Body Parts

So-Called Palestinians Flunk 'Statehood for Dummies', Contemplate New Intifada

Outraged that Netanyahu requires the so-called Palestinians accept the legitimate existence of Israel as the Jewish national state as a precondition for a limited-autonomy state, some leaders of the so-called Palestinians are calling for a new intifada against Israel. From DEBKAfile:

Senior Palestinian officials in Ramallah, enraged by the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's conditional offer of a Palestinian state Sunday, June 14 - and even more by what they see as US president Barack Obama's perfidious welcome - are weighing extreme options for reprisal, DEBKAfile's military sources report.

Some advise reverting to Yasser Arafat's two-stage tactics of synchronized terror and diplomacy and resuscitating the Fatah's al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Tanzim terrorist organizations.

 

What Would A Demilitarized So-Called 'Palestinian' State Really Be Like?

Even with Netanyahu's acceptance of the concept of a demilitarized so-called Palestinian state, I'm pessimistic about what such a state would in reality be.

Would the so-called Palestinians revoke all anti-Jewish state and anti-semitic doctrines in their charters and official documents? I don't believe it for a minute.

How could we doubt that a demilitarized so-called Palestinian state would still:

• Surreptitiously train its police and domestic security forces as para-military forces for attack on Israel

• Smuggle in heavy arms and rockets for attacks on Israel

• Refuse to stop cross-border terror attacks

• Incite anti-semitism in its educational system

• Remain an undemocratic kleptocracy

• Remain a undeveloped ward of Western welfare

• Receive US and Western support while the US and the West wink-wink ignore its failure to live up to the obligations it claimed it would accept.

Finally, wouldn't a Palestinian state simply encourage the desire of Muslims to unify control of southern Lebanon and Jordan as part of a greater so-called Palestinian state? And wouldn't efforts to establish such a greater state simply provoke another regional war?

Netanyahu Speaks Patient Realism To Obama's Desperate Foolishness

Israel must be recognized as the Jewish national state. Jerusalem will remain unified and within Israel's sovereignty. So-called Palestinian refugees cannot be resettled inside Israel. Any so-called Palestinian state must be demilitarized, otherwise the so-called Palestianian state would end up like Gaza's terror state, Hamastan; Israel could not permit that. In other words, Obama and the anti-semitic world have no right to demand that Israel commit suicide in order that a so-called Palestinian state exist. The Jerusalem Post's summary of the speech here. Text of the speech here .

Osama's Jealous of Obama's Bid For Leadership of the Muslim World

UBL and his associates have been sending out world wide messages. Osama's latest literary effort says that Obama has planted the seeds of Muslim hatred toward the US. Goodness! Is UBL having a fit of jealousy? UBL has been working the trenches for nearly twenty years to become leader of the reform of the Muslim world--of course, reform toward its radicalization. Now comes along Obama! An upstart! Obama seizing the reins of the Muslim chariot to try to steer it toward moderation. Osama upstaged as a leader. This will be an interesting popularity contest. Our "lived in a Muslim country" guy versus their "lives in a Muslim country" guy.

Bombing on Upper East Side New York City

Just two blocks from my daughter's apartment building. Outside a Starbucks. 3:30 am. No one hurt or killed. The word "evil" spraypainted on a wall. Police say the bombing is similar to other early morning bombings around New York City in the past year and a half. This is a campaign of terrorism in an American city. Appalling. Scary. Spooky--my daughter and son were at the World Trade Center on 9/11. I think I'd prefer that she live somewhere else. (He's already living in Seattle.)

(H/T Atlas Shrugged.)

Obama, The Presidential Liar

John Hinderaker of Powerline dissects Obama's speech on national security to demonstrate it is a sheet of lies. As he professionally states, being a practicing lawyer, Obama is dishonest. Dishonest about the Bush administration, dishonest about the war on terror, dishonest about the treatment of detainees. Read it all:

Parts I, II, III, IV

He concludes:

"For Barack Obama to repeat the canard that the Bush administration shredded the Constitution, operated outside the law, etc., is false and dishonorable. It is also damaging to our country. Barack Obama is slandering his own government--his own nation, really--for political advantage. This is one more in a growing list of contemptible actions by our new President."

Obama's Grip on the National Security Debate Weakens

President Obama has been forced to play defense in the national security debate, especially on the issue of closing Gitmo (which he ordered shortly after taking the oath of office). Over the past several months, former Vice President Cheney has relentlessly defended the Bush admnistration's war on terror and its national security measures. The vote in the Senate not to authorize funds to close Gitmo was a slap in Obama's face. It changed the position of the players. Cheney has effectively shifted from defense to offense. Cheney's position is now the anti-Obama position; this is a significant shift that weakens Obama politically. Obama owns the security issue and Obama's opponents are no longer Bush defenders, they are emancipated advocates of a realistic, tough national security policy, which has historic roots in the 1940s. This is a huge opening for the GOP and a gaping weakness in the Democrats. AP is even running Obama and Cheney in the same headline. Obama is no longer "The One". He's just a politician, doing the shuffle and jive.

Gingrich Blasting Pelosi on Torture Debate

Indignation ferociously, appropriately, rightfully expressed. Refreshing. Listen to it all.

(H/T HotAir.com)

Obama To Release Gitmo's Uighur Terrorists Into US

Obama has reportedly over-ruled objections from the FBI and DHS about the domestic release of these Gitmo Muslim prisoners, who were captured in a al-Qaeda training camp. China claimsthe Uighurs are terrorists, whose movement has attacked government insta lations and is involved with a separatist movement in China's Xinjiang region. The FBI and DHS assert that the Uighurs are too dangerous to release into the United States civilian population. China doesn't want them. I'm not sure I want to find out how dangerous these guys are by releasing them; their presence at an AQ training camp taints their benevolence (presumably they weren't there as tourists). But if they are to be released, I presume Obama has some sort of work-study or make-work program for them; or shall they immediately go on welfare? Maybe he could put pressure on Fiat and Chrysler to teach them how to repair Fiat autos, which are notorious for breaking down? At least until the Fiat-Chrysler combo goes bankrupt, they'd have jobs. Is working as a mechanic for Fiat-Chrysler something that American's won't do?

lslamic Religion Radicalizes Home-Grown Terrorists

An empirical research study of home-grown Muslim terrorists in the UK and the US finds that the Islamic religion radicalizes individuals, who then become terrorists. By one of the authors of Counter-Terrorism Blog.

Obama Will Okay Torture In Emergency

My bold prediction. If the US receives another 9/11 scale terrorist attack, during Obama's presidency, I predict that Obama will approve torture--ooops, "harsh interrogation methods"--as needed to coax information about follow-up attacks out of captured terrorists. He will approve waterboarding if needed and perhaps some new and inventive method. He will sing and dive and do the shuffle and jive, rhetorically soaring with code words and new terminology; but he will authorize the methods. He won't risk a second strike.  He doesn't want to go down in history as the first black president to be compelled to resign the office, along with the vice-president and the speaker of the house, for failure to execute responsibility to protect the nation. Just thought you'd like to know. I'm feeling optimistic today.

Gaza Was Not Destroyed In Israel's Recent Attack Against Hamas Terrorists and Hamas Infrastructure

An English Jewish journalist visited Gaza with a (so-called) Palestinian guide and reported his findings in The Jerusalem Post. Hamas police and paramilitary structures were destroyed, but otherwise Gaza was not a heap of smoking rubble. There were no hordes of wounded walking around. The people sitting on top of smoking rubble are posed there for Western cameras and have intact homes elsewhere in the strip where they live. The UNWRA school was not bombarded. The Shifa hospital had empty beds; wards were not filled with wounded civilians. Streets were filled with shoppers and markets were filled with fresh foods. Meanwhile, the Hamas-Fatah deception propaganda machine cranks up the lies about damage to the strip and the US and other nation's pony up a billion dollars in extortion money to "rebuild" a society that wasn't destroyed. Making extortion successful only encourages, does not end, corruption, crime, and a criminal regime that exploits the Gazans.

Off To Afghanistan

A friend is about to be deployed to Afghanistan; literally, "about to". A matter of hours. He is the boy friend of a young woman close to our family. He's a Navy Seabee stationed at a Navy training base on the coast. At her request, he has stayed with us when he comes inland to visit his girl friend.

He's twenty years old. He joined the Seabees to learn a construction trade. He has. He will use it. He's being sent to a forward area in Afghanistan where Marines are shortly to be sent. He and his platoon will build barracks, mess hall, administration, and other base buildings. We had planned to have a farewell dinner--it's certainly is not good-bye; but the military, as it is, kept changing his deployment date. Suddenly, it's departure time before we could have the dinner party. Good luck to him and his comrades. He'll get  his favorite meat loaf when he returns. We're grateful.

Nazi Goons Rough Up Hitchens--Coming To A Neighborhood Near You

Hitchens was roughed up by Nazi goons in Beruit when he wrote, fuck you, on a Syrian Nazi poster on an abandoned bagel shop (abandoned after Hezbollah trashed it last year, because bagels have Jewish connotations to them). Ace has the story, which he obtained from Hitchens shortly after the event. The attack is a symptom of the collapse of democracy and political freedom in that Middle Eastern state. The story has been widely reported, but I want to point to a lesson it raises for us. As states degrade into fascism, political thuggery becomes widely practiced. One sees political thuggery now in France in the suburbs outside Paris, and in Germany and Britain, practiced by Muslims against Christians, Jews, apostate Muslims, Muslim women, and anyone who expresses opposition to Islamism, and also against the state when it does not appear sufficiently deferential to the sensitivities of Islam. We are beginning to see such thuggery in the US in large Muslim neighborhoods, such as that outside Detroit. Political thuggery is spawned by political cowardice by the state and ideological amoralism of the political elite--political correctness and multiculturalism--which excuses, and therefore encourages, political intimidation. It's going to get worse, because the Obama administration is setting a tone of tolerance for "violence as the cry of the oppressed".

Update. February 26, 20099. Here is an eye witness account from Michael Totten, one of the Hitchens' party. He wasn't just "roughed up", he was severely beaten. (Hat tip, Little Green Footballs.)

That al-Qaeda Nuke

The double-faced coin of hysteria--fear on our side, rumor on their side to feed our fear--circulates like a gray market currency. AQ really wants a nuke. It wants one so badly that UBL went to the trouble of getting a fatwa saying that he had religious justification for using a WMD against the US. But having a nuclear weapon is a difficult task. The nuke requires maintenance, because key components degrade. It requires shielded hiding, because radioactivity gives it away. And then you have to deliver it to your target, not an easy task when we are watching. Nonetheless, all that said, it is not impossible for AQ to have a nuke. And the not-impossible rises to highly-probable once Iran has nukes and if Pakistan would fall to the Islamists. So it is worth listening to the hyperbolic claims of an AQ chief when he claims that his organization already has a nuke. Using a nuke or some other WMD against an American city is the name of the game. Regardless of President Obama's appeasing notions, it's the game we are in and have no choice but to play.

(Hat tip to Atlas Shrugs.)

Pakistan's Agreement To Permit Sharia Law in Several Provinces Essentially Hands The Provinces Over To The Taliban

President Obama's decision to send additional brigades to Afghanistan while neighboring Pakistan disintegrates prompts the following morose thoughts.

Pakistan is the "sick man" of Asia. As with the Turkey before World War I, the "sick man" of its era, whose weakness was a precipitating factor in the War,the slow collapse of Pakistan would probably precipitate a general war in Asia.

The current civilian government of Pakistan is unable to control some of its own services (such as the intelligence service) and unable to govern many areas.  If the secular government falls, Pakistan would undoubtedly be ruled by fundamentalist Islamists. The Pakistani military is already heavily infiltrated by Islamists. Upon obtaining control of the state, the Islamists have several immediate objectives--assisting the Taliban's reconquest of Afghanistan (Pakistan under the Bhutto government in the 1990s had assisted the Taliban in that decade), taking control of the disputed lands between Pakistan and India and the Muslim-dominated regions of India, and assisting Jihadists in their war against us, the United States. A Taliban controlled Afghanistan would again provide a safe-haven for al-Qaeda and other Jihadist terrorist militias. Islamist rulers of Pakistan would have control of Pakistan's nuclear bombs; this control would immediately imperil the US and could not be permitted. It would require immediate US military intervention. Pakistan would foment unrest among India's Muslims (the Mumbai massacres were a small preview of what could come). India would be compelled to use force to quell the unrest in its large Muslim minority, which would precipitate civil war, or something approaching civil war. Civil war in India would offer a justification for overt Islamist-state Pakistan intervention.

A general war in Central Asia would almost certainly involve Iran. We must envision ourselves and India fighting against a linked Islamist axis running from East to West, consisting of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. For the US, this is terrible geography in which to fight a war. It is possible that such a war would agitate the Muslim population of Western China, leading China into military action in its Western regions. Such a war would also agitate the Muslim populations of Central Asia on Russia's border. Russia could become defensively involved. Iraq would be caught on the margins of this conflict (between Iran and Syria) and our democratic experiment on the Tigris-Euphrates would be imperiled.

The possibility of a general conflagration in Central Asia is the future ground of President Obama's decision to augment US military forces in Afghanistan. But adding a few brigades will not do the job. He and his advisors need a much bigger vision of the region, of our stake in its stability and keeping it out of Islamist control, and of the horrendous difficulty of a larger war--a war we could not choose not to fight.

Obama needs to begin to rebuild, expand, and upgrade up the US military for a generation of asymmetrical conflict that is always on the edge of bursting into a general conflict. Clearly, doubling the number of combat forces is required, along with enlarging our air and naval forces. A couple of brigades, accompanied by big rhetoric, is inadequate. He needs to establish a series of secure, long-term, military bases in the region to support a much larger conflict than the one we now face in Afghanistan. He needs to establish general policy understanding with India, China, and Russia regarding the conduct of a war against an Islamist axis.

All these premonitions seem alarmist; but the prognosis for Pakistan is not good. The more the US does now to prepare for and to be prepared to wage and win a large war in Central Asia, the greater the likelihood that such a war will not occur.

Revised. February 19, 2009.

Was The September 11th Electronic Run On The US Banks A Terrorist Attack On America?

Diana West's column has a more complete rendition of the facts we know so far and puts more pieces of the puzzle together. It is clear that the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, President Bush then, President Obama now, and select Congressmen/women know much more than they have released to the public. It is understandable that in September these officials were silent about when went on, for fear, if indeed the electronic run was a terror event, that the public would, upon the news, immediately withdraw their funds from the banks and the stock market in a real run on the financial system. But the event was long enough ago for that danger to have passed and for us now to begin to get some truth about the event. In this regard, it is worrisome that President Obama seems oblivious to the issues raised by the event. It is worth reminding ourselves, as we think about questions related to this event that pertain to national security, that for a number of years the intelligence community and other financial observers have warned of vulnerability of the US banking and financial system to terror hacking and manipulation. The concern was that shutting down the Internet would shut down the financial system; but there are, as the September 11 electronic run of the banks proved, more than one way to shut down the system. The notion that the electronic run on the bank was a terrorist attack on the country is not unprecedented, but was anticipated, at least hypothetically. Every observer says we need to know much, much more about this event, and I say so, too. We have no reason to believe that the US has put into place adequate security measures to protect our nation against a repeat of the attack or some kind of new attack.

Losing Afghanistan Is Not An Option; Neither Is Losing Pakistan

Obama is under pressure from the Left in his party to get out of Afghanistan, which the Left sees as "Vietnam with snow". He is thinking about the DoD's request for more troops. What is there to think about? Surely getting out or losing  Afghanistan to the Taliban and its ally, al-Qaeda, is not an option. Not only would a Taliban victory provide A-Q with a secure territorial base to plan and train for attacks on the US, it would imperil Pakistan. The Islamists have been working hard since the 1990s to take over Pakistan. Pakistan contains a strong, growing radical Islamist element which would welcome their victory. They are now closer to their goal than ever, with major swarths of Pakistan's border regions already under their control. Why be concerned about Pakistan falling to a radical Islamist government? A radical Islamist victory in Pakistan would give A-Q and the Jihad a nuclear arsenal. They would love to use that arsenal against Hindu India, in concert with Iran against Israel, and against the US and the West.

35 Jihadist Training Camps in the US?

Robert Spencer reports on research by the Christian Action Network. A 2006 Justice Department memo, disseminated only to law enforcement and not reported in the media, identifies the 35 camps, some located in cities. The memo reports an estimate of 3,000 members. The Christian Action Network has done several years of research on the camps, with spies taking videos inside some of them. Some sources contend the compounds are not terrorist and are not engaged in training Muslim militias, presumably for action in the US. The evidence is that some are. Christian Action Network reports their research on February 11 in Washington.

Laying the Grounds of Obama's Impeachment: Panetta--No Enhanced Interrogation of bin Laden

At his confirmation hearing, Panetta was asked how the US would deal with bin Laden if the  CIA captured the AQ chief. Panetta responded that the CIA could temporarily hold OBL, in a secret site, to "debrief" him. Then: OBL would have access to the Red Cross and the Army Field Manual would guide interrogation. Enhanced interrogation, torture, and water-boarding would be prohibited.

This is an interesting, if appalling, answer. Bin Laden undoubtedly knows about numerous plots to strike America and American interests abroad (embassies, military bases, etc.). If any human being could be a ticking time bomb, OBL is it. Finding out the nature and timing of these plots would undoubtedly save American lives. Given the possibility that the AQ camp in Algeria, in which over 40 AQ trainees were reputedly killed by the bubonic plague (Algeria's and UN's expected denial here), was preparing an attack on the US using the plague as a biological WMD, many thousands of American lives might be saved if the CIA could obtain from OBL information about the plots. 

Suppose OBL refuses to answer, beyond name, rank, and a prayer to his Islamic God of Terror. What then? Do the President and Panetta mean, they would refuse to allow enhanced interrogation or water-boarding of OBL?

If they would refuse stronger procedures to get OBL to talk, and an AQ attack on the US follows, President Obama would have to be removed by impeachment, the entire line of presidential succession also removed by impeachment, and a new national executive chosen by an emergency national election.

Corrected.