The Berlin bureau Chief of Der Spiegel, on the ability of Germans to hold all sorts of strange beliefs, including anti-Americanism:

For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.

Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course — from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, “is worse than Hitler.” Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the F

Dean Esmay has some thoughts:

Time after time the naysayers have proven themselves both morally and intellectually incoherent, and yet they never have the introspection to acknowledge this.

Furthermore, anyone calling himself a “liberal” or a “humanist”–Muslim or not–is in my view faced with a stark choice:

You either sit around pretending that a vicious, murderous, fascist “insurgency” that routinely cuts people’s heads off and shoots children in the face is the “legitimate voice of the Iraqi people,” or you recognize that there is in Iraq a government elected by the Iraqi people working under a Constitution written entirely by Iraqis that recognizes human rights better than any in the Arab world.

No matter how many reservations you have about how it was done or how imperfectly that elected government implements the ideals expressed in that ratified Constitution.

If you take the former position you have no business calling yourself a liberal or a progressive or a humanist. If you take the latter position, then maybe you have to swallow the bitter pill that someone named George Bush, whom you don’t like and maybe think is incompetent, was the instigator of something that damn well needs to be supported.

But you can’t have it both ways. Indeed, by declaring the whole thing illegitimate, all you’re doing is siding with the Islamophobes of the world who claim the Muslims and the Arabs are far too savage, backward, and primitive to respect things like democracy and human rights. Indeed, you’re implicitly siding with the Jihadwatch crowd.

They’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side.

Oh, and I’m sure that the usual suspects in the “human rights community” will be speaking up about this violation of the Geneva Conventions any minute now.

Any minute now.

<sound=”chirping crickets”>

</sound>

Any minute.

So argues Mark Steyn:

How many times does the Islamic Republic have to (a) seize sovereign territory (the US embassy in Teheran); (b) order mob hits on foreign nationals (Salman Rushdie and his publishers); (c) perpetrate acts of state terrorism against citizens of countries with which it has no grievance whatsoever (the Buenos Aires community center bombing)? Its behavior has been consistent for three decades, yet, this time round as last time round, the British government calls in the Iranian ambassador and gives him a stern talking to, as if he were the emissary of Poland or India or any other civilized state.

That the people who may be sued by CAIR for sincerely attempting to protect their airplane and their lives should be provided with legal defense goes without saying. But I think it should go further.

We need to start a legal fund to have a class-action countersuit against the “flying Imams,” for maliciously terrorizing the passengers and delaying the flight. And for this clear attempt to intimidate us all into remaining passive in the face of equally clear threats. We should make this as painful for CAIR as possible, to discourage both such future behavior on what appear to be their operatives, and from filing frivolous lawsuits.

This is interesting. I wonder if, as the headline asks, it was just a local decision, or if Ahmadinejad knows something about it. Maybe, while he’s in New York, he should be detained for questioning.

Not for long, of course. Just until the British sailors are released unharmed.

[Evening update]

Maybe Ahmadinehad had a similar thought. As noted in comments, he’s decided to postpone his trip to the Big Apple. Which perhaps makes one think that he got caught by surprise himself.

This seems like good news. The “foreign guests” seem to have worn out their welcome among the Taliban in Waziristan. Here’s hoping that they kill each other in copious quantities, since the prospect of them becoming peaceful democrats seems dim.

The War on (some) Drugs, that is. In the real war. In Afghanistan:

We are winning in Afghanistan – that is the clear view on the ground. In contrast to Iraq, the Taliban are heavily on the back foot. Continued success, however, will be hampered by attempts to eradicate opium poppies…We are winning precisely because we are fighting the Taliban with “hearts and minds”, not just militarily might. Success hinges on not driving the locals into supporting the enemy. Yet this is precisely what poppy eradication is starting to do. Farmers grow poppies in Helmand for the same reason farmers decide what to grow the world over – because it is the rational thing to do. It is not part of a cunning scheme to flood the infidel West with cheap heroin. To a Pashtun farmer, poppies mean an instant cash-crop. Advocates of poppy eradication like to argue that narcotics fuel the insurgency. The truth is the precise opposite. Farmers carry a financial risk when they grow poppies having already been paid for their unharvested crop. Destroying their crop will make it impossible to pay their debts. As a direct consequence, they then become much more likely to accept work as hired-guns for the Taliban. Fear of poppy eradication is mobilising local farmers to side with the Taliban. In the poppy growing Sanjin valley, the locals have teamed up with the Taliban and so that is now where our troops face the fiercest fighting. As Americans say, “Go figure”.

Mario Loyola writes about the infantilization and dehumanization of the “Palestinians”–by the left.

A few months ago, I was reading Rashid Khalidi’s latest book (The Iron Cage, on the struggle for Palestinian statehood) and I was struck by his evident mission, which was not to relate the history of what happened in Palestine, but rather to explain how everything that happened in Palestine was the fault of the Zionists and their allies. The major premise of this argument is really very odd: namely, that everyone in the story has moral agency except the Palestinians, who (by virtue of their status as victims) cannot commit any crimes for which the Zionists are not ultimately responsible. This struck me as a particularly dehumanizing way to defend the Palestinians.

Maybe.

The question is, if they’re finally getting actionable intelligence, will there be any action?

Austin Bay says that we’re winning in Iraq (and really have been all along, despite the media’s body-count-driven narrative).