On The Third Hand

To DallasNews.com, for getting it right.

Call Them What They Are: Those who murder Iraqi civilians are terrorists

Hat tip: Cold Fury.

Islamists step up campaign to stop Muslims voting

Not a smart move… what good does not voting do? You get to whinge about how you didn’t vote for the winner? But that’s not what caught my eye. It was the second paragraph here:

The extreme Islamist group accused of threatening George Galloway and hijacking a meeting of moderate Muslims is planning to step up its direct action campaign to stop fellow believers from participating in the election.

The Guardian can reveal that the gang of youths who stormed two election meetings this week are members of al-Ghuraaba, an offshoot of the now disbanded radical organisation al-Muhajiroun.

Emphasis mine. Can reveal? One must assume that before this radical organization was disbanded it was somehow preventing the Guardian from revealing anything about it? Perhaps all the Grauniad’s reporters were kidnapped by this now-defunct group and physically prevented from revealing anything about them?

Ok, I’ll admit that the can/may thing is a pet peeve of mine. But in this case, I’m not sure “may” is much better. Either way, I suspect that what they mean is: “we were too lily-livered to report on this until they went away".”

Between murderer and martyr.

Jordan, it seems, doesn’t.

Suspected hostage cells found in Falluja

US forces have found nearly 20 houses in the Iraqi city of Falluja where they believe people were tortured and where foreign hostages may have been killed.

On Monday, a CNN correspondent attached to one unit in central Falluja said those troops believed they may have found the wire cage where British hostage Kenneth Bigley was shown on video pleading for his life. He was later beheaded last month.

“It looks like we found a number of houses,” where torture took place, said Major Jim West, an intelligence officer, told reporters. US officers put the number of torture sites “close to 20″.

I love all the passive voice in this article… “where torture took place", “people were tortured", “may have been killed” and “was shown". No actors… these things just happened somehow. Sigh.

Calling A Spade A Sturdy Digging Tool Having A Thick Handle And A Heavy, Flat Blade That Can Be Pressed Into The Ground With The Foot

Ok. I admit I linked Bigwig’s post partly because I really like the title. But only partly. Some of the attacks on Dr. Rice are seriously beyond the pale, and you’ll get some good examples there.

I also love his extremely sarcastic ending sentence.

It’s not racism, it’s “nuance.”

I’ll also note that wits0 (badly mis-nicknamed) left me a link to Rush Limbaugh’s rant on the same subject but I didn’t post it because I simply could not get past the fact that Rush Limbaugh is an insular idiot who does not realise that the Brits have always spelt things differently. “Learned” is American spelling, Rush baby. “Learnt” is British spelling. It isn’t a racist slur. Get a clue. (About halfway down the page, if you click the link.) Sheesh.

Ignore Limbaugh; Silflay Hraka’s got the goods — without the insular idiocy.

Hat tip: to Scott at amcgltd.com

Because Steyn’s Online.

MommaBear’s post below inspired the above comment. I understand her outrage; although I don’t completely share it. (In fact my exact first thought on reading her post was that you can’t censor someone with a web page. I just liked the rhyme better.) What the Telegraph did was not, strictly speaking, censorship. If the BBC (state-financed) had pulled his article, that would perhaps have been censorship. The Telegraph; however, is not state-run and so their decision to pull his article was simply because they (very likely rightly) thought their readers and advertiserers would be upset about it. They were simply refusing to print something they thought people wouldn’t want to hear. Not censorship, just plain, old-fashioned cowardice. Their bottom line was at stake. I can’t even really blame them.

Steyn’s article is cold, baby, freezing cold, chill-to-the-bone cold. And completely correct.

Though I think he does miss one thing. If anything can convince those like Paul Bigley that the jihadis cannot be negotiated with, that they really do not have any human sympathy, that they use their religion to disguise their sociopathy, that one thing that may convince them is Ken Bigley’s death. And perhaps, just perhaps, while the Islamists were learning things from Britain, Britain was learning a few things about the Islamists. I haven’t given up hope for Britain yet. Steyn shouldn’t either.

Evil’s true name Andrew Bolt

We’ve been tip-toeing around the real nature of terrorism for far too long. The horror in Russia compels us to recognise the truth about this evil.

ENOUGH. Finally enough with the evasions and excuses – the pretence that this had nothing to do with Islamism. No, the evil that turned a Russian school into a slaughterhouse is too great and too threatening for more such polite fictions.

Remember 9/11: Stop sanitizing the killers Michelle Malkin

The third anniversary of Sept. 11 is upon us. We remain at war – and the media remain in denial.

How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic “militants” or “guerrillas” or “rebels” or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted the Pakistan Times called them, “activists"?

Contrast the media whitewashing of our Islamofascist enemies with the press coverage of the Waco, Texas, siege in 1993 – which constantly reminded us that David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers were members of a “peculiar religious sect” (New York Times, March 3, 1993) and “a group of religious zealots with a known propensity for violence” (Washington Post, March 2, 1993) who were steeped in a “culture of Christian extremism” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993).

Some get it. But most are still in denial. We won’t have a chance of winning the war until the mainstream media stops euphemising and starts telling it as it is. You can’t fight an enemy without first identifying who the enemy is.

Cooter clash is nothing but a senseless name game

The word “cooter” is well-known slang for “turtle.” The word means turtle in Florida. It means turtle across the South, for that matter.

The town of Allendale, S.C., holds an annual Spring Cooter Fest.

There’s also a Cooter, Mo.

A character in the old TV show Dukes of Hazzard was named Cooter. The actor who played him even got elected to Congress.

…

On July 19, our learned editor of editorials in Citrus County, Greg Hamilton, wrote a column in which he pointed out that the word “cooter” also is a slang term, albeit less commonly used, for a key part of the female anatomy. It was not overly salacious; he just thought it was worth mentioning so that nobody got surprised later.

But this revelation set off shock waves among the innocent-minded of Inverness. As with towns and cities everywhere, there were already some folks unhappy with City Hall. They used this new scandal (Cootergate?) to blast the city’s leadership.

These critics asked, with perhaps a hint of crocodile tears: How could Inverness be so demeaning to women, so insensitive? Were they trying to make Inverness a target of ridicule?

Read on. The upshot is that they are holding their Cooter festival, under that name. Good for them.

I just noticed that, unlike most news sources, Al Jazeera (correctly) does not call al Sadr a “cleric". Our own media should take note.

The 9/11 Report’s Straight Shooting on Islamist Terror By Daniel Pipes

Finally, an official body of the U.S. government has come out and said what needs to be said: that the enemy is “Islamist terrorism … not just ‘terrorism,’ some generic evil.” The 9/11 commission in its final report even declares that Islamist terrorism is the “catastrophic threat” facing the United States.

As Thomas Donnelly points out in the New York Sun, the commission has called the enemy “by its true name, something that politically correct Americans have trouble facing.”

Why does it matter that the Islamist dimension of terrorism must be specified? Simple. Just as a physician must identify a disease to treat it, so a strategist must name an enemy to defeat it. The great failing in the U.S. war effort since September 2001 has been the reluctance to name the enemy. So long as the anodyne, euphemistic, and inaccurate term “war on terror” remains the official nomenclature, that war will not be won.

Better is to call it a “war on Islamist terrorism.” Better yet would be “war on Islamism,” looking beyond terror to the totalitarian ideology that lies behind it.

Significantly, the same day that the 9/11 report was published, July 22, President George W. Bush for the first time used the term “Islamic militants” in a speech, bringing him closer than ever before to pointing to the Islamist threat.

The report of the “National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States” has other good value. It paints an accurate picture of Islamist views, describing these as a “hostility toward us and our values [that] is limitless.” Equally useful is the description of the Islamist goal being “to rid the world of religious and political pluralism.”

In contrast to those analysts who wishfully dismiss the Islamists as a few fanatics, the 9/11 commission acknowledges their true importance, noting that bin Laden’s message “has attracted active support from thousands of disaffected young Muslims and resonates powerfully with a far larger number who do not actively support his methods.” The Islamist outlook represents not a hijacking of Islam, as is often but wrongly claimed; rather it emerges from a “long tradition of extreme intolerance” within Islam, one going back centuries and in recent times associated with Wahhabism, the Muslim Brethren, and the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb.

The commission then does something almost unheard of in U.S. government circles; it offers a goal for the war now underway, namely the isolation or destruction of Islamism.

Naming the enemy is one of the most important things the report did. I’ve been muttering (and occasionally ranting) about the “war on terrorism” and the even worse term, “war on terror” (just provide free valium for everyone and we win) since a few days after Sept 11, 2001. You can’t have a war on a tactic (or on an emotion). There are people on the other side with an ideology opposed to everything most of us believe in. It is the people and institutions promoting that ideology that we are fighting. It is the ideas in that ideology that we should be debunking.

If we had focused on that rather than a war on tactics, we would have done much more to set up (and support others who have set up) broadcasting into nations who have no news other than what their governments spoon feed them. We would provide protection and a platform for Muslims who disagree with the Islamists (some do, especially Sufis). We would have explained that people like CAIR and the Muslim Student Association are Islamists and stopped allowing them to claim to be ‘Muslim spokesmen’. We would have stopped allowing clerical visas for Islamist clerics.

It’s still not to late to do things like this. When will we start?

Odai’s athlete-torture equipment exhibited

Torture equipment used by Saddam Hussein’s slain son Odai to punish underperforming Iraqi athletes was displayed Saturday at a Baghdad sports stadium in advance of the opening of the Olympics next month in Athens.

Journalists were shown medieval-style torture equipment, including an “iron-maiden-like” casket with metal spikes fixed to the inside that athletes had been forced into and chain whips with steel barbs the size of tennis balls attached to the end.

There are some pictures at the link above. Charles at LGF has a few more pictures. Just so you know what torture is. As opposed to leading someone around on a leash or putting panties on their heads, for instance.

U.S. marines kill 25 guerrillas in Iraq

U.S. marines have killed 25 guerrillas, wounded 17 and captured 25 during several hours of fighting in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, a military statement says.

The statement on Thursday said 13 U.S. marines and one soldier were wounded in the clashes but none of the injuries were life-threatening.

The military said the clashes began on Wednesday afternoon when guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb near a marine convoy and then opened fire with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The clashes spread with an estimated 100 insurgents involved, the statement said.

Fascinating. Not once in the whole article did they mention ‘militants’; though they did stick in one ‘insurgents’. Also, they said ‘killed 25 guerrilas’ , rather than their usual ‘killed x Iraqis’ (which leaves it to the reader to guess whether said Iraqis were bad guys or bystanders). I wonder how long that will go on.

ABC, on the other hand, sticks to the usual. Their headline: “Marines Kill 25 Iraqis in Ramadi Clashes“.

Sigh.