Kevin M. Cosgrove, 46, of West Islip, Long Island, a vice president of Aon Corporation, was trapped, along with two other people, in an office on the northwest corner of the 105th floor of the South Tower World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A recording was made of his desperate pleas for assistance to the 911 operator and the New York Fire Department. The phone conversation continued until the moment of the tower’s collapse.

Lest we forget.

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At the Nav Log, ip568 compares Israel’s current situation with his own childhood experiences. The liberals apparenty have all led sheltered lives, and just don’t understand these things.

Here’s a television advertisement from Greenpeace UK, which alarmingly illustrates the intolerance and appetite for power of Environmentalist extremists.

Gas Guzzler video

Frank W. Benson (1862-1951), Salmon Fishing
oil on canvas – 32 by 40 inches

This impressionist oil painting by renowned sporting artist Frank Benson is the highlight of today’s Sporting Sale, today and tomorrow at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel by Copley Fine Art Auctions. The Benson is expected to sell between $600,000 and $900,000.

RESULTS

Sales price was $650,000 + 15% buyer premium = $747,500.00

Cartoon comment from Cox & Forkum.

Michelle Malkin performs her own personal version of a peace song.

video

Recent excavations in a well discovered last fall at Jamestown, Virginia have produced a number of interesting artifacts from the earliest English settlement in North America. The well, located within the 1607 stockade, is believed to be the earliest at the Jamestown colony.

The finds included a brass Scottish pistol, a ceremonial lead halbard bearing the arms of Lord De la Warr, leather shoes, and a small lead tag bearing the stamped inscription “James Towne.”

Times Dispatch

Virginian Pilot

A backhoe operator excavating in a bog in the Irish midlands last week unearthed a medieval manuscript written around 800 A.D.

The 20-pages discovered represented a portion of a Psalter, a collection of the Psalms. The find represents the first discovery of a new medieval Irish manuscript in two centuries.

By a suitable coincidence, the manuscript was found open to a page containing (in Latin) Psalm 83, a prayer invoking God’s aid in defending Israel against enemy nations bent upon her destruction.

For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.

They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.

For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee: The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes; Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assur also is joined with them: they have holpen the children of Lot. Selah.

Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison: Which perished at Endor: they became as dung for the earth. Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna: Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession. O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind. As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire; So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm. Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD. Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish: That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.

–Psalm 83.

Courier Mail (Australia)

AP

John Podhoretz wonders if Israel and the United States have become too sentimental and humanitarian to fight wars and win.

July 25, 2006 — WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy – the idea that all people are created equal – has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left’s insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right’s claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country’s leaders?

Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Didn’t the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn’t that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

If you can’t imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?

And if America can’t do it, can Israel? Could Israel – even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel – possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?

If Lebanon’s 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah? Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon – not because of world opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding of the value of every human life?

The American Rifleman, the NRA‘s traditional monthly magazine, has for many years run a featured called the Armed Citizen as a corrective to the MSM’s deliberate policy of avoiding coverage of the use of armed force by private citizens to stop crime.

It’s easy to see why.

Clayton Cramer catches USA Today inventing a non-existent tackle in a stabbing attack in Memphis halted by an armed citizen with handgun.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Dennis Prager identifies a key benchmark.

I believe the Left has been wrong on virtually every great moral issue in the last 30 years…

In just about every instance, one could say that the Left was foolish, the Left was naive, the Left was wrong, even that the Left was dangerous. But in all of those cases, one could imagine a decent person holding any or even all of these positions.

But we now have a bright line that divides the decent — albeit usually wrong — Left from the indecent Left.

The Left’s anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the “cycle of violence” between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation…

Anyone on the Left who cannot see this is either bad, a useful idiot for Islamic terrorists, anti-Semitic or all three. There is no other explanation for morally condemning Israel’s war on Hezbollah.

Read the whole thing.

David Kopel, at the Volokh Conspiracy, in response to demands for UN peacekeeping, notes the case a few years back in which Indian members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were successfully bribed by Hezbollah to assist in an act of terrorism.

UNIFIL’s most notorious collaboration with terrorists involved the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers, and the subsequent cover-up.

On October 7, 2000, Hezbollah terrorists entered Israel, attacked three Israeli soldiers on Mount Dov, and abducted them Lebanon. The kidnapping was witnessed by several dozen UNIFIL soldiers who stood idle. One of the soldier witnesses described the kidnapping: the terrorists set of an explosive which stunned the Israeli soldiers. Clad in UN uniforms, the terrorists called out, “Come, come, we’ll help you.”

The Israeli soldiers approached the men in UN uniforms. Then, a Hezbollah bomb detonated—-apparently prematurely. It wounded the disguised Hezbollah commander, and three Israeli soldiers.

Two other terrorists in U.N. uniforms dragged their Hezbollah commander and the three wounded soldiers into a getaway car.

According an Indian solider in UNIFIL who witnessed the kidnapping, “By this stage, there was a big commotion and dozens of UN soldiers from the Indian brigade came around.” The witness stated that the brigade knew that the kidnappers in UN uniform were Hezbollah. One soldiers said that the brigade should arrest the Hezbollah, but the brigade did nothing.

According to the Indian soldier, the UNFIL brigade in the area “could have prevented the kidnapping.”

“I’m very sorry about what happened, because we saw what happened,” he said. Hezbollah “were wearing our uniforms and it was too bad we didn’t stop them.”

It appears that at least four of the UNIFIL “peacekeepers,” all from India, has received bribes from Hezbollah in order to assist the kidnapping by helping them get to the kidnapping spot and find the Israeli soldiers. Some of the bribery involved alcohol and Lebanese women.

The Indian brigade later had a bitter internal argument, as some members complained that the brigade had betrayed its peacekeeping mandate. An Indian government investigation sternly criticized the brigade’s conduct.

There is evidence of far greater payments by Hezbollah to the UNIFIL Indian brigade, including hundreds of thousands of dollars for assistance in the kidnapping and cover-up.

The UN cover-up began almost immediately.