January 25, 2005

Responding to Criticism, Rolling Stone Will Run Bible Ad

Rolling Stone has reversed its policy, and has now agreed to run the Bible ad it had previously rejected.

I think this is commendable. Too often when people or organizations are criticized, they circle the wagons. Here, Rolling Stone has responded correctly to public discussion on this subject, and reversed its policy.

Report: Captured Terrorists in Iraq State They are Financed by Syria and Saudi Arabia

Hammorabi discusses interviews with terrorists captured in Iraq. The interviews were shown on an Iraqi TV satellite channel,

In the interviews these terrorists describe their financing by Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Al-Fayha Iraqi TV satellite channel showed for the last few days terrorists who were captured after they escaped the war in Falluja in their way to Basrah. They were from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Libya, and other Arab countries.

Their confession comes in line with the previous indications and facts as follows:

First: Syria was the point from which the terrorists enter Iraq and in which they gather and organize themselves.

Second: They used Syrian telecommunication while inside Iraq and they used various hotels, hostels, houses and apartments in Damascus. They met inside these places and in the public places in a way which is not difficult for any ordinary Intelligence services to disclose.

Third: The terrorist group financed by the Saudis as well as trained and prepared (brain washed) by Saudis. This brain wash started inside their original countries for some time

Fourth: There are Saudis, Syrians and Iraqis from previous regime in Syria to coordinate and rallying with agents in the Arab and foreign countries to get the duped youths and bring them to Syria. This occurs under supervision of Saudis who travel from and to Syria.

Fifth: The Arab media especially Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabyah TV plays major role in the whole process of terrorists rallying into Iraq.

There’s more. Read the whole thing.

The Courage of Iraqi Civilians

Check this out, from Firas Georges, on the Iraq and Iraqis weblog:

Election is a fact and is going to take place on the 30th of January no matter what, and may be some of us are not going to see the day after that day and loose their lives electing the right people or at least who we think right people, but it will be the price for our freedom, may be we didnt pay enough to remove Saddam, so it is the price we are going to pay that day, the 30th of January 2005 to overcome our fears and be free people who did pay for their freedom.

Its not a dreamy words and not banner words for election campaign, I am not a candidate and I am not going to be one but after few years from now inside Iraq or any where else in the world it will be very prodding to sit beside a chimney fire and tell the story of that day to a grand sun or two, or at least to remember that day a lone and remember that we werent afraid of a bunch of masked head choppers who wanted to take us to dark ages where we would be slaves of evil.

Russia, the U.N., and the Global Power Vacuum

Earlier this month in a post titled How the World (and America) Could Benefit From Another Superpower I quoted Victor Davis Hanson as saying that “Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight.” I noted that:

Part of the explanation for this is of course the absence of any superpower in that part of the world. The old Soviet Socialist Republic had the goal of forcing all of us to live under Communist rule. But they did exert influence in their part of the world that helped to keep local savagery under control. With them out of the picture, naturally the local nut jobs want to run wild.

Humanity is currently groping its way towards a new world order. Some new superpower will eventually emerge. China seems a likely candidate. Russia, with Communism in its past, will eventually get its act together. A successful, Democratic and capitalistic Iraq could lead the way to similar reforms in other Muslim nations.

Or it might arrive sooner than we think, in the form of the European Union.

A recent interview on FrontPage with former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold, also deals with this subject of increased global disorganization, and discusses the U.N.’s involvement:

Gold: During the period, when I served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN in the 1990’s, I was struck by a sense that the world was becoming far more anarchical than anyone had anticipated at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. After all the Cold War was over. The competition between the superpowers was no longer going to exacerbate conflicts around the world and their delegations on the UN Security Council were not going to neutralize one another with their respective veto power. For that reason, President Bush (41) envisioned a “New World Order” emerging and after the success of the Security Council in confronting the aggression of Iraq in Kuwait, the UN was supposed to become the main glue holding that order together. Yet instead, the decade of the 1990’s was marked by growing disorder—global chaos. A new, and far more dangerous brand of international terrorism arose that struck the US on 9/11, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction accelerated, and acts of genocide returned in Africa and even on the continent of Europe.

From my vantage point, the UN seemed to be directly connected to this global deterioration. Had it not taken responsibility for multilateral diplomacy over the future of Afghanistan during the rise of the Taliban, or not claimed to protect international security through the mechanism of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and finally not deployed peacekeepers on the ground in Rwanda and Bosnia prior to the mass killings in those areas, then I couldn’t make that charge. But peoples of the world looked to the UN to protect them, and the UN let them down. And frequently these UN failures led to the spread of far worse crises, particularly in the Central African Republic and in the Balkans.

FP: ...So crystallize for us briefly, then, your main indictments against the U.N.

Gold: For President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the UN was supposed to be instrumental in “nipping aggression in the bud,” and by doing so, preventing a re-play of the Second World War. But the UN couldn’t even define aggression until 1974 and even then its definition was full of loopholes. Worse still, the UN is a manufacturing plant for the worst moral equivalence that just cripples effective action to stop wars: in its international behavior, for the most part, the UN does not distinguish between aggressors and the victims of aggression. In Bosnia, UN forces were partial to the Serbs, and not to their Bosnian Muslim victims. In Rwanda, when General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander on the ground, proposed to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, headed by Kofi Annan, that it was necessary to destroy the arms of the Hutu militia before they were used to exterminate the Tutsi tribe, he was told by Annan’s office to not take sides—indeed, he was instructed to remain “impartial”. More than eight hundred thousand Rwandans were massacred within a few months.

Most recently, the UN General Assembly sought to activate the UN’s judicial arm—the International Court of Justice in the Hague—to stop Israel’s security fence. Annan’s office supplied supporting documentation to the judges in the Hague about Palestinian grievances over the fence, without even relating to the wave of Palestinian suicide terrorism against Israeli civilians that caused the fence to be built in the first place (nor was there mention of other security fences built on disputed territory in Kashmir or Cyprus). Yet the UN holds itself up to be “the source of international legitimacy”—a beacon of international justice. It is clear, however, that the UN does not determine the relative justice in the claims of parties engaged in an international dispute. It can only reflect the sum total of the political power that a state or national movement can mobilize on his behalf within the halls of the UN. For many peoples, from Tibetan Buddhists to Rwandan Tutsis, to Lebanese Christians to Iraqi Kurds and Black African Muslims in Darfur, Sudan, (and not just the Jewish people) that  leaves them completely unprotected if they have to rely on the machinery of the UN.

So to tie all this together: the communist, socialist system of the USSR failed as a superpower, leaving a power vacuum that has yet to be filled. The U.N. has expanded into this power vacuum but has misused its power, leading to growing international disorganization and anarchy.

Gold asserts that beyond this, terrorists have found a way to co-opt the power of the U.N.:

Gold:  The story of the UN and terrorism is really about the loss of standards in the world organization.  There may have been pre-conditions to join the UN in 1945, but no pre-conditions were set years later.  In 1974, Yasser Arafat was invited to address the UN General Assembly, without having to first renounce terrorism; in a 1970 interview just recently aired on CNN, he voiced his opinion that airplane hijackings could be justified by UN resolutions. In fact, from 1970 through 1982, the UN General Assembly adopted resolutions condoning resistance to alien domination “by all available means” and then added “including armed struggle”—to this day this has served as the key phraseology for legitimizing terrorism. More recently, in the years 2002-2003, Syria sat on the UN Security Council and was not required to close the offices of more than a dozen terrorist organizations in Damascus as a pre-condition to this elevation of rank in the UN system.  No wonder the Syrians feel that they can back the insurgency against the US in Iraq with impunity. The same trend continued elsewhere. UNRWA, the refugee agency for Palestinians, also sets no pre-conditions about the workers it employs; the heads of UNRWA unions are declared members of Hamas.  In short, from 1974 to 2004, those engaging in international terrorism were rarely punished in the UN (its post-9/11 Counter-Terrorism Committee, notwithstanding).  A political atmosphere was created that was conducive to the appeasement of terrorism instead of directly confronting its global spread.

Gold discusses approaches to fixing the U.N.:

Gold:  It is tempting to just discard the UN, but it would be a mistake. For the US, in my judgment, it would boomerang and just create more enemies. Historically, as I have noted, US administrations have bypassed the UN when their vital interests were at stake. President Kennedy relied on the Organization of American States in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and not on UN authorization for his naval quarantine of Castro. President Clinton acted in Kosovo through NATO, and not the UN. Finally, President George W. Bush assembled a coalition of the willing in the 2003 Iraq War, unlike his father’s UN Gulf War coalition in 1991. Coalitions of the willing will become the likely vehicle in the future for urgent military interventions. 

In the ongoing war on terrorism, it might be useful to form a permanent coalition of democratic countries. Some democracies, like France and Belgium, might be unlikely, at this point, to join. But besides European states, like Britain, Italy, and the new democracies from Eastern Europe, the US could go outside of Europe to Turkey, Israel, India, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Should this bloc become substantial, it would be worthwhile to force through the UN General Assembly new resolutions that served our collective interests and brake the hold of the Non-Aligned Movement. It is important for many countries what the UN is saying. If it is condoning terrorism in its resolutions, then they will not act sufficiently against armed groups. If it is protecting the Third World dictatorships by adopting resolutions about the “non-interference in the domestic affairs of states”, then they will abuse their citizens and ignore their responsibilities to human rights conventions. 

In short, in the near term, it is necessary to bypass the UN when the Free World faces imminent dangers. But in the medium to longer term, it may be possible to alter the UN—not by the kind of structural reforms, now being suggested by a panel of experts reporting to Secretary-General Kofi Annan (enlarging the Security Council from 15 to 24), but rather by reforming the substance of the UN through an agenda that serves the democracies instead of the dictatorships.

Gold has a new book, Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos.

FCC Denies 3 Dozen Complaints

I was talking to a Liberal friend of mine the other day, who mentioned that one of the worst things about Bush was that the FCC was cutting back on what could be said and shown on TV. However, this new report shows that the FCC is doing little or none of that. In fact, the FCC has just denied three dozen complaints:

The FCC Monday tossed out 36 indecency complaints filed by the Parents Television Council against prime time network programming that aired between Oct. 29, 2001 and Feb. 11, 2004.

The shows included some of TVs most popular and longest-running shows, including The Simpsons, Will & Grace, Friends, Dawsons Creek, NYPD Blue and Gilmore Girls.

IM’ing on Tonight’s Ep of 24

Posted here by permission.

This is good for a chuckle.