Andy McCarthy points out the cognitive dissonance of the ACLU and New York Times:
…which is it? Is the TSP leak a big nothing that changed no one’s behavior, or a bombshell that changed everyone’s behavior? Evidently, it depends on which scenario the Left believes will damage the Bush administration more on any given day.
Here’s an interesting article on the history of Israeli military conflicts, and why they lost (or at least didn’t win, making another inevitable soon) this one.
I’m too busy to post much on this right now, but this leads to a much bigger theme. One of the damaging things that the UN has done over the decades is to short-circuit many conflicts, causing them to actually go on unabated for years, albeit at a lower level with flareups, because its emphasis and urgency is always on band-aid ceasefires and halting fighting, rather than achieving true peace or justice.
On Monday I wrote at TCS Daily about it. Today, David Perlmutter has further thoughts, over at Editor and Publisher.
Perhaps it would be more reassuring if the enemy at the gates was a familiar one
By Arabs:
Arabism flies in the face of historical fact. Ethnic minorities in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, have suffered at the hands of Arabs since the Arab-Islamic invasions in the early Muslim period. Of the efforts of Arab regimes and their ideological supporters in the West to de-legitimize regional identities other than Arab, Walid Phares, a well-known professor of Middle East studies, has written: “[The] denial of identity of millions of indigenous non-Arab nations can be equated to an organized ethnic cleansing on a politico-cultural level.” This tradition of culturally suppressing minorities is the wellspring of the linguistic imperialism regnant at Middlebury’s Arabic Summer School.
Yet healthier models for language instruction are easy to find. In the Anglophone world, Americans, Irish, Scots, New Zealanders, Australians, Nigerians, Kenyans, and others are native English-speakers, but not English. Can anyone imagine an English language class in which students are assumed to be Anglican cricket fans who sing “Rule Britannia,” post maps showing Her Majesty’s empire at its pre-war height, and prefer shepherd’s pie and mushy peas? Yet according to the hyper-nationalists who run Middlebury’s Arabic language programs, all speakers of Arabic are Arabs–case closed.
A leading Arabic language program shouldn’t imbue language instruction with political philosophy. It should instead concentrate on teaching a difficult language well–on promoting linguistic ability, not ideological conformity. Academics should never intellectualize their politics and then peddle them to students under the guise of scholarship. Those who do may force a temporary dhimmitude on their student subjects, but in the end they only marginalize their field and themselves.
This is, in some ways, even more egregious than that loon up at Wisconsin who wanted to teach 9/11 conspiracy theories in a class on Islam, because it’s actually much more insidious.
[Via Jonah Goldberg, who also writes today about the Swastika and the Scimitar]
President Bush undoubtedly didn
Victor Davis Hanson writes that there is some hope amid the current gloom in the Middle East:
…all is not lost, since lunacy cuts both ways. Iran and Syria unleashed Hezbollah because they were both facing global scrutiny, one over nuclear acquisition and the other over the assassination of Lebanese reformer Rafik Hariri. Those problems won
This seems like a good idea to me. It would make it hard on spammers and netkooks, though. Then again, that’s not a bug, it’s another feature.
[Via Geek Press]
The New York Times thinks that the administration is “rewriting the Geneva Convention,” when in fact it’s the New York Times that is engaging in revisionism.
Mark Danziger explains the historical foolishness of the argument that it’s important for us to abide by Geneva so that our enemies will. In fact, when we grant Geneva rights to people who have no rules at all, we weaken the Conventions, and strip them of meaning. There are good reasons to treat Jihadi prisoners humanely, in general, but Geneva is a very misguided and in fact counterproductive one. And as a commenter points out, it’s only possible to make the argument that the Times does if one has never actually read the Conventions.
The New York Times thinks that the administration is “rewriting the Geneva Convention,” when in fact it’s the New York Times that is engaging in revisionism.
Mark Danziger explains the historical foolishness of the argument that it’s important for us to abide by Geneva so that our enemies will. In fact, when we grant Geneva rights to people who have no rules at all, we weaken the Conventions, and strip them of meaning. There are good reasons to treat Jihadi prisoners humanely, in general, but Geneva is a very misguided and in fact counterproductive one. And as a commenter points out, it’s only possible to make the argument that the Times does if one has never actually read the Conventions.
The New York Times thinks that the administration is “rewriting the Geneva Convention,” when in fact it’s the New York Times that is engaging in revisionism.
Mark Danziger explains the historical foolishness of the argument that it’s important for us to abide by Geneva so that our enemies will. In fact, when we grant Geneva rights to people who have no rules at all, we weaken the Conventions, and strip them of meaning. There are good reasons to treat Jihadi prisoners humanely, in general, but Geneva is a very misguided and in fact counterproductive one. And as a commenter points out, it’s only possible to make the argument that the Times does if one has never actually read the Conventions.
How is Bush doing?
Not very well, according to Gerard Baker.
…the US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective. Instead its leadership has been desultory and uncertain and tragically ineffective.
It tried unilateral pre-emption in Iraq, but never really had the will to see it through. So with Iran, it went all mushy and multilateralist. In Lebanon, it thought it would cover all the bases