Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Lola/Hezbollah

The folks at Junkyard Blog are nothing if not creative. Recall the tune from the old Kinks' song "Lola" and sing along to "Fauxla", a parody of the faked photos from Lebanon run by Reuters and other MSM outlets. Here are a couple of stanzas to get you started:

MSM stringers down in old Beirut
Nasrallah had some photos that he wanted them to shoot
Called 'em on his Motorola:
"We've a narrative to control-lah"
But the bloggers were a-watching all the clone-stamped smoke
Little Green Footballs said j'accuse! like Zola
Just like Emile Zola.

Oh Reuters, Reuters I can't understand
Why you keep on showing us the Green-Helmet Man
Taking bodies in and out of his mortuary van
While your cameras roll-ah
Doin' it for Hezbollah
And how many times have we seen the same scene
Where the same old woman-you know the one I mean
Pretends her home is now a hole-a.
Acts like she can't be console-a.

Clever, isn't it? Sing the rest at the link.

Media Miscellany

1. Cal Thomas calls for us to get serious in the war against Islamo-fascism. He says it's time we broke out of the legalistic civil rights mindset that has constrained us for the last forty years.

The British are still shocked that people who are born in their country, go to their schools, have British accents and eat fish and chips would kill their fellow Brits. They do so because their allegiance is not to Britain, or to the Queen, but rather to their perverted view of God and the instructions from the hate preachers telling them to go bag some Jews, Christians, Westerners and other "infidels."

Health officials respond to plagues by isolation and eradication. Their objective is not only to control the spread of a disease, but also to kill it so it won't infect others. If that is an effective method for combating a plague, why is it not also a good strategy for combating the islamofascist plague?

This isn't about "civil rights" and constitutional protection. These people use our Constitution to protect themselves so they can kill us. And this is decidedly not a game. It is life and death. We want to live and they want us dead.

The war against Islamo-fascism is centuries old and yet completely new. The rules that western states have devised to maximize justice for their citizens so that people could live in safety may no longer work in an age in which the enemy's chief grievance is that you do not share his religion, his chief goal is to kill you and his chief blessing is to die in the attempt.

2. Are we safer now than before 9/11? Of all the nonsensical questions that keep getting asked by media types this has to rank near the top. How can anyone answer it? What would count as evidence one way or another? How could anyone possibly know? As long as there are people out there who wish to kill us, and have the means to do so, then we are not safe. Period.

3. A CNN talking head was discussing the need to eliminate poverty and joblessness among European Muslims in order to eliminate terrorism. Poverty, she averred, breeds hopelessness and hopelessness breeds alienation and alienation breeds terrorism. Unfortunately for this thesis the plotters were all middle class and all had jobs. One pundit noted that some of them lived in nicer homes than did most of the policeman who arrested them. Too many liberals seem locked in the Marxist categories popular during the sixties, and are just unable to grasp that terrorism is not about economics, or land, or American foreign policy. It's about religion and the Islamist desire to conquer the whole world for Islam.

Gervais Refutes Darwinism, Sort of

I'm reluctant to link to this "talk" by comic Ricky Gervais because it's irreverent, vulgar, and it makes fun of beliefs which I have some sympathy for. Even so, it is funny so I'm crossing my fingers and letting you know about it. We have to be able to laugh at ourselves, after all.

Be forewarned that Gervais' language is R-rated.

Will the Cease-Fire Last?

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters explains why he thinks the cease-fire in Lebanon is doomed to be short-lived. He quotes the Times of London:

Today was supposed to be the day when the much-maligned army of Lebanon took control of its borders and policed the UN ceasefire. Instead, its military commanders were left humiliated and its troops stranded as Hezbollah told them not to try to disarm its fighters.

The first infantry units were preparing to head south yesterday when Hezbollah demonstrated who exercised the real control by announcing that it had no intention of surrendering a single weapon. General Michel Sleiman, the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Army, and his lieutenants had been invited to join in Cabinet meetings to finalise plans to deploy their 15,000-strong force in a buffer zone south of the Litani river. However, they ended up being lectured by Hezbollah's two Cabinet ministers in the coalition Government on what the army could and could not do.

Ed adds this:

This national humiliation will not soon be forgotten by the Lebanese. If Hezbollah gained some sympathy and support during the Israeli invasion that they themselves provoked, it has dissipated in this mutinous reaction. The scales have fallen from the eyes of the political class in Beirut, and they see the danger to their existence standing baldly in front of them. Hezbollah has stripped them of their legitimacy, and now their theft of southern Lebanon has become crystal clear.

There's more at the link.

Islamic Justice

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expresses dismay in his 60 minute interview with Mike Wallace that so many Americans are in prison. Perhaps his surprise is that we don't just execute them like they do in Iran. Consider the following example of Iranian justice.

I can't vouch for this series of photos sent to me by a friend. No documentation accompanied the e-mail which contained them. I will simply tell you what the e-mail claimed which is that the boy in the photos is 8 years old and is being publically punished in Iran for having stolen bread in a market. The punishment consists of crushing his arm. You are cautioned that these photos are very disturbing and may be very difficult to look at. I run them here for the same reason that I think it important that we saw pictures of what the Nazis did to Jews and others in the extermination camps, or that we see the pictures of Negro slaves with scars covering their backs where they were lashed, or that we see pictures of what happens to a fetus in an abortion. Nevertheless, you may prefer to pass them by.

Whether the claims accompanying the e-mail are genuine or not what is being done to this child is barbaric, and the adults responsible for it are primitive savages. Is this the fruit of the religion which has declared war on all other faiths? Are these the sort of people this religion produces? Is this the sort of world that lies in store for our children and grandchildren if we shrink from the threat that these people pose to our civilization? And Ahmadenijad has the chutzpah to chide us for our prison population?