Monday, July 25, 2005

Mark Steyn: "The more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room."

From The Australian:

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"

Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could." Read more.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Chinese General Threatens U.S. with Nuclear Weapons over Taiwan

Chinese Major General (a two-star general to the amateurs) Zhu Chenghu warned the U.S. today that if it intervenes in China's pending military invasion and overthrow of sovereign neighbor Taiwan, China will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against the United States.

The U.S. State Department has already dismissed the comments as "highly irresponsible" and doesn't consider them to be the policy of the Chinese government.

Ironically, this weekend China is joining in discussions with five other nations about disarming North Korea of its nuclear weapons cache. Even though China has been running the puppet government of North Korea, led by our favorite maniacal dictator Kim Jung Il, for some time now, could North Korea be next on China's "Hostile Takeover Short List"? How better to clear the way to invade a nuclear nation than to use the international community to disarm them first?

Just a little information to put China's world domination ambitions into perspective...according to GlobalSecurity.org, China has less than 400 nuclear warheads that could hit U.S. territory soil, versus the United States' 6400 that could hit Chinese mainland. Even if you believe a supposedly secret document smuggled out of the Chinese government, China boasts over 2300 warheads, but they still only have a few dozen ICBM's and submarines with the range to deliver them to U.S. soil.

If China hit the U.S. with nuclear weapons, WW3 would be over in less than a week. Several million Americans would be dead and parts of the West Coast, Hawaii, and a few islands would be uninhabitable for a long time, but China and her 1.35 billion peasants would be annihilated.

Is the takeover of Taiwan and another notch on your communism headboard really worth it, China?

VIDEO: 1999 ABC News Report on Iraq-Terrorism Link

I'm getting even more annoyed than usual at the liberal talking points lately. They keep repeating this line that "Saddam had no ties to terrorism" as part of their standard We-Hate-Bush-And-Blame-America-For-Everything rhetoric. Alan Colmes repeats this garbage fairly regularly and this is exactly what Ron Reagan was trying to put out before Christopher Hitchens put him in his place rather severely the other night.

Saddam had a long history of supporting terrorism and harboring international terrorists, including Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas. But in their effort to discredit Bush and the war effort, liberals have suddenly developed post-9/11 amnesia about Iraq's historical ties to terrorism.

View the Video

The video report details some of Saddam's known ties to terrorism at the time, including Osama bin Laden's attempt to seek assylum in Iraq following the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as tracing bin Laden's effort to locate weapons-grade uranium.

Audio: The War Room radio show out of Pittsburgh also has a spliced audio version of the report.

VIDEO: American Soldier Survives Sniper

PFC Stephen TschidererArmy Medic PFC Stephen Tschiderer of the 101st “Saber” Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was shot by an insurgent sniper from 75 meters on June 2, 2005 and lived to tell about it. Tschiderer was knocked to the ground and immediately got back up, took cover, and located the sniper's position. After calling in support, the area was cordoned off and the two combatants were captured. Tschiderer even treated the wounds of the sniper who had just tried to take his life.

Soldiers at the scene recovered the video below that the insurgents took of their act. Listen closely and you will hear the common "Allah Akbar" chant.



Links:
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-976420.php
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,161507,00.html

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Christopher Hitchens Scores a 1st Round TKO Against Ron Reagan

On Thursday (7/7/05) night on MSNBC's Connected: Coast to Coast, host Ron Reagan got his rhetorical derriere handed to him by Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens about the reason we went to war in Iraq in the first place. Like all good liberals, Ron Reagan can't think for himself so he simply repeats DNC talking points about the Iraq War daily.


The entire transcript below was taken from Radio Blogger.


Ron Reagan: Christopher, I'm not sure that I buy the idea that these attacks are a sign that we're actually winning the war on terror. I mean, how many more victories like this do we really want to endure?

Christopher Hitchens: Well, it depends on how you think it started, sir. I mean, these movements had taken over Afghanistan, had very nearly taken over Algeria, in a extremely bloody war which actually was eventually won by Algerian society. They had sent death squads to try and kill my friend Salman Rushdie, for the offense of writing a novel in England. They had sent death squads to Austria and Germany, the Iranians had, for example, to try and kill Kurdish Muslim leaders there. If you make the mistake that I thought I heard you making just before we came on the air, of attributing rationality or a motive to this, and to say that it's about anything but itself, you make a great mistake, and you end up where you ended up, saying that the cause of terrorism is fighting against it, the root cause, I mean. Now, you even said, extraordinarily to me, that there was no terrorist problem in Iraq before 2003. Do you know nothing about the subject at all? Do you wonder how Mr. Zarqawi got there under the rule of Saddam Hussein? Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal?

Ron Reagan: Well, I'm following the lead of the 9/11 Commission, which...

Christopher Hitchens: Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal, the most wanted man in the world, who was sheltered in Baghdad? The man who pushed Leon Klinghoffer off the boat, was sheltered by Saddam Hussein. The man who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 was sheltered by Saddam Hussein, and you have the nerve to say that terrorism is caused by resisting it? And by deposing governments that endorse it?

Ron Reagan: No, actually, I didn't say that, Christopher.

Christopher Hitchens: At this stage, after what happened in London yesterday?

Ron Reagan: What I did say, though, was that Iraq was not a center of terrorism before we went in there, but it might be now.

Christopher Hitchens: How can you know so little about...

Ron Reagan: You can make the claim that you just made about any other country in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.

Christopher Hitchens: Absolutely nonsense.

Ron Reagan: So do you think we ought to invade Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers from 9/11 came from, following your logic, Christopher?

Christopher Hitchens: Uh, no. Excuse me. The hijackers may have been Saudi and Yemeni, but they were not envoys of the Saudi Arabian government, even when you said the worst...

Ron Reagan: Zarqawi is not an envoy of Saddam Hussein, either.

Christopher Hitchens: Excuse me. When I went to interview Abu Nidal, then the most wanted terrorist in the world, in Baghdad, he was operating out of an Iraqi government office. He was an arm of the Iraqi State, while being the most wanted man in the world. The same is true of the shelter and safe house offered by the Iraqi government, to the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer, and to Mr. Yassin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. How can you know so little about this, and be occupying a chair at the time that you do?

Ron Reagan: I guess because I listen to the 9/11 Commission, and read their report, and they said that Saddam Hussein was not exporting terror. I suppose that's how, Christopher.

Christopher Hitchens: Well, then they were wrong, weren't they?

Ron Reagan: No, maybe they just needed to listen to you, Christopher.

Christopher Hitchens: Well, I'm not sure that they actually did say that. What they did say was they didn't know of any actual operational connection...

Ron Reagan: That's right. No substantive operational connection.

Christopher Hitchens: ...which was the Iraqi Baath Party and...excuse me...and Al Qaeda. A direct operational connection. Now, that's because they don't know. They don't say there isn't one. They say they couldn't find one. But I just gave you the number, I would have thought, rather suggestive examples.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

The Misguided Live8 Crowd

What rocks is capitalism... yeah, yeah, yeah
By Mark Steyn
Telegraph Newspaper Online Opinion

'To sneer at such events," cautioned The Sunday Telegraph apropos Live8, "demeans the generosity which they embody".

Oh, dear. If you can't sneer at rock stars in the Telegraph, where can you? None the less, if not exactly a full-blown sneer, I did feel a faint early Sir Cliff-like curl of the lip coming on during the opening moments of Saturday's festivities, when Sir Paul McCartney stepped onstage. Read more.