CUANAS: 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Ice Cream For Crow

Everybody should know about Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, if only so they can protect themselves.

Waiting For
Moderate
Muslims
Is Like
Waiting
For Godot

In recent weeks, I have been making the same statement over and over ad nauseum. Here it is:

There is not a single Islamic political organization, media outlet, academic institution, or government, of any appreciable size, anywhere in the world, which is moderate.

Those who read me are probably getting sick of hearing it. Perhaps, wondering if I have lost my edge, my ability to come up with new ideas on a daily basis. Maybe I have, because I confess, I am definately stuck on this idea. It seems to me there is no greater outrage in this world than this one simple truth.

I wonder whether many readers believe me when I write this, so on occasion I challenge those who read me to come up with one example of a moderate Muslim organization. I have yet to have a single commenter even attempt to rise to the challenge. And, if any do, I am extremely confident that I will be able to prove, in short order, that the organization is not at all moderate.

And, if there are any who do not believe me (for it is an extreme statement to make, even if true), well then, here is a Muslim who is saying the same thing as I (from the Toronto Sun):

In a recent column, Michael Coren, my colleague here at the Sun, demanded Muslims apologize for wrongs too numerous to list.

Coren is right. I, as a Muslim, apologize without equivocation or reservation for the terrible crimes -- small and big -- committed by Muslims against non-Muslims and against Muslims, as in Darfur, who are weak and easy prey to those who hold power in the name of Islam.

I imagine, however, Coren is not seeking an apology from a person of Muslim faith such as I, who maintains no rank and cannot speak on behalf of the institutionalized world of Islam.

Like many others who share his frustration and legitimate anger, Coren is asking to hear a contrite voice from within institutionalized Islam -- to repent for Muslim misconduct, past and present, that is indefensible by any standard of civility and decency, and seek forgiveness.

But Coren and others might well wait indefinitely for such an apology from those representatives of institutionalized Islam convinced of their own righteousness, even as they are engineers of a civilization's wreckage and prosper in it by the art of bullying.

Oh, we will not wait indefinately. Of that, I can assure you. The problem for moderates who are Muslim is that we are getting sick of waiting. And the day that we become completely fed up will be a very sad day for all of humanity.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Exit Music (For A Film)

Pianist Brad Mehldau playing a song by Radiohead.

Who Are You Rooting For?

For anyone who has trouble picking sides in the ongoing Middle East Conflict, let's step back from the conflict itself and look at some facts about the two sides. What do the two sides do with their relative resources? (From the Zionist Youngster):

Whatever wealth they have is the result of their good fortune (of having oil under their ground) and not of their efforts. Israel, poor in such natural resources, prospers by the brains and the sweat of its people ... This setting up of industry, science and culture by the Zionists predates the independence of Israel by decades, whereas the invented nation calling themselves “Palestinians” have been engaged in nothing but internecine warfare (of the violent kind), the setting up of terrorist training camps, and the maintenance of a poisonous education system ever since gaining land of their own in 1993.

Such is the difference between Israel and its enemies ...

Yes, but let's look a bit more at the difference. In 2002, the United Nations Development Program released its report on development in the 22 states of the Arab World. Get a load of these statistics:

No Arab country spends more than 0.2 percent of its gross national product on scientific research, and most of that money goes toward salaries. By contrast, the United States spends more than 10 times that amount.
Fewer than one in 20 Arab university students pursue scientific disciplines.There are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world. The global average is 78 per 1,000.
No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.
Only 370 industrial patents were issued to people in Arab countries between 1980 and 2000. In South Korea during that same period, 16,000 industrial patents were issued.

Is the answer, then, that Jews are smart, and Arabs are stupid? No, the answer lies in Islamic ideology vs. Jewish ideology. Arabs are predominantly Muslim. Islam teaches that the Koran is the final word of Allah, and that all circumstances are Insh'allah (as Allah wills it). And, what's more Allah is beyond his creation and totally incomprehensible.

Judaism, and Christianity by extension, teaches that humans particpate in God's creation in every way, from helping to write the Word of God (The Bible) to maintaining the garden, to naming the animals. And, God is not incomprehensible to man. Instead, man was created in God's Image. Therefore, just as God is rational and creative, we are to be rational and creative.

In the world of Islam, it is blasphemy to think this way. And, that is why Muslims invent almost nothing, and produce little wealth with all the revenue from their oil. Well, they did invent the Buzzing Prayer Rug.

Anyway, the question is, even if you have trouble disentangling the politics of the Middle East Conflict, which side would you rather have increase its influence in this world?

Also see: Observations on Arabs.

Isaac Schrodinger also has some important links on this subject.

Al Gore - Off The Rails

If you really thought Al Gore had a point all these years, I think all you need to do is read the following and you will understand that you were mistaken:

GORE: CIGARETTE SMOKING 'SIGNIFICANT' CONTRIBUTOR TO GLOBAL WARMINGFri Sep 29 2006 09:04:05 ET

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"

Gore, who was introduced by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said the world faces a "full-scale climate emergency that threatens the future of civilization on earth."Gore showed computer-generated projections of ocean water rushing in to submerge the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, parts of China, India and other nations, should ice shelves in Antarctica or Greenland melt and slip into the sea.

"The planet itself will do nicely, thank you very much what is at risk is human civilization," Gore said. After a series of Q& A with the audience, which had little to do with global warming and more about his political future, Annan bid "adios" to Gore.

Then, Gore had his staff opened a stack of cardboard boxes to begin selling his new book, "An Inconvenient Truth, The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It," $19.95, to the U.N. diplomats.

The only question is, is Al Gore a lunatic, or a shameless hawker of B.S.?

The Religion of Peace

Is Islam a religion of peace, or a religion of war? Should the Pope be allowed to address the issue in a free society?

From Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times:

EVER SINCE 9/11, a dark view of Islam has been gaining currency on what might be called the Western street. This view holds that, contrary to the protestations of our political leaders — who claim that acts of terrorism are being carried out by a minority of extremists — the real problem lies with Islam itself. In this interpretation, Islam is not a religion of peace but of war, and its 1.2 billion adherents will never rest until all of humanity is either converted, subjugated or simply annihilated. Is the war on terrorism really a "clash of civilizations"? The overreaction to Pope Benedict XVI's relatively innocuous remarks at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12 would seem to lend weight to this alarming notion.

As part of a plea for combining reason with religion, the pope cited a 14th century Byzantine emperor who condemned Muhammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman" because of "his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The pope subsequently made clear that these were not his own views, but this did not stop an explosion of animosity across the Muslim world. Amid calls from angry clerics to "hunt down" the holy father (a.k.a. "the dog of Rome" and the "worshiper of the cross"), various hotheads have taken to the streets and attacked Christian churches.

This recalls the over-the-top outcry this year after a Danish newspaper dared to print cartoons depicting Muhammad as an instigator of violence. Muslim spokesmen claim that these are unconscionable slurs. Yet, while demanding respect for their own religion, too many Muslims accord too little respect to competing faiths or even to competing brands of their own faith.

Where are the demonstrations in the Muslim street when the president of Iran denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel? Or when Palestinian kidnappers force two Western journalists to convert to Islam at gunpoint? Or when Sunni terrorists in Iraq bomb Shiite mosques and slaughter hundreds of worshipers?

All too many Islamic leaders prefer to harp on the supposed sins of the "infidels," however exaggerated or even fictionalized (no, the CIA didn't bomb the World Trade Center to create an excuse for invading Afghanistan), rather than focusing on the problems within their own umma (community). And yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the woes of Islamic society today, serious as they are, are endemic to the religion itself.

It is true that, alone of the world's major faiths, Islam was founded by a prophet who used force to win converts. "I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah,' " Muhammad proclaimed in his farewell address to his followers in AD 632.

Countless Muslims since then have followed the path of jihad — literally, "exertion in the path of Allah" but usually taken as an injunction for waging holy war. But countless Muslims also have been willing to trade with unbelievers, to live peaceably alongside them, to learn from them and even to enter into military alliances with them against Muslim rivals.

Religions are not monolithic. They have no fixed, eternal identity. Until the 18th century, Christianity was a militant faith whose adherents did not hesitate to kill "heathens." Throughout the Middle Ages, Islamic states usually offered greater tolerance to religious minorities and were more open to secular learning than their Christian neighbors.

Even now, most Muslim countries — from Senegal to Indonesia — are far more pluralistic and much less fundamentalist than Iran or Saudi Arabia. And even in the most militant Muslim societies, clerics are able to maintain a rigid orthodoxy only by force. Left to their own devices, the Saudi or Iranian people would opt for a less monastic existence — a danger that the guardians of official morality are keenly aware of.

The real enemy we face is not Islam per se but a violent offshoot known as Islamism, which is rooted, to be sure, in the Koran but which also finds inspiration in such modern Western ideologies as fascism, Nazism and communism. Its most successful exponents — from Hassan Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden — are hardly orthodox interpreters of Islam. They are power-mad intellectuals in the mold of a Lenin or a Hitler. The problem is that the rest of the Muslim world, by not doing more to curb the radicals — whether out of fear or sympathy — lends credence to the most objectionable caricatures of their faith.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

American Political Hegemony
Isn't Just A Myth -
It's Total B.S.

From Reliapundit, the Astute Blogger:

... just by comparing the nations said to be under USA hegemony the last 50 years to the nations under Soviet of Jihadist hegemony.

All the nations under so-called USA hegemony expanded their human rights and their prosperity under USA influence and protection - while those under Soviet or Jihadist hegemony had less and less liberty, and became poorer and poorer - (until the whole shebang collapsed!):

Western Europe was better for people than Eastern Europe; South Korea was better for people than North Korea; Japan and the Philipines and Taiwan and Singapore - and South Vietnam and Thailand - were better for people than China and Cambodia and Laos.

REPEAT: Hong Kong was better than China. Puerto Rico and the DR are better off than Cuba. Even India sucked until - like China - they abandoned Marxism and opened up to economic ties with the "evil greedy capitalistic USA!"

The last 2 decades of trade with the "evil greedy capitalistic " USA has lifted more Chinese out of poverty than the previous 5 decades of Marxist/Maoist idealism. We have exploited them right into the 21st century!

There is not a single solitary country which was under real USSR hegemony which did better than those under so-called "USA hegemony. " The walls were built to keep them in, not us out!

The BOAT PEOPLE were fleeing Vietnam and Cuba, not San Diego or Boston!

And we didn't even EVER conscript their citizens, or tax the people in these "captive client states". In fact, the opposite is quite true: WE PAID EXTRA TAXES TO PROTECT THEM - WITH OUR CONSCRIPTS, OUR SOLDIERS, OUR BLOOD! We sacrificed for their freedom.

That AIN'T "dominance"; that's humanistic heroism!

You really should read the Astute Blogger everyday. He is one of the best bloggers on the net.

Poll Says
Iraqis Back Attacks
On American Troops

From Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year, according to a poll in that country.

The poll, done for University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, found:
_Almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military force in Iraq provokes more violence than it prevents.

_About 61 percent approved of the attacks — up from 47 percent in January. A solid majority of Shiite and Sunni Arabs approved of the attacks, according to the poll. The increase came mostly among Shiite Iraqis.

Slip Slidin' Away

I worry that the compromises we are willing to make indicate a slow slide into what is called dhimmitude. A dhimmi is a person who lives under Islam with a status of protection. The Koran and Hadith proscribe that Christians and Jews can live in Islamic territory if they agree to pay the Jizya tax, which is a tax levied only on non-Muslims. Additionally, they must remain subservient to all Muslims and what they say counts for little in a court of law, should a Muslim happen to bring suit against them.

Now, I know this sounds crazy. Why would I worry about such a thing? Well, because the first step towards dhimmitude is allowing Sharia law to govern certain sectors of society. We have actually begun to see small movement towards this happening. In Canada, they almost passed a bill which would have allowed Sharia courts to govern domestic issues for Muslims. That's a first step. Additionally, there are neighborhoods in Sweden, the Netherlands, France and England, where the police refuse to go. The residents think of the neighborhoods as Dar al-Islam (territory of Islam). In other words, they believe they have colonized those neighborhoods and as far as they are concerned Sharia rules there, and so the police have no business in their neighborhoods.

Even firemen are afraid to go into these neighborhoods. When there is a fire, residents throw rocks and molotov cocktails at the firemen. Therefore, they need police protection. And, of course, the police don't want to go there.

So, the fire burns.

In England, pre-dhimmitude is so bad that a school system has banned public display of Piglet, because Muslims hate pigs. A chain of banks has done the same thing. They will no longer do their usual promotion of giving out piggy banks to children to teach them to save.

In France, one government official actually proposed creating "millets", which is a French word for neighborhoods governed by separate laws. He did this after having met with Muslims community leaders and determining that they ought to be able to govern themselves by Sharia.

I could go on and on, and I will.

In Dearborn , Michigan they publicly blast the call to prayer for Muslims. This was ok'd by the local city council.

This year will be the largest year for immigration of Saudis EVER in the United States.

In Belgium a writer named Paul Belien is being harrased by the police and threatened with charges of inciting violence and propagating racist ideas because he runs a website (Brussels Journal) which is more moderate than this one.

In Australia a Christian pastor was jailed for calling Islam a religion of the sword (which my Pastor has done openly in our church services) and using verses from the Koran to back up his assertion. In court, he attempted to read the verses and they would not allow him to do so.

In Germany, this week, an opera house decided not to run a production of a Mozart opera (which they had done only two years ago) because it featured a scene where a character pulls Mohammed's severed head from a bag. He also pulls the heads of Jesus and the Buddha from the bag, but that did not sway the German dhimmis.

These things I am telling you only scratch the surface. I write of stuff like this everyday. I am like a policeman who sees too much of the bad side of the world. I worry about myself, but I believe that I have been called to do this.

I'll tell you one thing I have learned, and it is going to sound like an extreme thing to say, but, if you disagree with me, I challenge you to research my assertion and you will find it is true.

THERE IS NOT A SINGLE ISLAMIC POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, MEDIA OUTLET, ACADEMIC INSTITUTION, OR GOVERNMENT, OF ANY APPRECIABLE SIZE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, WHICH IS MODERATE.

That is a frightening thing to ponder. If you really think about it, that means we have no partner for dialogue or negotiation. There are moderate people who happen to be Muslims, but if the organizations which represent them are to be believed, there is no such thing as moderate Islam.

And, until a sizable group of moderate Muslims organizes themselves in order to represent their viewpoint, we are fools to believe in a moderate Islam.

I think there are many in our government who already know this, but it wouldn't do much good to articulate it publicly. No use riling up the Muslims even further.

However, at this point, I see it as my job to rile up Muslims as much as possible. Because the more they show us their colors, the more Americans and Europeans will see the truth, and stop living in a PC dreamworld where all people and religions are of equal value.

There, that's my opinion.

Third Night
Of Rioting
In Belgium

Let's see, the media says that a pack of vague "youths" are rioting. They are "North African" youths, and it is the third night of Ramadan. I wonder if we can put two and two and two together:

It looks as if immigrants youths want to turn nightly rioting during the Islamic holy month of ramadan into an annual tradition. Around 8:30pm last night violence erupted again in Brussels, the capital of Europe. The riots centered on the Brussels Marollen quarter and the area near the Midi Train Station, where the international trains from London and Paris arrive.

Youths threw stones at passing people and cars, windows of parked cars were smashed, bus shelters were demolished, cars were set ablaze, a youth club was arsoned and a shop was looted. Two molotov cocktails were thrown into St.Peter’s hospital, one of the main hospitals of central Brussels. The fire brigade was able to extinguish the fires at the hospital, but youths managed to steal the keys of the fire engine.

During the month of ramadan Muslims are required to fast during the day and are only allowed to eat after sunset. As Esther pointed out “What should be noticed about the riots is that they start after sunset. Besides the fact that they start after dark, it also gives the rioters enough time to break their fast and enjoy the traditional family meal. Sunset is around 7:30pm.” Tuesday’s and Monday’s riots began around 8:30pm.

Last night the police arrested 45 rioters. One of them will be prosecuted for assaulting the owner of a shop. Philippe Close, the chef de cabinet of the Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, said that the authorities would continue their efforts to defuse the situation in a peaceful manner, but he announced that the police will be less complacent in future, “since we cannot tolerate that this [Marollen] neighbourhood falls victim to a problem from outside the neighbourhood.”

The immigrant youths claim that they are upset by the death of Fayçal Chaaban, a 25-year old criminal, in a Brussels prison last Sunday. Yesterday morning the authorities announced they would hold a meeting with the youths to hear their grievances about security in prison, but the meeting, which was due last night, could not take place because of the riots.

The authorities are especially nervous since the Belgian municipal elections are being held on Sunday October 8th. It is likely that the elections will be won by anti-immigrant, “islamophobic” parties. Since ramadan will not be over on October 8th and many immigrants might perceive a victory of the indigenous right (as opposed to their own far-right) as an insult, Muslim indignation over the election results in major cities may spark serious disturbances.

According to a poll published today the Vlaams Belang party is set to win 38.6% of the vote in Antwerp (compared to 33,0% in the previous municipal elections six years ago).

This is the face of modern Europe. The authorities refuse to do anything substantive about the problems in their midst. Instead, they tut tut and castigate those who do try to do something. Authorities are concerned that "Islamophobic" parties will win the election.

Well, of course they will, if the current government refuses to actually put an end to the riots. There are ways to stop such anarchy. Do they have the will to do so, or not?

Last year there were forty-five nights of rioting in Paris. The riots gradually spread to other cities, and eventually, most of the larger cities in France were ablaze.

Will Belgium allow this to happen? Will the Belgian rioting spread to neighboring France?

I'd bet on it.

Pathetically, only one news report has been filed on this in the mainstream media:

The third day of rioting in the Marollen district of Brussels commenced today, events which were sparked by the apparent murder of a Moroccan prisoner in a Brussels prison. What makes this story unusual is that so far, there has only been one report issued across the newswires (by Reuters) covering the events, and even though the rioting is entering its third day, not a single photographer has been dispatched to document the activities of the Muslim mob.

Here are some links to articles on last years wave of "youth" riots across Europe:

A Civil War Underway in Old Europe, 30 October 2005
Riots, How Very American of You, 1 November 2005
Ramadan Rioting in Europe’s No-Go Areas, 2 November 2005
Riots: The Failure of Big Government, 4 November 2005
Why Some Riot and Some Do Not, 4 November 2005
The Fall of France, 5 November 2005
Show Them Who Is the Boss in France, 6 November 2005
Intifada Spreads to Brussels and Berlin, 7 November 2005
Allons Enfants de la Jihad, 8 November 2005
Land of the Lost, 9 November 2005
The Breakdown of the Extended Order, 9 November 2005
Copycat, Copycat, Where Have You Been? 10 November 2005
Censorship as a State Collapses, 11 November 2005
Mosque Attack in France, 12 November 2005
All Quiet on the European Front, 13 November 2005
Religion, Don’t Mention It, 14 November 2005
France “Quasi Normal” After The Jack Chirac Show, 15 November 2005
Too Many Wives Causes Unrest, 16 November 2005
The Writing on the Wall, 18 November 2005
France’s Toll of Destruction, 18 November 2005

Censorship Through Intimidation:

Berlin...More self censorship in the West due to fear of Muslim "rage."

An opera company in Berlin has cancelled a Mozart production of his work Idomeneo fearing a scene in which the prophet Mohammed's decapitated head is rolled on stage could trigger an Islamic backlash...

...Mohammed is not the only figure to be decapitated in the opera – the heads of Jesus, the Greek God Poseidon and Buddha are also rolled on to the stage.

But it is the symbol which city officials fear could trigger rioting and bloodshed.

Monday, September 25, 2006

My Thoughts
On The
"Purple-Faced Rage"

If you don't know what I am referring to by "Purple-Faced Rage", then go check out Pamela's post on Bill Clinton's meltdown on Fox News yesterday.

I don't hate Clinton the way most people on the right do. I liked Clinton as a President. I recognize his problems, but he seemed like the right President for the time.

But that's all the past now.

That being said, I have to say that Clinton was behaving very bizarrely in this interview. My wife and I watched Pamela's vlog together and we both agreed that Clinton is clearly obsessed with this question. One might presume that the bags under his eyes come from sleepless nights tossing and turning on exactly this question.

The question itself set him off, and he became very irrational. At one point he senselessly changed the subject and asserted that Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News) is "for climate change." That is one of the most bizarre assertions I have ever heard a person make. And, I've got some pretty moonbatty friends.

So, I have to wonder what the intelligence was that Clinton rec'd on Bin Laden. It must have been frightening.

Here's the thing, Clinton had good reason not to take out Bin Laden. To do so, he would have had to fire on a country which we were not at war with. Additionally, he would have had to violate American law (signed by Ronald Reagan) which forbids political assassinations.

Clinton could simply fall back on that argument.

But, he doesn't, and that is telling.

What that tells me is that Clinton knew something about Bin Laden that made him very upset. Honestly, it must have been something beyond the Cole, the Khobar towers and all that. Those were grievous acts of terrorism, yes, but they were not worse than the bomging of the Marine barracks in Beirut. And that did not destroy Reagan's reputation.

We know that Clinton was not a President who was obsessed with his responsibility to the country. We know that he WAS a President who was obsessed with how he looked. He was obsessed with his reputation.

Therefore, he must have known something about Bin Laden which might have made him look bad.

I have to wonder if the nuclear threat was more worrying than has been let on.

That is the only thing I can think of that would have made Clinton this upset.

Here's the thing, the whole story in that interview doesn't so much turn on his "purple-faced anger". He actually doesn't look that out of control, until he made that statement about Murdoch being for climate change.

When he said that you know he had completely lost his ability to reason. Clinton has been angry before, but never in my recollection has he lost his his ability to reason. Even his bizarre soliloquiy on the meaning of "is", during his Monicagate testimony, relied on logic.

So, I heard a lot all weekend about the "purple-faced rage," but I didn't become convinced there was something really wrong until I saw that part of the interview. I couldn't figure out what people were making such a big deal out of.

It seems to me that too many people on the Right are simply using this as another excuse to laugh at Clinton and pile on him. I think this is something more significant. Don't just accept his behavior at face value and say "well that's just like Clinton."

Because it isn't.

Clinton has never freaked out like this before. He is a master at remaining calm when he is attacked. He has been attacked in ways which are almost as stupid as the things that have been said about Bush. The whole Clinton Chronicles thing was one of the low points of the Conservative movement IMO.

The only time Clinton ever looked even remotely near this stressed out was during the Lewinsky scandal.

Think about that, he looked ALMOST as stressed out when he was in position to LOSE HIS PRESIDENCY. But, he is more stressed out over this? Think about it.

I have to wonder if something is going to come out soon, maybe. Maybe he knows it. Maybe he thought he was going to be ambushed in that interview.

I don't know. I couldn't know. All I do know is that for all the Clinton haters who are having so much fun with this story (and it is fun) it is just too easy to say, "That's Clinton" even when it just isn't.

There is something more to this. That is exactly why Sandy Berger was willing to steal those documents in such blatant fashion.

It just would have been too easy for Clinton to say "We were not at war with Sudan or Afghanistan and besides there is a law against political assassinations." That is logical.

He is freaking out about something that YOU AND I AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC do not know about.

It is something that is worse than anything we know about.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Hell

Song by Squirrel Nut Zippers

Here are the lyrics:

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow therell be hell to pay

People listen attentively
I mean about future calamity
I used to think the idea was obsolete
Until I heard the old man stamping his feet.

This is a place where eternally
Fire is applied to the body
Teeth are extruded and bones are ground
Then baked into cakes which are passed around.

Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement
Top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide
Will be revealed on the other side.

Now the d and the a and the m
And the n and the a
And the t and the i-o-n
Lose your face, lose your name
Then get fitted for a suit of flame

A Religion
Of
The Sword

One Sunday, a couple years back, my Pastor gave a sermon in which he compared Christianity and Islam. He concluded by calling Islam a "religion of the sword." When I heard him say that I thought, "Wow, that's a bit extreme." Those were in the days shortly after I began to become aware of the rise of the new anti-Semitism. At that point I still thought was more or less like any other religion, but perhaps with a few more crazies.

Today, a stellar piece of writing on the subject of Islam appears over at the Australian News today. I suggest reading the whole thing, but will excerpt this section here dealing with Islamic scriptures which support violence:

Saudi Arabia's most senior cleric also explained that war was never Islam's ancient founder, the prophet Mohammed's, first choice: "He gave three options: either accept Islam, or surrender and pay tax, and they will be allowed to remain in their land, observing their religion under the protection of Muslims." Thus, according to the Grand Mufti, the third option of violence against non-Muslims was only a last resort, if they refused to convert or surrender peacefully to the armies of Islam.

Abdel went on to urge people to read the Koran and Sunnah (the record of Mohammed's teaching and example) for themselves, pointing out that the Koran, Islam's equivalent of scripture, has been translated into many of the world's languages: "Those who read the Koran and the Sunnah can understand the facts."

On this at least the Archbishop of Sydney and the Saudi Grand Mufti do agree, for in an address earlier this year, Pell also urged people to read the Koran.

Accessing the facts: So what are these facts contained in the Koran and Sunnah that the Grand Mufti would have us read? As it happens, reading the Koran is not without its difficulties. There is, for a start, the thorny problem of context. The Koran gives little help with this: it does not mark off specific passages one from another and its 114 chapters (suras) are not laid out in chronological order.

The keys to unlocking the context for individual passages of the Koran can be found in the life of Mohammed, the Sunnah. The sources for the Sunnah are the traditions (hadiths), of which Sunnis recognise six canonical collections, and biographies of Mohammed (sira literature). Although the volume of this material is considerable, it is now largely available in English translation, much of it on the internet.

In addition to the inherent difficulty of the sources, many secular Westerners rely on certain crippling preconceptions. One is the often-heard mantra that "all religions are the same". Another is the claim that "anyone can justify violence from any religious text". This idea stretches back at least to Rousseau, who considered any and all forms of religion to be pernicious.

Either of these views, if firmly held, would tend to sabotage anyone's ability to investigate the Koran's distinctive take on violence.

There is another obstacle, and that is Western culture's own sense of guilt and suspicion of what it regards as Christian hypocrisy.

Any attempt to critique some of Islam's teachings is likely to be met with loud and vociferous denunciations of the church's moral failings, such as its appalling track record of anti-Semitism. And did I mention the crusades? Finally, the reality is that Muslims adhere to widely varying beliefs and practices. Most people are understandably afraid to come to their own conclusions about violent passages in the Koran, lest they find themselves demonising Muslims.

But does the Koran incite violence, and how does its message compare with the Bible?

The Koran: It is self-evident that some Koranic verses encourage violence. Consider for example a verse which implies that fighting is "good for you": "Fighting is prescribed upon you, and you dislike it. But it may happen that you dislike a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that you love a thing which is bad for you. And Allah knows and you know not." (2:216)
On the other hand, it is equally clear that there are peaceful verses as well, including the famous "no compulsion in religion" (2:256).

Resolving apparently contradictory messages presents one of the central interpretative challenges of the Koran. Muslims do not agree today on how best to address this. For this reason alone it could be regarded as unreasonable to claim that any one interpretation of the Koran is the correct one.

Nevertheless, a consensus developed very early in the history of Islam about this problem. This method relies on a theory of stages in the development of Mohammed's prophetic career. It also appeals to a doctrine known as abrogation, which states that verses revealed later can cancel out or qualify verses revealed earlier.

The classical approach to violence in the Koran was neatly summed up in an essay on jihad in the Koran by Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Hamid, former chief justice of Saudi Arabia: "So at first 'the fighting' was forbidden, then it was permitted and after that it was made obligatory: (1) against those who start 'the fighting' against you (Muslims) ... (2) And against all those who worship others along with Allah."

At the beginning, in Mohammed's Meccan period, when he was weaker and his followers few, passages of the Koran encouraged peaceful relations and avoidance of conflict: "Invite (all) to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching; and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious." (16:125)

Later, after persecution and emigration to Medina in the first year of the Islamic calendar, authority was given to engage in warfare for defensive purposes only: "Fight in the path of God those who fight you, but do not transgress limits, for God does not love transgressors." (2:190)

As the Muslim community grew stronger and conflict with its neighbours did not abate, further revelations expanded the licence for waging war, until in Sura 9, regarded as one of the last chapters to be revealed, it is concluded that war against non-Muslims could be waged more or less at any time and in any place to extend the dominance of Islam. Sura 9 distinguished idolators, who were to be fought until they converted - "When the sacred months are past, kill the idolators wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every place of ambush" (Sura 9:5) - from "People of the Book" (Christians and Jews), who were to be given a further option of surrendering and living under Islamic rule while keeping their religion: "Fight ... the People of the Book until they pay the poll tax out of hand, having been humbled." (Sura 9:29)

The resulting doctrine of war was described by the great medieval philosopher Ibn Khaldun: "In the Muslim community, the holy war (jihad) is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and the (obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." (The Muqaddimah)

Let me point you over to my sidebar where I now have a link to the Koran and Sunnah, the sacred scriptures of Islam. If you have trouble believing anything in this article, look it up.

I highly suggest everyone read Sura 9 of the Koran at least once, and keep in mind when you do that that chapter is one of the last things Mohammed wrote. Therefore, its commandments and assertions abrogate (take precedence over) earlier passages.

That is why, while there may be many decent people who are Muslims, there is no major moderate Muslim political organization, media outlet, academic institution or government anywhere in the entire world. The more seriously one studies the Koran the more one must come to the conclusion that Mohammed's kingdom Dar al-Islam and Sharia law) must be spread and violence must be used, if the Infidel resists.

We have a big problem on our hands.

The Geneva
Conventions
Are Chilling

I love the No Pasaran blog because the writers there know how to say a lot in just a few words. Check this out:

... what the Geneva Conventions really say (instead of) what the press is alleging and selling as received wisdom.

Under them (the Geneva Conventions) the al Queda scum are un-uniformed irregulars who target civilians. They can be shot on sight under the protocols. Call them "troops" and they can be locked up for the duration of a conflict.

Still want that thar' Geneva Convention in place, pally? Or just some statute you can vainly hold up that you're convinced makes terrorists just innocent, misunderstood naïfs?

Heh.

Islam Is
As
Islam Does

A stellar essay by fellow Infidel Blogger W.C.

I’ve written before that how muslims are seen and treated in the West depends entirely upon them and if they don’t make a very public effort to distance themselves from the jihadists, there will come a day when any and all muslims will be seen as an enemy to a nation and be treated like the Japanese-Americans were treated in WWII. But this threat to their freedom hasn’t sunken in yet and they continue to blather on. First, they play the victim card over and over again, and second, they haven’t awoken to the fact they – and no one else - have the responsibility to confront those who, as Bush has deemed, hijacked their religion.

But it seems they will do neither.

A selection of news items proves out these facts. First the victim card.

Imams, academics and Arab leaders convened at a central London hotel last week for a three-day event sponsored by the International Moderation Center, a Kuwait-based research institute which attempts to promote cross-cultural understanding of Islam. The gist of the conference was this. “More needs to be done to improve tolerance of Muslim minorities across Europe”
Now think about that for a minute.

Why is it Europe’s problem – not theirs? The Islamists use very subtle language to infer that that intolerance towards muslims some how appeared for no reason at all. This ‘intolerance’ argument sounds like a petulant child who has been given everything from their host country, and they still want more. Europe had bent over backwards – to the extent that European countries like France, Germany, England, and Scandinavia are funding their own colonization.

But the Islamists demand more. Even a separate set of laws – the Sharia – for muslims as they demanded - yes demanded – in Sweden. The dhimmis in Sweden have not entirely lost its mind yet and the PM said ‘completely unacceptable”.

Then we have Iraq – yes our partners in democracy – whose Parliament speaker wondered why the West pressures the mulim world over nukes and not Israel and accuses the free democracies of continuing to put down muslims and continue their colonization. I guess the speaker didn’t read my blog entitled “Winds of War: Dealing With Liberals and 4 Year Olds” about how childish nations do not play with adult toys.

But as far as victimization goes – this one take the cake. Or maybe it’s just another example of the muslim mind’s inability to confront reality. Parvez Ahmed, the board chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (our so called moderate muslim friends at CAIR), "A Sensible Way to Describe Terrorists." He ended with a thought-provoking question. "Why is Islam being unfairly singled out?" How about finding the answers here, here, here, here, Mr. Ahmed, and I can go on and on.

Let’s go on to my other point. Muslims incapacity to see the threat before them and their unwillingness to confront it.

The police and intelligence services are beginning to wake up to the treats that local mosques are posing to our security – and are taking action. It is a fact that mosques have been and are still be used for jihadist propaganda and recruiting, and command and control of terrorist operations in the Europe and America. Our police response – monitor them. And they have been successful both here and in Europe in ferreting out those who would slur the good name of Islam.

And response from the Islamic community for exposing and arresting those who would hijack their religion? A big thank you? Perhaps even supported the police in the investigation? In your dreams. The response from the muslim community was this from the New York Times. “Many Muslims believe that the use of informers set back the police's campaign to win their trust and cooperation.” And this. “Wherever police spies are found among the Muslims, they must be rooted out. There must be zero tolerance for cooperation with the oppressors.” The title of the article says it all – “US MUSLIM COMMUNITIES FINALLY CATCH ON TO POLICE SPIES”

And then this piece of ridiculous tripe. The conviction of a Pakistani immigrant on charges he plotted to blow up one of Manhattan's busiest subway stations has sparked mixed emotions within the city's Muslim community about undercover police work. The response from the muslim community?

"This is a real setback to the bridge building," said Michael Dibarro, a Jordanian immigrant who until recently worked as a clergy liaison with the New York Police Department. "We had meaningful meetings. We thought we were going somewhere with this."

Yes! YOU ARE MAKING PROGRESS! It’s called catching those who will defame the reputation of your religion and you should be screaming support for the police from the rooftops sending a signal to the jihaists among you that you will work with the police and turn them in. What is so difficult to understand? Or like any fundamentalist religion, it dims the mind to rational thought.

Imam Shaker Elsayed of Dar Alhijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., worried many Americans equate Islam with terrorism rather than peace. In many cases, Elsayed said, Islam itself "is accused of being the disease rather than the cure."

Yes, Mr. Elsayed, you are correct. Islam is the disease and, as stated here, the irrational response of the muslim community in Europe and America proves the point.

Finally there’s this. A correspondent for an Arab newspaper in Washington DC, frets about the revelations of the NSA and it’s spying on potential terrorists. It seems he feels threatened by his correspondence with his Islamic trained father in Sudan. I quote. “Words such as bomb, explosives, jihad and infidels. My father uses some of those words. But sadly, my father's words can now raise red flags in the United States. The last time I spoke to him, he said he was going to send me a long written prayer in a letter. I said that regular mail would take too long and suggested that he give it to one of his computer-literate grandchildren to e-mail to me. But now I worry: Can NSA computers tell the difference between a prayer and a terrorist plot?”

I have to admit that, on occasion, I also have trouble distinguishing between an Islamic prayer and a terrorist plot.

Does that make me a bad person?

Friday, September 22, 2006

On And On

Erykah Badu

Damn, y'all feel that?

The
Hate America
Industry

Just remember, Noam Chomsky is worth some serious bank.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

When bin Laden praised William Blum’s Rogue State, it soared to the top of Amazon’s sales charts. So too now has Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival—as soon as the semi-literate Hugo Chavez held it up at the United Nations. The Left sees it as McCarthy-like to even suggest that our own are the ideological godheads of the enemy. But it is true.

I am going through the rough draft of a new Al-Qaeda reader this morning, translated and edited by Raymond Ibrahim, soon to be released by Doubleday. What do Dr. Zawahri and bin Laden complain about from their caves in Pakistan? Why, of course, the American failure to sign Kyoto, our desecration of the environment, George Bush reading a goat story on the morning of 9/11, Halliburton, and—that critically-important concern of radical Islam— the lack of campaign finance reform in the United States. Much of their rants are simply jottings and notes taken from watching Fahrenheit 9/11 and killing time in hideouts by listening to talking heads on CNN.

This is all fine and good in a free society, but there are two concerns—other than the abject hypocrisy of these comfortable prenatal Americans kicking at their own embryo. A tenured Chomsky—who thrives in pleasant, secure surrounds, makes a living through secure air travel, and is paid by a university rich in Pentagon contracts—can rant only on the surety that what he sees in the abstract as evil and so must end won’t quite fall apart in the concrete. William Blum said he was pleased by bin Laden’s endorsement, but wouldn’t want the terrorist to call him. But why wouldn’t he, since both agree on the central evil of our times—and the need to address it?

And that’s the point: there is a hot-house plant feel to this shrillness, in which authors sell books, and filmmakers rake in profits, but their invective supposedly doesn’t really weaken the system enough to imperil them and their children. But for a terrorist to read from these American intellectuals that the United States is the greatest source of terror in the world is not to begin a “conversation,” but to embolden them even further to try ending American altogether.

Go read the whole thing.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Song To The Siren

This Mortal Coil

Grace

Song by Jeff Buckley

CFR Vice Chair:
Ahmadinejad
Is A Clear
And Present
Danger

The Vice Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations, Maurice Greenberg, came away from his meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the impression that he is a real danger to the world:

Q: Please give us your perspective of President Ahmadinejad’s much-publicized performance yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relation, where only members were invited and no televisions cameras were present. Could we start with your personal exchange with the president of Iran?

Maurice R. Greenberg: He has been quoted many times, including last evening, that the Holocaust needs to be explored as to whether or not it really occurred. And he says, “Well you know, every time somebody tries to do that, they get imprisoned.” Well, the reason some have been imprisoned is because it’s against the law in some places to deny that the Holocaust occurred.

Of course it occurred. And when he said that, I responded: “Listen, I went through Dachau during the war. To suggest it didn’t occur is simply a lie.” So he turned around and asked me how old I was, to determine if I was old enough to have been there. And then he changed the subject.

Q: So that was the extent of it?

MRG: Yes, but then there was a lot of follow up on that. He wanted to know why there was an objection to have professors and historians explore whether or not it had occurred. The fact of the matter, obviously we said, is that it’s a recognized fact that it occurred; it was 6 million Jews that perished in the Holocaust and that any single individual that denies that is not only wrong but is also trying to be revisionist of history.

Q: Was it your sense that he truly doubts whether the Holocaust occurred or was he grandstanding? He was presumably playing just to that audience because there were no television cameras there.

MRG: No, no, but there were reporters there. Look, he has said this on many occasions, not just last evening. And it’s offensive. I would say that this man, he’s not only out of touch, he’s very clever and I worry about what he’s capable of doing. And I do believe that the administration’s, and the president’s in particular, view of Iran and the danger that it presents to the world, particularly our country and Israel, is not only real, it reflects a real and present danger. I do not think that we can take lightly what he stands for and is capable of, if he came into possession of nuclear weapons.

Q: Give us more insight on the man himself. Clearly you feel that he’s dangerous, and that the administration’s characterization of him is correct. Can you elaborate? You’ve dealt with many foreign leaders, given your position in the business community. Is there anything in particular that strikes you about Ahmadinejad?

MRG: Yes: How a man like this came to power. He’s very clever. He responds in an oblique way: never directly to the question. He changes the subject. He goes on and on and raises issues. For example, regarding those in prison in Iran, including members of the press-he doesn’t answer the question. He says, “There are 3 million people in prison in the United States. What are they in prison for?” He just throws back something that he believes is improper in our country. Not on any factual basis, it’s just his method of never answering the question.

The man... I wouldn’t call him nuts. He’s not crazy. He’s crazy like a fox.

Q: So bottom line: In your view, can we do business with him or is it impossible to do so?
MRG: I think it’s almost impossible to do business with him as long as he has those views. He says: “Why should the Palestinians suffer even if there was a Holocaust? What does one have to do with the other?” I mean, they have nothing to do with each other. We don’t link them together. And we discussed that. They’re not linked.

He thinks the Palestinians should be permitted to return, that’s never going to happen. If the Palestinians returned to Israel, they’d swamp the country and there wouldn’t be an Israel. But he doesn’t want an Israel.

Q: It sounds like he didn’t make any effort to try to reach out...

MRG: No, no. There was no effort to reach out. He’s offensive. He’s smug. He’s a danger.

Citgo
Gas Stations
Are Owned
By Chavez'
Venezuelan
Government

Your local CITGO gas station is owned by Hugo Chavez.

Pass it on.

Go Ahead, Make My Day

Yesterday, Little Green Footballs ran a post on how Steven Windmueller, a former winner of the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations Award, was giving his award back in protest against the fact that the Commission plans to honor anti-Semite Maher Hathout with the award this year.

The LGF post contained this amazing quote from the Daily News article, from Commission President Adrian Dove:

“We were looking to find anybody from the Muslim community that was discouraging terrorism, that was encouraging engagement in the dialogue and that was a potential bridge. While you may not have perfection, it is a starting point you can build upon,” Dove said.

“I challenge you to find another party in Los Angeles who is a practicing Muslim leader who would be less controversial.”

Now, I'm going to say something controversial with the hope that someone, anyone, can prove me wrong:

There is not a single moderate Muslim political organization, media outlet, academic institution, or government of any appreciable size, anywhere in the world.

Go ahead, prove me wrong. It will make my day. Because, like Adrian Dove said, I would love to find a bridge to a better relationship with Muslims. But unlike Adrian Dove, I am not willing to delude myself.

Please, please someone prove me wrong. I will say, it might rather hard to do, considering the official website of a major Islamic nation admits that Islam is spread by fear:

After God empowered Muslims to enter Mecca, Islam became the prevailing power and was spread by use of fear. This was particularly evident in the tribe of Quraysh, who had responded to the Prophet Muhammad’s new message of Islam with unrelenting persecution, eventually putting its resources in the service of the ever growing new religion. The Prophet then saw it preferable to contact neighbouring kings and rulers, including the two kings of Oman, Jaiffar and Abd, sons of Al Julanda, through peaceful means. History books tell us that the prophet had sent messages to the people of Oman, including a letter carried by military escort from Amr Inn Al Aas to Jaiffar and Abd, sons of Al Julanda, in which he wrote:

‘In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate, from Muhammad bin Abdullah to Jaiffar and Abd, sons of Al Julanda, peace be on those who choose the right path. Embrace Islam, and you shall be safe. I am God’s messenger to all humanity, here to alert all those alive that non believers are condemned. If you submit to Islam, you will remain kings, but if you abstain, your rule will be removed and my horses will enter your arena to prove my prophecy’.

I mean, what are you going to say?

Prove me wrong. Please, please, prove me wrong.

The
Sound
Of
One Hand
Clapping

Little Green Footballs points out a very important fact:

Astoundingly (or maybe not), yesterday 35,000 people turned out to demonstrate for Israel and against Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

...and not a single mainstream media source carried the story.

LGF reader Scott Silverstein writes:

From an information science perspective it is as clear evidence of world news media collusion and bias as any.

Additionally, I would point out that the Christian Church has not en masse spoken out against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He claims he wants to see Israel wiped off the map. He is about to aquire nuclear weapons, and yet the Christian Church does not speak out.

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were to carry out his plans, the record of the Christian Church, with regards to the second Holocaust of Jews, would be even worse than our record on the first Holocaust.

UPDATE: The Anchoress points out that the media has also gone missing on the insane speeches given by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavex this week at the UN:

... the press is trying to go as quiet as possible on Hugo and the UN gigglers and Ahmadinejad - so beloved of Mike Wallace - didn’t come off too well, either. I said yesterday that a “smart” press “would bury” the Chavez and Ahmadinejad stories…but I never said they “should.”

John Reid In Londonistan

British Home Secretary, John Reid, simply didn't know that the he had happened into a neighborhood that the locals consider to Islamic land (Dar al-Islam). Listen as Islamist Abu Izadeen shouts at Mr. Reid, "How dare you come to a Muslim Area ..."

I think John Reid handles himself very well here, never allowing anger to intercede, never allowing reason to be impeded, he replies, "My friend, there is no part of this country which any of us are excluded from."

Of course, the Islamists would beg to differ, and that is why it is important that everyone view this clip.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Springtime for Hitler

Considering the spectacle that we've been treated to at the United Nations the past few days, I think it's time for a little "Springtime for Hitler."

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Stealing
Their
Souls

I think this is supposed to be funny, and, of course, it is. Was it the Native Americans who believed that the act of a camera capturing a photographic image was literally the stealing of a soul?

Oh, if only we were so superstitious about the human soul in modern times, what with women walking around in full-on portable concentration camps, unable to project any personality whatsoever into the outer world.

Ahmadinejad
In English
And In Arabic

Time Magazine this week features an interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he says the following:

I gave some recommendations to President Bush in my personal letter, and I hope that he will take note of them. I would ask him, Are rationalism, spirituality and humanitarianism and logic?are they bad things for human beings? Why more conflict? Why should we go for hostilities? Why should we develop weapons of mass destruction? Everybody can love one another.

Now, just for the record, here is what Ahmadinejad says when he's in his own country:

Monday, September 18, 2006

Blow My Mind

What is it like for a non-drummer to see something like this? As a drummer all I can tell you is my mouth hangs open, drool comes out, I'm in a zone going, "WTF, has some sort of angelic being entered these dudes and blessed them with a pristine, precise to the millionth decimal, view of rhythm, or something?"

Jesus Christ!

The Wooden
Palestinian
Horse
In The
Christian Church

From CaribPundit (with thanks to Olivia):

The Palestine Solidarity Movement held a meeting at Georgetown University in D.C. in which they laid out a strategy to achieve Jewish genocide (a one-state solution in which Israel folds into "Palestine" is a prescription for genocide—the acid test: look at any Arab-Muslim country and find out what you can about its Jewish or Christian community).

One of the tactics include using the churches by pretending to be Christian as a way of winning Christians to their cause; another is making the "Palestinian" cause analogous to that of American blacks striving for Civil Rights.

By drawing that deceptive analogy between the American black situation and that of the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, what is left unmentioned is that the goal of American blacks was not genocide of whites, but their constitutional right to full equality under and before the law. Yet, no doubt, some, ignorant of history, will float away on a tide of emotion and assent to the Arabs' genocidal objectives.

Worse than this appeal to the darkest period of American history for blacks is the plan to obtain Christian help with genocide. Toward this end, the Muslim Arabs—read the text, it is evident they are not Christian—will strive to seem to be Christian: they will offer rosaries, "holy water," talk about the plight of Arab Christians. What they will never reveal is that the plight of Arab Christians is a result of their support for the viciously oppressive Arab Muslims.

What will remain unmentioned is that all around the globe, Muslims are slaughtering Christians because we are Christian. Now, they come to us with lies so that we can help them slaughter Jews.

The scope and extent of the intended-deception is breath-taking. What I find so extremely offensive about it is the use of the Church by people who, having achieved their genocidal aims, would then destroy the Church.

Go read the whole thing.

They Hate Us -
They Really
Hate Us

More from yesterdays Muslim demonstration outside Westminster Abbey:

In London, more manifestations of Pope Benedict's great error in implying in any way that Islam was not peaceful. From Joee Blogs (thanks to all who sent this in):

Holy Mass on a Sunday is the very source and summit of the Catholic week, so my family decided this Sunday to make the trip to Westminster Cathedral together. As we came out about 100 Islamists were chanting slogans such as "Pope Benedict go to Hell" "Pope Benedict you will pay, the Muja Hadeen are coming your way" "Pope Benedict watch your back" and other hateful things.

Wretchard, at Belmont Club, comments:

If you look very carefully at the pictures at a Catholic Londoner it will be obvious that this demonstration at a church is as much about gangsterism and intimidation than anything else. And it's a gangersterism -- under color of religion -- fueled almost entirely by Western political correctness and a refusal to insist upon basic reciprocal civility. This is learned behavior, the kind of behavior that is practically invited by the sickening double standards of modern "enlighted" attitudes. Compare the pictures above with the ones below.

British police officers speak to Iranian Reza Moradi, 29, who displayed a banner containing the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, at a demonstration rally supporting freedom of expression in Trafalgar Square, London, Saturday March 25, 2006. About 200 people held a free-speech demonstration in central London on Saturday, with several displaying posters of the cartoons that infuriated much of the Muslim world.

Yes, it seems like both the Islamofascists, and our leaders, hate us.

Al Qaeda
To Muslims
In US:
Leave
America Now

Guysen News is reporting that Al Qaeda is ready:

An official of the Al Qaida terrorist organization has called on Muslims in the United States to leave the country. Al Qaida said that it has completed its preparations for a huge non-conventional attack on New York and Washington.

A few days back, Infidel Bloggers Alliance ran this story about how Al Qaeda had warned that there is a nuclear attack on America coming soon.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be speaking at the United Nations tomorrow. I say, listen carefully to his words. They will be filled with threats couched in calls for peace.

Go to Infidel Bloggers Alliance for more on this story.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Islam
Will Conquer
Rome

Today when churchgoers came out of services at Westminster Abbey, this is what greeted them.

This photographer didn't get the best shot of her, but notice the woman down in the left corner with the sign reading, "Islam Will Conquer Rome."

Mark their words. I have a feeling we will be seeing attacks against Rome in the near future.

Lebanese Foreign Minister
Unhappy
Germany Wants Israel
To Continue
Existing

From Guysen.Israel.News:

Lebanon is calling on Germany to take an active part in Unifil. "We expect a balanced and objective action from a friendly country like Germany", Fauzi Sallukh, Lebanese Foreign Minister said. He also criticized Angela Merkel for having said that her country was sending naval forces to Lebanon to defend Israel's right to exist and to promote a peaceful solution to conflict in the region.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Thanks, Hillary

Hillary Clinton has stepped up and done the right thing. She has condemned the makes of the Bush Assassination Movie:

CHAPPAQUA — Sen. Hillary Clinton this morning blasted the producers of a new film depicting the assassination of Pres. George W. Bush.

"I think it's despicable," Clinton said of "Death of a President," a fictional film that features a staged assassination of the president in 2007. "I think it's absolutely outrageous. That anyone would even attempt to profit on such a horrible scenario makes me sick."

Stating That
Islam Is
A Relgion Of Love
Which Rejects Violence
Is A Big Lie

This, from the horse's mouth.

But,
I Got
It All
Planned,
Man ...

Yes, the Islamic world has got it mapped out. They know exactly what is gonna happen:

Islamic Movement head: Jerusalem destined capital of caliphate (The Caliphate is the worldwide Islamic government.)

Israeli Arab Muslim cleric Sheik Ra'ad Salah declared that Jerusalem will soon become the capital of an Islamic nation at a rally in the northern town of Umm al-Fahm, Israel Radio reported on Friday.

The leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement Salah, told a crowd of 50,000 gatherers that Israel's occupation of the Temple Mount was nearing its end.

For The Record

My take on Oriana Fallaci almost exactly coincides with this:

Those who have read “La rabbia e l’orgoglio [Rage and Pride]” and other writings on Islam by Oriana Fallaci – an author of worldwide fame who has lived in New York for many years – will find many points in common with hers in the essay by Bertacchini and Vanzan.

Oriana Fallaci is an extremely harsh critic of the religious and cultural factors that, in her view, feed into the Muslim world’s challenge against the West and Christianity, which she fiercely defends in spite of being a declared atheist.

She is a great admirer of Benedict XVI, who has read a number of her books and received her in a private audience last August 1 at Castel Gandolfo.

The only substantial point that separates Oriana Fallaci’s analysis from that of Bertacchini and Vanzan is that, while she maintains that Islam is incapable of reform and incompatible with the Christian West, the other two acknowledge that an integration of the two civilizations is possible, albeit extremely difficult.

And Benedict XVI is also known to acknowledge this last possibility.

With God all things are possible, even a reformation of Islam, even a reformation of Satan. I will not deny this reality for all the money in the Stock Market.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Richard Bona

Amazing. Brilliant. Beautiful.

Listen to the rhythm the audience claps. Astonishing.

Here We
Go Again:
The Muslims
Are
Restless

Pope Benedict has insulted the prophet and humiliated Allah:

ISTANBUL, Turkey - Pakistan's legislature unanimously condemned Pope Benedict XVI. Lebanon's top Shiite cleric demanded an apology. And in Turkey, the ruling party likened the pontiff to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades.

Across the Islamic world Friday, Benedict's remarks on Islam and jihad in a speech in Germany unleashed a torrent of rage that many fear could burst into violent protests like those that followed publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

By citing an obscure Medieval text that characterizes some of the teachings of Islam's founder as "evil and inhuman," Benedict inflamed Muslim passions and aggravated fears of a new outbreak of anti-Western protests.

The last outpouring of Islamic anger at the West came in February over the prophet cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper. The drawings sparked protests — some of them deadly — in almost every Muslim nation in the world.

Some experts said the perceived provocation by the spiritual leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics could leave even deeper scars.

"The declarations from the pope are more dangerous than the cartoons, because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world — the cartoons just came from an artist," said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst in Cairo, Egypt, who studies Islamic militancy.

Notably, the strongest denunciations came from Turkey — a moderate democracy seeking European Union membership where Benedict is scheduled to visit in November as his first trip as pope to a Muslim country.

Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party, said Benedict's remarks were either "the result of pitiful ignorance" about Islam and its prophet or, worse, a deliberate distortion.

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world," Kapusuz told Turkish state media. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

"Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks, is going down in history for his words," Kapusuz added. "He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini."

In the West, freedom comes before religion. This means that one can choose their religion, or they can choose to reject religion entirely.

In the world of Islam, religion comes before freedom. This means one does not have a choice.

God wants to be worshipped and followed by those who choose to do so. A follower without a choice is a slave, and an angry one at that.

Considering that fact, maybe it is not surprising that the followers of Allah so consistently react with violence.

More:

Muslims in uproar over pope’s remarks on Islam.

Muslims deplore Pope speech, want apology.

Muslims express fury over pope’s remarks.

Turkish lawmaker compares pope to Hitler.

Muslims assail pope’s remarks on Islam.

Pakistan parliament demands Pope retract Islam comments.

Pope branded a medieval crusader in India.

Muslims demand pope apologise for Islam comments.

Hamas Lectures Pope On Peaceful Islam.

"Anyone Who Describes Islam As Intolerant Encourages Violence."

Five
Minutes
To Midnight

From the Pullitzer Prize-winning journalist, Charles Krauthammer, in the New York Daily News:

In his televised 9/11 address, President Bush said that we must not "leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." There's only one such current candidate: Iran.

The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: "It's very important for the American people to see the President try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."

"Before" implies that the one follows the other. The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy.

With the crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option.

The costs will be terrible:

Economic. An attack on Iran will likely send oil prices overnight to $100 or even to $150 a barrel. That will cause a worldwide recession perhaps as deep as the one triggered by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Iran might suspend its own 2.5 million barrels a day of oil exports, and might even be joined by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, asserting primacy as the world's leading anti-imperialist. But even more effectively, Iran will shock the oil markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz through which 40% of the world's exports flow every day. Iran could do this by attacking ships in the strait, scuttling its own ships, laying mines or just threatening to launch Silkworm anti-ship missiles at any passing tanker.

The U.S. Navy will be forced to break the blockade. We will succeed, but at considerable cost. And it will take time - during which time the world economy will be in a deep spiral.

Military. Iran will activate its proxies in Iraq, most notably Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army. Sadr is already wreaking havoc with sectarian attacks on Sunni civilians. Iran could order the Mahdi army and its other agents within the police and armed forces to take up arms against the institutions of the central government itself, threatening the very anchor of the new Iraq. Many Mahdi will die, but they live to die. Many Iraqis and coalition soldiers are likely to die as well.

Among the lesser military dangers, Iran might activate terrorist cells around the world, although, without nuclear capability, that threat is hardly strategic. It also will be very difficult to unleash its proxy Hezbollah, now chastened by the destruction it brought upon Lebanon in the latest round with Israel and deterred by the presence of Europeans in the south Lebanon buffer zone.

Diplomatic. There will be massive criticism of America from around the world. Much of it is to be discounted. The Muslim street will come out again for a few days, having replenished its supply of flammable American flags, most recently exhausted during the cartoon riots. Their governments will express solidarity with a fellow Muslim state, but this will be entirely hypocritical. The Arabs are terrified about the rise of a nuclear Iran and would privately rejoice in its defanging.

The Europeans will be less hypocritical because their visceral anti-Americanism trumps rational calculation. We will have done them an enormous favor by sparing them the threat of Iranian nukes, but they will vilify us nonetheless.

The Rise
Of Neo-Nazism
In Germany

All things old are new again:

... the signs are clear: the far Right is on the march in Eastern Germany.

The neo-Nazis, picking up an astonishing level of support on the home turf of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, look set to win a big chunk of seats in regional elections on Sunday. And to make sure that middleclass voters do not panic ahead of the ballot, they have donned camouflage.

“What did you expect,” asked Michael Andrejewski, the new face of the extreme Right. “That I would beat your brains out with a baseball bat?” Blinking from behind gold-framed glasses, Herr Andrejewski looked as threatening as a maths teacher — unlike the five young men who formed a protective semicircle around their leader. “You’ll be wanting to move along,” said one of them with menacing politeness. One quickly got the point. The slogan on his T-shirt read: “Granddad was right”.

According to the latest opinion polls the NPD, the National Party of Germany, is poised to win between 4.8 per cent and 7 per cent of the vote this weekend in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the lush flatland that borders the Baltic Sea.

Since most Germans are afraid of admitting that they intend to vote for neo-Nazis, the betting is that the party will easily win the 5 per cent needed to capture parliamentary seats. It will be the second region, after Saxony, to have neo-Nazi members of parliament — a slap in the face for Frau Merkel, whose political constituency is in Mecklenburg.

Young Germans are leaving the area in droves in search of work. In East German days there were more than 20,000 people in Anklam, mainly fishermen and factory workers. Now there are barely 15,000. “It was the Leftists that got out,” says Herr Andrejewski, 47, who is likely to become a regional MP. “But our people stayed.”

That is only part of an extraordinary story — the economic transformation of the far Right. In Anklam and neighbouring Baltic villages ultranationalists own internet cafes and drink delivery services. They run music shops that are stacked with far Right rock bands. “There is a whole network of right-wing-run companies, above all in the local building business,” says Günther Hoffmann, who set up an association in Anklam to monitor the rise of the neo-Nazis. Small hotels are being bought up. A giveaway paper called The Island Messenger is edited and published by the extreme Right and is widely read.

This economic power — in a region where unemployment is more than 20 per cent — has translated into political clout. Firms in right-wing hands hire right-wing sympathisers as apprentices. Slowly but surely, neo-Nazis have become an indispensable part of society in northeast Germany.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

San Jacinto

One of the great performers in "Rock" history; Peter Gabriel.

Knights Of Cydonia

A very creative song by Muse. Kind of reminds me of Queen and the Beatles. Check it out.

CAIR
Supports
Democrats

CAIR (the Council of American-Islamic Relations), a radical Islamist front group, has ranked members of Congress, and guess who is winning?

By my count, there are 154 Democrats in the House of Representatives who get a 100% rating from the terror apologists at CAIR. Currently there are 201 Democrats total in the House, which means that a full 76%, more than 3/4’s, of them get the CAIR stamp of approval.

On the flip side, there’s only 8 Republicans who get CAIR’s approval out of the 231 GOP’ers in the House. That’s 3.5%.

I can’t find where CAIR has issued rankings like this for the Senate, but I think you get the drift as to the sort of politicians CAIR lends its support to.

So what do we say about this? Well, maybe we should consider why it is that a terror-apologizing, terror-connected group like CAIR overwhelmingly supports one political party over the other. It just makes sense that CAIR should support the Democrats. The Dems oppose aggressive anti-terror techniques like NSA call monitoring, Treasury Department finance tracking (which has tripped up CAIR in the past as I pointed out above), and aggressive interrogation of terror detainees. They oppose fighting the war on terror in the middle east. They seem to think that we can hide out within our own borders and just react to terror attacks as they happen. ...

As far as I’m concerned, CAIR’s list of recommendations works as a list of people Americans concerned about the war on terror shouldn’t vote for under any circumstances. I think the people on this list, and the people who agree with the people on this list, need to consider the fact that they’re finding themselves on the same side of our foreign policy as the allies of our enemies. I won’t go so far as to say that they actively support terrorism, or that they are happy about receiving CAIR’s endorsement, but the fact remains that their policy choices line up with CAIR’s interests...and that’s not a good thing.

Here's some information about CAIR, if you aren't familiar with their dissembling and support of terror.

Federal
Deficit
Down 14%

George Bush is evil and stupid:

The federal budget deficit, helped by a surge in government revenue, is running 14.1 percent below the pace of last year, the government reported Wednesday.

The Treasury Department said that with just one month to go in the budget year, the deficit totals $304.3 billion, down from $354.1 billion during the same period a year ago.

The Congressional Budget Office is forecasting that the deficit for the entire year will be $260 billion, which would mean that September will see a sizable surplus.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

In Praise
Of
Patriotism

The famous graphich novelist (that's fancy-schmancy for Comic Book guy), Frank Miller, was featured yesterday on NPR, extolling the virtues of Patriotism:

Both of my parents were World War II veterans. FDR-era patriots. And I was exactly the age to rebel against them.

It all fit together rather neatly. I could never stomach the flower-child twaddle of the '60s crowd and I was ready to believe that our flag was just an old piece of cloth and that patriotism was just some quaint relic, best left behind us.

It was all about the ideas. I schooled myself in the writings of Madison and Franklin and Adams and Jefferson. I came to love those noble, indestructible ideas. They were ideas, to my young mind, of rebellion and independence, not of idolatry.

But not that piece of old cloth. To me, that stood for unthinking patriotism. It meant about as much to me as that insipid peace sign that was everywhere I looked: just another symbol of a generation's sentimentality, of its narcissistic worship of its own past glories.

Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated -- reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that filled up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up.
For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.

Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don't all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.

Frank Miller is currently at work on a new Batman comic called Holy Terror Batman. Click here to learn about it.

Monday, September 11, 2006

The
Message
of
September
11th

The Islamic Jihadis will do anything they can to kill as many of us as is possible. They will do whatever they can to kill as many of us as is possible. If they can get their hands on nuclear weapons, they will use them against us.

They would like nothing more than to bring down our civilization.

Therefore, we must work to strengthen our understanding of what it is that makes our civilization great. We must understand that the precious freedoms we are afforded are a treasure. We must understand their origin.

And, we must understand how fragile our life is, and that Western Civilization is a unique oasis of goodness when seen in the scope of the barbarity of history. We can not afford to lose our civilization and it's values. We must do anything we have to to protect our beautiful culture.

The Crash

Look at that destruction, that massive, senseless, cruel loss of human life ... and then I ask you to look in your hearts and recognize that there is no room for neutrality on the issue of terrorism. You're either with civilization or with terrorists.

On one side is democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life; on the other is tyranny, arbitrary executions, and mass murder.We're right and they're wrong. It's as simple as that.
-- Rudy Giulani, October 1, 2001

"You love life, we love death."
-- Osama Bin Laden March 14, 2002

The Celebration

They celebrate.

Remember the Firemen

They ran into the buildings, while everyone else was running out.

Remember the heroes.

"There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for a friend."

"I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."- Matthew 16:19

The Falling

In
The Name
Of Allah

Here on the fourth anniversary of September 11, let's look back at an article Michelle Malkin wrote on the third anniversary:

The third anniversary of Sept. 11 is upon us. We remain at war -- and the media remain in denial.How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic "militants" or "guerrillas" or "rebels" or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted the Pakistan Times called them, "activists"?

It wasn't no-name militants or wayward guerrillas who have butchered, beheaded and slaughtered thousands of innocents over the last three years alone. Anniversary reality check:

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Russia stabbed babies to death, shot toddlers in the back, forced children to eat rose petals and drink their own urine, raped teenage girls, executed their teachers and blew themselves up in a crowded school gymnasium. Death toll: 338.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Spain detonated bombs on four commuter trains during Madrid's rush hour. Death toll: 190.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Bali blew up a beach resort with an electronically triggered bomb at one bar and a car bomb hidden in a van at another nightclub filled with young Western tourists on holiday. Death toll: 202.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Pakistan kidnapped and beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl.In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Saudi Arabia kidnapped and beheaded American engineer Paul Johnson.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and beheaded American independent contractor Nick Berg.In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and executed Italian security guard Fabrizio Quattrocchi.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in the Philippines kidnapped and killed American missionary Martin Burnham.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Israel engineered near-simultaneous suicide attacks on two buses, killing at least 15 people.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Morocco waged suicide bombing attacks in Casablanca.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Turkey bombed synagogues and the British consulate.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in America hijacked and incinerated three planes full of men, women and children, trapped pregnant women and firefighters in smoke-filled stairways, and forced office workers to leap 99 stories to their deaths after saying final prayers from the ledges of the World Trade Center on a peaceful September morning. Death toll: 3,000.

And I will add some of my own:

In the name of Allah, the Islamic government of Sudan has carried out a 21 year long campaign of genocide against Christians, Animists and Sufi, killing 2.2 million people.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists detonated four bombs on London's public tranportation system, killing 56 people and injuring over 700.

In the name of Allah, over 200 bombs were set off in India one morning, killing one and injuring over 100.

In the name of Allah, countless bomb attacks have been waged against the ordinary citizens of the Philippines, killing scores and injuring people by the hundreds.

In the name of Allah, Saudi Arabia has a policy of "No Jews Allowed" inside the borders of their countries.

In the name of Allah, Muslims across the world perform cliterectomies on their daughters. In one Kurdish province of Iraq a study was done recently which revealed that two-thirds of girls have been genitally mutilated.

And finally, remember that this is just a partial list. I could go on and on and on, for page upon page.

The Religion Of Pieces

Remember

What he must have been thinking. These are the important things. The last things.

All
You
Can't
Leave
Behind

Why The Christian Church Must Take On The Battle For The Defense Of Western Civilization

In yet another sign that Europe is waking up to its problem with Islamofascism, the official church of the state of Denmark has announced that Muslim Imams are not welcome in their churches, and that Muslims and Christians do not direct their worship at the same entity (report from Dymphna at Gates of Vienna):

(The) state church, Folkekirken, which is Denmark’s official evangelical Lutheran denomination. No one has to join, and you can opt out of paying any tax for its upkeep, though if you’re a lazy or indifferent type and don’t phone the local municipality, you will be billed for church maintenance. What’s interesting is that while eighty four per cent of Danes pay the tax and are official members, only about five per cent of these citizens are actually church-goers.

" ... Imams are not welcome in Danish state churches," says a new network of Islam-critical priests and theological experts. The purpose is to state that Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God, and that the church and the mosque are not religious equals says the new network of 60 priests and theological experts.

Well-known priests and opinion-makers such as Niels Højlund, Sørine Godtfredsen, Edith Thingstrup, Morten Kvist and Katrine Winkel Holm are among the prominent members. According to the Newfounded Network admitting imams into Danish churches is problematic.

The Danish People’s Church cannot agree with the imams without betraying the Lord Christ — who according to Islam is nothing but an inferior “prophet”, subordinated to Mohammad. When priests and imams are praying together, they are in essence ridiculing the Gospel, the network states. At the same time it distances itself from recent events such as religious councils with imams.

Bishops and imams are not religious colleagues separated only by different merchandise. It is of paramount importance that priests in the Danish Church make that fact very clear — as well as studying and criticizing Islam, says the network — which at the same time underscores that the intention is to criticize Islam, not the individual Muslim.

Dymphna, at Gates of Vienna, comments:

Is this what Christians would call a “Christian attitude”? In a smaller sense, no. But in the larger sense of putting a stop to the inroads some of the more notorious imams in Denmark have made into a hither-to civilized cultural life, and the economic damage they have caused Denmark by spreading taqiyya in the Middle East, causing boycotts of Danish goods and the destruction of Danish embassies, they are possibly serving a greater good.

The shameful spinelessness of American mainstream churches in the face of militant Islam, their divestment from tiny, besieged Israel, their unwitting and ignorant support of the spread of Islamicist propaganda in this country, makes Denmark’s line drawn in the sand a refreshing change.

I think this is a good starting point for me to discuss something I have been thinking about of late. The question Dymphna poses is a wise one. "Is this a Christian attitude," or, in other words, does it betray Christian values to reject ecumenicism, or, an approach of agreement, cooperation, and understanding, with an Abrahamic religion?In short, I think we need not even address that question. Because, before we even get to it, our answer should be clear to us.The first principle of the Judeo-Christian Christian tradition, and really, the first thing the Bible, itself, discusses, in Genesis, about the relationship of God and man, is that man was created in the Image of God.This does not mean that we look like God. What it means is that we were created with the attributes of God.And, what are the attributes of God?We need only look at that passage in the beginning of Genesis to understand. "In the beginning,1) God created the heavens and the Earth,"2) He created the beasts of the field,3) He separated the waters,4) He created man of dust, and5) breathed His own life into him, and then,6) seeing that it was not good for man to be lonely, and moved by compassion, He created, for him, a female companion named Eve.We can take from this that man God and, thereby man, are, among other things,1) Creative and magnificent of vision2) in love with reproduction and the process of life3) analytical in our creativity, and completely willing to remake, or reshape, what we have already made, even if we have seen that "it is Good."4) in love with matter itself5) generous, willing to give of ourselves in our own creative process6) loving, reasonable, and willing to change our plans, when moved by compassion.There are many other things that can be inferred from the opening passage of Genesis, but this is enough for my argument. The point is, both Judaism and Christianity teach that God is loving, reasonable, and creative.Both Judaism and Christianity teach that man, having been made in the Image of his Creator, also inherently possesses these attributes to some extent. Therefore, man is meant to be creative, he is meant to love matter, he is meant to be reasonable and analytical, he is meant to reshape his work, and even, the work of God's hands, using the gifts of reason and analysis, and more than anything, man is meant to be Free, as God, most indubitably, is Himself.And, what's more, God wants man to have Freedom of choice. He wants man to come to Him of his own accord. When man sinned, God could have unmade the sin, and started over, but instead, God worked with the new reality man had created, and even promised to make something more glorious of it. In other words, when God was confronted with man's sin, and He banished the sinners from the Garden of Eden, He did not make it His next step to take away man's Free Will, but instead, chose for man to retain Free Will, and He chose to remain a partner in man's creative endeavors.Reading the rest of the Hebrew Bible, and the Gospels, and the Letters, it becomes apparent that God made this decision precisely because He wants man to be Free, otherwise, man would not be free to choose Him.In other words - and I can't stress enough how important this is -The first principle of the Bible is that man needs to be Free, and this comes before anything else.This is not at all a principle of Islam. In Islam, a good Muslim is to learn the Koran by heart, and to follow its rules by rote. He is not to be analytical, because his analysis can never add anything to that which Allah has already provided. The Koran, itself, is the final word of Allah to man. It is not to be amended or added to. It is to be followed only.Man's creativity is to be impeded. Music must not be made of anything more than chanting and drums. Art must not be representational. It is forbidden for a Muslim to depict the human form in a sculpture, for instance.Man is to love the paradise Mohammed calls him towards. He is not to love the Earthly realm of matter. In fact, much of the material world is haram, to the extent that man is forbidden to even view the form of any female not his own wife.In Islam, man is not forbidden to be generous to other men, so long as his fellow man is a Muslim. But, there is no reason to be generous to a non-Muslim. In fact, one is not to take a non-Muslim as a friend.In Islam, compassion is not the central theme. Allah can not be said to be the equivalent of Love, as the Bible tells us Yahweh is. Allah is instead, probably, more easily called a god of justice, as defined by Allah. Or, is that justice defined by Mohammed. We can't be sure, because when it comes right down to it, the only person from whom we have learned of Allah, is the prophet himself. And, we shall never hear another new word about Allah from anyone else.So, we see, the god of Islam is not anything like the God of the Bible. We delude ourselves if we think the two can be compared.

What's more, we put ourselves in danger, and, we put our very ability to practice our religion in danger, if we accept the idea that God and Allah are the same. Because Allah does not accept divergence of opinion. It's Allah's way, or the highway. No other opinions, or ideas, or beliefs, are allowed. Free Speech, Freedom of Conscience, Democracy, these are all but the baubles and bangles of a decadent Western Civilization, as far as the most learned men of Islam are concerned. They all lead to disobedience, and sloth, and weakness, we are told. And most importantly, what we need to know is they all lead away from Allah.

Therefore, if we are to accept that Allah is the same as the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible, we are accepting that Allah is preeminent, and our God must be subservient. We are accepting, therefore, that we are no longer to be free, rational, and analytical beings. Therefore, we are accepting that we no longer can make our own choices, for Democracy, for Freedom of Conscience, or for our God Himself. If we accept such, we are condemning ourselves to the destruction of Western Civilization, and we are taking away the very duty of man himself, that is to express himself as a being made in the Image of God.

The Christian Church, in general, must come to understand these things. The most important endeavor the Christian Church can undertake, at this point in time, is to understand that the defense of Western Civilization is of utmost importance to the existence of Christianity. Without the protection Western Civilization provides to Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Speech, and Democracy, Christianity itself would go into a dark age. Christians would be forced to worship underground, away from the light of day. Fewer people would hear the gospel preached, and therefore, fewer people would be free to make a choice to follow the God of the Bible.

The Christian Church must understand that Western Civilization and the Bible go hand in hand. The Christian Church must become warriors for Western Civilization. I am not saying that this means the Church itself must call for violence. No, the Church, at this juncture has the luxury still of keeping its advocacy in the realm of peace. We can still fight our battles in the realm of ideology.

However, if the Christian Church, and the West, allow too many of our cherished Freedoms to slip away, it will become incumbent upono the Church, once again, to go into the business of War. And, that will be a shame upon us, not because it would be wrong to call for war in such a case, but, because we could have won our war without violence, if we had only acted sooner.

Let this be a warning to all Pastors, Priests, Rabbis, and Teachers of the Bible of the God of Abraham.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

The
Muslims
Are
Angry
Again

Oh, all the things that make Muslims angry. What are we to do about it. We know they hate Piglet. Well, we could ban Winnie the Pooh. They hate the British flag. What are you gonna do, ban the flag?

Muslims hate dogs too. So, what are we gonna do, ban Paris Hilton?

They don't like a lot of things that we do like here in the West. And, sometimes yes the things they don't like are funny and ought to be dealth with with ridicule and/or gentle humor. But, sometimes the things that get Muslims mad are truly frightening. As is the case in this example, where a moderate Muslim Member of Parliament in Denmark says we ought never condemn Sharia law:

Centre Democrat Ben Haddou, a member of Copenhagen’s City Council, has stated: “It’s impossible to condemn sharia. And any secular Muslim who claims he can is lying. Sharia also encompasses lifestyle, inheritance law, fasting and bathing. Demanding that Muslims swear off sharia is a form of warfare against them.”

Read that statement again, and read it carefully. Muslims in the West consider it “a form of warfare against them” if they have to live by our secular laws, not their religious laws. Will they then also react in violent ways to this “warfare” if they don’t get their will? Moreover, since sharia laws ultimately require the subjugation of non-Muslims, doesn’t “freedom of religion” for Muslims essentially entail the freedom to make non-Muslims second-rate citizens in their own countries?

How do we dialogue with such people?

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Terry Bozzio
And Chad Wackerman
Drumming Legends

Iron
Mike
Tyson

One minute and seventeen seconds into this video there is a short clip where a guy throws about eight punches in a row at Tyson and connects weakly on only two of them. Right after that, Tyson throws one perfectly-timed, perfectly-placed punch, and the guy goes home to Sleepyland.

When you watch this video, you will see Tyson do this time after time. One punch. Lights out.

Mohammed Ali was great. Sugar Ray Leonard was great. Joe Louis was great, but I never saw anyone like Iron Mike.

Vince Carter:
The Most
Amazing
Slam Dunk
Ever

Friday, September 08, 2006

Tone Poem

Musicians
Charles Lloyd - Tenor Saxophone
Michael Petrucciani - Piano
Cecil McBee - Bass
Jack DeJohnette - Drums

My September 11, 2001

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up later than I normally did in those days. I rushed my shower, and got the hell out of the house as quick as I could. I was in a daze because I was so tired and rushed. I drove for quite awhile that morning without even having the mind to turn on the radio. When I finally did, this is what I heard. The first human voice I heard that morning was Howard Stern saying, "We're under attack. There are people flying planes into buildings."

First Tower Collapses

Thursday, September 07, 2006

World Gone Wrong:
Olmert
Ducks His
Responsibilities
As Israeli PM

From Joshua Pundit:

The Israeli government is ending the air and sea blockade of Lebanon today at the behest of Kofi Annan and the UN.Prime minister Ehud Olmert and defense minister Amir Peretz consented to this move without the UN, Lebanon or Hezbollah meeting so much as a single one of Israel’s conditions for ending the embargo and accepting the August ceasefire...which should give any interested observer an idea of its validity and longevity.

There is no sign of life or Red Cross access to Israelihostages Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose kidnapping by Hezbollah triggered the Lebanon war.

Hezbollah is not being evacuated from South Lebanon or disarmed.

While Olmert said that Annan and the UN had assured Israel that UN forces are prepared to begin `executing their mission' under UN Resolution 1701, nothing could be farther from the truth, and the UN and the European contingents have made it clear that they consider disarming Hezbollah to `Lebanon's mission.' which of course, is never going to happen.

UNIFIL-2 has also not lifted a finger to halt Iranian and Syrian weapons shipments to Hezbollah and enforce the embargo mandated by UN Resolution 1701. As a matter of fact, one of my sources reports that the weapons flow to Hezbollah is so unimpeded that they have begun shipping arms to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This week alone, the Palestinians reportedly received 400 RPG anti-tank rockets and 15 Grad missiles from their allies in Hezbollah via Iran.

More stupidity surrounding this whole situation is here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

We are sailing the straights of insanity. The moral compass is spinning, as the magnetic field has been thrown into chaos by Islamic propaganda, appeasement, and the UN diplomatic reflex.

We have completely lost our way.

Sometimes
You Just
Gotta
Love Your
Enemies

Al Jazeera is running a videoclip of Osama Bin Laden meeting with the 9/11 highjiackers:

The Arab television channel Al-Jazeera broadcast a video which it said showed Osama bin Laden and suicide candidates of Al-Qaeda preparing the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. Al-Jazeera had said earlier it would broadcast "a video that included scenes showing for the first time Al-Qaeda leaders preparing the September 11 attacks and practicing for their execution."

The video showed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and two of the 19 Islamist militants that took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza el-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari.

They spoke of the situation faced by Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.

Fifteen of the 19 attackers on September 11 were Saudis, and Al-Jazeera said it had only aired a few minutes of a document which it said lasted about an hour and a half.

Man, you just gotta love your enemies when they tell you the truth.

Now see, here, the fact that this video shows Bin Laden working with the highjackers means that all the lunatics with the conspiracy theories are going to have to amend their theories to fit this new reality.

Of course, in the past we had seen a video in which Bin Laden bragged of the plan, but this is the first direct evidence tying him to it.

So now, Bin Laden had to have been working with Bush or this plan could have never gone through, right?

Smirk. Smirk.

I can't wait to watch the conspiracy theory crowd work on this one. Of course, I don't expect it to bring them around anywhere close to reality. In fact, the charming thing about conspiracy theorists is the more reality intrudes, the further out they have to go to explain their stupid ideas.

I expect they may have to start working the Pluto angle into their theories soon. You know, like, "Why did Bushitler recently de-list Pluto as a planet if not because that's where he's hiding the evidence of his meetings with Bin Laden?

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Islamic Society
Of
North America:
How To
Beat Your Wife

From Little Green Footballs:

At the Islamic Society of North America’s national convention, attendees learned that beating a woman is for her own protection. (Hat tip: ciaospirit.)

Sunday, 11:00-12:30 pm Room 22 Session 9G: “...And Beat them Lightly”: An Analysis and In-Depth Discussion of Verse 4:34

This session will discuss the following: understanding the context of revelation (asbaab al nuzuul) for this verse. Emphasis will be focused on understanding the correct meaning of the verse, with specific attention given to the words qiwamah, nushuz, and daraba as well as to understand how this verse is to be applied as a protection for women, not as an abuse.

Speakers: Muzzamil Siddiqi, Rabia Karim Khan Moderators: Mohamed Magid Ali
Muzzamil Siddiqi may be familiar to LGF readers. He was an imam at the Orange County Islamic Center when Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn converted to Islam there.

Another session moderated by Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic Relations focused on empowering Muslims to file federal civil rights lawsuits:

Sunday, 4:30-6:00 pm Room 21 Session 11F: Impact Litigation and Muslim: The Next Chapter in America’s Civil Rights History

This session will discuss how the American Muslim community can begin to strategically empower the general American community at large by filing federal civil rights lawsuits which will help to protect the constitutional rights in the great historical legacy of civil rights case like Brown v. Board of Education.

Speakers: Arsalan Iftikhar Moderators: Ibrahim Hooper

Both programs are listed in this document: ISNA 43rd Annual Convention Program.

Here is Koran 4:34 -

Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.

Pastorius Commentary: This brings up a subject that needs to be discussed. That is, I challenge anyone to find a Muslim organization of any significant size that is actually modersate. The Islamic Society of North America is a Muslim organization of significant size and funding. As such, they represent the views of mainstream Islam. So apparently, in the view of mainstream Islam, it is ok to beat your wife.

That is sick.

Any Muslims out there who do not agree that it is ok for men to beat their wives need to speak up. You need to organize yourselves, and you need to make your voices heard, because if you don't then we are all going to continue thinking that the mainstream of Islam thinks it's ok to beat your wife.

It is the responsibility of Muslims to make it clear what Islam is about. It is not the responsibility of non-Muslims to attempt to understand that wife-beating is a-ok with Muslims. Muslims alone are responsible for the fact they show the public.

London
Bus
Stickers

These stickers are popping up on buses throughout London. These pics were mailed into Little Green Footballs by a British reader.

Arab World Reaction To 9/11

Is It
Time
For Jews
To Leave
Europe?

From Atlas Shrugs:

A 12-year-old Jewish girl was stomped upon and brutally kicked on a public bus in London. Accosted and asked if she was Jewish, she replied, "I'm English." Unimpressed, four girls, accompanied by three boys, then pushed her to the floor, stomped on her face and repeatedly kicked her.

The month of July was one of the worst, in terms of anti-Semitism, in both England and Australia and in Canada, as well. More here

In Britain, The Times of London reports that attacks on Jews have soared, and that even the national government has taken notice. On Thursday, an all-party parliamentary inquiry will state that anti-Semitic violence has become endemic in Britain, both on the streets and university campuses. The report will call for urgent action from the Government, the police and educational establishments.

From Joshua Pundit:

If I were a Jew living in Western Europe or Scandanavia today, with the possible exceptions of Switzerland, Denmark, Germany(!) and the Netherlands, I would seriously think about relocating to Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or America.

It's that bad, and the danger signals are that clear.

... with the possible exceptions of the countries I mentioned above, none of the countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia are likely to do much to protect the Jewish populations of their countries from what I'm pretty sure is just over the horizon.

They will be too busy dealing with internal unrest and what may even amount to a virtual civil war in some places. And it isn't all that far off.

Sixty years after the Holocaust, with living survivors still among us, we are looking at the end of most Jewish life in much of Western Europe.

Anti-semitism and virulent Jew hatred, often camoflauged as `anti-Zionism' has become so common in countries like Britain, Spain, Norway, Sweden and France that it hardly even merits a mention anymore. Tolerance for hate speech in mosques and open Islamic expressions of Jew hatred are a given.

Attacks on Jews and desecration of Jewish religious sites is endemic, and usually whitewashed as ordinary street crime or mere vandalism in spite of the fact that the perpetrators are almost always Muslims targeting Jews - in fact, the EU's official report on anti-Semitism in Europe issued 2 years ago was whitewashed and `rewritten' in exactly that way.

Leftist governments in countries like Spain and Italy and Sweden openly symphathize with Hezbollah and Hamas, and indeed the EU does not even consider Hezbollah, a group sponsored by Iran and with the murder of every Jew in Israel on its agenda to be worthy of condemnation or proscription in any way.

... much of the press in Western Europe and Scandanavia is so vociferously `anti-Zionist', particularly in Britain, that it has made Jew hating more fashionable and mainstream than at anytime since the 1930's.

At the bottom of this equation, of course, is Europe's ascendent Muslim population, who are responsible for most of the blatant attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. They are the new `swing votes' for many of Europe's politicians.

The European Left, anxious to appease them and to appear politically correct have mostly had few problems in toeing the jihadist line when it comes to Jews and Israel.

Go read the whole thing.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Come Away With Me

by Norah Jones

Turn The
Other
Cheek?

A Christian argument against Pacifism:

No one likes war. That goes without saying. But some contend that war is evil in itself, and should never be engaged in for any reason. Some pacifists have theological reasons for their stance, while others are motivated by humanistic idealism. While pacifism is a wonderful ideal, is it a realistic and responsible position to take? Everyone wants peace, but can pacifism bring peace to this world?

For those who believe God is opposed to any and all war consider the following: Would God ever command us to do something evil? No. Did God ever tell people to go to war? Yes. Then war in itself cannot be evil.1

While some wars are unjust, there must be such a thing as a "just war."

What sort of thing justifies going to war, then? One such justification is to secure justice in the face of gross evil. Sometimes it's right to fight when it is the only means by which we can stop evil people from prevailing over weaker people.

Consider the following scenarios. What would you do if you saw an old lady being beaten by a mugger, a young lady being raped by a stalker, or a man fighting for his life against an armed attacker? Would you do nothing? Would you try to talk the criminal out of what they were doing? Of course not. Either response is morally irresponsible, if not reprehensible. We would do whatever was necessary to save the individuals from harm.

Now multiply the scenario 10,000 fold.

Imagine that a nation is engaged in the unjust killing of thousands of its citizens, maybe even ethnic cleansing. What do we do? Do we turn our cheek because it's occurring on a national, rather than a personal level, or do we do what we can to intervene on behalf of the innocent?

Whether the target is a single individual or a group of individuals, the principle remains the same. If we would intervene with force to rescue the elderly woman from being victimized by an evil man, why would we not intervene with force to rescue a group of individuals from being victimized by evil men?

Go read the whole thing.

How do the questions this writer raises apply in the case of Iran? The Iranian President says Israel ought to be "wiped off the map." He is about to aquire nuclear weapons.

Are we moral if we do not intervene?

Or, must we wait for him to hit Israel with a nuclear weapon before we would be justified in attacking Iran?

Telephone
Telepathy

I've been telling my wife for years that I have this, and she wouldn't believe me:

NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some scepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

One billion to one odds.

MoveOn.Org's
Website
Filled With
Anti-Semitic
Attacks Against
Senator Lieberman

Boy, this is a surprise. "Progressive" Democrats making anti-Semitic statements? Why, I'm shocked:

September 5, 2006 -- A string of anti-Semitic rants about Sen. Joe Lieberman have popped up on the liberal MoveOn.org's open forum Web site, drawing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League.

It's the latest flap in the contentious race between Lieberman, who is running as an independent to keep his seat in Connecticut, and upstart Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee.

"We recognize that Action Forum is an open forum intended to foster the free flow of ideas," ADL head Abraham Foxman said in a letter dated Aug. 31 to MoveOn, which supported Lamont in the Democratic primary against Lieberman.

"Nevertheless, since such profoundly offensive content is appearing on a board clearly linked to MoveOn.org, we believe you should assume some responsibility to respond to this hateful content," Foxman wrote in the letter, which was forwarded by Lieberman's campaign.

Foxman cited examples from the site's Action Forum, including "media owning Jewish pigs," "Zionazis," a reference to the senator as "Jew Lieberman" and the question, "Why are the Jews so Jew-y?"

Foxman wrote, "Those who allow hate to rear its ugly head under their auspices bear a special responsibility to distance themselves from that hate, and to speak out against it, as loudly as possible."

Lieberman is one of the country's best-known Jewish politicians.

Monday, September 04, 2006

It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

One of my favorite songs from Bob Dylan. It starts with modern footage. Sit with it.

This video has a lot of lefty silliness in it, but it's worth watching.

Make
The Other
Poor Dumb,
Bastard Die
For
His Country

Considering all the posts I have been doing on being willing to die for one's beliefs lately, I thought it might be a good thing to put up this video from the movie Patton featuring the great Generals thought on dying for one's country.

Why
Abduct Us?
We Cede
Our Values
For Free

Mark Steyn is on the money here:

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they'd converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism.

Consider, for example, the bizarre behavior of Reuters, the once globally respected news agency now reduced to putting out laughably inept terrorist propaganda. A few days ago, it made a big hoo-ha about the Israelis intentionally firing a missile at its press vehicle and wounding its cameraman Fadel Shana. Shana was posed in an artful sprawl in a blood-spattered shirt. But it had ridden up and underneath his undershirt was spotlessly white, like a summer-stock Julius Caesar revealing the boxers under his toga.

What's stunning is not that almost all Western media organizations reporting from the Middle East are reliant on local staff overwhelmingly sympathetic to one side in the conflict -- that's been known for some time -- but the amateurish level of fakery that head office is willing to go along with.

Down at the other end of the news business, meanwhile, one finds items like this snippet from the Sydney Morning Herald: "A 16-year-old girl was tailed by a car full of men before being dragged inside and assaulted in Sydney's west last night, police say . . . "The three men involved in the attack were described to police as having dark 'mullet-style' haircuts."

Three men with "mullet-style" hair, huh? Not much to go on there. Bit of a head scratcher. But, as it turned out, the indefatigable Sydney Morning Herald typist had faithfully copied out every salient detail of the police report except one. Here's the statement the coppers themselves issued: "Police are seeking three men described as being of Middle Eastern/Mediterranean appearance, with dark 'mullet-style' hair cuts." That additional detail narrows it down a bit, wouldn't you say?

Steyn's column goes on, and you really ought to read the whole thing. If the examples Steyn

cites aren't disgusting enough, check this one out:

Palestinian Terrorists Fire on Children, AP Obfuscates

This is a great example of how appallingly corrupt the wire services have become in their reporting from Palestinian areas, relying on Palestinian journalists and editors who are doing the bidding of terrorist groups and covering up atrocities. Associated Press writer Ali Daraghmeh’s story is about a gang of masked terrorists who fired on a crowd of schoolchildren to enforce a “teacher’s strike,” wounding a 12-year old boy.

Think about that. They used live fire against a crowd of children. But the Associated Press headline for the story is deliberately worded to be as innocuous and misleading—in fact, downright confusing—as possible: Palestinian teachers’ strike hurts boy.

Steyn's point is that Western journalism have ceded the value of truth-telling; the logic and reason upon which a just society is built. He's absolutely correct. If the West can not figure out what it believes in and what is worth dying for, we will surely be destroyed.

Once upon a time, a Christian would srhink at the idea of denying his faith. Now, we see nothing wrong with the Fox Journalists casually converting to Islam to save their asses. But, the problem is, it's not just about religion.

Even if you don't believe in Christ, even if you think it is ok to deny your Judaism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or your subscription to Maxim Magazine, the fact remains that these creeds by which we live are more than a just ways to assimilate ourselves socially. They are the ideologies which provide the foundation of our lives. All these ideologies were established because people were willing to die for them. Even Maxim Magazine.

Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death," and hard as it may be to believe it, 230-something years later we have such an attitude to thank for our right to gawk at scantily-clad babes. I don't know about you, but I am a Christian, I am an American, and I like to look at scantily-clad babes, and I don't want these things to be taken away from me. What do you say, my brothers?

Here's Robert Spencer's response to Al Qaeda's Adam Gadahn calling him to Islam:

Thank you for the invitation, Adam, and for your thoughtfulness in extending to me in particular a personal call. But I'm afraid I must decline. While I appreciate that I would be your "brother in Islam" if I became a Muslim and turned my "sword against the enemies" of Allah, I cannot and will not give in to violent intimidation, come what may, and I do not want to live in a society that bows to such intimidation.

I believe that societies that respect the equality of rights before the law of all people, including women and religious minorities, as well as the freedom of conscience, are superior to those that do not. I hope that such societies will be able to summon the will to resist you and your "invitation" in all its implications before it is too late.

Meanwhile, Adam, I have a preliminary invitation of my own for you: I invite you to accept the Bill of Rights, and enter into the brotherhood of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. My invitation does not focus on my religion, although I invite you to that also, but rather on a framework within which people of differing faiths can live in peace, harmony, and mutual respect -- provided that none of the groups involved cherishes supremacist ambitions to subjugate the others.

Those are the values for which we ought to be willing to die.

Pirates

Pirates Is terrorism a legal problem, or a military problem? Who has the authority to go after terrorists? Who has the authority to kill a terrorist, to target a terrorist for assassination? What should we do with captured terrorists?

What is a terrorist?

These are the issues Legal Affairs is dealing with in this article. Their solution? Treat terrorists as pirates:

INTERNATIONAL LAW LACKS A DEFINITION FOR TERRORISM as a crime. According to Secretary General Kofi Annan, this lack has hampered "the moral authority of the United Nations and its strength in condemning" the scourge. But attempts to provide a definition have failed because of terrorists' strangely hybrid status in the law.

They are neither ordinary criminals nor recognized state actors, so there is almost no international or domestic law dealing with them. This gives an out to countries that harbor terrorists and declare them "freedom fighters." It also lets the United States flout its own constitutional safeguards by holding suspects captive indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay.

The overall situation is, in a word, anarchic.

This chaotic state is reflected in, and caused by, the tortuous machinations of the U.N. in defining terrorism. Over 40 years of debate have produced a plethora of conventions proscribing acts ranging from hijacking to financing terrorist organizations. But the U.N. remains deadlocked on what a terrorist is.

As a result, terrorists and countries like the United States pursue one another across the globe with virtually no rules governing their actions. What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism. The framework should be incorporated into the U.N. Convention on Terrorism and should call for including the crime in domestic criminal law and perhaps the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

This framework must recognize the unique threat that terrorists pose to nation-states, yet not grant them the legitimacy accorded to belligerent states. It must provide the foundation for a law that criminalizes not only terrorist acts but membership in a terrorist organization. It must define methods of punishment. Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists.

Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race."

From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction—meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them.

The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

The fact of the matter is, America's first declared war after the Revolutionary War was a war against the Barbary Coast Pirates. And, guess what. That's right, they were Muslims.

In fact, in trying to figure out how to settle the problem without violence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams travelled to England to meet with the Ambassador of Tripoli to try to work things out. Here's what happened:

In the book "Victory in Tripoli," Joshua London writes about the Muslim Barbary pirates. They attacked American shipping vessels in the 18th century, often boarding ships and enslaving crewmembers.

Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, and John Adams, then ambassador to Britain, visited the resident ambassador from Tripoli (modern-day Libya) in London to negotiate a treaty to protect American ships from Barbary pirates. Why, asked Adams and Jefferson, is your government so hostile to the fledgling United States of America? After all, we have no quarrel with you, nor you with us.

The Tripolitan ambassador told them -- as reported to the Continental Congress --

"that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."

Sound familiar?

To think that liberals all over the world think Conservative have just imagined the enemy.

Eugenics,
Euthanasia,
And The Left

From Reliapundit, the Astute Blogger:

Leftists might be best defined as people who want to predetermine outcomes - they don't trust the marketplace, or individuals; they want the state to pick winners and losers. (If that's too oblique, then read two books by Hayek and call me in the morning!)The ultimate outcome which a Leftist can control is LIFE AND DEATH. And when presented with this choice, the Leftist almost always come down on the dark side:

they favor abortion on demand; they favor euthanasia, and they favor life sentences for convicted MURDERERS.

Recently, Leftists in Massachusetts argued in favor of euthanizing/murdering a little girl who was in a coma as a result of child abuse. The Left argued - as they did in the Schiavo case - that she was "virtually brain-dead". People who wanted her to live won the legal battle. And now she is continuing her remarkable comeback. MORE HERE.

Also in the news this week is a new practice made available - RIGHT NOW - to people undergoing IVF, (but it could just as easily be made available to people

conceiving naturally); it's called PGD - pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and it amount to SCREENING a propsective embryo/family member for potential diseases before implantation.

EXCERPT:

[Critics say that...] It raises the specter of eugenics, they say, in the most personal terms. “It’s like children are admitted to a family only if they pass the test,” said Denise Toeckes, 32, a teacher who tested positive for a BRCA mutation.

“It’s like, ‘If you have a gene, we don’t want you; if you have the potential to develop cancer, you can’t be in our family.’ ”

Other critics oppose preimplantation diagnosis on the grounds that it could be used to select against homosexuals, women or people with disabilities. It reduces people to their genes, they say, and paves the way for the pursuit of children designed to suit parental ideals and for discrimination against those born with perceived imperfections. I think this is an apt description. This is eugenics, and it's amoral at best.

Why does the Left consistently come down on the dark side!? Why do they favor euthanasia and abortion and appeasing the enemy!?

It's because they are moral relativists: lacking any belief in any universal truth or in universal and innate/God-given human rights, they have nothing that they feel is worth fighting for - or dying for --- OR EVEN LIVING FOR.

Go read the rest at The Astute Blogger.

Dithering
Over
Definitions

Who is our enemy? Newsweek says the President and his people are having trouble figuring out what to call our enemy. Amazing. It's only five years since this war began. Maybe that's what they mean by a Long War. It takes them a long time to figure out who they are fighting against.

They remind me of Treebeard and the Ent people in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. They never say anything that's not worth taking a long time to say. And consequently, they just sit there and talk while the world is crumbling around them.

Oh well, here's an article from Walid Phares which seems to have a pretty good grasp of what Islamofascism is:

Jihadists: The Two Forces

There are two major "trees" of Jihadism: The Salafists and the Khumeinists.

The Salafists, influenced by the radical Wahabis and the "Muslim Brotherhood" call for the removal of the current Arab and Muslim Governments and their replacement by a worldwide power they call "Caliphate."

The Salafist movement produced al Qaeda and its affiliates around the world and identifies itself as "The International Salafi Jihadi Movement." It is omnipresent in the Muslim world and has a significant presence inside democracies worldwide. The Salafi Jihadists established the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This was the model they wished to multiply around the globe.

The Khumeinists are the Jihadist followers of the teachings of Iranian Ayatollah Ruhallah Khumeini. They have established what they call an "Islamic Republic" in Iran and have funded organization, including Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iranian Regime oppresses its own peoples and seeks regional and world expansion through Terrorism and Nuclear threat.

Axis of Jihadism

Each of the two "Jihadi" blocs has its own strategy and area of action: al Qaeda and the Salafists have infiltrated many countries and penetrated some government institutions in the Muslim world. They have also established cells within Western and other democracies.

The Khumeinist Jihadists have full control of Iran's regime and created an axis of terror in the Middle East, including the Baathist regime of Syria and Hezbollah. Both powers aim at crumbling America, undermining democracies and repressing freedoms in the Arab and Muslim world.

Although with different long-term goals, the Jihadi Salafists and Khumeinists have converging interests against common enemies: democracies. In many places and on different occasions the two blocs of Jihadism have established interim alliances: the regimes in Iran,
Syria and Sudan and the organizations of al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jemaa Islamiya, and many others have cooperated: against democracies and civil societies, they have formed an axis of Jihadism.

This is what the American public and civil societies around the world are up against since the 1990s. The victims of Jihadism belong to all ethnicities and religions: from the Muslim Sunni civilians in Algeria and Syria, the black Africans, Muslim and Christian, in Sudan, the Copts of Egypt, Shiites and Kurds of Iraq, moderate Muslims and Christian minorities in Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Nigeria, to the societies of Russia, Argentina, India, Europe and the United States. In short, humanity is under attack by Jihadism.

The American people must learn more about the ideological movement that is waging war against them. The American public must ask the U.S. Congress to investigate Jihadism as a modern Terror ideology.

More here

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Blaming The Jews

A video about Muslim Anti-Semitism.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Fur Alina

Music by Arvo Part

You sit in a darkened room looking into a garden. There is no moon.

A single disembodied note sounds, and in the ambient light you see a piano. There is a repeated triad that you think is the opening of Moonlight Sonata, but it's not. It is a simple right-handed exercise, lovely in its repetition, a practiced, careful rhythm.

From a shadow in the drapes, a violin begins a pair of notes, one simple bow stroke, down and up, listening, enjoying its resonance, perfecting its tone. As if they were unaware of each other, piano and violin continue with parts accidentally overlaid.

Long slow notes by the violin are a wistful melody, the finger exercise a cautious metronome.

This is crushingly intimate music.

We have stumbled into a sacred moment. When the left hand strikes a lower key, it is as if a third musician has entered the room and with a simple, ominous single note, has taken the percussive role from the right hand. But the right continues and our attention is drawn again to its simple melody. There is that repeating triad. The cycle begins again.

This is Fur Alina. It is so lovely, so innocent and so unspoilt, we can only cry upon first hearing. It is unimaginable.

We Love Life
And
They Love Death

Really, what can you say to that. From Victor Davis Hanson:

Hezbollah’s black-clad legions goose-step and stiff-arm salute in parade, apparently eager to convey both the zeal and militarism of their religious fascism. Meanwhile, consider Hezbollah’s “spiritual” head, Hassan Nasrallah — the current celebrity of an unhinged Western media that tried to reinvent the man’s own self-confessed defeat as a victory. Long before he hid in the Iranian embassy Nasrallah was on record boasting: “The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death.”

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trumps that Hitlerian nihilism by reassuring the poor, maltreated Germans that there was no real Holocaust. Perhaps he is concerned that greater credit might still go to Hitler for Round One than to the mullahs for their hoped-for Round Two, in which the promise is to “wipe” Israel off the map.

The only surprise about the edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that has become a best seller in Middle Eastern bookstores is its emboldened title translated as “Jihadi” — as in “My Jihad” — confirming in ironic fashion the “moderate” Islamic claim that Jihad just means “struggle,” as in an “inner struggle” — as in a Kampf perhaps.

Meanwhile, we in the West who worry about all this are told to fret instead about being “Islamophobes.” Indeed, a debate rages over the very use of “Islamic fascism” to describe the creed of terrorist killers — as if those authoritarians who call for a return of the ancient caliphate, who wish to impose 7th-century sharia law, promise death to the Western “crusader” and “Jew,” and long to retreat into a mythical alternate universe of religious purity and harsh discipline, untainted by a “decadent” liberal West, are not fascists.

Next, in the manner that Hitler was to be understood as victimized by the Versailles Treaty, so too we hear the litany of perceived grievances against the Islamic fascists — George Bush, the West Bank, Gaza, or now Lebanon. But does anyone remember that bin Laden quip, four years before 9/11, when Mr. Bush was still governor of Texas: “Mentioning the name of Clinton or the American government provokes disgust and revulsion.”

Go read the rest.

Is
Civil War
Brewing
In
Mexico?

What the heck is going on down in the land down under us?

This AP story builds upon the increasingly violent antics and agitation of losing leftist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the "Democratic" Revolution Party (not enough Democratic, too much Revolution). Evidently, he has completely rejected the very concept of democracy: Leftists always love democracy... when they win. When they lose, it's a bourgeois running-dog imperialist plot against the people:

Vicente Fox was forced to forego the last state-of-the-nation address of his presidency Friday after leftist lawmakers stormed the stage of Congress to protest disputed July 2 elections.
It was the first time in modern Mexican history a president hasn't given the annual address to Congress....

"Whoever attacks our laws and institutions also attacks our history and Mexico," he said [in a written version of the speech that was blocked], a thinly veiled reference to leftist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The opposition lawmakers took over the stage in Congress, waving Mexican flags and holding placards calling Fox a traitor to democracy. They ignored demands that they return to their seats, shouting "Vote by Vote" - a rallying cry for López Obrador's bid for a full recount in the election.

So we have a close presidential election -- Calderón won by about 244,000 votes out of 41 million, or 0.6% -- and the leftist sore loser won't concede, instead calling out his supporters to riot in the streets. Again, the name is unfamiliar, but you should at least recognize the odor.

Only López Obrador goes even farther than simply trying to sue his way into the presidency, as Gore did; López Obrador has more guts: he clearly plans the violent overthrow of the Mexican government (perhaps with help from his close friend, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías in Venezuela), then to install himself as the new "people's president," assuming Al Sharpton is finished with the title. More than likely, People's President for Life -- just like Chávez.

If he's serious, if he doesn't plan to back down, then there will be civil war in Mexico ...

Protesters occupying Mexico City's center said they were ready to do whatever it takes to support Lopez Obrador. Fernando Calles, a 26-year-old university professor, said he was ready to fight for the former Mexico City mayor "until the death, until the final consequences."

"We lived 500 years of repression, and now we represent the new face of Mexico," he said.
The tight election left the nation deeply divided, with Lopez Obrador - who portrayed himself as a champion of the poor - alleging that fraud accounted for an official count showing him 0.6 percent behind Calderon.

Rival Reuters has a few more facts:

López Obrador's supporters have paralyzed central Mexico City with protest camps and he has vowed to make Mexico ungovernable if Calderón's victory is confirmed....

López Obrador railed on Friday against what he says are Mexico's corrupt institutions, such as the courts.

"To hell with their institutions," he told a rally of supporters in Mexico City's central Zocalo square. But he called on them not to march to the Congress building, where violent clashes had been feared.

This affects America hugely: if Mexico degenerates into a civil war, the first thing that will happen is hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of hysterical Mexicans will pour across our border, where we have no hope of stopping them at the moment... particularly since they will claim "refugee" status -- and not without a good case.

But the next problem is that the Bush administration and Congress will have a very difficult decision to make: do we just stand idly by and watch a Communist dictatorship take over our southern neighbor and ally? Or do we take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them -- maybe.

If you think we have a threatening "southern exposure" now, with a relative conservative like Vicente Fox (former high executive at Coca-Cola) as president, just imagine how bad it would be with Communist-leaning Andrés Manuel López Obrador... especially having seized power by force of arms.

Recall that López Obrador is extremely close to Venezuelan People's President for Life Hugo Chávez -- who has a tight working relationship with Iran, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. A Mexico run by López Obrador is a continuously open invitation for Moslem terrorists to flood into our country... probably hiding amongst the mass wave of legitimate refugees fleeing the forced-labor camps that López Obrador will start building.

But on the other hand, do we really want to intervene in Mexico yet again? I would rather we did, if the alternative is to allow López Obrador to seize control by civil war or coup d'état. But it might be a hard sell to Congress right about now, just before the elections.

Friday, September 01, 2006

We Will
Never
Forget

As horrifying and evil as the September 11th attacks on America were, there was an almost equally horrifying attack waged in Chechneya two years ago today.

Chechneyan Muslims (with connection to Al Qaeda) stormed an elementary school in Beslan, Chechneya, taking over 1,100 teachers and students hostage. During the ensuing standoff with police, the Jihadis raped young girls, shot teachers, strung the entire school with explosives, and forced children to drink urine.

In the end, the Jihadis went Apocalypse Now on the school, murdering 319 people, 186 of whom were children.

An
Affair
To Remember

The Washington Post, the media outlet that, along with the New York Times, did the most to promote the idea that members of the Bush Administration had outed a CIA officer, now tries to put the whole affair to bed:

It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.

He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Islamofascist
To Receive
Reward
For Human Relations
From LA County

The man featured in the video below is about to receive the “John Allen Buggs Award” for Human Relations from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. Here's a link to read the story.

Wal-Mart
Can Stop
A Nuclear Iran

From All Things Beautiful:

Well there's a title you don't read every day! What's the connection? Simple, tell China, that Wal-Mart will shift merchandise production to competing low-cost manufacturing countries, if it doesn't support a UNSC resolution, stopping Iran from going nuclear. After all, a nuclear Holocaust is also bad for business in China.

Make no mistake, Wal-Mart has that kind of purchasing power: Over 10% of all Chinese exports to the U.S. are bought by Wal-Mart, that's well over $20 billion.

"More than 70 per cent of the products sold at Wal-Mart are made in China. If Wal-Mart were a separate nation, it would rank as China’s fifth-largest export market, ahead of Germany and Britain."

The good news is, the threat would remain just that, for China would yield, we'd continue saving $100 billion each year and the Mullahcracy would have to abandon their expansionist ambitions, which they are planning to extort through nuclear blackmail. There was a time, when 'corporate' diplomacy supported the greater good.

Actually, I don't think this would work as well as All Things Beautiful thinks it would work. It would be rather easy for China to simply call the bluff. A business is dependent on its suppliers to stay in business, just as much as the supplier is dependent on the buyer.

China delivers for Wal-Mart. China delivers because it is efficient. Many of the other "competing low-cost manufacturing countries" are less successful precisely because their track record on deliver is not as good as that of China.

However, this is not to dismiss the idea outright. Certainly, it is the foundation of a very good idea. During the course of WWII America was fully mobilized in its war efforts. This means there was maximum open cooperation between all components of government and the business world. If government asked a manufacturing plant to retool to make bombs, for instance, they say, "How big an explosion do you want?"

We are not fully mobilized as a nation at this time. If this war gets worse, as I fully expect it will, then there is the likelihood that we will once again go into full-mobilization mode. At that point, the government could sit down with a company like Wal-Mart and strategize on how to best beat our enemies.

For the government to make such a request at this point would be considered an overstepping of authority. And, until the government had such authority, Wal-Mart will have no reason to take such a risk.

Bush Urges Nation
To Be Quiet
For A Minute
While He
Tries To Think

I saw this piece, from the satirical "newspaper" the Onion, over at The Anchoress this morning:

In a nationally televised address Monday, President Bush urged all citizens, regardless of race, creed, color, or political affiliation, “to quiet down for just one minute” so he could have “a chance to think.”“Every American has an inalienable right to free speech and self-expression,” Bush said. “Nonetheless, I call upon the American people to hold off on it for, say, 60 seconds. Just long enough for me to get this all sorted out in my head.”

“Please,” Bush added.

While the president said achieving a unilateral peace and quiet “would not be easy,” he hoped that citizens would respect his wish and work toward a temporary cease-talk so that he could can hear his own thoughts “for once.”

“Make no mistake: It will take patience and sacrifice,” Bush said. “But such drastic measures could lead to a better tomorrow for all of us, especially for your commander in chief.”
Bush then closed his speech by exhaling sharply, tightly closing his eyes, and massaging his temples. “I just—Christ, I just need a goddamn minute, you know?” he said.[…]

Bush’s plea was backed by leading Republicans, who urged their constituents to comply with the president’s request to “be quiet for seriously, like, two seconds.”

“In these trying times for our president, we must show respect for his office, even if it means turning our car radios down, shushing our children, and turning off all fans,” Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) said. “Heck, the man just needs one measly minute.”

Capitol Hill Democrats, however, have criticized Bush’s call for silence, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) calling it “yet another example of Bush’s inability to connect with everyday Americans, many of whom rarely, if ever, receive a moment to themselves.”
“Where’s their moment to think?” Pelosi said.

While Bush deemed the attempts at quiet “helpful and encouraging,” he called for “literally one more second” of complete silence, saying he was “very close to getting it together and almost had it” before being interrupted by the sound of a car alarm moments ago.

Read the whole thing.

CUANAS