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Tue. Apr 16, 2002

QuoteLog, 4/17

QuoteLog, 4/17 – "Consider your mental image of President Bush. The smirk … the receding hairline … the confidence and the swagger [...] He’s not a cowboy, as the Economist caricatured him last year [...] He’s a living, breathing Captain Kirk. Consider: He has the same poise facing down terrorists that the farm boy from Iowa had facing down Klingons. He jokes with his ’crew’ (the media, the Cabinet, Tony Blair) even as he weighs life-and-death matters. He even has the same array of advisers: The cautious, logical Spock (Colin Powell), a folksy, straight-talkin’ McCoy (Don Rumsfeld), and a trouble-shooting miracle worker (Dick Cheney) [...] Gerhard and Jacuques would rather have a civilized cup of tea, followed by aperitifs in Ten-Forward. In short, they would rather have to deal with Captain Picard, who, despite Patrick Stewart’s BBC Received accent, was French. Maybe they’ll get their wish sometime. But not soon. And not while President Kirk has the conn."

Paul Musgrave, Hoosier Review

"But attempting to control news during a war is too usual to be labeled outrageous. Stalin didn’t ban journalists from Stalingrad. He sent them there. They couldn’t refuse. I’d rather be banned. And there was censorship in the Soviet press anyway. The International Federation of Journalists is right. Censorship did not bring peace. Not that peace with Germany would have been a good idea [...] But when someone is pounding the stuffing out of someone else, there’s more human interest in the unstuffed than in the stuffing pounders. The Sioux were right at the Little Bighorn, but Custer is what sells. Any good reporter would have stuck to Yellow Hair, at least until the last 20 minutes. How do you say, ’I’m with CNN’ in Sioux? [...] These things don’t excuse Israel’s interference with the news media. They make it worse. Those of us in journalism who support Israel for being open and democratic were left with a lot of explaining to do, but we also learned a lot. The media learned that war, unlike politics, does not depend upon the media to exist. Reporters were being reminded that they are sometimes dense, prejudiced and self-seeking.

P.J. O’Rourke

"Instead, we are faced with this simple conclusion—people will never accept the fact that some people just hate us and will doing anything to see us hurt in order to satisfy their own twisted motives. No ludicrous accusations of profiteering will change that. What conspiracy theorists also have to understand is that they are not helping America see the ”truth”; instead they are actually reinforcing lies that our enemies will feed upon. Moreover, [Rep. Cynthia] McKinney’s statement reveal that she, like the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists, believes that the ”elites” can readily manipulate other cultures for their own personal gain with fair certainty of the conclusion. In other words, we have to believe Arabs and Muslims are too stupid to realize we are playing them for fools. One would think that supporters of the downtrodden, as conspiracy theorists claim to be, would be more careful and avoid theories that call into question the intellectual abilities of other cultures."

Brian Finch

"’The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraws,’ said Kofi Annan in Madrid last week, standing alongside various panjandrums from the EU, UN, US and Russia. ’I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.’ Oh, I don’t know. The ’whole world’ has a pretty good track record of being wrong, especially where Jews are concerned. Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, and never more so than when they’re teamed with Chris Patten, Mary Robinson, the European Parliament (which has demanded sanctions against Israel), the German government (which has announced an arms embargo against Israel), the brand-new International Criminal Court (which – in its very first 24 hours! – started mulling the question of ’Israeli war crimes’), the Norwegian Parliament (which had a visitor thrown out of the building for wearing a provocative Star of David on his lapel), never mind the members of Calgary’s ’Palestinian community’ who marched through the streets carrying placards emblazoned ’Death To The Jews’, a timeless slogan but not hitherto a burning issue on the prairies [...] Meanwhile, what have we learned from this last extraordinary month? Not much about the Middle East, but quite a lot about Europe. What happens when Palestinian civilians strap on plastic explosives and head for Israeli pizza parlours? Europe says Israeli checkpoints for Palestinians are ”humiliating”. Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances permit themselves to be used as transportation for bombs and explosives – and Europe attacks Israel for refusing them free movement [...] ’Ah, those Jews,’ an attractive, intelligent, sophisticated Parisienne sighed over dinner with me the other night. ’They cause problems everywhere they are.’ Actually, they don’t. Of the 30 ongoing conflicts in the world today, the Muslims are involved in 28 of them."

Mark Steyn

"In all, regardless of the fact that most of those killed were armed members of one PA militia or another, approximately 1,358 Arabs died in a little over eighteen months of warfare. That is, an average of three people per day. The question of whether or not those figures constitute a ’slaughter’ of Arabs needs to be seen in perspective [...] During the late 1960’s, the PLO established a terrorist fiefdom in the eastern part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. King Hussein did not take kindly to the PLO moves to divide his country, as he had good reason to believe that the PLO had the goal of creating a ”Palestine” on the ruins of the Hashemite kingdom rather than beside it. Therefore, in the space of one month in 1970, which came to be called ”Black September,” the ”moderate” king slaughtered 10,000 Arab PLO supporters and expelled the leadership to Lebanon. At the cost of 333 lives per day, Hussein managed to put down his intifada, exile seditionist elements, and totally remove the PLO claim to Jordan from public discussion."

Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, National Review