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African News Dimension Zimgreats. com September 17, 2006

Johannesburg (AND) In yet another furore to grip the Christian community, the head of the Orthodox Church of Greece has joined the Pope controversy by attacking what he calls Islamic fanaticism in Africa.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal James Taranto September 16, 2006

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — You might call Rear Adm. Harry Harris a jailer. As commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, a job he has held for six months, he is in charge of one of the world’s best-known detention facilities. But if you call this place a prison, he will correct you.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal June 30, 2006

“Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest.”

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Wall Street Journal Online Paulette Chu Miniter June 30, 2006

YORK, Pa.–Three days before terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. air strike in Iraq, Pastor Moussa Joseph Moussa led a group of 500 believers in praying for the insurgency to be defeated. After the bombing, Mr. Moussa says, “I really believe that because we prayed, God dealt with the evil forces.”

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Townhall.com Diana West June 26, 2006

I can see it now — I think.

It’s on the right-hand page of a book by or about Winston Churchill, and it is a quotation by Churchill on the subject on war — specifically, what happens to a civilized society when it goes to war with a barbarous one. I can’t find it (yet), but what I remember as being the main point was that if — if — the civilized society is to prevail over the barbarous one, it will necessarily and tragically be degraded by the experience as a vital cost of victory. Partly, this is because civilized war tactics are apt to fail against barbarous war tactics, thus requiring civilized society to break the “rules” if it is to survive a true death struggle. It is also because the clash itself — the act of engaging with the barbarous society — forces civilization to confront, repel and also internalize previously unimagined depredations. This is degrading, too.

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New York Times John Burns June 5, 2006

ON THE EDGE OF THE ASH SHAM DESERT, Iraq, June 3 — Among experts on the American-led team investigating Iraq’s mass graves, the skeletal remains lying face-up at the rear of the tangled grave here have been given a name — the Blue Man — that speaks for a sorrowful familiarity developed by some of those who work with victims of mass murder.

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Washington Post Kristin Henderson Sunday, April 30, 2006

For chaplains in Iraq, the constant battle is the fear, loneliness and tedium that can test a soldier’s faith Text and photographs

Just before sunrise on a foggy road outside Mosul, Iraq, a convoy of supply trucks lumbers from one forward operating base to another. On this December morning, the convoy is escorted by a dozen armored U.S. Army vehicles, including a Humvee with a three-man crew — artillerymen farmed out to the 142nd Combat Support Battalion and retrained for convoy security. This is some of the most dangerous duty a soldier can pull in Iraq because insurgents target convoys with their weapon of choice: improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Among service members, IEDs are the single greatest cause of death. Blast wounds account for 90 percent of the injuries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal Natan Sharansky April 24, 2006

George W. Bush has the courage to speak out for freedom.

There are two distinct marks of a dissident. First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures. Give up, they say to themselves, and evil will triumph. Stand firm, and they can give hope to others and help change the world.

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Ed. A reader sent this link.

Russian News and Information Agency Pyotr Romanov March 4, 2006

While recognizing the universal and appropriate appeals for tolerance for Muslims, I’d like to draw your attention to the strange attitude of the Western political elite, which has recently become so acute. I do not know what stands behind the lack of foresight, but too many of the political elite’s actions have dealt a devastating blow to Christianity.

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Wall Street Online Journal Christopher Hitchens March 21, 2006

Iraq is no “distraction” from al Qaeda.

In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention (”to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates” and “accelerate the emergence of the Messiah”), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq’s largest confessional group that: “These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.”

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The Daily Breeze Larry Elder March 12, 2006

Gen. Georges Sada, the No. 2 ranking officer with the Iraqi air force, is finally being heard in Washington on the issue of weapons of mass destruction.

Gen. Georges Sada, the No. 2 ranking officer with the Iraqi air force, is finally being heard in Washington, D.C. Senate Armed Services Committee member James Inhofe, R-Okla., recently said, “… This old argument of weapons of mass destruction, which has always been a phony argument from the beginning, now that we have information that’s been testified … in closed session, by this General Sadas (sic) — all kinds of evidence as to the individuals who transported the weapons out of Iraq into Syria.”

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MEMRI Special Dispatch - Reform Project March 14, 2006

New York Times Front-Page Profile March 11, 2006: Dr. Wafa Sultan

To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit: http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD111306.

Following the February 21, 2006 MEMRI TV clip featuring Syrian-born American psychiatrist Dr. Wafa Sultan on Al-Jazeera TV (in a debate with Islamist sheikh Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli) - The New York Times published a front-page profile on her titled For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats.

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Washington Times Insider Rowan Scarborough March 13, 2006

Audiotapes of Saddam Hussein and his aides underscore the Bush administration’s argument that Baghdad was determined to rebuild its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction once the international community had tired of inspections and left the Iraqi dictator alone.

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FrontPageMagazine.com Daniel Pipes February 28, 2006

The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy.

The destruction of the Golden Dome, built in 1905 and one of the holiest shrines of Shi’ite Islam, represents an escalation of the Sunni assault on the Shi’ites, a purposeful outrage intended to provoke an emotional backlash. It signals not Sunni weakness but the determination of elements in Iraq’s long-ruling community to reassert its dominance. Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, has rightly warned that “The fire of sedition, when it breaks out, can burn everything in its path and spare no one.” One shudders at the possible carnage ahead.

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The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli

In a synchronized act of terrorism on January 29, 2006, seven churches were attacked – six by car bombs and a seventh, St. Joseph, in the banking district of Baghdad, by explosives which caused no damage. Five of the churches are located at various parts of Baghdad and the other two in Kirkuk, northern Iraq. There were a number of casualties among Christians and passer-by Muslims.(1)

Elements Behind the Terrorist Acts

The bombing of seven churches in seven quarters of two large cities – Baghdad and Kirkuk – simultaneously is a well-planned and well-executed terrorist act. This act of terrorism raises two questions: first, who might be the perpetrators; and second, what could be their motives.

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Meet the imam behind the cartoon overreaction.
By Lorenzo Vidino

Confused by the wave of protests, threats, boycotts, and attacks against diplomatic facilities that have shaken their idyllic tranquility after the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed on Jyllands-Posten, the Danes are asking themselves questions. They wonder if an attack will take place in their country, as threatened by various jihadi groups, and if freedom of speech is in jeopardy. But a more immediate question is puzzling some: Why has the outrage of the Muslim world exploded only now, in February, when the cartoons were published last September? At the time of the initial publication, international media had reported news of the blasphemous caricatures, not only in Danish, but also in English. Yet nothing happened, aside from timid protests from the Muslim community of the tiny Scandinavian kingdom. So what is different about the situation now? More than the question, it is the answer that is keeping a good chunk of Denmark’s political and cultural elite awake at night. The recent anti-Danish emotional wave coming from the Muslim world, in fact, is far from a spontaneous reaction, but it has been cunningly orchestrated by a knowledgeable insider, a real snake in the grass who has been creeping in Denmark for the last 15 years.
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Wall Street Opinion Journal Friday, January 13, 2006

It is almost an article of religious faith among opponents of the Iraq War that Iraq became a terrorist destination only after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein. But what if that’s false, and documents from Saddam’s own regime show that his government trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside Iraq before the war?

Sounds like news to us, and that’s exactly what is reported this week by Stephen Hayes in The Weekly Standard magazine. Yet the rest of the press has ignored the story, and for that matter the Bush Administration has also been dumb. The explanation for the latter may be that Mr. Hayes also scores the Administration for failing to do more to translate and analyze the trove of documents it’s collected from the Saddam era.

Mr. Hayes reports that, from 1999 through 2002, “elite Iraqi military units” trained roughly 8,000 terrorists at three different camps–in Samarra and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle, as well as at Salman Pak, where American forces in 2003 found the fuselage of an aircraft that might have been used for training. Many of the trainees were drawn from North African terror groups with close ties to al Qaeda, including Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Mr. Hayes writes that he had no fewer than 11 corroborating sources, and yesterday he told us he’d added several more since publication.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal JOHN R. GUARDIANO Monday, December 19, 2005

The latest Iraq “scandal” the politicians and the media have discovered is the U.S. military’s alleged covert purchase of favorable articles in the Iraqi press. This alleged “propaganda campaign . . . violates fundamental principles of Western journalism,” reports the New York Times.

This is not surprising, insofar as Iraq does not yet enjoy “Western journalism.” Journalists there are murdered, blackmailed and bribed. They and their families are routinely threatened and coerced by terrorist/insurgents. Newspapers often serve as propaganda arms of various political and religious factions. The widely viewed Arab network Al-Jazeera works diligently to promote terrorism and undermine Iraq by disseminating lies, distortions and misinformation.

In light of this reality, the U.S. military has a choice: It can accept this deleterious state of affairs, play by Marquess of Queensberry rules, and wait decades for the emergence of “Western journalism.” The result would be a heady propaganda win for the terrorist/insurgents, a prolonged conflict, and more unnecessary violence and death. Or the U.S. military can work within Iraq’s present-day constraints to try to ensure that Iraqis hear the truth about what is happening in their country.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal NORMAN PODHORETZ Monday, December 12, 2005

What they’re really afraid of is American success.

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, “the times that try men’s souls,” the times in which “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” become so disheartened that they “shrink from the service of [their] country.”

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:

‘Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . Their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.

Thus, he explained, “Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head,” emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to conceal.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal DONALD RUMSFELD Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Why aren’t the media telling the whole story about Iraq?

(Editor’s note: Mr. Rumsfeld delivered this speech Monday at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.)

I’m not one to put much faith in opinion polls. But the other day, I came across an interesting set of statistics that I want to mention. It seems that the Pew Research Center asked opinion leaders in the United States their views of the prospects for a stable democracy in Iraq.

Here were some of the results: 63% of people in the news media thought the enterprise would fail. So did 71% of people in the foreign affairs establishment and 71% in academic settings or think tanks. Interestingly, opinion leaders from the U.S. military are optimistic about Iraq by a margin of 64% to 32%. And so is the American public, by a margin of 56% to 37%.
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