When discussing “All Burglars are Home Invaders,” readers in the sensible parts of the country were convinced that their state’s “stand-your-ground” laws would shield them in the event that they were forced to use deadly force to fend off an attack on person, property or both.
These laws removed the requirement whereby “people who think they are in immediate peril must first try to retreat from the confrontation before using deadly force. Prior to passage of the law, only people defending themselves in their own homes, for the most part, could use deadly force without first trying to flee.” (MSNBC)
That some of my readers had faith in the law surprised me somewhat. As recently as the 7/15/2011, I wrote about an “American veteran-hero jailed” for standing his ground, so to speak. Dr. Jerome Ersland was recently condemned to life in prison for defending his property and his employees from a gang of armed robbers. A pistol pointed at his head was not enough to save this hero from imprisonment, pursuant to defending his own life and the lives of his co-workers.
Ersland is from Oklahoma, which is in one of “14 states [that] have revised their laws to ensure that people don’t have to retreat from an attacker. Those states are: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas, according to the NRA.” (MSNBC)
UPDATE: At bottom, every employee, wife, pal wants a man like Ersland around when the stuff hits the fan. In “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism,” I describe the kind of left-liberal perverseness that permeates the letter below. Ersland is a hero; his is an adaptive, manly, normal version of the fight-or-flight response.
Gov. Chris Christie’s address on Tuesday, at the Reagan Library, was more rambling than Reaganesque. It was also a little baffling. In the second paragraph, Christie says,
“Ronald Reagan believed in this country. He embodied the strength, perseverance and faith that has propelled immigrants for centuries to embark on dangerous journeys to come here, to give up all that was familiar for all that was possible.”
What’s up with this? Was Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, an immigrant? And why mention immigrants at the onset of your coming-out-as-presidential-candidate address? By so doing, Ann Coulter’s crush is probably attempting to convey that to speak of America is to speak of immigrants.
America=immigration.
John Jay had a different take. He conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what his descendants are taught.
NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change
By Nebojsa Malic
MORE THAN A DOZEN civilians were injured when NATO troops opened fire on Serb protesters in northern Kosovo on Tuesday. The Serbs had been peacefully protesting NATO’s seizure of checkpoints on the roads to the rest of Serbia, seeking to enforce the writ of the self-proclaimed Albanian government “in the entire country” (Kosovo’s Albanians declared an independent state with NATO support in 2008; Serbia, along with most of the world, refuses to recognize it). Western media reported this as “clashes.” NATO spokespeople argued they’d used only rubber bullets, in “self-defense.” Video and eyewitness reports prove them wrong.
NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after an illegal war in support of the separatist Albanian “Liberation Army.” Evidence of alleged Serb atrocities – used to justify the war – never materialized. Albanian persecution of ethnic Serbs and other communities, meanwhile, has unfolded for 12 years now, under the very noses of the “peacekeepers” and often with their tacit approval. When Serbia acted to establish law and order in Kosovo in 1998, it was condemned by NATO as “aggressor” and its actions deemed “genocide.” But when NATO initiates violence on behalf of a criminal regime of ethnic cleansers, slavers, drug-runners and organ harvesters, they call it “law and order” and anyone who opposes it, no matter how peacefully, a “criminal element.”
Why should any of this matter? Because it shows the world’s dominant military power (for now) as dangerously and deliberately disconnected from logic, and hence justice.
In the early 1990s, a media image of the Balkans wars was created in the West, wherein the Serbs were these mass-murdering aggressors against their peaceful neighbors, and the virtuous West had to step in and stop them. The Serbs were accused of the most vicious atrocities and compared to the Nazis.
None of that makes any sense. The Serbs are accused of breaking up Yugoslavia – yet they wanted to preserve it (and even then, not at all costs). The West decided that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist (just like that) and that the borders of its federal units were inviolable – except for Serbia, which could be carved up further (Kosovo). Serbs in Croatia were denied autonomy and expelled en masse, but Albanians in Serbia were given independence. Serbs in Bosnia were told they had to submit to a centralized, Muslim-dominated state, while Serbia itself was ordered to de-centralize to the point of separatism. No matter which way one turns, the only consistent “principle” in the Orwellian Balkans is that the Serbs always lose.
The Nazi comparison is especially vile, considering that 1) the Serbs were the principal targets of Nazis and their allies during WW2, and had also fought German and Austrian aggression in WW1; 2) Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians were allied with the Nazis in WW2, and the first two fought for Austria-Hungary in WW1, and 3) both Croats and Albanians had designs for eliminating the Serbs from the territories they claimed, and put those plans into effect under Western patronage, while the Serbs were accused of genocide without any evidence of intent!
One PR executive even bragged, as early as 1993, that the biggest coup of his agency was convincing the Jewish public opinion in the West that the Serbs were Nazis reborn, even though Croats and Bosnian Muslims had a history of “real and cruel anti-Semitism”!
In the course of the Balkans interventions, the West has repeatedly violated its own laws and charters (NATO), making a mockery of the UN and international law, while claiming to be guided by some sort of higher morality. The result of these interventions was that the US, Britain and France betrayed an ally from two world wars and demonized them as Nazis reborn, while supporting Germany and aiding German allies from WW2 to finish what they started in 1941. If this sort of stunning reversal can happen in the Balkans, it can happen anywhere else. To anyone else.
First come the smears. Then the bombs. Then the boots on the ground, and the desert called peace.
You have been warned.
**** Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.
UPDATE: BAB contributor Nebojsa Malic on Russia Today, TODAY. The neocon is always and everywhere the most uncivilized:
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds that Obama earns 44% support to Paul’s 34%. Thirteen percent (13%) prefer some other candidate, and nine percent (9%) remain undecided.
This time last month, the two men were essentially even shortly after Paul’s second-place finish in the high-profile Ames, Iowa straw poll. The president posted a narrow 41% to 37% lead over the congressman in July.
Ron Paul still has time to catch up, but the congressman needs some competent campaign strategists. In my opinion (whose less negative line on Israel Paul recently adopted, despite the fact that it was written for him years ago), Paul has come this far despite the help.
