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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (9760)	10/19/2001 2:18:31 PM
From: Second_Titan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

The emphasis was to terrorize, by attacking very visible people they can illicit as much fear as possible. What better way than to hit media?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (9760)	10/19/2001 7:52:32 PM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23153

Re: Anthrax targets : Hit list represents a superficial rather than deep knownledge of the U.S. My guess it is a foreign national, or a relatively unsophisticated U.S. citizen. Not every lone nut is harvard educated (Kacynsiki), vubut most lone nuts would have a better target list. Where's Allen G ? Where's Hollywood ? Tabliods aren't even taken seriously by their readers. My guess is it could be someone acting on a target list compiled by someone overseas.

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (9760)	10/20/2001 6:30:27 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 23153

Where Are the Arab World's Moderate Voices? latimes.com October 19, 2001 By SHIBLEY TELHAMI As the militants in the Middle East take to the airwaves, many others are asking: Where are the voices of the moderate Arab majorities? Aside from voices criticizing Osama bin Laden and his terrorist acts, it is clear that the moderate elites--even though they are terrified by the prospect of a world dominated by militants--are watching the confrontation from the perspective of bystanders, as if it were merely between Bin Laden and the West. There are two reasons for this: They have no positive vision to offer the public, and they are paralyzed by their overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Regardless of Bin Laden's agenda, which includes an Islamic state across the Muslim world and the expulsion of Westerners from the region, his strength is that he speaks to the core concerns of Arabs and Muslims, and he promises results. For the powerless, he shows how the acts of a few men with knives can shake up the world order in one day. The moderate majorities who reject his methods have no proposal of their own to change the economic and political order that most people see as oppressive, and to resolve the Palestinian and Iraqi problems about which most people care deeply. Throughout the 1990s, governments and moderate elites could point to a post-Cold War, post-Gulf War vision that aimed at resolving regional disputes through negotiations and promised development and economic prosperity. By the end of the 1990s, that vision collapsed--together with the Arab-Israeli negotiations--and the region's economies worsened. During the past year of increasing violence on the Palestinian-Israeli front, moderates have become invisible. Today, as they need to confront the militants whose message and aims they reject, they find themselves with no positive vision of their own. A tremendous sense of victimization and powerlessness is prevalent across the region. This is in part because of the legacy of the 20th century: a collective memory that sees the region's political agenda set to serve Western imperial designs at the expense of regional interests. It is this legacy that Bin Laden evokes when he speaks of the "past 80 years," beginning with the British Mandate on Sept. 11, 1922. But the sense of powerlessness is also a product of a political system that has not given the people much say, let alone control, in their lives and futures. There is a pervasive sense of helplessness about economic prospects, politics and relations with the world. This widespread resignation is at once the fertile ground for conspiracy theories and the opportunity for Bin Laden. He and other militants are able to provide a sense of empowerment to induce change and overthrow an unacceptable order of which the U.S. is seen to be the anchor. To this, the moderate elites have no alternative message that the public can believe, so they choose to pretend that Bin Laden's struggle is not with them, and in the process lose even more ground. To be sure, there are some in the Arab and Muslim world who not only reject Bin Laden's terrorism but perceive his message as a threat to them. In a recent article in a leading Arab newspaper, one columnist spoke of the threat to "our America" as a threat to people in the region: "America is the dream of the peoples; it is the paradigm to which the peoples lift up their eyes, and it is toward its light that the countries advance." Such individual voices, however, have little impact without organized political action, and many other individuals are easily intimidated. The absence of organized political voices is a symptom of a broader problem in the region: the absence of political pluralism. But these are not ordinary times. This is not merely a Western conflict involving a few militants, and certainly it is not a conflict between Islam and the West. For the Middle East, it is a conflict for its soul, a conflict within. It is time for those elites and political forces that represent the views of the majorities in the region to speak with more courage and imagination, and for the international community and especially the U.S. to help them succeed. Certainly the U.S. cannot accomplish the task alone, but it is the richest and most powerful country, the anchor of the international system. We are the only ones who can help restart a credible Arab-Israeli peace process, mobilize international resources that inspire hope, and provide the support the moderates will need in their unavoidable war of ideas. ___________________________________ Shibley Telhami is a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (9760)	10/20/2001 8:22:19 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

Cynthia McKinney: Today's Hanoi Jane FreeRepublic.com October 20, 2001 During World War II, we had Tokyo Rose sending demoralizing messages to our troops. During Vietnam, we had Hanoi Jane Fonda sending her treasonous messages to our boys in Southeast Asia, while aiming the Communists' cannons at them. And in this War Against Terrorism, we have Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., – Jihad Cindy – to demoralize us and give aid and comfort to the enemy. McKinney has a strong record of hating America. During the recent U.N. World Conference Against Racism, she attacked the U.S. with the rest of the Arab world (now our "moderate" partners in the "Coalition Against Terrorism") and Third World republics in her push for slavery reparations, saying the White House is "just full of latent racists." But her latest set of actions are the most outrageous. Take McKinney's pandering letter to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in which she apologized for the valorous actions of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Talal, nephew of Saudi King Fahd, recently visited New York to see the World Trade Center remains and gave Giuliani a $10 million check for relief efforts. Then, the prince released a statement full of moral equivocations, rationalizing the murder of 6,000 innocent Americans and blaming U.S. foreign policy, "suggesting" it be changed. It's hard to ignore a $10 million dollar suggestion, no matter how ridiculous and immoral. But not for the valiant Giuliani. In the highest act of moral and civic courage, he promptly returned the check with a statement: "There is no moral equivalent for this attack. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification when they slaughtered 5,000, 6,000 innocent people ... Not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem." Giuliani is an American hero. Back to the American villainess. Last Friday, McKinney, in a ludicrous letter, apologized to the prince for Giuliani's actions, accusing Giuliani of denying the prince's "right to speak and make observations about a part of the world you know so well." Huh? Nobody denied the prince's speech rights – which nobody in his country, Saudi Arabia, has, by the way. He made his statement without being tortured to death, a la Middle-Eastern civil liberties. But McKinney is right about one thing: The prince and his family know that part of the world well – which is why, according to New York Times and Wall Street Journal reports, there is significant evidence that the Saudi government had their hands in the attacks and that they tacitly continue to support Osama bin Laden through his family, which lives comfortably in Saudi Arabia and hasn't cut their brother off. McKinney's letter was so disgusting, even her Georgia Democratic colleague, Senator Zell Miller called it "disgraceful" and denounces her on his website. Not only did McKinney agree with the prince's "remarks," but in her own shameful moral equivocation, she attacked America because, "Your Royal Highness, the state of Black America is not good." McKinney wrote, "There are many people in America who desperately need your generosity," making the false assertion that a black baby born in Harlem has a worse life expectancy than one born in Bangladesh. No, Cindy, America does not need Saudi "generosity." The Saudis need ours – like the generosity we gave in the Gulf War, saving the prince's shaky monarchy from being exiled to a Swiss chalet, while his country became a province of Iraq. And look what we've gotten in return – a royal slap in the face, aided by Jihad Cindy. I guess McKinney forgot the life expectancy of blacks in the Muslim Arab world, including Saudi-aided Sudan, where two million black Christians were savagely murdered and where millions more are enslaved, tortured, maimed and raped. McKinney's new buddy, Prince Alwaleed, is the sixth richest man in the world, according to Forbes. Giuliani showed him that even the wealthiest of scoundrels cannot buy respectability with their blood money. Unless they're buying Congresswoman McKinney. And her price is very cheap, apparently. She was the headliner at the Oct. 7 fundraising dinner for the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim terrorist front group that has been hanging out with President Bush a lot lately. In exchange for her revered status with this and other radical Islamic pro-terrorist groups, McKinney has attempted to stop congressional investigations into them and the WTC attacks. At an Oct. 3 House Committee on International Relations Hearing on al-Qaida and the Global Reach of Terrorism, McKinney had a temper tantrum when Oliver "Buck" Revell testified. Revell, associate director of the FBI in charge of Investigative and Counter-Intelligence Operations from 1985-1991, attempted to show segments of the 1995 documentary, "Jihad in America." McKinney wanted to censor it, so that Americans watching on C-SPAN would not see evidence of the extensive Muslim terrorist network in America documented in the film, including that of Islamic Jihad front-man and University of South Florida Professor, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. No complaints from her about denying Revell's right to speak. We're in the middle of war. But atop her tax-funded website, alongside a photo of her in leopard-print accents, are "news briefs," including "COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story," an attack on the U.S., which she and the Black Caucus presented to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism. Hello! – COINTELPRO took place under Nixon, three decades ago. And the victims cited in this 78-page diatribe by America-hating leftists Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are guys like Dhoruba Bin Wahad aka Richard Moore, a Black Panther who machine-gunned police officers, and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. Echoing her friend, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, whom she's refused to denounce, McKinney's website demands evidence against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. During wars in lands far away, Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Jane were bad enough. But now the war is on our homefront. And so is Jihad Cindy. freerepublic.com