LAST STRAWS

Women know all about last straws.  It will thus take a woman to explain to the puzzled men of the New York Times, the Hamas Palestinians, and the Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq why the events of this past week were last straws.

"Men are essentially clueless," most any gal will be happy to tell you.  "We keep giving them hints that things are bugging us, they keep right on ignoring the hints, until one day when we finally can't take it any more, we snap – and they are hurt and bewildered."

So it is that Editor-in-Chief Bill Keller and his fellow traitors at the New York Times are playing the besieged victim in the face of the torrent of outrage over their treasonous exposure of Bush's tracking of terrorist financing.

Just as are the terrorists of Hamas, the poor little victims of Zionist oppression who can't understand why this one last provocation, kidnapping an Israeli soldier, could prompt the threat of all-out war against them.

As for Al Qaeda in Iraq, they have had a collective senior moment, a memory lapse that could prove fatal.  Here's the story they forgot:

When, on November 4, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered his "students" to seize the American Embassy in Tehran and take American diplomats hostage, innumerable articles in the press appeared speculating if Khomeini was crazy.

In response, Richard Nixon observed:  "If Khomeini is crazy, he's crazy like a fox.  A truly crazy man would have seized the Soviet Embassy."

On September 30, 1985,  terrorists of the Islamic Liberation Organization kidnapped four Soviet diplomats in Beirut, Lebanon.  They shot one of them, Arkady Katkov, in the head, left his corpse in a soccer stadium, and announced they would shoot the others unless their demands were met (that the Soviets cease support of a rival terrorist group).

These were the same ILO terrorists who had abducted the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley on March 16, 1984 and horribly tortured him to death.  The CIA – recall this was Ronald Reagan's and Bill Casey's CIA – did nothing in retaliation.

Not the KGB.  The instant it learned of Katkov's death, they assigned a Spetsnaz counterterrorism group known as "Alfa" to the situation.  The Alfa team located the brother of the ILO leader, cut off his testicles, beheaded him, sewed the testicles in his mouth, and sent the severed head in a sack to the ILO with the message:

"If our men are not released unharmed in 24 hours, the testicles of your other brothers will end up in the heads of your wives."

The Soviet hostages were released promptly.  What is more revealing, however, is that no Middle Eastern terrorists bothered the Soviets ever again.

Until this week.  On Monday (June 26),  the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed that four of its diplomats in Baghdad – Fyodor Zaitsev, Rinat Agliulin, Anatoly Smirnov and Oleg Fedoseyev – who had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda terrorists demanding Russia give independence to its Moslem province of Chechnya, were beheaded.

Two days later (yesterday, June 28), Putin ordered a Spetsnaz Alfa team into Iraq, to hunt down the Al Qaeda Russian-killers and "destroy" them.  They will do whatever it takes to whomever it takes. 

The Alfa team will systematically and gruesomely go after every relative of the killers they can find.  One or more will talk, quickly and informatively.  When the Alfas find the killers, they will be physically dealt with in such a way as to ensure there will be no more memory lapses.

No rules of engagement, no endless paperwork to fill out justifying their every action, no traitor-media to worry about.  The Alfas will slip out of Iraq as quietly as they slipped in.

When there's a last straw for Russians, they make sure it stays the last.  No more straws.

It's a lesson that the Israelis would like to learn, but as of this writing (Thursday afternoon, June 29) haven't.  Then again, what did they expect with a corrupt socialist on the take from everyone including the Palestinians, Amir Peretz, as Defense Minister?

For us, the question is whether we are capable of learning the lesson at all – does America have a learning disability regarding last straws?

This is a true make-or-break moment.  We are at war, and the New York Times is on the other side, so criminally infected is it with Bush Derangement Syndrome. 

The disclosure of the secret financial tracking program is just the last in a long list of treasonous disclosures.  If it is not the final last straw, and Bill Keller not indicted for treason, then there will be endlessly more straws, none of them last however outrageous.

Last straws are marvelous opportunities if they are treated as such.  The Russians will, the Israelis might, the Bushistas – well, all we can do is hope they don't end up like the Palestinians, about whom Aba Eban (a former Israeli foreign minister) once said:

"They never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity."