Wariness about the impact of the ‘Mohali spirit’

India-Pakistan relations —a challenge at the best of times, and in the doldrums since 26/11 —received an unexpected boost in April, 2011 from an unlikely source: cricket. When the two countries became semi-finalists in the game's quadrennial World Cup, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh invited his Pakistani counterpart, Yousaf Raza Gilani, to watch the game with him at Mohali, with talks over dinner. Though the resulting thaw has involved no substantive policy decisions, Singh has nonetheless changed the narrative of the countries' relations, and seized control of a stalemated process.

Some Indian critics are less than enthused. The government suspended talks with Pakistan after the horrific attacks on Mumbai. By talking again at such a high level, despite there being no significant progress in Pakistan in bringing the perpetrators to justice, India, the critics charge, has in effect surrendered to Pakistani intransigence.

Indeed, the critics point out that the wideranging and comprehensive talks agreed to by the two sides are the old "composite dialogue" under a new label. It was this very dialogue that India justifiably called off after Mumbai: there was no point talking to people whose territory and institutions were being used to attack and kill Indians. The fear in some circles in India remains that Singh's government has run out of ideas when it comes to dealing with Pakistan — or at least that it has no good alternatives to a counterproductive military attack on the sources of terrorism or a stagnant silence. Yet it is also clear that "not talking" is not much of a policy. Pakistan can deny its shared history with India, but India cannot change its geography. Pakistan is next door, and it can no more be ignored than a thorn piercing one's side. 

India's refusal to talk to Pakistan did contribute, together with western (especially American) diplomatic efforts, to securing some initial Pakistani cooperation, including the arrest of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi and six of his co-conspirators. But this cooperation had dried up, and India's continued reticence had long passed its use-by date. The refusal to resume dialogue had stopped producing any fresh results, and the only argument that justified it —that it was a source of leverage —gave some in India the illusion of influence over events that the government did not in fact possess.

Ironically, it was India —the victim of terrorist attacks financed, dispatched, and directed from Pakistan — that had come to seem intransigent and unaccommodating. The transcendent reality of life on the subcontinent is that it has always been India that wished to live in peace. India is, at bottom, a status quo power that would like to be left alone to concentrate on its economic development; Pakistan is the troublesome rebel, needling and bleeding its neighbour in an effort to change the power balance and wrest control of a part of Indian territory (Kashmir). Refusing to talk didn't change any of that, but it brought India no rewards. On the contrary, it imposed a cost: by appearing stubbornly truculent, India allowed Pakistan to appear reasonable and conciliatory, tarnishing India's international image as a constructive force for peace.

The thaw engendered by the two prime ministers —meeting , devoid of rancour, at a major sporting event, which Pakistan narrowly lost to India's eventual world champions — recognized that simply talking can achieve constructive results. Dialogue can identify and narrow the differences between the two countries on those bilateral issues that can be addressed.

Of course, not every issue that divides India and Pakistan can be resolved across a table, at least not right now. But specific problems like trade, the military standoff on the Siachen glacier, the territorial border at Sir Creek, and water flows through the Wullar Barrage are certainly amenable to resolution through dialogue. Progress on the big questions — the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan's use of terrorism as an instrument of policy — will require much more groundwork and constructive, gradual action. But, as Singh has realized, just talking about these questions can make clear what India's bottom lines are and the minimum standards of civilized conduct that India expects from its neighbour. And, should it prove necessary, dialogue can also be used to send a few tough signals.

"Cricket diplomacy" is not new on the subcontinent. It was tried twice before, each time with Pakistani military rulers travelling to India. General Zia ul-Haq's visit to watch a match in Jaipur in 1986 was an exercise in cynicism, since it was aimed at defusing tensions stoked by his own policy of fomenting and aiding Sikh militant secessionism in India. General Pervez Musharraf's visit to a cricket stadium in Delhi in 2005 came at a better time in the countries' relations, but, in hindsight, foreshadowed the sharp reversal three years later. Watching cricket does not necessarily lead to improved dialogue. But when two countries are genuinely prepared to engage each other, a grand sporting occasion can be a useful instrument to signal the change. That is what the "spirit of Mohali" has brought about. Now it is time to see if and how that spirit translates into genuine progress on the ground. 

The United States, Israel and the Arabs

Please, not again


Without boldness from Barack Obama there is a real risk of war in the Middle East.

NO WAR, no peace, is the usual state of affairs between Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East. But every time an attempt at Arab-Israeli peacemaking fails, as Barack Obama did shortly before Christmas, the peace becomes a little more fragile and the danger of war increases. Sadly, there is reason to believe that unless remedial action is taken, 2011 might see the most destructive such war for many years.


One much-discussed way in which war might arise stems from the apparent desire of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons at any cost, and Israel’s apparent desire to stop Iran at any cost. But fear of Iran’s nuclear programme is only one of the fuses that could detonate an explosion at any moment. Another is the frantic arms race that has been under way since the inconclusive war in 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon. Both sides have been intensively preparing for what each says will be a “decisive” second round.

Such a war would bear little resemblance to the previous clashes between Israel and its neighbours. For all their many horrors, the Lebanon war of 2006 and the Gaza war of 2009 were limited affairs. On the Israeli side, in particular, civilian casualties were light. Since 2006, however, Iran and Syria have provided Hizbullah with an arsenal of perhaps 50,000 missiles and rockets, many with ranges and payloads well beyond what Hizbullah had last time. This marks an extraordinary change in the balance of power. For the first time a radical non-state actor has the power to kill thousands of civilians in Israel’s cities more or less at the press of a button.


In that event, says Israel, it will strike back with double force. A war of this sort could easily draw in Syria, and perhaps Iran. For the moment, deterrence keeps the peace. But a peace maintained by deterrence alone is a frail thing. The shipment to Hizbullah of a balance-tipping new weapon, a skirmish on the Lebanese or increasingly volatile Gaza border—any number of miscalculations could ignite a conflagration.


From peace process to war process


All of this should give new urgency to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. To start with, at least, peace will be incomplete: Iran, Hizbullah and sometimes Hamas say that they will never accept a Jewish state in the Middle East. But it is the unending Israeli occupation that gives these rejectionists their oxygen. Give the Palestinians a state on the West Bank and it will become very much harder for the rejectionists to justify going to war.


Easy enough to say. The question is whether peacemaking can succeed. After striving for almost two years to shepherd Israeli and Palestinian leaders into direct talks, only for this effort to collapse over the issue of settlements, Mr Obama is in danger of concluding like many presidents before him that Arab-Israeli diplomacy is a Sisyphean distraction. But giving up would be a tragic mistake, as bad for America and Israel as for the Palestinians. The instant the peace process ends, the war process begins, and wars in this energy-rich corner of the world usually suck in America, one way or another. Israel will suffer too if Mr Obama fails, because the Palestinians have shown time and again that they will not fall silent while their rights are denied. The longer Israel keeps them stateless under military occupation, the lonelier it becomes—and the more it undermines its own identity as a liberal democracy.


Don’t mediate. Legislate.


Instead of giving up, Mr Obama needs to change his angle of attack. America has clung too long to the dogma that direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians are the way forward. James Baker, a former secretary of state, once said that America could not want peace more than the local parties did. This is no longer true. The recent history proves that the extremists on each side are too strong for timid local leaders to make the necessary compromises alone. It is time for the world to agree on a settlement and impose it on the feuding parties.


The outlines of such an agreement have been clear since Bill Clinton set out his “parameters” after the failure of the Camp David summit a decade ago. The border between Israel and a new Palestine would follow the pre-1967 line, with adjustments to accommodate some of the bigger border-hugging Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and land-swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those adjustments. But there is also much difficult detail to be filled in: how to make Jerusalem into a shared capital, settle the fate of the refugees and ensure that the West Bank will not become, as Gaza did, an advance base for war against Israel after Israeli forces withdraw.


Mr Clinton unveiled his blueprint at the end of a negotiation that had failed. Mr Obama should set out his own map and make this a new starting point. He should gather international support for it, either through the United Nations or by means of an international conference of the kind the first President Bush held in Madrid in 1991. But instead of leaving the parties to talk on their own after the conference ends, as Mr Bush did after Madrid, America must ride herd, providing reassurance and exerting pressure on both sides as required.


The pressure part of this equation is crucial. In his first round of peacemaking, Mr Obama picked a fight with Israel over settlements and then backed down, thereby making America look weak in a region where too many people already believe that its power is waning (see article). This is a misperception the President needs to correct. For all its economic worries at home and military woes in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is far from weak in the Levant, where both Israel and the nascent Palestine in the West Bank continue to depend on it in countless vital ways.


The Palestinians have flirted lately with the idea of bypassing America and taking their cause directly to the UN. Going to the UN is well and good. But the fact remains that without the sort of tough love that America alone can bestow, Israel will probably never be able to overcome its settler movement and make the deal that could win it acceptance in the Arab world. Mr Obama has shown in battles as different as health reform and the New START nuclear treaty with Russia that he has the quality of persistence. He should persist in Palestine, too.

Chinese prowess

Is China closer than thought to matching U.S. fighter jet prowess?

  Images believed to be China's next generation of military air power have been buzzing around the internet, but Pentagon officials are insisting its appearance does not mean China has matched American air capabilities.

The new stealth fighter jet, known as the J-20, isn't supposed to be operational until at least 2017, but a Chinese air force commander told Chinese TV in 2009 that flight testing would begin much sooner. Stealth jets, such as the United States' F-22, are designed to evade detection by radar and anti-aircraft defenses.
Now unknown sources have posted photos of what appears to be the plane on an airfield runway in southwestern China.

"We are aware of their plans to develop this fifth-generation fighter," Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said. "The photos that were released recently are presumably of some taxi testing."
The emergence of the photos come as Defense Secretary Robert Gates heads to China to discuss the military relationship between the U.S. and China. And later this month, President Hu Jintao is headed to Washington for a summit with President Barack Obama.

One China watcher says China's failure to censor the grainy images on the web prove the photos are of the new jet and the country wants them to circulate.

"The Chinese military and the police could have swept the area around the airfield very easily, but what they've done is they've controlled this. They've allowed Chinese to only take photos with cell phones, meaning that the photos that we have are low-resolution, do not give us a great deal of detail about the aircraft and they're put on the web with a low-resolution format," said China military scholar and author Richard Fisher. "The response within China has been overwhelmingly positive and has spurred national pride to an enormous degree."

The Pentagon is taking a low-key approach to the surge in publicity about the Chinese fighter, saying their existing top-of-the-line warplane has engine problems and that their next plane is years away. But Fisher says that timeline could be sped up if the Chinese buy an engine from Russia as opposed to developing it themselves.

"It's something that is in some form of development, as a fifth-generation fighter. As I noted, the Chinese are still having difficulties with their fourth-generation fighter." Lapan said in an off-camera question session with journalists in his office.

And he said that while the new jet was not mentioned in Pentagon's report on China that was sent to Congress in August as an annual update for China's defense capabilities, the Defense Department has talked about it.

"We as a department have publicly spoken about it in the past. It is not as if we have not acknowledged that they are pursuing a fifth-generation fighter," Lapan said. "So we are aware of it. But it is not of concern that they are working on a fifth-generation fighter."

Fisher, however, says it should be a concern, citing the Chinese jet's potential ability to overtake that of America's F-22 in thrust and "supercruise" speed, which is the ability to fly supersonically without using fuel-guzzling afterburners.

"We can't say precisely what the capabilities are, but we have a good idea. Right now, we should be reviving production of the F-22 and not just reviving production, we should be developing an advance version of the F-22," said Fisher. "And sadly even though it is a troubled program, already the F-35 needs another rework. It needs to be made competitive with this fighter."

The F-22 was scaled back in production in 2009. The production of the F-35, which is being developed and tested, could be slowed under Gates' budget-cutting initiative.

In 2009, Gates said that no nation comes close to U.S. air power, and he anticipated the Chinese having only "a handful" of fighters that challenges the U.S. advanced fleets by 2025. But Fisher cautions that this Chinese jet could cause a change in the balance of power in the Pacific.

"Since WWII, the American military has never gone into battle without the assurance of air superiority. China is a rising power, and it is determined to challenge the American position globally," said Fisher. "This fighter will allow them to do that on a military level....and from my perspective, that's simply unacceptable."

India and Kashmir - K is for complacency

India risks storing up misery over Kashmir. It should grab a chance to do something more positive

MENTION Kashmir in polite Delhi society and noses wrinkle. Indians in the capital much prefer to talk of the economic boom, of India’s flourishing trade and its growing international heft. Old problems in the disputed, Muslim-majority territory in the mountainous north are waved off as a remote affair. They are not for foreigners to poke their noses into. And don’t begin to suggest that the world’s biggest democracy faces a growing problem in Kashmir, or that repressed Kashmiris have anything in common with the Palestinians or Tibetans.


Yet, in recent months, stone-pelting youths have launched their own intifada. Separatists have called for hartals, or self-imposed curfews, across the territory. And ill-trained Indian police have fired tear-gas and bullets with little care, killing over 110 people, mostly young and armed, if at all, only with crude projectiles. Deaths have spread bitterness, as have widespread reports of rape, torture and violent intimidation by Indian police. The chances are high that the miserable cycle of protests, deaths and funerals will resume in 2011.

India’s leaders are at least a bit embarrassed. They have promised better-trained police and sent three independent (if junior) interlocutors to hear Kashmiri grievances. The team is due to report within days. Yet the authorities are also harrying nationalist leaders in the territory. Separatists are often jailed or kept under house arrest. Demonstrations are usually banned. Western leaders, keen to keep India “onside” against China and greedy for its markets, have kept disgracefully quiet about human-rights abuses. On his visit in November Barack Obama uttered the K-word in public only when he was pressed by a questioner to do so.

It is not all bad. One silver lining is that Pakistan, which once devoted much malign energy to supporting an insurgency in Kashmir, is now preoccupied with its own fragility. Kashmiris, however troubled, are unlikely soon to return to the widespread armed militancy that used to claim thousands of lives a year. But India’s crushing of more moderate Kashmiri leaders is fostering other problems. The young stone-pelters are turning radical and religious. A mostly nationalistic dispute risks becoming ever more theological in much the same way as that between Israelis and Palestinians did.


A less complacent Indian government would work far harder to stop this slide. There is an immediate chance to seize the initiative while a winter freeze holds the troubled valley in its grip and before the pelting and shooting restart. It could signal that Kashmiris’ grievances will be taken seriously, for example by acting on the interlocutors’ report when it is released in January. Reducing the heavy presence of non-Kashmiris in uniform would ease tensions too. Cars cannot drive around Srinagar without manoeuvring past army roadblocks, snipers in pillboxes, lines of soldiers on the roadsides and military convoys. The security forces should be stopped from making arbitrary arrests. They should also allow nationalist political leaders to move and speak freely. That’s what democracies do.

Look to the horizon

In the longer term Indian leaders need to break their unhelpful silence on Kashmir’s prospects. The government will never allow the state to secede, let alone to join Pakistan. But India could agree to grant Kashmir greater political autonomy. It could concede that the army’s role in the territory will gradually diminish to one of mainly securing the line-of-control that divides it from Pakistani-run Kashmir. That would encourage the many Kashmiris who have taken part in Indian-run elections and who often accept in private that co-operation with India’s authorities would bring gains.


Perhaps India’s ruling Congress party, battered by corruption scandals, may not feel ready to brave Kashmir, especially if the opposition, the Hindu-dominated BJP, is hostile. Yet seeking reconciliation would be a sign not of weakness but of India’s growing confidence. Encouraging Kashmir’s moderate leaders is in the interests of all Indians—and of the West too.

The most powerful man in the world

The most powerful man in the world is not Barack Obama. It is Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, who is making America think again about big words like democracy and free speech, the kind of stuff that country prided itself on.

Allegedly Assange is promiscuous. There are rape cases filed against him. Since he is one way or the other stealing information that the US government considers classified, he could be called a thief. And since what he does can be easily interpreted as seditious, he could have been accused of treason if he were a US citizen. Enough stuff then to put him behind bars or keep him on the run. In short, a man of many failings. Just like and you and me.

Yet news about him drives newspaper sales. Every time WikiLeaks puts out apparently sensitive documents, the print world follows up on the act and in the short term at least does well. You could be forgiven to think that on a good day the net is print's benefactor.


Washington has done all it can to shut down WikiLeaks' operations. But the leaks keep popping up on mirror sites. There are any number of online debates and discussions happening on WikiLeaks. Most of them seem to think this is a clash between cultures, of the new net-based and truly democratic generation and the old posers in power, who mouth the good words and then pull the trigger.


Maybe it is. Equally, it is how the balance of power is shifting back to the individual in his fight against the system, here the state itself. Assange is powerful, because like Mahatma Gandhi, he is using truth as a strategic weapon. But unlike Gandhi, he has the unique advantage of the net, one of the most democratic of technologies. The US is a technologically driven country. It's perhaps justice then that it has met its match in a man who knows how to use technology with such subversive impact.

That Assange can disprove stated positions of a superpower and hold it accountable to its actions virtually single-handedly is good news to all those who believe patriotism and national identities must be subservient to human rights and ethics. The first is politics. The second is poetry. The individual is finding his voice again. And he is forcing the system to respect him. The power of one is now. And Assange is the man.

Al-Qaida aims to 'bring down' Pakistan: Biden

WASHINGTON: Al-Qaida is trying to "bring down" nuclear-armed Pakistan, US Vice President Joe Biden warned Sunday, days after a war review tip-toed around Islamabad's role in fighting extremists.


"Our overarching goal and our rationale for being there is to dismantle, ultimately defeat al-Qaida... to make sure that terrorists do not, in fact, bring down the Pakistani government, which is a nuclear power," Biden said.


The vice-president, in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" program, repeated threads of a one-year report on the US military surge in Afghanistan that pointed to progress but warned that more time was needed.


Unveiling the policy assessment, President Barack Obama urged Islamabad to do more to rein in extremists holed up along the Afghan border but also renewed US commitment to major aid programs for Pakistan.


The report trod carefully on the uneasy US anti-terror ally following pointed criticisms of Islamabad's nuclear safety and other areas of policy revealed in the US cables published by WikiLeaks and other reports.


Many experts say Pakistan is far less willing to take action against militants seen as useful in fighting rival India or in preserving Islamabad's influence in Afghanistan.
  While the war review called relations with Pakistan "substantial" -- a departure from private US assessments that question Islamabad's commitment to fighting extremists -- it did urge some readjustment.


"For instance, the denial of extremist safe havens will require greater cooperation with Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan," it said.


Biden measured success against al-Qaida by noting it had been restricted to efforts like the botched underwear attack on a US-bound jetliner last Christmas and a failed amateurish bombing in New York's Times Square in May.


They are planning much smaller bore but yet deadly attempts to go after the United States of America. We saw that in the underpants bomber last Christmas. We saw that in the Times Square effort.


"We have significantly degraded and knocked off a lot of the main planners and organizers and trainers. Does that mean we've succeeded? No. Does that mean we're in much better shape than we were a year ago and two and three? Yes."


Obama on Thursday said Afghan progress was sufficient to permit a "responsible reduction" of US forces to begin in July 2011, though the size of the likely drawdown appeared limited.

The assessment comes one year after the president announced both a surge of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan and the conditions-based July troop drawdown.

War Porn

“The Qana Massacre Hoax.”
The first hint of this meme that I noticed was a Powerline post about the Condoleeza Rice banner, the one with text referring to the Qana incident, the one that appeared with such suspicious rapidity on the streets of Beirut.


The banner was certainly very timely — it was hung on the morning after the “massacre”, just a couple of hours after the death of the victims in Qana.

And then it turned out that the Israeli airstrike that damaged the building had actually occurred some seven or eight hours prior to the building’s collapse. Curiouser and curiouser.

[Warning: some of the images in posts linked below are graphic.]
 
Israel Matzav, EU Referendum, and Confederate Yankee have followed up with analyses of the timing of the banner and the sequencing of the Qana photographs. EU Referendum has focused on the suspicious and mysterious “Green Helmet” and “T-shirt”, the two supposed rescue workers who changed clothes and positions so many times carrying the same two miraculously clean and un-bloody bodies to the waiting ambulance.


The “massacre” at Qana may well have been staged. This is not to say that Lebanese children did not die in Israeli airstrikes; they certainly did. This is not to say that the parents of these children do not mourn; I believe that they do.

But this is all very reminscent of Mohammed al-Dura, the boy whose “murder by Israeli fire” had been conclusively shown to be a hoax arranged by the Palestinians, with the complicity of the France 2 television network. Mohammed al-Dura may have been accidentally killed by Palestinian fire, or he may have been deliberately killed for propaganda purposes, or even not killed at all, but he was most definitely not killed by the Israelis.

Yet his murder attained an iconic “truth” which had transcended and outlived the mere facts of the situation. He was a visual proof of Israeli (and, by implication, Western) brutality and indifference towards Muslims. He was even been made into a postage stamp in Tunisia.


So the truth doesn’t really matter.

Qana was the latest in a long series of iconic images, an extensive collection of photos and video that might have been entitled The West Always Commits Atrocities Against the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. The first in the series was Eddie Adams’ famous photo of the the summary execution of Nguyen Van Lem during the Tet offensive in February of 1968. The uses to which the photo was put ignored all context — namely, that it was taken in the middle of an enemy offensive in a brutal war, and the victim was identifiably an enemy soldier, and an officer of the Viet Cong. The image was eventually enshrined as the visual symbol of America’s guilt towards the “brown people” of Vietnam, and was soon joined by other familiar icons such as Kent State and My Lai.


Eddie Adams’ photo was very disturbing. The newsreel footage of the same incident — which I saw in British images of the late 1960's, when it was aired by the nascently anti-American BBC — was even more disturbing. But the film was suppressed in this country for many years, because graphic atrocity images were generally not shown in the media.

Times have changed. The mainstream media are nowadays all too ready to show graphic images. Provided, of course, that they illustrate the dominant paradigm: America, Israel, and other Western nations always behave in a barbaric fashion towards the Third World and people of color.

For guilt-ridden liberal Westerners, looking at such images is a form masochistic voyeurism. “Oh, look at that! We’re so bad! We’re so awful! We deserve whatever we get!”


With a ready market like that, the brutal culture of the Arab world has plenty of supply to satisfy the demand. Muslims are the “brown people”, the victims of the moment, and they obligingly supply the forbidden images that we are so hungry to see.

And doing so suits the strategy of the Islamists, so there is a perfect synergy of effort: We want to hang ourselves; they hand us the rope. What could be better?

Staged or real, the prurient images of victimization are a precision-guided missile that strikes the target perfectly.


The dead bodies of children are props; the “rescue workers” are actors and stagehands. And the directors of the drama seem to be the media, who have lately become knowingly complicit.

Take a look at the Qana photo at right (to dampen the voyeuristic aspects, I have cropped out the most disturbing parts). See that guy crouching in the background?

He’s not a rescue worker. He’s another photographer. The photographer who took the this photo was not careful enough to keep his colleague out of the picture. Or maybe it didn’t matter to him — the Potemkin process is so far along that no one really minds if the secret is revealed.


Qana and other similar incidents are, regardless of authenticity, primarily media events. They are managed and delivered as weapons by the enemies of Western Civilization, with the connivance of our own media.

This is War Pornography, delivered to the greedy and guilt-ridden consumers of the West by our ruthless opponents. The couch potatoes of our intelligentsia are sitting here, sweating in a darkened room, with a raincoat over the engorged self-righteousness in their laps.
I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.

Since the aim of Imperialistic Islam is to win the Total War, the sacrifice of any member of the Ummah to further its goal only transforms them into glorious "martyrs", no matter who kills them. (Even if it is their co-"religious" cousins making Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa by comparison.)


Has anyone in the media checked to see whether these might have been Sunni kids, killed by Shiite Hezbollah, as a way to get rid of an internal enemy and use their p.r. deaths injure an external one?

Two birds with one (or a dozen) crippled kid(s)?

"War is deceit" as the pedophile "prophet" put it.

Quote: "It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy."


Yes. It is. And that is exactly what they are relying on when piecing these photsessions together.

These same western liberals seem to sleep easy when in fact the civilian human sheilds being killed are being sacrificed for them. For their pity, outrage; these terrorists have no moral right on their side, they can only create false propaganda for the ignorant, guilt-ridden Western liberals, who just want to hate themselves. (Is there a pyschological disorder here?)


If this is all true does a culture that allows itself to indulge in this masochistic effete angst, really deserve to survive?

I know the 'enemy' is grotesque, but if what you say about 'our' culture is even moderately true, frankly we do not seem to be much of an improvement.

A culture this decayed, has no claim upon survival on the merits, and certainly none on the basis of effort.

But that mysterious little voice keeps telling me that you have pretty much summed up the situation.

What a sad state of affairs.