American Flag Blog

The threat of Muslim violence as a result of those notorious Danish cartoons has a lot of Europeans on pins and needles. But there’s at least one American who was apparently on pins and needles himself on Monday.

As Muslims in Europe and the Mid-East were burning Danish flags, a Ridgefield, Connecticut, commodities trading firm wanted to make a statement. So Rob Ellis and Tom Trillo purchased a large Danish flag and hung it up in the firm’s windows last Thursday. Ellis explained their action this way, “It’s principally out of solidarity with the Danes and the abuse they’ve taken from the Muslim world.”

Then on Friday, someone brought in lapel pins with the Danish and American flags together and with everyone feeling the love, down came the Connecticut flag and up went the Danish flag (right under the American flag) on the building’s flagpole. And there it stayed all weekend.

Now comes the part about the nervous guy. Landlord Michael McNamara drove up Monday morning, took one look at the new flagpole arrangement, and down came the Danish flag and up went the Connecticut flag. “I was on vacation and I came back this morning and I saw that a Danish flag was up,” said McNamara. “And I took it down and put it the way it always was, a Connecticut flag.”

McNamara would not comment further, but obviously, when you’re responsible for a building, you really don’t want to attract people who have been known to burn buildings.

There’s a new film that begins by showing the famous raising of the American flag atop Mt Suribachi on Iwo Jima. But as the flag goes up, it’s turns out not to be the American flag at all, but a Confederate flag.

The film’s title is “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America” and purports to show what America would look like had the Confederacy defeated the Union. I Haven’t seen it and have no interest in seeing it, but according to a review at Filmcritic.com, this country would be a dark and sinister place where slavery is the norm.

The problems with CSA are obvious from the start. First, it’s based on the paranoid premise, common among Northeast liberals, that the South is largely populated by uneducated, evil racists. And second, it’s based on false historical assumptions.

Chris Barsanti, who reviewed the film and is presumably a Northeast liberal (no offense intended - I myself am a reformed Northeast liberal), tends to agree that the film accurately portrays what America would have become if Confederate forces had been victorious.

So here’s a quick review of the facts:

• The Southern States seceded from the Union not because of slavery but because the North was restricting the South’s ability to trade with England.
• Slavery was on it’s way out anyway. There were plenty of Abolishionists in the South and there were plenty of slaves in the North when war broke out. The majority of real historians (not the armchair variety that skulk about Hollywood) believe that slavery would have soon been abolished with or without the Civil War.
• Remember, the South seceded from the Union. The North declared war to prevent secession. If the South had been victorious at Gettysburg, there is nothing to suggest that they would have done anything other than to go home and continue with the business of forming a new seperate country.

A few decades ago, the joke was that the South was still fighting the Civil War. Now Northeast liberals, fixated on eliminating ever last vestige of the Confederacy including the Confederate flag, are the ones who are still fighting the war.

A bill has just passed committee in the Arizona legislature making it mandatory for each and every public classroom in the state, including colleges and universities, to display the American flag. Seems like a reasonable idea, but amazingly enough, some critics are calling it “government indoctrination.”

Really - it makes me want to take a nap in hopes that I’ll wake up back in America. How do people who are that wacked-out ever get elected to public office? How does the presence of an American flag, in full view of innocent eyes, amount to “government indoctrination?” If you don’t want American kids to respect and believe in their country, then tell us exactly what you want them to respect and believe in.

Here’s what Rep. David Bradley, D-Tucson, had to say about the possible consequences of hanging an American flag in your child’s classroom, “I just don’t think you can legislate patriotism. It has to come from inside their hearts and minds. For us to say, ‘You will do this,’ has the stench of another era,” comparing it to the “programmed loyalty” policies of Nazi Germany.

While the New York Times is busy trying to skewer Dick Chaney for a hunting accident, they’re letting elected officials make outrageous statements like this unhindered.

Amidst alarms from the hand-wringers on the left that freedom in America is in grave danger, largely due to the sinister machinations of the Bush “regime,” a dose of reality comes to us from faraway Morocco.

Moroccan parents blessed with a baby girl born on one specific day need not worry over what to name her. That’s because King Hassan II has named her for you. Yes, the good king has decreed that all baby girls born on the anniversary date of Moroccan athlete Nawal El-Moutawakel’s 1984 Olympic gold medal win shall be named Nawal. What if you don’t like the name Nawal? Well, we won’t go there.

El-Moutawakel had the honor of carrying the Olympic flag in the opening ceremonies in Turin. She was an Iowa State All-American in the 400-meter hurdles and took the gold for her native Morrocco in that event in Los Angeles.

Here’s a movie that’s sure to be a hit with zealous followers of Sheik Michael Moore. It’s called “Valley of the Wolves - Iraq” and it goes on record as the costliest cinematic undertaking in the history of Turkey.

It’s all about a squad of Turkish commandos who travel to Iraq to kill American soldiers as payback for mistaking other Turkish soldiers for insurgents and holding them for two days until their identity could be verified. In the eyes of the Muslim world, this is an insult that must not go unanswered with an excess of violence.

Americans are, as you might suspect, portrayed as brutal, bloodthirsty killers as they commit such atrocities as wiping out an entire wedding party.

The film stars two Americans - Billy Zane who plays the sadistic American Officer and the ever-psychotic Gary Busey who plays a Jewish-American doctor. Busey does not tend to the injured but rather, harvests the organs of freshly killed Abu Ghraib inmates for shipment to New York, London and of course, Israel.

Valley of the Wolves is a box-office smash in Turkey, as it will soon be all around the Middle East. And I suspect it will also be a hit here in America with the loyal adherents of Sheik Michael Moore.

An estimated crowd of 5000 Muslims converged on Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday as a kind of counter-protest to the brazenly anti-American/anti-European protests of the previous week. According to observers, the whole thing appeared to be carefully planned to portray rank-and-file British Muslims as peace-loving, loyal British subjects, right down to a sea of British Union flags.

This seems an admirable message, but one that will probably not resonate. And whether these particular people are sincere or not is beside the point. Most of the Muslim-led governments throughout the world have either condoned or even sponsored the recent violent protests against the West. Watching rioters in Beirut and Gaza trampling and burning American flags in fits of rage over a Danish cartoon points to a different agenda.

Staged events like the one in Trafalgar Square won’t do much to put the brakes on the juggernaut of Islam. Unless Muslims who claim to want peace take very serious and very public action against the radicals among them, their gestures are worthless.

Universtiy of Illinois faculty member Dennis Fox compares the “rage” that Muslims are currently acting out by burning flags and buildings and by killing people over a handful of cartoons to the willingness of a U.S. soldier to die protecting the American flag.

In a screed written by Fox, he ridiculously says that soldiers who are willing to defend the “American flag sometimes become veterans perfectly willing to attack those who burn it.” I’m not sure where Fox gets his information, but I’m pretty sure that if American soldiers were attacking those who burn American flags, CNN would latch on to that one like a pit-bull until we were all sick of hearing about it.

The piece, entitled God, Muhammed, and the American Flag, is really nothing more however, than a trashing of religion summed up with the line, “When God speaks, blood flows.” Fox calls for Western moderation towards the way we encounter the Islamic world, but doesn’t mind throwing a few rocks himself at Western Christians and Jews.

Last Month I wrote about an American flag that was mysteriously hung over the front door of a mosque in Boonton, New Jersey. It was a mean and childish thing to do, and the perpetrator may well have been a mean child, but the act was met with such consternation by members of the mosque that it propelled an otherwise minor local event into the national spotlight.

An official of the mosque, Hamida Amanat, who requested that police investigate the incident as a bias crime said, “It was very discomforting to see something blocking the door.” The nailing of an American flag to a door may or may not be the result of bias towards local Muslims - it’s hard to say without any other evidence - but assuming that it was motivated by bias, it is hardly of the same magnitude as, say, burning churches in Alabama. Amanat’s reaction was way out of proportion to the “crime.”

Anyway, a Boonton resident left a comment on that post that reads:

Boonton is at least 37 miles from the twin towers. Go to Mapquest.
NO ONE of Middle Eastern or West Asian decent celebrated in the streets on 9/11. Whether it was fear or perhaps disgust, I cannot say.

I cannot speak to the accuracy of the rest of your comments, but the inaccuracy of the few facts I do note, may all you say questionable.

I want to address these comments because, in my estimation, they are a great example of the use of obfuscation to discredit critics.

I originally guessed at the distance to NYC, having been a long time resident of that area of New Jersey, and admittedly got it wrong. According to my Hagstrom’s map, it’s about 22 miles, not 15 as I wrote in the post. The point is not 15 miles or 22 miles or 35 miles but that unlike the rest of the United States, people in Boonton and the other communities of North Jersey were very much a part of those horrible events. It would be unusual not to know someone who died that day.

Concerning the celebrations in the streets, our mysterious commenter is just plain wrong. While it’s true that, as news of these celbrations grew, fact was replaced with rumor and exageration, there were plenty of eyewitness accounts of two such celebrations in the city of Paterson.

The question has never been whether these gatherings took place but rather, what the nature of them was. Many witnesses say they were celebrations while a few others claim they were anguished protests. One witness, U.S. Congressman Bill Pascrell, who relies heavily on the ethnic vote in Paterson, said he saw participants throwing candy into the air and when he asked a bystander what was going on he was told it was a wedding. With all respect to the Congressman, a wedding at 5:00 PM on a Tuesday just after the most horrific attack in the history of our nation strains credibility.

The whole point of the post was that given the events of that day, it may not be wise for Muslims in that part of the world to rub salt in the wound by feigning such indignation over what is most likely some teenagers hanging an American flag on your door.

With the hope of one day lowering the American flags from the capitol buildings of our southern border states and replacing them with the flag of Mexico, bands of renegade Mexicans have dramatically increased their attacks on border patrols.

The images we usually see on TV are of groups of Mexicans dashing across the border in a sparsely vegetated deserts. But most Americans would be alarmed to know that there is an all-out war occuring at the border with Mexico.

Attacks on U.S. border patrol agents more than doubled in 2005 as compared to the year before, rising from 374 to 778. The weapon of choice is the rock and they are often covered with a rags soaked in gasoline, but the use of guns is growing fast.

The Mexican Government reportedly has sent 300 federalies to the border to help, but the question remains, which side are they there to help?

Ran across a new blog yesterday that could be marketed as a substitute for sleeping pills. It’s called OneUtah.org and purports to “serve the majority progressive community in Salt Lake City.” What it really is is just another boring rant against President Bush and conservative Christians.

These people act as if they went to bed one night in a totally secular America and awoke to find that Christians had moved in like a swarm of locusts and taken over. They fret and wring their hands over what horrible changes have been imposed on American life and culture.

The simple fact is that the major cultural changes of the last few decades have been imposed by secularists. Like it or not, the majority of Americans call themselves Christians and that has been the case since the first European settlements. Add to that the fact that the vast majority of Americans are very happy to be Americans and it makes you wonder what exactly the problem is.

Consider this: An article appeared in the Washington Post yesterday about the various American Olympic athletes who have had the privilege of bearing the American flag in the opening ceremonies. The words of skier Cynthia Nelson, who carried the American flag at Innsbruck thirty years ago, is representative of that very small club of athletes, “Now in hindsight I see how privileged I felt to do this. It’s even greater than having the medals hang around your neck.”

In contrast, four Canadian athletes in succession refused to carry the Canadian flag this year and all gave the excuse that to do so would upset their performance. Canadian hockey broadcaster Don Cherry was disgisted by the response of these athletes, “The thing is they don’t care. That nonsense about getting prepared? How long does it take? A little walk around? Come out and say you don’t care but don’t say ‘it will upset my performance,’ that’s ridiculous.”

A totally different ethos infects American culture and it bothers “progressives” like the ones at OneUtah.org. It is one in which your country comes before your personal goals, no matter how important they seem or how long you’ve worked to achieve them and it is embodied in the athletes who value the honor of carrying the American flag above personal performance.