Russia Today har uploadet denne video den 4. maj 2012. Jihadister på Balkan. Vesten tier og samtykker:
Kosovo terror training camps re-open for Syrian rebels
Syrian rebels have reportedly begun to undergo guerilla warfare training in Kosovo. They’re alleged to be using the same training camps built for the anti-Serb Kosovo Liberation Army – a group previously designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and even the UN. RT talks to Srdja Trifcovich, foreign affairs editor for the US-based Chronicles magazine.
Der følger en artikel med fra Russia Today, som man kan læse her.
Vi skal lige se lidt på, hvad Srđa Trifković egentlig render rundt og laver – blandt andet denne særdeles bemærkelsesværdige video. Trykkefrihedsselskabet bedes promte arrangere en event med denne meget kvalificerede tænker. Uploadet på YouTube den 26. april 2012 – værter Billy Baer og Dan Haggerty:
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic tells us how to defeat Jihad
The Baer/Haggerty Offensive of Repatriot Radio follows up on its recent discussion of Islam, and its deleterious effects on the world. Although Europe as we knew it is probably gone forever, it may still be possible for the USA to save itself from the culturally disastrous impact of Islam.
Og lidt af de seneste artikler:
Adolf Hitler, Our Contemporary
April 23, 2012 - Srdja Trifkovic
Hitler is 123, and he is alive and well. The Führer is going strong not because a vast neo-Nazi conspiracy is about to take over the Western world, kill the Jews, expel the Muslims and make April 20 the Day of Aryan Rebirth, but because he is an all-time favorite of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly at home and abroad.
When you advocate bombing a faraway nation of which we know little, call its leader a new Hitler (and, by extension, condemn the failure to bomb as a new “Munich”). When you want to discredit domestic opponents of migratory population replacement or abortion, compare them to Hitler. When you want to demonize the European civilization, Christian religion, national identity, or traditional culture, Hitler is ready. Six decades after the phenomenon was defined by Leo Strauss as reductio ad Hitlerum, the practice is more widely spread than ever. If you dislike a person/policy/idea, find a Hitlerian point of contact and thus prove that the PPI in question is a priori bad, mad and worthy of criminalization.
Mere HER i Veracity Voice. Kan også læses her i Chronicles Magazine.
Just a Regular French Youth
by Srdja Trifkovic • March 23, 2012
As soon as I heard the news I suspected the score. “Far-Right extremists!” screamed the media pack, but my hunch was right: the murderer of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school near Toulouse, and of three French soldiers only days earlier, was not French. He was a French citizen of Algerian descent, as we now know, but his allegiance and his identity had nothing to do with passports and ID cards.
Mohammed Merah (23), who was killed at his apartment on Thursday after a 30-hour standoff, was a Muslim—one of at least twenty million who now inhabit the European Union. The “context” was duly provided by The New York Times: “Much of the concern about domestic terrorism in Britain, Belgium, Germany and France has focused on these young people, who may have had little formal religious education but are susceptible to calls for jihad, especially when their own lives have been marked by disappointment, crime, racism and joblessness.”
The suggested narrative about this “soft-spoken and alienated youth” is clear:
by Srdja Trifkovic • March 30, 2012 • Printer-friendly
President Nicolas Sarkozy announced March 30 that French police have arrested 19 persons suspected of belonging to violent Muslim networks. “These arrests are linked to the world of a certain sort of radical Islamism,” Sarkozy told Europe 1 Radio, and added that automatic weapons were found in the homes of some of those arrested in the raids in and around Paris and several other French cities.
It is striking that Sarkozy added matter-of-factly that the arrests were not related to Mohamed Merah, the Muslim terrorist killed by police last week after he murdered seven people in the Toulouse area. This raises some troubling questions.
Most Western media professionals tend to subscribe, consciously or not, to a neo-liberal world outlook in general and to the tenets of multiculturalism in particular. The result is notable media favoritism of allegedly disadvantaged, non-Western, traditionally non-Christian societies.
Behind the veneer of all-embracing diversity, however, we find a carefully calibrated scale of acceptance or rejection of “the Other” depending on the cultural and political preferences of the media professionals themselves. The result is moral and intellectual relativism, which enables the media elite to pick and choose, which group or nation will be approved for the status of sympathy or victimhood, and which will be denied the benefit of the doubt.
Croatia and Nazi Germany: April 10, 1941: A Dark Day In History
by Srdja Trifkovic – May 1, 2012
Some important Westerners may prefer to look forward, to forget, minimize, or even deny, the fruits of the Croatian Holocaust of 1941-45 and its revived legacy of 1995. The endeavor is flawed. Sins unatoned for will continue coming back to haunt us.
The range of moral and political issues raised by the Ustaša movement and the regime it established in Croatia on April 10, 1941, is comparable to the Third Reich. In both cases, a political group, organized into a regime, devoted extraordinary resources to mass murder based on the victims’ race, creed or ethnicity. In both cases most ordinary Germans and ordinary Croats – those not directly affiliated with the regime, or overtly supportive of its goals and methods – opted for passive acquiescence. In both cases only a small minority was directly involved in the killing. In both cases the perpetrators understood why it had to be done; the mass murder made sense to them.
Both demographically and politically, the republic has a precarious present and an uncertain future.
An Orthodox church was set ablaze in the southwestern part of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on January 30. The incident reflects raising tensions between local Christian Slavs and Albanians, more than a decade after an Albanian rebellion brought FYROM to the verge of an ethnic war. It also evokes memories of the early stages of the conflict in Kosovo, in the late 1980s.
The Church of St. Nicholas, in the majority Albanian-Muslim village of Labuniste, was two centuries old and housed valuable icons. The arson at Labuniste followed the burning of a Macedonian flag and the raising of Albanian and Islamic banners in the neighboring town of Struga, allegedly in reaction to an incident of “mocking Islam” at a local carnival last month.
The town, on the shores of Lake Ohrid, lies at the southern edge of the line of ethnic separation between the two communities.
Mere HER hos The Jerusalem Post eller her hos The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies.
Og link til endnu en artikel af Trifkovic i The Jerusalem Post:
Det er egentlig imponerende, at man kan tale så længe uden at sige noget. Vores tidligere statsminister er blevet en sjælden gæst i de hjemlige medier. Sådan er det ikke udenfor Danmarks grænser. Man kan eksempelvis finde masser af videoer på YouTube – nu blogger jeg en af dem. Fra 23. – 25. marts 2012:
A Conversation with the Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen
Det bliver et sørgeligt endeligt for EU skråstreg euroen. Ikke bare seddelfornyelser. Designet er underordnet. Nej, regulære pengeombytninger skal der til. Store dele af siesta-landenes økonomier er sort. Svindelbaseret, ligefrem. Det var sådan grækerne kom ind i euroen. Følger de forskellige lande reglerne, skal det forlanges, at folk dokumenterer, hvor deres penge stammer fra. At der er betalt skat af dem, at de er ærligt tjent. Ellers kan udlandet ikke have tillid til den nye valuta – det er jo ikke bare en reklametryksag, der fremstilles. Grækernes, italienernes, mafiaernes penge vil i vidt omfang være reduceret til genbrugspapir eller et stort rundt elektronisk nul. Mon alle politikere, bankfolk, eurokrater overlever? Ja, jeg mener det helt bogstaveligt. Mafiøst tænkende mennesker vil ikke lade den slags passere ustraffet. Ikke sært, at der er panik i Bryssel. Der kan gå mange år, før vi ser demokratiet igen. Det er ikke engang sikkert, at det bliver i vores egen levetid. Det er ikke givet, at euroen tager EU med sig ned:
The Difference Between the U.S. Constitution and EU Constitution (Lisbon Treaty) – Dan Hannan
European Parliament, Strasbourg – 17 November 2011
Speaker: Daniel Hannan MEP – Cons (ECR)
Og artikel af Hannan:
The European Project is Now Sustained by Coup
Daniel Hannan – November 17, 2011
Even the outward forms of democracy are being shed.
What we have witnessed is a coup d’état: bloodless and genteel, but a coup d’état none the less. In Athens and in Rome, elected prime ministers have been toppled in favour of Eurocrats – respectively a former Vice-President of the European Central Bank and a former European Commissioner. Both countries now have what are called ‘national governments’, though they have been put together for the sole purpose of implementing policies that would be rejected in a general election.
If you thought the EU couldn’t get any less democratic, meet the Frankfurt Group
The Old Opera House in Frankfurt — once Germany’s most beautiful postwar ruin and now its most stunning recreation — has become a symbol of European rebirth. And it was here, last month, that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy met the EU’s bureaucratic elite in what would, in another era, be described as a putsch. They had grown tired of eurozone summits, with leaders flying here and there but getting nowhere. A smaller group needed to be formed, who would wield power firmly but informally. That evening, as they gathered to hear Claudio Abbado conduct the Mozart Orchestra of Bologna, a new EU hit squad was born.
As Silvio Berlusconi has now found out, this so-called Frankfurt Group means business. Only a few months ago, it would have been unthinkable that the head of one European government would try to destabilise or depose another. Now, two EU leaders have fallen in a week. As Sarkozy knows from recent experience, to enforce regime change one need only give a helping hand to the rebels.
Kilometerlang artikel her. Et såkaldt symposium – post 9/11:
A Free-for-All on a Decade of War
From the Times Magazine, a post-9/11 debate on what has been learned and where our conclusions might take us.
By Scott Malcomson – September 7, 2011
The American reaction to being attacked on Sept. 11 was in many ways an intellectual one. President George W. Bush tended to frame it that way: the attack was on our “values,” and the “war against terror” was a war of ideas meant to advance the idea of freedom. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the administration’s epistemologist, worrying over the question of knowability; Bernard Lewis was its historian, Paul Wolfowitz its moralist in arms. That America’s actions (as opposed to precautions) after 9/11 almost all took place far from home, with a professional army, strengthened this sense of abstraction. The possibility of anything like victory over our enemies was discounted early on (by Rumsfeld). Little wonder that, unlike in earlier wars, we have talked so much about what this conflict means, rather than simply working to end it as soon as possible.
Det drøjer desværre lidt. Pax America – kom tilbage nu! Vi savner dig:
The coming erosion of the European Union
By Stephen M. Walt – August 18, 2011
I gave a talk in Washington the other day about the future of the EU and transatlantic relations more generally, and I thought FP readers might be interested in what I had to say. Here’s a short summary of what I said.
I began with the rather obvious point that the highwater mark of Europe’s global influence was past, and argued that it would be of declining strategic importance in the future. The logic is simple: After dominating global politics from roughly 1500 to 1900, Europe’s relative weight in world affairs has declined sharply ever since. Europe’s population is shrinking and aging, and its share of the world economy is shrinking too. For example, in 1900, Europe plus America produced over 50 percent of the world economy and Asia produced less than 20 percent. Today, however, the ten largest economies in Asia have a combined GDP greater than Europe or the United States, and the Asian G10 will have about 50 percent of gross world product by 2050.
Reporting on the capture of the mass-murdering General Ratko Mladic by the Serbian government on Memorial Day, the New York Times summarized the newly created political situation like this: “Critical questions remain about precisely who protected Mr. Mladic. The pro-Western government of President Boris Tadic says it will investigate, a politically delicate examination that could lead to former government officials and perhaps even to religious authorities, since Mr. Mladic said after his arrest that he had been visited over the years by many priests.”
Pursuing the front-page story to an inside page, we see that the Times’ reporters, Doreen Carvajal and Steven Erlanger, stayed with that theme: “Government authorities, including President Tadic, have vowed to investigate the protective network, especially to determine if some of the loyalists included government operatives, high officials or perhaps even Serbian Orthodox priests.”
Mere HER hos Newsvine. Council for Secular Humanism har en hjemmeside, der har været nede i et par dage. Artiklen kan også læses der, når de engang får orden på tingene.
Den eftersøgte Goran Hadžić blev arresteret den 20. juli 2011 mistænkt for krigsforbrydelser. Trifković interviewes i sagen, der mest af alt handler om EU:
Hadzic held, ‘Kosovo next on EU wishlist’
Serbia has fulfilled the final demands of the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Ex-Croatian Serb leader – Goran Hadjich – has been arrested after eight years on the run. He’s accused of atrocities during Croatia’s war for independence from Yugoslavia in the early 90′s, ranging from murder to religious persecution. It follows the arrest of Ratko Mladic, who was wanted for similar crimes. The detentions were key requirements of Serbia’s bid to join the EU. For more insight on the story RT talks to Dr Srdja Trifkovic – foreign affairs editor at Chronicles magazine.
Den tyske indenrigsminister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, opfordrer imamer, muslimske familier og ledere til at forhindre spredning af militant islam. Herre jemini – tror Friederich mon selv på den?
German interior minister urges Muslims to combat militancy
25. June 2011
Germany’s interior minister met with Muslim community leaders to discuss how they can prevent youth radicalization. Muslim leaders countered that the responsibility lies with the government.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich urged the country’s Muslim community on Friday to do more to prevent the spread of radicalization among its youth. He told Muslim leaders at a meeting in Berlin that families must act early to prevent young boys from turning into jihadists.
“Neither the security authorities nor ordinary Muslim citizens can do much to help,” when youths radicalize, he said. “It is up to the parents and the rest of the family to be observant about what their children are up to and how they are changing.”
Friedrich, a member of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), had summoned the meeting to discuss the risks of homegrown terrorism.
Mere HER i Deutsche Welle. Samme advarsel kommer fra delstaterne:
[...]Hesse Interior Minister Boris Rhein of the conservative Christian Democratic Union told daily Die Welt that Salafism was a “centre and pivot for those who want to participate in so-called holy war.”
“Salafism can in this way lay the path to Islamist terrorism,” he said, adding that the law needed to be changed so that “hate preachers” can be more easily thrown out of the country.
“In future, this should be possible when someone spreads material that goes against the liberal democratic basic order or that fosters radicalisation or, as the case may be, terrorism recruitment.
Mere HER i The Local. Samme avis har selvføgelig en backlash-artikel. “Det er ikke alle muslimer, der er sådan”, skal man jo huske at sige…
Britain’s line on Israel is a cover for its impotence
By Douglas Murray, June 16, 2011
“When you can, you should.” That was Tony Blair’s opinion on intervention, as boiled down for a journalist a few days before sending British forces into Iraq.
The world has no shortage of dictators and despots. The Blair formula was that when such human-rights violators looked vulnerable, and provided you had the military capability and political will, you should seize the opportunity. Which he did – preventing genocides in, among other places, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. In those days, Britain punched above its weight. How long ago that seems.
The nature of 24-hour multimedia means that popular calls to intervene come faster than ever. A natural disaster occurs, a country erupts or a government begins to massacre its people and within hours “something has happened” turns into “something must be done”. And our politics are as reactive as our media.
This weekend marks a curious anniversary. Twelve years ago, Nato’s air war to wrest the province of Kosovo from Serbia’s control ended after almost three months. The allies achieved their professed war aims: Kosovar autonomy and an end to Serbian counter-insurgency measures, which Nato described as genocidal. But Serbian resistance was tougher than anticipated and western publics began to fear the war was going terribly wrong. The fears were well-grounded. There were two big consequences of Kosovo. First was a deepening Russian distrust of Nato’s aims. That led to Vladimir Putin. Second was an end to the principle that a sovereign ruler’s mistreatment of his own subjects is not grounds for war. That led to the invasion of Iraq.
What makes the Kosovo anniversary curious is that Nato’s mission in Libya is so similar. As in Kosovo, the west intervened to prevent a humanitarian tragedy and has wound up engaged in a civil war on the side of an insurgency.
Mere HER i iPolitics. Jeg fandt desuden dette fra marts 2011. Yderst interessant. Blandt andre disse herrer vil have krig: Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Her er resten – åbent brev om Libyen fra:
Historian Nicole Bacharan, artist Jane Birkin, writer Pascal Bruckner, European Parliament member Daniel Cohn-Bendit, philosopher André Glucksmann, former cabinet minister, Nicole Guedj, publisher Gilles Hertzog, former Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, philosopher and member of the editorial board of Le Monde Group Bernard-Henri Lévy, publisher Oliver Rolin, publisher Olivier Rubinstein, writer Dominique Simmonet.
Dette er, hvad de skriver:
Remember Rwanda…And Guernica! An Urgent European Call For Immediate Western Intervention In Libya
A group of leading French intellectuals and politicians make the case for immediate Western intervention in Libya, including possible military strikes against Gaddafi’s forces.
March 17th, 2011
Time is pressing in Libya. Day after day, hour after hour, the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, with his murderous army of airplanes, helicopters, tanks, missiles and mercenaries, is retaking his country and crushing the efforts of the Libyan people to break free. The tyrant seems determined to drown his country in “rivers of blood” — machine-gunning civilian populations, “purging” the towns of his opponents and sowing terror. Everywhere, in Tripoli and the other regions retaken by Gaddafi’s forces, large numbers of men have been abducted, taken to torture cells and murdered.
Christopher Hitchens: Don’t forget what a monster Ratko Mladic is
Christopher Hitchens – May 31, 2011
I suppose it is possible that the arrest of General Ratko Mladic is as undramatic and uncomplicated as it seems and that in recent years he had been off the active list and gradually became a mumbling old derelict with a rather nasty line in veterans’ reminiscences. His demands would probably have been modest and few: the odd glass of slivovitz in company with a sympathetic priest (it’s usually the Serbian Orthodox Church that operates the support and counseling network for burned-out or wanted war criminals) and an occasional hunting or skiing trip. Though there is something faintly satisfying about this clichéd outcome — the figure of energetic evil reduced to a husk of exhausted banality — there is also something repellent about it.
Mere HER i National Post. Kan også læses her hos Slate.
General Mladić: The Facts
by Srdja Trifkovic • June 1st, 2011
The circumstances surrounding the arrest of the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, General Ratko Mladić, seem puzzling. On May 26 he was captured in the house of a close relative with the same surname in a village north of Belgrade. Prima facie this means either that Mladić was entirely left to his own devices and had to seek shelter with people certain to be under police surveillance, or else that the Serbian authorities had been conniving in his hiding. The former is unlikely in view of the effectiveness of Mladić’s concealment after he finally went underground in 2002. The latter is even less likely in view of President Boris Tadić’s constant desire to please his mentors in Brussels and Washington and get Serbia a step closer to the ever-elusive EU membership.
According to our reliable sources in Belgrade, Mladić would not have been discovered had he not decided to give himself up in return for a substantial financial reward for his family. He is a very sick man and unlikely to live much longer. In addition to a chronic kidney ailment and high blood pressure, he has suffered several minor strokes over the past decade. Two years ago he was treated—under an assumed name—for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at a clinic in Belgrade. Aware that his wife Bosiljka and son Darko had been living in penury since the authorities stopped paying his pension in 2005, Mladić decided to offer the government a deal. The final settlement is well below the $10m previously offered for Mladić’s capture, but sufficient to enable his wife and son to live in comfort for many years to come.
Mere HER i Chronicles Magazine. Kan også læses her hos Serbianna.
Ratko Mladić and Myths of the Bosnian War
by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi – June 1, 2011
The recent arrest of the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić should mark the end of a dark chapter in the Balkans’ history. The military leader is charged with fifteen counts of genocide and crimes against humanity, including accusations of involvement in the Srebrenica massacre that witnessed the slaughter of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.
The capture itself is the culmination of a long period of international pressure — particularly by NATO — on Serbia, rather than an attempt to press for the resolution of a manhunt for a suspected war criminals residing in Serbia. The international community feared that a manhunt might jeopardize the fragile, tottering post-war ceasefire. Instead, it was made clear to Serbia that the country could not hope to attain EU membership while wanted individuals were sheltered within its territory.
Kommentar: Serberne vidste hele tiden, hvor Mladic var
Af Ota Tiefenböck
Var arrestationen af general Ratko Mladic en tilfældighed? Nej. Den var timet og tilrettelagt. Det var derfor, den kom så belejligt, netop som: 1. De nationalistiske tendenser i Serbien er aftagende, 2. Der er snart parlamentsvalg, hvor fangsten af Mladic styrker præsident Boris Tadic, 3. Hovedparten af serberne ønsker EU-medlemskab og ved, at de ikke får det, hvis Mladic er på fri fod.
The arrest of accused war criminal Ratko Mladic, the commander of Serb forces during Bosnia’s civil war in the 1990s, creates an opportunity to correct the historical record and provide a more balanced treatment of that episode.
One hopes that the media coverage of Mladic’s arrest and forthcoming trial will not be a repetition of the simplistic mythology about the Bosnian conflict that was so pervasive when it occurred. U.S. and European officials, the Western news media, ethnic lobbies, and much of the foreign policy community spun a Manichean melodrama. In that melodrama, the Serbs were almost entirely responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia and for the violence that followed, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs became arch villains, while Croats and Bosnian Muslims became innocent victims.
Ratko Mladic, killing 3,500 Christians near Srebrenica and Islamic jihad.
By Lee Jay Walker
After all, from enslaving Orthodox Christians during their brotherly love with the Turkish slave masters of the Ottoman Empire to having Muslim SS units who supported Adolf Hitler; then “victimhood” is needed in order to justify their history and culture.
Of course the wishy-washy brigade will tell us that the Ottoman period was enlightened and that the system of taking the eldest Christian boy (devshirme system) in the Balkans and converting them to Islam was noble. Yes, slavery in the modern era being justified and not mere slavery because the system meant that they would kill their own people in the name of Islam after being indoctrinated by Islamists in the Ottoman Empire.
Mere HER i Pakistan Christian Post eller her hos The Orthodox Church.
As I have recently returned from a tough but rewarding visit to Iraq, my mind has turned quite naturally to the role of religion in that part of the world and particularly to what is happening to Islam there and, conversely, to how it is affecting the political and social situation in these countries.
We have so often heard the mantras of “violent extremism”, “Islamism” or even “Islamist terrorism” that we are in danger of not noticing that the common element in so much of the turmoil in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and West Africa is not extremism or terrorism as such but a resurgent Islam. [...]
Anglican Bishop Blasts West’s Reticence on Christian Persecution
By Christian Today | May 07, 2011
An Anglican bishop in the Church of England has criticized the West’s reticence on violence against Christians and other minority communities in the Middle East, South Asia and other parts of the world.
Writing in the latest edition of Standpoint magazine, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali said the United Nations had taken the necessary steps to protect people in Libya from attacks by their own government, but questioned why the United Nations or the West was “unable to tackle the widespread and growing persecution of Christians?”
Mere HER i Christian Today eller her i Christian Post.
Der har været lidt støj på linjen, når det gælder Srdja Trifkovic. Men nu reparerer Robert Spencer dialogen og forklarer sig:
Discord among counter-jihadists: a call for unity
By Robert Spencer – 12 Apr 2011
Many times here at Jihad Watch I have stressed the need for those who are resisting the global jihad and Islamic supremacism to stick together — or at least not to let jihadists, their agents, and/or their useful idiots (or even their own narrow self-interest or what they perceive as such) set them against other people who should be allies in our common fight for survival. At the risk of redundancy or belaboring the obvious, I will repeat here what I pointed out then about such “friendly fire attacks”:
“There is a dispiriting number of self-described counter-jihad activists who spend more time sniping at other counter-jihadists instead of actually doing something constructive to fight the jihad. There are those who know all about how it can all be done better and more effectively, but never quite manage to get off their couch and prove it. There are those who sling around reckless and false charges against others, and those who style themselves as junior Machiavellis, maneuvering publicly and privately, in ways more or less transparent, to muscle out those they apparently regard as competition.
I find all this distasteful and wrongheaded, and do not participate, but am for whatever reason often the recipient of it.”
Mere HER hos The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. Læs især sidste afsnit af artiklen – her trækker Spencer sine ord tilbage og anerkender i stedet Trifkovic. Kan også læses her hos Jihad Watch. Tidligere blogget om sagen:
‘There Is No Military Solution to the Libya Conflict’
April 13, 2011
Even after weeks of NATO air strikes, the conflict in Libya appears no closer to being resolved. SPIEGEL spoke with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen about whether bombs can lead to democracy, the possibility of Libya becoming a failed state and Germany’s reluctance to get involved.
Spiegel: Mr. Secretary General, the military leadership of the Libyan rebel government has leveled serious charges against NATO, saying the alliance has not been active enough in flying air strikes against troops loyal to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and is thus partly responsible for the deaths of countless civilians. Is NATO failing?
Rasmussen: I can assure you that we are fully implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 to protect the Libyan civilian population. The scope and speed of our operation remain high. During the first week of our NATO operation alone, we flew more than 1,000 sorties. We have already destroyed a third of Gadhafi’s military machinery.
What’s even more absurd and futile than going to war to spread democracy and advance human rights? Intervention to stop regimes from “killing their own people.”
This is the sole rationale offered for Obama’s Libya excursion (Operation Odyssey Dawn even sounds like a Carnival Cruise ship) – to keep a tyrant from killing his own people.
British Prime Minister David Cameron declares: “Colonel Gaddafi has made this happen. We can not allow the slaughter of civilians to continue.”
It is tempting and certainly very easy to point out that Obama’s war (or Obama’s “kinetic military action,” or “time-limited, scope-limited military action,” or whatever the latest ever more preposterous evasion is) is at odds with everything candidate Obama said about U.S. military action before his election. And certainly every attempt the president makes to explain his Libyan adventure is either cringe-makingly stupid (“I’m accustomed to this contradiction of being both a commander-in-chief but also somebody who aspires to peace”) or alarmingly revealing of a very peculiar worldview:
“That’s why building this international coalition has been so important,” he said the other day. “It is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally.”
Mere HER hos Orange County Register. Kan også læses her hos Investors eller her hos National Review Online under en anden overskrift.
Opdatering 27. marts 2011 – Diana West om Libyen:
It’s all about fighting for the Left’s ‘humanitarian causes’
By Diana West – March 26, 2011
Considering the weirdo-bizarre assault on Moammar Gadhafi’s forces led — but supposedly not really — by the United States under order of the United Nations Security Council (motley crew) and the Arab League (rogue’s gallery), we must realize America crossed a fat red line.
President Obama sent the U.S. military, already stretched and worn by darn near a decade of wars, into harm’s way for no compelling American reason.
Despite the military drama unfolding in Libya, the Middle East is only beginning to unravel. American policy-makers have been spoiled by events in Tunisia and Egypt, both of which boast relatively sturdy institutions, civil society associations and middle classes, as well as being age-old clusters of civilization where states of one form or another have existed since antiquity. Darker terrain awaits us elsewhere in the region, where states will substantially weaken once the carapace of tyranny crumbles. The crucial tests lie ahead, beyond the distraction of Libya.
Regardless of its good intentions, the U.S. intervention in Libya will be depicted once again as aggressive, predatory and anti-Muslim.
By Edward N. Luttwak – March 21, 2011
Once again the United States is bombing a Muslim country to liberate its people from their own sanguinary rulers. Once again we are told that innocent civilians are being massacred and that the United States must intervene as a matter of moral duty, in its capacity as a great and good nation. But in this case — even as part of a broader, U.N.-sanctioned coalition to enforce a no-fly zone — the U.S. should not have intervened at all.
No humanitarian appeal should ever be lightly dismissed, and indeed many Americans justifiably recall with deep regret the failure of the Clinton administration to intervene against the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when a few thousand lightly armed soldiers on the ground could have saved hundreds of thousands.
Like so many jihad plots and actual jihad attacks and attempted attacks these days, the jihad murder of two U.S. airmen and the wounding of two others outside the Frankfurt Airport in Germany Wednesday was initially dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. According to the German news agency DAPD, Boris Rhein, the interior minister for the German state of Hesse hurried to the airport and almost immediately declared that there were no indications that the shootings had been a terror attack.
One wonders what actually would constitute a terrorist attack for such analysts. Would the murderer have to announce that he was about to carry out a terrorist attack before he started shooting? Would he have to be carrying an al-Qaeda membership card? In the case of the Frankfurt Airport shooting, there were, in fact, numerous indications that this was a jihad attack. The murderer was Arif Uka, a Kosovar Muslim. Despite widespread assumptions among American analysts that Kosovar Muslims are mostly moderate, secular, peaceful, Westernized, and grateful for U.S. intervention on their behalf, in reality al-Qaeda and other jihad terror groups have been active in that region for over a decade.
According to Bismarck’s best known maxim on Europe’s most troublesome region, the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Americans could be forgiven for harboring similar sentiments after the murder of two U.S. airmen in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim.
Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton in the wake of his Monica difficulties: Make war, not love, as the boomers advise. So Clinton did – and without any pesky UN resolutions, or even the pretense of seeking them. Instead, he and Tony Blair and even Jacques Chirac just cried “Bombs away!” and got on with it. And the Left didn’t mind at all – because, for a modern Western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Unlike Iraq and all its supposed “blood for oil,” in Kosovo no one remembers why we went in, what the hell the point of it was, or which side were the good guys. (Answer: Neither.) The principal rationale advanced by Clinton and Blair was that there was no rationale. This was what they called “liberal interventionism,” which boils down to: The fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it.
Mere HER i The Orange County Register. Kan også læses her hos Investors eller her hos AINA.
Gaddafi: The Steyn connection
By Mark Steyn – March 1, 2011
Like most folks outside Colonel Gaddafi’s immediate family, I greatly enjoyed Sheikh Qaradawi’s recent fatwa calling on “whoever can fire a bullet” to kill the Libyan leader. But Point de Bascule, the excellent Quebec website, points out that until recently Qaradawi’s Muslim Brotherhood and Gaddafi’s World Islamic Call Society were all buddy-buddy.
Along the way, Point de Bascule also sheds some light on a fellow called Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub, who was an “expert witness” at my “Islamophobia” trial at the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal. He was flown in from his university in Philadelphia, and treated with fawning deference by the Canadian Islamic Congress’ oleaginous counsel, and only marginally less so by the troika of hack “human rights” judges. Dr. Ayoub described himself as a loyal Canadian citizen who shared Trudeau’s vision of a harmonious multicultural society but had moved to America because Canadian taxes were too high. At this point I leapt to my feet and cried, “Objection, your honor! Every loyal Canadian knows that confiscatory taxation is an indispensable part of Trudeau’s vision of a harmonious multicultural society.”
Mere HER i National Review Online. Kan også læses her hos Free Republic.
Et klart mønster tegner sig. Konservative medier får etiketten ‘højreorienteret’, hvorimod venstreorienterede får ‘uafhængig’, ‘velanset’ eller ‘troværdig’.
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