Hapless = Innocent

Here's another piece by the MSM designed to make the illegal, non-uniformed terrorist combatants at Guantanamo look like sympathetic victims of an unjust system:

Australian suspect faces new Gitmo trial

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - After a nomadic decade that carried him from the Australian outback to the battlefields of Afghanistan, David Hicks ended up locked away at this remote U.S. base in Cuba, accused of training with al-Qaida and fighting for the Taliban.

Note how passive that reporting is. A gentle nomad. Just somehow "ended up" being "accused" and "locked away."

One of his attorneys, Joshua Dratel, dismissed as U.S. "mythology" that the Australian is a terrorist who threatened the United States or its allies.

The U.S. military had originally charged Hicks with attempted murder, aiding the enemy and conspiracy to attack civilians, commit terrorism and destroy property.

But those charges were dropped, suggesting that even the United States no longer considers Hicks to be a significant catch in its global war on terror.

"Even" the evil, paranoid United States? And the conclusion of what that "suggests" is purely in the mind of the reporter.

Military charging documents depict Hicks — a high school dropout who converted to Islam in 1999 after returning from Kosovo, where he fought on behalf of Muslim Albanians seeking independence from Serbia — as somewhat of a hapless holy warrior.

Somewhat? Hapless? It almost sounds like the premise of a stupid sit-com, the Hapless Holy Warrior!

You know, all fun and laughs. Nothing serious like really fighting fo the side of evil:

Armed with grenades and an assault rifle, Hicks spent weeks trying to join the fight in Afghanistan following the 2001 U.S. invasion but apparently failed to win the confidence of his al-Qaida associates, according to the documents.

He finally reached the front lines in Afghanistan two hours before they collapsed. His menial assignments along the way included guarding a tank.

So...he was armed to the teeth with deadly weapons and tried desperately to get into the fight to kill American troops and allies as a non-uniformed terrorist.

So if two hours isn't long enough to become guilty, how much is? What's it take? Can I steal a car for 90 minutes and just claim I'm hapless?

His father, Terry Hicks, has said that his wayward son went to Afghanistan in early 2001 as part of a religious pilgrimage. But the U.S. military alleges he traveled with support from a militant Pakistani group, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, and attended al-Qaida terrorist training camps.

The thoroughly evil Taliban ruled Afghanistan in 2001. What kind of "religious pilgrimage" would one be taking into that heart of darkness?

When the U.S. invaded in late 2001 — to oust al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts following the Sept. 11 attacks — Hicks remained on the margins.
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Three weeks later he arrived at the front lines near Konduz, where he briefly fought coalition forces before he was forced to flee. He was later captured by the Northern Alliance and handed over to U.S. forces.

Ah, just on the margins. Even though he did, indeed, fight coalition forces. Perhaps being "forced to flee" makes his guilt wash away?

In the years since, he has become a cause celebre in his native country.

Indeed. Along with the murderer Mumia, the monster Che, and the minihitler Chavez, no doubt, by those who worship such scum as a sign of their noble progressivity.

Belmont Club, of course, provides an analysis of the British prisoners of Iran that is an interesting comparison of the bizarre double standard of interpretation of the Geneva Conventions by the reactionary left-wingers.

Rumors swirl that Iran will charge the British soldiers -- nabbed in Iraqi waters! -- with espionage.

But as Captain Ed points out, you can't charge uniformed men on a patrol boat with espionage.

The Iranians cannot try the men for espionage if they captured the sailors in uniform. Article 46 of the Geneva Convention states this clearly
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Captain Ed asks, "The indictment of British sailors in uniform as spies will violate the GC. Can we expect the same level of outrage over this explicit violation as the supposed violations of the US government?"

Commentary

No of course not. As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes -- all while wearing mufti or even women's clothing -- these are all considered "freedom fighters" of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention. As to Americans like Tucker and Menchaca or Israeli Gilad Shalit -- or these fifteen British sailors for that matter, it is a case of "what Geneva Convention?" We don't need no steenkin' Geneva Convention to try these guys as spies. That's the way the Human Rights racket works. Don't go looking for any Geneva Convention in Somalia, Darfur, Basilan or Iran. Try Guantanamo Bay.
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Much of what passes for Western progressivism is nothing more than reaction: a kind of mindless attachment to Marxist dogma of the 1960s. And that is why, for example, the Geneva Conventions, which are the subject of this post have become hindrances rather than the helps to civilized warfare.

The original idea of the Geneva Conventions was to provide incentives to conduct civilized or humane warfare, to the extent possible. But today the "progressives" have actually made it a reactionary document by interpreting it to protect those who practice barbarism in war and thereby mindlessly achieving the opposite of its intent.

You see the same mummification afflicting liberals in America. Their Iraq policy makes no sense with the calender reading "2007". But it makes perfect sense if the date is forever stuck at "1969". This ossification is what often sets up revolutions and upheavals and it's possible that the "revolutionaries" will wake up one day to discover they had the roles completely reversed: that it is they who are unconciously defending the walls of their own Bastille.

Where did this sick "Western progressivism" come from?

It's a manifestation of Cultural Marxism.

One founder of which is Antonio Gramsci:

Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as “multiculturalism” or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as “multiculturalism.”

Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong?

Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, “Who will save us from Western civilization?”

And, the so-called Frankfurt School think tank:

Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented “Critical Theory.” What is the theory? To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a series of “studies in prejudice,” which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a “racist” or “sexist” of “fascist” - - and is also mentally ill.

Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood).

I am reminded of the popular 1999 Kevin Spacey movie American Beauty, for example, in which everyone in the suburban affluent American Dream is portrayed as dysfunctional -- except for the openly gay couple. Oh, and as icing on the cake, it is the (closeted!) military man who turns murderous. Of course, the authors contrived it that way. The movie seemed wise at the time but is a total left-wing fantasy.

And, gay marriage, anyone? That's a two-fer!

And the human-carbon theory of Global Warming is right in line with that agenda.

Now, Gramsci and his philosophy is sometimes portrayed almost in a "black helicopter" conspiracy way in which every ill is traced to some secretive cabal that is pulling all the strings. I don't think it's like that at all, though Gramsci and his efforts and those of his like-minded thinkers were very real.

No, it's much worse than just one secret group or personage being behind all this.

If only it were that simple!



Gramsci is just a symptom of a deeper problem and malaise in Western culture; he and the KGB-funded "peace" and "nuclear freeze" movements and the wave of political correctness in the media and academia are all just opportunistic infections in a weakened host. Gramsci's ideas wouldn't have gone anywhere if there weren't already hordes of willing accomplices who could continue to carry the torch without being given a specific directive to do so.

Well before al-Qaeda, these leftists were already acting like cadres of an informally networked movement, without a clear leader, but all operating according to a similar motivation: replace God with Man and reshape the world in their own utopian image.

It is just age-old hubris masquerading as sophistication, fueled by the vanity of our technological achievements.

With the loss of a mature Judeo-Christian faith in our culture, there is no humility.

And when the Calf is worshipped instead, disaster is around the corner.

Belmont's reference to the Bastille above is rather apt, as this movement likely goes back even further than the communists to the French revolution -- so different from the American!

I was reading a book (Worlds Enough & Time) by fiction writer Dan Simmons recently, from early 2001, just prior to 9/11, in which he introduces one of his stories with the following preface:

As I write these words in the early hours and months of the 21st Century, the great, grinding, resentful machinery of academic criticism is being run by the dead hands of a few French midgets with names like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. France -- a nation that most probably has given us no great writers or great literature in all of the 20th Century -- nonetheless controls the discussion of literature at the beginning of the 21st Century by the simple sophistry of denying the centrality of writers or the reality of characters or of the transcendent power of language and literature itself. As Tom Wolfe put it in a recent essay --
They [Foucault and Derrida and their lycanthropic legions since] began with the hyperdilation of a pronouncement of Nietzsche's to the effect that there can be no absolute truth, merely many 'truths,' which are the tools of various groups, classes, or forces. From this, the deconstructionists proceeded to the doctrine that language is the most insidious tool of all. The philospher's duty was to deconstruct the language, expose its hidden agendas, and help save the victims of the American 'establishment': women, the poor, non-whites, homosexuals, and hardwood trees."

And so, with such restrictions on language and expression and thought, our response to 9/11 has been hamstrung.

As it requires the American Establishment to hammer some poor non-whites.

Never mind those same poor non-whites like to hammer on women and homosexuals; that just proves it was never about those victims all along anyway!

It was always about destroying the American establishment. The celebrated victims were just to whip up the passions of the Useful Idiots, as Stalin called the manipulated footsoldiers of the progressive movement.

Dan Simmons, by the way, seems to definitely be a non-idiotarian from well before 9/11. In another story in that collection, he was to write something set in the year 3001. Wondering what concern of ours in 2001 might possibly still be relevant that far in the future, he at first was flummoxed for a plot. Then, he reveals in the preface,

The answer when it arrived, hit me with the full nausea of certainty.

The one constant thread between today and a thousand years from now will be that someone, somewhere, will be planning to kill the Jews.

Yeah, Dan Simmons gets it.

His award-winning novel Hyperion, told as a sort of futuristic Canterbury Tales, is about artificial intelligence, time travel, and the nature of God. Highly recommended!

Though Simmons himself seems to be firmly agnostic if not a committed skeptic, he finds militant atheism just another form of unreason:

I suspect the main reason that disbelievers end up sounding as shrill and filled-with-certainty as their True Believer foes is because we're in an age that accords so much fawning respect to religious beliefs -- i.e. certainties founded on nothing besides faith and our cultural habit of kowtowing to such certainties...

For me, having someone poke a finger in my chest and demand "Are you an atheist?" is as offensive as the person who leans too close and breathes into your face the question, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour?"

Beware the Shrike!