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BIN LADEN WON.

Bin Laden: Dead and Loving It

The tallest Arab ever wanted dead or alive by a president of the United States is still at large. Either that or he’s dead. Again. We’ve been hearing from intelligence sources and the media that bin Laden is dead for a long time. How dead can one evildoer get?

In July 2002 the New York Times carried an op-ed piece that led with “Osama bin Laden is dead.” Bin Laden died in December 2001, according to the author, Amir Taheri, an editor of the Paris-based journal Politique Internationale. Both Taheri and his journal have been broadly accused of questionable journalism practices. Taheri’s sources – all unnamed except for then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who “repeated” the information – weren’t any more reliable than Taheri is, but he ultimately based his conclusion on logic. “With an ego the size of Mount Everest,” Taheri reasoned, “Osama bin Laden would not have, could not have, remained silent for so long if he were still alive.”

And what of all the videos of bin Laden that have surfaced between 2001 and now? David Ray Griffin, whom the BBC identifies as “a former theology professor and member of the 9/11 Truth Movement,” says they’re false because “None of them can be proven to be authentic.”

These are negative proof arguments, the kind that say, “We can’t prove little green men are flying over Nevada in spaceships, but we can’t prove they aren’t, so it must be true.”

Live or Memorex?

As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi noted in December 2009, analysts “inside and outside the government” base their assessment that bin Laden has found sanctuary in the hereafter on non-evidence: specifically, that they haven’t had any solid information about the al-Qaeda leader since late 2001.

That puts our intelligence agencies, which have access to more space-age gizmology than any other spy apparatus in the history of espionage, on par with the likes of the conspiracy theorists at WHATREALLYHAPPENED.COM. According to these folks, bin Laden is dead because unreliable journalist Taheri said so in a New York Times op-ed piece, and because a video released in December 2001 made bin Laden look much older than he did in a photo taken when he was much younger, and because in the video he didn’t move his left side much therefore he must have been suffering from diabetes, and because in November 2001 the UK Guardian revealed that Le Figaro of Paris reported that in 2000 bin Laden had ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to his base in Afghanistan.

The bin Laden narrative aptly illustrates the extent to which our government institutions have used the big media and polluted the information environment. Rumor begets hearsay. Hearsay begets opinion. Opinion begets unconfirmed facts, unconfirmed facts beget disinformation begets propaganda begets intelligence, and intelligence begets nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

What makes these convoluted yarns successful is something I call the “grain of truth” factor. If one or more of the assertions in a far-fetched fable seem plausible, a certain type of person will accept some or all of the rest of the tale because “there’s a grain of truth in it.” There is, of course, grain in every pile of horse manure, but that doesn’t make horse manure easy to swallow, does it?

Having said all that, there’s a fair chance that bin Laden really is dead. If he’s hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border high up in the Hindu Kush mountains where helicopters can’t fly, he could have died of a nosebleed by now. And in November 2008 then CIA Director Michael Hayden said bin Laden was still alive, which adds credence to the argument that he wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter either way. Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is the greatest strategist in the history of human conflict. With no navy or air force or anything that resembles a formal army, he’s managed to whip the world’s mightiest nation like a rented camel. Our economy is shot, the best-trained, best-equipped military in history has been proven impotent, and our moral standing in the world has gone through the sub-basement.

Speculation about bin Laden’s status vis-à-vis mortality is little more than a smoke screen to keep the American hoi polloi from focusing on a harsh reality.

A tenet of the Dead Osama Theory says that the Bush administration hid the fact that Osama died in December 2001 to justify continuing the war on terrorism. President Obama stepped in a boiling vat of OOPS when, as Candidate Obama, he vowed to “get the job done” in Afghanistan to deflect criticism of Sen. Obama’s vote against the Iraq surge. In October 2008, a month before the election, Obama vowed to “snuff out” bin Laden, and if bin Laden isn’t available for snuffing out because he’s already snuffed, it gets real hard for Obama to justify the massive Afghanistan escalation that Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the rest of the warmongery strong-armed him into going along with.

Hence, the Obama administration has a vital stake in preserving the belief that bin Laden is still consuming oxygen. That may explain why, in January 2010, the FBI published a digital image of how bin Laden looks today on the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” Web site. Shortly afterward, it turned out the picture was an alteration of a web photo of Spanish parliament member Gaspar Llamazares. Nice try, FBI.

The most recent evidence that bin Laden still lives was the recording al-Jazeera released just before Obama’s first State of the Union Address in which bin Laden taunted, “God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support to the Israelis will continue.” But the recording was just an audiotape, so maybe the FBI hired Rich Little to do a voice impersonation.

It is little wonder that the status of the man who goaded history’s mightiest nation has become the stuff of checkout-line tabloids. The facts of our so-called war on terror are more ludicrous than our fictions, as witnessed by the National Security Agency’s exploitation of expanded and probably unconstitutional surveillance authorities to eavesdrop on obscene phone calls.

Here’s the disturbing news: our war on terror has been a colossal blunder regardless of whether bin Laden’s safe haven is in this world or the next one.

All the king’s machines and men deployed to far-flung corners of the earth have done little to stem the threat of terrorism, as the Christmas panty bomber illustrated. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington. We’re now discovering, thanks to Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service, that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader we ousted from power in Afghanistan because he gave aid to bin Laden’s planning of 9/11, actually attempted to prevent bin Laden from attacking America. Oops. Our bad.

Our “struggle against violent extremism” has produced, at a conservative estimate, a minimum of 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq alone. The figure may be well over a million. In 2007, official Iraqi government statistics showed that the country possessed 5 million orphans. That’s a bunch more Iraqi orphans than Saddam Hussein ever made.

Osama bin Laden didn’t need to survive beyond December 2001 to wreak havoc on the United States and the rest of the world. We’ve done it for him.

From AntiWar, here.

Academia Made Antisemitism Great Again

How did Hamas become the darling of the West?

Jewish Journal via JNS
By Judea Pearl

Western analysts will go to any absurd lengths to fabricate symmetry between Israel and Hamas, because symmetry is our new goddess of right and wrong.

In February 2009, I wrote an essay about a symposium at UCLA that marked the beginning of Hamas’s penetration into academic circles. I also described the culture of fear that had overtaken many of my colleagues, who felt it was unsafe to admit to supporting Israel. Twelve years later, in the wake of the most recent conflict between Israel and Gaza and the ensuing antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets, I have revised and updated my original essay, which is just as relevant today as it was when it was first written.

Remember Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”? Written in the late 1950s, the play describes the transformation of a quiet, peaceful town into anarchy when one after another of its residents is transformed into a lumbering, thick-skinned brute. Only Berenger, a stand-in for the playwright, tries to hold out against the collective rush into rhinocerism.

First, the townspeople notice a stray rhinoceros rumbling down the street. No one takes a great deal of notice other than to say that it “made a lot of dust.’’ It’s a “stupid quadruped not worth talking about,’’ although it does trample one woman’s cat.

Before long, an ethical debate develops over the rhino way of life versus the human way of life. “Why not just leave them alone,’’ a friend advises Berenger. ‘’You get used to it.’’ The debate is quickly muted into blind acceptance of the rhino ethic, and the entire town joins the marching herd. Berenger finds himself alone, partly resisting, partly enjoying the uncontrolled sounds coming out his own throat: “Honk, Honk, Honk.”

These sounds from Ionesco’s play have echoed in my ears twice. First in 2009, when Hamas gave its premier performance at UCLA and, second, this past week, when rhinos roamed the streets of Los Angeles shouting, “Honk, Honk, Honk.”

Let’s start in January 2009, when an email from a colleague at Indiana University queried: “Being at UCLA, you must know about this symposium…pretty bad.” Attached to it was Roberta Seid’s report on the now infamous “Human Rights and Gaza” symposium held a day earlier at UCLA.

To refresh readers’ memory, this symposium, organized by UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies (CNES), was billed as a discussion of human rights in Gaza. Instead, the director of the center, Susan Slyomovics, invited four speakers with long histories of demonizing Israel for a panel that Seid describes as a reenactment of a “1920 Munich beer hall.” Not only did the panelists portray Hamas as a guiltless, peace-seeking, unjustly provoked organization, but they also bashed Israel, its motives, its character, its birth and conception, and led the excited audience into chanting “Zionism is Nazism,” “F—, f— Israel,” in the best tradition of rhino liturgy.

But the primary impact of the event became evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, partially informed students woke up to read an article in the campus newspaper titled, “Scholars Say Attack on Gaza an Abuse of Human Rights,” to which the good name of the University of California was attached, and from which the word “terror” and the genocidal agenda of Hamas were conspicuously absent. This mock verdict, presented as an outcome of supposedly dispassionate scholarship, is where Hamas culture scored its first triumph—the first inch of academic respectability, the first inroad into Western minds.

Naturally, when students complained to me about how abused and frightened they felt during the symposium and how concerned they were about the direction taken by the Center for Near East Studies, I felt terribly guilty. “We should have anticipated such travesties,” I told myself, “we, the Jewish faculty at UCLA, should have preempted it with a true symposium on human rights, one that honestly tackles the tough moral and legal dilemmas that the Gaza situation presents to civilized society: How does society protect the human rights of a civilian population in which rocket-launching terrorists are hiding? How does one reconcile the right of a country to defend itself with the wrong of killing women and children when the former entails the latter? What is a legitimate military target?”

In 2009, these were new dilemmas that had not surfaced prior to the days of rockets and missiles, and we, the Jewish faculty, ought to have pioneered their study. Instead, we allowed Hamas’s sympathizers to frame the academic agenda. How can we face our students from the safety of our offices, I thought, when they deal with anti-Israel abuse on a daily basis—in the cafeteria, the library and the classroom—and as alarming reports of mob violence are arriving from other campuses?

Burdened with guilt, I called some colleagues, but quickly realized that a few had already made the shift to a strange-sounding language, not unlike “Honk, Honk.” Some had entered the debate phase, arguing over the rhino way of life versus the human way of life, and the majority, while still speaking in a familiar English vocabulary, were frightened beyond anything I had seen at UCLA in the 40 years that I had served on its faculty.

Colleagues told me about lecturers whose appointments were terminated, professors whose promotion committees received “incriminating” letters, and about the impossibility of revealing one’s pro-Israel convictions without losing grants, editorial board memberships, or invitations to panels and conferences. And all, literally all, swore me into strict secrecy. Together, we entered the era of “the new Marranos.”

Exaggeration? Jewish paranoia? Hardly. I invite skeptics to repeat the private experiment that I conducted among Jewish faculty in a reception hosted in 2008 by the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA. I asked each of them privately: “Tell me, aren’t you a Zionist?” I then counted the number of times my conversant would look to the right, then to the left, before whispering: “Yes, but….” I am sure that anyone who repeats this experiment will be as alarmed as I was about the level of academic terror that has descended on U.S. campuses, especially in the humanities and political and social sciences. Our generation of Jewish students are paying dearly for the failure of our academic leadership to acknowledge, assess and form a unified front to combat this academic terror.

And this brings me to 2021 and to the latest war in Gaza. To the New York Times front page depicting the victims of Israel’s defense operation, as if they had never heard the word “Hamas” or read Hamas’s charter. To CNN’s anchor Fareed Zakaria asserting that Israel is a military superpower, hence Hamas does not pose an existential threat to it. To NYT analyst Nicholas Kristof asserting (in an interview with Bill Maher) that Israel, too, positions its military headquarters among civilians. To UCLA Department of Asian American Studies stating (on its official university website) its “Solidarity with Palestine” and its authoritative understanding that such “violence and intimidation are but the latest manifestation of seventy-three years of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and occupation.”

To the statement of scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies from various universities who, in the Forward, condemned “the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza.” To members of If Not Now, saying Kaddish for fallen Hamas fighters (among other victims). And, finally, to the mob roaming the streets of Los Angeles and shouting, “Honk, Honk, From the River to the Sea.”

Looking back on the past 12 years, there is no question that Hamas has gained a major uplift in status and respectability. It has become, in fact, the darling of the West. True, seasoned commentators remember to add the obligatory, “We are not condoning Hamas, of course, but….”

But what?

Doesn’t Fareed Zakaria imply that it is not the end of the world if 300,000 Israeli children continue to bleed sleeplessly for another 20 years under Hamas rockets? Didn’t Nicholas Kristof imply that if those children suffer post-traumatic scars for the rest of their lives that it is Israel’s problem because Israel, too, positions its headquarters in civilian areas? Western analysts will go to any absurd lengths to fabricate symmetry between Israel and Hamas, because symmetry is our new goddess of right and wrong.

But let’s not forget that it all started in academia, with a herd of passionate intellectuals who managed to hijack the name of their academic institution, which hardly cared. Do not blame them. After all, intellectuals are trained to cheer their peers when the marching band starts playing, and academic institutions are too slow to understand what is being done in their names. Sadly, as Ionesco understood so well, we are all herd-honking organisms. Please take another look at the rhinos roaming the streets of Los Angeles, here, and see for yourself how hard it is to hold back and not join them with: Honk, Honk!

Judea Pearl is a chancellor professor at UCLA, co-author of “The Book of Why” and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (www.danielpearl.org), named after his son. He and his wife, Ruth, are editors of “I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Light, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

This article was first published by the Jewish Journal.

From Janglo, here.

Rabbis: Don’t Be Pessimists!

Rabbi Avi Grossman’s advice to rabbis:

… you should, like Rabbi Soloveichik did, offer your congregants as many opportunities as possible to study on an adult level, and to let them ask as many questions as possible. Let them learn to read gemara, and see how the rishonim understood the gemara. See how all of the commentaries until today actually discussed the practical halacha. The way we study gemara b’iyun is entirely alien to anybody who lived before the 20th century. There are two approaches to this. The first approach is to avoid, at all costs, your congregants ever realizing that the practices with which they are familiar do not exactly fit the logical conclusions of the halachic evolution, and the second approach, that of our teachers, is to allow them to realize. It will get them more involved and more interested in their studies. If you are so fortunate, you can encourage many of them to make aliyah after learning enough about the commandments associated with the land. Or take hilchoth tzitzith: study them in depth for a few weeks, and watch how you’ll suddenly have your people become big m’daqdqim, and maybe some will even start wearing t’cheileth. I know many rabbis who will look with dismay and point at how, inevitably, some one will enthusiastically adopt the position that cotton is 100% d’oraitha obligated in tzitzith and another will become mahmir for only wool tzitzith, and think that some horrible damage has been caused. That’s the ultimate in pessimism, because they fail to see the benefit in their increased observance. If only it would be that way all the time. And I understand why they take it so badly, also. When the ba’al habos suddenly becomes a hasid of this way to do the mitzva or that, the rabbi usually becomes alarmed if it is not his, i.e. the rabbi is a wool tzitzith man, and suddenly the congregant is all for cotton tzitzith, or vice versa, and the rabbi sees that the congregant’s new knowledge has only gotten him to adopt the “wrong” opinions. As for yourself, you should be happy about anything that gets your congregants more excited about observance. And if they do things differently than the way you would prefer, then go and study that opinion and learn the arguments for it.

See the rest here…

Ron Paul: How Texas Killed Covid

How Texas Killed Covid

By 

Ron Paul Institute

May 26, 2021

In March, Governor Greg Abbott announced that Texas would open for business 100 percent without a statewide mask mandate. The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart.

President Biden famously attacked the decision as “Neanderthal thinking.” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa warned that, with this order, Abbott would “kill Texans.” Incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tearfully told us about her feelings of “impending doom.”

When the poster child for Covid lockdowns Dr. Fauci was asked several weeks later why cases and deaths continued to evaporate in Texas, he answered simply, “I’m not sure.” That moment may have been a look at the man behind the proverbial curtain, who projected his power so confidently until confronted with reality.

Now a new study appearing as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted recently in Reason Magazine, has found “no evidence that the reopening affected the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the five-week period following the reopening. …State-level COVID-19 mortality rates were unaffected by the March 10 reopening.”

In other words, not only did the doom and gloom predicted by the lockdown fanatics fail to materialize, but the steady, seasonal downward trend of the virus toward extinction continued regardless of government action. As we have repeated for a year on the Liberty Report, the virus was going to virus regardless of anything we did about it. And Texas proved it.

However, some very important questions remain to be answered as the Covid panic across the United States is finally starting to recede.

First, will anyone be held responsible for the thousands who died because of the prohibition on safe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that have since been shown to be effective against Covid-19? As soon as Donald Trump mentioned that hydroxychloroquine might be effective against the virus, the “experts” circled the wagons. It was banned for use, until it later was quietly un-banned.

The politicization of medicine is anti-science, anti-human, and anti-American. Will those who needlessly died due to this politicization finally get their justice?

Second, though Abbott deserves credit for taking the bold step, shouldn’t he be held accountable for closing the state in the first place? After all, when someone has been punching you in the face and then they stop, do you thank them for letting up or do you ask why they punched you in the first place? Will all the tyrannical rule-by-decree orders across the United States be stricken from the books? Or will they just be allowed to do this again for any reason they choose?

Third, thanks to Senator Rand Paul, we are now all aware of Dr. Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research on viruses in China. Will we be able to find out exactly why we are being forced to pay for the mad scientist research into how to create more deadly viruses? Can we opt-out of this funding?

Though Greg Abbott deserves much criticism for shutting Texas down, his re-opening decree effectively ended Covid tyranny across the country. We are thankful for that. Now we must resolve to never let this happen again.

From LRC, here.