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| True Compassion |
| 07.30.04 (5:30 am) [edit] |
My first "involvement" with presidential politics was in 1964 when, as a high school freshman, I sat transfixed, mesmerized by the Johnson-Goldwater debates. Since that time, I've logged a lot of miles, figuratively speaking, so not a lot that goes on up to and at political conventions surprises me.
Who would deny a convention its right to put the best possible face on its proceedings? After all, while it's very important to rev up the delegates and like-minded people, it is also crucial not to alienate men and women who have yet to make up their minds.
Yet studying my eleventh Democratic National Convention this week, it occurs to me that it's almost like watching a virtual convention. Or, better, it's like there are competing, parallel conventions in the same hall, with the network choices of what to cover acting as a firewall.
On the dais, you have--in prime time--speakers whose language has been largely drained of the vitriol that has fueled Democratic politics. In the off-peak hours those who watch cable, which is devoting many times more hours to the convention than the "Big Three" networks, are witnesses to harangues and tirades and invectives heated enough to curl your hair.
That's why if all you see are the couple of hours the networks are giving nightly to the Democratic National Convention, you experience the curious disconnect between insistence that this "is the most important election in memory" and the bland, kumbiyah rhetoric.
Only occasionally are the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy allowed to tell you how much they really hate, loath, and despise President George Bush. That sort of 19th Century-esque personal assault, which is a staple of the party's campaign this time round, is largely confined to the afternoons and early evenings.
What's that to us? Simply this. The Democrats are a party whose embrace of abortion is so absolute it squeezes out virtually all pro-life voices. The only reason they would brook someone talking who usually votes pro-life in Congress is because (a) the party can piously say it has not shut out ALL pro-lifers, and (b) this congressman can introduce Ron Reagan, to extol the virtues of human cloning.
The latter is a twofer. It brought together a congressman who opposes abortion but not research that kills human embryos, and a man who trades on his father's name to advance a policy he would have utter rejected.
We used yesterday's column to talk about the remarks delivered at the convention by Ron Reagan. Let me borrow from bioethicist Wesley Smith, who always has something thoughtful to say.
Smith made a number of important points in a piece yesterday on National Review's webpage. "[U]nder the guise of promoting Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Reagan actually pushed for the explicit legalization of human cloning," according to Smith, which he described as bait and switch. "[T]hanks to Ron Reagan's speech, which never once mentioned leftover IVF embryos, we learn that what Big Biotech and the Kerry campaign are really after is for the federal government to fund human-cloning research."
Ron Reagan snidely dismissed those who disagreed with him-- it is an unreasonable "theology of the few" which "stands in the way of 'the many' receiving the miracle medical cures," Smith writes,"that Reagan's hyped speech all but promised would be here in 'ten years or so.'"
As Smith makes clear it is not religion that is the primary reason why so many people around the world oppose human cloning. "Indeed, scores of Democrats in the House of Representatives, some of them decidedly secular, have voted twice for the very legal ban against all human somatic-cell nuclear-transfer cloning that Reagan railed against President Bush for supporting."
And the list of countries banning cloning continues to grow. These include, according to Smith, France, Canada, Australia, Norway, and Germany.
There are many other important points Smith makes. I would encourage you to read the full essay at www.nationalreview.com/comment/smith20040728 0818.asp.
Irony of ironies, Ron Reagan's conclusion was absolutely correct: "We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology. This is our moment, and we must not falter."
Only the wave of the future is not the commodification of life, but rather the embrace of unborn children, and true compassion not the mindless ideology of choice, but the loving embrace of unborn children.
Likewise, it is most certainly true that the next few months ARE our moment, and that we MUST not falter.
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| French Anti-Americanism And Mcdonald's History Today |
| 07.29.04 (10:41 am) [edit] |
David Ellwood shows how anti-American feelings today have roots and parallels in the past.
THE YEAR IS 1930, the writer Georges Duhamel, popular Parisian commentator:
I was born in a country whose soul, inhabitants and products are diverse,
motley, changing and ingenious. From milk, this simple and elementary food,
we Frenchmen know how to make more than 100 kinds of cheese. All are good,
healthy, strong, substantial and amusing. All have their history, character
and role. In this feature alone, I recognise the genius of my country, in
it I understand that she has produced so many great men in all professions
... I belong to a peasant people which has cultivated lovingly for
centuries 50 different plums and which finds in each one a deliciously
incomparable taste.
Duhamel wrote this in a powerful diatribe warning Europeans, and Frenchmen in particular, that unless they took steps to protect their traditions, values and identities, the system of advanced industrialism which modernity had produced in America would soon overwhelm them. Seventy years later the same battle is being fought, this time by a farmers' leader, Jose Bove, who in August 1999 broke up the site of a new McDonald's restaurant in his home town of Millau, and almost instantly became a sort of national hero. Bove was briefly arrested, led a delegation of supporters to the Seattle conference of the World Trade Organisation in November 1999 (smuggling in a Roquefort cheese), and in July 2000 was put on trial in the midst of a `happening' which brought 40,000 young people to Millau and the attention of international media.
Meanwhile the Parisian bookshops were once more filling up with titles deploring American society and its overweening foreign policy: No Thanks, Uncle Sam, The World Is Not Merchandise, Who Is Killing France?, The American Strategy, and others. The American Ambassador commented: `The Anti-Americanism today encompasses not a specific policy like Iranian sanctions but a feeling that globalisation has an American face on it and is a danger to the European and French view of society ... There is the sense that America is such an extraordinary power that it can crush everything in its way.' The feeling certainly seemed to be shared by the government. Foreign minister Hubert Vedrine was quoted as saying that America's role in 20th-century European history did not give it the rights of a sixteenth member of the European Union. Only the French government explicitly presented the birth of the Euro as an antidote to the strength of the dollar.
`It's important to understand why a new stridency has crept into France's warnings about American power', commented the Wall Street Journal Europe in late February 1999. The problem, suggested interviewees, was the insecurity of the elites. In culture, diplomacy and political culture, they looked ever more beleaguered, overtaken and outpaced by the appeal of American dress-styles to their children, of fast-food to their youth, and of Hollywood to their cinema audiences. `The government, and the elites, realise that culture, writ large, is a battle that they're losing. They're very jealous of America's power to seduce,' Alain Franchon, an editorial writer for Le Monde, was quoted as saying. `When faced with that you have to fight, even if you risk looking ridiculous.'
Jack Lang, the man who brought a new prominence to these questions in his years as Minister of Culture under President Mitterand, recently insisted that if the nation's heritage was not to dwindle into insignificance, economics and culture should learn to live together in France, so that France would be better placed to `bet on the future'. Calling for a new Ministry of External Cultural Relations, Lang demanded more energy, more openness, more international operations by French television channels and a whole-hearted build-up of a European identity `of imagination, youth and spirit'. Either the Old World could remain frozen in the shadow of American culture, in which case diplomatic subjection would soon follow, said Lang. Or Europe, under France's powerful impulse, could show all those peoples wishing to seek an alternative to US domination, that `the West is declined in the plural. A message of hope.'
The leading French international relations Dominique Moisi, believes that to resolve the nation's fundamental identity problem, which is whether to be `a modern, normal country' or one which is different, even exceptional, the French must stop bewailing globalisation and America's role in it, give up cultural protectionism and refurbish instead their own message: `What France should seek to preserve -- once it has conceded defeat in the language battle -- is the context and originality of its message, not its medium.' Jean-Marie Guehenno, an expert on the State and national identity, is pessimistic about the chances of such a strategy being given a chance to work. Anti-Americanism is probably growing, he writes, `in spite of claims to the contrary and in spite of the success of American culture among French people.' It is, he says, a dangerous development which isolates France and encourages people `to withdraw in to a world of illusions in which la francophonie stands up to les anglo-saxons in the same way that Asterix confronted the Roman Empire.' And sure enough, within months of this warning, on February 3rd, 1999, the French film industry brought out to great acclaim its most expensive production ever: Asterix and Obelix against Caesar. It was, said Le Monde, a superproduction which represented the very image of national resistance against American cinematic imperialism.
Anti-Americanism is certainly an ambiguous form of response to America's presence as a power in Europe. Its more ideological manifestations often reflect the proselytising fashion in which America presents the lessons of its history to the world. When a unique national experience is characterised in the language of `exceptionalism', then it's not suprising that opponents reject the way of life as well as the message, the symbols as well as the actions. In the French case, writes the American specialist on France Richard Kuisel,
the basis of anti-Americanism is cultural and pivots on the notion of
protecting and disseminating civilisation. Though differences over
international relations, trade and economics will continue to stir
criticism of the hegemonic Western power, the core of resistance derives
from a sense of French difference, superiority and universal mission -- all
bound in the term civilisation. The implied universality of civilisation
breeds competition with the United States because America has its own sense
of universal mission.
But contemporary anti-Americanism is more than just a pseudo-ideological posture. Behind it lies the baggage of images and stereotypes about the new nation which European visitors accumulated throughout the nineteenth century. Then came America's development of an ideologically dynamic and disruptive model of modernisation in the 1920s. And the shared trans-Atlantic experience of two World Wars and the Cold War also left a legacy of attitudes. Without all these historical precedents and pretexts, the ascendancy of US power since the Second World War would never have attracted the resentments and antagonisms which classical anti-Americanism has expressed in a country like France. Today the true parallel of America's position vis a vis the Old World is not the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century, but the 1920s. At that time Fordism, Hollywood, Jazz, dance-halls, new forms of advertising, leisure pursuits and role models swept through post-First World War Europe, and antagonised traditional dikes engaged in the difficult business of reconstituting their power and legitimacy. `Americanism' was a phrase already current in the mid-nineteenth century which recognised that nation's unique inheritance of ideals and aspirations. The use of the term `Anti-Americanism' started in the 1920s. The transatlantic grievances of the time -- war debts and reparations, naval competition, the force of the new mass culture -- now began to be expressed in a language which connected American politics and foreign policy with what were perceived to be the nation's defects as a society and a civilisation.
In France this new critical attitude produced books which were destined to acquire lasting significance as trend-setters in the critique of America's likely impact on the nation's future. The most famous was Duhamel's Scenes de la vie future (1930). The most authoritative was political commentator Andre Siegfried's Les Etats-unis d'aujourd'hui, a discussion of all the issues outstanding between France and the US at the time. The politician and diplomat Andre Tardieu provided Devant l'obstacle: L'Amerique et nous, While the work of the business journalist Lucien Romier, Qui sera le maitre, Europe ou Amerique?, was a thoroughgoing critique of mass society and America's responsibility for diffusing it. All were bestsellers and they set a pattern which would later include Rene Etiemble's Parlez-vous franglais? (1964) and Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber's Le defi americaine (1967). The first of these opened the vexed question of language and called for a campaign which would rescue the French cultural heritage from the American `air-conditioned nightmare', just as de Gaulle was doing in international relations and economics. Servan-Schreiber's even more influential production called for a Europeanisation of America's most successful technical and social features, just as he had invented L'Express, a French version of Time or Newsweek. From the 1960s too came the radical, Third World-ist critique of American imperialism best articulated by Le Monde's international affairs supplement Le Monde diplomatique, which continues this tradition today.
The 1990s shifted the argument back to the influence of Hollywood's film and television output, reviving a debate which had provoked strong impulses of cultural protectionism in the 1920s and 1940s. At the 1993 GATT talks on world trade the French audiovisual industry, strongly supported by the socialist president and the conservative government, led efforts to have its products removed entirely from the purview of the negotiations, on the grounds that free trade invariably favoured the most powerful producers. No single country `should be allowed to control the images of the whole world,' Mitterand declared in October 1993; `what is at stake is the cultural identity of our nations, the right of each people to its own culture'. If Jurassic Park could be attacked as a threat to French national identity, as it had been some months earlier by the Minister of Culture, then this was not simply about the balance of economic power between the French cinema industry and Hollywood. A position like this reflected a sense of being forced to give up `a concept of nationhood that presumed sovereignty over culture', as the American historian Victoria de Grazia has written, talking of Hollywood's impact in the 1920s.
Until recently the battle of cultural sovereignty has been over languages, images and expectations, over the minds of one's own younger generations. Now the battle seems to be shifting to the stomach. As a target for generalised abuse of American commercial intrusiveness the McDonald's chain has faced levels of aggression in France which never troubled its predecessors of the 1940s and 1950s, Reader's Digest and Coca-Cola. Although contested from Hampstead to Hamburg, from Florence to Cracow, opposition has not been directed at other fast-food vendors, no other chain has seen an employee killed by a terrorist attack, as happened in Brittany in April 2000. In France the first McDonald's opened in Strasbourg in 1979. Twenty years later 790 restaurants were functioning, after expanding at the rate of around 80 per year since the middle of the decade. The company's annual report for 1999 announced that Europe was McDonald's most successful global sector, and within Europe France was one of its leading countries. In the meantime hundreds of traditional bistros and bars have closed up and down the country, victims of changing tastes and a punitive tax regime which, said a chefs' protest in Paris in October 1999, directly favoured the fast food industry.
The McDonald's experience in France shows how relatively small symbols of American economic power, because of their visibility, ubiquity and dynamism, are still the ones expected to bear the most disproportionate burden of anti-Americanist resentment, as local citizens and consumers attempt to pit their influence against that of corporations once merely `multinational' but now turned global. In 1999 Bove's protest against the Big Mac was sparked by the inclusion of Roquefort cheese among a cluster of European goods punished by the US with high import tariffs, a protest against European refusal to take unlimited supplies of hormoneraised beef. The cheese's timeless manufacture required the kind of unsullied milk Bove's farm supplied; but now, under the conditions of globalisation, `the Americans could cancel your business at the push of a computer button', as the new national hero said to a television interviewer. Le Monde meanwhile criticised an America `whose commercial hegemony menaces agriculture and whose cultural hegemony insidiously ruins culinary customs, the sacred gleams of French identity'.
Wherever ancient, modern and post-modern meet in contemporary Europe, the chances are that some version of the twentieth's century's long, intense and complicated encounter between American and European mass culture is being re-enacted. With food moving abruptly up the list of contested areas -- elbowing aside such staples as movies and technology, business and language, television and intellectual fashion -- the encounter seems likely to take on a more bitter flavour. In a 1988 discussion the leading French specialist Marie-France Toinet emphasised the need to distinguish between the external manifestations of anti-American sentiment and their roots. The `important thing about the French fascination for and rejection of Americanism' was that:
The French are not so much holding a debate about the United States but
about themselves, about their society, their goals and their methods. It
is, so to say, a Franco-French debate, where American arguments -- often
half-baked -- are just an excuse or a pretence. The French hold up the
United States as a mirror to look, in fact, at themselves.
But the pressures of social and technological change, of the imbalance of cultural power between America and France, are real enough, now as in the 1920s. Even if in no way comparable to the nation's historic enmities with the British and the Germans, the anti-American leaning in French political and intellectual thought persists. As the twenty-first century opens, France remains the nation which worries most intensely about American power in international life. It is a debate which tries to correlate the political, economic and mass cultural dimensions of that power with the big contemporary questions of sovereignty and globalisation, identity and modernity.[/
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| Queerly Beloved |
| 07.29.04 (5:26 am) [edit] |
France annuls first gay marriage
Date: Tuesday, 27 July 2004, 7:12 p.m.
While a Canadian lesbian couple awaits their time in court to begin possible divorce proceedings, the gay marriage between Stephane Chapin and Bertrand Charpentier has been annulled.
Well, so how are things going with the French case so far you ask? Comme ci, comme ca (so so). Read on....
The issue has ignited a fierce debate in France. France's first gay marriage, which was conducted last month by a local mayor, has been annulled by a court.
The tribunal in Bordeaux declared the marriage of Stephane Chapin and Bertrand Charpentier "null and void".
The mayor, Noel Mamere of the Green Party, was suspended for a month after defying government warnings that he would be breaking the law when he wed the two men in the town of Begles.
For the complete article please click on the following link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3929207.stm" title="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3929207.stm" target="_blank"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/eu...
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| Red Flag Rising |
| 07.28.04 (5:29 am) [edit] |
"Comrade John "Forbsky" Kerry recently received the much-coveted support and endorsement of the CPUSA. No, that's not a church denomination, but the Communist Party USA.
"The CPUSA supports the John Kerry campaign with donations and volunteer effort. We believe that defeating George Bush is the single most important issue this November...", said a CPUSA spokesman.
We have already noted that Kerry and Co. are fond of quoting Langston Hughes, a Communist poet, who said, "Let America be America again."
Certainly they must be aware that Hughes also said, "Goodbye, Christ Jesus, Lord, God, Jehova, Beat it on away from here now. Make way for a new guy with no religion at all -- A real guy named Marx, communist, Lenin, Peasant, Stalin, Worker, ME -- I said, ME!" So, now that Kerry/Edwards have the full support of the Communists -- why is it that those Republican states are red?" - quote from The Federalist
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| READY FOR MARTIAL LAW? |
| 07.26.04 (3:16 pm) [edit] |
OH IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE?
By: Dorothy Anne Seese for Ether Zone
My information comes to me in bits and pieces, an article here, someone's information sent email, piecing together news from various sites, connecting dots. Some of it is pieced together from the statements made by our government, regardless of how remote or harmless or "secure" the announcements sound.
This nation is very much prepared to invoke martial law. The questions are only what will trigger it and when it will occur. Since our military is aware that this could happen and US soldiers expressed revulsion at the idea of quelling civil disturbance by firing on their fellow Americans, those whom they swore to defend and protect, then the government has imported foreign mercenaries who have absolutely no qualms about doing that for which they were hired.
Why would our own government do this to Americans? Very simply because it is the only way to take control of people whose delusion of freedom will one day burst and they will be ready to revolt.
Americans will realize all that has been taken from them. Perhaps eighty percent will go into traumatic shock because they believe the ultra-conservative internet writers, if they know about us, are whack jobs and it will be horrifying to find out we were telling the truth about our government and its evil alliance with Global Governance.
At least twenty percent of people on American soil will care less because they are illegal aliens, some of whom will join with the mercenaries to end America's dominance in world affairs by its military might.
Frankly, most Americans are pretty wimpy now, but every human has a threshold over which none dare cross. Even the most milquetoast husband will try to defend his wife and children in a time of crisis and then afterward wonder how he ever got the courage. The same is true of folks who now won't speak up for or against anything for fear of saying the "wrong" thing, because it is well known by all Americans that we no longer have true freedom of speech and the use of the wrong term, or supporting the "wrong" cause might be cause for being fired from a job, ostracized by friends as a whacko, a "right-wing conspirator" or a secret member of the KKK
When the tanks and the soldiers are in the streets, all America will be wide awake and trembling in terror. Those soldiers may speak broken English or none at all. It seems now that all uniforms look alike, unless our military is in full formal dress, then we can tell them apart. Every soldier looks the same in cammies. What will be the spark that ignites the revolutionaries among us who are forced to be quiet in the land of free speech and the right to peaceably assemble? A massacre of civilian protesters? A march for freedom? What is coming will come and in due time Americans will wake up.
What will they do?
Some will hide indoors, afraid to go outside. Others might ask permission to go to the grocery store or pharmacy, to the doctor's office, or to take the children to school if it's in session. Who knows what will be suspended when the final stroke of totalitarianism takes over?
This would have caused a total revolution forty years ago. In fact, it was Democratic former president John F. Kennedy who stated that when the government makes peaceful revolution impossible, it makes violent revolution inevitable. He sounds like an arch conservative compared to today's Democrats.
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There are a number of people in America, well-armed, who will fight to the death for this nation when the time comes that we can do so. Of course it is better to have a ballot revolution than one with live bullets.
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It would be my hope that every dissenter, everyone who wants to see America free of political correctness, Marxist professors, NEA-infected teachers, homeland spies and political turncoats would say NO to both the Republican and Democratic candidates, should we actually have a November 2004 election.
What is evil about voting third party?
A massive third-party turnout of all the dissatisfied would shake up the little World of Oz in D.C. fairly quickly.
There are those who would like to secede from this "union" and form a new government. It seems that was attempted in 1861, not over slavery but over the South's rebellion at the North's demand for more taxes with which to destroy states' rights under the Tenth Amendment.
And you think martial law in America is impossible? That isn't thinking, it's an overripe imagination and it smells a bit like a compost heap.
"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
Dorothy Anne Seese can be reached at carrot710@yahoo.com
see complete article at the links
http://www.etherzone.com" title="http://www.etherzone.com" target="_blank"http://www.etherzone.com
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| GOVERNORS WORRIED ABOUT LOSING THEIR GUARD TROOPS TO IRAQ WAR |
| 07.23.04 (5:20 am) [edit] |
One of the traditional means that state governors have had to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies is the National Guard.
Now, however, with 40% of the occupation force in
Iraq being made up of reserve and National Guard troops, some governors are worried that they may not have the resources they need to respond to those kinds of emergencies, and they made their concerns known at the National Governors Association meeting, this past weekend in Seattle, in a meeting with Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David Chu and commander of U.S. Northern Command Gen. Ralph Eberhardt.
"This has had a huge impact," said Washington Gov. Gary Locke. 62% of Washington's National Guard is deployed, including the majority of the best-trained firefighters, just as the forest fire season is getting under way.
A spokesman for Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne noted that, in the past, the state has been able to call on the National Guard, but "We may not be able to call on these soldiers for firefighting capabilities," this year, because they simply aren't there.
As of July 21, a total of 153,599 reservists and National Guardsmen are on active duty, of which, 126,856 are Army Reserve and Army National Guard.
[source: Seattle Times, July 21; DoD press briefing, July 21]
PENTAGON CONSIDERING EXTENDING NATIONAL GAURDSMEN BEYOND 24 MONTHS.
The Defense Department is reportedly considering
extending the mobilization of National Guard soldiers beyond the federal limit of 24 months, as the first groups of soldiers activated after the 9/11 attacks near that limit.
The first soldiers effected would be about 450 from the Arkansas National Guard who are in Iraq as part of the 39th Infantry Brigade, but it could soon be extended to thousands of others.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied, during a press briefing this afternoon, that there were plans to extend anyone beyond the 24 months, but left the possibility open when he added, "the country's at war," and "the facts on the ground will determine what we do...."
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| Chirac and Arafat Working Together |
| 07.22.04 (10:30 am) [edit] |
French President Jacques Chirac has let it be known that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not welcome as a guest in Paris. Mazel tov!
Can you actually imagine Chirac putting out a genuine welcome mat for the Israeli leader who has shown that all of France's interventions in the area have brought nothing good: more of terror, more of Arafat, worst of all, more of Palestinian suffering, all to succor the illusion of French influence in the region.
But this latest donnybrook between the two leaders focused not on the dispute with the Palestinians but about anti-Semitism in France itself.
Chirac has for years been denying that the ugly phenomenon even exists. Finally, when day after day, evidence mounted that the country has not expelled the virus of Jew-hatred from the body-politic and that it is now becoming more malignant, even Chirac himself has had to sound the tocsin.
And Sharon sounded it, as well, when this week he called on French Jews to make aliyah or "go up" to Israel. (Would that some Israeli leader had a quarter century ago called on the Jews of Argentina to immigrate.)
This really got Chirac's goat. But not before he demonstrated in an off-hand remark that, for him, neither Jews nor Muslims, for that matter, are really genuinely French: "we are witnessing racial events involving our Jewish and Muslim compatriots. ...
Sometimes just simple Frenchmen are attacked." This is an ugly dichotomy. But it is not new. After the terrorist bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue on October 3, 1980, Raymond Barre, the French prime minister, alluded to this "odious act which intended to strike Jews [and] struck innocent Frenchmen."
Of course, Chirac and Barre are from the center-right and right where anti-Semitism has always nested. But such views are now a staple of the oh, so enlightened left, as well. French hatred of Jews now goes wall-to-wall. And French hatred of Israel, too.
A few days ago, France went into a frenzy to mobilize the countries of the European Union at the UN to vote "yes" on the General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to take down the security barrier it is building against Palestinian terror. Many fatuous reasons were mustered to support this demand. But the real reason that France and some others oppose the fence is that it works.
A new book by Christopher Andersen will hit The New York Times bestseller list this week. It is called American Evita, and it is about Hillary Rodham Clinton. She pushed herself into a prime time, opening night spot at the Democratic convention after the Kerry folk had relegated her to just one in an "all-the-girls" appearance of the party's women senators, with Barbara Mikulski doing the speaking.
How Rodham Clinton maneuvered herself out of this is hard to tell. But one clue is that the Democratic National Committee is still run by Clintonians. And, while we're mentioning arch names, there is Teresa Heinz Kerry, more than a bit on the haughty side herself. Heinz Kerry has certainly put John Edwards in his place in announcing that he is her husband's "second running-mate." This is fair warning of how she sees herself as first lady.
On the day that the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to begin divesting its holdings in corporations that do business with and in Israel, there was a pitched street battle in and around Bethlehem. It was not a battle between Jews and Arabs or between Hamas and Fatah. It was a battle between Christians and Muslims.
Bethlehem used to be a largely Christian city. It is, after all, where Jesus was born, so where the Church of the Nativity stands. Roman Catholics, Armenians, and Greek Orthodox have lived and flourished there since the first centuries of early Christianity. No longer.
As soon as the Palestinian Authority took over in 1994, the Christians of Bethlehem began to leave, many in an understandable panic. For all its secular pretenses, the PA is a militant Muslim jihadist show.
A Christian population that not so long ago stood at roughly 75 percent may now be as low as 30 percent. Many of them have come to the U.S. But American churches have averted their eyes from what is really tantamount to an expulsion of Christians not only from Bethlehem but from the Holy Land itself.
The Presbyterians have also turned the other cheek by siding with those who torment their own. And they have disavowed Christian Zionism as a heresy. Of course, there are only two and a half million Presbyterians in the U.S.--way down from what once made up this proud church. Moreover, there is growing alienation between the political leadership of the church and lay believers, as there is in the Episcopal communion, much of this revolving around the implicit support of the clerisy for Palestinian terror.
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| Anti War Journalists in a Tither Over Unraveling Niger Tale |
| 07.22.04 (10:06 am) [edit] |
The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling. And, of course, the phalanx of anti-war journalists is desperately trying to stop the bust-up. But it can't be done. The flying apart began with two stories in the Financial Times (London), one on June 28, the other on July 4. Relying on information ultimately sourced to three European intelligence services--none of them British and one of them that had monitored clandestine uranium smuggling to Iraq over three years--Mark Huband reported that the network also serviced or was to service Libya, Iran, China, and North Korea. A tell-tale element of the story is that the mines in Niger from which several thousand tons of uranium had been extracted and sold were owned by French companies. Apparently, after a time, they had abandoned the mines as economically unviable. But, as a counter-proliferation expert told Huband, this does not mean that extraction stopped. In any case, Lord Butler's altogether independent panel in the United Kingdom concluded that Tony Blair's claim about Hussein being in the market for uranium was "well-founded." These are the same claims made by George W. Moreover, the U.S. Senate report undercuts Wilson's very believability. I myself had wondered why the CIA had been so dumb--such dumbness is something to which we should have long ago become accustomed!--as to send a low-level diplomat to check on yellowcake sales from Niger to Iraq when it should have dispatched a real spook. Well, it turns out that a "real spook" had recommended him to her boss, that spook being Valerie Plame, who happens also to be Wilson's wife. He has long denied that she had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.
I confess: I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it. No matter. Still, here's his story about the filched classified materials dealing with the foiled Al Qaeda millennium terrorist bombing plot from the National Archives: He inadvertently took home documents and notes about documents that he was not permitted to take from the archives; secondly, he inadvertently didn't notice the papers in his possession when he got home and actually looked at them; and, thirdly, he inadvertently discarded some of these same files so that they are now missing. Gone, in fact. One of his lawyers attributes this behavior to "sloppiness," which may better explain his career as Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser and certainly describes his presentation of self in everyday life. But it is not an explanation of his conduct in the archives or, for that matter, at home. Personnel at the archives actually noticed him stuffing his pockets with papers as he left, which is how the FBI found out about this bizarre tale in the first place. Inadvertence, then, doesn't do it either. Maybe Sandy wanted souvenirs from his career in the White House that was punctuated by so many catastrophes for the United States. Nonetheless, he has had ambitions tied to John Kerry's, ambitions that clash with those of Richard Holbrooke and Joe Biden, who decisively do not have McGovernite politics. But Berger did run the Kerry foreign policy team at the writing of the Democratic Party platform a few weeks ago (when the only opposition, easily pacified, came from a handful of Dennis Kucinich loyalists) and has been deeply involved in crafting how the candidate presents himself on these issues. So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really. A more important question, of course, is: What was contained in the papers that Berger snatched? The answer to that question might answer another. Maybe Clinton's top national security aide didn't want others to see what they documented.
Postscript, July 22
The Kerry campaign has accused the White House of having leaked Sandy Berger's troubles to the press, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it did. As The New York Times pointed out today (July 22), however, this would not at all have been illegal or even unusual. It smells nonetheless. But most recent news answers another question that I asked yesterday: Did John Kerry know that Berger was under investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department. As I surmised, neither Kerry nor his staff was at all "witty," as it is called in the intelligence trade, and they were caught completely off guard. Kerry was probably rip-shit. Nonetheless, he issued a gentlemanly, even statesmanlike, comment saying, "Sandy Berger is my friend, and he has tirelessly served this nation with honor and distinction. I respect his decision to step aside as an adviser to the campaign..." But Berger's behavior in clinging to his role as Kerry's foreign policy guru shows that he is anything but a friend. Hoping that the disgrace of pilfering from the National Archives what were actually documents with the very highest security coding would somehow pass unnoticed in public, Berger was even willing to put his candidate at risk. This is a distinction of sorts. But it is not at all honorable. Martin Peretz
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| France wallows in disdain by scolding Israel's Sharon |
| 07.22.04 (5:09 am) [edit] |
France is native soil to many mysterious theories of international relations these days, but on Monday, President Jacques Chirac took the folie to a new level.
To prove France rejects anti-Semitism, Chirac announced that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would be unwelcome in the land of liberté, égalité and fraternité.
The contretemps began on Sunday, when Sharon, speaking to visiting American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, commented on the spreading rash of anti-Semitic incidents in France and encouraged French Jews to return to Israel "immediately."
Despite Sharon's praise for France's efforts to calm its roiling tensions, Chirac and his foreign minister, Michel Barnier, took the opportunity to castigate the Jewish leader on the world stage, calling the remarks "unacceptable" and disinviting Sharon from a state visit until he had an "explanation."
We wonder several things here, but first is exactly which part of the remarks they didn't understand.
The calling home of Jews to Israel has been around practically longer than Israel itself, and has been a frequent mantra for Sharon long before this week.
The object is as much practical and political as spiritual: As Sharon has noted, if demographic trends continue as they are, Jews are on track to become the minority in Israel a few years down the line.
On the merits, Israel's calls for massive exodus probably aren't a viable answer to its problems or to recurrent anti-Semitism.
A French cartoon this week reasonably portrayed two Jews asking, "Go back to Israel? Isn't that what the anti-Semites want us to do?"
And while Sharon's observation that France's growing Muslim population was the source of increased incidents may be true, it is perhaps not a thought process to naturally recommend the Middle East.
In light of Israel's current battles, using the racial tension in France to draft some new recruits and reinforcements may be opportunistic and misguided. But neither did the remarks, made thousands of miles away, remotely warrant the public scolding that ensued. In a world teeming with outrages, sadness and war, it was a telling moment for the people who invented blasé to suddenly lose their cool.
But then, the latest incident has as much to do with Paris's unrelenting disdain for the United States as with its tension with the Jewish state.
In an editorial on the Sharon speech, the leftist French newspaper Le Monde noted that "it's not exactly an accident that Ariel Sharon's remarks ... were made in front of American Jewish organizations." The piece went on to describe such groups as "militant" and to suggest they are the ones who, since Sept. 11, 2001, have "poisoned the climate" of relations between Israel and France.
Is it really a mystery to the French that by recent polls, some 57 percent of Israelis "feel antipathy" toward their country?
France, which is home to the third-largest Jewish population in the world, has been lending political aid and comfort to the Palestinians for several decades and quite ostentatiously so in the past handful of years.
On previous visits to Israel, its representatives spent nearly equal time with Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat in his bunker as with Israeli leaders, even as the terrorism continued. As a member of the United Nations Security Council, France has regularly supported U.N. resolutions condemning Israel. And the state has been supportive of the recent International Court of Justice's strongly worded, if feckless, opinion that Israel's protective fence on the West Bank was creating undue hardships for the Palestinians.
The disproportionate response to Sharon's remarks was the worst kind of political self-service: By casting itself as the injured party, France deflected a broader discussion of how its policies in the Middle East relate to the anti-Semitism within its borders.
The country saw 510 anti-Jewish incidents in the first half of 2004, compared with 593 for the entire previous year. Nearly half of all such incidences world wide.
Earlier this year, Chirac's efforts to calm religious strife bought the country an atrocious law prohibiting public school children from wearing any religious symbols in class, whether headscarves, crosses or the Star of David.
Following this week's incident, many wire stories hurried to include the anger of French Jewish groups at Sharon's remarks. The president of the French Jewish Student Union said in an interview that he finds it "particularly embarrassing that the Israeli prime minister would use a subject as serious as anti-Semitism to settle his accounts with French diplomacy." Really?
For all the bluster, Chirac still bears some responsibility for the problem Sharon was addressing: Many of the Muslims who have come to France in the past few years undoubtedly consider the nation an ally of sorts in their war against Israel and America. The Arab world is surely grateful and aware of France's role in the international sphere, and in regards to the war in Iraq, its positions are often parroted by Middle Eastern newspapers and cited in support of continuing the fight.
France was once one of Israel's staunchest allies in the years following independence, a position that eroded as Charles de Gaulle began edging the state away from Israel in favor of improved Arab relations — and contracts.
Some have suggested that Sharon's remarks were intended to expose French bias for the Palestinians, thereby taking them out of the role as an honest broker in the Middle East.
But that dynamic was clear to the political classes long ago. The real enlightenment has been the chance to see the French on the world stage, "J'accuse" echoing from the past.
Collin Levey writes Thursdays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com
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| France in a state of hysteria |
| 07.21.04 (3:26 pm) [edit] |
Sharon was right in calling on French Jews to make aliyah, even if it angered Chirac
Avraham Tirosh
France's hysterical reaction to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's call for French Jews to immigrate to Israel sounds like it came from someone with a guilty conscience. It is usually a guilt complex or repressed hatred that produces such disproportionate responses. It seems that if France were not so steeped in antisemitism (with nearly half the world's antisemitic incidents occurring within its borders), Sharon's words would have simply floated by.
This wasn't the first time Sharon called on the world's Jews to make aliyah, and this is to his credit. He is also not the first prime minister to do so. So what's all the fuss? "Sharon's words are unacceptable", the French Foreign Ministry spokesman said, with the National Council Chairman adding the label "irresponsible". Another source said that "Sharon's remarks were exaggerated and he trespassed into France's internal affairs". A tempest in a teapot (or wine glass).
Leaders of the French Jewish community also took exception to Sharon's remarks, calling on him to "let the French community cope with its problems". In short, don't anger the Goyim [non-Jews]. It may be hard to explain to these Goyim, and it should be unnecessary to explain to the Jews of France, that Sharon's words were totally acceptable from the Israeli point of view, and that one of the main functions of Israeli prime ministers is to encourage aliyah. Bringing Diaspora Jews back to their homeland is one of this nation's goals, and Sharon was intervening not in the affairs of France, but in those of his own country.
A few more words, which should be obvious to the Jews of France. The State of Israel was established in the wake of the Holocaust, partly in order to insure that such horrors never again occur. It sees itself as responsible for the fate of all Jews in the world and as their defender in times of trouble. When Jews, as Jews, are in crisis or danger, Israel does not hesitate to intervene and rescue them, either openly or behind-the-scenes. This was the case in, among other places, the former Soviet Union, South Africa, Arab countries, and Cuba.
This will also be the case if you, heaven forbid, are in grave danger and unable to help yourselves. Today, it seems like a distant possibility, but you should not underestimate it. Jews in the past paid dearly for miscalculating such danger. Think twice, at lease, before telling Israel to keep its distance. Antisemitism is not your personal problem; it belongs to Israel and the entire Jewish People. So, immigrate to Israel. Sharon was right, even if he angered Chirac. There's no need to wait to the last minute, when the sword is resting at your throats. It may come down if you wait too long.
I know it isn't easy these days for Israel to make such statements. The situation is complicated and leads to outspoken criticism: Israel poses as the defender of Diapora Jews while it can't even defend its own citizens; only in Israel are Jews killed because they are Jews; Israel is the main source of antisemitism in this century; Israel, through its policies and actions, endangers us, the Jews of France, and it is Israel that wants to rescue us? It shouldn't be putting us in danger in the first place.
Not all of these arguments can be disregarded. But most of them are empty words spoken by people looking for excuses not to make aliyah. Israel is still a secure place for Jews, and it is the only place they can truly call home. The more Jews it absorbs, the stronger and safer it will be. And one day, when the Palestinian conflict is resolved, it will be the most secure place in the world, while antisemitism, in its various dangerous forms, will never come to an end.
Since its inception, Israel has absorbed waves of immigrants (with the exception of religious Jews) who were not attracted by some wondrous vision, but were repelled by negative forces in the Diaspora. The increasing evidence of antisemitism in France has not been forceful enough to push most French Jews into immigrating to Israel, and we must pray that these incidents are abated. Aliya figures from France since 2000 are pitifully low. According to Ministry of Absorption data, fewer than 8,000 of the 600,000 Jews of France immigrated to Israel in the last 4 ½ years.
President Chirac has no cause for worry, and the antisemites have no reason to celebrate. Sharon's plea will not open the flood gates to French aliyah. Likewise, the Ministry of Absorption needn't become anxious, nor should it be making any special plans.
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| French Says, "Talk to the Hand" about Israel |
| 07.21.04 (11:01 am) [edit] |
Some of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's advisers and Israeli diplomats in Paris were at pains yesterday to try and temper Sharon's call on French Jews to come to Israel.
They explained that it was only part of Sharon's regular call to the Jews of the Diaspora to make aliya and emphasized that he had praised the French governments' efforts in battling anti-Semitism.
They should have saved their breath.
Sharon was unequivocal. After being asked a question about attacks on French Jews at a meeting with the leadership of the United Jewish Communities, the prime minister said, "If I have to advocate to our brothers in France, I would tell them one thing: move to Israel, as early as possible." I
nstead of making excuses, they should be backing up the prime minister's words.
In a normal diplomatic situation between two countries, one prime minister's suggestion to 600,000 citizens of another country to emigrate would indeed be an offensive gesture, rightly seen as interference in another country's internal affairs.
But for the last four years, the situation between Israel and France has been everything but normal. And this is to say nothing about the French government's repeated efforts to intervene in Israeli politics.
In October 2000, President Jacques Chirac summoned an emergency summit in Paris with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in an effort to stem the outbreak of violence that started the current war.
Through American mediation, an agreement had been reached for an end to the fighting, but at the last moment Arafat refused to sign it. The French encouraged him to hold out for a better deal, including an international committee that would include France.
This exchange typifies the Franco-Israeli relationship. The Chirac government has assumed the role of the Palestinians' unwavering patron. Even recently, when longtime supporters like Terje Roed-Larsen have come to the conclusion that Arafat is no longer a viable partner for anything, France remains the only major country to continue honoring Arafat with high-level visits.
Three weeks ago, Foreign Minister Michel Barnier ended what had been a virtual diplomatic isolation by meeting with Arafat in Ramallah. He didn't miss the opportunity to urge Israel to stop building the security fence and allow Arafat to travel freely.
We understand that France does not see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an "internal" Israeli matter. But the defense of Israeli citizens from Palestinian terror is indeed our internal affair. If they wish to deliver pronouncements about it, fine, but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
We also believe that the French government would do better to direct their efforts inwards. In 2002, Chirac insisted there was no anti-Semitism in France. Now he and his ministers are finally beginning to admit that they have a serious problem. Instead of preaching to Israel, the French should get down to dealing with their own homegrown intifada in which French Jews are the primary targets and French Muslims the primary aggressors.
Silence in the face of the mounting attack on Jewish communities around the world, most recently in Perth, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand, where a Jewish synagogue and cemetery, respectively, were desecrated last week, is not an option for an Israeli prime minister.
Israel's declaration of statehood ends with an appeal "to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream — the redemption of Israel." But from the state's first years, it was evident that Israel's relationship with the Diaspora is two-way and its main responsibility is to provide a safe haven for the Jews of the world. First for the survivors of the Holocaust, and over the years for the refugees from the Arab world, for Soviet Jewry and for the lost tribe in Ethiopia.
Sharon's words might be unacceptable in the world of polite diplomacy but he was only carrying out his most basic duty as the leader of the Jewish state. We only wish Chirac would carry out his own basic duties with as much forthrightness.
www.jpost.com . . .
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| French Jews Should Escape France While They Still Can |
| 07.21.04 (5:28 am) [edit] |
Ariel Sharon issued an appeal for all Jews in France to leave and move to Israel.
In doing so, he's not only right; he's also catching on a trend that's been going on for more than a year (see also here, here, and here... Enough already?)
While the French foreign ministry issues its Pointless Protest patented 254164 dash 6 (the one that calls Israel for an explanation of the "unacceptable comments"), the money quote comes from the president of the so called International League For Making a Living of Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, Patrick Gaubert.
There goes the Sandman, live from the Land of the Great Slumber:
« These comments do not bring calm, peace and serenity that we all need (...) I think Mr Sharon would have done better tonight to have kept quiet. »
In other words, do let us sleep while our Jews are being clobbered.
Putting aside what seems to be a French tradition to tell the rest of the world to shut up when the rest of the world puts France's face in France's feces, what's remaining is an outstanding example of an aggravated state of reality denial.
135 acts and 375 threats of anti-semitism in the first six months this year, as opposed to 125 acts and 463 threats for last year as a whole. Confronting hatred, terrorism and unavowed warfare, such as what the French Jewish community is facing today Mr. Sandman, will require anything but calm, peace and serenity.
What you need indeed is awareness, resolve and ultimately self-defense.
The Left, and all these so called International Leagues of Subsidized Gushy Feelings are very good at having pointless dinners and fruitless protests where people will chant with self-flattering tears of professed altruism "Never again".
How touching. How noble. How futile.
Synagogues are burning now, cemeteries are being profaned now, and Jews are being attacked now.
Never again? Now is the time to prove you really mean it.
Over the last year, when asked for advices by my Jewish friends, my answer has been fairly simple: you could get weapons, or you could get the hell out of here. However, you're not supposed to defend yourself, since the French State enforces its monopoly on the legal use of force.
So you'd better get the hell out of here, before it's too late my friends.
Because despite its promises, you can't count on the French state to use its monopoly for your defense.
---
Version francaise
Ariel Sharon a lancé un appel aux Juifs de France leur conseillant de quitter le pays et de partir pour Israël.
Ce faisant, il n'a pas seulement raison; il rattrape également une tendance qui suit son cours depuis plus d'un an (voyez aussi ici, ici, et ici... assez maintenant ?)
Alors que le ministre français des affaires étrangères oppose sa Protestation de Circonstance patentée 254164 tiret 6 (Celle qui appelle Israël à s'expliquer pour ces "inacceptables commentaires"), la remarque qui tue nous viens du président de la soit disant Ligue Internationale Pour Gagner Sa Croûte Sur Contre le Racisme et l'Anti-Sémitisme, Patrick Gaubert.
Ecoutons donc le Marchand de Sable, en direct du Pays du Grand Sommeil :
« Ces commentaires ne nous apportent pas le calme, la paix et la sérénité dont nous avons tous besoin (...) je pense que M. Sharon aurait mieux fait de rester tranquille ce soir. »
En d'autres termes, prière de nous laisser pioncer pendant que nos Juifs se font tabasser.
Si nous laissons de côté ce qui semble être une grande tradition française de dire au reste du monde de la fermer quand le reste du monde mets la face de la France dans les fèces de la France, ce qui nous reste est un incroyable exemple d'état aggravé de déni de la réalité.
135 actes et 375 menaces antisémites sur les six premiers mois de cette année, à opposer à 125 actes et 463 menaces pour toute l'année dernière. Pour confronter haine, terrorisme et guerre larvée tels que ce que la communauté juive française affronte aujourd'hui M. marchand de Sable, il faudra n'importe quoi sauf calme, paix et sérénité.
Ce dont vous avez besoin en effet, c'est de prise de conscience, résolution et au bout du compte autodéfense.
La gauche et toutes ces soi-disant Ligues Internationales Des Bons Sentiments Subventionnés sont très efficaces pour mener de futiles dîners et de vaines manifestations où les participants chantent avec d'auto congratulatoires larmes de prétendu altruisme, "Plus jamais ça".
Comme c'est touchant. Comme c'est noble. Comme c'est inutile.
les synagogues brûlent maintenant, les cimetières sont profanés maintenant, et les Juifs sont attaqués maintenant.
Plus jamais ça ? Maintenant est le moment de prouver que ce ne sont pas des paroles en l'air.
Au long de l'année passée, lorsque mes amis Juifs m'ont demandé conseil, mon avis a été plutôt simple : vous pouvez vous procurer des armes, ou vous pouvez foutre le camp d'ici. Cela étant, vous n'êtes pas censé vous défendre, puisque l'Etat français impose son monopole sur l'usage légal de la force.
En conséquence, vous avez plutôt intérêt à foutre le camp d'ici avant qu'il ne soit trop tard mes amis.
Car contrairement à ses promesses, vous ne pouvez pas compter sur l'Etat français pour qu'il fasse usage de son monopole pour votre défense.
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| Let's pretend we still care about France |
| 07.20.04 (3:12 pm) [edit] |
The French Prescription
The Gauls seem determined to bring about their own economic and social destruction, and they're moving heaven, earth, and the rest of Europe to assure it. There are ways they could avoid what's coming. If we can see the solutions to their problems, why shouldn't we tell the French?
Okay, okay, there's a thousand reasons why we should buy popcorn and sit back and watch them sink. But here's another idea, one that will give us vastly greater pleasure, and is guaranteed to toss an anvil to the drowning cheese-eaters. There are few certainties in this world, but one is that your average Frenchman would rather kill himself than be caught following American advice. I say let's give them the very best help we can, confident in the knowledge they'd damn themselves to a wine-free hell before they'll do what we say. Here -- with malice aforethought -- are the Top Ten Loose Canon All-American Ideas to Save France.
1. Get off your butts and get back to work. A 35-hour work week mandated by law? Laws that say if someone in your company works 36 hours, another has to work 34? No wonder the Poles, the Czechs, and the rest of New Europe are already eating your lunch in the world market. And don't even dream of catching us. Most people I know are working many more hours than that and even thinking about how to do their jobs better in part of their off time. It adds up to that elusive quality called "productivity." You can look it up.
2. Your "workforce" -- such as it is -- is largely made up of government bureaucrats and subsidized farm workers. There are all too few real workers who are producing something of value. There's no excuse for not cutting government other than cowardice in leadership. (We suffer that, too. That we admit it and you don't hurts even more, no?) As Heritage Foundation expert Dr. John Hulsman once told me, the agricultural subsidy is "really a sop from Germany to pay French farmers to sit around, play boule, and do nothing." Phase it out before the Germans and the rest of the EU cut you off suddenly.
3. Help your Muslim immigrants assimilate. France's population is now about 8 or 9 percent Muslim, and you guys are keeping them down, repressing them by refusing entry into French society to anyone who isn't immersed in French values and societal norms. Aid assimilation, or you'll soon wake up and France will no longer be French. For the rest of the world -- surprisingly -- that won't entirely be good news.
4. Why isn't there a French equivalent of Bob Morgenthau? You have to make a big dent in the corruption that is rampant in government and industry. The fact that you know corruption is a commonplace and don't even try to clean it out compels the conclusion that you think you can't succeed without cheating, which is truly pitiful. Trust us: we do better -- and we feel better about it -- when we put corrupt people in jail.
5. You have to do a better job of choosing leaders. In your last big election, you had to choose -- as your own newspapers described -- between Le Pen, a right-wing nut job, and Chirac, a crook. You chose the crook. Your leaders mostly come from the same place: the National School of Public Administration. There's no free market in ideas there; it's only producing Chirac clones. Close the place, and choose your leaders from those more capable of common sense and action.
6. Free your press. Your media are so uniform they could be mistaken for the old Soviet press. They're anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Chirac, without any significant opposition. This uniformity is unknown in free nations. Why are there no dissenting voices? Don't French people understand that it's dissent that enables voters to make informed choices?
7. Modernize your defense establishment on the basis of capability, not how svelte things look on TV. France is one of the few EU nations that spends significantly on its own defense. But you spend -- largely -- on the wrong things. Why spend 14 years and untold billions building a single aircraft carrier? For show, that's why. You're not a world power, but you can be a major regional power if you were smart about defense spending. Your forces aren't equipped or trained to fight modern network-centric warfare as ours are. Either stop spending for ego's sake and get into the game, or start making white flags (again).
8. Stop paying protection money to terrorists. Your banks are the largest lenders to nations such as Syria and Iran. You sell arms to these nations, and even push special EU trade deals with them and their ilk. You are significantly assisting the nations with which we (and you, if you'd be honest about it) are at war.
9. Identify and prosecute the government officials who gave American intelligence information to Milosevic and then to Saddam. Either shoot them or jail them forever. Prove to the world that there are limits to anti-Americanism, even in France.
10. Finally, quit whining about American reactions to French animosity. Many of us are boycotting your goods, and more and more will as people discover just how severe your dislike for us really is. If you don't like us, fine. But don't tell us we aren't entitled to react to your hate.
There is some wisdom in these suggestions. Will the French reject our advice out of sheer hubris? Will Dominique de Villepin start wearing straw cowboy hats?
(And it doesn't end here, dear reader. From now on, at least until we grow tired of it, I will publish your other great ideas to help the French from time to time. Please send them in.)
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| POLICE MUST NOTIFY RESIDENTS WHEN CATHOLIC CHURCH MOVES INTO NEIGHBORHOOD |
| 07.20.04 (5:23 am) [edit] |
Controversial "Egan's Law" Expected to Gain Widespread Support
Trenton, N.J. —
Under a new law designed to protect minors, local police departments will now be required to inform residents any time a known Roman Catholic church moves into their neighborhood.
New Jersey State Senate debating Egan's Law
The law also mandates that Catholic churches register with authorities, wear electronic monitoring devices, and be prohibited from moving to within a half-mile radius of a school.
A follow-up to Megan's Law, enacted by New Jersey in 1994, the so-called "Egan's Law" is named for Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who are both accused of covering up sexual abuse by priests under their authority. Like Megan's Law, Egan's Law is expected to spread quickly to other states, but for parents in towns across New Jersey, it's on the books none too soon.
"Last year, we discovered that a Catholic Church had been in our neighborhood for 30 years! And nobody told us!" said Ruth Harper of Redbrook, N.J. "My sons used to walk by that church every day on their way to school. Even now I shudder to think of what might have happened."
"I always told my kids to steer clear of that place," added neighbor Scott Carlyle. "But that's because there were a lot of strange people going in and out at odd hours, even at midnight on Saturdays. I was worried it was some kind of druggie hangout.
"To think the whole time it was a Roman Catholic Church. Now I know why they had all those stained glass windows —. so nobody could look in."
Critics, however, charge that Egan's Law is unconstitutional, specifically because it relies on religious profiling and is intended to safeguard only one segment of the population: young males. But State Sen. Carmela Truto, a Catholic who co-sponsored the bill, used church doctrine itself to prove only one segment needs protection.
"In the Catholic Church, after 2,000 years, Mary is still a Virgin," she said. "So clearly, they're not interested in girls."
That statement, however, angered Vatican spokesman Edgar Palowski, who said it propagated a common misconception about the church. "This doesn't get reported enough," he said, "but it's a fact that our priests abuse just as many girls as boys."
"Oh. Oh dear..." he added.
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| Kerry stops campaigning, nobody notices |
| 07.19.04 (10:56 am) [edit] |
Edwards carries the banner for Democrats
Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards appeared alone at several rallies over the weekend, and no one -- not the party faithful and not the press -- seemed to notice.
The enthusiasm for Edwards' campaign for vice president was wildly evident at each event, and even Theresa Heinz Kerry didn't notice that no presidential candidate was present. She urged the party faithful to campaign hard for Edwards.
"This country's problems won't be solved until John Edwards is elected vice president," she said.
Audiences roared with approval, many holding up "Edwards for Vice President" banners.
Party leaders, meanwhile, were huddling to determine if they should bother to pick anyone to be Edwards' presidential running mate.
Reports that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts might be the presumptive candidate for president proved to be unfounded. No one can remember hearing him speak at any campaign events.
A survey of probable voters conducted by Congers University showed that the Edwards for vice president campaign is running neck and neck with the George Bush for president campaign.
"It's just too close to call," political science professor Philip Selig said, "between the Bush-Cheney and the No One-Edwards tickets."
Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe said he's not worried about having No One as a party standard-bearer. "I predict that a No One-Edwards ticket can easily beat an Empty Suit-Cheney campaign."
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| Mertens Three Kick Rule |
| 07.19.04 (10:41 am) [edit] |
John Edwards went duck hunting in rural Stoneville, NC.
He shot and dropped a bird, but it fell into a farmer's field on the other side of a fence. As John climbed over the fence, an elderly farmer drove up on his tractor and asked him what he was doing.
John responded, "I shot a duck and it fell in this field, and now I'm going to retrieve it."
The old farmer replied, "This is my property, and you're not coming over here."
John became indignant & said, "I am one of the best trial lawyers in the Westerm hemisphere. If you don't let me get that duck, I'll sue you and take everything you own."
The old farmer smiled and said, "Apparently, you don't know how we do things in Stoneville. We settle small disagreements like this with the Mertens Three Kick Rule."
John asked, "What is the Mertens Three Kick Rule?"
The Farmer replied, "Well, first I kick you three times and then you kick me three times and so on back and forth until someone gives up."
John quickly thought about the proposed contest and decided that he could easily take the old codger. He agreed to abide by the local custom.
The old farmer slowly climbed down from the tractor and walked up to the lawyer. His first kick planted the toe of his steel-capped work boot into John's groin and dropped him to his knees. His second kick to the midriff sent John's last meal gushing from his mouth. John was on all fours when the farmer's third kick to his rear end sent him face-first into a fresh cow pie.
John summoned every bit of his will and somehow managed to get to his feet.
Wiping his face with the arm of his silk suit jacket, he said, "Okay, you old coot. Now it's my turn."
The old farmer smiled and said, "Naw, I give up. You can have the duck."
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| France Commemorates Deportaion of Jews in WWII |
| 07.19.04 (10:19 am) [edit] |
Chirac States That Sharon is not Welcome in France
Read On Though
Veterans and former deportees display flags at a ceremony to remember victims of racism and antisemitism committed by the French state during World War II, in Paris, Sunday, July 18, 2004. The commemoration was held on the site of the Velodrome d'Hiver, where thousands of Jews were rounded up before deportation.
With France facing a new upsurge in anti-Semitic violence, hundreds of people commemorated Sunday a World War II roundup of thousands of Jews sent to Nazi death camps 62 years ago.
Foreign Minister Michel Barnier and Veterans Minister Hamlaoui Mekachera joined veterans, war deportees and others at the Square of Jewish Martyrs in Paris for the ceremony, one of many around France.
Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe laid a wreath at a monument on the square, which sits on the site of the Velodrome d'Hiver bicycle stadium that was transformed into a transit camp on July 16 and 17, 1942.
On those days, 13,152 Jews were rounded up in the Paris region and 8,160 - mostly children - were held at the stadium before being sent to Auschwitz. In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.
Anti-Semitic acts against Jewish schools, synagogues or cemeteries have risen in France in the last years, coinciding with new tension in the Middle East. Many attacks have been blamed on young Muslims.
"The struggle against vile acts that we hear about in the news ... requires permanent vigilance by citizens along with the responsibility of remembering the past," Mekachera said.
Earlier this month, the Interior Ministry reported 510 anti-Jewish acts or threats in the first six months of 2004 - nearly as many as in all of last year, 593. Racist attacks also rose: There were 95 attacks and 161 threats through June, compared with a total 232 reported in 2003.
France's 6-million strong Muslim community has also faced recent attacks. In a case of suspected arson in March, fire damaged a mosque and destroyed a Muslim prayer hall in the southeast.
Earlier on Sunday, Sharon told a meeting of an American Jewish association in Jerusalem that he has to "advocate to our brothers in France: Move to Israel as early as possible."
"That's what I say to Jews all around the world but there (France) I think it's a must. They have to move immediately," he said while praising the French government for taking action against the "spread of the wildest anti-Semitism".
France, home to Europe's biggest Jewish and Muslim communities,estimated at 600,000 and 5 million respectively, saw the number of racist incidents soaring this year.
The country was gripped by a bout of soul-searching about anti-Semitism last week when a 23-year-old woman initially told police that a gang of six youths had accosted her on a Paris suburban train, slashing her clothes and drawing swastikas on her stomach after mistaking her for a Jew.
But she later admitted to police that she had made up the entire incident and begged forgiveness in a televised apology.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France also criticized Sharon's remarks as "adding oil to the fire" and "not corresponding to the facts."
"The Jewish community (in France) is worrying for the future oftheir children, but it knows that the French political authoritiesare doing all to fight against the anti-Semitism. To add oil to the fire in this way (in Sharon's way) is not acceptable," said the council in a statement.
The council also disagreed with Sharon's argument that 10 percent of the French population are Muslim means that the countryis anti-Semitist.
This remark confuses "a strong Muslim population and the fact that most of anti-Semitist came from the Muslim," said the statement, "To link the two is unacceptable."
"France is not an anti-Semitist nation and the French government is trying to do all, but the situation is difficult," it added.
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| Why al Qaeda is Fleeing Iraq |
| 07.19.04 (5:16 am) [edit] |
July 12, 2004: Al Qaeda operations in Iraq have encountered unexpected problems. Iraqis have become increasingly hostile to al Qaeda's suicide bombing campaign. Religious leaders, which al Qaeda expects to get support from, have been openly denouncing these bombings. Iraqis, aware that they are more likely, than American soldiers, to be victims of these attacks, are providing more information on where the al Qaeda members are hiding out. Most of the al Qaeda in Iraq are foreigners, and easy for Iraqis to detect. As a result of this, many of the al Qaeda men have moved back to Fallujah, which has become a terrorist sanctuary. The interim government is trying to convince the tribal and religious leaders of Fallujah to back a military operation in the city to clear out the various al Qaeda, criminal and Baath Party gangs. But the gangs of Fallujah are quick to threaten any local leader that shows signs of supporting the government. While the Fallujah leadership is intimidated, many residents of Fallujah are not, and are providing information to the coalition, which has led to attacks, with smart bombs or coalition and Iraqi troops, on buildings used by al Qaeda, or other gangs, as headquarters.
Al Qaeda has found the atmosphere even more hostile elsewhere in Iraq, and many of the terrorists have returned home. This is especially true of those who came from Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf nations, particularly Yemen) and Syria. Few, if any, al Qaeda came from Iran, which is Shia Moslem. Al Qaeda is dominated by Sunni Moslems who are often violently anti-Shia. While the hundreds of returning al Qaeda veterans are still determined to achieve al Qaeda's goals of world domination, they are also more realistic. Fanaticism was not sufficient to chase the foreigners from Iraq, and the Arab media's sensational, and largely false, reporting of the impact of al Qaeda's attacks contributed to the disillusionment.
Saudi Arabia and Syria are seeing an increase in al Qaeda activity because of the return of these survivors of the Iraq operations. However, many of those Saudis and Syrians who went to Iraq, didn't come back. Casualties were heavy, and the guys who had more on the ball, and were luckier, made it back to carry out al Qaeda's plans in their home countries. Here, al Qaeda wants to establish Islamic republics, and drive out infidels (non-Moslems.) This is much harder to do in Syria, which has an experienced secret police and security organization which has crushed Islamic radicals in the past. Saudi Arabia has also put down Islamic radicals in the past, but has a much less oppressive police force than Syria. Saudi Arabia has always ruled more by cooperation than coercion, and al Qaeda is taking advantage of this trust to carry out many attacks. Very few al Qaeda attacks have taken place in Syria, although some are expected because of the returning terrorists, and their experience operating in the harsh environment of Iraq.
All the Persian Gulf nations are seeing an increase in al Qaeda activity, especially in Yemen. Here, in the homeland of the bin Laden family, al Qaeda has always been active. But the Yemen government had made deals with many of the pro-al Qaeda tribes to keep the violence down. Unfortunately, that "arrangement" allowed al Qaeda to establish sanctuaries for recuperation and training.
While the surviving al Qaeda members are pretty clueless about the futility of their operations, many Arabs, in particular, and Moslems in general, are. Even Moslem journalists are starting to point out that al Qaeda consistently losses, and tends to hurt Moslems more than infidels. Moslem media is still eager to push al Qaeda as heroes, but the illusion is wearing thin and time is working against the "holy warriors".
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| Kerry Promises More of Everything to Everyone |
| 07.19.04 (5:02 am) [edit] |
John Kerry promised teachers today that a vote for Kerry is a vote for educational money. He said that his first presidential priority will be to give teachers the respect and the money they deserve.
However, this contradicts other speeches which John Kerry gave in the past, including telling the Steel Workers Of America that his first presidential priority will be to increase the wages of steel workers. In another speech three weeks ago, John Kerry promised ARPA that his first presidential priority will be to give the elderly better access to social security and 'depends'. In a speech 5 weeks ago, John Kerry also promised government city employees that his first priority will be to make sure that all city employees receive more pay and less work.
"This guy just promises everything to everyone." Stated a political analyst who wished to remain anonymous, "I mean where is he going to get all this money to pay for education? I'll tell you where! Most likely, he will tax all the 'rich' folks. And that is a big problem!"
A problem indeed. In order to pay for any and all services John Kerry is promising, the money has to come from somewhere. Many people believe that this needed money will come from new taxes he will introduce to the "rich".
"I will deliver on my promises." Stated John Kerry, "All these services will be paid through new taxes. But I'm only going to tax the rich. Not the poor. Anyone making more then $12,000 per year can afford new taxes."
John Kerry is set to make another speech next week where he will promise the Association of Fast Food Businesses discounts on Heinz Ketchup packages.
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| Community service sentence urged for Saddam |
| 07.16.04 (5:25 am) [edit] |
Saddam - 'That's him, he took my goldfish...'
Social workers will be calling for Saddam Hussein to be put on probation and given community service if found guilty at his trial.
The first social inquiry reports have been lodged with court officials and these paint a depressing picture of the dictator’s childhood – and one the Iraqi social services believe must be considered as mitigating circumstances.
Kimberley Achmed, of Baghdad’s social work department, has already lodged a protest with the Interim Government’s chief prosecutor, claiming a trial is inappropriate due to ‘past and present traumatic experiences’.
Ms Achmed, who heads the city’s children and families’ team, has compiled a dossier supporting her case but the key points are already in the public domain having already appeared on the internet in an essay posted in 1986 by a student at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
These include:
• The young Saddam was promised a puppy on his name day but, by mistake, received an American-made M-16 from the US Embassy
• Had his goldfish stolen at a fairground in Tikrit by a Kurd
• Was dropped from his primary school’s football team in favour of an Iranian whose father had bribed the coach
• Lost his high school sweetheart to the son of a Kuwaiti oil magnate
• Gave up a promising military career at the behest of the West to seize power and become an ally in the Middle East, then later abandoned.
Ms Achmed also details how Saddam had his excesses nurtured and pandered to by Britain and the US - while receiving copious amounts of weapons of mass destruction as one of the two Western-favoured sides in the Iraq-Iran war.
“I know social services are out of step but I believe the evidence proves that Saddam’s atrocities were acts of displacement,” she said.
“This was a troubled child who grew into a troubled man. There is no excuse for what he has done but we need to understand why it happened.”
In normal circumstances, even before a trial, a motion would be put forward recommending family therapy. However, in Saddam’s case this is not feasible, particularly due to his sons’ deaths in a shoot-out with coalition forces.
It is understood Ms Achmed believes community service, in the form of working with children or pensioners, could aid Saddam’s rehabilitation. Re-training in a trade, such as carpet fitting or crater landscaping, is also recommended.
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| Lone Phillipine Troop Prepares to Leave Iraq |
| 07.16.04 (5:21 am) [edit] |
Happy to be going home following his countries decision to withdraw from Iraq, Philippine soldier Alfonso de Asis began packing his bags for his journey home as the Philippine contingent to the Iraqi war.
Manila's decision to withdraw its solitary Iraq troop, Alfonso, draws tremendous support at home.
Residents of Alfonso's hometown in the Philippines are already preparing for his homecoming even though there is no sign yet that he has finished packing up his suitcase. "I have many souvenirs," says Alfonso.
Alfonso's friends cannot help but view the concession as a good thing.
"We need him home for our weekend football team, he's our best halfback," said a neighbor.
The country's partners in the coalition, on the other hand, particularly the US, have called the decision disappointing.
"It will encourage terrorists to move their base to Manila because they know that the government is weak," said a Bush administration spokesman. "We don't care about their problems gaining support at home for fighting Iraq and we don't care what happens to their people. We need them in Iraq to cover our political asses at home, watching people abandon us right before the election will ensure a swift retaliation for Manila from Bush, you can bet on that."
"I think the decision of the government to withdraw the troops is a question of domestic policy rather than foreign policy," said another political analyst. "When you have 95% against a decision you made as their leader, the midnight mobs are not far behind."
"We have to try to get a feel of what will really happen and a person's life is surely more important than George Bush's standing in his re-election polls. They don't need our troop presence there, all he did was guard the Coke machines anyway."
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| Moore "is a maggot feeding on the dead" |
| 07.15.04 (5:00 am) [edit] |
The family of U.S. Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone was shocked to learn that video footage of the major's Arlington National Cemetery burial was included by Michael Moore in his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Stone was killed in March 2003 by a grenade that officials said was thrown into his tent by Sgt. Hasan K. Akbar, who is on trial for murder.
It's been a big shock, and we are not very happy about it, to say the least," Kandi Gallagher, Stone's aunt and family spokeswoman, tells Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson.
We are furious that Greg was in that casket and cannot defend himself, and my sister, Greg's mother, is just beside herself," Gallagher said. "She is furious. She called him a 'maggot that eats off the dead.'"
The movie, described by critics as political propaganda during an election year, shows video footage of the funeral and Stone's fiancee, Tammie Eslinger, kissing her hand and touching it to his coffin.
The family does not know how Moore obtained the video, and Gallagher said they did not give permission and are considering legal recourse.
She described her nephew as a "totally conservative Republican" and said he would have found the film to be "putrid."
"I'm sure he would have some choice words for Michael Moore," she said. "Michael Moore would have a hard time asking our family for a glass of water if he were thirsty."
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| Bush's True Feelings for the French President |
| 07.14.04 (10:55 am) [edit] |
From the out set, Let me say that I found the Presidents remarks concerning the French and their current President to be extremely amusing, and pretty close to the truth as far as I am concerned. Good humor needs to have a grain of truth to be really funny.
A mistaken assumption that a microphone was off has landed President Bush in hot water with French President Jacques Chirac. The incident occurred while the President was recording a special message to be included in an upcoming episode of NBC’s reality program, “The Next Action Star.”
Mr. Bush spoke passionately and at length about his love of reality television – a fact later confirmed by several aides. These aides indicated that following an especially intense episode of one of what the President refers to as “my programs”, they are forced to join Mr. Bush in critiquing every aspect of the show. “It gets old fast,” conceded one aide.
During a break, Mr. Bush took the opportunity to stretch his legs and walked around the Oval Office. Pausing to look at a large globe, the President was heard to comment, “Hey, isn’t tomorrow some kind of frog holiday? We need to send Jacques some kind of gift basket. Have Rove send over some good cheese – like Velveeta or something.”
The President then affected a French accent. “Oui, oui, I am zee President of France and I no wear zee underpants.” Mr. Bush next began propositioning various women in the room, again mimicking Jacques Chirac, “Ah cherie, we could make zee beautiful music together – as soon as I take off zee frilly ladies underpants I am wearing.”
The President’s antics – which continued along this vein – had his staff and the NBC crew in stitches.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bush did not stop by simply assailing Mr. Chirac’s masculinity but went on to refer to the French as “just a bunch of stupid stooges for the damn krauts,” and “the worst smelling bipeds on the planet.”
He went on to suggest that if one were to look up homosexual in the dictionary, a picture of French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin would appear beside the definition. “Unless I am mistaken, I’m pretty sure Villepin is French for ‘gay bath house’.”
When Vice President Cheney entered to Oval Office to discover the source of the loud laughter, the President immediately accosted him. “Hey Dick, what is the frog holiday they are celebrating tomorrow?” When told it was Bastille Day, the President began an ersatz ballet. “Look at me,” he shouted, to the amusement of all, “I am doing some bastille!”
After dancing about the office for ten minutes, the President began losing steam, but this did not prevent him from one final dig at the French. Draping an arm over the Vice President’s shoulder, Mr. Bush was heard to say, “Thank God the frog army wasn’t in Iraq, those dumb bastards couldn’t hit a lake if the fell out of a boat – you know what I mean?” The Vice President laughed and nodded in agreement.
Unfortunately for the President, one of the sound engineers happened to be French.
Within thirty minutes of returning to NBC’s DC studio, the unnamed engineer had forwarded a digital copy of the Oval Office session to the French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte who in turn had it delivered to President Chirac. According to aides, although he received the content after 11:00 PM Paris time, President Chirac wasted no time in contacting President Bush.
Aides in both capitols confirmed that Mr. Chirac had “strong words” for Mr. Bush and that while on the phone Mr. Bush was appropriately contrite. Upon hanging up however, he turned to his aides and again affecting a French accent said, “Please pass zee Grey Poupon.”
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| US Tells Annan to Suck Pond Water |
| 07.14.04 (10:46 am) [edit] |
US Spurns Annan's $1 Bln Plea for Global AIDS Fund
And the main reason is that the US wants the dollars to go to help those suffering, and working to alleviate the suffering, not to the horrificly corrupt UN beauracracy which eats up over 1/2 of the funds.
The United States rejected on Wednesday U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's plea to inject $1 billion a year into a global AIDS fund.
"It's not going to happen," U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias told a small group of reporters at the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok.
"The President has requested $200 million for next year and I think that is more than adequate to meet the requirements of the Global Fund in terms of getting money out for putting programs in place," he said.
Annan called on Tuesday for the United States to contribute at least $1 billion a year, echoing a plea from Richard Feachem, the executive director of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which needs more than $3 billion for 2005.
[b]Tobias said The US taxpayers were leading the global fight against AIDS and spending nearly twice as much to fight the pandemic as the rest of the world combined. [/b]
But controversy about its payments to the public-private Global Fund, launched in 2002 as a brainchild of Annan, has overshadowed discussions at the AIDS summit this week.
Critics have condemned the United States for pursuing a go-it-alone strategy in setting up its own $15 billion five-year AIDS action plan, rather than folding its efforts into the international body.
Tobias said the Global Fund was an important part of Washington's strategy but that bilateral programs allowed it to move more quickly and aggressively in the war on AIDS, which has killed 20 million people.
The Geneva-based fund's first priority should be to increase its infrastructure and capabilities on the ground to put existing money to work, he said.
"There are those in the Global Fund who would like to continue to approve more grants and increase the number of grants in the pipeline," Tobias added.
"Our position is the Global Fund needs to focus on getting the money to work and that really the energy needs to be going there, and probably not be looking at another round of grant proposals until some in mid-2005."
AIDS activists want the Global Fund to announce funding for a fifth round of treatment and prevention programs before the end of this year.
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| Why J.F. Kerry Cannot Be a Liberal - And Still Be a Catholic |
| 07.13.04 (3:18 pm) [edit] |
In our day the Catholic world, with as much justice as reason, attributes impiety as a quality of free-thought, whether in a person, a journal or an institution. "Free-thinker" is an odious epithet which few are willing to accept, but which many justly bear in spite of their protestations. They chafe under the appellation of the word, but find no inconvenience in being all that it implies. Persons, societies, books, governments which reject, in matters of faith and morals, the only and exclusive criterion--that of the Catholic Church--are Liberals. They acknowledge themselves to be Liberals. They feel honored to be so recognized and never dream of scandalizing anybody except us terrible "irreconcilables."
Now change the expression; instead of Liberals, call them free-thinkers. They resent the epithet as a calumny and grow indignant at the insult, as they term it. But why this excruciating tenderness, this delicate sensitiveness over the variations of a simple term? Have you not, dear friends, banished from your conscience, your books, your journals and your society all recognition of the supreme authority of the Church? Have you not raised up as the sole and fundamental criterion of your conduct and your thought your own untrammeled reason?
Very properly then do you say that you are Liberal, and no one will dispute the title with you. But you should remember that the very principle which makes you Liberal constitutes you free-thinkers. Every Liberal, no matter of what degree or shade, is ipso facto a freethinker, and every freethinker, as odious as the title may seem according to social conventionalities, is only a logical Liberal. He is simply a Liberal following his premises to their conclusions. This doctrine is as precise and as exact as a mathematical proposition. It is based on the laws of the strictest logic. It is a simple syllogism, whose premise is Liberalism and whose conclusion is free-thought.
Let us illustrate. You are a Catholic more or less open to false allurements, and as a punishment for your sins, you belong to a Liberal society, say, of a literary character. Consider a moment and ask yourself the following question: Would I continue to belong to this atheneum if tomorrow it should proclaim itself publicly and boldly a society of free-thought? What response would your conscience and your shame dictate? Would you not at once withdraw from its membership? As a Catholic you could take no part in its proceedings. Again, you subscribe to a journal and read it without scruple, although it bears a Liberal title and speaks and reasons accordingly. Would you continue your subscription if all of a sudden it should place upon its title page the following heading: journal of Free-Thought. Well, this moderate or violent Liberal journal has been for years nothing more nor less than a free-thinker, and you have been imbibing its poison under the delusion of a word.
Ah, of how many prejudices would we rid ourselves if we only reflected a little on the meaning of words! Every society, whether scientific, literary or philanthropic, constituted on Liberal lines, is free-thinking. Every government Liberally organized is free-thinking. To reject with distrust the name and not the substance is blindness. Any institution, no matter what be its character, established in complete independence of the magisterium of the Faith, is free-thinking. Catholics cannot, consistently with their faith, belong to them. Membership there means rebellion against the Church.
In all such institutions Liberalism reigns and, in consequence, free-thought. No Catholic can remain a Catholic and affiliate with them. We are Catholics all-in-all--or not at all. We cannot dwell in an atmosphere where God is not. There is no true spiritual life where Jesus Christ is not, and He has given His promise to be with His Church forever. He who abides not in Him lives in the outer darkness.
How much do perverse Catholics serve the devil by obstinately clinging to such associations and participating in their works! In the folly of their ignorance, which they assert against the wisdom of the Church, they harden their consciences to the practical guidance of the Holy See and blindly enlist in the service of an enemy whose cunning deludes them into the slavery of Hell--under the disguise of freedom! They forget that the Truth alone makes them free. To know and serve God is the only freedom, and Liberalism completely severs the bond which links man to God. With a just and rational horror does a good Catholic regard Liberalism. Ultramontanism will never cause you to loose your soul; Liberalism is a broad road to the infernal abyss.
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| What is the actual track record of the UN or Europe? |
| 07.13.04 (5:19 am) [edit] |
"Is it something to rely on, in life and death decisions?"
To those who do not want to face up to hard and brutal choices in a nuclear age, the magic formula is to turn to something called "the international community" -- or, more concretely, the United Nations or "our European allies." As with so many rhetorical solutions to hard problems, the specific realities behind the rhetoric get very little attention.
What is the actual track record of the UN or Europe? Is it something to rely on, in life and death decisions?
The UN stood idly by in Rwanda while mass slaughters went on. The UN passed resolution after resolution on Iraq for years, without taking any action to enforce them. Indeed, the UN was part of the massive corruption in the oil-for-food program, which enabled Saddam Hussein to divert money intended to feed the Iraqi people into buying weapons and palaces for himself.
When the UN seated Libya on its human rights committee, that was a sign of its moral bankruptcy. So was its conference on racism, which featured anti-Semitic propaganda by Arab countries.
What of our European allies, who are automatically assumed to be so much wiser and more sophisticated than American "cowboy" presidents, whether Reagan or Bush?
Europe's track record throughout the 20th century was one unbelievable disaster after another. European countries blundered their way into two world wars -- from which every country involved emerged worse off than before, with a continent devastated and its people hungry amid the rubble. Both times American food fed them.
The two biggest ideological disasters of the 20th century -- Communism and Fascism -- were both created in Europe. Both of these blind fanaticisms led to innocent civilians being killed by the millions, during peacetime as well as in wars.
For more than half a century, Western Europe has not had to defend itself because it has been protected by the American nuclear umbrella. Without that, there w | |
