Dhimmied Down Again

 
Dhimmification continues.

In a review from Newsweek you can find the latest on offer: a sitcom — actually, they term it a “drama” — on HBO about polygamy. Don’t ask why, maybe they just figured it might draw an audience.

Essentially, the plot revolves around a shopkeeper in Utah who has three wives and pops a lot of Viagra. Maybe it’s just an extended Viagra commercial? As one actress who plays a part in his harem puts it:

"In my career, I've pretty much seen it all, but I can honestly say I've never seen anything on a polygamous family," says Tripplehorn. Though she was intrigued by the concept, Tripplehorn wasn't sure she could handle it. "I had a hard time finding a connection as to why a woman would share her husband. I didn't think I was up to the task. I didn't think I could make it real."

Nothing like having integrity in your work life, lady.

Of course, the moral imbeciles producers of the show are quick to explain away any ambiguity:

Despite the title and the Viagra, "Big Love" is only peripherally about sex. The Henricksons are devoutly religious and wholesome (they are not Mormons, but an unspecified offshoot). Most of the action focuses on how Bill, who owns home-improvement stores in Utah, handles the mundane aspects of his overpopulated life. How does he keep three women emotionally, as well as physically, satisfied? How does he juggle the demands of work and home? And how do the wives deal with all the competition? Suffice it to say these are three very desperate housewives. "It's everything that every family faces, just times three," says co-creator Mark Olsen. "The yuck factor disappears and you just see human faces. We found it to be a mother lode."

This may be the mother of all mother lodes. Can you say “crock”, Mr. Olsen?

I love this…stuff. It reminds me why we got rid of our television. No doubt those who still own these propaganda outlets will soon be treated to a Palestinian version of “The Brady Bunch.”

I can’t wait not to see it.


Hat Tip: Commenter Rebecca JW on Jihad Watch

UPDATE: They don't mention any children in this show. How can a man have three such worldly delights and not be producing scores of descendants? Not a one of 'em looks pregnant.

Sacred Animal Farm

 
What’s wrong with this picture?

If you’re a Christian or an atheist, nothing.

If you’re a Jew, unless you see it as a version of the golden calf and the restaurant patrons as worshippers, nothing.

If you’re a Muslim, and you’re one of the strict no-graven-images types who believes that all representative art is offensive to Allah, then you wouldn’t like it. Otherwise it would be fine.

If you’re a Hindu, though, since it’s a representation of the earthly form of your primary deity, you might well find it sacrilegious and offensive.

So devout Hindus in New Delhi are rioting to demand that the offending statue be removed, right? And hasn’t the restaurant owner received a death threat because of his blasphemy?

No? I wonder why not…

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *The recent brouhaha over the cartoons depicting Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper reminds us of the consequences of impinging on the religious sensibilities of Muslims. Any prominent transgressor of Islamic strictures – for example, Theo Van Gogh or Salman Rushdie – is putting his life at risk.

Here in the ultra-tolerant heart of Western Civilization, no other religion demands so much special treatment. Nor does any other garner such fawning capitulation. In Britain the piggy banks must go. In Norway women must take into account the cultural characteristics of Muslim men, or risk rape. Muslims even want banks to issue interest-free loans, since the Koran bans usury.

For a counterpoint to all this, look at Christianity. Forget inadvertent offense: the examples of deliberate, calculated, and extreme attempts to offend Christians are legion within the popular culture. Even so, no Baptists are strapping on bomb belts and blowing themselves up in the Museum of Modern Art.

Not long ago, on my way towards the meat counter in a grocery store I passed a Hindu couple pushing their shopping cart up along the aisle. When I got to the beef section I noticed a little display sign showing a smiling cartoon cow holding up a steak on a platter and licking her chops in autophagous anticipation.

Surely, I thought, the Hindu couple must have found this display repugnant. The rows of raw red beef in packages might well have deeply disturbed their religious sensibilities. Yet there they were, calmly shopping!

No one was picketing the store. I didn’t have to pass through a metal detector to get in. Nobody firebombed the place the next day. No Hindu suicide bomber blew up the regional Food Lion headquarters.

Britain has its share of Hindus. If they are demanding an end to cow iconography, I haven’t heard about it. They’re not writing angry letters to Borough Councils demanding the removal of the “Cock and Bull” pub signs. If they mind the little cow pitchers that dispense milk in the tea rooms, they’re not making a loud noise about it.

Why is that? They’re just as much aliens in Britain as their Muslim counterparts. Until very recently they were indiscriminately designated “wogs” by the uncouth, along with their Pakistani neighbors. They’re just as entitled to politically correct redress of their grievances.

What makes Muslims different?

I’d like to be very politically incorrect and assert that Hindus are more civilized.

There. I said it, and the sky didn’t fall.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Leaving aside for the moment why Hindus (and adherents of other religions) are less belligerent than Muslims, there still remains this question: Why do modern Western societies cave in so easily to Muslim demands, capitulating and appeasing at every opportunity?

Of all the major religions, only Islam is enjoined by its scripture to have a hair-trigger for violence. Add to that the traditional shame/honor tribal culture and you have a volatile and lethal mix.

And we in the West are so allergic to violence that the merest whiff of it sends us scurrying to the ethnic grievances dictionary to look up the “root causes.” Find the solution, apply the anodyne, build yet another ethnic outreach cultural center, designate a new Muslim school holiday, and then…

And then what? And then the Muslims won’t be mad at us any more?

Or will capitulating to their violent threats only lead to demands for more concessions, and then more again? Until at last the Caliphate is established and Shariah instituted and the Ummah becomes coterminous with the entire planet…

Pigs and cows. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Say Goodbye to Fjordman

 
Fjordman’s last post is up. He will be sorely missed – his blog was a powerhouse of information on the Great Jihad and other topics of current interest. And not just on Europe – breaking news anywhere in the world was likely to show up on Fjordman before any of the other blogs.

The Scandinavian Vikings are still represented by Viking Observer, of course, who blogs in English from Denmark.

In his last post Fjordman says that his work may occasionally appear here in Gates of Vienna. Anything he cares to send will be welcomed by us and promptly posted.

The Islamic Ratchet

 
As noted here recently, Pakistani irredentism manifests itself in a claim to the province of Kashmir. Other territorial hot spots for Islam are in southern Thailand, the Philippines, Indian Punjab, northern Nigeria, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan, and, of course, the Palestinian territories.

And then there’s Al Andalus, formerly known to most of the world as “Spain.”

As Dymphna has written, “any geography that once belonged to Islam always belongs to Islam and it is the duty of every Muslim to reclaim its property.” This doctrine means that Muslim cemeteries anywhere in the world are part of the Ummah, and subject to Islamic agitation.

And what about the areas that are not yet Muslim? It doesn’t take a Muslim majority to turn a province into a hotbed of religious strife and jihad. Recent examples can be found in Rotterdam, Birmingham, Toronto, Malmö, and Hamtramck. When the Muslim population in a region reaches a certain critical point, the agitation begins: You must respect Islam! No more pig imagery! Women must cover themselves! Muslim holidays must be observed!

Take a look at these Muslim population statistics. It’s no surprise that Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey are almost entirely Muslim. Saudi Arabia clocks in a 95.7% – what are the other 4.3%, for goodness’ sake? Filipino maids? Christians in the catacombs under Riyadh?

But look at the countries that lie on the outermost marches of Islam’s “bloody borders”:

Country	Population	Pct	# Muslims
Canada	32,805,041	2.0%	656,100
China	1,306,313,812	3.0%	39,189,414
India	1,080,264,388	12.0%	129,631,726
Netherlands	16,407,491	6.0%	984,449
Nigeria	128,771,988	50.0%	64,385,994
Philippines	87,857,473	5.0%	4,392,873
Spain	40,341,462	2.5%	1,008,536
Sweden	9,001,774	4.0%	360,070
Thailand	65,444,371	5.0%	3,272,218
United Kingdom	60,441,457	2.7%	1,631,919
United States	295,734,134	1.4%	4,140,277

It’s easy to see why Nigeria has a problem: it’s half Muslim already. And India, at 12%, has a mighty struggle ahead. But the other trouble spots have a much smaller percentage, yet they – especially Europe – are the ones that cave in more easily to Muslim pressure.

The one exception is China. Now why do you think that might be?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *Islam ratchets in one direction only. Where Muslims are in charge, other faiths are gradually driven out, converted, or killed. No one may convert out of Islam on the pain of death.

The signposts to dhimmitude are all prominent all around us. Neon lights are flashing and horns are blaring to draw our attention. The arrows point in one direction only.

We ignore them at our peril.


Cross-posted at Infidel Bloggers Alliance.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Georgia

 
The Politics of CP has another investigative report on the Muslims of America. This time CP is looking through his virtual magnifying glass at an MOA/Fuqra Community in Commerce, GA .

Ahmadinejad’s Kampf

 
In November 1923, Adolf Hitler entered a beer hall in Munich and fired a pistol into the ceiling. He announced that he was about to overthrow the Bavarian state government and install himself and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as the new revolutionary government of Bavaria.

With that, he and his fellow Nazis — along with the renowned hero of the Great War, General Ludendorff — marched towards the government offices in what became known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.” Unfortunately for the Nazis, they were met by the police, who ordered them to halt and then fired into the crowd, leaving more than a dozen Nazis dead.

This debacle turned out to be the event that launched Hitler’s career: the putsch made him into a household name across Germany. After a well-publicized trial he was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served but nine months. During his incarceration Hitler was allowed not only pencil and paper, but also the secretarial services of his loyal follower Rudolf Hess.

Hitler spent his time dictating to Hess the infamous Mein Kampf, a rambling memoir and political diatribe that touched all the bases which eventually became so familiar to Germany and the rest of the world. His genocidal goals were not hidden; they were all laid out in Mein Kampf for anyone to see.

Fifteen years later in 1938, when the senior statesmen of Europe were negotiating away large chunks of territory from other people’s countries and giving them to Germany, they were acting on the assumption that Herr Hitler did not mean what he said back in 1925; that those were simply the somewhat intemperate writings of a man who was otherwise a politician just like they were; that once his demands for the return of the Volk to the Reich were met, Der Führer would be satisfied and the world (except for some unfortunate Jews, gypsies, and so on) could once again live in peace.

But Hitler’s agenda was clear, and it was all laid out in his book:

The danger to which Russia succumbed is always present for Germany. Only a bourgeois simpleton is capable of imagining that Bolshevism has been exorcised. With his superficial thinking he has no idea that this is an instinctive process; that is, the striving of the Jewish people for world domination, a process which is just as natural as the urge of the Anglo-Saxon to seize domination of the earth. And just as the Anglo-Saxon pursues this course in his own way and carries on the fight with his own weapons, likewise the Jew. He goes his way, the way of sneaking in among the nations and boring from within, and he fights with his weapons, with lies and slander, poison and corruption, intensifying the struggle to the point of bloodily exterminating his hated foes. In Russian Bolshevism we must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination. Just as in other epochs they strove to reach the same goal by other, though inwardly related processes. Their endeavor lies profoundly rooted in their essential nature. No more than another nation renounces of its own accord the pursuit of its impulse for the expansion of its power and way of life, but is compelled by outward circumstances or else succumbs to impotence due to the symptoms of old age, does the Jew break off his road to world dictatorship out of voluntary renunciation, or because he represses his eternal urge. He, too, will either be thrown back in his course by forces lying outside himself, or all his striving for world domination will be ended by his own dying out. But the impotence of nations, their own death from old age, arises from the abandonment of their blood purity. And this is a thing that the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth. And so he advances on his fatal road until another force comes forth to oppose him, and in a mighty struggle hurls the heaven-stormer back to Lucifer.

We must eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area… Some of this land can be obtained from Russia… we National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy, namely, to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this earth.

If only the politicians of Europe had taken him seriously in 1933 or 1935 or 1938, before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland. A quick peek into a translation of Mein Kampf would have left them with no doubt about what was coming.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Now fast-forward eighty years. Watch Kristallnacht, D-Day, Auschwitz, the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, and 9-11 fly by in a blur. Hit “play” as soon as you see the face of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, making his infamous speech this past October:

	The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world… The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land.
	As the Imam [Khomeini] said, Israel must be wiped off the map.
	The Islamic umma will not allow its historic enemy to live in its heartland.

It is as if the President of Iran were eerily channeling the Reichskanzler of the 1930s.

President Ahmadinejad elaborated on the same topic when he denied the existence of Herr Hitler’s most notorious accomplishment:

They have fabricated a legend under the name “Massacre of the Jews”, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.

To underscore the messianic nature of his mission, Mr. Ahmadinejad revealed during an interview that, when he was giving his recent speech at the UN, a halo appeared behind his head for half an hour or so. Not only that, the members of the audience who were watching were unable to blink during that time!

Yes, we’ve got a Hitlerian fruitcake here, but he’s a fruitcake who’s about to go nuclear on us. Hitler, after all, never managed to get that far.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has no doubt of his mission; he has made that mission blindingly clear on numerous occasions. He is here to prepare the way for the appearance of the Twelfth Imam, which will usher in the Islamic version of the Apocalypse.

The parallels with Hitler are uncanny:

• Volk = Ummah
  
• The Sudetenland = Palestine
  
• Götterdämmerung = Twelfth Imam
  
• France and Britain= France and Germany
  
• Six million Jews = Six million Jews

But this time the six million are determined not to go quietly. After the Holocaust, the Jews will never again go quietly.

The 21st century’s version of Der Führer is ready to incinerate the Jews in their homes, but Israel is resolved: this shall not come to pass. Unfortunately for the Jews, and for all of us, the dénouement of this sordid drama is imminent.

As a final note, consider the following:

For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim… all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.

Who do you think said that? I’ll give you two guesses.


Note: The “Beer Hall Putsch” photo at the top shows Hitler, Ernst Röhm (second from the right), and Rudolf Hess (far right). The fourth man (second from the left) I haven’t been able to identify; Göring, Strasser, Streicher, Frick, Eckart, and Rosenberg have all been ruled out. Knowledgeable readers are invited to fill in the missing name.


Update: Commenter Charlie Eklund has identified the mystery man in the putsch photo as Hermann Kriebel. I’ll have to take his word for it, because the only other photo of him I can find is here (fourth from the left, in the pickelhaube), and the resolution is not good enough to confirm the likeness. But it could be the same guy…


Update 2: El Jefe’s post about the mullahs, which he was too bashful to link, is here.


Update 3: Ah, the distributed intelligence of the internet!

Reader SC writes, “Left to right, it's Hitler, Emil Maurice (his chauffeur), Kreibel (not Roehm), and Hess.”

Also, reader CW writes, “According to The Hidden Hitler by Lothar Machtan, the man behind Hitler’s left shoulder is Emil Maurice.”

They’re quite right. I found another version of the same photo, and, even though it’s in Hungarian, you can see the list of names identifying people in the photo.

Hermann Kriebel is the guy I thought was Röhm (he still looks like Röhm to me!). Also see this page identifying Emil Maurice as Hitler’s “secretary.” It’s definitely the same guy.


Update 4: Welcome, Corner readers! Take your time and look around; you might be interested in the Jamaat ul-Fuqra material – look at the left sidebar near the top for links.


Update 5: Reader JS writes, “Your updated attribution is correct. There's a better picture (including a fifth man, another early gangster crony, I think, Christian Weber) in my Folio Books edition of Shirer.”

The Hungarian site includes the fifth man, and identifies him as “Friedrich Weber.” So it looks like JS knows what he’s talking about.

Welcome the Infidel Bloggers Alliance

Dymphna and I have signed up as contributors to a new group blog, the Infidel Bloggers Alliance, along with Cuanas, Drunken Blogging, Justify This!, Fu2rman, Liberty And Culture, A Deeper Look, News From Eurabia, and Thomas The Wraith.

The mission statement of the Alliance: We are a user contributed site featuring the latest articles from around the blogosphere. Our mission is to act as a hub for bloggers and web users who want easy access to the latest news but do not necessarily have all day to look for it.

If you want to know what’s going on, drop by the Infidel Bloggers Alliance.

Pakistan Irredenta

 
With the rise of nationalism in Europe during the 19th century came a new phenomenon called “irredentism” – the agitation by one country to reclaim portions of another, based on ethnic similarity or previous ownership. The term was based on the phrase Italia irredenta, the slogan of Italian nationalists who wanted Italy to annex Italian-speaking areas retained by Austria after the unification of Italy in 1866. Italia irredenta was a significant force in Italian politics right up until the Great War, and helped induce Italy to join the Allies.

Various irredentisms were the bane of Europe in the 20th century. Hitler wanted to unite with his ethnic compatriots in the Sudetenland and Alsace-Lorraine. A significant Romanian minority was included in the Hungarian portion of Transylvania, causing friction between the two countries. The Turks and the Greeks are still at odds over Cyprus, and the Serbs long to reclaim the “historic heartland of Serbia” in Kosovo.

Ethnicity, religion, language, shared history, and general culture combined to form a volatile mix that produced modern nationalism. But nationalism and irredentism are not necessarily language-based phenomena; both Italy and Spain united even though their component provinces spoke dialects which were all but separate languages.

Driven as it is by powerful nationalist emotions, irredentism can cause countries to make decisions that are not always in their national interests. It is impossible to understand the deadly foreign policy of Germany during the 1930s without reference to German irredentism. Similarly, in order to understand current Chinese foreign policy it is necessary to examine China’s fixation on reclaiming Taiwan.

And Pakistan’s foreign policy cannot be understood without considering Kashmir.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *


In the runup to independence in the 1930s and 1940s, the Muslim portions of India could not be reconciled with the rest of the country, and the British decided to partition the territory.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah founded the state of Pakistan in 1947, cobbling together different ethnic groups whose only major commonality was Islam. Many Muslims remain in India, but few Hindus and other non-Muslims remain in Pakistan – like other Muslim-majority countries, Pakistan has driven out, killed, or converted most of its infidels.

Even so, Pakistan is quite diverse. It originally included what used to be East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. The latter is ethnically distinct, and fought to gain its independence from Pakistan in 1971. In Pakistan are Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Sunnis are divided into different sects and subgroups, speaking different languages or dialects and having differing social status.

One of the major distinctions is between the Deobandis and the Brelvis. According to B. Raman,

	The majority of the Brelvis are descendants of converts from Hinduism and belong to poor rural classes. Since they cannot afford to go on Haj to Saudi Arabia, their tradition allows them instead to visit the graves of their pirs and saints. These flexible and tolerant traditions had spread in the past from the sub-continent to Afghanistan , the Central Asian Republics (CARs), Dagestan and Chechnya and to other countries where Muslims from the sub-continent have migrated.
	The Wahabi-Deobandis of Pakistan, who are in a numerical minority, are the descendants of the original migrants from Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Gulf. They look upon themselves as the high-born (the “Ashraf”) and look down on the Brelvis as the low-born (the “Alaf”). Power has largely remained in the hands of the Wahabi-Deobandis, but till 1971 there was no organised, state-sponsored attempt to force the Wahabi religious traditions on the Brelvis.
	The alienation of the people of pre-1971 East Pakistan was mainly due to the refusal of the Deobandi high-born of West Pakistan to accept the Bengali Muslims, largely the descendants of converts from Hinduism, as their equals.
	The war of 1971 and the separation of Bangladesh and the subsequent appearance of signs of alienation amongst the Mohajirs of Karachi and other urban areas of Sindh, who are descendants of converts from Hinduism from northern India, created fears of another split of Pakistan.
	This led to the emergence in the 1980s of a number of Muslim extremist organisations wedded to the policy of ridding Islam in Pakistan of what they looked upon as the corrupting influences of Hinduism and making the Muslims of Pakistan strictly adhere to the Deobandi-Wahabi traditions.

The Deobandi-Wahhabi group Tablighi Jamaat has experienced a tremendous growth during the last quarter-century, converting infidels and bringing lapsed Muslims back into its austere version of the Ummah. Its graduates have moved on to join or form some of the most violent and radical of the Islamist terror groups.

At the time of independence India was awarded the former principality of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir is a remote but strategically important area, and has at various times been ruled by Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, as well as the British. It contains a mixture of tribal groups, including many which share ethnicity with their brethren in Pakistan itself.

Pakistan went to war with India in 1948 with the aim of obtaining Kashmir. There was an eventual cease-fire, a line of control was demarcated, and an uneasy truce ensued. Affairs were complicated by the interference of China, to whom Pakistan ceded a part of the “Northern Areas” in 1963. China annexed the part of Kashmir known as Aksai Chin, which is still claimed by India.

Conflict has flared periodically since 1948, with India and Pakistan occasionally going to war over Kashmir. But after each country acquired nuclear weapons, war became all but unthinkable. In order to achieve its urgent goal of occupying the remainder of Kashmir, Pakistan must consider different strategies.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Since the 1980s Pakistan has allowed extreme Islamist groups to operate openly within its borders. Even proscribed terrorist organizations flourish; when listed by the U.S. State Department they tend to change their names so as to avoid a crackdown.

Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, finds these groups useful, since they are instrumental for operations in Kashmir. The groups infiltrate India, inflame the sentiments of like-minded Muslims there, and organize terrorist attacks against Indian targets. They can also be useful within Pakistan itself:

	In their efforts to maintain law and order in Pakistan and weaken nationalist and religious elements and political parties disliked by the army, the ISI and the army followed a policy of divide and rule. After the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, to keep the Shias of Pakistan under control, the ISI encouraged the formation of ant-Shia Sunni extremist organisations such as the Sipah Sahaba. When the Shias of Gilgit rose in revolt in 1988, Musharraf used bin Laden and his tribal hordes from the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to suppress them brutally. When the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM---now called the Muttahida Qaumi Movement) of Altaf Hussain rose in revolt in the late 1980s in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur in Sindh, the ISI armed sections of the Sindhi nationalist elements to kill the Mohajirs. It then created a split between Mohajirs of Uttar Pradesh origin (in Altaf Hussain’s MQM) and those of Bihar origin in the splinter anti-Altaf Hussain group called MQM (Haquiqi--meaning real). In Altaf Hussain’s MQM itself, the ISI unsuccessfully tried to create a wedge between the Sunni and Shia migrants from Uttar Pradesh.
	Having failed in his efforts to weaken the PPP by taking advantage of the exile of Mrs.Benazir and faced with growing unity of action between Altaf Hussain’s MQM and sections of Sindhi nationalist elements, Musharraf has constituted a secret task force in the ISI headed by Lt.Gen.Mahmood Ahmed, the DG, and consisting of Lt.Gen.(retd) Moinuddin Haider, Interior Minister, and Lt.Gen.Muzaffar Usmani, Deputy Chief of the Army Staff, to break the PPP, the MQM and the Sindhi nationalists.
	This task force has encouraged not only religious political organisations such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI) of Maulana Fazlur Rahman etc, but also sectarian organisations such as the Sipah Sahaba and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi of Riaz Basra, living under the protection of the Taliban and bin Laden in Kandahar in Afghanistan, to extend their activities to Sindh.

This is the unruly tiger which Pervez Musharraf inherited and is attempting to ride. The ISI believes that it controls the terrorist groups, but who controls the ISI? Depending on which source you read, the ISI answers either to the office of the President or to the Army chiefs of staff. Musharraf would like us to believe the latter – “Ah, those rascals at ISI! I wish I could do something about them, but they are beyond my control!” – but Indian intelligence tends to believe that he is in control. Otherwise, how has he managed to escape the tiger’s jaws thus far?

But it is a dangerous game that Pakistan is playing:

During his televised breakfast discussions with Indian editors at Agra on July 16 and his press conference at Islamabad on July 20, Musharraf described the terrorists operating in J & K as “indigenous freedom-fighters” and denied that they were based in Pakistan or that they were receiving any assistance from Pakistan. A similar stand was taken by Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the Pakistani High Commissioner in New Delhi, during a TV interview on July 22 when he was asked about the post-summit massacre of some Hindu pilgrims going on their annual pilgrimage to the Amarnath cave by the Al Umar Mujahideen and the massacre of the Hindu residents, including women and children, of a village in the Doda district of Jammu by the LET on July 22.

In its issues of February 13,1995, and March 27,1995, the “News” of Pakistan had carried two detailed investigative reports by Kamran Khan, a well-known Pakistani journalist, on an international terrorist network consisting of the HUM (then known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar) and other Islamic terrorist organisations operating from Pakistani territory with the knowledge and connivance of the Pakistani authorities. He reported that about 200 HUM members from Pakistan had died in clashes with the Indian security forces in J & K since 1991 and that its cadres were also active with the Abu Sayyaf group in Southern Philippines and with the terrorists in Chechnya. He also brought out the links of these organisations with Ramzi Yousuf, now undergoing imprisonment in the US for his role in the New York World Trade Centre bombing in February, 1993, and their role in the explosion at a holy shrine at Mashhad in Iran on June 20,1994, killing 70 people and in training Saudi fundamentalist elements opposed to the ruling family.

The Islamist terrorists may prefer Musharraf to the infidels, but it is hard to imagine that they like Pakistan’s military government as much as they would the Caliphate. That is, after all, their ultimate goal.

Musharraf and the ISI believe that they can continue this triple game indefinitely – holding the terrorists “by the scruff of the neck,” playing the extremists off against each other, and then saying, “Terrorists? What terrorists? There are no terrorists here!” to the world at large.

Pakistan’s cynical policies bore fruit in 1999, when India caved to the demands of terrorists after the Kandahar hijacking:

	Five years after Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 was hijacked in December 1999, the three men released by the Indian government to ensure the safety of the passengers continue to be sheltered in Pakistan despite repeated demands for their custody by Interpol, the American FBI and the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
	On December 24, 1999, five armed Pakistani nationals hijacked Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 from Katmandu to Kandahar, Afghanistan. Led by Sunny Ahmed Qazi, alias Burger, the hijackers slashed the throat of one of the 178 passengers, a honeymooner, and forced pilots to open the cockpit door. Burger demanded that the Indian government release three Pakistani terrorists from prison in exchange for the hostages aboard the aircraft.
	…Among those released by India was Masood Azhar, a Pakistani national and secretary general of the Harkat-ul-Ansar, who was arrested on February 11, 1994 from Srinagar. Masood Azhar was the ideologue of the Harkat-ul-Ansar, a militant group already placed on the US State Department’s watch list of terrorist organizations. The second released jihadi was an Indian national -- Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, chief of the Al-Umar Mujahideen militant outfit.

Azhar has continued to ply his trade under the watchful eye of Pakistan and the ISI.

In 1917 The German General Staff had their own version of Azhar. They, too, thought that they had him by the scruff of the neck. Calculating that they could play the Bolsheviks against Kerensky, they permitted Lenin to travel in a sealed train through Germany to the Finland Station in Petrograd. Their schemes succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, igniting the Bolshevik revolution and consigning millions of people to the hell of Communism for the next 74 years. For those survivors who could still remember, it must have been bitterly ironic to see the hammer and sickle flying over the ruins of the Reichstag in 1945.

What diabolical forces is General Musharraf even now unleashing? What future conflagration is he igniting by playing with his terrorist matches?

And all for Pakistan irredenta, those swaths of Central Asian mountainous territory, the Alsace and Lorraine of Kashmir.

On a Lighter Note…

 
Tonight’s poem is a masterpiece of wordplay in two languages by Robert Graves. The great poet lived on Mallorca for many years, and long familiarity with the Spaniards and their language merged with his native poetic gifts to produce this spoof. It is not widely known; for some reason it has been excluded from his Collected Poems. I found it via Google, but am unable to provide a date for it.

Mr. Graves based his poem on the bizarre English used in some of Spain’s travel brochures. With fractured forms of English now widespread on the internet, the language so ably mimicked by him in this verse seems quite familiar.

“¡Wellcome, to the Caves of Arta!”
by Robert Graves

'They are hollowed out in the see-coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a stuporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, which prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called “The Spiders”. There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their elegy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.' [From a tourist guide]

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
    Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit thier impotence (though autors most formidable)
    To sing in words the excellence of Nature's underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
    Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water drops.

¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom
    Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?
Already in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Arta
    The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefied;
So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums
    And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending
    You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;
“The Saloon of Thousand Banners”, or “The Tumba of Napoleon”,
     “The Grotto of the Rosary”, “The Club”, “The Camping Tent”,
And at “Cavern of the Organs” there are knocking strange formacions
    Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,
    The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.
Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills aprehending
    An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.
It is poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,
    Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.

Gender Warfare Without the Glass Ceilings

And now for an update on the Muslim gender war….

Where to start???

Here’s one: on December 7th in Riadyh, an announcement by the Philippine Embassy to its domestic workers in Saudi Arabia will probably take the prize for 2005’s Fatuous Double Speak Award.

	Philippine Embassy officials have reminded Filipino women in the Kingdom to avoid going out of their residence at night so as not to get into trouble.
	They also urged compatriots not to encourage workers who have complaints against their employers to run away because doing so would only complicate matters.

Want to know why this particular piece of advice — fabricated so as to cover the maximum amount of Embassy gluteus maximus — was issued?

For the same reason all of their pronouncements to their domestic workers are extruded from the wind-up doll they use to make these assinine statements: another domestic worker attempted to escape her Saudi employer and ran from the frying pan into the fire. When her story became public knowledge, they were forced to haul out the robot and push the right words through his mouth tube. Here’s what the tin man said:

Filipino women: Do-not-go-out-of-residence-at-night-in-Kingdom-You-will-get-into-trouble-Do-not-encourage-other-workers-to- run-away-Running-away-complicates-matters.

	The victim told embassy officials that she ran away at about 8 p.m. one night last month to avoid the alleged sexual advances of her employer.
	“I was walking hurriedly when five young men pulled me into a pickup and drove me to a house just a few blocks away from my employer’s residence,” she said.
	She said seven young men took turns on her and gave her away later to another group of five young men, who also gang-raped her inside a tinted van as they cruised along the streets.
	The rapists were reportedly playing full-volume music and her cry for help were apparently unheard.
	She said her attackers also took her gold earrings and necklace plus SR1,000 cash.
	Embassy personnel found her on a street seven hours later, almost naked. She was placed under the custody of Bahay Kalinga (shelter house) and given medical treatment.

She stayed at the shelter about a month and declined to file any charges. Her former employer returned her visa to her and paid her plane fare back to Manila. Wasn’t that nice of him? Maybe it was a birthday present: she turned twenty while staying at the refuge for battered domestics.

That’s one story. Wash, rinse, repeat endlessly in the Kingdom of Evil Saud. I’d have harsher words for the Philippine Embassy except that they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. These domestic slaves pump a lot of money back into the home economy. At least when they’re paid they do.

For the next Muslim gender war story, we fly on to Sweden, where Muslim immigrant men make no excuses for their treatment of Swedish infidel women:

“It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl,” says Hamid [link is in Swedish]. “The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably fucked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity until she marries.” It was no coincidence that it was a Swedish girl that was gang raped in Rissne – this becomes obvious from the discussion with Ali, Hamid, Abdallah and Richard. All four have disparaging views on Swedish girls, and think this attitude is common among young men with immigrant background. “It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore…… girl, I mean;” says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. “Many immigrant boys have Swedish girlfriends when they are teenagers. But when they get married, they get a proper woman from their own culture who has never been with a boy. That’s what I am going to do. I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces.”

The rate of rape and other violent crimes by Muslim immigrants in Sweden is difficult to ascertain. Sweden’s suicidal multi-cultural choke on freedom of the press makes it hard to know exactly how many young women are being victimized. The most basic of freedoms, the inviolability of the person, has been tied to a rock, put in a burlap bag, and dropped into the sea in Sweden. The ugly sister, P.C.-Speak, has taken Liberty's place.

But the numbers of victims are not nearly so important nor as lethal as the motive behind the systematic degradation of women by Muslim men. As Fjordman says:

The number of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants in Western nations are so extremely high that it is difficult to view them only as random acts of individuals. It resembles warfare. Muhammad himself had forced sex (rape) with several of his slave girls/concubines. This is perfectly allowed, both in the sunna and in the Koran. If you postulate that many of the Muslims in Europe view themselves as a conquering army and that European women are simply war booty, it all makes perfect sense and is in full accordance with Islamic law. Western women are not so much regarded by most Muslims as individuals, but as "their women," the women who "belong" to hostile Infidels. They are booty, to be taken, just as the land of the Infidels someday will drop, it is believed, into Muslim hands. This is not mere crime, but ideologically-justified crime or rather, in Muslim eyes, attacks on Infidels scarcely qualify as crime. Western women are cheap and offensive. We Muslims are here, here to stay, and we have a right to take advantage of this situation. It is our view of the matter that should prevail. Western goods, like the land on which we now live, belong to Allah and to the best of men -- his Believers. Western women, too, essentially belong to us -- our future booty. No wonder there is a deep and increasing suspicion against Muslims in the Swedish and European public.

What Fjordman says makes sense in one context, but not in all of them. Many of the Indonesian victims of gang rape in Saudi Arabia are Muslim girls, not infidel whores. This is just another example of taqiyya at work.

Islam practices misogyny of a most muderous kind. All women — not just infidel women — are potential booty. Objects. Disposable containers. One has only to observe how women are treated in Muslim countries to know you wouldn’t want to be a Muslim woman if you had any say about it.

But Swedish girls want to fight back so they've invented something to protect themselves:

	A group of Swedish teenage girls has designed a belt that requires two hands to remove and which they hope will deter would-be rapists…
	"It's like a reverse chastity belt," one of the creators, 19-year-old Nadja Björk, [said]… meaning that the wearer is in control, instead of being controlled.
	The military-style buckle has a latch that the wearer has to move through a labyrinth into the correct position in order to unlock the belt.
	"You need two hands to open it, so the rapist can't hold you down and open it at the same time. It takes a while to figure it out if you don't know what you're doing," she said.
	The product was designed as part of a high school project in entrepreneurship and the girls have already sold 300 of the belts in Sweden, priced at 150 kronor.
	Björk and one of her partners now plan to start a business to mass produce the belts and are currently in negotiations with potential partners.
	"But I'm not doing this for the money," she said. "I'm really passionate about stopping rape…

Her youth and passion are endearing. However, wait till one of those young women run into a group of Muslim men who don’t find their protection of themselves amusing. Nadja, how many times do you have to get punched before you’ll gladly undo that belt buckle you invented?It’s not just rape, my dear, it’s systematic degradation. If you don’t understand this, ask your fellow countrywoman,who made the mistake of going out to celebrate New Year's Eve with a friend. Here's how her year ended at the hands of five Somali Muslims. Do you think, Nadja, that your belt would have helped her? I don't. I think it would have enraged her attackers even more. They don't let you have guns over there, do they, my girl? Lacking armament, I suggest you consider the oldest weapon women have: men. Belt or no belt, don't leave home without several testosterone-filled humans for back-up.

Otherwise, until your country can make some provision for protection of its women, move here and join the NRA. We'd love to have an entrepreneurial soul like you.

RE: The Stomach Of The Political Class

Representative John Murtha's (D-Pa) contention that the war is unwinnable and we should leave Vietnam Iraq as soon as possible is so well-known that even I, sans TV or newspapers or radio news, had heard of the man and his "tired," worn-out" et ceteras. But since I'd avoided hearing his anti-war rant, I didn't stick around for the outcome.

I should have.

What I hadn't heard, and which gave me great pleasure, was the real story, the actual outcome of Rep. Murtha's "heroic" stance before the MSM, slathering on the words they love to hear. What actually happened is that when Murtha growled, the Republicans turned around and bit him. The House Republicans showed the real grit: they called for an up-or-down vote on Murtha's musings, and Murtha lost so bad you couldn't have found him under the pile: 403-3 said the House. We're not abandoning the Iraqis. In other words, we're not going to make this another Vietnam, no matter how many boomers and their groupies in the MSM long for it.

Can you imagine the headlines the next day? I'll bet you can. Instead of reporting Murtha's drubbing, the old Grey Whore led the pack with “Uproar in House as Parties Clash on Iraq Pullout.” 403-3 is an "uproar"? A "clash"?

The whole thing makes obvious that the nation is not losing hope in the war. 403 Congressmen know which side their bread is buttered on. While the Dems may have cheered Murtha on, they weren't going there with him. Do you think he knew that? Does he get some kind of pay-off for being their canary in the coal mine?

Much has been made of Murtha the Warrior by the MSM. For a different perspective The Buffalo News ran this essay as its lede on the op-ed page today. Reading this soldier's response provided the incentive to go back and find out what happened to Murtha. And by the way, finding the final outcome on google wasn't easy. I had to drill down through three pages of hits before I found out what happened.

The writer of the piece is David Bellavia. He is from Batavia, New York and earned the Silver Star in Iraq. He has also been recommended for the Medal of Honor. Obviously, Representative Murtha's words, and their repetitive drumming by the MSM, have their effect.

As the debris continues to settle from the explosion detonated by the defeatist comments by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., I wonder how he expected his statements to be perceived. As an infantryman whose boots are still caked with blood and dust from Iraq, I am beyond confused by the insistence by Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Louise Slaughter that he preserve his title as a combat visionary.

As rancor and hyperbole peak, we continue to be fed bastardized statistics and a complete denial that Iraq, according to al-Qaida intercepts, is indeed the front line in the war on terror.

[...]

Iraqi veterans are without apologies for not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Former administrations ignored the danger present in this region for years, and we in the trenches now pay the price for our past inability to confront our enemies. Each day, the enemy hopes that one more 10-plus death toll inflicted against the coalition via a roadside bomb will be the last straw of the American collective will.

Make no mistake. This is a middle- to lower-class war, fought by volunteers of the greatest generation of American warriors ever born. I have written more than 47 recommendations for Bronze Star valor awards for the members of my 34-man infantry platoon. That award, alarmingly, is growing more and more common during this fight. And yet my peers cannot use their awards as a platform to defend their noble struggle, because they are still deep in the fight.

Neither Murtha, who wears his Bronze Star as his badge of authority, nor any other congressional representative has held a position in a skirmish line under fire in Iraq, yet they pontificate to the masses from "their war" experience. Not one has borne witness to the extreme close-quarter nature of this fight or commented on the tearful thanks from a deserving and proud people who need us to stay the course.

Yet Murtha has the extreme audacity to call my peers "broken." Funny how a man like Murtha, who made his career on detailing his heroism under fire, is the first to chip away at my generation's valor.

Each day, the Iraqi war veteran grows closer to the embarrassing disrespect of the Vietnam warrior. Each day, legislators like Murtha move us closer to losing a winnable war and abandoning a worthy ally. Staying the course isn't a campaign slogan; it is a life support message to my peers. Like Vietnam, the American soldier cannot be defeated on the field of battle, only by the failure of the political class to stomach the hardships of combat.

Remember that last sentence:

The American soldier cannot be defeated on the field of battle, only by the failure of the political class to stomach the hardships of combat.

These guys are the grandsons of the "Greatest Generation." Obviously the gene pool is in good shape. And it was in Vietnam, too, until the MSM smashed our efforts and led millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians to slaughter. As Bellavia says so well, "Staying the course isn't a campaign slogan; it is a life support message..."

It is the cowards in the MSM we have to be afraid of. Their fear will do us in again if we listen to them. For those of you who read The New York Times, I have a suggestion for your New Year's resolution. Think of it as what you can do for your country when you help this "newspaper" disappear from the horizon just a little sooner. Don't renew.


And Thomas Sowell agrees with the soldier from Batavia, New York. In an essay today, entitled Only Irresponsible Politicians, Media Want Iraq Pullout, Mr. Sowell lays it out:

	…No matter how many towns are wrested from the control of the terrorists by American or Iraqi troops, it just isn't front-page news like the casualty reports or even the doom-saying of some politicians.
	The fact that these doom-saying politicians have been proved wrong, again and again, does not keep their latest outcries from overshadowing the hard-won victories of American troops on the ground in Iraq.
	The doom-sayers claimed that terrorist attacks would make it impossible to hold the elections last January because so many Iraqis would be afraid to go vote. The doom-sayers urged that the elections be postponed.
	But a higher percentage of Iraqis voted in that election -- and in a subsequent election -- than the percentage of Americans who voted in last year's Presidential elections.
	Utter ignorance of history enables any war with any casualties to be depicted in the media as an unmitigated disaster.

I think one of the requirements for "J" school is an absence of the history gene. That way you can just go with whatever feels right at the moment. Or, less radically, you can ignore the facts in the name of larger Truths to which only you and your kind are privy.

Hirsi Ali Doesn’t Get It: Pluralism

 
I hate to lose a heroine. There are so few of them, these larger-than-life leaders who dedicate themselves to the common good. “Public servants” we used to call them, though most who collect government salaries have long since ceased to practice anything but self-service.

Hirsi Ali is different. She is dedicated to the public good and has laid her life on the line for her beliefs. But now, it is precisely those beliefs that call her work into question.

As everyone knows, Ali Hirsi and Theo van Gogh made a ten-minute documentary film, Submission that ended up getting van Gogh killed. He was actually executed because the killer couldn’t get access to Hirsi Ali, who was his real target. He had to be satisfied to append a message to her by a knife stuck to the chest of his dying victim.

Ali’s contention has always been that Islam is harmful to those who practice it. As the victim of an horrific clitorectomy — sans anesthesia — when she was five, Ali is living proof of that claim. She has gone from that contention to include all religions in her indictment against harmful beliefs that must be eradicated if people are to be free.

Just how fervent is her atheism is coming to light in proposed legislation to do away with Article 23 of the Dutch constitution. At the heart of her dissent are the clauses from three to seven:

3) Education provided by public authorities shall be regulated by Act of Parliament, paying due respect to everyone's religion or belief.
(4) The authorities shall ensure that primary education is provided in a sufficient number of public-authority schools in every municipality. Deviations from this provision may be permitted under rules to be established by Act of Parliament on condition that there is opportunity to receive the said form of education.
(5) The standards required of schools financed either in part or in full from public funds shall be regulated by Act of Parliament, with due regard, in the case of private schools, to the freedom to provide education according to religious or other belief.
(6) The requirements for primary education shall be such that the standards both of private schools fully financed from public funds and of public-authority schools are fully guaranteed. The relevant provisions shall respect in particular the freedom of private schools to choose their teaching aids and to appoint teachers as they see fit.
(7) Private primary schools that satisfy the conditions laid down by Act of Parliament shall be financed from public funds according to the same standards as public-authority schools. The conditions under which private secondary education and pre-university education shall receive contributions from public funds shall be laid down by Act of Parliament.

One can understand Ms. Hirsi's concern, if not her conclusions. Private religious schools of the Muslim variety teach values and a way of life that is not conducive to the integration of its students into Dutch life. On the other hand, the Netherlands form, historically, part of Western Europe’s long association with Judaeo-Christian culture. It is these values, formed in a Dutch sensibility about the world, that private and public schools in the Netherlands are designed to inculcate. Ali would lump all these schools together, and it is this stance which may cause her fall from grace.

Unraveling Ms. Ali’s beliefs to find their core is difficult. As does any politician of merit, her views have changed as she has gained experience and perspective. Thus, her initial allegiance to the Dutch Labour Party changed when the Socialists drew back from her ideas about forbidding further Muslim immigration into the Netherlands. Subsequently, she found refuge in the Liberal Party. Now, with her demand that the 23rd amendment of the Dutch constitution be abolished, her place there is threatened.

Alexandra Colen makes several points about Ali in an essay in Brussels Journal. She begins by questioning Ms. Hirsi's understanding of the culture in which she has made her home:

Hirsi Ali became known worldwide as a paragon of the successful immigrant: bright, loquacious, a modern woman readily assimilated into Western society, and aware of the necessity to adopt the values of the nation that she has made home. But how Dutch is she really? This seems to depend on whether or not secularism is seen as the core value of Western society, or rather the Judeao-Christian heritage.

That is a very large question, one which Europe has been grappling with for some time.

In addition, Hirsi Ali appears blind to the Dutch world view:

Her recent clash… revealed an appalling insensitivity to issues relating to religion but also to classical liberalism, where parents, rather than the state, have always been allowed to decide about the education of their children. Though Hirsi Ali exercises her freedom of speech to the full (and rightly so – it is an indication of the intolerance of certain Muslims that she needs constant surveillance at the expense of the taxpayers), she seems never to have heard of freedom of religion and freedom of education – basic freedoms which have always been as central to the concept of the free society as the freedom of the late Theo Van Gogh to shout abuse at people he did not like.

Ms. Ali may not have understood the radical differences between the culture in which she was raised and that which she adopted. Her demand to abolish all non-state schools is similar in spirit to Shari’ a law: it is one of absolutes rather than respect for pluralism.

As Ms. Colin points out:

One may also wonder how much Hirsi Ali really knows about the history of the Dutch. Like other European peoples, they have waged fierce political battles over education and the right to organise independent schools where children could be educated in accordance with the religious values of their parents. Without this system, all traces of Christianity would have long since been eradicated from Dutch society by the secular, anti-religious, “enlightened” establishment. As it is, Dutch society has become largely secular and anti-religious. In all its “enlightenment” it has refused to procreate and, in the name of tolerance, it has accepted alternative lifestyles and multiculturalism. To compensate for the demographic void it created, it has opened its doors to millions of immigrants from an entirely different cultural background, thereby creating the problems that some, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali now hope[s] to fight by restricting the existing freedoms of the West even further for the small band of remaining Christians. Their children will be forcefully secularized by the state, because the latter is frantically searching for a means to forcefully secularize the children of Islam. [emphasis added].

So far, the United States has avoided this clash — but barely. The government-run schools are a hodgepodge of p.c. reflexivity and large doses of irrelevant diversity. These institutions continue to churn out poorly educated, historically ignorant graduates. Attempts to move toward school vouchers which would permit some children to attend private or public schools of their choice have been met with furious attacks by the powerful and entrenched system of spoils that represent American education from kindergarten through graduate school.

Given the experience of the Dutch in having won some freedom of choice in this regard, perhaps we are better off searching for an alternative in which our public schools can be encouraged to atrophy as we find alternative methods of real education. Homeschooling is not increasing in a vacuum, after all. It exists because those parents who can find a way to make the sacrifice in order to avoid public schools are doing so in increasing numbers. This continuing growth of schooling at home represents a push against the dhimmification of public education. So far efforts to ban homeschoolers have failed.

The Islamic schools in our midst are a concern. They have been found to teach anti-American sentiments. But then, so do our public schools, if not so blatantly. Thus, banning religious education would not solve our problem.

Part of the problem is the locus of power. If the provenance of schools were returned to the states and localities, many issues parents have with schools as they are would die a natural death. Parents would return in droves to an institution which they helped devise and run; children would be educated in the values and history of their surrounding community and their families. “National” “education” is a hybrid of the worst elements of each.

Meanwhile, Ali Hirsi is an object lesson: it is difficult indeed to truly move away from one’s origins without bringing along some of the trappings, however unwittingly. Ms. Ali’s one-size-fits-all forcing of secularization on Dutch education in order to avoid Muslim education for any child is not distinguishable in kind from the orthodoxy in which she was raised. It’s merely the substitution of one orthodoxy for another.

Ms. Ali has not learned or experienced true pluralism so she cannot see past the limits of orthodoxy, she can only move the chairs around.

You Don't Have To Be a Lawyer To Be A Dhimmi, But It Helps

 
Jihad Watch has announced the winners for Dhimmi of the Year. The American prize went to Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General and all-around public servant and idiot savant.

Clark’s curriculum vitae is well-enough known, but not having the particulars nailed down, I went a-googling to see what I could find. There were lots of lists and articles, including the usual Wikipedia allotment for a man of, shall we say, his stature. But no particular hit stood out until I tried using the “search within results” function. Another blogger once suggested that should one desire to find the flaws in a particular item (I do believe he was speaking of electronic gadgets) that searching within results using the word “sucks” would bring forth interesting items.

My word, was he ever right! Here is Sandmonkey’s post from December 6th: Ramsey Clark Sucks. To the point, no? This is his blistered opening pass:

The New York Times has done it's best to make Ramsey Clark- ex-US attorney general and Saddam's Lawyer- look a little better than the douche bag that he is in their piece on him. But thankfully, the truth shines clearly through the cracks of their B.S

Now, already, I know this is my kind of thinker. He has the same take on the Old Grey Whore that I do — though I rather think his appellation for Mr. Clark — douche bag? — as one more appropriate for The New York Times rather than its subject.

But that’s a small quibble, for Sandmonkey is following the story closely, and he sees the truth shining through (Truth often does that if the clods aren’t too thick). Here, from the very mouth of Herself:

It is a remarkable roll call, the men who have had him at their side at times of confrontation with America and its government: Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, Slobodan Milosevic of the former Yugoslavia, Charles Taylor of Liberia; and, at home, fringe figures like the Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, the right-wing gadfly Lyndon LaRouche, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life term in an American jail for his role in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

A “remarkable roll call”? Is that what they term it? How about an allusion to the fact that those who lie down with dogs wake up with fleas?

Ramsey Clark must indeed be the scratchingest man in the Western hemisphere.

There will be few who won’t concur with Jihad Watch’s conclusions about this man. There may not be sufficient words to convey the opprobrium in which he is held by many of his fellow Americans. Still, it’s nice to see that an Egyptian has the same ideas about what justice means for Saddam Hussein. I mean, if you can use those two things — justice and Hussein — in the same sentence.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
On a related subject -- since we are speaking of dhimmi attorneys -- the essay on the phenomenon of top-drawer trial lawyers flocking to Gitmo to represent (pro bono, of course) the terrorists who want to kill all of us (including said attorneys), see The National Review for an essay by Deroy Murdock, “Gitmo Legal: Why are top-notch law firms aiding Gitmo detainees?”

What is most fascinating about these folks — forget their "progressive" claptrap agit prop about injustices that break down along gender, class, and racial lines. Just figure this one out: the attorneys from these firms who fly down to hold hands with the terrorists are from the very same firms which represent the companies that built the planes which terrorists flew into the Twin Towers, and the airlines which owned the planes, just to name two creepy connections.

We already know that law firms, even more than mere lawyers, are responsible for much of the mischief in this country. Their reach into all sections of our culture has become a cancer, but with this move into terrorist country, they represent a metastasis. Originally, I’d planned to extract just my favorite firm (in Richmond) from Mr. Murdock's list as an example of the perfidy of “the Guantanamo Bay Bar Association” (to use Mr. Murdock’s term). But perhaps you ought to see the whole ugly truth of Mr. Murdock’s research for yourself:

	*Covington & Burling (520 lawyers; $337.5 million in expected 2005 earnings). Clients: Coca-Cola, Deere & Co., Emory University, Goodyear, IBM, Merck, Microsoft, the NFL, UBS, and 13 Yemeni enemy combatants at Guantanamo.
	*Dorsey & Whitney, Minneapolis (640 lawyers; estimated 2005 gross: $330 million). Clients: 3M, Cargill, ConocoPhillips, General Mills, Northwest Airlines, and six Bahrainians at Guantanamo.
	*Holland & Hart, Denver (300 attorneys in twelve offices). Clients: Safeway, Sears, the Williams Company, and five Algerian terror suspects, including Dr. Abu Muhammed, Abbar Sufian al Hawary, and Motai Saib.
	*Hunton & Williams, Richmond, Virginia (“850 attorneys. 16 offices. Since 1901”). Clients: Bank of America, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Eli Lilly, General Dynamics, General Electric, and six Yemeni suspected terrorists, including Issam Hamid Ali Bin Ali Al Jayfi.
	*Paul, Weiss ($504 million estimated 2005 revenues). Clients: Chubb, DirecTV Group, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Philip Morris, Time Warner, Viacom, and eleven Saudi Guantanamites.

As one U. S. attorney put it, these people could be helping the survivors of Hurricane Katrina:

“Why our best law firms would dedicate their pro bono resources to suspected terrorists rather than, say, people rendered homeless by Katrina, is beyond me,” marvels one former high-level federal attorney who has been involved with these issues. “By definition, these representations only serve to expand the rights of alien enemy combatants during wartime.”

Their treason is beyond me, too. Perhaps Mr. Spencer at Jihad Watch could keep them in mind for next year’s Dhimmi Awards.

Can you think of a more deserving group?


N.B. Deroy Murdock is a syndicated writer and an advisory board member of Project 21. Check it out.

It's Enough to Drive You to Marry

 
Remember Karen Hughes’ speech to the Saudi women, when the latter harumped to Ms. Hughes that the Saudi law preventing them from driving cars was no problem? No problem for them, anyway, living as they are in professional, pampered lives in Riadyh.

But what about the rest of the women in Saudi Arabia? The ones who have to make a living for real? Well, here’s a tale of ingenuity:

According to al-Reuters, four teachers in a rural school in the south-west province of Al-Baha have gotten together with their driver — literally “gotten together,” as in all four of them marrying him and settling down in the village where they teach.

Now why would they do this, you ask? Because it’s a damn long commute and marrying the person who drives you solves the problem of driving while female, a crime punishable by beatings in the Kingdom of Saud. On the other hand, it's perfectly permissible in the Alice-in Wonderland form of Wahhabi sharia law for a man to marry four women. Evidently marrying this chauffeur seemed less tiresome than having him drive them home everyday.

The lucky groom will be paid a share of each teacher’s salary, which no doubt obviates the need to find other work.

This is a story made for the movies. Please, someone, call Roger Simon and see if he can get someone onto the screen play. The high farce inherent in this situation should be captured on film. Especially the part where the husband/driver tries to get along with four women with PMS. Good luck to him; he's going to need it.

Of course, some spoilsport will no doubt issue a fatwa against the writer, actors, director, etc., but what the hey... they can all convert to Hinduism and look forward to reincarnation -- one would hope in a more honorable role than the cinematic life.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, here's a picture of the Queen of Jordan. Kind of makes all those protesting women at Karen Hughes' speech in Riadyh look silly. And that's putting it kindly.

 


Hat Tip: American Ex-Pat