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Israel To Gaza: It’s On
From Hot Air:
The Israelis have sent a warning to Gaza and its Hamas leadership after the latest rocket attack on Ashkelon. If the attacks continue, Israel will invade Gaza and conduct large-scale military operations to eliminate the threat:
Israeli leaders warned Friday of an approaching conflagration in the Gaza Strip as Israel activated a rocket warning system to protect Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 people, from Palestinian rockets.Ashkelon was hit by several Grad rockets fired from Gaza on Thursday, a sign of the widening scope of violence between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza. One hit an apartment building and another landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old girl.
Located 11 miles from Gaza, Ashkelon had been sporadically targeted in the past but never suffered direct hits or significant damage.
“It will be sad, and difficult, but we have no other choice,” Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defense mister, said Friday, referring to the large-scale military operation he said Israel was preparing to bring a halt to the rocket fire.
“We’re getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we’ve used a small percentage of the army’s power because of the nature of the territory,” Vilnai told Army Radio on Friday.
Israel had tried using softer methods to stop the attacks, including a lockdown on the border between Gaza and Israel. That resulted in a breakout at Rafah, which took the Egyptian government several days to resecure. Other nations had pressured Israel to end the embargo or at least loosen it for food, energy, and medical supplies, but the rocket attacks continue.
Hamas says that Israel’s return fire has killed 15 civilians and blames Israel for the rising tensions. Apart from the absurdity of blaming someone for hitting an aggressor in return, Hamas and other terrorist entities have no one but themselves to blame for civilian deaths. Even the AP acknowledges that Hamas launches its rockets from densely populated civilian centers, drawing fire onto their own people.
Israel cannot stand idle while terrorists rain rockets onto civilian populations, and the escalation to Ashkelon is a deliberate provocation by Hamas. The IDF has to take action, and this time it cannot be constrained by proportionality. They need a massive response to the Gaza provocateurs, one that leaves them no ground to hide. If Gaza’s civilian population wants to avoid that, then they need to rid themselves of the terrorists before Israel’s military does its work.
Hot Air has it right as usual. Israel needs to quit taking this crap from the terrorists and take care of business. The sooner they move into Gaza and lay waste to the place the sooner the violence will end. Anyone who thinks Israel can ever coexist with Hamas is living in a fantasy world.
Every single member of Hamas should be systematically hunted down and killed. The same goes for Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and any other gun toting, missile firing, Islamic group.
All the pretend cease-fires and half measures on the part of Israel only prolongs the violence. They need to get in, level the joint, and get out.
-Chris Jones
Is This A Warning?
Motivational Waterboarding?
A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.
That’s right, “motivational waterboarding” is what this guy allegedly did! Now the guy who was waterboarded is suing the company claiming that he’s in therapy now as a result.
I find this story to be hilarious! For one, because a motivational speaker would actually do something that outrageous. Secondly, because the guy actually allowed himself to be waterboarded.
The whole story sounds a little over-the-top, but it will be interesting to see how it all plays out in court.
-Chris Jones
Pictures: Prince Harry At War
Here are some pictures of Prince Harry serving his country in Afghanistan:
(Click photos to enlarge)
Prince Harry Serving On Front Lines In Afghanistan
From the AP:
Prince Harry has been serving on the front line in Afghanistan with the British Army, calling in airstrikes on Taliban positions and going out on foot patrols, the Ministry of Defense announced Thursday.
Officials said the prince, a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals regiment, was still deployed in the country.
“His conduct on operations in Afghanistan has been exemplary,” said the head of the army, Gen. Richard Dannatt. “He has been fully involved in operations and has run the same risks as everyone else in his battle group.”
Harry, who is third in line to the throne, has been in Afghanistan since December.
The planned deployment had been disclosed to reporters, with no specific date, and was not reported previously under a pool agreement between the Ministry of Defense and all major news organizations operating in Britain, including The Associated Press. The news blackout was intended to reduce the risk to the prince and his regiment.
The news embargo was broken, however, after reports of the prince’s deployment were leaked by an Australian magazine and a German newspaper, and then reported on a U.S. Web site, the Drudge Report.
Dannatt, the military commander, said he was “very disappointed” that the story had leaked.
Harry, 23, has been deployed in the restive Helmand province for 10 weeks, where most of the 7,800 British troops in Afghanistan are based, according to the military’s statement.
In a recorded interview, Harry said he was happy to be standing shoulder-to- shoulder with his colleagues.
“It’s nice just to be here with all the guys and just mucking in as one of the lads,” said Harry, who had expressed bitter disappointment when he was banned from going to Iraq with his battalion last year. Army chiefs said publicity surrounding his deployment could put him and his unit at risk.
Pooled video footage of Harry in Afghanistan showed the prince dressed in camouflage fatigues patrolling arid and dusty terrain and firing a machine gun.
Harry graduated from Sandhurst military academy in 2006 and trained as a tank commander. After the decision not to send him to Iraq, he retrained as a battlefield air controller, the job he has been filling in Afghanistan.
The fact that Prince Harry actually wanted to fight is a very noble thing. He has more honor and guts than a lot of people both in Britain and in America. He and his brother are a credit to their country and will make exceptional leaders one day.
-Chris Jones
Obama and Rezko
There’s a great piece over at Pajamas Media looking at the whole Obama/Rezko connection which the media has completely ignored. They would rather focus on innuendo about McCain than the actual shady dealings of Barack Obama and his felonious friend Tony.
-Chris Jones
Congratulations To Fox’s Megyn Kelly!
Fox News anchor and attorney Megyn Kelly is getting married! She is a terrific reporter and The Hot Joints would like to offer her a big congratulations.
Geldof and Bush
Interesting article in Time magazine by Bob Geldof about traveling with President Bush in Africa. He talks about the amazing things Bush has done in Africa, and about the man himself.
China may scrap one-child policy
China, worried about an ageing population, is studying scrapping its controversial one-child policy but will not do away with family-planning policies altogether.
With the world’s biggest population straining scarce land, water and energy resources, China has enforced rules to restrict family size since the 1970s.
An unintended consequence of China’s one child-policy has been a growing gender gap. China’s culture has a preference towards boys and those boys are expected to grow-up and get married. As a result, in some villages women have become quite sought after as there are very few.
This problem is biggest in rural areas, but even large cities like Bejiing are feeling the effects. Even when men move to big cities, the competition for women can be fierce.
What has made the problem even worse is that China’s economic boom has created a generation of well educated, independent women who prefer to be CEO’s and business tycoons than housewives.
The Chinese government has been combating the problem in rural areas by paying families to have girls and emphasizing that girls are as much a part of China’s future as men.
China for its part argues that while the policy is not perfect, it’s prevented several hundred million births which has boosted the overall prosperity of the country.
-Chris Jones
Victim’s Sister Lays Into Ex-Cop At Sentencing
William F. Buckley Jr. Dead At 82
From the AP:
William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.
His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.
Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of “Firing Line,” harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor’s race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.
Yet on the platform he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent’s discomfort with wide-eyed glee.
“I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. “I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.”
Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down “Firing Line” after a 23-year run, when guests ranged from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. “You’ve got to end sometime and I’d just as soon not die onstage,” he told the audience.
“For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television,” fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. “He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement.”
Fifty years earlier, few could have imagined such a triumph. Conservatives had been marginalized by a generation of discredited stands—from opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to the isolationism which preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Liberals so dominated intellectual thought that the critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were “no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand “athwart history, yelling `Stop’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it.” Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft.
William F. Buckley was the greatest intellectual the conservative movement has ever known. He was also one of the greatest debaters of all time. He was a true master of the spoken word and he will truly be missed.
-Chris Jones
The following clips are from a debate between William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky:
Cindy Sheehan In Egypt To Protest Muslim Brotherhood Trial
In an effort to show just how low she can go, Cindy Sheehan has now surfaced in Egypt to protest the trial of 40 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Cindy Sheehan, an American activist who was nicknamed the “Peace Mom” by the media for her criticism of the Iraq War, retreated from her public campaigns in 2007.
The death of her son Casey, a US soldier, in a Baghdad battle in 2005 had transformed Sheehan into a public figure in the US.
But she resurfaced in Cairo last week as a member of a delegation from the Muslim American Society which is in Egypt to protest against the military trial of 40 members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
It’s going to be an incredibly disturbing irony if Cindy Sheehan ends up getting her head cut-off by the very terrorists she foolishly defends. Moreover, if she thinks the Egyptian security services are going to allow her agitate the public the way she does here she’s in for an unpleasant surprise.
She even showed up on Al-Jazeera television in Egypt talking about “American Imperialism” and impeaching Bush/Cheney.
Here’s the interview she did on Al-Jazeera:
Al Jazeera: You first became famous for your protests against the Iraq war in August 2005, but you have not been an active anti-war figure for a while now. What happened?
Sheehan: In May 2007, I decided to quit actually being the face of the anti-war movement in America. I quit and I have not gone back to that. When I left the movement I was broke, I was tired, I was sick – literally sick and in pain.
I wanted to just totally be out of the political realm and not have anything to do with it. The establishment that runs our country just disgusted me and I was tired of it. It is very corrupt and I definitely saw that when I was focusing on anti-war activism.
The leaders of both parties work together to keep normal people out of the process. In many ways the Democratic leadership, especially in Congress, has been complicit with George Bush, the US president, in his crimes against humanity.
How can [Democratic Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi say unequivocally that water-boarding is torture and that Bush and [Richard] Cheney, the US vice-president, should not only be impeached but they should be charged with war crimes when in 2002 she herself was briefed on water-boarding and shown video of the rendition places where water-boarding happened?
Impeaching George Bush was a popular demand among liberal Americans at one time, but very few people talk about it anymore. Is that what turned you into an activist again?
When George Bush commuted [vice-presidential aide] Scooter Libby’s sentence, the Democrats in Congress didn’t do anything about it. When the Administration said they would not cooperate with subpoenas against [presidential aide] Harriet Myers, the democrats didn’t do anything about it.
That’s what pulled me back into activism. I thought how can they do that? How can they say ‘I’m just not going to come to your stupid trial,’ and no one will say anything about it?
When the Democrats took impeachment off the table, I decided enough was enough. On July 23, 2007, I officially announced that I was running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi.
Why the focus on Nancy Pelosi?
I decided if Nancy Pelosi wasn’t going to put impeachment on the table then I would run against her.
You can’t take any part of the Constitution off the table, even though they have rendered it almost meaningless between George Bush and Karl Rove. Since they came to power they have institutionalised torture and spying against Americans.
They have passed the Military Commissions Act and just done away with habeas corpus. They have practically rendered it meaningless. That is why I decided to challenge Pelosi for her seat. I always say if you want change you have to vote out the enablers, and Pelosi is the biggest enabler there is.
If your new focus is on unseating Nancy Pelosi, what are you doing in Egypt?
My anti-war work evolved into work for global human rights because I saw the problem was much deeper than just George Bush.
It’s about militarism and violence, globalisation and free trade.
I decided I wanted to do human rights work on behalf of people around the world who have been harmed by US imperialism.
Part of why I am here, also, is to draw attention to the parallels between the military courts here and the same kinds of courts that are being used to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay by the US.
If this becomes the standard for the world, and there is no international outcry, then everyone is in big trouble.
But what does the US have to do with a military trial in Egypt?
Egypt is a major recipient of US foreign aid, and there is no relationship between American aid and human rights.
If we [America] really want to promote democracy in this region then we cannot silence the voices of the Muslim Brotherhood because they’re the moderate voice here and they are the ones who are actually working for democracy.
Do you think your presence in Egypt will have an effect on the trial?
Well, we have been doing a lot of media work since we came to Egypt and we hope this will put pressure on the Egyptian government to treat the prisoners better and to also maybe alleviate their punishment.
Hopefully we will draw some international attention to what is happening here, too, and that will help the situation.
You also went to the National Council of Women in downtown Cairo to request a meeting with Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s First Lady. How did that go?
I didn’t really understand a lot of what was going on. There was a lot of yelling in Arabic. They weren’t the right people to get us a meeting with Suzanne Mubarak … I left a letter for Madame Mubarak and they promised that she would see it.
We thought it was important to go there because there are women and children who are being harmed by having their fathers and husbands detained, so I wanted to talk to Suzanne, mother to mother.
We brought along mothers and wives of the detainees and they were actually able to file complaints, and it was really great.
Have you spoken to many of the families of the defendants in the military trial? Have you spoken to many female members of the Brotherhood mother-to-mother?
My conversations with the mothers and children of the detainees have been really emotional. They told me about the hardships [the arrests and trials] have placed on their families, from financial hardships to emotional and physical hardships.
It is very emotional for me because my family has gone through the same things since my son died. It has been really hard for us.
People always say to me, ‘Cindy, why do you always make everything personal?’.
But in the end, everything affects people, whether it’s war or economics or human rights violations. I don’t think politicians who make political decisions necessarily think about how they are going to affect people and their families.
That is why when I meet people who have been harmed by the policies of their own countries, or the policies of my country, it just makes me resolved to work harder to make the world a better place.
Cindy Sheehan is truly a despicable person for which I have zero sympathy. I would imagine that if her son were alive he would be appalled that his mom is in Egypt insulting America and defending a terrorist organization.
Maybe Egypt can do us a great favor and just hang on to her for a few years.
-Chris Jones
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