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The Power of "No" Slowly, ever so slowly, it is beginning to dawn on Americans that anything we attempt to do to entice the Middle East into the 21st century is likely to meet with defeat because its Muslim population, held in the grip of brutal men and a brutal theology, remains impervious to the possibility of peace, of freedom, of individual liberty.
What did Americans know of the Middle East? Not much and mostly gleaned from movies like "Lawrence of Arabia" and whatever films and television shows might depict. Long after WWII, the Middle East did not have a high priority on our attention. Our scant knowledge came from headlines about assassinations and wars. There were historical events like the independence of Israel in 1948 following one of the great horrors of the last century, the Holocaust. The same United Nations decision to grant sovereignty to the Israelis was extended to the Arabs in the area, granting them territory on which to build a Palestinian nation. The Arabs said no. Instead, they immediately attacked the new nation and were defeated. Would they now accept terms granting them a nation of their own? No. In 1967 the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians massed their troops and, this time, the Six-Day War was an overwhelming defeat costing them vast tracts of land, the Golan Heights, the Sinai desert, East Jerusalem, the West Bank. What was their response? The defeated Arab nations convened a conference from which they issued their now-famous Three No’s: No to peace with Israel. No to recognition of Israel. No to any negotiation with Israel. Israel’s response has been to negotiate at every opportunity. They negotiated with Egypt and returned the Sinai. They negotiated "land for peace" with Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Front in Oslo, Norway. They were rewarded with the infamous Intifada that escalated into a series of suicide bombings. Finally, the Israelis built a high wall between themselves and the Palestinians in Gaza. These days the wall is breached daily by mortars and rockets that continue to rain down on towns adjacent to that hellish place. The Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon, occupied to avoid constant shelling of its northern cities and towns hoping that would bring peace. No. That ultimately led to more shelling and a short war in 2006. The Israeli failure to destroy Hezbollah last year was hailed as a great "victory" by the Arabs. Earlier the Israeli government had unilaterally withdrawn from the Gaza strip, literally dragging their own citizens who lived there from their homes. Surely that would secure peace? No. That led to a civil war between Hamas, whose entire political platform is the destruction of Israel, and Fatah, backed by the U.S. in the vain hope that it might negotiate peace—at last—with Israel. Americans began to pay attention when, in 1979, the "Islamic Revolution" in Iran led to their diplomats being held hostage for 444 days. What kind of nation takes people hostage these days? An Islamic one. And what kind of people commandeers four jet airliners and fly them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? Muslims. The root cause of strife in the Middle East is not Israel, a tiny nation with about six million inhabitants; one that is surrounded by twenty-two Arab nations with 300 million people. Even if Israel did not exist, the root cause of the terrorism and wars is Islam, the "religion of peace" embraced throughout that fetid, backward, cesspool of corruption and oppression. What the Arabs of the Middle East offer is what Islam offers, only the peace of the grave if nations and men do not bow down to their threats and violence. It is the power of "no." The global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000 or 20% of the world’s population as compared with the global Jewish population of 14,000,000 or about 0.02% of the world’s population.
If one looks at Nobel Prizes awarded since 1910, one Muslim earned a prize in literature. Among the four awarded a Peace Prize were Egypt’s Mohammed Anwar El-Sadat who was assassinated for negotiating the return of the Sinai and Yasser Arafat who never brought a moment’s peace to the Palestinians. Two Muslims received prizes for medicine. Two Muslims have received a prize for economics. By contrast, the list of Jews receiving Nobel Prizes in all categories takes up several pages. Which world do you want to live in? Compare Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Khartoum or Mogadishu with any of cities of the West. Part of the world is insane, held in the grip of a "religion" spread by the sword and maintained by insuring that enlightenment of any kind is feared and destroyed. It is a world in which tiny children are taught to embrace murder and death. Americans cannot understand such people. Americans cannot understand that the Islamic practice of deceit and war is deemed critical to the expansion of this "religion." America and the West are at a crossroads of history. The terrorism that would return us to a dark age ruled by Islam must be resisted. We can begin by supporting Israel, by supporting our troops on the front lines of wherever the conflict takes them, and by affirming the power of "Yes", the power that flows from freedom and liberty. To keep you informed on the events and issues of our times, the Center requires your financial support. Please send a donation of any amount so that we may continue to make sense of a complex world. If you would prefer to send the Center a check, please make it payable to The Caruba Organization, 29 West Third St., Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you! A few weeks ago the electricity in my sector of town failed. I was in an elevator between two floors of my apartment complex when it happened and I spent a half hour waiting until the building manager and a fireman showed up, opened the outer door and pulled me out. We never give any thought whatever to the availability of electricity until it ceases to exist. While Americans remain fixated on the prospect of terrorism, the fact is this nation is astonishingly vulnerable to a shutdown of vast, regional proportions because our electricity transmission system has been neglected for years, rendering it comparable to Third World nations.
In May, a US News and World Report article, "When the Lights Go Out", noted that summer is the time of highest vulnerability for what is generally called the North American grid, the actual transmission wires that distribute electricity. Much depends on Mother Nature in terms of whether storms knock out sections of the grid or whether it gets so hot that air conditioners and other appliances are running full out. In 2003, a great swath of the northeast lost electricity because some tree limbs in Ohio set in motion a cascade of failures affecting fifty million people. That’s how big the threat of failure is. Jason Makansi has written "Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You" ($27.95, John Wiley & Sons). This is not likely to be your reading choice for a day at the beach, so I have read it for you. It is useful to keep in mind that, at $700 billion, the power industry is the largest enterprise in the nation. The author, a consultant to the power industry, writes that, "In some ways a weakly interconnected grid may be beneficial when it comes to (national) security. Disconnected systems cannot all fail together. However, the Y2K studies revealed that there are a handful of major substations in our ‘national grid’ that, if taken out, could likely cause the entire eastern or western parts of the U.S. electricity system to falter." Surely, the federal government and the various elements of the electricity supply industry are aware of this? Yes, they are, but anyone who recalls the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the general way that federal and state bureaucracies function, also knows that not enough is being done to address this critical problem. Specifically, utilities have generally resisted sinking money into upgrading the transmission systems for electricity. The 2003 cascade generated demands for new rules and, among them, are fines up to $1 million a day for companies that violate mandatory reliability standards. These days energy insiders think that we should get through this and other summers okay, but they worry about Southern California and parts of Connecticut. Major upgrades, however, will be needed coast to coast. Then there’s a factor to which few pay any attention. For decades the environmental movement has done everything in its power to thwart the development, expansion, and ability to secure the raw sources from which electricity is generated. Instead, Americans have been fed a steady stream of nonsense about solar or wind power, both of which are heavily subsidized and neither of which provides barely one percent of the nation’s electric power needs. So while "Greens" are fighting against the building of coal-fired utilities in Texas, nuclear facilities in California, or against the prospect of long transmission lines that require right-of-ways through "pristine" areas, the need for more electricity grows and the ability to provide it slows. As for the sources of power, coal, natural gas, oil, uranium, environmentalists have opposed access and extraction in the United States and throughout the world. Makansi, who has been involved with the power industry for twenty-five years, says, "As long as I can remember, we’ve been ‘running out." During that time, we’ve had a ‘ten-year supply of natural gas’, "a 250-year supply of coal’, a ’30-year supply of petroleum.’" Energy resource availability is not the problem. The Earth is not ‘running out’ of energy resources, but the global warming hoax is entirely based on deterring the use of energy in any form anywhere and limiting existing use by claiming that greenhouse gases emitted threatens the very existence of the Earth. The simple truth is that, if the Earth should either warm or cool, the entire process is caused by the Sun. However, we are running out of time when it comes to building new facilities and transmitting electricity throughout the nation. We are running out of time to find a new generation of engineers and others to run our electricity industry. We are facing growing competition for the raw materials of electrical power from China and India where one-third of the world’s population live and whose economies are growing at 7% to 15% annually while ours barely tops 3%. Coal, uranium, and natural gas account for 90% of the electricity generated in the United States. Electricity isn’t created from air. Its raw materials must be mined and drilled for extraction. Oil is primarily used for transportation needs. In all cases, we are increasingly dependent on sources that are far away from our shores. The environmental movement and politicians in Washington, D.C. have successfully stymied the ability of "Big Oil" to access vast quantities of energy resources that exist just offshore of our vast coastlines or in "pristine" places like Alaska. Meanwhile, the aging transmission system has been seriously neglected for too long and when the lights go out next time, they may not come back on in an hour or a day or a week or any time soon enough to save the economy from sinking into a very deep, black hole. When that happens, the terrorists won’t have to lift a finger to harm us. We will have done it to ourselves by being ever so "green", by believing the lies about "global warming", by not permitting our energy industry to provide the electricity upon which our lives depend. To keep you informed on the events and issues of our times, the Center requires your financial support. Please send a donation of any amount so that we may continue to make sense of a complex world. If you would prefer to send the Center a check, please make it payable to The Caruba Organization, 29 West Third St., Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you!
©
2007 Alan Caruba. |
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What they are especially good at is saying "No." They have been saying no to anything that smacks of modern civilized behavior for a very long time and that resistance has been largely tolerated in the West because (a) their nation may sit atop a lot of oil and/or (b) they are oppressed their fellow Arabs.
When I say "shutdown", I mean everything that depends on electricity to function. It takes electricity to pump gasoline. No gas means you’re not going anywhere. The loss per hour of downtime would be $2,580,000 for all credit card operations. No credit card means you’re not likely buying anything. Brokerage operations would lose $6,480,000 per hour. Even if you could get a ride to the airport, there would be no flights.