Posted on 07/31/2004 12:41:40 PM PDT by Kaslin
You mean America hating liberals who claim to be US citizens don't you?
You're welcome
This week's tagline. (from Oman at Iraq the Model Blog)
Oops. Omar might be p'd at me calling him Oman. (I need more drink!)
Good News BUMP!
Great, Great article.
Superb find.
Thanks for this post. I will be distributing it widely.
The TRUTH will prevail in Iraq.
.
I forgot to post my most loved excerpt...
"Soon, this will happen to Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw. I'll not hold my breath. "
Oh Rather,Jennings, et. al, will start reporting the truth.... After Kerry wins and Bush is defeated.
But will the Iraqis will still have the will to resist and the American Publis the will to stay....
For a moment I thought you were serious
Ahem. their "version " of the truth, of course!
Thanks kaslin
Our President was right, the Iraqis were the perfect people for us to offer the gift of freedom. They immediately understood the value of that gift and they will fight for it.
No comment...self explanatory!
My post in # 1 should have been that it is the Non-Iraqis who are blaming the US for the attacks
A realization a long time in coming. Yet obtuseness persists.
This post simply speaks for itself. How I wish we could hear from these voices daily in the mainstream US media. For that matter, I'd even settle for daily Fox news segments presenting some REAL Iraqi opinion. Maybe the word would finally spread that we have achieved and are daily continuing to further a great victory in Iraq.
If this trend continues (Iraqis placing blame where it belongs and uniting against it, instead of blaming our troops) it may be a fatal blow to a major Kerry theme: Bush did not plan to win the peace. As if Kerry could have planned any better for the sad aftermath the toppling of Saddam has wrought.
Sometimes it's hard to take these people seriously in the Middle East. This Mark Steyn column isn't about Iraq but I think the same mentality persists in most countries over there. They will believe just about anything that tickles their ears.
Enjoy.
Mark Steyn: Muslim Paranoia
Steyn Online ^ | 26 October 2003 | Mark Steyn
Muslim paranoia: Enemies made us impotent!
October 26, 2003
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement
I haven't really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, Gen. Kitchener's victory over the Mahdiat the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. But a recent story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. Last month mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. A man from West Africa came into the shop and "shook the store owner's hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body."
I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after shaking hands with Sen. Clinton. Anyway, as Al-Quds reported, "The store owner became hysterical, and was taken to the hospital." The country's "Chief Criminal Attorney General" Yasser Ahmad Muhammad told the Sudanese daily Al-Rai Al-A'am that "the rumor broke out when one merchant went to another merchant to buy some Karkady [a Sudanese beverage]. Suddenly, the seller felt his penis shriveling."
The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, in its exhaustive coverage, noted that the penises of Khartoum were vulnerable not merely to handshaking. "Another victim, who refused to give his name, said that while he was at the market, a man approached him, gave him a comb, and asked him to comb his hair. When he did so, within seconds, he said, he felt a strange sensation and discovered that he had lost his penis."
Tales of the vanishing penises ran rampant round the city, spread by cell phones and text messages. Sudan's Attorney General Salah Abu Zayed declared that all complaints about the missing penises would be brought before a special investigative committee, though doctors had determined that the first plaintiff was "perfectly healthy." The health minister, Ahmad Bilal Othman, said that the epidemic was "scientifically groundless," and that it was "sorcery, magic, or an emotional problem."
By now you're probably saying, "Oh, come on, Steyn, this Sudanese penis thing is all very well, but you're supposed to be a columnist. There's some big geopolitical argument behind all this tittering at shriveling manhoods, isn't there?"
Absolutely. For one thing, a week after the Malaysian Prime Minister told an Islamic summit that their "enemies," the Jews, control the world and got a standing ovation from 56 fellow Muslim leaders, it's useful to be reminded that the International Jewish Conspiracy is comparatively one of the less loopy conspiracies in the Islamic world. That said, they'll probably figure out a way to pin the disappearing penises on some or other agent of Zionism. After all, according to reports in Middle East newspapers, Israel laces Arab chewing gum with secret hormones to make Muslim men hot for Jewish babes who turn out to be Mossad agents. Come to think of it, remember those stories in the National Enquirer after 9/11 about Osama bin Laden being, ah, somewhat underendowed in the trouser department? He spent much of the '90s in Sudan. Who's to say some Zionist didn't sneak up and shake his hand while he was on a shopping trip to Khartoum?
It is, in that sense, the perfect emblematic tale of Islamic victimhood: The foreigners have made us impotent! It doesn't matter that the foreigners didn't do anything except shake hands. It doesn't matter whether you are, in fact, impotent. You feel impotent, just as -- so we're told -- millions of Muslims from Algerian Islamists to the Bali bombers feel "humiliated" by the Palestinian situation. Whether or not there is a rational basis for their sense of humiliation is irrelevant.
One of the things I'd feel humiliated about if I lived in the Arab world is that almost all the forms of expression of my anti-Westernism are themselves Western in origin. Pan-Arabism was old-school 19th century nationalism of the type that eventually unified the various German and Italian statelets. Nasserism was transplanted European socialism, Baathism a local anachronistic variant on 'tween-wars Fascist movements. The Arabs even swiped Jew hatred from the Europeans. Though there was certainly friction between Jews and Muslims before the 20th century, it took the Europeans to package a disorganized, free-lance dislike of Jews into a big-time ideology with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf and all the rest.
Even Islamic fundamentalism, though ostensibly a rare example of a homegrown toxin, has, as a practical matter, more in common with European revolutionary movements than with traditional expressions of Islam -- an essentially political project piggybacking on an ancient religion to create the ideology of choice for the world's roublemakers.
There's something pathetic about a culture so ignorant even its pathologies have to be imported. But what do you expect? The telling detail of the vanishing penis hysteria is that it was spread by text messaging. You can own a cell phone, yet still believe that foreigners are able with a mere handshake to cause your penis to melt away.
Aside from its doubts in its collective manhood, Sudan is no laughing matter. Two million people have been slaughtered there in the last decade. The Christian minority is vanishing a lot faster than that fabric merchant's privates. Osama certainly found the country fertile ground for his ideology: Sudanese mujahideen have been captured as far afield as Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. An economic basket case with a 27 percent literacy rate has managed to find enough spare cash to export revolutionary Islam to many other countries. And they've got half-a-billion dollars' worth of state-of-the-art Chinese weaponry from Iran.
A handshake-fearing guy with a cell phone is one thing; what happens when the handshake-fearers have cell phones and a suitcase nuke? It's at the intersection of apparently indestructible ancient ignorance and cheap, widely available western technology that the dark imponderables of the future lie.
In 1898, after Kitchener slaughtered the dervishes at Omdurman, Hillaire Belloc wrote a characteristically pithy summation of the British technological advantage:
"Whatever happens We have got The Maxim gun And they have not."
But the dervishes have cell phones now. Those and some dimestore boxcutters and a couple of ATM cards
were all they needed to pull off 9/11.
And there are plenty of people out there willing to help them get the cheap knock-offs of the 21st century's Maxim gun.
No wonder there is so much anger directed at the satellite channels. Unfortunately, the press has this really creepy ethic that says it is wrong to criticize a fellow journalist. The press may have been very rough in the days of the old "newspaper wars," but in many ways, it was also self-disciplining. Not anymore. Any idiocy is immediately forgiven by the only people in a position to actively, directly criticize. The term "press-weenies" has been well-earned.
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