Posted on 03/14/2012 1:22:10 PM PDT by presidio9
It’s the latest Leftist talking point: Rick Santorum is a bit dangerous, a bit unhinged, deeply religious and dangerously fanatical, not to be trusted with the governance of our pluralistic republic, and certainly not with guardianship of the First Amendment protection of the freedom of religion. The prominent Leftist Muslim writer Reza Aslan has recently become a foremost exponent of these claims, although they did not by any means originate with him.
Leftist journalists and Islamic supremacist spokesmen always march in lockstep, using the same talking points, as I’ve pointed out previously in connection with Islamic supremacist boy Reza Aslan’s frequent recycling of tired and discredited Leftist/Islamic supremacist agitprop. Aslan is so abjectly intellectually bereft that he has apparently never had an idea of his own, but only repeats whatever his masters have determined to be the political line of the day, and can do nothing but hurl adolescent abuse at those who dare point out his unsavory allegiances and shoddy, dishonest reasoning. Aslan routinely lies about the positions of his opponents — apparently the real points they make are beyond his meager intellectual abilities to answer, so he has to resort to setting up straw men, and does so regularly.
Aslan’s latest straw man, and parroting of a Leftist talking point, comes in a piece so cutesy and self-conscious that the reader is almost embarrassed for him: “Grand Ayatollah or Grand Old Party?,” in Foreign Policy. It’s an exercise in moral equivalence, equating Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. The piece appeared on February 29, one day after — what a coincidence! — the Cagle cartoon above, which equates Santorum with Taliban suicide bombers. I am not saying Aslan cribbed from Cagle; what is more likely is that they’re both repeating a Leftist line that originated with neither of them.
Anyway, Aslan’s whole piece is summed up in its subtitle: “Who said it: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or U.S. Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum?” The bulk of the rest is a series of quotes, with the reader invited to guess which man said each, although only the most blinkered Leftist would fail to identify correctly the source of each one. Writes Aslan — and one can picture him mugging furiously for the cameras — “One is a religious fanatic railing against secularism, the role of women in the workplace, and the evils of higher education, as he seeks to impose his draconian moral values upon the state. The other is the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Yes, yes, Santorum is the American Khamenei, the American Taliban. No doubt he wants to mow down his own people who dare to dissent from his policies, blow up girls’ schools, throw acid in the faces of women who get out of line, make people wearing Western dress drink from latrine water, imprison and torture rivals and those who disagree with him, amputate the hands of thieves, murder apostates, stone adulterers — you name it. Of course, Leftists probably really do believe that Santorum wants to do those things, and are attacking him on that basis, even though it doesn’t seem to bother them all that much when the mullahs or the Taliban actually do them.
Behind this witless equivalence, there is a more sinister agenda. Aslan is a Board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), about which the Iranian human rights activist Manda Zand Ervin writes:
The Iranian American community widely believes NIAC…to be a Washington lobby group for the Khomeinist regime leadership. NIAC has long advocated unconditional negotiations with Tehran, and the total abandonment of all economic sanctions and military options against the Iranian regime. NIAC’s advocacy appears as a deftly veiled refusal to support the Iranian democracy activists and the Iranian freedom movement. This is not only un-American but contradicts all conservative ideals. The founder of NIAC, Trita Parsi is an unpopular figure within the Iranian-American community, as can be seen from his high disapproval ratings in a July 2011 poll of over 1800 Iranian Americans taken by the Pro-Democracy Movement of Iran. Senator Jon Kyl has called for an investigation into Trita Parsi and his work. Last month, on November 5, Parsi stated that criticism of Iran should be “punishable.”
So by equating Santorum with Khamenei, Aslan is not only smearing Santorum, but whitewashing the murderous mullahs, equating their bloody record with American social conservatism. In other words, Aslan is not just stupid; he’s evil.
Mr. Spencer is correct. This is exactly what Left thinks and spews. The Left’s playbook was written by Saul Alinsky, and one of his foremost rules was the destruction of an opponent.
Obama is dangerous. But you’d have to eliminate “deeply religious” from the phrase, unless it was made clear that his religion is not of God, at least in the way we know Him.
(Every living human being is religious; some are just more honest about it I suppose.)
From judicially imposing gay marriage to forcing insurers to provide contraceptive insurance at taxpayer expsnse, it’s the Secular Left which has been forcing its values on everyone else. Their hypocricy is so rank, it boggles the mind.
Agreed. This has been one of the most disappointing developments of the primary season.
The invective spewed against Rick Santorum by liberals is expected. Connecting his name with a byproduct of homosexual unprotected anal sex was one of the first successful cases of googlebombing, and he's been a target of vicious hatred by the gay community for a very long time.
What was not expected was the viciousness of the attacks against Rick Santorum by fellow conservatives. I don't have a problem with someone who thinks someone else is a better candidate. That's fair. What's new is the attacks on Christian beliefs by conservatives who say that someone who is an outspoken conservative Christian is a hindrance to the conservative movement because he loses elections and drives away people who value personal freedom.
I do realize there has been a libertarian amoral wing of the conservative movement for longer than I have been alive. I realize that some economic conservatives and some military/national defense conservatives have always been capitalists first or America firsters with no reference to moral values. I also am **VERY** much aware of the hatred by many RINOs of the “great evangelical unwashed.”
What's different this year is that not just the RINOs but hard-right conservatives have been openly attacking Christian conservatives. I simply haven't seen that in previous election cycles — the nationalist conservatives were saying “going to church is part of being a patriotic American” and the economic conservatives were staying quiet about their personal moral choices.
I wonder if this is what lies behind all the stories in the New York Times and other mainstream media about how the secular Tea Party has overtaken the religious right as the provider of highly motivated foot soldiers for the conservative movement. Maybe their reporters, who generally make no claim to be religious believers, have seen something more clearly about changes in the conservative movement than those of us who are traditional “social conservatives.” After all, many of us who are Christians have been around the conservative movement for a long time and people who don't share our faith probably aren't going to deliberately try to offend us to our face.
From the wiki review on "Flyboys" (an excellent book, BTW):
As U.S. Marines in 1945 invaded Iwo Jima some 150 miles away, U.S. warplanes bombed the small communications outpost on Chichi Jima. While Iwo Jima had Japanese forces numbering 22,000, Chichi Jima's forces numbered 25,000. Additionally, Iwo Jima has flat areas suitable for a naval invasion, while Chichi Jima's geography included hilly terrains and unsuitable coasts. According to one Marine (who Bradley does not identify), "Iwo was hell. Chichi would have been impossible." Assumedly, it is because of this that U.S. pilots, known as "Flyboys", were needed to neutralize Chichi's defenses.[1]
Nine crewmen survived after being shot down in the raid. One was picked up by the American submarine USS Finback. His name was Lieutenant George H. W. Bush, who later became the forty-first President of the United States. The others were captured by the Japanese and were executed and partially eaten as POWs, a fact that remained hidden until much later. The names of Flyboys were Jimmy Dye from Mount Ephraim, New Jersey, Floyd Hall from Sedalia, Missouri, Marve Mershon from Los Angeles, California, Warren Earl Vaughn from Childress, Texas, Dick Woellhof from Clay Center, Kansas Grady York from Jacksonville, Florida, Glenn Frazier from Athol, Kansas, and an airman whose name was never known. Senior Japanese Army Officers hosted a Sake party for their Navy counterparts where the livers of American POW's were roasted and served as an appetizer. The Navy officers subsequently reciprocated by hosting a party where they butchered and served their own American POW's.[1]
The book also documents Japanese cannibalization of not only the livers of freshly killed prisoners, but also the cannibalization-for-sustenance of living prisoners over the course of several days, amputating limbs only as needed to keep the meat fresh in the harsh jungle environment. It also cites cannibalisim of Allied soldiers killed in action and of Japanese dead, wounded and by lot drawings.[2]
These atrocities on Chichi-jima, were discovered in late 1945 and was investigated as part of the war crimes trials. In 1946, 30 Japanese soldiers were court-martialed on Guam and five officers (Maj. Matoba, Gen. Tachibana, Adm. Mori, Capt. Yoshii, and Dr. Teraki) were found guilty and hanged. All of the enlisted men were released within eight years.[3]
I knew WH had been shot down, but did not know all that.
Thank you for the correction... It’s been a long while since I read the book about that particular incidence. I loaned the book out to a Japanese friend who was interested in reading it and haven’t seen it again :/ (That was about 6 years ago).
Many things out there, lots to learn, and not enough people reading about history. So sad.
Again, thank you for setting that straight ;)
Same here.
It says a lot about President George H.W. Bush's restraint that he didn't use this in his campaigns. Bush was a legitimate combat war hero, gave up an Ivy League college deferment to become the youngest-ever American combat pilot, and apparently narrowly escaped being eaten by sadistic Japanese cannibal war criminals. It's the sort of thing nobody would believe and everybody would think is a wild exaggeration — except that it is TRUE.
We sometimes forget just how horrible some of the enemies of Western civilization have been over history. Obviously we have our problems as Americans, but eating the livers of enemies of our prisoners of war, and keeping POWs alive after we hack off some but not all of their limbs so we can harvest their remaining body parts for food without needing to worry about refrigeration in jungle conditions, is not on the list of American problems.
When American servicemen urinate on enemy corpses, it gets blasted all over the international media with other Americans killed in retaliation. When Japanese servicemen kill captured pilots and eat their roasted body parts, the case gets buried and most of those involved get released after eight years of imprisonment.
It would be nice to believe the reason for the difference is that Americans have higher standards and we get attacked for hypocrisy when we fail to follow our own standards.
[Not to mention the fact that he was shot down near the coast of Iwo Jima and almost executed by the Japanese...]
George was not “almost executed” by the Japanese. Here are the facts around his service and casualty incident;
After Bush’s promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) on August 1, the San Jacinto commenced operations against the Japanese in the Bonin Islands. Bush piloted one of four Grumman TBM Avenger aircraft from VT-51 that attacked the Japanese installations on Chichijima.[5]
His crew for the mission, which occurred on September 2, 1944, included Radioman Second Class John Delaney and Lieutenant Junior Grade William White.[1]
During their attack, the Avengers encountered intense anti-aircraft fire; Bush’s aircraft was hit by flak[6] and his engine caught on fire.[1]
Despite his plane being on fire, Bush completed his attack and released bombs over his target, scoring several damaging hits.[1] With his engine afire, Bush flew several miles from the island, where he and one other crew member on the TBM Avenger bailed out of the aircraft;[6] the other man’s parachute did not open.[1]
It has not been determined which man bailed out with Bush[1] as both Delaney and White were killed as a result of the battle.[6] Bush waited for four hours in an inflated raft, while several fighters circled protectively overhead until he was rescued by the lifeguard submarine USS Finback.[1]
For the next month he remained on the Finback, and participated in the rescue of other pilots
Bush was shot down on 2 september, 1944...five months before the Iwo landings.
You'll have to take the matter up with respected WWII histortian James Bradley, author of this account, Flags of our Fathers, and Imperial Cruise. To be honest, I'm not sure what you're disputing here, but past experience tells me that you tend to feel entitled to your own facts to go with your curious opinions.
The Germans deserve every bit of bad press they get, but there were men every bit as evil as Hitler walking around at that time, and they didn’t always have swastikas on their jackets. The Russians were at least as repulsive as the Nazis. The Japanese, who had no cultural understanding of surrender or prisoners, were worse. The Japanese not only believed they were the “Master Race,” they believed they were the only humans. They had no immigrant population to purge on their island homeland, but everybody else, everywhere they went, was fair game.
We agree, especially about the Japanese.
To get an idea just how horrible the Japanese were, it was their **LIBERALS** oriented toward the West who were allowed to run their puppet state in Manchuria which conducted human experiments in biological warfare, hypothermia, and trauma surgery. More typical Japanese occupying armies elsewhere had even more vicious attitudes — instead of keeping most of the civilian population alive and using only a few for inhuman experiments as the liberals did in Manchuria, Japanese who conquered elsewhere considered things like the Bataan Death March to be appropriate and normal behavior to conquered people.
My wife is Korean. My father- and mother-in-law, who now live in our home in the United States, lived through the Japanese colonization of their nation and were teenagers during World War II. Connect the dots.
As a Freeper, I'm sure you'll agree that multiculturalism is wrong. I'd go beyond that limited statement on which most conservatives can concur and say some cultures are so horrifically evil that they must be destroyed in order to be rebuilt from their ashes.
Nazi Germany and its Prussian predecessors, as well as the Imperial Japanese Shinto cult, are on my list of such cultures which could be fixed only by utter and absolute military defeat, followed by reconstruction by occupying forces. I'd probably say the same thing for radical Islam, though I still have some hope that liberal forms of Islam will do the same sorts of damage to Islam that liberalism has done to Christian churches. The Islamic “moderates” deserve time to try to fix their societies, just as we encouraged liberal Germans and liberal Japanese in the 1920s and 1930s before their reform movements failed, but I'm not optimistic.
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A correction is not a dispute. And facts are neither yours nor mine.
You may rely on a novelist for what you think are the facts...some of us prefer to do our own work and have read the USN's own account which is available on line.
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq10-1.htm
And Bradley never wrote a novle that I am aware of.
"As U.S. Marines in 1945 invaded Iwo Jima some 150 miles away, U.S. warplanes bombed the small communications outpost on Chichi Jima.....Nine crewmen survived after being shot down in the raid. One was picked up by the American submarine USS Finback. His name was Lieutenant George H. W. Bush, who later became the forty-first President of the United States."
As I and others pointed out (with supporting USN links), the raid during which Bush was shot down happened on September 2, 1944 ----- five months before the invasion of Iwo Jima.
If you want to get prissy about facts you should make sure that they are on your side.
I swear I think the only reason you ever log on to FR is to come up with new ways to correct someone. An yet, you're always wrong. Even when your point is semantic.
And even then you are wrong.
PS: You're a punk.
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