I wrote on Aug. 28 on gunpoint conversions to Islam. Speaking of conversions under duress, here are two vignettes, the first humorous and the second from a play by Elie Wiesel.

A Jewish man moves into a Catholic neighborhood. Every Friday the Catholics go crazy because, while they’re morosely eating their Friday fish, their Jewish neighbor is outside cooking steaks on his grill. So the Catholics work on the Jewish man to convert him. After several weeks, by threats and pleading, the Catholics succeed. They take the him to a priest who sprinkles holy water on the him and intones:

“Born a Jew
Raised a Jew
Now a Catholic!”

The Catholics are ecstatic. No more delicious, but maddening smells every Friday evening! But the next Friday evening, the scent of grilling beef wafts through the neighborhood. The Catholics all rush to the Jew’s house to remind him of his new religion and its tradition of meatless Fridays. They see him standing over the cooking steak. He is sprinkling barbecue marinade on the meat and saying:

“Born a cow
Raised a cow
Now a fish!”

In Elie Wiesel’s play of the Holocaust, “The Trial,” a man named Berish is a survivor of a pogrom in which most of the Jews had been killed in the village of Shamgorod. Afterward, Berish and some Jewish actors stage a trial of God, with Berish acting as the prosecutor. He speaks as witness for all the slaughtered: “Let their premature, unjust deaths turn into an outcry so forceful that it will make the universe tremble with fear and remorse!” Berish’s play is interrupted by the news that the murderers are returning to finish the job. The village priest offers to baptize Berish so he can truthfully claim to be Catholic. Berish refuses, saying, “My sons and my fathers perished without betraying their faith; I can do no less.” He insists that this decision does not suggest a reconciliation with God. “I lived as a Jew,” he exclaims, “and it is as a Jew that I shall die – and it is as a Jew that, with my last breath, I shall shout my protest to God! And because the end is near, I shall shout louder! Because the end is near, I’ll tell Him that He’s more guilty than ever!” Berish dies in faithful defiance and defiant faithfulness.

I posted a couple of days ago that my host, navmonkey.net, is getting out of the hosting biz, so I had to move to a new host. I selected An Hosting, principally because they offer first-cabin assistance in transferring the site and getting it back up and running. And they deliver. There were several technical glitches in transferring my site, which is now complete, principally because I really didn’t know what I was doing. But their techies were patient and very fast to respond.

Alles gut jetz, so we’re back. So while more content is being formed, go read today’s piece by David Warren, “Doing the Enemy’s Work.”

It’s great news, of course, that Fox News Channel reporter Steve Centanni and his videographer, Olaf Wiig, have been released by their Islamist captors kidnappers unharmed. However, their release came at a price:

“We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint,” Centanni told FOX News. “Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what the [blank] was going on.” …

[B]efore the journalists’ release, a new video was released, showing Wiig and Centanni dressed in beige Arab-style robes. Wiig, of New Zealand, delivered an anti-Western speech, his face expressionless and his tone halting. The kidnappers claimed both men had converted to Islam.

The way to convert to Islam is very simple. One simply utters the confession, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is in prophet.” The confession is one of the “five pillars of Islam,” that every Muslim is required to do. (The other four are making a pilgrimmage to Mecca, giving alms, praying daily while facing toward Mecca and fasting during the Islamic month of Ramadan.)

In Western jurisprudence coerced confessions are invalid in courts of law. This has not always been true, of course; for example, confessions resulting from torture were considered valid during the Inquisition and other times of the Middle Ages. But generally, coerced confessions of conversion to Christian faith, as opposed to confessions of juridical guilt, have never been thought valid. There have been exceptions. Again, I think the Inquisitiion was one, and during some of the eastern European anti-Jewish pogroms of later centuries, some Orthodox priests offered to baptize Jews to save them from persecution. These would have to count as coerced “conversions,” although it was not the church, but civil authorities, doing the coercion.

So - were the forced confessions of Islam by Centanni and Wiig valid? I would say not because there is no reason to believe from the men’s reports that they experienced a religious change of heart. That is, the men’s confession did not spring from faith in Allah, it was a deed done from fear of their lives.

But, let us remember that the basis of Islam, indeed the very meaning of the word, is “submission,” not faith. There is no concept of original sin in Islam as there is in Christianity; indeed, while original sin is the conceptual glue that holds Christian doctrine together, it is entirely rejected in Islam. Christianity teaches that original sin cannot be remitted by any human works, only by the works of God, namely, Christ dying and resurrected. Hence, no deeds human beings can do can bring them to salvation. Thus, wrote St. Paul, “If you believe in your heart that Jesus was raised from the dead and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.” Note the order: confession follows a change of heart, an affirmation of belief. Without the change of heart the confession’s utterance is of no value.

But in Islam, the confession’s utterance is unconnected to a change of heart. In fact, a change of heart is wholly irrelevant. The confession stands alone and its only point is that it is done, not that it is believed. The entire edifice of salvation theory in Islam is built on one thing alone: human submission to perform deeds ordered by Allah. Islam does not teach that Allah desires human beings to love him; they are commanded to obey.

According to the Koran, “humans have been created with a sound nature and provided by God with a true religion that enables them to have fullness of life through close communion with God in this world and the next. … God’s revelation to Muhammad and Muhammad’s words and actions, as gathered in “authenticated” Hadith, provide rules of correct action; unlike in Christianity, where original sin precludes salvation without God’s grace, here man’s nature enables him to act in ways that merit God’s grace. While not easy to follow, the rules do not demand anything that people are incapable of accomplishing through their own capacities; the rules guide men to paradise.

So according to the precepts of Islam, Centanni’s and Wiig’s confessions were completely valid. Any Muslim, not just their captors, considers it so. That they were uttered “at gunpoint” is unobjectionable. The guns simply enabled the two newsmen to understand that submission to Allah was required of them. Regardless of what Centanni or Wiig may think or believe, Muslims now consider them to be of their religion.

Update: Here’s an interesting point: what would the western media’s reaction be if the US started requiring Gitmo prisoners to be baptized into the Christian church as a condition of their release? And, as Dean Barnett points out, what was being said by the media that Centanni and Wiig were “released unharmed”?

Interesting locution there, “released unharmed,” no? This comes from the newspaper that believes that a Christmas crèche or a prayer uttered before a high school football game is a violation of the highest order. And yet being forced to adopt another faith at the point of a gun doesn’t rise to the level of “harm” in the Times’ judgment.

Good question.

Update: I’ll backtrack a little. Whether forced conversions in Islam are considered valid by Muslims is a matter of controversy within Islam’s history. Thanks to PD Shaw’s comment at Winds of Change for linking to an explanation of jihad by Abd-al-Masih:

Idolatry is the greatest evil that exists, so warfare is considered legitimate as a means to rid the world of this evil. Idolators may be forced to convert to Islam, on pain of death or enslavement. It is an act of piety (in Islam) to make converts in this way [but] Christians and Jews, should be granted a certain measure of toleration within the Muslim community, e.g. it is contrary to Muslim law to convert a Jew or Christian by force… .

Christians and Jews have historically not been considered idolaters in Islamic history since Muslims claim that the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus is the same as the God of Muhammed. The captors of Centanni and Wiig would have presumptively considered them Christian, but that may not have mattered when it came to coercion. Consider Shaw’s citation of present-day Egyptian textbooks:

If a Protected Person [Dhimmi] is forced to convert to Islam, his conversion is valid. If a Harbi [non-Muslim alien] is fought against and converts to Islam - it is valid… If the [same] Dhimmi returns [to his former religion], he is not killed [like an ordinary apostate], but imprisoned until he converts to Islam [again], because there is doubt regarding his belief [when he was forced to convert]. There is a possibility that it [i.e., his forced conversion] was sincere, so he is to be killed as an apostate. It is [also] possible that he did not believe [in Islam while having been forced to convert] and then he [should] be a Dhimmi and shall not be killed…
Selections for the Explanation of [the Book of] “Selection”, Grade 10, (2002) p. 168 (Azharite)

Naturally, the defenders of the kidnappers have rushed to drag out the tired old quote from the Quran that “there is no compulsion in religion,” but I would suggest that how most Muslims define “compulsion” and how we of the West do doesn’t line up too good.

While we’re on the topic of Iraq and the GWOT, let’s take a short review of the strategic plans of important combatants.

You may recall that I wrote on July 22 that Israel, in its campaign against Hezbollah, was carrying out a spasm, not a strategy. It’s one thing to have strategic goals that’s not the same as having a strategic plan. Israel had the former but not the latter. In Sept. 2003 I wrote basically the same critique of al Qaeda, that Osama bin Laden had strategic goals but no actual plan to accomplish them.

In October 2003 I explained what was then the American strategy in, “The Big Picture.”

I have been thinking for some time now that the same sort of criticisms I made of the strategic thinking of al Qaeda and Israel has become germane to the Bush administration. I held beginning in early 2003 that the case for the Iraq war was just, resting only partly on Saddam’s WMD programs. And when I wrote The Big Picture, it seemed that the administration was thinking long term. But it seems that their thinking froze before 2003 ended and events since then haven’t reinvigorated their strategic thinking.

For the nonce, I urge everyone to read retired Lt. Col. Joseph Myers’ essay, “America’s Strategic Fix and Our New Decision Points.” I plan on writing more about this in coming days.

Austin Bay’s guest writer, Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College, reviews the intelligence posture on whether Iraq had WMDs going back to the Clinton administration. A nice, unwitting companion piece to my October 2002 review of what the president said about the subject.

A Tennessee Marine was killed in action Wednesday.

J.D. Hirlston, 21, a native of Rutherford County, was killed Wednesday in combat in Iraq.

He was a lance corporal in the Marines, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He joined the Marines in June 2005 and went to Iraq early this summer.

First Lt. Barry Edwards, spokesman for the 2nd Marine Division, said Lance Cpl. Hirlston’s unit had been conducting patrols and training Iraqi security forces in Al Anbar province, where a number of Marines are stationed. The details of the combat operation in which he died were not released by the Marines on Thursday.

As a rifleman, he was among the Marine class that serves as the primary scouts and assault troops.

“They are the ground forces you usually see patrolling the streets,” Edwards said.

The last time he talked with his father, James Hirlston, was at a family dinner in Murfreesboro right before J.D. went to Iraq.

“He told me if he didn’t come back, what he’d want to happen,” James Hirlston recalled Thursday.

“We told him we weren’t too worried about that, just that we wanted him to come back. Now I wish we had talked longer.”

Last year I was the speaker at the Gold Star honor banquet for the Tennessee Marine Families, a 501(3)(c) organization in the state devoted to supporting deployed Tennessee Marines, their units and their families here at home. Sadly, we will add Lance Cpl. Hirlston’s name to the roll of absent comrades for the Gold Star dinner coming up Sept. 16. I will not be the speaker; TMF’s officers have wisely chosen a reserve, field-grade Marine infantry officer, a veteran of Iraq, to speak. He’s also a candidate for ordination in the Episcopalian church, intending to re-enter active duty in the Navy as a chaplain, hopefully to be assigned to a Marine battalion. I know him very well, and am honored to call him a friend.

Edward Luttwak writes that the ceasefire is far from a defeat for Israel, including an observation that Hezbollah’s military prowess is much overhyped; in fact, Luttwak says the war proved its fighters to be mediocre and far from the standard set by previous Arab armies who fought Israel. As for the existing IDF plan, dating back at least three years, to surge to the Litani, Luttwak says,

That plan was not implemented because of the lack of casualties among Israeli civilians. It had been a fair assumption that thousands of Hizbullah rockets fired in concentrated barrages would kill many civilians, perhaps hundreds of them each day.

But Hezbollah proved incapable of doing that, resulting in Iraeli deaths of one or two per day. (Luttwak does not address that a million Israelis huddled in bomb shelters.) So, says Luttwak, it was politically unacceptable for Olmert to launch the blitz to the Litani. I think he’s wrong because if there is anything reading multiple Israeli media during the wear showed, it was that Olmert enjoyed a wealth of domestic political capital practically without precedent in the country’s history. The electorate was urging Olmert to close the issue, but he refused.

Luttwak concludes,

[T]he outcome of the war is likely to be more satisfactory than many now seem to believe. Hassan Nasrallah is not another Yasser Arafat, who was fighting for eternal Palestine and not for actually living Palestinians, whose prosperity and safety he was always willing to sacrifice for the cause.

Nasrallah has a political constituency, and it happens to be centered in southern Lebanon. Implicitly accepting responsibility for having started the war, Nasrallah has directed his Hizbullah to focus on rapid reconstruction in villages and towns, right up to the Israeli border.

He cannot start another round of fighting that would quickly destroy everything again. Yet another unexpected result of the war is that Nasrallah’s power-base in southern Lebanon is more than ever a hostage for Hizbullah’s good behavior. /p>

Well, maybe. I’m skeptical. Most commentators expected Hamas to morph into moderation once it gained power in Gaza, but that sure didn’t happen. That’s why I’m skeptical of present claims that Hezbollah will be hindered from rearming and retraining for war because of its great social-welfare responsibilities for the people of southern Lebanon. One, Hezbollah really believes that Israel is preparing to attack it again, making Hezbollah’s prerparation for a renewed onslaught all the more imperative in its view. Two, Hezbollah has announced it will give $12,000 to every household destroyed by the Israelis. Now that the Lebanese government has announced it is moving into southern Lebanon, it gives Hezbollah a perfect escape from future social work: that’s the Siniora government’s problem. We, Hezbollah can claim, are the guardians of Lebanese independence from and resistance to Israel. With its newly-buttressed hero status, Hezbollah will hardly need to pass out blankets and water and canned goods.

There is a growing sentiment among many Israelis that one reason the Olmert government did not send large formations of ground forces into southern Lebanon early, to win a decisive victory on the ground right away, is that the Bush administration placed a tether on Olmert to prevent such an operation. For example, an Israeli soldier, Yaron, whose views on the war I posted here, is of that opinion.

[T]he sub-plot surfacing currently from other sources (see http://www.debka.co.il) suggests that the US and specifically Condoleezza Rice had more than a hand in the decision to “take it slowly” and not use the full might of the forces. Generally speaking, Condi preferred the crying of Israeli mothers over the Lebanese ones.

Well, Debka is not always very reliable; its analyses seem to be borne out no more often than not. Nonetheless, there was a lot of discussion in the war’s early days on whether President Bush had given Israel a “green light” to smash Hezbollah. The White House and the State Department said no, and that in fact the president never even spoke to Olmert until shortly before the passing of the UNSC’s Resolution 1701, which established the ceasefire. This position is somewhat disingenuous, though, since what diplomats don’t say is just as important as what they do say.

Much of the media record of the day is past easy retrieval now. But my recollection (and someone please provide corrections with links, if you can, if I’m wrong) is that the USG temporized quite a bit in moving toward a ceasefire. Over and again, both President Bush and SecState Rice said that the Middle East was “littered with ceasefire agreements” that didn’t hold up, and they refused to put the administration behind yet another litter-to-be agreement. If Bush and Rice didn’t give Israel a positive green light to stomp Hezbollah, they at least refrained from showing Israel a red light, or even a yelllow one. On July 18, however, the UK’s Guardian reported that the White House had advised Israel that it had only one more week to wrap things up. Only three days later Secretary Rice said that the US did not support termination of the war on the basis of the status quo ante. But by that time even outsiders were wondering whether Israel actually had a strategy to fight the war.

Eventually, of course, the US did start to press for a ceasefire resolution in the UNSC, but certainly not one that obligated Israel and not Lebanon or Hezbollah. My analysis is that the administration initially played “hands off” the anti-Hezbollah campaign, expecting that the IDF would enter action decisively on the ground relatively soon, within the first two weeks or so. But time dragged on and the ground campaign was never more than desultory at best; with only a couple of exceptions IDF units didn’t penetrate more than two or three kilomters into Lebanon. Eventually the Bush administration figured out that Olmert et. al. had not the will, hence not the intention, actually to enter a decisive ground fight with Hezbollah.

That meant that, inevitably, world diplomatic and popular opinion would turn against Israel, especially in view of the news reports of deaths and damage coming from Lebanon. That many of the reports were “fauxtography” didn’t matter. It was always in America’s self-interest for Israel to eliminate Hezbollah’s army, but the Olmert government was not willing to do so. For two reasons, this fact mitigated against the continuing the tacit “green light” that the Bush administration had given Israel:

1. Indecision is neither a just aim in war nor a pragmatic tactic.

2. Even the Arab governments that would have privately smiled at Hezbollah’s elimination would not countenance Israel’s bombing of Lebanon that was increasingly unconnected to that goal and, by the last two weeks at least, of no obvious connection to a ground campaign that clearly was never going to come about.

At the end of the day, all nations finally look out for number one. Olmert got an implicit green light from Bush but sat there merely revving the engine. American interests with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait would have been harmed by Israel continuing what was a violent though phony war. American finally pushed for the ceasefire not because it was in Israel’s interests, but because it was in ours, since Israel was obviously never going to close Hezbollah down. (By the time PM Olmert did give the go-ahead to move to the Litani river, it was too late; the UNSC had reached agreement.)

UPI reports the latest Syrian view:

Syria’s official Tishreen daily said in its editorial Thursday the U.S. administration will try to find new pretexts to achieve what the Israeli war machine failed to accomplish in Lebanon. The state-run paper argued the Bush administration sees the war on Lebanon as its own, not just Israel’s, and is seeking to turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate. That’s why, it claimed, Washington coordinates with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government around the clock and speeded up its diplomatic efforts in the U.N. to allow it to continue its aggression on Lebanon in different ways. It said Israel saw Security Council Resolution 1701 that stopped the war as a break to assess its calculations and allow pressure on the Lebanese resistance to take its course, adding the U.S. administration is seeking to take revenge from the resistance. “What is happening in Lebanon and the U.N. circles indicates the war on Lebanon stopped, but did not end; while Olmert’s government is drowning in its losses and wants to reclaim its dignity at any cost, relying on the unlimited American support,” the Syrian daily asserted. It said the London-based Amnesty International human rights organization on Wednesday had accused Israel of war crimes in Lebanon, adding the group “undoubtedly took into consideration that the Bush administration is a partner in these crimes.”

UPI’s report is a summary of the latest Arab editorials, interesting reading.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 calls for 15,000 UN-back soldiers to be deployed in southern Lebanon, expanding the presence of the small, existing UN Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL), which has been there since 1978. France, which pushed hard for the measure and was expected to lead the mission, backpedaled furiously a few days ago. (Jules Crittenden argues that since we don’t speak French, we must have misunderstood what they meant.

[O]ne must understand that when France suggested it wanted to broker peace in Lebanon, it did not necessarily mean “broker” or “peace” or “Lebanon” in the way we might understand those words. The same is true when France further suggested it wanted to “lead” a “strong” “multinational” “force” there.

But I digress.)

Anyway, Italy has pledged 3,000 troops but there is still no chain of command established or a clear mission or rules of engagement or anything that would make the UN force a, well, military force. Already, UN spokespeople have ruled out absolutely that the reinforced UNIFIL will disarm Hezbollah, which the Lebanese government also has said it will not do and which is (sort of) called for by the same UNSC Resolution 1701.

Other than Israel and the sea, southern Lebanon borders Syria. Since Syria is the main supplier of Hezbollah’s weapons, one might imagine that UNIFIL would take an interest in patrolling along the Syrian border, on the Lebanese side, of course. And so UNIFIL might take such an interest, if indeed a new UNIFIL actually ever sets foot there (which I doubt).

Syria has no interest at all in any new UNIFIL, however pusillanimous it may be, in stepping onto Lebanese soil, and Syrian dictator President Bashar Assad restated only last week that no peace is possible with Israel. As Lebanon’s Daily Star reports,

Indeed, as the recent declaration made by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem during his brief visit to Lebanon indicated, the prospect of a wider regional war is something these regimes actually welcome. For the strong showing that Hizbullah has made, the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure notwithstanding, is encouragement enough for these regimes, with their minds and hearts still stuck in the 1980s, to revive the old dream of defeating Israel militarily through involvement in a war of attrition and thus achieving military glory that will boost their credentials both at home and abroad. With the US caught in the Iraqi quagmire and its power seemingly neutralized as a result, this prospect might appear more and more tempting with each passing day.

Add to these things that Syria has continued to resupply Hezbollah with weapons since the ceasefire went into effect (as confirmed by Israeli surveillance aircraft, the announcement of which has been studiously ignored by Western media) - well then, it shall come as no surprise that Assad,

… was quoted Wednesday as rejecting the deployment of UN troops along the Lebanon-Syria border, saying such a move would create animosity between the two countries.

“This is an infringement on Lebanese sovereignty and a hostile position,” Assad told Dubai Television. The TV station’s anchor quoted Assad without showing video of the interview, which would air later Wednesday.

Assad also urged the Lebanese government to adhere to its responsibilities and not embark on anything that could sabotage relations with Syria.

Does it not bring a tear to your eye that Syrian dictator President Assad is so concerned about Lebanese sovereignty? I mean, it’s not like Syria ever occupied Lebanon or did something truly dastardly like, say, assassinating Lebanon’s prime minister.

Fer shur Assad doesn’t want Lebanon to do anything that “could sabotage relations with Syria,” since Assad & Co. consider Lebanon to be a Syrian satrapy - so the Lebanese better not get any silly ideas such as actually being a self-determining people. And most of all they may not disarm Hezbollah, Syria’s only real means, at present, of fighting Israel.

Now, the questions are whether the new, reinforced UNIFIL will, (a) ever be formed and if so, (b) will it defy Assad and deploy along the Syrian-Lebanese border anyway, because otherwise it cannot minimally fulfill UNSC 1701’s mandate wishes.

Here’s your four-letter answer: No, no.

Or maybe a good deed for a lifetime - an 18-month-old gfirl whom two Scouts saved from drowning.

OMAHA, Neb. — A troop of Boy Scouts on a camping trip saved an 18-month-old girl who had fallen in a river upstream from them and was floating face down, officials said.

The boys were swimming in the Platte River at Two Rivers State Recreation Area, about 20 miles west of Omaha, on Saturday when 11-year-old Christian Nanson spotted something floating in the water. It turned out to be a young girl.

Nanson and John Fitzgerald, 9, both member of an Omaha Scout troop, reached the girl and brought her to shore while others called for help on a cell phone, assistant scoutmaster Matt Fitzgerald told the Omaha World-Herald.

The BSA does award lifesaving medals to its members; I’d say Nanson and Fitzgerald certainly deserve it.

Home sales are in the tank.

The supply of homes for sale at the end of July jumped sharply by 3.2 percent to 3.86 million units. This represented a 7.3 months’ supply, the highest since April 1993.

Here in the South, though, the market is still pretty robust, with sales dropping from last year by only 1.2 percent. The South’s median sale rose 3.2 percent to $192,000. That price is still $38,000 less than the national median, but the median’s rise in the South was 2.3 percent better than the national increase.

Strategy Page says “Ahmadinejad Seen As a Loser Back Home.”

Overall, Iranians are angry at Ahmadinejad for not doing anything to get the economy going. Despite the rising price of oil, Iran’s big export, most Iranians are still poor. Iranians blame this on incompetence and corruption among the religious leaders that dominate the government. The nuclear weapons program is now perceived as another example of incompetence. Ahmadinejad’s battle with the UN, over inspections of the Iranian nuclear program, are moving towards the imposition of international economic sanctions. These will hurt all Iranians. The poor will get poorer, and the religious leaders will still have their fancy cars and big houses.

And Iran’s military is less than happy with him, too.

BreakingNews reports:

Dutch F-16s escorted a Northwest Airlines flight bound for India back to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport today, and authorities detained several passengers for questioning.

The pilot requested permission to return as the aircraft was flying over Germany shortly after leaving Amsterdam, and asked for a military escort, said spokeswoman Pamela Kuypers.

Customs police were investigating the security alert, and airport authorities had no further information on what caused the alarm, she said.

The Dutch National Terrorism Co-ordinator’s Office was informed, but said there was no cause to raise the nation’s terror threat level, said spokeswoman Judith Sluiter.

“It is the same as it was before – light threat,” said Sluiter.

I’ve always wondered just what we expect the fighter jets to do in case there’s a terrorist-related problem aboard the airliner. They can’t directly influence activity aboard the airliner. All a fighter pilot can do is report an airliner’s altitude and heading, but military radars can do that just as well. Of course, the fighter’s missiles can destroy and airliner and since 9/11 I can’t imagine any national leader failing to give that order if the choice was between losing the lives aboard the airliner or multiples more lives on the ground.

Although the extremity of a shootdown must be held in mind when the fighter jets are called out, I’m guessing that what the Northwest pilot wanted to do most was signal potential terrorists aboard that their presence was blown. When the suspect passengers looked out the windows and saw F-16s flying alongside, they had to know the gig was up.

Of course, if terrorists intend to blow an airliner up rather than fly it into a ground target, fighter jets can’t do one thing about it. It is futile to threaten killing those who are already determined to die.

Update: Dutch authorities have arrested 12 persons who were aboard the flight. There were 149 passengers altogether. No other details were released.

Over at my Blogspot-hosted blog devoted exclusively to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, an Israeli MLRS artillery soldier named Yaron wrote a long comment in response to my post, “Lebanese govt.: We will not disarm Hezbollah,” which is posted on this site with a little more content. I am pasting Yaron’s comment below for your consideration.

I am an Israeli reserve soldier, and just came back from a “30 day tour” serving in the Israeli MLRS (which is how I came across your site…)

I stumbled upon your blog and though I normally don’t comment and just mind my own business - this time I think I’ve got to.

What you say is true, mostly. The Israeli Army should have taken down the Hezbollah in the 1st week, or maximum 10 days, with a full blown air strike and artillery usage against the katyusha launchers. It was Ehud Olmert and his cabinets’ responsibility to our nation and people to take care of that threat at any cost, and he failed to do so, and therefore MUST resign, along with Defense Minister Amir Peretz & Chief of Staff Dan Halutz.

However, the sub-plot surfacing currently from other sources (see http://www.debka.co.il) suggests that the US and specifically Condoleezza Rice had more than a hand in the decision to “take it slowly” and not use the full might of the forces. Generally speaking, Condi preferred the crying of Israeli mothers over the Lebanese ones.

(more…)

Joe Rosenthal has died at age 94.

Photographer Joe Rosenthal in the field during World War II

Joe was the war correspondent on Iwo Jima in 1945 who took what some historians say is the most-reproduced photograph of all time - the raising of the second flag on Mt. Suribachi.

His photograph of the flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, may be the most widely reproduced photo in American history. It was re-created on at least 3.5 million Treasury Department posters publicizing a massive war-bond campaign. It was engraved on three-cent Marine Corps commemorative stamps that broke Post Office records for first-day cancellations in 1945. It was reproduced as a 100-ton Marine Corps War Memorial bronze sculpture near Arlington National Cemetery. And it brought Mr. Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize.

I remember reading Joe’s own account of the picture. He had gone to the summit of the extinct volcano to shoot photos of the first flag to be raised, not knowing it was to be taken down. The battalion commander of the Marine unit that raised it ordered it brought back because it was too small to be seen across the island and out to sea; he also knew that Navy Secretary Frank Knox was afloat offshore and was worried that some brasshat would order the flag be given to Knox. The Marine commander was determined it go to the regimental museum.

Disappointed that he had missed the first flag going up, Joe said he almost missed the shot of the second, larger flag being raised. He was fiddling with his camera (reloading film, I think). There was a Marine motion-picture photographer there, too, Sgt. William Genaust, who knew another flag was to be raised and who stacked a couple of rocks to get a good angle. He alerted Joe, who turned at the last moment, raised his camera and pressed the shutter.

Mr. Rosenthal said he was lucky to catch the flag-raising at its most dramatic instant, producing a masterpiece of composition acclaimed as a work of art.

“The sky was overcast, but just enough sunlight fell from almost directly overhead, because it happened to be about noon, to give the figures a sculptural depth,” he wrote in Collier’s magazine on the 10th anniversary of the flag-raising.

“The 20-foot pipe was heavy, which meant the men had to strain to get it up, imparting that feeling of action,” he wrote. “The wind just whipped the flag out over the heads of the group, and at their feet the disrupted terrain and the broken stalks of the shrubbery exemplified the turbulence of war.”

Joe coped for years after the war with accusations that the photo was posed, but it wasn’t, as Sgt. Genaust’s movie proves. Moreover, as news photos go (Joe was an AP wire photographer), the shot is very poor. Some of the men can hardly be seen and none of them are facing the camera. It didn’t matter.

“The characters create an ascending motion, but they’re frozen in time in a brilliantly precise way,” Alan Trachtenberg, the author of “Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans,” said in a 1997 interview with The New York Times. “And it’s more than just raising a flag. It’s a sense of culmination, of triumph, not just over an enemy but over the challenge of war itself. It’s become an iconic image, like Uncle Sam.”

Fifty-six years later, that iconic image still resonated in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

New York City firemen raising a flag near the ruins of the World Trade Center

As had been done in 1945 with Joe’s photo, many newspapers in America published full-page versions of this photo. Yet, inspiring as this shot was at the time (and still is), its emotional effect depended on Joe’s decades-old work.

The men raising the flag were Pfc. Ira Hayes, Pfc. Franklin Sousley, Pharmacist’s Mate 2d Class John Bradley, a corpsman and Sgt. Michael Strank, Pfc. Rene Gagnon and Cpl. Harlon Block of Texas. Bradley and Strank cannot be clearly seen in the picture.

Although depicting sacrifice, courage and determination, the photo did not depict triumph. The battle for Iwo Jima raged another month. Of the Marines in Joe’s photo, Pfc. Sousley, Sgt. Strank, Sgt. Hansen and Cpl. Block were killed in action. Sergeant Genaust, who took the movie of the flag raising, also was killed. Navy Corpsman John Bradley was awarded the Navy Cross for later heroism.

After the war, Joe Rosenthal worked for The San Francisco Chronicle after the war until his retirement in 1981.