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Pickings has devoted much space to the al-Dura affair which is the modern day version of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion. Those Protocols were created for the Czar’s secret police in 1903 and have become a staple of anti-Semitism since. (Hitler referred to them in Mein Kampf) Later today we devote a lot of space to a Weekly Standard article debunking the al-Dura myth.
Before we get to news items, Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College reminds us of the document and the birthday we celebrate tomorrow.
… We might remember then, this Fourth of July, that our nation may not be perfect, but it can make a claim available to no other: in the name of the rights of all, it was built from the first to belong to its people and not to their rulers. …
A week ago Victor Davis Hanson wrote on our “can’t do” mentality. Daniel Henninger has the theme today with the World Trade Center site as back drop.
James Taranto has interesting background to the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt from FARC rebels in Colombia.
We’ll spend some time today on Wesley Clark. Jennifer Rubin starts us off with three posts from Contentions.
Barack Obama can’t figure out why it should be a top priority to cough up an apology to John McCain for the Wesley Clark slur. Let’s see: 1) it is burying his patriotism defense and making a mockery of Monday’s speech; 2) it is convincing the political establishment that he is tone deaf or arrogant or both; 3) no one will believe his squishy words distancing him from this and future attacks; and 4) New Politics is now fodder for parody. Oh–and he turned a one day story into a week-long blunder. …
… So we have Obama’s entirely self-created blunder where even the MSM is virtually slack-jawed at the sight of the Obama campaign’s determination to inflict more and more damage upon itself. His atrocious judgment in perpetuating a horrible storyline for himself defies the pre-existing media narrative — that Obama is smart, savvy, world-wise, and adept. Not the Obama we have seen lately: he is either paralyzed by indecision or in such a cocoon of liberal elitism that he sees nothing wrong with attacking a war hero’s military service. …
While Rubin concentrated on Obama, Victor Davis Hanson turns towards the perpetrator – Wesley Clark.
… But how can a former four-star general suggest that piloting a jet fighter-bomber under fire can be reduced to “riding in a fighter plane” (as in a Sunday spin above the base?). And isn’t the ability to repeatedly pilot a vulnerable aircraft over enemy territory, and then survive years of unimaginable savagery precisely “a qualification to be president” (note the indefinite article “a” that Clark employed, as in one of many that might make a successful President). …
Power Line has spotted the root of the problem – Wesley’s ego.
Wesley Clark has made the rounds of just about every talk show on television over the last 24 hours, repeating his attack on John McCain as lacking the executive experience needed to be President. It’s pretty funny, actually, if you listen to Clark, because whenever he describes the precise military experience needed to equip a candidate for the Presidency, it turns out to be exactly what Clark himself did. Right up until the time he got fired. …
There’s manifest evidence of that ego in Slate’s 2001 review of his book. (2001, mind you. A couple of light years in internet time)
… But at the book’s core is an agenda of score-settling and ass-covering–and there’s plenty of both to do. I don’t really see the difference between “modern war,” as Clark describes it, and a cynical kind of media savvy. (“For large democracies, the home front is the critical theater of war, and words and images are the key weapons.”) Like his fellow airwave-hog Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special negotiator in the run-up to the Kosovo bombing, Clark sought to wage the war by chatting up Tom Brokaw and Christiane Amanpour. He made end-runs around the U.S. Army chain of command and leaked information to other branches of government (State, in particular) and other governments (Britain’s, in particular). This won Clark a reputation for flexibility with Holbrooke and Albright and the esteem of both NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and British Prime Minister Tony Blair–so much esteem, in the latter case, that Clark was recently knighted.
But at the same time, his methods led him into a propagandistic press strategy that was transparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the war. And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, “Get your f–king face off the TV.” Shelton didn’t trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen–with no objection from President Clinton–ended Clark’s tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him. …
Back to the real campaign, Karl Rove has a recap of the money war.
On the money front, how do Sens. Obama and McCain stack up? No contest, it seems. Since the campaign began, Mr. Obama has raised a staggering $295-plus million, versus Mr. McCain’s almost $122 million. But that’s misleading.
Mr. Obama spent a lot to win the nomination. So how much cash did he and his rival have when the general election effectively began in June? As of May 31, Mr. Obama had $43.1 million on hand while Mr. McCain had $31.6 million – a significant but not overwhelming advantage.
There is also the cash raised by the Republican and Democratic National Committees. Each candidate depends on the party committees for certain expenditures – registration, voter identification and get-out-the-vote drives, materials distributed by volunteers, even some advertising. Here, the Republicans had $53.5 million in hand on May 31, versus the Democrats’ paltry $4 million. Thus Mr. McCain and the RNC have $38 million more than Mr. Obama and the DNC. …
In 2000 a new blood libel against the Jews was created in the Gaza strip. The Weekly Standard tells us how it was done.
To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can’t own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it’s thumbs-down. Not for nothing was Brennus a Gaul. His modern French heirs don’t do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.
So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura-a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000-it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel’s regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.
In the ensuing eight years, the small figure of Muhammad al-Dura cowering beside his crouching father became the defining image of the second Intifada. The “child martyr’s” picture cropped up on posters, websites, postage stamps, and street names throughout the Muslim world from Mali to Indonesia, fueling lynchings and suicide bombings. The Israeli authorities at first took the French report more or less at face value and blandly deplored the child’s death in a hasty release (“To the best of our knowledge, the boy was hit by our fire”). Others, however, were not so sure.
They parsed and scoured each of the 59 seconds of the film and every corner of the location for clues, ballistic angles, improbable moves, and hidden motivations. The film showed the two figures first seeking cover from gunfire, then later slumped over, though with no sign of blood or wounds. When increasingly convincing voices came to question, at the very least, the point of origin of the shots-the location of the small Israeli garrison made it pretty much impossible for Muhammad and his father, who was allegedly wounded, to have been hit by Israeli bullets-it took six weeks for the Israeli army spokesman to state in an interview that “both versions of the incident [are] possible,” and two more months for an official investigation to be launched.
Meanwhile, Enderlin and his bosses at the state-run France 2, who had distributed their news item free worldwide, were refusing to answer questions. They flatly declined to provide the complete 27 minutes of footage taken that afternoon by the cameraman, or to concede any possible error, ping-ponging in the classical obfuscating pattern of bureaucracies everywhere. (“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” hasn’t yet made it to France.) …
The Economist reviews a book on Communist jokes.