Posted on 03/21/2004 7:12:00 PM PST by sfwarrior
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Terrorists Topple Their First European State VIEW FROM THE RIGHT
Adam Sparks, Special to SF Gate Monday, March 22, 2004
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"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Apparently, Spain has chosen appeasement. And, proving old Ben's wise dictum, Spaniards now deserve neither liberty or safety, and they'll most certainly get what they deserve.
The upset election of the socialists in Spain speaks volumes about the Spanish people. They now gleefully join much of Old Europe, which had already capitulated to the Islamo-fascists who are waging their terror campaign worldwide. The grand Spanish capitulation, at the first sight of blood in its homeland, is shocking and has the world aghast. It is the most startling European surrender since the French handed over their nation to the Nazis in World War II when they came knocking.
Spain, like France, has a substantial and rapidly growing Arab population. Those people, many of whom are glued to the 24-hour, hate-America-all-the-time, satellite-news channel Al-Jazeera, not surprisingly are quite sympathetic to al-Qaeda. A tape released to the media immediately following a terrorist attack on a Spanish commuter train reveals just how the homicidal terrorists enjoy mocking the West: "You want life, and we want death," the tape taunts.
Angel Acebes, Spain's interior minister, said al-Qaeda or a related group is the primary suspect behind Europe's worst terrorist attack ever. The police, after finding near the bomb scene a stolen van with Arab-language documents, detained three Moroccans and two Indians in connection with the bombings.
The Spanish people have now turned to a socialist leader to save them. Heaven help them. Ironically, Spain, under the leadership of the outgoing right-of-center president, José María Aznar, had one of the stronger economies in Europe. The distraught Spaniards are now turning to a government that will not only turn its foreign policy on its head but endanger its booming economy as well.
Imagine if Americans, after 9/11, simply phoned the world's most brutal purveyors of hate and terror and said, "OK, may we shine your shoes? And, by the way, how else may we serve you today?" Spain just endured their 9/11 -- it's called 3/11 -- and they just made that phone call through their election, which brought in a government of professional appeasers.
If elections in Western democracies can be decided by just a few well-placed bombs that can reliably get the people to vote for whomever represents the surrender party, just imagine how many more bombs are yet to hit Europe, and perhaps America. This is probably the first time terrorists have been able to topple a Western government. And they weren't even trying that hard -- they hardly broke a sweat.
Just imagine what they could achieve if they just focused a bit more. Perhaps they could isolate America from its allies by vilifying us. Perhaps they could convince our European allies that it's America that's the brutal terrorist and the terrorists that are the misunderstood victims. This is not only what the American Left here says; it's also what the new, socialist prime minister of Spain believes. It's even being parroted by presidential wanna-be John Kerry.
Left-of-center world leaders, with al-Qaeda, could conceivably join together and support the leaders of the opposition party here in the United States. Gee, isn't that happening already? In a virulently anti-Semitic speech in October 2003, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called on Muslims to unite against Jews towards a "final victory," saying that "the Jews rule the world by proxy." Now, according to the Associated Press, he's supporting Kerry.
Kerry has publicly asserted that many world leaders back him, though, when pressed to identify them, he refuses to divulge their names. Apparently, Kerry answers only to secretive, foreign heads of state, not to American voters. Presumably, we have no right to know which world leaders are endorsing his candidacy. No wonder he won't divulge which ones love him. He's too embarrassed to say it's the heads of state of the entire Arab world.
If another terrorist attack were to hit our shores, it's unlikely Americans would surrender their government and choose a party that champions appeasement and isolationism as foreign policy. Somehow, I believe we're are a bit tougher than that. The American resolve will be to strike back, hitting terrorists in their midst and dismantling governments that coddle them. This is precisely the battle that is taking place in this nation. Do we put down the weapons of war because we fear an attack? Unlikely. If we did, we, too, wouldn't deserve liberty, according to Ben Franklin's thoughtful admonition.
However, we will need to be engaged in nation building, just as we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must help nations in the Middle East rebuild into democracies. There is no better terrorist breeding ground than a despotic nation that wants its population to focus on the evils of the West.
The Arab Development Report (ADR), released in 2002 and written by a group of Arab scholars and intellectuals under the auspices of the United Nations, notes that a distinct "mismatch between aspirations and their fulfillment has in some cases led to [Arab] alienation, apathy and discontent."
The Arab world today consists of 280 million people, and that figure is likely to increase to 400-450 million by 2020, far faster than the population growth rate of America or especially Europe, which is barely reproducing itself. The ADR states that in 1999, the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of all Arab countries stood at $591.2 billion, less than the total GDP of Spain alone. Israel, with a population of just 6 million -- 2 percent of the Arab world's numbers -- enjoyed a GDP equal to one-sixth of the total for all Arab countries. This disparity is particularly surprising, considering that the Arab world has a near monopoly on the world's oil resources, and Israel has none.
Over the last decade, growth in per capita income in the Middle East was the lowest in the world. The ADR notes that "more than 15 percent of the Arab labor force is unemployed ... with few job opportunities at home; just over half of the young people in the Arab world (13- to 20-year-olds) want to emigrate to industrialized countries, with Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States as the most desirable areas for relocation."
The report theorizes that it's likely the most educated Arabs will continue to abandon their countries, leaving only the poor and uneducated in the Middle East. The report concludes that "poverty and deprivation in their many forms remain real in many Arab societies."
It's hard to keep entrepreneurial and intellectual classes in a totalitarian or despotic society. No wonder this part of the world is a breeding ground for terrorists. Yes, we will ultimately have to take an active role in nation building to spread liberty to the angry and disenfranchised Arab world. The United Nations won't do it. Either the United States becomes a proactive catalyst in distributing the benefits of democracy and liberty in that part of the world, or we face the prospects of a perpetual war. The choice is ours.
Liberals have taken our president to task for allegedly lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. This criticism is a bit disingenuous, however, as it implies the Left might have supported the liberation of Iraq had we just found the WMDs. Well, hellooo. Iran is now essentially admitting to a nuclear program that's in clear violation of all U.N. agreements and other international atomic treaties.
Why isn't the Left in an uproar now? Shouldn't it be urging Bush to take appropriate action? Obviously, liberals don't give a hoot about WMDs in the hands of tyrants. They care only about sowing discontent at home and scoring political points against our president, who is trying to do the right thing.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report Global Trends notes that, by 2015, "Middle East populations will be significantly larger, poorer, more urban and more disillusioned. Job placement is compounded by weak educational systems, producing a generation lacking the technical and problem-solving skills required for economic growth ... . Attracting foreign direct investment will also be difficult: Except for the energy sector, investors will tend to shy away from these countries."
Gee, this sounds a lot like the prospects for the new, socialist Spain after the election.
There, investment will likely be, as the CIA noted about the Arab world, "discouraged by overbearing state sectors; heavy, opaque and arbitrary government regulation; and the threat of political instability." Well at least this should make all the new Arab immigrants to Spain feel right at home.
Adam Sparks is a San Francisco writer. He can be reached at adamstyle@aol.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
"The Arab Development Report (ADR), released in 2002 and written by a group of Arab scholars and intellectuals under the auspices of the United Nations, notes that a distinct "mismatch between aspirations and their fulfillment has in some cases led to [Arab] alienation, apathy and discontent.""
Hey... Arab world... It ain't nobody's business business but you're own! If you could stop hating long enough to start educating your youth to something beside hate and teach them something productive, instead of destructive... You might begin to make some progress in a generation, or two.
You are all so blinded with rage brought on by your own warped viewpoint that you have begun to become as mentally crippled as liberal leftist in the United States like Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and John F'n Kerry!!! Get a friggin grip, will ya???
The next time Europe gets themselves into a fix from their inability to govern themselves I hope they don't expect American boys to come to their rescue again. Twice is enough.
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