Tiananmen West, Iron Fist Falls

Jim Hoft is all over what is happening in Tehran. There is blood in the streets.

>In Baharestan Square the Police are shooting. A girl is shot and the police are not allowing to let the people help them.

>Cell network down in Baharestan & nearby area

>Conflict still in Baharestan Sq they even people who talk with their cellphone

>The girl who was shot was taken to a private clinic, not known yet of her well being…alive or not?

>People gathered in Baharestan but police & plain cloths don’t let the core of the rally to form

>All shops and Passages are closed at Baharestan SQ, Gunshot being heard from Jomhori St

> Gunshot being heard at Baharestan Square.

>About 5,000 Protesters gatherd at Sadeghieh Sq, Bassij and Hezbollah attcking them

>Hezbollah Attcked to some people trying to gather at Tajrish Square

>Army Helycopters flying over Enghelab Sq. Army Vans moving toward Azadi St with heavy Machine Guns.

>Hezbollah Attcked to some people trying to gather at Tajrish Sq.

>Protesters gatherd at Sepah Sq

>More than 3 people have been shot in Baharestan’s conflict, The shooting is still continues and conflicts increasing!!!!

I can see this ending very badly for the mullahs, even though they have the upper hand right now. There is a big difference between a country like Iran and one like, say, Burma. The people of Iran know that the people can throw off an unpopular regime having done so before. 

On a very slightly bright note, the Obama administration appears to have withdrawn its offer of all the hot dogs the mullahs could eat on the 4th of July.

Terminal Tribute

The very last parade given by the British survivors of the D-Day landings in Normandy in honor of those who did not return is over. The veterans, all very old now, will not organize another parade.

They stood proudly, remembering those who served bravely alongside them.

Hundreds of veterans defied humid weather yesterday to pay tribute on their last memorial service in London.

With heads held high they marched down Whitehall, some with walking sticks and others in wheelchairs.

Decked out in smart blazers and berets many shed a tear as they attended the memorial for the last time

At least two former soldiers collapsed during the service, as the heat and long time spent on their feet proved simply too much.

The Normandy Veterans Association (NVA) said this is the last memorial service they will organise in London as it has become increasingly difficult to hold, because of the age of veterans.

There are fewer and fewer veterans of the D-Day landings, or indeed of the entire Second World War now. After all, it has been 65 years since the landings. Yet these men have carried on, year after year to pay tribute to those who did not survive the war.

They still serve, all these years later.

It is now up to those younger people who were not alive during the Second World War to remember the fallen and all who served in the name of freedom and liberty. Let us not take that duty less lightly than the veterans have done for all these years.

“You Always Have A Dog In The Fight,…”

“…Whether you know it or not.” Mark Steyn:

There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early Nineties, the attitude of much of the West to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder. As Osama bin Laden put it:

“The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed.”

How come a catalog of imperial interventions wound up with that bit of scrupulous nonimperial nonintervention? Because great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims. They swarmed to the Balkans to support their co-religionists and ran into a bunch of Wahhabi imams moving into the neighborhood with lots of Saudi money and anxious to fill their Rolodex with useful contacts in the West. Among the alumni of that conflict was the hitherto impeccably assimilated English public (i.e., private) schoolboy and London School of Economics student who went on to behead The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl. You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.

Studied neutrality is met with contempt by the dictators of the world. That is why Obama’s cautiously neutral response over the past week is such a problem. There was at least a somewhat better response from the White House yesterday. It is not enough. The west, especially the United States, has got to stand for something. Liberty would be the right message to be on right now. Denouncing the evil of Iran’s mullahs would be the right thing to do. Publicly refusing to even consider negotiating with Iran for any reason as long as the mullahs kill their own people would be a good place to start. 

We cannot be neutral when liberty is at stake. We always have a dog in that race.

Smart Move

The BBC is reporting that Mir Hossein Mousavi did NOT attend a scheduled meeting with the Guardian Council today. Had he done so, one suspects he would already be dead - or wishing he was.

Mr Mousavi had been expected, along with fellow challengers Mr Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai, to discuss more than 600 objections they had filed complaining about the poll at a meeting of the Guardian Council, which certifies elections, on Saturday.

But neither Mr Mousavi nor Mr Karroubi attended the meeting - which suggests, our correspondent says, they have abandoned their legal challenge to the election results.

Again, time for the west, especially the US, to denounce the mullahs brutality toward their own people. Specifically place the blame for the violence where it belongs.

Tehran Burning

Great roundup from Ed Morrisey, I will not even begin to try to catch up to him, go over and check it out. Warning, he has some pretty harsh videos up over there.

It would appear that the people have taken matters into their own hands. Keep your thoughts and prayers with them, they will need all the help they can get.

Now would be a good time for the western governments to denounce the Mullahs for their brutality. It would at least send some small bit of hope to those fighting for their freedom.

“…A Flame Bright Beyond Common Understanding.”

The words of historian SLA Marshall from a 1960 article in The Atlantic. His subject is Lieutenant Walter Taylor and the breakout from Omaha Beach:

Taylor is a luminous figure in the story of D Day, one of the forty-seven immortals of Omaha who, by their dauntless initiative at widely separated points along the beach, saved the landing from total stagnation and disaster. Courage and luck are his in extraordinary measure.

When Baker Company’s assault wave breaks up just short of the surf where Able Company is in ordeal, Taylor’s coxswain swings his boat sharp left, then heads toward the shore about halfway between Zappacosta’s boat and Williams’. Until a few seconds after the ramp drops, this bit of beach next to the village called Hamel-au-Prêtre is blessedly clear of fire. No mortar shells crown the start. Taylor leads his section crawling across the beach and over the sea wall, losing four men killed and two wounded (machine-gun fire) in this brief movement. Some yards off to his right, Taylor has seen Lieutenants Harold Donaldson and Emil Winkler shot dead. But there is no halt for reflection; Taylor leads the section by trail straight up the bluff and into Vierville, where his luck continues. In a two-hour fight he whips a German platoon without losing a man.

Marshal sums Taylor’s story up with a line that is used in the title of this post:

Thousands of Americans were spilled onto Omaha Beach. The high ground was won by a handful of men like Taylor who on that day burned with a flame bright beyond common understanding.

June 6, 1944. 65 years later, that flame burns as brightly.

(Photo via Wikipedia) 

Stop Apologizing

Nial Gardiner in The Telegraph:

No leader in American history has gone to greater lengths than Barack Obama to make amends for his own country. From condemnation of American “arrogance” in a speech in Strasbourg to acknowledging U.S. “mistakes” before millions of Muslims on Arab television, Obama has rarely missed an opportunity to apologise for the actions of the American people.

President Obama has elevated the art of national self-loathing to new heights, and seems to delight in prostrating the most powerful nation on the face of the earth before its critics and rivals, especially on foreign soil. The Obama worldview revolves around the central premise that the United States must be humble and “engage” and work with its enemies through the application of “smart power”. There is nothing smart, however, in appeasing rogue states such as North Korea or Iran.

Barack Obama is about to travel to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Germany. One simply cannot wait to hear what Obama will apologize for this time. John Hinderaker over at Powerline notes the insanely clumsy German itinerary: Buchenwald and Dresden.  

Yes, we here in America have much to be sorry for at this point:

 Aisne-Marne, France

Ardennes, Belgium

Brittany, France

Brookwood, England

Cambridge, England

Epinal, France

Flanders Field, Belgium

Florence, Italy

Henri-Chapelle, Belgium

Lorraine, France

Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Meuse-Argonne, France

Netherlands, Netherlands

Normandy, France

North Africa, Tunisia

Oise-Aisne, France

Rhone, France

Sicily-Rome, Italy

Somme, France

St. Mihiel, France

Suresnes, France

At this point, I’m sorry that so very, very many Americans gave their lives to twice free a continent from German aggression. There are more than 100,000 Americans officially buried in Europe and North Africa  - Lord knows how many more are there in unmarked graves. For those sacrifices, we are given disdain, contempt and abuse by far too many in Europe.

Perhaps it is time - past time, really - for us to bring them home. All of them. Both our war dead and the living American troops that have secured Europe for 65 years now.

(This post is in no way meant to be disrespectful toward the American Battle Monuments Commission which has done fantastic work in keeping these monuments to our fallen heroes in the fine condition they are. If you get to Europe, try to make it a point to visit one of the many cemeteries. As this article points out, a tour can be a highlight of a trip.)

Bush Vindicated

So says The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama, for his part, still wants Gitmo closed, and he cited South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham in saying that the idea that the detainees could not be securely held in the U.S. was “not rational.” Apparently also irrational is FBI Director Robert Mueller, who this week told Congress that bringing the detainees even to U.S. prisons raised serious concerns, “from providing financing, radicalizing others, [to] the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States.”

Yet for all of his attacks on the Bush Administration, which he accused of making “decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor’s support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition. For the record: Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the President has all but embraced the Bush policy.

But if Obama does close Gitmo, you may already be a winner! Check here to see if your state could become the storage location for detainees.

The Political Left - Dissed By Dems

This one I did not see coming at all. The Democrats in Congress have blocked all funding to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.

In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said on Tuesday that they would not provide the $80 million that President Obama requested to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Mr. Obama, who on Thursday is scheduled to outline his plans for the 240 detainees still held in the prison, has faced growing pressure from lawmakers, particularly Republicans, to find a solution that does not involve moving the prisoners to the United States.

While Democrats generally have been supportive of Mr. Obama’s plan to close the detention center by Jan. 22, 2010, lawmakers have not stepped forward to offer to accept detainees in their home states or districts. When the tiny town of Hardin, Mont., offered to put the terrorism suspects in the town’s empty jail, both Montana senators and its Congressional representative quickly voiced strong opposition.

So, after all the posturing worrying about the “rights” of the terrorists, it suddenly occurs to the Democrats that they might actually have to face the prospect of these illegal combatants running loose in the US.

Well, duh.

Bonus here is that the left finds out that polls matter more to their chosen party than the principles of the left do. Because the issue of importing these detainees into the US must have polled very, very badly indeed for the Democrats to have shifted this hard, this fast, on this issue.

Well, double duh. 

Welcome to the sudden realization that Bush just might have made the right call on these illegal combatants - which is what the Geneva Conventions call them.

Ch-Ch-Chains

Mark Steyn:

Watching the Democrats champing at the bit last week, I thought perhaps we could cut to the chase and handcuff Cheney and Pelosi to a radiator in the basement of a CIA safe house somewhere. But on reflection this would be an unacceptable level of torture. It would be ungallant to say for whom.

Stinging column this week. Go read it.

Must Read

Really, must.

Respect

From Public Secrets.

Hate Without End

Mark Steyn hits one out of the park with this column. This one is a must read from start to finish. Please click the link.

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!,” and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from Jan. 1, 2009, but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews”; in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, Sweden, the congregation at a synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in. in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store. in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a synagogue; in Antwerp, Netherlands, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel in Britain, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

You can shrug and let the “elites” turn their rage on Israel. You can let a hopelessly corrupted Western media fill in the narrative. You can join the Jew hatred. Or you can experience 15 seconds in Sderot. That is how much time you have to reach shelter when the Hamas rockets begin to fall. 15 seconds.

Steyn link via Memeorandum.

Double Standard

Marvin Hier, a rabbi and the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, writes in the Wall Street Journal about the double standard applied against Israel and the Jews.

The world-wide protests against Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza are so full of hatred that they leave me with the terrible feeling that these protests have little to do with the so-called disproportionality of the Israeli response to Hamas rockets, or the resulting civilian casualties.

My fear is that the rage we see in the protesters marching in the streets is far more profound and dangerous than we would like to believe. There are a great many people in the world who, even after Auschwitz, just can’t bear the Jewish state having the same rights they so readily grant to other nations. These voices insist Israel must take risks they would never dare ask of any other nation-state — risks that threaten its very survival — because they don’t believe Israel should exist in the first place.

Just look at the spate of attacks this week on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world: a car ramming into a synagogue in France; a Chabad menorah and Jewish-owned shops sprayed with swastikas in Belgium; a banner at an Australian rally demanding “clean the earth from dirty Zionists!”; demonstrators in the Netherlands chanting “Gas the Jews”; and in Florida, protestors demanding Jews “Go back to the ovens!”

I remember the US media’s reaction to the 1967 war. It was overwhelmingly admiring of the Israeli repulse of the Arab invasions and subsequent victories against the massed attacks. Things have sure turned around since then. Now a rain of terror rockets dropping down on civilians is supposed to be shrugged off by the Israelis. If not, then they are condemned. The west will again impose a ceasefire - which Israel will abide by while Hamas ignores it.

No Decency, No Humanity

This is appalling. A member of the Dutch parliament stood at a pro-Palestinian rally while people were chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Via Jihad Watch. Perhaps Harry van Bommel yearns for the “good old days” of the Henneicke Column.

Meanwhile, here in the US an alliance of ANSWER and pro-Palestinian groups are unleashing an intifada on the streets of San Francisco. From Zombietime’s blog.

Finally, in Britain, the left, led by a host of virulent old lefties and washed up celebrities held a little riot in London. Powerline blogged it.

Hamas launches thousands of rockets at civilians. Women and children. Virtually every day brings multiple rockets attacks. Where is the outrage for that? No, we get rioting brought to the civilized west by representatives of these monsters.

All links via Memeorandum.