My briefing's up!

Winds of Change.NET: Monday Winds of War: August 14/05

Top Topics

• The Gaza withdrawal begins.

• SOCOM (Special Operations Command), elevated by Rumsfeld to peer status with the other war-fighting commands like CENTCOM, hasdrafted its terrorist-fighting warplan and is shopping it to combatant commands before presenting it to the defense secretary.

• Pakistan has test-fired a nuclear-capable cruise missile, its first.

• FBI: Al Qaeda wants to drive hijacked fuel trucks into high value targets in London and US cities sometime in the next few weeks. The US cities threatened are New York, LA, and Chicago. DEBKA also thinks something is up.

Other Topics Today Include:
Billion dollar fraud in Iraq; Hamas will not disarm; Feds recruiting hackers; Feebs drop the ball on computers again; no more taking your shoes off in the airport; South Africa cagey on arms sales; Al Qaeda presence in the Horn of Africa;UK-India nuke restrictions lifting; micro-reactors set to allow anyone to covertly build a chemical weapons stockpile and more...

More and more Chinese are turning to Buddhism. Would that lead China to bring back the Dalai Lama? I doubt it, but the people from Free Tibet Campaign seem to think it's a possibility.

UPDATE: embarrassingly enough, this story's three years old.

Now that there is no ba'ath party to kidnap, torture and murder Iraqis, a lot of grumbling is going on in Iraq.

BBC reporters, in an interview with the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, asked him questions about the organisation's views regarding Israel. This led MCB to accuse BBC of having a 'pro-Israeli agenda'.

A plane departing from Cyprus crashed in Greece killing 121 people, 48 of them children. I don't even know what to say, this is so sad. Cyprus is a very small place and many people were affected by this tragedy. My condolences to the families.

Geostrategy-Direct.com (subscription req'd) has this interesting tidbit:

A Chinese military specialist has outlined Beijing's plan to use force against Taiwan.

The officer, identified only as a renowned military expert and professor at China's National Defense University, said in a speech on China and the "revolution in military affairs" that the plan for operations against Taiwan is to "bombard, seal off and land on" Taiwan.

It is highly unusual for China to cite threats by an unidentified officer. It follows recent comments by Chinese Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu that China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against "hundreds" of U.S. cities.

Reunification will be enforced under the new anti-secession law, the unidentified officer said in a Chinese media report. Planned military action against Taiwan is "an enormous historical obstacle" to China's peaceful rise, he said. The officer also said the United States is most opposed to "the rise of socialist China" and that Washington is curbing China through the Taiwan issue.

The Pentagon's recent dispatch of an active duty military officer to Taiwan is an "escalation" of U.S.-Taiwan cooperation, he added. "This is something that China cannot tolerate," the officer said. The officer said China's government continues to support peaceful reunification as long as Taiwan does not violate the anti-secession law. The reference to the new law, which U.S. officials say was drawn up to counter U.S. policy reliance on the Taiwan Relations Act, is a new condition allowing the use of force.

Past conditions for a Chinese invasion included a formal declaration by Taiwan of independence, foreign intervention on Taiwan and the introduction of nuclear weapons on Taiwan. The officer said Chinese missiles could counter any efforts by Taiwan to use its jet fighter aircraft to attack China.

Bombard, seal off and land on? Yeah, that sounds like a master plan. In other news, PACOM is keeping a close eye on the upcoming mammoth joint Russian-Chinese exercise:

The U.S. military will closely monitor the first-ever joint Russia- China military maneuvers, a U.S. general said last week.

"We are aware of the planned exercises," said Army Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of the Multinational Brigade-Northwest. "And the commander of U.S. Pacific Command is taking an effort to monitor the conduct of those exercises. Clearly, there's interest in anything that affects the security in the Pacific Region. So PACOM is keenly interested in that and will monitor that, to the extent possible."

Ham said the maneuvers are not something that U.S. military leaders are "particularly worried about."

"But certainly as it affects, or may potentially affect security, they're very interested," he said.

Asked if the joining of Russian military forces and Chinese forces is a cause for future concern, Ham said: "I'm not sure we know yet, and that's why the interest in the monitoring."

Dedicated to our new Dutch guests, if they are still around...

The Jews of the Forest: The Bielski Partisans

I just finished reading Peter Duffy's The Bielski Brothers. They were three Belorussian Jews who took to the nearby forests as partisans soon after the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommando units started wiping out Jews in their town, including their parents and the wife and baby of one of the brothers.

Not only did they actively resist the Nazis, but by the end of the Nazi occupation, they led an estimated 1200 non-combatant Jews out of their forest hideout, roughly as many as Oskar Schindler saved.

Most of the Shoah literature focuses on the concentration camps, but the atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen units were equally horrendous. In addition to the Nazis the Jewish partisans had to avoid other enemies including anti-Semitic Polish and Russian partisans, local collaborators, Cossacks and even rebellious factions in their own ranks. But they had allies among the local peasants who risked their lives to support them, such as the heroic Konstantin Koslovsky who was declared a Righteous Gentile by the Vad Vashem. They also enjoyed the protection of the local Soviet leader of the partisans, Sergei Vasilyev who was so taken with the Bielski's cause that he later claimed in his memoirs that the Great Patriotic War was fought to defend the motherland and "defeat chauvinism and racism against the Jews". His second-in-command Yefim Gapayev was also a staunch ally.

I was most moved by the humanity of the leader and eldest Tuvia Bielski. Although a fierce and implacable enemy of the Nazis he would often be moved to tears by the plight of the Jews who managed to reach his forest hideout. He struck me as a proto-type of the "new Jew" who not much later went on to establish the State of Israel. Although the term was first used sneeringly by hostile peasants, the Jews themselves came to think of their refuge as Yerushalayim in Vald or Jerusalem in the Woods.

One brother died in combat before the end of the war, the others left Europe first for Israel, and later the US. They had little recognition for their struggle, save one event at the end of Tuvia's life that recaptured the grandeur of his fighting spirit after years of struggling in obscurity to survive financially in a strange new world.

The lasting impressions are two. The Jews were and remain the litmus test for the character of the gentiles. We can commend the righteous few who gave their utmost to help the Bielski Jews survive. The other is that the forces that converge to annihilate the Jews may seem very different superficially but they are motivated by the same ancient enemy across generations and ages. It would be profitable to all of us to ponder why.

So a rabbi and a parrot...no, wait. A rabbi and a pirate...uh... I mean a sailor... So a sailor and a rabbi walk into a bar. No, no, wait, they're in an airplane. So a sailor and a rabbi are in an airplane and the flight attendant- I mean the pilot- and the pilot says... um... okay wait... and the flight attendant comes out and uh...

Ah screw it.