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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (41626)	9/2/2002 11:18:32 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

I'm not sure how having a bullseye painted on the town center differs from having one painted on your forehead. It looks kind of like this: intelmessages.org

To: Dayuhan who wrote (41626)	9/3/2002 2:32:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

An editorial from "WSJ" about the Media's treatment of Muslims. The contrast between Muslim treatment and the Media's treatment of the "Right" after Oklahoma City has occured to me before. Readable by those of us who are not in "PC denial." :^) FROM THE HEARTLAND The Backlash That Wasn't Why does the press keep hyping nonexistent threats to Arab civil rights? BY THOMAS J. BRAY Tuesday, September 3, 2002 12:01 a.m. When a federal grand jury in Detroit last week announced the indictment of four Middle Eastern men on terrorist conspiracy charges, the story naturally received page one coverage. But, in what has become almost a ritual, the local press quickly followed up with articles averring that not all Muslims are terrorists, that Arab-Americans are good patriots like everybody else and that Islam is a compassionate, not a violent, faith. Not that anybody had suggested otherwise. But the media seem determined to see Arab-Americans through the prism of the old civil rights crusade. Any investigation of domestic links to Sept. 11 prompts heavy suspicion that a new outburst of McCarthyism is imminent and that President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft hanker to establish a police state. It doesn't hurt for the media to keep a close eye on government, of course. But a serious double standard seems to be at work. If you doubt that, just think back to the aftermath of another bloody terrorist episode, the Oklahoma City bombing. Soon after Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were identified as the culprits in Oklahoma City, they were linked with the far-right militia movement. And that in turn sent the press baying after conservatives, religious fundamentalists, anti-big-government libertarians, Rush Limbaugh and anybody else with whom they disagreed. President Clinton, eager to regain the offensive after his party lost Congress, was especially happy to encourage the witch hunt, equating conservatism with "extremism" at every opportunity. The media can claim that they were only doing its job after Oklahoma City by investigating the possibility that the bombing may have had a broader social significance. Just three of America's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, have run at least 400 articles chronicling the militia movement since that attack, according to one quick search of the Lexis/Nexis database. That includes a recent column by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, writing from a remote vacation area in northern Montana, who breathlessly announced the discovery of a nine-member militia group planning to overthrow the government. "We Americans have conjured so specific a vision of terrorists--swarthy, glowering Muslims mumbling fanatically about Allah--that we're missing the threat from home-grown nuts," concluded Mr. Kristof. Whether the movement was ever as powerful or threatening as the media seemed to think is open to question. Mr. Kristof himself quotes a sheriff in Montana as saying that most militia types "are so stupid that they would kill themselves first." And the self-described leader of the Michigan Militia, Norm Olson, disclosed last week that he is selling off a 120-acre training property in northern Michigan and moving to Alaska. Only eight people attended his most recent training session, and Mr. Olsen complained that militia members in the lower 48 these days are too "moderate." But would the Times, or any other paper, turn the Kristof formula around to ask what they might have missed by focusing so intently on the "nuts" during the past eight years? It has been no secret, for example, that many Arab-American groups were maintaining close ties with Palestinian and Muslim terror groups, yet not much was written about it. And you might think last week's indictments would trigger some sharp questions about how four young Arabs could operate so freely in America, much less inside the secure area of a major metropolitan airport. Yet on the same day the indictments were announced, one Detroit daily gave equal play to a story headlined "Metro Arabs Question Charges," quoting an array of local Arab-American leaders who worried that the grand jury's action "wrongly fuels hostility against Arabs," in the paper's words. And it went on to quote the publisher of an Arab-American paper in Dearborn as hyperventilating that "The police can come and arrest me for being a terrorist--and people would not blink an eye. . . . My civil rights? Gone. Finished." One is tempted to ask where his civil rights would go if Osama bin Laden were in charge. But if four members of the militia movement had been indicted for plotting attacks on innocent civilians, it's unlikely their friends would have been able to find space anywhere in the American media to lament the "discrimination" against them. The right wing, as well all know, is paranoid. All others are potential victims of plots to take away their civil rights. Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays. opinionjournal.com

To: Dayuhan who wrote (41626)	9/3/2002 10:15:57 AM
From: FaultLine	Respond to of 281500

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To: Dayuhan who wrote (41626)	9/3/2002 10:43:59 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

I think it's fairly evident that Saddam's focal goal is to retain power. Expanding his power is a secondary goal, one that has been effectively blocked at every turn (the contention that Saddam has ever been "appeased" is too absurd to even be acknowledged). Absolutely. And the concern that I believe is being advanced by the Bush administration (indirectly) is that once Saddam has obtained nuclear weapons his regime will effectively be "untouchable". No foreign power, including Israel, will risk confronting Saddam and creating a mutual nuclear exchange. Thus, from behind his nuclear "shield", he will be free to subvert neighboring regimes, as well as conforming his image to the Arab world as their new "Saladin". And we'll be hard pressed to oppose his actions. That's the risk of future destabilization that a nuclear armed Saddam poses for middle east policy. Nuclear weapons will provide him the prestige, as well as the iniative, in shaping regional policy. Hawk