This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Foreign Policy

  • Jimmy Carter: Portrait of an abject failure

    There’s an old saying that goes: “Let your life serve as a warning to others”.  In Jimmy Carter’s case, that’s an understatement.  In the “worst president in history” category, it’s a tie between Jimmy Carter and Bubba Clinton. Neither was keen on national security, and both were dismal failures at foreign policy. They were however, adept at smooth-talking minorities and poor into believing that age-old myth of the “Democratic party being for the “working class”.  All one needs to do is study the history of the Unions in this country to see the result of that lie.
    The former Georgia peanut farmer never met a dictator he didn’t like.  His approach to foreign dictators is stomach-turning.
    Of Saddam Hussein, Carter said: “Even if his effort is successful [Colin Powell addressing the U.N. Security Council] and lies and trickery by Saddam Hussein are exposed, this will not indicate any real or proximate threat by Iraq to the United States or to our allies.”  Instead, Carter wanted a “a sustained and enlarged inspection team, deployed as a permanent entity until the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council determine that its presence is no longer needed”.
    Evidently, 12 years of Hussein’s nose-thumbing trickery wasn’t convincing.
    During his disastrous administration he declared that Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was someone “Who believes in human rights”, and told Nicolae Ceausescu that “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics”.
    Thanks to hapless foreign policy decisions which resulted in the abandonment of the Shah, mishandling of the Iranian hostage crisis, and botched rescue attempt, this myopic simpleton was responsible for thousands of deaths, and left the door wide open for a succession of Iranian Ayatollahs and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
    His antics with the former Soviets weren’t much better.  During Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure, the Soviet Union expanded militarily and engaged in several coups funded by the Kremlin. Carter’s reputation as a foreign policy wimp encouraged the Russians to install Communist regimes in Vietnam, Angola, Somalia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Grenada, Nicaragua, and South Yemen.  All the while, the American military was underequipped, underfunded, and underpaid.
    As if Carter’s bumbling as President weren’t enough, it pales in comparison to his post-Oval Office behavior.  He cuddled up with Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime, wrote letters to members of the United Nations opposing any interference with Iraq’s aggression in Kuwait, traveled to Pyongyang and praised Kim Il-Sung, announcing that that Pyongyang was a “bustling city where shoppers pack the department stores”.  That’s great news of the rest of North Korea; since they have virtually no electricity and a diet consisting of grass soup.
    Included on Carter’s past and present A-list list of friends:  Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Syria’s late Hafez al-Assad, Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam, and former Haitian butcher and junta leader Raul Cédras.  It reads like a who’s who of global despots.
    He refuses to let go of the office he was kicked out of in 1980.  His free-lance anti-American diplomacy is an embarrassment and a disgrace.  His arrogance and stupidity doesn’t just affect himself. The problem is that he gives aid and comfort to America’s enemies and there is a segment of like-minded sycophants who endorse his grotesque behavior.
    Do us all a favor, Jimmy.  Stick to building “Crack houses for humanity”.
          

    GI JANE

    sfcmac@wordpress.com

  • It ain’t just a river in Egypt, Edwards

    John Edwards, the prettiest girl in the Democrat field of Presidential candidates, denies that there’s a terrorist threat to this country, according to USAToday;

    Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a “global war on terror,” calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

    In a defense policy speech he planned to deliver at the Council on Foreign Relations, Edwards called the war on terror a “bumper sticker” slogan President George W. Bush has used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad to the invasion of Iraq.

    “We need a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq military that is mission focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes,” Edwards said in remarks prepared for delivery. “By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set — that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.”

    I’m sure that the Jersey Girls will be outraged that Edwards called their slaughtered husbands “bumper sticker slogans” for a “discredited ideology”. Funny, but we can replay the scenes of the World Trade Center attack over-and-over and some people still don’t believe it happened, I guess.

    I wonder what Edwards considers a 21st century threat – maybe split ends epidemics or caked mascara in the corner of his eye? Does he think that space aliens are going to fly their craft into the White House? What the hell could a 21st century threat be if not this global war against terror?

    Edwards outlined several steps he said he would pursue as president to strengthen the military, including using force only to pursue essential national security missions, improve civilian-military relations, and root out mismanagement at the Pentagon.

    Ah, that’s the real enemy – the Pentagon. Now we can see clearly – thank you, poodle-boy.

    I’ve catalogued on this blog that terrorists are cooperating across ideological borders to prepare for the next attack. If they can find IRA terrorists in Columbia and Basque separatists in Bolivia, what more proof do we need that there is a GLOBAL war against GLOBAL terrorists?

    Not only is Edwards wrong about terrorism, he’s wrong on the economy, too, according to the Wall Street Journal;

    It’s been a rough week for John Edwards, and now comes more bad news for his “two Americas” campaign theme. A new study by the Congressional Budget Office says the poor have been getting less poor. On average, CBO found that low-wage households with children had incomes after inflation that were more than one-third higher in 2005 than in 1991.

    The CBO results don’t fit the prevailing media stereotype of the U.S. economy as a richer take all affair — which may explain why you haven’t read about them. Among all families with children, the poorest fifth had the fastest overall earnings growth over the 15 years measured. (See the nearby chart.) The poorest even had higher earnings growth than the richest 20%. The earnings of these poor households are about 80% higher today than in the early 1990s.

    What happened? CBO says the main causes of this low-income earnings surge have been a combination of welfare reform, expansion of the earned income tax credit and wage gains from a tight labor market, especially in the late stages of the 1990s expansion. Though cash welfare fell as a share of overall income (which includes government benefits), earnings from work climbed sharply as the 1996 welfare reform pushed at least one family breadwinner into the job market.

    If Edwards can’t get simple economics right, how can we trust him to handle the big stuff – like our lives.

  • China trade spigot II

    Sunday, I wrote about the low quality control on Chinese imports and today, by way of the Drudge Report, I find this from the New York Times;

    Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of “Mr. Cool Junior.”

    * * * * *

    Government investigators arrived here [in Panama] just days after customs officials in Panama said that they had discovered diethylene glycol in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste. The toothpaste was being sold under the English brand names Mr. Cool and Excel.

    And the Chinese response;

    “We didn’t do this; we didn’t make the bad stuff,” said Shi Lei, a manager at Danyang City Success. “It was probably someone else.“

    So why are we trading with these backwards bumpkins? Would Americans tolerate that behavior from our domestic companies? Then why do we tolerate it from our “trading partners”?

    In other news from China, the peasants are revolting;

    The violence appeared to stem from a two-month-long crackdown in Guangxi to punish people who violated the country’s birth control policy. The policy limits the number of children families can have legally.

    Corruption, land grabs, pollution, unpaid wages and a widening wealth gap have fueled tens of thousands of incidents of unrest in recent years, many of them occurring in rural areas that have been left behind in China’s long economic boom.

    The central government, expressing concern that unrest could undermine one-party rule, has alleviated the tax burden on peasants and sought to curtail confiscations of farmland for development. But China’s hinterland remains volatile compared with the relative prosperity and stability of its largest cities.

    They treat their own people with indifference, why should we expect them to be honest traders with the rest of the world? The problem is that no one is willing to make the Chinese pay for their uncivilized behavior – it’s up to the American consumer to avoid Chinese imports.

  • Gore discovers 20/20 hindsight (Updated)

    Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV, Al Gore is back and on book tour for his latest act of public mental masturbation “Assault on Reason” – a more apt title I can not imagine. From ABC News;

    On the one hand, Gore has written an un-nostalgic look back at the previous six years that lays out his case as to how the world might look today had the chads fallen another way — a world where U.S. troops would not be fighting in Iraq, Abu Ghraib would just be a town’s name and the nation would have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina, global warming, and, yes, perhaps even Sept. 11.

    Funny but I saw an episode of Family Guy last night that touched on the same subject. Without going into detail, Al Gore becomes the President in 2000 and the cast comments on how he hunted down and captured bin Laden himself (bin Laden was hiding out amongst the cast of MadTV) and cars all ran on vegetable oil. I wonder if the show’s writers had a sneak peak at Gore’s book.

    According to Dan Fromkin in the Washington Post Gore claims;

    “‘History will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy (Iraq) as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd.’

    “He does not flatly state that Sept. 11 would not have occurred during a Gore administration. But, he writes, ‘Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes.’”

    Look, Al, you and your country-ass hick master had eight years to do something about al Qaida and Hussein, you did nothing – only because you needed something to distract the American people from your constant failures and they made nice, easy targets at which to fire off cruise missiles. And finally, when they did strike, we had no choice – thanks to you, dimbulb. And what did the Clinton Administration do to protect New Orleans from Katrina. Have you forgotten that you were Vice President for eight years?

    As for the title, I’m sure that everyone will agree that you assault reason just by writing your crybaby crap – thinking that any rational person would have the slightest interest in what you would have done if only we’d had your hindsight as foresight.

    I had a girlfriend like Al Gore once – she never let me go. To this day, she still emails me after 35 years and tells me how wonderful our life would have been if I’d married her instead of my wife of 30 years. And then she complains that I don’t answer her email.

    Al Gore, you’re America’s pathetic ex-girlfriend.

    UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico has a “User’s Guide to Gore Fever”.

    A fawning EJ Dionne professes his non-sexual man-crush on Al Gore in his Washington Post column “Free to be Al Gore“;

    Gore, to his credit, won’t talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

    I guess it’s easy to be declared right when it’s impossible to prove whether it’s true or not. Apparently, even some on the Left aren’t buying Dionne’s deranged hug-fest.

  • White House; Carter “increasingly irrelevant” (Updated)

    Former worst US President in my memory, Jimmy Carter, feeling left out of limelight lately, took time to bash the President on BBC last week, while taking a glancing blow at Tony Blair, according to the Washington Post;

    The former president also lashed out at British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Asked by BBC Radio how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, Carter said: “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient. And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.”

    Of course, this a foreign policy critique from the guy who not only aided the mullahs’ rise to power in Iran by abandoning our tradition ally the Shah, but he also facilitated the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan by being such a spastic creampuff that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan during his Presidency without fear of retribution (except that we boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics – that must’ve really stung, huh?).

    Well, according to the Post (Reuters Wire service story), the White House fired back at Carter yesterday;

    White House spokesman Tony Fratto had declined to react on Saturday but on Sunday fired back.

    “I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless personal criticism is out there,” Fratto told reporters. “I think it’s unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.”

    Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday’s sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.

    Yeah, well Reuters forgets that former Presidents have traditionally kept their stupid mouths shut on policy, too. Especially when they’re talking to the foreign press. Carter has been a non-stop, yammering goofball since Clinton left office and the new administration has ignored him.

    Of course, Clinton sent Carter to negotiate with the Haitian Generals and North Korea (look how well those worked out for us) and he went to insure that Hugo Chavez won his re-election in Venezuela. I’m surprised he had nothing to do with his favorite Commie’s election in Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega, by the way).

    Carter, during his interview, went on to blather;

    In his interview with the [Arkansas] Democrat-Gazette, Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having “zero peace talks” in Israel. Carter also said the administration “abandoned or directly refuted” every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts, by other presidents.

    Look how well all of Carter’s negotiations have worked out for us – yet he thinks that there is something negotiate over in the Middle East. Hey, dipstick, Arabs don’t want to negotiate – they want to kill us all. Especially YOU.

    Carter went on to ignore history;

    “We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,” Carter said.

    I guess Carter forgot that every other nation on Earth has waged pre-emptive war on us in the last century. Remember the Zimmerman Telegram? The sinking of the Lusitania? How about Pearl Harbor? And ya know what – the Carter Doctrine was a pre-emptive, unilateral move by your administration to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.

    Don’t you think it’s time we stopped sitting still like ducks on a pond during opening day? Or would you prefer that we just sit by and wait for terrible things to happen like the embassy seizure in Iran?

    No, of course you don’t think we should get ahead of our enemies – that’s why you got to be the last President who could walk the mile down Pennsylvania Avenue on your inauguration day. By the end of your administration, you’d made the world so dangerous that every President since has had to ride in a bullet-proof limo.

    The RNC wasn’t so gentle with Carter as the White House;

    “Apparently, Sunday mornings in Plains for former President Carter includes hurling reckless accusations at your fellow man,” said Amber Wilkerson, Republican National Committee spokeswoman. She said that it was hard to take Carter seriously because he also “challenged Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War.”

    Carter’s been wrong about every one of his foreign policy criticisms and attempts over the last 35 years. Why should anyone think he has something substantial to add now?

    UPDATE: Fox News Channel (with an AP contribution) reports that Carter claims he was misunderstood;

    “My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted but I wasn’t comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking about anyone personally,” Carter said in an interview Monday when asked to explain.

    The comments “were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between [President Richard] Nixon and this administration, and I think that this administration’s foreign policy compared to Nixon’s was much worse. … I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations throughout history but just with President Nixon’s,” he told NBC’s “The Today Show.”

    What a doofus. In his quote above, he used the word “worst” which means he was comparing this administration with at least two other administrations, otherwise he would have used the word “worse” which would be used in comparing two administrations (Nixon versus Bush). Language means stuff.

    Oh, and he admits that he’s irrelevant;

    Carter…said he doesn’t “claim to have any relevancy” on the Iraq issue, though he has sent reports for the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his personal activities monitoring elections around the world.

    Well, he finally got something right. The old coot needs to go back to Plains, sit on the porch of his mansion and rock himself further into obscurity.

    Editor’s Note: I know I’ve said much of this before, but I feel it bears repeating. This a form of self-flagellation over the guilt that my first vote in a Presidential election went to Jimmy Carter. I regretted it within days after his inauguration when his first official act was to give amnesty to draft dodgers. And the main reason I’d voted for him was because he’d promised, during the campaign, to not surrender the Panama Canal (where I was stationed at the time) – we all know how that turned out.

    Later, I spent weeks on Green Ramp in Fort Bragg waiting for the signal to run a Soviet combat brigade out of our Hemisphere – that of course never came to fruition, to our great shame – but our equipment at the time had been manufactured during the Vietnam war and there were no parts available and mostly failed to work – none of us were surprised when Desert One ended because of maintenance failures.

    There was no fuel or money to train; we practiced jumping from the tailgate of moving duece-and-a-half trucks to simulate assembling on the drop zone. When I got promoted to Sergeant from Corporal, my raise was an whopping $22/month.

    So yeah, my beef with Carter is personal and will last until one of us dies. Expect one of these posts everytime he opens his stupid yap.

  • Shut off the Chinese import spigot

    China is a bad trading partner. I know it’s hard to remember before 9-11-01, but China knocked one of our recon flights down and held the crew hostage for 11 days. That’s how they began their dealings with this administration. After 9-11, they went through the motions of fighting terrorists, but only as the term could be applied to their enemies, not in the interests of the civilized world.

    The Chinese have since then amassed a fortune by counterfeiting everything they could get their grimey little paws on – usually at the expense of US manufacturers. As an example, from BusinessWeek;

    General Motors Corp. execs would agree with that — which is why they’re apoplectic. GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co., the Korean subsidiary of GM, says the QQ is a knockoff of its own Matiz minicar, sold in China as the Chevrolet Spark since 2003. “The cars are more than similar,” says Rob Leggat, vice-president for corporate affairs at GM Daewoo. “It really approaches being an exact copy.” Same cute, snubby nose. Same bug-eyed headlights. Same rounded, high back. And most components in the QQ, Leggat says, can easily be interchanged with parts on the Spark. So on Dec. 16, GM Daewoo filed suit in a Shanghai court alleging that Chery Automobile Co. stole its trade secrets to make the QQ. Chery declined to comment.

    This isn’t the first time a foreign auto maker has felt ripped off in China. In 2003, Toyota Motor Corp. sued Hangzhou-based Geely Group Co. for copying the Japanese company’s logo and slapping it on Geely models. Toyota lost the case. Yet Honda Motor Co. (HMC ) in December won a ruling that bars Chongqing Lifan Industrial from selling motorcycles under the “Hongda” brand. Honda is also suing Shuanghuan Automobile Co., saying the Chinese company’s Laibao SRV is a copy of the Honda CR-V sport-utility vehicle. “Chinese car companies still have limited [design] capabilities,” says Jia Xinguang, an analyst at China National Automotive Industry Consulting & Developing Corp., a consultancy. “That is why so many [of them] copy bigger car companies’ models.”I still don’t know why the idiots at GM thought buying Daewoo was a good idea, nonetheless, the Chinese ripping off their designs, similarly naming vehicles and mounting misleading trademarks on cars is not the act of a good trading partner. 

    I still don’t know why the idiots at GM thought buying Daewoo was a good idea, nonetheless, the Chinese ripping off their designs, similarly naming vehicles and mounting misleading trademarks on cars is not the act of a good trading partner.  In Panama, Chinese drug manufacturers managed to kill 51 people by lacing cough syrup with antifreeze (in some cases some as much as 99%). From an AP story;

    A Chinese company that sold a batch of diethylene glycol, a chemical cousin of antifreeze that killed at least 51 people in Panama, had no license to sell pharmaceuticals, the government said Tuesday.

    Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said an investigation into the source of the deadly medicine revealed that the Chinese company that originally sold it, was authorized to sell only chemicals for industrial use.

    “This morning we contacted the State Food and Drug Administration, which investigated the matter half a year ago,” said Jiang. “According to the investigation, the relevant company is not an enterprise for medicine production but is licensed to make chemical-grade material.”

    “The production of medicine and supplementary materials is strictly regulated in China,” she said.

    But the deadly concoction was exported, nonetheless. And the Chinese are not accepting any culpability, apparently. And now their indifference is affecting US imports. From today’s Washington Post;

    Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

    Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

    Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

    Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

    These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

    For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught — many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

    Now the confluence of two events — the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week’s resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China — has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that software piracy is down in China;

    Software piracy is still high by international standards: The study, conducted by research firm International Data Corp. for the Business Software Alliance, estimated 82% of software used in China in 2006 was pirated, down from 86% in 2005. That compares with a global average of 35% both years.

    Illegal software usage in China stood at 92% as recently as 2003. The reduction of 10 percentage points in China’s piracy rate over three years avoided $864 million in losses for legitimate software providers, according to IDC.

    Meanwhile, the size of China’s legitimate software market grew to $1.2 billion in 2006, an 88% increase from the previous year, said the report, issued yesterday. 

    But you can bet that the illegal software economy in China funds the legal software portion. Even if they stopped pirating today, the damage (and profits) has been done.

    The WSJ also reports that China has promised to improve on their exported food standards, too;

    The Chinese government said it is cracking down on dangerous domestic food-industry practices, in Beijing’s first top-level policy response to the recent storm over tainted pet food in the U.S. The response suggests Beijing is sensitive to the outcry, but the plan lacked specifics, an indication that its impact could be limited.

    As far as I’m concerned, it’s too late. They export inferior products and they’ve made money doing so. If I’d been treated the same way by a local merchant, it’s happen just once. I’d take my business elsewhere.

    The Chinese also have not been very useful in controlling their client, North Korea, either – probably for the same reasons they can’t control their economy – it doesn’t affect the Chinese government, so it doesn’t matter. As long as the money is rolling in and the US is more involved in quelling the world’s troubles than in combating illegal trade, the Chinese economy has been booming.

    Maybe it’s time we just pack up and leave them to their own devices until they can join the civilized world instead of acting like some third world goat ropers.

  • Convert or die

    According to the Associated Press (via Fox News Channel);

    Christians in a Pakistani town beset by pro-Taliban militants sought government protection Wednesday, the eve of a deadline for them to convert to Islam or face violence.

    About 500 Pakistani Christians in Charsadda, a town in the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, received letters earlier this month telling them to close their churches and convert by Thursday or be the target of “bomb explosions.”

    Several Christians, a tiny minority in the predominantly Muslim country, have fled town and others are living in fear, community leaders said.

    Ron Paul and the Iraq Study Group and Nancy Pelosi say we should negotiate with these people. They don’t seem to be a mood to negotiate. Seems pretty simple to me – they want everyone to either be like them or dead. Where’s the wiggle room?

    The AP story is oddly consistent with what Mike at Flopping Aces wrote last night on Ron Paul’s idiot explanation Tuesday night;

    From the bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People:”

    What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

    (1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

    (a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.

    It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions.
    …
    You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.

    In comparison, Little Green Footballs tells us that the Saudis are concerned that the Western world is xenophobic towards Arabs, and they don’t understand why we could think that. And islamophobia is a worse form of terrorism than being beheaded or blown to smithereens while doing your grocery shopping;

    “The increasingly negative political and media discourse targeting Muslims and Islam in the United States and Europe has made things all the more difficult,” the foreign ministers said. “Islamophobia became a source of concern, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, but the phenomenon was already there in Western societies in one form or the other,” they pointed out. “It gained further momentum after the Madrid and London bombings. The killing of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh in 2004 was used in a wicked manner by certain quarters to stir up a frenzy against Muslims,” the ministers pointed out. Van Gogh had made a controversial film about Muslim culture.

    Imagine that – everytime an Arab commits an act of terrorism against perfectly innocent people, living their lives peaceably and no one in the Arab World condemns the act, and the Arab people dance in the streets celebrating the act, hatred towards Arabs increases.

    Sounds like Scrappleface.

  • Just one question

    So, I’m just getting my daily diet of blogs and reading Michele Malkin’s report of Cuba defending Michael Moore’s schlockumentary “Sicko”. Apparently Moore went to Cuba to prove how much better the healthcare system is in Cuba than the US. Of course, given Moore’s record of manipulating the truth, I doubt anyone would believe Moore if he set out to prove rain is actually water.

    Regardless, I’m just wondering if anyone can tell me, if the Cuban healthcare system is so good, why did Castro need to import a doctor from Spain when he was stricken ill this last winter? Just wonderin’ that’s all.

    Read the rest of Michele’s post about real censorship and Rob at Say Anything on the same subject.