Leading the fight is Gunnery Sgt Michael Burghardt, known as "Iron Mike" or just "Gunny". He is on his third tour in Iraq. He had become a legend in the bomb disposal world after winning the Bronze Star for disabling 64 IEDs and destroying 1,548 pieces of ordnance during his second tour. Then, on September 19, he got blown up.
"Taser! Taser!" Cassidy shouted as she sent a two-pronged wire, packing 50,000 volts, at Crouch's chest. What happened next stunned everyone.
A Taser probe pierced the pocket of his khaki shirt -- and ignited the butane lighter inside. Crouch's pocket exploded in flames.
"The subject," recounted Sgt. Al Tolley in a subsequent report, "immediately dropped the knife."
Crouch didn't seem too concerned about his run-in with police and clearly had other priorities Tuesday night.
"You're burning my minutes," he said about his cell phone. "It's not 9 o'clock yet."
"Why did they get into my house?" he asked of police. "I didn't invite them into my house. They came into my bedroom and shot me with the Taser, and it [the lighter] exploded."
"We were called back because there was a gooey substance, a tarry-type substance, coming out the underground electrical vaults, out of manhole covers in the street, through the sidewalks and possibly in one older apartment building," Myers said.
A 120-foot stretch of Olive buckled 1 1/2 feet, he said. The pre-1933 unreinforced masonry apartment building shifted one foot from its foundation. Sidewalks were as hot as Jacuzzis.
And a pressurized liquid shot from every street orifice located above what used to be a historic oil field downtown.
Bennett's most important comment was, "I promise you, they have won. They have silenced -- these -- these mobs have silenced the mainstream media, who are afraid of the mob." Later on in the discussion, Bennett stated, "One of the difficulties with the cartoons is, they hit pretty close to the bone...Is there no suggestion that, in the name of Islam, in the name of the Koran, in the name of Allah, people are having their heads cut off? These things hit their target."
To me, that is the crux of the matter. There is a war of civilizations being waged in the world with the Islamic fanatics subliminally seeking to storm once again the gates of Vienna, where, in 1683, they were defeated. If by threats of terror against them, the great media institutions can be brought to their knees, we are in big trouble. Before this occurred, I had no doubt that, no matter how difficult, no matter how long the war we are now engaged in continues, the democracies of the world would win, as they did when first facing Hitler and later Stalin. Today, I am no longer so certain.
Today there are new ostriches in our land. They refuse to take terrorists at their word. The Times reported on February 4th the comments of a cleric at the Al-Omari mosque in Gaza, "We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible." Regrettably, many Westerners don't take Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden's principal deputy, at his word when he said, "Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute."
So, a big storm is in progress over Europe. It's all about cartoons. Or is it? What we are seeing more and more on a daily basis is the rise of Islam, not only in Europe, but also in our country and Canada as well. I've written time and again about unlimited immigration from the Middle East, swarming into an unsuspecting Europe, but this tragically is happening in North America as well. The results of this ill-advised process is a soon to arrive clash of cultures on a catastrophic scale.
Apologizing for "offending Islam" is not enough for the Muslim masses of Europe. They want blood! They literally want the heads of the cartoonists and the laws of Europe changed to meet their demands. The masses of Muslim immigrants living in Europe today did not come here to assimilate. They have no intention of becoming Germans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen or Danes. They come not to assimilate, they come to DOMINATE.
The Islamics are fanatical about Jerusalem. They are dedicated to the destruction of every Jewish man, woman and child. A united Muslim world, under the command of a Caliph could facilitate such a military and political reality in the never-ending lust to destroy the tiny nation of Israel. Everything else is a sideshow.
Gore told the largely Saudi audience, many of them educated at U.S. universities, that Arabs in the United States had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
Since mid-November, a camera at the corner of Hiawassee Road and Raleigh Street in Orlando has caught 2,700 people running the red light.
The scientists are the first outsiders to see it. They could only reach the remote mountainous area by helicopter, which they described it as akin to finding a "Garden of Eden".
There were so many new things it was almost overwhelming. And we have only scratched the surface of what is there." The scientists hope to return this year.
Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as "tokens."
"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side," he charged.
To spare embarrassment of the students who do not know the answer, the school has incorporated a "phone a friend" system, allowing one child to nominate another to take the question instead.
