(CNN) — Did ISIS use a notorious former CIA interrogation technique on Western hostages?
At least four ISIS hostages in Syria were waterboarded during their captivity, the Washington Post reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the treatment of the abducted Westerners.
Among those waterboarded was James Foley, the American journalist who was beheaded by the terror group….
This caused lefty cartoonist to remind us all about one of the big issues of the left… moral equation:
Here is my post on John’s blog:
We water boarded a handful of people… and got actionable intelligence from them (because we had leads and info from computers — as an example) to connect information that was credible… and was key in stopping the Library Tower attack. What did they get from Foley, his editors name? Listen, if I were captive to ISIL and they did this to me (http://www.mrctv.org/videos/water-boarding-exemplified) versus the terror torture manuals they found… bring it. I would go through this daily if it meant I wouldn’t have my head cut off.
But this is the rub… morally equating actions — which is a problem of the left. There is no “evil” greater than our own, and so… strategies are delayed and hem-hawed in dealing with them. I mean, those dastardly conservatives are equal to ISIS/Hamas (Fareed Zakaria, Charlie Rangel).
I enjoy political cartoons. One cartoonist whom tends to be moderate-left is John Cole. I comment here-and-there on his work. the most recent comments from me were on this particular drawing he did:
I wrote the following to John and others reading his comment section (I added some emphasis that I could not on his site):
This is something the people who support this particular mosque will be regretful for (well, maybe not regretful, I mean the Left is still proud they essentially killed millions in Vietnam by pulling out). There are already ties to bad money and some supremacist quotes and writings popping up from this Imam and his financial sources.
The funny thing is ~ I mean besides the idea that the people who supported the student uprising in Iran are now supporting the same people that squashed that uprising ~ the people that we want to support [truly moderate and reformational Muslims] WOULDN’T WANT to build a mosque here.
One other point [sorta]. The argument seems to be that if you oppose this mosque you are fomenting some prejudicial fear. This tactic of argument works for those who are The shallow thinkers making them as well as The shallow thinkers hearing them. It is similar to people telling me that being against same-sex marriage is somehow prejudicial, or homophobic. They are typically surprised to find out many homosexual persons are against this “same-sex marriage” movement. (https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/2010/06/joy-behar-vs-homosexuals-on-same-sex-marriage/) I never get an answer as to how these gay people are homophobic. Showing that these cards whipped from hip-high are vacuous and not thought through.
Just like the “if you are against [this mosque you are against] ‘freedom of religion’” argument. Many moderate Muslims are against the building of this mosque. Are they xenophobic or Islamaphobic? Do they hate the Muslim faith? OR, do they realize that supporting extremism IN THEIR OWN religion is anti-religious?
For those who do not get outside MSNBC type news, here are some interviews/articles with moderate Muslims:
So what is it? The anti-Islamic/anti-1st Amendment Right versus the pro-Islamic/pro-1st Amendment Left? OR, is it moderately minded/truly reformational/pro-Islamic/pro-1st Amendment Muslims against the Left and radical Islam (as proven by the Imam’s statements [more will be uncovered I am sure of it] and ties to “funny money”)??
I have gotten responses to this such as: “there are strip clubs, Burger Kings, bars at ground-zero… how can this be a sacred place?” To which I simply respond:
“Those were in place before 9/11, plus, 19 strippers didn’t fly planes into the Towers. (Non-sequitur: you proved my point, guys carrying Qur’ans not whips and chains or cherry flavored undies attacked us.) 3,000 people were killed by people doing it in the name of Islam. In fact, part of the reason they attacked was because of these gentlemen clubs, so I would rather have more of those and less of mosques to foment radical religion. So there should be — like other places where tragic events happen — a buffer zone for sensibilities. That building (besides being funded by “funny money” and being headed up by an Imam that said we were partly responsible for 9/11. There are other places for him to build a Mosque and for conservatives to bury Dems by their support of him as more quotes and radical positions come out. But a building where parts of human remains and pieces of jet were found, is unsupportable. Hell, even Howard Stern gets it.” (https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/2010/08/tearing-down-that-which-no-one-believes-the-left-and-the-ground-zero-mosque/)
Thank you for your visitors taking the time in reading this and for John being truly fair enough and freedom minded enough to allow shlubs like myself to challenge his lifeblood. For all the items I may disagree with him on, he shows that his work [a single frame drawing] can produce feelings and cause separate wills to clash. Which is why I absolutely love political cartoons. A Single frame can catch a whole idea that others would have to express in multiple paragraph’s [like myself].
SO, I do not wish to merely tear down, but build up: “John, keep up the ‘bad’ work” (tongue-in-cheek).
I wanted to build a bit off of that first sentence I wrote, “This is something the people who support this particular mosque will be regretful for.” Regretful because they are supporting a radically supremacist Imam and mosque, and so I confidently tell people that more and more quotes will be shown from this Imam and more and more terrorist ties will be revealed via donors. And so, here are the first compilations of some wacky stuff this Imam has said. I am sure more will be revealed soon.
Whilst the NY Times front page spins interfaith yarns into PR gold faster than Rumpelstiltskin and accords godlike status to Imam Faisal Rauf, new audio surfaces. Here are a couple of soundbites of tolerance: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: “We tend to forget, in the West, that it has blood on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US lead sanction against Iraq lead to the death of over half a million Iraqi children.”
No mention of the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilation and enslavement. No mention of the recent slaughter by Muslims of Christians, Hindus, Jews, non-believers in Indonesia, Thailand, Ethiopia, Somalia, Philippines, Lebanon, Israel, Russia, China……………. no candor, no criticism of Islam. Imam Feisal: “The West needs to begin to see themselves through the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, and when you do you will see the predicament that exists within the Muslim community.”
On the question of reforming Islam and expunging the texts of the threat doctrine and mandated violence and conquest: Imam Feisal: On the issue of the reformation, in terms of what is again intended by it, Islam does not need a reformation. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: “So men will say: women, you know, they’re emotional, ….. whatever, whatever, and women will say: men, they’re brutes, insensitive, etcetera, and you have the beginning of a gender conflict. If gender is not what distinguishes us we’ll look at skin colouring and say: n***** or whities, or whatever”
Reverend Al Sharpton was unavailable for comment. Too busy endorsing the Islamic supremacist mosque. Imam Faisal: And when we observe terrorism, whether it was done by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or by al Qaida or whoever is behind the bombings in London or those in Madrid,
Note, when he says about the London and Madrid bombings,that was five days after the London attacks and over a year after Madrid. It was common knowledge who the perps were at that time.
In July 2005, Ground Zero Imam Rauf gave a public lecture, presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre/UniSA International and The Migrant Resource Centre, entitled, What does it take to change the relationship between the West and the Muslim world? His remarks were devastating.
May I first say I enjoy John Cole’s art and he is included often in my Sunday Toons and he isn’t always biased as he is here.
The above cartoonist mentions the following at his blog:
And I’m still waiting for a common sense explanation of how the convoluted grammar in the Second Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”) lays out the right for everyone (who isn’t a convicted felon, etc.) to own a gun.
I will supply him with some original intent:
1) There is no contrary evidence from the writings of the Founding Fathers, early American legal commentators, or pre-twentieth century Supreme Court decisions, indicating that the Second Amendment was intended to apply solely to active militia members.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.
In the appendix to the Commentaries, Tucker elaborates further:
This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty… The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.
Not only are Tucker’s remarks solid evidence that the militia clause was not intended to restrict the right to keep arms to active militia members, but he speaks of a broad right – Tucker specifically mentions self-defense.
“Because ‘[g]reat weight has always been attached, and very rightly attached, to contemporaneous exposition,’ the Supreme Court has cited Tucker in over forty cases. One can find Tucker in the major cases of virtually every Supreme Court era.” (Source: The Second Amendment in the Nineteenth Century)
(William Blackstone was an English jurist who published Commentaries on the Laws of England, in four volumes between 1765 and 1769. Blackstone is credited with laying the foundation of modern English law and certainly influenced the thinking of the American Founders.)
Take note there is another aspect to this cartoon that seems to go unnoticed in Mr. Cole’s creative mind. It is this:
Forty children under age 5 die annually from drowning in water buckets at home.
One hundred fifty children under age 5 die from fires they start with cigarette lighters.
Mechanical locks diminish the effective value of guns because they require that a gun be unloaded, yet thousands of children are saved each year by adults who use loaded guns to defend themselves and their families against home intrusion.
Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse
Where is this in his cartoons? Which is why I wrote this on his blog:
Your drawing draws the slimmest of deaths. There are many more persons saved by the stopping of a criminal. So the drawing should be a tombstone with writing on it that would go something like this: “Here lies another criminal who was killed in the action of committing a crime against which an innocent person feared for her life.”
HotAir h/t – 90% OF Al Sharpton’s radio listeners applaud decision:
