The Truth Project

 
A new blog worth looking at is The Truth Project, whose mission is "Promoting the Dissemination of the Truth about Islam". It posts quotes from Muslims with quotes from kaffirs for comparison. My favorite Muslim quote:

Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth. -Omar Ahmad, Co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

It doesn't get any clearer than that, does it?

Gates of Vienna recommends a look at the Truth Project.

You Have to Live Like a Refugee

 
The inimitable James Lileks, in his most recent Screedblog, discusses the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip:

Perhaps it was a waste of resources to defend 8500 settlers living next to 1.5 million Muslim refugees; unfortunately you can’t give up the land without the sweet lads at Hamas claiming victory and wishing to press their momentum. [emphasis added]

In a sign of how entrenched the Leftist “narrative” of the Palestinian conflict has become, Mr. Lileks uses the word “refugees” to describe the non-Jewish residents of the Gaza Strip. One presumes his use of the word is careless; after all, his position on the Palestinian issue is well-known, and very clear in this particular essay.

How did the children and grandchildren of the Arab residents of the British Mandate of Palestine come to be called refugees? Their ancestors were residents of the Mandate before 1949, and then residents of Egypt or Jordan until 1967. Since that war of Arab aggression, they and their descendants have been residents of the “occupied territories”, left in a limbo created by the intransigence of the Palestinian Authority and the cynical refusal of their Arab neighbors to accept them as residents and citizens.

So now they are all “refugees”, as will be their descendants in perpetuity, until, presumably, they become the joyous citizens of a new Palestine when the Zionist colonizers are finally driven into the sea...?

Given this definition of “refugee”, as concocted by Islamist irredentists and their usefully idiotic Leftist fellow travelers in the West, it is high time to recognize other groups which deserve the same rights as the suffering Palestinians. We will begin with the Acadians of Louisiana, commonly known as “Cajuns”. Their French ancestors were forced out of Nova Scotia and parts of New Brunswick by the British after the end of the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War, a war of French aggression). A number of them migrated south and settled in Louisiana, which was still French territory at that time. When Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, they were once again subjected to the brutal rule of the Anglo-Saxons.

I call for the right of return for the Cajuns, that they might re-occupy their ancestral homes in Moncton and St. John and Halifax and Prince Edward Island, and drive the hated English colonizers into the sea!

Then there are the Tories who fled the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution, grabbing anything that could be piled onto a wagon and hurrying to Ontario or Quebec to escape the oppression of their Yankee overlords. When will their great-great-great-great grandchildren gain the right to return to Manhattan and claim their rightful properties?

Or how about the Germans who, after the War of Nazi Aggression, were deported from their homes in Königsburg in 1945 by the Red Army and resettled in the rump state of Germany? Now that the Soviet Union has attained its well-earned place in the trash compactor of history, the rightful heirs of the East Prussia should be able to return to Kaliningrad, drive their Slavic oppressors into the Baltic, and resume their status as Junker landowners.

The list goes on and on — Lapps, Finns, Basques, Welsh, Poles, Irish… Forget the Irish, what about the Fir Bolg who preceded the Celts in Ireland? When will they gain the right to evict their vicious oppressors? The Etruscans. The Minoans. The Assyrians. The Paleolithic inhabitants of North America who were driven off their land by the “Native Americans” who arrived from Siberia.

The case can be made that we are all refugees, and have the right to return to the places from which we were wrongfully ejected.

As a matter of fact, my great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy during the War of Northern Aggression. He returned in 1865 to his plantation between Richmond and Petersburg to find that it had been burned out by Union troops, and his family had fled to Richmond. Forced into penury as a result, he and his wife were reduced to the position of running a boarding house.

I claim for myself and the future Baron the right of return to that idyllic and hallowed ground in Colonial Heights, and I look forward to the day when we drive the evil Yankee occupiers into the James River.

Get Infidel Threads Spanking Clean!

 


All satire, all the time...

Baghdad: Little Russia

 
A naturalized Canadian citizen who returned to his native Iraq six months ago was kidnapped on August 2nd in Baghdad and killed two days later. His captors used the victim’s own cell phone to demand $250,000.00 from his family for his release. When it was not forthcoming they shot Zaid Meerwali and dumped his body.

Meerwalli was a Shia Muslim who left Iraq in the '90s and settled in Canada. His brother described him as a “trader” and said that Meerwali had married since his return to Baghdad. Claiming that his brother wanted only to help rebuild his native country, Munir Meerwali went on to say that his brother was targeted because he was a Canadian.

That’s disingenuous at best. Mr. Meerwali was targeted because he was wealthy and it was a good opportunity to make a quick killing on an easy target.

His grieving brother was closer to the truth when he described the process in Iraq for new arrivals:

They go only for certain kinds of people -- doctors, engineers -- people they come from outside usually, and those guys they have connections."
He said that whenever a foreign professional arrives in Iraq, kidnappers are notified through a network of informers placed at airports, borders and telephone companies.
"Anybody come, they call those people in these places. They call the people in the intelligence, so they follow him until the right time and they kidnap him."

That’s closer to the truth. Mr. Meerwali was killed because he prospered and because Iraq does not operate under the rule of law. It may be a long, dangerous slog to reach that goal, too.

As the paper noted, more than two hundred foreigners have been kidnapped. It does not say whether ransom was involved in all of them or if some were simply infidel killlings. It also does not mention the large number of native professionals –doctors, lawyers, etc., -- who have been kidnapped and held for ransom. Many such men now hire bodyguards to prevent being taken.

This is just one of the booming businesses in a brutal land. The legacy of Mohammed lives on.

Those who are struggling against the corruption and thuggery are courageous to simply keep on keeping on. This poor, benighted country has had more than its share of sorrows.

It is fortunate for them that their culture frowns on alcohol consumption. Otherwise, they might be like the Russians, dying of alcoholism at an ever-increasing rate as the gangsters make life there not worth living. Or at least not worth living sober.

The next time someone complains about this country, suggest they consider emigration to a friendlier, safer clime. Say, Russia, perhaps. Or Cuba. Or Haiti. Or France, for that matter. There is nothing like living elsewhere for awhile to open your eyes to the niggardly size of our problems compared to most others. Not all, mind you -- there are a few spots left in the Anglosphere where you might feel safe.

Count them on one hand and have some fingers left to count your blessings.

The Boys From Pluto

The world with which the London bombers identify is neither their parents’ culture nor that of their home countries. This tertium quid they have devised, this generational chasm, is one of the reasons the perpetrators of 7/7 could make their plans in the midst of their families with no one the wiser. The parents, stunned, simply call it brainwashing. If only it were that simple. Here’s the profile — what they are, what they are not — taken from Homegrown Terror:

**These are young people who have broken mentally with their backgrounds, even if they are often relatively well integrated in social and economic terms.

**Contemporary terrorists are jihadists, since they have opted from the outset for armed struggle - a struggle that has taken over the targets of the far left in the 1970s, such as US imperialism.

**[They are] both Salafist and jihadist. Salafists seek to purge Islam of all outside influences, starting with the cultures and traditions of Muslim societies, and restore it to the letter of the Qur’an and the tradition of the Prophet.Salafism is fundamentally opposed to all cultural or national forms of Islam.

**These radicals are not fighting for a specific national cause. They are part of the contemporary global jihad: Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir and now Iraq.

**Their enemy is the US and the West in general. They are not fighting to establish an Islamic state in Iraq or Palestine.

**They are not concerned with solidarity networks or fundraising; nor are they involved in the conflicts and practical problems of Muslim populations in Europe.

**None of them is known to have been active in Muslim trade union, political or communal organisations.

**Those who have attended mosques have often done so under the patronage of fundamentalist organisations, such as Jama’at ut-Tabligh, which do not advocate political action.

** The young second-generation Muslims radicalised in the run-down suburbs and inner-city slums of Europe are motivated by their own situation, not Iraq. They have not been sent to fight somewhere: they fight where they live and where most of them were born.


These are different boys than we thought. This second-generation of al-Qaida has global intetions. Their vision of The New World Order is not atttached to anything we have share. These new warriors are not tied to love of a people, a place, or the desire for freedom. Above all that, these are Salafi jihadists. It would be hard to say which part of that term is primary.

The the rest of us are from Mars and Venus, preaching either the need for war or for love as a response to aggression. These boys are from Pluto, the farthest planet (usually) in the solar system. Pluto was the god of Hades and he is who they worship, whether they know it or not. Their belief is a logical extension of Marxism, caricatured and twisted into a cruel post-modern posture that only a deconstructionist could love.

What grotesquery Marx foisted on the world. And now, London, where he concocted his theories, is merely the latest victim of his diabolical ideas. Most certainly it is not the last.

Uleashing the Dogs of Immigration

"Calling President Bush, calling President Bush...the Hispanic vote is moot now. Time to protect the citizens (please read your oath of office, sir)…Karl Rove was right until he was wrong, sir, which is now….”

	Governor Bill Richardson on Friday declared an emergency in four New Mexico counties along the border, an action that lets him free up money to be spent on everything from fighting drug smuggling to fencing a livestock yard.
	The executive order, issued after Richardson toured the area around Columbus, makes $750,000 immediately available to Dona Ana, Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties. He pledged an additional $1 million.
	The money will aid state and area law enforcement efforts, fund a field office for the state Office of Homeland Security and help build a fence to protect a Columbus-area livestock yard where a number of cattle have been killed or stolen.

Well, thank you Governor Richardson. Checkmate. Now let’s see if the federales will be permitted to do their job -- that is if Bush would just give them the go ahead. Perhaps, Governor, your judo move will unleash the dogs of immigration.

It would be the most horrific of legacies if Bush is left with his honorable response to 9/11 being overshadowed by his lack of attention to the terrible conditions on our southern border.

Is this genetic? George the First did a bang-up job on the First Gulf War only to pull back from the denouement, leaving the world saddled with Saddam for all those tortuous years and putting our pilots in danger with those interminable flyovers. GHW Bush will have some questions to answer when posterity ascends to the Judgment Bench. Meanwhile, please do not let it be George the Second’s legacy to have led us through the horror of 9/11 only to founder in the deserts of New Mexico and Texas.

God watches over fools, drunkards, and the United States of America, but surely we’re pushing it.

Hat tip: VDare

See You Next Year in Jerusalem

There are more than two opposed ideas about the Gaza Strip closing -- actually there are probably as many variations on this theme as there are Jews to tell them. The two positions presented here are sensible; they do not agree so much as they dovetail with on another. Each has a good case to make.

The first position says that removing the Jewish settlers is wrong and will lead to further trouble. The second point of view says, no, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza is proof positive of Israel's bona fides in the “peace” “process” or whatever it is you care to term the attempts at bringing down the temperature in the Israeli-Palestinian conflagration.

Hugh Fitzgerald, the vice president of Jihad Watch sees the closing of the settlements in Gaza as both unlawful and immoral:

Israel's destruction of its own villages, some of which long predate the existence of Israel as a state, and all of which are on land which, by the terms of the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine, were part of the tiny territory assigned for the sole purpose of the establishment of a Jewish National Home, is nothing less than geopolitical and moral idiocy. (The Mandate's Preamble states that the Mandatory authority, Great Britain, had to "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land.")

He compares Israel’s occupation with other incorporations in times not too long past — including the eventually successful French claim to Alsace-Lorraine and the United States’ acquistion of California. As he points out, Israel was victorious in the Six-Day War. He’s right, too — that was a war Israel neither wanted nor started. The smug, supremacist Arabs thought they had a cakewalk going in. What they did, however, was to change the perceptions of the rest of the world about who was the paper tiger in the Middle East and who was the real panther in the flesh. But now, Israel, in order to appease, is leaving what is rightfully theirs:

Sharon had an idea. Now the idea has him. He thought that in order to pre-empt pressure from the E.U. and others, he would simply, unilaterally, get out of Gaza. He failed to change course even though it was clear that the Europeans themselves were coming to a new understanding of what Islam, what the Jihad, is all about. And what is still worse, he never made Israel's case. He never explained, nor did the Israeli Foreign Ministry, that Israel had a perfect right to remain in those villages.

Fitzgerald doesn’t call it a “teachable moment” but that is what he is describing when he points out the lost opportunity here:

It was a moment to tell people that these villages were built entirely on sand -- on sand that was owned first by the Ottomans, and then by the Mandatory authority, and then by the successor state, Israel, which has the strongest legal, historic, and moral claims. But Sharon, and the helpless, hopeless, Israeli leaders never made any of this clear.

The mess has been made, so what kind of clean-up and salvage does Mr. Fitzgerald envision?

There is only one way to retrieve some small victory out of this self-inflicted defeat. It is for the Infidel world to do nothing to disguise what goes on in Gaza… That is to not help conceal in any way the "Palestinians" as they shriek with joy, ululate with orgasmic pleasure, over the remains of those tidy houses and orchards, which they themselves have never managed to create anywhere in the lands that they have controlled.

Here’s what the light should shine on

The chaos and the shooting in the air, the whole mess -- let it be exposed. No Infidel aid. No infusions of money from American taxpayers to people who hate, and have been instructed to hate, and hate, all Infidels -- "the Jews and the Americans" and everyone else who is not Arab and Muslim.

In other words, accept the inevitable and make sure the results are reported in signficant and detailed accounts to the West. This is a fine idea.Further, the Christian churches so eager to "dis-invest" from Israel can give aid to the Palestinian "victims." The churches had better not hope for an accounting of their aid funds, however. That's not how Hamas operates.

The other view, from a long account on Norm’s Blog, is that of Linda Grant. She has been on the ground in Israel for some time, doing her research for a forthcoming book. Ms. Grant is knowledgeable about Israel’s far Left, and found them firm in their conviction that the whole idea was a hoax. They were sure the withdrawal would never happen. Writing before the gates closed, she said:

On Sunday the army is expected to arrive at the remaining settlements, as part of a deployment of 55,000 troops and police … and those who plan to practise non-violent resistance will be led in handcuffs from their homes. There is only so long the recalcitrant can stay.

They expect violence from the small far-Right parties, who may try to take on the Army. It is not expected that the resistance will last.

Ms. Grant says that this last gasp is predictable. When she was in Gush Katif (part of Gaza) it seemed apparent to her that the majority would go while a sizeable minority would be carried out kicking and screaming and a very few might dangerously resist. However what she noted was the response last Autumn of the far Left. It was disdainful dismissal:

'You don't believe,' they said to me scornfully, 'that the disengagement is actually going to happen, do you? You poor deluded tourist, we know the government. Don't believe a word of what they say.'

They were certain, as rock-hard certain as Leftists tend to be about matters their absolutes. In other words, there is no room for entertainment of an opposite possibility.

The Israeli far left were certain no disengagement from Gaza could take place. A blog, updated regularly until May of this year, collected articles amassing the evidence that the Gaza disengagement was a hoax - a conspiracy hatched during the period when Sharon was under investigation for corruption during the Greek Island Affair, or to divert attention away from the ICJ's ruling on the fence. It would be quietly dropped or indefinitely delayed. But it would never happen. And if by any chance it did, it would be derailed by civil war.

There is some kind of intellectual comfort in knowing that the extremes in any culture deal in paranoia as a way to devalue whatever causes dissonance in their world view. These people sound much like our very own moonbats, don’t they?

Since the settlers didn’t want to go, they made their alliance with the far Left. The settlers were convinced that the will of God and the “better instincts” of their fellow Israelis would provide a way out of the closure of the Gaza strip.

As Ms Grant observes, both factions were living in a dream world. It was not a world which allowed them to gauge realistically the mood of the rest of the country or the commitment of their government to get on with it. As she says, both were “impervious to reason,” even if for different reasons. She describes the emotional climate in the lead up to the locking of the gates to Gaza:

The settlers believe that God gave them the land in perpetuity and would not permit it to be removed. The far left thought that Zionism was a colonial expansionist movement that would not give up an inch of what it regarded as eretz-Israel, the Promised Land. Not only would it not give up any land, its intention was to acquire more.

These residents of LaLa Land are impervious, believing the Iraq war to be simply a diversion so that Palestinians could be removed forcibly from the West Bank and shipped to Jordan while the world’s press was looking the other way. Not only that, but this current withdrawal is just a pretext, a cover for the massacre to be perpetrated in Gaza. As Ms. Grant notes—

	conspiracy theory is no substitute for a proper analysis. We do not have to applaud Sharon's actions or intentions, we merely need to understand what exactly they are…It was…stated clearly from the outset that the Gaza disengagement was part of an overall plan to defuse what was seen as the demographic time bomb, a future in which Jews would be a minority of the population, between the Jordan and the sea.
	It should now be obvious that the function of the fence was to construct a de facto border, behind which would be a Palestinian state smaller and more fragmented even than in the offer made by Ehud Barak at Camp David.
	It suits the purposes of Sharon for Gaza to sink quickly into anarchy, for Hamas to rise, for it to become another failed Islamic state, without even the dignity of statehood. Then he will be able to say to the international community, 'See? How can you do business with these people? They're barbarim' - barbarians.
	We should not mistake Sharon's plans for anything other than what they are: realpolitik - the scheme of a master tactician intent on political survival. The Sharon vision is that of disconnected, powerless bantustans.

Grant seems to think that the true significance of the Gaza withdrawal lies in a reality that is seldom discussed here:

…that both a government and the rest of the Israeli population are at long last prepared to stand up to the power and arrogance of the settler movement who have sought to substitute eretz Israel, the land of Israel, for the state of Israel.

And what is the distinction? It is the difference between theocracy —living under a Jewish version of Shar’ia Law — and a democratic, secular state:

	The Israeli public backs the disengagement, and so do the majority of Jews in the Diaspora - the Greater Israel movement is effectively dead as any significant force in Israeli society, one with a future. They have lost the argument and are losing the war.
	Dror Etkes of Peace Now's Settlement Watch [said]:
	...Let's not fool ourselves: there will still be missiles, there will be a long war of attrition after the withdrawal. It will turn Gaza into a prison, yes, but one with fewer guards, a bit less friction, a bit less blood, and a first and a not-even-third world economy a metre away from each other. It will still be hell for the Palestinians, just a slightly sweeter hell. But the withdrawal is a necessary precondition to ignite the end of the conflict and the beginning of reconciliation. Its cardinal advantage is the introduction of history, of real political considerations. [Italics LG's.] The majority of Israelis are terrified, traumatised people seeking to reach normality and, as in any other society, they are far from being equipped with a good political memory or able to assume real responsibility for democracy.

So now begins the struggle for the future. It is a struggle which engages all of us. Mr. Fitzgerald thinks it can bring only failure unless we keep the spotlights on over Gaza. Ms. Grant thinks it’s a good opportunity to have a truly secular state.

Time will tell which analysis is the correct one. Or perhaps they both are, with Ms. Grant’s having a more optimistic outcome.

We Americans find it hard to ‘wait and see.’ The Israelis have been playing some tense and traumatic version of this tune since 1948.

Romeo and Juliet, Muslim Style

From Barcepundit to Dhimmi Watch to The Scotsman, we rewind the film to ascertain the real motive for the murder of Stephen Vincent.

And I hate to say this, I hate it ….because I didn’t have the courage of my convictions when I read of his death. Some little nugget of intuition said “this is about the woman, this is about the woman…” But I ignored what I knew at a visceral level because there was no information. I know; I looked. It was hard to even get her name. It was infuriating that she might die without a name.

	An American journalist who was shot dead in Basra last week was executed by Shiite extremists who knew he was intending to marry his Muslim interpreter, it has emerged.
	Steven Vincent was shot a week before the planned wedding to Nouriya Itais and had already delivered a $2,500 dowry to her family.

	In America, his death was taken as retribution for his article. But in London yesterday, British officials pointed out that the police in Basra believed it was retribution for his affair.
	"We warned him to look after his security in a more professional manner than he was doing," said the official.
	The couple were found by Iraqi police after being shot by their captors. Medics managed to save Ms Itais.

So what does "looking after his security in a more professional manner" mean, precisely? That he should've spirited Ms. Itais out of the country before marrying her? Probably so. He must have known the penalty for a kaffir marrying a Muslim. Surely he did?

Stephen Vincent was knowledgeable about Islam and about Muslim customs. He knew Iraq. But he was led by his heart and it got him killed.

As they say, follow the money -- in this case right to the dowry. But first, follow your heart. Turns out mine was right. Dammit.

Don't you wonder now if her family was complicit in this? My intution tells me thay had the $2,500.00. Were they willing to lose a daughter?

Yeah...follow the money and trust your gut.

Two more questions: what do you think Ms. Itais is doing right now? Shakespeare killed her off but the Iraqis let her live. Do you think they are letting her live in peace?

MIDNIGHT AT THE GAZA STRIP GATE

From The Jerusalem Post

	In a midnight ceremony at the Kissufim checkpoint, the IDF sealed the Gaza Strip to incoming Israeli civilian traffic for a final time, marking the beginning of the end of a 38-year presence.
	A barrier was lowered bearing two red signs – one in English and one in Hebrew – stating that entry into the Gaza Strip "is forbidden by law."

...

	Over the past few weeks, the IDF has built a large gate at the Kissufim site. At midnight the IDF, with only the smallest amount of pomp, closed it.
	For two days, until Wednesday – when evacuation forces begin removing those settlers that have remained in their homes – the gate will remain open to traffic leaving Gaza only.

...

…

The sealing of Gaza comes under the terms of the Disengagement Implementation Law. According to the law, Gush Katif and northern West Bank settlers have until Wednesday to leave their homes.

The next move belongs to Palestine. Let's see what they do with it.

A Day at the Shar'ia Beach

God bless Roger Simon. He comes up with the most intriguing little tidbits. One has to wonder what websites he visited to stumble upon this particular morsel.

I will be the first to admit that I've wondered sometimes what Saudi women wear while swimming(you deal with your fantasy life, I'll deal with mine). Hard as I tried, I couldn't envision anything but large, floating tents that you swam under and they somehow moved along with you. Even google was no help on the subject, though that was some time ago; perhaps Saudi swimsuits are a seasonal thing, thus allowing Roger to find this catalogue offering in August.

So here she is, Ms. Wahhibi at the seashore. The hotel pool? As one of Roger's commenters said, this may be why Arab women don't win medals at the Olympic swim meets. He's on to something there.

On the other hand, this woman is never going to get skin cancer from too much exposure to the sun. She might die of heat stroke decked out in all that gear, but she'll die with nothing showing.

Dymphna's aunt was a Franciscan sister for sixty years and some of Celine's time was spent as the Mother Superior of a small convent in Tybee Beach, Georgia. Believe me, they never got that covered up. In fact, compared to this woman, they were downright licentious in their black, one-piece, longish boxer-shorts type bathing suits and their white latex bathing caps. But from a distance they passed for your regular, Western-type woman out for a swim.

If this is a must-have for your late summer wardrobe -- say for Labor Day at the old swimming hole -- go here. You have a choice of the six colors shown, but it doesn't say if the whole ensemble includes the flip-flops. Surely flip-flops are infidel fashion? Toes are a real turn on for some men, but maybe that doesn't apply to Wahhabis.

Come to think of it, sooo much of what passes for normal behavior in the 21st century doesn't apply to Wahhabis that the world has taken to looking on in bemused horror at their attempts to meld their beliefs and their contact with modernity. This particular effort is higher on the bemusement scale than, say, their current project of bulldozing Mecca.


UPDATE: Cutler's Yankee Station has an eerie comparison of the swimsuit photo with another picture, this one from the last presidential campaign. As Malvolio says, "some have greatness thrust upon them."

Taking Taqiyya to the Big Leagues

 
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows the concept of taqiyya. It’s Arabic, and basically it means “lie like a rug and make a fool of your opponent while you go ahead and do what you say you’re not doing.” It’s how Muslims negotiate and it has Mohammed’s blessing. Prevarication in the name of Islam is considered lawful and legal and even to be admired. How do you think Mohammed managed his initial victories and the capture of Medina via slaughter without setting up his victims first with an “agreement”?

So does this latest treachery by the Iranians surprise anyone except the useful idiots who sat at the negotiating table with them?—

	An Iranian foreign policy official has boasted that the regime bought extra time over its stalled negotiations with Europe to complete a uranium conversion plant.
	In comments that will infuriate EU diplomats, Hosein Musavian said that Teheran took advantage of the nine months of talks, which collapsed last week, to finish work at its Isfahan enrichment facility.

Mr. Musavian fairly gloated over his smooth lies:

	Thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year in which we completed the [project] in Isfahan,” he told an Iranian television interviewer.
	Mr Musavian also claimed that work on nuclear centrifuges at a plant at Natanz, which was kept secret until Iran’s exiled opposition revealed its existence in 2002, progressed during the negotiations.
	“We needed six to 12 months to complete the work on the centrifuges,” said Mr Musavian, chairman of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council’s foreign policy committee. He made his remarks on August 4 - two days before Iran’s foreign ministry rejected the European Union offer of incentives to abandon its uranium enrichment programme.

The Telegraph noted that the United States was always pessimistic about the chances for success of the negotiations…

Yesterday President George W Bush refused to rule out using military force to press Iran into giving up its nuclear programme, which Washington suspects is a front for weapons-making. “All options are on the table,” Mr Bush told Israeli television.

What do those Euro-duds need to convince them they are dealing with Muslims and that Muslims lie, lie, lie? And they hedge, prevaricate, stall and circumvent. It’s all legal, it’s all in the Koran.

What they can’t do in this country is beat around the Bush. George has their number. Let’s hope he’s willing to play it.

Smoking:Lung Cancer :: Socialism:Child Murder

 
Be patient. It will take awhile to establish these links. Just about as long as it took the link between smoking and lung cancer to be admitted, accepted, and then established as fact. Once upon a time, a researcher could get fired for finding a link between lung cancer and smoking. Remember the days when doctors endorsed Luckies? Hey, I’m old enough to remember smoking in my living room with our family doctor when he came by on a house call to see my ailing son. We both smoked in front of this child who was sick with a respiratory ailment.

But times have changed because our available information has changed. From universal tobacco smoke wherever you went, smoking is now rated right up there with social disease. Just to take a random example, what do you want to bet that they frown on smoking at NARAL meetings while touting the moral neutrality of partial birth abortion? Aside from a few furtive hold-outs, cigarettes are becoming the albatross only of the underclasses.

Meanwhile, here’s a news report from the Brussels Journal. Warning: the material is bizarre, inhuman and painful to read.

It seems that Sabine H., a thirty nine year old woman has had nine children in the last twenty years. Or rather, nine babies, since they never grew up. After each birth she killed the baby and buried it in a flower pot. The news report doesn’t say whether or not she used a fresh flowerpot for each baby but for some strange, no doubt hormonally-driven reason, I want each baby to have had his very own flowerpot.

Of course, eveyone is shocked, shocked I tell you. The interior minister announced that everyone must ask themselves how this “unbeleivable crime remained hidden all these years.” I’m sure he meant to say “crimes” since there were nine of them. Then, upon reflection, Mr. Schoenbohm suggested that “one of the causes of this horrible crime might have been the “proletarisation” of the former GDR.”

You see, the GDR was East Germany, and as we all know East Germany was a Communist dictatatoship. Perhaps, the interior minister (a man with higher political ambitions) suggested, it was living in such an amoral climate that had been the root cause of Sabine H.'s murders and flower pot burials:

Schoenbohm had opined that the compulsory collectivisation of farms 50 years ago in the largely rural state had led people to lose their sense of personal responsibility, which in turn had led to a decline of moral values in society. “This is one of the fundamental reasons for both the disregard of and the readiness to resort to violence,” he said, blaming communism and the “deliberate proletarisation” of the country by the former SED regime.

You can bet that this kind of moral conjecture brought the wrath of…well, not of God, perhaps, but the wrath of the German politicos, which is probably worse.

Schoenbohm was immediately criticised by the German Left Party (the “post-communist” successor to the SED), the Greens, the Socialist SPD, and the Liberal FDP, while even his own party leader Angela Merkel called him to account.

There were calls for his resignation and indignant claims that he had insulted East Germans. The Speaker of the German Parliament, a socialist, angrily retorted that he was not going to accept any blame that saw the GDR as “the root of all evil.”

However, as the Brussels Journal points out, the interior minister has hit a sensitive nerve.

A number of German academics and intellectuals, however, stress that Schoenbohm’s explanation should not be rejected out of hand. Crime expert Christian Pfeiffer pointed out that according to official statistics the risk of being killed by their parents is three times as high for children in East-Germany as for those in West-Germany. The historian Hubertus Knabe, who researched the archives of the former East-German secret police Stasi, said Germans ought to reflect on the causes of Sabine H.’s behaviour, though he stressed that obviously not all East-Germans are child murderers.

And then the Brussels Journal makes its case, here:

Sabine H’s case, though horrendous in its scope, is not an isolated one. Over the past years there were 17 cases of child murder in East-Germany, with a total of over more than 40 victims.

Further, the author proposes an analogy, one which you will hear more of in the coming years re various acts and their unintended consequences both for the actor and for the larger community in which she lives:

The situation can be compared to that of a smoker who is dying of lung cancer after having smoked two packets of cigarettes a day for 30 years, and who claims that his cancer has nothing to do with his smoking habits, ignoring the fact that thousands of heavy smokers develop lung cancer.

In a final entreaty to reason, they plead for recognition of the obvious:

Surely the fact that the loss of morals due to communism may have something to do with this spectacular rate of infanticide must be taken into consideration. That socialists and post-communists alike feel uncomfortable about this is understandable, but one wonders why Angela Merkel should call a party member to account for stating the obvious, namely that a regime that robs people of their sense of personal responsibility also robs society of its moral values.

Good summation of this moral conflict and self-questioning, but the real parsing of the problem was made in the beginning, by the interior minister:

…the compulsory collectivisation of farms 50 years ago in the largely rural state had led people to lose their sense of personal responsibility, which in turn had led to a decline of moral values in society.

In other words, the right to private property is the source of liberty. Frédéric Bastiat said it was the primary source of liberty and was God-given. Where men take it away by force, they also rip asunder and eventually cause to atrophy a multi-layered, dense and highly contexted individual morality. Morals are not about being good. They are body-based, visceral understandings of how the world operates and on what it hinges. Morality is the deep understanding that all actions have consequences and that we can never know ahead of time absolutely every ramification of our behaviors.

Socialism in all its forms destroys the very idea of personal responsibility, leaving in its place a vapid and vacuous sense of license.

What a gyp.

Indus Valley Rising

 
Welcome a new friend to the blogosphere! Longtime Gates of Vienna commenter Krishna Kirti has started his own blog, Indus Valley Rising, in which he will examine the issues of the Great Islamic Jihad from its Hindu front. A sample:

I named this blog Indus Valley Rising because India is gradually becoming a world power. Of all the other civilizations that are rising in the World, I think it is in the best interests of the world--particularly the West as well as India, of course--that India prevails over others such as China to its East and Islam from its innards to the West. India retains an historical and linguistic kinship with Britain and the rest of the Anglosphere, so from a purely political and cultural point of view the rise of India as a super-power is in the best interests of the West. The West does not want China nor Islam to get substantially more powerful than they are. That will be a mutual disaster for both the West and India. In order to revive culture and peace in the world, the depopulating West is unlikely to do it without the help of a friendly civilization that has still retained the idea of a future worth creating. I believe that civilization to be centered within India, and that civilization is the Hindu civilization.

It has long been my assertion that Hinduism is compatible with the Judaeo-Christian world, and that India is a natural ally with the West in its confrontation with the Third Wave of the Great Islamic Jihad. It seems that Krishna Kirti agrees.

Keep an eye on his blog.

Bulldozers for Allah

 
So much for Tancredo’s option. In a short while there won’t be anything to nuke. The Saudis, those Wahhabist preservers of antiquities, are in the process of reducing thousands of years of antiquities to rubble. Remember when their Afghan Taleban adherents blew up the Buddhist statues near Bamiyan? Same general principle.

Islam is a hard concept to get your mind around, but the Wahhabi version is the strangest of them all. Had it not been for petroleum, we’d never have heard of their austere nihilism. They could be dismantling Mecca and Medina and we’d shrug and go about our business. Unfortunately we get to witness this pathological destruction up close.

How must it feel for other Muslims, those who care deeply about their pilgrimages to the Holy Places, to have these sites eradicated in the name of some punitive and destructive theology that abhors history, reverence for the past, and love of place?

Writing in the Independent (subscription required) Daniel Howden describes the unprecedented destruction of a holy place by its own people:

	Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.
	Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades.
	Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

According to Sami Angawi, an expert on regional Islamic architecture, the last days of Mecca and Medina are imminent. There are fewer than twenty structures left that date back to Mohammed’s time, and those which remain are set to be bulldozed, too.

This strange Wahhabi visionary annihilation in the name of holiness descended on Saudi Arabia with the victory of the al- Saud tribe in the 1920’s. They are fanatics — as we have witnessed in their clinging to slavery, the slaughter of those who fail to adhere to the Wahhabi tenets, and their world-wide dissemination of money to fund the teaching of Wahabbi Islam from Afghanistan to Indiana.

Thus they destroy their history in order to prevent idolatry. Pilgrims making their way to Mecca or Medina might unwittingly worship the place and not the god, Allah. From this theological mistake could arise polytheism, tolerance, and who knows what else?

So Medina and Mecca must go.

As John R. Bradley notes in his new book Saudi Arabia Exposed, the practice of idolatry in the kingdom remains, in principle at least, punishable by beheading. And Bradley also points out this same literalism mandates that advertising posters can and need to be altered. The walls of Jeddah are adorned with ads featuring people missing an eye or with a foot painted over. These "deliberate imperfections" are the most glaring sign of an orthodoxy that tolerates nothing which fosters adulation of the graven image. Nothing can, or can be seen to, interfere with a person's devotion to Allah.

The Wahhabi answer to the threat of history is a bulldozer and concrete.

For once, though, this is not America’s problem. It is an Islamic problem. What’s your guess as to how it will be solved?


Hat tip to Jeff in the comments section of the Lebanese Political Journal blog