The October death toll for American troops in Iraq (where I spent most of 2005) was down to 36, which is the lowest death toll since March of 2006. (That’s small consolation though, for the families of those 36 soldiers.)
Not only was the American military death toll down, so was the Iraqi civilian death toll, as reported by the LA Times.
According to the article,

“The civilian death toll plummeted nationwide in the last two months; the toll was 2,076 in January but 884 in September and 758 in October, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry.”[Iraqi Civilian Deaths Plunge, Ned Parker, LA Times, Nov. 1st, 2007]

Why is the death toll of both American troops and Iraqi civilians lower? U.S. commanders credit the troop surge, which in June reached full strength, and has slowed sectarian bloodshed:

“They [commanders] say the decision to send 28,500 more troops to Iraq has made a difference by allowing them to send soldiers to live on the fault lines between Sunni Arab and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, and to conduct sweeping offensives in provinces east and south of the capital against strongholds of Shiite Muslim militias and Sunni militants linked to foreign insurgents.”

OK, so the surge is part of it, however there’s another reason also:

“….others say that the picture is more complicated than that because those seeking to cleanse their neighborhoods of rival religious sects have largely succeeded.”

In other words, ethnic cleansing has reduced violence. For example, in the formerly mixed Ghazaliya district of Baghdad, scene of heavy sectarian fighting a year ago, things have cooled down considerably. Why? According to resident Mohammed Azzawi,

“Everyone in our neighborhood is Sunni, even the birds flying above us are Sunni… I expect to live in Ghazaliya the rest of my life. This is our home. Now that it is pure Sunni, it is better for us.”

In another part of town, the Rashid district formerly had a majority Sunni population. That has changed, it is now 70% Shiite.
And, as residents are driven out of one neighborhood, they can settle in another neighborhood which had people of the other sect driven out of it. The Hurriyah neighborhood is a haven for Shiites chased out of other parts of the city. There is space for the refugees, because the Shiites drove the Sunnis out of the neighborhood.

Dana Graber Ladek, Iraqi case officer for the International Organization for Migration credits both U.S. troop presence and ethnic cleansing:

“Certainly the presence of [U.S.] soldiers in insecure neighborhoods in Baghdad could stabilize the neighborhood, resulting in less violence and fewer people fleeing the neighborhood. In addition, as neighborhoods become homogeneous, violence is likely to decrease and fewer people are likely to flee these areas.”

Nevertheless, though violence is reduced, it’s still high. About 200 Iraqis are being killed a week.

So is Diversity really Strength, as we’re constantly lectured? When I was in Iraq, I wrote some “Memos from Mesopotamia” concerning Iraqi diversity, they are located here, here and here.

The University of Delaware program mind-control program I blogged about earlier has been canceled, because college administrations are cowardly, and the fact that they’re instituting these programs is sign of cowardice in the face of the race hustling industry in the first place.

When challenged by the media and alumni they frequently run in the other direction.

The Foundation For Individual Rights in Education preserved some samples of their thinking:

FIRE - Excerpts from University of Delaware Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training
Excerpts are taken from from the University of Delaware Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document, linked in PDF form below.

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“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)” - Page 3

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“REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’” - Page 3

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“A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called “blaming the victim”). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent.” - Page 3

—–

“Have you ever heard a well-meaning white person say, ‘I’m not a member of any race except the human race?’ What she usually means by this statement is that she doesn’t want to perpetuate racial categories by acknowledging that she is white. This is an evasion of responsibility for her participation in a system based on supremacy for white people.” - Page 8

—–
“The notion of indigenous people as more akin to animals than human beings is at the basis of U.S. policy toward Native Americans. In 1784 George Washington, famous Indian fighter, large landholder and slave owner, advised the Continental Congress that it would be cheaper for the new nation to buy up Indian land than to make war on Indian people for the land. If you make war, Washington cautioned, ‘the savage as the wolf’ - both wild beasts of the forest - will retreat for awhile and then come back to attack you. Washington’s metaphor stuck. The young U.S. nation-state, and all sectors of European- American; began to view the Native American as a wild animal.” - Page 10

The last part, about Americans thinking of Indians as wild animals because George Washington said so, is a prime example of the weirdness of multicultural thinking.

You can read the Washington’s letter online via Google Books–it’s on 477, of The Writings of George Washington (1855): and the wolf quote is on page 484. As is typical, the multiculturalists got the date wrong–they’re quoting from a letter “To James Duane, in Congress” written from Rocky Hill, September 7, 1783. I’d never heard this quote, but it’s been the subject of extensive whining from Indians, and from Noam Chomsky.

However, for any readers who didn’t study American history in school, and for all the multicultural fantasists out there, here’s what you need to know:

• George Washington is not primarily known for being a “famous Indian fighter, large landholder and slave owner,” but for being the Father of his Country–“First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
• Neither Washington nor most of his contemporaries thought of Indians as wild animals. They may have thought their behavior savage and inhuman, but that’s because they were judging them by human standards.
• If somewhere a settler, viewing a scene of butchery, said to himself “They’re animals,” he didn’t need Washington’s letter to make him think that way, especially since it’s quite possible that for many years, the only person who read the damn letter was James Duane, the addressee.
• Finally, there is one group that thought of and referred to the Indians as wild animals–the Indians themselves. Their warrior traditions were heavily connected to animal totems–like the famous Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, the Bear People band of the Oglala Sioux, and the warriors present at Little Bighorn who had names like: Bear-With-Horn, Big Elk , Black Elk, Black Fox, Crazy Horse , Crow Dog, Dog’s-Back-Bone, Dog-With-Horns, Elk Bear, Fool Bull , Good Fox, He Dog, High Elk, He Crow, Kicking Bear, Little Bear, Lone Bull, Lone Dog, Long Elk, Low Dog, Red Horn Buffalo, Red Horse, Short Bull, and of course Sitting Bull. Had all these people been reading George Washington’s letter of September 7, 1783?

As far as I can tell, many of these “multicultural educators” simply have no conception of the simple facts of history, as it was understood by a 10th grader in 1960.

Listen here to the second part of Joe’s immigration podcast hosted by PHX News and Todd Hartley.

This is from the web page of BAMN–the pro-quota, pro-illegal immigrant group named after the Malcolm X saying “By any means necessary,” which for Malcolm meant, at least potentially, a violent revolution, which for BAMN means the occasional mini-riot.[See video]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) has embarked on a prolonged campaign of kidnapping raids and racist terror. Sometimes with the help of local police authorities, all around the country, they are stealing away women and men from our families and from the streets of our communities.BAMN - Stop the Raids

As for the “racist terror,” it is not ICE’s fault that most of the illegalsare Mexican Indians. Their plan is too cram the left-wing churches with illegals and defy the authorities:

The church sanctuary mobilizations are a way to focus broad media and public attention to our fight to stop the raids. This tactic will test the limits of the authority of I.C.E. If I.C.E. is consistently unable to carry out the arrest and deportation of immigrants taking sanctuary in churches around the country, we can break their will to conduct further raids.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement should not respect the “Privilege of Sanctuary” which does not exist in American law, and which even in the Middle Ages was strictly limited.

Quantitatively consistent blogging — relentlessly feeding the beast — tends to be the enemy of quality. There are a handful who can be prolific, steady, and still surprising over many years — Michael Blowhard perhaps comes first to mind — but many of the best bloggers are among the most erratic.

All of a sudden, Dennis Dale is back at Untethered with lots of good stuff, especially about the Noose Scourge sweeping our nation ever since the Jena Six story got all that media play:

CNN’s Rick Sanchez, whose Hispanic surname seems to have made him the network’s go-to guy on racial issues despite the fact that he is nearly as WASP-like in appearance and manner as Ted Knight’s Judge Smails in Caddyshack, (or, for that matter, Knight’s affable and clueless anchorman Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show), is valiantly traipsing into the dark heart of America, with his expedition of camera and make-up crew in tow, hunting the now legendary Great Noose Scourge of 2007.

My point here is not to pick on Rick, who evinces the same bemusing persona that Fred Willard periodically reprises in Christopher Guest’s faux-documentaries: confident, cocksure and half-cocked–as enthusiastic as he is oblivious. He sees opportunity; he seizes it; he is no exception. But under his guidance the absurdity has moved beyond comic into surreal, and there will be no competing with real life now, my fellow amateur satirists. Soon we may find it difficult to delineate the boundaries between. Game over. It’s time to simply shut-up and marvel.

Last night, on Halloween, Sanchez utilized a split-screen format to simultaneously deliver two reports, one from a private residence and one from a bar, each the subject of controversy because their elaborate Halloween displays featured corpses hanging from nooses. As the cameras tightened in on the offending figures to reassure us they weren’t black (the report wasn’t quite so thorough as to call in forensics to analyze one body, just bare decomposing flesh over a skeleton, which the homeowner assured Sanchez was “Caucasian”), also revealed was a fairly realistic upper torso (safely, reassuringly white), severed at the waist and hanging upside down from a meat-hook, unremarked upon.

I guess you had to be there, but the absurdity of it was riveting, delicious irony: this ghoulish, fetishistic fascination with gore, once a ritualistic, occasional transgression for days such as these, now as widespread and mundane as the dull safety of daily life it mocks, juxtaposed with the bizarre conceit of the segment and its cravenness (acting as a tie-in for CNN’s upcoming, opportunistic report, “The Noose, An American Nightmare”), the real-life horrors of the war out of sight and mind; well, all I can say is genius. Pure, unadulterated, unintentional genius.

Bravo, Mr. Sanchez. Bravo, CNN.