When Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, held a well-publicized hearing on a specific new type of terrorist threat last April, a lot of folks got scared. It turns out the threat is marginal. Instead of being called the EMP Terror, it should be called the EMP Annoyance.

EMP stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse, caused by a nuclear bomb exploding not on or near the surface but high in the atmosphere. Kyl claims it’s the easiest way for America to be defeated by its enemies.

An EMP attack from a single Scud missile, launched by a Nuclear Iran from a freighter in international waters, would have according to Senator Kyl, “irreversible effects on the country's ability to support any large fraction of its present human population. Those who survived would find themselves transported back to the United States of the 1880s.”

I suppose this is what happens when politicians, well-meaning and patriotic (for let there be no doubt - John Kyl is one of the good guys on Capitol Hill) yet who know very little science get scared of a threat they don’t understand. (Again: Kyl is very bright - he was a Phi Beta Kappa in college and a smart lawyer - but he has no scientific background.)

His staffers also didn’t do their homework - for it turns out that there already has been an EMP attack on an American city, and nothing much happened.

These two Tibetan lamas blowing their tunchen horns, are calling the Buddhist faithful to prayer atop the Stok monastery in a remote Himalayan region called Ladakh. The river below is the Upper Indus. On the other side of the mountains in the distance is China - for Ladakh is in India, that part of Tibet that escaped seizure by the Communist Chinese. I took this picture in 1993.

The Chicoms’ courtship of India has been much in the news lately, with India usually portrayed as swooning over Beijing’s attention and flattery. Dire predictions are being made of India being suckered into a strategic Sino-Indo alliance with China the dominant partner. Analyses are being issued celebrating India jilting the US in favor of China, causing the “souring of the India-US honeymoon.” Don’t believe it.

For all those worried or elated about China’s bonding with India to America’s detriment, here’s the reality without the filters and blinders: It is India that is playing China like a fiddle, not the other way around.

In 1977, the original Star Wars morality play of heroes fighting for freedom against the evil Galactic Empire resonated with millions of people struggling for their own freedom against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. Now in Star Wars III, George Lucas wants folks to associate the Galactic Empire with America and the freedom-destroying dictator Palpatine with George Bush.

So it was gratifying to see both adults and kids in the audience not taken in by this stupidity, and howl with derisive laughter when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader and wails “Noooooooooooooooooooo!” upon learning his wife has died. Despite its special effects eye candy, the movie is a joke, pathetically written and acted..

It does, however, contain one supremely educative moment. It’s not when Obi-Wan blurts out unintelligibly, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes” (as if the whole point of all six movies isn’t about the absolutes of the Sith as evil bad guys and the virtue of fighting against them). It’s Palpatine’s rationale for suppressing rebellion against his tyranny: When the rebels are defeated, there will be “peace.”

Let’s hope Star Wars III teaches lots of people the difference between the “peace” that comes from submission and the peace that comes from freedom. Thus, lots of Moslems should see it.

Earlier this month in The Golden Fleece of Freedom, we discussed how there was no word for peace in Russian. It turns out there is no word for peace in Arabic either.

Two weeks ago on May 14, a small group of folks staged a peaceful rally in Baldwin Park, a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles suburb. It was to demand the removal of a monument to anti-white racist hatred and bigotry, which is on public property and was erected by the city council at taxpayer expense. Here is one of its inscriptions:



They, of course, are the hated “Anglos,” the white European-Americans who “stole” the land from Mexico - who stole it from Spain who stole it from Indian tribes such as the Chumash (not the Aztecs, whose empire was in central Mexico, 2,000 miles away from LA), who stole it from other Indian tribes like the Shoshone.

The rally was met by a far larger, violent counter-demonstration led by an organization of Mexican Nazis who call themselves Reconquistas. These are people who want to “reconquer” the entire American Southwest ceded to the US in 1848 and have it become part of Mexico again.

One of the Reconquista chants was “Go back to Europe, go back to England, Gringos.” Another was, “Viva (long live) Zarqawi, the Gringo Killer,” in praise of arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s killing American soldiers in Iraq.

I first wrote about the Reconquistas two years ago in America’s Curse. Since then, they have become ever more explicitly and virulently pro-terrorist. The Baldwin Park incident this month is simply the latest example of how impossibly dangerous Mexican illegal immigration has become to America’s national security.

Last August in To The Point, Ariel Cohen in Terror in Tashkent told you about two Islamist movements in Uzbekistan, the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a designated terrorist group) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. What Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has done with the stupidity of only which a Soviet apparatchik is capable, is to drive moderate Moslems into their arms.

The Massacre of Andijan that took place last Friday, May 13, with Uzbek soldiers murdering hundreds of men, women, and children in cold blood, is only Karimov’s latest effort to do so. When he took power, he promptly blew the most monumental opportunity in the Moslem world to create a modern Islam.

As the head of the Soviet Communist Party in Uzbekistan, Karimov seized power as the USSR dissolved into its constituent Republics in 1990. His primary goal since then has been to hold on to that power at all costs, turning Uzbekistan into a police state. As a Soviet apparatchik, he has no understanding of economics, no appreciation for the consequences of destroying the environment, and no capacity to prevent his paranoia from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Karimov’s standard rationale for power is holding up the boogeyman of terrorist Islam. “I am the only thing in the way, I am the only man capable of preventing a Taliban takeover of Uzbekistan,” he claims. On the contrary, he may have made it inevitable.