On Tuesday 1/30/07, William Arkin (photo left), the WaPo’s "Homeland and National Security reporter," wrote a particularly repugnant piece entitled The Troops Also Need to Support the American People, in which, among other things, he said, “I've been mulling over an NBC Nightly News report from Iraq last Friday in which a number of soldiers expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States.
“I'm sure the soldiers were expressing a majority opinion common amongst the ranks - that's why it is news - and I'm also sure no one in the military leadership or the administration put the soldiers up to expressing their views, nor steered NBC reporter Richard Engel to the story.
“I'm all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn't for them to disapprove of the American people.”
Actually William, it’s exactly the reverse.
The American people have no business disapproving of their military!
From the safety and security of his desk Arkin suggests that the Troops are lucky they aren’t spit on and called “baby killers.”
An interesting quote considering one Iraq veteran and war supporter (Joshua Sparling), an amputee who spoke before a Code Pink rally was spit on by anti-war protesters this past weekend in D.C.
Arkin seems to lament the even barely livable standards the soldiers overseas endure, “So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?...”
“...But it is the United States and instead this NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.”
He ends with, “America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform.”
It's as though Arkin were trying to rival the routinely vile Ted Rall!
“I'm sure the soldiers were expressing a majority opinion common amongst the ranks - that's why it is news - and I'm also sure no one in the military leadership or the administration put the soldiers up to expressing their views, nor steered NBC reporter Richard Engel to the story.
“I'm all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn't for them to disapprove of the American people.”
Actually William, it’s exactly the reverse.
The American people have no business disapproving of their military!
From the safety and security of his desk Arkin suggests that the Troops are lucky they aren’t spit on and called “baby killers.”
An interesting quote considering one Iraq veteran and war supporter (Joshua Sparling), an amputee who spoke before a Code Pink rally was spit on by anti-war protesters this past weekend in D.C.
Arkin seems to lament the even barely livable standards the soldiers overseas endure, “So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?...”
“...But it is the United States and instead this NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.”
He ends with, “America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform.”
It's as though Arkin were trying to rival the routinely vile Ted Rall!
<
So who exactly is William Arkin?
He is, according to Hugh Hewitt, “For starters, he is the scribbler who launched the assault on Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (back in October of 2003) by providing NBC with tapes of Boykin speaking in churches, and then followed with a Los Angeles Times op-ed that accused the general of being "an intolerant extremist" and a man "who believes in Christian 'jihad'" (Arkin later admitted on my radio program that Boykin never used the term "jihad").
William Arkin began his career with the extremely Left-wing Institute for Policy Studies, and from there went onto positions with Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Human Rights Watch. He's been a regular columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In recent years he's taken some more mainstream work as a senior fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, though Hugh Hewitt notes, "he appears to do most of his writing not from the SAIS campus, but from his home in Vermont."
Before his employ with the Washington Post he was the regular military affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a commentator for MSNBC.
In one speech, Arkin claimed that "the war against terrorism is overstated."
So why is Arkin’s background important?
Well, it should be noted that the The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) was founded in 1963 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization with seed money (derived from a fortune made in cosmetics sales under the Faberge trade name) from the Samuel Rubin Foundation. Samuel Rubin (1901-1978) was a Russian Bolshevik and the father of Cora Weiss, who headed the Samuel Rubin Foundation from its inception and is currently the principal financier of IPS.
Weiss' husband, Peter, is Chairman of the IPS Board of Trustees. He is also a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, both of which were created as Communist Party fronts. The Weisses selected Richard J. Barnet and Marcus Raskin to be the first Co-Directors of IPS, with the aim of transforming the United States by altering public attitudes, changing laws, and reversing foreign policy through an Academy that reached every nexus of the national nervous system.
Throughout its history, IPS has committed itself to the task of advancing leftist causes. It worked with agents of the Castro regime and championed environmentalist and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; it declared against the Reagan administration's efforts to roll back communism in the 1980s; it joined the vanguard of what IPS hails as the "anti-corporate globalization movement" in the 1990s; and, most recently, it has furnished policy research assailing the U.S.-led war in Iraq."
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6991
Perhaps John Stuart Mill summed up the likes of William Arkin best when he said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
“The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
He is, according to Hugh Hewitt, “For starters, he is the scribbler who launched the assault on Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (back in October of 2003) by providing NBC with tapes of Boykin speaking in churches, and then followed with a Los Angeles Times op-ed that accused the general of being "an intolerant extremist" and a man "who believes in Christian 'jihad'" (Arkin later admitted on my radio program that Boykin never used the term "jihad").
William Arkin began his career with the extremely Left-wing Institute for Policy Studies, and from there went onto positions with Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Human Rights Watch. He's been a regular columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In recent years he's taken some more mainstream work as a senior fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, though Hugh Hewitt notes, "he appears to do most of his writing not from the SAIS campus, but from his home in Vermont."
Before his employ with the Washington Post he was the regular military affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a commentator for MSNBC.
In one speech, Arkin claimed that "the war against terrorism is overstated."
So why is Arkin’s background important?
Well, it should be noted that the The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) was founded in 1963 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization with seed money (derived from a fortune made in cosmetics sales under the Faberge trade name) from the Samuel Rubin Foundation. Samuel Rubin (1901-1978) was a Russian Bolshevik and the father of Cora Weiss, who headed the Samuel Rubin Foundation from its inception and is currently the principal financier of IPS.
Weiss' husband, Peter, is Chairman of the IPS Board of Trustees. He is also a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, both of which were created as Communist Party fronts. The Weisses selected Richard J. Barnet and Marcus Raskin to be the first Co-Directors of IPS, with the aim of transforming the United States by altering public attitudes, changing laws, and reversing foreign policy through an Academy that reached every nexus of the national nervous system.
Throughout its history, IPS has committed itself to the task of advancing leftist causes. It worked with agents of the Castro regime and championed environmentalist and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; it declared against the Reagan administration's efforts to roll back communism in the 1980s; it joined the vanguard of what IPS hails as the "anti-corporate globalization movement" in the 1990s; and, most recently, it has furnished policy research assailing the U.S.-led war in Iraq."
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6991
Perhaps John Stuart Mill summed up the likes of William Arkin best when he said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
“The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
No comments:
Post a Comment