That's the opening paragraph to Stephen Farrell's reports on some of yesterday's violence, in this morning's New York Times, entitled "11 Die in Attack on a Shiite Mosque in Iraq." At McClatchy Newspapers, Leila Fadel explains the religious festival Ashura and speaks with Iraqis hopeful that it won't be marred by violence. However, Reuters is already reporting:
Iraqi police clashed with gunmen from a Shi'ite cult who staged a series of hit-and-run raids in two southern cities on Friday, security officials said.
Witnesses in Iraq's southern oil hub of Basra and Nassiriya said at least four people may have been killed in the violence, in which gunmen were reported to be using heavy machineguns and mortars.
The clashes came as religious observations for the annual Ashura festival, one of the holiest events in the Shi'ite Muslim religious calendar, approached their peak across southern Iraq.
Over at The Baltimore Sun, journalism takes a holiday as Frank James swipes from a 'news' source to both 'cover' and slime the peace movement. Let's all quit calling these faux peace groups "peace groups." Win Without War does what exactly?
Not a damn thing. Never has never will. And they're only one of the three losers being hailed as a peace group. Council for a Livable World? Yeah, they've inspired the country for the last few years, right? (That was sarcasm.) These are the phony 'anti-war' groups that always rush to sell out the movement. They aren't leaders, they don't have any real members they can call on, but they sure do eat up a lot of press time. They're like two little boys from the Brookings Institute -- you know the two meant -- who rush out whenever it's time to sell something.
Not peace, they never sell peace. But they're always there to sell out the peace movement. And they're always hailed as realistic and treated as though they're CODEPINK or some other group on the front lines offering real leadership.
They're an online creation existing solely to provide cover for the Democratic Party and no one outside of the MSM press thinks they're a part of the peace movement. They do, however, prevent the real peace movement from being heard since the MSM repeatedly goes to these worthless 'organizations' which couldn't fill a back booth in Georgetown let alone create a significant march down Pennsylvania Avenue. Well it feeds their egos and it allows the peace movement to defocus on a bunch of gas bags who always preach 'realism.' They clamp down on objections to the illegal war and work to lower outrage. That's not the peace movement. That is a phony front that needs to stop attempting to pass themselves off as anything other than an online creation.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
thom shankerthe new york times
leila fadelmcclatchy newspapers
