The Latest Fad

 
In an article in The Australian entitled Suicide bombings surge since 9/11, Tim Reid reports:

	SUICIDE bombings have become the world's most common form of terrorism since the hijackings of September 11, 2001, and by far the most effective apart from weapons of mass destruction, a study shows.
	The pace of suicide attacks has accelerated so quickly that three-quarters of all suicide bombings in the past 25 years have been carried out since the 9/11 attacks in the US.

These conclusions are based on a study by the Rand Corporation. According to the study, there have been more suicide bombings in Iraq since March of 2003 than there were inthe entire world between 1980 and 2003.

The report identifies the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka as the inventors of the suicide bomb as a terrorist tactic in the 1980s. Since then the technique has rapidly spread to many other terrorist groups across the globe.

	In May, according to Rand, an estimated 90 suicide bombings were carried out in Iraq alone, almost as many as the Israeli Government has recorded in its conflict with the Palestinians since 1993.
	"With the exception of weapons of mass destruction, there is no other type of attack that is more effective than suicide terrorism," Rand terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told The Washington Post.

Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, does not see Islamofascism as the primary cause of the increase of suicide bombing.

Instead, he argues that it is a logical military tactic against occupation "to compel the US and other countries to remove their forces from the Arabian peninsula".

But Mr. Hoffman does not agree:

	Mr Hoffman and many others strongly disagree with Professor Pape's assessment, noting that the bombers themselves are footsoldiers often motivated by religious belief.
	Mr Hoffman calculates that 31 out of the 35 groups that have used suicide bombings are Islamic.

If the potential future suicide bombers do not outnumber their future victims, over the long haul the tactic is bound to fail. Say the average suicide bomber takes out ten other people when he explodes. If only one in a population of 10,000 is a potential suicide bomber (a generous guess), then the trend will soon peter out.

Of course, the effectiveness of the bomber might be improved. Give a suicide bomber a dirty bomb, a vial of virulent pathogens, or a suitcase nuke, and the calculus of destruction changes considerably.

From Haram to Halal in Seconds!

 


You bet it's satire.

The Racist Hegemonic Patriarchal Oppressor’s Burden

 
In a comment on a recent Belmont Club post, Jakita said:

	OK, I’m going to express a verboten idea—but what the heck, I’m anonymous.
	Today should be the beginning of the Age of the New Imperialism—or maybe, to be au courant—the Neo-Imperialist Era.
	Why do we have to take all kinds of crap from people from non-Western cultures (referring to Judeo-Christian cultures, not whether they are geographically in the “West.”
	It’s time to stand up and say to those who have barbaric values, “Stop what you’re doing. Or, we’ll make you stop.”
	I guess I’m a little annoyed at the jihadist atrocity in London. People should defend civilization, and not be so tolerant of barbaric customs.

This trepidation with which Jakita voices these opinions is nearly universal within the literate classes of the English-speaking West. For decades such thoughts have been almost unthinkable; the mind simply turns away from anything that is so evidently doubleplus ungood.

And so down the memory hole has gone the great poet of British imperialism, the bard of jingoism, the minstrel of European supremacy. I refer, of course, to Rudyard Kipling. Of all his politically incorrect poems, none violates more of the Ten Commandments of Multiculturalism than this one:

	The White Man’s Burden
	Take up the White Man’s burden—       Send forth the best ye breed— Go, bind your sons to exile       To serve your captive’s need; To wait, in heavy harness,       On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught sullen peoples,       Half devil and half child.
	Take up the White Man’s burden—       In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror       And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple,       An hundred times made plain, To seek another’s profit       And work another’s gain.
	Take up the White Man’s burden—       The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine,       And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest       (The end for others sought) Watch sloth and heathen folly       Bring all your hopes to nought.
	Take up the White Man’s burden—       No iron rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper—       The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter,       The roads ye shall not tread, Go, make them with your living       And mark them with your dead.
	Take up the White Man’s burden,       And reap his old reward— The blame of those ye better       The hate of those ye guard— The cry of those ye humor       (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:— “Why brought ye us from bondage,       Our loved Egyptian night?”
	Take up the White Man’s burden—       Ye dare not stoop to less— Nor call too loud on Freedom       To cloak your weariness. By all ye will or whisper,       By all ye leave or do, The silent sullen peoples       Shall weigh your God and you.
	Take up the White Man’s burden!       Have done with childish days— The lightly-proffered laurel,       The easy ungrudged praise: Comes now, to search your manhood       Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,       The judgment of your peers.

If one moves past the conditioned response to Kipling’s politically incorrect tropes, this poem seems strangely apropos to our time. Replace “White Man” with “Anglosphere” or “America”, and it is not 1899; it is 2005, and the poem is our poem.

Examine some of the poem’s components. For example, Send forth the best ye breed: Anyone who has followed accounts of the Special Forces teams in Afghanistan or the Marines in Fallujah knows that there has never been a finer military than the one presently engaged in resisting the Great Jihad.

To veil the threat of terror/And check the show of pride: Coalition soldiers who helped pull down the statues of Saddam and now guard the thoroughfares of Iraq have done just that: the threat of Saddam’s terror is gone.

Fill full the mouth of Famine, /And bid the sickness cease; /And when your goal is nearest / (The end for others sought) /Watch sloth and heathen folly /Bring all your hopes to nought. Kipling might have been describing last year’s Christmas tsunami. Remember how American and Australian ingenuity expedited the delivery of resources and aid to the ravaged areas of the South Asian archipelago? Now, seven months later, much of the aid rots on docks and in warehouses. Such is the bureaucratic incompetence and corruption of “heathen folly”.

The ports ye shall not enter,/The roads ye shall not tread, /Go, make them with your living/And mark them with your dead. Our soldiers build schools, hospitals, power stations, and sewer lines; they encounter IEDs and their flag-draped coffins arrive at Dover AFB. Americans know well what Kipling has described.

And too well do we know this one: Take up the White Man’s burden,/And reap his old reward—/The blame of those ye better/The hate of those ye guard. The blame was going on for a long time before September 11, 2001, resounds now, and will continue indefinitely into the future. For forty years the United States stood guard over the democratic states of Western Europe, protecting them from a tyranny that would have enslaved them and sent their free-thinking literati off to rot in the camps. For that we have reaped the reward of an anti-Amercanism so virulent that it consumes the hearts of those who harbor such envious hatred for their liberators.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *
Yes, the British were brutal in maintaining subjugation in their colonies. But compared to the other powers of the period — the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Russians, the Chinese, or the Turks — the British exercised restraint and humane governance. As a counterexample, consider the Belgian Congo: to be forced to labor in the mines there was a virtual death sentence. It is estimated that more than fifty percent of the colony’s native laborers died in the service of King Leopold in what was effectively a gigantic slave-labor camp.

When the time came for reform, when conscience asserted itself and insisted on the end of the slave trade, it was progressives within Britain who spearheaded the movement. No more enlightened social force existed than that of the literate classes of Great Britain. And, to twist the knife in the wound of modern politically correct sensibility, that force was driven by fervent Christian principle. It was the Christian evangelists who created what are now the universally accepted principles of human rights.

But we are in many ways different from our 19th century forebears. In Kipling’s time virtually everyone was what we would now call a “racist”. It was assumed that non-physical differences between the races — differences of intelligence, skill, emotional predisposition, creative ability, and technical inclination — were inherent. Thus the superiority of some races over others was unquestioned; the only dispute was which race rightfully deserved to be King of the Hill.

Victoria was the Queen of the 19th century, and the British Empire was the force of cultural and technological enlightenment spreading the benefits of Anglo-Saxon superiority to heathen peoples throughout the world. The duty of the Englishman in the colonies was to uplift the savage and civilize him to the extent that his race made possible. This attitude was typical of the times and no group was exempt from it.

The British Empire, like those of the other European colonial states, was commercial in nature. The genius of British commercial and imperial success lay in laissez-faire economics, enforcement of the rule of law, a small, decentralized administrative structure, and a relatively mild authoritarian rule. The British encouraged free trade, trained local magistrates and jurists, created a native civil service (this was particularly notable in India), and raised local governing bodies via a native franchise.

It was the commercial success of the Empire, along with the supremacy of the Royal Navy, that made the British pre-eminent in the 19th century. Economists have demonstrated that the Empire, like all the colonial empires, was not in fact cost-effective, that its costs exceeded its benefits. But economic growth and the success of the British masked that important fact until two world wars and the destruction of much of the Empire’s merchant shipping had made it inescapable.

So here we are, a century later, with the American Imperium standing in for the British. America’s empire, like the British, is also commercial in nature. But the difference is that it is even more decentralized — America demands neither full political control nor territory, merely that the “colonies” play by the rules of law, engage in open and peaceful commerce, and avoid threatening the United States’ vested interests.

The Great Islamic Jihad does not meet any of these criteria. Thus we Americans man the same ramparts across the world that our British predecessors did, leaving our blood and treasure in the same mosquito-infested foreign dungheaps as did our English forebears so long ago.

Today major areas of the world enjoy unprecedented peace and prosperity, the rule of law, full democratic participation, and the right of all citizens to pursue their own fulfillment. The question remains: why are these also the places which use English as a common tongue?

The burden is no longer that of a “white man”, as the work of Condoleezza Rice so eloquently attests. And those who carry it can no longer rely on the The judgment of [their] peers. Thanks to a century of Socialism and enlightened thought, the judgment of our peers has turned against us. We shall have to learn to get along without it.

-----------------

Update: An enterprising Italian blogger has translated the poem into la lingua di amore here.

Unite Against Terror

There is a new group in town: Unite Against Terror. One of the signatories puts his reason for joining hands this way:

We are witnessing one of the greatest betrayals by the left since so-called left-wingers backed the Hitler-Stalin pact and opposed the war against Nazi fascism. Today, the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values. While it deplores the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, only last year it welcomed to the UK the Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who endorses the suicide bombing of innocent civilians. These same right-wing leftists back the so-called 'resistance' in Iraq. This 'resistance' uses terrorism against civilians as its modus operandi - stooping to the massacre of dozens of Iraqi children in order kill a few US soldiers. Terrorism is not socialism; it is the tactic of fascism. But much of the left doesn't care. Never mind what the Iraqi people want, it wants the US and UK out of Iraq at any price, including the abandonment of Iraqi socialists, trade unionists, democrats and feminists. If the fake left gets its way, the ex-Baathists and Islamic fundamentalists could easily seize power, leading to Iranian-style clerical fascism and a bloodbath. I used to be proud to call myself a leftist. Now I feel shame. Much of the left no longer stands for the values of universal human rights and international socialism.

Even though it’s only a symbol, this kind of standing up to be counted is important. It gives breadth and depth to the cry for a peace founded on strength and on the fundamental human right of liberty based on responsibility.

Please click the link and consider adding your name to the world of those who are saying “ENOUGH!” Enough of terrorism and especially enough of the "fake left" cited by Peter Thatchell, above.

Hat tip: Norm Geras

Is Britain Too Decadent to Survive?

 
Jihad Watch has a link to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.The dateline is Leeds, England.

"We can proclaim peace as tolerance all we want," said Mohammad Khan, a Pakistani-born shopkeeper who attended midday prayers at the mosque after walking around police barricades throughout the neighborhood of red-brick row houses in the Beeston section of Leeds. "But we are fighting something so big. Our young people always hear these calls of martyrdom and jihad in the name of religion. Some follow it, and I'm afraid more will, too," he said.

"I think there was something we could have done to stop them. But what? How do you fight an enemy you can't see; an enemy that resides in people's souls?"

Well now. How hard can that be? This is not an invisible enemy, this is an education system that permits families to pressure children into wearing hijab to school. This is a culture that, in the name of free speech, allows seditious speeches by radical imams. This is old Nanny Britain, standing around wringing her hands and asking people to play nice. The same old Nanny that permits traitors to live on the dole while they cry for jihad in Britain… oops, sorry: not traitors because these people refuse to apply for citizenship in what they term “Hell.” Charles Krauthammer reveals the problem:

British Islamists had spoken of a "covenant of security" under which Britain would be spared Islamic terror so long as it allowed radical clerics free rein. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, for example, a Syrian-born, exiled Saudi cleric granted asylum 19 years ago, openly preaches jihad against Britain. He is sought by the press for comment all the time. And, a lovely touch, he actually lives on the British dole — even though he rejects the idea of British citizenship, saying, "I don't want to become a citizen of hell."

So, Nanny, why are you handing out money to people inside your kingdom who are trying to destroy your kingdom? Is it intellectual dementia? A failure of nerve? Are the old Communists/socialists still pulling the strings? Just because the Soviet Union fell apart doesn’t mean that all the spores she released fell with her. A lot of them are alive and well in London.

	It is in places like this that "the real war on terrorism will be won or lost," said Nadim Shehadi, an Islamic affairs specialist at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.
	"London is the real capital of the Islamic world," Shehadi said. "It's from here where ideas spread. If you can rob terrorism of its intellectual strength in Britain the impact of this will be felt all the way around the world from Chechnya to Uzbekistan, Iraq, Syria and everywhere."

If that is so, if London is where the action is, then it behooves us to speak to London about its long, long history of playing footsie with the Arabs, permitting them to come play in England, drop their petro dollars into English banks, drop their Wahhabi poison into the public square, and keep the peace at home by sending their troublemakers abroad to live in London, Leeds, and Lancashire.

British authorities have squarely placed responsibility on moderate Muslim leaders to join forces or risk being left irrelevant as officials move toward tougher measures against those preaching anti-Western venom or groups seeking holy war combatants for places such as Kashmir.

If the the “British authorities” are going to “squarely place responsibility” anywhere, it certainly shouldn’t be on “moderate Muslim leaders.” To even attempt to do so proves that the authorities are either fools or quislings. No other European nation allows the kinds of “free speech” that Britain does; it may be that no other nation at all has the level of suicidal inclination that Britain is manifesting in its failure to rein in the terrorists in her bosom.

To see how it ought to be done, dear Queen Elizabeth, please speak to Queen Margrethe of Denmark. Or buy the book.

	Denmark's Queen Margrethe II warned against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Denmark and the world in a new book out on Thursday, saying people must on occasion "show their opposition to Islam".
	"It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and very lazy."

Charles Krauthammer put it best:

Decadence is defined not by a civilization's art or music, but ultimately by its willingness to simply defend itself.

From your pen to the citizens of Britain, Dr. Krauthammer. Quit fiddling around over there. London is burning. It's not the job of moderate Muslims to extinguish the fire; it's their job simply to get out of the way while "the authorities" begin acting as if they had sufficient testosterone to take the hose in hand and start spraying down the conflagration.

Enough with the Nero imitations.

The Council Has Spoken!

"You know, sometimes I honestly despair."

So says the Sundries Shack, this weeks Council Winner.

	I listened this morning to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal - to the call-in portion of the show. I heard caller after caller after caller spouting absolute drivel until I finally had to turn it off. It actually made me angry. My hands were shaking. That bothered me because I’m not a man given to physical displays of anger.
	What made me so angry was not that those callers were in possession of the facts and drew a different conclusion than I. It was that their facts were so wrong. Not just that, but they were wrong about things that any elementary-school kid who can use Google could find out. They were wrong about facts that were so easy to verify, if they had only put forth a basic amount of effort.
	It was like listening to people condemning the voyage of the Queen Mary because they just knew it would fall off the edge of the world.

He’s right. It’s willful ignorance and unless we can change that, we’ll end up surrendering.


Non-Council Winner was The Winds of Change. By now, many of you have seen Al Queda Attacks: A Flash Presentation. Stuck as I am with a dial-up modem, even I let it load up the first time I saw mention of it. If you've got a neanderthal connection, too, just let it load while you go do something else. It’s worth waiting for:

The purpose of the presentation is to graphically demonstrate al Qaeda’s ability to conduct mass casualty assaults on a global scale. This presentation by no means documents every single al Qaeda attack. For example, the murders of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and USAID executive Lawrence Foley in Jordan were excluded, as have smaller impact suicide attacks and beheadings by al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere. al Qaeda's butchery in Iraq can fill a presentation of its own. Also, planned or foiled chemical attacks against Jordan, France and England, the assassination attempts on President Musharraf of Pakistan and numerous other incidents throughout the world have not been documented.

The background music is Cat Stevens’ work.


Meanwhile, the rest of us participants are all over at the Watcher’s post here.

A Waqf Call for India

 
On July 13th, the Sunni Central Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh declared that the Taj Mahal was Muslim property, and claimed ownership of the monument. Their claim is based on the Islamic principle that any burial ground where Muslims are interred belongs to Islam (see last month’s post on this topic).

But it seems that the Indian government is not going to roll over for the Islamists. According to the Economic Times,

	Finally, it took the Taj Mahal to bring the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP on the same side of the fence. Both the government and the BJP today rejected the Waqf Board move to stake claim over the Taj Mahal.
	While Union law minister HR Bharadwaj today described the historic monument as “national property” and said the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) shall continue to look after it, BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi urged the Prime Minister to disband the Waqf Board instead.
	“The Taj is a national property and the whole controversy is a self-created one. I am surprised about the declaration. They (Waqf Board) already have so much property and they do not know how to take care of it. There is no need of any other body to look after the monument as the ASI is taking care of it quite well,” Mr Bharadwaj said.
	On the other hand Mr Naqvi today urged the Prime Minister to do away with the very concept of the Waqf Board. In a letter to Dr Manmohan Singh, he charged the Waqf Board with lending a religious colour to historic heritage such as the Taj Mahal and claiming it as its property saying it was a challenge to Indian Constitution, law and order and democratic structure which “if not taken seriously, could lead to serious consequences in the coming days”.
	“If mosques, burial grounds and places where namaz is offered become the criteria for Waqf property, then perhaps 90% of important buildings would have to be handed over to Waqf Boards. There is an imminent need to discuss the relevance and necessity of institutions like the Waqf Boards—which cannot pay its employees, maintain its assets and are mired in controversy— in a secular country.”

Don’t you love India? What an eminently sensible country! It’s hard to imagine that Britain would show the same kind of common sense if Muslims laid claim to, say, St. Paul’s. There would have to be meetings of the Multicultural Committee of the Borough Council, or something similar, which would undoubtedly conclude that there was something to what these imams had to say, after all, and cultural sensitivities require us to pay attention to sharia law, and etc blah yak…

And what about Arlington Cemetery? Are there any Muslims buried there? It seems to me there must be. Let’s hope that Donald Rumsfeld has the same kind of sand as the Indian government.

---------------------------------

Update: According to Northern Virginiastan, there are definitely Muslims buried in Arlington Cemetery. Stay tuned...


---------------------------------

Further update: The exact link is here.

Undermined

 
The News Telegraph has reported that the BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings. When the horror first happened, the BBC amazed the world by actually referring to the terrorists as “terrorists.” But reality didn’t last long. In two shakes of a journalist’s tail, it was back to “bombers” for them.
The News Telegraph said:

	Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC’s website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as “bombers”.
	The BBC’s guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the “careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments”.
	Consequently, “the word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding” and its use should be “avoided”, the guidelines say.

So here’s the Gates of Vienna version of things. Much closer to reality, too:

The BBC has redacted some of the language used to describe its initial coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings.

Earlier reports had spoken of terrorists but as new attitudes were adjusted — or as the shock wore off and journalists reverted to their former attitudes — it became clear that “careless use of words which carry…value judgments” would need to be…umm, erased.

The BBC says this revision of recent events is necessary in order to avoid “undermining” its credibility. Undermining?? Why, absolutely it would. Thus, the new version of events:

The BBC has learned of the recent holiday in London enjoyed by the local Bright Incendiary Hobbies Club. Using their avocation of spelunking to enter the tunnels of the Underground, the enthusiasts were able to undermine several trains, detonating explosive materials with great success… and thus undermining any rumors or imprecations regarding their manhood. Or womanhood, as the case may be. Or human species of whatever sort.

Obviously this talented team is able to use incendiary materials to great effect. It has been observed that their timing and methods bespeak an expertise to be admired and emulated. Even now, others are searching for them in order to be shown how to create their own special effects to undermine several credibilities other than merely those of the BBC.

Our hats are off to such skilled incendiary practitioners. Also off are some of our legs, arms, and vital body parts. But no matter. At least we know these underminers are good at what they do.

I say, not bad for a morning’s work, what?

 

Yes, it’s satire.

What Kind of War?

 
The California National Guard made the mistake of reaching out a welcoming hand to its opponents. According to a July 11 story in Mercury News (Hat tip: LGF), the Guard invited a group of antiwar activists to visit its headquarters in Sacramento, in order to demonstrate that the Guardsmen were normal, decent human beings, and not the ravening bloodthirsty baby-killers of wide repute.

Big mistake.

As it happened, one of the Guard members had posted a flyer on his cubicle featuring the hoary old story about General Pershing and the Muslim terrorists.

	The Pershing flyer recounts a tale -- which may have been embellished or entirely woven of legend -- that resurfaced after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. According to the tale, Pershing captured 50 Muslim extremists before World War I while stationed in the Philippines. He tied 49 of the men up, slaughtered two pigs in front of them, dipped bullets in the pig’s blood and had the men executed, believing that by doing so they would doom the men to hell.
	The extremists were then buried in pig’s blood and parts while one survivor was set free to relate the horrifying tale. For the next 42 years, the flyer states, there were no Muslim terrorist attacks in the world.
	Whether the story is true remains unclear. Pershing is said to have threatened to bury Philippine rebels in pig skins and splatter pig’s blood on their houses, but some historians have been unable to verify the story of Pershing overseeing the controversial execution.

Now, to those of us who are concerned about actually winning this war, and who don’t have to worry about winning re-election or holding down a job in academia, this does not seem like a terribly controversial idea. A little bit over the top, maybe, but nothing we all haven’t contemplated with secret pleasure in the privacy of our vile Crusader hearts.

But to the antiwar activists, it is a misfeasance of the highest order.

	“It’s troubling to see a governmental organization dedicated to the security of our country promoting culturally and religiously insensitive ideas,” said William Youmans, media relations manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Santa Clara. “It’s very possible to combat terrorism without offending the cultural values of a major world religion.”
	[…]
	Below the Pershing tribute is a second flyer with the wings and tail of a bomber forming the legs of a peace sign with the slogan: Peace the old fashioned way. There’s also a cartoon from a Web site known as www.stopislam.com that depicts a Red Crescent ambulance stuffed with weapons and a cartoon figure that looks like the late-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat unloading the cargo.

Once again, most of us wouldn’t have a problem with this. In an allegorical way, the cartoon simply speaks the truth: Islamist jihadis in the West Bank and Gaza have repeatedly used ambulances to transport weapons for terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. If this “offend[s] the cultural values of a major world religion,” well, then maybe “a major world religion” is offended by the truth.

But, predictably, the Guard caved under the pressure and took the flyer down.

	On Monday, Islamic, Arab-American and anti-war groups called the Pershing flyer reprehensible. They praised the Guard for taking the flyer down, but said more may need to be done to educate the citizen soldiers.
	“Muslims are not our enemies,” said Ruth Robertson, a member of Raging Grannies who saw the flyer.

I’m willing to stipulate to the possibility that not all Muslims are our enemies. However, it is an ineluctable fact that a significant percentage of them are indeed our enemies.

Here’s the clincher:

“It makes it sound like what we are doing is some sort of religious war,” said [Jackie] Thomason…

Well, DUH. I wonder why that is?

Ms. Thomason is a volunteer for the GI Rights Hotline, “a coalition of nonprofit groups that offers advice and help to soldiers”. If I were offering advice to a soldier, it would be that he is fighting a religious war. I would assert that it is a religious war because the enemy is fighting a religious war. He wants to kill us because of what he perceives to our religion; if we believed exactly as he does, then he would not be fighting us.

And when the Great Islamic Jihad eventually arrives at the Left Coast — as it has in Israel, Iraq, Spain, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Thailand, and, most recently, London — it will do the well-meaning peace activist no good whatsoever to protest that he is an atheist, or an agnostic, or secular, or a lapsed whatever. He can keep repeating his non-religious mantra right up to the moment when the hooded mujahid holding the bloody scimitar hoists his severed head high up before the video camera.

Or, if he is lucky, he can become a dhimmi, and pay the jizyah. Then his life will be spared.

For a while.

On Discerning Your Elbow From Your Gluteus Maximus

 
Of the traitors and quislings in World War IV, Norm Geras says:

So there are apologists among us. They have to be fought - fought intellectually and politically and without let-up. What is it that moves them to their disgraceful litany of excuses? This is doubtless a complex matter, but here are a few suggestions.

First, he says, there are those who see the terrorist murderers [my term] as an environmental hazard. Like killer bees, maybe. So this is the deal: you don’t disturb their nest, they don’t bother you. As he says, more or less, that’s one lame explanation.

Then, there are the America bashers:

...people for whom the discomfiture of the US is number one priority, who would therefore have been happy to see the Americans bogged down without reaching Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein, who have openly spoken their support for an Iraqi ‘resistance’ committing daily crimes against the people of Iraq.

Finally, there are what Mr. Geras (and I) would term the confused:

...there are others not of this ilk and who would be horrified and outraged - and rightly - to see themselves described as indulgent towards such ugly and murderous forces, but who employ the tropes of blame-shifting and excuse-making nonetheless...

In other words, this third group, this tertium quid, is more properly known as that group which cannot tell its ass from its elbow. They want to appear enlightened about the local political infighting while refusing to take sides because of their superior omniscient perspective. At least that’s my take on Mr. Geras’ view of this group — you know, the chattering classes, as in “Blessed are the sincere.”

Sincerity be damned, this is war, and it will be won by those on the side of truth, liberty, justice... and, oh, yeah, the Anglic Way — of which the American counterpart is just one via.

But don’t tell Superman.


hat tip: Roger Simon

Trotsky’s Ice Axe

 
According to a recent CNN story, the ice axe used to murder Leon Trotsky has resurfaced.

This was an interesting coincidence for me: a few days previously I had been discussing the very same topic with my good friend Wally Ballou. Whenever you read about the weapon, it is generally described as an “ice pick”, just as in the CNN story. As you can see from the photo below, it is indeed an ice axe. Wally is of the opinion that ice picks should be called “ice awls”, since that is what they resemble, and then ice axes could be renamed “ice picks”, since they certainly look like picks.

In any event, the ice axe turned up in the possession of the daughter of the late commander of the secret police, who had been in charge of a criminology museum where the pick was on display, and later removed it “for safekeeping”. The woman evidently wants to shop it around to the highest bidder, and Trotsky’s grandson is outraged.

CNN reports:

The revelation comes just weeks before the 65th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination on August 20, 1940. But tests that could prove the weapon’s authenticity have been delayed by a dispute between the ice pick’s owner, who is shopping it around, and Trotsky’s descendants, who want it donated to a revolutionary museum -- proving that the struggle between socialist ideals and capitalism is continuing. [emphasis added]

What caught my eye is the contention that “the struggle between socialist ideals and capitalism is continuing.” In whose opinion? CNN’s? Or that of Trotsky’s outraged grandson? And notice that only socialism has “ideals” — capitalism, of course, is not capable of such things.

Well, business as usual in the MSM.

“Trotsky” was a nomme de guerre; his birth name was Lev Bronstein. Like so many of the Old Bolsheviks, he was Jewish, a fact which was used by Hitler to characterize Communism as an “international Jewish conspiracy”. Strangely enough, Stalin did the same thing, and found himself having to purge all those dangerous Semitic conspirators from his inner circle.

And, of course, the Jews are still internationally conspiring. Even today their secret cabal controls the foreign policy of the Western Allies, and persuades young Muslims to blow up women and babies so as to discredit Islam. Clever fellows, those Jews.

It’s a strange world.

Bonkers in Aspen

 
Ol’ Hillary gave a speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival this past weekend. During an otherwise boiler-plated address, she laid this breath-taking egg:

“I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington,” Clinton said referring to the freckle-faced Mad magazine character. She drew a laugh from the crowd when she described Bush’s attitude toward tough issues with Neuman’s catchphrase: “What, me worry?”

This from the woman who married William Jefferson “What Me Worry?” Clinton??

This from a sort-of wife of a sort-of president whose foreign policy consisted of lobbing the occasional bomb followed up by massive libidinal overreach??

The gall. Talk about projection.

Dear Lord, find her a good therapist. Let’s certify her before she’s sworn in.

In the Beginning Was the Fatwa

Wolfgang Bruno breaks down the stages of jihad for us. Taking his cue from Mark Gabriel, an ex-Muslim turned Christian, he divides the stages of jihad into these three:

1.The first is the weakened stage. This is when Muslims are in a small minority and have to dissemble regarding their intentions. Think of Mohammed before Medina.

2.The preparation stage begins when Muslims are a large minority. Here, they have the beginnings of real power and are able to make headway in the political marketplace. Think of Europe and the unrelenting positioning for place and voice in the public debate.

3.This marks the true jihad stage. This is the point at which Muslims begin the process of full scale armed assault. Remember how the Muslim minority in India created Pakistan? There you have the paradigm for jihad.

But it doesn’t end in Pakistan. As Mr. Bruno points out, Islam currently makes up ten percent of the population in France. However, thirty three percent of all babies born in France are Muslim babies. He predicts that when some critical mass is reached – somewhere between fifteen and thirty percent – France may experience civil war just like Lebanon did. All they have to do is wait; demographics are on their side.

Do you think he’s unnecessarily pessimistic? Remember Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses? Who could forget that book? For many of us, it was the dawn of the age of Islam. “What is a fatwa?” we asked one another? To our bemusement, and to Mr. Rushdie's terror, it turned out to be a death sentence. That fatwa was issued sixteen years ago. In 1989 it seemed exotic and not terribly germane to our lives. Sure, some novelist or other had his problems with some religious extremists, but what did that have to do with us? Earlier this year, the original fatwa, issued by the long-gone Khomeni, was re-issued by his political heirs. And now it no longer seems exotic. Now it seems familiar and up close.

Mr. Bruno says that the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s work was assassinated in 1991. Lots of people have died because of the Muslims’ reaction to that book. But as we have also learned, Muslims die for rumors about books.

So far, in America, Islam in is the first stage. But it won’t stay that way unless we stay vigilant. If we go the way of Europe – vacillating, apologizing, excusing terrorists and refusing to call them by their right name – the second stage will be here shortly. Already, for fear of appearing incorrect, we refuse to profile Arabs at airport terminals. What next on the slippery slope to dhimmitude?

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We already knew that, but now we're having to learn it by heart and the hard way.

It's just a matter of time.

As Seen on Al Jazeera...

 


Yes, it's satire.