Do We Really Seek Freedom?
The entire world is perplexed about us - the Arabs - and no longer knows whether we truly live on this planet or came from another planet. Are all the Arab peoples in need of psychological treatment, or are we a hopeless case for which psychological treatment will make no difference?
Early last October, a senior White House henchman, let’s call him Richard Head, paid Janet Reno a visit. The conversation went something like this.
Head: Ms. Reno, the president is very concerned that you do the right thing regarding criminal investigations of his administration.
Reno: That’s reassuring, Richard — may I call you Dick?
Head: Yes — so we at the White House would like you to prosecute Bill.
Reno (spilling her coffee): Prosecute the president? But I thought no matter how massive the evidence against him, I was to stonewall…
Head: No, Ms. Reno, that’s the wrong Bill —
(The following letter was sent to TTP by a Vietnam Veteran familiar with “Swift Boat” tactics in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. He is a Rear Admiral (Ret.) and a Graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1959).
I was in the Delta shortly after Kerry left. I know that area well. I know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used. I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116 (PBRs) I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's command.
Here are my problems and suspicions:
The older you get, the more staying in shape is like being the Red Queen of Wonderland: You have keep running faster and faster to stay in the same place.
I want to wish you all a healthy and strong 2004. I can’t tell you how to achieve this, however, because I’m not you and we all have our individual differences and preferences. What I could do is tell you what works for me. This means I don’t have to insert any boilerplate blather about “consult your physician before doing any of this stuff.” You get to make up your own mind about that, and adapt for yourself whatever you think may be useful...
You first learned in The CIA in Deep Qaaqaa last October about a group of left-wing “Rogue Weasels” that incoming CIA Director Porter Goss was purging from Langley.
It’s important to understand that the CIA has been a left-wing outfit since the 1970s. The Watergate Scandal was pretty much a coup to oust Richard Nixon from the White House conducted in a cooperative effort by the CIA left-wingers, the Democrat Party, and the Media. This same cabal thinks it can conduct a similar coup against George Bush and Karl Rove over the ridiculous Plamegate nonsense.
Problem is, Bush is smarter than Nixon, the bloggers are smarter than Old Media, and Porter Goss is smarter than the Weasels. In fact, many of the Weasels are unbelievably stupid. Take ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson...
None of all the momentous events that occurred in 2003 -- the recovery of the US economy, the invasion of Iraq and military overthrow of Saddam’s regime, the capture of Saddam, the capitulation of Libya’s Kaddafi, you name it -- was the most important. The single most important event of 2003 is the one that didn’t occur: there was not one single successful terrorist attack in the United States.
This is the single greatest achievement of the year -- and note the identifier achievement. This is not a lucky accident -- although luck and chance played a role as in most everything else in life. But those who are truly wise know that to a very considerable extent, you make your own luck, and this is what George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft have done.
One of the most amusing sights of 2003 was to see so many people turn their brains into jello over John Ashcroft. Anyone who has personally known Ashcroft can testify to his decency and integrity. Yet he and his Patriot Act became the focal point of hate for both the Loony Left and the Loony Right -- the Hollywood Left and Dizzy Dean Democrats see eye-to-eye with Jane Fonda Libertarians like Lew Rockwell, Pro-Moslem Conservatives like Grover Norquist, and Hate-Israel Paleocons like Pat Buchanan…
As you are reading this, 300,000 Ethiopian fighters are pitched astride the border from 200,000 Eritrean soldiers, separated by less than 4,000 UN peacekeepers (a mission that incidentally costs taxpayers almost $200 million per year). Half a million heavily armed men facing each other with hate-filled eyes and itchy trigger fingers.
Even a minor incident could spark all-out war. And a number of State Department bureaucrats seem determined to do nothing to prevent it.
It wasn’t that long ago that a good many European Jews swore an oath: Never Again. Never Again will Nazi-like anti-Semitism be tolerated. Never Again will Jews be meekly herded down a path that leads to Zyklon-B showers.
So in response to the explosion of anti-Semitism in France, what is the advice of France’s chief rabbi, Joseph Sitruk? Replace yarmulkes with baseball caps.
"I ask young Jews to be alert, to avoid walking alone, to avoid wearing the yarmulke in the street or in the subway and consequently becoming targets for potential assailants," Rabbi Sitruk cautions. "I ask them to replace the yarmulke with the baseball cap.” This is the best way, he warns, “to protect our young people."
Au contraire, Monsieur Rabbi. The best way for your young people to protect themselves would be for them to learn how to beat the crap out of those who attack them. Someone needs to make Rabbi Sitruk write 500 times on a blackboard the French translation of: The Best defense Is A Good Offense…
Tony Blankley, the erudite editorial editor of The Washington Times, certainly knows his Toynbee. I can attest to this, with all 12 volumes of Arnold Toynbee’s masterwork, A Study of History, residing on my bookshelf.
Toynbee studied the rise and fall of entire civilizations rather than individual countries or ethnic groups. His model for the success and failure of civilizations was challenge-and-response. Those that rose to a challenge flourished, while those that didn’t failed.
Tony, however - who is both my neighbor and friend of long standing - focuses on one of the most fascinating yet little understood insights of Toynbee’s model: that without challenges, a successful civilization will stagnate and culturally implode.
In other words, Western Civilization will die unless there is a challenge to it. Islam, the whole civilization or culture of Islam with Jihadism as its most extreme manifestation, has become that challenge. “In the strangest possible irony,” writes Tony in his new book, Jihadism is giving the West a “chance to regain its faith in itself.”
[Tarek Heggy, a native Arab Egyptian, is one of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals and most successful business managers. He is the author of innumerable articles and several books, and is a frequent guest lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England.]
I have written many books and articles over the last ten years about the defects in the Arab mind-set, all of which are cultural defects stemming from three main sources.
The first is the repressive climate that prevails throughout Arab societies, the second a backward educational system that lags far behind modern educational systems and the third a mass-media apparatus operated by those responsible for the climate of political repression to serve their interests.
The following are the most obvious defects from which the contemporary Arab mind-set suffers:
If you bought a home 10 years ago for $100,000 and just sold it for $300,000, have you engaged in price gouging? Most people would say "no," provided there were willing buyers and sellers of both sides of the transaction merely responding to the market at the time.
As a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, some politicians have demanded prosecution of "price gougers." In many states, like Florida, "price gouging" is illegal. The Florida statutes say, "It is illegal to charge unconscionable prices for goods or services following a declared state of emergency."
Hmmm, I know what the law means when says burglary or murder are illegal, but an "unconscionable price"?
The thunderous boos of New England Patriots fans in Boston Stadium during the performance of black racist singer Kanye West during the NFL Kickoff Show September 8th are only the start of a massive backlash.
West’s earlier claim - at a fundraising telethon for Katrina victims - that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” was appropriately condemned by First Lady Laura Bush as “disgusting.” That’s going to be the view of more and more Americans towards the left’s deranged politicalization of Katrina.
The Left Stream Media’s warnings of how Bush’s alleged “failures” regarding Katrina are going to hurt Republican candidates in 2006 is just wishful thinking. One reason is that 2006 is shaping up to be The Year of the Black Republican.
This coming revolution in US politics will take place in a huge swath of America, from Chesapeake Bay to Lake Superior, and it has the potential to gut the Democrat Party.
Assume you were a regular blood donor but had an accident in which you lost a considerable amount of blood. Do you think you should increase or decrease the size and frequency of your blood donations until you recover?
Though most politicians are smart enough to answer, "decrease the blood donations," many seem not smart enough to understand that, when you take an economic hit, you don't want to unnecessarily add burdens to the economy.
I refer to the call from some politicians to increase taxes or not extend President Bush's tax cuts to "pay" for Katrina.
Why is this cold, rainy land with its stark volcanic landscape, without much in the way of natural resources, one of the wealthiest places on Earth?
Small states, in the past, were most often poorer on a per capital income basis than large states, but in the last half-century many have become much richer then their large neighbors. Among the wealthiest places on the planet, we now find Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland, none with many natural resources.
In a just-concluded meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Iceland, some leaders of small states that have developed very successful economies met with some of the worlds' leading free-market economists and policy institute professionals, partly to discuss what lessons the rest of the world can learn from these small states.
Here is what they concluded.
One of the many markers distinguishing civilized from primitive and traditional societies is that the former possess the concept of luck, both good and bad, while the latter do not.
There is no word for luck in the language of many American Indian tribes such as the Navaho, African tribes such as the Azande, Amazon tribes such as the Yanomamo, or New Guinea tribes such as the Dobu. The concept is absent, literally inconceivable, in their thinking about the way the world works.
How could something, anything, happen out of sheer blind chance? Whatever happens to anybody, good or bad, it was caused by spirits placated to be benevolent or goaded to be malevolent. Man is always the toy of demons. That’s a primitive mind at work.
Thus the primitive compulsion to find someone to blame for misfortune. Since there really is no such thing as sheer misfortune, tragedies must always be someone’s fault, the someone who incurred the anger of the spirits and brought down their punishment suffered by all.
So the primitive mentalities of leftist intellectuals and politicians within hours of the horror of Katrina began a chorus of blame, pointing their spiteful superstitious fingers at President Bush.
