Update #II: Oops, Iran’s Innocent

Bush, Intelligence, Iran, Islam, Neoconservatism

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s dormant nuclear program confirms the following:

* If a Pinocchio proboscis that grew with each lie uttered was a feature on the faces of political leaders, the Cheney-Bush-Rice gang would put the Ahmadinejad-Hussein knaves to shame in the nose department.
* The Intelligence community has been somewhat deterred by its failures in Iraq; not so the brazen Bush Administration.
* Since the Iranians halted their weapons program well before this latest unjust round of sanctions, economic punitive measures penalizing all Iranians seem more unjust than ever, to say nothing of futile.
* Americans remain criminally clueless about the Arab mentality and culture: Since national pride and honor are at stake, Arab leaders would sooner lie and claim to have the know-how to manufacture WMD, than admit to lacking it. Therefore, when habitual blowhards such as Saddam and Mad Mahmoud tone down their truculence and confess to having no weapons, they’re probably being truthful because truly terrified of an American invasion.
* Hillary has been a hawk on Iran except when the political expediency of the campaign has dictated otherwise. The new intelligence discredits the Democratic frontrunner—and all the GOP candidates bar Ron Paul.

Update #I: I just KNEW someone would take issue with my tagging of the Iranian leadership as typifying the Arab mentality. Everyone knows Ancient Persia was not Arab and that the Iranians are descendants of a medley of non-Arab people. However, since the Islamic conquest, the place has gone the way all places under Islam have gone—to the dogs.
With respect to more recent developments, I’ve written this on BAB: “Reza Shah and son hated Arab culture and identified themselves completely with pre-Islamic Persia. Not so the clerics who came to power after the Islamic revolution in 1979; they endeavored to expunge the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, and Zoroastrianism from Iran’s historical memory. To Islamists, history begins with Mohammad and his exploits; all that went before doesn’t count.
Shortly after the revolution, Islamic mobs in Iran tried to Talibanize Cyrus’s tomb. Persian names were changed to Islamic names, and references to the Achaemenid kings were banned on the state broadcaster. In post-revolutionary Iran, children were no longer named Darius or Cyrus (but Mo and Hussein, like one presidential candidate).”
In any event, I’m sticking with the “Arab-mentality” appellation for Iran’s leadership. It fits.

Update # II (Dec. 5): The neocons are still in power among the punditocracy. Their adherents are hanging on for dear life too. Not that they’ve been truly challenged; reality doesn’t seem to interfere with hereditary rights in American media. Still, I thought that by now they’d have the decency and sense to steer clear of the “left-liberal” libel when it comes to my views—and certainly not expect to be hosted on my blog. Alas, hubris is another of their distinguishing trademarks.
Libel aside, I’m extremely cautious about Iran, but I’d like to see other powers do the heavy lifting—let Israel take care of itself. The IAEA is a good option too, so long as an American president doesn’t kick them out of the inspected region to start a war.

Here are my pieces on the “Persian Pussycat”:

“The Persian Pussycat”
“Satan’s Little Helpers“

Minimizing the Crime of Home Invasion

Aesthetics, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Individual Rights, Natural Law, Private Property, Race

Don Lemon, one of CNN’s not-very-bright, cherubic, soft-spoken “girlie-men,” called the murder of Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor a “robbery gone wrong.”

In other words, the four career criminals who invaded Taylor’s home and shot and killed him were modern-day Jean Valjeans. Like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables, these thugs intended only to take a loaf of bread, sate their hunger, and then leave. (Please don’t tell me I have to post a “cynicism alert” every time I’m being, well, cynical.)

Let’s unpack this.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little a homeowner can do to divine the intentions of the invader. If you violate someone’s inner sanctum, then he or she ought to proceed from the premise that you’re willing to violate the occupant.

The law ought to proceed from the same premise. A home owner ought to be permitted to deploy deadly force in defense of his home and family. In general, albeit with a growing number of exceptions, I believe this is the rule in the US. (Although, not in Cool Britannia.)

This is why neighbors are out in force to demonstrate their support for Pasadena hero, Joe Horn (good luck finding this story on the major news networks’ sites; I couldn’t):

Horn “shot and killed two suspected burglars at his neighbor’s home last month… The neighborhood has been awash in controversy ever since the two men, Miguel Dejesus, 38, and Diego Ortiz, 30, were shot.
The whole thing started when Horn called 911 to say that two men were breaking into his neighbor’s home.

In a tape of the 911 call released to the media, the emergency operator can be heard urging Horn to remain in his home and wait for police to arrive.
‘You’re gonna get yourself shot if you go outside that house with a gun. I don’t care what you think,’ the operator said.
Horn disagreed.
‘You wanna make a bet?’ he said. ‘I’m gonna kill ‘em.’
After the shooting, a shaken Horn called 911 again.
‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘They came in the front yard with me, man. I had no choice. Get somebody over here quick.’”

[Snip]
“Values” is a buzzword not only in the presidential campaign. There is a veritable revival of the civil rights movement around certain criminal core values. African-Americans are coalescing around thugs to make the case that, wait a sec; what case are they trying to make? You tell me. If the issue is indeed race, then the Juvenile criminal from Jena came close to killing a white boy; these two black men robbed the home of whites.

Incidentally, why do you suppose this story is so hard to trace?

Update # II: ‘Redacted’: De Palma Tells The Truth

Film, Hollywood, Media

“There’s one pesky problem with all the indignant huffing and puffing” over the film “Redacted”; it’s “based on a true story. It’s a docudrama. Moral grandstanding notwithstanding, our mighty mediacrats have failed to mention that minor detail.”

“De Palma has, at least, bothered to commemorate the vanquished young victim at the center of ‘Redacted.’ To Rupert Murdoch’s protégés in Mainstream Media, Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi is redundant, a castaway. The same broadcasters who won’t quit braying when an American youngster is harmed pan De Palma for widening his lens to include an Iraqi girl’s ghastly demise at the hands of American soldiers…”

The complete column is “Redacted: De Palma Tells The Truth,” now on WorldNetDaily.com.

Update #I: I’m pro-truth, not anti-troops. For those who can’t Google–or rely on Michelle Malkin to verify facts for them–this case is well-documented. The culprits are sitting in jail, one for 90 years. The idea that individuals should shut up to serve what the mediacrats and their masters in Washington declare to be best for the fictitious collective is … fascistic.

Update #II: Americans don’t want to see a miserable film about a war most don’t support and aren’t able to bring to an end, thanks in no part to the lapdogs that lap up the propaganda perpetrated by what I’ve dubbed the Media-Military-Congressional-Industrial-Complex.
Said offenders have surmised Americans won’t see the film because they want the army to continue mucking about in Iraq. Who’s to say Americans are not simply avoiding a miserable film, about a miserable reality they can do nothing about? Wake up lapdogs! The likes of Ann Coulter are getting rich off the war; you ordinary suckers are paying for it—some with their lives, and all with a devalued dollar and depreciated assets.

As for those who would like to decide what narrative will power a De Palma film: Why can’t De Palma tell any sorry story he likes? Why must he do what these collectivists think he should do? Since when must a director be directed in the choice of his subject matter? So much for our dwindling freedoms. Live and let live.

Asking “what is De Palma’s motive or justification” for producing his film is like asking me why I inveigh against injustices as I see them. I’m a political and cultural commentator. If you want to read non-controversial nonsense, then read Cosmopolitan. Similarly, filmmakers are like novelists; the one writes about things he thinks are important and have touched him; the other depicts them on celluloid. (Personally, I like films like “Dressed to Kill”—thrillers. As I say in the column, Hollywood no longer entertains me.) This reminds me of the foul attacks I got when, starting in 2002, I protested the unjust, illegal, unconstitutional Iraq war. It’s no different.

On Idiot Ideologues Who Pan Paul

Elections 2008, Ilana Mercer, Individual Rights, Liberty, Private Property

A word about the tinny ideologues who pan Paul because he isn’t perfect: They hate freedom, plain and simple. They don’t know what it is to live without it. They are mollycoddled milksops. Here’s why:

I don’t agree with Paul about everything—I voiced my reservations about his understanding of Islam and the Muslim world in “Some Advice for Ron Paul.”

Without going into it, I don’t much care for his position on abortion. However, unlike Paul’s detractors, I happen to know what living without freedom is like. Paul is as close to The Good Life we could hope to come. Only idiots encased in an armor of worthless ideology—worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth—would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul.

Let me share with you a little something: I left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of my apartment stashed in the soles of my shoes. Had I been apprehended smuggling my property out of that country, I’d have gone to jail with my husband. We both stood taller on that trip. As I am in the habit of sending funds to family, I’ve seen firsthand the same creeping oppression sneak-up on Americans. We’ve already seen the South-African model of detention-without-trial slowly become part of the American legal landscape.

I love life and liberty. Almost more than anything I want to keep what is mine—not to pay the mafia shakedown fee levied on my home (property tax), which means I can never really own my abode, and that ownership is merely nominal. When such prospects loom, I seize them. Being an individualist who loves life and liberty means seizing the day; it means that when one encounters a man whose understanding of freedom and individual rights approximates—if not parallels—your own, you seize the moment.

This is not to say one ought to become a mindless “Paulbearer.” Some have; I have not. (More criticism of Paul’s position on immigration is in “Ron Paul’s Electability.”) Nor does it mean that one turns into an asinine detractor, while deluding oneself that rejecting imperfection is tantamount to a show of principle. What the love of liberty means is seizing the best opportunity at a revolution one has. Those who stand on the sidelines are pussies, and worse, slaves to abstractions.

Update: Barely a Blog friend Steven Browne has continued the thread here. Lest I be identified with the treason faction of the liberty movement—the rank pinkos who promote open borders to the detriment of liberty and property in the US—let me add that Dr. Paul is not sufficiently restrictionist on immigration. As I’ve written, “When government orchestrates an unfettered movement of people into an interventionist state, in which the rights to property, free association, and self defense are already heavily circumscribed by the state—it is guilty of unadulterated social engineering, central planning, and worse.” Aiding and abetting this is philosophical treason.
Our Immigration Archive, in which I’ve demolished most of the feeble arguments advanced by those who are laissez faire on immigration. Admittedly, if one is an anarchist, a meaningless position, then the open-borders stance is the only principled one. But since I’m not a kook (anarchist), but belong to the respectable classical liberal tradition, my position is perfectly congruent philosophically.

Paul was wrong to imply, reductively, that Islamic terrorism in general and September 11 in particular are the sole consequences of American foreign policy. Libertarians cannot persist in such unidirectional formulations. As I’ve said previously, our adventurous foreign policy is a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one, given that Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict across the world. The received leftist wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false and patronizing. As scholars such as Efraim and Inari Karsh have shown, “Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Ultimately, a rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power.