Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

White House: "Arafat part of the problem, not solution"

From yesterday's White House press briefing:

Q Does the White House have any reaction at all to Arafat asking the militant groups to reinstate the truce?

MS. BUCHAN: The way forward in Israel, in the Middle East, is by dismantling terrorist networks, by dismantling terrorist organizations. And one of the first steps in the road map is the consolidation of the security forces under Prime Minister Abbas. That must happen. The terrorist networks must be dismantled. And Arafat has once again shown himself to be part of the problem. He is not part of the solution. And the security forces need to be consolidated under Prime Minister Abbas.

Q He's asked the militant groups now to reinstate the cease-fire, basically.

MS. BUCHAN: Well, actions to dismantle terrorist organizations and to dismantle terrorist networks are what is needed and what's most important.

Anocephaly of the day

via LGF:. Right-hand man of Jacques ChIraq tells Israeli ambassador: "there is no proof that Hamas is a terrorist organization".

More proof of French perfidy, or simply a logical consequence of an intellectual climate that regards objective reality as a mere "text"?

Hobsbawn: if it works, seven-figure mass murder justified

Also via the Instaman: excerpts from an interview with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. The following incredible statements on Stalin's collectivization and Great Purges speak for themselves:

HOBSBAWM: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. [...]
[Interviewer Michael] IGNATIEFF: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?

HOBSBAWM: Yes.

Imagine the (more than justified) outcry if some "respected intellectual" claimed that the Nazi death camps would have been worth it if the Nazi racial utopia had actually been created. But the logical equivalent of same is fair game on the far "left". And believe this former leftist --- the argument is much more commonly made (in Europe) than you would think.

Steyn: it was about East Timor

(Double hat tip: Instapundit.) Mark Steyn points out a motive for the UN HQ bombing that may be very close to the mark:

[...S]itting in the middle of an unprotected complex staffed by ex-Saddamite spies was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the individual most directly credited with midwifing East Timor into an independent democratic state. Osama bin Laden (or rather whoever makes his audiocassettes) and the Bali bombers have both cited East Timor as high up on their long list of grievances: the carving out, as they see it, of part of the territory of the world's largest Islamic nation to create a mainly Christian state. Now they've managed to kill the fellow responsible. Any way you look at it, that's quite a feather in their turbans.

Go read the whole thing. And while on the subject, look at this one by Ralph Peters on US involvement in the rescue efforts:

n the weeks before the truck-bomb attack, the U.N.'s veteran security officer on site struggled, argued and begged for better protection. He knew the Canal Hotel was a vulnerable and likely target - but the U.N. chain of command refused to acknowledge the dimensions of the threat.

The U.S. military did offer protection - repeatedly. But U.N. bureaucrats turned it down. They didn't want to be associated with those wicked, imperialist, ill-mannered Americans. After all, everybody loves the United Nations, don't they?

Repeatedly stymied by prejudice and inertia, the U.N. security chief - a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer with a wealth of prior experience - nonetheless managed to cajole his superiors into letting him build a wall around the hotel.

That wall was made of reinforced concrete, almost 17 feet high and a foot thick. But U.N. officials refused to let the security officer push the wall very far out from the hotel. They didn't want to annoy anyone by limiting access to a public alley. Still, the security officer inched the wall as far out as he could.

The truck-bomber could not get inside the compound - the security measures in place at least prevented that. But the truck was able to speed toward the wall's exterior, using the alley that "had" to be kept open.

The driver knew exactly where he was going. He aimed his truck-bomb precisely to decapitate the U.N.'s in-country staff.

We all know what happened: Two dozen dead, including one of the U.N.'s most capable senior diplomats. Almost 150 wounded. A tragic day, indeed.

But without that wall and the security measures for which one American veteran fought, the hotel would have been leveled, with a death toll in the hundreds. The wall absorbed the initial force of three separate bombs packed into the truck.

And there is some justice in the world: Although his office disintegrated around him, the security officer walked out of the wreckage uninjured.

An active-duty U.S. Army officer, Lt.-Col. Jack Curran, was in charge of local medevac operations. Weeks before the truck-bomb attack, he, too, recognized the vulnerability of the hotel compound. Diplomatically, he asked if his pilots and medical personnel could "practice medevac ops" at the U.N. headquarters. "Just for training." With the security officer's help, he got permission.

As a result, there had just been two full, on-site rehearsals for what had to be done after the bombing. Thanks to this spirited, visionary officer, our helicopters and vehicles knew exactly how to get in, where best to upload casualties and where a triage station should be set up.

With impressive speed, the U.S. Army medevaced 135 U.N. employees and Iraqi civilians from the scene, saving more lives than will ever be known for certain.

U.S. Army Reserve engineers and Army mortuary personnel moved in to do the grisly, demanding work of rescuing any trapped survivors and processing the dead.

Now that the damage is done, the U.S. Army's welcome. A company of our 82nd Airborne Division took over external security for the site last week.

You don't say

Israeli newspaper headline (my translation): "[Palestinian Interior Minister Muhammad] Dahlan: Arafat is a liar-dog who destroys everything and lets us do nothing." (Arafat hu kelev shaqran, hores et ha-kol ve-lo noten lanu la`asot klum.)

ISM Central

Tal G. started a new blog entitled ISM Central, a skeptical look at the International Solidarity Movement, a.k.a. Intellectual Self-sodomy Movement, a.k.a. Idiots Shilling for Mass-murderers.

Seasons in the abyss

Mark Steyn minces no words when it comes to the French humanitarian disaster:

'The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell," thundered George Galloway last month. "Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour."

As usual, George was a little off. The gates of hell are on the périphérique and it's 100 degrees at midnight in the pissoir on the Metro. To date, two US soldiers are believed to have succumbed to the heat in Iraq, whereas over 10,000 people have succumbed to it in France.

[...]

Certainly, Iraq has its problems. Jacques Chirac, en vacances just up the road from me in North Hatley, Quebec, took time out of his three-week holiday to issue a statement on events in Baghdad, where 20 people died on Tuesday. But he didn't bother to interrupt his vacation to issue a statement on events in France, where so many people have died, the funeral homes are standing room only and they're having to store bodies in the freezers at the fruit and veg markets.

Now that his old pal and nuclear client has been removed from power, M Chirac is utterly irrelevant to the future of Iraq. But But surely France still falls within his jurisdiction, doesn't it?

And where are the Red Cross and Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and all the other noisy humanitarians? If 10,000 Iraqis had died of dysentery on George W Bush's watch, you'd never hear the end of it. A few weeks back, with three fatal cases of cholera, the Humanitarian Lobby was already shrieking that we stood on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe.

France isn't on the edge, it's in the abyss. When I motored round Iraq a couple of months ago, the hospital wards were well below capacity. Yet in France the entire health system – or that percentage of it not spending August at the beach – is stretched beyond its limits (35 hours a week, 44 weeks a year). Why aren't Médecins Sans Frontières demanding to be allowed in to take over?

There's an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different disasters on American TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But 10,000 French can die, and even the French don't seem to care – or not too much, and not with any great urgency.

Bernard Mazeyrie, managing director of France's largest undertakers, told the New York Times that several of the bereaved were in no hurry to bury their aged loved ones: "Some, he said, informed of the death of relatives, postponed funerals, not to interrupt the August 15 holiday weekend, and left the bodies in the refrigerated hall." Au bord de la mer? Ou au bord de ma mère? Hmm. Tough call.

[...]

In Paris this spring, a government official explained to me how Europeans had created a more civilised society than America - socialised healthcare, shorter work weeks, more holidays. We've just seen where that leads: gran'ma turned away from the hospital to die in an airless apartment because junior's sur la plage. M Chirac's somewhat tetchy suggestion that his people should rethink their attitude to the elderly was well taken. But Big Government inevitably diminishes its citizens' capacity to take responsibility, to the point where even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the state should do something about.

Meanwhile, Maggie Pernot wrote the other day to chide me for my continued defence of the Rumsfeld Death Camps at Guantanamo. The prisoners, she complains, are "kept in tiny, chainlink outdoor cages where they were likely to be rained upon". In fact, they have sloping roofs and cool concrete floors, perfect for the climate. If they had solid walls rather than airy wire mesh, they'd be Parisian sweatboxes and everyone would be dead. By contrast, if those thousands of French pensioners had been captured by the Marines and detained by Rummy in Cuba, they'd be alive today.

Mme Pernot writes from St Julien, France. That's right: she's surrounded by an actual humanitarian scandal on all sides but she'd rather obsess about an entirely fictional one. Heat getting to you, Madame? Or just the unusual odour from the flat next door?

UN bombing: the non-obvious purpose?

Instapundit and Roger Simon are only two generally acute observers who are wondering if the UN bombing could have had another purpose than the obvious one. OK, as a law professor and professional crime writer that's what one might expect of them, but this isn't your run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory. Yet, it doesn't quite pass the Occam's Razor test...

Feel like an alien, a stranger in an alien place...

French expat "Chicago Boy" Sylvain Galineau comes back to France on a family visit, and, quoting T. S. Eliot, "knows the place for the first time". With some changes of emphasis, his experience feels quite familiar.

One little victory

Via Critical Mass: history professor KC Johnson recounts his ultimately succesful struggle for tenure after he was initially denied it --- despite an excellent academic record --- for having run afoul of the departmental "touchy-feely thought police". I don't know what takes more guts: his fighting the good fight or his willingness to stay on in such an environment.