Ann Coulter is right about very many things; it’s a shame she rarely writes about the things she’s right about. This week, she has—and with a vengeance—in an excellent column exposing the crime that is America’s news coverage of the case of creepy, corrupted “Foxy Knoxy” (Amanda Knox), an American college student, aged 21, from Seattle, Washington, who is on trial for murder in Perugia, Italy.
With O.J.-type evidence in support of their case, Italian law enforcement agencies are alleging Knox murdered and sexually assaulted one of her roommates, British exchange student Meredith Kercher.
— a large kitchen knife, believed by forensic investigators to have caused at least one of Kercher’s three wounds, found at Sollecito’s house. Despite having been thoroughly washed, the knife had Knox’s DNA on the handle and the murder victim’s DNA on the blade.
— a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matches Sollecito’s. The floor had been cleaned so that the footprint was invisible to the naked eye, but was revealed with Luminol (just like on “CSI”).
— Knox’s bloody footprints, mixed with Kercher’s blood, were found in another roommate’s room, where a window had been broken to make it look like there had been a break-in — a theory discounted immediately by investigators. Knox’s footprints, too, had been scrubbed but were discovered with Luminol.
— Kercher’s bloody bra strap at the crime scene that had abundant amounts of Sollecito’s DNA on it.” Read on.
[SNIP]
The case is instructive in what it says of a deep-seated pathology infecting American society, where reality takes a backseat to some self-serving parallel universe. You see it again and again … Something else that’s worth noting and is not forthcoming from the American media, paragons of pity that they are: Meredith Kercher, whose throat was cut with a pen knife during the sexual assault, died an agonizingly slow death.
There is something quaint and good-natured about laughing at the ludicrous Geithner’s claims of American solvency, instead of getting angry or being rude, as less-inhibited Westerners might, when faced with a bald-faced lie. The Chinese response is definitely culturally distinct.
Were American students capable of grasping how bad the U.S. Treasury Secretary’s policies are, and how dire the debt and the deficits, they might grow testy. Alas, no point dealing in hypotheticals. The chances are slim that an audience of students on a typical American campus would allow facts, the laws of economics and reason to get in the way of Obamadualtion and general Keynesian credulity (a proxy for economic illiteracy).
“China is the biggest foreign owner of U.S. Treasury bonds. U.S. data shows that it held $768 billion in Treasuries as of March, but some analysts believe China’s total U.S. dollar-denominated investments could be twice as high.
‘Chinese assets are very safe,’ Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s.
His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience, reflecting scepticism in China about the wisdom of a developing country accumulating a vast stockpile of foreign reserves instead of spending the money to raise living standards at home.”
FROM BARACK OBAMA. “Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to [Obama’s] right,” Chavez joked on a live television broadcast.” More via Reuters:
“Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday that he and Cuban ally Fidel Castro risk being more conservative than U.S. President Barack Obama as Washington prepares to take control of General Motors Corp.”
“During one of Chavez’s customary lectures on the ‘curse’ of capitalism and the bonanzas of socialism, the Venezuelan leader made reference to GM’s bankruptcy filing, which is expected to give the U.S. government a 60 percent stake in the 100-year-old former symbol of American might. …”
“During a decade in government, Chavez has nationalized most of Venezuela’s key economic sectors, including multibillion dollar oil projects, often via joint ventures with the private sector that give the state a 60 percent controlling stake.”
“Obama has vowed to quickly sell off General Motors once the auto giant is back on its feet, but the government will initially control the company after a $30 billion injection of taxpayer funds.”
OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH. Dialogue is good, dhimmitude is not. From a cursory look, Obama’s speech is festooned with feel-good fantasies, cliches, and plain errors, highlighted by the great Robert Spencer, who provides a point-by-point Guide to the Perplexed (via “Virgil”). Naturally, our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Terrorism, of course, is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam. However, Hussein omits any reference to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as the scholar Samuel Huntington put it. More from me later.
Over to Spencer, who dishes unvarnished truth.
Update I: ME HERE (see Spencer below) Where to begin? In his speech, Obama equated Islam with peace. That’s nothing new in the annals of American presidents. Remember Bush?
About the greatness of Cairo University. Is anyone of these Nobel Prize greatsa graduate?
Thomas Jefferson owned a Koran. So what? So do I.
I’m “an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.” So the president is owning his name. After making hay about scribes (like this one) who used it in vain.
Grammar: “I’m aware that there’s still some who would question or even justify the events of 9/11.” So he’s not such a pedantic writer. Should be: “there are.”
“The Holy Quran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as — it is as if he has killed all mankind.” Not quite. The adage, bowdlerized from the Jews, is heavily qualified in the Koran. I covered it in “More Fatwa Fibs”.
THIS NEXT ITEM from Hussein, the “student of history,” as he refers to himself, is particularly priceless: “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.”
Memo to Hussein, “student of history”: The ideas of human rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. There is no such thing in Islam, despite what our Head Historian says about “the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.” Does the latter failed parallelism (pairing a country and a religion) mean that Hussein acknowledges Islam is a political system? Or perhaps he is just bad at constructing corresponding syntactic constructions.
This is growing tiresome: the banality of the cliches Obama uses come straight out of … a Michelle Obama univesrity thesis.
LATER.
Update II (June 6) Krauthammer: Speech abstract, vapid, and self-absorbed. Pretty much. This is good. Watch:
SPENCER: I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning,
…whose Grand Sheikh, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, has given his approval — on Islamic grounds — to suicide bombing.
and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.
According to Islamic law, a Muslim may only extend this greeting — Peace be upon you — to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided,” i.e., Peace be upon the Muslims. Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naive non-Muslim Islamophilic Presidents offer the greeting to Muslims.
We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
“Co-existence and cooperation”? When and where, exactly?
Note that Obama lists only ways in which the West has, in his view, mistreated the Islamic world. Not a word about the jihad doctrine, not a word about Islamic supremacism and the imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that existed long before the spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world, which Obama D’Souzaishly suggests is responsible for the hostility Muslims have for the West.
Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.
The idea that the jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, but has no evidence to back it up. The evidence that appears to back it up is highly tendentious — check out here how Dalia Mogahed (now an Obama adviser) and John Esposito cooked survey data from the Islamic world to increase the number of “moderates.”
And of course it was by no means only “the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians” that “has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” It was also the Islamic texts and teachings that inspired those attacks that have fueled this perception. But Obama is not singular in declining to acknowledge the existence of such texts and teachings. In that he is following George W. Bush and every influential American politician, diplomat, and analyst. …
