Reality lessons for LWPCAS

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Private Papers
www.victorhanson.com

December 20, 2005
Iraq and Moral Distortion
by Victor Davis Hanson
The American Enterprise Magazine

The war that began on September 11, 2001 has unfortunately pushed international moral relativism and anti-Americanism back onto the front burner. Ugly paradoxes abound:

European and American journalists agonized over a purportedly mistreated Koran in Guantanamo Bay, yet remain silent about the police state right outside of Gitmo’s walls.
Sexual stupidity at Abu Ghraib gets far more weight than the thousands murdered in the same building by the dictatorship that America ended.
The U.N. is held up as a morally superior alternative to coalitions of the willing, even after the vast Oil-for-Food scandal that enriched Saddam and U.N. insiders at the expense of everyday Iraqi lives has been exposed.
France and Germany present themselves as alternatives to U.S. leadership in solving the problems of the Middle East, even though they were the main traffickers with Saddam up until the very eve of the war, and have sent money to terror groups like Hamas.
The U.S., which has welcomed millions of Arab immigrants, and given billions in aid to Egypt, Palestine, and Jordan, and rescued Muslims in Kuwait, Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, and Afghanistan must now plead that we are not anti-Muslim.
How did America’s willingness to remove fascistic and odious regimes like the Taliban and Iraqi Baathism result in such a skewed moral reaction?
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Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing writer for The American Enterprise.

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http://www.humaneventsonline.com/lists.php?id=12331

Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Top 10 Most Dangerous Professors in America

by David Horowitz
Based on the new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery—a HUMAN EVENTS sister company). Visit HUMAN EVENTS U for more information and exclusive content.

10. “bell hooks”
Born Gloria Watkins, spells new name in lower case. Has written, “It is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest” and “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.” hooks is a distinguished professor of English at City College in New York.

9. Amiri Baraka
Born Everett Leroy Jones in 1934, adopted current name after converting to Islam in 1968. Former poet laureate of New Jersey. Has written: “… the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence [by a black man] is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped” and “I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured.” Baraka has received a series of academic appointments at prestigious universities throughout the U.S.

8. Tom Hayden
Former leader of the 1960s-era radical group Students for a Democratic Society. Calls for an antiwar “strategy” to defeat the U.S. in Iraq. Lecturer in politics at Occidental College, California. Hayden has no scholarly publications, nor does he have any training beyond a B.A. that would qualify him to teach.

7. Joseph Massad
Calls for the destruction of “the Jewish State.” Believes the “Jewish state is a racist state that does not have the right to exist,” and “the Jews are not a nation.” Massad teaches modern arab politics and intellectual history and an introductory course on Israeli politics at Columbia University.

6. Jose Angel Gutierrez
A former judge for Zavala County, Texas. Established the militant La Raza Unida (“the Unified Race”), an association dedicated to the belief that the Southwest does not rightfully belong to the U.S. Once said, “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.” Gutierrez teaches political science at the University of Texas, Arlington.

5. Armando Navarro
Advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government by Latinos, and Mexico’s reclaiming the Southwestern U.S. In 2002, sworn in as a member of the State Central Committee for the Party of Democratic Revolution, a Socialist party in Mexico. Navarro teaches ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside.

4. Gayle Rubin
Recipient of the Woman of the Year Award from the National Leather Association, a sadomasochist, fetish, bondage organization. Proponent of pedophilia. Argues that the government’s crack-down on child molesters is a “savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Rubin teaches anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

3. Angela Davis
Former member of the Communist Party and Black Panthers. Once on the run from the FBI. Indicted, but acquitted (her trial was a farce), for involvement in the death of a California judge and three others outside a courthouse in Marin County, Calif. Received the Lenin Peace Prize from the former Soviet Union. Davis teaches the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

2. Bill Ayers
Former commander in the Weather Underground. Spent most of the 1970s on the run from the FBI. In a coincidence, rich in irony, he was interviewed in the New York Times on 9/11 and said, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers teaches early childhood development at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

1. Bernardine Dohrn
A leader of the Weather Underground. Spent most of the 1970s on the run from the FBI. Once said of the Manson murders of actress Sharon Tate and others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” The stomach was that of pregnant Sharon Tate. Dohrn teaches law at Northwestern University.

the caracal kid

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Riedl, Heritage’s Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs, also points out that in the past 25 years,

*The share of taxes paid by the wealthiest fifth of Americans has actually increased, from 56 percent to 66 percent

*The share of taxes paid by the middle three-fifths of Americans has declined from 41 percent to 33 percent

*The share of taxes paid by the bottom fifth has declined from two percent to one percent—so the poor effectively pay no taxes

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The enemies of freedom

By George Will
Feb 26, 2006

WASHINGTON -- In some recess of David Irving's reptile brain, he knows that his indefensible imprisonment is helping his side. His side consists of all the enemies of open societies.

Irving, born in England in 1938, was a prodigy of perversity, asking for a copy of "Mein Kampf'' as a school prize. He grew up to be a "moderate fascist'' -- his description -- historian who has made a career of arguing, in many books and incessant speeches, that although many Jews died of disease and hardship during the Second World War, nothing like the Holocaust -- 6 million victims of industrialized murder -- occurred.

Holocaust deniers, from crackpots to the president of Iran, argue that the "so-called'' gas chambers were only for showers or fumigation; that Zyklon B gas was too weak to produce mass deaths; that it was too strong to be used -- it would have killed those emptying the chambers; that the crematoria were built after the war by Poles as a macabre tourist attraction, or by Jews to extort compensation; that Germans concocted "evidence'' of "genocide'' to please their conquerors; etc.

Holocaust denial, which is anti-Semitism tarted up with the trappings of historiography, is a crime in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland. And in Austria, which criminalizes speech that "denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify'' Nazi atrocities.

In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among much else, that only 74,000 Jews died of natural causes in work camps and millions were spirited to Palestine after the war. An arrest warrant was issued. Last November, Irving was arrested when he came to Austria to address some right-wing students. Last week, while Europe was lecturing Muslims about the virtue of tolerating free expression by Danish cartoonists, Irving was sentenced to three years in prison.

What folly. What dangers do the likes of Irving pose? Holocaust denial is the occupation of cynics and lunatics who are always with us but are no reason for getting governments into the dangerous business of outlawing certain arguments. Laws criminalizing Holocaust denial open a moral pork barrel for politicians: Many groups can be pandered to with speech restrictions. Why not a law regulating speech about slavery? Or Stalin's crimes?

Some defenders of the prosecution of Irving say Europe -- and especially Austria, Hitler's birthplace -- rightly has, from recent history, an acute fear of totalitarians. But that historical memory should cause Europe to recoil from government-enforced orthodoxy about anything.

American legislators, using the criminal law for moral exhibitionism, enact "hate crime'' laws. Hate crimes are, in effect, thought crimes. Hate crime laws mandate enhanced punishments for crimes committed as a result of, or at least when accompanied by, particular states of mind of which the government particularly disapproves. Governments that feel free to stigmatize, indeed criminalize, certain political thoughts and attitudes will move on to regulating what expresses such thoughts and attitudes -- speech.

For several decades in America, the aim of much of the jurisprudential thought about the First Amendment's free speech provision has been to justify contracting its protections. Freedom of speech is increasingly "balanced'' against "competing values.'' As a result, it is whittled down, often by seemingly innocuous increments, to a minor constitutional afterthought.

On campuses, speech codes have abridged the right of free expression in order to protect the right -- for such it has become -- of certain preferred groups to not be offended. The NCAA is truncating the right of some colleges and universities to express their identity using mascots deemed "insensitive'' to the feelings of this or that grievance group. Campaign finance laws ration the amount and control the timing and content of political speech. The right to free political speech is now "balanced'' against society's interest in leveling the political playing field, or elevating the tone of civic discourse, or enabling politicians to spend less time soliciting contributions, or allowing candidates to control the content of their campaigns, or dispelling the "appearance'' of corruption, etc.

To protect the fragile flower of womanhood, a judge has ruled that use of gender-based terms such as "foreman'' or "draftsman'' could create a "hostile environment'' and hence constitute sexual harassment. To improve all of us, people with various agendas are itching to get government to regulate speech of this or that sort.

Even open societies have would-be mullahs. But the more serious threats to freedom are mullahs who control societies: Irving, expecting a suspended sentence, had planned to travel to Tehran to participate in a conference, organized by Iran's government, to promote Holocaust denial.

George F. Will is a 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner, whose columns are syndicated in more than 400 magazines and newspapers worldwide.

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Why the Left doesn't blame Muslims for Muslim violence

By Dennis Prager
Feb 28, 2006

There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered.

The most recent example is the blaming of Denmark, or at least the Danish newspaper, for publishing cartoons of Muhammad. From Kofi Annan to The New York Times -- and the other American newspapers that declared respect for religious symbols a new journalistic virtue -- liberal and leftist opinion always condemns violent Muslim demonstrations, but always with a "but." The "but" is that in the final analysis, it was the Danish and other European papers' faults for insulting the Muslim prophet.

This is only the latest example of finding the victims of Islamic violence responsible for that violence.

For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don't engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don't, so they use the poor man's nuclear weapon -- suicide terror.

The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don't we support Israel?

And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq.

When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course -- France doesn't know how to assimilate immigrants, and, as the BBC reported on Nov. 5, 2005, "[Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy's much-quoted description of urban vandals as 'rabble' a few days before the riots began is said by many to have already created tension." Calling rabble "rabble" causes them to act like to rabble.

If you wish to test the thesis that the Left blames those blown up for being blown up by Muslim terrorists, have your son or daughter at college ask some liberal arts professors who is to blame for 9-11 or Muslim suicide bombers in Israel, etc.

In fact, one way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and liberals is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and liberals blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.

We Americans are used to this. For decades, liberals have blamed violent crime in America on racism and poverty, i.e., on American society far more than on the murderers, rapists, arsonists and muggers themselves. Conservatives blame the criminals.

During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people at American racism. The daily special section on the riots in the major local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, was titled, "Understanding the Rage."

Though Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs correspondent, has been among the few prominent liberals to support the Iraq War, he regularly blames Islamic terror on unemployment in the Arab world.

Since examples of liberals refusing to blame criminals and terrorists for their behavior are legion, let's try to figure out why this moral inversion is so common.

Here are three hypotheses:

One is that liberals tend to blame outside forces for evil. This emanates from the secular humanistic view of people as basically good -- and therefore human evil must come not from the bad choices and bad values of the evildoer, but from the unfortunate socioeconomic and other circumstances of the person's life.

The second explanation is that as you go further left on the political spectrum, it becomes increasingly difficult to blame the "weak" for any atrocities they commit. The Left does not divide the world between good and evil nearly as much as it does between rich and poor, and between strong and weak. Israel is stronger and richer, so Palestinian terror is excused. White America is stronger and richer than black America, so black violence is excused. The West is stronger and richer than the Muslim world, so Muslim violence is explained accordingly.

And third, liberals tend to be afraid of the truly evil. That's why the liberal newspapers of America refused to publish the Danish cartoons, probably the most newsworthy cartoons ever drawn, but have never had any hesitance about showing cartoons and photos that mock Jewish and Christian symbols. Christians and Jews don't kill editors.

We don't know who will be the next target of Islamic or other murderers from poor or non-Western or non-white groups. All we can know is that liberal and leftist thought will find reasons to hold the targeted group largely responsible.

Dennis Prager is a radio talk show host, author, and contributing columnist for Townhall.com.

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Unhealthy discrimination
The View From Ottawa

Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, February 28, 2006
A Cornwall woman's problem at a community health centre demonstrates what a zero-sum affair health care in Ontario has become.

Shirley Ravary, an English-speaker, went to see her family doctor at a clinic where he works part of the time; she says she was turned away because the clinic's purpose is to provide primary care to Cornwall's francophones. She calls it discrimination, and she's right.

The government says there's a shortage of French-language health services there.

If Ms. Ravary spoke broken French, could she have been served? What if she came with her French-speaking husband?

None of this would matter if there were enough health services for Cornwall anglophones such as Ms. Ravary, so that she could have a family doctor and make a short-notice appointment. Instead, the government's mismanagement has yielded a shortage, so that Cornwall's francophone clinic can only provide minimal services to its clientele by cannibalizing the inadequate services available to others.
Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman owes us all better.

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Finding answers to Iraq’s WMD
By Boston Herald editorial staff
Sunday, March 12, 2006

The time is right for another look at whether Iraq really had weapons of mass destruction. There have been just too many recent reports, impossible to brush off, that they were transferred to Syria shortly before the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The place to start is the 2 million documents captured by U.S. forces in Iraq along with more than 2,500 hours of audiotapes of Saddam Hussein’s meetings with underlings.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has introduced a bill to release the material and may hold hearings this spring.
Twelve hours of tapes and 28 al-Qaeda documents captured in Afghanistan have been made public, and Hoekstra has been given 40 documents from the Iraqi pile by John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, that Hoekstra must keep secret. This is far from adequate.
Hoekstra says he has an open mind. His staff tried to check claims by former Iraqi Air Force Gen. Georges Sada that chemical or biological weapons were flown to Syria in 56 flights, but was unable to confirm it.
The suspicions do not rest on Sada alone. A former deputy undersecretary of defense, John A. Shaw, who was responsible for keeping track of Iraq’s weapons programs, says special Russian troops in civilian clothes handled the transfer of Saddam’s WMDs to Syria. An Israeli general, Moshe Yaalon, has made a similar claim. The general in charge of Pentagon spy satellites has admitted observing large truck convoys from Iraq to Syria before the war began.
Yet most of the 2 million documents have not been explored or even translated. It’s almost as if the CIA and the Pentagon don’t want to know what they contain.
The CIA’s clandestine war against the White House means the agency cannot be trusted for an honest account of what’s in this material. Hoekstra’s committee, and Congress, should make sure that an independent body with no ax to grind checks the documents and releases every last one that can be made public safely, except perhaps for the mess-kit repair orders and laundry invoices, no matter who might be embarrassed or how long it takes.
Washington isn’t Baghdad. Saddam’s secrets need not be protected, especially not at the expense of this administration’s credibility.

http://news.bostonherald.com/opinion...74&format=text

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What these massive demonstrations reveal is the narcissism, laziness and irresponsibility inculcated by socialist societies.

Enough generations of socialist policies have now passed for us to judge their effects. They are bleak. Socialism undermines the character of a nation and of its citizens. In simpler words, socialism makes people worse.

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Katie Gets Advice for Communism Class
March 24, 2006

CALLER: Good! Well, I really need your help, and I am not the type of person to mess around, so I decided just to call you, the expert. I am in a communism class here in Michigan.
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RUSH: Okay. All right. I knew it. She's right, but I knew they don't have the guts to call it what it is. No liberal ever does. So you're taking PoliSci. What's going on in there?
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RUSH: To create a communist society: the first thing you do is you build a wall around wherever the people live, either the country or the county or the city. Then you put security checkpoints on top of the wall at various places and if anybody tries to get out, you kill them.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: You take away every bit of freedom that they have. Everybody that works will work for the state and will make the same amount of money. It won't be much. There will be no achievement allowed, no excellence allowed. The only people who will make out will be those who lead this community -- its president, its Politburo; I've got to use the right terms -- or what have you. It's misery. It is forced misery and death if you try to escape it. It's prisons. It is mind control. It is denial of free media and truth. It is suppression of any statement that opposes the government. Do that, and the guy ought to give you an A and probably think you have a good future.

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RUSH: When liberals see "haves" and "have-nots," they attempt to equalize the imbalance, and they do this by punishing the achievers. They do this by punishing the people at the top in order to bring them down on a more level field with the have-nots. They never attempt to educate or inspire the have-nots to do better and move up or prosper because they have contempt for people. They look at people with condescension. They don't see people who have smarts enough to handle life's challenges on their own and they need help from government, need help from liberals, who are the smart people.

The liberals' faith in the individual is dwarfed by their faith and love of government as the great equalizer -- with themselves in charge of it of course -- and they look at this situation of inequality as something that is not the result of normal actions in a free market -- i.e. capitalism. They look at it as he "powerful" choosing who will succeed and who will fail determining life's winners, "the winners of life's lottery" and otherwise. Capitalism -- very simply, Katie -- is what happens when people are free to engage in commerce amongst themselves. Socialism and communism are attempts to control that because you don't like the outcomes; you think they're unfair. It's the attempt to equalize things, but that's not possible. They do it, they say, on the basis of compassion, but capitalism is simply the natural result of freedom! It's all it is. We can get into detailed economic definitions of various things, but that's really all it is.

RUSH: What institution of higher learning are you stuck in?

CALLER: I attend Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
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Plans Destroyed
A terror plot foiled; experts react.

An NRO Symposium
On Thursday, as everyone now knows, a terror plot was foiled in Britain. Most Americans were not even at work yesterday when U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff let slip that it looked like the work of our familiar enemy, al Qaeda. National Review Online gathered a group of experts (below), asking the general question: “What should Americans be thinking about the foiled London terror plot?”

R. P. Eddy
The magnitude of the success this week cannot be overstated. It is hard to imagine the trauma and the long-term cost we would have endured economically, politically, and socially if the terrorists had succeeded.

Why were we successful this time? Likely because of great investigative work, and the massive increase in intelligence sharing between nations. Note that Pakistan assisted in the investigation. We may soon learn they were critical to identifying the group or helping the U.K. better infiltrate them.

We also continue to have the lesson pounded into us that homegrown terrorists are a massive threat. In the days after 9/11 we looked to the federal government for security, and the federal government looked overseas for solutions. This was highly effective to disrupting al Qaeda, but we failed to focus on the threats within our borders. The British began to take homegrown threats very seriously after their subways were bombed by second- and third-generation British citizens, but in the U.S. we have yet to make this paradigm shift. Yesterday’s British success is yet another reminder that law enforcement — including our local police — is actually on the frontlines of the war on terror. We must begin to train and equip our police as “First Preventers” of terrorism, and not simply as “First Responders” who clean up after the terrorists have been successful.

— R. P. Eddy is senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Manhattan Institute.