RICE AND “REASONABLES”
She's a Renaissance woman, whose talents run from scholarship to music and sport. But in this interview with Bret Stephens of the Wall St. Journal, Condoleezza Rice often seems oddly detached from the life-and-death quality of the war against the terror masters. Indeed, she doesn't even call it a war, and the things she says about it are sometimes striking - headline quality remarks - but more often very peculiar. To begin with, she doesn't expect us to win this "battle, if you will, or a struggle," during the Bush presidency. Her mission for the next two years is not victory, but to put "some fundamentals in place." I wish the interviewer had asked her to define these "fundamentals," so that we could better judge whether or not they are worth the lives and limbs of our children.
STOCK SCAMS A GROWING THREAT
Here we are, well on our way into the 21st century. The human race has been around for at least 5,767 years as of last weekend (the Jewish New Year), and we've been working with e-mail, Internet and spam for over a decade already. With those credentials, you'd think people would know better.
Well, we do know better - but some people never learn. The proof? Many people are following the advice offered in the flood of stock-scam spam that has hit the Internet in recent months, leaving virtually no computer immune.
I'm sure that some To The Pointers are among them.
According to a recent study by Internet researchers at Harvard and Purdue Universities, the prices of "penny stocks" being touted in mass mailings to suckers actually rose significantly after a batch of messages were sent - as if recipients were rushing to their online brokers to buy the likes of Cyberhand Tech and ThermaFreeze Products in the hope that they could double their money.
Well, the come-ons are certainly appealing, but it's a scam, of course; all part of "pump and dump" schemes, where scammers buy stock in companies that exist mainly on paper and are traded on unsupervised exchanges, and then dump the shares on those who respond to their spam.
It must be working, because in the past few months stock spam has begun edging out fat pills and Viagra messages in my inbox!
WITH THE PESHMERGA
The moon was a little over a quarter full. It would be setting in an hour or so, leaving us without its meager light. I longed for night vision goggles, but the men I was with seemed to have no need of them and moved confidently in the dark. They were Kurdish guerrilla fighters known as Peshmerga, "Those who face death." We were armed, but not heavily. Holstered on my belt was a Webley Mark IV .38 revolver, and slung over my back was an AK-47 Kalashnikov, Type 2 with a wooden stock. The famous banana clip only holds 30 rounds, but I had no vest for extra magazines. One of the men showed me he was carrying eight and motioned for me not to worry. The Peshmerga were all carrying AKs of course, with vests for extra magazines and pouches for hand grenades. But that was it - no RPGs (rocket-propelled grenade launchers), no heavy machine guns. We were traveling light, as this was an insertion team. The mission was to insert me into Iran.
JOKE INTELLIGENCE
There is an "intelligence website" emanating from Israel called Debka. This Monday (September 24), it breathlessly blared Iran and Turkey Prepare for War in Iraqi Kurdistan. Debka's "exclusive military sources in Iraq" have revealed just to the website alone that "Turkish and Iranian air units as well as armored, paratroop, special operations and artillery forces are poised for an imminent coordinated invasion of the northern Iraqi autonomous province of Kurdistan." Since I am in Iraqi Kurdistan meeting with Kurdish resistance movements operating in Iran, I showed them the story. They laughed their heads off.
THE NEW YORK TIMES DESERVES A HORSEWHIPPING
The New York Times who, along with the Washington Post did stories last Sunday on a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued in April deserves a horsewhipping. The NIE represents the collective judgment of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The stories insinuated the intelligence chiefs had concluded the war in Iraq was a mistake. "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat," said the headline in the New York Times. "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight," said the headline in the Washington Post. "We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," the NIE said. The Times and the Post reported only the first half of that sentence.
CHOOSING A PRINTER
When I moved to Israel years ago, I brought with me all my worldly possessions, among them a 300 dpi laser printer - quite an expensive gadget in those days.
It was so pricey, in fact, that I remember having to leave a huge deposit at the airport; the customs inspectors said that I would have to return with paperwork proving that I needed it for business if I wanted to get my money back.
And now? Printers are practically throwaway items! Actually, there ain't so such animal as a "printer" anymore. Nowadays, the only printers with decent output are part of "all-in-one" machines that include faxes and scanners as well as three- and even four-color printing.
Though printers are more powerful and cheaper than they have ever been, and they come with a raft of features, they are, for the most part, really and truly flimsy.
Compare these printers with the one I brought with me to Israel. It was solid enough to make the trip in an airline luggage hold and survive to tell the tale. I dare you to try that with most of the printers you can pick up in stores such as Office Depot nowadays.
THE KURDISH KEY TO THE MIDDLE EAST
Among the most fascinating folks in the world are people known as the Kurds. They are older than history. The Land of Kurda is mentioned in Sumerian clay tablets - the world's oldest writing - over 5,000 years ago. The Land of Kurda - Kurdistan - was ancient five millennia ago. The Kurds had been living there for thousands of years before 3,000 BC - and they are still living there today, in the mountains of what is now northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. They number in the tens of millions - five million in Iraq, ten million in Iran, three million in Syria, between twenty and thirty million in Turkey. They are by far the largest ethnic group on earth without their own country. This has always made them a threat to the countries that divide up their homeland of Kurdistan. Always. The Kurds have been fighting the Persians for 2,500 years, the Arabs for 1,300 years, the Turks for 500 years. Western governments look upon the Kurds as a problem which threatens to break apart the fragile map of the Middle East into chaotic pieces. Now at last, the time has arrived to look upon the Kurds as an opportunity rather than a threat, not as a problem but a solution. The emerging reality is that the Kurds are the key to peace, freedom, and democracy throughout the entire Middle East. That's why I am in northern Iraq right now, as I am writing this.
TOXIC HONOR
The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan. However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed. Nothing better illustrates this "honor" mentality better than the fury directed by Islamic militants against Danish and Norwegian cartoons of Mohammed, or most recently the Regensburg speech of Pope Benedict XVI. Sacrilegious art in other cultures can offend and get people angry but the lunatic response of radical Islamists is in a class by itself. It's the shrieking, out of control petulance of a three-year old throwing a tantrum. People infected with this attitude will be utterly incapable of recognizing wrongdoing by their own society, utterly incapable of taking criticism or recognizing the need for correction. This is remarkably close to the image of Hell painted by C. S. Lewis in his books Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters: a paralyzing self-absorption that imprisons the individual in hate and impotent rage while simultaneously blinding him to any possibility of escape.
TRUE CRIME STORY
In the mood for a true crime story? Well, here's one ... and you are the victim! It's unbelievable but true. You and I, all of us, are being held hostage! It's even worse than that, because this extortion could end up costing us lots of money, time and frustration. But it's a fact: Your expensive PC/laptop, all your files, work and e-mail, the hours of toil and trouble you put into your career, are all being held hostage by a couple of lines of simple code that can disappear at anytime, with the result being that you will have to shell out big bucks for a new computer, or at least spend time you can't spare on what often ends up to be a wild goose chase! I'm talking about drivers, those little controller pieces of software that we don't think about until it's too late - which is when they disappear by being erased or damaged by a virus or any of the other daily PC hazards.
RESCUING ISLAM FROM ITSELF
The recent brouhaha surrounding Pope Benedict XVI comments on Islam delivered in Germany should give Moslems a pause. What the Pope said allows me, as a Moslem, to ponder self-examination and not rush into a reaction of condemnation. Islam, throughout its history, delivered its share of great minds to humanity during times of peace and prosperity. Scientists like Mohammad al-Khawarizmi who invented algebra and Avicenna who contributed greatly to medicine lived in an era of "political prestige, financial power, and intellectual pursuit with Baghdad as the epicenter" as Saadia Iqbal described it in a recent National Geographic article. We Moslems, in another era, built our own great and peaceful civilization that ushered the prosperity wished upon any people of any race in any religion. But Islam of today differs from the Islam of yesterday. Instead of a thriving era of the Abbasids, we are experiencing a terrorist era of Wahhabism. The radicalism of Wahhabi Islam demands a concerted effort by moderate Moslems and Moslem nations alike if ever Islam is to survive to usher another era of peace and prosperity.