by Brendan O’Neill – August 29, 2006 According to President George W. Bush, America is at war with “Islamic fascists.” Commentators who support Bush’s military interventions also argue that the West faces new religious enemies who do not play… Continue Reading
…..What of us Americans? Do we negotiate with terrorists?
At Tehran and Yalta, FDR ceded Eastern Europe to the Great Terrorist he called “Uncle Joe.” Truman at Potsdam affirmed the grant to Stalin. Three years after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution, Eisenhower invited the “Butcher of Budapest” to Camp David and had him escorted on a 10-day U.S. tour.
In the year the Viet Cong perpetrated the massacre at Hue, going door-to-door with lists and executing 3,000 South Vietnamese, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman sat down with the VC and North Vietnamese at Paris.
In 1972, Nixon went to Peking to shake hands with the greatest terrorist of the century, Mao Tse-tung, even as Mao’s Gang of Four, including his wife, carried out the Chinese pogrom known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution….. Continue Reading
…..Why do they hate us? Qana provides the answers, but it appears few in the West are really listening.
All morning when Arab channels were showing the crushed building in Qana, and the Red Crescent workers extracting from under it more than 60 bodies, mostly children, embalmed in blood and dust, Israel was showing family movies on its main television networks.
Foreign channels were hardly better. It is in the first responses of the Western broadcasters – before they have had time to hone and polish their scripts and cover all the bases – that their partisan agenda is at its most transparent. So all morning their attention was directed less at the new Qana massacre than at the destruction of the UN building in Beirut, as though it was our last rampart against the rampaging hordes of Islam. In this framing of the world, our provocative acts appear so much less significant than the mystifying response, the Other’s delusional anger….. Continue Reading
Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored “blue line” on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah’s military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah’s leadership; this indeed has been the pattern….. Continue Reading