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JOURNALISTS AS ENEMY PROPAGANDISTS

 The Marine incident, and its aftermath, at Haditha last November tells us much more about the media than it does about the Marines. And what it tells us ought to outrage us to the core.   

On every radio and television show I appeared on last week (and all I observed) in which this topic came up, without exception at least one of the media people immediately attempted to implicate not just the still-presumed-innocent Marines, but the American military's leadership and methods in general.     

The "Drive By Media" (Rush Limbaugh's scientifically accurate description) has already started to report this story in a manner that is likely do vast damage that may last for several years to the morale (and possibly recruitment) of our military. It will create a propaganda catastrophe of strategic proportions in our mortal struggle with radical Islam and their terrorist spear point.     

And all this is being done by journalists who should be considered enemy propagandists.

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ARE WE ALL LIBERALS NOW?

Playwright and socialism-advocate George Bernard Shaw famously declared a century ago that “We’re all socialists now” - meaning that socialist ideas had so permeated English society they were advocated however disguised even by their opponents.

The current hysteria over the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners is evidence that American society has become so infected with envy-appeasing liberalism that “We’re all liberals now.”

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OILY LIES OF THE LEFT

With oil prices reaching record levels, the left is up to its old tricks, blaming the President and calling for lots of expensive big government "solutions". As part of this push, they argue that we're running out of oil.  

But clearly, this argument is not new -- and it's dead wrong.  

Truth be told, the world's estimated oil reserves grew from 60 billion barrels in 1920 to 600 billion by 1950, 2,000 billion by 1990, and 3,000 billion by the year 2000. And in the next few years, they'll keep rising. Here's why.

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CHINA’S THREE NO’S

Chinese are fond of compressing a social, political, or economic issue into a set of bullet points designated by the number of them. One of the most famous was “The Three Rounds,” encapsulating Chinese material dreams as they began emerging from the horror of Mao Tse Tung.

You were wealthy in post-Mao China if you possessed a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine -- the three “rounds.”

That was a quarter-century ago. Comparing the dream of having The Three Rounds to China’s economy today gives you an idea of how amazingly far China has traveled in that period. China has been speeding along a highway of wealth creation that has few parallels in history - yet now it looks like it is going to drive right off a cliff.

What is transforming the Chinese economy from a dream to a nightmare are The Three No’s: No Water, No Wives, and No Banks.

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HOW DIFFERENT IS AMERICAN EDUCATION FROM COMMUNISM?

When I went to college I had my biggest problem with the discipline of history. It may have started when I was a kid in Hungary and first ran up against official "scholars" who rewrote Hungary's history-renamed the streets in Budapest, rewrote all the textbooks, and reshuffled the holidays, and even completely recast Western intellectual history.

Under Marxism there was room for just one account of the development of philosophy, namely, what Karl Marx and his epigones wrote.

At first I thought that in a relatively free society historians could be trusted a lot more than under Marxism. But I am not so sure about this now.

To begin with, the one major institution of American society that's very similar to what it had been under communism is education.

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ARABS AND AZTECS

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam.

Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques.

Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs.

The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem:

There is nothing like death in war
Nothing like the flowery death
So precious to the gods who give us life
Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it!

The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.

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THERE IS NO RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE

In the advertisement "A Renewed American Agenda" (USA Today, May 4, 2006) - placed by The Bedell World Citizenship Fund of Spirit Lake, Iowa - the organization urges us to "Recognize that All Americans Have A Right to Medical Care."

I suppose they mean well but in fact they are perpetrating a gross misunderstanding about individual rights.

Medical care is a value doctors, nurses and other medical professionals would, if they were free men and women, provide to those they would choose as recipients, on terms they regard as acceptable.

These provisions are not owed to anyone. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals may not be placed into involuntary servitude to those needing their services. The relationships must be voluntary, no matter how vital those services are to the recipients.

The belief that others may justly be placed into involuntary servitude so as to secure funds to pay medical professionals - who then will service those who need their work - is a gross moral error.

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TERRORISM ON THE ROPES?

At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico this week, George Bush assured America: “I know what I’m doing” regarding winning the war against Moslem terrorists in Iraq and threatening our country. Although the Pogo Press is doing its best to prevent voters from figuring it out, GW is right. He is conducting a full court press right now, and rolling the terrorists up in a ball.

Let’s start with Afghanistan. The Taliban is breaking apart. About one-third of the Taliban remnants still fighting in Afghanistan have broken away from Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, who has now lost control of a number of his senior commanders. The pressure of 18,000 American and NATO soldiers relentlessly hunting them down and killing them has precipitated the dissolution of the Taliban.

Then there are all the contract guys across the border in Pakistan.

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THE TORTURE OF TIBET

[To The Point salutes the courageous Chinese lady, Wenyi Wang, who publicly denounced Communist oppression in China to Hu Jintao at the White House yesterday, April 20. 

 

Hu Jintao governed Tibet for several years, brutally tyrannizing the Tibetan people.  One of those Tibetans is Phuntsog Nyidron, who tells her story here.  For information on how to help liberate Tibet, go to FreeTibet.org. ---JW]

I was 19 years old when I made the protest that resulted in my imprisonment for 15 years. It happened in 1989, when my country, Tibet, was under martial law.

Together with a group of fellow Tibetan nuns, I went to the Barkhor area of central Lhasa, and we shouted, 'Long live the Dalai Lama!' and 'Free Tibet.' We had been inspired by the news that His Holiness the Dalai Lama had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and we wanted to make a statement of our continued loyalty to him.
    

I did not experience freedom again until I was finally released to the care of the D.C.-based International Campaign for Tibet last month on March 15.

On my arrival in Washington, I was told the Chinese government had apparently allowed me to go to the U.S. to help ensure a smooth and successful visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao, who meets President Bush.

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CROATIA BOOM UPDATE

To update you on the Freedom Research Foundation delegation to Croatia with Congressman George Radonovich, June 26-July 3:

The delegation,led by me and accompanied by Congressman George Radonovich, will be focusing on investment opportunities in real estate, tourism, construction companies, and investment banking.

As I mentioned last week (“The Pro-America VIP Investment European Vacation,” now posted in the Classics section), we’ll be meeting with Prime Minister Ivo Senader, government officials, business leaders and bankers.

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ILLEGALS AND SENATORS ON ONE SIDE, VOTERS ON THE OTHER

 It is lucky America has more than two centuries of mostly calm experience with self-government. We are going to need to fall back on that invaluable patrimony if the immigration debate continues as it has started this season.

The Senate is attempting to legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public. The Senate Judiciary Committeemen - and probably a majority of the Senate - are convinced that they know that the American people don't know what is best for them. 

The senators should remember that they are American senators, not Roman proconsuls. Nor is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee some latter-day Praetor Maximus. 

But if they would be dictators, it would be nice if they could at least be wise (until such time as the people can electorally kick their regrettable backsides out of town). It was gut-wrenching to watch the senators prattle on in their idle ignorance concerning the manifold economic benefits that will accrue to the body politic if we can just cram a few million more uneducated illegals into the country.  I guess ignorance loves company.

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THE PROBLEM OF STATE

The State Department is causing most of the problems in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom. There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.

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BAGHDAD ISN’T GETTYSBURG

If surgeons wielded scalpels as carelessly as to day's journalists misuse language, the mortality rate in our hospitals would soar. The latest example of this deadly abuse of terminology was the media's declaration of "civil war" in Iraq.

It was the equivalent of describing vandalism as genocide. The blaze faded, only to be reignited briefly by former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's statement last weekend that Iraq was in a civil war - a claim he swiftly retracted, to the disappointment of anchormen and -women everywhere.

Perhaps it's time to consider what a civil war actually is.


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THE MYTH OF MECCA

For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands history on its head.

They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes as Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real history.

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