I am linking two stories below, one is to show that having armed students is a good thing and American universities (and seminaries) should want such trained students to be packing! The other is to just show the animal instincts of the people whom
Yeshiva student: 'I shot terrorist twice in the head' By News Agencies Tags: Jerusalem, Merkaz Harav
An armed student at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in
Yitzhak Dadon, a student, said he was armed with a rifle and waited on the roof of a nearby building. "He came out of the library spraying automatic fire ... the terrorist came to the entrance and I shot him twice in the head, he said."
Gaza: Thousands celebrate Jerusalem attack
Ali Waked 03.06.08 / Israel News
In mosques in
Armed men fired in the air in celebration and others passed out sweets to passersby.
And the hits keep rolling in! I love it. How long will it be until the cold weather and possible small ice-age is blamed on Global Warming?
Cool News About Global Warming
By Bill Steigerwald
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
You've no doubt seen the stories about strange snowfalls in
And if you are a vigilant observer of the global warming debate, you know how inconveniently cold it is in the
But how cold is it, Johnny?
Well, NASA says recent satellite images show that the allegedly endangered polar ice cap -- which will melt completely one of these summers and kill off all the polar bears if we don't slash our greedy carbon footprints and revert to the lifestyles of medieval peasants -- has recovered to near normal coverage levels.
That's what Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's
As far as Google's search engine knows, Comiso's comforting report has appeared nowhere but in
There's even better news for polar ice-pack lovers from ice expert Gilles Langis, who says Arctic ice is now even thicker than usual in spots. A senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in
Meanwhile, in other news too climatically incorrect for U.S. mainstream media to touch, California meteorologist Anthony Watts says January 2008 was the planet's second-coldest January in 15 years.
Even more shocking, the average temperature of Earth dropped significantly from January 2007 to January 2008. As
You may remember
So far, Watts and his volunteers have checked out more than 500 weather stations (none in
Calling it a "fluctuation" and "a large anomaly" compared to the 30-year running temperature average that climatologists use, he emphasized that the cold spell is "no indication that global warming is over" but does "illustrate that the driving mechanisms behind our planet's climate are still very much in control of changing the climate and that the planet's not in the death grip of CO2 just yet."
A careful, honest man of science, all Watts would say for sure was that his findings and all the strange cold-weather events of this winter prove only one thing so far -- that "Mother Nature is still in control of things, not us."
Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in
We want life!
I am typically not a huge fan of Alan Dershowitz. His defense of legal positivism against Alan Keyes erudite slap down via natural law theory on C-Span was a reminder to me what is at stake in our culture war. But on
Worshippers of Death
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
March 3, 2008; Page A17
Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in
At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."
Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful image.
Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women -- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:
"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The
"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in
How should Western democracies fight against an enemy whose leaders preach a preference for death?
The two basic premises of conventional warfare have long been that soldiers and civilians prefer living to dying and can thus be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed; and that combatants (soldiers) can easily be distinguished from noncombatants (women, children, the elderly, the infirm and other ordinary citizens). These premises are being challenged by women like Zahra Maladan. Neither she nor her son -- if he listens to his mother -- can be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed. They must be prevented from succeeding in their ghoulish quest for martyrdom. Prevention, however, carries a high risk of error. The woman walking toward the group of soldiers or civilians might well be an innocent civilian. A moment's hesitation may cost innocent lives. But a failure to hesitate may also have a price.
Late last month, a young female bomber was shot as she approached some shops in central
As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will be shot at -- some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the "harsh arithmetic of pain," whereby civilian casualties on both sides "play in their favor." Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when they kill civilians, even inadvertently. As Golda Meir once put it: "We can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children."
Civilian casualties also increase when terrorists operate from within civilian enclaves and hide behind human shields. This relatively new phenomenon undercuts the second basic premise of conventional warfare: Combatants can easily be distinguished from noncombatants. Has Zahra Maladan become a combatant by urging her son to blow himself up? Have the religious leaders who preach a culture of death lost their status as noncombatants? What about "civilians" who willingly allow themselves to be used as human shields? Or their homes as launching pads for terrorist rockets?
The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.
We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.
Mr. Dershowitz teaches law at
QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador broke off diplomatic ties with Colombia on Monday, escalating a dispute across the Andean region that erupted after Colombian soldiers raided inside its southern neighbor to kill a guerrilla leader.
Colombia also fueled the tensions by accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of funding Colombia's Marxist rebels -- a charge denied by the anti-U.S. president's government.
The three-nation crisis erupted when Colombia flew troops into Ecuador at the weekend in a bombing raid that killed a leading guerrilla commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
It was a major blow to Latin America's oldest guerrilla group. Chavez responded by ordering troops and tanks to the border with Colombia and he warned conservative President Alvaro Uribe that a similar strike on Venezuelan soil could lead to war.
Ecuador has also sent thousands of troops to the border and took another step in the dispute on
Monday.
"The Ecuadorean government has decided to break off diplomatic relations," it said in a letter to Colombia's foreign ministry.
The juxtaposition of events in
~ Hot Air
We need to understand how nuts these leftists are both in
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Warning that Colombia could spark a war, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sent tanks and thousands of troops to the countries' border Sunday and ordered his government's embassy in Bogota closed.
The leftist leader warned
"Mr. Defense Minister, move 10 battalions to the border with
He ordered the Venezuelan Embassy in
Though Chavez didn't say how many troops he was sending, a Venezuelan battalion traditionally has some 600 soldiers—meaning some 6,000 could be headed to the border.
Chavez called the Colombian government "a terrorist state" as he sided with the leftist rebels it has battled for decades, saying its military "invaded
Neither
Speaking in
"This is an odd reaction by
Chavez said he had just spoken to Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa and that
Against the law to pray
Christians ordered to pay big bucks – for praying!
Lawyer plans appeal of convictions for disorderly conduct at 'gay' fest
March 01, 2008
Lawyers for a team of Christians convicted of disorderly conduct for praying at a "gay" fest in a public park in
Joel Oster, of the Alliance Defense Fund, said an appeal will be filed in
Oster told the Star-Gazette newspaper that the police in the
The Supreme Court has ruled in cases involving "sit-in" protests, he said, that authorities cannot arrest blacks just because they were making white people angry.
"The police have a duty to protect the speaker," he told the court, according to the Star-Gazette.
"Choosing to exercise your First Amendment rights in a public place is not a crime," Oster said just before going into the trial….
….
…"It seems oxymoronic to say that by walking silently in a public park, with heads bowed, these people somehow disturbed the peace," Oster said of the case earlier. "From the sit-ins of the 1960s to today, courts have repeatedly ruled that the police cannot arrest those who peacefully express their message in public places."
The ADF said the issues are no less than the freedoms of speech and religion.
"If this violation of these Christians' rights is allowed to stand, the First Amendment rights of all people of faith are in jeopardy," the ADF said.
As Europe and
