Let the sun shine in.
I love Michelle Malkin, but she's so very wrong in this case that it's not funny. Spreading hysterical nonsense about an ally doesn't help the WOT. In fact, she and others of her ilk have only helped the dems's efforts to promote a "Arabs = Enemies" fear, which sure isn't going to aid our fight.
I agree with this guy.
OK, everybody get ready for the violins.
We treated those Arabs so cruel and inhuman.
Cry me a freakin river.
The totalitarian monarchies of the middle east are nice to America only because they are afraid of being overthrown.
Which is why the port controversy is more about the unknown chaotic murderous future of the middle east, not about how good they are behaving today.
Let the sun shine in.
Here's a huge part of the communication problem on this topic: My local TV news had it as the top story on our 5:30AM news just now, because it affects the Port of Houston.
Once again, the news anchor went on and on about the UAE "taking control of six US ports." And this was just the story about the delay on the approval!
Can't any of them read the "rest of the story" and comprehend that no one is "taking control" of any entire ports? They are simply providing some services for certain portions or terminals of some ports? Aaarrghh!
When I first heard that US ports were being SOLD to a foreign state I along with everyone else thought this was indefensible. When I looked into it and saw that no PORTS were being SOLD to anybody I realized people were either fatally uninformed or were deliberately working to stampede me with distortions and outright lies.
From Hannity to Hillary, we have shot ourselves in the foot with the anti-UAE demogoguery and overreaction. Why would ANY muslem work with us when they see this example of how we treat those who try.
"The scurrilous comments directed at the United Arab Emirates by Michelle Malkin have the potential to assist al-Qaeda recruiting in that country, and thus do more damage than the port deal would have done."
As soon as this think blew up, I couldn't help but think of the danger the UAE is now in. Al Qaeda is certainly learning what a great ally the UAE is and has been to the USA. Learning about how much they have helped us militarily got the attention of many in this country this week.But, I'm also sure that it got the attention of Al Qaeda leaders as well. Working that closely with the "infidel" can surely bring some attacks their way.
As long as we keep sending the UAE our jets and weapons, they'll be our friends. We don't need to give them our ports.
Her husband, President Bill Clinton, used US tax dollars to help build a nuclear reactor near Shanghai that powers the building of Chinese warships in the Jiangnan shipyards.
Her husband gave preferential treatment to China's government-owned company, COSCO, even though 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles were smuggled into the US aboard a COSCO ship in 1996.
Hillary is PO'd because her friends, the Red Chinese, have been outbid by the Arabs who bought P&O
Only one month ago the British were alarmed when it looked like a Singapore-China alliance was going to buy P&O. If that had happened, China would have had control over 90% of the British ports.
Clinton was thwarted in his attempt to give a US Naval Base to a Chinese government company (COSCO) but Clinton succeeded in rewarding his rich pals in other ways [remember the Chinese campaign contribution scandals of the 90's?]
BTW,
This guy nails it. Thanks for posting. It is sad when Michelle Malkin, Sean Hanity, and John Gibson can establish the talking points on a matter like this and get it so wrong... When they start mouthing points made by Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, they should realize they are off in the woods and doing the country wrong.
The White House has again shown lousy political skills to allow this to get so distorted in the media -- very concerning going into a mid-term election.
We should have found a less controversial business deal for our "staunch allies" rather than compromising our sovereignty with this controversial port deal. It was a bad idea and remains a bad idea to provide access to sensitive information, and to provide a potential route for terrorist infiltration. It is not a complex situtation. Give our allies some other lucrative business if we must.
Draft Halliburton for the job.
:)
If you go to Abu Dhabi or Dubai, they are very modern cities that just about equal even Singapore in modernity. There spanking new buildings all over the place, and many Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians and Filipinos make good money working in the UAE.
The totalitarian countries of the middle east face an uncertain future.
I'll stay with Bush on this call. If he likes the deal it's for good reason.
Bush is doing a great job for America.
Really? Is that the truth? Well let's see here, UAE was one of only THREE countries in the ENTIRE world to recognize the TALIBAN as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. I think we all can see where their true loyalties lie, and it sure the heck isn't with the religious tolerance crowd!
We can do without these anti-truth diatribes from the Michelle Malkin basher Harold C. Hutchison.
On August 1999, Impeached-and-disbarred-former-President Clinton commuted [aka pardoned] the sentences of 16 members of the FALN Puerto Rican violent terrorist group. (Their hobbies include explosives and firearms.)
The pardoning of these terrorists was opposed by the FBI; however it was supported by former President James Earl Carter, Jr. (the weakling who gave away the Panama Canal).
Hillary Rodham, who wants to be your president, has not been asked by the MSM if she is aware of just who are our allies in the war against terror.
.
Only the left in the Mainstream media can make any sense of this miraculous change of heart with liberals taking on our war against terror.
thank you so much for linking me here!
here is a very good article on this issue from national review:
The Politically Correct vs. the Politically Ridiculous
No heroes in the port drama.
With the approval of the Bush administration, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over commercial management of shipping and stevedoring operations at six major American ports, located on the eastern seaboard and in New Orleans. When attention was suddenly drawn to this development last week, the urge toward public-safety questions was understandable. Not panic, but legitimate questions.
Sure as Dean follows Howard, though, understandable concern rapidly degenerated into calculated hysteria from poseurs seeking to claim the high ground from a president against whose measure they stand as national-security Lilliputians. Accelerating the downward spiral, the administration’s initially temperate but unconvincing defense of the transaction devolved just as quickly into nauseating politically correctness.
Neither corner of the ring has distinguished itself. In one, leading Democrats and some Republicans are evidently shocked to learn that many of the nation’s ports are managed by foreigners. Indeed, even as they railed against the prospect of this buy-out by UAE’s Dubai Ports World, Inc., they skipped past the inconvenient fact that the seller, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, is a British concern.
Naturally, they prefer to cast the issue as one of foreign port-terminal management because they lack the gumption to state that the problem is Islamic participation in what is a gaping soft-spot in our armor. Yet, as usual, such too-clever-by-half cravenness has landed them in a box. Terminals at the ports in question — like many others in the country — have long been under the management of non-Americans. Should we expel everyone?
THE CLINTONS AND THE PORTS
Especially precious in this regard is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s newfound passion for port security. Fresh from throwing in her lot with partisan efforts to derail the Patriot Act and frame the NSA’s surveillance of wartime enemy communications as a crime, the ’08 stars in Mrs. Clinton’s eyes have suddenly twinkled with a fond memory: namely, how her husband managed to win the 1992 election, in large part, by getting to the right of the first President Bush on what was that era’s great global menace — post-Tiananmen Square China. So here she is, trying to elbow her way to the right of the current Bush administration on the scourge of al Qaeda … and hoping the rest of us are struck by amnesia.
You may recall, however, that, upon election, President Clinton proceeded to get tough with Beijing for, oh, about ten minutes. After that, there was no transfer of precious technology and no national security secret that couldn’t be had for the right price. Oh, and guess who now controls several port operations on the West Coast? And has for years? Well, whaddya know? It’s China.
Indeed, Chinese infiltration of U.S. ports would have been even more pervasive if Senator Clinton’s husband had had his way. In 1998, the Republican Congress (led by Senator James Inhofe (OK) and Congressman Duncan Hunter (CA)) had to stop him from turning over management of a 144-acre terminal at the former U.S. Naval Station in Long Beach to the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company — a subsidiary of the People’s Liberation Army linked to arms trading to Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, and even the street gangs of Los Angeles.
Of course, in the Clinton years, when anyone had the temerity to suggest that maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to give away the store to thuggish, democracy-crushing Communists, we were told such troglodyte notions were insentient to the alchemy of “constructive engagement.” This was the very “why make friends when you can let them buy you?” philosophy that led these super-competent, obsessed-with-national-security Clintonistas to sell $8 billion worth of F-16s, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, other advanced weapons, and sundry munitions to — guess who? — The United Arab Emirates.
That happened in early 2000. For those keeping score, that’s less than two years after al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It is one year after the Clinton administration had Osama bin Laden targeted at a camp in Afghanistan … but called the strike off because the al Qaeda chief was in the company of high UAE officials, including an Emirati prince. A few months later, while the Clinton folks were getting the UAE its new military hardware, the regime’s friends at al Qaeda were blowing up the U.S.S. Cole.
So why do I have this crazy feeling that, in a new Clinton era, we’d be apt to find a lot more “engagement” than exclusion of the UAE (not to mention other dubious “partners”) at our ports? In any event, now that Senator Clinton is all over this port thing, it’ll be interesting to hear how she plans to tackle those dread Chinese foreigners managing California’s coastline — not to mention her explanation of why the administration in which she figured so prominently thought it was okay to sell lots of stuff that goes boom to a country apparently not even fit to run a port terminal.
PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE PORTS
Meanwhile, President Bush, who has never, ever vetoed anything in five years — not campaign-finance “reform” that shredded core First Amendment protections, not bursting budgets they haven’t built calculators big enough to tally, not a law extending Fifth Amendment protections to alien enemy combatants, etc. — has somehow decided that this, the great principle of equal-market access for checkered Muslim regimes, is where he draws his line in the sand.
The president is promising to kill any legislation aimed at derailing the deal, so offended is he by the suggestion that, in the middle of a war against jihadists, a tiny Islamic country with a history of terror ties, which lives in an unstable, al Qaeda-friendly neighborhood, maybe, just maybe, might be a smidge less suitable for port management than, say, a private company based in England. (England, for those with a short memory, is a country with which we have a bit of history, and which was, for example, patrolling the no-fly zone with us in Iraq while the aforementioned Emirati prince was cavorting with bin Laden in Kandahar.)
I mean, does it get any more chauvinistic than that?
So while Democrats pander to our fears (and thus adopt the very cudgel they claim the administration has clubbed them with since 9/11), the president panders to what he takes to be our sense of fair play. He has he challenged lawmakers, the Wall Street Journal reports, to “step up and explain why a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard” than a British company.
Well, okay. The Middle Eastern company is wholly owned by an Islamic autocracy. The president says we need to democratize the Islamic world because autocracies are unstable. And this particular one, oil-rich but only about the size of Maine, has more non-citizens than citizens among its four million or so residents, is enmeshed in a territorial dispute with those famously reasonable mullahs in Iran (over the Tunb Islands and Abu Musa Island), and has been a hub for international narcotics trafficking and money laundering.
Nonetheless, the administration regards the regime — which does not show much promise of democratic reform — as both friendly and adherent to moderate Islam. As usual, “moderate” is in the eye of the beholder. For example, it is a crime punishable by imprisonment in the UAE for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man — because that is a violation of the meta-tolerant Religion of Peace’s sharia law, which governs the realm. Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women (and more than one if they like), but you can get sent to prison for such crimes as urging Muslims to convert to other faiths.
Moreover, as my friend Frank Gaffney points out, the regime despises our close ally, Israel. The UAE promotes the idea of a one-state solution in “Palestine” (hint: the one state is not Israel), and may well be funding charities in Gaza and the West Bank — where “charities” are notorious for underwriting terrorism.
It was also a key supporter of the Taliban — one of only three countries to recognize bin Laden’s kindly hosts as the official government of Afghanistan. In fact, the UAE is the country through which bin Laden was allowed to transit when al Qaeda moved its headquarters to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.
All that aside, we are at war with jihadists who, more than anything else, seek to strike us domestically with weapons of mass destruction — including nukes if they can access them. Lo and behold, it turns out that the UAE has been used as a transfer-station for nuclear components in the conspiracy of Pakistani proliferator A. Q. Kahn, who was selling technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Obviously, the Kahn enterprise would have made other plans had it not believed it was on safe footing with the UAE.
SHOULD WE CANCEL THE DEAL?
Does all this mean the port deal ought to be scotched? I think it does, but I have a (slightly) open mind — as do a lot of other people who fret over our security.
The Bush administration contends that the UAE has cleaned up its act since 9/11. There are reasons to be skeptical. The administration, after all, also counts Saudi Arabia and Yemen as cherished friends. It has set a laughably generous grading curve for Islamic regimes (and Islamic leaders) seeking the “moderate” diploma which qualifies them for the status of “ally” in the war on terror. Moreover, while the UAE has plainly taken some steps in the right direction, its facilitation of the enemy prior to 9/11 was substantial. It is not generally our practice to consider hardened criminals redeemed after only four years of good behavior — especially when “good” in this context is, to put it mildly, relative.
On the other hand, port commercial management is not exactly the same as port security. If it really insists on pressing ahead with this deal, the administration should have a chance to demonstrate why, at a time when our homeland is a target and it takes very few operatives to execute a massive attack, we should be comfortable with the UAE in such a prominent role at our borders — even if security remains primarily the task of the Department of Homeland Security.
But the administration should make that case to Congress and the American people, not to a secret tribunal (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) which is run by the Treasury Department — rather than the Pentagon or DHS — and for whom the promotion of commerce has pride of place over national security.
Which is all to say: This transaction needs a long, careful look. It doesn’t need stone-throwing from opportunists who would be better advised to check their own glass houses. And it doesn’t need bully-pulpit demagoguery.
You don’t need to be an “Islamophobe” to have doubts here. You just need to have an IQ of about 11.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200602231409.asp
To Moderator:
if my post #412 was inappropriate, please delete it.
thanks.
The hypocrisy of Malkin, who whines about being called a "gook" in her email, and her anti-Arab remarks is astounding.
She and Coulter are the bomb-throwers of the extremist right.
Now.
Oh, I'll grant they have done things that prove we can trust them.
Now.
But Islam could very well be stronger in a decade.
Paranoid? Absolutely, especially since it ain't friggin' necessary, except to secure an ally which may stop being an ally at any time. Why take the chance? 