Ten questions for the media pundits

Posted on 09/14/2008 by Meryl Yourish

They’ve asked the candidates the questions, and written many sneering op-eds on that yokel Sarah Palin, so I have a few questions for the media. Just to test their general knowledge of things I’ve been reading about lately.

  1. How do you field dress a moose? Please be specific and tell me what kind of equipment is generally used, and why you would do so in the first place.
  2. What is the Bush doctrine? Name the dates and times it was enunciated, and who was the first to describe it as such.
  3. How old were you when you got your first passport? If you weren’t a reporter, do you think you would have gotten one? Be honest.
  4. Do you go to church, synagogue, or any other house of religion on a regular basis?
  5. If your teenaged daughter got pregnant, would you mind if your colleagues in the media investigated the story and threatened to leak it to the public? (This is mostly for nationally-known reporters; reporters from small towns can skip this question and move onto the next.)
  6. Do you think all feminists must be pro-choice or they are not “really” feminists?
  7. Are you a registered member of either party? If yes, which one?
  8. Whom did you vote for in the past four (if applicable) presidential elections?
  9. Did you contribute any money to a presidential campaign? If so, which one?
  10. True or false: If you’re not voting for Obama in November, you’re a racist.
  11. True or false: If you don’t think Sarah Palin is a good vice-presidential candidate, you’re a sexist.

Whoops. Looks like that’s eleven questions. But that’s okay. The media won’t be putting forth any such suggestion as the eleventh question. Because it’s not the narrative.

Click on the links to see how many reporters vote Democrat in November. (Or to learn how to field dress a moose. Being a city girl, I’ll just pass on that.)

Please hand in your responses to be graded. We will not be using a curve.

Update: Welcome, Instapundit readers. If you like this post, you’ll like the all-Sarah-Palin, all-the-time Shire Network News podcast, where my contribution is why a former Clinton/Gore/lifelong Democrat voter is going to vote for McCain-Palin.

Posted in Juvenile Scorn, Media Bias | Tagged , | 33 Comments

Still not barking

Posted on 09/14/2008 by Soccerdad

If we go back four years and two months we learn:

Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday.

”What we know about this most recent information is that it is being directed from the senior most levels of the Al Qaeda organization,” said a senior official at a briefing for reporters. He added, ”We know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern.

Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports — apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence — referred to efforts ”to inflict catastrophic effects” before the election.

The article reports that the nature of the threat was “unspecific” leading me to believe that it never got much past the wishing stage. For some reason or another. Still, it’s incredible that there was no such chatter this year. Was there?

And we if we go back to right before the election we recall that Osama bin Laden made a rather specific threat.

The Islamist website Al-Qal’a explained what this sentence meant: “This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, ‘Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,’ it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn’t treat all American people as if they’re the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.” [3]

Apparently, unable to strike before the elections, Bin Laden attempted to bully the American electorate into voting for John Kerry. It likely didn’t have any effect. But still remember he made a threat and never carried it out.

Jonathan Spyer has more as to what has happened to Al Qaeda since 9/11.

Al-Qaida has combined sometimes nightmarishly effective tactical ability with a somewhat other-worldly, incoherent political and strategic program. Political Islam is transforming the politics of the Middle East, and represents a key strategic challenge to the west. But the particular version of it represented by the perpetrators of 9/11 is today more of a murderous side-show than the nerve center of the future Caliphate which it likes to imagine itself.

Al Qaeda, Spyer reports, has been effective in getting its message out to like minded organizations, but operationally it has suffered numerous setback over the past seven years.

Abe Greenwald summarizes some of these losses:

Every criticism of President Bush’s national security record begins rightly with the charge that Osama bin Laden has not been captured or confirmed dead. Any honest defense of Bush must reckon with this fact. The story goes that in 2003 U.S. forces abandoned the hunt for bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan and shifted their focus onto Iraq, giving the al Qaeda leader a free pass so that we could take up arms against a regime unconnected to the attacks of September 11. Let’s put aside the fact that this is a false choice. And let’s put aside questions about the claim’s legitimacy regarding timelines, intelligence agencies, roaming fighters, Iraq’s terrorist ties, and the dynamics of force deployment, and simply accept the accusation at its most damning. To wit: Bush lost bin Laden by going into Iraq. Okay: If I were offered the choice of taking out one al Qaeda mastermind who had recently been reduced to the status of cave-dwelling spoken-word artist or more than a thousand senior al Qaeda operatives and tens of thousands of armed Islamist soldiers, I would choose the latter a thousand out of a thousand times.

And the proof is in the pudding. Consider the decimated state of al Qaeda and related organizations since they’ve come up against overwhelming American force in Iraq. As CIA director Michael Hayden recently put it, we’ve seen “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally.” Would the hunt for one man in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan have yielded better results?

While Al Qaeda remains a force to be reckoned with, it cannot act as it did seven years ago. This means that whatever mistakes President Bush has made along the way, he has succeeded in the big picture. Will whoever succeeds him take the calm we have experienced over the past seven years for granted and relax his vigilance or will he remain committed to keeping the forces of the Islamists on the defensive. Osama hasn’t barked in seven years on American soil. What will it take to extend that record?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Politics, Terrorism | Tagged | Comments Off on Still not barking

Caturday night is all right

Posted on 09/13/2008 by Meryl Yourish

It’s been busy, but I do have some cat pictures taken here in Beit Yourish.

First, a study in Tig, taken this afternoon:

Thoughtful Tig

Then we have Gracie, looking like a Kliban cat with slightly glowing eyes.

Chubby rolly Gracie

Gracie is finally starting to feel more comfortable here and is spending more time downstairs. She was sitting nearby, grooming herself, earlier tonight.

Grooming Gracie

And finally, a scene that promises to become a regular part of my day: Tig sprawling along the marble in front of the fireplace. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter—this is probably going to be his favorite spot. And he looks absolutely gorgeous on the black marble. I really love this place.

Tig in front of the fireplace

We are all very happy in our new home. Tig has developed a new, revolting habit. He’s trying to eat all the dead bugs he can find. Gracie, thankfully, hasn’t developed any new habits, except she continues to sleep under the bureau, and Tig is nearly too big to fit underneath. But she’s talking to me again. She’s been very quiet until today. It’s good to hear her mew, and better to see her down here with Tig and me.

They’re still playing Kitty Tag, and it’s still starting at the ungodly hour of six a.m. Two days ago, I woke up to hear Tig mewing at the foot of my bed, where he was lying with his head over the edge, discussing whether he was coming down or Gracie was coming up. I won the argument and threw them both out.

I have the two of them with me now. Gracie’s on the carpet in front of the ottoman, waiting for me to come to her. Tig is asleep on the back of the sofa. All’s right with their world.

Posted in Cats | Tagged | 8 Comments

Antony Lerman and the Jewish question

Posted on 09/13/2008 by SnoopyTheGoon

A fairly standard battle cry on the Israeli roads is: “The person that gave you a driver license has to be killed!”. I don’t need to describe the situation relevant to this cry, do I?

The first thought I had reading the Haaretz article Jews attacking Jews by Antony Lerman wasn’t totally dissimilar to that battle cry: who the heck is the editor that published this one? He definitely needs some killing. On the other hand, it could have been a slow day in the office of Haaretz, and this thing just happened in the inbox – who knows, let’s be charitable.

One cannot, of course, keep a straight face and blame the author – he is too daft, it looks like, to be held responsible for the drivel he spouts. For example:

When Jew-hatred is identified, it’s mostly in the form of what many call the “new anti-Semitism” – essentially, anti-Zionism. Others (this writer included) fundamentally dispute that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are synonymous.

“Many” usually say that the new anti-Semitism is using anti-Zionism as a cover – not that all anti-Zionists are automatically anti-Semites. So “others” (Antony Lerman included) could go and screw themselves vigorously, instead of “fundamentally dispute” the false strawman these “others” created to publicly destroy to their own satisfaction.

Another good one:

Anything from strong criticism of Israel’s policies, through sympathetic critiques of Zionism, to advocacy of a one-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict, is defined as anti-Zionism, when none of these positions are prima facie anti-Zionist.

So the advocates of a one-state solution are not anti-Zionist? Yeah. But in this passage Antony Lerman makes his dimness outstandingly clear:

The new EU-approved definition fundamentally subverts the term because to warrant the charge of anti-Semitism, it is sufficient to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government, to denial of Israel’s right to exist – without having to subscribe to any of the elements that historians have traditionally regarded as constituting an anti-Semitic view. And it puts out of bounds the perfectly legitimate discussion of whether increased anti-Semitism is a result of Israel’s actions.

Notice the last sentence, which is a final giveaway: these pesky Israelis are making Lerman’s life hard by their ill-considered behavior. Repeating many an anti-Zionist (and many an anti-Semitic) “thinker”, starting with incomparable Seumas Milne who several years ago claimed that Jews in Europe would feel much better were Israel to behave…

More detailed debunking of this stupid article by Ben Cohen here.

Another definitive piece by David Hirsh on linking Israel’s behavior and the anti-Semitism here.

>Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Posted in Israel Derangement Syndrome | 1 Comment

Osama didn’t bark. Why not?

Posted on 09/12/2008 by Soccerdad

After the United States was struck by terror 9/11/01, Americans feared that it was just a first attack and that we’d see more in subsequent years. In 7 years, no other successful large scale terror attack has succeeded on American soil. Why not?

In a prescient article “Terrorism on Trial” about the trials which convicted some of the plotters of the terror attacks on American embassies in east Africa, published on May 30, 2001, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson wrote:

Perhaps the most disconcerting revelations from the trial concern Al-Qaeda’s entrenchment in the West. For example, its procurement network for such materiel as night vision goggles, construction equipment, cell phones, and satellite telephones was based mostly in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Bosnia and Croatia. The chemicals purchased for use in the manufacture of chemical weapons came from the Czech Republic.

In the often long waits between terrorist attacks, Al-Qaeda’s member organizations maintained operational readiness by acting under the cover of front-company businesses and nonprofit, tax-deductible religious charities. These nongovernmental groups, many of them still operating, are based mainly in the U.S. and Britain, as well as in the Middle East. The Qatar Charitable Society, for example, has served as one of bin Laden’s de facto banks for raising and transferring funds.

Osama bin Laden also set up a tightly organized system of cells in an array of American cities, including Brooklyn, N.Y.; Orlando, Fla.; Dallas; Santa Clara, Calif.; Columbia, Mo., and Herndon, Va.

I don’t now if any of the cells listed had a hand in providing logistical support for 9/11, but it’s certainly possible. So why hasn’t Al Qaeda – which is a loose network of terror groups – succeeded in attacking the American homeland in the past seven years?

An article yesterday in the LA Times observes:

Al Qaeda remains determined to strike on American soil, anti-terrorism officials say. But it has run up against aggressive surveillance, tough border security and a lack of extremist communities in which to operate. Instead, officials say, it appears to have focused on using Europe to hit targets such as the flights bound for the United States from Britain.

Or more generally:

The shift in the terrorist threat is largely attributable to U.S. and international efforts after 9/11 to crack down on al-Qaida. With tighter border security, document control and financial tracking, al-Qaida recognized that it would be more effective if it used local groups to conduct its attacks. While the al-Qaida core is somewhat resurgent, it is still a far more decentralized model than the al-Qaida of 9/11.

Quinn Hillyer fleshes out the details:

HE DID IT by fashioning, with the help of Colin Powell (before Powell went off the reservation), an incredibly impressive coalition that went into Afghanistan — even then, liberal pundits predicted, yes, a “quagmire” in Afghanistan, too — and in incredibly short order kicked out the rogue regime, killed numerous members of Al-Qaeda, and chased the remaining ones high into the hills where they presumably live in caves perfectly suited to their troglodyte mentality.

Bush did it by directing his government to use all the tools at its disposal to identify and freeze Al-Qaeda assets, improve intelligence-gathering (and intelligence-sharing, back and forth, with anti-terrorist nations), disrupt Al-Qaeda communications, and track down and kill Al-Qaeda leaders. He did it by getting tough on other terrorists, too, even ones not directly affiliated with Al-Qaeda. And he did it by encouraging democratic movements throughout the Middle East and central Asia, while providing material support where necessary.

And yes, Bush warded off terrorists by toppling Saddam Hussein’s dangerous outlaw regime in Iraq. It was a regime that had repeatedly shot at American aircraft. It was a regime that demonstrably owned weapons of mass murder and then refused to account for their removal or their destruction. It was a regime that had invaded its neighbors, and that had gassed and slaughtered its own people. And it was most certainly a regime that harbored terrorists, trained terrorists, and that maintained friendly communications and at least some operational ties with Al-Qaeda.

Or as Hillyer puts it simply:

This wasn’t a dog that didn’t bark merely because it felt like being mute; this was a dog that didn’t bark because it was forcefully muzzled. And Bush was the one who applied the muzzle.

Something’s managed to keep America safe despite the creation of the bureaucratic monstrosity known as DHS and despite adding another layer in intelligence bureaucracy. So maybe just maybe President Bush did other things correctly that made terrorism prevention successful.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Terrorism | Tagged , | 11 Comments

A piece of peace

Posted on 09/12/2008 by Soccerdad

One thing that reporters in the Middle East enjoy is irony. So that’s the angle Ethan Bronner takes about Jenin in A West Bank Ruin, Reborn as a Peace Beacon.

But a quiet revolution is stirring here in this city, once a byword for the extremes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2002, in response to a wave of suicide bombers from Jenin, Israeli tanks leveled entire neighborhoods.

From that rubble, now newly trained and equipped Palestinian security officials have restored order. Israeli soldiers have pulled back from bases and are in close touch with their Palestinian colleagues. Civilians are planning economic cooperation — an industrial zone to provide thousands of jobs, mostly to Palestinians, and another involving organic produce grown by Palestinians and marketed in Europe by Israelis. Ministers from both governments have been visiting regularly, often joined by top international officials. Israeli Arabs are playing a key role.

The aim is to stand conventional wisdom on its head. Instead of a shaky negotiated peace treaty imposing coexistence from the top down, a bottom-up set of relationships that lock the two societies together should, proponents argue, lead to a real two-state solution.

There are some positive aspects to this report and some negative ones. On the negative side, Bronner writes “Israeli tanks leveled entire neighborhoods.” Well did that really happen?

A JCPA issue brief gives the actual scope:

Still, the level of destruction was limited. Out of 1,896 buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, 130 buildings were destroyed — or less than 10 percent (Israel Defense Forces — Central Command). According to Fatah activist Mousa Kadoura, the area affected was the size of a large football field (Washington Times, May 1, 2002). Moreover, because of the large amounts of Palestinian explosives in the camp, it is difficult to discern what component of this destruction was caused by Israeli forces and what part was a result of Palestinian detonation.

But remember unlike Bronner’s language that suggests the destruction haphazard or disproportionate, Israel was fighting an armed enemy. Less than 10% shows restraint; “whole neighborhood” suggests a massive scale.

It’s good to know that there’s a place where there’s some level of cooperation going on and the Palestinians are taking control of their lives someplace. And Bronner hits on an important reason for that limited success may be due to the bottom approach being taken here. Unfortunately, the rest of his reporting shows that he doesn’t understand the reason why. When Bronner tries to explain why cooperation is occurring in the Jenin area, he gives these reasons:

Jenin, officials on all sides say, offers many advantages for a pilot project, an idea arrived at by American and European officials in February when they sought ways to build peace on the ground.

First, they said, Hamas, the main Palestinian militant opposition in the West Bank, is relatively weak in Jenin. Second, after the evacuation of four Israeli settlements in the region in 2005, the area is essentially free of settlers, a major source of friction elsewhere. Third, the barrier that Israel has been building causes little friction in this area because it is right on the boundary between Israel and the West Bank, not over it so there is little territorial dispute.

There is also a fourth reason. Gilboa, the Israeli region that abuts Jenin, is an unusual and unusually well-suited neighbor. Small and rural with 30,000 people, it is 40 percent Arab and 60 percent Jewish and the inhabitants have worked assiduously to create their own kind of model — of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel.

Do you notice what’s missing? Well how about Operation Defensive Shield that destroyed most of the terrorist infrastructure that existed in Jenin? Somehow acknowledging that killing terrorists helps bring peace seems to be beyond his understanding. But of course it’s important to mention that there are no more “settlers” there.

Then there’s this:

There are other concerns. The Palestinians have asked to base their newly trained battalion for Jenin in an abandoned Israeli settlement, a good spot in terms of location and infrastructure. But Israeli officials are worried about how it will play in Israel and have so far said no.

Israeli security officials say their Palestinian colleagues are good at law and order but not at stopping terrorist groups. They say that Islamic Jihad used to be strong here and is no longer because Israel spent years destroying its infrastructure and killing its militants, setting the stage for the Palestinian security takeover. But if they relax their vigilance, the Israelis say, the situation will deteriorate. Early on Wednesday morning, for example, Israeli soldiers and security men raided a home in Jenin and detonated a 30-pound pipe bomb.

The Palestinians complain that they are often urged to arrest someone just because he wears a beard. They add that as long as they are seen as puppets of the Israelis, the project is doomed. The key is for Palestinian security officials to be seen as agents of state building. Then the population will cooperate. This requires the kind of discretion that the Israeli Army has not been known for.

Notice how the Israeli claim that decimating Islamic Jihad played a role in the improvements is qualified by “they say.” The claims about settlers and the security fence are not qualified.

Also problematic is the idea that the Palestinians ought not to be seen as “puppets.” Well maybe that’s important in terms of their constituents, but if they don’t take responsibility to fight terror they’ll have no credibility among the Israelis. Why Israel’s concerns are given a short shrift here is a puzzle.

And the dig at the IDF is uncalled for. Again, if the IDF hadn’t unsubtly destroyed the terrorist infrastructure in Jenin, this experiment could not be taking place.

Finally we have Tony Blair:

“The intifada turned them into enemies in one day,” Mr. Blair said in an interview. “Now we are trying to recreate a sense of mutual confidence after seven years. It is a very slow process. But what is happening in Gilboa and Jenin is exactly the direction we would like to go.”

Blair here, presents the intifada as an independent force that just turned Jews and Arabs into enemies; the intifada, to Blair, just spontaneously generated causing destructive enmity between the two parties seeking peace.

Blair (and Bronner by quoting him uncritically) shows the same cluelessness that the late Scott Shuger described in a different context seven years ago at the start of the intifada:

The headline the Washington Post put over its lead Ramallah story was similarly misguided: “Grief, Anger Spurred Frenzied Crowd to Kill.” With its emphasis on external, even understandable, forces, this is classic responsibility-avoiding language. Note that there are no individuals in either the Times sentence or the Post headline. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence of personal culpability, all too often the papers still try to fuzz it over. Take that unbelievable picture of the guy with the bloody hands. The Los Angeles Times supplied a caption to the photo that managed not to refer to the blood at all. And in fact, neither the Los Angeles Times’ nor the New York Times’ lead story even mentioned the guy with the bloody hands.

The lynching of the soldiers didn’t just happen. It was the result of an orchestrated campaign of violence unleashed by Yasser Arafat a month earlier. The intifada didnt just happen, it was planned and executed by Yasser Arafat. The problem with the top down approach wasn’t in the details; it was in the fundamentally bad faith of the top of the Palestinians leadership. If the project in Jenin works, it will be because, at least in part it has circumvented the Palestinian leadership.

So while the idea of this little piece of peace working out is mildly encouraging, Bronner’s failures to acknowledge the success of the IDF and the perfidy of Arafat and the Palestinan leadership detract from the story.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel, Media Bias, palestinian politics | Tagged , | Comments Off on A piece of peace

Seven years ago, plus

Posted on 09/12/2008 by Soccerdad

Lower Manhattan

(Manhattan skyline Sept 11, 2008, photo courtesy of Elder of Ziyon. Click on picture to see full size. For contrast see the Elder’s Hole in the Sky.)

There were some excellent 9/11 roundups. For one thing the New York Times, for all my griping, sometimes still does serious journalism. It’s combined some fine reporting and analysis in its section on Sept 11, 2001. The section includes images of its front pages over the next 10 days as well as the reporting at that time. What was at once informative and tragic is its recreation of what happened to the people trapped in the upper sections of the towers. The information is put together from phone calls by the doomed people and the recreations are narrated by NY Times reporters. This is an incredibly powerful piece of work.

Both the Army and the DoD have 9/11 sites.

At the dedication of the Pentagon 9/11 memorial, Secretary of Defense Gates had some kind words for his predecessor.

Good morning, and thank you all for coming today. It is an honor to be part of this solemn occasion, and I would like to recognize Secretary Rumsfeld for the indispensable role he played in helping to bring the memorial project to fruition. Mr. Secretary, the valor you showed here, seven years ago, was an inspiration to all in the Pentagon and to all of America.

In all the Iraq vilifications, I think it’s been largely forgotten that on 9/11/01 Secretary Rumsfeld didn’t just sit around:

Mr. Rumsfeld was in his office on the third floor of the outer ring when he heard and felt the crash on the other side of the building. The 69-year-old former Navy pilot was jolted and rushed to the scene. ”He went outside the building and was helpful in getting several people that were injured onto stretchers,” said a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley. ”He was out there 15 minutes or so helping the injured.”

Yid with Lid dissects Keith Olbermann’s 9/11 rant, demonstrating why MSNBC was right to demote him.

Meryl reflects on her change in geography since 9/11 in 7 years later, 20 miles west.

Charles asks “Where were you on September 11?”

The answer I’d love to say is that it was beautiful day so I came home early from work to spend the day with my wife and one week old daughter. When I got home they were sitting out on the sunny lawn.

But however idyllic the scene was, the sunniness of the day did not dispel our worries. About an hour earlier I had gotten a call from my wife that the World Trade Center was on fire. I tried to find out what was going on, but most news sites wouldn’t load. The Windows on the World website, I think, was down. Since my wife hadn’t heard from her brother, she wanted me to come home.

My brother in law worked for Trade Web, which was located on 51st floor of the north tower. With phone circuits overloaded we remained uncertain about his whereabouts for a few hours, until he was on the ferry back to New Jersey. (He did contact my mother in law about 9:30 or shortly before the towers fell, and then we couldn’t get back in touch with him.)

Trade Web didn’t lose any employees. And it had an interesting story:

Similarly moving is the display on 9/11 that immediately greets visitors upon entry. Accompanying a promotional baseball found at Ground Zero by New York City firefighter Vin Mavaro is Mavaro’s letter to the CEO of Trade Web, the company that manufactured the baseball: “Being a baseball fan, coach and player, this item has become a symbol of hope for me.” For me, this pairing is even more poignant than Curt Schilling’s cap from the 2001 World Series, adorned with a New York Police Department shield. A lesser exhibit might have included only the professional baseball connection to 9/11 and missed how powerful the average person’s relationship to baseball can be.

And finally a Watcher’s Council rememberance.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Terrorism | Tagged | Comments Off on Seven years ago, plus

Wanted: Temporary husband or grown children

Posted on 09/11/2008 by Meryl Yourish

You know, if anyone out there wants to rent themselves out as a temporary husband or grown child, I sure could use some help unpacking and getting my new condo into shape.

I’m just sayin’.

Posted in Life | 2 Comments

Twelve miles west, seven years later

Posted on 09/11/2008 by Meryl Yourish

On September 11, 2001, I was twelve miles west of the Towers. I worked for Montclair State University, helping redesign the SVP’s website. When the first jet hit, I was walking down the campus to pick up a copy of Dreamweaver at the bookstore. When I got to the bookstore, the DJs on the radio were talking about the second plane hitting the second tower, and I thought, “This is the stupidest joke I ever heard in my life. It’s not funny.” I picked up my copy of Dreamweaver and stood in line to pay for it. “What’s with the stupid joke?” I asked the clerk. “It’s not a joke. Two planes hit the World Trade Towers.”

I hurried back to the office. The news was all over campus by then. I found myself crowding around the small TV in one of the administrators’ offices, watching one of the towers burn and wondering why the picture looked so strange, and then suddenly realizing that there was only one tower standing. And I remember scouring the web for alternative media, as the main news sites were overloaded with people all over the world trying to find out what was happening. . I didn’t find Instapundit that morning—I spent more time at Dave Winer’s site, gleaning information from there, and trying various non-local media sites with some success. By noon, I had had enough and although the VP told us we didn’t have to go home, I went home. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

For some reason, I was convinced that was the end of life as we knew it, and I went to the supermarket and picked up some food items. When I tried to get home, I couldn’t. The police had blocked off the route between my supermarket and my home, because Eagle Rock park lay in between, and some 20,000 people had gone there to watch the towers burn. Eagle Rock park has a phenomenal view of the Manhattan skyline, and has a great restaurant where you can eat good food and watch the lights of Manhattan. An impromptu shrine sprang up along the wall people stand by to look at The City. That’s what NJ natives tend to call New York. “I went to a party in The City last night.” “I’m going to The City to do some shopping.” “I’ve got tickets to a show, I’ll be in the City tomorrow.”

The City was burning.

I went home by roundabout streets and convinced the officer at the last one that I lived where I said I lived. When I got home, all of my neighbors were outside, sitting on the porches of our apartment complex. My upstairs neighbor was an IT tech who worked in the World Trade Center. He didn’t die, because he was always late. He never, ever got to work on time. So that morning, his lateness saved his life. I expect a lot of his coworkers didn’t make it. They were working on the 103rd floor, I believe.

We sat outside in stunned conversation for some time. I had the TV on from the moment I got home, and switched from station to station to station. NBC, ABC, CNN, CBS, anything and everything. I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to worry about a relative, although I found out later my cousin’s husband drove into Manhattan to work that day, saw the towers on fire, and turned around and drove back out. One of my sister-in-law’s cousins died in the tower. Even though there are 20 million people in the New York Metro area, everyone knew someone or knew someone that knew someone who was in the World Trade Center that day.

Our lives changed that day. Don’t believe anyone who says it’s time to get over it. It’s over. It’s in the past. 9/11 may be in the past, but the events of that day were the proverbial ripples in the pond that are still heading towards the shore today. 9/11 changed me from a lifelong Democratic voter to a woman who voted for W. four years ago and who will vote for McCain in November. 9/11 destroyed the American airline industry, or at least, it was the first of the one-two punch (the second being the price of fuel). But the price of fuel is up in part because of 9/11. We went into Iraq and Afghanistan because of 9/11. 9/11 terrorists attacked Spain and England and threaten Europe today. 9/11 was the attack that woke America up to the fact that we are at war with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. There are many who still don’t believe we are at war. They are mistaken. The terrorists have been very plain in both their intentions, and their thoughts. They tell us flat out that all we have to do to stop them is to convert to Islam, sacrifice Israel, give Spain back to the Muslims, and take a secondary role in the Islamic Caliphate.

Yeah, we have a three word answer for that: Not. Gonna. Happen.

It’s an overused expression: “The world changed.” But it’s a true one. Osama bin Laden’s mindless cruelty changed forever the way America and Europe moved forward into the twenty-first century. The fact that seven years later, there has not been another attack on American soil, is a sign that we’re winning the war. The fact that seven anniversaries have come and gone without an al Qaeda hit on us anywhere in the world on that date is a sign that we have weakened al Qaeda quite well. But they’re not gone yet. They are resurgent in Afghanistan. They still plot in Europe and South America. So we’re still in what some call The Long War, which will take quite some time before we can safely call it ended—but we’re winning.

Now I live 90 miles south of the Pentagon, but two days a week, when I work in my Job in NorVA, I’m ten miles north.

I never want to see the smoke rolling to the heavens again. I don’t think I’ll have to. But it is far from over.

Posted in Terrorism | Tagged | 4 Comments

Osama in a cave and on tape

Posted on 09/11/2008 by Soccerdad

A New York Times article reports on tapes of Osama bin Laden that are now being studied.

While Mr. bin Laden’s evolution from opposing Saudi Arabia’s ruling dynasty to running an international terrorist organization has been detailed before, said Flagg Miller, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who spent five years translating the tapes, the recordings provide a more spontaneous look at Al Qaeda than what is available through the carefully choreographed messages it releases.

“These are back-room conversations of Al Qaeda’s key operatives as well as fresh or potential recruits who are trying to figure out what the heck is going on and what their role in it is,” Mr. Miller said.

The article is underwhelming, except perhaps, where it discusses how boring the life of jihadists was. And that recalls an observation of Reuel Marc Gerecht as to why the United States had so little good intelligence on bin Laden.

A former senior Near East Division operative says, “The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with s***** food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ’s sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don’t do that kind of thing.” A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: “Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.”

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

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Ingrid Betancourt: Work for Shalit’s release

Posted on 09/10/2008 by Meryl Yourish

Ingrid Betancourt is on the right side of the Gilad Shalit issue.

“People all over the world should work for the release of Gilad Shalit. If we adopt globalization for financial goals, the struggle for the release of kidnapped people should also be global,” Betancourt told Yedioth Ahronoth on Tuesday.

“If people all over the world work for Gilad Shalit’s release, he will be freed,” she added.

Yeah, that concept has two immediate problems. One, the world will not work for the release of an Israeli prisoner, and two, especially not an Israeli soldier. They don’t look at it as an illegal kidnapping, even though it is. They look at it as just desserts for an “occupier” by “freedom fighters.”

But it’s good to hear someone else say that Hamas is made up of a bunch of thugs.

Betancourt made her statement during a UN-sponsored symposium on terror victims. And of course, the Arab world had to criticize the nerve of the UN calling a terrorist a terrorist, by trying to insert their Bizarro world view on things.

The symposium garnered criticism by several Arab representatives, who protested that the symposium was biased because it had not invited Palestinian victims of ‘Israeli terror’ to speak.

In late August, an Arab group led by Palestinian Ryadh Mansour met with Orr, reported the Kuwaiti News Agency (KUNA) to complain about the UN “lack of transparency” in organizing the event and demand that Palestinian victims be invited to attend.

“Our position is that if Israel is going to be invited to participate with victims, Palestine has to be invited with victims too because nobody suffered as much as the Palestinians from Israel’s state terrorism and from the Jewish settlers,” Mansour told KUNA.

Yeah. More Mad Hatter material from the world’s biggest victims. I’m actually amazed that the UN didn’t cave.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Ingrid Betancourt: Work for Shalit’s release

The return of the podcast

Posted on 09/09/2008 by Meryl Yourish

I have rejoined SNN and my first podcast back with them is about—Sarah Palin, of course. (That’s the general link. Here’s the individual one.)

If you listen very carefully, you will hear Tig on it.

He and Gracie decided that the best time to play kitty tag was while I was (sigh) recording the podcast.

Posted in Podcasts | 5 Comments

A new campaign poster

Posted on 09/09/2008 by Meryl Yourish

Click here.

Laugh.

Don’t be drinking or eating.

Jon, I want that on a t-shirt.

Posted in Feminism, Politics | Tagged | 2 Comments

Slackman flacks for troofers

Posted on 09/09/2008 by Soccerdad

In his Memo from Cairo today, the NYT’s Michael Slackman writes about Egyptian attitudes towards 9/11.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

The premise of the article is that the United States hasn’t done a sufficient job of making its case to the Muslim world. But that ignores that the United States isn’t alone in this battle for hearts and minds.

Slackman then lectures:

Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it then capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.

Slackman is doing the talking here. “Experts” provide him with suitable cover to claim that this isn’t his own opinion. But this is a common device in “journalism.” If you want to say something, there’s always an “expert” who’ll say the same thing and “confirm” that you’re correct.

Perhaps, though, there are other forces. From a State Department blog:

Conspiracy thinking has grown, especially since the September 11 attacks, says Mohamed Abdel Salam, Head of the Regional Security and Arms Control Program at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt. His article, “The Modes of Arab Conspiracy Theories,” says “markedly non-scientific modes of thought prevail throughout the Arab world,” one form being conspiracy theories.

My Right Word makes a similar observation (the one quoted above comes from an Arab source):

But that’s what I and many others have been sounding out for years (okay, in my case, decades). There is something called a mindset. There is nothing racist in this. It is a fact. And the MiddleEast/Arab mindset is such that logic and rationality play much less a role in political education and wisdom than in other regions.

he also refers to Bernard Lewis:

Well, I can’t subscribe to it since the terrorists themselves claim to be acting in the name of Islam. There was one Muslim leader who said, not long ago, that it is wrong to speak about Muslim terrorism, because if a man commits an act of terrorism, he’s not a Muslim. That’s very nice, but that could also be interpreted as meaning that if a Muslim commits it, it doesn’t count as terrorism.

When a large part of the Muslim world was under foreign rule, then you might say that terrorism was a result of imperialism, of imperial rule and occupation. But at the present time, almost the whole of the Muslim world has achieved its independence. They can no longer blame others for what goes wrong. They have to confront the realities of their own lives at home. A few places remain disputed, like Chechnya and Israel and some others, but these are relatively minor if you’re talking about the Islamic world as a whole.

Lewis also points out that the entrenched tyrants of the Muslim world have a reason to resent the invasion of Iraq: the current Iraqi government is an imperfectly functioning democracy. If the government in Iraq is successful, it will signal to the rest of the Arab/Muslim world that change is possible. Not that Lewis expects quick political change, but he believes it possible over the long term.

Slackman also doesn’t acknowledge the role the official (and unofficial) media in the Arab world plays in perpetuating these myths.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories that are so prevalent in the Arab world result not from a rational assessment of the situation. (Amazingly Slackman’s article never mentions that Egypt is the second largest recipient of American aid; that the United States and the West, continually provide the Palestinians with much more money than the Arab/Muslim world does.)

The Arab world thinks its grievances are real. But instead of shining a light on reality and asking why these grievances persist in resistance to fact and reason, Slackman lectures the West that we ought to understand and accommodate the mindset.

Opinion Dominion writes about the 9/11 “truthers”:

In short, they encourage conspiracy belief in the Middle East, and that cannot possibly help achieve peace there.

Unfortunately articles like Slackman’s effectively legitimize and entrench these beliefs, making them even harder to dispel. So that’s how the New York Times celebrates the 7th anniversary of 9/11, by making the ideology that led to the terror more sympathetic to its Western audience.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel Derangement Syndrome, Media Bias | Tagged | 4 Comments

Scientific progress goes Ghostbusters

Posted on 09/09/2008 by Soccerdad

You might remember, a few weeks ago there was news about the “Real Genius” weapon. Well now different scientific news recalls another movie.

CERN – the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire – the same organization where the World Wide Web was born, is about to start testing the Large Hadron Collider in an effort to recreate conditions after the Big Bang.

However there are those who fear that the experiment could destroy the world and have filed lawsuits to prevent the activation of the device.

The device is designed to replicate conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and its creators hope it will unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

However, opponents fear the machine, which will smash pieces of atoms together at high speed and generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade, may create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.

Does this remind anyone of this dialogue from Ghostbusters?

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

So if you’re reading this next week, the experiment has been so far successful. But if not, apparently the black holes were a bigger problem than the researchers anticipated, but at least we were first with the news.

h/t Secular Blasphemy, who lives in Norway, which is a lot closer to the collider, so if there are any problems maybe he could send out a warning e-mail.

UPDATE via Instapundit: An item about debunking the doomsday scenarios.

Several rounds of scientific studies, considering increasingly outlandish scenarios, have ruled out the black-hole threat. The evidence shows that the collider is absolutely safe, and poses no chance of cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the hysteria continues: Part of the reason for that is that scientists say it’s conceivable that a less threatening breed of subatomic black holes could be created. But another factor is that there’s so much science-fiction appeal to the tale of the black hole that ate the earth.

But this is also fascinating:

Speaking of time travel, Cramer has been in the midst of a real-life experiment in retrocausality – a kind of backward flow of information from the future to the past. I first wrote about this experiment almost two years ago, and Cramer recently told me that he’s still trying to get the apparatus to work. Perhaps what Stephen Hawking said is true: Nature abhors a time machine.

And if Cramer’s successful he’ll write an article about it last week!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Movies, Pop Culture | Tagged , | 1 Comment