CUANAS: 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005

Friday, December 31, 2004

Happy New Year, Everybody

I've always had a hard time understanding New Years celebrations, because it seems like such an arbitrary dividing line in time. Not celebrating anything, really, just some calendar decision that was made by someone, for no reason that I can fathom, a long time ago.

But, on the other hand, I do believe it is significant and important that we recognize and mark the passage of time with signposts. So, Happy New Years everybody. 2004 was eventful, kind of frightening but, I believe in the course of history, will prove to have been a very good year for humanity.

I'm guessing the next year will prove to be even more so; more frightening, and more important for the progress of humanity. I believe it's going to be quite a roller coaster. So, I resolve to prepare, to strengthen my mind, my heart, my soul, to devote more time to think upon those things which are good and worthy.

God bless us, everyone.

The Editors At Haaretz Are Soviet Style Propagandists
Against Their Own People

A couple of days ago I posted a piece about the Israeli paper, Haaretz, and how they published notes from a meeting of Palestinian officials. The article featured Mahmoud Abbas claiming that Bush told him that God had ordered him to make war upon Iraq and Afghanistan.

This enrages me, to tell you the truth. It is my opinion that even if Haaretz does not ordinarily editorialize within their news articles, they should have made an exception in this case. Considering the fact that many people in Europe, the Middle East, and even some in the U.S. are living under the delusion that Bush does say things of that nature (which he doesn't), I believe it was incumbent upon Haaretz to correct Abbas' slander. As they didn't, then I say they committed slander themselves.

Of course, it is nothing new for the media to slander the President of the United States. It's a hallowed tradition.

The problem with Haaretz refusing to put Abbas' statement into the context of reality is, history begins to be written in the present. Future historians will cite sources in the media for whatever revisionist assertion they want to make. I can guarantee you that in the future, there will be historians around the world citing that Haaretz article to give their work authority.

Haaretz, by publishing that slander, has granted authority to people who will publish future "histories" which will then be used by tyrants to accomplish more evil in the world. Haaretz with it's slander has set the wheels in motion for more death and destruction. The words of such "histories" are a gun at the head of oppressed and beleaguered peoples. The old saying "the pen is mightier than the sword" may sound almost trite by now, but it remains true.

So, the editors at Haaretz should sit back here tonight, kick their feet up and hear the screams of the people who will be tortured and killed in their name in the future.

I am going so ballistic on Haaretz because I believe they know better. I don't believe they live in a state of round-the-clock psychosis like the Arab world's media do. To those to whom much is given, much will be expected. And, it is not much to expect that a major newspaper, in a country supported so strongly by the United States, should not knowingly slander the leader of the our country.

A big American "Screw You" to Haaretz then. Have a happy freakin' 2005 you liars.

In the spirit of Haaretz' slander then, I will bring you the truth about them. From Front Page Magazine:

A Haaretz story from Monday, December 27 informs us:

“ . . an Israel Defense Forces tank opened fire and killed two Hamas activists early Sunday morning near the fence along the Green Line. . . . The two were seen crawling some 200 meters from the fence, and the IDF believes they were planning to set an explosive charge. Hamas confirmed the two were members of its organization.”

Activists? What were they, campaigners against whale farming, or for a higher minimum wage, or a shorter school day? “Activist” is a strange term for people who were seeking to commit mass murder, and who belong to an organization whose charter states:

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. . . . There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. . . . Jihad is [our] path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes. . . . ”

When Haaretz isn’t referring to terrorists of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the various PLO offshoots as “activists,” it calls them “militants”—a word that connotes, or used to connote, hard-boiled labor leaders and the like. And what, exactly, would Haaretz have called people in Germany in the 1930s who called for the destruction of the Jews and incited and perpetrated attacks against them—militants? Activists?

Haaretz’s use of delicate terminology for today’s Nazis is ... an offense against truth, against the memory of what Jews have suffered.

Bloggers Eat Media For Lunch

Thanks to The Anchoress for making me aware of this brilliant satirical piece (making fun of the addled Mainstream Media) from Transterrestrial Musings:

For some, a lucky few, catatonia is a blessed escape. One poor wretch named Ted just sits up in his bed all day. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes are unfocused, or focused on some distant unreality, unseeable by the rest of us.

Old newsroom veterans call it the "thousand-word stare." They've all seen it--that look you get as you gaze intently at a blank computer screen, in a futile attempt to conjure up some words that will somehow spin an obvious and just victory into humiliating and immoral failure.

He had been leading a frontal assault on common sense, when he was cut down in a withering fire of logic and irony by a brigade of blogger sharpshooters and fact checkers. The hits were effective, but not always clean. He lived, but his syntax was badly mangled, and his credibility was shattered beyond any hope of salvaging it.

For some, though, perhaps death would be kinder. One man, by the name of Robert, had to have so many false assumptions, invalid premises, and logical fallacies removed that there was little left. They couldn't excise the last vestiges of self loathing--to do so would have left him with nothing at all. Now, he just wanders the halls with a bandage on his head, like a post-post-modernist zombie. As he staggers along, he mutters under his breath, "I'm a Western oppressor. Beat me...stone me. Ooooohhhh, I'm such a naughty little tool of the phallocentric oligarchy. Spank me...spank me until my tender little bum is a rosy red..."

An orderly brushes past him, wearing nose plugs. He is carrying, at arms' length, a slop-bucket full of stale cliches, failed paradigms and illogical conclusions, in search of some place to dump them where they won't contaminate the local educational system.

Even for those who will eventually recover, the road to becoming productive may be long and painful. Many have experienced nothing their entire lives except misreporting war and politics, and are untrained and unfit for anything else. Without some way of transitioning them back into civil society, they will remain a dangerous source of social instability.

Sometimes satire is truer than truth.

Northwestern University Professor
Is A Traitor
And An Anti-Semite To Boot

Yesterday, I ran the post about the Northwester University professor who wrote an article which stated that the 9/11 highjackers were just like the Freedom Fighter's of the American Revolution. Well, an LGF reader who was apalled by his traitorous rhetoric fired off an email to the professor. Here's the email the LGF reader sent, from Little Green Footballs:

You are a disgrace to your position. How dare you state the those people killed that their people “might live, free and in dignity”? Where is your sense of justice and pride in the country that allows real freedom? You tell me what freedom and dignity the women in Afghanistan lived with! I await your reply.

I am a South African living in the US and I witnessed the transition from a one party dictatorship to a free democracy in SA and no children and civilians were slaughtered like bugs to do it. The South African people had nothing to lose yet they lived and died for freedom with real honour and dignity. There is no justifications for terrorism and by doing so, you make yourself complicit in murder. Learn from South African history that one need not use terrorist tactics to achieve goals and then educate yourself professor that one need not justify murder.

Dean Levitt

Here's the response from the Northwestern University professor:

Why is it that the only hateful mail I have received is signed by Levitt, Hoch or Freedman?

Thursday, December 30, 2004

Northwestern University Professor
Champions 9/11 Terrorists

Northwestern University professor Shahid Alam wrote an article championing the 9/11 terrorists as freedom fighters in the tradition of the American Revolution. From Little Green Footballs:

On April 19, 1775, 700 British troops reached Concord, Massachusetts, to disarm the American colonists who were preparing to start an insurrection. When the British ordered them to disperse, the colonists fired back at the British soldiers. This “shot heard ‘round the world” heralded the start of an insurrection against Britain, the greatest Western power of its time. And when it ended, victorious, in 1783, the colonists had gained their objective. They had established a sovereign but slave-holding republic, the United States of America.

The colonists broke away because this was economically advantageous to their commercial and landed classes. As colonists, they were ruled by a parliament in which they were not represented, and which did not represent their interests. The colonies were not free to protect and develop their own commerce and industries. Their bid for independence was made all the more attractive because it was pressed under the banner of liberty. The colonial elites had imbibed well the lessons of the Enlightenment, and here in the new world, they had an opportunity to harness liberty in the service of their economic interests. Backed by the self interest of their landed and commercial elites, and inspired by revolutionary ideas, the colonists had a dream worth pursuing. They were prepared to die for this dream - and to kill. They did: and they won.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers too demonstrated their willingness to die - and to kill - for their dream. They died so that their people might live, free and in dignity. The manner of their death - and the destruction it wreaked - is not merely a testament to the vulnerabilities that modern technology has created to clandestine attacks. After all, skyscrapers and airplanes have co-existed peacefully for many decades. The attacks of 9-11 were in many ways a work of daring and imagination too; if one can think objectively of such horrors. They were a cataclysmic summation of the history of Western depredations in the Middle East: the history of a unity dismembered, of societies manipulated by surrogates, of development derailed and disrupted, of a people dispossessed. The explosion of 9-11 was indeed a “shot heard ‘round the world.”

This guy has to be removed from his job. He is traitorous in his rhetoric. Diversity of opinion does not include encouraging violence against Americans.

The Golden Age Of Islam
The History of Jihad In Europe

Important information on what Muslims were up to back in the "golden age of Islam". You know, that time when we all "peacefully coexisted", and Islamic "science" was one of the wonders of the world. From Front Page Magazine:

... the Islamic jihad conquest and rule of the Iberian peninsula was not a pacific process which created a model ecumenical society of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. From the two greatest modern historians of Muslim Spain, Evariste Levi-Provencal 6 and Dufourcq 7, we learn the following, all of which occurred before (and thus in addition to) the well-known 12th century Muslim Almohad persecutions: The Iberian peninsula was conquered in 710-716 C.E. by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques.

Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a faction of Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavements, deportations and killings.

Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, subjugated non-Muslim dhimmis -Jews and Christians- like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – were prohibited from building new churches or synagogues, or restoring the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing.

Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class exploited by the dominant Arab ruling elites; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing.

Oh wait, there's more:

Many thousands of non-Muslim captives were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves, brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.

And what the treatment of the Jews?

In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela, and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to five thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade. The Granada pogrom was likely to have been incited, in part, by the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu Ishaq a well known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who wrote:

Bring them down to their place and Return them to the most abject station. They used to roam around us in tatters Covered with contempt, humiliation, and scorn. They used to rummage amongst the dungheaps for a bit of a filthy rag To serve as a shroud for a man to be buried in...Do not consider that killing them is treachery. Nay, it would be treachery to leave them scoffing.”

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Rabbi, Who Is My Neighbor?

Yesterday, I posted a comment on Ross Douthat's comment that we shouldn't help Middle-Eastern countries establish democracy because they aren't "our people". Today, the original object of Douthat's derision, Michael Ledeen, wrote his response:

The rejection of an American embrace of freedom-seeking people seems to me distinctly un-American, a snooty rejection of the essence of our national mission, which, as Tocqueville observed more than a century and a half ago, is to support freedom and democracy. I think that the Germans and the Japanese and the Italians became "our people" when they became democratic. When they were tyrannical they were our enemies, as tyrants always are. That’s why Tocqueville was able to predict our inevitable conflict with tyrannical Russia.

Douthat is pretty confident that he knows a lot about the Iranians, but he doesn’t seem to know that, in the mass anti-regime demonstrations that have regularly taken place over the past few years, the demonstrators commonly brandish banners and signs that say "don’t talk to us about the Palestinians, talk about US." If there were an Iranian revolution, I think that aid to Hamas, Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad would end, and I also think we’d see a lot of members of al Qaeda scrambling for a new place to work.

Finally, he rejects the idea that vigorous American political and limited material support for pro-democracy forces in Iran could possibly bring down the mullahs. Well, virtually the entire American and European intellectual establishment thought Ronald Reagan was nuts to believe he could do that to the Soviet Communists, and they ridiculed his "evil empire" speech as at best fatuous and at worst provocative. I always thought that was an odd position for intellectuals, who claim to believe in the value of ideas and the power of words.

When Galileo was criticized for his theories, he remarked "eppur, si muove," and yet, it moves. Look at the world today. Look at the world in 1980. Is it not moving? Are we not in the age of the second democratic revolution?

I hope so. As with any war, we shall not know the outcome until it's over.

WARNING: FANATIC ALERT! MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS!

And now, I am going to do what I almost never do. I am going to quote scripture to justify my political opinion. From the book of Luke Chapter 10, verses 25-37:

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.
32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.
34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him.
35 The next day he took out two silver coins[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Persecute Christianity
And It Gets Stronger

From Mark Steyn at the Chicago Sun Times, via Little Green Footballs:

The seasonally litigious rest their fanatical devotion to the de-Christification of Christmas on the separation of church and state. America’s founders were certainly opposed to the “establishment” of religion, whose meaning is clear enough to any Englishman: The new republic did not want President George Washington serving simultaneously as supreme governor of the Church of America, as the queen today is simultaneously head of the Church of England, or the bishop of Virginia sitting in the U.S. Senate, as today the archbishop of York sits in the House of Lords. Two centuries on, these possibilities are so remote to Americans that the “separation” of church and state has dwindled down to threats of legal action over red and green party napkins.

But every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month’s election results. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized Christianity in America. By “politicized,” I don’t mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing “Silent Night” if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out, it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: What’s more important? Winning a victory over the New Jersey kindergarten teacher’s holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?

In Britain and Europe, by contrast, the formal and informal symbols of religious faith remained in place in national life and there were no local equivalent to America’s militant litigants, and the result is the total collapse of Christianity: Across the continent, the churches are empty. In attempting to sue God out of public life, American liberals demonstrate yet again that they’re great on tactics, lousy on long-term strategy.

Guess they better start leaving us Christians the hell alone.

:)

Now, Even The Rocks And Trees
Hate The Jews

From Palestinian Media Watch, via Robert Spencer:

For years, the PA religious establishment has repeatedly portrayed the killing of Jews as a religious necessity. Today, PA TV chose to rebroadcast this same call to genocide as a historical necessity -- this time from a senior PA academic rather than from a religious leader. Dr. Hassan Khater, founder of the Al Quds Encyclopedia and a TV lecturer, cited the identical Hadith - Islamic tradition attributed to Mohammed - that the religious leaders have used to demand this genocide. This was part of a lecture focusing on what he described as the war of the Jews against Palestinian trees.

These were his words quoting the Hadith:"Mohammed said in his Hadith: 'The Hour [Day of Resurrection] will not arrive until you fight the Jews, [until a Jew will hide behind a rock or tree] and the rock and the tree will say: Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!'" PA TV Dec. 27, 2004 [Rebroadcast from July 13, 2003]

The continued teaching that this Hadith applies today could well be a dominant factor driving terror against Israeli civilians. By depicting redemption as dependent on Muslims' killing of Jews, the PA world view presents this genocide as a religious obligation and historical necessity -- not related to the conflict over borders, but as something inherent to Allah's world.

Yep, the Palestinian Authority is all grown up and ready to take over a state of their own.

Really, is there room for this in a sane world?

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Haaretz International Slanders George Bush

From Haaretz International:

Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans.

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Why would Haaretz International publish such a ludicrous statement from Mahmoud Abbas without any qualification? This is incendiary. George Bush has never said anything of the like. And yet, in much of the world, people believe that he does go around saying things like this all the time.

If he were to have said anything like this, he would not have been elected President of the United States. End of story. Now, I understand, though, why people think we Americans are such fanatics. It's because foreign papers, including papers in Israel are, apparently, willing to print slanderous statements about the President we elected.

Does Haaretz do this kind of thing often? What is going on here? I don't get it.

Ok, Someone Has Finally
Come Right Out And Said It

Ross Douthat wrote in to comment on a Michael Ledeen argument applauding America for supporting the Ukranian "Orange" Revolution. Ledeen cites this success as an example of what we can do on behalf of Democracy. Douthat doesn't agree that we can draw paralells between the Ukraine and the Middle East. His reason? Well, just hold on to your sears, cuz here it comes:

Finally, and not to get too old-fashioned-realist here, but . . . the Iranians are not "our people." Neither are the Syrians, the Saudis, the Chinese, or the North Koreans. And they do not become "our people" just by believing in democracy, or even by establishing democratic self-government. An Iranian democracy would be a good thing in countless ways -- but it would also probably be just as hell-bent as the current regime on acquiring nuclear weapons, flexing its muscles in Iraq, and perhaps even sponsoring anti-Israeli terrorism. As such, it would be our strategic rival, not our brother nation, even were its constitution copied word-for-word from ours.

Uh, wow.

I have always suspected that blind racism is the reason that so many insist that Democracy can't work in the Middle East. Douthat is, apparently, a Conservative because he writes for National Review. But, I believe that this "reasoning" is the motivation of the left as well. They've certainly proven themselves handy enough with the racist stereotypes when it comes to the Jews, so why not the A-Rabs, huh?

Hat tip: Roger Simon.

"Democracy Is An Atheist That Idolizes Human Beings"

From MSNBC, via Jihad Watch:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Ansar al-Sunnah Army has emerged from its roots as a little known militant group operating in northern Iraq to become the country’s deadliest terror network, capable of carrying out spectacular strikes like last week’s suicide bombing at a U.S. base and virtually eclipsing al-Qaida’s cell in the war-torn nation.

Unlike al-Qaida, Ansar al-Sunnah is believed to be made up mainly of Iraqis, and its apparent strategy of targeting only Americans and those viewed as collaborating with them — Iraqi security forces and Kurds — may have increased its support, in contrast to other groups that have hit more clearly Iraqi civilian targets.

Nearly five months after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003, Ansar al-Sunnah’s first statement surfaced on the Internet, pronouncing itself “a group of jihadists, scholars, and political and military experts” dedicated to creating an Islamic state in Iraq.
The statement was signed by the group’s “emir,” or leader, the previously unknown Abu Abdullah al-Hassan Ibn Mahmoud.

Since then, it has carried out numerous bombings and attacks, the slaying in August of 12 kidnapped Nepalese construction workers, releasing video showing their deaths. In Ansar al-Sunnah claimed responsibility for Feb. 1 suicide bombings against two Kurdish political parties in Irbil, killing 109 people.

In the Irbil attack, the group slipped bombers into the Kurdish party offices during celebrations to set off their explosives. Tuesday’s attack on U.S. forces at Mosul showed even greater sophistication and planning: a bomber — possibly in an Iraqi military uniform — entered a dining tent on the heavily guarded American base and detonated the blast during lunch, killing 22 people, mostly American soldiers and civilians.

Now the group is warning Iraqis not to participate in crucial Jan. 30 elections, promising to attack polling stations.

But who exactly is behind Ansar al-Sunnah and how it was formed remains a mystery. Some experts believe the group splintered from Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaida-linked group established in September 2001.

Ansar al-Islam was founded by Mullah Krekar, who has been living as a refugee in Norway since 1991. The group vowed to set up a conservative Islamic state in northern Iraq, and its members have trained in Afghanistan and provided safe haven to al-Qaida members fleeing the U.S. invasion there.

The offshoot group may have changed its name to Ansar al-Sunnah — Arabic for “supporters of the sunnah,” of the traditions of Prophet Muhammad — as an attempt to appeal to Iraq’s minority Sunni Arabs, experts suggest.

They chose the name Ansar al-Sunnah to distinguish the Sunni group from Shiite militias, Salah said.

The group seeks an Islamic government and Islamic law in Iraq, stressing its opposition to democracy, which it says replaces God’s rightful rule with that of man.

“We believe democracy is an atheist call that idolizes human beings,” says a manifesto detailing Ansar al-Sunnah’s ideology.

Robert Spencer, at Jihad Watch, points out that this is a quote from Sayid Qutb. Wikipedia has a section on Qutb, calling him "the central theorist of twentieth-century Islamism," and saying that he was "the most persuasive publicist of the Muslim Brotherhood." Qutb believed that "the unity of God and His sovereignty meant that human rule – government legislates its own behavior – is illegitimate. Muslims must answer to God alone."

Sounds great, right?

And it's also important to note that Ansar al-Islam is the Al-Qaeda splinter group that Colin Powell was criticized for citing as implying that Hussein had connections to Bin Laden. Well, I guess Mr. Powell has been vindicated.

Democracy Marches Forward

New York Post columnist, and retired U.S. Military General Ralph Peters, says Democracy experienced a "vintage year" in 2004. Events in Afghanistan, the Ukraine, Australia, Mozambique, as well as the U.S. have demonstrated the good that comes when people are given the right to vote. From Powerline:

Terrorists will do all they can to disrupt the balloting. Iraqis will die for the crime of casting a vote. There'll be local corruption, religious influence, ethnic division, tribal bullying and polling boycotts. After all of our sacrifices, those Iraqis who manage to vote may favor parties whose agendas frustrate us.

But the Iraqis will vote. Not all of them. But millions. Despite the ferocious efforts of the terrorists and insurgents, the Arab world is about to see the first truly free election between the Nile and the Euphrates.

Global pundits will find endless flaws, and many a Washington apparatchik may be troubled by the election's outcome. But the Iraqi elections will be a milestone that no demagogues, America-haters or instant revisionists will be able to wish away.

Democracy works. It doesn't work all of the time, and it doesn't work everywhere instantly. Sometimes the largest tribe wins and believes it has a mandate to oppress minorities. Sometimes the people choose the hater, not the man of hope. Sometimes the thugs get away with stealing the election.

But consider where this world of ours stood 50 years ago. Or 15 years ago. Or even in 2003. Democracy's march is long, hard and painful. But humankind stepped forward in 2004.

U.S. Military Provides Foreign Aid

From Powerline:

Anne Malone of the Palm Tree Pundit emails us from Kailua, Hawaii regarding Rocket Man's post below on Tom Friedman:

I laughed out loud at Tom Friedman's complaints about the size of the defense budget and wanting us to give more foreign aid. He must not be aware that our military often provides foreign aid -- right out of that huge defense budget!

Example: My husband (a LCDR in the Navy) was just called in to work this afternoon because of the earthquake and tsunamis. Hell be working on determining needs and providing ships, planes, etc. We'll send help, just like we do whenever there is a hurricane, typhoon, etc. This comes out of the defense budget. It seems all Mr. Friedman wants to see is big numbers on budget items that he likes. It'd sure be nice if he knew what he was talking about, though.

In addition, much of what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is foreign aid. Ask women in Afghanistan if the U.S. Military has aided them. Ask the Shia, and the Kurds, in Iraq.

The United States might need to be doing more to win the propaganda war, because there are too many people who support the war, but seem reticent to make the case for the idea that, ultimately, the war itself is foreign aid.

It does seem Orwellian, I must admit, to carelessly say War is Altruism. And, maybe for that reason, it is a dangerous idea to put forth. Obviously, there are people being killed and displaced from their homes.

I guess I don't know where to come down on this. I'd love to hear comments on this subject.

Is it dangerous to call the War On Terror a kind of foreign aid?

Monday, December 27, 2004

European Fundamentalism
Is A Danger To The World

From Euro/Brazilian blogger Nelson Ascher:

As you may all know one of the most widespread memes in the planet nowadays is that religious (Christian) fundamentalism is an exponentially growing phenomenon in the US. According to the spreaders of this meme, fundamentalists have conquered the White House, all red states are basically fundamentalist etc. "Fundamentalist" here means religious fanatic and/or bigot.

Now, though I know Americans are on average more religious than the Europeans, I have seen no real trace of any kind of widespread fanaticism or intolerance in America. The reaction of the so-called tolerant Dutch to a single Islamist murder was, to say the least, much more vehement than the American popular reaction to 3.000 similar deaths.

I've not heard, for instance, of Mosques or of Synagogues being burnt down in the US in the same rhytm they are, for instance, in France or Belgium. Nor of desecrated cemeteries etc.

This is very obvious to any American who really thinks about it. After Sept. 11th there was one attack on an Islamic person in the Southern California and one on a Sikh in Phoenix Arizona. That was it. But, of course, this is not the message spread by the media. We stupid cowboy Americans are the fanatics.

Yee ha!

Atheist Stops Believing In
What Is Logically Impossible
To Believe In

I am fascinated with the case of Anthony Flew, the renowned spokesman for atheism who has recently announced that he now believes in the existence of God. The reason I am so fascinated is because I have never believed it when people say they are atheists. I don't believe it because it is impossible to prove a negative. That is a fact of logic.

Therefore, there is less reason to believe that God does not exist, than there is to believe the converse. In fact, it requires quite a "leap of faith" to believe without a doubt that there is no God.

This leads me to believe that atheism is a psychological phenomena rather than an act of reason.

From BPNews:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Christian apologist Gary Habermas had just finished debating noted British atheist Antony Flew about the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The two friends rode an elevator together as they left the Californian university where the debate was held in January 2002. As Habermas exited the elevator, he extended his hand through the open door. "Tony," he said, "this is it for now. I enjoyed talking with you. When you become a Christian, I want to be the first one to know."

Flew laughed and responded, "I think you deserve that right."

The doors closed.

Most observers of the debate never thought that Flew would take steps toward Christianity. The former professor at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading universities in Britain had argued against the existence of God for more than 50 years, publishing such books as "Atheistic Humanism" and "Darwinian Evolution."

But in December 2004 the unexpected happened when Flew took a step toward Christianity, announcing that scientific evidence led him to a belief in God.

Habermas was among the first people he told.

Habermas, chairman of the department of philosophy and theology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., had known that Flew was reconsidering his position since the fall of 2000 when Flew sent Habermas a letter in which the atheist acknowledged the strength of arguments for theism and Christianity."

In September 2000, that's about the earliest indication that I had that he was changing," Habermas said in an interview with Baptist Press. "He wrote me a long letter, quite an incredible letter, where at several points he conceded the evidence for [theism and Christianity]."

When Habermas received the letter, he knew something was happening in Flew's life."

I distinctly remember reading that letter when it came in the mail and thinking, 'Wow, something huge is happening with this guy,'" Habermas said.

Over a period of three years the two scholars corresponded about God. By January 2003 Flew began considering arguments from the "intelligent design" movement and was on the verge of belief in God.

Intelligent design is a theory arguing that some features of the natural world are best explained as the products of an intelligent cause rather than naturalistic evolution."

He told me he was really rethinking theism and had corresponded with [naturalistic scientist Richard] Dawkins and was putting the ID arguments up against what Dawkins was saying and trying to compare the arguments," Habermas said. "And he was going back and forth as to whether he should be a theist or not."

By early 2004, Flew completed his transition to theism and indicated his change of mind to Habermas in a telephone conversation.

When media reports revealed Flew's belief in God in December 2004, some skeptics argued that the former atheist had changed his mind suddenly. But Habermas said such allegations are clearly incorrect in light of the four-year dialogue he had with Flew."

The implications that he's just recently arrived at theism ... and that he hasn't had time to think through this aren't correct," Habermas said. "The first sign that I've seen of him changing goes back to the fall of 2000. So he's been thinking about these things for four years."

Flew currently holds a position known as deism -- the belief that God created the universe but is not actively involved in people's lives today, Habermas said. Because deism is traditionally a "tenuous" position, Flew could move closer to traditional Christianity in the days ahead, he said."

Deism is a very tenuous position, and deistic belief is a short-lived movement in the history of philosophy over the last few centuries," Habermas said. "One reason deism is a troubled position is that it usually moves one way or the other."

Flew could revert back to atheism, Habermas noted. "Still, he has made a number of statements to me indicating that he is open, even to revelation," Habermas said."

Three weeks ago I received a letter from him where he said that he was rereading my arguments for the resurrection and was very impressed with them,'" he said.

Despite his interest in the resurrection, however, Flew remains far from belief in Christianity, Habermas said."

He's told me on many occasions that he was impressed with the arguments for the resurrection ... and he says it's the best miracle claim in the history of religions," Habermas recounted. "So he's impressed with them. Enough to believe? I don't think so, certainly not right now."

The dialogue with Flew highlights the need for Christians to engage non-believers in meaningful, caring friendships, Habermas said. Christian scholars in particular should bear in mind the need to build relationships with non-believing scholars, he said.

There are "benefits of carrying on a genuine friendship with people who do not agree with you on things," Habermas said. "I mean a genuine friendship where you're there for them in season and out of season. You're there for them when they're having bad days. You can tell them things that are on your mind. ... It's not connected to whether the people convert or not."

Christians should rejoice that Flew has adopted a belief in God but remember that mere belief in God falls short of the belief in Jesus Christ that Scripture requires for eternal life, Habermas said."

His deism provides no relief for dying because he doesn't believe in life after death," he said. "It's not ... an 81-year-old who is embracing God so that he can come out on the good side when he dies. If you said that to him, he would say, 'I'm just going where the evidence leads.'"

An interview conducted by Habermas exploring Flew's conversion to belief in God will be published in the winter 2004 issue of Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

I know what all my non-believing readers are saying out there. You're saying, "Isn't "Evangelical Philosophy" an oxymoron?"

Let me just say, you would be very justified in your little joke, if you did think that.

:)

Islamofascists Kill Imam For Saying Peace Prayers

In India, Islamofascists killed an Imam for saying peace prayers. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch says this is supported by the Koran, and that the Koran specifially warns against those "who would keep the other observances of Islam but dare to remove fighting from it":

Hast thou not seen those unto whom it was said: Withhold your hands, establish worship and pay the poordue, but when fighting was prescribed for them behold! a party of them fear mankind even as their fear of Allah or with greater fear, and say: Our Lord! Why hast Thou ordained fighting for us? If only Thou wouldst give us respite yet a while! Say (unto them, O Muhammad): The comfort of this world is scant; the Hereafter will be better for him who wardeth off (evil); and ye will not be wronged the down upon a date-stone. (4:77)

America's Belligerance Feeds The Jihad

From Medienkritik:

SPIEGEL ONLINE is showing its true colors this Christmas season. Instead of interviewing American conservatives in an attempt to promote transatlantic dialogue and understanding, the online publication is once again scraping the bottom of the journalistic barrel. How? By publishing an article on the opinions of an Iraqi kidnapper. Why? You guessed it: George W. Bush is presented in a negative light.

Here is some of what the kidnapper, who until recently held two French journalists hostage, had to say:

“The US attacks on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 have allowed Islamic extremism <>"

According to SPON, that is a major reason the kidnapper “hoped for a Bush victory.”

Well, this just proves it! America should have negotiated with the Islamic terrorists! They should have voted Kerry! The terrorists would have stayed in Afghanistan if it hadn’t been for Bush! The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are to blame for Islamic terrorism!

Can’t we just go back to the good old days before George W. Bush provoked the <> of Islamic terror with his crusades?

Holland Rethinks Multiculturalism

From Little Green Footballs:

The murder of one Dutch filmmaker 911 days after the assassination of Fortuyn is described by people in Holland as having had the same effect on their country as the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in the World Trade Center towers. Dutch people have the sense that, for the first time in centuries, the thread that connects them to the world of Geert Mak’s father, and that world to the world of Erasmus and Spinoza and Rembrandt and William the Silent, is in danger of being snipped. Part of it is the size and the speed of the recent non-European immigration. The Netherlands, with a population of 16 million, has about 2 million foreign-born. By some estimates, a quarter of them do not speak Dutch.

What’s more, the public has been told for two decades now that they ain’t seen nothing yet, that this is only the first wave of a long era of immigration, which they’d better learn to love. The immigrants the country now hosts have been difficult to manage. Part of the problem is the interaction of high immigration and what was for years a generous, no-questions-asked welfare state: As many as 60 percent of Moroccans and Turks above the age of 40—obviously first-generation immigrants—are unemployed, in the only major economy in Europe that has consistently had unemployment at or below American rates.

Most of these immigrants are Muslims. Muslim immigrants had begun to scare people long before Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic populist, turned himself into the country’s most popular politician in the space of a few weeks in 2002, by arguing that the country was already overloaded with newcomers. (Fortuyn was assassinated by an animal-rights activist in May of that year.) Already in the 1990s, there were reports of American-style shootouts in schools, one involving two Turkish students in the town of Veghel. This past October, newspaper readers were riveted by the running saga of a quiet married couple who had been hounded out of the previously livable Amsterdam neighborhood of Diamantbuurt by gangs of Muslim youths.

There were incidents of wild rejoicing across Holland in the wake of the September 11 attacks, notably in the eastern city of Ede. The weekly magazine Contrast took a poll showing that just under half the Muslims in the Netherlands were in “complete sympathy” with the September 11 attacks. At least some wish to turn to terrorism. In the wake of the van Gogh murder, Pakistani, Kurdish, and Moroccan terrorist cells were discovered. The Hague-based “Capital Network,” out of which van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri came, had contact with terrorists who carried out bombings in Casablanca in 2003. Perhaps the most alarming revelation was that an Islamist mole was working as a translator in the AIVD, the national investigative service, and tipping off local radicals to impending operations.

The question naturally arises: If immigrants behave this way now, what will happen when they are far more numerous, as all authorities have long promised they will be?

I truly hope that we all can find a way to deal with this problem without burning down mosques and Islamic schools, as has happened in Holland. If the goverments of Europe don't listen to the wishes of their people, and slow the tide of immigration, then I fear a return to fanatic racism in Europe. I could be very wrong. However, the evidence presented by the violence against immigrants in Holland and France, indicates that Europe is vascillating between blind adherence to an outmoded creed of multiculturalist "tolerance" and sheer racist violence.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Associated Press - Just Helping The Terrorists
Tell Their Story
And Broadcast Their Murders

From Poynter Online ("Everything You Need To Be A Better Journalist"), via Little Green Footballs:

From JACK STOKES, director of media relations, Associated Press: [This is a solicited letter regarding Salon’s “The Associated Press ‘insurgency.’”] Several brave Iraqi photographers work for The Associated Press in places that only Iraqis can cover. Many are covering the communities they live in where family and tribal relations give them access that would not be available to Western photographers, or even Iraqi photographers who are not from the area.

Insurgents want their stories told as much as other people and some are willing to let Iraqi photographers take their pictures. It’s important to note, though, that the photographers are not “embedded” with the insurgents. They do not have to swear allegiance or otherwise join up philosophically with them just to take their pictures.

In light of this, it is probably important to consider Wretchard's thoughts and questions from his post, Haifa Street:

The execution of Iraqi election workers on Baghdad's Haifa street was probably not, properly speaking, a murder. It was a political act. While most killers seek to hide their faces and plan their attacks so no one can see them, these killers scorned masks and chose a busy street in Baghdad to carry out their work because they wanted to send a message. According to Abdul Hussein Al-Obedi of the Associated Press:'

During morning rush hour, about 30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns, swarmed onto Haifa Street, the scene of repeated clashes between U.S. forces and insurgents. They stopped a car carrying five employees of the Iraqi Electoral Commission and killed three of them. The other two escaped. The commission condemned the attack as a "terrorist ambush."

Two or three dozen people, at the most, would normally have witnessed these events. But due to the great good fortune of the killers, a photographer from the Associated Press was present and pictures of the execution were carried on newspapers throughout the globe, sending the executioner's message not merely to a handful of bystanders to hundreds of millions of readers throughout the world.

Salon says:

A source at the Associated Press knowledgeable about the events covered in Baghdad on Sunday told Salon that accusations that the photographer was aware of the militants' plans are "ridiculous." The photographer, whose identity the AP is withholding due to safety concerns, was likely "tipped off to a demonstration that was supposed to take place on Haifa Street," said the AP source, who was not at liberty to comment by name. But the photographer "definitely would not have had foreknowledge" of a violent event like an execution, the source said.

Here was where the killers really lucked out. The AP photographer, though caught at unawares, who definitely had no "foreknowledge" of what was going down and at the worst expected a street demonstration, did not take cover, even as soldiers and Marines are trained to do when shooting starts. He was made of sterner stuff and held his ground, taking pictures of people he did not know killing individuals he did not recognize for reasons he would not have known about. This -- in the midst of "30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns" -- as the Associated Press report says. And he continued to take photographs for a fairly long period of time, capturing not just a single photograph, but a sequence of them.

And then, as Wretchard mentions in another post on the same subject:

The photo itself raises more questions than any conservative blogger ever could. It shows traffic backed up behind the killers, afraid to proceed further. The attack, according to the Associated Press's own account was carried out by "about 30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns", but the photograph itself is taken from a fairly elevated position, as from a standing person.

The Egyptian blogger Big Pharoah comments:

The blogoshere is currently discussing the issue of how an Associated Press photographer managed to stand in the middle of one of Iraq's (and probably the world's) most dangerous roads and shot a picture after another of a ruthless murder in the middle of the day. ... The case at hand has to do with the brutal killing of 2 Iraqi heroes whose only mistake was trying to organize an election in their country. This is a moral case and we, the friends of Iraq and of the troops serving there, should not let this incident pass unnoticed.

Forces For Sharia (Islamic Law)
In The United States

In light of the previous post regarding the imposition of Sharia law in civil cases in Canada, it is important to understand that there are powerful forces at work, trying to accomplish the same thing here in America. CAIR (The Council on American-Islamic Relations), commonly called a "moderate Muslim organization" by our wise and paternal media, has a history of it's leaders calling for Sharia here in America. From Front Page Magazine:

“Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

This was the sentiment of Omar M. Ahmad, the Chairman of the Board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR, as told at an Islamic conference held in Freemont, California, in July of 1998.

If a recent event taking place in Irving, Texas, is any indication, CAIR also hopes for an American jihad.

The event took place on Saturday, December 11, 2004. The theme was “The Unity of Muslim Ummah around the globe.” [Ummah = universal knowledge of Islam.] The affair was titled “A TRIBUTE TO THE GREAT ISLAMIC VISIONARY.” That “visionary” was none other than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

On the flier for the event were the words “Neither east nor west,” alluding to Khomeini’s feeling of how the Soviet Union (“Lesser Satan”) in his mind was ultimately just as evil as the United States. It states, “‘Neither east nor west’ is the principal [sic.] slogan of an Islamic revolution....”

The venue was the Metroplex of Organizations of Muslims in North-Texas (MOMIN), certainly a far distance from where someone would think something like this would normally take place.

However, this actually does turn out to be the perfect location for this event, as the website of MOMIN contains: 1. photos depicting Khomeini; 2. a poem that states, “[Hollywood] films are Satanic”; 3. a link to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), which describes (on its website) the Iranian Revolution and overthrow of the Shah as a “triumph”; and 4. a link to a website featuring an entire page dedicated to Khomeini and deifying him, saying he masterminded a “divine uprising.”

In addition, the spiritual leader of MOMIN, Maulana Shamshad Haider Murtazawi, in May of 2004, had the following published in islamicdigest.net, a website that contains anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-American images and advertisements and propaganda for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization.

Murtazawi wrote, “There are elements within the Shia community who have a certain dislike for the Islamic revolution, Imam Khomeini or Islamic government in Iran. Such people are usually supported by the western governments to win the hearts of the liberals within the Shia Muslim community in the West. If such elements are not flushed out, they will become a menace for our community that will mislead many more. Allah (swt) is the Guardian of the believers.”

The declarations of Omar Ahmad and Murtazawi are not unlike those made in the late 70’s, when an upsurge of anti-American, anti-Western sentiment was beginning to take hold within Iran. Led by an exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the uprising, or “revolution,” was largely a violent fundamentalist response to the secular monarchy of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (a.k.a. The Shah).

As chaos broke out in the streets of Tehran, Khomeini shouted from afar “Death to America” and referred to the U.S. as the “Great Satan.” Soon the Shah, said to be an American collaborator, would be overthrown, in favor of an Islamic Republic with Khomeini as its leader.

As it turns out, people did attend this dreadful event. And one of the featured speakers was a representative from CAIR, Iyas Maleh, the President of CAIR’s Dallas-Fort Worth chapter. Maleh said of the June handover of sovereignty to Iraq: “Two years from now we’ll be saying, ‘What have we done? We’ve installed a government that the Islamic people do not see as a legitimate government.’”

…confirming that Omar M. Ahmad’s dream is still alive and well, at least within the confines of CAIR.

Sharia (Islamic Law) In Canada?

Canada has opened the way for special "Sharia Courts" for Muslims to deal with personal manners of business and family law. From the liberal Montreal Gazette (via Little Green Footballs) comes an editorial which clearly stands against the creeping encroachment of Sharia in Canada:

The idea that Sharia law should be allowed a foothold in Quebec is floating around this month with talk of a proposed meeting between Montreal Muslim Council president Salam Elmenyawi and Justice Minister Jacques Dupuis. Sharia in Canada is a thoroughly bad idea that should be rejected promptly and permanently - along with any other impulse to tailor Canada’s justice system to individual cultures.

The cornerstone of a modern, multicultural nation such as Canada is an impartial legal code that governs everyone equally, no matter what their ethnic origin, religion, sex, race or age. Aside from immigration law, our statutes and regulations apply equally to aboriginals, United Empire Loyalists and the newest refugee claimants.

This equal treatment under the law is at the heart of what it is to be a Canadian. Religious-based laws - Christian, Muslim, Jewish or any other - have no place in our system. The state is the font of justice, and strives mightily, if sometimes imperfectly, to make that justice - from criminal sentencing to child support - uniform. Equality under the law cannot be sub-contracted to religious, or any other, organizations.

Stupid Cowboy America

From No Pasaran:

Criticism of America often turns into an irrational hate, based on flagrant double standards, arrogance and misperception writes Cathy Young as she recounts a scene that happened to her in Europe in the Boston Globe.

SCENE: An elevator in a hotel in a small town in Germany, about a week ago.
Dramatis personae: Your humble columnist, your humble columnist's mother, a German gentleman in his 60s.

My mother and I exchanged a few words in our native Russian, whereupon the German gentleman inquired amicably, "Russisch?" I explained that we did, in fact, come from Russia originally, but had lived in the United States for nearly 25 years and were now American.
The man's demeanor changed visibly. After a glum silence, he remarked sourly as we were leaving the elevator, "America is always starting wars everywhere in the world. It's not good for people."

I was so shocked that the most obvious comeback did not occur to me until a couple of minutes later, when he was out of sight: "You mean, like World War II?"

I'd heard the stories before — tourists in Europe being subjected to anti-American verbal outbursts. But there's nothing like running into it personally.

…People have every right to be critical of US policies. The problem is that criticism of America often turns into an irrational hate, based on flagrant double standards, arrogance and misperception.

Take my German encounter. First: Sorry to bring up an unpleasant past, but it takes some nerve for Germans to lecture anyone on starting wars. (I don't believe in collective guilt — but if American tourists can be harangued about US policies, it's only fair to remind their accusers of their own country's recent history.)

No less remarkable is the fact that the gentleman was quite friendly when he thought my mother and I were from Russia — a country which doesn't have a stellar record with regard to military aggression. (Hungary, anyone? Czechoslovakia? Afghanistan? Chechnya?) Germans have every reason to love the Russians, I suppose; the Russians built them such a nice wall across Berlin, and free of charge too.

Such double standards abound. For instance: An indignant European chorus that includes France has excoriated the United States for denying judicial protections to suspected terrorists held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. Yet France's own antiterrorism policies dating back to the late 1980s give police and prosecutors broad powers of preemptive detention and drastically limit the rights of suspects.

To some extent, European-American tensions are nothing new. Many commentators now say that during the Cold War, a common enemy — communism — brought the United States and Europe together in a way that the terrorist threat has not. But they may be overstating the old unity. In the 1980s, the deployment of US missiles in Europe sparked furious opposition. America, led by the "cowboy" Ronald Reagan, was often seen as a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. …

That's true. I lived through it. Reagan was constantly portrayed in the media as a stupid cowboy. Sound familiar? When Reagan chose to deploy the Pershing Missiles in Germany there were huge demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of major cities across Europe.

I guess, when taken in the context of history, we should be proud to be called "Stupid Cowboys" by the Euros.

Friday, December 24, 2004

A Christmas Present For The Whole World

On this, Yeshua's (Jesus real Hebrew name) birthday, let us celebrate one of the most signifigant things that has happened in the past year; the Democratization of Afghanistan. From Little Green Footballs:

Amazing strides forward, in a country that was very much in the Dark Ages before September 11: Karzai appoints three women to Afghan cabinet. (Hat tip: NY Nana.)

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has announced a new cabinet that excludes leading warlords and drug traffickers and includes three women for the first time in the Islamic country’s history.

After 10 weeks of bargaining and hard politicking that followed his victory in the country’s first democratic election, Mr Karzai retained many familiar faces but brought in technocrats to run ministries involved in rehabilitating the economy.

Analysts regard his cabinet list as the real test of whether he can bring in a new era of stability after a quarter-century of conflict.

United States, Nato and government forces continue to fight an insurgency inspired by Taliban militants and al-Qa’eda remnants, following the invasion in the wake of the September 11 attacks, while opium production is booming.

The warlord and former defence minister Gen Mohammed Fahim was dropped in favour of the American-trained Gen Abdul Rahim Wardak. The only former warlord accommodated in the cabinet, as minister for energy, is Ismael Khan.

One of three women appointed in the list of 25 was Massouda Jalal, who was the only female candidate among 17 to oppose Mr Karzai in the elections. She was made minister for women’s affairs.

God Bless America.

U.N. Peacekeepers Raped Young Girls

From Little Green Footballs. Charles comments:

Seven months after we first reported it (lgf: UN Troops Exploit Rape Victims), mainstream media finally awakens to the repulsive actions of United Nations “peacekeepers” in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Sex scandal in Congo threatens to engulf UN’s peacekeepers.

Here's an excerpt from the article from London Times:

HOME-MADE pornographic videos shot by a United Nations logistics expert in the Democratic Republic of Congo have sparked a sex scandal that threatens to become the UN’s Abu Ghraib.
The expert was a Frenchman who worked at Goma airport as part of the UN’s $700 million-a-year effort to rebuild the war-shattered country. When police raided his home they discovered that he had turned his bedroom into a studio for videotaping and photographing sex sessions with young girls.

The bed was surrounded by large mirrors on three sides, according to a senior Congolese police officer. On the fourth side was a camera that he could operate from the bed with a remote control.

When the police arrived the man was allegedly about to rape a 12-year-old girl sent to him in a sting operation. Three home-made porn videos and more than 50 photographs were found.
The case has highlighted the apparently rampant sexual exploitation of Congolese girls and women by the UN’s 11,000 peacekeepers and 1,000 civilians at a time when the UN is facing many problems, including the Iraqi “oil-for-food” scandal and accusations of sexual harassment by senior UN staff in Geneva and New York.

The prospect of the pornographic videos and photographs — now on sale in Congo — becoming public worries senior UN officials, who fear a UN version of the scandal at the American-run Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. “It would be a pretty big problem for the UN if these pictures come out,” one senior official said.

And then, once again, Charles' comment"

Notice: the photos and videos of this horrendous abuse are on sale in Congo, yet mainstream media doesn’t seem motivated enough to find them. Compare and contrast with the months-long feeding frenzy around the Abu Ghraib photos—in which children were not raped.

I am glad that Charles never tires of calling the media to account for their anti-American and anti-Semitic prejudices. Sometimes I read these articles and I just think, "Oh, why bother? Yeah, so the U.N. hired a bunch of sick people. Everybody makes mistakes."

But, you know the U.N. does have to be held accountable for their actions. And the fact that the media says little about U.N. atrocities, while going on for months on end about bad behavior on the part of U.S. soldiers does say a lot about which side the media is on in the current war.

Iranian TV Show Portrays Israeli President
As Being Kept Alive By Organs Harvested From Palestinians

From Rip n' Read:

A truly disgusting, almost unbelievably sick antisemitic blood libel from Iranian television, broadcast throughout the Arab world: Iranian TV Drama Series about Israeli Government Stealing Palestinian Childrens Eyes.

Iran's Sahar 1 TV station is currently airing a weekly series titled For You, Palestine, or Zahra's Blue Eyes. The series premiered on December 13, and is set in Israel and the West Bank. It broadcasts every Monday, and was filmed in Persian but subsequently dubbed into Arabic.

The story follows an Israeli candidate for Prime Minister, Yitzhak Cohen, who is also the military commander of the West Bank. The opening sequence of the show contains graphic scenes of surgery, and images of a Palestinian girl in a hospital whose eyes have been removed, with bandages covering the sockets.

In Episode 1, Yitzhak Cohen lectures at a medical conference on the advances being made by Israeli medicine regarding organ transplants. Later in the episode, Israelis disguised as UN workers visit a Palestinian school, ostensibly to examine the children's eyes for diseases, but in reality to select which children's eyes to steal to be used for transplants.

In Episode 2, the audience learns that the Israeli president is being kept alive by organs stolen from Palestinian children, and an Israeli military commander is seen kidnapping UN employees and Palestinians.

Sorry to hit you with something like this on Christmas Eve, but you know the world just goes on, doesn't it?

A Soldier Wishes Us A Merry Christmas

Kermit, a soldier of the United States Army, wishes us a Merry Christmas from Iraq. As you read this, just imagine that this was your life. We are blessed to have such men doing our work for us:

Hey everyone..... I'm not sure how much access I will have to the internet for a while after this, so I want to tell everyone Merry Christmas. Thank you all so much for the support you have given us over here.Of course I can't talk about anything up-coming because of OPSEC (operations security), but I can say that this may be my last post for a good while.... possibly the last one before we pack up to head home..... as long as a couple months. We have a lot of work to do, and it looks like I will be going to help the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit a bit.

That said.... just in case this is my last post, I want to thank everyone, and let you know that you have all been in my thoughts over there. Thanks to that whole news story thing that Channel 11 did, I have been in contact with people I haven't spoken to in years! It's been very neat. We have accomplished alot of things over here, though, I am afraid that it''s still far from being done over here.

The 1st Cavalry Division Band was playing in our chow hall the other day, or I should say some of the soldiers from the band were.... they had a wind quartet, and a brass quintet there playing Christmas music. I think CBS was there recording it. It was pretty cool.... made me wish I had stayed in the band when I was in school..... I would have loved to have been able to help everyones spirits here like that. Anyway, I need to go.

Pass my love on to everyone please. Luke and Brooke... I love and miss you so much. Daddy will be home as soon as possible. I promise.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

George Bush Works In Mysterious Ways
Somehow He Is Able To Use His Stupidity
To Make Miracles Happen

From a David Brooks article in the New York Times:

It was a series of unfortunate events.

How did we get to this sudden moment of cautious optimism in the Middle East? How did we get to this moment when Egypt is signing free trade agreements with Israel, when Hosni Mubarak is touring Arab nations and urging them to open relations with the Jewish state?

How did we get to this moment of democratic opportunity in the Palestinian territories, with three major elections taking place in the next several months, and with the leading candidate in the presidential election declaring that violence is counterproductive?

How did we get to this moment of odd unity in Israel, with Labor joining Likud to push a withdrawal from Gaza and some northern territories? How did we get to this moment when Ariel Sharon has record approval ratings, when it is common to run across Israelis who once reviled Sharon as a bully but who now find themselves supporting him as an agent of peace?

It was a series of unfortunate events.

It was unfortunate that Ariel Sharon, whom tout le monde demonized as a warmonger, was elected prime minister of Israel. After all, as Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations reasoned in The New York Review of Books, "The war Sharon is waging is not aimed at the defeat of Palestinian terrorism but at the defeat of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for national self-determination."

It was unfortunate that George W. Bush was elected and then re-elected as president of the United States. After all, here is a man who staffed his administration with what Juan Cole of the University of Michigan called "pro-Likud intellectuals" who went off "fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv." Under Bush, the diplomats agreed, the U.S. had inflamed the Arab world and had forfeited its role as an honest broker.

It was unfortunate that Bush gave that speech on June 24, 2002, dismissing Yasir Arafat as a man who would never make peace. After all, the Europeans protested, while Arafat might be flawed, he was the embodiment of the Palestinian cause.

It was a mistake to build the security fence, which the International Court of Justice called a violation of international law. Never mind that the fence cut terror attacks by 90 percent. It was the moral equivalent of apartheid, the U.N. orators declared.

It was a mistake to assassinate the leaders of Hamas, which took credit for the murders of hundreds of Israelis. France, among many other nations, condemned these attacks and foretold catastrophic consequences.

It was unfortunate that President Bush never sent a special envoy to open talks, discuss modalities and fine-tune the road map. As Milton Viorst wrote in The Washington Quarterly, this left "slim prospects" for any progress toward peace.

It was unfortunate that Bush sided openly with Sharon during their April meetings in Washington, causing the European Union to condemn U.S. policy. It was unfortunate that Bush kept pushing his democracy agenda. After all, as some Israelis said, it is naïve to export democracy to Arab soil.

Yes, these were a series of unfortunate events. And yet here we are in this hopeful moment. It almost makes you think that all those bemoaners and condemners don't know what they are talking about. Nothing they have said over the past three years accounts for what is happening now.

It almost makes you think that Bush understands the situation better than the lot of them. His judgments now look correct. Bush deduced that Sharon could grasp the demographic reality and lead Israel toward a two-state solution; that Arafat would never make peace, but was a retardant to peace; that Israel has a right to fight terrorism; and that Sharon would never feel safe enough to take risks unless the U.S. supported him when he fought back.

Bush concluded that peace would never come as long as Palestine was an undemocratic tyranny, and that the Palestinians needed to see their intifada would never bring triumph.

We are a long way from peace. But as Robert Satloff observes in The Weekly Standard, Israel's coming disengagements "will constitute a huge leap - both in psychology and in strategy - rivaling the original Oslo accords in historic importance." And the U.S. is already raising millions to help build a decent Palestinian polity.

We owe this cautiously hopeful moment to a series of unfortunate events - and to a president who disregarded the received wisdom.

My prediction is, George Bush is so dumb he will leave the left utterly speechless before this is all through.

The End Of Free Speech In Australia?

Robert Spencer, from Jihad Watch discusses the "religious incitement" conviction of two Australian Pastors for daring to question Islam:

Two Christian pastors in Australia have been found guilty of religious vilification of Muslims. The decision threatens us all.

One of the pastors, Daniel Scot, is Pakistani. He fled his native land seventeen years ago when he ran afoul of the notorious Section 295(c) of the Penal Code — which mandates death or life in prison for anyone who blasphemes “the sacred name of the holy Prophet Muhammad.” It’s a treacherously elastic statute that has been and is often used to snare Christians: cornered and made to state that they don’t believe Muhammad was a prophet, they then find themselves charged with blasphemy.

Scot went to Australia, only to run afoul of that nation’s new religious vilification laws. Last Friday, Judge Michael Higgins of The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found him guilty of vilifying Islam in a seminar hosted by his group, Catch the Fire Ministries. The judge noted that during the seminar, Scot stated that “the Quran promotes violence, killing and looting.” In light of Qur’anic passages such as 9:5, 2:191, 9:29, 47:4, 5:33 and many others, this cannot seriously be a matter of dispute. Muslims have pointed to verses in the Bible that they would have us believe are equivalent in violence and offensiveness, or have claimed that the great majority of Muslims don’t take such verses literally; but it takes a peculiarly strong resistance to reality not only to deny that such verses are there, but to charge one who pointed them out with religious vilification.

Yet Higgins wasn’t finished. He also scored Scot for contending that the Qur’an “treats women badly; they are to be treated like a field to plough, ‘use her as you wish,’” and that in it, “domestic violence in general is encouraged.’” He charged Scot with saying that the Qur’an directs that “a thief’s hand is cut off for stealing.” Yet the idea of the field and “use her as you wish” are from Sura 2:223 of the Qur’an. Husbands are told to beat their disobedient wives in 4:34. Amputation for theft is prescribed in 5:38. What Qur’an is Higgins reading?

There are some hints that the outcome of the case was virtually predetermined. When during the trial Scot began to read Qur’anic verses that discriminate against women, a lawyer for the Islamic Council of Victoria, the organization that brought the suit, stopped him: reading the verses aloud, she said, would in itself be religious vilification. Dismayed, Scot replied: “How can it be vilifying to Muslims in the room when I am just reading from the Qur’an?”

With religious vilification laws now coming to Britain and no doubt soon also elsewhere in the West, Scot’s question rings out with global implications, and must be answered. If it is inciting hatred for Muslims simply when non-Muslims explore what Islam and the Qur’an actually teach, then there will be a chill on reasonable public discussion of Islam — a public discussion that is crucial to hold in this age of global jihad terrorism. Such laws actually make Muslims a protected class, beyond criticism, precisely at the moment when the Western republics need to examine the implications of having admitted into their countries people with greater allegiance to Islamic law than to the pluralist societies in which they’ve settled.

To criticize is not to incite. The courageous ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq calls upon Muslims to “admit the role of the Qur’an in the propagation of violence.” If they do not do this, what end can there possibly be to the jihad terrorism that is inspired, according to the terrorists themselves, by the Qur’an? What will keep jihadists from continuing to use the Qur’an to recruit more terrorists, right under the noses of fatuous Westerners like Judge Higgins who would prefer to pretend that what they use in the book isn’t really in there?

When Judge Higgins signed the guilty verdict on Daniel Scot, he may have been signing the death warrant for free Australia — and maybe even the entire Western world.

I'll Have To Read Dorothy Sayers

Jaymarie, over at Pond Ripple discusses and compares C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. Here's a quote she provided from Sayers:

"The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense--that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal.

Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print--nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name. And particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark age, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading. Words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense, statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition, arguments founded in misapprehension are accepted without examination, expressions of individual preference are construed as oecumenical doctrine, disciplinary regulations founded on consent are confused with claims to interpret universal law, and vice versa; with the result that the logical and historical structure of Christian philosophy is transformed in the popular mind to a confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity."

True. True.

The Level Of The People We're Dealing With
Saudi Government Accuses U.S. Military Of
Harvesting The Organs Of Dead Iraqi's

From Memri.org:

In the Saudi government daily Al-Watan, an article from Brussels written by Fakhriya Ahmad charges that, based on alleged secret European military reports, the U.S. military in Iraq is harvesting and selling human organs. The following day, the story was also published in the Iranian daily Jomhouri-ye Islami,(1) as well as the Syrian daily Teshreen.(2) The following are excerpts from the article:(3)

"Secret European military intelligence reports indicate the transformation of the American humanitarian mission in Iraq into a profitable trade in the American markets through the practice of American physicians extracting human organs from the dead and wounded, before they are put to death, for sale to medical centers in America. A secret team of American physicians follow the troops during their attacks on Iraqi armed men to ensure quick [medical] operations for extracting some organs and transferring them to private operations rooms before they are transferred to America for sale. "

The reports confirm the finding of tens of mutilated cadavers or cadavers missing parts. Some were found without a head. The American military command could not offer reasons to explain the bewilderment about the missing parts, suggesting that this may have been caused by the penetration of bullets to the [missing] parts. But these excuses cannot be medically accepted.

The reports also confirmed that the burning of bodies was deliberate in order to conceal the crime of organ extraction. [The reports] further indicate that American medical teams have [made] active and suspicious moves in Iraq to recruit some Iraqis to guide them to dead and critically injured individuals to engage in the extraction of organs. These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye. The reports confirm the finding of mutilated bodies in Fallujah. The reports indicate that the cadavers are immunized inside special cars to prevent the spread of the plague until the bodies are buried by their relatives. "

The reports have indicated that a number of those killed in 'Abu Ghraib' and other prisons were subjected to operations for extracting their organs. Following their mutilations, the bodies were discarded far from the prisons to conceal the facts. The reports revealed that that the American forces restricted the media by force to prevent them from getting near the scenes and recording the events. But the relatives of the Iraqis are aware of these facts.

The reports have [also] indicated that the military forces of the European allies have noticed the absence of organs from the cadavers that were dealt with by the Americans and have reported to their high command, which instructed them to maintain silence and to avoid the discussion of the subject due to its gravity, while the military and intelligence high command have written secret reports about was observed by their forces and sent them to the European ministries of defense for their information."

Do you think, maybe, the Euro's really did tell the Saudi's we're doing this?

You know what? Maybe all the "Progressives" and "Liberals" who keep saying this war isn't worth it (that the Arabs and Muslims don't want to be free), maybe, all those people are right.

Maybe we should just pack it up and bring the troops home.

Or, maybe, we should just kill everybody who is stupid enough to pass this story around as if it were credible. Including this guy.

How's that for a Christian idea on the eve of Christmas Eve?

P.S. They did get one thing right in that story. We Americans are so brilliant that we have actually already learned how to do "Human Brain Transplants." That's why we cut their heads off; to harvest the brains of the intelligent Islamofascists.

Mary, Mother Of God

From Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost:

Earlier this year, The Passion of the Christ sparked a great deal of controversy, shocking even believers with its realistic scenes of torture. But one of the most stunning scenes of the movie was one of the least violent. As Jesus stumbles and falls while carrying the cross, an inconsolable Mary watches and reflects on a similar memory from his childhood.

Being a parent myself I empathized with her sense of helplessness and discovered that I had never really thought of her in this way. I was struck by the realization that Jesus wasn’t just the son of God; he was Mary’s son too.

I also realized that I suffer from a mild case of Maryphobia – the fear that any appreciation of Mary will be viewed as a sign that I'm a closet Catholic. Like many evangelicals, my renunciation of Marian theology causes me to downplay the importance of Mary herself. Oddly, while we are quick to defend the virgin birth, we are often hesitant to praise the virgin mother. Even during Christmas we often pay more attention to the magi than we do to the woman who gave birth to our Savior.

How is this possible? Consider for a moment what it must have been like for this Jewish virgin. At home in Nazareth, planning her wedding to a stout young carpenter, dreaming of the children they will have and the home they will make and then…the angel Gabriel appears in order to tell her she's been chosen to give birth to the Son of God.

And everything changes.

She dreams about the honor it will be to bring this child into the world…and then gives birth to him in a stable, surrounded by mules and visited by smelly shepherds.
She waits patiently for the day that he will change the world…and watches as he suffers and dies, hanging on a cross in Golgotha.

She thinks back to the visit by the angel and wonders how everything could go so wrong…and then he comes back, alive and unbroken.

She thanks God for her son’s return…and watches as He goes home to be with His Father.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” said Mary, “for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.”

Indeed we should. As Gabriel told her, she had found favor with God. She should find favor with us evangelicals as well.

In his article, Joe Carter also says that we should be in "awe" of Mary for having carried God in her womb. I don't know about that. We should admire her for the tenacity of her faith. But, I believe we should save our awe for God Himself.

Progressivism Has Made Us Blind

From Front Page Magazine:

If one were to rely on the mainstream Western media, one would assume that the situation in Iraq represents nothing more than a disaster and a horrible error by the United States. This media spin, which is more pronounced and strident than any in recent memory, is based on two critical flaws in the way Western media work.

The first is the most obvious and is known to millions: the bias of Western reporters, and nearly all the experts and other sources on which they depend, against the Bush administration's policy of democratization in the Middle East. For such commentators, the failure of the Bush intervention in Iraq was a foregone conclusion. In many cases, including those of Arabist and ethnic Arab academic experts, opposition to democratization is based on breathtakingly prejudicial stereotypes.

Few American intellectuals would ever, in the 1950s, have predicted that the time would come when the very concept of "democracy" would be the object of so much polemical contempt in the democracies themselves. And fewer still would have predicted that Arab adherents, as so many now do, would one day reject altogether the appropriateness of democracy in their countries. When Arab academic and media figures declare that their people are unprepared for democracy, and cannot go beyond limited and culture-bound reforms, one wonders if they realize how arrogant and cruel they sound. In the past, we all seemed to agree that democracy was a universal and benevolent value, for which all peoples, at least outside the palaces, strove.

The second serious defect in the methodology of Western media, when dealing with Iraq, is their lack of knowledge about Islam. Reporters seem to continue to base their dispatches on off-the-street quotes and Iraqi official handouts. Much more homework needs to be done, especially considering that American lives have been sacrificed for the future of Iraq. Western reporters seldom study Islam or seek out authoritative representatives of the Islamic leaderships; and when, almost as if by accident, they encounter such figures, they seem never to know what questions to ask them.

Terrorism continues in Iraq and monopolizes headlines. But there is much more to be said about the situation in that country, and it has to do with much more than the restoration of public services and infrastructure. Perhaps the biggest story left unreported in the West is the extraordinary exuberance about the Iraqi election, set for January 30, among Iraqi Shias.

I know about this because I spend a great deal of time talking to Iraqi Shia religious leaders, some of whom commute back and forth between Iraq and the U.S. The effervescence among them must be experienced to be believed. One prominent Shia in the U.S. told me, "I call the president Imam Bush." (In Shia Islam, the imams are the chief religious guides throughout the history of the sect.) "He is a believer in God, he is just, and I believe he will keep his promise to hold a fair election on January 30," my interlocutor said. "He liberated Kerbala and Najaf [the Shia holy cities]. He has done more for Shias than anybody else in history."

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The Geneva Convention As Part Of
The War Strategy Of Islamofascists

Wretchard, at the Belmont Club, on a terrorist attack against medical caregivers outside of a hospital in Mosul:

... it is safe to say that the attack demonstrates assymetrical warfare in action. The enemy chose the weakest point he could find to attack; exploited the known limitations of the American response; and understood that he was to all intents and purposes exempted from the condemnation attendant to attacking the wounded and medical personnel.

The chaplain and the medical personnel knew this and did not mill around expecting the Geneva Convention to protect them from those who have never heard of it, except as it applies to their own convenience. They knew the true face of the enemy; a face which bore no resemblance to the heroic countenance often presented by the media to the world.

Losing It
And Admitting It
To Gain The Kingdom Of Life, And Of Heaven

The Anchoress has written another on of her beautiful meditations, which put life into perspective. I excerpt it here, but if you start in on it, and appreciate it, I suggest you click and read the whole thing at her transcendant site:

... as sometimes happens in life, everything came to a head yesterday afternoon. After a so-so day at work, during which I made arrangements with my pediatrician to get a second cardiologist opinion on a situation with Buster (my brother is not long for this world, and my 15 year old is routinely clutching at his chest and turning purple - can we say stress overload?) I took a look at my schedule for the day. It included many errand-y, Christmas-themed type things, ending with the hour's drive to see my brother at hospice, later in the evening.

At a red light, I suddenly thought: oh...supper...what am I going to make for supper...and the thing that once in a while happens to every busy woman happened to me. At the thought of having to figure out a supper menu, my entire interior software collapsed. In my head I heard the sort of beeping siren you hear in cheap sci-fi movies about this or that doomsday scenario. Files corrupted! 404 FILE NOT FOUND!!! Three minutes to critical mass! Eject, Eject, Eject!

I sat at the three minute red light, paralyzed, helpless ...

I put in a call to the husband and was lucky enough to actually reach him at his desk. Babbled. Hyperventilation and gasping words ...S!!...Buster!!...don't know what to make for supper...and I gotta go to the POST OFFICE! Whaaaaaaaa!

"Order Chinese food," he cooed. "Don't worry about it. Get Pudgy's. I love Pudgy's!"This only made me feel worse. The man was raised without fast food...now he actually has fast food he loves! He can give you comparisons on different fast food establishments! I feel a detestible failure. I serve my family food other people prepare. Often.

I am loathesome. My dog shuns me.

Loaded down with self-recrimination, and ignoring my to-do list, I realized Buster would soon be getting out of Jazz Band, and decided to scoot over and give him a ride home. Actually, what was going through my head was: I need to see Buster! I had to see my kid!

Is this something parents do? Suddenly find they need to see one or both of their children, simply to get ahold of themselves? It seemed odd to me, but there it was. I need to see Buster!

Buster walked out of school and beamed when he saw the ride, because it was awfully cold out, to walk. He loaded the horn into the car, got in said, "hiya, Ma, what's going on?"

Bad question. Ma immediately dissolved into another bath of tears, much of it involving my frustrations with the pediatrician, my fears for his health, and of course, my brother's deterioration. "I want to see him tonight, but I'm just so tired...and I'm really sorry to be falling apart like this, in front of you!"

Buster handled it well, though. He handles everything well. He patted my hand and offered to keep me company while I drove around on my errands.

It was all I needed.

I drove around from stop to stop, to post office, to Penneys - to this store, to that - and Buster (who remained in the car between stops, reading Stephen King's The Stand and listening to his eclectic music collection) simply, cheerfully kept me company.

I thought it was one of the most generous things anyone had ever done for me. My sons are intuitive, kind and compassionate people, bless them. Buster was willing to walk a mile with me. He was willing to enter into a little of the mess my life had become - however temporarily - and that willingness made all the difference.

It's what we're called to, not merely as Christians, but as human beings. To be willing to ENTER INTO the pain, or the fear, or the tumult and whirlwind of another person's life and say, "ssssshhhh, it's alright, I'll keep you company for a little while."

It is humanity at its finest.

And while it is, as I say, neither the exclusive calling or the exclusive virtue of the Christian (in fact in too many Christians it is all-to-lacking), I cannot help - in these final days of Advent - to think about what God did, in a lonely cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem, when He condescended to enter into the pain and fear, the tumult and whirlwind of the world...when he "set his tent among us," not merely "dwelling" among us as lofty king, but literally "with" us, with hunger, the capacity for injury and doubt...

God entered in, not with a cacophany of noise and a display of raw power, but as the humblest and most dependent of creatures: a baby, lying in a manger, a place for the feeding of animals. He, who became Food for the World, entered with silence, as though he had put his finger to the quivering mouth of a troubled, sobbing world and said..."ssshhhh...it is alright, I'll keep you company..."

It will be alright.

The Palestinian Terror Organizations
Are The Palestinian Army
An Answer To "Behind The Scenes"

I posted the results of a poll, from Maariv International, the other day, which stated that over 70% of Palestinian's oppose the dismantlement of the terror organizations in their midst. I titled the post "Seventy Percent Of Palestinians Want The Terror Campaign To Continue."

A very thoughtful regular commenter here at CUANAS, named "Behind the Scenes" posted this comment, challenging me on my logic:

"Seventy Percent Of Palestinians "/"70% object, at this stage, to the dismantlement of terror groups." It's not very clear.

Do these %70 object to the dismantlement or do they object to ceasing terrorist activities? What question were they given?

If %30 are interested in dismantling the terrorist organisations then it implies these organisations have lost a great deal of support! For example, many countries have no interest in sending their armies to war but still don't wish to dimantle the army.

Here's my answer to Mr. the Scenes:

Dear Behind the Scenes, :)
Your point is well taken. And I hate to sound like a know it all, but I did think of that before.

But, since you pointed it out, I feel that if I don't answer, then I'm doing myself a disservice, so I'm going to tell you the strategy I am using.

Here's the thing, if the terrorist groups are the Palestinian version of an army, then that means the Palestinian people are waging a WAR against Israel, not a "struggle."

If they are not an army then they must be dismantled because they are criminals engaging in criminal activity.

Maybe the mistake we make, as a world, is that we call for the "dismantling" of the terror groups, when we should call for their "destruction through the rule of law."

And, the truth is, if it is to be done by "rule of law," then it is incumbent upon the Palestinian's themselves to apply the law. It is not incumbent upon Israel to "dismantle" the terror groups. Because how is Israel supposed to do it?

As the terror groups treat any movement of Israeli forces into PA territory as a battle, and as the media implies that movements are a battle, by calling it an "incursion", then, the only choice Israel has is to treat the resultant attacks as a battle, which they invariably do.

But, then the media, and the world, do something fundamentally unfair. They castigate Israel for treating the "incursion" as a battle, and they pretend that the terror groups don't represent the will of the Palestinian people. In other words, it wasn't a battle.

Is that right? Come on. Let's get real.

This is why, ultimately, I support the terror fence, and the unilateral disengagement of Israel. Such a move by Israel will have two benefits:

1) It effectively gives the Palestinians a state. It may not be exactly the state they want, but certainly they can negotiate from there. But negotiating will have to be done by talking, not with guns and bombs. Because that's how negotiating is done. Right?

2) By establising a real border, it will make it apparent, that, as is true anywhere in the world, any attack by one side against the other across the border is an act of War.

In other words, it will put an end to the excuses that the Palestinians give that they can't control the terror groups. And, it will put an end to the excuses the world gives the Palestinians.

I hope you will read this and answer, because I would love to have further refinement of the idea, if there is any flaw in my reasoning.

Thank you,
S. Memes/Pastorius

Dallas Morning News Says
Khomeini Tribute Was A Disgrace

From the Dallas Morning News, via LGF:

Most Americans remember the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of the great villains of the 20th century, who bequeathed his patrimony of fanaticism and hatred to the 21st.

Khomeini led the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the corrupt shah and replaced the government with a brutal Islamic theocracy that today is locked in battle with reformers seeking to end a quarter century of repression. Khomeini preached worldwide violent Islamic revolution, thundering that “those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world.”

“Why do you only read the Quranic verses of mercy and do not read the verses of killing?” Khomeini challenged fellow clerics in a 1981 speech. “Qu’ran says: kill, imprison! Why are you only clinging to the part that talks about mercy? Mercy is against God.” The tyrant also exhorted his followers to “kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all.”

That’s some vision. Yet a Muslim group based in Irving hosted a seminar earlier this month paying “tribute to the great Islamic visionary.” It’s chilling to think that any local Muslim would be willing to honor such a man, especially with the United States under the threat of attack by Islamic terrorists.

Dismayingly, the list of speakers at the Irving event included some of North Texas’ best-known mainstream Islamic figures, including Dr. Yusuf Kavakci of Dallas Central Mosque, widely considered a moderate. He and other leaders shared the roster with Mohammed Asi, a radical Washington imam whom, according to The Washington Post, U.S. officials suspect to be an Iranian agent.

Dr. Kavakci declined two invitations to tell us why he attended the conference. We tried to obtain a tape of the conference, but we’re told none is available. Another attendee, Mohamed Elibiary, president and CEO of the Plano-based Freedom and Justice Foundation, shares his reasons for attending on the opposite page. Still, we are hard-pressed to understand what good could possibly come from attending — let alone hosting — such a forum.

Event organizer Imam Shamshad Haider told us that Khomeini has been unjustly portrayed in the Western media. He complained in a television interview last week that Khomeini had been unfairly judged on only one aspect of his personality.

Imam Haider insists that the theme of the conference was Muslim unity. Other area Muslim leaders who spoke at the event support this contention, saying they agreed to speak to foster cohesion between Sunni and Shia Muslims, not necessarily to endorse Khomeini.

That may be true on one level. But no amount of good Khomeini might have done can possibly balance his blood-soaked legacy. Unity is a poor excuse for legitimizing the views of Khomeini admirers by appearing at this event ...

If Muslim leaders want to be perceived by the broader community as men of good will and moderation, they need to make clear what they consider radical and extreme and treat it accordingly.

As former FBI counterterrorism chief and Rowlett resident Oliver “Buck” Revell tells us, “If we continue to be deaf, dumb and blind to what’s plainly in front of us, we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Q: Why Do We Fight?
A: To Win

"Nice" people (people who want things to be "nice") often have a hard time remembering why we fight the War on Islamofascism. They can't remember because they are so focused on things being "nice" that they forget that the Islamofascist terrorists aim is to kill as many of us as they possible can. Here's evidence, from the London Times:

NEW evidence of Osama Bin Laden’s attempts to acquire radioactive material for a “dirty bomb” has been revealed by an aide to the Al-Qaeda leader.

In a book to be published shortly, the insider shows that Bin Laden bowed to pressure from hawks within the terror group’s leadership to buy the material through supporters in Chechnya. He had initially been cautious about such a dramatic increase in its armoury. It is the first time that such a senior Al-Qaeda figure has revealed the internal tensions and debates within the group, and shows it was far less unified than had been thought.

During the American bombardment of Tora Bora in Afghanistan where the leadership had fled in 2001, the book says, Al-Qaeda was hopelessly split and faith in Bin Laden declined. Bin Laden had also fallen out with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.

Excerpts from the book appeared last week in a London-based Arabic newspaper and are believed to have been written by Abu Walid al-Misri, an Egyptian who spent years in Afghanistan where his son was killed fighting the Russians.

Misri, who was with Bin Laden in Tora Bora, is thought to be one of Al-Qaeda’s leading theorists. When they fled Afghanistan, his book records, the organisation had been devastated by the death of Mohammed Atef, its military commander, killed by American bombing near Kandahar....

Misri also criticises the growth in Al-Qaeda training camps, saying many of them were compromised by spies and that they lacked discipline. “The last months in the life of Al-Qaeda (in Afghanistan) were a tragic example of an Islamic movement being run in a terrible way,” he says.

So, they want to use a dirty bomb on us. Is it really reasonable to doubt they would use a nuclear weapon if they could?

No, it's not reasonable. So, we fight. And, ultimately, why do we fight? To win. Here's evidence that we are winning:

An interesting theory from Peter Brookes in the New York Post (thanks to Nicolei):

December 20, 2004 -- WHATEVER you do, don't dismiss Osama bin Laden's newest audio message. Sure, it's just the latest of 17 cameos by the terrorist thug since 9/11. But it may be his scariest yet.

Why? Because Osama's latest appearance shows he's changing tactics, and he's onto something that just might work this time.

Everyone — most of all Osama — knows that his al Qaeda movement is losing steam. Today, major al Qaeda terrorism is confined to Iraq, where Abu Musab al Zarqawi, not bin Laden, holds center stage.

Cowering in a cold, dank cave for the last three years is causing Osama's stock to fall precipitously among the terrorist faithful. His campaign of global death, destruction and despair isn't leading al Qaeda to world domination as he had promised.

In fact, by terrorizing Muslims and Muslim governments, he's actually signing al Qaeda's death warrant. Realizing that he's no longer the king of the terrorist universe, Osama has embarked on a new campaign — a terrorist makeover of sorts.

Now, instead of calling exclusively for the violent overthrow of governments on historically Muslim lands, he's downsized his global ambitions to a chunk of Middle Eastern sand — and tempered his message. Masquerading as a terrorist statesman of sorts, he's pushing for a peaceful revolution (yes, peaceful change) in Saudi Arabia as a parallel path to a violent overthrow.

Osama has decided that world Muslim domination just isn't in the cards for al Qaeda at the moment. But getting a fundamentalist foothold in the holiest Islamic land (anyway he can) just might be the key to overthrowing neighboring Muslim governments.

Think of it as al Qaeda's domino theory. First, Saudi Arabia falls, then Yemen, Oman, the Gulf States and so on.

So why should we be alarmed by this? Because Osama's new strategy, announced on the same day as planned anti-regime protests in Saudi Arabia, smacks of the plot that successfully brought down the Shah of Iran 25 years ago at the hands of Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Exiled for opposing the Shah's reforms in 1963, Khomeini settled in the southern Iraqi Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, where he called for religious rule in Iran.

Under pressure from the Shah, Saddam Hussein expelled Khomeini in '78. Moving to Paris, he called for the Shah's overthrow, communicating through radio broadcasts, written statements and taped sermons that were smuggled into Iran.

Unhappiness with the Shah's repressive policies and Khomeini's mythical stature (supported by local clerics) instigated widespread riots in Iran in late 1978. Reading the handwriting on the wall, the Shah left the country in January 1979 on a "vacation" and never returned.

Without firing a single shot, Khomeini, now a veritable Muslim rock star, returned to Iran, establishing the first Islamic fundamentalist state. The aftermath of Khomeini's "peaceful revolution" was anything but peaceful.

Twenty-five years later, revolutionary Iran stands as:

a) the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism;

b) a highly repressive regime, and

c) a near nuclear weapons state.

Could this happen in Saudi Arabia? Sure.

So, there are two messages there; first, that we are winning, so far. Second, that we could lose if, say, Paris decided to give the "new peaceful Bin Laden" exile. I don't think we're going to let that happen, do you?

A Return To Medieval Times In Australia

There has been a law proposed in Britain against "religious incitement." This legislation is primarily supported by British Muslims who want to ban "defamation of the character of the prophet Mohammed." I have posted about it here.

Now, Melanie Phillips writes about what has happened in Australia where such a law already has been passed, and is being applied:

Anyone in Britain who wants to know what is likely to happen as a result of the proposed law against incitement to religious hatred should look at the first verdict handed down in Australia last week under a very similar law. Two Christian pastors from the Catch the Fires ministry, Daniel Scot and Danny Nalliah, were found to have committed religious vilification against Islam. Their crime? Quoting the Koran in a way that got "a response from the audience at various times in the form of laughter".

The judge, Michael Higgins, said they had 'made fun of Muslim beliefs and conduct'. Ridicule in Australia is thus now a crime. And as Andrew Bolt observes in the Herald Sun, the pastors have been convicted essentially for telling the truth:

'The judge gave 13 examples, starting like this:

"Pastor Scot, during the course of the seminar, made statements --

"(1) that the (Koran) promotes violence, killing and looting

"(2) that it treats women badly ...

"(5) that Allah is not merciful and a thief's hand is cut off for stealing ...

"(12) Muslim people have to fight Christians and Jews, humiliate them and fight them until they accept true religion (sic)..."

'Indeed, at least eight of the accusations arose from Scot quoting the Koran at the seminar, and -- it seems to me -- for the most part accurately. The Koran indeed tells Muslims to "kill disbelievers where you find them" in defending Islam, to "fight those who believe not in God ... until they pay the jizya (a penalty tax for non-Muslims)", and to share loot after a war. It also instructs men how to punish "ill-conduct" in their wives -- "admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds (and last) beat them (lightly)".

Thieves must indeed have hands lopped off, and so on. So what did Scot, in those 13 examples the judge gave, say that was actually false? Higgins in his summary does not say -- other than that he used wrong immigration statistics and failed to cite a verse of the Koran that claimed Allah was indeed merciful. But he ruled that in quoting the Koran Scot "failed to differentiate between Muslims throughout the world, (and) that he preached a literal translation of the Koran and of Muslims' religious practices which was not mainstream ..." '

Bolt points out that when the law was introduced, the government gave assurances that it would only be used against 'the most noxious forms of conduct", and would 'promote racial and religious tolerance'. Yet now two pastors have been convicted for, at worst, poking fun at the Koran -- while, Bolt charges:

'the Islamic Council... voted to install as Australia's Mufti Sheik Taj El-din El-Hilali, who has praised suicide bombers as "heroes", accused Jews of using "sex and abominable acts of buggery, espionage, treason and economic hoarding to control the world" and called September 11 "God's work against oppressors" -- as well as "the work of 100 per cent American gangs". '
In Australia, this law has already incited inter-religious strife and community tension, criminalised truth-telling and restricted legitimate speech. Far from producing greater tolerance, it has attacked a cardinal tenet of a tolerant and just society. The Australian experience should be a chilling warning.

The effect of this law is to destroy freedom of speech on the subject of religion. As Melanie notes, what the Pastor said was all true.

Ultimately, how will judges know whether a particular sermon, or article, or speech is "incitment"? If you think about it, the answer is that Judge's will take under advisement the words of religious authorities on the subject. This means that, for the first time since Medieval times, the West will be subjecting the will of the state to the will of the religious authorities.

It is a rather subtle subjugation at the moment. But clearly, this is headed in the wrong direction.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Joel Beinin and The Insane Roots Of Anti-Americanism

From Alyssa Lappen at Front Page Magazine:

If one individual can showcase all the flaws of Middle East Studies in academia, Joel Beinin is that man. A former president of the Middle East Studies Association, Beinin teaches Middle East history at Stanford University. This professor’s politics color his work.

Beinin’s specializes in Egyptian history. Here, too, his work bears an anti-Zionist tone and frequent contradicts the facts of history. In opposition to “the Zionist project,”[25] he instead favors “Levantinism,” an Israel-replacement ideology that calls for revitalizing the “fruitful compromise” of cultures he believes existed in the past.[26] Scholars and Jewish refugees from Muslim lands both maintain that such idyllic harmony never existed,[27] but Beinin romanticizes and politicizes their history.[28] He also dismisses bona fide work on Arab and Muslim attitudes toward Jews by such writers as Yehoshafat Harkabi and Bat Ye’or, calling this perspective a “neo-lachrymose interpretation”[29] that inexcusably has “distracted attention from Palestinian claims.”[30]

It appears that Beinin delves into history only to support his own preconceived theories. He ignores facts that contradict his ideas, sweeping certain events aside as if they never occurred. In his 1998 book on the fate of the Egyptian Jewish community, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, Beinin ignores the 1730s riots that destroyed Cairo’s Jewish quarter, killing 5,000 to 10,000, at least half its population.[31] He makes no mention of the 1901 blood libel leveled at a Cairo Jewish woman.[32] He condescendingly informs a former Jewish resident that the harat al-yahud was “not a ghetto,”[33] when in fact it was. He minimizes Egypt’s 1929 Nationality Law,[34] which blocked citizenship for Jews and many Christians, making some 40,000 Jews apatrides—stateless.[35] He downplays the 1947 Company Law that made it nearly impossible for minorities to work in Egypt.[36] He insultingly twists Egypt’s Jews into “Arabized” nationalists who would have been happier without Israel’s existence.[37]

Beinin even neglects Egypt’s state-sponsored publication of hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an edition of which was issued by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brother Shawki.[38] He denies the inherently anti-Semitic nature of arrests of Egyptian Jews during the 1940s and 1950s on trumped-up charges.[39] He asserts that Nazi officials in Egypt’s government[40] cannot be traced – and anyway, that they had no political influence – ignoring a well-documented record of Nazis having moved to Nasser’s Egypt and their significant impact there.[41]

In 1956 and during 1967-70, Jewish males over 19 were imprisoned in the Abu Za’bal and Tura camps.[42] They were tortured, forced to walk barefoot on broken glass and recite “I am a coward Jew. I am a Jewish donkey.”[43] Beinin makes no mention of these camps.

At AllLearn, a joint online venture of Oxford, Stanford and Yale universities,[49] Beinin teaches a course on “Palestine, Zionism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” and his lessons are fraught with conspiracy theories.[50] The “Zionist lobby” in Washington, he informs students, has the power to induce Washington to adopt an “uncritically pro-Israel foreign policy.”[51] For “serious” reading, he recommends Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram,[52] a newspaper that routinely features anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial, likens Israeli leaders to Nazis,[53] and praises suicide bombings.[54] Al-Ahram’s editor Ibrahim Nafie was actually sued in France for a piece claiming that Jewish rituals require the use of Christian children’s blood.[55] Jonathan Leffell, a student of Beinin’s online class, informed AllLearn that the course was a “miserable hate fest.”[56]

So, we can see, then, that Joel Beinin is perfectly willing to put up with vicious anti-Semitism. This makes him an anti-Semite himself. A reasonable person would be apalled and revolted, for instance, by a newspaper which spreads the lie that Jews use Christian children's blood to bake Passover Matzoh. How does such content get in the paper if it is not deemed credible by it's editors? But, that doesn't matter to Joel Beinen because he doesn't like Jews either. A man with such tolerance for anti-Semitism is sick, and his ideas should be considered insane.

So, what does a sick man like Joel Beinin this think about Israel?

Beinin’s antagonism toward Israel pervades his commentary concerning the Jewish state. He maintains that exodus of Jews from Arab lands after 1948 resulted not from their forced expulsion by Arab governments but from “provocative actions by Israeli agents.”[15] Despite the fact that Israel offered Jews a haven from mass murder in Europe, and atrocities and mass expulsion from Muslim lands,[16] Beinin holds that “Modern Zionism is a revolution against traditional Judaism, not its fulfillment.”[17] (He shares this view, ironically, with a tiny minority of anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews.)

The violence of the first intifada (1988-92) was, in Beinin’s view, actually a “strike for peace.” With Hamas-like rhetoric, he has praised “the first martyr of the uprising,” and excused the “small number of violent incidents” against Israelis[18] (overlooking that they led to 160 murders).[19]

After September 11, 2001, Beinin ignored Osama bin Laden’s explicit calls for jihad; instead, he pointed to “Israel’s disproportionate use of force” against Palestinians.[20] This ignores the obvious fact that Al-Qaeda opposes Israel’s very existence, rendering irrelevant the level of force it deploys.

In spite of overwhelming evidence, Beinin refuses to acknowledge the threat that Islamic terrorism poses to civilians. In March 2002, a Hamas terrorist entered a hotel in Netanya, Israel, and killed 30 civilians, including children, as they celebrated the Passover holiday.[21] The following day, Beinin addressed an anti-Israel demonstration and did not even mention this atrocity.[22] Instead, he insouciantly denied that Palestinian terrorism “posed an existential threat to Israel.”[23]

As for American involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, despite staggering diplomatic efforts and vast sums of money given to the Palestinian Authority, Beinin can see only a “consistent [U.S.] denial of independence and self-determination” for the Palestinians.[24]

Beinin’s specializes in Egyptian history. Here, too, his work bears an anti-Zionist tone and frequent contradicts the facts of history. In opposition to “the Zionist project,”[25] he instead favors “Levantinism,” an Israel-replacement ideology that calls for revitalizing the “fruitful compromise” of cultures he believes existed in the past.[26] Scholars and Jewish refugees from Muslim lands both maintain that such idyllic harmony never existed,[27] but Beinin romanticizes and politicizes their history.[28] He also dismisses bona fide work on Arab and Muslim attitudes toward Jews by such writers as Yehoshafat Harkabi and Bat Ye’or, calling this perspective a “neo-lachrymose interpretation”[29] that inexcusably has “distracted attention from Palestinian claims.”[30]

And what does a sick man like Joel Beinin think of America, and the War On Terrorism?

Beinin blames the United States for major problems facing the Middle East, and he attributes U.S. actions to aggression and ill will. Just a few examples of his most outrageous actions include:

Before the 2003 Iraq war, Beinin appeared on Al-Jazeera to condemn U.S. “imperial” policy in the Arab world. President Bush, he informed his Middle Eastern audience, planned to establish “a puppet regime” in Baghdad to benefit U.S. oil interests and force what he called “Israeli dictates” on the Palestinians.[9]

After the war began, Beinin accused Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other U.S. policymakers of collusion with “Israel’s Likud Party”[10] and asserted that the U.S. and Israel had collaborated with Arab regimes to block “democracy and economic development in the Arab world.”[11] Beinin insisted that the U.S. was bent on showing “the overwhelming military power of the US…to make and unmake regimes and guarantee access to oil.”[12] American conservatives, in his opinion, wanted to ensure that “Islamist forces would forsake legal political action and engage in armed struggle.”[13]

Beinin rejects critical thought regarding terror, and with it any opportunity to sensibly evaluate the current U.S. war. He mocks this effort as “terrorology.” A year after 9/11, he actually congratulated fellow MESA academics for their “great wisdom” in refusing to examine terrorism, much less address what nearly all agree is the gravest national security threat to the United States.[14]

I believe there is a great moral sickness in the world today. This sickness is evidenced by the fact that the Peace/Pacifist/Anti-War movement has been hijacked by men like Joel Beinin. There are many people involved in the Peace movement who are legitimately Pacifists themselves. Pacifists are people who truly do not believe in War. But a man like Joel Beinin is not a Pacifist, because he accepts all manner of hatred leveled at Jews. And he is perfectly willing to accept the Palestinian terror campaign against the Jews, which is, itself, a war. A true Pacifist would work to delegitimize, and ostracize, the Islamofascist movement which openly calls for the killing of Jews.

Men like Joel Beinin seem more to dislike what they call "Western Power" or "Western Hegomony." They seem to dislike Western Civilization, itself. But, ultimately, what do the people of the world have to fear from the West? Western Civilization ain't a bad thing, is it? Women are allowed to educate themselves (indeed in America 56% of college degrees are awarded to women), our science and medicine has prolonged the life span, our culture has produced great works of literature, music, and art. The whole world gradually comes to benefit from these initiatives.

And for the last sixty years Western Civilization has been intent on learning how to integrate the many cultures of the world into it's own culture. This is a huge undertaking. Never before in the history of this planet have so many people's lived together, so peacefully, as they do in America and Europe. And yet, Western Civilization is stridently castigated, by those who preach tolerance, for it's lack of tolerance.

Considering how illegitimate, racist, and insane his positions are with regards to Jews, I would say Mr. Beinin does not deserve to be listened to by a decent society. And yet, if you really look, it is almost without fail that it is people, with just such ideas (think Noam Chomsky, for instance), that produce the critiques of "American Hegemony" and "Imperialism" which go so far to attempt to deligitimize every American undertaking.

The truth is, America's undertakings have proven profoundly helpful in most cases. Nazi Germany is gone. South Koreans are free. The Soviet Union is gone. Milosevic is out of power in Bosnia. Afghani's have established the first democracy in their region ever. All of these things have happened largely because America stepped up to the plate. And, in each instance, if you read history, America was loudly criticized for it's actions.

And, it seems, that whenever the world really gets into trouble, men like Joel Beinin crawl out of the woodwork, and attempt to explain to us how the "Jews" control the powers of the world. Yes, it can all be explained by the Jewish influence in the White House, the media, the intelligentsia, etc. Yes, the "Neocons" are behind America's dubious behavior.

We as a civilization will destroy ourselves if we allow this kind of hatred to fester within us. Joel Beinin is another person who needs to be delegitimized and ostracized. He certainly should not be teaching at Stanford University.

Go read the whole of Alyssa Lappen's article. It is heavily footnoted.

Monday, December 20, 2004

Justice And Chivalry in Iran
Executing a Mentally Retarded
Teenage Girl For "Crimes Against Chastity"

From Eursoc:

Iran's supreme court is considering whether or not to execute a teenage girl with a mental age of nine for prostitution.

The girl, known as Leyla M, is being held in prison while the court decides whether she is guilty of "crimes contrary to chastity:" One of the most serious offenses on Iran's admittedly insane rulebook. Leyla was convicted and sentenced to death in November by a lower court in her city of Arak.

Under Iran's laws, girls as young as nine can be executed; for boys, the legal age is fifteen. In Leyla's case, the court ordered that she be flogged before she is executed. She received 100 lashes aged 14 when she was convicted of falling pregnant.

The prisoner claims to have been forced into prostitution by her mother as an eight year old. She was, she says, repeatedly raped and bore a child at nine. Iran's press reports counter that she ran a brothel, had sex with relatives and had an illegitimate child.

Some defenders of Iran's theocracy claim that these trials rarely result in executions, and that under Iran's version of Islamic law, condemned prisoners can save their skins by pleading "repentance" three times.

However, as the Independent reports, this did not save 17 year old Atefeh Rajabi, who was still crying "repentance" as judge Hajj Rezai pulled the noose over her head and sent her to the gallows in August this year.

According to Amnesty, three child offenders have been executed in Iran this year. This figure does not include a 14 year old boy who died while being flogged: He had been sentenced to 85 lashes for eating in public during Ramadan.

Seventy Percent Of Palestinians
Want The Terror Campaign To Continue

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for this from Maariv International:

A new poll conducted in the Palestinian Authority has revealed that a large majority of Palestinians fear the continued state of lawlessness on the streets, but at the same time nearly 70% object, at this stage, to the dismantlement of terror groups.

The above figures are a cause for concern for PLO Chairman and leading candidate in the January 9 Palestinian elections, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), who last week came out against the use of arms in the intifada.

In addition, 51% said Fatah could bring about an improvement in their situation, in comparison with only 25% who named Hamas.

This is yet more evidence that it is the will of the Palestinian people that they are at war with Israel. Therefore, it is incumbent upon Israel to fight and win that was, for the sake of it's own people

The Battle Of The Bulge

From Medienkritik:

Imagine if America's losses in Iraq were far higher. To date, just over 1,000 US soldiers have paid the ultimate price in the struggle for Iraq. But how would the American public react if those losses were over a dozen times higher? What would the consequences be if, say, the United States had lost 19,000 dead in the Iraq war to this point? Would the hysteria in the media be 19 times more intense? Would a war with those sorts of losses be 19 times the quagmire, debacle and disaster that many in the media and among the Angry Left see in Iraq today?

You may be scratching your head at this point and asking, why 19,000...why does that matter?

Well, six decades ago, Germany and America were locked in a life and death struggle on the European continent. World War II was raging to its violent conclusion. Hitler had launched one final, desperate offensive on the Western front, hoping against all odds to turn the war around and repeat the Ardennes breakthrough of 1940. A ferocious fight ensued which left 19,000 American soldiers dead and 81,000 wounded. Around 100,000 Germans were killed, wounded or captured.

The Battle of the Bulge, which began sixty years ago this week, was a decisive victory that paved the way to final victory in World War II for Allied forces. 19,000 American soldiers were killed in this single battle which lasted little more than a month. Was it a disaster? Was it a debacle? Was it a quagmire? Was it a mistake?

Of course it wasn't. It was an historic victory for freedom and democracy over Fascism.

Yet, let us pose the question again: How would today's media react if the United States lost 19,000 in a single battle against Islamo-fascists? What would be the consequences be?

As we all know, Germany is a democracy and not a Nazi dictatorship thanks in large part to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died fighting in World War II. Their sacrifice sixty years ago was not in vain. And equally so, the sacrifices of those who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be in vain if America stays the course in its war on terror. Every now and then we need to collectively remind ourselves that freedom and democracy require enormous sacrifice and eternal vigilance.

Davids Medienkritik would like to thank those American veterans of the Battle of the Bulge still around today on this 60th anniversary. Germany is a better place today because of you.
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both nations will be better places today and tomorrow because of you.

Sunday, December 19, 2004

We Must, As A Society, Provide For Those
Who Prove Incapable Of Providing For Themselves

The Anchoress linked to this article written by Joseph Marshall, a frequent commenter on her site. The Anchoress had wondered where Joseph had disappeared to recently. This article provided the answer:

The Reality of Mental Illness and the War against the Poor

I am mentally ill. The particular condition I have is a bipolar disorder, what used to be known as manic-depression. Over the past month, noted in passing with alarm by the Anchoress, one of my mutual commentors, I have been adjusting to a new medication cycle and not posting.

I try to be as open as possible about my disorder. The lingering stigma associated with a mental health condition in our culture is merely fed and made stronger by trying to conceal it from others. What so few really understand is that there is a gradient of what we in the mental health system (I also now work in the system on a consumer-staffed phone line) call both "disorder" and "recovery".

I personally think that my disorder has been with me from childhood, present but undiagnosed, and it did not prevent me from stable participation in society for half a century, until now. It is important to understand such things, and not to respond to mental disorder in oneself or in others with irrational fear.

For the last two years I have been struggling with the fact that my condition has become more troublesome and, finally, openly diagnosed. Three things made this happen, I lost a job in the recession at an age (50) when it is hard to find another, lost my health insurance in consequence, and two other latent medical conditions which both mimic and reinforce mental disorder, Type II diabetes and hypothyroidism, caught up with me in these same two years as a result of advancing age.

The inner experience of the disorder is, for me, the key evidence that the condition has always been latent. I have an iron and unshakable intellect, zoned in the direction of order and organization, a mind that functions in permanent outline form, constantly separating the world into topics and subtopics, major and minor items in a hierarchy. Obsessively so, in fact. And I have noted over the years both that this particular form of intellect is not very common and that most very intelligent people whom I know have minds that do not usually function precisely in this way. Nothing ever disturbs this "outlining" process. It is like some nautical instrument aboard a sailing vessel, a barometer or a GPS, which functions independently of whether the seas are choppy or still, recording data impartially in a calm or in a gale.

My childhood and youth was full of uncontrollable emotional storms, and I think that my intellect developed as it did to compensate for and manage this fact. The evidence is clear and unequivocal, these days, that such uncontrollable emotional affects, far beyond the incidents which elicit them, are due to biochemical imbalances in the brain. And my inner experience of bipolar disorder is one of a rock solid intellect trying to sail my brain and body in an unrelenting emotional gale.

The medicines help, but even these, as they wax and wane in the body, and as their power to damp down the biochemical imbalances expands or contracts, create independent interior changes of mood for which my intellect is constantly compensating. Medicated, I experience my brain and body like someone who drives different company cars every day, with each change of make, model, and year altering the acceleration, the speeds at which the gears change, and the precise location of many of the peripheral controls.

It's a good thing my intellect is stable. I really need it. As an unemployed and/or underemployed mental health client I have had to fight a constant guerilla war with the social service agencies in my town and my state. I am a paradigm case of how the frilling away of the social service safety net under 25 years of mostly Republican rule has been an undeclared war on the old, the sick, and the poor.

I subsisted these past two years, with a serious mental health condition, unable to see a medical psychiatrist who could properly diagnose and prescribe for it. I started out with health insurance, the kind called COBRA where, on unemployment (which is HALF your former salary in my generous Republican state) I had to pay the ENTIRE cost of the insurance which my employer carried. That's right, on COBRA both my premiums AND my employer's contribution suddenly became my sole responsibility on half of what I had been making.

How did I manage to carry it? By running up thousands of dollars in debt on my credit cards, as well as using the left over money from a home improvement second mortgage, while I was searching for work until (having been completely unsuccessful, probably in part due to my undiagnosed and worsening mental condition) the unemployment ran out and I defaulted on both the cards and the mortgage.

Did having health insurance help me? Not a bit. Every private psychiatrist in my town stopped taking private insurance long ago. They now do strictly a cash-and-carry business at $125.00 a session. My entire weekly unemployment check was about $125.00. And then I lost it.

That left me with the social service agencies in the public mental health system. And also the social service agencies that deal with the fact that you can't pay your utilities and you can't afford to buy food while your house in forclosure and you can't afford a lawyer to fight for it.

If I had tried to commit suicide, or lost my wits and started taking my clothes off in a public street and howling at the moon, I could have, finally, seen a shrink--after having been incarcerated for some time, and then booted out on the street fully medicated, but a homeless wreck, whose meds would shortly run out. Then back to crisis center for more incarceration, another round of medication, and another bout on the streets.

I am not exaggerating. On my phone line work I deal with such cases routinely.

By clinging as much as I could to my intellect, I have managed to avoid this. My home is gone, I rent from the man I sold it to, and I have managed to obtain part-time work while I hide from my other creditors (I still don't have enough cash flow to even bankrupt cleanly.) And by persistently demanding care, over and over, I finally managed to get it.

I had to lose one counselor to funding cutoffs, change care agencies, and pull every social service bureaucrat I met into the fight. And I had to cope with the fact that my feelings and my body from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, would be an unceasing roller coaster ride from utter exhaustion and suicidal despair to manic motor-mouth wittiness with a high as complete as anything on crack cocaine or crystal meth. But it has finally happened.

I write this blog because it helps relieve the pressure of constant emotional pitch-and-toss in my private life. And I write on politics because I KNOW from personal experience that my political adversaries, whether they admit it or not, are part of a deliberate and calculated war on folks such as I. A war which they cannot win, but which I and my fellow targets can completely lose.

And a war which, in the end, will turn this country into a spiritually bankrupt desert.

That is very hard to read, and very convicting. I have mentioned many times on this blog that I never voted for a Republican, for President, in my life, until George Bush 2004. I voted for Bush because I think the War on Islamofascism is World War IV. I think the war needs to be fought and won, or we are in big trouble.

It seems to me that the Democratic Party should be capable of understanding this. However, they ran a candidate who showed no committment for, or against the War and, therefore, there was no way I could vote for him.

I like Bush for many reasons, but there are things I do not like about him. One thing I need to say is I think the notion that the George Bush Administration is conducting a "war against the poor" is laughable. That is inflamed rhetoric, and it is the result of the bipolar disorder the Democratic Party seems to have been seized by in the recent past. Mr. Marshall, I think you could describe it better than that. Why don't you give it another try?

The thing is, everything else Mr. Marshall says in this article is true. I know it. And, it is the reason I have been a Democrat all my life. Personally, I am a guy who has completely pulled myself up by my own bootstraps all my life. I have never worked a job where I subsisted on my salary. Instead, I have chosen jobs where there was a negotiated bonus structure dependant upon my performance. If I made the company money, I got paid good money and, as I have always excelled at what I do, I have made good money. If I had not succeeded, I would have lost my home. So, I am a risk-taker.

Most people like me look at people who can't get it together and think, "loser." I don't. I think, "There but by the Grace of God go I." I have had some unique experiences in my life which have made me aware of how fragile people are, and of how many people really do not have the inner strength to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." I have family members who are mentally ill. You can't imagine, unless you are around it, what the experience of mental illness is for the people who struggle with it. It can be described as a nightmare from which one can not awake. Imagine that, my friends. Living a waking nightmare.

Imagine being normal for days, weeks, or months on end, and functioning at a high level, and chalking up the self-esteem that goes with accomplishment, only to be assailed with thoughts and fears which seem to come at you from out of nowhere, and seize you and debilitate you. Imagine having a recurring flu of the mind, complete with metaphorical vomiting and diarrhea.

Imagine what it would do to even the strongest human being to repeatedly find that they have destroyed what they had worked so hard to build; credibilty, accomplishment, friendships.

I have also watched other family members who never quite understood how the world worked. If you think about it, you probably know some people like this yourself. If you don't, then think about, maybe, the waitress who serves you at the little cafe down the road, or the "janitor" in your office. Think about how they complain to you about petty little grievances. Think about how they sometimes seem to feel that the deck is stacked against them by unseen forces. These people are not merely making excuses for themselves. Sometimes it is the lack of sufficient intelligence required to put simple ideas together. Maybe there mind doesn't work quick enough to function in an arena bigger than where they are. It's not laziness. Sometimes, maybe, they are emotionally damaged by physical, sexual, or emotional abuse as they were growing up. You can not believe the stories you will hear if you simply ask, which I do.

Suffice it to say, that the stories you hear on Oprah and all the other daytime TV talk shows are very common. Those are the stories of the people walking around you everyday. I have gotten very good at picking out such people. I could take you for a walk down the street and point the people out and tell you that person has trauma. That person does not trust a soul. That person is fighting back voices which are telling her she is a truly worthless human being.

We could sit in a book store and I could pick someone out and strike up a conversation and within fifteen minutes you would see what I mean.

I'm not claiming that I have any special powers of discernment. The reason I can do this is because I am extremely curious about people and their feelings, and I am shameless about asking people personal and inappropriate questions. And, for whatever reaons (maybe because truly inappropriate questions are so disarming) people will answer me. And so, after having heard the stories so many times, I have put them together with the looks on peoples faces, and the ways they hold themselves, and I can recognize where people are coming from many times now, without even asking.

So, I believe that there are many people out there who are not capable of "helping themselves" in the same way as others. The problem becomes, then, what is to be done when these people reach a crisis point? Anchoress comments:

I don't know if, again, I can agree with his conclusions. Clearly, the status quo is not the answer, and putting the government in charge of more things they do badly seems wrong. By the same token, doing less is not an option, unless the private sector or the churches step up to the plate. I surely don't have the answer, but the discussion must take place.

Anchoress knows that her answer is insufficient. With all due respect (because I find The Anchoress to be an extraordinary person, and one who is herself full of compassion), I would almost venture to say it might have been better that she hadn't commented at all, if that is her answer. Obviously, religious institutions have proven unable to "step up to the plate" to take care of all the mentally ill, incapable, and homeless people thus far. So, why would anyone posit that that is a solution for the future?

I also object to the idea of simply saying the government does it "badly." There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are recieving free health care and shelter (at least partially funded by the government) every day. As a Christian I say, "Thank God for that."

But, it is true that, for instance, in Los Angeles, many trauma centers, hospitals, and health care facilities are shutting down because funds are drying up. The reasons for this state of affairs are multi-faceted. Rising health care costs are part of the problem. An increased illegal alien population is also part of the problem. And finally, (and I only have this on anecdotal evidence, but I tend to believe it to be true) people who are incapable of paying for Dr. visits, many times simply go to the emergency room (where they will not be turned away) instead. My anecdotal evidnece suggests that this is particularly true of people who live here, but do not speak english.

As Joseph Marshall says himself, if he would have tried killing himself, or had a public breakdown of some sort, he would have been given treatment. The truth is there are thousands of people out there who do "play the system" by faking it. Mr. Marshall seems too honorable to do that.

There is a Jewish law which says that, if you set money out in a place where it can be easily seen by a servant, and the servant steals it from you, you are partially culpable in his crime. I agree with that law. Therefore, I believe that we are culpable in the "crimes" the poor commit in "playing the system." Maybe part of the solution is to set up a system of minimal and accesible "cheap" healthcare that makes sense. Advil and cold towels are very, very expensive, when administered to a four-year old child, with a 104 degree temparature, when his illegal immigrant parents have brought him to the Emergency Room to be treated. I am not disparaging Illegal Immigrants here. Once again, clearly we are culpable in their "crimes." In fact the truth is, if I were in their shoes, I would probably do exactly as they do.

Instead, I am simply saying that the system we have set up is being "played" in ways that make it exhorbitantly expensive to maintain. So, I do not agree with The Ancoress that government is not the solution, and I don't think the answer is necessarily that more money be thrown at the government. Instead, I think the current system needs to be reformed.

I believe that we need to be aware of the fact that there are many people who can't take care of themselves. I believe that we need to, as a society, be compassionate towards these people, and set up a system which administers care and "a hand up" for them, when they are in crisis. And I believe that the government is the institution which should administer this care. Ultimately religious institutions are only accountable to God. And many are not living up to their commitments. The government is accountable to the people, or theoretically so. This would indicate that the government be better than the church at consistently providing help for those in crisis.

I don't understand why anyone would object to this idea. We don't object to the idea that the government should build our roads, or provide for our defense. Maybe we should start seeing that providing "a hand up" to our less fortunate brothers and sisters is the building of roads into our future, and it is providing for the defense of our society's immune system.

Moderate Muslim Writer Says
Have No Love For Unbelievers

From JihadWatch:

Muslims must not love unbelievers -- even a little bit? Uh-oh! Is this another "Islamophobic" production, complete with "out of context" quotes from the Qur'an? Nope. This is part of a Muslim catechism for children -- written by Muslims for Muslims. It comes from a site called Play & Learn (thanks to MCJ), which also features an Islamic coloring book and other material for children.

Note also that this little valentine was written by none other than Harun Yahya, a foremost "moderate Muslim" who got a bit of publicity after 9/11 for loudly proclaiming that Islam condemns terrorism, etc. I discuss some of the points he makes in Islam Unveiled.

No Love Towards The Unbelievers

In order to live with the morals of the Qur'an, one should completely leave the culture and all the moral values of the profane society. One of the first things to be left is the love towards it.
In a profane society, all the relations are based on selfish interests. A person gets along with the other one only if there is a benefit from him or if he is been taken care of the other or at least he treats him good. Another measure is the family tie. People love others just because that they are from the same family; or from the same dynasty, or from the same society or sometimes even from the same nation.

However these are not the criteria for the believers. Because, believers love Allah more than anything or anyone.

"Yet there are men who take (for worship) others besides Allah, as equal (with Allah): They love them as they should love Allah. But those of Faith are overflowing in their love for Allah. If only the unrighteous could see, behold, they would see the penalty: that to Allah belongs all power, and Allah will strongly enforce the penalty."(AL-BAQARA 165)

Believers respect Allah above anything, therefore the believers love people according to their sincerity with Allah, and they dislike them according to their disobey to Allah. No matter if these people are close to him or not. This characteristic of the believers is described in the Qur'an as:

"Thou wilt not find any people who believe in Allah and the Last Day, loving those who resist Allah and His Messenger, even though they were their fathers or their sons, or their brothers, or their kindred. For such He has written Faith in their hearts, and strengthened them with a spirit from Himself. And He will admit them to Gardens beneath which Rivers flow, to dwell therein (for ever). Allah will be well pleased with them, and they with Him. They are the Party of Allah. Truly it is the Party of Allah that will achieve Felicity."(AL-MUJADILA 22)

Having even a little bit of love towards the unbelievers would never be a proper attitude for a believer. Believers are seriously warned in the Qur'an as below verse expresses:

"O ye who believe! Take not my enemies and yours as friends (or protectors),- offering them (your) love, even though they have rejected the Truth that has come to you, and have (on the contrary) driven out the Prophet and yourselves (from your homes), (simply) because ye believe in Allah your Lord! If ye have come out to strive in My Way and to seek My Good Pleasure, (take them not as friends), holding secret converse of love (and friendship) with them: for I know full well all that ye conceal and all that ye reveal. And any of you that does this has strayed from the Straight Path."(AL-MUMTAHINA 1)

Some moderate Muslim. I looked up Harun Yahya on Amazon and found this title:

Soyk¸r¸m yalan¸: Siyonist-Nazi isbirliginin gizli tarihi ve "Yahudi Soyk¸r¸m¸" yalan¸n¸n içyüzü

I think the language is Turkish, but I'm not sure. whatever it is, I think I understand where he's going with it. Any Turkish speaking people out there willing to translate this for us?

How is it that everytime the media tells us that someone is a "Moderate Muslim," we, seemingly always, find out something like this about them?

Dying To Be Born Anew

From the book Our Greatest Gift, by Henri Nouwen:

Recently, a friend told me a story about twins talking to each other in the womb. The sister said to the brother, `I believe there is life after birth.' Her brother protested vehemently, `No, no, this is all there is. This is a dark and cozy place, and we have nothing else to do but to cling to the cord that feeds us.' The little girl insisted, `There must be something more than this dark place, there must be something else, a place with light where there is freedom to move.' Still she could not convince her twin brother.

After some silence, the sister said hesitantly, `I have something else to say, and I'm afraid you won't believe that, either, but I think there is a mother.' Her brother became furious. `A mother!' he shouted, `What are you talking about? I have never seen a mother, and neither have you. Who put that idea in your head? As I told you, this place is all we have. Why do you always want more? This is not such a bad place, after all. We have all we need, so let's be content.'

The sister was quite overwhelmed by her brother's response and for a while didn't dare say anything more. But she couldn't let go of her thoughts, and since she had only her twin brother to speak to, she finally said, `Don't you feel these squeezes every once in a while? They're quite unpleasant and sometimes even painful.' `Yes,' he answered. `What's special about that?' `Well,' the sister said, `I think that these squeezes are there to get us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this, where we will see our mother face-to-face. Don't you think that's exciting?'

The brother didn't answer. He was fed up with the foolish talk of his sister and felt that the best thing would be simply to ignore her and hope that she would leave him alone.

This story may help us to think about death in a new way. We can live as if this life were all we had, as if death were absurd and we had better not talk about it; or we can choose to claim our divine childhood and trust that death is the painful but blessed passage that will bring us face-to-face with our God.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Dhimmi Watch Banned In London?

The following quote is a comment left on the JihadWatch website:

I was using the internet in my local library in London. I could access www.jihadwatch but when I tried to click onto dhimmiwatch the computer wouldn't let me, saying that is was censored by the borough as hate speech.

I'm beginning to suspect that sites with jihad in the title might be allowed as they assumed to be pro-Jihad but those with dhimmi in the title are banned as they are assumed to be anti-dhimmitude.

I think I have a few British readers. If any of you happen to read this, could you tell me if this is true? This sounds a little hard to believe.

UPDATE: Sue, a reader from England wrote in and said she had no trouble accessing Dhimmi Watch. She speculates that it is just the policy of the library. That sounds plausible.

Anti-Semites Reign In The Streets Of Oakland

There was a protest rally the other day in Oakland, against AIPAC. The anti-Semities came out in full glory. Go here for the photos and read the story, from ZombieTime.

The Mystery Achievment of Lasting Power

From Mystery Achievment:

The Twilight Of The False Gods

For all the gods of the nations are idols,but the LORD made the heavens.--Psalm 96(95):5

After reading the news story on the poll of Europeans and their firmly and uniformly negative opinion of President Bush, I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep without conducting a poll of my own. Luckily, I'm married to a European, so a pollee is always ready at hand. As we were finishing up with dinner, I told my wife about the poll and asked her why she thought so many Europeans felt that way about Bush.

Now, whatever my wife thinks usually comes out of her mouth in an instant. So I was surprised when her initial reaction was an unusually long and thoughtful pause. She lowered her eyes. Then, looking up (but not at me), she answered:"

We're an old, tired continent. We're sick of fighting wars. All we want is serenity and stasis."

She looked old, tired, and sick as she said it, too.

Putting aside for a moment the corruption and perfidy of the Euro-elites that deserve to get hit by every piece of monkey feces flung at them, could my wife's answer be a clue to the results of the poll, as well as a window into the psyche of the average European? Is this why Europeans seem unable to muster either the effort or will necessary to defend themselves?

Thanks to a post by my fellow lizardoids at Marlowe's Shade, I think I've found the answer in three essays by the redoubtable Spengler of Asia Times. Trying to expound on all of them in a single post would try your patience and mine both, so I'll leave you with a key excerpt from the second one, followed by a suggested order in which to read them.

For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.And now, a suggested order of reading:

1. The Sacred Heart of Darkness

2. Why Europe Chooses Extinction

3. Tolkien's Ring: When immortality is not enough

By the time you're done, the Bible quote at the top will make sense.

There's No Denying It
America Has Done Something Right

A few days ago I posted an piece entitled "There's No Denying It, France Has Done Something Right" which credited France for getting rid of Al-Manar TV. Well, America has now followed France's example:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Friday designated al-Manar television — the mouthpiece of Lebanon’s Hizbollah anti-Israel guerrillas — a terrorist organization, prompting an end to its U.S. satellite transmissions.

Lebanon’s ambassador called the designation unacceptable censorship and an attack on freedom of speech.

The State Department listing came less than a week after France banned broadcasts of al-Manar’s satellite channel following accusations that its programs were anti-Semitic and could incite hatred.

The United States already considers Hizbollah a “foreign terrorist organization.”

“The designation is to put al-Manar television on the Terrorist Exclusion List because of its incitement of terrorist activity,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

In response to the new designation, al-Manar was removed from the satellite which beamed it into the United States on Friday, the satellite’s owner Intelsat told Reuters.

Alright America. It's about time.

Hat tip: LGF

Fake But Balanced

From Graham Lester:

Fake But Balanced (Ten Satire Stories I’m Too Busy To Write):

Fugitive Woman Caught after She Disguises Herself as a Blonde and then Forgets Why She Fled

Congressman’s Family Urge His Selection as Homeland Security Chief, Want to Spend Less Time with Him

International Association of Cannibals Endorses Atkins Diet

Scientists: More Research Funds Needed to Prove Link between Cause and Effect

Innovative Therapy Program Helps Murderers Choose More Appropriate Targets

Postal Service Delivers Letter from Jesus after 1,963 Years, Blames Lousy Handwriting

New John Nash Theory Cracks Mystery of Parallel Parking

Botox Support Group Fails: Members Unable to Open their Mouths

Scientists: More Attractive Women Gave Early Humans Breeding Advantage Over Ugly-Ass Apes

Stephen Hawking Smacks His Bitch Up

From the NYT, comes an interview with Stephen Hawking. Here's an excerpt:

What is your I.Q.?

I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

How can we know if you qualify as a genius physicist, as you are invariably described?

The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.

Are you saying you are not a genius?

I hope I'm near the upper end of the range.

With all your intense erudition, why do you bother writing pop-science books about the universe, the latest of which is the illustrated version of ''On the Shoulders of Giants''?

I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

Are you always this cheerful?

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

You have long been associated with Cambridge University, in England, and I'm wondering whether you find Americans to be equally knowledegable about science.

I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.

How can you say that? Just last month a Gallup poll found that only 35 percent of Americans accept Darwin's theory of evolution, while 45 percent prefer the creationist view.

Maybe it is because people in America have less sense of belonging to a tradition and culture than in Europe, so they turn to fundamental religion.

Do you believe in God?

I don't believe in a personal God.

Ok, I am convinced now. He is a genius.
:)

I must say, though, that I believe Americans turn to religion instead of tradition, not for want of it. America was founded on one beautiful, sustaining, and everlasting principle;

"F%&k Arbitrary Cultural Traditions"

In addition, of course, religion and "booty" were the initial motivating forces behind European's settling in America. So, the truth is, we have carried on our "traditions" pretty darn well, haven't we?

Back to Hawking's comment, I also think that American's are more likely to question "Darwinism" because American's are more likely to question everything. And that, of course, is because we hate tradition.

Al Qaeda Calls For Muslims to
Hack Pieces Off Their Own Bodies

Charles Johnson on Islamofascists and their death cult:

There’s no better demonstration of the primitive nihilism of the Al Qaeda ideology than Osama bin Laden’s recent call to attack the oil fields of Iraq. These resources are crucial to Iraq’s hope of building a real future for their people; attacking and destroying them is just like hacking off pieces of their own bodies.

It’s the Death Cult of radical Islam, writ large.

Is it my imagination, or is Charles Johnson getting even better at what he does lately?

Friday, December 17, 2004

Ali (at Iraq The Model) Smacks His Bitch Up

Apparently Juan Cole, and other generous liberals of his ilk, have been accusing the brothers at Iraq The Model of being CIA moles, or something. Likewise, apparently, the brothers also feel used by right-wing pundits who quote them to justify American patriotism. Thanks to my friend, "the unknown blogger", for making me aware of this response, from Iraq The Model:

When are both sides going to realize that it's not only about them! That there are millions of Iraqis, Afghanis, Iranians..Etc who are suffering daily and who are trying to find a solution and a way to achieve their dreams (with the help they are getting from America) and who do not have the slightest interest in supporting any party in America. The world is bigger than you and your partisan conflicts and frankly I'm getting sick of it. Take this crap somewhere else and leave us alone! We have enough problems to deal with and we are not interested in supporting any party anwhere, as simply we cannot afford the time or the effort.-

By Ali.

Turkey, The EU, and The Hudna

My good friend Jack, over at Jack of Clubs, has posted a very worthy meditation on the possible admission of Turkey into the EU. The whole thing is worth reading. However, since it is multi-faceted and lengthy (a la Wretchard at Belmont Club), I will only quote the portion that bears most on the issues I discuss here at this blog:

... the question of Turkish occupation of Cyprus (...) is the real sticking point for EU membership. Cyprus was admitted into the EU as of May 2004, but the rejection, in April, of the UN proposal to unify Greek and Turkish Cypriots has resulted in continuing tension. Specifically Turkey has refused to recognize the island nation. As noted by the London Times:

But because the UN blueprint was not endorsed by both communities, Cyprus entered the EU divided on May 1, with the Turkish Cypriots effectively excluded from membership pending a settlement.

Their breakaway state is recognised only by Turkey whose 35,000 troops in northern Cyprus are regarded as occupying part of EU territory.

In the run-up to the EU summit, the Greek Cypriots had dangled a veto threat over Turkey, hoping to win concessions from Ankara, including its formal recognition of Cyprus.

Greek Cypriots argued it was absurd that Turkey refused to recognise an EU member, whose agreement it needed to begin accession talks.

So, the compromise sounds like a step in the right direction. However, the BBC report is disturbingly vague on what exactly this compromise consists of. Specifically, what does it mean that the Turkish Prime Minister "insisted signing the protocol was not a formal recognition of Cyprus"? A close inspection of the actual language of the statement suggests that this compromise is merely a bureaucratic expedient to smooth over legitimate questions about Turkey's commitment to freedom:

As a result of meetings between Turkey and the EU, the paragraph in the final declaration of the EU summit about Cyprus was changed. In the revised paragraph, it was said, "the European Council welcomes Turkey's statement to sign the protocol regarding the adaptation of the Ankara Agreement, taking account of the accession of the ten new Member States."

In the first draft prepared by the Netherlands, which holds rotating EU presidency, it was said, "the European Council welcomes Turkey's decision to sign the protocol regarding the adaptation of the Ankara Agreement, taking account of the accession of the ten new Member States."

As a result of the change, the European Council welcomed Turkey's "statement" to sign the agreement instead of Turkey's "decision" to sign the agreement.

So, Turkey has not actually decided to acknowledge the sovereignty of Cyprus, it has merely verbally stated that it will do so. A subtle point, perhaps, but indicative of continuing intransigence.

Subtle? Only to Western ears, I believe. I think this is an example of the kind of treaty-making which is common when the Islamic world is dealing with non-Muslims. Other examples of this kind of dissimulation are the concept of Hudna, and the reality of Arafat's Phased Plan. I believe that all three (Hudna, Phased Plan, and Turkey's "statement" to sign) are manifestations of the same Islamic Hudna stratagem.

I say "Islamic" because the concept was initiated by Mohammed himself.:

... "hudna", often mistranslated as a “ceasefire” or armistice, connotes no more than a temporary respite in the war between Islamic forces and non-Islamic forces.

The authoritative Islamic Encyclopedia (London, 1922) defines "hudna" as a “temporary treaty” which can be approved or abrogated by Islamic religious leaders, depending on whether or not it serves the interests of Islam, and that a “hudna” cannot last for more than ten years.

The Islamic Encyclopedia mentions the Hudaybia treaty as the ultimate “hudna.” Arafat also referred to a hudna in his speeches when he would refer to the Oslo accords. In the words of the Islamic encyclopedia, “The Hudaybia treaty, concluded by the Prophet Muhammed with the unbelievers of Mecca in 628, provided a precedent for subsequent treaties which the Prophet’s successors made with non-Muslims. Muhammed made a hudna with a tribe of Jews back then to give him time to grow his forces, then broke the treaty and wiped them out.

Although this treaty was violated within three years from the time that it was concluded, most jurists concur that the maximum period of peace with the enemy should not exceed ten years since it was originally agreed that the Hudaybia treaty should last ten years.”

From A Soldier's Perspective

From Time In The Desert, by Kermit, a soldier serving in Iraq:

The past couple of days have been neat....We have been preparing for an upcomming mission that take a little more work to get ready for than normal. Will probably be a few more days before everything is set to go... in the mean time, yesterday, we had the USO come and they brought some people to see us... John Elway came and threw some footballs. Some female announcer from Fox Sports News came (she recently posed in FHM magazine), as well as the comedian who played, amongst other films, in the Water Boy with Adam sandler... he was the Cajun guy that no one could understand when he talked.... that guy was funny... from talking about how we should get Steve Irwin(Crocodile Hunter) to come and help us in our search for Osama Bin Ladin... to talking about his time in Vietnam as a infantry platoon leader...

The icing on the cake, however, was Robin Williams, who opened things up with a big "GOOD MORNING BAGHDAD!!!!" I have seen some of his material back in the days prior to his acting career, so I knew that he was a funny guy... but man this guy is hilarious! After seeing him perform like that, I wonder if they just hire him for a part, and just have him run with it, because I bet he wouldn't follow the scripts, if he's liek he was there....

It was real nice to get that kind of show. They all spent time signing autographs as well, and all wished us a merry Christmas.

Other things in the news over here..... a fellow soldier over here walked by me and said "84 days". I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me that that's how long we have left if everything goes according to plan... or thereabouts anyway. Man, only a couple months left! I remember thinking, after only a couple months here, that this time would go by so slowly.. but it has flown.... we have done so much over here. Between trying to improve the situation for ourselves, and our replacements, along with the main mission of helping ensure that the people here in Baghdad have a safer place to live, so that they can focus on developing themselves into something functional.

Also, I have read about this fiasco about armor on vehicles over here, and that story about National Guard soldiers asking Hon. Rumsfeld questions regarding it..... I want to say my piece to that.... The reason that the soldiers that are down in Kuwait are not getting uparmored trucks, or kits for their trucks, is because those of us up here, who are in the fight, haven't all gotten them yet. I drove a "soft" vehicle my first 4 months here, out on mission... through the town, etc... I don't want to hear anymore of that nonsense. The truth of that matter is that the Army is, and has been, providing us with the ability to protect ourselves better, however, the supplier is only making the stuff so fast. That doesn't change the mission that we have, or the risks that we soldiers have taken when we made that oath... including those National Guard members who signed up for "the college money". Guess what buddy.... you joined a crew that teaches you to shoot real bullets at real people... what did you think you might get activated for????

Alright, Robin Williams! Thank you for that. As far as I know, Robin Williams is opposed to the war and thinks very unfavorably of George Bush. So, he is the man for going over and supporting the soldiers. That is very admirable.

Why Would Anyone Oppose Elections In Iraq?

From PowerLine:

Last night, the Trunk and I taped a television show. We waited for the taping to start in a green room that included a couple of liberals who derided the "disaster" in Iraq and sneered at next month's elections. Why? Beats me. Arabs are about to vote in an election, I believe, for the first time in world history (except in Israel, of course). Why isn't that worth celebrating?

Haider Ajani has translated the results of a poll of 5,000 Iraqis, taken in and around Baghdad, that appeared yesterday in the Arabic newspaper Alsabah:

What will you base your vote on?
Political agenda----------------------------65%
Factional origin----------------------------14%
Party Affiliation---------------------------- 4%
National Background----------------------12%
Other reasons--------------------------------5%

Do you support dialog with the deposed Baathists?
Yes-------------------------------------------15%
No--------------------------------------------84%
Do not know----------------------------------1%

Do you support the postponing the election?
Yes-------------------------------------------18%
No--------------------------------------------80%
Do not know---------------------------------2%

Do you think the elections will take place as scheduled?
Yes-------------------------------------------83%
No--------------------------------------------13%
Do not know---------------------------------4%

As we've said before, the only people who want the elections postponed are the ones who want them never to take place. The vast majority of Iraqis can't wait to begin exercising their privileges as free citizens. And it's good to see that an overwhelming majority expect the U.S. to stand by its commitment to January elections, rather than giving in to the terrorists and Democrats. They have learned, I guess, that President Bush is a man who says what he means and means what he says.

I think Afghani's count as Arabs, so wouldn't Iraq make the second Arab election in history. Which would only go that much further to prove just how extraordinary George Bush, and his vision for the future, is.

"It is the Jews, isn't it?"

From Mystery Achievment:

... an interview with Jeffery Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin. It is entitled, "Experiencing European Anti-Americanism and Anti-Israelism".

"I must say I have never before seen all of the elements of the decadence and madness that characterize European politics assembled in one place as they are here. The America-envy, the godless and soulless utopianism and materialism, the complete lack of ability to distinguish between good and evil--they're all here. I warmly recommend reading Roger's and Davids' excerpts. Some select bits:

"As a Catholic I was struck by the amount of virulently anti-Semitic hate letters and email I received. There were many dozens of items. I was called a 'Jewish war criminal,' a 'Jewish pornographer.' Pardon my language, but more than once, these texts stated that I was a 'Jew f***er' or 'a son of a whore, who should be covered with napalm.' [...]

Gedmin illustrates how obvious this anti-Israeli bias often is. "Not so long ago there was a story on the front page of a prominent German mainstream newspaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Above the fold, in color, was a photograph of an elderly gentleman with tears running down his face. Any human being would look at that gentleman and feel some empathy. The caption of the story said that he was a Palestinian farmer and Israeli defense forces had just razed his grapefruit field."

This was immediately after a lethal Palestinian suicide bombing against Israeli civilians. This event was covered on page six of the same issue, without a photograph, in a brief text. The article on the destroyed grapefruit field on page one was much larger than the one on page six about the murderous Palestinian suicide bombing."

Gedmin says he could offer many more examples. "In 2002, I gave a speech on Iraq before a business group in Frankfurt. Afterwards, during the coffee break, a German international businessman came up to me, talking about Iraq in a very friendly, warm, casual sort of way. Then he said, 'Can I ask you one question about American policy toward Iraq?' I replied, 'Sure, ask anything.' And in the public space with several people standing around, he asked, 'It is the Jews, isn't it?' I said, 'What do you mean?' He explained, 'It is the Jews in the United States who are driving the entire Iraq campaign, is it not?' I was shocked that this could happen in public in 21st-century Germany.

Gedmin believes that networking and disseminating information can counter the anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism that are regnant in the Old Continent. But his recurring theme of Europeans being tone deaf to certain ideas seems to undermine that belief. And if Europeans who agree wtih him won't even speak up to defend him (see the interview for that anecdote), then all the networking in the world won't amount to squat.

I have a very hard time understanding how Germany still breeds this kind of paranoid (Protocols-type) anti-Semitism, after what I understand to be their very sincere attempt to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.

Don't they know that the road to the Holocaust began with blaming "the Jews" for most of the evils in the world?

The Myth Of Legitimacy

Little Green Footballs points to an article by Daniel Polisar which explains "The Myth Of Legitimacy," that Arafat enjoyed as a result of people like Jimmy Carter:

This belief that Arafat must continue to be recognized as the "chosen" representative of the Palestinians is not limited to the State Department, but represents a position widely held among Western leaders-so much so, in fact, that at a summit in December 2001, the nations of the European Union passed a unanimous resolution declaring that Arafat must continue to be treated as the "elected president" of the Palestinian Authority.4 In April 2002, a few months and a few dozen suicide bombings later, the EU's chief foreign policy official, Javier Solana, was still stressing that Arafat is the "legitimate leader of the Palestinian people and [the] interlocutor of the international community," while Ben Bradshaw of the British Foreign Office announced that "We're quite clear that Yasser Arafat is the democratically elected president of the Palestinian people."5 This position has also been championed by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who asserted in a recent op-ed in The New York Times that the PLO leader had become the Palestinians' president through "a democratic election in the West Bank and Gaza which was well organized, open, and fair."6

The reason for all of this emphasizing and re-emphasizing of Arafat's status as the legitimately chosen leader of the Palestinians is that without it, one might easily reach the conclusion that everyone-Jews, Arabs, Americans, and Europeans-would be better off with him gone. Indeed, for many in the West, the claim that Arafat is the Palestinians' legitimate, democratically elected leader is his last line of defense.

But is it true? To take statements such as Jimmy Carter's seriously is to argue that while some national rulers are best viewed as illegitimate usurpers, Yasser Arafat is more like the leaders of democratic countries, who come to power through a fair expression of the popular will-and that as such, he cannot reasonably be replaced. Such a conclusion, however, would have to stand on more than the observation that an election was held in the West Bank and Gaza in January 1996 in which Arafat received nearly 90 percent of the votes. After all, plenty of dictators do that well in elections aimed principally at reinforcing their rule, and this phenomenon is particularly widespread in the Middle East.

There's more, if you are interested.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Chirac's Grand Vision

From John Vinocur of the International Herald Tribune:

In the American mind-set, there's nearly a lifetime to go - think Super Bowl and, maybe, Iraq's elections in the meanwhile - before George W. Bush comes to Europe in late February to make things trans-Atlantically whole and wonderful again.But European markers are coming down already. In London, the talk in Downing Street runs in the direction of Bush "doing something substantive about the Israeli-Palestinian situation" if he wants to make good on the reaching-out-to-Europe notions that the administration uses to describe his trip.

In Berlin, the Germans clearly want better relations, but have made sealing the "fissures" and "breaches" more complicated by clamoring to sell arms to China and insisting last week that they require a permanent UN Security Council seat with veto power, like the big fellas. This, although a UN panel on reforming the Council does not recommend a German veto, and the Bush administration would likely choke on the idea. The French, theoretically the ally with the furthest to go in improving ties with Bush administration, (Colin Powell describes the White House as specifically hoping to "mend" the relationship) have smartly laid out through a speech by Jacques Chirac a blueprint of where they want to be positioned in terms of the United States.

The speech was made last month and has gotten only marginal attention. This is curious in the view of an aide to a European prime minister because he considers that Chirac was trying to explain for the first time how his multipolar view of the view of the world can be compatible with good relations between the United States and Europe.

In the speech ... Chirac is forthcoming, saying things that the Bush administration would presumably like to hear. Terrorism is not some kind of nuisance as John Kerry promised to make it, but a threat Chirac described as "present and growing." France and the United States are on the same line, "with exemplary cooperation" (no reference to Iran, though) on the issues of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation, Chirac said. And, he stressed, finding peace in the Middle East "should rally America and Europe together," as should cooperation in reducing poverty, and environmental protection.

If Chirac has been mocked at home for wanting to be the next Third World hero, a French Nehru or Nasser, he persists with the mantra that a "new reality" of a multipolar world "is challenging the longstanding pre-eminence of the West and all its models." This development, he says, "has paved the way for the assertion of another modernity that is emancipating itself from us."

Not exactly George Bush's view of a world clamoring for democracy in the context of a global battle against jihadist terrorism. But Chirac tries in the end, at least, to baste Europe and America's future together by saying, "I believe that [Europe's] harmonious dialogue with the other major poles in the world is helping to promote the universal values that are at the heart of the trans-Atlantic link."

In the French case, Bush could take the advice of all those in Washington who say respect France but do not exaggerate the importance of what it says about the world's future. This argument maintains that since Europe will never be a superpower, it makes no sense for the United States to overreact to French theorizing.

A counterargument accepts over- reaction as a mistake, but makes the point that the United States shouldn't just let lie an approach to the world that essentially defines America as the globe's biggest problem.

Doing this tends to legitimize French and German ambitions to lead Europe at Britain's expense, and leaves in the lurch the countries in Europe and elsewhere that see their development secured in a comfortable relationship with the Americans - and not rebranded by Chirac as their counterweights.

I really don't understand the objection to a "multipolar" world view. The reality is, no matter what anybody says or does, it is a multipolar world. Nations do, and always will, hold competing opinions, and each opinion carries with it a certain amount of weight given the relative economic and military clout of the individual nation. There is nothing the United States, or France, can do to impede that reality.

So, I guess what people are reacting to when they object to the concept of a multipolar world is the idea that France believes it must consistently oppose the United States in order to set up a counterweight, or even a bulwark, against our rampant, outrageous hyperpower. But, I don't really think that's what Chirac has in mind when he refers to multipolarity.

It is Chirac's fault, however, that he is perceived to have that opinion. He has made statements in the past which would lead one to conclude that this is what he has in mind. But, the reality is he would not set himself against the United States, if it went against French interests. For instance, France is very strong in it's prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists. As far as I know, they are also very diligent about cooperating with the United States in the pursuit and capture of terrorists, and their financial holdings.

However, Chirac is an old-fashioned political leader of the "Realpolitik" school. His strategy, which he insists upon defining with the postmodern, and somehow progressive-sounding, word "multipolarity" is, in reality, Machiavellian triangulation, plain and simple.

Chirac's multipolarity means that he is willing to weigh the balance between France's true and immediate interests in any given situation, against the longer-term interest of decreasing American power. So if, for instance, Chirac knows that rampant Muslim immigration, and the attendant anti-Semitism it brings with it, is a danger to French society, he is willing to weigh that against his interest in triangulating out America's influence within the Arab world. He is thus willing to make short term sacrifices, within his society, in order to defeat America in the long term.

This is hardly a new idea. Instead, it is one of the oldest principles of war. Really, you've got to raise a glass to Chirac, because while many leaders are only thinking of what they can do to get them elected next year, he is outlining a grand vision for France's future.

Saluer, Monsiuer Chirac

UPDATE: Diane comments that,

"it's not about taking down the US at all. I don't really believe Chirac wants to take down the US, at least not in the long run. (He doesn't mind damaging it in the short and medium term, obviously.) But it's really just a racket. It's more about *pointing at* the US and saying Look at them, now *give us money* and sign this treaty which accumulates power in our direction."

Good point. When I said France wants to "defeat" us, I didn't actually mean that they want to take us down. To destroy America would run counter to the interests of Realpolitik. The amoral power gaming of realpolitik would dictate that it is in France's interest for America to exist because we make a lot of cool stuff, and we buy a lot of their goods. No one wants to lose America as a market.

But, yes, I do think that France wants to "defeat" us in the sense that they want to beat us and, in so doing, take a good deal of our power away from us and keep it for themselves.

Idolatry and False Devils

Thanks to Graham Lester for making me aware of this quote from G.K. Chesterton:

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice."

The UN -
A Weapon Of The Global Jihad

Anne Beyefsky from National Review writes:

Every schoolchild or member of the public who walks into U.N. Headquarters today (and the entire month of December) will be greeted by a large display in the front entrance put on by that main U.N. body, the Committee on Palestinian Rights. It includes a series of pictures "Fashion for Army Checkpoints," that conveys the alleged degradation of being searched for a suicide bomb strapped to one's body. Of course, nothing is said about the degradation of being blown up by a suicide bomb strapped to those bodies who manage to avoid such searches.

Is this just a problem for Israelis? Not if one compares the extensive Palestinian exhibit gracing the U.N. lobby with the minimal display they managed to squeeze alongside on the subject of AIDS.

But the public U.N. entrance is just the tip of the iceberg. There is only one entire U.N. Division devoted to a single group of people — the U.N. Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977). There is only one U.N. website dedicated to the claims of a single people — the enormous UNISPAL, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. There is only one refugee agency dedicated to a single refugee situation — UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (in operation since 1950.)

Is this just an Israeli problem? Not if you're a Dalit in India, a farm worker in Zimbabwe, or a Tibetan, and your rights are not on the U.N. agenda...

How about the takeover of the General Assembly emergency-session procedure? These sessions began in 1956, and since then six of the ten emergency sessions ever held have been about Israel. The 10th such session began in 1997 and has been "reconvened" 13 times, most recently this past summer.

Is this just an Israeli problem? Not if you were one of those people who thought a million dead in Rwanda or two million dead in Sudan might have warranted one General Assembly emergency session.

For the past four decades the United Nations has become the personal propaganda machine of the nom de guerre of Arab and Islamic states — Palestinians. Their aim is to demonize, debilitate, and destroy the state of Israel — the thriving democratic beachhead in their midst — for a start. The original U.N. mission, to protect the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, has been hijacked and corrupted by nations that neither share the universal values of the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights nor have democratic intentions.

This is true, and this is why I commented the other day that:

... what is cracked about the European illusion is their utter refusal to deal with the fact that the UN itself is a decadent entity, where belligerent, and morally illegitamite, nations such as Iran, and the Sudan, have an equal vote in the initiation of discusions and reolutions. Such a system ensures an atmosphere of moral chaos, and a momentum directed away from Democracy and Human Rights.

But, in commenting on the above Anne Bayefsky piece, Mr. Mystery Achievment goes me one further:

Anne makes a point I've been trying to make here and on other blogs for a while now: The U.N. is now a full-fledged instrument of global jihad. Period. I had thought that the transformation had begun sometime around the mid-70s, with the infamous "Zionism=Racism" declaration. But, as Bayefsky documents, its seeds actually go back to a few years after the end of the first Arab-Israeli War--closer to 50 years than 40. Anything else it pretends to do by way of resolving conflicts, educating children, or fighting disease and hunger in other parts of the world is a sham--a smokescreen to distract attention from the only mission it approaches with any heart or effort. And that mission is the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.

How can the U.N. be expected to do anything about AIDS when it's dying of IDS (Israel Derangement Syndrome)?

I have, for a very long time now, clung to the notion that the UN needs to exist. But, I'm really starting to believe that it does need to die, and soon. It seems that it is just too sick to be made well.

No doubt, there needs to be a functioning international consortium, open to all nations, in order to facilitate communication and to deal with problems. However, such a consortium needs to function under a completely different set of criteria.

I believe the new international body would best be set up in such a way that any given nations participation, and power within the international body, would be based upon a hierarchical structure which would, in turn, be based upon the nations human rights record. In other words, the better the nation is at Human Rights, the more power it's voice has in the international consortium.

There's No Denying It
France Has Done Something Right

From Eursoc:

France has finally pulled the plug on Arab-language channel al-Manar, accusing the Lebanon-based broadcaster of inciting racial hatred.

Al-Manar had been on probation with France's highest court since August, following an outcry when it broadcast a series based on the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The broadcaster is backed by Lebanon's Islamist "militant" group, Hezbollah.

Against a background of rising anti-Jewish violence in France, Al-Manar was ordered to stop broadcasting anti-Semitic propaganda. Its foreign editor responded that Paris was bowing to "pressure from the Jewish lobby" by threatening the ban.

However, it appears that the channel was unable to keep a lid on the hate speech for long: In November a speaker claimed Israel was deliberately infecting Palestinians with the HIV-AIDS virus.

Of course, when the Nobel Prize committee can award its Peace Prize to crackpots who insist that AIDS was invented by western scientists to kill black Africans, Al Manar's editorial team could be forgiven for believing it was open season on absurd conspiracy theories.

Nevertheless, France's Council of State concluded that al-Manar was unable or unwilling to conform to French law and ordered the channel's European facilitator to block transmissions from the satellite within 48 hours.

This is good news and France is to be commended.

I don't believe Eursoc got it quite right here, though. My understanding was that until very recently al-Manar had been banned from France. And then, somtime within the last month or two, the ban had been lifted. The rumour was that France had lifted the ban as part of an agreement to effectuate the release of the hostages in Iraq. Melanie Phillips has written about it here.

But, apparently, France's tolerance of the vile anti-Semitism can go only so far, and, as I said, that is good news. Especially for Jews who live in France.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

15 Facts About The UN's Anti-Semitism

Thanks to Mystery Achievment for making me aware of this, from Israpundit:

1. Before 1990, Security Council passed 175 resolutions, 97 were directed against Israel (It is 55% of all resolutions).

2. Before 1990, UN General Assembly voted on 690 resolutions, 429 were directed against Israel (It is 62% of all resolutions).

3. The UN was silent when Jordanians destroyed 58 Synagogues in Jerusalem.

4. The UN was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

5. The UN was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

6. The UN was silent while for 18 months Israel was terrorised by indiscriminate suicide bombing campaign unleashed by PA leadership.

7. There are 54 Muslims countries in the UN. As well as many more are others Arab oil dependant states.

8. Israel is the ONLY MEMBER OF THE UN THAT IS NOT PERMITTED MEMBERSHIP ON THE SECURITY COUNCIL.

9. Israel is the only country excluded from the U.N.'s regional group system… Since Israel does not belong to any group, it is the only country of 190 member states that is not eligible to serve on the numerous U.N. commissions…

10. In recent years, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has annually passed five resolutions condemning Israel. This year, they passed seven. By contrast, each of the following countries/regions has been the subject of only one resolution: Afghanistan, Burundi, Congo, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Russia/Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Southeast Europe and Sudan…

11. Nov. 29 is the United Nations Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People. No other people has a U.N. Day of Solidarity…

12. Israel is the only state to which a special investigator with "an open-ended mandate to inspect its human rights record" is assigned by the U.N.

13. It is the only state targeted by two special committees and special units of the U.N. Secretariat ostensibly devoted to the Palestinians but in reality dedicated to Israel-bashing worldwide, costing millions of dollars a year.

14. UNIFIL, the U.N. force stationed on the Israel-Lebanon border, hid a videotape of Israeli soldiers being abducted by Hezbollah in October 2000. After finally admitting to having the tape, the U.N. would only show an edited version (in which Hezbollah faces were hidden) to the Israeli government.

15. UNESCO, in Paris, began passing resolutions about protection of Jerusalem holy sites and access for Muslims in 1968. No resolutions about protection or Jewish access were passed from 1946 to 1967 when Jordan controlled Jerusalem and barred Jews from entering…

Really, how can one deny that anti-Semitism is the motivating force behind such inequities?

What other explanation could there be?

Sometimes You Just Gotta Love Your Enemies
American Muslims Honor The Ayatollah Khomeini

World Net Daily has a piece today on the Islamic organization honoring the Ayatollah Khomeini, and what it might portend. Once again, click on the link if you would like to see the poster advertising the event:

A Texas Muslim organization held a special event honoring the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, advertised as a "tribute to the great Islamic visionary."

With the aim of cultivating "the unity of the Muslim ummah [brotherhood] around the globe," the Metroplex Organization of Muslims in North Texas, a Shia group, invited prominent local and national Muslim leaders to the seminar Saturday, including Mohammad Asi, the former imam of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., who has been monitored by U.S. law enforcement for ties to Tehran's radical regime.

Asi wrote in a 1994 public letter to Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: "I ... swear allegiance to you as leader of the Muslims."

Other speakers included the director of the local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which casts itself as the nation's leading Muslim civil-rights group, and an NBA player.
A Dallas-area Muslim leader who has been honored for his civil-rights work told WorldNetDaily he spoke at the day-long seminar in Irving, Texas, and heard a couple of other speakers.

But Mohamed Elibiary claimed he was not aware of the event's general theme and "tribute" to Khomeini.

In a phone conversation yesterday, WND directed him to an ad for the seminar posted on the Metroplex Organization of Muslims in North Texas website, which includes a photo of Khomeini alongside a message speaking of "Islamic revolution."

[Editor's Note: Since the publishing of this story, the Muslim group has removed the page. The link goes to a Google, cached version.]

The leader of Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979, Khomeini famously viewed the U.S. as the "Great Satan" and said "Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males ... to prepare themselves for the conquest of countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world."

Elibiary – known for his Muslim lobby and vote-mobilization efforts as president of the Plano, Texas-based Freedom and Justice Foundation – stated that this was the first time he had seen the flyer.

Replying to a question, Elibiary said he disagreed with the thrust of the message, which reads:
"'Neither east nor west' is the prinicipal slogan of an Islamic revolution in a world of hunger and oppression and outlines the true policy of non-alliance for the Islamic countries and countries that in the near future with the help of Allah SWT, will accept Islam as the only school for liberating humanity and will not recede or sway from the policy even one step.

"I don't know what they mean by revolution," Elibiary commented, "but I see myself as a Westerner."

The Muslim leader said he doesn't foresee America becoming an Islamic nation.
"I don't think it's possible," Elibiary said. "We'll always have choice of different faiths. I don't see that disappearing."

He said he is very aware of debates within Islam on such issues, "but I don't bother with them."
Asked his view of Khomeini, Elibiary, reared in the U.S., said he didn't know much about the Shiite leader and his revolution.

"All I know is what I grew up learning about it, the hostage crisis," he said. "All I know about him is negative stuff. I have never read his writings. I never bothered to learn any positive stuff about his history."

'Grand strike against New York'

Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes told WND he finds the Dallas-area event a troubling step in the direction of Great Britain, where radical leaders freely speak of overthrowing the government.
"Historically, in this country, Islamists have had the decency to pretend to not have the view they have and try to accommodate American opinion," said Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a presidentially-appointed board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

"In a place like Great Britain, they don't worry about that anymore," he said. "While on the one hand, that clarifies matters and makes it easier to see who's who, on the other hand, it shows a disdain for majority opinion that is troublesome."

The imam Asi drew attention with an October 2001 speech at the National Press Club in Washington in which he called 9-11 "a grand strike against New York and Washington" launched by "Israeli Zionist Jews" who had warned Jews working at the World Trade Center to stay home that day.

If America contines to offend Islam, he warned, "the day of reckoning is approaching."

You've just got to love your enemies when they tell the truth, don't you? I mean, these people are making it very clear for us. There's no doubt how they feel about us infidels and our whole infidel country.

This reminds me that my local library has a children's book on the Ayatollah Khomeini. I saw it there about a year ago, before I started this blog. I remember picking it up and thumbing through and being apalled by it's generally positive appraisal of Khomeini, and by the books morally neutral language.

I'll have to down and check the book out and write something on it.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Look What The Cat Dragged In

Once again, thank you to Little Green Footballs. Click on this link to see what some Muslims are up to in the United States.

Proud To Have Such Enemies

Thank you to Little Green Footballs for making me aware of this, from Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - International resentment of the Bush administration has spilled over to include bad feelings for the American people, too — at least in three European countries that opposed U.S. policies in Iraq.

People in France, Germany and Spain are more likely to have an unfavorable than favorable view of Americans, Associated Press polling found.

Just over half in France and Germany said they viewed Americans unfavorably. Almost half in Spain felt that way, while a third of Spaniards viewed Americans favorably.

The U.S. rift with longtime allies France and Germany is the most serious in years, and relations with Spain have been particularly frosty since Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq last April.

I'm not really joking with the title. Read the post on Thomas Friedman below, and you will understand why. I really do believe that France, Germany, and Spain are on the wrong side, and it's better that they don't like us. If they liked us, we would know we were doing something wrong.

What Does CUANAS Mean?

CUANAS is "Christians United Against the New Anti-Semitism"; a non-apocalyptic group of Christian Zionists who are apalled by the spread of anti-Semitism in the modern world, and are endeavoring to do something about it. Some of our members are in other countries working to foster better relationships between Christians and Jews, while some of us work to make this blog a source of information about the new anti-Semitism and it's effects.

Our goal is two-fold:

1) To educate Christians and non-Christians alike that anti-Semitism is once again rearing it's ugly head in our world.

2) To let Jewish people know that there are Christians out there, who are interested in helping, and who do not merely see Jewish people as the key needed to unlock the door leading to the apocalypse, and the return of Christ.

We hope we do good work.

How Small Groups Of Fanatics
Are Driving Our World To Lunacy

From Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times:

On the flight over to the Persian Gulf, I was reading an article in The Financial Times about NATO fighting with itself over whether to send a few dozen more trainers to Baghdad to help the Iraqi Army. I couldn't help but wonder to myself: Let's see, there are now 26 countries in NATO. If each NATO country contributed just 100 soldiers, roughly speaking we could have five NATO soldiers guarding every polling station in Iraq for the January election. That would be a huge help. After all, what does NATO stand for today if not for helping to protect a free and fair election in Iraq that is being opposed by a virulent minority whose only motto is: "You vote, you die - elections must fail." Is it so much to ask that each NATO country contribute 100 soldiers for a long weekend to advance the prospect of Iraqi elections? Heck, I'll throw in the air fare myself. I have so many frequent-flier miles, I could even fly over a few hundred soldiers from European Union countries that aren't in NATO.

Wait a minute, did I say European Union? Do you know how many trees have been cut down to publish studies about the European Defense Initiative - the E.U.'s quest to build a military force independent of NATO and America? Whole forests have been devoted to studies of E.D.I. So I was thinking: What does E.D.I. stand for today, if not for sending 500 E.U. soldiers to Iraq for a long weekend so that Iraqis might begin to create the first real bottom-up democracy in the Arab League?

Wait a minute, did I say Arab League? The Arab League has been sniping at the U.S. from the minute it toppled Saddam's tyranny, constantly barking that the Iraqi government there was not representative. Well now we're trying to help elect one that would be the most representative in the Arab world, and what is the Arab League doing? Virtually nothing. Why couldn't it offer to send some Arab and Muslim soldiers to protect polling places in the Sunni towns of Iraq?

If only we could call the Iraqi election, "A Seminar on the European Defense Initiative: Why NATO Is passé and E.D.I. Is the Future"; then we could get thousands of Europeans to take part. If only we could call the Iraqi elections, "A Seminar on George Bush and Genghis Khan: Why Bush Is Worse"; then the Arab League would send so many people, we'd be turning them away. We'd be talking pay-per-view on Al Jazeera.

Hey, look, I have no idea what sort of government the Iraqis might elect. I believe it's their first step in a thousand-mile journey to make that country something halfway decent and normal. But I do know this: There are a lot of Iraqis who would really like the chance to vote on their future, just once, and there is a virulent minority that is butchering people there just so they can never have that chance. Yes, the Bush team's incompetence in securing Iraq is a travesty. But even with all that said, is it such a hard call for Arabs and Europeans to figure out on whose side they should be? Do these people really feel good about not lifting a finger?

"We in Iraq have a lot of disappointment with many of our neighbors," Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's interim president, told me the other day while he was visiting Washington. President Yawar described Iraq's neighbors as sitting on a fence "dangling their legs and munching on pistachios," while "the forces of darkness" try to rip Iraq to shreds. "We do not understand why a vicious suicide bomber who claims the lives of innocent civilians is a terrorist in one country and in Iraq he becomes a freedom fighter," added Yawar, a bright and decent man.

The situation in Iraq is a microcosm of what is going on in the whole Middle East today.

Everywhere you turn, the debate is over but the fight is not - because determined minorities are determined to thwart the will of majorities, and the majorities are too weak or divided to push back. The vast majority of Israelis want to get out of Gaza, but a determined, potentially violent, fanatical Jewish minority has been holding them back. Among the Palestinians, the debate is over, but the fight is not. Most Palestinians clearly want an end to the conflict with Israel and a chance to live a normal life, but a determined minority from Hamas has been resisting. Most NATO countries (I hope) would prefer a decent outcome in Iraq, but a determined minority, more worried about an American success than an Iraqi failure, is holding NATO back.

So let the record show that when Iraq finally decided to hold a free and fair election, all the bad guys decided to come and "vote" and all the good guys sat on the fence, dangling their legs, eating pistachios.

As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." However, when the "good people" "sitting on the fence eating pistachios" spend their time castigating America, who is willing to lay it on the line to effect the triumph of good over evil, then you have to wonder if they deserve to be considered good people at all.

For instance, while this article is about Iraq, I am intrigued by the next to last paragraph which contains the words about how most Israeli's want out of Gaza, and most Palestinians want the intifada to be over, but "determined minorities" are holding these things back from coming to fruition.

Really, these are not "determined minorities" at all. The angry roar of condemnation against Israel's security fence has been almost universal, and yet, how can they be expected to disengage from Gaza when they are being attacked day after day by suicide bombers.

And, as for the idea that most Palestinians want an end to the fighting, I find that a laughable notion when you consider what passes as popular entertainment in the Palestinian territories.

But, just for the sake of argument let's give Friedman the benefit of the doubt and say "Oh yes, the Palestinians want peace." Once again, it really isn't a "determined minority" who are holding these things back from being accomplished.

It is the huge, seemingly all-pervasive leftist media. It is everyone who calls suicide bombers "freedom fighters", "activists", and "the resistance", thus granting them the moral authority, and the political momentum, to continue on in their destruction. It is everyone who attacks Israel for the leveling of houses which are used as bomb factories and bases from which to build tunnels into, and under, Israel in order to blow up yet more people.

Of course, people will say, "Well, it couldn't possibly be that all those houses contain bomb factories and tunnels." You know, they're probably right about that. But how is Israel supposed to know? How are they supposed to be surgical in their stikes when they enter cities with booby-trapped bombs strung across main streets. When parents are sending their children into the streets to serve as rock-throwing decoy and cover for "activists" with rockets launchers?

All these people who twist the meaning of words to justify evil, and who malign the motives of free democracies who are trying to carve out zones from which peace can be launched, all these people are participants in the "resistance." They are part of the war effort for the other side. They are the "propagandists" of evil. In that they are willing apologists for mass-murder, it would not be entirely inaccurate to call them the Joseph Goebbels of our time.

Monday, December 13, 2004

It Only Took Him 81 Years To Figure It Out

Thanks to JewSchool for making me aware of this, from ABC News:

Dec. 9, 2004 - A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"

The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife. (Pastorius note: Phew!)

Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.
Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.

I hope it only takes a few more days for him to realize that God loves him.

Anyway, I admire Flew's reasoned approach. He's very brave. Can you imagine changing your mind (and, in some sense negating your life's work, the work that made you famous) about one of your most deeply held beliefs when you are 81 years old? To say to youself, and to the world, that you now believe that you were wrong? That does take some courage.

I agree with Flew about Darwinian evolution. Christians who blindly hold to the idea that there is absolutely no such thing as evolution do Christianity a disservice. Evolution may not work quite the wonders that scientists think it does, but that does not mean that it can not, or does not exist as part of the logical machine of the universe.

Now, on to Flew's assertion that he does not believe in the kind of God that Christians believe in. Maybe he ought to pick up a copy of his old friend C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity and give it a reread. It's probably been years since he's thought about those arguments. There are logical arguments for the belief in a personal God who loves us and wants the best for us, and Lewis lays them out well in Mere Christianity.

And, I am guessing that, when Flew says that the God of Christianity is a despot like Saddam Hussein, he is referring to the popular understanding that all non-Christians are going to burn in hell for all eternity if they don't confess in words, during their lifetime, that they believe in God. Once again, it is my opinion that Chrsitians have done our faith a disservice by stubbornly clinging to dogma, and not having a nuanced discussion on this issue. On this subject I would suggest Mr. Flew read the work of his fellow country Peter Cotterrell, Mission and Meaninglessness, paticularly the "Ten Thesis" chapter.

To tell you the truth, the beauty of this world, trees, mountains, children, birth, and even death, are enough to convince me that God cares about us. But then I am an artist, so it's not surprising that aesthetics would work on me. As Flew is a logical Philosopher type, well then, he needs to approach it that way.

I'm sure tens of thousands of Christians all over the world are praying for you Mr. Flew.

UPDATE: The Anchoress blogged about this several days ago. Sorry I missed it.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Europe Poisons It's Own Well

British Historian Paul Johnson says Anti-Americanism is racist envy:

Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today. Like other diseases, it doesn't have to be logical or rational. But, like other diseases, it has a syndrome--a concurrent set of underlying symptoms that are also causes.

• First, an unadmitted contempt for democracy. The U.S. is the world's most successful democracy. The right of voters to elect more than 80,000 public officials, the length and thoroughness of electoral campaigns, the pervasiveness of the media and the almost daily reports by opinion polls ensure that government and electorate do not diverge for long and that Washington generally reflects the majority opinion in its actions.

It is this feature that intellectuals--especially in Europe--find embittering. They know they must genuflect to democracy as a system. They cannot openly admit that an entire people--especially one comprising nearly 300 million, who enjoy all the freedoms--can be mistaken. But in their hearts these intellectuals do not accept the principle of one person, one vote. They scornfully, if privately, reject the notion that a farmer in Kansas, a miner in Pennsylvania or an auto assembler in Michigan can carry as much social and moral weight as they do. In fact, they have a special derogatory word for anyone who acts on this assumption: "populist." A populist is someone who accepts the people's verdict, even--and especially--when it runs counter to the intellectual consensus (as with capital punishment, for example). In the jargon of intellectual persiflage, populism is almost as bad as fascism--indeed, it's a step toward it. Hence, the argument goes, the U.S. is not so much an "educated democracy" as it is a media-swayed and interest-group-controlled populist regime.

The truth is, on the European Continent there is little experience of working democracy. Italy and Germany have had democracy only since the late 1940s; Spain, since the 1960s. France is not a democracy; it is a republic run by bureaucratic and party elites, whose errors are dealt with by strikes, street riots and blockades instead of by votes. Elements of the French system are being imposed throughout the EU, even in countries such as Denmark and Sweden that have long practiced democracy with success. In a French-style pseudodemocracy, intellectuals have considerable influence, at both government and street levels. In a true democracy, intellectuals are no more powerful than their arguments.

• Second, anti-Americanism is a function of cultural racism. An astonishingly high proportion of European elites know very little about U.S. history or culture and even deny that they have a separate existence apart from their European roots. It is strange that those seeking to bring about a European federal state or union have at no stage sought to study the lessons Americans learned during the creation of the U.S. in the 1780s. After all, the U.S. Constitution (suitably amended) has lasted for more than 200 years, and within its framework the country has emerged as the richest and most powerful society in world history.

You might think, therefore, that European elites would seek to learn something from such a successful process. Not at all: The view is that sophisticated, civilized Europe has nothing to learn from "adolescent" America. What these Euro-elites particularly abhor is the way in which the framers of the Constitution made every effort to involve the population through the process of public debates, town meetings and ratification votes--and this at a time when Europe was still governed (for the most part) by the absolute sovereigns of the ancien régime.

This cultural racism is particularly directed at the supposedly "know-nothing" President George W. Bush and his "gung ho" Texas background. The European intelligentsia gets its notion of America chiefly from Hollywood, TV soaps like Dallas and fiction. Few of them have any experience of America, outside of three or four big cities. Middle America is unexplored territory. The fact that the U.S. has proved a highly efficient crucible for melding different peoples into a human sum greater than its constituent parts is seen as a misfortune in Europe because it produces a cultural stew that lacks purity of any kind and is therefore at the mercy of commercial forces.

• Third, European elites tend to look at Americans as a subcivilized mass, whose function is to be obedient consumers in a system run by big business. The role of competition in U.S. economic life--and in every other aspect of life--is ignored, because competition is something Continental Europeans like to keep to a minimum and under careful control.

Although Americans are seen as highly materialistic consumers, they are also despised and feared for their spiritual interests, their participation in religious worship and their subscription to creeds of morality. Europeans see no inconsistency in their condemnation of the U.S. for being at one and the same time paganly unethical and morally zealous.

The truth is, any accusation that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia. Anti-Americanism is factually absurd, contradictory, racist, crude, childish, self-defeating and, at bottom, nonsensical. It is based on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy--an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination. It is an envy made all the more poisonous because of a fearful European conviction that America's strength is rising while Europe's is falling.

I believe that Johnson's points are largely accurate. However, just to be completely logical about this, let's be honest and say that it is not impossible for a Democracy to elect a bad, or even insane, leader. We elected Richard Nixon. The people of Georgia elected George Wallace to be governor back in the 60's. Until very recently, Strom Thurmond sat in the Senate of the United States.

--- As a side note: It is less likely, however, that a country like the United States (with it's rather strict adherence to the two-party system) would elect an insane leader than that a country like France such as France would elect a racist (LePen) because of the fragmentation of it's party system. Hitler, for instance, was elected (I believe with approximately 10-15% of the vote if I recall) in just such a fragmented system. ---

It is one of the tenets (which I repeat ad nauseum) of this site that whole societies can, and do, go insane from time to time. Germany did in the 1930's and 40's, and, it is my contention that much of the Islamic world is suffering in the grips of insanity at present.

But, on the other hand, to assert that George Bush is insane, or that he is evil, is insane itself, and is completely unsupportable. Where are the concentration camps? Where is the mass murder? Where is the suppression of dissenting opinion?

I can understand why much of Europe is angry with the U.S. They have been laboring under the illusion that the United States would not go against the will of the United Nations, unless Europe (read France and Germany) said it was ok to do so. It has always been ok for France to get into little adventures in places like the Ivory Coast, but it is not ok for the U.S. to work according to it's own will.

Such an illusion actually makes some cracked sense. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. is the most powerful nation on Earth, and is therefore the most influential. The question of how we could expect to lead the world to a place where nations do not unilaterally make war upon one another in the future when the most influential of countries will not play by such rules, is a completely valid proposition.

But, what is cracked about the European illusion is their utter refusal to deal with the fact that the UN itself is a decadent entity, where belligerent, and morally illegitamite, nations such as Iran, and the Sudan, have an equal vote in the initiation of discusions and reolutions. Such a system ensures an atmosphere of moral chaos, and a momentum directed away from Democracy and Human Rights.

In addition, Europe refuses to acknowledge their own hypocrisy in the leadup to current war, when France, Germany and Russia argued against the War not for moral reasons, but for financial reasons. Not only were existing contracts with the Hussein regime a motivation against going to was against Hussein, but additionally, they were also on the take through the UN administered Oil For Food Program.

The United States is not a completely moral entity either. There are probably myriad tertiary issues, as well as some primary issues, where we are not without moral culpability revolving around the War and other problems on the world stage. This is undeniable. But, if the world wants to turn the United States into it's Great Satan, they are making a big mistake, and doing themselves a great disservice. Because our system, and all the economic, scientific, and cultural blessings that flow from it, is the last and best hope for humanity.

James Woolsey:
Why We Are Fighting The War On Terror

This is an excerpt of a speech given by James Woolsey at Restoration Weekend 2004. In it he pretty much outlines the same points that I outlined in my post of a week ago, entitled Why We Are Fighting The War On Terror:

Well, let me share a few thoughts with you this morning on what I have come to call the Long War of the 21st Century. I used to call it World War IV, following my friend Eliot Cohen, who called it that in an op-ed right after 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal. Eliot’s point is that the Cold War was World War III. And this war is going to have more in common with the Cold War than with either World War I or II.

But people hear the phrase World War and they think of Normandy and Iwo Jima and short, intense periods of principally military combat. I think Eliot’s point is the right one, which is that this war will have a strong ideological component and will last some time. So, in order to avoid the association with World Wars I and II, I started calling it the Long War of the 21st Century. Now, why do I think it’s going to be long? First of all, it is with three totalitarian movements coming out of the Middle East.

I want to say just a word about each one. And I am not going to further deal with North Korea during these remarks. People can ask questions about it if you want afterwards. North Korea is crazy enough to be part of the Middle East, but it doesn’t happen to be. In any case, I think it’s important that we are, as was the case in World War II, actually at war with not one, not two, but three totalitarian movements.

These movements hate each other and they come from somewhat different roots. They were all affected by the chaotic history of the early part of the 20th century. They insult each other. They kill each other’s members from time to time. But like the Nazis and the Communists, they are perfectly capable of working together. And they have; and do; and are now; and will, if they think it’s in their interests to do so.

First of all, there are the Middle East Fascists. I use that term advisedly about the Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria, because they are Fascists. There’s no point in mincing words. The Ba’athist parties were modeled after the Fascist parties of the ’20s and ’30s. They function like them and they’re anti-Semitic like them. They’re Fascists.

Every time I hear the word “insurgent” to describe the enemy in Fallujah, it grates on me. What we ought to call them is what they are, which is Fascists. They call themselves the Party of Return, because what they want to do is bring Ba’athism, i.e., Fascism, back to Iraq. We’ve been at war with that totalitarian movement since around 1991, probably when the first President Bush organized the coalition to throw Saddam out of Kuwait. Saddam called 1991 the mother of all battles because it was just a battle in a long war. He tried to kill former President Bush in ’93, fired at our airplanes all the time in the ’90s. So that war never really has ended. It’s going on in Fallujah, in the Sunni Triangle today. It’s going on in the support for the terrorists and for fellow Ba’athists/Fascists that the Syrians are continually sending across the border.

This movement I am not terribly worried about for the long haul, because their ideology is dead. It is nothing but a rationale for power, the way the Communist ideology came to be, as the 20th century moved on, an excuse for power. No one, I think, anymore really believes in the Ba’athist vision of a unified Middle East under Ba’athist rule. But they will be troublesome for some time, and they are a group that has to be defeated.

The second and third groups are also totalitarian in exactly the sense Mussolini meant it: total commitment required, total control – the objective is a total vision of the world – [and] are both Islamist movements; one from the Shi’ite side of Islam, and one from the Sunni side of Islam. The first: the Vilayat Faqih, the Rule of the Clerics in Tehran – Khamenei, Rafsanjani and his colleagues. And the second: the Islamists of Al Qaeda’s stripe, underpinned, in many ways, by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia.

I always say Islamist rather than Radical Muslim or anything of that kind because I don’t think we want to credit either Khamenei or Osama bin Laden – or, for that matter, the Wahhabi – with truly representing the great religion of Islam. I think that Khamenei and his gang in Tehran and bin Laden and the most extreme of the Wahhabi clerics are Muslims to just about the same extent that Torquemada was a Christian. Torquemada ran his life as a power behind the throne in Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain by burning Jews, Muslims and dissident Christians at the stake, stealing their money. His behavior was about as far from that preached in the Sermon on the Mount as it is possible for an individual to be.

And I don’t think we need, in current terms, to grant either Khamenei’s or Osama bin Laden’s claim that they represent Islam. They are trying to be as totalitarian movements, to take over an important position in one of the world’s great religions. But we have hundreds of millions of good and decent Muslims we need to make common cause with. And we don’t want to grant, at the outset, that our enemies represent them.

The Islamists in Tehran have been at war with us for something like a quarter of a century – just over a quarter of a century, actually. A few days ago was the 25th anniversary of their having seized our hostages in Tehran in 1979. They, through their instrumentalities such as Hezbollah, have conducted terrorist attacks against us for over two decades, going up to Khobar Tower.

So that movement is also one that, unfortunately, has more legs and more power and more steam, I think, than the Fascists. It controls the instruments of power of the Iranian state. It controls its oil money. It controls its intelligence services. It controls Hezbollah. And it will be with us, I am afraid, for some time. But it has a weakness that the Sunni Islamists don’t have, because, as Bernard Lewis says, there is only one country in the Middle East – excluding, I think, Israel, there is only one country in the Middle East where the United States is genuinely and broadly popular, and that’s Iran.

And the reason is because Khamenei and his fellow members of the rule of clerics are solidly at odds not only with common sense in the way a society can decently be administered, but they are at odds with the mainline Shiite tradition, which is one of separation of Mosque and State, with one very old historical exception, the Shi’a have generally not believed in the union of Mosque and State. They have not been in favor of theocracy. And Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq today speaks for that so-called quietest tendency or movement, the notion that Mosque and State should be kept apart. And it’s one of the reasons why I think we have some source of potential optimism about the direction of Shiite Islam and its political objectives in Iraq.

... Khamenei and his henchmen – are at odds with the mainline Shiite tradition.

So, although we need to worry about them a great deal – we especially need to worry about them getting nuclear weapons – I think that their ideology has some important weaknesses, which unfortunately are not shared by the Sunni Islamists, the third group. This group has been at war with us, off and on, for a long time, but pretty much intensely for about a decade, since ’94/’95, when bin Laden turned his attention from what he calls the near enemy, such as the Mubarak regime of Egypt, toward the far enemy, or us, whom he calls the Crusaders and the Jews.

The Sunni Islamists have a couple of advantages that the Shiite Islamists don’t. First of all, the tradition of Sunni Islam in many points in history is one of the union of Mosque and State in the Caliphate. When bin Laden says that the darkest day in the history of Islam was 80 some years ago, and you calculate back and it’s 1924, and you ask yourself why, it’s because that’s when Kemal Ataturk disestablished the Caliphate, the union of Mosque and State in Turkey.

The union of Mosque and State in theocracy is what bin Laden is pointed toward. First, his radical world vision is to unify the Arab World, destroy Israel, expel the United States from the Middle East, then to unify all of Islam, then to unify all of the world that had once been under Islam, such as what they call Andalucia, namely Spain, and then finally the world as a whole.

Now, this may seem like a crazy vision to those of us in the West, who are not part of this tradition. But it’s no crazier than Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich or the dream of world communism. Totalitarian movements have these kinds of heaven-on-earth dreams. And it is a decided advantage to the Sunni Islamists that they are operating pursuant to something that has historically been there, from time to time, and sometimes for centuries, within Sunni Islam.

They also have another advantage, which is that they are fabulously and phenomenally rich. They are operating with the funds from wealthy Saudi families and from others in the Gulf. They are sustained by oil money. My acquaintance, on whose show I was a few weeks ago, Bill Maher, who I don’t agree with on most things I can think of, except oil, Maher has a book out called When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden.

It’s a picture from a World War II poster of a man driving and a ghost of Hitler sitting next to him. It was to encourage carpooling and saving of gasoline. And the theme was when you ride alone, you ride with Hitler. His book now is called When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden. And the overall point in this book of Maher’s is that oil is really the sustaining structure and financing mechanism for not only the terrorist attacks on us but much of the political movement and structure of things in the Middle East, which creates very serious difficulties.

We can get into this some in questions if you want, but the point is that in the late 1970s the Saudi royal family, particularly, had two things happen to it. They got very, very frightened because of the takeover at the Great Mosque in Mecca by the Islamists – that was nearly a coup against the Saudi state in ’79 – and also the shah falling to a Shiite Islamist theocracy right across the Gulf.

They got very frightened. And they also got very rich, because foreign earnings from oil sales to the Saudis were about $2 billion a year at the beginning of the ’70s. By the end of the ’70s, they were $20 billion a year headed up. Lord knows what they are today at $50 a barrel of oil. But oil earnings in the last quarter of the century have meant that the Wahhabis and families who are generous to them have been able to fund Wahhabi beliefs and proselytizing in the world to the tune of some $70-75 billion – that’s with a ‘b’ – over the last quarter of a century.

The Saudis essentially struck a deal with the Wahhabis, which was, here is all the money in the world you could ever want. Take over the education in the kingdom. That’s fine. Take over education in Pakistan, madrassas of Pakistan, set up religious institutes in the United States. Here’s all the money you ever want. Just leave us alone. And that bargain has, more or less, stayed until relatively recently, when there have been some terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia. None yet on the royal family.

But it is a very serious problem. To give you an idea of what it means, I was scheduled to be in a – I won’t call it a debate – a “discussion” over in the Pentagon some months ago with Adel Al-Jubeir. You see him on television from time to time. He’s a very smooth young Saudi spokesman for the Crown Prince on foreign policy issues.

I did a naughty thing. I went on the Web the night before and, through the Mideast Media Research Institute Web site, downloaded the main themes that the Saudi Religious Ministry had sent out the previous week, drawn from the Saudi imams’ sermons in the kingdom the Friday before. And the Saudi Religious Ministry, every week, takes these, consolidates, develops the major themes that it likes and wants the Wahhabi mosques, whether in Los Angeles or in Rawalpindi, to emphasize in the following week.

This week these three themes were a) that all Jews are pigs and monkeys, b) that it is the obligation of all true Muslims to hate and, where possible, to kill Christians and Jews, and c) American women routinely sleep with their fathers and brothers. Incest is a common way of life in the United States, and that just shows how rotten the Americans are.

Now, this is not some one military officer or some one minister who has happened here saying something like Christianity is better than Islam, and everybody says oh, no, no, no, you can’t say that. No, no. This is not an individual; this is the Saudi government’s planned dissemination of doctrine for Wahhabi ministers, imams around the world, to emphasize the following week. This garbage has been going on for a quarter of a century.

So, if you wonder why sometimes the young men in the streets of Cairo or Fallujah are particularly angry as the news comes from Al-Jazeera, their imam is saying these sorts of things at the mosque. It’s not too hard to figure out where the money is coming from for that, and why it is happening.

Woolsey goes on in his speech to say that he believes the Islamist hate us, and make war upon us, because of our freedom. I don't quite agree with him on that. I think they look at our freedom and see only the licentiouness and moral decay, so I don't think it's quite our freedom they hate. They hate our decadence, yes. But, I don't know that I believe that that's even the reason they make war upon us. I think they make war on us for the same reason mountain climber's say they climb mountains. Because they're there. It seems to me the Islamists believe that it is their role in destiny to take over the whole by the sword, or conversion for Allah.

It's hard for Westerners to understand such a world view so we sit around and hypothesize that Islamists resent our freedom, they resent our "imperialism", etc. But, you know, I have spent many years around fundamentalist evangelical Christians, so I have known quite a few individual Christians who also believe that is the role of the Church in history to convert all of humanity. Christians, in general, believe that it is best for everyone to become a follower of Christ.

Being that I am immersed in such a culture it is not hard for me to understand that Islamists might think the same way. The difference between the Evangelical Christians and the Islamists, is the convert or die message. Christians have not, for many hundreds of years now, killed people because they refused to convert. The Islamists are an extreme group of Muslims who still, basically, live in the Dark Ages in terms of their simplistic, and frightening, view of the world.

David Blunkett Wants Britain
To Return to Medieval Times

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for making me aware of this, from the Telegraph:

Iqbal Sacranie, of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, wants the new law because any "defamation of the character of the prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him)" is a "direct insult and abuse of the Muslim community". In effect, he is asking for the law of libel to be extended beyond the grave, giving religious belief a protection extended to no other creed or version of history.

Where does all this come from? Not, I fear, from the right, if misapplied, desire for different faiths to live at peace. Incitement to violence, after all, is already an offence, and so it should be. No, the pressure is chiefly from Muslims. If we want to understand its context, we should look at what happens in Muslim societies.

According to Muslim law, believers who reject or insult Islam have no rights. Apostasy is punishable by death. In Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, death is the penalty for those who convert from Islam to Christianity. In Pakistan, the blasphemy law prescribes death for anyone who, even accidentally, defiles the name of Mohammed. In a religion which, unlike Christianity, has no idea of a God who himself suffers humiliation, all insult must be avenged if the honour of God is to be upheld.

Under Islam, Christians and Jews, born into their religion, have slightly more rights than apostates. They are dhimmis, second-class citizens who must pay the jiyza, a sort of poll tax, because of their beliefs. Their life is hard. In Saudi, they cannot worship in public at all, or be ministered to by clergy even in private. In Egypt, no Christian university is permitted. In Iran, Christians cannot say their liturgy in the national language. In almost all Muslim countries, they are there on sufferance and, increasingly, because of radical Islamism, not even on that.

The ancient plurality of the region is vanishing. Tens of thousands are fleeing the Muslim world, and in some countries - Sudan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast - large numbers die, on both sides. In Iraq, the intimidation of Christians is enormous. Five churches have suffered bomb attacks this year. Christians in Mosul have received letters saying that one member of each family will be killed to punish women who do not wear the headscarf. According to Dr Patrick Sookhdeo of the Barnabas Fund, a charity working for persecuted Christians, "Christians in Iraq are isolated and vulnerable this Christmas, and feel that they have been let down, even betrayed, by their fellow Christians in the West, especially the Church leadership".

The push for a religious hatred law here is an attempt to advance the legal privilege that Muslims claim for Islam. True, Muslim leaders are happy that the same protection should be extended to other religions in this country. But to a modern liberal society which claims the freedom to attack all beliefs, this should be no comfort. It says a good deal about the quality of churchmen and politicians in Britain that the most prominent opponent of the Bill is Mr Bean. The Archbishop of Canterbury is more or less invisible. The Government is on the side of repression.

Because it is usually called Boxing Day, people forget that December 26 is the feast of St Stephen, the first martyr. Somewhere in the Muslim world on that day, there will be more Christians martyred, as there are every day of the year. Muslims are not martyred in Britain. For once, the mote is in our own eye, and the beam in somebody else's - or will it soon be illegal to say that?

Charles Moore is a brave man and deserves to be highly commended for writing this article. The only question I have for him is, he says that in "Sudan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast - large numbers die, on both sides," but if that's true then tell me how many Muslims were killed by Christians. The truth is it is very few, if any at all. The media did report that there was an uprising by Christian in the Congo earlier this year and there were Muslims killed. But, in the Sudan, the only Muslims who have been killed have been the peaceful Sufi Muslims, and they were killed by the Islamofascists.

I hate to nitpick, but he got that part wrong. Like I said, he deserves to be highly commended.

What Did Jesus Look Like?

I was talking with a friend of mine (who happens to be black) the other day about what Jesus looked like. He said he grew up thinking Jesus was black, because there were pictures all over his house of Jesus, and he was black. I told him that I grew up thinking Jesus was white, of course, because in the pictures we had in our house he was white, with light brown hair and blue eyes.

"But, of course, he wouldn't have been either white or black because he was from the Middle-East, " I noted.

"Yeah, imagine what everybody's going to think when they finally meet Him, and He looks like Osama Bin Laden."

Friday, December 10, 2004

Everybody Got Something To Hide
Except Me and My Monkey

My man the Logic Monkey makes such an incredibly obvious point (and logical too) that I suspect it must have been made before, a million times, but to tell you the truth, I've never heard it articulated so clearly as to resonate with me like this:

... why would anybody want to be a pagan? Being a pagan must have been utterly miserable. At all times and in all places you were at the mercy of impersonal gods and spirits. Behind every rock, tree and bush was some sprite just ready to jump out and smite you- if you fail to make the correct offering in the correct ceremonies.

The big difference between Christianity and every other religion is that Christianity is, as far as I can tell, the only time God sacraficed for us and not the other way around.

I'm not a big fan of apologetics (my wife's definition of apologetics is: "you're so worried about the truth of your faith that you feel the need to apologize for it all the time") but that was really a classic. Good work, Mr. Monkey

A Wake Up Call For Europe?
A Video About Holland
After The Murder Of Theo Van Gogh

Thank you to Little Green Footballs for making available this video about the problems in Holland surrounding the murder of Theo Van Gogh. Here's what Charles of LGF says:

Here’s an LGF special feature: a 24 minute documentary by Danish public TV about Holland after the murder of Theo Van Gogh, broadcast on December 6, 2004. This is a must-see, with English subtitles provided by Hans Nagel, who created the Windows Media video.
Holland: The End of the Multicultural Dream. (Windows Media, 56 Meg.)

The video features interviews with Theo Van Gogh, Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Dutch MP Geert Wilders (both of whom speak in English), Moroccan immigrants and common Dutch citizens—and it really brings home the impact of unregulated immigration from cultures that do not assimilate with Western society.

You need to see this. It’s a wake-up call for Europe, and it’s also very revealing that Danish TV dared to cross the boundaries of multicultural political correctness and produce such a frank, candid documentary.

The video file will only be available for a few days, because it’s so large it may cause my .MAC account to go into toxic shock.

UPDATE at 12/9/04 6:17:40 pm:

LGF reader Victor also has a copy of the video here.

Will The Ents Awaken

Victor David Hanson wonders whether Europe will wake up and compares Europe to the Ents of Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings trilogy:

One of the many wondrous peoples that poured forth from the rich imagination of the late J. R. R. Tolkien were the Ents. These tree-like creatures, agonizingly slow and covered with mossy bark, nursed themselves on tales of past glory while their numbers dwindled in their isolation. Unable to reproduce themselves or to fathom the evil outside their peaceful forest — and careful to keep to themselves and avoid reacting to provocation of the tree-cutters and forest burners — they assumed they would be given a pass from the upheavals of Middle Earth.

... does the Ents analogy work for present-day Europe? Before you laugh at the silly comparison, remember that the Western military tradition is European. Today the continent is unarmed and weak, but deep within its collective mind and spirit still reside the ability to field technologically sophisticated and highly disciplined forces — if it were ever to really feel threatened. One murder began to arouse the Dutch; what would 3,000 dead and a toppled Eiffel Tower do to the French? Or how would the Italians take to a plane stuck into the dome of St. Peter? We are nursed now on the spectacle of Iranian mullahs, with their bought weapons and foreign-produced oil wealth, humiliating a convoy of European delegates begging and cajoling them not to make bombs — or at least to point what bombs they make at Israel and not at Berlin or Paris. But it was not always the case, and may not always be.

The Netherlands was a litmus test for Europe. Unlike Spain or Greece, which had historical grievances against Islam, the Dutch were the avatars of the new liberal Europe, without historical baggage. They were eager to unshackle Europe from the Church, from its class and gender constraints, and from any whiff of its racist or colonialist past. True, for a variety of reasons, Amsterdam may be a case study of how wrong Rousseau was about natural man, but for a Muslim immigrant the country was about as hospitable a foreign host as one can imagine. Thus, it was far safer for radical Islamic fascists to damn the West openly from a mosque in Rotterdam than for a moderate Christian to quietly worship in a church in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Algeria. And yet we learn not just that the Netherlands has fostered a radical sect of Muslims who will kill and bomb, but, far more importantly, that they will do so after years of residency among, and indeed in utter contempt of, their Western hosts.

Things are no less humiliating — or dangerous — in France. Thousands of unassimilated Muslims mock French society. Yet their fury shapes its foreign policy to the degree that Jacques Chirac sent a government plane to sweep up a dying Arafat. But then what do we expect from a country that enriched Hamas, let Mrs. Arafat spend her husband's embezzled millions under its nose, gave Khomeini the sanctuary needed to destroy Iran, sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam, is at the heart of the Oil-for-Food scandal, and revs up the Muslim world against the United States?

Only now are Europeans discovering the disturbing nature of radical Islamic extremism, which thrives not on real grievance but on perceived hurts — and the appeasement of its purported oppressors. How odd that tens of millions of Muslims flocked to Europe for its material consumption, superior standard of living, and freedom and tolerance — and then chose not merely to remain in enclaves but to romanticize all the old pathologies that they had fled from in the first place. It is almost as if the killers in Amsterdam said, "I want your cell phones, unfettered Internet access, and free-spirited girls, but hate the very system that alone can create them all. So please let me stay here to destroy what I want."

Turkey's proposed entry into the EU has become some weird sort of Swiftian satire on the crazy relationship between Europe and Islam. Ponder the contradictions of it all. Privately most Europeans realize that opening its borders without restraint to Turkey's millions will alter the nature of the EU, both by welcoming in a radically different citizenry, largely outside the borders of Europe, whose population will make it the largest and poorest country in the Union — and the most antithetical to Western liberalism. Yet Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the "other" coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values.

Of course, we are amused by the spectacle. Privately, most Americans grasp that with a Germany and France reeling from unassimilated Muslim populations, a rising Islamic-inspired and globally embarrassing anti-Semitism, and economic stagnation, it is foolhardy to create 70 million Turkish Europeans by fiat. Welcoming in Turkey will make the EU so diverse, large, and unwieldy as to make it — to paraphrase Voltaire — neither European nor a Union. Surely Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia will wish to get in on the largess. Were they not, after all, also part of the historical Roman mare nostrum, and did they not also enjoy long ties with France and Italy?

So, to our discredit I suppose, we are enjoying schadenfreud after our recent transatlantic acrimonies: Europe preached a postmodern gospel of multiculturalism and the end of oppressive Western values, and now it is time to put its money (and security) where its mouth is — or suffer the usual hypocrisy that all limousine liberals face. The United States has its own recent grievances with the Turks — its eleventh-hour refusal to allow American troops to come down from the north explains why the now red-hot Sunni Triangle never saw much war during the three-week fighting. Recently a minister of a country that gave rise to the notion of 20th-century genocide (Pastorius note: He's referring to the Armenian Genocide, a forgotten footnote in history, when the Turks killed over one million Armenians) slurred the United States for resembling Hitler, who in fact was an erstwhile Turkish near ally. Still, our realists muse, how convenient that Europe may carry the water in bringing Turkey inside the Western orbit and prevent it from joining the radical Islamic fringe. Knowing it is in our interest (and not necessarily in the Europeans') and will cost them lots and us nothing, we "on principle" remonstrate for the need to show Western empathy to Turkish aspirations.

But gut-check time is coming for Europe, with its own rising unassimilated immigrant populations, rogue mosques entirely bent on destroying the West, declining birth rate and rising entitlements, the Turkish question, and a foreign policy whose appeasement of Arab regimes won it only a brief lull and plenty of humiliation. The radical Muslim world of the madrassas hates the United States because it is liberal and powerful; but it utterly despises Europe because it is even more liberal and far weaker, earning the continent not fear, but contempt.

The real question is whether there is any Demosthenes left in Europe, who will soberly but firmly demand assimilation and integration of all immigrants, an end to mosque radicalism, even-handedness in the Middle East, no more subsidies to terrorists like Hamas, a toughness rather than opportunist profiteering with the likes of Assad and the Iranian theocracy — and make it clear that states that aid and abet terrorists in Europe do so to their great peril.

So will the old Ents awaken, or will they slumber on, muttering nonsense to themselves, lost in past grandeur and utterly clueless about the dangers on their borders?

Stay tuned — it is one of the most fascinating sagas of our time.

I Have A Dream
That Condoleeza Rice
Will Be Our President

The Anchoress analyzes Peggy Noonan's analysis of the "deep bench" the GOP has for 2008, and comes up with lineup card of her own:

What was most interesting was Noonan's assertion that the GOP has - for 2008 - a "deep bench".

They've got a deep bench and a big fight coming. Alphabetically the list so far can be considered to include George Allen, Bill Frist, Rudy Giuliani, Chuck Hagel, John McCain, Bill Owens, George Pataki, Mitt Romney, and beyond that any number of potential surprise guests from Tommy Thompson to Colin Powell to Mrs. Hutchison.

With all due respect to Ms. Noonan, um. No. That bench is neither deep nor sturdy. Allen? All the charisma of melted ice. Frist? A genuinely good man, indeed, but also lacking in charisma, and he has not yet demonstrated strong leadership abilities in the Senate. Hagel? Get outta here, he's a self-promoting wet handshake of a man. McCain? Too busy playing both sides of the aisle, too in love with magazine covers, too much cancer history. Owens and Pataki are interchangable snores. Mitt Romney is a Mormon and that will give him a hard time with both the Evangelicals in the GOP and the moderate Democrats any successful Republican will still need to court. Tommy Thompson just gave terrorists some hints as to how they might hurt the nation, "hey, fellas, have you thought about the FOOD SUPPLY?" So even if he were not already a little scary-looking, he's officially to scary-sounding. Colin Powell's wife has made it very clear that she doesn't want him running for president, and Kay Hutchinson is...mmneh.

It leaves only one name. No matter how you pad the list and crowd the bench to make it look like there is a real choice for the GOP, the truth is we have one genuine quarterback on which to call: Rudy Giuliani.

I could be wrong, but my inclination is that Condoleeza Rice is the powerhouse here, not Giuliani. Giuliani does have great decision-making credentials, and has proven that he is willing to make tough values-based stands, such as his refusal of a large donation from a Saudi Prince to NYC's 9/11 Fund. But, Rice appears to have the same mettle, and she has some strategic advantages over Giuliani.

Many on the GOP side have been brazenly confident that Hilary Clinton can not win the Presidency because opinion polls have shown that she is "unlikable." In my opinion, that shows a deep misunderstanding of human nature. Hilary Clinton is not "unlikable" in the way Bob Dole was, or Al Gore, or even John Kerry, where there's something stiff, and uncompfortable, about their personality. Instead, Hilary's "unlikability" is the very part she plays in the National Soap Opera of American politics.

Hilary Clinton is the Queen Bitch with whom we are fascinated. She is a reasonably attractive, cold-hearted, "knives-in-the-eyes," women who is willing to do anything to get ahead. Think the Joan Collins character on Dynasty. Or anyone of the women on Melrose Place. I fear, and am rather convinced that Hilary Clinton is our own American Imelda Marcos. She is the woman, with whom we are so fascinated, we would allow her to do anything to us. ANYTHING.

You know who needs to write about the Hilary phenomenon? Camille Paglia. Camille could explain this from the historic/literary perspective much better than I. But, just understand that there are certain characters who resonate as part of our civilizational drama because they are archetypes. The OJ Simpson trial was an example of this. OJ Simpson was functioning as the Othello archetype. George Bush resonates as a kind of Lone Ranger/Cowboy archetype. Or to go deep, George Bush is Henry/Hal from Shakespeare's Henry IV.

Similarly, Hilary Clinton is our Cleaopatra. She married into power, and seems willing to commit metaphorical murders to ascend from there.

Another thing the Hilary's naysayers do not take into account is that the American people truly love Bill Clinton, and we have a nostalgia for the time during which he was our President. Sure they ended badly, but nostalgia is a trick of the light when we are gazing backward in time. We remember the good things and forget the pain.

Now, let me be clear, I am not saying that I am fascinated with Hilary Clinton. I don't like her one bit. I was disgusted by her behavior during her Senate run in 2000. She shows a disgusting willingness to pander to people by playing on the most elemental raicial and lifestyle stereotypes. Her recent revelation that she is an "Evangelical" recalls, for me, the Jewish Minstrel Show she performed, in her debates with Rick Lazio back in 2000, when she related homey little stories about sharing a bagel with her good friend Mr. Goldstein.

But, for whatever reason, Hilary's base and disgusting appeals to stereotype work. And this reality, coupled with America's fascination with her, are the reason that Condi Rice is, to my mind, the only Hilary killer the GOP has on it's bench. The fact that Condoleeza Rice is a black woman renders useless the old Clinton strategy of implying that the GOP does not look out for the interests of women and minorities. Considering that that is the primary weapon in the Clinton arsenal, it will leave Hilary exposed where she is most vulnerable. She will have to run on issues and values. And, on issues and values, Rice can, and most certainly would, run Hilary ragged.

In addition, the appeal of a Condi Rice Presidency would have a powerful resonance in the American Drama. Her personal story is the story that America wants to tell itself, and, in the telling, to make manifest. Rice's parents determination to give her real access to the American Dream, in spite of the racist realities of their time, is the story of the ascent of Black people in America. Considering who Condi Rice is a person (her stands on issues, her steadfastness, her values), Americans would die to rally around her story, and to push it up to the very peak of the moutaintop.

Thursday, December 09, 2004

"A Definite Attack On Islam"

From Little Green Footballs:

Chicago couple Joyce and Stanley Boim, whose son David was murdered in a 1996 Jerusalem terror attack, are suing an Islamic charity for complicity in his death because they funneled money to Hamas. The usual Muslim groups are claiming injustice, and the defendant, the Quranic Literacy Institute, is refusing to mount a defense against the suit.

Here's an excerpt from the NBC5 News website article:

NBC5’s Charlie Wojciechowski reported that local Muslim groups on Monday said the lawsuit is putting their religion on trial. At least three Chicago Muslim groups say a federal judge is being unfair in forcing the Quranic Literacy Institute to proceed with a trial it says it’s not prepared for.

But the parents pressing this $600 million lawsuit say they deserve justice, too, for the 1996 terrorist attack that killed their son, David, when he was in Jerusalem.

Wojciechowski said that Monday was another difficult day in court for Joyce and Stanley Boim as they heard the alleged connections between the death of their son David and Islamic charities in Chicago accused of funneling money to the terrorist group Hamas.

“It is very difficult to listen to this information ... knowing what was behind the bullet that killed my son,” Joyce Boim told NBC5.

Terrorism expert Matt Leavit took the stand Monday and explained that Hamas runs hospitals and schools in addition to sponsoring assassins and suicide bombers.

“We are showing how Hamas operates,” said attorney for the Boims, Steven Landes. “And that a template for how it operates in the Mideast sets a template for how it operates in the United States,” he added.

But for every accusation there has been silence from the attorney representing the now lone defendant, the Quranic Literacy Institute.

“I’m simply sitting there in the courtroom, essentially as a potted plant, letting the case go forward in, essentially, silent protest,” said the institute’s attorney, John Beal. His is a protest of Judge Arlander Keyes’ ruling denying the group a continuance.

Now local Islamic groups say that have doubts that any Muslim can get a fair trial. “I think what we saw in court today was a definite attack on Islam,” said Seema Imam, of the Muslim Civil Rights Center.

How is it that presenting evidence of Hamas structure as a terror group is an attack on Islam? If attacking Hamas is attacking Islam does that mean that the Hamas ideology is Islamic?

Hmm.

Palestinian Leaders Are Planning More Jihad

From National Review:

With Arafat's death, there has been an unprecedented amount of optimism in the West regarding the establishment of a Palestinian state and the possibility of peace. Yet amongst Palestinian officials there is little talk of such a peace, the continuation of Yasser Arafat's "jihad" against the Jewish state instead being endorsed. (To watch examples of these statements, visit www.memritv.org.)

Some members of the Palestinian establishment close to Arafat are now stating in public that he never really wanted peace, and instead considered the Oslo Accords a strategy to destroy Israel in phases. It was reported on November 21 that Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, discussed a meeting he held with Arafat shortly before the latter's return to Gaza from Tunis. When Atwan criticized the Oslo Accords, Arafat reassured him: "The day will come when you will see thousands of Jews fleeing Palestine. I will not live to see this, but you will definitely see it in your lifetime. The Oslo Accords will help bring this about."

The Palestinian ambassador in Iran, Salah Al-Zawawi, explained in an interview on Iranian Al-Alam TV on November 12: "[Arafat] knew that this path is the path of martyrdom and Jihad. He knew that this great cause requires martyrs, not leaders.... He fought the Jihad and we saw him in many battles...if you ask me what will surely be the end of this Zionist entity, I will say to you that this entity will disappear one of these days...It's a matter of time.... Our phased plan, which I already mentioned, is to establish an independent sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital...."

... on November 11, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader Raid Al-Aidi said on Al-Arabiyya TV, "We call from here to all the heroes...[to] strike this occupier anywhere, with no holds barred. We...will direct our painful blows against this monstrous entity. The Palestinian state will be achieved only by strengthening the resistance.... This occupier understands only the language of gunfire and gunpowder and we will teach this occupier, Allah willing, a lesson as we have taught it in the past, in Tel Aviv, Hadera, and everywhere. We will escalate our blows against this occupier...."

In the same program, Fatah Central Committee member Hani Al-Hassan explained that, "In Fatah we have a rule: the armed struggle sows and the political struggle reaps.... Therefore, when Oslo didn't bring results, the sowing came in the form of the Intifada.... We will see now whether the political situation allows us to reach political results and to bring about a change in our favor. Otherwise, we will go back to sowing."

Quoting former Egyptian president Abd-Al Nasser — "what was taken by force will be restored only by force" — is how the new leader of Fatah, Faruq Al-Qaddumi, described the Palestinian strategy against Israel on Al-Arabiyya TV on November 14. Al-Qaddumi has considerable popularity among the Palestinian street for never accepting Oslo. With his naming as leader of Fatah, Al-Qaddumi is openly challenging Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmad Qureia to be Arafat's successor. As he stated in the interview, "Anyone who thinks that I have abdicated my authority is mistaken."

He explained Fatah's position about Hamas: "The Hamas movement is our friend. It is a...movement of heroes. It is part of the national Palestinian movement. No...Fatah member could possibly harm Hamas." Al-Qaddumi is also close to Hezbollah, and during a meeting with Sheikh Nasrallah on September 4, 2003, they discussed "cohesion between the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance."

The Palestinian leadership is not alone in stating in public that terrorist attacks against Israel must continue. The Arabic and Iranian press have been particularly vocal. In response to an interviewer's question as to whether the Intifada will continue and grow stronger, Lebanese MP Zaher Al-Khatib said on November 13: "It will escalate and develop technologically. The martyrdom operations are no longer the only kind of operations in Palestine. The martyrdom operations have become a strategy. A strategy doesn't mean that we carry out these operations whenever possible; it means [real] military operations.... There is an infrastructure of resistance that wages battles, enters Ashdod, crosses borders, penetrates military zones, conducts operations as in Ashdod, and so on."

American officials intimately involved in the Oslo Accords now publicly state that more attention should have been paid to the issue of Palestinian incitement, and what the Arabs were saying amongst themselves about peace in Arabic. With Yasser Arafat gone, the U.S. should be paying close attention to his heirs to understand their true intentions.

If the Palestinians want to wage Jihad then it is incumbent upon Israel to fight back. It is the Israeli government's responsibility. to it's citizens. to win the war.

Europe Seems To Lack The Ability To
Think With Nuance
and
ABC News Lies About Pym Fortuyn

This article really bugged me for both reasons:

Dec. 7, 2004 — It was not what she said, but the way she looked and her manner of dress that had the crowd hooting and jeering as she addressed a conference in Paris last year. When Salma Yaqoob, a 32-year-old British Muslim activist, took the stand at the November 2003 European Social Forum, she was taken aback by the ruckus.

As chairwoman of the Stop the War Coalition in Birmingham, England, Yaqoob was in Paris to talk about the backlash against British Muslims sparked off by the war on terror during a session titled "Dimensions of Islam." But it was her veil, or hijab, that turned into the subject of an acrimonious dispute.

This was months before France passed a controversial law banning head scarves in public schools, and Yaqoob, a psychotherapist who took up community service shortly after the 9/11 attacks, says she was rattled by the audience hostility.

"I was genuinely shocked how people reacted just because I happened to be wearing a hijab," Yaqoob recalled in a phone interview. "It was actually a very upsetting experience. It was shocking to see people so passionate and, in my view, so ignorant of basic things, basic things like etiquette. [They] felt they had a right to behave that way in the name of what they thought was freedom and liberation."

In the Netherlands — a country famed for its relaxed attitude to everything from pot smoking to prostitution — at least 14 Muslim buildings and schools were attacked in the troubled days following the killing of a Dutch filmmaker by a suspected Islamist extremist. Postings in online chat rooms showed a rising anti-Muslim feeling. "Today is the day I became a racist," read one typical message.

And when a TV contest recently asked viewers to name the "greatest Dutchman ever," they chose Pim Fortuyn — a self-avowed anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant politician who was killed by a white animal rights activist in 2002.

First, America is commonly derided for it's supposed racism and xenophobia. However, you never hear of incidents like the one mentioned here involving Salma Yaqoob. Americans don't do that kind of thing. Of course, I'm sure it will happen, or has happened, but, if so, then it is extremely rare.

And, you know, I thought the Euros were good with nuanced thought. How nuanced is it to jeer a woman for wearing a hijab? If they were jeering her for her ideas that would be reasonable, but that's not what the article describes. I guess when the Euros get attacked by Muslim terrorist they immediately broadbrush all Muslims as terrorists. Hmm. Who woula thunk it?

The other thing that bugged me about this article is the fact that it blatantly, and really slanderously, lies about Pym Fortuyn. He was not "a self-avowed anti-Muslim ... politician." Nor was he anti-Muslim. In fact, I don't think he was even anti-Immigration.

Instead Pym Fortuyn was an openly gay man who had Muslim friends and lovers, and everybody knew it. And that was what gave him the credibility to criticize the more dangerous elements of the Muslim population in Denmark, and to attack the runaway North African immigration which contributed to these problems.

Now, isn't that a completely different thing?

Germans Say
Israel Is Exterminating The Palestinians

From the Jerusalem Post, via Little Green Footballs:

Six decades after the mass extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, more than 50 percent of Germans believe that Israel’s present-day treatment of the Palestinians is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II, a German survey released this weekend shows.

51 percent of respondents said that there is not much of a difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today and what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust, compared to 49% who disagreed with such a comparison, according to the poll carried out by Germany’s University of Bielefeld.

The survey also found that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is waging a “war of extermination” against the Palestinians, while some 32% disagreed with such a statement.
In a first reaction, the chairman of Yad Vashem’s directorate Avner Shalev said Tuesday that the poll’s results, which he termed “very worrisome,” were indicative of a long-suppressed felling of anti-Semitism among the mainstream “so-called liberals” population which now, under the coating of anti-Israeli criticism, are becoming legitimate again. He added that the poll’s results, which he said any objective person would repudiate, are also the result of the release of pent-up feelings of guilt built up from the Holocaust.

Roger Simon says he believes Germany is trying to demonize the Israeli's to excuse themselves for the Holocaust. I agree.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Praise Be To Allah

There's been so much going on that I've been falling behind lately. So, in the name of Allah, here's a links dump:

Dennis Prager says it used to be the conservative who were easily offended, but now it's the left. I say that's just more evidence of a reversing of the poles in politics. The Right fights for the Human Rights of the Iraqi's and the Left supports fascists like the Palestinian Authority. The resulting confusion, and reorientation, has left us in a state where we need Mr. Bean to tell us what's up. Now, that's funny.

It's gotten to the point that the Pope has to seriously warn the world against Christianophobia.

Wretchard points out that the Left uses, what Elias Canetti called, the true tools of totalitarianism; "the right to question and to demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the right to pardon and show mercy."

Those are terrifying tools, true, but I would say that to shut down a Jewish school for no purpose other than to foment anti-Semitism in order to consolidate your power, is much more terrifying. That's what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela. Great, huh? Roger Simon says,

"Jews have always been the canary in the coal mine. When they are attacked, everyone's freedom is in jeopardy. In the words of prominent Venezuelan journalist Carlos Blanco:
"That this red light be of use for all of those who fight for freedom; when a Jew is attacked for being such, we enter in a zone of total and absolute risk for the free thinking and existence of all, Jews and non Jews alike."

In France and all over the Arab world, they run canary killing programming on TV 24 hours a day. Hezbollah's TV Network al-Manar runs an eclectic mix of Jew-hatred including:

"The Spider’s House is a talk show dedicated in part to uncovering the weaknesses of the “Zionist entity.” The program claims that Israel can be destroyed through a combination of low-intensity warfare and a demographic shift in favor of Arabs, the latter facilitated by implementing the Palestinian right of return to all of pre-1948 Palestine."

Sounds like they've got their plan all worked out. I wonder if the world will buy it.

Hat tip to Dave Budge. Thank you very much for the help.

Thus Spake The Fu2rman
Denver And It's Political Correctness Fiasco

My good friend, the Fu2rman (I know him as Fu2), started a new blog recently. Here's an excerpt from a post:

You had better not have a Christmas Parade!

Denver found that out.

... when a church in Denver wanted to enter the Denver Parade of Lights and sing Christmas caroles, they of course, were rejected."Our policy, which we have applied consistently for years, is to not include religious or political messages in the parade --in the interest of not excluding any group," said Jim Basey, the president of the Downtown Denver Partnership.

I'm fine with no political messages, but why exclude to include? That just sounds stupid, did you hear yourself say that? Did you cringe as that left your lips? Did you hide under you desk the next day when you read it? Of course you did.

My friend Fu2rman is not an evangelical Christian like myself. He doesn't have any ill will towards Christianity, but he's not certainly not a church-goer. I mention this not to speak for him (I don't want to do that. He can write in and correct me if I'm wrong), but only to make a point. That is, he was the second non-Christian to call me yesterday and speak with livid anger about what happened in Denver.

Who was the other one? Well, remember my friend, the ultra-lib who pitches scripts in Hollywood? Yep, that friend. (Editor says: note how many non-Christian friends the Proprietor of this blog has. That's interesting, huh? An open-minded Christian? Couldn't be, could it?)

The Ultra-lib remarked in an angry, and sarcastically amused tone that the libs (his friends, hee hee) were "turning our country into a Totalitarian state, like the Communists." He went on to make a great point, which was that the fact that people, like himself, hate Bush so much is exactly what drives them to do these things (That's when he sounded sarcastically amused, by the way).

Well, jeez, beat it all. I agree with him completely. Finally, something upon which we can all agree. Even these guys.

Let the healing begin.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Rewriting History

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has long been expressing his anger over the MSM's use of words like "militant," "resistance," etc. when they really mean terrorist. Recently, he noted that Reuter's has taken to using the word "activist" in place of terrorist. That does seem downright evil, doesn't it?

Anyway, I guess Charles figures if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Read his newest:

Saudi Activists Stage Demonstration

Islamic activists tried to air their grievances by murdering Americans in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia today, but were thwarted when their oppressors hid in a fortified room. The activists were then disenfranchised by Saudi security forces.

He was referring to this news story.

Hee hee. That's classic.

Can you imagine if history were written this way:

The United States neutralized Japan's resistance in the town of Hiroshima. Eighty thousand people were subdued.

Adolph Hitler implemented his plan to quash the Jewish rebellion. All told six million people of Hebraic origin were chastened.

Stalin effectuated a strict nutrition plan for the Ukranians. One million citizens participated.

Man, I feel a new blog coming on.

Moderate Muslims Start Petition
Against Islamofascist Preachers of Hate

This is cause for celebration. However, this article makes the point that, while the moderate Muslism are doing the right thing here, it will be up to the UN to act on the petition. Eric Stalkebeck doesn't think it's likely. From Front Page Magazine:

While the U.N. has long been awash in its own depravity—as evidenced by Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent “warning” to Coalition forces to avoid an assault on Fallujah, not to mention the burgeoning oil-for-food scandal—from time to time, opportunities still arise for that feckless institution to accomplish some good.

The latest one is a petition by several liberal Arab and Muslim thinkers advocating the creation of an international tribunal that would prosecute radical Islamist clerics whose sermons contain incitements to violence and terrorism.

The authors of the proposal, which originated in late October on the liberal Arab websites www.elaph.com and www.metransparent.com, hope to eventually acquire 10,000 signatures, which they will then present to the U.N. Over 2,500 Muslim intellectuals from 23 countries have signed on thus far.

However, given that the petition does not call for severe measures against their favorite target, Israel, Annan and his minions will likely show little interest. This is unfortunate, because at alarming rates, Islamist clerics continue to encourage their followers to wage global jihad against non-Muslims and moderate Muslims alike.

In November, a group of 26 Saudi clerics and so-called “scholars” released a letter urging Iraqis to support “militants waging holy war against the U.S.-led coalition forces.”

The letter, which was posted on the Internet, described terrorist attacks on U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq as “legitimate” resistance and declared “fighting the occupiers is a duty for all those who are able.”

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., quickly condemned the letter and said that it did not represent the views of the Saudi government. Yet several of the signatories hold teaching positions at state-run Saudi universities, and another, Safar Al-Hawali, has worked for the Saudi government as a “mediator” in its negotiations with Al-Qaeda—despite his close ties to Osama bin Laden and several of the 9/11 hijackers.

Thanks to his work with the House of Saud, Al-Hawali, who openly preaches the destruction of the U.S. and Israel and is thought to have maintained contact with bin Laden even after the 9/11 attacks, is now regarded as a moderate voice by media outlets like the Associated Press, BBC and Reuters.

Another extremist cleric who has been embraced by the mainstream press is the Egyptian-born Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a leader of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood movement and a vocal advocate of suicide bombings.

In August, Al-Qaradawi, who was given a hero’s welcome by the mayor of London during a visit there last summer, issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the abduction and killing of American civilians in Iraq. In response to the ensuing uproar, Al-Qaradawi, in an effort to maintain his moderate image, released a statement claiming he had been misquoted.

Yet, that same month, Al-Qaradawi was one of 93 sheikhs to sign a petition calling on Muslims around the world to join with the Al-Mahdi Army of extremist cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr in its fight against American forces in Iraq. It was Al-Sadr’s jihadist incitements that spearheaded a bloody, months-long campaign by terrorists against Coalition forces in Najaf that only recently subsided.

But this inflammatory language isn’t limited to clerics in the Middle East. In recent months, France has deported several radical imams (Memes note: Good job France), and Britain continues to host some of the most incendiary preachers this side of the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, leaders of the recently disbanded Al-Muhajiroun group, which sought to transform Britain into an Islamic state and even held conferences honoring the 9/11 hijackers (whom it called “The Magnificent 19”), continue to preach freely in London.

In Germany, authorities are considering requiring Muslim clergy to deliver sermons in German instead of Arabic. This after an imam in a Berlin mosque was captured on tape recently saying that, “Germans can only expect to rot in the fires of hell because they are non-believers.” For good measure, he even decried Europeans’ supposed lack of personal hygiene, proclaiming, “these non-believers, these Europeans, they do not even shave under their armpits, so sweat gathers in their body-hair and makes them stink.” The sermon, which was translated and broadcast on state television, has caused an uproar across Germany.

Canada is having similar difficulties. In a lecture posted on the website of Vancouver’s Dar al-Madinah Islamic Society in October, one Sheikh Younus Kathrada called for an “offensive jihad” and labeled Jews “the brothers of monkeys and swine.”

It’s clear that the kind of hateful rhetoric espoused by Kathrada and other radical clerics—which is broadcast regularly on Al-Jazeera and other Arab networks for millions of impressionable young Middle Easterners to digest—inspires Islamist terrorism. Now that the U.N. is going to be presented with a petition that would hold these preachers of hate accountable, it will be interesting to see how it responds.

If the U.N.’s reaction to Yasser Arafat’s recent death is any indication (flags outside the U.N. building in New York flew at half-mast, while inside, Kofi Annan led an hour-long tribute to the deceased terror master), the petition won’t go very far.

To defeat terrorism, one must be prepared to confront not only those who practice it, but also those who preach it; unfortunately, these are two steps which the U.N. has never shown the slightest interest in taking.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Why We Are Fighting The War on Terror

Stan wrote in to tell me that I'm wrong about the Iraq War and the Global Jihad. I'll let him speak for himself:

Memes, you make a fundamental error in comparing the war on terror to the war against Nazism. There may be some justification in that, on a one-to-one basis, comparing the characters of two individuals, but when you extend the analogy to conflicts of entire groups of people, you have to take a closer look at it. In other words, calling the terrorists 'Islamofascists', as if they were just another version of Mussolini's fascists, is easy to do but wrong.

What Hitler and Mussolini were doing was setting out to conquer the entire world militarily. Trying to stop them certainly didn't inflame the Nazis to conquer more territory, as you suggest. That was their course whether anyone opposed them or not.

I may be wrong to some degree, but it seems to be just the opposite with the Muslims. Even the hardliners you call fascists are, consciously, at any rate, trying to defend their territority against what they see as Western aggression, starting with Israel and followed by America. ...as much as the hardliners at least started out with a defensive position, the rest of the muslim world sees them more and more as defenders of all their countries and of their religion and their lives.

Unlike Nazism, which was an aggressively expanding nationalistic movement, Islamism is based on a religion. They don't just feel superior to everyone else, as the Nazis did, instead they feel very strongly about their souls and the afterlife. And when they feel all of that is threatened, it incites all of them, not just the warriors amongst them. That's the scary thing here. When we pushed a little bit against the Nazis, it actually slowed their empire-building down a little bit, diverting troops, etc.

But when you push a little against a religion like the Muslim faith, it just inflames them, even those who don't even live in that country. And the longer we keep fighting there, the wider and deeper the hatred will spread. You can't forget that a religion is a LOT different than a purely nationalistic group. And that's what nobody seemed to clue into before they went into Irak. Really, let's face it, the religious Muslims in the population (which is nearly all of them - the secularists are insignificant) don't care about democracy, freedom, women's rights, any of that. Unless that freedom means (or an election allows them to grab it) the freedom to practice their faith as they are told they are supposed to. So forget them being happy and grateful to us for instituting all the wonderful products of western civilization. They don't want it.

I think Stan's points are very well thought out. This was really a challenge for me. I think it was two days ago that he sent this in and, to tell you the truth, I have been formulating my answer this whole time. I think someone like Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, or Charles Johnson could have answered Stan in a heartbeat. But, the thing is, I started this blog to make people aware of the rising tide of anti-Semitism. I have only wandered into discussing the War on the Islamofascists, and the growth of anti-Americanism.

However, I don't come to my viewpoints completely uninformed. I have done a great deal of reading on these subjects. I think the mistake I have made here is that I have been writing with the assumption that people who come to this site are with me in their understanding of what's going on in the world. That's foolish of me.

Instead of writing a lengthy essay detailing how I have gotten to this place in my understanding of world events, I am just going to provide a series of links to articles which support my point of view.

Stan says the Islamofascists are not like the Nazi's in that their ideology is not supremacist. I don't agree. I think they believe that the world is divided into two camps; Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (House of War). Not only do they believe that those who are Islamic are superior to those who are not, they also believe that there are only three choices left open to those who are of Dar al-Harb; convert, dhimmitude (second-class citizenship), or death:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9860

http://atheism.about.com/od/islamicextremism/a/daralharb.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dar_al-Islam

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2035107

Stan says the Islamofascists don't want to take over the world like the Nazi's did. He says they merely feel they are retaliating against Western aggression. Leaving aside the question of how we could possibly completely disentangle ourselves from that part of the world, I still don't agree. I think the Islamofascists believe it is their duty to wage Jihad throughout the world until the whole world is Dar al-Islam:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2035107

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0743233247/ref=sib_rdr_ex/104-4696912-3563150?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S005#reader-page

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11805031_1

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/006350.html

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12922

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/003897.php

Understand Bin Laden's message: He wants the return of the Caliphate (One Islamic Rule in all Islamic lands past and present). He wants Andalusia (Spain) back. No land which was once Dar al-Islam can be ceded to Dar al-Harb:

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-robbins100801.shtml

http://slate.msn.com/id/1008411

http://slate.msn.com/id/1008420/

Stan says that when we fought the Nazi's we were fighting against a military state. When we fight against the Islamofascists we are fighting against a religion or ideology. One answer to that is that Nazism was an ideology. In fact, Nazism had a mystical/religious element to it based upon paganism and old German folklore. But, I will not try to make the case that it's appeal to the masses layed in such mysticism.

Instead, I assert that, while Islamofascism is religious in nature, it is not to be confused with mainstream peaceful Islam. Instead it is a militant ideology of Islam. And it needs to be done away with so that it does not fester and grow, as it has been doing for the past 25 years. Additionally, I believe that it is clear that Islamofascism is funded and supported by military states. These military states are not powerful enough to go up against the United States directly, so they attack us with their Islamofascist army. For instance, it is clear that Saudi Arabia funded and housed Al Qaeda terrorists:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Printable.asp?ID=8506

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/levitt/levitt091003.htm

So did the Iraqi Saddam Hussein regime:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16160

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15919

Additionally, it is common knowledge that Saddam funded Palestinian suicide bombers:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2846365.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2846365.stm

http://cbs11tv.com/localnews/topstories_story_322070624.html

Syria funds Hezbollah:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah

And Iran funds and controls terrorism:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/15/wmid15.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/15/ixworld.html

I've read countless articles from numerous sources, from all over the world, for the past three years, that all make these assertions. We know these things are true. However, until we start tearing down the walls we are not going to know just how bad the infestation really was. I've provided many links. If you do not believe these things, fine. But, at least now you'll know that I didn't get here without thought. I would encourage you to further google all these different topics.

In addition, I recommend you read the book Preachers of Hate:
Islam and the War on America by Kenneth Timmerman:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400049016/qid=1102114156/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/002-6498172-8776867

And check out this Little Green Footballs link for an example of how far the deceit of the Islamofascists goes:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=13827_Terror_Gang_Anxiety

Finally, I want to address Stans point that, while I may cherish our freedom and Democracy, the Islamic people don't want it. I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept that. I believe that all people are the same. We're all human beings. We all share certain drives and impulses. I agree with our Declaration of Indepenance:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Furthermore, I believe that when the Bible says we were created in God's Image, it specifically meant that we were created with free will, imagination and creativity. And I believe that for a government to impede it's people's free will, imagination and creativity to the extent that the Islamofascist governments of the former Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia do is tantamount to perpetrating a psychological holocaust on their people.

Now I'm going to tell you what makes me happy about America and I'm going to be very blunt. I believe these things which I'm going to enumerate are positive things about America and I believe it would be positive for countries all over the world to have these things in moderation.

I'm happy that I had a Playboy magazine hidden in the bottom of my dresser drawer when I was 14 years old, and I'm glad for the hours and hours of amusement it gave me. I still remember the way those girls looked to this day.

I remember, as a kid, seeing drunken grown men stand up at baseball games and scream, "Fuck you" at the umpire, and I'm happy that they felt free to do so, and that I, as a child, was prepared for the fact that the world is not a perfect place.

I'm glad that there is a West Hollywood, and a Castro District in San Francisco. I've spent time in both places and enjoyed myself.

I'm glad that there is angry hip hop, and heavy punk rock music on MTV, and that when Janet Jackson flashed her breast on CBS it didn't fundamentally change our political atmosphere, and that nobody was arrested or stoned.

I like that I can go down to the store and buy a six-pack of beer.

I'm happy that people from all over the world can move into my country and bring their culture and religion and add it to our mix.

I'm happy that I can write this essay.

I'm happy that queers for Palestine can stand in the streets of San Francisco and call Bush "Hitler."

There are so many things I'm happy with about America, and Western Civilization in general, that I could go on for pages. But, suffice it to say, I truly believe that all people, everywhere would want these freedoms. Well, it is true that intolerance of homosexuality is almost universal, but I don't know what to say about that.

The thing is, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and any other country where freedom is stolen from it's people, are states run by fanatics. As with any society, organization, company, team, etc. the group takes on the personality of it's leaders. So, if the people of those countries have taken on the fanaticism of their leaders, it doesn't surprise me. However, I do not believe that that means they really want to live that way. This is why I believe they do want what we have. And, ultimately, this is why I believe it's right for us to go to the trouble

I will say, there is part of me that believes that deep inside (in our animalistic natures) men do want to dominate women the way men do in Islamic countries, but that doesn't mean that it is acceptable. I've heard it said that the measure of a civilization is how it treats it's women. I think this is probably largely true.

In many homes in Saudi Arabia and Iran there are women in burkhas who are not allowed to leave the house without an escort, not allowed to choose an education for themselves, many times not allowed an education at all. They are not allowed to choose whom to marry, or even what to buy at the store. They are not allowed to work, not allowed to play, and barely allowed to think for themselves at all. What is that called? It's called slavery.

I refuse to accept that half the people in a certain part of the world are subjected (by religion, government and law) to being treated as slaves.

His Mortality

Read this a post from the blog of a U.S. Soldier serving in Iraq:

My own mortality
I just got word that a friend of mine has passed. He was hit by an IED on convoy. He was in the unit I was in when I first deployed here to Iraq. Sometimes I think that perhaps I am getting used to the fact that people are getting hurt or killed over here, because sometimes it just doesn't bother me. Sometimes though, it bothers me alot.Now is one of those times. He was killed doing exactly what any one of us here would be doing..... his job. It could have just as easily been me that was driving by that explosive. After being here a year, to be honest..... when you hear a boom, or bullets whizzing... you often don't give them a second thought unless they are within a certain distance from you... otherwise you would be on the ground all the time... but when the situation hits close to home like this.... it reminds of how real the situation is. I would like to ask everyone to pray for his family. I can't say the name because I don't know if families have been notified yet, but the way I see it, you don't have to know a persons name for your heart and prayers to go out to them.

That said, I also want to make sure I thank everyone who has been supporting me over here. My family and friends have been sending me packages, prayers, e-mails, and replies to my posts here on this blog. I cannot put together words that eccurately portray how gratefull I am. I know that I haven't said thanks enough for all the support I have received.... that's how I make it.... you guys.

Now that I know of the existence of his blog, I will be a daily reader. I am also including him on my blogroll. I didn't know that soldiers serving in the army were allowed to blog. Now that I know that I will find more, and include them as well.

The fact that U.S. soldiers are allowed to blog points even more to what a great and free country we are. The people who call our President "Hitler," and say that the United States is turning into a totalitarian fascist country should be ashamed of themselves. And they need to grow up and join the real world.

Yesterday, someone wrote in to me and said that my satirical blog (Screaming Memes) is an "ugly" kind of manipulation. I can understand the point. And, I sympathize with those who are taken in by it and, as a result, feel manipulated. But, I will not stop. The truth is, I believe I represent quite a few people here in America who are sick and tired of the anti-American b.s. that is being flung all over the world.

I started this blog to fight against anti-Semitism, but increasingly I have recognized the truth of the "Canaray in the Coalmine" theory of Jew-hatred, which is that the rise of anti-Semitism as a force is evidence of a sickness in a society, which will gradually come to manifest itself in all manner of evil.

I believe we are seeing that sickness in the world today. And I will continue to fight against it, in serious manner, on this blog and, in a satirical manner on the other blog.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Norah Jones

I just want to say that I think now is a suitably inappropriate time to say that Norah Jones is probably the most beautiful woman I have ever layed eyes on.

Oh, excepting my wife, of course.

The Death Of The Left

Interesting thoughts from Michael Ledeen:

The hysterical reaction of the Western Left to the reelection of President George W. Bush is not just a primal scream from politicians and intellectuals deprived of political power. The violent language, numerous acts of violence, and demonization of Bush and his electorate — the same as that directed against Tony Blair in Britain, Jose Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy — portend a more fundamental event: the death rattle of the traditional Left, both as a dominant political force and as an intellectual vision.

For the most part, the Left only wins elections nowadays when their candidates run on their opponents’ platform (Clinton and Blair) or when panic overwhelms the political process (Zapatero and Schroeder). Under normal circumstances, leftists running as leftists rarely win, proving that their ideology — the ideology that dominated political and intellectual debate for most of the last century — is spent. When their ideas were in vogue, leftist advocates took electoral defeat in stride, as they were confident that their vision was far more popular — because far more accurate — than their opponents’ view of the world. History and logic were on their side. But no more. Incoherent rage and unbridled personal attacks on the winners are sure signs of a failed vision.

Ironically, the Left’s view of history provides us with part of the explanation for its death. Marx and Hegel both understood that the world constantly changes, and ideas change along with it. The world they knew — and successfully transformed — was a class-bound society dominated by royalty and aristocracy. They hurled themselves into class struggle, believing it to be the engine of human history, and they fought for liberty for all. Successive generations of leftists preached and organized democratic revolution at home and abroad, from the overthrow of tyrants to the abolition of class privileges and the redistribution of both political power and material wealth.

In true dialectical fashion, they were doomed by their own success. As once-impoverished workers became wealthier, the concept of the proletariat became outdated, along with the very idea of class struggle. Then the manifest failure and odious tyranny of the 20th-century leftist revolutions carried out in the name of the working class — notably in Russia, China, and Cuba — undermined the appeal of the old revolutionary doctrines, no matter how desperately the Left argued that Communist tyrannies were an aberration, or a distortion of their vision.

Unable to either understand or transform the world, the Left predictably lost its bearings. It was entirely predictable that they would seek to explain their repeated defeats by claiming fraud, or dissing their own candidates, or blaming the stupidity of the electorate. Their cries of pain and rage echo those of past elites who looked forward and saw the abyss. There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision — global democratic revolution — into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

History has certainly not ended, but it has added a new layer to its rich compost heap.

I agree with the thread of Michael Ledeen's argument here. Most notably that the ideas of Marx, Hegel, et al, were developed in reaction to the the prevailing aristocratic atmosphere in Europe. However, I think he minimalizes the extent to which the ideas of the Left took hold, and still have power in the United States.

I remember sitting at lunch with an exec from a television network who had had a post 9/11 discovery of love for her country. She admitted, ashamedly, that back in her days as a student, she had worked with a leftist organization known for it's terrorist tactics. "I did some very bad things," was the way she put it.

However, her newfound patriotism, and it's attendant remorse for her past activities, had not completely done away with her old leftist leanings. She waxed nostalgic about "the movement" and admitted anguish over the fact that they had not accomplished their goals.

"Are you kidding me?" I said. "You guys filled the halls of justice and academia with your ideas. Every university student in the U.S. gets class after class of indoctrination. And clearly, the courts are acting as a sort of socialist aristocracy, handing down their epistles of excommunication to those who would hang a cross in the town square, or to those who believe that opportunity, for education and employment, should not be subjected to racial profiling."

The truth is that while left has failed to win power, it has succeeded in attaining power in the universities, and being appointed power in the justice system. That manifestation is not going to be exorcised quickly. Indeed, in the case of academia, it is largely self-perpetuating.

In addition, I must say that I believe the death of Leftist ideology, and it's deleterious effect on the Democratic Party, is a potential disaster in the short-term. The two-party system is an important component of the checks and balances system of our Democracy. It does America no good to have the Democratic party be led by crazed Leftists who shout epithets from metaphorical bullhorns.

I hope the Left finds it's bearings and quick. In fact, it would ultimately serve Republicans well to offer help to the Left, rather than derision. However, we probably wouldn't find any takers.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Hey Imam, I'm Not Convinced

I don't know why David Horowitz published this article, by Imam Luqman Ahmad, at Front Page Magazine. I hope Horowitz will explain himself shortly. Anyway, here's an exerpt:

Since the tragedy of September 11, Muslims in America have been expressing their patriotism more often than in the past. Virtually every Muslim organization and community has touted its American-ness. And rightfully so; we are Americans. Some of us were born here, and others are naturalized citizens. Many who are not yet American citizens certainly aspire to be.

Here we are, attempting to define ourselves as true Americans while holding onto our Islamic heritage and values. But defining Islam is far easier than defining American culture. Some would argue -- especially those not raised in America -- that there is no American culture. I disagree. While it is true that this culture is an ever-changing amalgam of ideas, values, cuisines, styles and ideologies, some imported and some born of this soil, there is a national consensus about what is distinctly American in the modern age.

Some say that a pronounced, anti-Muslim; anti Arab and anti-immigrant vein runs though this country. That does not represent the views for all Americans. And, remember, people can change. Many Americans have no real problem with Islam in their midst. They just want their shake and fries with it. We have always embraced other cultures; we just like to add our own twist to it. Just look at how we embraced pita bread! I remember the time where about the only place you could get pita bread on the East Coast was to go to Malko Brothers on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Now you can get it at just about any major supermarket in the country, and in different flavors too! At least 19 towns in the United States are named for Lebanon, six for Jordan, four for Egypt, and three for Palestine. There are four Cairos, six Damascuses, two Arabis, and at least one Baghdad. There's even a place called Mecca, California. History has shown that Americans are open for new ideas.

Many American converts to Islam are ambivalent to downright indignant about being told that they must abandon all of their American-ness if they are to fully embrace Islam. Undeniably, there is such a thing as American culture -- and its subscribers cherish their way of life. And if we are to truly find our place here as Muslims, it may help to understand just what it is to be an American.

American culture is Super Bowl Sunday, cheese steaks, and high school basketball. Its block parties in the summertime, coming from a neighborhood and always being able to go back and see the people you grew up with. America is the electoral process, with all its flaws, corny campaign ads, debates, and voting machine function and malfunction. America is savvy commercials, the local shopping mall, and Wal-Marts from Harlem to Middletown, USA. It's Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali and the resilience of Lance Armstrong. That's America. Its opportunity, sometimes equal, sometimes not, getting your mail delivered in the driven snow, and 24-hour Jack in a Box. That's America.

American culture is public debate about racism, affirmative action, and the success story of Tiger Woods. It's Girl Scout cookies, camping trips, and summer vacation from school. It's your alma mater, baby boomers and the quest for early retirement. America is John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. It's Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Saturday morning cartoons. America is good neighbors, back yard barbeques and a manicured lawn. It's sitting on the front stoop in the summer time eating Italian water ice.

Where else but in America can you go to Friday prayer at the mosque and find a person of African origin with an Irish last name wearing a shawal khameez from Pakistan, with a Saudi abaayah, khuffs on his feet, and Stacy Adams wing tips? That's America.

Of course American culture is much more what I've listed. America is changing and so are Muslims. Always looking to expand, American advertisers have taken notice of Muslims. We spend, and we spend big. Maybe that's a bad thing and maybe not. This is a wealthy country with a high standard of living. Perhaps that's one reason why we like it here so much. Hey, al-humdu lillah that we're not doing so bad financially. We just need to remember who to thank.

Some of American culture is at odds with our Islamic values, but thankfully we are free to take or leave these aspects. I abhor street gangs and the pervasiveness of sexual promiscuity.. I hate parking tickets, high taxes and corporate welfare, but let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. There are certainly a lot of things wrong with our country, but there are so many wonderful things to enjoy.

I gave a sermon (khutba) last summer about watching Fourth of July fireworks, something I have always done with my kids. Someone asked me, "Imam how can you sanction such a thing?"

"Hey, I like fireworks," I said. "Besides, the First Amendment is what assures me the freedom to practice my religion." Does that make me a dyed in the wool patriot? Not necessarily. But I will take advantage of the liberty to practice Islam, pray at the Masjid, enjoin the good and forbid the evil.

America is lot of things to a lot of people -- but I wouldn't condemn her just yet. I expect to get some flak for this article, and that's okay; I can live with that. I sense that we like this country more than some of us are willing to admit. We've been told that America is the Great Satan. Well I've got news for you. The Shaitaan (Devil) is an equal opportunity deceiver; he respects no borders, color, nationality or even religion. Yes, it is true that Shaitaan is busy in America, but he's busy elsewhere as well. Somehow all of the forces of the devil did not stop the athaan (Muslim call to prayer) from being called from Sarasota Florida, to Sacramento California. Tolerance -- that's America.

My first problem is that Imam Luqman Ahmad's article says that's it's easy to define Islam, but not so easy to define American culture. The problem here is that he believes he can basically define Islam wholly in terms of it's core values, while he defines America primarily by it's popular culture. Is that fair? No.

If he wanted to compare each institution by what it's popular culture produces, then it would be fair to say that Islam is burkhas and mirrored mosaics. Islam is suicide bombers and golden-domed mosques. Islam is religiously-sanctioned physical abuse of women, and it is men walking the streets in long-white shirts. Islam is Al Qaeda flying planes into building, and thousands of men lying prone in prayer on the floor of a mosque.

Does that sound fair? Well, it is by the rules the Imam set up.

However, if you want to compare by laying out the respective values of the two institutions, then America is Freedom of the Press and religion. America is a country where we believe that we were all created equal and that we were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America is freedom to own a gun, and it is the freedom to call your President "Bushitler" over a megaphone in the streets of San Francisco.

Now, I like those values. Don't you?

I would like to hear the Imam tell us what the comparable Islamic values are. All I saw him write about was prayer, fruit juice, and hijab's. That's interesting. Is that all Islam boils down to?

And I'm glad the Imam likes fireworks, and that he appreciates that he can practice his religion freely in this country. But, I would feel a lot better if I heard Muslims, en masse, standing up and saying that they are happy that Christians and Jews are free to practice their religion in this country, and that they want to see it stay that way forever. And, you know, a good way for them to start proving that they feel that way, would be to start a petition protesting the oppression of religions, other than Islam, in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

When can I expect to see something like that Imam Ahmad?

1/2 Of Britons Unaware Of Auschwitz?

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for making me aware of this, from Reuter's:

LONDON (Reuters) - Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.

The results of the survey conducted by the BBC were released on Thursday as Britain's public broadcaster announced it will show a new series next January to mark the 60th anniversary of the concentration camp's liberation.

"We were amazed by the results of our audience research," said Laurence Rees, a producer on the series, "Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution." "It's easy to presume that the horrors of Auschwitz are engrained in the nation's collective memory, but obviously this is not the case," Rees said.

The survey found that 45 percent of those surveyed had not heard of Auschwitz. Historians estimate that anywhere from one million to three million people, about 90 percent of them Jews, were killed there. Among women and people younger than 35, 60 percent had never heard of Auschwitz, despite the recent popularity of films such as "Schindler's List," "Life is Beautiful" and "The Pianist," which depict the atrocities of the Holocaust.

"The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror, but the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it," Rees said. The BBC said the research was based on a nationally representative postal survey of 4,000 adults 16 and older.

The broadcaster is marking Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, with a variety of television and radio programs. The Auschwitz series for BBC2 is based on nearly 100 interviews with survivors and perpetrators and is the result of three years of research with the assistance of professors Ian Kershaw and David Cesarani.

I have a hard time believing this is true. I hope that this scares the government of Britain into doing more extensive research on the subject.

If the results of this poll are true, it is just more evidence that Grandma Europa is senile, and is a danger to herself, and her neighbors. She's liable to turn on the gas in the oven one day and not realize the pilot light isn't lit. You know what will happen then.

I've written quite a few posts about how the "Neocon" conspiracy theory is big in England. Politicians and columnists find nothing wrong in going on TV and making claims that Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristal are controlling George Bush like he's a puppet. The insinuation is a variation on the old Protocols liable that the Jews are trying to control the world.

I guess this poll goes some way to explaining how it is that their society is so willing to accept such bald nonesense. Obviously, the true history of the Jews is barely a blip on their map. The resultant vacuum in their heads thus sucks up all the conspiracy theories.

I guess you've got to have something to think about if you're that stupid.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

A Reply To Stan
Islamofascism Needs To Be
Sent to The Dustbins Of History

Stan wrote in to say that he had always been a strong supporter of the Iraq War, but now he's starting to worry:

I don't know, Memes. I supported the Irak war at the beginning, but now it all just seems pretty weird. Estimates are over 100,000 Iraki citizens, non-combatants, killed since the war began. And the conflict seems only just getting up a head of steam. And all the good reasons for the US being in there have evaporated. It's all just getting worse and worse. The whole Arab world is going to join the conflict soon, and what will happen to Israel, nukes or not, in the process is anybody's guess.

The one fact that always held me in favour of the war in the early going was that however little evidence of WMDs were found, there was no denying that if left on his own Saddam would eventually have them, and use them. The equivalent big fact we have to deal with now is that the harder we push on any one spot in the Muslim world, the more the whole Musim world unites behind the terrorists. The first fact is still there but it's beginning to pale compared to the magnitude of the second.

And these are the two big facts you have to deal with realistically if you want to be realistic about what's happening right now, and have a realistic idea as to what's best to do in future.

Now, I'm not sure that Stan is serious in his question because he quotes the discredited study saying 100,000 thousand more Iraqi's have died during the duration of the war than would have if the war were not being conducted. I believe he might be joking. He has good reason not to trust me. But, that other site is satire. So, I will treat his points seriously because the objections he raises are raised daily by people who oppose the Iraq war.

It is true, Stan, that, if we push hard against the Islamofascists (not the Muslims in general), we run the risk of causing them to resort to ever more extreme measures. One of those measures, of which I am particularly concerned, is the possible use of a nuclear weapon.

However, ask yourself this question: Was it not true also of the Nazi's in 1941? Wasn't it true that if the United States struck against the Nazi's in 1941 (unprovoked, by the way) that they may have been motivated to use ever more extreme measures against us. In fact, our strike against Germany did result in Germany doing everything they could to defeat us.

So, what's new? That's war.

The fact remains that Islamofascism (Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and many others) is an ideology that needs to be sent to the dustbins of history. As a world, we can not move past our medieval boundaries as long as Islamofascism is trying to recreate a world in which women are slaves, infidels and gays are to be killed, and there is no freedom of expression or religion.

I'll bet you that, when you think about it, you agree with me on that, don't you Stan?

Israel Must Repel It's Enemy And Win The War

Yesterday I posted an article by Anne Bayefsky where she criticized the UN for it's unwillingness to condemn anti-Semitism. In thinking about the article later this part struck me as bizarre:

The U.N.'s judicial organ, the International Court of Justice, decided in July that Israel's security fence violated its version of international law. The contortions necessary to arrive at this conclusion resulted in a decision that there is no right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter when terrorists are not state actors. But just in case anyone missed the point, Judge Tanaka spoke of "the so-called terrorist attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers against the Israeli civilian population" (emphasis added) and Judge Elaraby (Egyptian ambassador to the U.N. until 1999) affirmed a "right of resistance" on the grounds, judicially speaking of course, that "violence breeds violence."

So, the UN is saying that Israel is not allowed to defend itself but the Palestinians are? And think about it, the UN effectively legalized terrorism. How, is Israel supposed to deal with terrorism other than to what they are doing? Are they supposed to send the police out to knock on doors and attempt to arrest people who are willing to blow themselves up in order to kill "Jews"? Is not a security fence and targeted attacks a better idea? And what about the fact that Israel has provided the UN with proof that Arafat himself funded terrorist attacks? Doesn't that make the terrorists "state actors"?

Here's the thing that has always gotten me about the anti-Israel side: When you comment to them that the Palestinian's are waging terrorist attacks, they will counter by saying something to the effect of, "Well, what do you expect them to do? They don't have an army." So, then if they are acting in place of an army doesn't that in effect make the terrorist's the Palestinian army? And, if they are acting as the Palestinian Army then are they not waging war against Israel? And doesn't that mean that Israel, as a state, is responsible to it's people to repel the enemy and win the war?

I say so, and I must admit, I have a hard time understanding any other viewpoint.

A Hush Over Hollywood

Thanks to Jack at Jack of Clubs for clueing me into the fact that Pat Sajak is apparently one celebrity who is actually on our side in the War on Islamofascism. Here's Pat:

Picture this:

Somewhere in the world, a filmmaker creates a short documentary that chronicles what he perceives as the excesses of anti-abortion activists. An anti-abortion zealot reacts to the film by killing the filmmaker in broad daylight and stabbing anti-abortion tracts onto his body. How does the Hollywood community react to this atrocity? Would there be angry protests? Candlelight vigils? Outraged letters and columns and articles? Awards named in honor of their fallen comrade? Demands for justice? Calls for protection of artistic freedom? It’s a pretty safe bet that there would be all of the above and much more. And all of the anger would be absolutely justified.

So I’m trying to understand the nearly universal lack of outrage coming from Hollywood over the brutal murder of Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, who was shot on the morning of November 2, while bicycling through the streets of Amsterdam. The killer then stabbed his chest with one knife and slit his throat with another.

The presumed murderer, a Dutch-born dual Moroccan-Dutch citizen, attached a 5-page note to van Gogh's body with a knife. In it, he threatened jihad against the West in general, and specifically against five prominent Dutch political figures. Van Gogh’s crime? He created a short film highly critical of the treatment of women in Islamic societies. So, again I ask, where is the outrage from Hollywood’s creative community? I mean, talk about a violation of the right of free speech!

Perhaps they are afraid that their protests would put them in danger. That, at least, is a defensible position. If I were Michael Moore, I would much rather rail against George W. Bush, who is much less likely to have me killed, than van Gogh’s murderer and the threat to creative freedom he brings. Besides, a man of Moore’s size would provide a great deal of “bulletin board” space.

Maybe they think it would be intolerant of them to criticize the murder, because it would put them on the side of someone who criticized a segment of the Arab world. And, after all, we are often reminded that we need to be more tolerant of others, especially if they’re not Christians or Jews.

There’s another possibility; one that seems crazy on the surface, but does provide an explanation for the silence, and is also in keeping with the political climate in Hollywood. Is it just possible that there are those who are reluctant to criticize an act of terror because that might somehow align them with President Bush, who stubbornly clings to the notion that these are evil people who need to be defeated? Could the level of hatred for this President be so great that some people are against anything he is for, and for anything he is against?

Yeah, I think that's it. Because they are acting like children and, as I mentioned the other day, we as a society have indulged a whole portion of our society in their extended adolescence. We do not demand accountability of them. Thankfully, Sajak has done that here. Hollywood needs to stand up and condemn Islamofascism which stands murderously against everything they claim they are for.

CUANAS