Our Heads in the Sand

Ralph Peters sums up the Islamist murder spree at Fort Hood. Sadly he's one of the few who's telling it like it is.

On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting, "Allahu akbar!" ("God is great!") committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Fort Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of nondenominational shoplifting.

This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it's an act of terror. Period.

When the terrorist posts anti-American hate speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as "Palestinian" in a Muslim spouse-matching program and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit -- well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an "Islamist terrorist."

But the president won't. Despite his promise to get to all the facts. Because there's no such thing as "Islamist terrorism" in ObamaWorld.

Read it all and pray for our future. With the clowns we have in DC there may not be much of one.

Paul Sperry echoes Peters.

Ralph Peters Hammers Janet Napolitano

Colonel Peters pulls no punches. He probably just found himself on the DHS watchlist.

'Now Our Domestic Surrender Monkeys Are In Shock'

Ralph Peters nails the whimpering lefties flipping out over Barack Obama selecting Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural.

AMERICA'S hardcore leftists had convinced themselves they were finally getting "their" president. Boy, were they wrong.

Their latest cause for outrage: Barack Obama has picked the Rev. Rick Warren - a pastor who actually believes in the redemptive power of faith - to give the invocation at the inauguration.

That's what you get for judging a book by its cover - or believing campaign promises.

Months ago, I predicted that, if Obama were elected, the most-disappointed Americans would be the MoveOn.org gang.

Now our domestic surrender monkeys are in shock.

And it's not just Warren, as Peters points out by examining a number of Obama's cabinet selections.

I'm mildly surprised by some of Obama's picks and unsurprised by others, more recently Arne Duncan at Education. Considering the illiteracy rate in Chicago's schools, that one smacks of rank cronyism.

But really, the childish reaction of the far left blogs and radical gay groups is just beyond hysterical with the Warren announcement. Clearly, pragmatism and moderation aren't their strong suit. It's either march in lockstep and cave to their demands or they turn on you.

There never will be a president who appoints a cabinet 100% to my or anybody's liking. You often have to accept some bad with the good and hope in the end your agenda is followed to some extent. Having a temper tantrum and flipping out before your guy is even inaugurated speaks volumes about these people. They really need to grow up.

Previously.

San Francisco: The American Calcutta

Ralph Peters takes a look at the mess that is San Francisco.

ONE of the best ways to see a city's bones is to take a long jog in the hour before dawn. That's what I did in San Francisco this week.

The city reminded me of Calcutta.

By day, the camouflage of color and crowds makes the multitudes of homeless less apparent. At the chilly end of the night, though, they lie strewn on the sidewalks like plague victims, wrapped in filthy blankets and abandoned.

New Yorkers have no idea how bad a homeless crisis can be.

I didn't even run in the rougher sections, where old garbage fills the alleys and druggies prowl. My course ran from the slopes of Nob Hill, south of Union Square, down to the Embarcadero, up to North Beach and back. That's the better part of downtown.

My new symbol of San Francisco is a man with ulcerous calves exposed, head and torso thrust into a cardboard box in front of a Prada boutique.

What I saw as I sidestepped bodies wasn't just the failure of social policies, but a collective flight from responsibility. Shrugging our shoulders and declaiming The homeless deserve the right to make their own choices! just lets us all off the hook.

I refuse to romanticize the homeless - unlike those who live in San Francisco's multimillion-dollar Victorians and idealize the homeless from a distance, then cross the street to avoid giving a deranged beggar a quarter.

I haven't been in San Francisco in ten years now, but even back in 1998 I was appalled by the free reign the bums were given.

Read the rest of the piece, as Peters is spot on in his observations.

Just one thing, though. Imagine his reaction if he were to have seen this display?

Seven Whoppers: Media Myths and the Lying Liars Who Lie About Them

Ralph Peters minces no words today.

THE facts about your security are being torn to shreds by activist liars. And they think that you're too stupid to know the difference.

Let's lay out the worst current examples of media make-believe and election-year truth-trashing:

Whopper No. 1: America is less safe today than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Oh, really? Where's the evidence? The Clinton years saw New York City attacked and Americans slaughtered by terrorists around the globe. Nothing was done to protect us.

And the true end of the Clinton era came on 9/11.

A record to be proud of.

Countless aspects of the Bush-Cheney administration deserve merciless criticism. But fair is fair: Since 9/11, we haven't suffered a single successful terrorist attack on our homeland. Not one.

Explain to me, please, how this shows we're less safe. What factual measurement applies, other than the absence of attacks?

God knows, the terrorists desperately wanted to strike our homeland. And they couldn't. Are we supposed to believe that was an accident?

Six more to go. Read on.

An excellent point Peters makes is one we've been noting, and it's the absurd notion that a bunch of Clinton hacks represents change.

Hmm: Take a gander at Obama's senior foreign-policy advisers: Madeleine Albright (71), Warren Christopher (82), Anthony Lake (69), Lee Hamilton (77), Richard Clarke (57) . . .

If you added up their ages and fed the number into a time-machine, you'd land in Europe in the middle of the Black Death.

More important: These are the people whose watch saw the first attack on the World Trade Center, Mogadishu, Rwanda, the Srebrenica massacre, a pass for the Russians on Chechnya, the Khobar Towers bombing, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the near-sinking of the USS Cole - oh, and the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Their legacy climaxed on 9/11.

You couldn't assemble a team in Washington with more strategic failures to its credit.

Ouch.

Change!

The New Lepers

Ralph Peters delivers another sledgehammer blow to the reeling New York Times for their disgraceful portrayal of our armed forces as a bunch of psychopathic killing machines.

The Times has been in a slow death spiral for quite some time, but they may never recover credibility after this outrageous piece.

They must realize it since they've not even tried to defend this journalistic malfeasance and there's an odd silence from the left on this.

When you can't even get the hard left Koolaid slurpers to defend you, you know you're standing on the cliff's edge all alone.

Again, the Times' smear certainly wasn't an accident. The paper's staff is highly paid and highly experienced. Its editors know that a serious news story has to put numbers into context. But their sole attempt at context was to note that offenses by former soldiers have ticked up since we went to war.

The Times is trying to make you fear our veterans (Good Lord, if your daughter marries one, she's bound to be beaten to death!). And to convince you that our military would be a dreadful place for your sons and daughters, a death-machine that would turn them into incurable psychopaths.

To a darkly humorous degree, all this reflects the Freudian terrors leftists feel when confronted with men who don't have concave chests. But it goes far beyond that.

Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don't want our pity - they want our respect), the Times' feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.

The image we all were supposed to take away from that story was of hopelessly damaged, victimized, infected human beings who've become outcasts from civilized society. The Times cast our vets as freaks from a slasher flick.

The hard left's hatred of our military has deteriorated from a political stance into a pathology: The only good soldier is a dead soldier who can be wielded as a statistic (out of context again). Or a deserter who complains bitterly that he didn't join the Army to fight . . .

Read the whole thing.

Brits' Shame Blame

Ralph Peters goes off on the freed hostages.

A soldier's law in the U.S. Army holds: "The maximum effective range of an excuse is zero meters." Yesterday, the two officers on a panel of former British hostages delivered nothing but excuses for their disgraceful conduct.

No matter how codes of conduct for prisoners of war are worded, none countenances voluntary collaboration with the enemy. A POW doesn't have to engage in daily violent resistance, but he's obligated to avoid providing active support to his captors.

The Brit hostages failed the test, and theirs was a failure of leadership. Perhaps the enlisted sailors and Royal Marines can be redeemed, but their officers need to be cashiered.

Another ironclad military rule - not always fair, but generally wise - runs that, "An officer is responsible for everything his subordinates do or fail to do." While the two Brit officers, held separately from their sailors and marines, obviously couldn't control every subordinate's actions, the speed with which some enlisted personnel complied with what their captors asked says a great deal about the atmosphere prevailing in the unit.

Read the rest.

No More Churchills

Ralph Peters asks Where's Winston?

THE greatest shock from the Middle East this year hasn't been terrorist ruthlessness or the latest Iranian tantrum. It's that members of Britain's Royal Marines wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors.

Jingoism aside, I can't imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would've resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman.

You could put a U.S. Marine in a dungeon and knock out his teeth, but you wouldn't knock out his pride in his country and the Corps. "Semper fi" means something.

And our Aussie allies would be just as tough.

What on earth happened to the Royal Marines? They're members of what passes for an elite unit. Has the Labor government's program to gut the U.K. military - grounding planes, taking ships out of service and deactivating army units - also ripped the courage from the breasts of those in uniform?

Read the rest.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair says the next couple of days are crucial.

Blair told Scotland's Real Radio that Ali Larijani's suggestion of talks offered hope of an end to the crisis. "If they want to resolve this in a diplomatic way the door is open," the prime minister said.

But if negotiations to win the quick release of the 15 sailors and marines stalled, Britain would "take an increasingly tougher position," he said.

Increasingly tougher than doing nothing means what, exactly?

Peters: Viva Bush

Ralph Peters has an excellent take on George W. Bush's trip to Latin America and the media spin that follows. I find it laughable how the press tries to put a two-bit thug like Hugo Chavez on equal footing.

AS our president arrived in Brazil last week, the U.S. media made it sound as if Latin America had erupted in flames. TV news featured flying tear-gas canisters; a typical newspaper headline read, "Angry Crowds Rally Against President in Brazil."

Message: Bush is hated. He's ruined our relations with the hemisphere. Nobody loves us anymore - and it's all his fault.

Well, venceremos, muchachos, and no pasdaran!

If you bothered to read the reports below the headlines, you learned that 6,000 Brazilians had gathered in Sao Paulo to protest Bush's arrival in their country.

Wait a minute - wasn't that 600,000? Or at least 60,000?

Nope. Just 6,000 outraged citizens. Out of Brazil's population of 200 million.

Shucks, down here in Washington you can rally 6,000 activists at a moment's notice to march for equal rights for prairie dogs.

Couldn't Cindy Sheehan have flown down to pump up the numbers a little? (Or Jack "I'm a hero!" Murtha? He'd look studly in a Speedo on a Rio beach . . . )

Read the rest.

Cowards Give in to Evil

Ralph Peters is fired up. For good reason.

PROVIDING aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime is treason. It's not "just politics." It's treason.

And signaling our enemies that Congress wants them to win isn't "supporting our troops."

The "nonbinding resolution" telling the world that we intend to surrender to terrorism and abandon Iraq may be the most disgraceful congressional action since the Democratic Party united to defend slavery.

The vote was a huge morale booster for al Qaeda, for Iraq's Sunni insurgents, and for the worst of the Shia militias.

The message Congress just sent to them all was, "Hold on, we'll stop the surge, we're going to leave - and you can slaughter the innocent with our blessing."

We've reached a low point in the history of our government when a substantial number of legislators would welcome an American defeat in Iraq for domestic political advantage.

Read the rest. The New York Post editorial calls it the Dems' Disgrace. That's putting it mildly.

It's really great timing, considering the successes we're beginning to have.

Sunni tribes in troubled Anbar province have begun working closely with U.S. and government forces, contributing nearly 2,400 men to the police department and 1,600 to a newly organized tribal security force, authorities say.

U.S. troops are training and equipping the new tribal forces, which are called Emergency Response Units (ERUs), and are charged with defending the areas where they live, according to the local U.S. commander.

By a U.S. count, 12 of the Ramadi area's 21 tribes are cooperating in the security effort, six are considered neutral, and three are actively hostile. That is almost the reverse of the tribal posture last June, when three were cooperative and 12 were hostile.

If you haven't quite had your fill of the sickening Democrats, Michelle notes how they're playing the body armor card again. Weak. Sure, they care about the troops.