Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Nov 23, 2010 - 01:12pm PT
|
You have it right that the only clash of any real significance to U.S. strategic interests is in Israel. If there was ever a case of "stop the insanity" it's in letting it continue unabated - Israel is it. It's as if the Israelis and North Koreans have a 'play the Americans for chumps' hotline between their capitals given their obdurate foreign policy machinations relative to negotiations are identical in their machinations and the obvious dishonesty of a contrary intent.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Nov 23, 2010 - 01:27pm PT
|
equating noko (a totalitarian regime that starves its people; shoots dissidents; ignores, flaunts, mocks international law and diplomacy; launches unprovoked attacks against soko) with israel (a democracy that has built a flourishing society in a desert with a standard of living that rivals nations with more, better, and friendler land; includes multiple cultures and religions living peacably together; allows open criticism of its policies and actions by the people, press, and politicians; suffers repeated, daily, attacks on its civilians without immediate retaliation) explains why noko thinks it can get away with attacking soko...because it can...and will...because you libs, including barry, have a warped view of reality
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Nov 23, 2010 - 01:45pm PT
|
for further reading from vdh, check out "Culture and Carnage" and "Ripples of Battle"
North Korea and the Ripple Effects of Obama’s Foreign Policy
By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted on November 23, 2010 12:51 PM
The North Koreans are sending another loud reminder that they are crazy and unpredictable. They just finished showing off another nuclear facility, which means they want more appeasement money to sorta-kinda monitor it under “international” auspices. This shake-down gambit seems to be the paradigm of the future, an easy way to gain cash, attention, and influence otherwise not accorded such a miserable state. Note that in such cases (cf. Iran), the Chinese are usually in the vicinity.
Nonetheless, the more sinister regions of the world are watching the U.S. response to the shelling, for either a yellow or a green light for their own agendas. More enlightened states are watching, too, for indications of the American reaction should the trouble spread to their corners of the world.
But after 22 months of apologizing, bowing, and contextualizing supposed American sins from the trivial (lamenting the Arizona law in a meeting with the Chinese) to the profound (the mythical Cairo speech, unilaterally pressing Israel right out of the starting gate), the Obama administration has sent the message that it may not be so comfortable with America’s past unilateral responsibilities to its allies, and may even sympathize with some of the grievances of our purported enemies. Whether this assessment is fair or not, that’s the message they’ve sent.
Dismissing the idea that past global problems might transcend George W. Bush, this administration operated as if a charismatic world citizen, with reset magic, could win over the globe to a U.N.-sponsored utopia. These false assumptions intrigued the curious abroad — why would Obama seek to advance such absurd notions about global problems having originated with U.S. belligerence circa 2001–2009 and being resolved by U.S. empathy in 2009–2010? Apparently, as we are now learning, North Korea wants to find out the answer.
In general, listlessness and misdirection in Washington always ripples out to the world abroad within a year or two. Sanctimonious Carterism had confirmed the image of a paralytic America by 1979, which may be why that year saw the Chinese in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan, Communists on the rise in Central America, hostages in Tehran, the end of the Shah, and the rise of an emboldened radical Islam. When Nixon and his congressional opponents wrecked U.S. foreign policy in the long dark days of Watergate, by 1973-4 the world became a very unstable place, with the Yom Kippur War, oil embargoes, an imploding Southeast Asia, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
The tragedy of all this is that, once a sense of American self-confidence is lost, the result is usually a lot of post facto, herky-jerky catch-up efforts to restore credibility. E.g., a once-sermonizing Carter suddenly boycotting the Olympics and establishing the Carter doctrine in the Middle East, or the U.S. 1973 global alert during the Yom Kippur War, or Gerald Ford and the 1975 Mayaguez incident.
To deter North Korea, we should now express and follow through on the sort of solidarity that is unquestioned, a kind of solidarity that has been sorely lacking in the last two years with Israel, Britain, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
And, in a larger sense, the commander-in-chief needs to stop his contextualizing and apologizing, especially this pernicious messianic notion that, as an empathetic and post-national president, his mission is to redeem a previously culpable America. Otherwise, in the next two years that nonsense is going to get people killed.
|
|
bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
|
|
|
Nov 26, 2010 - 01:13pm PT
|
WTF is up with the Saudi King coming here for medical care? He'll prolly have a jewish doctor too. So the American medical care is better than Saudi Arabia? And now it's cool if a Jooooo cares for him?
The irony....
|
|
couchmaster
climber
pdx
|
|
|
Nov 30, 2010 - 03:35pm PT
|
A satellite image of Tehran airport taken by Google Earth has outraged Iranian government officials as it reveals a Star of David on the roof of the headquarters of the national carrier Iran Air.
Iranian media explained that the building was constructed by Israeli engineers during the time of the Shah.
LOL! Nice work boyz!!! Nothing like a latent stick in the eye when it's most needed!
|
|
Douglas Rhiner
Mountain climber
Truckee , CA
|
|
|
Nov 30, 2010 - 03:45pm PT
|
LOL! Nice work boyz!!! Nothing like a latent stick in the eye when it's most needed!
Weak sauce.
Can't wait till you are blind.
|
|
bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
|
|
What bookworm said ^^^^^^^^.
Just because they made it flourish isn't enough you would argue though, right?
Check Allah's teachings though wherein he state's that it is the duty of 'believers' (Muslims) to gather lands of unbelievers for the umma.
The Israelites had possesion of that land, is it theirs? Was Spain (andalusia) really an Islamic state of the umma originally?
Yet they claim it's theirs even though they had their asses handed to them in the end. So what are the 'sacred Islamic lands' that the subsequent Islamic scholars talk about that need to be reconquered in the name of the umma and Islam?
It seems they want it both ways.
Read up on this in; http://www.amazon.com/Al-Qaeda-Reader-Raymond-Ibrahim/dp/038551655X
I'm still cruising it and I would offer it to somebody, but don't be a Jew, buy your own copy and read it!
I wanna keep my copy. The book, largely quoted from Al Zawahiri texts, lays out why Muslims HAVE to hate infidels and either lie to them, or kill them if they are to gain Allah's praise.
This is why Islam needs a reformation. Or needs to be slaught.
But Zawahiri in these texts, I doubt, speaks for many, many Muslims. He's just trying to rally his troops to kill where he is to cowardly to do the same.
He conviently points out that you should 'speak out' if you are incapable of 'Offensive Jihad'. Yeah....so he can sit back and watch Muslims die for the cause he interrprets to be just and holy in the eyes of Allah.
Isn't that convenient.
Coward!
|
|
bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
|
|
Read again...genius...
|
|
bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
|
|
Matt, I'd be willing to mail this book that is well documented and footnoted if you promise to return it at Facelift, or next time we meet.
It's very eye-opening, and based on actual texts and released documents.
E-mail me privately if ya want it...Or anybody else. I just want it back eventually. I've highlighted the really relevant sections.
|
|
Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
|
|
bluering: I'm still cruising it and I would offer it to somebody, but don't be a Jew, buy your own copy and read it! That is offensive. Please remove it.
It also seems to contradict your apparent support of the state of Israel.
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
when the eu collapses, anybody who expects a "let's all get through this together" response knows nothing about history or human nature; it's going to get ugly fast, and i can tell you who will come out on top
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFkkIpj4kHc
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
This is a little scary - it seems the ultras are taking over the IDF.
Not surprising except for the extent and rapidity of it.
from "Newsweek":
Onward, Jewish Soldiers
A surge of ‘knitted skullcaps’ is transforming Israel’s military—and that worries their secular countrymen.
Among the elite troops of the Israeli military’s Maglan special-forces unit, Naftali Bennett was an oddity. As an officer in the unit in the early 1990s, he commanded more than 80 young men, all of them secular and many from kibbutzim communities aligned with the left-center Labor Party. Bennett is an observant Jew, and among combat officers throughout the military he was one of the few who wore a yarmulke, didn’t travel on Saturdays, and never ate cheeseburgers because of the Jewish ban on mixing milk and meat.
Now long a civilian, Bennett had a chance recently to visit with new recruits in his old unit. Two things struck him: the large number of religious Jews among the young men, and the Army’s extraordinary efforts to accommodate them. “In my day, no one gave it a thought,” he says.
A transformation is sweeping the Israeli military: deeply religious Jews are now filling leadership positions in numbers far exceeding their share of the general population. Given that religious Israelis tend to be more hawkish than most, the trend raises a real question about whether Israel can rely on the Army to implement the toughest parts of any future peace agreement with the Palestinians.
U.S. efforts to keep the talks alive continued last week as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government weighed a new 90-day ban on construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But if a peace deal is ever achieved, it would undoubtedly require the evacuation of at least some settlements—a job for the Army. Some defense analysts and former officers worry that the military’s new religiosity could lead to mass insubordination. “If soldiers decide they don’t want to participate, that’s one thing,” says Mikhael Manekin, a reserve lieutenant who co-chairs the left-wing group Breaking the Silence. “If commanders don’t want to participate, that would be much more worrying.” (Manekin says all his commanding officers were settlers during his four years of active duty.)
The threat isn’t as farfetched as it sounds. Ever since the government demolished the West Bank settlement of Homesh in 2005, former residents have kept trying to establish an illegal outpost there, and authorities have kept sending troops to evict them. A year ago, during swearing-in ceremonies for new recruits of the Shimshon Battalion in Jerusalem, several soldiers unfurled a banner proclaiming: SHIMSHON DOES NOT EVACUATE HOMESH. The military court-martialed the perpetrators, sentenced them to the brig, and expelled them from their unit. But in the weeks that followed, similar signs were displayed at two other units’ training bases.
Although the military publishes little information about the backgrounds of its enlistees, a recent issue of the defense journal Maarachot reported that in recent years some 30 percent of graduates from the infantry officers’ course have defined themselves as “Zionist-religious,” up from only 2.5 percent 20 years ago. (About 12 percent of Israelis in general choose that label.) Many of those fledgling lieutenants, along with a number of higher-ranking combat officers, were drawn from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and some are residents of outposts—smaller, makeshift settlements—established without authorization from the government.
The mere specter of widespread refusal is enough to make the government think twice before ordering evacuations, whether of settlements or of outposts, says sociologist Yagil Levy, who specializes in military trends. (The threat might explain why most outposts remain standing despite Israel’s promise to dismantle dozens of them under a U.S. initiative back in 2003.) Some analysts have suggested that the police should handle future evacuations, rather than the Army.
The rise within the military of the “knitted skullcaps” has been building for years. In the 1990s, after the controversial first Lebanon war, many liberal Israelis stopped encouraging their kids to go beyond the mandatory three years of national service. “We secular people can only blame ourselves for no longer being able to convince our kids to spend as many years in the military as in the past,” says Avshalom Vilan, a former member of Parliament from the left-wing Meretz Party and a kibbutznik.
At about the same time, more religious Israelis were concluding that their community should have played a larger role in building the country’s secular institutions decades earlier. Embracing military service more fervently was a way to make up for lost time. “The religious community has to be involved in all public institutions, not just the Army,” says Rabbi Eli Sadan, 62, at his home in the settlement of Eli, deep in the West Bank. “That’s the revolution we’re creating.” Sadan oversees one of a string of West Bank pre-military academies where rabbis teach Torah and Jewish philosophy for up to two years while preparing students for military service and imbuing them (this is where some secular Israelis get nervous) with a religious sense of mission. Most graduates forgo the option of serving in strictly religious units, mixing instead with the general population.
The religious-run military academies have had a big role in reshaping the Army. Of Eli’s 2,500 alumni, about half have served as officers in combat detachments, and a quarter have spent time in the military’s most elite units. Twenty-one of the graduates have been killed in action, most in recent years. Their names and photos are displayed on the wall of a memorial room at the academy, except for one—a lieutenant colonel, killed in Lebanon; his unit is so secretive that his photo cannot be shown even after his death, say people at the academy.
That kind of heroism has brought respect. Nevertheless, critics worry about the loyalty of religious Jews in uniform: if tested, would they obey their commanders or their rabbis? In fact, a number of rabbis in West Bank settlements have repeatedly urged soldiers not to evacuate Jews from settlements in case the order is ever given. “How can anyone even consider commanding a Jew, for whom the mitzvah [commandment] to settle the Land of Israel is so central, to destroy a settlement and to displace its residents?” wrote the influential Rabbi Eliezer Melamed of the Har Bracha settlement in an online column last year. When “a ruling of the Israeli government clashes with the essential commandment to settle the Land of Israel,” Melamed wrote, “there is clear and unquestionable preference for the law of the Torah.”
To be sure, not all religious Jews support the settler movement. Even among those who do, many believe that maintaining the Army’s cohesion is more important than even the most sacred political battle. Sadan is quick to point out that few religious soldiers disobeyed orders during Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But the evacuation of Gaza involved only 10,000 settlers. They number 300,000 in the West Bank, which is much holier to religious Jews. That settlers are among the company and battalion commanders serving in the West Bank is itself problematic, says sociologist Levy. He cites cases of soldiers who leaked information to settlers about planned evacuations of outposts, giving settlers time to organize resistance.
Others say Israel’s center of gravity will move further than ever to the right as religious Jews retire from the military’s senior ranks and move on to prestigious roles in civilian life. Bennett, the former member of Maglan, is a good example. He went on to found a startup company that he eventually sold to a U.S. firm for $145 million. Bennett now serves as the director of the settlers’ main political arm, the Yesha Council. “It’s a sea change for Israel,” he says. He’s certainly no oddity now.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/20/are-religious-troops-changing-israel-s-military.html
|
|
AndyG
climber
San Diego, CA
|
|
Fattrad:
The Saudi's are scum and Obama knows it:
Fattrad, finally we agree on something.
|
|
bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
|
|
bluering: I'm still cruising it and I would offer it to somebody, but don't be a Jew, buy your own copy and read it!
No, I threw that out there for the PC crowd. Plus it's a gimme for someone to use against me to call me insensitive or a neo-Nazi.
Run with it!!
|
|
TGT
Social climber
So Cal
|
|
From SWJ
Has a war on Iran already begun?
This week's WikiLeaks release of State Department cables highlighted the growing concerns of numerous Sunni Arabs leaders over Iran's nuclear program. Bahrain's king, for instance, pleaded to a U.S. diplomat that the Iranian nuclear program "must be stopped." In another leaked cable, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia supposedly implored the United States to "cut of the head of the snake" (presumably referring to the government in Tehran) before it was too late.
But how to stop the Iranian nuclear program? In yet another leaked cable, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates dismissed the traditional way, an air campaign, concluding that it "would only delay Iranian plans by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker." Left unsaid by Gates, but no doubt at the front of his mind, are the bitter consequences of the U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. For its efforts in these two very visible wars, the United States spent a huge fortune, lost thousands of soldiers and earned opprobrium from many quarters of the world. It is little wonder why Gates would be quick to find a reason to avoid yet another military commitment.
But Iran also seems to be under assault from a different kind of warfare. First was the arrival of Stuxnet, a highly sophisticated malware worm specifically designed to attack machinery produced by Siemens Corporation, a German industrial conglomerate. According to FPRI, a think-tank in Philadelphia, Stuxnet (introduced into Iran's nuclear program by an infiltrator wielding a USB flash drive) targets Siemens-designed Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Some anonymous adversary has apparently concluded that Iran's uranium enrichment facilities, archetypes of large-scale industrial processes, are highly suitable candidates for this type of cyber attack.
Iran's nuclear program is also under attack from another very old-fashioned method: the anonymous assassin. This week one high-level Iranian nuclear scientist was killed and another wounded when they were attacked by assassins on motorcycles who attached bombs to their cars. In January, another Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by a bomb.
This covert war -- involving assassinations, cyber-sabotage, and perhaps other measures yet to be revealed -- will, like Gates's conclusion about air strikes, only delay Iran's nuclear program. Iran will adjust by neutralizing Stuxnet, providing better protection for its remaining nuclear scientists, and replacing its human losses with new physics graduates. The anonymous adversary will likely find it increasingly difficult to penetrate Iranian security now that those forces are on alert.
Is this covert war worth the bother? It is likely achieving the same delay that an air campaign would have achieved but without the massive diplomatic and economic consequences of an overt preventive war. For the worried anonymous adversary, that isn't nothing. But a strategy of delay is necessarily attached to a vague hope that something fortuitous inside Iran will occur while the covert delaying attacks proceed. In this case, the adage "hope is not a plan" was never more true. When the anonymous attacker reaches the last page in his covert action playbook, the air campaign operations order will still be looking down from the bookshelf.
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
A shocking revelation in today's LA Times:
Majority of Muslims want Islam in politics, poll says
They have mixed feelings about the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, the survey shows.
By Meris Lutz, Los Angeles Times
December 6, 2010
Reporting from Beirut — A majority of Muslims around the world welcome a significant role for Islam in their countries' political life, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, but have mixed feelings toward militant religious groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing current laws to allow stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for those who convert from Islam to another religion. About 85% of Pakistani Muslims said they would support a law segregating men and women in the workplace.
Muslims in Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Jordan were among the most enthusiastic, with more than three-quarters of poll respondents in those countries reporting positive views of Islam's influence in politics: either that Islam had a large role in politics, and that was a good thing, or that it played a small role, and that was bad.
Turkish Muslims were the most conflicted, with just more than half reporting positive views of Islam's influence in politics. Turkey has struggled in recent years to balance a secular political system with an increasingly fervent Muslim population.
Many Muslims described a struggle in their country between fundamentalists and modernizers, especially those who may have felt threatened by the rising tides of conservatism. Among those respondents who identified a struggle, most tended to side with the modernizers. This was especially true in Lebanon and Turkey, where 84% and 74%, respectively, identified themselves as modernizers as opposed to fundamentalists.
In Egypt and Nigeria, however, more people were pulling in the other direction. According to the poll, 59% in Egypt and 58% in Nigeria who said there was a struggle identified with the fundamentalists.
Despite an overall positive view of Islam's growing role in politics, militant religious organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah spurred mixed reactions. Both groups enjoyed fairly strong support in Jordan, home to many Palestinians, and Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based. Muslim countries that do not share strong cultural, historical and political ties to the Palestinian cause, such as Pakistan and Turkey, tended to view Hezbollah and Hamas negatively.
Al Qaeda was rejected by strong majorities in every Muslim country except Nigeria, which gave the group a 49% approval rating.
The poll was conducted April 12 to May 7 in seven countries with large Muslim populations. About 8,000 people were interviewed face to face, and the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for Pakistan and 4 percentage points for the other countries.
Lutz is a special correspondent.
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-1206-muslim-poll-20101206,0,252922.story
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!