This exerpt from the Bill Whittle essay entitled “WAR”;

There are two images I will never forget, and I expect I will think of them often in the days and weeks to come. For in the front row of this parade of horror and depravity, I have watched a fundamentalist Islamic crowd stone two women to death. They were covered head to toe in shockingly white linen – the better to see the bloodstains. Taken into a field and buried up to their waists, they looked like odd white sails on a sand horizon, until the stones began to fly, leaving red carnations where they landed. One of the women just crumpled, bent at the waist, and I still pray that this person was knocked unconscious within the first minute or so. The other did not go peacefully into that good night. She died fighting and struggling, enduring the most sickening lurches as the unseen stones fell on her, twisting under that now-scarlet hood, trying to protect her face as best she could, as hundreds of her friends and relatives vented their rage, calling out the name of their god as we would cheer on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Allahu Ackbar! Allahu Ackbar! Allahu Ackbar!
I will not forget that image.
And I will not forget another one, either. As long as I draw breath, I swear I will never forget the sight of two people holding hands, and leaping from 108 stories above the hard concrete sidewalks that I myself have walked, gawking skyward at one of the wonders of the world. I will not forget them. I will not forget their fall, the spin that finally tore their hands apart as they fell forever, forever down that quarter-mile. I will never stop wondering what they said to each other in that last moment, or their cries to each other as they launched themselves to their deaths, having watched their friends take the same leap a few moments before. I will never forget what an unimaginable hell that their cozy office, full of coffee mugs and pictures of grandchildren, had become in order for them to make that choice, with the ruins of their friends visible on the streets so far below them.

His book, Silent America, is now out.

Imagine is “America’s alternative national anthem since 9/11�?
Words fail me.
And that’s something I have in common with John Lennon at the time he was writing that saccharine totalitarian dirge. – Andrew Stuttaford

A Belmont Club history review for the modern Nazi distortionist.

If Hitler was altogether more evil than we can conceive, he arose from a time and circumstance which few if any can still remember. Any comparisons between the 1945 and 2004 are likely to be inexact. Those who point to the shooting of Jihadi in Fallujah by a US Marine as evidence that America is drifting into Nazism would do well to remember that in 1945, American troops who arrived in Dachau were so disgusted by what they saw they executed hundreds of SS guards on the spot. This is a link to remarkable photographs of the incident.

“The killing of unarmed POWs did not trouble many of the men in I company that day for to them the SS guards did not deserve the same protected status as enemy soldiers who have been captured after a valiant fight.

To many of the men in I company, the SS were nothing more than wild, vicious animals whose role in this war was to starve, brutalize, torment, torture and murder helpless civilians.” Flint Whitlock, The Rock of Anzio, From Sicily to Dachau: A history of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division.

Iraq link roundup:
Greyhawk: It’s a good thing we’re communicating by written words now rather than spoken, because there’s a helicopter parked about 50 yards from me, still running, an ambulance next to it with a guy on a stretcher in between. It’s loud – but it’s also dark out right now so I can’t see if it’s an American on that stretcher or an Iraqi. Whoever it is they’re on their way out now. A must read.
Jeremy Brown on the current peril of Iraqi blogger Zayed. (Healing Iraq).
Rising concerns in Europe about the “growing ethnic tensions as EU nations struggle to absorb a steady stream of poor, mostly Muslim immigrants.”
James Joyner has the MSM versions, plus good news on debt forgiveness.
Donald Sensing on the Marine shooting, and how it might be viewed under the Geneva Convention.
Powerline sums coverage up succintly today –

Today, the Associated Press reports: “Violent Attacks Sweep Baghdad; GI Killed”: […] Baghdad is, I believe, a city approximately equal to Los Angeles in area and population. One can fairly question whether incidents occurring in six locations constitute “widespread clashes” “sweep[ing] Baghdad.” But, as always, the tone of the coverage of the Iraq war reflects the agenda of those who write the news.