Month: November 2006

Christmas, As Sponsored By Secularists

One would expect that the new movie coming out this holiday season, The Nativity Story, to spend quite a bit of money on advertisements. Where might we see these ads? Television viewers will probably notice them on holiday specials and perhaps news shows; certainly they will appear in malls and shopping areas for those looking for Christmas presents. Perhaps some might even show up on bus stops and billboards around town.
One place Chicago residents won’t see the advertisements will be, ironically, at the city’s Christmas celebration:

A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says. Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the German Christkindlmarket, to reconsider using a movie studio as a sponsor because it is worried ads for its film “The Nativity Story” might offend non-Christians.
New Line Cinema, which said it was dropped, had planned to play a loop of the new film on televisions at the event. The decision had both the studio and a prominent Christian group shaking their heads.
“The last time I checked, the first six letters of Christmas still spell out Christ,” said Paul Braoudakis, spokesman for the Barrington, Ill.-based Willow Creek Association, a group of more than 11,000 churches of various denominations. “It’s tantamount to celebrating Lincoln’s birthday without talking about Abraham Lincoln.”

This decision is so stupid, it’s difficult to get angry about it. Exactly which sensitive attendees of a Christmas celebration will the city be saving? If ever a target market ever existed, it’s the Christkindlmarket. People go there to celebrate Christmas, and while the holiday may not have much religious significance for many of them, they can’t be offended by a reminder of its religious roots — especially since many of the displays will reflect just that.
Their excuse? Mindless multiculturalism, meaning that they reject one culture in order to keep from offending others. The festival will have displays that reflect other religious traditions, which it should, but apparently having The Nativity Story as a sponsor of the event twisted the delicate balance that the city believes it must strike in order to legitimize their involvement. Apparently, they want to keep too much Christmas from invading Christmas.
Rational multiculturalism means accepting everyone’s culture, not keeping scorecards and points about how much of one we get at the expense of the other. Irrational multiculturalism has governments trying to protect the tender feelings of a handful — if that — of overly sensitive critics who will find any excuse to complain about everything, no matter what effort gets made. Anyone who worries that there’s too much Christmas in Christmas has defined himself as a practitioner of the latter.

Olmert Offers Peace, Fatah Responds As Usual

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave what had been billed as a major policy speech, but to little practical effect. Olmert urged Palestinians to agree to end hostilities in order to negotiate for a long-term peace and offered mass prisoner releases as an incentive, but the Palestinians responded with rocket attacks from Gaza:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, trying to build on a shaky cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, on Monday offered Palestinians a series of incentives, including negotiations and a prisoner release, if they turned away from violence.
The offer was made in what was billed as a major policy speech, but it contained little that was new. The timing was important, though, because Mr. Olmert and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, are eager to bolster their own political positions, begin a serious dialogue and stop a bloody cycle of violence. …
In his speech, Mr. Olmert appealed to Palestinians to turn away from militant resistance and make a commitment to peaceful negotiations for an independent state. “You, the Palestinian people,” he said, “are standing in these days at an historic crossroads.”
If the Palestinians can form a new unity government that satisfies international standards and release a captured Israeli soldier, Mr. Olmert said, he will respond by immediately meeting with Mr. Abbas, releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, reducing checkpoints and moving toward a further withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the occupied West Bank.
He promised that Israel would also then release to the Palestinian Authority the $50 million a month in taxes and duties that Israel has collected for the Palestinians but withheld — more than $500 million so far this year — contending that Hamas, the governing Palestinian faction, is a terrorist group.

Unfortunately for Olmert, Hamas isn’t the only terrorist group in the territories. The new rocket attacks on Sderot did not come from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The AAMB belongs to Fatah, the same faction that Mahmoud Abbas leads — the same Abbas that Olmert praised as a partner for peace. Either Olmert has seriously deluded himself on Abbas’ intentions, or he’s picked a really weak sister for his plans to end the hostilities.
None of the Palestinian factions gave Olmert much of an audience. Hamas complained that Olmert wouldn’t commit to the 1967 borders, even though Hamas has repeatedly said that wouldn’t convince them to recognize Israel anyway. They also rejected the proposed prisoner releases as inadequate. No one knows how the Islamic Jihad leadership took the speech, although they appeared to take a day off and gave the rocket launchers to AAMB terrorists instead.
Although Olmert stayed close to other public offers, his office hinted at more movement from the Israelis. They characterized the 2002 Saudi proposal positively, a first for the Israelis, even though it also calls for a return to the 1967 borders. The so-called “right of return” also will be a no-sale to Israelis, although Olmert explicitly called for land swaps to resolve the issue. The effort and enthusiasm for peacemaking appears striking; Olmert seems rather suddenly eager for a peace settlement. Has he decided that the US might not be so reliable in the next couple of years, given the pressure here to pull back from our commitments in the region? Or does he think that the only way to remain in office is to achieve something that has escaped Israeli leaders for the last 58 years?
Whatever Olmert’s motivation, he hasn’t been rewarded with any movement from his enemies. Given their history, we can expect the Palestinians not to miss this opportunity to miss another opportunity.

The Informant Retreats

Five days ago, I wrote about the no-knock warrant that resulted in the death of a 92-year-old woman and the wounding of three officers in a drug raid gone bad. I questioned the facts as the police laid them out, when they claimed that they had announced themselves and waited for a response, but that the woman had shot the three officers as they approached the house. Now we hear today that the informant on whose information the warrant was issued has changed his story:

The confidential informant on whose word Atlanta police raided the house of an 88-year-old woman is now saying he never purchased drugs from her house and was told by police to lie and say he did.
Chief Richard Pennington, in a press conference Monday evening, said his department learned two days ago that the informant — who has been used reliably in the past by the narcotics unit — denied providing information to officers about a drug deal at 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta.
“The informant said he had no knowledge of going into that house and purchasing drugs,” Pennington said. “We don’t know if he’s telling the truth.”
The search warrant used by Atlanta police to raid the house says that a confidential informant had bought crack cocaine at the residence, using $50 in city funds, several hours before the raid.

Let’s review why “no-knock” warrants exist. They get issued most regularly for two reasons: to pre-empt any violent reaction to the police officers and to keep suspects from flushing evidence down the toilets and sinks inside the domicile. Only the first reason has any validity for overwhelming force being employed by the police, as the destruction of evidence does not put any lives in danger. As this raid shows, a sudden invasion of a private home can have deadly consequences for all when the homeowner has guns with which to defend herself — a rational expectation in a neighborhood infested with violent drug dealers.
These warrants should not get banned, but judges should only issue them when demonstrable risk of violence can be established. Strictly speaking, the police have no right to enter anyone’s home without their permission, and the legal system should resist any kind of forced entry such as we saw in Atlanta except under the most exceptional circumstances. That’s just common sense. It’s also common sense to find out who lives in a house before charging through the door, a task that all indications show the police failed to attempt. She lived there for seventeen years, after all. People would have known her.
And what major crime did the Atlanta police believe was committed at Johnston’s house? The purchase of $50 worth of crack. It’s a legitimate crime under the laws at present, but it hardly warranted a smash-down entry by the police. This wasn’t a case of national security, or the lair of a serial killer; it was a house in a bad neighborhood that may or may not have been fingered by an informant as a retail location for narcotics.
On top of all this, it now looks like the police may have lied about their information, or the informant lied and they didn’t do any homework to verify his story. If the police lied, then they need to be arrested and charged with the woman’s death; if the informant lied, he needs to face similar charges. The FBI, which has opened its own investigation, might find that the police violated Johnston’s civil rights in either case.
One fact remains: a ninety-two year old woman got shot to death in her own home by the police, protecting herself against what she believed were armed intruders into her home. There really are no excuses possible for that fact.

Will The UK Try Partition For Itself?

The United Kingdom has had a long history of imposing partitions in its former colonies, including Ireland, India, and the entirety of the Middle East, all of which has spawned wars in the following years. Now a new poll conducted on behalf of the London Telegraph show that the British might want to try out partition for themselves. A solid majority of Brits support the full independence of Scotland and a more clearly English Parliament (via Instapundit):

A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.
There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with similar powers to the Scottish one.
The poll comes only months before the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between England and Scotland and will worry all three main political parties. None of them favours Scottish independence, but all have begun internal debates on the future of the constitution.
The dramatic findings came as Gordon Brown, the favourite to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister, delivered an impassioned defence of the Union at Labour’s Scottish conference in Oban yesterday.
In an attack on the Scottish National Party, against whom Labour will fight a bitter battle for control of the Edinburgh-based parliament next May, the Chancellor claimed: “We should never let the Nationalists deceive people into believing that you can break up the United Kingdom.”

England did not start colonialism, but it might be its last real practitioner. The natural end of that era would have come from the dissolution of ties between Northern Ireland and the UK, which might have been the UK’s least successful partition in that it never resulted in the severing of their responsibilities in their colony on Ireland. Scotland, however, has been part of the kingdom for centuries. Its loss would spell a clear end to the idea of a “united kingdom” and press for a much more English Britain.
It seems that Gordon Brown and Labour might find themselves on the wrong side of history. Defending the definition of Britain to include Scotland when neither the Scots nor the British believe it any longer puts Labour in the uncomfortable position of being de facto royalists, normally the position of the Tories. One would expect that the tradition of iconoclasts in Labour to inform a position closer to the apparent tenor of the populace, and that it would remain for the Conservatives to plead for the notion of a kingdom. If, as the Telegraph reports, none of the political parties support complete devolution as of now, one of them soon will, and Labour might have blown a chance to lead that effort.
What would the dissolution of the UK mean for international relations? One would have to expect that Britain — or England, if Wales becomes independent — would have less to offer militarily and diplomatically. After all, they would speak for fewer people, and their military assets would assumably get distributed to the newly-independent nations that would have paid for them over their history as part of the core kingdom. It might call into question their permanent seat on the UN Security Council, although Russia inherited the Soviet seat with little difficulty. It would almost certainly leave the US with a less vigorous partner in global relations.
Freedom might mean a new era of explicit significance for the Scots, and perhaps the Welsh and Irish, depending on how far devolution goes. It might just as easily usher in an era of decline for all of the components of a former empire that has spent the last century in contraction as their relevance could wink out entirely, ending the twilight of British influence on world culture. Considering all of the ills and benefits that have come from the remarkable history of these island peoples, that would be a tragedy both for themselves and for the world today. One hopes they choose their next steps wisely.

A Little Muscovite Salt In Old Wounds

Russia has released files from its Soviet era that purport to show that the West agreed to have Moscow to occupy the Baltics as a proper method of de-Nazification, a move Latvia decried as a method of undermining NATO unity ahead of its summit. According to the war-era memos, the Allies allowed the Baltics to become vassal states in the interests of stabilization:

Latvia said on Friday Moscow’s release of documents stating the United States and Britain gave tacit approval to Soviet occupation of the Baltics was an attempt to sour NATO relations ahead of next week’s summit.
Russia’s foreign intelligence service SVR this week released declassified files and said in a statement the West regarded the removal of pro-German influences from the Baltics and occupation by Soviet forces “a necessary and timely step.” …
The subject of the Soviet occupation of the Baltics, in 1940 and resumed again in 1944 after the Germans were driven out, is an emotionally-charged one in the region.

Never let it be said that Vladimir Putin passed up an attempt to appear heavy-handed and hypocritical. The Russians do not care much for the idea of NATO expansion, and clearly the West had that in mind when it scheduled its first-ever summit on former Soviet-controlled territory. Latvia has welcomed its NATO partners and relish their freedom and independence, and recognize this as a typical dog-in-the-manger ploy by Putin.
However, his attempt to put a damper on NATO’s summit only underscores the continuing relevance of the alliance in Europe. Putin has gradually attempted to reconstitute Russia as a regional threat, if not a global power, and the events of the past week clearly show that he has succeeded in some measure. The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the latest in a series of suspicious deaths of Putin’s critics, demonstrates the ruthlessness of Putin’s regime. The worst elements of personal power from the Soviet days are making a comeback under Putin.
Under these circumstances, NATO becomes more necessary than it has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Europe and the West need to remain vigilant against a return of Stalinism in Moscow, and the poisonings of Litvinenko and Viktor Yushchenko as well as the mysterious deaths of other dissenters show that as a real possibility. Freedom made significant gains in eastern Europe and central Asia over the last fifteen years, and NATO has to ensure that those gains do not suffer a rollback.
The Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia know that better than anyone else at the NATO summit. All three have rejected this threadbare attempt at wedge-driving by Putin on the eve of the meeting, knowing that their own freedom relies on the strength of the alliance. They can stand a little Muscovite salt in old wounds as long as they feel assured that it constitutes the entirety of what Putin can do to them.

We Gotta Draft ‘Em Because They’re So Dumb

Charles Rangel has decided to take up where John Kerry left off, only this time he’s not kidding about our military men and women being a collection of lazy dolts. The proposed chairman of the House Ways and Means committee and therefore one of the most powerful Democratic leaders in Congress told Fox News that only those with no options for a decent career would enlist in the military. Here’s the video from Power Line:

I want to make it abundantly clear: if there’s anyone who believes that these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No young, bright individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment. If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.

Rangel has insisted that we restart the draft to fill the gaping enlistment shortfall in military recruiting ever since the war in Iraq began, as well as the staggering drop in re-enlistment rates. Oh, wait … never mind. I guess it’s to solve the overrepresentation of the poor and urban in the military. Oh, wait … never mind.
I guess it’s just to feed the Left’s bigotry about the military. Bingo! This is just another method of infantilizing soldiers and sailors. Their efforts to cast them as children pushed into the service by their parents didn’t work, so now Rangel wants to pick up Kerry’s notion that they have little choice but to join the military through lack of other economic options, a fallacy that has been repeatedly disproved. It’s all part of the Left’s overarching philosophy that choice really doesn’t exist for individuals, and therefore government exists to make all the choices for the citizenry. It’s another form of victimology, and a rather offensive form at that.
I hope Rangel keeps appearing on television for the next two years. It’ll make it easier for the Republicans to recapture the majority and the White House in 2008.

Bomb Parts Found In Rental Car At MSP Airport

Early yesterday, an Avis employee found the makings of a bomb in a returned rental car in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport, triggering an FBI investigation on one of the busiest travel days of the year. The device contained shrapnel, wires, and tubing, but fortunately no explosives:

A bomb-like device was found in a rental car Sunday morning at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, shutting down part of the Lindbergh terminal parking ramps for about two hours.
The Bloomington police bomb squad examined and blew up the device. FBI agents interviewed the man who rented the car after he arrived on the West Coast on Sunday. He said that the device was not a bomb and that he didn’t mean to leave it behind, said Pat Hogan, airport spokesman. …
An Avis service employee, who was doing routine cleaning and checks of the car after it was returned about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, found the device in a cargo compartment in the trunk of a hatchback car. The worker called the airport police because it looked suspicious.
The device, which was loose in the compartment, included tubes, wires and shrapnel, airport officials said.

My first thought is that I’m glad I heard about it this morning rather than yesterday afternoon, when we boarded a flight back home from our vacation in Southern California. My second thought is that the person who rented the car and left the device in the trunk had better hope that he has a dozen or so character witnesses that can testify to his stupidity, rather than any malice. It seems rather implausible that anyone would be dumb enough to bring a rental car back to an airport with bomb parts in the trunk, but it’s impossible to underestimate the foolishness of people in general.
By the time we arrived, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Traffic was lighter than usual, if anything. I saw no signs of increased security, and I usually notice when they beef it up. If the FBI is still investigating, they apparently had not found anything to make them more nervous about securing the airport.
NOTE: I should add that posting will be limited today due to my late-night return from California yesterday.

Guess Who Financed The Insurgencies?

The New York Times reports on the financial underpinnings of the insurgencies in Iraq, showing that they have developed well-oiled mechanisms for generating millions in funding for their operations. A significant portion of those funds come from their abduction industry, and the major donors to that program have been France and Italy:

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.
The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.
As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.

First, let’s acknowledge that the Times has managed to blow more classified data into the open. This time, they manage to refrain from directly exposing a clandestine operation, but this data had to come from somewhere, and the US will find it harder to get this information again if this report uncovers any of their sources. Data gets classified for very good reasons, and no one elected the Gray Lady to make declassification decisions.
Moving beyond that for now, the report shows that whether we like it or not, we have to focus more effort on Iraq as a part of the war on terror. Terrorists have become so adept at raising money that they now run surpluses that go outside of Iraq for other terrorist groups. Iraq’s insurgencies have begun to spread through the region, a major reason that the Bush administration insisted that we remain engaged in Iraq until we stamped out the terrorist networks.
If we are to succeed, we need to get a cleaner set of leaders in Iraq. Part of the financing comes from Iraq’s rebuilding oil industry, perhaps the extorted payments to stop terrorist attacks on the pipelines. Enough of the production gets hijacked to put tens of millions of dollars into terrorist pockets, and that will increase as Iraqi oil production improves. That access comes via corrupt or intimidated officials at the Iraqi oil ministry. If the Iraqis want to stop the violence from the insurgencies, they will have to start with themselves.
One other interesting point gets made by John Burns and Kirk Semple in their report. The Ba’athists have mostly left the field in Iraq, convinced that they will not return to power. Their assets have been successfully frozen, and the remainder of their liquid funds now support them in comfortable lifestyles rather than paramilitary attempts to restore the Ba’athist regime. The insurgencies operating in Iraq now mostly consist of radical Islamists or sectarian militias, the kind of terrorists we want to face and beat in their territory rather than ours.
Oddly and out of character for the NYT, Burns and Semple try to pour cold water on this report. They note that unnamed intelligence experts call the report — which the Times publishes — guesswork intended on supporting Bush’s efforts in Iraq. They call the NSC-generated report “political cover”, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Bush administration wanted this for that purpose, they could have simply declassified an executive summary from the report, rather than leak it through the NYT, as Burns and Semple imply. The paper didn’t seem nearly as incredulous with other leaks it published on its front page in the past.
We’re seeing the beginnings of a terror-exporting state in Iraq. We need to stop it now, rather than engaging in a retreat that will only force us to return later at greater loss of life. We also need to get our erstwhile buddies in Europe to quit financing it by ending ransom payments for abductions by terrorists.

Triangle Offense Returns In Record Time

Last night, I noticed that the Israelis had once again agreed to a cease-fire and withdrawal from Gaza, reaching the accord with Hamas and Fatah. The Guardian reported the “hopes for peace” late last night, and I intended on writing a cautionary post about it this morning. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had told Ehud Olmert that all factions had agreed to the deal:

Palestinian militants have agreed to stop firing rockets into Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a halt to targetted killings, it emerged last night.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, telephoned Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, and told him that all Palestinian factions had agreed to a ceasefire from 6am this morning.
Olmert replied that if there was no rocket fire from Gaza, Israeli forces could stop their operations and begin to withdraw from Gaza. The ceasefire could bring an end to a spate of violence which has seen the death of more than 100 Palestinians in Israeli operations and two Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian rockets within the past month.

I figured I’d wait until the morning to remind everyone that the modus operandi of the Palestinians in the past had two of the three major factions agreeing to cease-fires while one continued to attack Israel. In this way, the Palestinians could be both peacemakers and provocateurs, and let the Israelis suffer the attacks for as long as it took to get them to finally act to end them. At that point, the Palestinians could run to their Western apologists and sob about the mean Israelis who keep violating cease-fire agreements.
Unfortunately for me, the Palestinians couldn’t wait for even a day to put their triangle offense into action:

Israeli troops withdrew from the Gaza Strip as a last-minute cease-fire deal took hold Sunday morning, but two major Palestinian militant groups, saying they had no intention of stopping their attacks, fired volleys of homemade rockets into Israel.
The ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad tempered hopes for a lasting truce, which was meant to end five months of deadly clashes. The rockets landed in open fields and caused no injuries.

The USA Today headline mirrors the fecklessness of the entire enterprise. It reads, “Gaza cease-fire takes hold, attacks continue,” a headline that practically defines oxymoron for all practical purposes. A cease-fire takes hold when all sides cease firing. If one side keeps firing, then there is no cease fire. One would think that journalists, headline writers, and diplomats would have at one time looked in their Websters for the definitions of cease and fire and have this figured out.
In this case, we have two out of the three major factions violating the agreement before the ink dried on paper. Both factions acknowledge their continuing attacks, Hamas says they’ll keep firing rockets at Israeli civilians until the IDF leaves Gaza, and Islamic Jihad says they’ll keep going until the IDF leaves the West Bank as well. In other words, there will be no cease fire at all, ever, until the Palestinians agree to the two-state solution or the Palestinians annihilate the Israelis.
Abbas could have his cease-fire in a heartbeat if the former came to pass, but no one will have peace until the Palestinians give up their morbid fantasies of the latter. Israel should quit listening to their fair-weather friends in the West and resolve to give the Palestinians the war they want until they get sick enough of it to negotiate in good faith for a solution of co-existence. Cease fires with one-sided attacks make a mockery of any diplomatic efforts with a group of people who can’t keep their word for even an hour.