Walt recommends NOT trying to drive in China

À propos of nothing, Agent 3 sent us this photo of a traffic sign in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong.

Jordan Road (Chinese: 佐敦道) runs from the West Kowloon Highway in West Kowloon, through Kwun Chung and Ferry Point to Gascoigne Road and is a major east–west road in southern Kowloon. However, it is not a straight road, and drivers confronted with this directional sign must quickly decide which way to go.

Fortunately for the indecisive, Kowloon is one of the most densely populated cities on earth, so speeds on Jordan Road usually range from very slow to stop. And, Chinese drivers being what they are, no-one is surprised if they turn at a place or in a direction contrary to the one indicated by the sign. 

Or if they just stop to discuss with others (often going the other way) to discuss which is the correct thing to do. Agent 3 is not saying that Chinese can't drive, only that Chinese can't drive well. Hence the old cliché of the Chinese fire drill. Don't even think about driving there.

A sensible view of demands to retaliate against Iran

Most of Walt's readers don't read (or haven't heard of!) the National Post. Founded by Conrad Black, sometime Canadian (when he wasn't busy being Lord Black of Cross Harbour) and arch-conservative, the Post (and its group of Sun newspapers) is the only media outlet in Canuckistan which takes a reasonably balanced view of the world. 

One of the Post group's premier columnists is Kelly McParland, who wrote an excellent piece today on the stupidity of the Excited States of America's entering yet another war in the Middle East. Mr McParland argues that the Republicans who are pressing Crooked Joe Biden to hit back at Iran for the drone strike that killed three US soldiers [How come all three were black? Ed.?] are all but insane to advocate such folly. 

Worse, they are urging a course of action which President Trump has rightly and repeated condemned. I've emphasized Mr Trump's words in Mr McParland's column, which I'm reposting, in a slightly shortened version. (To read the entire column, click on the headline link.) 

Biden pressed to start another 'stupid' war

If you disliked Donald Trump but were determined to say something positive about him, you could always cite his consistent criticism of “stupid” American wars. It’s a position that hits home with a lot of people — Democrats as much as Republicans — who have lost loved ones in distant countries over matters a lot of Americans don’t view as their responsibility to solve.

Trump has been nothing if not consistent on the point.While campaigning for re-election in 2020 he boasted of his efforts to reduce U.S. military deployments overseas and pledged to "keep America out of these endless, ridiculous, stupid, foreign wars in countries that you’ve never even heard of."

He regularly assails the Biden administration over its defence performance — particularly the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, insists he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours as president, and says the White House "has brought us to the brink of World War III."

His admirers like to cite his record of having "no wars" during his four years in office — a claim with some merit compared to recent predecessors. One 2017 study concluded that crucial Trump victories in three key states in the 2016 election may have been helped by concern over high casualty rates under previous administrations. All of which makes it a bit odd that top Republicans are loudly demanding the sort of retaliatory action against Iran that history suggests would be an excellent way to start yet another ill-fated U.S. military entanglement....

"The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East. Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief," said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is backing Trump’s renewed bid for the presidency. 

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell charged in a statement that "the entire world now watches for signs that the President is finally prepared to exercise American strength to compel Iran to change its behaviour."

He said U.S. enemies would continue to be emboldened "until the United States imposes serious, crippling costs — not only on front-line terrorist proxies, but on their Iranian sponsors who wear American blood as a badge of honour." Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn both fired off tweets insisting the White House aim hits directly at Iran, while Trump himself used the attack to criticize Biden for his "weakness." 

Given the Middle East’s status as one of the world’s most relentlessly volatile regions, Iran’s success in spreading its tentacles throughout the region, the tensions already centred on the bitter confrontation in Israel and Gaza and the growing boldness of Iran’s determination to taunt western powers, it’s difficult to see how yet another one-off U.S. retaliatory effort could accomplish anything other than increasing the danger the region’s many festering hot spots erupt into one giant conflagration.

In other words, just the sort of "endless", "stupid" foreign war that Trump has so often derided, and just the sort of quagmire the mullahs in Tehran would love to see sweep over the region. Chaos and conflict work to the benefit of regimes like Syria’s and Iran’s, helping focus hatred on foreign powers rather than the brutality and repression they inflict on their own people. 

A few quick missile strikes on known Iranian dependents in Syria or Iraq, or even Iran itself, might raise cheers for a day or two in Washington but would be yet another opportunity for Tehran to recruit the sort of fanatics who think spilling more blood is a good reaction to all the blood that’s already been spilled. Jumping impulsively into doomed conflicts is indeed a trait that has brought the U.S. tragedy and humiliation time and again. 

Vietnam was a quagmire. It was far harder for the Obama and Trump administrations to get US troops out of Iraq than it was for the Bush White House to get them in. The US disaster in Benghazi may not have killed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign all on its own but was certainly a nail Republicans hammered at enthusiastically. And Joe Biden’s rush to flee Afghanistan was a fiasco from which he’s never managed to recover.

It’s easy to understand the temptation to use Washington’s immense military might to strike back at a country that works so hard to bring despair to so many people. But in pressing Biden to risk lives for the sake of a quick headline or two, Republican leaders are demanding a response that’s diametrically opposed to what their favoured candidate has been preaching since the day he entered politics. 

Would they be making the same demand if it was a Republican sitting in the White House, forced to confront the prospects of setting off a regional explosion, complete with body bags being shipped back home? If so it would be evidence they’d learned no more about the dangers of stumbling into foreign wars than the presidents who sent U.S. sons and daughters into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and came to regret it.

Your militant Muslims today (Islamic terrorism update)

Following up yesterday's posts on attacks in Europe and the Middle East for which fanatical Muslim terrorists are responsible...

In Germany, the toll from the death truck which was deliberately crashed into people thronging the Christmas market near Kaiser Wilhelm church in Berlin has climbed to an even dozen (12), with four dozen (48) reported injured.

Die Polizei arrested a Muslim-looking person caught running away from the scene, who turned out to be... wait for it... a Pakistan asylum-seeker. But now Herr Inspektor Hitler [Ed., please check name.] says they may have got the wrong man. "They all look the same," he told the press.

In a separate statement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose policy of Willkommenskultur has opened Germany's legs [Arms! shurely. Ed.] to over a million "refugees" and asylum-seekers in the last year, said she was "disappointed". Walt says she's not half so disappointed now as she will be after next year's elections.

The gunman who assassinated the Russian ambassador to Turkey turned out to be a native-born Muslim, hardly surprising since the vast majority of Turks are followers of the Prophet. If Turkey is ever admitted to the European Union (which now seems highly unlikely) it would be the first Muslim nation to be included in once-Christian Europe. The whole idea of Turkey being considered a European nation is ludicrous, but I digress...

Turkish police say it was easy for the assassin to get close to the ambassador since he (the killer) was an off-duty policeman. As he pulled the trigger (eight times) he shouted "Allahu akbar!" and other dire imprecations in Arabic, but then switched to Turkish for a rant about Syria and Aleppo. Although his family and roommates are helping police with their investigation, it's unclear whether the killer was acting in support of ISIS or the militias who are revolting against the Syrian government. This one may not be "Islamic terrorism"... merely a "political statement".

The excitement over the Berlin and Ankara attacks was such that a less spectacular incident in Switzerland got buried in the inside pages, so to speak. In Zurich, a gunman wounded three people attending prayers at an Islamic centre, before turning the gun on himself.

Witnesses to the attack reported that the gunman, dressed in dark clothes and a woolen cap, had escaped on foot after the shooting. Swiss police have not identified a motive for the attack on the Islamic centre, which was largely frequented by members of Zurich's community of Somali "refugees". An update on the investigation is expected momentarily.

Finally to the Middle Eastern sandpit of Jordan, where seven members of the country's security forces, two local civilians and a Canadian tourist were killed on Sunday in an attack on a Crusader-era castle in Karak, south of the capital, Amman.

At least four gunmen laid siege to the popular tourist attraction for reasons as yet "unexplained". Four of the attackers were shot dead by police. 15 members of the security forces were injured along with 17 Jordanian civilians and two foreigners, including the son of the Canadian lady who was killed. The attack is said to be one of the bloodiest incidents in Jordan in recent memory. ISIS has claimed responsibility for a series of weekend shootings, in a statement released today by the US-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant internet traffic.

Further reading: Geert Wilders says Angela Merkel has blood on her hands, after Berlin attack. Fox News, 20/12/16.

VIDEO: How goes the war against IS/ISIL/ISIS? It's a fiasco!

In the past ten days, while Walt was preoccupied with weightier matters [The NHL playoffs? Ed.], the "Caliphate" struck back, seizing the key cities of Ramadi (in Iraq) and Palmyra (Syria). The loss of the latter is sad for the West because it was a centre of culture and civilization since for millennia, and priceless antiquities are now threatened with destruction by the Islamic barbarians. The toll of dead (beheaded and otherwise) and displaced (refugees) in both places continues to mount.

How did this happen? For over a year now, it will be remembered, the Paranoid States of America and its running dogs (O Canada!) have been bombing the excrement out of targets -- latrines, dumptrucks, and so forth -- in Iraq and Syria, with the avowed aim of "degrading" (not "defeating") "ISIL" (as Obama and Harper still call it), and keeping our countries safe from the dreaded Islamic terrorists.

Now, with the fall of Ramadia and Palmyra, the shekel has dropped. The coalition's defence honchos have belatedly realized that without boots on the ground, the mission against ISIS is futile. They tell us that they already knew that, but were relying on the Iraq's alleged army -- trained and advised by coalition troops -- to get the job done. How's that working out? At Ramadi, the Iraqis, although outnumbering the jihadists 10 to 1, turned tail and ran.

Pause for a little levity...
Q. How many gears to Iraqi tanks have? A. One forward, four reverse!
Q. What's the forward speed for? A. In case they're attacked from behind!

United States Secretary of Defense Ass Carter ["Ash"! Don't do that again. Ed.] didn't actually tell that joke on CNN last Sunday, but did, on the national air, criticize Iraqi soldiers for not being willing to fight and defend themselves. He blamed the biggest ISIS victory in almost a year on something that sounded a lot like Iraqi cowardice. What he actually said was, "What apparently happened [in Ramadi] is that the Iraqi forces showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. And yet they failed to fight."

Mr. Carter’s frustrations are apparently shared by the Prez. Mr. 0 told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that "if the Iraqis are not willing to fight for the security of their country, then we cannot do it for them."

In "Why Iraq's Military Has No Will to Fight" Matt Schiavenza says it’s easy to see why Washington is unhappy with Baghdad. He writes: "In the eight years since the US formally occupied Iraq, the US invested $25 billion in training and equipping the country’s armed forces before withdrawing in 2011. To this day, a much smaller number of American soldiers remain in the country in order to train Iraqi soldiers.

"What accounts for the Iraqi military’s failure? Many problems stem from the Bush administration’s decision to disband the existing Iraqi military in 2003 and build a new one from scratch. Intended to rid the institution of officers linked to Saddam Hussein, the move instead left thousands of armed men unemployed and embittered. This contributed to a security vacuum within Iraqi society and fed a vicious anti-US insurgency. Many high-ranking officials who served under Saddam have now become senior commanders with ISIS.

"The Iraqi army is also notoriously corrupt, a legacy of Nouri al-Maliki’s years as prime minister. Fearful that a strong military would pose a threat to his power, al-Maliki replaced top commanders with political clients drawn from his Shiite sect, undermining any attempt to establish a merit-based system of promotion. So-called 'ghost battalions' draw salaries despite never reporting for duty, and the forces who do remain are no match for fanatical ISIS fighters.

"'Military training, no matter how intensive, and weaponry, no matter how sophisticated and powerful, is no substitute for belief in a cause,' William Astore, a former US Air Force lieutenant colonel, wrote last year in the American Conservative."

That's a very good analysis from a respected -- and liberal -- source. But it begs the question Walt and others have been asking since the beginning. What are "we" -- Obama's "coalition of Western democracies" -- doing there? Why are we meddling in the Middle East, taking sides in Islamic civil wars and jihads which are really none of our business? See "Canada re-ups for another year of the Obama war" and "Jordan's King Abdullah II speaks about the 'war within Islam'"

Quoting the Schiavenza article again: "The main problem with the Iraqi military is the problem with Iraq as a whole -— the country effectively no longer exists as a unified state. Kurdistan, for all intents and purposes, acts as an independent country. Much of the Sunni population lives in territories controlled by ISIS. The rump Iraqi government, meanwhile, operates in close cooperation with Iran, which funds Shiite militias that act as a paramilitary force. The Iraqi military, then, is less a cause of the country’s failures than a reflection of them."

Dear readers, Iraq is a fiasco! So says Ron Paul, in a dialogue with Daniel McAdams, the latest installment of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. Here's "Who Won't Fight in Iraq?".

Jordan's King Abdullah II speaks about the "war within Islam"

Thanks to Agent 6 for sending us the link to a thoughtful speech given to the European Parliament earlier this month by a moderate Muslim -- yes, there is such a thing -- King Abdullah II of Jordan. He talks about the war within Islam, the conflict between Islamic terrorists (ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram) and the rest of the Muslim world, the Palestinian question, and the need for peaceful coexistence with the West.

خطاب جلالة الملك عبدالله الثاني المعظم في البرلمان الأوروبي - آذار

King Abdullah speaks in English. There are Arabic subtitles.

Answer: "Helloo dere! I'se your new neighbuh!"

And the question? "What are the six most-feared words in the English language?"
(Thanks to Johnny Carson's alter ego, Carnac the Magnificent, for the format.)

Yesterday we talked about how Anglo-Saxon immigrants chased the Celts out of England in the 5th century A.D. It happened again of course, in the 11th century, when the Norman French came. Today there are very few "English" people of purely Anglo-Saxon descent. And it's happening again... right now...

A massive influx of aliens who cannot or will not integrate themselves into the host society challenges the host people's capacity for tolerance and goodwill. Since WWII, some countries -- America, Britain and Canada -- have managed not too badly, although patience is wearing thin. Other nations remain quite xenophobic. And they don't like foreigners either!

Recently two Swedish economists decided to study whether there is any correlation between economic (and social) development and the warmth of the welcome extended to immigrants. Putting it another way, does economic freedom make people more or less racist? 

They asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbours. The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbours from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society.

Max Fisher, of the Washington Post, put the results in the form of a "racial tolerance map". Here it is.

The countries most tolerant of "diversity" are the bluest ones. [Wonder if Fisher's a Democrat. Ed.] The Swedes and Norwegians are near the top of the list, of course. The AABC countries -- America, Australia, Britain and Canada -- are also OK with neighbours who are "different". So is the rainbow nation of Brazil.

The least tolerant countries are... wait for it... mostly Muslim countries! No surprises there! Jordan led the list. They don't even like Palestinian refugees. Indonesia (the world's most populous Muslim country) was right up there, along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran. Even worse was India.

The only "developed" country hauling in the welcome mat right sharpish is France. Could it be that the French think they're getting more than their share of immigrants from, errr, Muslim countries? Could be!

Lettuce alone

Meet Amina Tarek. She's the one on the right, dressed in a costume stitched together out of ... errr ... lettuce leaves. She is promoting the biodegradable attire as an ecologically sound alternative to the Muslim burqa.

An added bonus, according to Ms Tarek, is that "if you get hungry and can't find a snack, you can always nibble on your sleeve". The theme of the campaign, according to the placard is "Let vegetarianism grow on you."

OK, seriously, Ms. Tarek is actually leading a PETA protest hoping to persuade Middle Eastern meat lovers to go vegetarian. Although her costume drew a lot of attention, police were not amused and officers arrested her and a colleague for not having obtained permission for their little demonstration.

She was released a little later, after Jordanian police realized the protest was about animal rights, not human rights. For her part, Ms. Tarek promised to "turn over a new leaf".

Girl stabbed to death for pregnancy outside of marriage

AFP reports that a man was charged on Sunday with premeditated murder after allegedly stabbing to death his 22-year-old daughter because she became pregnant outside wedlock.

"The father and his brother took the girl on Saturday to a doctor because she suffered stomach pains, and everybody was surprised to learn that she was six months pregnant," a police spokesman told AFP. "On their way home, the father stabbed the girl with a sword 25 times in her stomach, killing her immediately as well as her unborn baby boy."

The source said the suspect has confessed to the crime following the murder. "His brother was also charged with premeditated murder, while the victim's boyfriend is being held in custody for his own protection," he added.

Now where do you suppose this happened? Afghanistan? Iraq? Wrong! It happened in Jordan. One might say that the accused murderer is a man in Amman.

And what do you suppose is the religion of the accused daughter-slayer? Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please. No prizes!

AFP explains that murder is punishable by the death penalty in Jordan, but in cases of so-called "honour killings" a court usually commutes or reduces sentences, particularly if the victim's family urges leniency.

Around 15-20 women are murdered each year in Jordan in the name of honour. So far this year, 17 cases have been reported.

Remember, dear reader, that this is what we're fighting for in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why?!