Thursday, November 30, 2006

The Race of the Unclean

Here’s a good heartwarming Texas story for you, from ABC13 (Houston):

(11/29/06 — KTRK/KATY, TX) — There’s an awful lot of exciting news when you round the corner on Baker Road. One of two big yellow signs announces a new neighbor is coming soon.

K.I.A., that’s the Katy Islamic Association, plan to build a mosque here.

“It’s not an appropriate place to have a mosque or church,” said resident Barbara Simpson.

It isn’t going over real well.

“As a house of worship, they shouldn’t be disturbing the peace and tranquility of 15 homes,” said resident John Wetmore.

Neighbors tell us they’re concerned about traffic and drainage and a little fear of the unknown. Some of the homeowners even offered to buy the land back for more than a million dollars. The K.I.A. doesn’t seem very interested in the offers.

“We’re not going anywhere,” said Katy Islamic Association member Alvi Muzfar.

So far, not good, right? But there’s more:

SwineSo it seems the community at the end of Baker Road has a pretty good fight. But this fight has gone much farther than many between two neighbors. You see in these fights, sometimes neighbors throw mud at one another. In this instance, they’re wallowing in it.

Craig Baker owns pigs. He’s the guy behind the second big yellow sign on Baker Road. That’s the one announcing Friday night pig races.

“What does it matter, I can do whatever I want with my land, right?” asked landowner Craig Baker.
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Sure can. But aren’t pigs on the property line racing on a Friday night a little offensive to a Muslim neighbor?

“The meat of a pig is prohibited in the religion of Islam,” said Katy Islamic Association member Youssof Allam. “It’s looked upon as a dirty creature.”

Yeah, there’s that and also that Friday night is a Muslim holy day.

“That is definitely a slap in the face,” said Allam..

Now before you go thinking Craig Baker is unfair, or full of hate, or somehow racist, hear him out.

Baker has long roots here. His family named the road and when the new neighbors moved in, he tells us, they asked him to move out.

“Basically that I should package up my family and my business and find a place elsewhere,” said Baker. “That’s ridiculous, they just bought the place one week prior and he’s telling me I should think about leaving.”

That new owners deny they ever said anything like that, but Baker isn’t budging.

Baker admits the pigs are a message he is not leaving.

If John Conyers has his way, Mr. Baker has not seen the last of this trouble. His actions are about to become hate crimes, and his words hate speech, if the new Dhimmi Congress has its way.

Keep an eye on this one.


Hat tip: Tom Pechinski

The Coalition to Preserve Civilization

The Great Islamic Jihad is certain that Western Civilization is about to come to an end.

Islamic Fascism looks forward to the rule of the new Caliphate, in which the whole world will swear submission to Allah and bow five times a day towards Mecca. It aims to kill or enslave every person who will not accept its twisted vision of Islam. With the help of its allies among the world’s dictators and within our own media, it is confident that it will achieve its goal.

But even as this beast tears at our throats, a new defensive force is being born, a determination to preserve all that is good and right and true within the Western world. Even as we are abandoned by our leaders, by the sophists in our academies, and by the propagandists of our major media, ordinary people are connecting with one another, and are ready to stand up and defeat those who would destroy us.
The 910 Group

Here in the 910 Group this force is symbolized by the Phoenix, reborn from the ashes of the World Trade Center in order to resist the onslaught of Islamofascism.

Synergy and synchronicity are at work here. The 910 Group was initiated in the comments on a Gates of Vienna post and is barely two months old. Yet it is growing incredibly rapidly, and is much larger than all of us.

We are an international movement, with members in India, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Norway, and Canada, as well as the U.S.A. We comprise a self-selected group of people who share common goals: to oppose Islamic Fascism wherever it threatens us, and to promote the emergence of liberty in all the dark corners of the planet where ordinary people are degraded and oppressed.

Anyone interested may subscribe by visiting the the CVF forum and following the instructions there.

A new “network of networks” has formed under the 910 umbrella, and now another synchronicity has opened the door to a larger alliance, one that calls itself The Coalition to Preserve Civilization. The rallying cry for this new group is a speech by Senator Rick Santorum from October 30th, 2006. Sen. Santorum’s speech is entitled “The Gathering Storm of the 21st Century”, and is posted at To The Point News.

There are some longer excerpts further down in this post, but here is a brief quote from the speech:

It’s time to wake up.

There is no way to escape it, no matter what our policies, and whoever our elected representatives are. There is no escape because our enemies are fully committed to our destruction, and they will not stop until they have either destroyed us, or have been destroyed.

That is our choice: we can win or lose, but we cannot opt out and walk away from the greatest threat and most resistant threat this country has ever faced.
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Another part of the new synchronicity arrived in the form of an email sent out last Friday to conservatives by Jack Wheeler and Steve Baldwin. One of the members of the 910 Group received the email and brought it to the group’s attention. A flurry of messages and phone calls ensued, and on Monday morning several core members of the 910 Group met in Northern Virginia with the two conservative activists.

Jack runs an excellent news and opinion website called To the Point News, and Steve is the Executive Director of the Council For National Policy. They are both veterans of the decades-long struggle to fight communism and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they want to build a similar infrastructure in order to combat radical Islam.

This is from their email:

We don’t think anyone can dispute the fact that the forces of Islamofascism have embarked upon a World War of global conquest that may last for decades if not longer. Since Islamofascist terrorists have no boundaries, this war will be even tougher to fight than our battle was against the Soviet empire.

Already, the Islamofascists have a beachhead in Western Europe. According to demographic experts, Europe will become Islamic in a generation — and it’s not the moderates who hold sway in the Islamic communities in Europe. If these numbers are translated to political power — which undoubtedly will be the case — it will have dire consequences. Eventually, radical Islamic political blocs will take power in many European nations such as Belgium, Holland, France, and Britain.

The Washington Times reports (11/21/06) that Russia is well on its way to becoming an Islamic country. Within eight years (by 2015) over half the soldiers in the Russian Army will be Moslem. By 2020, over 20% of Russia’s entire population will be Moslem.

What happens when Moslems in political power have access to the nuclear arsenals of Russia, France, and Britain?

Couple this with the increased presence of Islam in Africa and Latin America, and there is a distinct possibility that America, within a generation of two, will be alone in the world. We would be encircled by enemies dedicated to our destruction. No doubt by then, there will be thousands of Jihadists within the US prepared to carry out terrorist acts on command from international Islamic powers.

We cannot allow this to happen without a fight. Western Civilization is worth fighting for. We cannot allow our grandchildren to live in Islamofascist tyranny.

But we don’t seem to be prepared for this war. Unlike the movement created during the Cold War, there doesn’t seem to be much of an infrastructure to combat Islamofascism.

If we truly care about our children and grandchildren, then we must create an infrastructure modeled after the Anti-Communist Movement. Here’s a few areas off the top of our heads that an Anti-Islamofascism Movement could be addressing:

  • Investigate radical mosques. 80% of mosques in America are Saudi-funded and promote a form of Radical Islam known as Wahhabism. There aren’t any groups that monitor them or call for congressional or IRS investigations of their activities. Yet we know from literature picked up by those who have signed up for classes at these mosques that many promote jihad against the West. If a Christian church did that, they would lose their tax-exempt status within a week.

  • Support Anti-Islamofascist freedom fighters. There are resistance and dissident groups within Iran and other radical Islamic countries who are willing to organize against their regimes if they had some outside assistance. Yet there are no groups set up to promote their cause or to lobby Congress to get them covert assistance.

  • Thwart attempts to impose Sharia Law. The ultimate goal of Islamofascists is to impose Islamic “Sharia” religious law upon us all. Groups could monitor and block every Fabian effort (imposing Sharia in small bites) like demands for prayer rooms and allowing headscarves in schools.

  • A Rapid Response media team to stand up to Islamic bullying. The US Airways story removing Moslem imams from a flight resulted in a barrage of denunciations from Moslem advocacy groups like CAIR with no one to give a “fair and balanced” rebuttal. What is needed is an “Anti-CAIR” media team that can praise the justifiable concern of airline passengers for their safety and demand that Moslems understand that concern. There must be no tolerance for Islamic bullying.

  • Form an Anti-Islamofascist publishing network. There is a great need for more publications and newsletters that focus on the Islamofascist threat both here and abroad. Remember the “Pink Sheet of the Left”? It launched an explosion of Anti-Communist publications.

  • Create an Anti-Islamofascist portal on the Internet. There’s a need for a website “portal” coordinating efforts to monitors all the radical Muslim foundations, leaders, organizations, mosques, etc. now operating in the US who have already been tied to terrorists or are espousing radical viewpoints. Such a website would also allow private citizens to contribute intelligence to it. For example, Joe Sixpack reports picking up a flyer promoting jihad from a neighboring mosque. This intelligence would be checked for accuracy and if accurate, added to the entry on the website under the name of that mosque.

  • Establish an Anti-Islamofascist Speakers Bureau. There are many experts in addition to the small number now known to the media such as Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer, who can talk about the world-wide Islamofascist threat. But most media people don’t know who they are or where to find them. There’s a need for a speaker’s bureau marketing Anti-Islamofascist experts in a systematic fashion to all the major media outlets.

  • Monitor the billions now being spent on Homeland Security. There are already reports of large-scale waste and fraud occurring, which, of course, takes funds away from counter-terror efforts. There currently aren’t any groups that monitor the effectiveness of various Homeland Security tactics or lobby to institute new tactics and strategies that may be more effective.

  • Wage an ideological assault on Islamofascism. Radical Islam is a totalitarian doctrine with numerous parallels to Marxism, yet intellectually crude and medievally primitive. A scholarly assault through think-tanks, seminars, and conferences can be conducted, targeting the multitude of weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Islamofascism.

  • Support the Chinese Christian Back to Jerusalem project to evangelize Moslems in Europe and the Middle East. China is on its way to becoming a majority Christian nation within 20 years, with over 100 million Christians right now. Not only can they serve as a major bulwark against the spread of Islam in Asia, but many are determined to reverse that spread throughout the world. Teams of Chinese missionaries are already preaching the Gospel in many countries abroad, with tens of thousands to follow. Their efforts could be greatly assisted by the large network of Christian philanthropists who fund mission work.

  • Create a Global Anti-Islamofascist Coalition. We need to identify and work with other organizations in Europe and elsewhere who are working against the Islamofascist threat. They exist, but few know anything about them. The Anti-Islamofascist movement needs to become a world wide coalition.

  • Reframe the illegal immigration issue as one of national security. This is already being done by Congressman (and 2008 presidential candidate) Duncan Hunter. There is evidence that Moslem Terrorists may have crossed our porous borders and if it hasn’t happened already, it certainly will. We also know that they have exploited other immigration issues such as the student VISA program so favored by the 9/11 terrorists. And yet, there is little evidence that much has changed in this regard. We still allow people in from terrorist-harboring countries with little checking, and the Democrats are determined to block the construction of a security fence on our southern border.

  • End our dependence on foreign oil that’s funding the Islamofascists. Despite protests to the contrary, we know that Saudi money is being funneled to radical madrassas and foundations that are the training grounds for Radical Islam. We also know that Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is using his oil billions to fund anti-American groups. It is time that we pushed our political leaders to get out of the way and allow America to become energy independent. We need to stop subsidizing our own enemies.

This message aligns perfectly with the aims of the 910 Group, and a new partnership has been launched. The Coalition to Preserve Civilization aims to combine the organizing and fund-raising expertise of the conservative movement with the high-tech networking skills of the 910 Group and its affiliated networks and bloggers.

The CPC has an ambitious goal: to resist and overthrow Islamic Fascist tyranny in all its forms through the efforts of our information networks.

The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed because the United States and its democratic allies held fast to their goals and never lost faith in the eventual result.

This struggle will also be won.

Western Civilization will be preserved.

Liberty will be extended to people who long for it but have never known it.

All people have the right to speak freely, to choose their religious beliefs, and to be free of the threat of violence.


This is primarily an information war, fought via the television screens and computer networks across the entire globe. The enemy is very adept at it, and has a head start. But the Islamists lack our major advantages: originality, flexibility, technical innovation, and a tradition of free enquiry. These are the skills we will use to build our networks and destroy theirs.

Make no mistake: this is a civil war within the heart of the West, between those who would appease Islamic tyranny and those who want to eliminate it; between those who would censor themselves and restrict their own rights rather than steadfastly resist any encroachment on them; between those who believe in the values and heritage of the West and those who are ashamed of them.

We will be vilified by those who are still under the thrall of the legacy media. We will be required to overcome the stifling fog of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism that infuses every aspect of modern discourse, and would enervate those who seek to preserve our culture. We will be beset by enemies both within and without. Yet we will not waver in our task.

How could we do otherwise?

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Longer excerpts from Senator Santorum’s speech:

This summer I gave two speeches that defined the unique challenges that confront the United States as we conduct a new world war. I gave those speeches — one in Washington at the National Press Club, and one here in Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Press Club — because I believe that now more than ever we need to study the past, learn from events, and take proactive measures to protect our freedoms at home and provide a safer world in which to exercise those freedoms.

I am here again today talking about this issue because Islamic Fascism continues to rear its ugly head. And because it is being joined by others, becoming a hydra.

The war is at our doorsteps, and it is fueled, figuratively and literally, by Islamic Fascism, nurtured and bred in Iran.

Islamic terrorists planned a mass kidnapping at the Central Synagogue in Prague just a few weeks ago. They intended to carry it out on Rosh Hashanah, when large numbers of Jews would be celebrating the New Year. Once the world’s attention was focused on Prague, they intended to make impossible demands, and then blow up the synagogue and all within.

Those people were not marked for death because they supported the war in Iraq, or supported George W. Bush, or sent troops to Afghanistan. They were targeted because they were guilty of being Jews. This is evil.

[…]

How many Americans realize that Iran declared war on us 27 years ago — in 1979 — and has been killing Americans ever since?

Most everybody has heard by now that Iranian President Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. But that’s only the beginning of his mission.

He continued with a rhetorical question: “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” He answered himself: “But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

[…]

This is an unpopular war. I have been ridiculed by the media and my opponents for defining the enemy as Islamic Fascism — they say words don’t matter. But words do matter because words are what define the enemy we confront. Words are needed for Americans to comprehend what motivates the deeds that the enemy is planning, so we can effectively defeat them. And defeat them we must.

Ahmadinejad has recruited and is training 52,000 suicide terrorists called the Commando of Voluntary Martyrs. An Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence officer bragged that “We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization and for the uprooting of the Americans and English … There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them.”

[…]

Ahmadinejad , like Hitler and Mussolini, intends to conquer the world. This is not a hidden agenda. His goal is to establish a Caliphate. Like Khrushchev, he wants a nuclear arsenal, and he is building the same sort of frightening global alliances that enabled the Soviet Union to put missiles near us.

Look again at the Iranians’ strategy. A couple of months ago Ahmadinejad signed a mutual defense pact with his pal, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Two dictators, awash in petrodollars, and besotted with hatred for the United States.

President Chavez, who called President Bush “a devil” at the podium of the U.N., spoke to the applause of those in attendance as he decried America. Calling America an “imperialist power,” he says his ambition is to become leader of global alliance of nations to “radically oppose the violent pressure that the (American) empire exercises.”

This summer Chavez honored Ahmadinejad at a gala and plans to visit North Korea, at which an “oil-for-missiles deal” may be on the agenda.

The same North Korea that has been building nuclear weapons to put on missiles that can reach our soil.

Did you know that Venezuela is the leading buyer of arms and military equipment in the world today? Did you know that Chavez is building an army of more than a million soldiers and the most potent air force in South America — the largest Spanish-speaking armed force in history?

Did you know that Venezuela will shortly spend thirty billion dollars to build twenty military bases in neighboring Bolivia, which will dominate the borders with Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil? The bases will be commanded by Venezuelan and Cuban officers.

This is what the brilliant Carlos Alberto Montaner — a survivor of Castro’s bloody regime — calls “a delirious vision of history,” and it is driven by a new alliance of dictators from Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

It is part of the grand design so proudly announced by Ahmadinejad: the destruction of our civilization.

And the sad irony is, we are dependent on the very people who hate us. American imports 60% of the oil we need to fuel our economy. We are underwriting their efforts to undermine us.

[…]

We have forgotten our history. We have been here before.

We only entered the First World War after German U-boats sank American civilian and commercial ships on the North Atlantic. World War I was “the war to end war,” and with the defeat of the German armies, it seemed that peace was destined to last a long time.

But it did not last even one generation. It did not last because we failed to recognize the evil of fascism, and because we allowed the fascists to grow stronger and stronger, until they felt capable of defeating us.

We left Great Britain alone to face the Nazis for several years, and despite Mussolini’s entrance, we only engaged in the Second World War after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Germany, Italy and Japan. They had nothing in common, so we weren’t willing to see the axis of evil gathering around us.

We entered the Cold War only after Stalin’s aggression in the Middle East and Greece. In every case the evil was obvious, the threat indisputable, but the willingness to confront was in every case late and prohibitively costly.

Are we willing to see the storm gathering around us and act before it is too late? Was 9-11 not enough? Have our memories faded? Or will it take something even more devastating?

When Winston Churchill wrote his great history of the Second World War, he began the first volume-”The Gathering Storm”- with a short description: “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.”

We were part of that moment of folly, and we paid a terrible price for it on the battlefields of that war. We are running the same risk today, and we are again acting carelessly, unwisely and we are permitting the wicked to grow stronger and stronger.

[…]

Many Americans are sleepwalking, just as they did before the world wars of the last century. They pretend it is not happening, that it all has to do with the errors of a single American administration, even of a single American president.

Some even pretend that it will all go away if only the Democrat Party is elected in November.

How do they propose to save us from these people? By negotiating at the United Nations? By removing U.N. Ambassador John Bolton office? By relocating American forces from Iraq to Okinawa? By abandoning the Iraqi people to Iranian and Syrian slaughter and domination? By engaging in more direct talks with a nuclear North Korea?

[…]

It’s time to wake up.

There is no way to escape it, no matter what our policies, and whoever our elected representatives are. There is no escape because our enemies are fully committed to our destruction, and they will not stop until they have either destroyed us, or have been destroyed.

That is our choice: we can win or lose, but we cannot opt out and walk away from the greatest threat and most resistant threat this country has ever faced.


Cross-posted at the 910 Group Blog.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Don’t You Dare Touch Jolly Old St. Nicholas!

Everyone has his limit. The point at which they open the window and yell “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Can you hear me, Vienna?

They are banning Saint Nicholas from kindergartens in Vienna this year. Can you believe it? Jolly old Saint Nicholas is being given the boot?!

St. Nick, nein! A ban on St. Nicholas at Vienna’s kindergartens is taking some of the ho-ho-ho out of the holidays for tens of thousands of tots this year.

And it’s creating a political ruckus, with opposition parties accusing City Hall of kowtowing to a growing Muslim population by showing Europe’s Santa the kindergarten door.

Municipal officials insist their decision is prompted more by psychology than political correctness.

Instead of joy, the sight of a strange bearded figure at the door evokes fear in most kids, they argue. And they point out that the policy on St. Nicholas is more than a decade old — though they concede it is being enforced more rigorously than in the past.

There are limits to Muslim appeasement, folks. No pork, no art, no music (oops — music is allowed, you’re just not permitted to listen to it), no joy — unless self-flagellation has some amusement I’ve missed.

How dare they! How dare the joyless pedants and the sensitive Muslims complain about a character who has evolved over the centuries to provide Christmas memories for millions of children and their parents?

What right do Muslims and ignorant educators — both of whom know less about cultural history and Western traditions than any other two groups — have to set the rules for what will be celebrated? Right there you have it: supremely sensitive Muslim immigrants in Europe and state-funded EU “educators” are the perfect bah-humbug storm of witless ignorance. Scrooge would’ve loved these guys.

Killjoy edicts such as these are enough to try the patience of a saint, even one as generous as Santa Claus.

Sinterklaas and Zwarte PietDo you know where jolly old St. Nick originated? In the cradle of Hellenistic Christianity, about three hundred years before Mohammed took his first breath. He was the bishop of Myra, a Christian city that fell to Islam’s marauders several times. Initially, the city was associated with St. Paul’s proselytizing of the Hellenes. However, with the conversion of Nicholas several centuries later, Christian tradition came to view Myra as Saint Nicholas’ domain. In the fifth century, a cathedral was built in his honor and his remains were buried there.
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In the eleventh century, during one of several Turkish invasions Italian sailors took advantage of the turmoil to steal Nicholas’ remains. They brought them to Bari, Italy, where they remain in a basilica to this day. And thus, St. Nicholas of Myra morphed into Nicholas of Bari.

Among many other attributions, Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, thus their thievery. In a way, their removal of the relics may have been fortuitous, given that Myra is now part of Turkey and we know what happens to Christians in Turkey, even dead ones.

A little background: Saint Nicholas was from a wealthy family and was known for his generosity. The most famous story about him during his life — a story which has several variations — is his secret gift of three bags of gold to a penurious father who could never have married off his three daughters without the Bishop’s generosity. In one story, he throws the bags of money through the man’s window at night. In another, he drops them down the chimney.

And of such stories are traditions born. The giving of gifts, generosity for its own sake (he made many anonymous gifts through his life), life viewed as abundance to be shared — all of these characteristics of Saint Nicholas gradually accreted over the centuries onto a mythical figure who came on December 6th to give presents to children. Much later another figure, Black Peter — depicted as his servant — was added to the story. Zwarte Piet serves many functions, depending on the country using the tradition. In the US, he has evolved into the Elves, Santa’s helpers.

Saint Nicholas is not going away. The ignorant schools, eschewing history for some revisionist version that better suits their agenda, cannot erase a tradition no matter how much the Muslims whinge about it, and no matter how hard the “Europeans” try to erase every iota of their Christian history and culture.

Draw this bright line in the sand: Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, etc., is not going anywhere except down the chimney.

Jolly old St. Nicholas, Lean your ear this way!
Don’t you tell a single soul, What I’m going to say;
Christmas Eve is coming soon; Now, you dear old man,
Whisper what you’ll bring to me: Tell me if you can.

When the clock is striking twelve, When I’m fast asleep,
Down the chimney broad and black, With your pack you’ll creep;
All the stockings you will find Hanging in a row;
Mine will be the shortest one, You’ll be sure to know.

Johnny wants a pair of skates, Susy wants a dolly;
Neddie wants a story book; he thinks dolls are folly;
As for me, my little brain isn’t very bright;
Choose for me, old Santa Claus, what you think is right.

An Opening on The Council

There’s an opening on the Watcher’s Council. Interested bloggers should go here for details.

And how about some gurrrl blogger applications for a change? It’s a whole buncha guys and me over there - and no paranoia about sexism, please. It’s simply that the guys are willing to apply.

Onceuponnatime, when I first started, there was Doc Sanity and e-claire on board. Now…nothing but bloggers who have to shave. We need a little die-versity, a little lipstick and powder, some estrogen added to the mix.

I want some gender parity here or I’ll...I'll stamp my foot.


Take a look at e-claire’s huggy-kissy photo.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The Carnival of Homeschooling

The Study of the Child

The Carnival of Homeschooling is being hosted this week at our old friend The Common Room. Just a few samplings at random…

Marcy’s Musings has this great snippet from an interview with Milton Friedman about homeschooling:

Q: I’m sure you’re familiar with the home-school movement, which has arisen over the last 10 years as form of competition to schools.
A: It is. And the fact that it is a form of competition shows how bad our schools are. Can you think of any other sophisticated product in which the home-made product is superior to the factory-made product?

Home Where They Belong describes an interesting group effort — the attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the “Most People Reading Aloud Simultaneously in Multiple Locations” using a passage from E.B. White’s classic book, “Charlotte’s Web.” That sounds like a worthwhile use of children’s time to me.

Then on to my favorite subject… Let’s Play Math! Historical Tidbits: The Pharaoh’s Treasure takes a spyglass to the history of mathematics, and looks at the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, Eratosthenes’ “sieve” for prime numbers, Euclidean geometry, and other mathematical minutiae… even Fibonacci, my favorite.

There’s more — much, much more — homeschooling information and resources to be found at the Carnival. If you’ve got kids, or ever were one, there’s something in there for you.

Council Winners Were Both Tied For First Place

Watcher’s CouncilThere were ties for first place in both sections of the Watchers’ Council for the week of November 17th.

In the Council area, Joshuapundit and American Future were neck and neck. The Watcher, per the rules, broke the tie by choosing Joshuapundit’s The March of Folly, which concerned the recent elections.

Joshua says, re the results:

What we can expect, of course, is not the sky falling in..but an intensified concentration on settling old scores and a curtailing of our ability to defend ourselves at a time when our nation is perhaps in the greatest peril we have ever faced.

That pretty well sums it up, though the Dems are going to have to try harder now. Look for less “get-out-of-Iraq-this-minute” talk. Things change when the ball is in your court.

American Future’s entry, The Politics of Iraq, takes exception to Mark Steyn’s post-election gloom. In fact, he shares my skepticism re what the Dems will do now that they’re in charge:

…what prevents me from sharing Steyn’s gloom is that there’s a presidential election in two years. If Iraq goes down the drain, the blame-game will operate in both directions: Democrats will blame Republicans for an ill-advised policy (which many Democrats endorsed in 2002) and mismanagement, and Republicans will blame Democrats for setting a date-certain for withdrawal and/or cutting off funding (notwithstanding Pelosi’s current denial of this intent). Thus, an American defeat in Iraq would pose big risks for both parties, as it couldn’t be known in advance which side’s arguments would find greater resonance with the public.

A good fisking of Steyn’s essay. I would add that part of Mr. Steyn’s gloom was brought on by his conviction that the Dems would lose. He must be feeling the sting more than those who could see what was coming.

On the non-council side, TCS Daily won first place - again, the tie being broken by the Watcher.

Why Intellectuals Love Defeat, an essay by Josh Manchester, contemplates what leaving Iraq would mean:

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Leaving Iraq will be worse than leaving Vietnam, not necessarily in terms of bloodshed, though that will be no comfort to those who will be slaughtered, but because the jihadist threat today is more dangerous than the Soviet threat then. Despite lacking — so far — in similar capabilities to the Communists, our enemies more than make up for it with an insatiable bloodthirsty ruthlessness. The honor that Mr. [James] Carroll sees in defeat will soon be forgotten should Al Qaeda establish a caliphate in Anbar Province and begin a healthy trade in the export of mayhem throughout the West. The Furies that will visit us from such a redoubt will engender much more than a little longing that we had stayed.

I knew Mr. Carroll when he was Father Carroll - before the Vietnam War really hotted up. No wonder he turned left: he was a Paulist priest whose domain was Boston University. Many people turned left then, but in the long cooling down period since have turned right once more. It is unfortunate that Mr. Carroll doesn’t discern the lack of wisdom in his blindly pacifist stance.

Reconquista, the second choice, has a fascinating post, Have You a Daughter? I call it “fascinating” and I don’t even like statistics. If you do, you’ll be in linear heaven.

What Reconquista examines is the number of sex offenses in various areas of London, comparing them with the make-up of the population. What I am about to quote isn’t fair, because it doesn’t provide the depth - or breadth - of what he’s done. Those you owe it to yourself to see.

However, that said, here are his conclusions:

I’m content with what I found.

Conclusion?

More Christians - fewer sex offences.

More other religions - fewer sex offences.

More Muslims - More sex offences.

And then he sums up:

This work is not proof of cause and effect, but the contrasting correlations couldn’t be starker and I need say no more, other than to repeat:

You may not be able to actually prove something dropped out of the back end of a dog, but if it looks like it did, smells like it did, feels like it did, and tastes like it did, then it might be best not to step in it.

I am going no further with this. I am not going to insult the unemployed, the poor, the uneducated by even considering any possibility that these things may be confounding factors in this picture I have presented. I could do, I have the data to use, but I will leave that to the PC brigade and whingeing Islam itself.

Talking of the PC brigade and Islam, there are those who will say this is little more than a hatchet-job: of course it’s a hatchet-job, you bloody fools. I’ve already established with my first two posts that we are at war with Islam, and when you are at war you must win. Against an enemy as ruthless and merciless as Islam you have to be even more ruthless and merciless or it will rip you apart - literally in Islam’s case.

Everything is still at The Watcher’s Place, awaiting your reading pleasure.

A Stroll Down Gilani Lane

The Muslims of AmericaLast weekend I posted about my visit with members of the Christian Action Network in Lynchburg. These brave folks have decided to go head-to-head with the Muslims of America and Jamaat ul-Fuqra over the official county name of a road: “Sheikh Gilani Lane”. It’s the main private road in the Red House compound, and is named after the terrorist group’s leader.

Yesterday the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an article about the controversy. I talked to Christian Action’s president, Martin Mawyer, last night, and he says he doesn’t know how the paper got onto the story.

“They never talked to us,” he said.

Surprisingly, the newspaper’s account is a fairly accurate one. The only sign of PC propaganda was what the headline writer did to summarize the issue: “Private road named for Muslim is focus of Christian group’s bid”.

Notice that Sheikh Gilani is simply a “Muslim”, as if Christian Action were targeting Gilani and the MOA out of religious spite. No indication that this is a terrorist Muslim that they’re objecting to.

But the story itself is a straightforward account of the facts:

If you want to know the history of the Muslims of America community in Charlotte County, just flip through the 2-inch-thick file at the county administrator’s office.

A county employee started collecting various articles and filings years ago in response to the many inquiries about the Muslim enclave in western Charlotte County. It is a compilation of a relationship that one professor noted shortly after the community’s establishment was bound to have conflict because of the “culture shock” on the part of the local residents and the Muslims.

The community — or compound, as a federal prosecutor called it — was established in the mid-1990s on 44 acres in this rural county of about 12,400 people. Most of the homes there are trailers, and about 20 families were estimated to live there several years ago.

Early on, county officials pushed community residents to correct zoning violations, local residents complained about its effect on property values and the Muslims complained they were victims of discrimination.

In the wake of the Sept.11 attacks, three residents of the community were indicted on federal gun charges. Federal prosecutors alleged that they had ties to a black Muslim terrorist group called al-Fuqra that had been involved with violent attacks, though not with the Sept. 11 attacks. Two of the three residents were convicted of the gun charges.

Residents of the community have denied any ties to terrorism.

Since then, there has been little public discussion of the community.

“They haven’t been at the forefront of issues we’ve dealt with for the last few years,” County Administrator R.B. Clark said.

That changed in recent weeks.

Sheikh Gilani LaneMembers of an organization calling itself the Christian Action Network said they want to appear before the Charlotte County Board of Supervisors to request that the name of Sheikh Gilani Lane, the private road running through the Muslim community, be changed.
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Martin Mawyer, president of the Forest-based group, showed up at Tuesday’s board meeting to make his case but was not allowed to speak because the issue was not on the agenda. About 30 members of the Muslims of America community were also in attendance but also did not speak.

Members of the Muslim community as well as nearby residents declined to comment when contacted later last week.

The week before, the Christian Action Network, which says it is a nonprofit lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the traditions of the American family and defending the nation against radical Islam, said it dropped from an airplane about 2,500 fliers on the Red House area around the Muslim community. The fliers allege that Sheikh Gilani Lane honors a terrorist and blames [sic] him for the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl.

Pearl was reportedly on his way to interview Sheikh Mubarik Gilani, a Muslim cleric in Pakistan, when he was abducted Jan. 23, 2002, in Karachi. Gilani helped found the Muslims of America and the Charlotte County site, as well as several others in rural areas across the country. Federal authorities have alleged that Muslims of America is connected with al-Fuqra and responsible for bombings and murders across the country.

The Christian Action Network’s Web site says the group is one of the nation’s leading grass-roots Christian political organizations with more than 250,000 active members.

“It is outrageous there is a road sign in Charlotte County named after an international terrorist,” Mawyer said in a letter left at the board’s meeting last week. “It is an insult to all the victims of 9/11 to continue to honor a known terrorist by granting him a sign that officially appears on the maps of Charlotte County.”

Sheikh Gilani Lane was established shortly after the Muslim community was developed. about 10 years ago. County rules allow residents to name their private roads.

“We didn’t know who Gilani was, and we felt like it was their business,” Clark said. “But 9/11 changed all that.”

Clark said the Board of Supervisors has referred the issue to the county attorney to decide whether it can even take up the question of the lane’s name without it being an act of discrimination. There is no time frame for when the attorney will finish his research.

“All I can do is wait to hear from our attorney and the board will decide what or what not to do,” Clark said.

“Changing the name of the road is not going to change the situation we are faced with,” he said. “It wouldn’t change anything going on in that community.”

Thanks to Martin Mawyer and everyone else at Christian Action, people other than the residents of Rolling Hill Road are becoming aware of Jamaat ul-Fuqra and the Red House compound. This could put Charlotte County, Virginia, on the map — though not necessarily in a way they’d like.

Dhimmi Watch picked up the story from the Times Dispatch, but — because the newspaper did not include a link — DW had no link to the Christian Action website.

I’m remedying that right here. Drop by the Christian Action Network and look at what they’re doing. It’s a nasty and dangerous task, and they are dedicated people.

Browse their site, look at the “Daily Terrorism News”, and leave an encouraging comment. You might even make a donation.

They’re one of the pillars of the Counter-Jihad.

Topics of the Day

I haven’t been posting on two of the biggest news stories — the bogus news coming out of Iraq, and the radioactive poisoning of the former KGB spy Alexander Litvenenko — because other bloggers are doing such a great job on them.

The manufacture of fake news by the terrorists in Iraq has become so outrageous, and the credulous (or complicit) peddling of it by the MSM has become so shameless, that you would think that surely the whole “news media” edifice has to come crashing down. But somehow it can keep piling treason upon disinformation upon propaganda, without hurting its business model. Very peculiar.

See this post by Gateway Pundit, or go to his main page and scroll to look for others. Flopping Aces digs very deeply into the topic, and deserves much of the credit for turbocharging this meme.

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The Alexander Litvenenko poisoning affair is so bizarre and labyrinthine that it’s hard to know what to make of it. When you peer into it, you not only run into the lies and disinformation put out by the Russian government, but also those put out by the intelligence agencies within Russia to deceive their own government. It’s a hall of mirrors of indefinite extent.

The best summary I’ve seen so far is by AJStrata; see his main page at The Strata-Sphere for other posts on the topic.


Hat tips: Larwyn.

Monday, November 27, 2006

That’s Funny — You Don’t Look European…

Today I had the privilege of meeting Jack Wheeler, of To The Point News. If you haven’t heard of him, check out his site (some of which requires a subscription). I will eventually be blogging more about our meeting.

Baron BodisseyBut, first, a funny story. After we had been talking for a while, I mentioned our blog. Jack stopped me and said, “Wait a minute. What’s your blog’s name?”

“Gates of Vienna,” I replied.

“You’re Gates of Vienna?!?”

“That’s right…”

“I thought that was a European blog!”

I told him that a lot of people think that. So, just for the record:

St. Dymphna

We’re not European.

Well, not counting Fjordman, LN, Kepiblanc, Zonka, XY, Phanarath, Rune, and all the other Scandinavians who guest-post here.

Dymphna claims Irishness, but she was born in the USA. My mongrel ancestors (English, Scots, German, French, etc.) all crossed the Big Pond at least 150 years ago.

We’re bloody Yanks. We have no right to bloviate on matters European, but we do, anyway.

More on the MSM

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit has responded to my “lumpen electorate” rant from last Saturday. He has a good point to make:

With the media doing the heavy lifting for the mujahideen, the Republicans had no chance, even if they had somehow managed to grow brains and a spine in time for the election.

This is just a tiny snippet from a much longer article about a different subject entirely, but I couldn’t let it pass. I see too much of this in the conservative, pro-American community, that the “legacy media” (or MSM) is simply too strong for the administration — any administration — to resist.

It’s an attractive copout, but the problem is, it isn’t true. And it makes it too easy for administrations to grab the copout and use it. “What could we do?” the Bushbots whine. “The all-powerful liberal media was against us.”

Horsehookies.

If there’s one thing that Americans love, it is victory. The NYT might have bitched and whined its head off, but if Bush had piled the bodies up in Sadr City and along the borders between Iran, Syria, and Iraq, and done a Serbia on the towers of Tehran and Damascus until the Mullahs and the Baathists screamed for mercy, he’d still be running approval ratings in the high eighties.

The power of the legacy media didn’t remove Bush’s spine. Bush’s lack of spine empowered the legacy media.
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Bill, I grant you your point. We all would have loved to have seen boot applied to fundament in Fallujah, and many other places.

But the question is: Why is Bush such a wimp? Why didn’t he just go ahead and get the job done?

Could it be that he’s afraid of the reaction of New York Times and CNN, just like every other politician?

If so, it still makes my point about the power of the MSM, as filtered through our elected leaders’ fear.

We won’t know who’s right, you or me, until a Republican president finally cleans some Muslim clocks. Then we can find out if it helps him politically.

Until then, we’re just guessing.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

The Poetry of War, Part VIII

Postscript to a Series - Previous Installments:   I   II   III   IV   V   VI   VII

Ninety Years On


Last year I wrote a series of posts featuring the poetry of the Great War, and concluded with poems by two British soldiers who survived the War. Now it becomes necessary to revive the series in order to add a coda with song from Al Stewart’s latest CD.

It had seemed that the magnificent work in Between the Wars (1995) might well be the capstone of Mr. Stewart’s career. Down in the Cellar, which came out in 2000, is a pleasant enough CD, a themed collection — every song is about wine or vintners — but it doesn’t rise to the level that Between the Wars attained.

Skulls in a trench during the Great WarThen came his latest work, A Beach Full of Shells (2005), which indicates that the old man is still at the peak of his form. The song containing the collection’s title is its most powerful, looking back most of a century to ponder the impact of the Great War on the English, and on English poetry.

Somewhere in England 1915
by Al Stewart


On the platform of an old railway station I enter a dream
And a couple are saying good-bye through the noise and the steam
But it’s just Brief Encounter my mind is trying to rerun
And I wait for the poignant finale but the dream has moved on

And the train has turned into a ship that is sailing away
And the platform is a beach full of shells under silvery grey
And the girl on the beach is an English Prime Minister’s daughter
And she watches the ship disappear at the edge of the water
And it feels like the pain in her heart will be never-ending
And everyone feels this way in the beginning

And she watches the ship disappear for the length of a sigh
And the maker of rhymes on the deck who is going to die
In the corner of some foreign field that will make him so famous
As a light temporarily shines to illumine his pages
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Then the scene has changed once again; now it’s moonlight on wire
And the night is disturbed by a sudden volcano of fire
And a skull in a trench gazes up open-mouthed at the moon
And the poets are now Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
And nobody talks anymore about losing and winning
And everyone feels that way in the beginning

And I’m up in the air looking down at a girl on a bed
She’s lying asleep on her side with a book at her head
And it’s someone who left long ago
Was it something I said?
And I hope that she’s reading “King Lear”,
But it’s “Twelfth Night” instead.

Now the girl and the beach and the train and the ship are all gone
And the calendar up on the wall says it’s ninety years on
I go out into the yard where the newspaper waits
There’s a man on the cover we all know, defying the fates
And he seems very sure as he offers up his opinion
Well everyone feels like this in the beginning

When you feel that the pain in your heart will be unending
Everyone feels this way in the beginning

If you feel that the pain in your heart will be never-ending
Well everyone feels that way in the beginning

Mr. Stewart shows an admirable restraint in the last stanza. It would have been so easy to name the man on the front of the newspaper — Bush, Blair, Osama bin Laden, whoever — and make the song topical and relevant, and earn the plaudits of the bien pensants. But he didn’t go there; he left the topic to our imagination, where it belongs.

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The poet who was made famous by the “corner of some foreign field” was, of course, Rupert Brooke. His poem was the most well-known and popular of the war poems until the mass insanity that was the Great War turned poetical sensibilities in a different direction.

But in 1915, this was the song of the flower of England’s young men:

The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke


If I should die, think only this of me;
   That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s breathing English air,
   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
      Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
   And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
      In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke personified the English moment that died on the Western Front and was never recovered. Even though Edward VII was dead by then, Brooke exemplified the Edwardian period, when the tide of British power was at the flood, and when the arts in Britain were still burning with their last bright flare before the slide into decadence and narcissism and Modernism.

Rupert BrookeRupert Brooke was a pretty boy, a hedonist who had numerous flings with members of both sexes. Curly-haired and dashing in his uniform, he embodied the noble British ideal when he went off to the war. His premature death was a heartbreaker, and ensured his literary immortality. The unromantic details of his death — he died on Easter Sunday, 1915, of tetanus from an infected mosquito bite, en route to the disaster at Gallipoli — could be ignored. He stood for England.

And then the whole façade came crashing down in the mud of Flanders. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon did indeed become the poets of the war, and the romantic martial ideal departed from poetry, never to return.

Brooke’s life and death are a bitter irony, compounded by the fact (as Paul Fussell has observed) that it was the horror of the Great War that gave birth to irony in modern Western culture.

Dymphna and I were discussing all this the other night, and she wondered if the looming demographic disaster in Europe might be a result of the Great War, the final consequence of a conflict so horrendous and meaningless that it destroyed the collective will to live of an entire continent.

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There’s another Al Stewart song in the latest collection that enlarges the retrospection to include Edwardian times and pan the camera across an entire century:

My Egyptian Couch
by Al Stewart


Now here’s a book full of photographs
That my ancestors made some generations ago
They’re wearing the latest clothes in a nautical way
The Suez Canal close behind is frozen in time
The deck crews stare out of a mime
And they seem to be considering me
Here on my Egyptian couch

O the life on Edwardian steamships
Is measured and slow, while down below
There are fires that shudder and clang and thunder
And sweat-caked in smoke, and cauldrons to stoke
To send the ship on her way
Tasting the salt and the spray
And a century later I scan the equator
From my Egyptian couch

And the news every day brings
Contains the strangest of things
But with confident smiles my forebears decline
To gaze into the wings

So they look from the photographs
And they’re curious now, wondering how we turned out
Let’s say like the Chinese adage
We’re living our lives in interesting times

When I went looking for a First World War image to go with this post, I had to search through websites containing hundreds of Great War photographs. After a while the enormity of the horror was so great that I simply couldn’t look at any more of them — trenches and craters and muddy fields covered with mutilated corpses, body parts in every cubic yard of churned-up mud, bloated horses and shredded clothing and smashed equipment and Death — a little more than a little was by much too much. You could lay all the photos of Great War corpses side-by-side, and they would run from here to Seattle, with plenty of them left over.

We’ve never recovered from the Great War. With the influenza epidemic hard on its heels, the War did damage to Western culture that has not yet run its course. Even those blessed souls who are totally ignorant of its history have to live with its consequences every day of their lives.

As the Great Jihad burrows its way into our countries and our institutions, it enters by the cracks and fissures and gaping holes that are left over from the period between 1914 and 1918.

Swedish Service to the Reich

Here is an article from today’s Aftenposten, kindly translated from the Norwegian by reader Mr. C:

Swedish Elite Kneels for Hitler

King Gustav V of Sweden decorated Hitler’s henchman Hermann Göring with an order when the persecution of Jews was in full effect. He started a letter to Hitler in 1941 with the words “Mein lieber Reichskanzler!” [my dear Chancellor]

Hitler with the Swedes in 1939“Sweden was not a neutral country under WWII, never!”

In the book Mein lieber Reichskanzler! — titled after the king’s own words — former Expressen editor-in-chief Staffan Thorsell joins the growing number of people who question Swedish policy during the war.

Chose to keep silent

“Depending on your point of view and mood, Sweden’s policy in the first years of war can be described as cowardly, careful, realistic or egoistic, but it was never neutral. ‘Intelligent adaptation’ was the tune of the times in the early 1940s, among diplomats, generals and politicians, but also among Swedish journalists. The truth is, you ducked in fear of the aggressive and racist superpower Germany, because that was considered wise and expedient,” Thorsell says.

Close ties

In the book he describes close ties between the rulers and upper classes of the two countries. He starts off with a wedding in Koburg in October 1932, the first town to become nazified: Then Swedish presumptive heir Gustav Adolf marries princess Sibylla, daughter of grand duke Carl Eduard of Sachsen-Koburg. She would later become mother of present day king Carl XVI Gustaf.

“Carl XVI Gustaf’s maternal grandfather was one of nazism’s earliest supporters, Thorsell says,” but makes a point of not burdening today’s king with this.
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The night of November 10th 1938 Anders Forshell, Swedish marine attaché in Berlin, had his sleep interrupted by window breaking and noise: It was the Kristallnacht, the night that became the start of ever grosser harassment of Jews.

“Beneficial”

In February the year after the Swedish king’s railway carriage and Gustav V rolled into a Berlin railway station. His majesty’s errand was to decorate Hitler’s general field marshal Hermann Göring with the Grand Cross of the Swedish Order of Swords, established by King Frederik I in 1748, awarded for “outstanding merit in time of war and for beneficial and long-lasting activity”.

Göring had a weakness for glitter and finery, but also for morphine way beyond medical use. When the German journalist in exile Kurt Singer wrote about this in the book Göring — Germany’s Most Dangerous Man, the Swedish government banned the book.

Has something in particular gripped you during your work?

“That Sweden didn’t do more for the Jews in the 1930s, while there was still time,” Thorsell says.

In the book he writes that Sweden in that period was one of the least hospitable countries to Jewish refugees, and that the immigration law of 1937 stated that they were not to be considered political refugees.

He points to the fact that Sweden and Switzerland, three weeks before Kristallnacht, persuaded Germany to stamp a 3 centimeter tall “J” in the passports of German Jews.

Swedish anxiety

Thorell describes the enormous Swedish anxiety after April 9th 1940 (invasion of Norway), that the Germans might waltz over Sweden as well.

“That anxiety would mark Sweden for the rest of the war,” he says.

On April 17th 1940, a week after the invasion of Norway, Germany demanded to be allowed to send “a few railway carriages” with medical equipment, some food and nurses through Sweden to Narvik. The Swedes allowed it, but saw through their fingers the fact that “a few carriages” turned out to be 34 freight cars, mostly loaded with provisions for the army, and a passenger car with 40 young Germans from Bayern.

“They were weapons experts and radio specialists. Sweden helped Hitler conquer Narvik. This betrayal is almost unknown in Sweden,” Thorsell says.

Later the Germans would issue more of these demands, and the Swedes solved the “problem” by letting single German railway cars attach to Swedish trains. After a while alcohol and cigars would be included in the cargo to cheer up the German fighters in the cold north.

“Sweden exported ball-bearings — parts necessary to keep the war machine going — to Germany until the autumn of 1944,” Thorsell says.

On the 17th of May (Norwegian Constitution Day). Norwegians in Stockholm were ordered not to celebrate the day in public; it was feared that Swedes would join the celebrations and that it could turn into a demonstration against the German attackers.

Another story concerns Sweden’s foreign minister Christian Günther, who banned the Norwegian president of parliament from broadcasting a radio speech from Stockholm after April 9th. The plan for the speech was detected by Berlin; Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels was furious, and pushed all he could. Which was enough.

The speech was instead recorded in Stockholm, and transmitted from London.

Part of the story is also that Norway probably had more to gain from the fact that Sweden was not in war than any other country, as it became a destination for thousands of Norwegian refugees.

“Towards the end of the war, Sweden went from ‘neutral’ to the allied,” Thorsell says.

When you piece these stories together — is there a danger that you, in sum, paint a picture which is too dark?

“That might be. But I want to change the mendacious view of a morally elevated neutrality which for too long has had power over Swedish foreign policy,” Thorsell says.



Update: LN — thanks for the correction. “Carl” was evidently a typo in Mr. C’s translation, and I was guessing as to what he meant. I’ve changed it.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Taking Action in Lynchburg and Beyond

As many readers know, the blogger CP (of The Politics of CP) is a dedicated investigator of domestic Islamic terrorists, especially Jamaat ul-Fuqra. An organization called Christian Action Network, based in Lynchburg, Virginia, has also been looking into Jamaat ul-Fuqra. They’re working on a documentary video about their investigations, and a couple of weeks ago they contacted CP and asked him to get involved.

CP knows that I live in the backwoods of Virginia, so he emailed me to find out if I wanted to meet up with him and some of the Christian Action people. We arranged to have dinner together on the outskirts of Lynchburg, and it has at last been my pleasure to meet the renowned CP and shake his hand. He wouldn’t allow himself to be photographed, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that he’s a real live human being, and not a Homeland Security spy-bot.

Christian Action Network is a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating and resisting the Great Islamic Jihad as manifested in its various forms here in the United States. They work from a Christian perspective, but their efforts are to be lauded by anyone who wants to take a stand against the forces of Islamism.

Their main web page features the “Daily Terrorism News”. Here’s their mission statement:

Why Do Christians Need a Daily Update on Terrorism News?

Christian Action NetworkThe Bible versus the Koran. Jesus versus Mohammed. Christians versus Muslims. A deadly battle over religion is shocking the world. With new terrorist threats and attacks happening every day, Christian Action Network is now hosting a daily briefing on terrorism news to keep the Christian church informed.

Muslim terrorists want to install a new Caliphate (a Supreme Religious Leader) to rule the world. That is their stated goal. They want complete global domination. And every Christian should stay informed and updated on their efforts to force Islam upon the citizens of the world.

Christ encouraged all believers, “Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming.” Matthew 24:42

Stay alert. And visit this page frequently in Defense Against Muslim and Islamic Terrorism.

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During an enjoyable dinner with CP and several people from Christian Action, there was a lively discussion about Jamaat ul-Fuqra, its activities in various locations, and our respective investigations into the group. CP is the premier pajama-clad sleuth looking into JF, but those Christian Action guys really wear out the shoe leather tracking down and visiting the Muslims of America compounds up and down the East Coast.
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Martin and JasonTwo members of the group are shown at left, Martin Mawyer (the President, on the left), and Jason Campbell. These fellows have a lot more guts than I do: they’ve been visiting JF compounds all over the place, just driving on in, even when they have to pass a sign that says, “STOP! If you don’t live here, turn around and go back.” Yes, the sign really says that; I saw the photo.

They showed us two packages of fascinating photographs, including a large number taken during a recent visit to Jamaat ul-Fuqra locations in Georgia and South Carolina. Jason said that he was thrown out of one compound in Georgia; the JF people told him not to take photos, but he did anyway. Fortunately no one confiscated his camera.

The group paid a visit to the Georgia State Prison near Reidsville, which is a prime recruiting location for Jamaat ul-Fuqra. When the young converts are released from prison, they take up residence in the Commerce compound or one of the other locations in Georgia or South Carolina.

The day before our dinner, Martin and Jason took CP for a ride in the country and drove right on in to the compound in Red House, about which I have posted previously. CP reports that Friday prayers had let out just before his visit, and the people there were quite friendly. I’m sure he’ll be posting on his experience in due course.

Sheikh Gilani Lane

Christian Action Network has undertaken an initiative to get the Charlotte County authorities to pull down the “Sheikh Gilani Lane” sign and rename the road at the Red House compound. It is unconscionable that the authorities allow an official county road to be named after an international Islamist whose organization has been listed as a terrorist group by our own State Department.

Martin says that his group has had conversations about the Sheikh Gilani sign with Charlotte County officials, and he is certain that it will be taken down. He has also started a leaflet campaign among local residents; his conversations with them are detailed on the Christian Action website, with a permalinked page here.

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I’ll be posting again later on the efforts of the Christian Action Network, as photos become available. Keep your eye on this group; they’re doing important fieldwork in a dangerous field.

A Field Trip to a Mosque

Last night a commenter on my CAIR post asked the following question:

My son’s school is going to take him to a mosque as a field trip. How do I determine if this mosque is on our side or the jihadis’?

I told him that it would be a very unusual mosque that is “on our side”; the best we can realistically hope for from a mosque would be a kind of neutrality.

Then I put the question to the 910 Group, and this morning I got an email from one of their experts on Islam and CAIR:

We’re going to the mosque!I remember seeing a list, but can’t remember where. I’ll keep looking, but it’s probably out of date anyway — they pop up in new places all the time. [Later followup: Found that list of mosques in this classic report (pdf format) on Saudi influence in mosques, but it’s only 15 mosques listed at the end, and the report is 2005. However, the document is useful for your local parent as background, and to distribute to the school and local churches/synagogues/temples if needed — from FreedomHouse.org.]

REQUEST: If he can give me a name and a city/state or zip code, I may be able to give him info — my assumption on most mosques is that 80%+ have been taken over by Salafist imams. Here’s a quick Mosque locator, that may pick up a website if it doesn’t come up in Google once we have a name for the Mosque.

LEGAL BACKGROUND: Here’s an NEA article, one that takes a sort of limited comparative religion approach but would allow preferencing Islam.

Here’s the most commonly cited document on how to handle religion in schools, from freedomforum (liberal, does not require balance — again, can allow a rationale for preferencing Islam over other religions).

TACTICAL RECOMMENDATION: Let’s assume the mosque they’re going to is pure Wahhabist. I say, bring it on — we need incidents to define issues in bold colors, not pastels: I’d have him ask 3 questions:
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1. Balance of comparative religion vs. preferencing one religion: How is the school going to ensure balance and comparative teaching of religion, if they only go to one place of worship? If they’re going to the local mosque as a field trip, will the school ensure that they’re also going to the local Roman Catholic Church, synagogue, a couple protestant churches (maybe Lutheran for history’s sake, Calvinist Baptist or Episcopalian for the same historical value), a Hindu Temple and a local Bahai or Buddhist place of worship as well — or at least to 3-4 places of worship representative of the religious participation of the local community? And it must have some diversity if there is a mosque there.
2. Teaching context for visit to the mosque: Is this an elementary school class, in which case the curricula may be about different values, some basic civic lessons, integration of new cultures, but at a basic level… Or is it a middle school/high school class, in which case a broader World History or comparative government approach may be important (and in that case, what texts are they using?). Is the trip to the mosque part of the left’s revisionist teaching of history and politics? The school and mosque leaders should be required to present a rationale, and to defend it.
3. What information has been provided to the parents about the trip? He has a right to ask for detailed info on what will be presented, and what materials will be distributed — this may vary by state but generally for religious activities, the default state is that he can ask for copies of curricula and other info (they may be vague and it won’t make him popular with the teacher or principal, so he has to decide if this is a fight he wants to take on). If you can identify the state, we can research exact regs for his situation (county may be important here too). Do they have the option of accompanying the kids? Can they opt out of the trip if they want?

ASSESSMENT: My own view — the more comparative religion the better, but if there are not at least a couple of Christian and one Jewish trips/curricula/historical perspectives etc. provided (and Hindu/Buddhist as well if that group is represented in the local population), then it’s not comparative religion, it’s proselytizing.

And if the local churches and synagogues don’t have any outreach to the schools to compete with the local mosque, this is an opportunity for him to contact them and help them get their act together. It seems to me it’s another category where outreach can be helpful — to synagogues and churches to let them know what the competition is doing, and that they have a legal right to get in there and compete. Not to mention a moral obligation to do so.

Readers are welcome to suggest other ways for concerned parents to be proactive about the creeping Islamicization of their children’s schools.


Update: Here is an additional resource sent in by the 910 Group — Parents and Students for Academic Freedom. From their mission statement:

The Students for Academic Freedom Information Center is a clearing house and communications center for a national coalition of student organizations whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

They cover K-12 in addition to the university level.

Friday, November 24, 2006

The Lumpen Electorate

Well, it’s been two weeks, now, and I can finally write about the election.

DespairI’ve passed through all the typical emotional stages of reaction to tragedy — shocked disbelief, denial, numbness, escape, and — finally — bitter determination.

It’s not as though the election made that much of a difference. We’re only a millimeter away from where we were on November 6th, but we passed through a membrane in order to get here. The damage had long been done, but now we have to acknowledge it.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, whether it’s Rumsfeld, the State Department, the craven and profligate Congress, or the President’s open-borders-and-amnesty immigration policy.

Above all, there are the mainstream media, the traitorous lackeys of the Left who have gone over to the enemy. With the media doing the heavy lifting for the mujahideen, the Republicans had no chance, even if they had somehow managed to grow brains and a spine in time for the election.

The shape of things to come is becoming clear. Syria — which means Iran — has moved openly in Lebanon, with the mullahs in Tehran ready to proclaim victory. Sensing the imminent American pullout, the terrorists in Iraq are ramping up the violence, knowing that with just a little more carnage the Democratic Congress will be ready to cut the funding for the war and abandon the Iraqis to their fate. The specialists at Reuters are probably even now photoshopping the last helicopter lifting off from the roof of the American embassy in Baghdad.

It doesn’t mean that we won’t fight this war, or that we will lose it (although we might). It means that we will fight it later, closer to home, and with many more casualties than we would otherwise have had to take. It means that right about the same time that the Supreme Court forces the states to institute homosexual marriage, parts of Dearborn will be instituting Shari’a. It means that right about the same time that amnesty is declared for all the Mexicans illegally in this country, agents of Al Qaeda infiltrated across the southern border will be detonating a weapon of mass destruction in a major city of the United States.
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The power of the legacy media is immense, despite their declining stock prices and number of viewers. The blogosphere and other alternative media are expanding, and they represent the future. But politicians don’t pay much attention to the blogs; they still take their cues from The New York Times. It is fear of the major newspapers and the networks which has driven the Republicans to take such cowardly positions on nearly every issue. Even their responses to the immigration problem, which polled so clearly in favor of strict enforcement, were late and lame.

When you read that John Boehner, the new House minority leader, gets his information from “the newspapers”, you know the depth of trouble that we are in. The people who brought you Mohammed al-Dura, the “genocide” of Jenin, and the massacred babies of Qana — those are the same people who are informing the opposition party in the United States Congress.

Weep for America.

And with the giants of the Republican Party leading, can the average American be far behind?

We, the readers of Gates of Vienna, and other members of the VRWC live in a rarefied atmosphere. We’re relatively well-informed, and vacuum up information wherever it can be found, not relying on news filters and conventional sources.

But most Americans don’t pay much attention. They have only the most superficial grasp of political issues, yet many of them vote. When they pick up any political information at all, it is from the soundbites on the network news, or from the headlines in the national dailies. And in the last two decades these organs of the Fourth Estate have gone from being biased towards the liberal to being outspoken shills for the Democrat party. The simple truth is that, due to the uniform partisanship of the media, it has become politically impossible for a Republican administration to prosecute a war successfully. We will have Vietnam, and then Vietnam, and then more Vietnam, over and over again, until the electorate gets the message and votes the Democrats back into power.

I have seen this process at work with a couple of my close relatives. These people aren’t stupid, and they aren’t even ignorant of most things. But they don’t pay any attention to political matters in any depth. It doesn’t mean that I always disagree with them — since they are regular working folks and not members of the runny-brie-and-dry-Chablis élite, they often have reliable instincts that run against the prevailing politically correct wisdom.

But when they talk about current political issues, their positions are almost word-for-word from the headlines in the Washington Post or the soundbites from the evening news. You can hear them say “Bush is a moron” or “Republicans only care about rich people” without any idea of whose party line they are parroting or where they picked it up. And when election day rolls around, they troop on down to the firehouse and do their civic duty.

It’s a reasonable assumption that there are millions more like them all across the country, and that’s how the same people could vote for Bush two years ago and yet make Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House this year.

Eventually the decline of the legacy media will become so severe, and the alternative media so widespread, that ordinary people and politicians will be collecting their information from different sources. But that process will take at least another decade, by which time it will be too late to keep us out of the worst of the struggle against the Great Islamic Jihad.

It’s going to be a lengthy war, and a messy one. Gird your loins and settle in for the long haul.

The USA is the Biggest Threat

Swedish reader XY has provided us with this translation of an Oct. 29th article in Svenska Dagbladet:

Uncles Sam and KimThe USA and North Korea are the two biggest threats against world peace. That’s the opinion of Swedes, according to a survey by Temo.

Almost one in three Swedes, 29 percent, thinks that the USA is the biggest threat to world peace, according to a survey by Temo, as commissioned by the TV-channel Axess Television, says Dagens Nyheter [Today’s News].

More than 1000 people were posed the question “Which one of the following countries do you think is the greatest threat to world peace?” There were six alternatives: Israel, China, Russia, USA, North Korea and Iran.

North Korea was close to sharing the top spot with the USA — 28 percent of those asked thought that this country was the most dangerous. In the third spot came Iran with 18 percent of the votes.
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The survey also shows that it is the younger people — those between 16 and 29 — that see the USA as the biggest threat, whereas a majority of the eldest — those over 60 — thinks that North Korea is most dangerous.

Political opinions are related to the result. 68 percent of those that voted for vänsterpartiet [the Leftist Party] and 57 percent of the voters of miljöpartiet [the Green Party] that the USA is most dangerous. Only 20 percent of the m- and kd-voters [center/right parties] shared that opinion.

It’s notable that these opinions are more prevalent among Swedish youth, indicating that the suffocating blanket of media propaganda has had an effect on the impressionable young.

Or… Maybe we are the greatest danger to world peace. Maybe we should just realize the error of our ways, bring all our boys home, and leave Europe and the rest of the world to fend for itself.

I’m sure the Swedes would be eternally grateful if we did.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

“This is something one is not allowed to speak of.”

The Swedish newspaper Folkets Nyheter has published a followup (in English) to its interview with the Malmö policeman that we featured here a few days ago.

I don’t want to hear complaints about the nature of Folkets Nyheter, or its association with neo-Nazi or other hate groups. The important thing is the information about Malmö in the interview, and whether or not it is true.

Here’s what the newspaper has to say in its defense:

A commentary from Folkets Nyheter’s editorial staff on the interview with a Malmö police man

Malmö PoliceOn account of all the attention caused by the publishing of Folkets Nyheter’s article Malmöpolisens klarspråk: Det är på väg att gå åt helvete! (in English: Plain Speech From the Malmö Police: It’s all going to hell!), Folkets Nyheter would like to make some clarifications and take the opportunity to say thank you, for all the e-mails we have received and to those of our readers who on their own initiative have translated and spread the interview around the world.

This is one of the most important interviews Folkets Nyheter has made and we owe much gratitude to the very courageous policeman who dared to tell us and our readers about his experiences from and about the true reality of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city.

Due to the state of suppression of free opinion and the lack of practical freedom of speech presently in Sweden in matters of the highest importance to our people and country, we can not disclose any further information on the identity of the policeman we have interviewed.
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Naturally, we understand that people are curious about his identity but we guarantee absolute anonymity to those who we interview and hope to interview in the future about similar topics. There is, as many immigrant youth have picked up on and are participating in wholeheartedly, a sort of war waged against the Swedish people and for a policeman to let himself be interviewed about the matter is not without its dangers.

The interview with the policeman is authentic, evidently. Folkets Nyheter has, which you can see if you read articles published on our web site and in our paper issue, made a large number of interviews: with other policemen from Malmö whose only advice to Swedish youth that are attacked by immigrant gangs is to “Run like hell away from there!”; with government authorities like the Ombudsman Against Ethnic Discrimination who are of the opinion that Swedes, who do not want to spend an evening out in places they find are to frequented by immigrants, should stay at home…

With news papers like Kristianstadsbladet who expose people who are critical of current immigration policies with names and home addresses and in their news articles magically transform left wing extremists into “Nazis”. With a seventeen year old Swedish girl who was harassed and beaten by an immigrant mob in Ronna and when rescued by her father and the police, was shot at by the mob with automatic weapons. With a 20-year old who was stabbed in the back by an immigrant gang in Helsingborg and escaped death by a mere 2 millimetres. With a police officer in Stockholm who confirmed that the majority of perpetrators behind the rape epidemic that has struck Stockholm are black Africans and also commented: “But this is something one is not allowed to speak of”.

This is just a fraction of what Folkets Nyheter and other alternative Swedish news sources have reported on. Claiming, like certain debaters have done in different forums around the world where our article is being discussed, that our interview is a fraud and that the policeman himself does not exist is politically corrects’ wishful thinking and to cowardly turn away from the reality taking place in Malmö and Sweden.

Considering all of the attention and stir caused by just one interview like this, we are hoping this will give others the strength and courage to get in touch with Folkets Nyheter or other media who are working outside of the establishment. An establishment with a massive hostility towards ethnic Swedes and hell bent on distorting reality.

The established mass media of Sweden have deserted the Swedish people long ago, and so has our political leadership. It is now up to us who have realized and acknowledged this, to build a structure that will be able to circumvent and in time replace the current establishment with something better.

If any readers find factual inaccuracies in all this, or errors of deduction, or biased presentation, or any other fault in the information itself, please go ahead and argue your case. But don’t argue by discrediting the source; I don’t consider that valid. As I said the other day, the PC-Multicultural establishment in Sweden has forced all dissenting opinion into the same bed as the neo-Nazis and Nordic nationalists.

I don’t care. If this information is true, it’s worth looking at.

Let’s pretend that Folkets Nyheter is being run by a consortium that includes Jack the Ripper, Heinrich Himmler, and Attila the Hun. There. Now we know they’re Real Bad Guys.

Let’s drop that argument and look at what’s being said.


Hat tip: Steen of Snaphanen.