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The Trouble with Peace A lot of people, attributing the current conflicts in the Middle East to either religion or oil, believe they don’t really have a dog in the fight. What cannot be ignored however is that a paroxysm of religious strife has broken out in the Middle East and it is exporting death and terror in the name of Allah.
Considering how little previous generations of these Arabs or Islam have contributed to modern civilization this seems astonishingly arrogant. The modern world is entirely the creation of the West. The West of today, wanting only to purchase the latest ingenious new gadget and wishing to avoid warfare at all costs, cannot ignore a declared war even if it wants to. The "neocons" have been disgraced and some have been driven from office. The President has been chastised by the loss of his party’s power in Congress and the Democrat leadership is in full cry to abandon the war in Iraq. In blunt terms, it cannot be done. We live our lives forward, not retreating into the past. As such, men who we entrust with power have no choice but to exercise it today with the hope it will work out tomorrow. Tomorrow, in the case of the Middle East, is going to be a very long time. It operates out of a medieval mentality, a tribal allegiance, and a religion that has not changed since its inception in the seventh century. We are not dealing with modern men even if they employ modern technology. America wants to rest from a war it did not start and wants to end. We have discovered that we need to build up our troop strength. The reluctance of several previous presidents to engage the enemy has cost us 3,000 American lives on 9-11 and quite a few in the years leading up to it. We have reached a point where we continue to ignore the millions of Mexicans and others from south of the border who have literally been invading our nation for years. We’re Americans. We want to buy a new car, a flat-screen television, a worldwide warehouse of stuff! Why won’t they leave us alone? We are tired of hearing and reading bad news out of Iraq because our news media will not give us any good news. We’re Americans. We want and expect a happy ending. Just like in the movies, but this isn’t the movies. It’s realtime, real people, it’s real life and death. Iraq, like the whole of the Middle East is just one giant sinkhole of all our expectations. So we want to leave, but we can’t because, if we do, some astonishingly evil people might end up in charge. They cut off people’s heads. They have been doing this since the days of Mohammed, the self-proclaimed final prophet of God. The Jews of Israel understand this like no other people on Earth and, yes, they too are weary of the Arabs who surround them, howling for their blood just as they howl for ours every time they shout "Death to America! Death to Israel! It was only the decisive victories in war that protected Israel, the lone Western outpost in the Middle East. The last big one was the 1967 Six-Day War against Egypt. Since then, guerrilla wars of attrition have been the choice of battle by the Palestinians. The peace accord that returned the Sinai to Egypt is seen as a great "victory" by that nation and it occasioned the "Intifada" by Arafat’s Palestinians. After a sixteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon to deter the rockets of Hezbollah, the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 led directly to the war of 2006. The withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has seen an increase of rocketing from that territory and a civil war between Fatah and Hamas to determine which group leads the destruction of Israel. Any withdrawal from combat will be hailed as yet another "victory" for our enemies. Realistically, we are likely to move troops to safer ground, which means the Kurdish region and border nations such as Kuwait. That move is likely to be followed by a bloodbath between the Shiites, the majority sect in Iraq and Iran, and the Sunnis, the majority sect in the rest of the billion-plus world of Islam. It doesn’t matter whose side we take or if we take no side. Humanitarian behavior is not high on the list of priorities for Arabs, whether they are Islamists or not. The difficulty of achieving peace is that it requires everyone to agree to it. Wars, whether initiated by a religion or the naked desire to acquire land, resources, and power are still wars. Winners are determined by who is willing to resist and, beyond that, to destroy the will of the enemy to continue. Failure, for America, Israel, and the West is literally not an option. Like the canary in the coalmine, what happens to Israel will happen to us. The great empire of Rome discovered what happens when citizens do not want to defend what they have. They began to rely on armies made up increasingly of people they called barbarians. Tired of endless conquest and occupation, the citizens of Rome discovered one day those barbarians were at their gates. They sacked Rome. The Dark Ages followed. I do not know what the President will do in these final two years of office, but if George W. Bush decides to reduce large portions of Baghdad to rubble or obliterate big chunks of Iran, history will likely say he was right to do so. The National Anxiety Center is seeking a more secure financial basis by which we can continue our communications programs. We greatly appreciate the many small donations received, but need larger grants to maintain our efforts. If you or someone you know can assist us in this, please do. Journalism? Don’t Make Me Laugh! As a very young man, fresh out of college and the army in the mid-1960’s, I found myself employed as a rookie reporter on a weekly newspaper in New Jersey. I had never taken a course in journalism in my life, but I could write. The managing editor of the newspaper group that serviced a number of communities taught me all I ever needed to know about journalism. He taught me to be skeptical of everything and everyone. Not distrustful. Skeptical. People will tell you the truth they believe or want you to believe. They may be wrong. Or they may be deceitful. There’s a difference. However, when error and deceit combine, there is a purpose, an agenda, and it exists, as often as not, to acquire wealth and power despite the harm it will leave in its wake. At the heart of what is wrong with journalism today is that legions of journalists will stand shoulder to shoulder for the sole purpose of deriding any "global warming skeptic" rather than wonder for a second how the "news" of a coming Ice Age in the 1970s became the "news" of Global Warming in the 1980s. I am reminded of this daily as I read newspapers and news magazines in which various reporters blithely and deliberately inform the reader that all questions regarding the existence of global warming have been answered, that the science is beyond doubt, and that the cause is the production of greenhouse gases, largely from industry, transportation, and other human activities. This is not merely an error. It is a complete deception the journalists have joined. They have ceased to be skeptical. They want you to stop being skeptical despite all evidence to the contrary. "Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn’t exist," says Dr. Timothy Ball. He has Ph.D. in climatology, having earned his degree from the University of London, England, and taught for many years at the University of Winnipeg. A Google search of his name turns up a plethora of posts attacking him, always a sure sign that the Greens feel threatened by an outspoken scientist. The quote below explains why: "Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science." Dr. Ball is hardly alone in his views. Dr. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, as well as a member of the National Academy of Science, has said of Global Warming that, "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Increasingly, not just climate scientists, but people in leadership positions around the world have joined in rebuking the Global Warming hoax. Czech President Vaclav Klaus is only the most recent, joining Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who, in 2006, received a letter from sixty prominent scientists expressing opposition to the theory of Global Warming. The list is growing as other scientists in France, Denmark and around the world speak up. There is something quite horrible about the complete failure of America’s journalists to even acknowledge there might be something terribly wrong about the theory of Global Warming. So far the published science that purports to support the theory has been severely challenged and even disproved to the point of having deliberately falsified data. Too many journalists have remained steadfast to this greatest hoax of our times, publishing the most astonishing nonsense about the North Pole melting or all the polar bears disappearing. Anything can be attributed to Global Warming, but the premise of a rapidly warming Earth is baseless. The Earth warmed barely one degree Fahrenheit from 1850 to 1950 and there is no evidence of further warming. Anyone who challenges the "truth" of the global warming charlatans is demonized and compared to Holocaust deniers. Others are routinely accused of being in the pay of corporate interests. My own background as a public relations counselor has been cited as "proof" that I cannot be trusted. However, in nine years of writing a weekly commentary, my credibility would be in shreds if my facts were wrong. Is this new generation of journalists indifferent to the truth? Do they arrive at their job imbued with a mission to save the world? Do they believe that inconvenient facts can and should be ignored? This is not journalism. It is advocacy. The former belongs in the news columns, the latter on the editorial and opinion pages. For the week leading up to and following the recent release of the United Nations climate report summary, the front pages of America’s newspapers proclaimed that Global Warming was real, millions would die from starvation, and the fresh water resources of the world would go dry by 2080. The final report is not due out for months and, like previous reports, what "science" is cited to support this balderdash will be thoroughly encumbered with words like "could", "may", "might", "is believed", or "is predicted." These are mushy words that scientists abhor. They want proof. The final report will actually be altered to reflect the initial summary. That is not science. It is propaganda. We look to journalists to present facts as accurately and dispassionately as possible. When they tell you the Earth is doomed, look for an alternative source of information. Editor’s Note: Caruba is a longtime member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of Science writers. To learn more, read Christopher C. Horner’s new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism", published by Regnery Publishing Company. Do you understand things a little better, a little clearer than before? How much is that insight, that knowledge worth to you? Because that’s what the Center does. It debunks nonsense and it addresses reality. For that we need your donation to continue. If you prefer to send a check, please make it payable to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third Street, Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you.
©
2007 Alan Caruba. |
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Still angry over the defeat in 732 A.D. at Poitiers, France that stopped their northward conquest of Europe and the Crusades that followed from 1095 to 1291, the Arabs of the Middle East have taken the temperature of the West today and concluded that it’s time for a big comeback. Either through birthrates in Europe or the use of terror from Bali to Manhattan, they have concluded it’s time to try once again to be the ones who run the world.