THE ILLITERATE LEADER OF BRAZIL
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - known as “Lula” - is functionally illiterate. He won’t read anything, any studies, reports, books et al. His aides have learned to give him only one-page bulleted summaries of any issue, then explain it to him verbally. He has no education and knows nothing of economics or business. Yet he has a photographic memory for events and what is said to him. He is incredibly articulate and persuasive in speech. Thus he is the perfect populist demagogue to rouse the poor Brazilian masses.
THE SASSER WORM — What You Can Do Now
I’m sure most of you have heard of the Sasser worm by now. This vicious piece of code hit the Internet some ten days ago. It’s been on television, newspapers and magazines. Some of you have been infected. Hopefully many of you will have followed the advice of these broadcasts and articles, so won’t need this column. I fear that many of you haven’t.
ARABS AND AZTECS
Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam. Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques. Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs. The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem: There is nothing like death in war Nothing like the flowery death So precious to the gods who give us life Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it! The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.
GOOD NEWS! KERRY RESCUED BY NEW YORK TIMES
Whew. That was close. Earlier this week, Hanoi John’s campaign looked like a goner. And then the Gray Lady came to the rescue.
TERROR ON THE DOLE
Four young British Muslims in their twenties - a social worker, an IT specialist, a security guard and a financial adviser - occupy a table at a fast-food chicken restaurant in Luton. Perched on their plastic chairs, wolfing down their dinner, they seem just ordinary young men. Yet out of their mouths pour heated words of revolution. "As far as I'm concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better," says Abdul Haq, the social worker. "I know it's going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid - I pray for it, I look forward to the day."
PANIC AS POLICY IN IRAQ
We should have prepared the political battleground before the fighting ever started, by creating a democratic Iraqi government-in-exile. But internal divisions within the Bush administration proved intractable, and future historians will no doubt marvel at the fact that more passion and more man hours were spent fighting Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress than combating the likes of Moqtada and the remnants of Saddam's security forces.
LIBERATING SYRIA
As Syria is emerging as the principal facilitator of terrorism in both Israel and Iraq - see “Syria In The Gunsights” in last week’s TTP Weekly Report of April 23 - a Syrian democracy movement has just come in to being. It is the Reform Party of Syria, dedicated to terminating the Assad tyranny and achieving freedom and democracy for the Syrian people. The RFS immediately recognized that the “terrorist attack” in Damascus earlier this week (April 27) was staged by the Syrian government as a ruse to divert attention from its being wedded to the very terrorists they claimed were attacking. The RFS report enabled Members of Congress, such as Eliot Engle (D-NY) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), to denounce the attack as a “charade,” pointing out that it was on a vacant building. The RFS website is: http://reformsyria.org/ RFS now listed in Liberation Links. If you haven’t explored this feature of To The Point (listed on the left side bar), I invite you to do so. There are many people out there in the world struggling for liberation from Communist, Islamofascist, and other tyrannies. You can find out about a good many of them on Liberation Links.
A BRILLIANT NEW TOOL
All of you know of Google as a search engine; you probably use it. For a long while Google also has had a free toolbar for download. It appears as a toolbar on the top of your Internet Explorer page, along with Internet Explorer’s own toolbars. The Google toolbar enables searches without having to navigate to www.google.com. While convenient and useful, I normally wouldn’t mention it in these columns, because it hadn’t until recently enhanced your computer’s security. Google has come out with a second edition, and among several new features, it includes a pop-up killer.
BUSH’S BIGGEST SUPPORTER
She’s pretending to be John Kerry’s biggest supporter, but no one is rooting for George Bush to win in November more than Hillary. She got behind the best straw candidate Bush could most easily demolish, Dizzy Howard Dean. When he imploded, she looked around and asked, “Who’s the next worst?” A no-brainer: obviously, an egomaniacal gigolo with more negatives than an Algebra student who fantasizes he could be another “JFK.”
WHO DO THEY THINK WE ARE?
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was, "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them." The Fascists and Nazis believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust races and nations would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.The Terrorists have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.