A Quote

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

Marcus Aurelius
Roman emperor and stoic philosopher
121-180 A.D.

h/t: FrauBudgie at Red Hot Cuppa Politics
(Mark, I know you’ll enjoy this particular quote!)

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Forced Conversion: More Than Just Faith

The debate over giving in or standing strong when faced with the threat of death is being debated across the country since the kidnapping and release of Fox News’ Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. Whether you feel that Steve and Olaf did what they had to in order to stay alive or you feel that they should have stayed strong because nothing would make you denounce Christ, you must remember that this is just one part of the issue. The other is all about appearances.

As we have found in this war on terror and especially noticeable in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, appearances can be everything. Hezbollah’s manipulation of the media was both obvious and yet ignored by those reporting it. It did not matter that Hezbollah was using residential areas to launch missles and rockets into Israel. When Israel took out those locations they were accused of purposely targeting civilian areas. With the recent kidnapping, it was about how easily it appeared that Centanni and Wiig went along with the kidnappers in converting to Islam.

David Warren, a writer for The Ottawa Citizen, explains how this easy conversion appears to the kidnappers and terrorists of the Middle East in his article Doing the Enemy’s Work.

Why did Fatah bother to make the video? Didn’t they realize conversion under duress means nothing? That no one, East or West, would take it at face value?

They didn’t make it for face value. They made it to show the whole Muslim world, via satellite television, what wimps these Westerners are. That they’ll do anything at all to save their lives, that they don’t think twice about it. That is the substance of most Islamo-fascist propaganda: that the West consists of straw men, of men without chests, of men easily pushed over.

These two journalists were captured and held under nasty conditions by a branch of Fatah: the Palestinian party associated not with the “radical” Hamas, but with the supposedly “moderate” party of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority. They were for use as chips in prisoner exchanges. They could be sold, or exchanged for other prisoners.

President Abbas could have had them sprung at a word, but did not do so at first, for he had nothing to lose by “playing with the crisis”. At no point, for instance, was he told he could either release the prisoners, or have his compound at Ramallah levelled. We don’t “overreact” in the West, the way we used to do — we don’t like to put out little fires, we prefer to wait until they are big ones. And we prefer blaming ourselves to blaming the enemy, when the enemy lights the fire. We assume they only do it because we must have done something to annoy them.

Jean-François Revel: “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.”

At the time Revel said this, the enemy power was Soviet Communism. The intellectuals, the smart journalists, the fashionable academics, the smug urbane of all descriptions, were hardly pro-Communist. They were more ironical than that, they were “anti-anti-Communist”. Today they are anti-anti-Islamo-fascist.

Warren uses the term “straw men” and another is “paper tiger.” We talk the talk, but we don’t walk the walk. We take the easy road rather than fight. Why is that? Have we become so complacent, so easily swayed that we have lost our resolve, lost our will to stand up for what we believe? Warren states that society as a whole has allowed this to happen.

I created a scene with a column, many years ago, when I wrote about the young men in the corridors of the University of Montreal, who stood by and watched while Gamil Garbi (alias Marc Lépine) shot fourteen women to death. To a man (if you could call them men), they explained afterwards, “We couldn’t do anything, he had a gun.” As I pointed out at the time, we have bred young men who will stand by and watch a psychopath shoot defenceless women, so long as he assures them he will not shoot them. And we have bred the young women these young men deserve.

Men without chests, men without character, men who don’t think twice.

What will it take for us to realize that we are losing our values and our country by giving in and giving up?

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Thank You: A Video

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Quote for Today

“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Thomas Paine
The American Crisis, No. 1
December 19, 1776

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My First Blogiversary

These are my first posts when I started blogging a year ago, back in the day when I was over at Blogspot (aka Blogsnot). I’ve come a long way, learned a lot (thank you Harvey of Bad Example for all your help and blogging tips!) and made many, many blogging friends (check out my Favorite Places on the sidebar)! I have had the priviledge of being linked by Michelle Malkin, had a post read on the news in Oklahoma City and of course, mentioned on air, linked to and become friends with Andrea Shea King and Mark Vance of Constitutional Public Radio and their blog, The Radio Patriots). They are great people and I must give a giant thank you to THIRDWAVEDAVE for introducing me to them!

Here are my first posts:

Tuesday, August 30, 2005
To begin at the beginning

As good a place to start as any.
Just trying to learn the ins and outs of webposting and site creation. Old dog/new tricks and all that. Hoping to understand it enough to do a little e-commerce. We shall see if any of this is possible.

posted by Anna @ 12:11 PM Welcome | Track (0)

Hurricane

Sat in front of the TV watching the devastation in the Southern states. So thankful not to be living there, but heartsick for the people who do…or rather did. To lose absolutely everything including, in some instances, loved ones. Bet the world will not come running to help though they did when the Tsunami hit Indonesia.

posted by Anna @ 9:32 PM Welcome | Track (0)

Live This Life

by Big & Rich

“Met a man on the street last night,
Said his name was Jesus.
Met a man on the street last night.
Thought he was crazy till I watched him heal a blind man.
I watched him heal a blind man and now I see.

I’ll live this life until this life won’t let me live here anymore,
Then I will walk, yes I will walk with patience through that open door.
I have no fears, angels follow me wherever I may go.
I’ll live this life until this life won’t let me live here anymore.

Met a girl in a chair with wheels, but no one else would see her.
Met a girl in a chair with wheels.
Everyone was so afraid to even look down on her,
And she just spread her little wings and flew away.

I’ll live this life until this life won’t let me live her anymore,
Then I will walk, yes I will walk with patience through that open door.
I have no fears, angels follow me wherever I may go.
I’ll live this life until this life won’t let me live here anymore.

Met a kid on a bridge last night, contemplating freedom.
Met a kid on a bridge last night.
And he said, ‘I’m tired of this maddening life and I’m ready to go meet Jesus.’
And I said, ‘He’s a friend of mine. Met him just last night and it’s all right.’

It’s all right…

I’ll live this life until this life won’t let me live here anymore,
Then I will walk, yes I will walk with patience through that open door.
I have no fears, angels follow me wherever I may go.
I’ll live this life until this life won’t let me live here anymore.

Met a man on the street last night, said his name was Jesus.
Met a man on the street last night….”
______________________________________________________
Just seemed appropriate somehow…

posted by Anna @ 9:37 PM Welcome | Track (0)

By the by, that e-commerce thing didn’t work out so well. It might have something to with all the time I spent blogging!

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Media Wars

We here in the United States and probably elsewhere, were very happy when Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were released by their captors two days ago. Then when they had their first newsconference after their release, many of us were amazed and dismayed at the comments they both made about the “…very beautiful, kind-hearted and caring people that the world need[s] to know more about.” Referring, of course, to the Palestinian people. But Caroline Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post points out a very important fact about that news conference. It is the fact that Steve and Olaf are surrounded by Palestinians. She points out that they were not really free when they made those statements.

…Sunday afternoon released hostages and Fox News journalists Steven Centanni and Olaf Wiig spoke before the cameras. The fact of their release and their statements were reported by more than 1,000 news organizations throughout the world.

At the press conference, Centanni and Wiig, who were forced by their Palestinian captors to convert to Islam, praised the Palestinians. Centanni said, “I just hope this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover this story because the Palestinian people are a very beautiful, kind-hearted and caring people that the world need[s] to know more about.” Wiig similarly praised the Palestinians.

While their remarks were covered extensively, no one seemed to think that the fact that their first post-release statements were made at a Palestinian Authority sponsored media extravaganza in Gaza was significant. No one noted that the men were flanked by Palestinian “security forces,” and stood next to Hamas terrorist leader and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

No mention was made of the fact that the two were initially kidnapped by just such PA “security officials,” or that Haniyeh is one of the leaders of one of the most fanatical jihadist organizations in the world, an organization that the majority of the “beautiful, kind-hearted and caring” Palestinians voted into office last January.

That is, no mention was made of the fact that until the two men left Gaza, they remained unfree. No one asked whether they had been given the option of not giving a press conference in Gaza. And now that they have spoken, there can be little doubt that a second press conference by the two men, in Israel or the US where no one will force them to convert to Judaism or Christianity or threaten to kill them, will draw far less media interest. After their press conference, the two men became yesterday’s news.

I know from reading various blogs and hearing people talk about that newsconference on various news channels, that some people found Steve and Olaf’s comments to be surprising. How could these men say those wonderful things about the people who had kidnapped them? Then later, there was more information which came out through a phone call that Steve Centanni made to Fox News. He told of them being tied in painful positions and of having to lie face-down in what he thought to be a garage, for hours at a time. These statements were not made in front of the cameras, but in a phone call. Yes, Steve also made comments about Islam and his respect for it, but at the time, he was still in Gaza, in a Palestinian hotel.

Steve Centanni is now back in New York City and will be appearing on Greta Van Sustern’s show, On the Record, tonight at 10pm Eastern. I am very curious to find out what he has to say now that he is in the United States and is not being flanked by Palestinians. Will he still praise the Palestinian people and Islam? We shall see.

Caroline Glick’s article also goes into the manipulation of the media by the terrorist groups and even by those who are supposed to be unbiased such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International and various U.S. mainstream media outlets. And as we know, our mainstream media is more then ready to believe the worst about our troops and the Israelis and will accept doctored photos and outright lies as fact to “prove” how awful we are.

Caroline also goes on to praise bloggers such as Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Zombietime and EU Referendum for exposing the lies that the mainstream media is putting out there for mass consumption. She states emphatically that, “Their work has exposed the dirty secret of the Middle East that the media has hidden for so many years: The global media and the international NGO community, which profess to be neutral observers, are in fact colluding with terrorist organizations.”

She ends her column with these words:

As each day passes, the governments, formal and informal legal apparatuses, and media of free societies show themselves to be less and less capable of contending with the information operations conducted against their societies by subversive forces seeking their destruction.

As each day passes it becomes clear that the responsibility of protecting our nations and societies from internal disintegration has passed to the hands of individuals, often working alone, who refuse to accept the degradation of their societies and so fight with the innovative tools of liberty to protect our way of life. The vigilance of just a handful of bloggers brought us the knowledge of the corruption of our media and the network of global NGOs that we have come to rely on to tell us the “objective” truth.

It is up to all citizens of the free world, who value our freedom to recognize this corruption, applaud the bloggers and join them in refusing to allow these corrupt institutions to cloud our commitment to freedom.

Don’t believe everything you read and don’t believe everything you see. Verify, verify, verify!

For an American viewpoint on the terrorists’ outright lies as well as their use of our own media against us, read Donald Rumsfeld’s comments over the past two days at Fox News.

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Wonderful News!

On August 28, 11:19 PM EDT the 2,996th name was assigned.

Howard (Barry) Kirschbaum, age 53, a resident of New York, N.Y., will be honored by El Rider at the blog Flying Debris.

There will be more to come. But every name will be honored. It took exactly 90 days, and more hours than I’d care to count–and not just from me.

But for tonight I’ll take this victory and sleep well.

Thank you to everyone who joined in to pay tribute to these victims of 9/11, giving them a voice on this 5th anniversary of that terrorist attack. I hope to be able to do justice to Daphne’s memory and let her family know that she will not be forgotten!

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A Reminder

This is a reminder to any and all of my readers who are currently serving in the military and are stationed out of the country. Please, please don’t forget to get your absentee ballots so your voices can be heard in the election in November! It’s a right that you’re fighting for and I just want you all to have the opportunity to exercise that right yourselves! So spread the word and get your voices heard in November!

trackback at Old War Dogs

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Tripod Fire: Latest Update

9/6/06 update here.

The good news is that they are saying they have the fire 48% contained. The bad news is that it’s over 138,000 acres! There are still 2,300 personnel working on getting this fire completely contained, but they are still projecting an October 1st containment date. (And that’s if all goes well!)

The towns of Conconully, Winthrop and Loomis are open for business.

The west side of the Tripod Complex is nearing full containment. Hotshot crews accomplished fire objectives to halt fire spread to the north by securing an important section of the northern line. They completed a burnout south of the 300 Road. Mop-up operations and fireline rehabilitation are occurring throughout the Tripod fire perimeter daily. The exception is a limited portion of the fire perimeter at the north end of the fire where the fire continues to back down into the river bottom.

Soldiers of the U.S. Army Task Force Blaze from Ft. Lewis, WA continue to play an important role in the firefighting effort on the Tripod Complex.

They’ve even gotten the Army involved, along with crews from California, Canada and Australia! Please keep saying prayers for those living in the area and those fighting the fire!

More information at InciWeb.

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They’re Free!

And it sounds like it was none too soon.

They were not treated well as they claimed in their video and they were often tied up in painful positions. They were also forced at gunpoint to “convert to Islam” and if they denounce it after release they would face death in any country that practices Sharia law. It is one thing to be a Westerner or a Christian in a country where Sharia law is observed and quite another to have converted to Islam and then to have denounced it. (Even if that conversion was at gunpoint.)

In a phone call with Fox News, Centanni said they were abducted Aug. 14 by four masked gunmen on a side street in Gaza City. He said the assailants covered his head with a black hood, and crammed him and Wiig into a small car.

Their possessions were taken, and their wrists were bound behind their backs. “I still have some sore wrists,” he said. “It was digging into my wrists really badly.”

In captivity, Centanni said, he was laid face down in a dark garage and tied up in painful positions.

“If we tried to get up and sit up, which I did do a few times, they would eventually just force us back down with something stuck to my head,” he said. “I don’t know if it was a stick, a flashlight or a gun or what. We couldn’t see. We were forced to lay face down again in the dirt with blindfolds on.”

Before their release, a video was released showing Wiig and Centanni dressed in beige Arab-style robes. Wiig delivered an anti-Western speech, his face expressionless and his tone halting. The kidnappers claimed both men had converted to Islam.

“We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint,” Centanni told Fox. “Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

Wiig, who has covered some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts, including Afghanistan and Iraq, said at the news conference that he also was worried the kidnapping might scare reporters away from Gaza.

“My biggest concern really is that as a result of what happened to us, foreign journalists will be discouraged from coming to tell the story and that would be a great tragedy for the people of Palestine,” Wiig said. “You guys need us on the streets, and you need people to be aware of the story.”

The release of Centanni and Wiig ended Gaza’s longest crisis involving foreign hostages, but left unclear who was behind the kidnapping and what led them to free their captives. Palestinian militants have seized more than two dozen foreigners the past two years, usually to settle personal scores, and generally released their captives unharmed within hours.

I am so glad that Centanni and Wiig are free and that they are with or will soon be with their families. There are still so many questions about what happened. And will we ever know who the people in this Holy Jihad Brigade really are and what they truly wanted?

AP By Ibrahim Barzak
h/t: Castle Argghhh!

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