Crusader War College

regarding the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Hattip Steve White via Rantburg

Via American Realpolitik comes this article from Hog On Ice (The original title was "CYA is a Big Job in a Town With as Many Asses as New Orleans") Here's a Jewel of a quote (emphasis mine):

A large number of local citizens refused to evacuate, ensuring that they and their children and pets would die. We’re not supposed to talk about this, because it’s “blaming the victims.” I’m sorry to ask this, but when a person is a victim because of his own irresponsibility or bad judgment, isn’t it an injustice to blame his suffering on someone else?

Yes.

At Michael Yon's blog, via Rantburg, comes a haunting photo...

Major Mark Bieger found this little girl after the car bomb that attacked our guys while kids were crowding around. The soldiers here have been angry and sad for two days. They are angry because the terrorists could just as easily have waited a block or two and attacked the patrol away from the kids. Instead, the suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers.

Michael Moore's minutemen at work...

Interesting post at "The American Enterprise".

Via ed's comment at Rantburg comes this link to The Jawa Report on Kos's declaration that U.S. Torture is the same as Saddam's. Warning: the links are very graphic.

More on this later.

Via Israpundit comes this juicy little interview of Jose Maira Aznar, the former (and best) Prime Minister of Spain:

Israel need not pay much attention to Europe, which is using its Middle East policy to separate itself from the US, has a tendency toward appeasement and is largely pro-Palestinian, former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar told The Jerusalem Post Monday.

"Europe likes appeasement very much; this is one of the most important differences between us and the States," Aznar said in an interview on the Bar-Ilan University campus. "Europeans don't like any problems. They prefer appeasement."

Exactly my diagnosis.

Aznar said Europe had no chance of independently impacting on the situation in the Middle East and would be wise to work closely with the US. "Do we Europeans have the capacity to change the situation and influence this area? The answer is no," he said.

Aznar said that European policy was "not favorable to Israel," and that different political leaders in Europe used the Middle East question as a way to establish a different identity from the US.

Like Duh.

"In Europe, Israel is not very popular, not only this government, all governments," he said. "Most Europeans support the Palestinian cause. Europeans sincerely wish for a peace agreement and support the peace process, but the reality is that the peace process is closed. At this moment I think that Europe should work closely with the States, because that is the only opportunity to change the region."

One major problem with the Roadmap is that the Palestinians want the benefits, but not fulfill the obligations. This is the sort of mentality that the Euros relate to: birds of a feather...

Asked if Israel should, as a result, pay attention to the US, but not necessarily to Europe, Aznar succinctly replied: "Certainly."

Israel, forget the Chinese and terminate all technology exchanges (especially involving American technology and know-how) with them. It may not bite you now, but it WILL bite you.

He said that the French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution last week provided the EU a good opportunity to reform its polices and move away from the isolationist, anti-Americanism that he said defined much of its foreign policy.

Aznar's a good man, but does have his blind spots. But he can hope.

While Aznar, when in office, was considered one of Israel's closest friends in the EU, Spanish public opinion and the Spanish media are considered by some in the Foreign Ministry as among the most unfavorable in Europe.

Asked to explain this phenomenon, Aznar said that "the situation is improving." He attributed the negative image of Israel in Spain to the fact that the countries did not establish diplomatic ties until 1986.

"It is very difficult to have a good image without diplomatic relations. It is true in general that the majority of Spain supports the Palestinians, but this position has changed over the last few years, and is not as strong as it was," he said.

Exactly what's been said at Israpundit: They've been losing the PR war for decades, and aren't near to turning it around. Maybe they should take a page from the Saudis and use a Madison Avenue Advertising agency.

"Never has a man confused so many people by telling them exactly what he was going to do."

This little jewel was made by Orrin Judd in these comments.

Orrin's response to David of "going Harry" on them can only be appreciated by the regulars.

Via Orrin Judd at Brothers Judd comes this quote from this article at the London Times.

YOU HAVE to hand it to the French. No one matches their panache when it comes to demolishing the ancien régime and proclaiming a glorious new dawn. For the guerrilla resistance that has ambushed the heavy cavalry of the establishment, the likely “non” in tomorrow’s referendum on the European constitution is another dash for a radiant future. May 2005, they hope, will join all those other revolutionary beacons which have illuminated modern French history, from July 1789 to May 1968. Most of those revolts ended in tears and it is worth examining why this one is heading the same way.

The Elysée Palace and much of the continent will certainly view a “no” as a self-destructive tantrum by the nation that fathered the European project and put a Gallic stamp on the constitutional treaty. Amid the likely glee in Britain on Monday, though, remember that French rejection is largely driven not by hostility to the idea of Union but by the desire for “another Europe”, a dream alternative with France in the driver’s seat.

For the mutineers of Right and Left, the looming “no” is a chance to give a bloody nose to a rotten political class. This arrogant nomenklatura is being punished for failing to listen in 1992 when President Mitterrand almost lost his Maastricht referendum and again in 2002 when Jacques Chirac pursued business as usual after his traumatic re-election against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right bruiser. Beset with high unemployment, France clings to its protective state while blaming out-of-touch politicians for the malaise that has afflicted it for three decades. It has dumped its governments at every parliamentary election since 1978.

Voter whiplash. Entirely proper and the way a REAL Democracy REALLY WORKS.

As good French revolutionaries, the nonistes also see themselves blazing a trail not just for France but for humanity. They want to lead Europe on a hop back to the future. For the left-wing voters, this is the Utopia imagined by Karl Marx and last glimpsed elsewhere in the 1970s. For the Right, it is the sombre patrie of the paranoid and protectionist 1930s.

The people of Europe, say the nonistes, will cheer a “no” as the opening shot in the battle for a new, socially protective Union. “Ours is a ‘no’ of foundation,” says Philippe de Villiers, the rural aristocrat who has eclipsed Le Pen as champion of the nationalist Right. “Ours is a joyful ‘no’ of hope,” says Marie-George Buffet, the Communist leader, whose party is enjoying a new lease of life. Laurent Fabius, the socialist grandee who leads the middle class left-wing resistance, is talking about a salutory “no” of liberation.

Now, this makes some sort of sense: One MUST say "no" to one choice, if saying "Yes" to that choice blocks one's ability to say "Yes" to a better alternative at a later time.

This is astonishing: socialists are actually GRASPING the concept of causality.

However, the problem is that "better alternative at a later time." The current alternative is here NOW, while the better is later off. What IS the alternative of the nonistes?

Alone in Europe, France has no main party that openly favours the market. After 1981, the Socialists, under Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin, their recent Prime Minister, reformed by stealth while soothing their public with Marxism. M Chirac has most to answer for. Since his election in 1995 he has lulled the country with Socialist-sounding talk while his governments have stirred public wrath with modest reforms to the welfare state that clash with the President ’s promises. This has led to the surreal campaign this spring in which the dirtiest of words, for both the “yes” and “no” camps, has been “liberal”, meaning free-market thinking.

Thus, they are saying "non" now, because they think the proposed EU draft constitution is NOT SOCIALIST ENOUGH, since there are provisions in it that implement components of a free-market economy. Mind you, whatever free-market components are in the constitution, they won't be of help because they need the free-market components that are missing.

The argument of the nonists is that the mix of socialism and free-market components in the Constitution won't work. What a coincidence: I agree.

A rickshaw and a Jaguar automobile are perfectly fine means of transportation. Each will get you from point A to point B, and have their merits and demerits. But they work because the rickshaw is 100% rickshaw, and the Jaguar is 100% automobile. Thinking that you can merge a rickshaw with an automobile in a way to get all the merits and none of the demerits is the motivation of compromisers. What you'd get would be a rickwar (or a jagshaw), but I daresay the resulting mongrel would be impractical and nobody would buy it.

In the name of design purity, I'd toss the socialist components and go with a pure free-market system. They, ALSO in the name of design purity, would chuck the free-market components and use a pure socialist system.

We both agree that a mongrel system isn't going to work.

We just don't agree on which is the Jag and which is the rickshaw.

Via Brother's Judd comes this article from The Telegraph about recently completed research correlating abortion with risks in subsequent pregnancies

A French study of 2,837 births - the first to investigate the link between terminations and extremely premature births - found that mothers who had previously had an abortion were 1.7 times more likely to give birth to a baby at less than 28 weeks' gestation. Many babies born this early die soon after birth, and a large number who survive suffer serious disability.

The research leader, Dr Caroline Moreau, an epidemiologist at the Hôpital de Bicêtre in Paris, said the results of the study, which appear in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, provided conclusive evidence of a link between induced abortion and subsequent pre-term births.

The link?

Dr Moreau said: "Clearly there is a link. The results suggest that induced abortion can damage the cervix in some way that makes a premature birth more likely in subsequent pregnancies."

Her study compared the medical histories of 2,219 women with babies born at less than 34 weeks with another 618 who had given birth at full term. Overall, women who had had an abortion were 40 per cent more likely to have a very pre-term delivery (less than 33 weeks) than those without such a history. The risk of an extremely premature baby - one born at less than 28 weeks - was raised even more sharply, by 70 per cent. Abortion appeared to increase the risk of most major causes of premature birth, including premature rupture of membranes, incorrect position of the foetus on the placenta and spontaneous early labour. The only common cause of premature birth not linked to abortion was high blood pressure.

Mr Peter Bowen-Simpkins, a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a consultant obstetrician at the Sancta Maria Hospital in Swansea, said the study revealed that abortion might not be as safe as previously supposed. "This study shows that surgical termination of pregnancies may have late complications and may not be without risk," he said.

Denials and conspiracy theories will commence in 5, 4, 3, 2, . . .

At MSN. Check it out.

I pretty much agree.

Via Rantburg comes this jaw-dropping comment from Queen Margrethe II of Denmark:

We are being challenged by Islam these years - globally as well as locally. It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and lazy.

We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.

And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction.

She gets it. That quote goes on the masthead.

=> Read more!

She's gone.

Cautions for us pro-lifers to not resort to violence are superfluous and slanderous: The time for any sort of "redemptive violence" (whatever the hell that is) was last week, and there is no justification whatsoever for it now. Besides, everything human pro-lifers did, was seen as springing from Flesh and Politics, not Spirit and Love. Ditto for what anything we will do from now on, for having abandoned an objective moral code in favor of a tailored, personal one, the pro-death advocates know that the perception of moral authority has ceased to spring from an overarching, impersonal code. It has been replaced by assurances that one's motives spring from sincerety and good intentions, and that the motives of one's opponents springs from self-interest: thus the avoidance of discussing Michael Schiavo's motives and lifestyle.

Rest assured, however, that there will be hell to pay.

But when the butcher's bill is presented, it MUST be delivered by a hand unmistakably non-human.

Via Rantburg comes this delicious article wrung by blood, as it were, from the New York Times:

Ordinary Iraqis rarely strike back at the insurgents who terrorize their country. But just before noon today, a carpenter named Dhia saw a troop of masked gunmen with grenades coming towards his shop and decided he had had enough.

The man got mad as hell, and he wasn't going to take it any more.

As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their own AK-47's and opened fire, police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived.

This is why we have a second amendment, and why Liberals don't want you to keep it.

"We attacked them before they attacked us," Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, said in a brief exchange at his shop a few hours after the battle.

Preemption. The only way to deal with scum like this.

He did not give his last name. "We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen. I am waiting for the rest of them to come and we will show them."

Smart man. The mujahedeen who so very bravely ran away know where to find him, AND know he's ready and waiting.

It was the first time that private citizens are known to have retaliated successfully against insurgents.

'Bout damn time.

The battle was the latest sign that Iraqis may be willing to start standing up against the attacks that leave dozens of people dead here nearly every week. After a suicide bombing in Hilla last month that killed 136 people, including a number of women and children, hundreds of residents demonstrated in front of the city hall every day for almost a week, chanting slogans against terrorism. Last week, a smaller but similar rally took place in Baghdad. Another demonstration is scheduled for Wednesday in the capital.

The Iraquis are learning quick: Took them only a month to realize that protests and marches work fine in Seattle, Davos, Paris, and Washington DC, but that it comes up somewhat short in Hilla and Baghdad, where the shooting actually is taking place.

Two of Dhia's young nephews and a bystander were injured, the police said.

Good job, lads. Here's for a speedy recovery, and wear the scars with pride. May you be the pebbles that start the landslide...

Via Israpundit comes this quote from Barbara Lerner's article "Collapsing Temples in Gaza":

Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the man our press keeps assuring us is "a moderate," has made no move to disarm these men or the hundreds of thousands of others like them who form a majority of all Palestinians in the West Bank as well as Gaza. Instead, he proposes to integrate gunmen who are not already members of the Palestinian security forces into their ranks, arming and training them with huge new infusions of American and European cash.

Last week, Abbas sent a different message to the beleaguered minority of Palestinians who actually do want peace — those who try to thwart planned terrorist attacks by reporting them to Israeli authorities. Fifty-one Palestinians are currently under Palestinian death sentences, more than half of them for "collaborating" with Israel, but executions have been suspended since August 2002. On March 3, Abbas lifted the ban, ordering the execution of 15 of them this month.

Interesting how there was no storm of protest, no flurry of moral denunciatons from the normal suspects...

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson has definitely outdone himself in his latest article at his website: "Eurospeak: Sorting out the teenage sass".

There is simply so much good stuff, that I'd have to quote the entire article. His listing of the contradictory messages coming of Europe is dead-on: If you have EVER been irritated by the lefty-euro use of the magic word "BUT", then you have GOT to read how Dr. Hanson plucks it out of their hands and eviscerates them with it.

However, the following paragraph stands out head and shoulders in my eyes, since it puts in words a vague intuition that I have tried to voice in a couple of earlier posts, but never felt able to communicate clearly.

So if Europe sounds conflicted, that's because it is. One symptom of such a troubled patient is its blustering rhetoric — as if words can mask reality, as if idealistic vocabulary and shots at America can substitute for faith in Western values, sacrifice, and risk-taking. One reason that Europe understands so well the braggadocio and sense of inferiority of the impotent Muslim world is that it suffers precisely from some of these same maladies in its own problematic relationship with the United States. A Muslim in Europe who puts a picture of bin Laden on his wall is the equivalent of a European chanting that Bush is Hitler: The Arab does not really wish to destroy the opulent European network that he counts on, nor does the European in jeans with a cell phone truly wish the U.S. would stop protecting his lifestyle. Yet each feels terrible about his own hypocrisy and accompanying appetites for what he professedly hates, and so looks to express angst on the cheap.

Right on the money, in my humble opinion.

Let me throw out, in response to the above, my latest attempt at articulating this.

=> Read more!

Via Israpundit comes the following article by Charles Krauthammer. A summary:

Why did Ariel Sharon do this? Did the father of the settlement movement go soft? Defeatist? No. The Israeli right has grown up and given up the false dream of Greater Israel, encompassing the Palestinian territories. And the Israeli left has grown up too, being mugged by the intifada into understanding that you do not trust the lives of your children to the word of an enemy bent on your destruction.

For now, you trust only the defensive fence and the deterrent power of the Israeli army. Sharon is no dreamer like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who bargained away land for a piece of paper. Sharon, like any good general — and he was a great general — is giving up land for a stable defensive line.

Everyone wants peace, but Sharon's real obsession is terrorism. From his days as a young commando in the 1950s, he has been a fanatic about fighting terrorism. Take away the terror weapon and everything else follows: safety, stability and the conditions for a final peace. A peace based not on the good will of a Sharon or a Mahmoud Abbas but on the new reality on the ground: separate nations delineated by a temporary barrier to produce a temporary peace — and the possibility of a final one.

A barrier can be torn down, but a life lost to genocidal terrorism can never be restored.