Posts Tagged ‘Israel’

The real question to ask

Posted: June 17, 2010 by datechguy in media, opinion/news, Uncategorized
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“The American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.” Ahmed Aboul Gheit Egyptian Foreign Minister Jan 2010

I actually take this story from Atlas with a grain of salt, not because I doubt the veracity of Atlas (I trust her implicitly) but because I don’t trust Ahmed Aboul Gheit to tell the truth. I expect them (the Egyptians) to say whatever is to their advantage. She does however raise a much more interesting point:

This is a devastating claim, and yet no media outlet is covering it.

Can someone explain to me how 5 months this was said on Television, not whispered, not a rumor, not in confidence or unattributed, that it takes a US blogger to introduce such a statement to US media? Even to just call it a joke?

If the old media doesn’t want to do it’s job it should get out of the way and let those willing to do the work do it.

Apparently you can be right on an important issue…

Posted: June 13, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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…and still be an #$*

Back on May 31st when I was looking at various links around the blogosphere about the Turkish flotilla. I found myself curious what the newly left leaning Charles Johnson might be saying, so I did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I checked his blog to see what it said. Here is what I saw:

And in a sign that there is still hope for him: Charles Johnson:

The Israeli Navy boarded a flotilla headed toward Gaza yesterday, leading to a wild melee that ended in several deaths. The IDF is reporting that the “peace activists” planned the violence in advance, and released the following video — clearly showing the “peace activists” attacking the IDF boarding party with a variety of weapons, including firebombs and stun grenades.

His new friends on the left won’t like those quotation marks but I am very pleased to see them.

It was the first time I linked to him in a very long time. I didn’t read anything else on the blog and basically forgot about it until a little more than a week later I noticed a story on memeorandum from the Fox site that credited LGF for noticing Reuters cropping a photo to disarm one of the “activists” in the flotilla that headed to Israel to try to break the Gaza blockade. I also noticed that none of the found it kind of funny that all of the links on Memorandum didn’t mention Johnson:

This isn’t a surprise, I don’t care for Johnson, I don’t like the way he treated my friend Stacy, or Pam or Peg and he has run in my opinion run his site like a cheap dictator, but in the end his position on Israel and his willingness to expose Reuters shows he still has a trace of the old Johnson in him.

Christians in general and Catholics in particular are very much into redemption. I’ve still got a little Pollyanna in me so I’ll include him in my prayers this week. Who knows.

If I had been reading his site I would have noticed that although he is on the side of the angels on the Gaza flotilla it hasn’t increased the thickness of his skin as Stacy and Ace both note first Ace:

My experience with throwing tips to Charles Johnson was this: Don’t bother. Because if you sent him the tip that a Reuters story included interesting paragraph 1, interesting paragraph 2, and interesting paragraph 3, your “reward” from the Great Charles Johnson was seeing this up at his wonderful blog:

Reuters [direct link to Reuters story]:

Interesting Paragraph 1. [which you sent him]

Interesting Paragraph 2. [which you sent him]

Interesting Paragraph 3. [which you sent him]

Via Ace of Spades. [Gee, thanks! You mentioned me! You see that, Ma? I’ma somebody now!]

It quickly dawned on me that if I wanted any traffic from LGF readers, the right strategy was to not tip Charles Johnson, thus forcing, sort of, his readers to come over to my blog and see for themselves if I’d found anything of interest.

Because, if I sent Johnson a tip, that whole tip was going up on his site, pretty much, just as I myself had put it on mine, with no apparent reason for any reader to click through to me. In other words, having an Ace of Spades tip up at LGF pretty much meant his readers wouldn’t come over to the site, as they’d know that CJ had faithfully reproduced the only interesting thing on my site that day.

Better, then, to leave it up in the air as to whether anything interesting was going on on this site then, so at least I’d get curiosity-clicks.

It’s kind of screwed up when you realize you probably get more traffic by not being linked from a site than being linked by it.

And this is only a sample of what he has to say (go and read the whole thing).

Stacy picks up the narrative with some screen shots from LGF where Charles thin skin is demonstrated in visuals:

UPDATE: To put the Ace/LGF situation in context, some explanation is in order. There was a minor media-bias kerfuffle this past week in regard to the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla,” and I didn’t blog about it because the source was Little Green Footballs. But it got picked up in the media and everybody else blogged about it, including Yid With Lid:

Reuters is now doctoring its pictures from the violence aboard the Guerrilla Flotilla.

YWL got linked at Hot Air, and this prompted Charles Johnson to go thermonuclear on Allahpundit:

Ironically he gives shots and the backstory of something similar involving Charles with another blogger with the roles reversed.

When I had put up my initial “credit where credit is due” post and promoted it on Twitter Stacy tweeted back with the following warning:

@SissyWillis @DaTechGuyblog Be Ye Not Deceived!

followed by four further tweets about Mr. Johnson’s history.

Now I only knew about his role because the Fox story mentioned it, if I had seen it at Yid with Lid or hotair first I would have credited them first. The blogosphere is a pretty big place and unless you are Glenn Reynolds (who I suspect is a future regeneration of a certain 2000 year old timelord with a TARDIS of his own) you just can’t see everything, link everything and credit everything on the web.

I tend to read memeorandum first, then Robert Stacy, then a few of my linked blogs and then Glenn. By the time I see Glenn I’ve already linked and scheduled several posts that he might have already put up. I don’t look at LGF but I don’t look at Ace of Spades much either (Sorry Ace but I just don’t). With 24 hours in a day and something resembling a life I just can’t do it without a longer life span and a time/space vehicle.

If Charles hasn’t figured that out yet concerning people like Allahpundit then right or wrong on this issue his troubles remain.

It doesn’t look good, with God all things are possible but apparently with Charles he is taking his time.

Another example of the “if you start from the idea…

Posted: June 12, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news, war
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…that they are all Marxists it makes perfect sense.” meme in play. In fact three of them:

Item: Apparently environmental groups have decided that their love for the environment doesn’t trump their loyalty to the dear leader president.

Actress Q’orianka Kilcher chained herself to the White House fence while her mother slathered the “Pocahontas” star in black paint meant to look like oozing crude.

Kilcher’s cause? Not the Gulf spill at all but oil-related abuses of indigenous people in Peru, whose president was visiting Obama that day.

As the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history has played out on Obama’s watch, the environmental movement has essentially given him a pass — all but refusing to unleash any vocal criticism against the president even as the public has grown more frustrated by Obama’s performance.

About a dozen environmental groups took out a full page ad in the Washington Post Tuesday – not to fault Obama over the ecological catastrophe but to thank him for putting on hold an Alaska drilling project.

After all its one thing to protect the environment it’s quite another to protect the higher cause of Obama, and if the environment has to suffer well so be it. After all once oil drilling is allowed in Alaska, you can’t fund raise based on stopping it can you?

Item: Speaking of oil drilling apparently.

The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium — something they actually oppose.

You mean that the administration is actually misrepresenting the facts from their own reports? Why would one do such a thing? Why because the ends justify the means of course.

Item: Mosab Yousef is the son of a founder of Hamas founder who eventually decided what was being done was wrong, converted to Christianity and used his position to give Israel information that saved lives. He is intimately familiar with the mind set of terror and has written a book on the subject called Son of Hamas. You would think that this is exactly the type of person we want to encourage and to protect. You would apparently think wrong:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano believes Mosab Yousef is a national security threat, and wants to send him back to Palestine. According to Yousef writing on his publisher’s blog, he is now Homeland Security File# A 088 271 051. He is scheduled to appear before Immigration Judge Rico J. Bartolomei at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Court in San Diego on June 30th at 8 a.m.

As you can guess people of sense are up in arms over this nonsense. The only people he is a threat to is our enemies.

Forgetting the fact for the moment that letting him stay is the right thing to do, letting him stay is also the SMART thing to do. How are we going to encourage people to be warn us on terror attacks if we throw people who help stop them under the bus? Not a wise recruitment tool.

I would encourage you to contact your representatives on this matter.

Why on earth would this administration act this way? The question answers itself.

Will Israel decide to be taken for Wolves?

Posted: June 11, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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A few years ago I wrote this to Glenn concerning Haditha saying with the press and left’s cry of “atrocity” to all we ever do eventually those who support the war might decide to be taken for wolves rather than sheep.

Today Victor Davis Hanson says something similar about Israel:

Israelis should assume by now that whether they act tentatively or strongly, the negative reaction will be the same. Therefore why not project the image of a strong, unapologetic country to a world that has completely lost its moral bearings, and is more likely to respect Israel’s strength than its past concern for meeting an impossible global standard?

How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.

David Borg Expands on things:

The path toward terrorism begins with the erasure of moral lines. It starts with the equation of terrorists — who seek to kill civilians — with the armed forces who seek to stop the terrorists. It mistakes cartoons with corpses, collateral damage with intentional murder. It fails to distinguish between an errant missile and an intentional suicide bomb. It confuses the “extremists” with those who fight extremism.

As we Americans fight the war on terror, we must fight with our heads as well as our hearts. Americans must always demand the highest standards from their army and from those of allies such as Israel. But we should never validate the type of thinking that is the hallmark of the very enemies we pursue. Today Israel’s soldiers are in the dock. But tomorrow it will be our own.

Victor considers it a matter of ignorance:

Obama reminds me of my own twenties when I was both ignorant and arrogant in my self-absorption: Wondering why a particular ag supply company would not put all the bags on the pallet that I paid for, confused over why the guy I hired to level a field left his CAT meter on his idling carry-all while he visited his girlfriend and billed me for the “hours,” disheartened that workers would habitually write “320 tablas” on their first grape tray, when in fact I counted only 231 when I walked down their rows, and curious why a big ag corporation would spray “fix” on their table grapes that made them bigger and prettier than mine, even though the chemical was long banned. Unfortunately, appeals to reason were, to quote Mark Knopfler, “all for nothing.”

He thinks the president will eventually learn. I think that Victor and David are both thinking like an ignorant youths. The erasure of the moral lines isn’t a bug of the left’s thinking; it’s a feature.

And it looks like the events of the day suggest that “learning” will not be for a while yet:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that senior Obama administration officials have been telling foreign governments that the administration intends to support an effort next week at the United Nations to set up an independent commission, under UN auspices, to investigate Israel’s behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident. The White House has apparently shrugged off concerns from elsewhere in the U.S. government that a) this is an extraordinary singling out of Israel, since all kinds of much worse incidents happen around the world without spurring UN investigations; b) that the investigation will be one-sided, focusing entirely on Israeli behavior and not on Turkey or on Hamas; and c) that this sets a terrible precedent for outside investigations of incidents involving U.S. troops or intelligence operatives as we conduct our own war on terror.

Again a-c are features. After all administration actions have political costs, international actions can produce the condemnations they wish without the political risk and can be reluctantly be accepted.

Update: The Whitehouse is denying it. That could mean that they were not planning on doing this or that they were until it came out early and they want to avoid any political damage ahead of time, a lot easier to deal with a fait acompli that to deal with it ahead of time.

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