Category Archives: War Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

White House To Liberal-Minded Muslims

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Drop dead:

Administration officials declined to explain why they have not reached out to groups of liberal-minded Muslims. “Federal Departments and Agencies engage with a wide variety of Muslim organizations and groups throughout the country, often through open forums and meetings and we have also consulted a wide variety of academics and researchers about the views of Muslims in America,” according to a March 8 statement from White House spokesman Nicholas Shapiro.

Among the Muslim groups with the greatest access to the White House are MPAC, based in Los Angeles, and the Islamic Society of North America, based in Plainfield, Ind. MPAC is an advocacy group with few members, and ISNA is a umbrella group for many groups and mosques that practice orthodox Islam, which mandates the subordination of democratic governments to Islamic rules.

Leftists like to fly the false flag of “liberal,” but they’re really not.

[Update a while later]

How today’s “liberals” betray yesterday’s.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

When Is No-Fly Zone…

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…a no-fly zone?

Joe Pappalardo makes the case against one. I’m on record as supporting one (though of course, it was a quick blog post, and I always reserve the right to change my mind), but I was actually being more generic. While the points Joe makes are all valid, what I was really advocating was rendering Colonel Whathisname incapable of attacking civilians from the air. The scenario he lays out would do that just about as well, and at much less cost and risk.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

A Hero In Pakistan

…has been murdered:

Death threats were a constant in Bhatti’s life for many years. He once told me that he had never married because he did not think it would be fair to a wife and children to subject them to this concern. His work was his life: At the end of each day, he left his government Cabinet office and headed over to his office at the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, where he continued to help Pakistan’s persecuted minorities until late into the night.

“I personally stand for religious freedom, even if I will pay the price of my life,” he had said when he received the USCIRF award. “I live for this principle and I want to die for this principle.”

Sadly, he got what he wanted. I’d like to comfort myself with the thought that this was the work of extremists, but in Pakistan, the extreme is the norm. And they have nukes.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

How Heinlein Became A Writer

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An interesting anecdote from the thirties. I found this particularly interesting:

Political ignorance also may have hurt Heinlein’s campaign in two other ways. First, Heinlein believed that he was harmed by the fact that the Communist Party had endorsed him. Although a leftist himself at the time, Heinlein was very hostile to the communists in the 1930s, denouncing them as “red fascists” no better than the “brown fascists” of the far right.

As with Heinlein, it was clear to most at the time that fascism and communism were just two slightly different flavors of the same totalitarian political phenomenon, and much of the American left admired both. It’s only the modern left that has developed an amnesia about it (somewhat deliberately, by rewriting history in academia), declaring after the fact that they are political opposites on the simple-minded one-dimensional left-right spectrum.

I will say one thing that was worse, or at least different, about Nazism, though. This morning I heard someone from Libya saying that if reports coming out of there were accurate, that a “genocide” was going on.

No. That word has become devalued in recent decades (partly to minimize what happened to the Gypsies and Jews during the war, and as a way of reducing support for Israel). Killing lots of people is not genocide. Even ethnic cleansing in a region is not genocide. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire “race” of people (while race is largely a social construct, in this case use it as shorthand for “group of people sharing a large genetic heritage”). Hitler was, I think, unique in his desire to do this. Well, except for modern Islamists.