Dear Palestinian Arab brethren: an open letter

A great letter written by an Arab that sees the futility of continuing to fight Israel. I mean when was the last time an Israeli tank was taken out by kids throwing rocks.

The war with Israel is over.
You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.
Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.
At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.
Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.
[snip]
We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.
Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.
Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.
Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods -- more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives -- while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.
The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

Al-Qaeda Attack Omaha?

This is a great post from Defense Tech Blog. It discuss how the decisions are made on how to spend the DHS money across the country. Personally I feel it is impossible to fortify every target in America. The money should be spent first on increasing intelligence capabilities; and two on block grants to states to so they can decide how to defend themselves in the event of a terrorist attack. The amount of money each state receives is based on the population of each state.


Some ordinarily smart people are saying some extraordinarily silly things, to try and spin some sense into the Homeland Security Department's decision to cut funds for New York and DC. The argument goes like this:
If I were a terrorist... I’m not sure I’d hit New York or Washington. Too obvious. Been done. Besides, both probably are reasonably well fortified. Therefore, I could easily imagine a scenario in which the next terror attacks occur in, say, Wichita.
Okay, sure. You can imagine all kinds of doomsday scenarios. Let your mind roam free. But if you want figure out where Osama & Co. might attack in the future, your best bet is to look at what they've done in the past, not daydream darkly. Because terrorism is an evolutionary art. Al-Qaeda doesn't hatch brand new types of strikes out of the blue; it develops them slowly, over time, taking what it learned in one attack and applying to the next. Even seemingly "out of the box" plans, like 9/11, were test-marketed years and years before.
So let's look at the record. Have Al-Qaeda and its affiliates hit any cornfields? Any small towns? Any exurbs? No, no, and no, actually. Instead, they've focused on three main types of targets:
* Big cities (New York, London, Madrid, Istanbul, Amman, Riyadh, DC)
* Military and government installations (Pentagon, USS Cole, East African embassies)
* Resorts (Sharm-el-Sheikh, Bali, Kenya)
Once it's tried an attack in a given place, does Al-Qaeda give up on it, and move somewhere else? 'Fraid not. In fact, they tend to revisit the same sites, over and over again. Take my home town, for example. As Police Commissioner Ray Kelly notes in today's New York Post:
New York remains a target-rich environment nonetheless, as a cursory review of terrorist acts here would indicate.
The iconic Brooklyn Bridge caught al Qaeda's eye after 9/11 when its operative Iyman Faris was tasked to see if it could be taken down. Another Islamic radical, Rashad Baz, was drawn to the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994 to shoot up a van with Hasidim occupants, including 16-year-old Ari Halberstam, who was killed. A like-minded radical picked the Empire State Building to spray the observation deck with gunfire, killing one tourist and wounding six others there in 1997.
The terrorists' first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center resulted in the deaths of six innocent people in 1993. Al Qaeda returned in 2001 to finish the job.
Then there was the al Qaeda "landmark" plot of 1993 to destroy the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the United Nations. The New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup Center in Midtown made al Qaeda's list of inviting targets in another plot exposed after 9/11.
More recently, a federal grand jury convicted the suspect in a plot, foiled by the NYPD, to bomb the Herald Square subway station in 2004. A terrorist bombing of the Atlantic Avenue subway complex in Brooklyn was narrowly averted by police intervention in 1997. Then there were the anthrax attacks against The Post and NBC in New York...
We had hoped that DHS would rely on the intelligence community to assess the threat and make funding decisions accordingly. Instead, DHS abdicated its responsibility.
For a while now, we've been focusing way too much on what security guru Bruce Schneier calls "movie-plot threats" -- scenarios that sound completely scary, but are beyond unlikely. So countless millions get poured into protecting cows from Al-Qaeda and stopping jihadist cropdusters. When he first took the Homeland Security gig, Michael Chertoff promised to end the farce, and protect the places that Al-Qaeda might actually attack, no matter how, well, hum-drum, that might seem. Unfortunately, he -- and others -- can't seem to resist the Tinseltown draw.
UPDATE 5:28 PM: Here is Rep. Peter King's letter to Chertoff, asking how this risk-analysis process went FUBAR.

What's up with Gitmo?

One of my favorite bloggers, Michelle Malkin, continued a thread of discussion on the latest Gitmo detainee suicides in her post, Boo Freakin' Hoo. She writes, "The manipulative detainees at Guantanamo Bay reportedly used the generous civil liberties protections we gave them to plot their suicide pact. Are you surprised?" No Michelle, I'm not, and I'd like to add my comments for the education of all who were surprised.
The Gitmo detainees are warrior ideologues, completely indoctrinated in a totalitarian resistance philosophy. They make war upon the infidel wherever they find him, be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gitmo, London or Manhattan. If they must, they will resist from inside a prison camp, and they will gleefully use our civilized system of laws to beat us. The quicker we understand this, the more capable we will be to defeat them.
(For a similar episode, see T. R. Fehrenbach's This Kind Of War, specifically Chapter 35, "Koje Do." This describes the revolt of North Korean prisoners at a POW camp. Having been equitably treated under Geneva Convention rules, given all sorts of facilities for recreation and betterment, the NoKo prisoners secretly organized and then captured the American camp commandant. It is not a pleasant tale. There are multiple lessons contained in the story, and I commend it to you if you want to understand totalitarian warrior ideology.)
I wonder if we have to endure a "Gitmo-Do" before we understand truly what we're dealing with. There are many courses of action open to handle the Gitmo detainees. Treating them like normal prisoners isn't the right one. Let them suffer the consequences of their actions, and let them regret the day they took the field against the United States. Hard measures are in order. I, for one, won't lose sleep.

P.S.

Here is your post for July, JDIII!