Fighting alongside their Canadian brethren in the greater war on terrorism.

Newsfeed…. Nov 17, 2004
Marine shoots wounded Iraqi … War crime … Abu Graihb … Goss bullies CIA … UN Human Rights commissioner criticizes coalition … Starr Jones’ eye for queer guy … Insurgency grows … warmonger Condi Rice black … Iraq police abducted…
(More here)
update

Rusty Shackleford is reporting that Hosting Anime has shut down all terrorist related sites on their servers, including several linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The website had been previously hacked on several occasions by a group calling itself Teamz USA. The story was first reported here (and then ripped off by MSNBC) and a second hacking was reported by Chad Evans (also ripped by MSM). Might I just add that a certain Star Wars themed website gave out the URL for Zarqawi to well over a hundred people promising to take down the site again….Perhaps the new owners just got sick of all the hackers?

Now, if someone would only take care of Al Jazeera.

Fairuz Yamulky, a 38 year old Iraqi-Canadian, was taken hostage in Iraq on Sept. 7 and held for 16 days. She was tortured, beaten and threatened with death. She escaped with the assistance of one of her captors.
U.S. forces diverted a Blackhawk helicopter to pick up her and her protector in the desert, they provided medical tests and trauma counselling and gave her a place to stay in a general’s apartment.
Her treatment by Canadian government officials?

Once in Amman, Yamulky said Canadian officials never offered any followup medical help. She eventually saw her own doctor in Dubai, where her family lived while she worked in Iraq.
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Yamulky said she could afford to pay what Canadian officials required and despite feeling traumatized was able to make some decisions.
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But others in similar situations might not have her financial resources nor be able mentally to cope with such demands, she said.
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“Some people come out of these traumas and they’re totally distorted,” said Yamulky.
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“I do thank the Canadian government for keeping in contact with my family. But I do at the same time want them to have something in place when things like this go wrong.”
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Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Marie-Christine Kilkoff said officials followed Yamulky’s plight very closely and worked with local Iraqi authorities and “other countries with a presence in Baghdad.”
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Once Yamulky was free, they obtained an emergency passport for her and arranged travel to Jordan, though the flight was paid for by relatives and friends, said Kilkoff.
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“While in Amman, Canadian officials advised Mrs. Yamulky that we could assist her with hotel and flight arrangements, which she declined,” she said.
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The department has been warning Canadians since 1995 not to travel to Iraq, said Kilkoff, and its travel advisory states it has no consular services in that country.
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Canada has one foreign service officer as a liaison with the Iraqi interim government and an RCMP officer looking into ways of aiding the country’s police forces.
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Dining with Canadian embassy officials in Amman, Yamulky said one left the table to take a telephone call from Ottawa. She returned to ask if Yamulky would make a statement that the Canadian government had helped her.
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“I refused,” she said. “I said I do not know how much you guys have done in my case.”

One might argue that when policies are established, and warnings given to travellers, that those who ignore them do so at their own risk and expense. Fair enough – but let us not forget that this is the same Canadian government that issued emergency passports and paid the airfare for the Khadr terrorism clan to return to Canada from Pakistan.

This time the suspects had grenades.

My initial reaction to the Bin Laden release yesterday was about the same as Wretchard’s. The tone has changed.

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

On Larry King last evening, Walter Cronkite agrees – Bin Laden would like to negotiate. Of course, he also said this…

“Indeed. Indeed. And the thing that in bringing this threat to us, there is almost, in the fact that he dressed well, that he looked well, he was clean shaven, nearly clean shaven as those folks get.”

Say, what?
update, via Instapundit; Jeff Jarvis is slowly (?) starting to see he’s supporting a candidate whose party is suffering from a case of full-blown political necrotizing fasceitis…

Roger Ebert gave this movie a single star. I can’t say I’m surprised. This is a man who will undoubtedly place Michael Moore’s discredited “documentary” on his Ten Best for 2004.

If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I’d be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it. The White House gets a free pass, since the movie seems to think Team America makes its own policies without political direction.
I wasn’t offended by the movie’s content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides — indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they’re wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn’t matter.

Really, Roger?
Were we watching the same film?
Sure, there were moments when the trigger happy “Team America” members went over the top, but you know, there was a certain “inanimate object” aspect to their “collateral damage” – the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx…
But, were you out taking a p*** during the scene involving the terrorist bombing of the Panama Canal, Roger? Did you not notice how completely unfunny the movie suddenly became when those “dead” puppets were bobbing in the floodwaters?
Come to think of it, how did your review manage to omit mention of the left’s cult-hero Michael Moore – a suicide bomber, inside Mount Rushmore? Certainly, that had to be one of the most politically charged “statements” of the film. Hans Blix, being torn to pieces in Kim Jong-il’s shark tank – did you sleep through that or just close your eyes in horror?
Finally, the biggest hint of them all – how did it end, Roger? Who “saves the world” from destruction? Alex Baldwin? Sean “rivers of chocolate” Penn?
Team America is a funny, funny movie. The sex scenes would someday join those “moments in movie history” – if you could actually show them during a “moments in movie history” retrospective. This movie outragiously, gloriously slays all the sacred cows of the politically correct. Contrary to all prior warnings, I was never offended.
I left thinking that this movie was not at all what the reviewers would have you believe it is. It has one of the most deadly serious undercurrents of any “comedy” I’ve seen in a very long time. Maybe because of the absurdity, exaggeration and the bawdiness, that undercurrent is more easily avoided or overlooked, but for me, it was just driven home more starkly because of the contrast. Perhaps it’s the fact that the stance taken by Parker and Stone – a vicious indictment of the left, of the entertainment industry and the cancer of anti-Americanism that infects and undermines the war on Islamic fascism – is so counter-Hollywood and so rare.
Go see this film.
(Don’t take grandma.)

James Joyner highlights this WaPo report:

Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials. Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses. “If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force,” said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah’s Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents.

(Instapundit has more.)
Belmont Club looks at the murder of Ken Bigley and the still stubborn reluctance of Western media to accept that we are at war.
A bit of serious, but necessary, reading. Grab a coffee and get to it.

Mosnews

A foreign mercenary who apparently came from Canada has been killed while fighting Russian forces in Chechnya, the headquarters of the counter-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus told the RIA-Novosti news agency on Friday.
“The documents found on the killed African-American testify to the fact that he had arrived from Canada,” the agency’s source said. The source noted, however, that the authenticity of these documents was yet to be verified.
“At present we are translating and checking the numerous visas in his passport. The expertise to check their authenticity will be held in the nearest future,” the HQ source said.
Official spokesman of the North Caucasus HQ, Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, said that the killed African-American was an expert in explosives and that he had arrived in Chechnya to replace Algerian fighter Abu Muskhab who was recently taken prisoner by Russian troops. (Kamal Burrakhlia, AKA Abu Muskhab was detained by Russia’s FSB in Chechnya on September 17, 2004. Before arriving in Chechnya in 2001, the mercenary had lived in Great Britain for almost 10 years.)
“The mercenary and three Chechen gunmen who accompanied him were killed on Thursday near the village of Niki-Khita in the Kurchaloi District of Chechnya,” Shabalkin said. The gunmen belonged to a group headed by the warlord Avdorkhanov who is under the immediate command of Aslan Maskhadov, he added.
A grenade launcher, a machine gun and two assault rifles were found on the killed fighters, the spokesman said.

The Belmont Club puts the data cited in a NYT article on “sweeping” violence in Iraq into perspective. Or more accurately, into a graph. (image below is a partial snapshot – go read the whole thing).

Stewart Bell, author of Cold Terror, in the National Post;

Yusuf Islam, the British singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, was the guest of honour at a Toronto fundraising dinner hosted by an organization that has since been identified by the Canadian government as a “front” for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
In a videotape of the 1998 event obtained by the National Post, Mr. Islam describes Israel as a “so-called new society” created by a “so-called religion” and urges the audience to donate to the Jerusalem Fund for Human Services to “lessen the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Palestine and the Holy Land.”
The Jerusalem Fund is one of four “fronts” named in a secret Privy Council Office memo that was sent to Jean Chretien, then prime minister, on May 23, 2000, discussing what it called groups that “have unsavoury links with terrorism.

Via Norm Spector.

Continue reading →

Reluctantly, the American prisoners did as they were told, all 150 of them, crawling single file into the dark, poorly ventilated pits. Everyone but Stidham, whose stretcher was conveniently placed beside one of the trench entrances. If the planes came, his buddies would gather his limp form and tuck him into the shelter with everyone else.
They waited and waited but heard not a single American plane, let alone a hundred. They huddled in the stifling dankness of their collective body heat, sweat coursing down their bare chests. The air-raid bell continued to peal. A Navy signalman named C.C. Smith refused to go into his pit. Suddenly the Buzzard set upon him. He raised his saber high so that it gleamed in the midday sun, and with all his strength he brought it blade side down. Smith’s head was cleaved in two, the sword finally stopping midway down the neck.
Then, peeking out the ends of the trenches, the men saw several soldiers bursting into the compound. They were carrying five-gallon buckets filled with a liquid. The buckets sloshed messily as the soldiers walked. With a quick jerk of the hands, they flung the contents into the openings of the trenches. By the smell of it on their skin, the Americans instantly recognized what it was — high-octane aviation fuel from the airstrip. Before they could apprehend the full significance of it, other soldiers tossed in lighted bamboo torches. Within seconds the trenches exploded in flames, The men squirmed over each other and clawed at the dirt as they tried desperately to shirnk from the intense heat. They choked back the smoke and the fumes, their nostrils assailed by the smell of singed hair and roasting flesh. They were trapped like termites in their own sealed nest.
Only a few managed to free themselves. Dr.Carl Mango, from Pennsylvania, sprang from his hole, his clothes smoldering. His arms were outstretched as he peaded — “Show some reason, please God show reason” — but a machine gunner mowed him down.
Another prisoner crawled from his trench, wrested a rifle from the hands of a soldier, and shot him before receiving a mortal stab in the back. A number of men dashed toward the fence and tried to press through it but were quickly riddled with lead, leaving a row of corpses hung from the barbed stands like dried cuttlefish. A few men managed to slip through the razor ribbon and leap from the high cliff, but more soldiers were waiting on the beach to finish them off. Recognizing the futility of escape but wanting to wreak a parting vengeance, one burning prisoner emerged from his trench, wrapped his arms tightly around the first soldier he saw, and didn’t let go — a death embrace that succeeded in setting the surprised executioner on fire.
All the while, Lieutenant Sato scurried from trench to trench with saber drawn, loudly exhorting his men and occasionally punctuating his commands with a high, nervous laugh. At his order, another wave of troops approached the air-raid shelters, throwing grenades into the flaming entrances and raking them with gunfire. Some of the troops poked their rifle barrels through the entrances of the trenches and fired point-blank at the huddled forms within. James Stidham, the paralytic who had been watching all of this from his stretcher, quietly moaned in terror. A soldier stepped over to him and with a perfunctory glance fired two slugs into his face.

From Ghost Soldiers– an account of the atrocity at Palawan, Dec.14, 1944.
Today, as we witness acts of what seems unprecedented barbarism, we must remind ourselves that others have been down this road before.
But, unlike today’s helpless individuals whose names flash around the globe as they plead for mercy, their murders recorded single file — the American and Filipino prisoners of war who suffered years of unspeakable cruelty, who died of torture, starvation, disembowling, decapitation at the hands of the Japanese, were dumped in nameless thousands in mass graves, or simply left to rot.
Yet, those who survived were witness to the transformation of that society into a peaceful, prosperous democracy in their lifetime. It must still seem miraculous to them.
I’m nearly finished reading Ghost Soldiers. It’s a difficult book. As I turn the pages, another contrast becomes evident – that of the steady and courageous resolve of leaders of that time, and a would-be-President of today, whose reaction to the ugly reality of defeating and reforming inhuman ideologies is to publicly proclaim the effort a “mess”, and announce that “We need a summit.”
The ghosts of Bataan would despair.

Mundir Badr Haloum, for Al-Safir (Lebanon), September 13;

“Twelve Nepalese citizens are slaughtered – Islam. A metro station is bombed – Islam. Civilian aircraft crash – Islam. A school is taken and the souls of 50 children [are lost] for the soul of [each] terrorist – Islam. A bus is bombed here, a railway train there, and before that there were hospitals and theaters, etc – all of them Islamic acts. [Behind] the color green are exposed rivers red with blood, flowing in the streets and public squares. And Muslims everywhere.
[…]
“Self-examination – would result in favor of abandoning Islam – yet what gets passed on from one generation to the next is – the latest version of Islam – Algeria, Afghanistan, Moscow, and New York, the version of the planes and the buses, the metro stations, the theaters and the residential complexes. What gets passed on from one generation to the next is the faith of Jihad that takes lightly the spilling of others’ blood. How easy it is to shove someone into the category of the enemy. What gets passed on from generation to generation is the belief in legal rulings that forbid thought and permit killing. Religious Muslims prepare an offering to heaven – a fresh bit of human flesh, meant to be evidence of the truth and the proof of Jihad for the absolute truth.
“Indeed, we as Muslims produce terrorism, succor it, and praise it. We condemn it only when forced to. Motivated by considerations of power, interests, and diplomacy, we wear a pained expression on our faces but in our hearts we rejoice at the brilliant success – a large number of casualties. Unfortunately, in this black reality it does not matter if it is an American, Israeli, or Russian mind who is responsible for certain terrorist operations or whether those who kill themselves are poor, ignorant, or destitute.”
[…]
“Islam is in need of true reform. Islam’s need [for reform] – or, to be precise, our need for Islam’s reform – is not less than the need for reform in the Arab political regimes. This is the need for people who are capable of fearlessly acknowledging that terrorism nests within us as Muslims and that we must exorcise it. Unfortunately, the meaning of delay is more death. The reform will take a long time and the price will be high, but it is the only path to our return to history as Muslims and not as terrorists.”

MIchael Totten on the end of the Intifada.

The doom-mongers were wrong. Period. Just as they were wrong when they predicted disaster in Afghanistan. Just as they were wrong when they predicted disaster in Iraq the first time around. Just as they were wrong when they (although it was mostly Republicans this time) predicted disaster in Kosovo.
Those who keep insisting we or one of our democratic allies will actually lose a war have been wrong for a third of a century now. I am thirty four years old. The last time the doom-mongers were right I was three. They have been consistently wrong throughout my entire living memory. (Am I forgetting something? Have we lost a war since Vietnam?)

Wretchard, at The Belmont Club follows up;

The most remarkable thing about Israel’s campaign against the Intifada was not it’s adoption of new warfighting concepts, like Europe’s Human Security Doctrine, but its reversion to the oldest method of all: winning by fighting back. Social historians in the future, should we ever attain it, may endlessly wonder how it was possible for Western European and liberal American intellectuals to forget 5,000 years of military experience in favor of the slogans, some composed facetiously, of the Peace Movement of the 1960s.

For two fellows as observant as Wretchard and Totten, I’m surprised that they overlook the obvious – at their ideological core, the “Peace Movement” and Western European and liberal American intellectuals have far more invested in the notion of losing wars than they do in winning them.
Why would they endorse methods that have a proven track record of success?

No one needs to be reminded of the day. No one needs to say “never forget”. Not yet, and not for a very long time. With the battle against Islamic extremism in full swing around the globe, no one needs a jab in the ribs to remember just what it was that happened on a pleasant morning in New York City, in Washington, in the skies over Pennsylvania.
But while we are in no danger of forgetting, discussion has shifted to 9/11’s impact on the present, and the implications for the future. Today, the focus is directed to the political and geopolitical fallout. We’re obsessed with dissecting, analyzing and second guessing. We argue about how best to guard, prevent, secure.
“Never forget” is evolving into “never again”.
As the years pass and the events (if not the consequences) become further removed, the shared anguish for those who lost family, friends, co-workers will begin to dim. It’s the natural way of things.
And so, this is why we have memorials. Not to mark historic events, but to honour the personal – the heros, victims, the sacrifice, and those who struggle on without them.
Today is their day.

I saw this piece a couple of days ago, but in light of a private email suggesting I draw attention to it, I think today is an appropriate day.
We Are So Sorry for 9-11
A welcome sign that moderate Muslims are finally starting to understand, and more importantly – speak out against the qualified outrage and weak disclaimers of the Islamic apologensia.

After numerous admissions of guilt by Bin Laden and numerous corroborating admissions by captured top level Al-Qaida operatives, we wonder, does the Muslim leadership have the dignity and courage to apologize for 9-11?
If not 9-11, will we apologize for the murder of school children in Russia?
If not Russia, will we apologize for the train bombings in Madrid, Spain?
If not Spain, will we apologize for suicide bombings in buses, restaurants and other public places?
If not suicide bombings, will we apologize for the barbaric beheadings of human beings?
If not beheadings, will we apologize for the rape and murder of thousands of innocent people in Darfour?
If not Darfour, will we apologize for the blowing up of two Russian planes by Muslim women?
What will we apologize for?
What will it take for Muslims to realize that those who commit mass murder in the name of Islam are not just a few fringe elements?
What will it take for Muslims to realize that we are facing a crisis that is more deadly than the Aids epidemic?
What will it take for Muslims to realize that there is a large evil movement that is turning what was a peaceful religion into a cult?

More of this, please.

Rusty Shackleford has more video links and photos from the Beslan school massacre than you’ll probably care to see.

“We share the same biology*
Regardless of ideology
What might save us, me, and you
Is that the Islamists love their children too“.

Never underestimate the moral and intellectual decay of the left.
Flea, on Beldar

“It took less than a day for the vultures at The Guardian to point a finger of blame for the butchery at Beslan. The guilty: Russia, America and Israel.”

Wretchard notes the reaction of the EU;

Dateline Europe: the EU seeks Russian explanation for school siege toll:

Valkenburg, Netherlands, Sept 3 (Reuters) – The European Union asked Russia to explain the bloody end to the siege of a school by Chechen gunmen on Friday with huge loss of life. In a statement in the name of the presidency of the 25-nation EU, Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot said all countries should work together to prevent such tragedies. “But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened,” he added.