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October 5, 2002 - On Solving Middle East Problems
October 5, 2002 - How to Get Profiled
October 5, 2002 - "Street People" Are Losers
October 5, 2002 - Urban Warfare and Why Not

On Solving Middle East Problems

Here is what an Egyptian-American had to say to people who have a solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict and similar mattters:

1) God sent Moses, and he couldn't fix it.

2) God sent Jesus, and he couldn't fix it.

3) God sent Mohammed,and he couldn't fix it.

4) Do you think YOU can fix it?

--- Charles Issawi, "The Laws of Social Motion"

How to Get Profiled

The first airline hijackings by Arabs broke out in 1970. About a month after that I took a trip to Africa with a lot of stops at airports in Europe.

Before the 1970 rash of hijackings there were absolutely no searches of airline passengers. In the early 1960s, I once accidentally stepped onto a plane at Memphis airport that was completely empty! I went into the cockpit looking for somebody and then got off and found the plane I was supposed to be on.

The 1970 hijackings changed everything. Each airline tried something different. A lot of them had each passenger come into a little room and get a quick frisk.

To my surprise I found that I was getting profiled. Other passengers would go in and get out of the search room in a couple of minutes. They went over me with a fine toothed comb, taking ten or fifteen minutes and double checking. This puzzled me.

Somewhere in the air over Africa, I suddenly realized why I was being searched so especially.

I once worked in a prison. Everybody who came in, including the warden, got frisked before being admitted inside. Usually it was a light check, but they also had random thorough searches of each person who came in regularly.

So when I walked into the little airline search room, I took the perfect stance for being frisked. I held my jacket out in my right hand, kept my knees bent slightly, and held my hands rigidly out.

If there was a wall I probably propped my hands against it.

This worried the searchers. You see, the average airline passenger does not go into frisk position routinely as if he has lined up in a police station a hundred times before.

Do you think I was upset at the airlines? Of couse not. I looked like I belonged to a suspect population, so they searched me. That was the whole point of the exercise.

"Street People" Are Losers

A lot of thirty-year-old white guys wear their caps backwards and their pants low. They want to look like Gangstah Rappers and they want to look Street Wise.

That's pathetic.

Another pathetic thing is young guys who have chains tattooed on them to show they have been in prison or to look like they have.

We live in a society where the Libertarians, who call themselves Intellectuals, insist that a wall to keep Mexicans OUT of the United States is the same as the Berlin Wall which kept people IN East Germany.

So naturally the people in such a society will brag about being IN a prison. After all, it's the same thing as being OUTSIDE a prison, right?

There's a lot of talk about how great it is to be an ex-con. You get all that wisdom, you see. It's called "street smarts."

All our Tough Guy talk and rule by so-called "intellectuals" has produced a society where young people honestly don't know the difference between success and failure. Our Libertarian Intellectuals don't know the difference between a country that has to kill people who try to escape and one that has to keep people out.

And absolutely nobody but WhitakerOnline.ORG is even going to point this difference out! Being in prison makes you a loser. Being on the street makes you a loser. Communist countries are losers.

Period.

Urban Warfare and Why Not

Teddy Kennedy has raised the prospect that an invasion of Iraq will involve street fighting against urban guerrillas.

Teddy Kennedy and his fellow liberals used to threaten America with the same thing back in the 1960s. They were always telling America that it would be DOOMED if minorities seized the cities and held them. As always, not one single person ever questioned how absurd this idea was.

I remember that nonsense was brought up to me one time and one time only at the University of Virginia. Somebody said, "Well what if the militants seize the cities, what would you do?" I replied, "I'd cut off the water."

But Teddy and all the other media types, people who think the earth begins at the city line, are simply incapable of realizing how dependent a city is on the outside.

City minorities are losers. There was urban warfare in Budapest in 1956 against the Soviet occupiers. But that was because the Soviet troops wouldn't get ruthless enough. So the Soviets brought in Asiatic soldiers and they crushed the Budapest uprising.

In the 1960s, when Teddy Kennedy liberals sent National Guard troops into cities WITHOUT AMMUNITION, the cities might have been a threat. But, in the real world, if we expect to do any real fighting, we had better begin by getting a grip on reality, and reality does not include taking Gangstah Rap or Street Smarts seriously.

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