RalphSpeak

The Syrian "arsonist-cum-fireman" jig -- was the deadly embassy attack staged?

Olivier Guitta has a follow-up.

In a New York Post piece, the editor of Popular Mechanics, James B. Meigs, writes:

Conspiracy theories alleging that 9/11 was a U.S. government operation are rapidly infiltrating the mainstream. These notions are advanced by hundreds of books, over a million Web pages and even in some college classrooms. The movie "Loose Change," a slick roundup of popular conspiracy claims, has become an Internet sensation.

Worse, these fantasies are gaining influence on the international stage. French author Thierry Meyssan's "The Big Lie," which argues that the U.S. military orchestrated the attacks, was a bestseller in France . . .

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion," Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying. "He is not entitled to his own facts." Yet conspiracy theorists want to pick and choose which facts to believe.

Rather than grapple with the huge preponderance of evidence in support of the mainstream view of 9/11, they tend to focus on a handful of small anomalies that they believe cast doubt on the conventional account . . . If true, these and similar assertions would cast serious doubt on the mainstream account of 9/11.

But they're not true. Popular Mechanics has been fact-checking such claims since late 2004, and recently published a book on the topic. We've pored over transcripts, flight logs and blueprints, and interviewed more than 300 sources - including engineers, aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses and members of investigative teams.

In every single case, we found that the very facts used by conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies are mistaken, misunderstood or deliberately falsified.

Read the whole thing.

More here.

La Nouvelle Peste
by Baron Bodissey
Gates of Vienna | 25-Aug-06

EXCERPT:

Any ideas that spread successfully within a culture can be viewed through this [biologic] analogy. They do not have to be pathological; for example, Christianity and the scientific method, just to name two, were systems of ideas which replicated themselves throughout Europe and its colonies, helping to create the modern civilization whose benefits we enjoy.

But a successful meme can just as easily be destructive, and cause damage to the culture and death to millions of people before it kills its host or is stopped by newly-evolved cultural antibodies. Success isn't determined by the "goodness" of an idea, only by the efficacy of its replication.

And this new Islamic plague has proven to be very successful indeed, not just at replication but at exporting its Third World pathology to locations thousands of miles from its home base. . .  more »

Australia and the US can avoid the bleak future awaiting dying old Europe.

It's Mark Steyn. Read it.

'Islamofascism'
Beware of a religion without irony.
by Roger Scruton
Opinion Journal | 20-Aug-2006

EXCERPT:

Now of course it is wrong to give gratuitous offence to people of other faiths; it is right to respect people's beliefs, when these beliefs pose no threat to civil order; and we should extend toward resident Muslims all the toleration and neighborly goodwill that we hope to receive from them. But recent events have caused people to wonder exactly where Muslims stand in such matters. Although Islam is derived from the same root as salaam, it does not mean peace but submission. And although the Koran tells us that there shall be no compulsion in matters of religion, it does not overflow with kindness toward those who refuse to submit to God's will. The best they can hope for is to be protected by a treaty (dhimmah), and the privileges of the dhimmi are purchased by onerous taxation and humiliating rites of subservience. As for apostates, it remains as dangerous today as it was in the time of the prophet publicly to renounce the Muslim faith. Even if you cannot be compelled to adopt the faith, you can certainly be compelled to retain it. And the anger with which public Muslims greet any attempt to challenge, to ridicule or to marginalize their faith is every bit as ferocious as that which animated the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. Ordinary Christians, who suffer a daily diet of ridicule and skepticism, cannot help feeling that Muslims protest too much, and that the wounds, which they ostentatiously display to the world, are largely self-inflicted.  more »

Islam versus West
by David Warren
RealClear Politics | 20-Aug-200

EXCERPT:

The larger strategic scheme of Osama and Zawahiri . . . has fully emerged . . . And the scheme is so brilliantly simple, that it begins to be understood. Witness Tony Blair's recent speech to the World Affairs Council on August 1, in Los Angeles.

He defined the enemy as: "A movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this take-over, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works."

The enemy's reasoning was: "A battle about Islam was just Muslim versus Muslim. They realised they had to create a completely different battle in Muslim minds: Muslim versus Western."  more »

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -- T. Jefferson Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson

Poor Ned Lamont. A victim already.

What would new golfing buddies Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson think?

In the article titled "Lamont says he was 'surprised' by attacks" published Aug. 14 [in The Day], Mr. Lamont claims to be the butt of a conspiracy after Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman each happened to point out that during wartime an anti-war candidacy, however well-intentioned, cannot help but gratify the enemy.

"It surprised me," he said. "It seemed almost orchestrated."

Selectman Lamont, meet Col. Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army and received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

In an interview published in The Wall Street Journal of Aug. 3, 1995, the colonel was asked if the American anti-war movement was important to Hanoi's victory. "It was essential to our strategy," he said. "People like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses . . ."

Orchestrated? No, Mr. Lamont. Just two wiser men citing the same obvious truism.

Unrepentant Neocon
Norman Podhoretz stands IV-square for the Bush doctrine.
by Joseph Rago
Opinion Journal | 12-Aug-2006

EXCERPT:

The scale and the suddenness of that day [Sept. 11], as Mr. Podhoretz sees it, swept away the assumptions of the era that preceded it, both the soft internationalism and the balance-of-power calculations that by turns governed the way America conducted itself in the world. Here was a generational, existential confrontation with militant Islamist antimodernism, international in character and analogous to World War III (known otherwise as the Cold War). The "war on terror," he argues, ought to be rightly understood as "World War IV," demanding a new set of policies and ideas that will allow the U.S. to cope under drastically altered conditions.

The point of his voluminous WWIV essays (currently being expanded into a book) is to limn the ways in which George Bush has done precisely that. "The military face of the strategy is pre-emption and the political face is democratization," he says. "The stakes are nothing less than the survival of Western civilization, to the extent that Western civilization still exists, because half of it seems to be committing suicide."  more »

Rumsfeld is Right
by Cal Thomas
RealClear Politics | 08-Aug-2006

EXCERPT:

America won [WWII] because the objective wasn't to understand the Nazis, or to reach an accommodation with them; the objective was to win the war. Anything less in this war - against an equally evil and unrelenting enemy - will mean defeat for the United States and for freedom everywhere.  more »

Issued 4 July 1942

Picture Kill
How We Got Here
by Ed Driscoll
EdDriscoll.com | 06-Aug-06

READ it.