Thursday, May 24, 2007

A Request for Amnesty

This is an unusual post for me because it is partly an excuse and partly a thank you. When I put my first post up on this past December 28th , I had hopes that, in time, I would be able to add my voice to the many that I respect on the Web in mutual support of the ideals and goals of our Judeo-Christian civilization. The response to my first post was overwhelming as bloggers that I have admired for years (allow me to pat myself on the back: Michael Ledeen, Solomonia, American Thinker, Discerning Texan, Jewish Odysseus, Richard Landes at Augean Stables, Jeremayakovka and many more) endorsed my writing and ideas. I felt, from the outset, a responsibility to reward their faith and endorsement with diligence and good work. Now, only five months into this enterprise, I have a wide and growing readership (if you are here you know who you are) to whom I feel an even greater responsibility. I am flattered that you are here and I want to give you enough reward to keep you coming back.

When you are a blogger writing about the civic, moral and intellectual challenges that face us in this time of war, there is always too much to write about. I am in a perpetual state of despair that I will never get to it all. Now a week has slipped by with only one post and some of you may be wondering if I am running out of gas…

Not the case!

In fact, the lull is due to a combination of obstacles that a poor blogger like me has to deal with all the time. Over the past week they have simply accumulated and have slowed me to a crawl. Allow me to put my excuse before you. I hope you'll bear with me.

There is the usual stuff that all but the most elite and prosperous blogger deals with- the day job (anybody got a solution for that one?), family things (I’ve had two of my six offspring graduate form college in the last two weeks), and the need to get more than three hours of sleep a night- once in a while.

Then there is the danger of picking a target that spends so much of its time doing more and more ridiculous things that it becomes difficult to finish an essay on it before they trump themselves with even greater idiocy and you have to go back and rewrite before posting. For the past two weeks I have been trying to write about Amnesty International but they simply won’t hold still and stop damaging themselves long enough to let me take the snapshot of them being hypocritical and biased. Every time I think I have it framed, they do something new and even more bizarre. Yesterday I was almost done writing a post about the recent report from NGO Monitor in which they analyzed the content and subject matter of Amnesty International’s publications and statements. The study shows how biased and politically partisan AI really has become. Solomonia did a very nice job bringing that one up here and my postwas taking off from there for a wider analysis. So there I was with this post ready to go up when both Solomonia
and Little Green Footballs came up with a newer and even more obvious illustration of how Amnesty is doing their best to invalidate their own reputation and credibility.
I am on this, folks, give me a few more days… In the meantime I’ll give you a hint of where I’m headed. I left this comment on Little green Footballs about AI last night:

“If the fire department in your town thought the way Amnesty International does they would send all the trucks and ambulances down to take care of the burning toaster in the mayor’s kitchen and keep them there to make sure the fire is out while a 727 crashes next to the elementary school and burning children run into the street igniting five high-rise apartment buildings where mothers are forced to throw their babies out their windows to passers-by.”

More on this soon!

5 comments:

Jewish Odysseus said...

Yaacov, I had the strangest dream the other night...in my dream, after the US rescued 3 Arab Muslim countries in the 1990s (Kuwait, Saudia, and Somalia), a small group of Arab Muslims declared "jihad" against the US.

In a few years the jihadis had planned and executed the largest and most bloody terror attacks in history against the US, culminating on 9/11/01. That served to shake the US out of its slumber, a bit.

But it was all a dream, right?

Amnesty just doesn't understand that it is NOT a dream, nor that, if Bush hadn't stepped up, you'd better believe the US wd have IEDs and burning cities every week.

Bush stomped into the jihadis beloved caliphate capital, so they are devoting all their efforts to get him out. They are getting tracked down and gunned down in the gutters and marshes of Iraq, rather than coolly making their way thru our airports and chemical factories and malls.

This IS WW IV, and idiots like Amnesty International are even more irrelevant--check that, diversionary--than they were in WW III. The good news is, that if we win, our historians will clearly record their ineffective efforts at sabotage...and if we lose, Amnesty will quickly be disbanded by the jihadi authorites, with a few publicly beheaded for good measure.

And the fax machines will lay silent.

Nancy Coppock said...

What can be said after jewish odysseus? Shooting a moving target requires a little lead time, imagining where the target will be three steps from now. Sometimes, we bloggers must push that fence toward the horizon just to keep up with things. The jackalope is confident you will get a proper focus with laser scope and sight.

Congratulations on the graduation of your children. I am sure you and your wife are immensely pleased.

Anonymous said...

Yaacov!

Your analogy posted in another blog that you've included toward the end of your writ is so true and simplified for what it is once a person is able to fan away the smoke.

A huge thank you for plodding along; a huge thank you to the other bloggers who write the same message as yourself, namely, those whom you've paid homage to on here and of course not forgetting the others (you know who you are, please congratulate yourselves). And please don't give up.

Some blogs in my opinion are the best we can glean of the truth, which is something that is clearly lacking in the deluge of the leftist-myopic and self-serving views of what you and others have described as kitsch media. I remember reading the same sentiment in a book entitled "THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN CULTURE", authored by Morris Berman. This is something that is not widely contemplated upon here in NZ, and I'll die from fright if I should ever hear it around about my ways or even if our media, politicians, educators and even religious Judeo-Christians should be as bold to include this angle in their publications.

I am eager to read your latest contribution that follows from here, and I must now exit here to continue bathing in your light.

Once again, I thank you and the others!

Anonymous said...

Mr. Ben Moshe (or maybe informally as, YBM?) like many others I recently discovered your writings. I am quite impressed with the thoroughness of your opinion and scholarship even though we know nothing about your background or day job. I strongly feel you rank up there with some of the better conservative columnists: the late Oriana Fallaci, Mark Steyn, John Leo, and especially Victor Davis Hanson.

Please keep up the good work and we eagerly await more!!

Yaacov Ben Moshe said...

Thank you all for your encouraging words. You folks are the kind of people I write for- that is to say you have the ability to stay with an internet post that is longer than one paragraph. Please tell everyone you can and help me build traffic here. I would love to reach more people and I would also love to get paid for the hours that I spend doing all this thinking and writing. The only way I can get there seems to be proving that there are enough good people like yourselves who have the intelligence and patience to read and respond to long, detailed essays like mine.
Thanks to you all,
YBM