Archive for the ‘war’ Category

I’ve alluded to the Memorial Day event at Doraville already, Liz Carter was there and after Col Kings presentation she talked to me a bit about what we heard:

I have to agree Chief King was very impressive and a lot of people would benefit from his presentation.

Yesterday in Doraville Ga I attended a Memorial Day event at the Civic center. The featured speaker was Police Chief John King who just returned from a national guard deployment to Afghanistan. He presented a power point presentation of what he saw and I include YouTube videos of some the the highlights:

One of the hardest things to do is changing the mindset of both police and the people they serve. He touched on the fact that people are used to serving a tribe instead of a central government.

Hey does that mean those Afghanistan police will be doing racial profiling? Off camera he talked about how they have recruited female police, there is only a tiny amount but what has been does is this, daughters of people who have been hired come in as clerks and are often used handling accounts. The women have proved to be much more reliable with the funds in terms of corruption.

He then talked a bit about our losses:

He speaks some common sense there.

Finally he is answering a question on how much religion plays a part in what is happening.

The Applause at the end was well earned.

President Obama when signing the freedom of the press act had an interesting omission, and I don’t mean the lack of questions being allowed. I’m talking about what Jennifer Rubin noted:

Has Obama done anything about the suppression of media critics in Egypt (other than prepare a lucrative financial package for the Egyptian government)? Has Obama made this a priority with any thugocracy? No. And when signing a bill in the name of someone who elevated and personified the freedom of expression, Obama at least could have departed from his campaign to delete the name of our enemies from the public lexicon.

It’s not that odd a lot of information get suppressed in the war on terror and the worldwide war against Jews. A few examples:

Item: The “right of return

Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in-chief Safwat noted with some astonishment that the Jews “have so far not attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.”) By the time of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even then, none of the 170,000-180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.

Well it’s not like Arabs were mistreating their own at this time, oh wait:

No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews. During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover that while the refugees

express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.

Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.

You don’t see much of this talked about in history but it was years ago. Hey it’s not like Arabs are still driving “Palestinians” out of their homes; oh wait:

Hamas police wielding clubs beat and pushed residents out of dozens of homes in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on Sunday before knocking the buildings down with bulldozers, residents said.

Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers said the homes were built illegally on government land. Newly homeless residents were furious over Palestinians on bulldozers razing Palestinian homes.

For years, Palestinians have criticized Israel for destroying houses, mostly because they were built without permits issued by the military. Now, Rafah residents complained, their own government, run by the Islamic militant Hamas that seized power in Gaza in July 2007, has done the same.

Funny how this doesn’t rate a big story in the papers. And that doesn’t even count the young Arab American who given the chance to denounce the idea of genocide of Jews in Israel declared herself “for it
Well even that isn’t the same as violence threatened in America; oh wait again:

With Draw Muhammad Day drawing closer, death threats have been leveled (warning, exceedingly bad language through link) against Dan McLeod, creator of the Facebook group that urges people to draw a picture of Islam’s prophet. The threats are made in one of the group’s discussion pages with the label “F*** that Person who Celebrate this Day” (edited for language and removed all-caps).

I’ve already declared that I will not be drawing Muhammad. I will not be buffaloed into doing what I wouldn’t normally do one way or the other. I will be doing my own protests in my own style on that day.

But I will publicly declare as a believing Roman Catholic that Muhammad is a false prophet and that Muslims are are wrong in declaring Christ a prophet he is the son of God and no amount of beheading or outrage will change that fact. The difference between us I am secure enough in my beliefs to make my points in argument and let God sort out who is right and wrong on this issue in the end. Our Islamic friends are so insecure in their beliefs that they hide their uncertainly behind the sword or their silence in the face of the sword. If their argument had weight then they wouldn’t be afraid of Christian Churches in their midst, they wouldn’t have a bounty on the head of a priest that they can’t out argue and they wouldn’t be burning the houses of cartoonists.

That is all.

Maybe it’s because I’ve got a birthday coming, but if you substitute the words “Afghanistan” with “Iraq”, substitute “Karzai” with “Maliki” and turn the clock back to 2006. It would be the very same conversation. The very same, why are we there, we will be there 10 years or more, why are soldiers dying, we can’t win this war, blah blah blah blah.

C’mon guys we’ve seen this show before. Let me explain a few things.

  • This is a war, in a war both sides try to win, just because we are the US that doesn’t mean the other side is going to stop trying.
  • Yes we are losing troops, that’s because unlike World War 2 we aren’t mass bombing their areas since it would kill an awful lot of civilians. If we DID use all our power the argument would suddenly be how we were killing people indiscriminately.
  • The Taliban is operating in Pakistan, we are not going to go to war or invade a nuclear Pakistan. As long as that is the case we need to be killing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
  • The Goal is the same as the “flypaper” strategy in Iraq. Attract the warriors to a place where we can kill them. We have lost nearly 1,000 soldiers in how many years of war? Does anyone here know what those numbers break down per year? Have you ever heard of a war lasting that long with a loss rate like this. How does it compare to the rates in Chicago, or the Mexican border towns?

If you only know one song people are eventually going to get tired of hearing it.