Western Civilization is under attack from within and without. It is tempting to allow the efflorescence of schadenfreude at the plight of the French, with riots and arson spreading across the countryside, but they remain part of the civilized world, if not the most appealing or admirable in their world weary cynicism and hypocrisy.
There has been the slant taken by the press that the statements of Nicholas Zarkozy have worsened the situation and he has even been assigned a significant part of the blame by the New York Times in their skillful use of the "some people believe" meme. The BBC today has an update:
Last night, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met eight key ministers and the head of the Paris mosque, Dalil Boubakeur.
After the meeting, Mr Boubakeur urged a change in tone from the government.
"What I want from the authorities, from Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, the prime minister and senior officials are words of peace," he said.
The rioting almost certainly has multiple determinants, but there is a strain running through the rhetoric of the rioters supportive of the idea that "their" areas in France should be effectively ceded to the Islamists. Those Frenchmen and women who object to their creeping dhimmitude are specifically targeted. Some are suggesting that the riots now have a specific aim, the resignation of Nickolas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister who has taken a harder line on the rioters (also from the BBC article):
Hundreds of people heard a call for calm at the rally in Aulnay-sous-Bois.
The suburb's mayor, Gerard Gaudron, made the appeal to marchers outside a fire station which had come under attack.
But youths at the rally in the suburb's rundown Mitry estate predicted violence would continue until Mr Sarkozy resigned.
At the same time as France contends with its Intifada, subversion is taking place in America, much better hidden and unreported, and equally insidious. Captain Ed (or is it Vox Taciturn?) has an important post up from last night, Would You Like A Coup With That Leak?, that is a "must read"; this is our democracy at risk by parts of the permanent bureaucracy, the CIA, the left wing anti-Bush press, and their enablers and accomplices in the Democratic party:
Intelligence officers are not dummies. They had to know that Plame-gate was too weak to withstand serious scrutiny, so they had to have a backup plan. Speak of the devil and he appears in the form of a story that blows the cover of a covert program of interrogation centers/prisons. Another dastardly deed concocted by the evil doers in the White House who, when they are not beating up women, take their frustrations out on innocent “militants.”
Still think rogue Bush-haters in the CIA aren’t getting reporters who cover the national security beat to carry their water? Let’s go to an impartial source. I don’t have a LexisNexis account so we’ll use Google News to search for the non-issue that is “Valarie Plame”: 21,800 hits. Now a search for the real intelligence related controversy that is “Able Danger”: 72 hits. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t that what is known as a blow-out?
Plame, Able Danger, Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Data Mining . . . it is all so confusing to Joe Six-Pack and Molly Homemaker in Peoria . . . why should anyone outside of DC care?
Read it all and then take a look at what at Bill Bennett writes in the National Review on-line today, about the latest CIA leak, gleefully reported in the LSM with no apparent concern for the real damage to our National Security that this can cause:
Moral consistency may never have been a strong virtue of the Left or the Mainstream Media (Am I being redundant?). I suppose, then, we should perhaps thank Joe Wilson for getting the Left and the MSM to finally support and think of the value of the CIA and its agents, even its agents whose jobs are classified.
However, that support for the CIA, and that respect for secrecy in war and intelligence, lasted only as long as they thought it might bring down a high official like Karl Rove. Now they're back to their old selves.
Item: Dana Priest of the Washington Post writes a front-page story on Wednesday headlined, CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons. Pay close attention to the second sentence of the story: "The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents."
"Secret"! "Covert"! So after the press and the Left make a meal of the allegation that people in the White House might have leaked the name of a covert operative, and after we find out that Plame was indeed not a covert operative under the law, the Washington Post — by its own admission — can print classified information that involves covert CIA activity?
This is an outrage. It took less than a day for al Jazeera to run with the story. And by Dana Priest's own admission in an online discussion forum on the Washington Post's website she states, "The article [I wrote] is bommeranging [sic] around Europe, especially Eastern Europe."
The behavior of the disloyal opposition has become more and more outrageous and yet, where is the Bush administration on this? Where are the calls for another special prosecutor to investigate these leaks? The Bush administration has been curiously passive for a very long time, much too long a time in my humble opinion. Are they worried about more embarrassing revelations? What could be worse than this slow-motion coup by LSM leakage?
We face one front in the war on Islamic Fascism in Iraq, other fronts are in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the horn of Africa, Southeast Asia; a new front has opened in France to join the fronts in England, Australia, Italy, et al. We face a particularly egregious assault here at home from the LSM/ CIA/Permanent Bureaucracy.
And finally, today, is this yet another front in the war?:
Cruise ship repels Somali pirates
Passengers were woken early in the morning by gunshots
A cruise ship sailing off Somalia has beaten back gunmen in speedboats who opened fire on it in an apparent pirate attack which terrified passengers.At least two boats closed in on the Seabourn Spirit, reportedly firing automatic weapons and a rocket-propelled grenade.
But crew took evasive action, repelling the attackers without returning fire.
One crew member was lightly injured in the early-morning incident in waters notorious for pirate attacks.
The Bahamas-registered ship was hit by bullets but not, apparently, by the rocket-propelled grenade.
Anyone care to wager on the provenance, religion, and ethnicity of the pirates?
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