Posted on 02/21/2003 8:05:54 PM PST by Timeout
Susan Sontag has become the poster girl of anti-war protests among the intelligensia. But now a piece she wrote in 1999 about the Kosovo conflict has come to light...and it shows the blatant hypocracy of today's libs.
WHY ARE WE IN KOSOVO?" by Susan Sontag, May 2, 1999
She deplores Europe's inaction "in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering," and observes: "Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you."
In answer to the placards at antiwar demonstrations, she says: "For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?"
She argues that a dictator need not pose an immediate threat to those outside his borders to justify taking action against him: "Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision?"
In other words, she used every single argument being used today TO SUPPORT WAR in Iraq. Of course, they saw Kosovo as a "humanitarian war", not one where we greedy Americans were just protecting our own national interests (God forbid!). This needs to be seen far and wide as a perfect example of the libs' real agenda: pulling down Bush.
(My first Guild thread-creation....hope this all turns out OK. Here goes.....
By George, I think I did it!
Now that you mention it (or rather, mentioned it) what was Mandela's stand on that murder of nearly a million people? Don't believe I heard him spewing at clinton for igoring the problem.
Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision?
I'm sure as Susan penned this she was quite proud of herself for this statement. Wonder how it's going down now?
But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe. My friends in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can "the West" be letting this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're Europeans. Surely "they" won't allow it to go on.
But they -- Europe -- did.
As usual Susan. At least they're consistent. But no need to worry in silence anymore (we know you have to keep quiet else you won't get invited to all the good parties) the adults are in charge now. Just be silent and let us take care of it.
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust.
Repeat that 10 times every 6 hours, take plenty of laxative and never ever call me. That'll be $500, thank you and you're welcome.
I came to the party late. You all had been having fun for months before I discovered you. I'm sure HLL has all the good old stuff.
Help HLL.
I'm tellin' ya Timeout, that's one ugly woman... er man... uh, whatever.
French President Jacques Chirac emerged today from a summit of 52 African countries -- including three that hold seats on the U.N. Security Council -- with a unanimous endorsement of France's opposition to U.S.-led military action against Iraq....The declaration from the Paris summit appears to place the African nations in the antiwar camp.
Oh puhleeeeeze....the article doesn't say how much France pledged for African Aids relief.
Don't Put The Blame On Clinton
Charles Krauthammer's column blaming all the world's problems on former president Bill Clinton [op-ed, Feb. 14] echoes attacks by ultraconservative writers and regurgitates their anti-Clinton bile to distort history. Krauthammer's allegations are wrong and misleading. At a time when our nation is preparing for war, we should be serious about serious things, rather than gathering debating points to please one extreme of the political spectrum. Consider: [snip]
... usual revisionist history...
And then THIS!
By the way, if any leading Republicans were calling for military action against Afghanistan during the Clinton administration, it is hard to find evidence of it in the public record of that time. Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush certainly did not.
As for the allegation that Sudan "offered up" Osama bin Laden to us in 1996, it's a right-wing lie. It didn't happen. If a more robust strategy for combating international terrorism was obvious before 9/11, President Bush had nine months to initiate it. He did not.Compost
Uh, never mind that clinton and halfbright have already admitted dropping the ball.
NY Times, 2/21/03
RE: Sami Al-Arian indigtment...Ms. Reno, attorney general from 1993 through 2000, declined today to discuss her department's handling of the case. "It's a pending case," she said. "I can't comment on it."
But according to former officials and experts intimately familiar with the effort to indict Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders in the United States, the investigation suffered from a lack of resources, such as insufficient Arabic translators, and fierce bureaucratic turf battles between the F.B.I. and the Customs Service over control of the investigation.
"We had so many obstacles that were put in our way," said a former official who worked on the case. A trip to Israel as part of the investigation had to be canceled because of bureaucratic problems, the official said, "and there were times when the Justice Department and F.B.I. were not very supportive. It fluctuated, but we never gave up."
"an extension of my sympathies to other selves...territories...phah, phah, phah, phah..." What a load of unmitigated self-inflating crap.
At the risk of sounding shallow (again) I noticed in her biography that her father was a fur trader. Is that one of those Davy Crockett hats on her sympathetic head?
Sontag's piece on Kosovo repeats the same old inaccuracies regarding the Serbs, of course. Milosevic was a communist bastard, no doubt, but did not embark on a program of ethnic cleansing. While she's boo-hooing over the poor heroin-smuggling KLA (muslim terrorists), why doesn't she take a look at what happened in Croatia in 1991? Until that time, the Serb population ran about 12 percent. The Croatians embarked on their own little program to drive them out, and most fled to Serbia (where Clinton later bombed the bejeezus out of them in 1999).
In 1998, when Mr. M and I visited his cousins in Zagreb and the little Croatian villages from which Mr. M's Serbian grandparents emigrated, the Serb population in Croatia was down to 4 percent of the population. In 1993, Mr. M's cousins in Ogulin operated a little coffee bar on the first floor of their house, and the family of four lived in the tiny upstairs apartment. At about 3 a.m. they were awakened by an explosion. Earlier that evening, a couple of Croatian "patrons" of the coffee bar had planted two bombs there. Why? Because the owners were Serb, and it was a popular gathering place for their Serb neighbors, and Serbs had to be convinced to get out.
Fortunately, no one was injured, but the bar was destroyed and the building still bears the marks of the explosion. This was commonplace. One night, bombs were set off all over town, but only in the homes and businesses of Serbs. Dozens were killed. Maddy HalfBright made a tour of the area a while later and her hosts told her about that night, more or less - except that they told her it was the Serbs who had bombed Croatian families. Of course, being an idiot, she believed it.
I know I'm rambling and will wrap this up soon, but the Clintons and their liberal buttkissers also demonstrated the Chirac-like tendency to forget what had been done for them in the past. Just like France is spitting on the memory of the thousands of Americans who died trying to liberate their country from the Nazis, the Clinton Administration turned on the one group in the Balkans who had fought the Nazis. Serbs rescued hundreds of American pilots who were shot down in one famous incident, and the nationalist (bad word to Sontag) Serb Chetniks fought both the Nazis and the Communists, while assisting the U.S. in the war.
Don't even get me started on the liberal hypocrisy regarding Rwanda, where Clinton apparently found it just dandy that a bunch of Africans were slaughtering one another. But I've never doubted the real racists in this country are on the left.
Why Are We in Jolo?
IN THE PAST DECADE the United States has only twice sent ground troops into combat. The first instance, in Somalia, grew out of a humanitarian operation and ended abruptly with the first U.S. casualties. It also ended the career of the secretary of defense. The second, in Afghanistan, came in response to an attack on the United States, was approved by Congress and was thoroughly explained to the public by President Bush and his Cabinet.
Over the years the threshold for putting U.S. soldiers at risk has sometimes seemed too high: Think of the Rwandan genocide or the Balkan wars. Yet now the country appears to be drifting toward the opposite extreme.
On Thursday, via a series of background briefings by unnamed spokesmen, the Pentagon casually let the public know that it intends to dispatch 1,700 Special Forces and Marines for a combat mission against Muslim guerrillas in a remote and hostile corner of the Philippines.
We hear . . . THAT Bill Clinton is expected to come face to face with his ex-pal Denise Rich for the first time since Pardongate at the Artist Empowerment Coalition Grammy Brunch tomorrow morning at the Hilton . . .
BARBRA Streisand is good at making speeches about how pharmaceutical companies gouge AIDS patients with exorbitant drug prices, but she's even better at making a bundle speculating on their stock prices. The diva's non-profit Streisand Foundation has invested in such companies as Bristol Myers Squibb, Abbott Laboratories and Eli Lilly. Streisand's charity earned more than $17,000 from its trades in drug companies in 2000, according to papers filed with the government. A rep for the singer did not return calls. [Remind anyone of Hillary?]
Here's a pic from 02/02/01
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