Wargaming Our Terms of Surrender

Christine is one of the major driving forces behind the Center for Vigilant Freedom. I received this email from her today, summarizing the current state of the Counterjihad from the point of view of someone who is organizing the coalitions.

I have often said that coordination and communication among the various groups that oppose the Great Jihad are our most important tasks. It’s time to put aside the factional infighting, the anathematizing of opponents, and the insistence on doctrinal purity. After our victory there will be plenty of time to decide whose method was the best, and who was the most ideologically correct.

Christine’s analysis is billiant:

Virtually everything we do is in coalitions, and that emergence of effective coalitions — often ad hoc, for single rallies, or over months over a piece of legislation, or locally as activists find each other from groups with common interests — is an important trend from the last year. A lot of our work is in helping to incubate those coalitions, both by supporting other groups, and also by helping to incubate single-issue sites that can become battlegrounds in this war of ideas.

If you think of this in terms of war gaming, we need more pieces on the board. Our Islamist adversaries have a lot of pieces on the chess board, pieces they have been building with petrodollars for over a generation — new Islamic organizations like NAIT and ISNA (Wahhabi forces), pseudo-Western organizations to enforce the separation of Muslims from mainstream integration, such as CAIR, MAS, and MSA (Muslim Brotherhood forces), groups to effect infiltration and intimidation into existing Western NGOs and government agencies of Muslim Brotherhood supporters (FBI, U.S. Peace Institute, CIA, White House, Transportation Security Agency, Department. of Justice) .

A lot of Islamist dawa is about putting hundreds of organizations and individuals in place in each country’s civil and governmental institutions — not just in the USA. The strategy is one of colonization under Islamic Imperialism — for these Islamist groups to act as Muslim Brotherhood front groups, creating the parallel society of Shariah which will then be in place to take over as national sovereignty is corrupted and preoccupied with the chaos of civil war and terrorism. Gramsci, Qutb, Mao — various theorists of insurrection and colonization of the West have written on this. Our side is beginning to look at this now too, especially over the last half decade.

So much of what needs to be done right now is building up our own organizational capacity, finding people who can work together, and targeting key areas of weakness in our adversaries. Many groups are starting to do this.

I’ve worked with Muslims professionally over the years in various IT projects. Many train expertly as engineers, systems analysts and systems modelers. I wish I could see — because it exists somewhere — the system dynamics model that has been built, perhaps even by people I once knew, to model the Islamization of the West. It’s implicit, but given the skills and that Islamic cultural interest in the design of complex, internally referential systems, I suspect several models are out there competing for strategic dominance as the most useful tool. Our adversaries are wargaming our terms of surrender; it is up to us to build the wargames to define our terms of victory.

This is where our political leaders have failed so miserably, in failing to understand dawa, jihad, supranational terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, the whole set of tactics as a single system. It doesn’t need a single political entity governing it, to function systematically. You can build these things fairly loosely and they still keep functioning.

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Building such analytical models of global Islamization ourselves- not in STELLA or powersim necessarily, but in something more generally accessible, like Excel — is not a bad activity, as a kind of Red Team wargaming activity. Making it public is good, to show the connections between Islamist attack vectors. There are other ways to provide this holistic view of the problem — novels, plays. A culture of resistance requires a breadth of approaches.

But we must fight on the entire game board — against all these attempts to Islamize the west — not just one tiny corner of the board called terrorism, as our political leaders are now doing. To fight against al Qaeda and to legitimize CAIR is like playing chess and saying you like the other guy’s bishops and rooks, and wouldn’t want to offend him by capturing them, so you’re going to play “fair” and only capture his knights.

So we do need to model what our adversaries are doing, and that is Red team wargaming. And then we can build — less publicly perhaps — a model for Blue Team response. We’re doing that now ad hoc, by resisting Islamization with many groups. But we know enough now to plan.

And we need to communicate our findings, both to the general public and to political leaders (possibly through public pressure, since they are willfully blind). We need government leaders who understand wargaming, to stop legitimizing “self-appointed” leaders of Muslims who never chose those leaders.

Truman, Eisenhower and Reagan never met with the American Communist Party to show their “outreach” to the American Workers. It makes even less sense for government officials to meet with supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, such as CAIR and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and pretend that doing so means they are engaging in “outreach” to American Muslims. It is a betrayal of trust and a creation of moral hazard that exceeds Neville Chamberlain’s, for he gave away another country, and they are giving away their own.

George W. Bush: Armenian Holocaust Denier

For the last ninety-two years, the Turkish authorities have been denying that the events that occurred in Anatolia in 1915 constitute a genocide against the Armenians.

First the Ottomans denied it, and then the Turkish republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his successors took the same line: there was no genocide. There may have been some excesses, and several thousand people got killed, but that was because a few Armenian provocateurs instigated a rebellion during a time of war. The Turks did what they had to do.

We’ve written about the Armenian Genocide several times. The political battle over the official recognition of it has been waged almost since the last of the Armenian corpses were buried in their mass graves. There are extensive eyewitness accounts, many of them by non-Turks and non-Armenians, mostly American aid workers who were present in Anatolia before the United States joined the war against the Central Powers.

Turkey’s German allies sent their observations of the events back to headquarters in Berlin: how’s that for a reliable source? Here’s a quote from the files of the German Foreign Office: “The final result must be the extermination of the Armenian race.”

In the ensuing decades much of the eyewitness material was recorded on audio and film. The last living eyewitness account I read was an interview in 2005 with a very old Armenian woman living in Israel. She had been a small child in 1915, and both her parents had been killed before her eyes.

But to the Turks all of these peoples are liars and exaggerators, and the attempts to designate the unfortunate affair as a genocide is the work of Turkey’s longtime enemies.

The political issues over the Armenian Genocide intensified after 1945, when Turkey became a member of NATO, home to an importqant US Air Force base, and a stalwart ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The genocide was relegated to the sidelines, an annoying trifle to be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of pragmatic statecraft.

The USSR is no more, and the Cold War exigencies are gone, but the impulse to suppress discussion of the Armenian Genocide has never died. And now the administration of George W. Bush joins the ranks of the holocaust deniers. According to the AP:

Turkey, Bush work to block House resolution on Armenian genocide

Turkish and American officials have been pressing lawmakers to reject in a vote next week a measure that would declare the World War I-era killings of Armenians a genocide.

On Friday, the issue reached the highest levels as U.S. President George W. Bush and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan talked by telephone about their opposition to the legislation, which is to go before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Armenian supporters of the measure, who seem to have enough votes to get approval by both the committee and the full House, have also been mustering a grass-roots campaign among the large diaspora community in the United States to make sure that a successful committee vote leads to consideration by the full House.

One interest group, the Armenian National Committee of America, has engaged about 100,000 supporters to call lawmakers about the issue, according to Executive Director Aram Hamparian.

Similar measures have been debated in Congress for decades. But well-organized Armenian groups have repeatedly been thwarted by concerns about damaging relations with Turkey, an important NATO ally that has made its opposition clear.

Lawmakers say that this time, the belief that the resolution has a chance to pass a vote by the full House has both Turkey and Armenian groups pulling all stops to influence the members of the committee.

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“The lobbying has been most intense that I have ever seen it,” said the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

The dispute involves the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Armenian advocates, backed by many historians, contend the Armenians died in an organized genocide. The Turks say the Armenians were victims of widespread chaos and governmental breakdown as the 600-year-old empire collapsed in the years before Turkey was born in 1923.

Though the largely symbolic measure would have no binding effect on U.S. foreign policy, it could nonetheless damage an already strained relationship with Turkey.

And why is our relationship with Turkey strained? What have we done to offend them?

Is it strained because of that nasty little business in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, when the Turks denied the United States permission to enter northern Iraq via Turkey?

That little bit of diplomatic hanky-panky caused a logistical nightmare for the US military, lengthened the war, generated numerous additional American casualties, and allowed thousands of Baathists, criminals, and terrorists — who otherwise would have been interdicted by a northern front — to escape.

That’s Turkey, “an important ally in the war against terror, and a friend of freedom”.

In Turkey’s defense, it has to be said that the diplomatic disaster in 2003 was a piece of European mischief. The French and the Germans dangled the prospect of EU membership in front of Turkey in return for the Turks’ betraying the Americans. This was pure Gallic cynicism on the part of Chirac, who never had any real intention of letting Turkey into the EU. But all is fair in love, war, and sticking it to the USA.

However, it’s the Turks’ fault that they fell for the ploy. They made their bed, and now they should have to lie in it, but we won’t let them. For some reason they remain a “staunch ally”.

The French, indifferent to such niceties, have no such compunctions:

After France voted last year to make denial of Armenian genocide a crime, the Turkish government ended military ties.

Many in the U.S. fear that a public backlash in Turkey could lead to restrictions on crucial supply routes through Turkey to Iraq and Afghanistan and the closure of Incirlik, a strategic air base in Turkey used by the United States. Lawmakers have been hearing arguments from both sides about those concerns.

I’m no military expert, but don’t we have strategic air bases now in Iraq and Afghanistan? What would happen if we call the Turks’ bluff and told them to stuff it? Who has more to lose by the closure of Incirlik, us or them?

The Turks are playing the same card the Arabs do, and pulling the old protection-racket technique: Do as we say, or you’ll get more terrorism.

According to one congressional aide, Turkey’s military chief, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, has been calling lawmakers to argue that a vote will boost support for Islamists in Turkey. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Foggy Bottom has long been known for squishiness on the issue of the Armenian Genocide. But now the White House has finally come out in the open with the same line:

The Bush Administration has been telling lawmakers that the resolution, if passed, would harm U.S. security interests.

I’m willing to accept this idea provisionally. But somebody tell me: besides Incirlik, what “interests” are realistically likely to be threatened by official recognition? Which of Turkey’s threats are of real significance, and how likely are they to carry them out if their bluff is called?

Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman said Friday that Bush believes the Armenian episode ranks among the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, but the determination whether the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.

I’ve got news for the smart set in the White House: the Armenian disaster of 1915 has been a matter of historical inquiry. Historians have studied it extensively for decades, and — outside of Turkey — have overwhelmingly concluded that a genocide was deliberately committed. But that’s not good enough, is it?

And to put the icing on the cake, Mr. Bush is ready to cut deals with Satan herself:

White House staff have also spoken with aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with hope that she will stop the measure from coming to a vote.

“The Administration has reached out to the speaker’s office and made our position clear,”he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Now that’s a marriage made in heaven… or somewhere.


Hat tip: Exile.

A Line Drawn in the Sand

Note: I left this comment in the thread of a post yesterday by the Baron about the video of an angry Army veteran. He cut the American flag down from its place under the Mexican flag and walked off with it, obviously angry. The Hispanic-looking restaurant owner or manager who had run the flags up the standard with the Mexican flag on top watched without comment. When addressed by the interviewer, he retreated into the restaurant.

The Baron requested that I put up my comment as a post, so here it is. I will not pretend to some idealized objectivity in my attitude toward this man’s actions. Illegal Mexicans have stomped one of my sons and attempted to rape my daughter. That does not mean I blame all Mexicans, just the ones with a bad case of supremacy. You can read my positive account here of an encounter with a Mexican mason, an incident that happened after my daughter’s assault.

The American in the southwestern US pictured in this video is reacting to years of illegal aliens’ dismissal of America. The old rules - which have served us well since the first floods of immigrants - were that you fought your way up the ladder and made your fellow-citizens accept your right to be here. Which, of course, they did. Ask the Italians, the Irish, the Jews the Greeks, the Poles, the Armenians, etc.

The [new, illegal] Hispanics, in addition to trashing much of the southwest, bankrupting small towns’ welfare services, and refusing to acculturate, are finally meeting resistance.

The restaurant owner was rude and he knew it. That’s why he wouldn’t reply to the interviewer. His deliberate thumb-in-your-eye hoisting of the Mexican flag above the flag of the country he was residing in was a deliberate provocation. The Army vet answered the provocation and raised the ante.

The vet’s “vandalism” disappears in the avalanche of assaults, robberies, rapes, murders, and drug running brought into this country by people who refuse to speak our language or follow our customs. People who treat us with contempt.

Our elitists have made patriotism appear the refuge of jingoists. It is sooo politically incorrect to set limits to those who would abuse our laws, customs and folkways and instead would substitute their own, using organizations like La Raza to push separatism.

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Some of our elitists (many of them teachers in our schools) encourage the behavior this restaurant owner exhibited.

Vandalism? Yes. But a necessary corrective in the current atmosphere of contempt of the vandals amongst us.

Right now, the largest town near us is coming under siege by gangs who “slash and trash” strangers because they look American. Wait till it’s your kid - in my case, a grown man - who is set upon and kicked repeatedly by seven thugs. Wait till his ribs are broken by the boots of haters and he or she spends weeks finding it painful just to breathe.

There are teams of these jerks all over town, attacking couples, groups, and individuals in what is supposed to be a safe place. It’s not anymore. My son-in-law has a relative whose spleen was cut as he returned to his car after a movie. For no other reason than that he was there. No robbery, just brutality for its own sake.

I am glad the veteran did what he did. It’s a limit set, a line drawn in the sand. And were any such person charged, I’d be glad to donate to his legal fund.

Setting Your Own Neighborhood on Fire

Fjordman sent a link today to a story from the town of Saint-Dezier in the northeast of France:

The dateline is current - October 5th - but the tale has assumed a stylized character, as though we were spectators at an opera. One could repeat the general outline of the drama without even reading the account. I would say “youths in Saint-Dezier, France” and you would fill in the blanks, saying “rioted, injuring police and firefighters.” And a third person would add,” officials say they do not know why the riots occurred.”

Wash, rinse, repeat.

So here we go:

Dozens of hooded youths battered two police vehicles with metal bars, set fire to more than a dozen parked cars and torched a community center in northeast France, officials said Friday.

The rampage in a tough neighborhood in Saint-Dizier, about 120 miles east of Paris, revived memories of a wave of car burnings, vandalism and clashes with police in 2005 fanned by feelings of alienation among French youths of Arab and African origin.

Authorities were not sure what sparked the violence by 30-40 youths late Thursday. The trouble began when firefighters escorted by police entered the Vert-Bois neighborhood in response to a fire alarm.

Two injuries were reported. A police officer was treated for cuts from broken glass, and a firefighter was struck in the arm with a metal bar.

Stratfor claims that this new outbreak of violent “youths” does not portend another crisis like the one in 2005, especially since there does not seem to be a precipitating factor to act as a catalyst for further violence [this link was available when I clicked on it earlier from Google News. However, in checking it I find that all but an abstract has disappeared behind a subscription wall]:

For now, the event does not appear to herald a replay of the race riots that rocked France in 2005, when the alleged accidental electrocution of three Muslim youths fleeing local police sparked violence on a national scale. This time around, there seems to be no precipitating event, suggesting that the violence will not again expand nationally in short order.

But the spontaneous nature of the violence suggests that French suburbs -- where the 10 percent of France’s population that is Muslim is concentrated -- are beginning to develop characteristics similar to those found in Watts, Calif., in the United States in 1965. In Watts, the local minority -- blacks -- felt so dispossessed that violence was seen as one of the few means of impacting political discourse.

Everyone knows the sociology of the problem of unassimilated third generation non-French ethnic groups, but no one seems to have an answer or solution. Stratfor is correct to compare it to Watts in 1965. And I well remember then the French public’s attitude toward racist America when Watts finally melted down. Now they are faced with not only racial issues, but politico-religious ones as well. These radicalized rioters self-identify as Muslims, even as they break the tenets of this religion on a daily basis.

This is not about religion….
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The issue is political in nature and Islam is just a handy funnel down which to pour the gasoline of dissatisfaction, alienation, and despair that roils a surplus population which feels nowhere at home. Until indigenous community leaders emerge to take charge of the situation, nothing will change.

Here’s a summary of Watts:

Longstanding resentment by Los Angeles’ working-class black community over treatment by police and what was seen as inadequate public services (especially schools and hospitals) exploded on August 11, 1965, into what were commonly known as the Watts Riots. The event that precipitated the disturbances, the arrest of a black youth by the California Highway Patrol on drunk-driving charges, actually occurred outside Watts, but the district was by far the area most damaged in the turmoil.

Watts suffered further in the 1970s, with gangs gaining in strength. Between 1989 and 2005, police reported more than 500 homicides in Watts, most of them gang-related. Three of Watts’ most notorious gangs-Grape Street Watts Crips, Bounty Hunter Watts Bloods, and PJ Watts Crips-formed a cease-fire agreement after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a pact that may have been tied to a decrease in crime in the area between 1992 and 2000.

Beginning in the 1970s, many African Americans left Watts for other parts of South Los Angeles, and later the Antelope Valley, the Inland Empire, The San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, and the San Joaquin Valley. This process, known as black flight, is a phenomenon occurring in many inner-city neighborhoods in Los Angeles today. The exiting black population is being largely replaced by immigrants of Ethiopian, Indian, Mexican and Central American ancestry. This process accelerated after the 1992 riots.

Neighborhood leaders have begun a strategy to overcome Watts’ reputation as a violence-prone and impoverished area. Special promotion has been given to the museums and art galleries opened in the area surrounding Watts Towers around on 1765 East 107th St which is towards Imperial Highway towards surrounding suburb of Lynwood. This sculptural and architectural landmark has attracted many artists and professionals to the area.[my emphasis]

The French government can help its Algerian and North African ethnic groups by pulling in French business leaders, by offering corporate tax breaks and other incentives to those willing to risk working with community-identified leaders in these ghetto areas, and by creating mixed-use spaces which allow people to live near the areas they work and go to school. In Watts, as people became successful with the intervention of Enterprise Zones, then they left the area to disperse into the wider California counties nearby. Into their place moved the newer immigrants, this time non-native ethnic groups from other countries.

Can the French culture initiate and sustain such change? Or will it continue to restrict its non-native populations to ethnic reservations?

One guaranteed failure: continued hand-wringing and claims of ignorance about the sources of a growing and incendiary problem.

My Way or the Highway

File under “1,000 words”.


[no more in this post]

Unacceptable Levels of Diversity

“We can’t call this diversity and no nation on earth could accept the erosion of its culture on its own land.”

Who said that? Some racist Islamophobe in, say, Sweden? Or maybe Britain, or Belgium, or Texas?

No, it was Bahrain’s Minister of Labor, Mr. Majeed al-Alawi. Mr. al-Alawi is alarmed by the numbers of non-Arabs who have come to Bahrain to take advantage of all the petrodollars and work for Bahrainis.

According to today’s Asia News:

Manama wants to expel foreign workers after six years

Manama (AsiaNews) - Gulf States might end up expelling foreigner workers after six years if a proposal being put forwards by Bahrain is accepted. The Bahrain Labour Minister Majeed al-Alawi has denied however that he intends to present it to the next Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) meeting scheduled for Doha (Qatar) in December. If implemented it would affect an estimated 13 million expatriate workers living in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

“The majority of foreign manpower in the region comes from different cultural and social backgrounds that cannot assimilate or adapt to the local cultures,” al-Alawi told the Gulf Daily News in an interview. “In some areas of the Gulf, you can’t tell whether you are in an Arab Muslim country or in an Asian district. We can’t call this diversity and no nation on earth could accept the erosion of its culture on its own land,” he said.

Wow. Is it time to cite Bahrain for human rights violations? Should we educate them to help them overcome their kuffarphobia?

Actually, it’s not clear that these foreigners are mostly kuffar. The article refers to them as “Asians”, and most of them are probably poor Muslims from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines:
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The Bahraini minister is worried by the fact that under international labour treaties and global conventions expatriate workers and their families will be entitled to housing, education and health services and could also claim nationality after five years’ residency.

Expatriates account for around 80 per cent of the population of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, while in Kuwait they are roughly 60 per cent. In Bahrain they are about 40 per cent.

Eighty percent! And the French feel like they have an immigrant problem, with a mere ten percent.

Foreigners in the Arabian peninsula, even if they are Muslims, are considered second-class citizens, and not entitled to the same rights and privileges that Arabs expect. It will be interesting to see how this influx of foreigners turns out over the long haul.


Hat tip: insubria.

“If They Wanna Fight Us, Then They Need to be Men”

A Mexican business in Reno, Nevada recently flew a Mexican flag with the American flag flying below it. Not only is this disrespectful of the country that these Mexicans live in, it is actually against the law here in the USA to fly a foreign flag above our national flag.

A US Army veteran named Jim Brossard who lives in Reno saw what was happening and decided to take action, without waiting for the authorities, using his own Army-issue knife.

Fortunately for the rest of us, a TV reporter was present with his video camera. Take a moment to watch this very inspiring video.


There’s more information at Breitbart, and also at the Radio Patriot.

God bless him, and let’s hope there are more like him, and that they are registered to vote in next year’s election.


Hat tip: A New Knighthood.

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Islam, the West, and Science

Fjordman has posted the conclusion of his excellent three-part essay “Islam, the West, and Science” over at Dhimmi Watch. Here are a few choice excerpts:

At least two conditions are necessary for the creation of a successful nation: The ability to produce talented individuals with great ideas, and the cultural and structural ability of society to recognize the full potential of these ideas and utilize them. The Islamic world, for a while, performed reasonably well at the former task, but failed miserably and consistently at the latter. Even if it could occasionally give birth to gifted individuals they tended to be unorthodox Muslims or, in the case of Rhazes, outright hostile to Islam. The frequency of thinkers of Avicenna’s and certainly Alhazen’s stature also steadily declined. This strongly indicates that “Islamic science” had little to do with Islam, but was the amalgam of pre-Islamic knowledge, Greek, Indian, Persian, Jewish, Assyrian Christian and other. As Muslims gradually became numerically dominant and Islamic orthodoxy more firmly established, this pre-Islamic heritage was slowly extinguished, hence science declined and never recovered. This failure was intimately linked to the Islam’s hostility towards innovation and freethinking. In contrast, the Christian and Jewish religions proved more receptive towards new ideas. At the very least they were not as aggressively hostile to logic as was Islam, and in certain situations even facilitated it.

Upon saying this, I must confess that I cannot say with a straight face that these are hallmarks of Europe today. We have always been told that there is a basic conflict between religion and reason, which would presumably mean that the less religious we become, the more rational we should become. Western Europe is currently less religious than we have ever been, yet I see no indication that we have become more reasonable because of this. We may not have a formal index of forbidden books, as did the Catholic Church for centuries, but we do have an informal index of forbidden topics which can be equally effective in suppressing free enquiry and stifling debate. This is now done in the name of tolerance and Multicultural diversity, not God, but the result is much the same. The end of religion, thus, didn’t herald an age of reason; it led to a new age of secular superstition and new forms of witch-hunts. Bad things can be said about medieval Europeans, but at least they didn’t import Muslims in large numbers and congratulate themselves for their tolerance. Secular Europeans do.

And one more:
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We are currently witnessing major global shifts in power. In a macrohistorical perspective, China was the leading civilization a millennium ago but was surpassed by Europe. I firmly believe free speech and political liberty have long-term effects, and I’m not convinced China can keep up her economic progress unless she undertakes reforms. I’m also not convinced Europe’s Islamization is inevitable, yet, but if present trends continue, maybe we will see a reversal of roles in the twenty-first century: China will prosper and Europe will disintegrate. In the meantime, however, when Muslims get their hands on Western technology and Europe’s accumulated wealth, the world from Britain to Thailand could be plunged into a new age of Jihad.

Go over to Dhimmi Watch and read the rest.

Grubbing Through the Referrals on Site Meter

Occasionally, when my mind is on auto pilot and refuses to let me steer, I pass the time rummaging through our site meter, looking at the World Map feature and clucking over all those Europeans who are staying up so late. Or perhaps I start looking at the Referrals to see the variety of Google searches that land people on our blog.

With some of these search strings below, it’s obvious how people arrived at our site. Others are mysterious… what have I ever written about “Filipina domination”? And why would anyone want to know how old Anne Frank was when Hitler started slaughtering Jews? We seem to be driven to discover the oddest things.

For those of you who remember the “Bill Gates is a Muslim” April Fool's joke post (the Baron can be wickedly evil sometimes): I'll let you know there was only one of them today. Way back when, variations on that search used to make up about twenty-five per cent of the Google-driven clicks on Gates of Vienna, most of them from Middle Eastern ISPs. I don't think April 1st is a major joke day in Islam. Besides, the need to believe something often trumps reason.

These days, however, the searches are more varied…and perhaps even stranger. Who is it, do you think, that fears Germany is planning to take over Europe using the EU as a cover? Well, maybe it isn’t a fear, maybe it’s a hope? I did read somewhere today that twenty percent of Germans want the Berlin Wall put back up.

And I found out there are far more saints’ feast days on May 15th than just Dymphna and old Gerebemus.

For those of you with blogs and site meters, I suggest a journey through the bowels and steam tunnels of your referrals. As we say in Virginia, it’s a right strange trip.

Here are the search strings I found on ours in about fifteen minutes:
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• WILL GERMANY CONTROL ALL OF EUROPE THRU THE EU
  
• where angels fear to tread
  
• map of tampa jet fuel pipeline
  
• muslim toilet habits
  
• big pig gig Vienna Ga.
  
• saint for May 15th
  
• slogan for policeman
  
• american civil war xenophobia
  
• how old was Anne Frank when Adolf Hitler started slaughtering jews?
  
• glamour girls and old men
  
• filipina domination

The only one in this list that bothers me is the search for a map of the Tampa jet fuel pipeline. Sure wish I knew what that dude had in mind.

“You’re Innocent if You’re a Muslim”

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “Islam is Peace” public relations campaign which is being waged vigorously across various media in the UK. It is a well-funded and slickly-produced initiative designed to induce acceptance of British Muslims and counteract the “negative stereotypes” about Islam that have become so unfortunately prevalent since the 9-11 and 7-7 attacks.

The appealing images of photogenic men, women, and children resemble the ads we often see here in the USA, and they serve the same politically correct and Multicultural purposes. Take, for example, a typical poster or billboard for a major bank: in it you are likely to see a cheerful, prosperous, and immaculately groomed Hispanic family, in a brightly-lit modern kitchen or out on the perfect lawn in front of their fully-mortgaged house.

The message is: these young professional Latinos are well-heeled exemplars of suburban Americans, just like the rest of us, a boon to our multi-ethnic high-tech society. This is yet another manifestation of the Big Lie, since the undeniable truth of Hispanic immigration is that the vast majority of the recent arrivals are poor, illiterate, and live in substandard housing in cultural ghettoes. Statistically speaking, they are not the mortgage-holders out there frolicking on that perfect lawn: they are the ones who come and tend that same lawn in the hot sun for six dollars an hour while the perfect children are at school and their immaculate parents are at work.

Slick non-profit ad campaigns like "Islam is Peace" are similarly designed to obscure truths and foster illusions that powerful groups have a vested interest in creating. Most Muslims in Britain are not well-dressed perfectly-groomed (and in the case of the women, perfectly-veiled) yuppies who are just like the rest of us except that they pray five times a day towards Mecca. No, the truth is somewhat different.

And the message that “Islam is Peace” propagates has elaborate and artfully phrased deceptions, carefully designed to serve the Great Jihad’s purposes. In the video embedded below, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch gives us a short tutorial on some of the deliberately embedded taqiyyah that can be found in the ad campaign:


Anjem Chaudry, a radical British Muslim, is prominently featured in this video stating that Muslims alone can be considered innocent, so that as far as the infidels are concerned, the ad campaign’s condemnation of “violence against innocents” means precisely… nothing.

If you visit the Islam is Peace website, you’ll find this brief introductory paragraph:
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The Islam is Peace Campaign aims to address the negative perceptions and stereotypes of Islam and British Muslims. We intend to do this through media engagement to reach out to the wider community across the United Kingdom. We hope to start this process through a multi-pronged approach…

Notice that it is the perceptions and stereotypes of Islam that need to be corrected. Nothing about Islam itself needs to be changed or corrected, because Islam is perfect. Complete and perfect knowledge, all a human being might ever need to know, is contained within the Koran. Discussing any change or improvement is an absolute blasphemy.

That’s why only the kuffar must be changed. Their attitudes, their antagonism, their Islamophobia — those are the real problems, which the “Islam is Peace” campaign aims to overcome.

That the perceptions might be based in reality, that the stereotypes might have some validity, are not to be discussed. In this endeavor the PC regime is Islam’s greatest ally, because according to the high dogma of Orthodox Multiculturalism, these things may not even be spoken. They shouldn’t even be thought — they are doubleplus ungood.

That’s why it’s important to accept and celebrate our Islamophobia. We’re Islamophobic and proud of it!

The term “Islamophobia” is designed to stigmatize the person who dares think impure thoughts. It’s intended to put us beyond the pale, to cast us into the outer darkness. Only by embracing the epithet can we remove its sting as an insult. It’s OK to be afraid of Islam: any rational and well-informed infidel would be afraid of it.

In any case, the average Briton who lives in a working class neighborhood in any major city knows that Islam is not peace. He knows that Islam means honor killings, the rape of young infidel girls, gangs of violent “youths” who hold all non-Muslims in sneering contempt, and the gathering in mosques of large groups of men to plan violent jihad against him and his fellow Britons.

But maybe the “Islam is Peace” campaign, with its relentless multimedia offensive, will convince him otherwise. Perhaps the barrage of propaganda will have its desired effect.

When that happens, it will be time to update George Orwell for the 21st century. The new novel could be called 2084.

In it a giant poster of a grim-faced bearded man in a turban hangs on every corner. Underneath it is the ubiquitous statement: Big Imam is Watching You!

Ubiquitous slogans are printed on huge banners and displayed on all the grimy public buildings:

Freedom is Slavery. Islam is Peace.


Hat tip: Steen.

The Descent into Dhimmitude

I can understand why it’s important tolerate Muslims. As long as they are peaceful and don’t inject their religion into our politics, Muslims who live legally amongst us should be left alone. Until the rule of law in the West breaks down entirely, there’s no other way.

But, given that hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims have been brutalized and slaughtered in the name of Islam in recent years, I don’t see why it’s incumbent upon us to celebrate the Religion of Peace.

But that’s exactly what our leaders want us to do:

Bush White House Event Celebrates Islam

President Bush is hosting a controversial event at the White House Thursday evening, with an invitation to Muslim officials and clerics to join him for prayer and dinner in observance of the holy month of Ramadan.

Many Christians question the president’s decision to make the Islamic celebration of “iftar” into a standard religious observance for the White House.

Iftar officially breaks Muslims’ daytime fast.

Islam, referred to by some politicians as a religion of peace, is viewed by many conservative Americans as a faith rooted in violence and hostility toward non-Muslims, collectively referred to as “infidels.”

One of the invited guests to Bush’s annual event is Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota.

- - - - - - - - -

Ellison, the only Muslim elected to office, asked to be sworn into his position in Congress with the Koran instead of the Bible.

The Democrat expressed that he is looking forward to Thursday’s iftar event at the White House, and noted that he has also engaged in Ramadan observances at the Pentagon and the Capitol.

And it’s not only the president who’s busy salaaming to the imams; Congress can’t wait to join the groveling bandwagon:

This week, the House voted unanimously, 376-0, to recognize Islam’s holy month of Ramadan. The resolution commended Muslims and hailed the Islamic faith as “one of the great religions of the world.”

No one dared to vote against the resolution, but forty-two congressman mustered the nads to vote “present” on it, including, I’m happy to say, our own congressman, the Hon. Virgil Goode of Virginia’s Fifth District:

Forty-one Republicans, more than 20 percent of the caucus, and one Democrat voted “present” on a resolution recognizing the commencement of Ramadan on Tuesday.

The 42 lawmakers make up more than 10 percent of the members voting on the resolution. There were zero “no” votes, and 14 members did not vote.

The resolution recognized “the Islamic faith as one of the great religions of the world,” rejected “hatred, bigotry and violence directed against Muslims, both in the United States and worldwide” and “[commended] Muslims in the United States and across the globe who have privately and publicly rejected interpretations and movements of Islam that justify and encourage hatred, violence and terror.”

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) dismissed the resolution as political correctness gone too far.

“This resolution is an example of the degree to which political correctness has captured the political and media elite in this country,” Tancredo said. “I am not opposed to commending any religion for their faith. The problem is that any attempt to do so for Jews or Christians is immediately condemned as ‘breaching’ the non-existent line between church and state by the same elite.”

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said, “I voted ‘present’ because I read somewhere that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.”

A miserable forty-two congressmen stand between the American public and total dhimmitude, and they are too scared, either of the throat-cutters or The New York Times, to actually vote “no” on this monstrosity.

A principled stand against such resolutions is in order. After a decade or more has passed since the last time a mujahid cut an infidel throat or killed his daughter for the sake of honor — then we can talk. But not until then.

I repeat: A principled stand is in order.

But don’t hold your breath.


Hat tip: Kepiblanc.

The Clowns at Homeland Security

How much faith do you have in the political appointees and federal civil service apparatchiks charged with protecting you from terrorist attack?

It’s no secret that I’ve looked askance on the Department of Homeland Security ever since it was just a gleam in George W. Bush’s eye. It has always seemed to be yet another bureaucratic black hole into which freight cars full of taxpayers’ money can disappear without a trace, not to mention a convenient and lucrative backwater into which favored political cronies can be shunted.

As of today we know one thing: the Department of Homeland security can’t even keep an email newsletter’s subscriber list secure.

The blog Suitably Flip tells the story:

DHS Pulls Bookcase Of Spam Over On Self

I subscribe to a Department of Homeland Security mailing list called the DHS Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, which is basically a collection of excerpts and hyperlinks to news stories about security issues in communications, transportation, finance, and other critical sectors. The highlighted stories are frequently about cyber-security — e-mail scams, viruses, stolen laptops, etc.

Today, though, the listkeeper (the National Infrastructure Coordinating Center) is flailing in an e-mail mire of its own design.

A little after 8:00 this morning, one of the list subscribers sent a change-of-address notice back to NICC, which — upon arriving in the inboxes of every subscriber — suddenly made it clear that the distribution list was unrestricted. Anyone replying to it was (and still is, apparently) able to hit the inboxes of thousands of security professionals, including law enforcement, U.S. military, federal employees, private security consultants, etc.

The accidental exposer chased his original message with a “recall” note, but the horse had long left the barn. In the hours since, about 100 list members have chimed in, frequently in an ironically futile attempt to ask other members to stop replying, so their inboxes will stop flooding. More than 20 list members were so fed up with all the replies that they’ve sent “unsubscribe” notices (some of them more than mildly perturbed in tone), but in so doing, they’ve frequently broadcast their e-mail addresses, names, and employers to the rest of the list, which may wind up backfiring spectacularly.

So now the email addresses of everyone who subscribed to the list are available to anyone on the list. If you were a clever and resourceful terrorist who subscribed to the list to keep an eye on what DHS is doing, then you got a surprise Ramadan present yesterday: an extensive list of people with a professional interest in US homeland security.

And if you’re a spammer, you’ve got a huge list of live email addresses to add to your database of recipients.
- - - - - - - - -
Maintaining an email list isn’t rocket science, but it’s easy to make mistakes. Most of us have had the experience of being on the receiving end of one of these “bounce floods” when some list administrator checks the wrong box in his list configurations and then someone on the list hits “reply all”.

And most of us could have fixed it promptly, as soon as it was brought to our attention. But not DHS — it took those government security experts nine hours to plug this particular security hole, and by then innumerable messages bearing the email addresses of everyone on the list had passed back and forth.

The DHS response was — wait for it — to blame the list subscribers themselves for hitting “reply”:

At 1:30, the NICC tried to kibosh the insanity with this message:

All -

Please do not use the “reply to all” when responding to the emails from this email address.

The listserve email address used has thousands of recipients and causes server problems when used this way.

v/r

NICC

That, um… didn’t work. List member “Tech Guy” was stupefied by the attempt.

Are you serious? Is this actually the official response and remedy for this issue?

I have refrained from commenting up till now as to not perpetuate this issue, but this sort of response is unacceptable and just goes to prove why so many lack faith in our government and government agencies.

How about utilize some common measures to ensure that others are not allowed to send to the list. Its actually pretty simple and common place to do.

Thousands of small businesses and private individuals across the country could have dealt with the problem in a tenth of the time it took DHS to get it right. Christine, who keeps the lists at CVF and has years of experience dealing with email groups, would have fixed the error within five minutes of getting the first email from a user.

But not DHS.

The members of the list reacted with commendable distributed intelligence, the hallmark of cyberspace:

List members have now set up at least two off-site forums (this one and that one), both to keep the networking channel open and in an attempt (thus far an unsuccessful one) to divert the message flood away from the listserve.

Flip has this final update:

Update: WSJ’s Washington Wire:

Everyday, the Department of Homeland Security emails an “Open Source Intelligence Report” about the nation’s critical infrastructure to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of security and emergency officials working for corporations, governors’ offices, big city police forces and a myriad of federal agencies. It is a group of serious, security-minded people, or so one would have thought.

[…]

A senior DHS official described the incident was a “non-event” for the department’s own security. No systems crashed; no backdoors were revealed. The reaction of the security professionals on the list, he said, was “much more worrying.”

It’s been about 90 minutes since the last message came through, so the problem appears to have been fixed (incredibly, a full 9 hours after the flood began). Now that it’s been pinched off, I’ll reveal that when I tried replying to one of the messages this afternoon, it bounced off an e-mail relay at the firm that handles this listserve for DHS, which then sent me a full list of the e-mail addresses my message did not reach.

Roughly 7,000 in all — presumably every e-mail address on the DHS Daily Report distribution list.

The level of incompetence in all this is mind-boggling.

Now, to be fair, maybe DHS gets the big stuff right and doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Maybe they can handle threats to the homeland, even if they can’t handle an email list.

They’re out there with their geiger counters and their automatic weapons, dressed in kevlar vests and helmets, standing guard against our nation’s enemies. We see them at the airport wanding nuns and making kids take off their shoes. Their reassuring presence lets us know that our homeland is secure.

Fortunately for the American people, all the bad things that have happened since 9-11 have no connection with terrorism. Whether it’s the guy who ran over people in North Carolina, or the fellow who shot up the El Al counter at LAX, or the would-be Sears Tower bombers, or any of the other incidents where American were killed or injured by wackos who just happen to be Muslims, it’s nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. We know this because the Department of Homeland Security has told us so.

And if anything goes wrong, it’s the user’s fault. He shouldn’t have hit “reply all” to that email message. He should have put an extra deadbolt on his door. He should have kept off the Golden Gate Bridge when the threat level was orange, and used an alternate route…

Which would you rather count on for protection, the Department of Homeland Security, or Smith and Wesson?


Hat tip: Larwyn.

Saudi Arabia Lectures the EU on Human Rights

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


Hello from Fjordman, with thanks to the Danish blog Snaphanen. The “Human Rights Commission” of Saudi Arabia, a country where slavery was formally abolished as late as the 1960s and is still practiced more or less openly (it is allowed according to sharia law), now lectures Europeans on Islamophobia.

Notice that this is not an isolated incident; it is part of a sustained, ongoing effort with the explicit goal of surrendering half a billion Europeans to Islam. The Euro-Arab Dialogue, which this is a part of, was established in the 1970s and is rapidly progressing towards the goal of merging Europe with the Arab world. The European Union is thus formally negotiating the surrender of an entire continent, without asking their peoples about it and without even mentioning this in the major media. It is one of the greatest betrayals ever recorded in the history of Western civilization.

The EU is quite simply an evil and criminal organization which must be dismantled as soon as humanly possible. I don’t care whether some readers think this is “too harsh.” Europe’s future is being decided now.

By the way: I’ve just demonstrated that these so-called “Arab contributions to science” were largely bogus:
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HRC to Address Muslim Rights Issues in Europe

Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) will urge its counterparts in the European Union to ask their governments not to link terrorism to Islam and also to issue regulations to protect Muslims from prejudice and discrimination because of their faith. According to a source at HRC, the government-funded rights body will also address various human rights issues in Europe: when Muslims are unjustly interrogated, treated with disrespect, physically or mentally abused, or not allowed to practice their faith freely such as Muslim girls being prevented from wearing the hijab (head cover) in some schools. The points are expected to be addressed during HRC’s official participation in the Second Arab-European Dialogue on Human Rights and Terrorism, which will take place in Copenhagen on Oct.21-23. “The dialogue is significant because it is being held in Denmark, where the controversy started over the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) cartoons,” the source told Arab News.

Among topics up for discussion are “Islamaphobia” and the fear Europeans have of Muslims or Islam as a religion. People’s general attitudes toward Muslims will also be on the agenda. Another topic the rights body is expected to address is the history of Islam in Europe, specifically in Spain where Muslims contributed to the prosperity of humanity at a time when most of Europe was struggling through the Dark Ages. According to HRC, this second dialogue is expected to come up with several recommendations similar to the first dialogue held in Amman on April 18 and 19 this year. The Amman conference concluded by backing the international bill of rights and other human rights instruments, emphasizing that states are obliged to ensure that anti-terrorist measures comply with human rights standards, and stressing the importance of national human rights agencies in advising governments and monitoring anti-terrorist legislation.

The delegates urged governments, politicians and the media not to resort to discriminatory ethnic stereotypes in their battle against terrorism. In addition, the delegates recommended the establishment of an Arab-Euro working group, consisting of representatives from Arab and European human rights organizations. These working groups would be able to enter into dialogue with governments and politicians as well as professionals employed in the police force, intelligence services, the courts, civil society and the media.

Our Potemkin Villages Are Falling Over

Wretchard had a post up yesterday titled “Hope Springs Internal.”

He reminded us that the outcome of inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia University was touted as our chance to show off. Wretchard said:

Remember how inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia University was supposed to impress the Iranian president with the power of American freedom and the courage of American academia? Well according to Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Ahmadinejad has just called the US a “dictatorship” whose citizens are not allowed to know the facts and described the Columbia invitation as a “Zionist plot”.

As I read that post at Belmont Club, I had a moment of enlightenment. Here it is, more or less as I put it in a comment below Wretchard’s post:
- - - - - - - - -
“Well, the cat’s out of the bag. Now that the nut job has been over here to see for himself, he actually knows how trammeled and victimized we poor Americans are.

Maybe he will come back and rescue us.

Maybe the 12th imam will turn out to be Rage Boy, who is really the Missing Link. Yeah, that’s it: Rage Boy will save us from Bushitler and places like Columbia University, where the students are tied to their chairs and beaten with canes.

I guess he saw how the police force our women to walk around in skimpy clothing. Anyone under the age of sixty has to wear six inch skirts and three inch heels or risk stoning.

I knew we never should have let him in.

What a big mouth.”


This could be a real problem. What if we let other world leaders in and they turn out to be as perspicacious as the beloved Iranian leader?

What if they saw through the Potemkin villages we have set up with all those cardboard Mac Mansions that keep falling over in even the slightest breeze?

What if they found out that our “obesity” is really caused by bicycle pumps applied forcefully to various orifices so no one outside our gulag would know we were really starving?

What if they discovered the Joos are running everything? What if they saw the puppet strings attached to our arms? Heaven forfend!

What if they went into the supermarkets and poked the vegetables and discovered they were merely plastic displays? The little jets of water spray make them more life-like though, don’t you think?

Okay, y’all. No more smart people get invited to the party. Let’s stick to safe ones, and keep the sharp-eyed leaders like Ahmadinejad banned. I tell you, it’s the only way to save our killer image, our imperial pretensions, our glorious façade.

Let’s do it for Old Glory. No lie is too extreme to keep the illusions of our wealth and grandeur from shattering on the rocks of harsh reality.

And that foreign aid largesse we dole out like Lady Bountiful? Heck, that’s been Monopoly money for years - one of Alan Greenspan’s genius ideas, ya know. Remember, he said nobody would look real close anyway. Personally, I think pink dollar bills are a mite suspicious but who am I, a mere mortal, to question God Greenspan?

All right… time to man the bicycle pumps. Some of you are looking a tad skinny.