Ex-Leftitsts Speak Out

Also via Tammy, five former leftists speak on their political journeys in this symposium on "Leaving the Left" at FrontPage. The guests are Tammy Bruce, Phyllis Chesler (another hero of mine), Dr. Paul Kamolnick, John R. Bradley, and Keith Thompson.

More on Rosa Parks

Tammy Bruce has some information on Rosa Parks' activist background. Tammy argues that the popular image of Parks as an "everywoman" diminishes her:

The actual history of Rosa Parks is a reminder of what an individual can accomplish. That big things happen by those who plan; the lesson is that we can and should as individuals make commitments and set out to make a difference.

RTWT.

Condi Photo Manipulated

Demonic, triangular-shaped, black-centered eyes were added to a photograph of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as From the Pen demonstrates.

The USA Today version on the right was deliberately altered to make Condi Rice look more menacing. Notice how the whites of the eyes are highlighted to make her BLACK eyes look BLACKER and HATEFUL.

Go to the link to see a Rathergate-style animation of the original and retouched photos.

Powerline and Michelle Malkin are on it.

Times of India on Communist Chinese threat to US

An article on the PRC threat to the United States appears in The Times of India:

The greatest threat to America is not terrorism but a belligerent communist nation that is over billion strong, says Constantine Menges, an unknown figure even to the scrupulous China experts, in his recent book, China: The Gathering Threat . ...

... Bill Gertz, the national security reporter for The Washington Times and New York Times reporter writes in the foreword, "Menges explains why we need to go on the political offensive against Beijing's communist rulers and bring democracy to China."

In fact Gertz opens his foreword by saying that the challenge posed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation represent the most serious long-term threat to American national security, now and for the foreseeable future.

Full article at the link.

Why do people hate the Jews?

An opinion piece at Portland State University's student newspaper The Vanguard offers some explanations.

Currently, Jerusalem is deep inside the West Bank, and may be the single biggest impediment to a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the Diaspora, or scattering, Jews left their ancient seat of government and went all across Europe. Then the Holocaust came, the Great Burning, and Jews started to leave the Europe that hated them for centuries because of their exclusive religion. Nobody can really convert to Judaism — you are born Jewish, or you are not.

The Jews did not like to integrate with other peoples. When the Greeks met the Egyptians, they said, “Oh, your Ammon is our Zeus. We worship the same gods. Let’s feast together and exchange presents.” When the Greeks met the Jews, the Jews told them, “No, our God is not your God. Our God belongs to us alone. Take your God and shove it.”

People didn’t like Jews because of this; they feared whatever secrets their exclusive god might be hiding. Scholars think this attributed to the hereditary prejudice against Jews, and in response, Zionism attracted the scattered Jews back to the land their ancient kingdom once rested upon. Israel was formed.

Instead of keeping the barriers put in place by the United Nations after the Six-Day War, in 1967, Israel proceeded to grab as much land as possible over the last century. ...

Go to the link to read the rest of the column in the Vanguard.

UPDATE: The Vanguard has removed the article, with an apology. Please go to the link for further statements.

More at this post:
Retraction, Apology from Vanguard

UPDATE: Please read Caelan MacTavish's response at the link. I will post comments on this shortly.

More Uppity Middle Eastern Women

Iraqi women take up arms as security contractors. It's worth the 15 seconds it takes to register for this Washington Times article ... go read what these women are doing, and why they're doing it. (One is a conservative Muslim, an action movie fan, and calls herself "Xena". Heh.)

Hat tip: Hyscience.

Antipodes ...

... is a fancy Greek word meaning "dig here"
Hat tip: Judith.

Saddam on Trial

Iraq's deposed fuehrer went on trial today. Saddam Hussein pleaded "innocent" to the first charges brought against him, stemming from the 1982 killings of more than 150 people.
MSNBC:

A judge on Wednesday adjourned the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants until Nov. 28, after Saddam pleaded innocent to murder and other charges, questioned the court’s authority and scuffled with guards.

The main reason for the adjournment was because some 30 to 40 witnesses had been too scared to show up, the presiding judge said.

“They were too scared to be public witnesses,” Rizgar Mohammed Amin told Reuters. “We’re going to work on this issue for the next sessions.” ...

The first session lasted just three hours, during which presiding judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin read the defendants their rights and the charges against them — which also include torture, forced expulsions and illegal imprisonment in a case involving the massacre of nearly 150 Shiites in 1982. ...

Mohammed at Iraq the Model:

“Does he deserve a fair trial?” this was the question that kept surfacing every five minutes…he wasn’t the least fair to his people and he literally reduced justice to verbal orders from his mouth to be carried out by his dogs.
Why do we have to listen to his anticipated rudeness and arrogant stupid defenses? We already knew he was going to try to twist things and claim that the trial lacks legitimacy or that it’s more a court of politics rather than a court of law, blah, blah, blah…

“Why do we have to listen to this bull****?” said one of my friends.
“I prefer the trial goes like this:
Q:Are you Saddam Hussein?
A:Yes.
Then take this bullet in the head.”

Everyone could find a reason to immediately execute a criminal who never let his victims say a word to defend themselves “let’s execute him and get over this” sentiments like this were said while we watched the proceedings which were rather boring and sluggish for the first half of the session.
At the beginning we were displeased by the presentation of the prosecution which was more like a piece of poetry in the wrong time and place and this is what encouraged the defense to give us a worn out speech about objectivity and how the court must not go into sideways; the thing which both the prosecution and the defense were doing.

Anyhow, the prosecutor began reading the facts and figures about what happened in Dijail. The defendants went silent but Saddam objected on some details and then prosecutor said “Do you want me to show the film where you said and did that?” Saddam stopped talking and the prosecutor asked the court to allow showing the film, we don’t know if it was played there as transmission was paused for a while.

As the prosecution went deeper into details and facts, the way we viewed the trial began to change an d those among us who were demanding a bullet in Saddam’s head now seemed pleased with the proceedings “I don’t think I want to see that bullet now, I want to see justice take place as it should be”.
We were watching an example of justice in the new Iraq, a place where no one should be denied his rights, not even Saddam.

Tammy Bruce points out an unsettling episode.

Go read the full posts at the links.

Google Does the Right Thing

Physics Org:

Mainland media control over Chinese-language content took a blow Wednesday with state press claiming rage after Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant Google removed referrals to Taiwan as a province.

Chinese media reports said "Google.com, world's largest Internet search engine, deleted the words 'Taiwan, a province of the People's Republic of China' on a map of Taiwan linked to its maps search engine maps.google.com. This has drawn rage from Chinese officials and the people." ...

Please take a moment to send a message to Google.

Headline of the Day

First, the text of the article:

TRIPOLI, Libya [AP] - Several hundred Libyans demonstrated Tuesday in the Libyan capital to protest President Bush's call for the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death for allegedly infecting 400 children with the AIDS virus.

The United States and European Union have been pressuring Libya to free the six, who were sentenced to death in May 2004 on charges they infected Libyan children with HIV-contaminated blood in an experiment to find a cure for AIDS.

The defendants have appealed the verdicts, and international observers say the charges were contrived and extracted by torture. ...

And now, the headline:
Libyans Demonstrate Against Bush's Stance

Well, that tells you everything you need to know, right?

Chinese Dissident Protests Yahoo/PRC Collusion

David Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy:

A few weeks ago, I criticized Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco for cooperating with evil, because each of those companies assists the Chinese suppression of dissent, in order to be able to make money from the lucrative and growing Chinese market. Some apologists for the companies replied that, even though the companies were assisting repression and making it more efficient and pervasive, the companies were somehow encouraging the long-run development of freedom in China.

Today, the Financial Times reports on a letter which a leading Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, has sent to Yahoo. Having spent time in prison for speaking the truth about China's ruling Communist Party, Liu "says Yahoo has enough market clout not to need to toady to authorities." He explains the corporate-communist deal: coporations make profits at the expense of human rights; the communists are given Internet control, and new means to squelch dissent. Thus:

“The collusion of these two kinds of ugliness means that there is no way for western investment to promote freedom of speech in China, and that in fact it greatly increases the ability of the Communist party to blockade and control the internet,” he writes.
“You are helping the Communist party maintain an evil system of control over freedom of information and speech,” he writes.

Simply put, there appears to be no way to be an ethical Internet company in China today, just as there was no way to be an ethical supplier of spy equipment to the USSR or Nazi Germany.

Read the rest at the link.

Bobby Schindler Speaks Out

Deseret Morning News

Bobby Schindler says his memory is seared with images of his sister, Terri Schiavo, after courts approved removal of her feeding tube in a high-profile right-to-die/right-to-life battle he says wasn't always fairly portrayed in the media.

... "She was beautiful, she was alive, she was a human being and had a family willing to . . . show her compassion as every human being deserves. But the courts decided she would be better off dead."

About six months have passed since Schiavo died. And Schindler is on an international speaking tour of sorts, criticizing the right-to-die movement and, through the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, pushing for changes in federal and state laws to protect the lives of the elderly and people with disabilities.

He addressed about 150 people at Westminster College Wednesday night and spoke with the Deseret Morning News beforehand. Student leaders had invited him after learning he had spoken to another university, free of charge. His Salt Lake speech also included no honorarium, he said....

Read the rest at the link. (Hat tip: Blogs for Terri.

A couple of points I want to touch on here. The Terri Schiavo case never was about the right to die. It was about the right to live - without which the right to die is meaningless. A lot of liberals were just sure this was a case of some crazed right-wingers trying to keep a woman alive against her wishes. But the nature of Terri's wishes was - in my view, and in the view of many reasonable people - very much open to question. And to compensate for the weakness of the evidence for Terri's supposed wish to die, the kill-Terri side hedged their bets by inviting us to make assumptions about what Terri would want, or what we would want if we were in her place.

There's a lot more I want to say about this, but Shabbat is coming, so I'm going to stop for now.