On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. There was no mention of relocation centers in the EO, because initially none were envisioned. The purpose was for those of Japanese ancestry to relocate voluntarily, anywhere within the interior, away from the West Coast and areas of strategic military importance.

On April 25, 1992, as a UCLA student, I went by bus from campus on a pilgrimage to Manzanar, 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles on the 50th Anniversary of the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans into relocation camps during WWII.

As sympathetic as I am to the Japanese-American experience (my mom being Japanese, I identify more with …Japanese-American culture than Thai/Thai-American), I’m going to go ahead and anger a lot of people and extol some of the non-PC merits of Michelle Malkin’s book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror
.

Whether you agree or disagree with Malkin’s points in the end, I see nothing at all that is “racist” about her book, unless one knee-jerks into PC-induced sensitivities as substitution for thinking.

It is revisionist dishonesty (or unfortunate ignorance) for anyone to claim there were no instances of Japanese issei or nisei who displayed commitment to the ultra-nationalistic tradition of “doho” (unbending loyalty to the Emperor regardless of residence or citizenship status). Malkin provides a number of examples of where there was evidence of Japanese-American disloyalty.

Even moreso than racism and prejudice, the possibility of fifth column saboteurs and the dangers of further attacks on the West Coast were very real, and supported by the best military and civilian intelligence analysis at the time. This included the MAGIC messages which were intercepted diplomatic communications that revealed Japan’s espionage activities in regards to the West Coast, Hawaii, and the southern border.

Throughout Europe and the South Pacific, there were instances of Japanese immigrants who consorted with their ancestral homeland, revealing where their loyalties lay. Same held true with Germans who no longer lived in Germany (which brings up the point that it wasn’t just those of Japanese ancestry who were interned by the Department of Justice- of the 31 thousand enemy aliens from Axis nations, nearly half were European).

The conventional perspective, of course, is exemplified by the following passage from “Yankee Samurai“, by Joseph D. Harrington- a perspective that rings heroic for me, with selfless patriotism, bitter sorrow, honor and conflicted loyalty, and unconditional love and service to country:

“Before leaving New Guinea, Walter Tanaka had faced up to a major crisis in his life. He had done everything he could to dissuade his angry and disappointed father from renouncing the U.S. and returning to Japan. This was not easy to do while soaking wet in a foxhole with the enemy shooting at you. The moisture on Walt’s face was more than rain when he read what he feared was his father’s last letter on a painful subject.

America had disappointed him. Tunejiro Tanaka told his son, as he recounted the family troubles. He intended to go back to Japan as soon as he could. But, he had other ideas concerning Walter. ‘When a tiger dies, he leaves his skin,’ Tunejiro wrote, quoting an old Japanese adage, ‘but when a man dies he leaves only his name. America has rejected me, and I am going back to my native country, Japan. You, however, are to stay in America. It is your country. Defend it. I charge you not to do anything that will dishonor my name.”
-Ch. 12, pg 258

And we are all proud of the selfless patriotism and heroism of Nisei who found themselves in the unfortunate circumstance of having to prove their loyalty, fighting for a country that uprooted and held their families in internment camps.

To my knowledge, the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team remains the most highly decorated unit in American military history. And those Japanese-Americans who acted as translators for military intelligence played a large role in saving lives by winning/shortening the war.

Today, civil rights activists want to draw parallels between the Japanese-American experience of then to that of Muslim-Americans, today.

Vigilance against prejudice is ok; but we shouldn’t be crammed with so much political correctness as to throw common sense out the window.

Profiling is not the worst evil in the world. It is a logical process of identification. You do this naturally in your everyday activity. If I see someone wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt concert, the natural conclusion for me to reach is that, chances are, the guy’s a fan of their music. I could be wrong, sure. But percentage-wise, I’m probably correct in my initial assessment, without yet verifying and confirming.

There are all kinds of profiling: Racial/ethnic, national, religious, behavioral…

The act of profiling doesn’t mean you automatically are thinking “guilty before proven innocent”.

If a certain terror cult had a strange fixation with wearing Casio F91W wrist-watches, it only follows that one should scrutinize those wearing the favored watch more closely than those without; it does not mean that ALL and even MOST people who choose to wear that watch are terrorists. It’s just one clue on a list of potential traits to be on the lookout for.

The fear of racial/ethnic/religious/national profiling- of being labeled “racist”- failed to protect us against 9/11 terrorists. Ronald Kessler’s The Terrorist Watch, pg 30-31, pg 33:

When he wrote the Phoenix memo, Williams was investigating an individual who was a member of the al-Muahjiroun, an Islamic extremist group whose spiritual leader was a supporter of bin Laden. The man was taking aviation-related security courses at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. Why was he interested in aviation security? Perhaps so he could hijack a plane, Williams thought. Others taking flight training could have the same nefarious purpose.

Headquarters passed the memo off to low-level analysts, who wondered whether interviewing Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons or aviation security courses would raise issues of racial profiling.

~~~

the FBI operated in a politically correct atmosphere that Congress, the Clinton Administration, and the media fostered. Focusing on Arab men was a no-no.

In Defense of Internment, pg XXVIII-XXIX:

Williams recommendation to canvas flight schools was rejected, FBI director Robert Mueller later admitted, partly because at least one agency offical raised concerns that the plan could be viewed as discriminatory racial profiling. “If we went out and started canvassing, we’d get in trouble for targeting Arab Americans,” one FBI official told the Los Angeles Times.

To be sure, the Phoenix memo was not enough to warn of the 9/11 plot (Williams himself only marked the memo for “routine” attention and never dreamt of the possibility of hijackers flying planes into buildings); but what is revealed is the aversion to conduct the kind of profiling that would raise the hackles of civil rights groups.

And today, we are still hamstrung by our political correctness sensitivities and fear to offend, as demonstrated by the Ft. Hood shooting (and what have we here….5 U.S. soldiers plotting together?!). That one should have been preventable.

So long as this remains the case, we will treat grandmothers and young, Middle-Eastern men in their 20’s with equal levels of scrutiny, taking off belts and shoes, and being prevented to bring aboard a simple gift like a snow globe. Because discrimination is such a naughty word and profiling an act of great evil and injustice.

When civil liberty activists hyperventilate about “That’s profiling!”

My answer, in classic Cheney-fashion, is…

“So?”

“Yesterday, America saw two giants of American literary fiction pass: JD Salinger and Howard Zinn.”

Boston Globe:

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as “A People’s History of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

“He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. “He’s changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can’t think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect.”

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn’s writings “simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

~~~

Carroll called Dr. Zinn “simply one of the greatest Americans of our time. He will not be replaced — or soon forgotten. How we loved him back.”

I believe it was on The Dennis Prager Show that I heard him interviewed a few years ago. Prager asked him if the world would have been better off had the U.S. never come into existence. His answer? “Yes.”

A “liberal” is someone who is open-minded, understanding, comes with open-arms, and seeks discussion and compromise. Then…there are these people:


Look, I like a green Earth. I worked for years as an environmental technician. I’ve worn the plastic suit and cleaned up the hazardous waste spills. I’ve been in places where even bacteria don’t grow because the toxins are so bad. What separates me from the Ed Bagely’s of the planet is that I want to discuss. This guy’s just an angry freak, and yes, that does make him dangerous.

Anger is not a destination or a simple state. It’s a direction. It’s a direction that is stopped by our morals, our character, our sociological and our psychological limits….in most cases. Sometimes it’s not. When that happens we get violence, and people suffer. Even if anger turns to violence 1 time in a million, we should try to understand why it happened, and to that end, I ask:

“Why are people so angry that global warming is discussed, debated, and not accepted or obeyed without question?”

Put another way, has the propaganda of the left stirred people so effectively, angered them so well that we run the risk of violence rather than discussion? I think it has, and I blame the people that Ed Bagely gets his news from-the people that have him so fired up as to start raving about “death panels” in the middle of a discussion about whether or not the debate is open/closed about Global Warming.

Ed needs help, and those who have misled Ed-and so many others-need a moment of inner reflection. It’s one thing to have freedom of speech, but it’s another to yell, “FIRE!” in a theatre (global warming metaphor intended)

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U’s flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers’ lack of “cultural competence” contributes to the poor academic performance of the state’s minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward “cultural competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

Read the Initiative.

Hat tip: Mike Gallagher

The President will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning. He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens.

Millions of kids will be stopping their day to sit down and listen to this speech.

Now that, in itself, is not THAT creepy, well kinda…but this is:

Things get downright disconcerting when one eyeballs the federally approved lesson plans that the Department of Education has cooked up to support the president’s speech. The preK-6 lesson plans, which were developed with federal funds, devised on taxpayer time, and made available on the Department of Education’s website, exhort teachers to extend the impact of the president’s speech by having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” This clumsy bit of cheerleading shows no awareness that ”help[ing] the president” might be construed as an invitation to engage in advocacy rather than instruction or that it might worry those who are not Obama partisans. What’s truly remarkable, however, given recent concerns about intrusive federal government this past month, is the lesson plan’s directive that “these [letters] would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”

It all sounds a touch Orwellian, no? “Redistributed” to whom? “Accountable” to whom? Accountable for which “goals” exactly—the ones that involve “helping the president”? I’m sure the intentions behind all of this were decent enough, and that this whole effort was intended as a pep talk dressed up with innocuous materials. The lesson plans were likely drawn up by a couple of low-level staffers and slapped up on the department website without a careful look. But this all points to some of the perils posed by the growing presidential inclination to serve as superintendent-in-chief, and it highlights the kind of hubris that has fueled concerns about the implications of the federal government’s growing reach.

While the liberals will tell us that the President is just trying to motivate the kids to do good but the thing is the President should not, ever, address our kids and extol them to help him achieve is Socialist goals. Imagine if Bush had tried this….just imagine the outcry that would emanate from the left.

“You can’t avoid these questions,” Dr. Emanuel said in an Aug. 16 Washington Post interview. “We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a ‘God committee’ to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.”

Dr. Emanuel argues that to make such decisions, the focus cannot be only on the worth of the individual. He proposes adding the communitarian perspective to ensure that medical resources will be allocated in a way that keeps society going: “Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity—those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations—are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Covering services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic, and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” (Hastings Center Report, November-December, 1996)

Dr Emanuel is Rahm Emanuel’s brother & when asked directly by the Washington Press Corps if Dr Emanuel had provided advice on healthcare plans to the Admin, Press Secretary Gibbs repeatedly said yes.

Baby Boomers beware. Social Security has already been cut (last week). In a few years it will give out more than it takes in, and then it will be gone. That means that today’s retiring members of the “Me Generation” will be short on cash, at the end of the line for healthcare, and-if this guy has his way-will be left to die when Alzheimers hits.

Ben Stein described the brouhaha over his selection as commencement speaker at the University of Vermont as “laughable” on Tuesday called the whole episode “pathetic.”…

“I am far more pro-science than the Darwinists,” Stein said later in an e-mail. “I want all scientific inquiry to happen — not just what the ruling clique calls science.”

Stein’s comments came a day after UVM President Dan Fogel announced that Stein, whom Fogel had invited to address UVM’s commencement in May, would not be coming after all. Fogel said that his selection of Stein generated an intense protest, that he received hundreds of angry e-mails over the weekend, and that after he shared these “profound concerns” with Stein, Stein “immediately and most graciously declined our commencement invitation.”…

Stein called the university’s response to the furor “chicken sh**, and you can quote me on that.”

“I like Dr. Fogel,” Stein wrote, “and feel sorry he is caught in the meat grinder of political correctness. My heart goes out to him. He’s a great guy trying to do his best in difficult circumstances.”

Don’t you love the free exchange of ideas in a country run by liberals? Oh, wait a second. They didn’t let it happen when conservatives ran it either. You don’t agree with them, it’s time to get pies thrown at you, shouted down, or have the stage where your speaking bullrushed by idiots…..

But that isn’t censorship eh?

HOUSTON (KTRK) — Houston police are looking for a vandal who defaced a monument in honor of former President George Bush. Shortly before 2pm, Houston police got a call of criminal mischief in progress at the George Bush monument on Bagby at Preston in downtown Houston. Witnesses say a man who appeared to be homeless was using paint to vandalize the monument. The man was described as having long blond hair, possibly in a ponytail, and wearing a plaid shirt. He may still have some yellow paint on him.

FOUR YEARS after declaring that there should be no red states or blue states because we are all red white and blue states… it appears that Obama’s message still hasn’t been answered.

Juan Cole is one of those academics poisoning the young minds of college students and gullible left-leaning minds.

He now sees fit to hold Israel accountable for bringing on the events of 9/11.

His post from Wednesday:

In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/ Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the place where Jesus is said to have made water into wine, Israeli bombs wrought a different sort of transformation. In the distant, picturesque port of Hamburg, a young graduate student studying traditional architecture of Aleppo saw footage like this on the news [graphic]. He was consumed with anguish and the desire for revenge. As soon as operation Grapes of Wrath had begun the week before, he had written out a martyrdom will, indicating his willingness to die avenging the victims, killed in that operation–with airplanes and bombs that were a free gift from the United States. His name was Muhammad Atta. Five years later he piloted American Airlines 11 into the World Trade Center. (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 307: “On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque.l It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged,and by filling out his last testamentd during the attack he was offering his life in response.” ).

And if Atta didn’t find offense and inspiration from Operation Grapes of Wrath, his radical beliefs would have found outrage by any number of other subsequent perceived “offenses” against fellow Arabs/Islam. And if Atta hadn’t participated in the events of 9/11, perhaps his soul wouldn’t know unrest from having participated in a terrorist act that has led to the deposition of an Islamic fundamentalist state in Afghanistan and the hanging of an Arab dictator, the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and the loss of prestige of al-Qaeda in the eyes of the Muslim world. These are all “blowback” for his actions.

And speaking of “blowback”, Juan Cole includes Michael Scheuer in his post:

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA Bin Laden desk for some years and knows something about radical fundamentalism, concludes, “What is likely to become known across the Islamic world as the “Gaza slaughter” will ensure the continued growth of the Sunni insurgency al-Qaeda leads and inspires.”

And as though on cue, Ayman al-Zawahiri came out with a video Tuesday, saying, “”We will never stop until we avenge the death of all who are killed, injured, widowed and orphaned in Palestine and throughout the Islamic world . . .” He then attacked Barack Obama, saying “These air strikes are a gift from Obama before he takes office, and from Hosni Mubarak, the traitor who is the primary partner in your siege and murder.”

What I am saying is that Israeli leaders like Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and the Israeli high command and intelligence all knew this danger very well when they launched this bloodbath. They subjected you and me to it anyway, because it is immaterial to them what happens to the United States as a result of their bloody-mindedness. They want theirs. They are no different in that regard from American hawks. Bush knew he was endangering Madrid and Glasgow when he attacked Iraq. He didn’t care about his allies, either. In the Hawk Business, provoking terrorism is all to the good. Nor are they different in this regard from the leadership of Hamas, which also acted provocatively without regard to the wider consequences.

Juan Cole is a useful idiot to the likes of Zawahiri and Hamas; an ally in their propaganda dissemination. Zawahiri is being opportunistic here, trying to salvage al-Qaeda’s failed goal of uniting the Muslim world to answer THEIR call to “jihad”. Zawahiri doesn’t need Israel as an excuse to continue on with al-Qaeda’s murderous killing spree in the name of Allah; but Israel defending itself does give him propaganda fodder. And rather than countering it, Cole gives legitimacy to it in the eyes and ears of those Palestinian supporters and Hamas sympathizers who have a slanted perspective on Israel-Palestine history. He is an appeaser and an enabler for the world to receive more of the very violence he decries.

The burden of peace is on Hamas. It is the writings and lectures of liberal academics like Juan Cole who make the moral inversions of terrorist apologists and the anti-war movement possible. They are silent on Iranian dissidents being tortured in Iran everyday; they express love and admiration for dictators like Castro; they sympathize with the plight of Hamas and Islamic terrorists; all the while they call President Bush who has liberated 60 million Muslims the warmonger, and the plight of Israel “illegitimate”, “criminal”, and an “illegal occupation”.

It is the moral inversion of liberal peace/anti-war movements that causes war and the perpetuation of “the cycle of violence” by not protesting and pressuring the true dictators and violators of human rights.

I encourage all FA readers to go support Michael Totten in defeating Juan Cole in the 2008 Weblog Awards for Best Middle East or Africa Blog:

Juan Cole is decrying all the neocons he’s forced to compete with in the 2008 Weblog Awards for Best Middle East or Africa Blog. He thinks Helena Cobban — a deranged Hezbollah supporter — should have been nominated instead of someone like me. He’s worked his leftist readers into a tizzy, and they’re putting him over the top. I don’t really care if I win this award; I won it last year. But Juan Cole certainly doesn’t deserve it.

You know what kind of abject nonsense he’s peddling now? He’s arguing that Israel’s 1996 attack in Qana, Lebanon, inspired Mohammad Atta, who led the Al Qaeda cell on September 11, to write his “martyrdom will.” But Atta’s will, as Martin Kramer points out, was written before the attack in Qana. And it wasn’t a martyrdom will. It was a standard will. But Cole won’t let facts get in the way of blaming Israelis for just about anything, including violence committed by Al Qaeda.

Don’t let Cole win. Go over there and vote for me.

Go vote. Spread the word. Let Juan Cole experience firsthand what blowback is for his years of blogging 6 years of long-winded academic cyber-rubbish.

Also blogging:
American Power
Yaacov Lozowick’s Ruminations

President-elect Obama had this to say in response:

Klein returns from his useless adventure with little more than a pimp-punditry paper on excusing isolationist policies rather than engagement of genuinely bad guys; suicidal members of death cults bent on hunting down and killing Americans by any and all means. His article whines about how hard things are over there as if the very word “Afghanistan” isn’t a historical synonym for “ass end of the world,” “land of the nearly impossible,” or at least “graveyard of empires.” Of course it’s hard over there. It’s a war zone in the worst place on the planet. It’s a place that has known little more than war going back almost 10,000 years. The people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer by western standards because building schools has never been as useful to them as building bunkers, trenches, and dugouts. Their ideas about women, human rights, etc are not western, because the west has always asked the two connecting questions: “Why are we there”+”Why not just leave?” …and then left!

Klein actually managed to go all the way to Afghanistan to report on the insurgency there, and he never read a book on what an insurgency IS. He never read the 911 Commission report on WHY the United States and NATO are in Afghanistan, and (my favorite) the title to his article labels it an aimless war, questions why “We” [the United States] is in Afghanistan, and the man doesn’t even mention conversations with United States forces, officials, etc.

“Why Are We [Americans] there”….let’s ask the Canadians, Dutich, British, and then write about how aimless the American effort there is? Talk about arrogance on the part of a writer, his editors, a magazine, and the ignorance of its readers.

The war in Afghanistan was proposed by the Clinton Administration’s Richard Clarke in 1999 (according to his book, the 911 Commission, Bill Clinton’s memoirs, Madeline Albright’s book, and others). Why? Because Al Queda and their political wing, the Taliban, were using Afghanistan as a terrorist state bent on attacking the United States. Two years later, they succeed. Tomahawk missiles were not readily available. In fact, even ammo for tanks is scarce, but they had two things in abundance: hate and conviction. From that point, all they needed was a few guys and some box cutters. 3000 people died as a result, and where does that hate come from? It comes from the abandonment of Afghanistan to a land of infinite chaos and war instead of a land of hope and peace.

So Klein, in complete ignorance of the 911 Commission report, multiple Clinton Administration memoirs, and without talking and citing any Americans in Afghanistan, asks, “Why are we [Americans] there?”

If I turned in a story to my 8th grade English teacher, and the story was about eagles, but all I talked about were doves….she’s have torn it up. This goes beyond stupidity-even beyond propagandist arrogance. It’s irresponsible. It’s dangerous. It reinforces the idea that poor writing, incompetent editors, and vain efforts are killing print journalism.

The Aimless War? I think not. It’s time Mr. Klein and his editors looked at page ONE of the US Army Counterinsurgency Manual:

1-1. Insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) are complex subsets of warfare. Globalization, technological advancement, urbanization, and extremists who conduct suicide attacks for their cause have certainly influenced contemporary conflict; however, warfare in the 21st century retains many of the characteristics it has exhibited since ancient times. Warfare remains a violent clash of interests between organized groups characterized by the use of force. Achieving victory still depends on a group’s ability to mobilize support for its political interests (often religiously or ethnically based) and to generate enough violence to achieve political consequences. Means to achieve these goals are not limited to conventional forces employed by nation-states.

1-2. Insurgency and its tactics are as old as warfare itself. Joint doctrine defines an insurgency as an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict (JP 1-02). Stated another way, an insurgency is an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control. Counterinsurgency is military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency (JP 1- 02). These definitions are a good starting point, but they do not properly highlight a key paradox: though insurgency and COIN are two sides of a phenomenon that has been called revolutionary war or internal war, they are distinctly different types of operations. In addition, insurgency and COIN are included within a broad category of conflict known as irregular warfare.

1-3. Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate. Insurgents use all available tools—political (including diplomatic), informational (including appeals to religious, ethnic, or ideological beliefs), military, and economic—to overthrow the existing authority. This authority may be an established government or an interim governing body. Counterinsurgents, in turn, use all instruments of national power to sustain the established or emerging government and reduce the likelihood of another crisis emerging.

1-4. Long-term success in COIN depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government’s rule. Achieving this condition requires the government to eliminate as many causes of the insurgency as feasible. This can include eliminating those extremists whose beliefs prevent them from ever reconciling with the government. Over time, counterinsurgents aim to enable a country or regime to provide the security and rule of law that allow establishment of social services and growth of economic activity. COIN thus involves the application of national power in the political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure fields and disciplines. Political and military leaders and planners should never underestimate its scale and complexity; moreover, they should recognize that the Armed Forces cannot succeed in COIN alone.

emphasis added
link

Perhaps the best source for understanding why NATO and the United States are in Afghanistan can be found in the 911 Commission’s final report. There are several sections that detail WHY Afghanistan was and is important to the war with Al Queda (a war declared by Bin Laden in 1992; sixteen years ago). Perhaps the best can be found in sections 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5

He returned to Afghanistan.
2.5 AL QAEDA’S RENEWAL IN AFGHANISTAN
(1996–1998)
Bin Ladin flew on a leased aircraft from Khartoum to Jalalabad, with a refueling stopover in the United Arab Emirates.62 He was accompanied by family members and bodyguards, as well as by al Qaeda members who had been close associates since his organization’s 1988 founding in Afghanistan. Dozens of additional militants arrived on later flights.

No Mr. Klein, AMERICA and the rest of the world are in Afghanistan because if they weren’t, it would become another terrorist state. There is historical evidence to prove this as well as theoretical. Moreover, there is a plan for Afghanistan, but one cannot understand why Americans are in Afghanistan by asking Dutch, French, Canadian, or British soldiers who are there as peacekeepers. Why? Because American troops are there not only as peacekeepers, but also on the attack in a counterinsurgency. It’s not the same as in Iraq as no two battles or wars are ever the same (this ain’t a football game). The coming surge and shift of operations in Afghanistan is necessary, allegedly supported by the left (including President-elect Obama), and while having many of the same maxims and tactics will be as unique as every setting and scenario is.

How sad is it that TIME magazine and a veteran “writer” like Joe Klein could get away with such a puff-piece of poorly-written, sensationalist rhetoric; an article with a title that’s completely unsupported by the text within? Maybe, as Newsweek and other print pubs look at layoffs….Joe Klein should go back to Kabul and start his own publication? One wonders how fast he’d be demanding MORE peacekeepers were he to live and work there?

Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that “time has upset many fighting faiths.” Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

Sounds fabulous right?

But liberals in action are something entirely different:

Should there be boycotts, blacklists, firings or de facto shunning of those who supported Proposition 8?

That’s the issue consuming many in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban.

Yes indeed….should there be firings and blackballing of individuals who supported Prop 8?

The answer is a resounding YES from the liberal left.

Most conservatives have seen the liberal left become unyielding to any viewpoint not their own. They call those who supported the liberation of Iraq “warmongers” and “criminals”. They love debate, so long as you have the same views as their own.

There is no “celebration of free and open debate.” Recall the rushing of the stage while a Minuteman stood up to talk at a college. They shut down his speech, and forced his viewpoint to be smothered. A liberal doesn’t agree with you, they will just shout, scream, and yell to drown it out. How dare a opposing viewpoint get out into the public realm.

And so it is with Prop 8. The people of California voted, for the second time, to define Marriage as between a man and a woman. Because they don’t agree with that, they take to the streets, they blackball filmmakers like Richard Raddon of Film Independent:

Raddon has been a particularly polarizing figure because Film Independent’s board includes many independent film stalwarts, including Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice and Oscar-winning writer Bill Condon. One of the group’s explicit missions is to promote diversity.

Last week, Raddon offered to resign. According to one board member, a conference call was hastily arranged, and after much discussion the board voted unanimously to keep him.

Yet the anger continues to stew.

“There is still roiling debate within the organization,” says distributor Howard Cohen, an advisor to the film festival who is gay. “Is it OK to let this go? There are a lot of gay people who work at Film Independent. The issue has not been closed.”

No one is certain how the current protest will affect Film Independent’s Spirit Awards in the spring, a popular event recognizing work that “challenges the status quo.” And there are already indications the Los Angeles Film Festival could be affected.

Gregg Araki, director of the critically acclaimed gay cult hit “Mysterious Skin” and an influential figure in “new queer cinema,” has said he won’t allow his films to be shown there, while others, such as “Milk” producers and gay activists Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, say they’re going to “study in depth all the facets of our specific situation before making a decision.”

Araki says Raddon should step down. “I don’t think he should be forcibly removed. The bottom line is if he contributed money to a hateful campaign against black people, or against Jewish people, or any other minority group, there would be much less excusing of him. The terrible irony is that he runs a film festival that is intended to promote tolerance and equality.”

Hateful campaign against black people? Huh?

It was a Democratic campaign to have the citizenery of this State decide whether marriage should be between a man and a woman. There was no hateful campaign. Gays already have the same legal rights as those who marry by joining together in a civil union. They may have to do a bit more paperwork by putting their partner on their will and so forth, but all in all….legally, its the same.

Mataharley has done a great job describing the agenda of the gay community in this debate. It’s to re-educate the public on what is and what isn’t traditional rites:

A marriage between a man and a woman follows natural laws of conception and procreation. It is the way our world evolves and grows. Were any animal species of this inclination to any serious degree, it becomes extinct.

I can easily agree with the 50-60% of the population that feels civil unions gives same sex partners legal benefits that are enjoyed by married couples. But marriage and civil unions are not “equal” in the laws of nature… unless you think premature extinction from the lack of ability to conceive is “natural”. They should be equivalent in benefits, but in no way considered equal as a traditional family.

Marriage is, and will always remain, a union between a man and a woman. It is only by the two, combined, that a child is borne of natural (not petrie dish) conception… a natural order to procreation. Just as animals will not continue to exist without the natural order of procreation, neither will man. I do not want my granddaughter taught anything different.

If same sex unions needs to be “blessed” by govt in order to achieve their benefits, that is their choice. There is no reason to muddy the waters by the govt redefining what is not theirs to define. The meddling in the traditional rite of marriage is unconcionable. Civil unions… fine. Marriage? An insult to the rite…. and to it’s traditional history.

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If I choose to be married… whether “in the eyes of God”, or perhaps just a vow spoken between myself and another on a remote beach somewhere… the vow and intent bind me in a way far more powerful than a govt contract. Marriage was not created to be a govt contract, but a very personal vow between a man and a woman before God… or the powers they believe exist.

So my question to you would be… why does the govt have to sanction it as “marriage” for your “right” to be recognized?

I cannot, and will not, put govt on a par with God – enabling them to define a religious (and intensely personal) rite on this issue. The govt does not grant us rights. They pre’exist and usurp govt power.

Again, you still miss the true agenda. This is not about govt benefits for the LGBT community. It is about reeducating the public as to what is “marriage” in order to tear down traditional rites. Otherwise, they’d go for the civil unions.

That reeducation of the public is all that matters. If they have to go back to the McCarthy era and start blackballing people, then so be it.

Professor Stone wrote that to be a liberal means you “consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others.”

In a alternative universe maybe, but not in this one.

In the weeks before the election, I noticed a growing number of my fellow citizens wearing Obama’s face on their t-shirts, usually in the spirit of socialist realism art. There’s not a politician alive who I admire enough to the point of worshipful adoration that I’d sport his likeness on my clothing or plaster it all over the wordsmobile (I do, however, wear my FA t-shirts with pride and enthusiastically tell people it’s a right-wing website when asked).

The only pro-McCain t-shirt I have seen in person was worn by a lone demonstrator in front of the house where an effigy of Sarah Palin was hung, supposedly in the spirit of Halloween. And even his didn’t sport McCain’s face on it.

I know that even in blue state California, here in the Los Angeles area, there were more than just a handful of McCain-Palin supporters. Yard signs and bumperstickers were more common; just not the t-shirts. And I’m sure a big part of that has to do with the intimidation factor.

There seem to be more loud activists on the left than on the right. Conservatives seem to not want to make a nuisance of themselves; but many liberals have no problem wearing their politics on their sleeves, on their t-shirts, on their cars. It’s apparently an automatic given that the whole world hates Bush; that’s why, in open public and broad daylight, they can say something derogatory about President Bush and feel safe in not getting called on it. Even amongst strangers.

The sad fact is, liberals, through the education system and through media and Hollywood pop culture, have been “allowed” to define and characterize conservatism. The Republican Party has been branded as the party of the rich; warmongers and war profiteers; racists and bigots. If you don’t believe in the alarmism of global warming, you are a “denier” and don’t care about the planet; if you believe in closing the borders, assimilation, and controlling immigration, then you’re against diversity and appreciation for the beauty of other cultures as well as anti-Mexican. And on and on, it goes…

I did not see one- NOT ONE!- “yes” on Prop 8 sign or button or bumpersticker. But I saw the “No” on Prop 8 placards around, perhaps even more than Obama signs. I thought it might pass, given that California voters had already “been there, done that” with Prop 22. What truly makes me livid about the issue, is how liberal activists once again are the ones who get to frame the debate. They’ve painted it as “the next good fight” in the struggle for civil rights and equality; and anyone who stands in the way is a bigot and a hatemonger, with backward religious beliefs and narrow-minded intolerance. Frankly, as someone rather agnostic on the issue, the bigotry and intolerance that I see is all coming from the self-righteous activists who won’t take “yes” for an answer and allow the majority rule to decide.

If you walk around with a “Yes” on Prop 8 sign the stigma is that you are a homophobic bigot and religious nut. You are the radical. Not the other way around. It’s also amusingly not funny to me that these activist bullies targeted the Mormon Church but not black churches when 70% of blacks voted “yes” on Prop 8. Ah, but I digress….

My post is actually about 14 year-old Catherine Vogt and her t-shirt experiment.

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we’re all united now, let’s consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching “inclusion,” and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

“McCain Girl.”

“I was just really curious how they’d react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters,” Catherine told us. “I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be.”

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain’s name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

“People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn’t be wearing it,” Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

“One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,” Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren’t the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

“In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,” Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

“Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said,” Catherine said.

How often do you suppose this happens in the classroom? Often, I believe. I work with a lot of kids and it sounds like liberal indoctrination is all too common. Outing oneself as belonging to a conservative Republican family, and the child is subjected to ridicule from the herd mentality of children who have been told Democrats are “the good guys” and Republicans are basically “evil and selfish”.

Scott’s own daughter experienced abuse by Obama bullies.

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

“He said, ‘You should be crucifixed.’ It was kind of funny because, I was like, don’t you mean ‘crucified?’ ” Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election.

I’ve heard some deranged liberals accuse McCain of being a racist. Absolutely laughable, given one of the most under-reported items regarding Senator McCain is that he and Cindy have a Bangladesh daughter, Bridget, adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage. McCain did not politicize the touching story of how this daughter came into their lives, nor make an issue of his two sons currently serving.

And I thought such politicized logic was confined to American newsrooms. Yet Catherine refused to argue with her peers. She didn’t want to jeopardize her experiment.

“I couldn’t show people really what it was for. I really kind of wanted to laugh because they had no idea what I was doing,” she said.

Only a few times did anyone say anything remotely positive about her McCain shirt. One girl pulled her aside in a corner, out of earshot of other students, and whispered, “I really like your shirt.”

Whispered “out of earshot”…..

It’s time for conservatives to be more “activist” and to start fighting back more vocally and vociferously against the misperceptions and decades of slander against the Republican Party and conservative ideology. More importantly, we need to stem the tide of liberal indoctrination in our schools, when we turn on the tv, when we open up the newspaper, when we go out to see movies. If we don’t we will lose the culture war and we will lose the half of America that we believe represents the best part of America.

Hat tip: American Power for the story of Catherine Vogt.

Here’s the follow-up story.

Naturally, how to measure patriotism is a matter of argument. One way is to look at differences in military involvement: Rural and small-town families are more likely to see their children go off into combat, and return in body bags. Or, we can turn to one of the few recent non-partisan surveys on the matter, the American National Election Study from the University of Michigan. It’s produced every election year, and the most recent data is from 2004.

This installment asked two pertinent questions:
1. How strong is your love for your country? . . . EXTREMELY strong, VERY strong, SOMEWHAT strong, or NOT VERY strong?
2. Is being an American EXTREMELY important, VERY important, SOMEWHAT important, NOT TOO important, or NOT AT ALL important to you personally?

If we scrutinize the responses from large cities, suburbs, and small towns, the small towns are far more patriotic. Nearly three in every four (73.4 percent) respondents from counties of fewer than 25,000 people expressed that their love for their country was extremely strong, compared to only half of those in counties with more than 300,000 inhabitants. In the nation’s largest population centers, those expressing “extremely strong” love for country stood at only 46 percent. And over two-thirds of respondents from small counties reported that it is ”extremely important” to be American, compared to about half of big-city folk.

It is certainly possible that factors other than simple geography are at work here. The populations in small towns are older, and older people are generally more expressive of pro-American values than younger people are, for example. Also, rural areas are more Republican, and the University of Michigan survey shows a significant partisan difference in patriotism. Democrats are considerably less likely to express strong love of country than Republicans are, and less likely to think being an American is important. Of those who claimed to be “Strong Democrats,” only around half expressed extremely strong love of country, compared to three-fourths of the “Strong Republicans.” A sizable share of (but by no means all) committed Democrats are apparently embarrassed about their country and about being American.

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Central Florida 7th grader called racist for wearing Palin t-shirt
She’s only 12 years old but Ashleigh Jones is feeling the heat of this election year.

That’s because the seventh grader at New Smyrna Beach Middle School was called a racist by classmates for wearing a pro-Sarah Palin t-shirt.

Jones is volunteering at the Republican Headquarters in New Smyrna Beach. The Palin t-shirt was a gift from her fellow volunteers.

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