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Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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 Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 7:00 pm Post subject: |
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Mark Steyn on yesterday's events in London with a retrospective from earlier columns...a truly stunning read...here's the start....
| Quote: | Topical Take - Spain and Australia
The Choice
"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding.
That's how I began my Telegraph column on March 16th last year - five days after the Madrid bomb, two days after the Spanish election. The choice for the British people today is whether to be the Spaniards post-Madrid or the Australians post-Bali. Anyone who knows Britain knows the citizenry don't incline naturally to appeasement, but anyone who knows their political elites knows the same cannot be said quite so clearly for their governing class.
With hindsight, the Spaniards were let off lightly for their contemptible behaviour. As I wrote back in that column:
To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that Thursday's attack was the work of Eta, when it was obviously the jihad boys. One's sympathy, however, disappears with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war against the jihadi. As Margaret Thatcher would have said: "This is no time to go wobbly, Manuel." But they did. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the background - just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government. In Spain, the bombers hijacked the ballot, and very decisively. The Socialist Workers' Party wouldn't have won, except for the terrorism.
At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.
And, if it works in Spain, why not in Australia, Britain, Italy, Poland? In his 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans", Bin Laden cited Washington's feebleness in the face of the 1992 Aden hotel bombings and the Black Hawk Down business in Somalia in 1993: "You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew," he wrote. "The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear." To the jihadis' way of thinking, on Thursday, the Spaniards were disgraced by Allah; on Sunday, they withdrew. The extent of their impotence and weaknesses is very clear.
SteynOnline - cont'd |
hattip: Hugh Hewitt |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 7:33 pm Post subject: |
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Excellent article!! Thanks, Me#1.
| Quote: | Unlike Mr Fisk, I don't have decades of expertise in the finer points of Islamic culture, so when people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew—like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. We are all infidels.
Back in February, Fisk wrote a column headlined "Please Release My Friend Daniel Pearl". It followed a familiar line: please release Daniel, then you'll be able to tell your story, get your message out. Taking him hostage is "an own goal of the worst kind", as it ensures he won't be able to get your message out, the message being—Fisky presumed—"the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees", "the plight of Pakistan's millions of poor", etc. Somehow the apologists keep missing the point: the story did get out; Pearl's severed head is the message. That's why they filmed the decapitation, released it on video, circulated it through the bazaars and madrasas and distributed it worldwide via the Internet. The message got out very effectively. |
Hee Hee, "Fisky presumed". I love Mark Steyn for his droll little expressions denoting the absurdity of Libs.
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“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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