French soldiers kills unarmed protestors? Why are media not reporting?The French appear to have had an incident in Ivory Coast which has NOT been widely reported despite there being videos etc available showing what appear to be French troops opening fire on an unarmed crowd of protestors. It looks very much as if one soldier has lost it, two more then also fire and several people are killed and seriously injured. The graphic video is available at various places (Not linking as it is very graphic) so why does the BBC not have anything apart from a strange comment that "Some "Unicorn" soldiers may be chomping at the bit - eager to teach the Ivorian government a lesson - but for the time being they are likely to stay put." .see the BBC news report...interesting and very worrying if the French have had an incident yet it is being covered up.
Meanwhile the left in the UK are getting very neurotic....and rightly so
Read this excellent article at Harry's
Band Aid 2004 - will it be abused the same way it was in 1984?
"When Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine was transmitted on BBC News on 23 October 1984, the idea immediately took hold that this was a natural disaster - `a biblical famine', in Buerk's words - which would be alleviated by massive food aid.
There was a severe drought in the region, but the creation of famine was a military tactic of the Dergue government of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu. For journalists like Buerk and activists like Geldof, the wars in Ethiopia were an inconvenience which were complicating relief efforts. Yet the wars were the principal cause of the tragedy... As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984-85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies.... Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory. One point is certain: the war which we helped fuel continued for another six years, claiming many thousands more lives.
Pasted from Dissecting the Left
Post Colonial Africa
Post-colonial Africa: "Today there is no public security. Slavery is found once more in Sudan, and sinister forms of domestic enslavement that involve the trafficking of children exist elsewhere too. Fiscal management is a farce- and Nigerian misappropriation of public funds is a farce played on a global stage. Transport is haphazard and unreliable. Education and public health struggle on in deplorable conditions. And nothing can be done without lies and bribes and payoffs at every step and every social and political level, all public revenues tending to leak away into private hands. Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive"
Pasted from Dissecting the Left
I have to say that Botswana seems to be rapidly gaining a reputation for good government and so on. Things are maybe not as bad in some cases? I know a lot of farmers fleeing from Zimbabwe have settled there and the Botswana economy is doing very well.Any confirmation? I'm doing a postcolonialism poem from Mozambique for my essay question so this is of interest to me just now!
The media still getting it wrong
In Fallujah, where U.S. Marines and soldiers are still battling pockets of resistance, insurgents waved a white flag of surrender before opening fire on U.S. troops and causing casualties, Marine spokesman 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert said Saturday without elaborating.
Pasted from LGF
The Marines at Fallujah are operating in accordance with a UNSC Resolution and have all the legitimacy in international law that flows from that. The Allawi government asked them to undertake this Fallujah mission. To compare them to the murderous thugs who kidnapped CARE worker Margaret Hassan, held her hostage, terrified her, and then killed her is frankly monstrous. The multinational forces are soldiers fighting a war in which they are targetting combatants and sometimes accidentally killing innocents. The hostage-takers are terrorists deliberately killing innocents. It is simply not the same thing.
Pasted from Instpundit
Can we have ALL the facts please?
In his original written report, Sites, the correspondent who videotaped the shooting, doesn't mention the medical treatment provided to the injured enemy combatants, but he does note that four of the combatants were some of those who had been left behind from the firefight on Friday. If the NBC reporter knew that from being there the day before, why didn't he tell this new group of Marines before they rushed into the room?
None of that is included in the tape, which is now being used to raise Islamic ire at the "American invader." Why? And why did it take more than a day to learn that the Marine seen shooting on the videotape had been wounded in the face the day before if the correspondent knew that when he filed the videotape? Why didn't the original story include the fact that a Marine in the same unit had been killed 24 hours earlier while searching the booby-trapped dead body of a terrorist?
Within hours of the videotaped incident in the mosque, another Marine was killed and five others wounded by a booby-trapped body they found in a house after a gunfight. Why was this not made part of the original story? Even Amnesty International, no friend to the American armed forces, has reported that the Iraqi terrorists have illegally used white flags to lure coalition forces into ambushes. Yet this, too,
is absent in the original story.
From an essay by Colonel Oliver North: Read the whole thing at this link
There's more
Knaves: The U.S. media, for taking every opportunity to cast our troops in the worst possible light. Watching the nightly news, you might not have known that U.S. forces achieved a historic victory in Fallujah this week. You might not have known this because all the U.S. media, spearheaded by NBC News, seemed to care about was one Marine shooting an insurgent pretending to be dead. As the Wall Street Journal lamented on Thursday, “Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?”
Is one Marine, wary of “dead” terrorists rigged with bombs, more important than the 40-plus Marines who gave their lives in the battle? Does one Marine, weary of fighting and seeing his buddies cut down by fanatics, trump the torture chambers, starving prisoners and disfigured victims that U.S. forces found throughout the city? It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
In just over a week, our guys killed more than 1,200 terrorists, captured 1,000 more and liberated a city in the grip of Islamists for the past eight months. And all the media can do is find their next Abu Ghraib. Memo to big media executives: The election is over and you lost. Now get back to reporting the news.
For their relentless efforts to shame our troops, the U.S. media are the Knaves of the week.
Pasted from LGF
And to get things in proportion.
[T]he widespread clashes in Baghdad — which broke out early Saturday in at least a half-dozen areas — and other areas of central and northern Iraq underscored the perilous state of security in this country after 18 months of American military occupation — and just more than two months before vital national elections.
Baghdad is, I believe, a city approximately equal to Los Angeles in area and population. One can fairly question whether incidents occurring in six locations constitute "widespread clashes" "sweep[ing] Baghdad." But, as always, the tone of the coverage of the Iraq war reflects the agenda of those who write the news.
Pasted from Powerline
Some great war reporting...
...by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who provides us with an emotional inside glimpse of Marines in action in Fallujah. Filkins clearly had empathy for men at war that Kevin Sites didn't. Reading Filkins' account of the Marines being shot by fascist jihadis (this site is now an 'insurgents'-free zone) masquerading in the uniforms of the Iraqi Army makes it clear what a cheap propaganda artist Sites is. These Marines were moving through a killing field in which their adversaries were busy beheading people in blood-filled execution rooms. How are the Marines supposed to act? If that particular wounded jihadi had been being playing possum, faking like those "uniformed" Iraqi Army soldiers, Sites and his buddy from NBC, not to mention everyone else in the room, would have been blown to smithereens.
It's obviously my turn of mind, but these self-righteous "anti-warriors" like Sites often make me think of the concentration camps. How would they have dealt with that most horrible of horrors from the vantage point of their soi-disant idealistic world view?
Pasted from Roger Simon
Point to note - those who call Bush et al Nazis
...until there's some evidence that America, or Israel, or the Bush administration, or the Sharon government, is setting up factories of death in which millions upon millions of members of hated ethnic minorities (or even majorities) are deliberately and hideously tortured and killed, then claims that America or Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany will amount to ways of denying or diminishing the fact and the horror of the Holocaust.
Pasted from Hurray Up Harry
More outside interference in Iraq
Many say this was in response to the incident yesterday at the Abu Hanifa mosque in Adhamiya which is a sacred Sunni shrine. Apparently storming the mosque during the Friday prayers has provoked Arab and Muslim clerics to call for Jihad yet again. Qardhawi reiterated his call for Jihad in Iraq yesterday on Al-Jazeera describing it as a "religious duty", and the International Union of Muslim Scholars based in Pakistan has also called all Muslims to head to Iraq for Jihad.
One can't help but notice that the clerics who usually incite holy wars in Iraq against the US occupation on the expense of Iraqis are based in countries allied to the US such as Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On the other hand, you have Sheikh Salah Al-Din Kuftaro, son of Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria, publicly denouncing the behaviour of Iraqi insurgents yesterday during Friday prayers at the Kuftaro mosque in Damascus. He described them as the "present day Kharijites" and their actions as "unislamic".
Pasted from Healing Iraq
