I’ll be discussing “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” with Chuck Wilder, who “continues in the tradition of the late George Putnam with his daily ‘Talkback.'”
Date & Time: Fri Oct 21,1:05 to 2:00 PM Pacific Time. Do call in.
America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Just War, Justice, Middle East
Backed by American and French (NATO) sorties up above, our buddies the rebels, bless them, apprehended the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. With barbaric, blood-curdling harangues of “Allahu Akbar,” the revolutionaries proceed to lynch him on camera. Sophisticated enough to film their “justice,” these animals are sufficiently in touch with their atavistic selves to tear to pieces a helpless individual. Secular democracy rising.
Invigorated by killing a 16-year old boy (Abdel-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki) because related to an American the president had ordered assassinated (Anwar al-Awlaki), without due process, Obama, a worthy disciple of Bush the Barbarian, is celebrating the murder: “You’ve won your revolution,” obama tells Libya.
Once again, the US has supervised and given imprimatur to a French-Revolution like upheaval in a Muslim country.
Below is footage of what we’ve become and who we befriend:
Here are stories that flesh out the gory details from Al Jazeera, the MailOnline, and the AP.
UPDATE: THE CACKLING HILDEBEEST. Even the pro-Bush Allahpundit of “Hot Air” recoils at Hillary Clinton’s “We came, we saw, he died,” vis-a-vis Gaddafi’s death. (Although Bush’s barbarians did plenty laughing and looting. I believe Bush took Saddam’s sword, but Google seems to have wiped all evidence of the Shrub’s crime. Looting goes against Just War doctrine, not that Bush prosecuted a just war.) http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/20/hillary-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died/
Elections, Family, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Private Property, Ron Paul
RICK SANTORUM said this during the CNN Western Republican Debate, last night: “I disagree in some respects with Congressman Paul, who says the country is founded on the individual. The basic building block of a society is not an individual. It’s the family. That’s the basic unit of society.”
[SNIP]
What came first; the unit or its constituent parts? Is not a social unit like the family comprised of individuals? And did not the sovereign states precede the union? Although it all begins with the individual, the preeminence of the individual in no way negates the vitality of the family.
CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL REPLIED: “Well, I would like to explain that rights don’t come in bunches. Rights come as individuals, they come from a God, and they come as each individual has a right to life and liberty.”
Someone please stand up for property, next time. The defense of private property rights is urgent as the Occupy Wall Street hooligans encroach.
UPDATE: Contemplationist below is right. With his “Live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as I observed, Jefferson has “bequeathed us a vagueness that has helped undermine the foundation of civilization: private property.”
Individual Rights, Islam, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Liberty, Middle East, Palestinian Authority, Religion, Republicans
This may sound chauvinistic, but when nations are consumed with safekeeping their own, by default (and in self interest), they are more careful with the lives of their enemies.
Israel has demonstrated once again its commitment to that Talmudic verse, “To Save One Life Is Like Saving the World.” (The verse was ‘appropriated,” or ripped off, by Islam, and an exclusionary clause written into the equivalent Quranic ayah. Islam’s borrowed version, needless to say, is considerably less humanistic and universal.)
MSNBC’s Martin Bashir expressed bewilderment at the news that,
Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and hundreds of Palestinians crossed Israel’s borders in opposite directions on Tuesday as a thousand-for-one prisoner exchange brought joy to families but did little to ease decades of conflict. …In all, Israel is setting free 1,027 Palestinians in return for the liberty of Shalit. Some have spent 30 years behind bars for violent attacks against Israel and its occupation of land taken in the 1967 Middle East War.
Over 100 of the 477 prisoners released in the first phase of the exchange were taken to the West Bank. The rest were coming into Gaza, apart from 41 who were due to fly out from Cairo to exile in Turkey, Syria or Qatar.
Bashir, a neocon-cum-liberal, is in good company here in the US. The following is from a 2004, Antiwar.com column:
… the neoconservatives at National Review have grumbled about Israel’s “lopsided prisoner exchanges” over the years. One “sofa samurai,” Eric Leskly, [once noted] the startling disparity of exchanging 5,500 Egyptian soldiers, following the Sinai campaign of 1956, “for the lives of the four Israeli soldiers captured in the fighting,” and over 8,000 Egyptians, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in exchange for 240 Israeli soldiers.
Its official policy notwithstanding, Israel has also negotiated with terrorists for the lives and bodies of its soldiers. As Dr. Boaz Ganor, executive director of the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, told the Jerusalem Post: “Israeli governments are more prone to the influence of public opinion.”
I remember thinking just that when, years back, I watched demonstrators heckle Ariel Sharon after yet another suicide bombing. One man yelled, “If you don’t sort this mess out, I’ll personally pay you a visit.”
UPDATE II: Bar Ron Paul, the debaters at the CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate related not at all to the Israeli position—a consistent preference for doing what it takes to save a life, even if not always strategic.