BARVENNON.COM
24th March 2004
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
IN AMERICA
- LOS ANGELES 2 -
In central Hollywood, which (to this untutored Australian tourist)
is where
Highland Avenue intersects
Hollywood Boulevarde, (Angelinos would say, "at Highland and
Hollywood". Angelinos uniformly drop the street descriptor) there
was a demonstration on the afternoon of the 20th March.
Snapshot: dozens of police
in cars, on pushbikes, standing around,
choppers overhead, barricades sectioning off the street for about 100
meters . About thirty people with placards "NO WAR" and other
anti bush stuff were around while a couple of television crews
prepared to film them. Most of the Hollywood population in a
hurry to get wherever they were going, glancing. A few, maybe
tourists,
standing around gawking. The evening news broadcast worldwide
demonstrations on the anniversary of the invasion. I guess the
editor thought the Hollywood demo was too much a fizzle to mention for
local consumption. I wonder if it made the news on the East coast
or Europe?
In a nearby Starbucks I struck up a conversation with a bloke who
turned out to be an Israeli from Houston. He thought the demo
was a joke. We commiserated that it was the (mostly lefty)
journalists who blew
these demonstrations up out of all proportion. This of course
gave
muslim terrorists the moral conviction to promulgate further terrorist
acts. We agreed that it seemed to be a one sided application of
anti-discrimination philosophy when only the palestinian version of
history is published. Everyone "knows" that the Israelis are
enforcing migration from Israel on the Palestinians. Few people
are aware of the Turkish
enforced migration of Israelis out of Palestine in the 19th
century. The fact that
jews have throughout history been the victims and refugees is known but
discounted in the face of their supposed inhumane treatment of
Palestinians. The fact that Muslims are
members of a religion whose founder was a
dictator who regularly used
assassination, brigandage and enslavement as instruments of
state is virtually unknown. The fact that muslims continue the
tactics utilized by
their founder is a fact readily uncovered by any person who chooses to seek
out the truth, but receives little publicity from our mostly
ill-informed journalists.
A little more about LA. Downtown LA (LA City) includes Hollywood,
which is a reforming "red light district" like King's Cross in
Sydney. West Hollywood is a city in it's own right, and quite
upmarket, about equivalent to Paddington. To the north of
Hollywood is the HOLLYWOOD sign. The exclusive residential
district known as Hollywood Hills is NW of Hollywood. Beverley Hills is
to the west of West Hollywood. It is about 20 Km further west to
Santa
Monica beach, LA's equivalent to Bondi Beach.
The smog is unbelievable. It is so pervading that most of the
time it is
unnoticed. Occasionally some of the surrounding mountains are
visible, and then the true extent of the smog is apparent. About
100 meters high, it blanks out features more than two kilometers
away. I went for a walk up Hollywood Hills on Thursday. The
tall buildings of the CBD (downtown) were visible about three miles
away. The snow capped (3,000 meter high) mountains that I saw two
weeks earlier after it had rained were lost in the haze.
Getting back to Angelino's habit of dropping street
descriptors. I suspect that it happens in LA because they are
such a car centered society. Street names become more important
than place names, because to a car driver, street names are more
relevant.
To give an example. Santa Monica is a beach, and there is a
road called Santa Monica Boulevard that runs from the beach for about
30 miles to
Hollywood and on to downtown LA. I asked somebody how to get to
Santa Monica, (meaning Santa Monica suburb, where the beach is) and he
said, (pointing) "go that way for about half a mile, you cant miss
it." He thought I wanted Santa Monica Boulevard. To
Angelinos, streets are "places".
- HAMAS -
In the news is the execution of HAMAS' spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed
Yassin. What makes me incredulous is the vituperous outpouring of
threats of escalating violence pouring from Hamas leadership
& supporters. Here was a person who started an organization
that should have been called "terrorism incorporated", an organization
that openly advocates and brags of the murder
of Israelis: e.g. Josef Federman wrote on March 23 in "MyWay":
Hamas,
founded by Yassin in 1987, wants to destroy Israel and replace it with
an Islamic state. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Monday that Hamas
killed 377 Israelis and wounded more than 2,000 in hundreds of attacks.
So how does the Hamas organization have the Chutzpah to object to the
execution of their founder? Do they believe that they have a
right to murder
civilians and go unpunished?
"Liberal" journalists and governments are calling the execution an
"extra judicial"
killing, or "assassination". Did those journalists and
governments call
"extrajudicial" or "assassination" when Clinton ordered the bombings
that caused the death of journalists and other civilians in Serbia? (It
is becoming clear even to liberal journalists that Hillary's war was
not about stopping Slobbo from persecuting ethnic Albanians, but about
stopping Slobbo from protecting ethnic Serbs in Kosovo.) Or
when our
leaders ordered the bombing of Hamburg (more than 100,000 killed)
during
WWII? When somebody orders and achieves the murder of a states'
citizens, that somebody has declared war on that state, and in my mind,
it is the state's duty to bring that person and cohorts to
justice. It is totally understandable that the Israelis plan the
execution of the Hamas executive, and the sooner the better. I
can only conclude that the fleur de liberty has fallen to economic
expedience.
- WMD -
Talkback radio in LA has a journalist called Bill O'Reilly. He is
their version of John Laws.
The discussion on the airwaves is former security consultant Clarke and
WMD. OK, Clarke has impeccable credentials, served last 4
presidents, bit difficult, sounds as though Condoleeza Rice reduced him
in rank (He used to attend meetings with Clinton, but Rice kept him as
her personal adviser). So now he has cashed in his pension in the
form of a book, and what better way to sell it than as the centre of a
controversy in an election year? I dont think the average
Angelino condemns Bush for not listening to Clarke's prophecies of doom.
As for WMD, some liberal journalists are saying "why can't they be
found? We have offered huge rewards, so there must not have been
any!". As if that were proof that they never existed.
Their asking of that question shows typical liberal lack of
imagination. Or maybe they are all girls and never read "Treasure
Island" by R.L.Stevenson. As any subteen boy could tell them, if
you want to hide something, you kill all the people who help you bury
it before they have a chance to tell anyone else where you buried the
treasure. Given Saddam's reported character, that would have been
no problem for him or his sons (who, regrettably, are no longer with
us.)
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