The inestimable Diana West once again speaks truth to the dhimmis in power. From the Washington Times:
If democracy makes leaders accountable to the people who elect them, it works the other way as well: People are also accountable for their elected leaders. Which is why the United States, in agreeing to provide a $10 million care package to the Palestinian Authority, is so dangerously wrong in failing to hold the people of the PA accountable for the democratically-elected terror chieftains of Hamas.Here's what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said this week when she announced the U.S. would provide medical and other supplies to the PA, which, after two months of no American or European Union aid, has run desperately low on such necessities: "The Hamas-run Palestinian Authority government bears sole responsibility for the hardships facing the Palestinian people and the international isolation that the PA is now experiencing due to its refusal to recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements and obligations."
That's a lot of refusal, but never mind. The real here question is, Why does the Hamas-run government bear "sole" responsibility? What about its supporters, i.e. the Palestinian voters who gave that Hamas-run government a landslide victory? In the world according to the Bush administration, they remain voiceless victims even after exercising their political will at the ballot box, voting into power an outlaw organization whose charter unfolds under a statement by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." Regardless of whether this heinous call to jihad leaves any peace for the so-called "Quartet" to process, Ms. Ricecontinued: "Hamas' policies and actions should not deprive the Palestinian people of their legitimate humanitarian needs."
Why ever not? Why shouldn't Hamas' "policies and actions," driven by a Hitlerian plan to "obliterate" Israel, deprive Hamas constituents of their "needs," humanitarian or otherwise — particularly when it comes to support from civilized nation-states spilling blood and treasure to fend off Islamic jihad in the so-called "war on terror"? There is a strategic and moral senselessness to the administration's willful disconnect. After all, the U.S. and the EU cut off aid to the PA two months ago in order to extract concessions — like, for instance, on Israel's right to exist. Hamas' response? No concessions. The U.S. and EU are now cranking aid back up, in humanitarian dribs and drabs, but this is probably just the beginning and still no concessions. This doesn't sound like successful statecraft.
Read it all.
If as if the administration (along with the rest of the world) sees the Palestinians as children, incapable of fending for themselves, and certainly in no way responsible for their own actions.
That being the case, how can anyone expect they'll be able to govern themselves in their own state? Or can we drop the pretence of "the two-state solution" and admit the self-evident: It's not so much that they want to rule themselves in a sovereign "Palestine" as that they want to put an end to Jewish sovereignty in Israel.
"...make the world safe for sharia."
Succinct!
Diana West is always speaking truth to power. Does power ever listen?
Maybe she should wrong foot everyone by speaking lies to weak people and making herself a bit more estimable.
"People are also accountable for their elected leaders"
I don't know why this is such a jagged pill for our administration to swallow. Osama Bin Laden himself echoed this very idea, almost in the exact words when he stated that the American People were valid targets because we re-elected Bush.
Our politicians aren't going to wake up until Sahid Ahmed Scimitar-Wielder shows up at their doors to collect their heads.
Sadly, regarding the so called victims of Israeli occupation not responsible for their actions will only make the "Palestinians" more dependent on jizya and less likely to take responsibility of their own actions.
This means that "Palestinians" will continue to play the victim and complain about Israeli "occupation", while the West Bank and Gaza will remain Europe's most distant muslim ghettoes.
This staged victimhood will then be used to justify terrorist acts described as "martyrdom operations".
"Palestinians" are a lot like the French students that rioted a while back. Both "Palestinians" and the French students regard welfare payments as their God-given right.
Diana West: BRAVO! Couldn't say it better.
The palestinians have made their bed, and now it is time for them to sleep in it. Their Saudi brothers and sisters are simply swimming in money, so let them help for a change. If the palestinians feel no pain, if they don't sense the consequences of having elected brutal terrorist murderers into office, then they will be convinved that Hamas is the right choice, and if we send them money, then we are feeding this viscious cycle. Forget it!
I would say that there are enough poor americans who could benefit from those 10 million dollars. What do you think?
from the article: "But notice Hamas didn't get weepy over its own young and decide to "save the children" by simply recognizing Israel's right to exist. Nor did any of Hamas' oil-rich Muslim brethren feel moved to come to the rescue, either."
That's because Arabs couldn't care less about the Palestinians. If they cared a whit they could have easily absorbed what WAS a relatively small population into their enormous territories decades ago. The Palestinians are pawns and willing pawns it would appear (they appear to deal with their despised status by transmuting it into a proud culture of "martyrdom"). In any case, this is just further evidence that Muslim life is cheaper to Muslims themselves than Muslim life is to infidels (other examples being Sudan, the Muslim-initiated carnage in Iraq, and the prevalence of honor killings in Muslim societies). What matters is not individual life but the Borg.
People have justified the 9/11 and (in my country) the 7/7 attacks as being caused by the governments that "we" voted for. We were told that we brought it on ourselves by bringing to power people who encouraged terrorists to attack us.
Why do they then expect us to help them when the government they voted for screws their country to a point that they cannot support themselves? I have no wish to see children dying but, really, what sort of support would they give us if the tables were reversed? That's an easy one, they would dance around celebrating every dead child, burning flags and shouting about how we brought it on oursleves and how allah has worked against us.
We are having our conscience used against us by a group that doesn't have one.
Hard though it may be, we need to force the issue.
DaveMate: "We are having our conscience used against us by a group that doesn't have one."
Yup. That sums it all up pretty well.
I wonder if any statistics exist on the number of Palestinian men and women working in the rich Gulf countries and sending money back to their families. Why don't the Saudis fire their Indonesian maids and Egyptian drivers and hire the poor Palestinians, fellow Muslims, whom they claim to care so much about in all of their sermons and public relations campaingns. I am sure that the Indonesians and Egyptians won't mind. After all, in those countries, obsession with the Palestinian cause is part of the Muslim religion. Everyone would be happy and the American taxpayers could be saved a few dollars in foreign aid.
asked Maryrose-
"Why don't the Saudis fire their Indonesian maids and Egyptian drivers and hire the poor Palestinians"
Gulf Arabs fear them and dislike them as do Egyptians, Jordanians.
OTT but I saw a funny bumper sticker today:
"I Love My German Shepherd - Pope Benedict."
Extremely well put. It's high time that we played by their rules when it came to the Jihad.
For one thing, if we have to pay Jiziya in the form of aid, we don't give a dime more than the highest Islamic donor (lowest would mean simply defaulting to zero, since I'm sure that countries like Egypt or Maldives don't give any aid to the Palestinians). Similarly, Palestinians who may be settled in infidel lands (including Israel) shouldn't have any more rights than Palestinians settled in other Arab lands.
This is just the beginning. In order to maintain an equitable treatment of Muslims in dar-ul-Harb in comparison to Infidels in dar-ul-Islam, turn their laws around. A good exercise would be to take the Quran, the Hadith and the Sira, and do the following things:
- Replace all instances of the word "believer" with the word "Infidel", and the word "Kafir" with the word "Mohammedan"
- Make other changes so that they make sense e.g. verses where Allah condemns Christians for regarding Jesus as the son of God and Jews for doing the same with Ezra (sic), change them such that Allah condemns Muslims for regarding Mohammed as Rasul.
- Make the resultant documents the foundation of our policy towards Muslims (i.e. new mosques cannot be built, old ones cannot be repaired, Muslim women may marry Infidel men and convert, but not vice versa, anyone who coverts to Islam is executed,... You get the idea.)
Once this is done, perform the same exercises on the Hadith, Sira and Tafsirs. Let them enjoy. After all, if it is sauce for the goose...The Great Betrayal:
Started by calling it a war on Terrorism.
They aren't terrorists they are Mujihadeen,
mujihadeen, n. Arabic
one who struggles (fights) for the faith. Or one who wages Jihad.
A war on nouns can't be won, since there is no party in charge to surrender, all a war on nouns can do is to destroy our own civil liberties, renders us increasingly wards and property of the state and bankrupt our economy and morals (in the name of morality).
But we can win a war against Jihad and the Mujihadeen as they are easily identified.. they pray five times a day, facing mecca and utter Arabic words every time they mention their "profit" and Al Ilah.
They also lie and obfuscate with amazing facility, and sans embarassment (no sense of guilt, for all is the will of Al Ilah, and anything done to protect and propigate the faith is considered righteous and required.
Oops, I repeated the Hadith and Sira. Oh well, one gets the idea
Diana West says, "People are also accountable for their elected leaders." This basic principle, unfortunately, has been rejected for decades. We have become terribly guilty about cultural, let alone ethnic, stereotyping, and wish to honor all cultures as potentially valuable. Hence, the modern multicultural mythology is that all human beings are basically good and don't intrinsically hate each other. Wars, including genocidal wars, only happen because decent people are "misled" by leaders who lie to them and sell them a bill of goods. So Palestinian terrorism is Arafat's fault or Fatah's fault or Hamas' fault.
We didn't always believe that. When we were fighting World War II, it was taken as common knowledge that Germans were warlike and their culture loved regimentation and harsh discipline; that Japanese were sneaky and brutal and hated white people; and that this probably made those peoples and cultures more receptive to Fascist ideas.
And similarly today, the Palestinians don't teach peace to their children; they teach hatred, jihad and terrorism. But today, uttering such concerns about a foreign culture will get you instantly tagged as a "bigot." I know. I've already had that happen to me.
There was a 1996 book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," that dared to suggest that Germans eagerly killed Jews because they freely chose to, not because of lies or threats from the Nazi officials. Well, we need a companion volume, "Hamas' Willing Terrorists," that makes the same case about the Palestinians.
A war on nouns can't be won, since there is no party in charge to surrender, all a war on nouns can do is to destroy our own civil liberties, renders us increasingly wards and property of the state and bankrupt our economy and morals (in the name of morality). (by Nariz)
This is alarmingly true, should you be living in the still free U.S. then I would advise you to skip on the next lot of books/videos and instead get yourself a license and a gun. You might need it one day. (this is only a practical tip)
And just how much of this money are we to believe will actually make it to the humanitarian services it is being offered for?????
Let them swim in their own swill.
A war on nouns can't be won...
Worth a go, though. You could try divide and rule, splitting the common nouns from the proper nouns. You could try a war of attrition - look at all those inflexions English used to have, and look at it now. Last but not least, you could enlist some gerunds as double agents. They have the body of a noun but the heart and soul of a verb.
Word of warning: beware the adjectives. They speak with forked tongue.
Beg to differ.
Go after the verbs. The medieval schoolmen, and Buddhists of every age, understood that there was too much frenetic to-and-froing, getting-and-spending, making-warring and then peace-processing. In the old days, the contemplative life was placed higher on the scale than the active life. One needs a lot more contemplation, and a lot less activity. In fact, contemplating rather than doing uses up far less energy, and is far more ecologically sound way to conduct one's life, than all that rushing about. And what causes that rushing about, that getting, that spending, that attending meetings, that consulting, that jabbering away in order to make sure that the third quarter earnings meet or exceend the expectations of analysts? It is all the fault of those verbs.
But when you offer only nouns, and not verbs, you get something quite different. Here is a famous line from a famous Russian poet (hint: not the famously verb-less Afanasy Fet, but someone later):
"Noch'. Ulitsa. Fonar'. Apteka"
"Night. Street. Streetlight. Pharmacy."
A Hopperish scene, even if in war-time Petrograd. Not a verb in sight.
Just a scene. Ut pictura poesis. And vice-versa too, come to think of it.
That's the way to go.
Put those damn verbs on notice. Shape up, or ship out. Who's in, who's out, what's up, what's down, what's hot, what's not -- all the fault of verbs, and what they do, do, do to create the frenzy and hectic vacancy of many lives.
If there must be maidens loth, and mad pursuits, and struggles to escape, let it mostly be on an Attic vase. Red-figured. Black-figured. Le rouge ou le noir. It scarcely matters. And when life's croupier insists "Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs" --you won't have placed all your chips on the roulette table. You'll be looking, not doing, contemplating that vase.
"Night. Pharmacy. Streetlight."
Sounds like:
"A country road. A tree. Evening"
Hate it already.
Interested --
After a jolt of caffeine, I realized that I had both left out a word, and had reversed the order of the last two. Now that the line has been corrected ("noch. ulitsa. fonar'. apteka."), your comment stands as an implacable sentry on duty at the monument to the mistake.
Possibly that mistake can be forgiven if one realizes that, in the game of musical chairs, where the chairs are the "Dvenadtsat' stul'ev" of Ilf and Petrov, and the players in question are represented by "Dvenadtsat'" (The Twelve) of Blok, a thirteenth is needed, the one who doesn't, when the music first plays and then suddenly stops, is the one left awkwardly, clumsily standing. In that game, I was that thirteenth -- the one who is eliminated right away, who never gets a chance to survive even one round only to be defeated in the next.
Singing, quietly, the lyrics to a Frank Sinatra song: "Everything Happens to Me."
noch. ulitsa. fonar'. apteka
Night. Street. Pharmacy. Streetlight.
Reminds me of
Un Banc Un Arbre Un Rue
Severine's 1971 Eurovision song contest winner for Monaco.
Eurovision 2006 takes place in Athens this week. And Hugh, I do believe that you have just written the winning song.
I'm practicing now.
Did you catch me at San Remo in 1974?
can't people see through the "human rights" drivel by now? Samuel Johnson wrote that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But today "peace" and "human rights" can also be refuges for scoundrels.