual Ed."Feb 7, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
Larry Elder writes in On Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Did the American President Lie?:The near pathological contempt so many hold for President Bush clouds their ability to put themselves in the commander-in-chief's shoes. On Sept. 11, in America, over 3,000 people lost their lives. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein continued to defy United Nations Security Council resolutions to come clean. He flouted the U.N.-sponsored Oil-for-Food program, diverting the money from its intended purpose.
Critics quite properly accuse the U.S. intelligence community for failing to connect the dots and thus prevent 9/11. After the first Gulf War in 1991, the advanced nature of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program shocked intelligence analysts. Nuclear bomb testing in India and Pakistan came as a surprise, as did the advanced nature of Iran's and Libya's WMD programs. By all means, the U.S. intelligence failures call for serious soul-searching, and possibly housekeeping to improve accuracy.
But, in the case of pre-war Iraq, the president's critics suggest the following: Cross your fingers, hope for the best, and run the risk of another attack on American soil, this time possibly with chemical or biological weapons. No, the president acted upon the best available information and properly discharged his responsibility as commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile, this same commander-in-chief and other members of the U.S. government don't seem very concerned about the danger posed by the Iranian Islamofascist regime, from its funding of terrorists to its development of WMD. In fact, unlike Iraq, there's been a concerted effort even court diplomatic relations with this Axis of Evil member.
Michael Ledeen recently wrote about the danger of this policy of appeasement with Iran: The Seventh Level: Americans appeasing evil.If the Specter/Ney/Biden efforts to "improve relations" [with the Iranian theocracy] were simply acts of folly by men who don't know better, one might laugh them off. But they have serious consequences, as our diplomats -- who actively encouraged the representatives' acts of appeasement -- must realize. The Iranian people overwhelmingly hate the regime, and look to Washington for encouragement and support to carry out a democratic revolution, and therefore the mullahs try to create opportunities to convince the people that the Bush administration in fact approves of the regime itself. Any warm statement from a famous American is a body blow to the democratic opposition, and a balm to the mullahs, just as every critical word from President Bush has encouraged the people, and weakened the tyrants. Appeasers are sent deep into the Inferno, because their acts are truly wicked, shoring up our would-be killers and discouraging our would-be allies inside the country.
Also see: Winds of Change features Iran In Focus, a great collection of links compiled by 'Free Iran' News. Winds of Change also had this Iran entry from early this week: Iran: Pay Attention, which features a good post by Oxblog, and via 'Free Iran' News: Telegraph reports: Iran 'has secret atomic bomb project'.America has convincing new evidence that Iran is hiding an atomic bomb project despite Teheran's promise to open up all of its nuclear facilities to international inspectors, a senior US official has told The Telegraph. He said the Teheran regime was secretly trying to build a second and more advanced uranium enrichment plant in parallel to the large facilities in the town of Natanz revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last year. "There is no doubt in our mind that the Iranians have a lot that the IAEA does not know about," said the official. "The Iranians have a military programme that the IAEA has never set eyes on."
Feb 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Brooklyn middle-school teachers told city lawmakers yesterday they were ordered not to expel students no matter how severe the crime under the Education Department's school safety plan....
The directive came from a principal during a September staff meeting, he told admittedly "shocked" City Council members in a hearing on school safety. Students have choked each other, stabbed each other with pencils, and shot off bottle rockets in the cafeteria, but weren't punished, teachers at J.H.S. 258 testified. In some cases, there were under-the-table suspensions where a troublemaker was walked home and kept out of school for five days, but there's no record of a suspension, according to another J.H.S. 258 teacher, Dorian Hunter Jr. [NYSun, January 29, 2004]
An article the following day reports that "Whistle-blowers who share tales of woe about school safety, micromanagement, and other education issues with Chancellor Joel Klein have suffered a backlash from their superiors..."
