Fingers clinched, my wrist twists to the right.
There’s a slight hesitation.
I hold my breath.
Then we’re off.
I let out a sigh.
That’s been the course of events these past few days since I noticed my car hesitating when I go to start it. It started on Monday night and has taken increasingly longer and longer to catch the motor each time I go to crank it. In my vast knowledge of car diagnostics (in fact, you might have seen me on “Pimp My Ride,” except the producer turned me down for my infinite *lack* of car intelligence), I decided it was my battery dying a slow and very painful death. And long story short, (of which includes a flirtation session with the manager at NTB to get it changed quickly AND to increase the chances of my business card being drawn for a free alignment), I was right.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Barely Running on a Low Battery
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5 comments:
:O)
One more example of a woman using her 'ample' woman powers to get moved to the head of the line and a free alignment. Nice. . . Very Nice
Its that smile and those porn star breastesses...
i would have to say with that most beauiful smile you could melt steal , were have you been my entire life
For decades, it has been the policy of the United States not to negotiate with terrorists. Interestingly, that policy was adapted as a consequence of the activities of the father of modern terrorism, the late, but unlamented Palestinian master terrorist, Yasser Arafat.
On February 21, 1970, the PFLP — by then also under the PLO arch — bombed SwissAir Flight 330 enroute to Tel Aviv, murdering 47 passengers and crew.
Eight months later, on September 6, they attempted a spectacular atrocity: a quadruple aircraft hijacking.
Shortly thereafter, the United States announced that it would never, ever, engage in negotiation with terrorists, taking its cue from the Israeli experience that taught that negotiating with terrorists imparted a legitimacy to terrorist acts.
It was recognized that negotiating with terrorists was akin to paying a blackmailer; once the blackmailer has been paid once, two things occur. First, the profit motive is confirmed and realized. Secondly, blackmail, like terrorism, is a gift that keeps on giving.
The only way to stop a blackmailer is to call his bluff and face the consequences. But the blackmail stops when there is no reason for the blackmailer to think his scheme will pay off.
The same principle applies to terrorism. If terrorists blow up an airplane, or a building, or themselves, and the only benefit they get is the resulting fireworks display and the prospect of spending the rest of their lives as hunted men with no safe haven, the incentive for terrorism is gone.
Terrorism is defined as an effort to effect political change by the use of violence. For it to be terrorism, therefore, there are two necessary elements. The first is violence, but without any possibility of that violence resulting in political change, it is pointless violence.
There are plenty of street gangs in southern California, but they seldom engage in terrorism. The only thing they can count on is being hunted down by police and either jailed or killed.
Criminals often take hostages and engage police negotiators and issue demands, but what they get is promises that are only good until they step into the cross-hairs of a SWAT sniper's scope.
The only reason terrorists exist is because terrorism works.
Although the United States took its 'no negotiation with terrorists' cue from Israel, for it to work, it required a level of political courage not seen in America since the darkest days of World War Two. That requirement was never met.
As the level of Palestinian terror increased in both scope and destructiveness, the US developed a two-tiered approach to the problem. The United States would not negotiate with terrorists, but it began to insist that Israel must, in order to contain terrorism to the Middle East.
In 1975, Harold H. Saunders, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East.
Saunders began the process of legitimizing Palestinian terror, making the case that the end justifies the means.
"Mr. Chairman, a just and durable peace in the Middle East is a central objective of the United States. Both President Ford and Secretary Kissinger have stated firmly on numerous occasions that the United States is determined to make every feasible effort to maintain the momentum of practical progress toward a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Having opened the door to negotiating with terrorists via the euphemism of 'every feasible effort', Saunders went on to explain that the problem with terrorism wasn't the terrorists, but the perceived legitimacy of their cause.
Saunders began the process of reinventing US policy by reinventing history on the fly:
"We have also repeatedly stated that the legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account in the negotiation of an Arab-Israeli peace. In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict. Final resolution of the problems arising from the partition of Palestine, the establishment of the State of Israel, and Arab opposition to those events will not be possible until agreement is reached defining a just and permanent status for the Arab peoples who consider themselves Palestinians."
This was 1975. The "Arab peoples who considered themselves Palestinians" had, until only eight years before, 'considered themselves' West Bank Jordanians and Gaza Egyptians.
The 'legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs' stemmed from the failed effort by the combined forces of the Arab world to annihilate Israel in 1967 that resulted in Jordan's West Bank and Egypt's Gaza Strip being annexed to provide Israel with a buffer zone against further invasion.
Only two years before Saunders addressed the House subcommittee, that buffer zone had saved Israel from a second annihilation attempt by the Arab world during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The gunsmoke had scarcely cleared from the second attempt in eight years to utterly destroy the Jewish State by the Arab world, and Saunders was proposing a 'just and permanent status for the Arab peoples' -- at Israeli expense.
Concluded Saunders; "The major problem that must be resolved in establishing a framework for bringing issues of concern to the Palestinians into negotiation, therefore, is to find a common basis for the negotiation that Palestinians and Israelis can both accept."
With that, terrorism became a legitimate form of political persuasion.
One would assume that, given the history of the last thirty years, the circular logic of the Saunders argument would be exposed for what it always was -- a failure.
Since the United States began to pressure Israel to knuckle under to the terrorist demands of the PLO to prevent terrorism from expanding beyond the scope of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it has done exactly the opposite.
In 1970, one could board an aircraft with more or less complete confidence. Boarding an aircraft was no more difficult than boarding a city bus. All you needed was a ticket.
As recently as 1985, I boarded a flight from Lubbock, Texas, to Buffalo, New York. While we were somewhere over Tennessee, the guy beside me showed me a new .375 magnum revolver he had just picked up at an Amarillo gun show. He had it in his briefcase under his seat.
(In 1970, he could have carried it aboard loaded. By 1985, it was only legal to carry a weapon aboard an aircraft if it was unloaded -- except for police officers)
While he was showing me his new gun, a long ash from the cigarette he was smoking fell into his lap. America was a different country -- and that was only twenty years ago. Terrorism was something that only happened to Israel.
The only major terrorist attack that the US had suffered to that point was the 1983 Beirut bombing of a US Marine barracks.
Rather than go after the terrorists, Ronald Reagan, in one of his few, but most spectacular failures, elected instead to withdraw US forces, which handed Middle Eastern terrorism (and Yasser Arafat's PLO) a massive victory by proving terrorism works, even against the world's largest and most powerful nation.
By 1993, the United States had forced Israel into the Oslo Agreement, a deal based on the equation of 'land for peace'. Another way of describing it is, 'you give us you land, and we'll stop killing your civilians'.
The "Land for Peace" equation, by its very definition, legitimized terrorism as a form of political persuasion, depending only upon the perceived legitimacy of the terrorist's grievances.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Now, America is engaged in a deadly war against a sophisticated, trained and well-equipped army of terrorists whose efforts are constantly rewarded with concessions and negotiations in an effort to, as Winston Churchill once put it, "feed the crocodile in the vain hope that it will eat you last."
That policy has now been extended to the degree terrorism isn't just legitimate, it plays a necessary role in the democratic process. On July 4th, the Palestinian Authority, under elected leader Mahmoud Abbas, announced that talks about a “unity government” with Islamic Jihad and Hamas would begin.
The terrorists rejected the proposal, but that rejection is irrelevant to the point. The very fact that Abbas proposed it speaks volumes.
Hamas and Jihad want Israel destroyed and an Islamic state created in place of Israel, Jordan and the West Bank and Gaza. They are on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations because they have murdered Israelis and Americans.
But both Israel and the United States are willing to continue negotiating with Abbas -- and Condi Rice has gone so far as to promise that it would work with the terrorists, "within the framework of a democratically elected Palestinian Authority."
That is to say, if the Palestinians elect terrorists, well, we'll work with them as if they were as legitimate as members of the US Democratic Party.
It is irrelevant, evidently, that the PA has met none of the conditions set forth as part of the appeasement policy generally known as 'land for peace'.
In the last 12 years, Israel has given up almost all of its hard-won 1967 buffer zone (land) in exchange for nothing resembling even an illusion of peace.
There has been no effort to disarm or dismantle the existing terror groups, indeed, the US administration is eager to embrace them as democrats.
There's been no cessation of the vitriolic anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-Western propaganda in Palestinian Authority controlled territory. There's been no cutoff of financial and material support for terror by sponsors in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran or elsewhere.
There has been no recognition, despite lots of flowery promises, to even the most basic premises upon which peace could be based, namely, Israel's right to exist.
Instead, terrorist groups are being invited to Gaza, there are more rocket factories being built to attack Israeli towns, and more attempts being made to kill Israelis.
The US has offered more than $300 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority, despite the fact not one single obligation imposed on the PA by the Road Map for Peace has been met. Think of it! Not ONE.
Israel can't even disengage from the terrorists without coming under global condemnation. What originally had been a plan for Israel to declare the process dead and simply unilaterally disengage, allowing the PA to sink or swim, has been reshaped and rewritten until the only one it benefits is the Palestinians.
The protests from the Israelis who see themselves winning every battle but continuing to lose the war make headlines like 'Hardliners Protest Disengagement' instead of 'Palestinians Refuse to Honor Commitments'.
This past week, the city of London was rocked by a series of terrorist attacks. The reason for the attacks, according to the terrorists who perpetrated it, was Great Britain's support of Israel.
US support for Israel was cited as the reason for Osama bin-Laden's declaration of 'holy war' against America.
The US has expressed its support for the creation of a Palestinian state beside Israel. It is rewarded by increased terror attacks.
Tony Blair said yesterday that Britain would 'never be cowed' by terrorism -- in the same breath in which he announced a three billion dollar aid package for Palestinian statehood.
From the perspective of the terrorist, negotiations are merely the first step along the road. From there, terror takes over, and bingo! World leaders can't throw enough money at them.
The Arabs aren't expecting that they will ever destroy Israel. They are using terror to force the world to do it for them. Every time a world leader takes to a podium to announce its 'defiance' of terror, the terrorists open a new bank account and wait to get paid off. Then they use the money to recruit new terrorists.
Modern terrorism traces its birth to Yasser Arafat's struggle to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with an Arab state with its capital in Jerusalem. Any nation that supports Israel or opposes Palestinian aspirations for Jerusalem is a target.
The Bible says that in the last days, the world would find itself engaged in a global war, with the prize being possession of the City of Jerusalem.
Scriptures predict the war will begin and end over the continued existence of Israel. The Scriptures predict that the 'whole world will be gathered against Jerusalem' and that 'all that burden themselves with it will be cut in pieces'. (Zechariah 12:2-3)
We are seeing this prophecy's fulfillment in this generation in a way that could never have been imagined in any previous generation in history.
Zechariah's war is the war that culminates, according to the prophets, on the fields of Megiddo in what is known as the Battle of Armageddon. It isn't actually a battle, but a war that reaches its climatic end at the close of the Tribulation Period.
"And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon Me Whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for Him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn." (Zechariah 12:9-10)
The Battle of Armageddon is yet future, but the War of Armageddon is already fully engaged.
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