O Canada

Your young men do you proud in Afghanistan.

Via Afghanistanica.

Islamofascism runs rampant

Pic: “Hamas-trained” Islamofascists on the attack. Note “mean-girl” face and terrorist hand signals.

 

This horrific Islamofascist assault at Wellesley is too atrocious/hilarious to ignore. Thank you, Jim Henley.

Even Blackfive knuckles under.

The enduring ignorance of Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan, 23 Oct:

We never hear about Islamism from the Kurds, do we?

Ummm … Kurdistan Islamic Union … Ansar al-Islam …

As for the PKK guerrillas that Sullivan enthuses over, I wonder if he’s aware of just how many suicide bombings they’re guilty of. Or if he knows who Jalal Talabani’s political role model is.

Not that I am unsympathetic to the Kurds, or to Kurdish nationalism. But Sullivan and those like him often over-romanticize foreigners whose interests, for a time, come into congruence with their own wished-for policies. It’s not enough that the Kurds like the Americans for bringing down Saddam – now they’re fighting for women’s liberation, as well!

The “noble savage”, updated for the 21st century, with a touch of Gunga Din.

Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr.

To be honest, I haven’t read any of the man’s work, but he sounds like the kind of guy I’d get along. He had all the right enemies:

January 9th 1975:

When I was chatting with Gil Harrison before [Walter Lippmann’s memorial] service, he confided that he had just resigned as editor of the New Republic. I said that I thought Gil had been assured editorial control for three years in the sales agreement. The assurance had not been strong enough, however, to block [Marty] Peretz, and Gil said somewhat enigmatically that money had talked. He well remembered that I had warned him against Peretz, who has always seemed to me an unprincipled egomaniac. When I first heard that he was after the New Republic, I wrote Gil saying that, if he ever got hold of it, he would destroy it.

January 10th 1982:

[When he moved in a neoconservative direction, Pat Moynihan’s] great friends became people like Irving Kristol, a likable and intelligent ex-radical, and Norman Podhoretz of Commentary, an odious and despicable ex-radical.

December 11th 1986:

Last night I appeared on ABC’s Nightline (Ted Koppel), leaving an entertaining dinner party given by Ahmet and Mica Ertegun for Irving Lazar. My combatant on the show was a fellow named Charles Krauthammer who writes particularly obnoxious neo-conservative trash for the New Republic and other rightwing journals. His special line is that a mature power must understand the vital need for an imperial policy and for unfettered executive secrecy in the conduct of foreign affairs. He argues this line with boundless self-righteousness and sublime ignorance of American history… The puzzle is that there are people who take Krauthammer seriously as a deep thinker.

The best movie of the year

An excellent film that leaves you hollow at the end. Not a crowdpleaser, but a truly mature work with moral resonance. Forget Mystic River or The Departed, this is the Boston movie, and the best by far of the three. Yes, Ben Affleck outdirected and outwrote Martin Scorsese, and it’s not even close.

It’s so refreshing nowadays for a movie to earn its payoff without cheap tricks or directorial sleight of hand, but which evolves naturally from the setting and the characters. And when the payoff is as crushing and well done as in this film,  it deserves awards. Go see this movie and take your friends.

‘24′ is bullshit.

So say the real professionals — men like Colonel Stuart A. Herrington.

Two  problems with torture – it’s wrong and it doesn’t work.

Recently revealed White House memos have raised the ugly question yet again: Is torturing prisoners captured in the Global War on Terrorism an effective and permissible use of our nation’s might?

…

In interrogation centers I ran, we called prisoners “guests” and extended military courtesies, such as saluting captured officers. We strove to undermine a prisoner’s belief system, which we knew instructed him that Americans are unschooled infidels who would bully him and resort to intimidation, threats and brutality. Patience was essential. We rejected the view that interrogators could merely “take off the gloves” and that information would somehow magically flow if we brutalized our “guests.” This notion was uninformed and counterproductive, not to mention illegal, and we made sure our chain of command understood that bowing to such tempting theories would result in bad information.

…

 Self-styled “experts” on interrogation frequently cite the “ticking bomb scenario” (featured on shows like “24″) to justify the Jack Bauer-like tormenting of a prisoner. According to this construct, it is necessary and acceptable to torture in the name of saving an American city from “the next 9-11.” This has a magnetic appeal to legions of Americans, among them future soldiers.

But the so-called ticking time bomb scenario is a Hollywood construct that I never encountered in my 30-year career …

A great way to start off the week.

“As for me, I am jumping ship. This is my last weekly column on these pages.” – Niall Ferguson in the Los Angeles Times.

His last column epitomizes why this eminently unserious git deserves no media megaphone.

It’s Islamofascism Awareness Week!

Be aware.

Thinktank reading of the day

Iraqi insurgent media campaign targets American audiences - Jamestown Foundation. Primarily useful for alerting us to the Islamic Army in Iraq’s English language website.

Coalition warfare in Afghanistan – Burden-sharing or Disunity? – Chatham House. NATO is failing in Afghanistan due to the lack of any shared sense of commitment or unity of effort. The partners cannot agree on a genuine unified strategy for Afghanistan and several refuse to expose their soldiers to possible danger. A lack of resources, emblematic of the lack of commitment, compounds the problem.

Muslim Integration: Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Europe and the United States - CSIS. A lot of good background data, especially on the UK, France, and Germany. Eurabia is a myth, but this outlines a lot of the problems of Europe’s growing Muslim population without alarmism or Islamophobia.

Matthew Yglesias is making sense.

Yglesias says everything there is to say about Superfriends or Leagues of Democracy and other such “get rid of the U.N.” nonsense.

Oftentimes, I see people look at China’s poor human rights record and its even worse record of diplomatic support for regimes with appalling human rights records. Then they look at China’s veto on the UN Security Council. And then they conclude that it’s an imperative — in humanitarian terms — not to bind ourselves to follow the UN.

One thing missing from this is how it’s going to look from the perspective of Beijing if the US decides that it has the right to invade any country, anywhere, at any time because we’ve decided we don’t approve of its government’s internal policies. The answer is: not good. Expanding the ambit of decision-makers to something like a “Global NATO” or a “League of Democracies” — groups that would exclude China — doesn’t change the basic dynamic. What you’d have is a situation where the United States was proposing a set of rules to govern the international road that the primary rising power couldn’t possibly agree to. In short: Sino-American conflict and tensions. Even if that didn’t erupt into something disastrous like an actual Sino-American war, it very well could mean a return to Cold War-style proxy wars and constant paralysis of global institutions and people need to understand that that would be an utter humanitarian catastrophe.

As horrible as Rwanda or Bosnia were or Darfur may be, one ought to recognize that on the whole the post-Cold War world has been much more peaceful than were comparable-duration periods of the Cold War (see the Human Security Report for a bunch of data on this) thanks to the existence of fewer proxy conflicts and the tendency for conflicts to be conducted with less money and weapons. Basically, one of the very most important things we can do in humanitarian terms in try to preserve a generally peaceful big-picture international environment, even though this may, indeed, mean exercising restraint vis-à-vis some specific humanitarian emergencies.