Cool Dude

With guys like Michael Burghardt in Iraq the scumbag Islamofascists will be overcome. This guy has what it takes in spades.

The Hand of a Hero
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 27, 2006

Last September 19 Sergeant Michael Burghardt was on his third tour of duty in Iraq. He is one of those young men with the military in his DNA. His father had come home from Vietnam with a Bronze Star and a body paralyzed from the waist down; he had to teach Michael to play football from a wheelchair. Michael joined the Marines right out of high school. He is now a veteran Gunnery Sergeant with almost 18 years’ experience, including 15 years in bomb disposal. During his second tour he too had been awarded the Bronze Star for disabling an astonishing 64 IEDs and destroying 1,548 pieces of ordnance.

Earlier on this day he had signed up for another three months of duty, then went about his business in the wild Tammim neighborhood in a western corner of Ramadi, a Sunni Triangle city of 400,000 west of Fallujah on the main road to Syria. Less than one Iraqi in five is a Sunni Muslim, but Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party elite were Sunnis. Many in this tribal city were enraged at those who toppled an Iraqi dictatorship that favored them.

Burghardt regarded Ramadi as “the scariest place on Earth.”

Four American soldiers had just been ambushed and killed there, and Sergeant Burghardt, part of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Team supporting the 2^nd Brigade 28^th Infantry Division (Pennsylvania Army National Guard), was ordered to help sweep the area for the kind of secondary explosives the Islamist terrorists often planted to kill soldiers reacting to a first bomb or ambush.

Along the area’s evacuation route, Burghardt noticed an odd piece of shrapnel in an eight-foot wide crater five feet deep. He jumped into the hole wearing only a flak jacket and helmet, not the bulky protective suit designed for those in bomb disposal. “You can’t react to any sniper fire” in that suit, he told a reporter, “and you get tunnel vision.”

The terrorist bombs, he knew, had been getting bigger. In 2005 one destroyed a 25-ton amphibious assault vehicle, killing 14 of his fellow Marines. IEDs in his time in Iraq had evolved from primitive bombs into cleverly-concealed, sophisticated shaped-charge explosives that can be detonated by a variety of remote-control techniques, including the infrared beams used by Irish Republican Army terrorists in south Armagh and by Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists based in Lebanon and Syria. The fixings and technology behind such bombs increasingly appear to come from Syria and Iran, now rushing to devise its own nuclear weapons.

“Pink mist” is how Burghardt and his fellow bomb defusers describe what they turn into if they make a mistake. Five EOD team members Burghardt worked with had been blown to bits by such bombs, one of them only three weeks earlier. “It’s a vague science,” he later said of bomb disposal. “Some art, some guesswork and some luck. Explosives do weird things. Sometimes they kill you. Sometimes they just blow you out of a hole. But we’re beating the insurgents. We’re getting to them so much that they’re targeting us. I take that as a compliment.”

Inside the crater Burghardt pulled out the trusty Shrade 7 inch knife that he had carried since 1994 and began probing the ground. Suddenly he saw a glint of telltale orange plastic covering a Senao base station. He quickly cut the wire leading from it, his hand following it to uncover two buried 122 millimeter cannon shells that had been rigged to explode.

Burghardt patted his head, a signal to nearby soldiers that he had found a bomb. A captain grabbed press photographer Jeff Bundy of the Omaha World-Herald and pushed him down out of harm’s way.

What Burghardt saw too late was another wire leading between his legs to a third such cannon shell. A distant terrorist, probably watching through binoculars, triggered it by remote control. The explosion hurled Sargeant Burghardt’s body 10 feet into the air. His limp frame came smashing down, face first, on the roadway.

As fellow soldiers rushed toward the limp body of Sargeant Burghardt, whom they knew as “Iron Mike,” he was awake. While still in the air, he had thought “I don’t believe they got me” and was already feeling “ticked off they were able to do it.”

After hitting the ground, Burghardt was unable to feel anything from the waist down. “I was lying there thinking I didn’t want to be in a wheelchair next to my dad,” Burghardt remembered, “and for him to see me like that.”

Around his body, his fellow soldiers looked down at his shredded uniform. After the gigantic explosion, they were amazed he still had legs and was clearly alive. They quickly began cutting off what remained of his pants.

“I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down,” the Sargeant remembered. “Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, ‘Good, I’m in business.”

Medics arrived with a stretcher, but Burghardt had other ideas.

“I decided to walk to the helicopter,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher.”

And he wanted to send a message to the cowardly terrorist still probably watching from afar. He stood, then raised a one-fingered salute of defiance toward this bomb and all insurgents.

The press photographer Bundy snapped a picture of Burghardt’s bold gesture, and his image would soon speed around the world via patriotic web sites and be posted on thousands of American walls, bulletin boards and refrigerators.

But back in Omaha, a debate raged among Bundy’s editors. “We questioned whether to print the picture because we are a family newspaper,” said the World-Herald’s Iraq reporter C. David Kotok. But in the end the photograph ran on its front page.

Sergeant Michael Burghardt suffered injuries in this bomb blast, mostly from scrapnel in his legs and posterior. He described the three weeks it took him to recover and return to duty as among the longest of his life. “I don’t want a ticket out,” he said when told that his wounds might send him home. “I want to stay here so we can take as many people home as possible. I’ll do 30 years, as long as I’m having fun. Unless I die.”

I nods to Nealenews.

Dissident President

I can only add that I agree totally with Natan and feel nothing but contempt for those who would sacrifice their childrens future to further their hatred of President Bush.

Dissident President
George W. Bush has the courage to speak out for freedom.

BY NATAN SHARANSKY
Monday, April 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

There are two distinct marks of a dissident. First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures. Give up, they say to themselves, and evil will triumph. Stand firm, and they can give hope to others and help change the world.

Political leaders make the rarest of dissidents. In a democracy, a leader's lifeline is the electorate's pulse. Failure to be in tune with public sentiment can cripple any administration and undermine any political agenda. Moreover, democratic leaders, for whom compromise is critical to effective governance, hardly ever see any issue in Manichaean terms. In their world, nearly everything is colored in shades of gray.

That is why President George W. Bush is such an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability. Even the fiercest critics of these ideas would surely admit that Mr. Bush has championed them both before and after his re-election, both when he was riding high in the polls and now that his popularity has plummeted, when criticism has come from longstanding opponents and from erstwhile supporters.

With a dogged determination that any dissident can appreciate, Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.

I myself have not been uncritical of Mr. Bush. Like my teacher, Andrei Sakharov, I agree with the president that promoting democracy is critical for international security. But I believe that too much focus has been placed on holding quick elections, while too little attention has been paid to help build free societies by protecting those freedoms--of conscience, speech, press, religion, etc.--that lie at democracy's core.

I believe that such a mistaken approach is one of the reasons why a terrorist organization such as Hamas could come to power through ostensibly democratic means in a Palestinian society long ruled by fear and intimidation.

I also believe that not enough effort has been made to turn the policy of promoting democracy into a bipartisan effort. The enemies of freedom must know that the commitment of the world's lone superpower to help expand freedom beyond its borders will not depend on the results of the next election.

Just as success in winning past global conflicts depended on forging a broad coalition that stretched across party and ideological lines, success in using the advance of democracy to win the war on terror will depend on building and maintaining a wide consensus of support.

Yet despite these criticisms, I recognize that I have the luxury of criticizing Mr. Bush's democracy agenda only because there is a democracy agenda in the first place. A policy that for years had been nothing more than the esoteric subject of occasional academic debate is now the focal point of American statecraft.

For decades, a "realism" based on a myopic perception of international stability prevailed in the policy-making debate. For a brief period during the Cold War, the realist policy of accommodating Soviet tyranny was replaced with a policy that confronted that tyranny and made democracy and human rights inside the Soviet Union a litmus test for superpower relations.

The enormous success of such a policy in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end did not stop most policy makers from continuing to advocate an approach to international stability that was based on coddling "friendly" dictators and refusing to support the aspirations of oppressed peoples to be free.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. It seemed as though that horrific day had made it clear that the price for supporting "friendly" dictators throughout the Middle East was the creation of the world's largest breeding ground of terrorism. A new political course had to be charted.

Today, we are in the midst of a great struggle between the forces of terror and the forces of freedom. The greatest weapon that the free world possesses in this struggle is the awesome power of its ideas.

The Bush Doctrine, based on a recognition of the dangers posed by non-democratic regimes and on committing the United States to support the advance of democracy, offers hope to many dissident voices struggling to bring democracy to their own countries. The democratic earthquake it has helped unleash, even with all the dangers its tremors entail, offers the promise of a more peaceful world.

Yet with each passing day, new voices are added to the chorus of that doctrine's opponents, and the circle of its supporters grows ever smaller.

Critics rail against every step on the new and difficult road on which the United States has embarked. Yet in pointing out the many pitfalls which have not been avoided and those which still can be, those critics would be wise to remember that the alternative road leads to the continued oppression of hundreds of millions of people and the continued festering of the pathologies that led to 9/11.

Now that President Bush is increasingly alone in pushing for freedom, I can only hope that his dissident spirit will continue to persevere. For should that spirit break, evil will indeed triumph, and the consequences for our world would be disastrous.

Mr. Sharansky spent nine years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. A former deputy prime minister of Israel and currently a member of the Knesset, he is co-author, with Ron Dermer, of "The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror" (PublicAffairs, 2004). You can buy "The Case For Democracy" at the OpinionJournal bookstore here.

I nods to the WSJ.

Unions

The summer of 64 was when I helped build The Iron ore plant in Wabush, Labrador. It is also the summer I learned all about unions. Since that summer I have despised those thugs. This leads to what the BC teachers union is doing to one of their teachers who had the gall to not commit an illegal act. Read about an honest woman who is standing up for integrity. Margaret Christopherson is not taking the crap from the union and the outcome maybe precedent setting.

I nods to SDA.

Sedition

I have many, many stories about the Anglo/Franko problem in Canada and every single one of them speaks volumes about the vicious, diabolical, underhanded and immoral behavior of the separatist faction in Quebec. The worst part is the willing acquiescence of a substantial portion of the sycophantic political milieu who we can easily term "The Appeasers."
It seems to mirror the Islam/Anglosphere confrontation in some respects.
The latest in the great Canuckistan wars is the publishing of a book that is being used in grade schools to promote Quebec sovereignty:

On Wednesday, the Council for Quebec Sovereignty -- a group initially formed with grant money from the Parti Quebecois (PQ) -- launched a pro-sovereignty textbook designed to help teachers indoctrinate Quebec students against federalism.

Happily, the book is so extreme and blatant in its efforts to propagandize (one proposed music exercise includes a song called Canada Is Not My Country, and one illustration shows a Quebec flag flying above a Canadian flag that has been torn in two) that both the PQ and the CSQ (Quebec's largest teachers' union) have said that they do not want to see it used in classrooms.

PQ leader Andre Boisclair quite rightly declared of the schoolbook: "This work cannot and must not be considered pedagogical material intended for children," while CSQ union president Rejean Parent insisted member teachers would not take part in such a "brainwashing operation."

It is nonetheless disturbing that the council itself is so firmly committed to pushing such propaganda on Quebec students, and that the book's publisher is hopeful enough about demand for the agitprop, titled Parlons de souverainte a l'ecole ("Let's Talk About Sovereignty at School"), that it is printing 11,000 copies.

The council and the book's publisher, Les Intouchables, have every right to produce their advertisement for separation. That right does not explain, however, why two levels of government appear to have used taxpayer money to fund the pro-sovereignty exercise: At the beginning of Let's Talk About Sovereignty, Les Intouchables thanks both the Canadian Arts Council and Ottawa's Book Publishing Industry Development Program for their support of the company.

Books are generally subjective works about which reasonable people can disagree (a common problem with government arts funding), but in this case, there is simply no excuse: Ottawa should not be funding a book that asks kids to calculate how many more novels they could buy at $15 each if they got rid of the pesky and pricey governor-general, whom they claim costs the residents of Quebec $9.4-million annually. We can think of no greater insult to add to the injury of the textbook's publication than Canadians' having footed part of the bill.

© National Post 2006

Go here to keep up with the latest in the fight. Then sign up to get the latest updates on the struggle.

More Grist

Slowly but surely more folks are coming to the conclusion that this Islam thing is far more than was thought at first. The sad part is that it took so long. Part of the reason is the pathetic attitude of the self-righteous do-gooders and the overwhelming liberal ideas of diversity and inclusiveitely and the Rodney King theory of get-alongitis. The cartoon caper, thank heaven was the wake-up call and we owe the Danes a debt of gratitude for having to bare the brunt of the first soldiers in.
Lets look at a few situations going on out there.

A Catholic priest in Belgium has been suspended by his bishop for saying the following:

"Every thoroughly islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority."

Father Samuel has been also brought to trial for hate crimes for the above statement.
Sam fled Turkey because of Islamic persecution.

Look at more unbelievable details here and here a great site! Here .

Not a wimpy looking guy!

Now lets look at Mark Steyn in the Sun-Times where he says that many Muslims are hot for jihad.
Mark is, as usual, on the mark, pun intended:

"If I had to propose a model for Western rhetoric, it would be the Australians. In the days after Sept. 11, the French got all the attention for that Le Monde headline -- "Nous sommes tous Americains" -- "We are all Americans," though they didn't mean it, even then. But John Howard, the Aussie prime minister, put it better and kept his word: "This is no time to be an 80 percent ally."

Marvelous. More recently, the prime minister offered some thoughts on the difference between Muslims and other immigrant groups. "You can't find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad," he said, stating the obvious in a way most political leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. "There is really not much point in pretending it doesn't exist."

Unfortunately, too many of his counterparts insist on pretending (at least to their citizenry) that it doesn't exist. What proportion of Western Muslims is hot for jihad? Five percent? Ten, 12 percent? Given that understanding this Pan-Islamist identity is critical to defeating it, why can't we acknowledge it honestly? "Raving on about jihad" is a line that meets what the law used to regard as the reasonable-man test: If you're watching news footage of a Muslim march promising to bring on the new Holocaust, John Howard's line fits."

Read it all here.

There is almost too much Islamic intransigence going on in the world to keep up with and the most damming evidence is the Imams around the world who vilify honest folk who speak out about terrorist attacks. When The leaders of the religion of peace equate terrorists with their faith you know they are part of the problem.

Wake up folks!

Information Overload

"Those librarian blogerati have done it again: they've just discovered 'The Cure for Information Overload'. It's a very elegant formula if you ask me, with obvious SRU/SRW applications, and maybe even TLA ramifications. I'm not sure about all of the conclusions, but it sure is an interesting theory."

I nods to Agent Clauswitz.