Don’t give me any “I don’t do videos” BS. This is three and a half minutes long and vitally important:
It is incomprehensible to me that there are Americans – non-Muslims – who fail to appreciate the evil and savagery of Islam.
Any woman who sees this and remains persuaded that “Islam respects women’s rights” is too far gone into lunacy to be helped – or trusted.
As Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said, there is no “moderate” Islam. And now Rashida Tlaib, the newly elected Muslim Congressvermin from Michigan, has confirmed that verdict:
Tlaib deleted the tweet swiftly...but not swiftly enough to prevent the Internet, with its inexhaustible memory, from capturing it.
Rashida Tlaib is plainly anti-American. The Michiganders who put her in office are equally anti-American. Islam is anti-American, which is why Muslims were forbidden to immigrate to the United States under the terms of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. And the rest of the country needs to know it.
I shall repeat myself:
No further immigration of Muslims can be permitted.
Every Muslim in the U.S. must be expelled.
All mosques must be demolished.
Wake up, America...before you wake up dead.
Let’s have a little C. S. Lewis:
“Yes,” said Weston at last, “and I will begin with a frank admission. You may make what capital of it you please. I shall not be deterred. I deliberately say that I was, in some respects, mistaken — seriously mistaken — in my conception of the whole interplanetary problem when I went to Malacandra.”Partly from the relaxation which followed the disappearance of the pistol, and partly from the elaborate air of magnanimity with which the great scientist spoke. Ransom felt very much inclined to laugh. But it occurred to him that this was possibly the first occasion in his whole life in which Weston had ever acknowledged himself in the wrong, and that even the fake dawn of humility, which is still ninety-nine per cent of arrogance, ought not to be rebuffed — or not by him. (From Perelandra)
A Swedish theologist has publicly denounced Islamism. A couple of detractors have leaped on her act of considerable courage with comments to the effect of “It’s about BLEEP!ing time.” This is small minded told-you-so crap that decent persons should condemn. An awakening to and admission of one’s own errors is not to be derided!
The Swedes are awakening to their danger. Many others remain asleep. Don’t pour contempt on the first flickering sparks of wisdom reborn.
Our CULTURE - the prevalent, progressive culture that "everyone" agrees on - is dying. Either we shift to a more robust culture, or we die with it.Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb.
Forgive me, Gentle Reader, but I can’t let this pass:
How inconvenient that First Amendment is for the tyrannists in government and their friends in the savage world of Islam! While you were sleeping, a federal prosecutor named Bill Killian aka Muhammad al Tyranni Killian announced criticism of the religion of murder would violate civil rights laws. We are so civilized in America these days that we will imprison our citizens who dare criticize the religion whose goal is total destruction of our country and the deaths of our citizens!Federal prosecutor Muhammad al Tyranni Killian said:
“This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion. This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”
Yo, Killian:
Now try to do something about it, Killian. But come well armed and armored, because I’m a very good shot.
Christ told us to “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Christians are supposed to take that stricture to heart and live by it: to condemn behavior rather than persons. The rationale, of course, is that no man can truly be condemned except by God, and He waits until the end of life to do so.
But it’s hard. Especially in light of stories like this one:
“He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God. … He said that raping me is his prayer to God.”These extraordinary statements come from girls who were kept as sex slaves by jihadis of the Islamic State, as reported in a lengthy and revealing New York Times piece that was published Thursday.
Not only does the piece illustrate the horrifying ordeal that Yazidi and other non-Muslim women endure at the hands of the Islamic State when they are forced into sexual slavery, but — most surprisingly — the article explains in detail how these monsters believe they are pleasing their bloodthirsty god by destroying these girls.
Reported the Times’ Rukmini Callimachi:
In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
Reflect on that for a moment before continuing on.
With all the domestic troubles the United States suffers today, it’s hard to make room in one’s thoughts for seemingly distant evils such as ISIS, Iran, HAMAS, and Islam generally. But of course, just because we spare them no thought doesn’t mean they’re not out there destroying the lives and lands they afflict today. They’re potentially just as threatening to us here at home. They become more so by dint of our refusal to think about them.
ISIS isn’t currently top o’ the heap for Islamic threats; that honor goes to rapidly nuclearizing Iran. Yet it possesses a significance that Americans would be advised not to overlook. That significance stems from its wholehearted embrace of evil – an evil the Qur’an explicitly ratifies, even encourages, in its text:
And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then one of those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline to injustice. [Qur’an, Sura 4, Verse 3]
“That your right hand possesses” is the Quranic phrase that denotes slaves taken as captives in jihad:
This term includes the slave girls and slaves in general those who are under control of a free Muslim. As a rule, the only channel of producing this segment of society is Jihad in the cause of Allah....At last, a Muslim has the right to have sex with a slave girl since she is "in the possession of his right hand". Then, if she has a child, it becomes Haram to sell her, and when her master dies, she becomes free.
Note that such slaves possess no rights against their owner. They may not refuse to be “married” to him. Note also that slavery is still practiced, more or less openly, in Islam-dominated lands – and I don’t mean just the swatch of land currently controlled by ISIS.
The Nuremberg Trials, a wholly unique exercise of jurisprudence in the history of post-Westphalian nation-states, were founded on a premise that had never before been articulated and acted upon: There is a law higher than any law made by a nation-state, and everyone is expected to know it. That premise was used to disallow claims by the Nazis that came before the tribunals that what they did was only what was required of them by Third Reich law.
Twelve Nazis were condemned to death by those tribunals:
Not one of those twelve could be proved ever to have taken a life by his own hand. Yet they had collaborated in the construction and operation of one of the greatest instruments of death the world had ever seen, whether as its planners, its executives, or its ideologists. They had lent their intellects and efforts to it willingly. The Tribunal’s verdicts were based on the premise above: i.e., that they could not have been unaware that what they were doing was absolutely wrong, despite any “laws” to the contrary.
For a villain who has wholly surrendered his will to evil, death is the only proper sentence. Consider this passage from Perelandra:
Then he remembers—as one remembers an island of consciousness preceded and followed by long anesthesia—going forward to meet the Un-man for what seemed the thousandth time and knowing clearly that he could not fight much more. He remembers seeing the Enemy for a moment looking not like Weston but like a mandrill, and realising almost at once that this was delirium. He wavered. Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever had in our world came over him—a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotions and its object. Bleeding and trembling with weariness as he was, he felt that nothing was beyond his power, and when he flung himself upon the living Death, the eternal Surd in the universal mathematic, he was astonished, and yet (on a deeper level) not astonished at all, at his own strength. His arms seemed to move quicker than his thought. His hands taught him terrible things. He felt its ribs break, he heard its jaw-bone crack. The whole creature seemed to be cracking and splitting under his blows. His own pains, where it tore him, somehow failed to matter. He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year.
Thus judged the tribunals of Nuremberg...and thus must be our judgment upon ISIS and all others who cleave to the conviction that “Allah” wills their subjugation and abuse of “the unbeliever.”
Perhaps the following expresses the concept most succinctly:
I, for one, would sleep soundly afterward.
Senator Rand Paul unnecessarily angered quite a few GOP true-blues with the following:
(Feel free to pull the ripcord after about 2:00, as the rest of the video is rather discursive, and contains much that pro-freedom conservatives would reject on the merits.)
Reactions on the Right have been exceedingly negative. Consider this from Sara Noble:
Hello! Radical Islam and the radical Islamists caused ISIS! Are we incapable of blaming the truly guilty parties who would have warred against the people no matter what? We’re scapegoats.[Senator Paul] also criticized Republicans for going along with Obama’s war in Libya but I have to agree with him there and always had agreed with him on that, not because the idea of deposing Gaddafi was all that bad, but because Obama never agreed to fight it adequately.
However, just as Senator Paul has overstated his case, Sara has cited an indisputable nugget of truth but is inclined to throw out the bathwater without first removing the baby, so there’s much to discuss.
No, the United States didn’t “create” ISIS or Islamic fanaticism — that was a very poorly chosen word on Senator Paul’s part — but we surely produced conditions favorable to its metastasis, in a place where and at a time when the Islamist tumor was already present and growing.
Like nature, power abhors a vacuum. The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, followed by the precipitous withdrawal of American power from Iraq at a time when regional tensions were near their peak, created a power vacuum that no one but the Islamists was ready to exploit. The ludicrous government in Iraq and the Assad regime in Syria were both unwilling and incapable of regularizing the situation: the first because it was too busy establishing a Shia-dominant, Iran-friendly corruptocracy intent upon disenfranchising Iraqi Sunnis; the second because of the ongoing Syrian civil war. So the largely ungoverned north of Iraq and the huge piles of armaments U.S. forces left behind were easy pickings for the fanatics. There can be no question that those armaments, which included many heavy weapons and armored units, have been of great value to ISIS.
Where the senator erred was assigning the responsibility entirely to GOP “hawks.” Our entire political class was complicit — and the responsibility stretches well back into the Bush 41 administration.
No one on the Right, certainly not I, would claim that America deliberately and willfully created conditions favorable to the rise of ISIS. But a well-intentioned mistake in foreign policy can do a great deal of damage, and the U.S. has made quite a few in recent years.
The core of the subject is the ever-maddening question: When, where, why, and how should the United States use its military powers? This is not a question that can be answered definitively, for the ages. Military force, like all applications of force, intimidation, or politico-economic influence, always has more than one effect – and at least one of its effects is guaranteed to be undesirable. Ultimately, practical considerations must rule: the decision to intervene militarily must be predicated on a high probability that should we stay our hand, the outcome will be substantially worse.
The invasion of Iraq in 1990 was justified by Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait – “Province 19,” as he styled it. Whether that was adequate reason for our action is debatable, as Kuwait was not then (nor is it now) partner to a treaty of mutual defense with the U.S. Moreover, there is reason to believe that behind the representations about defending Kuwait from enslavement was a more urgent motivation: the protection of the ruling regime of Saudi Arabia, also not a treaty partner of the U.S. Given subsequent events, the wisdom of that motivation can also be debated.
The insertion of American power into the Gulf region created a pair of attitudes there. First, the Gulf states and the Saudis were given reason to believe that they could count on America as the maintainer of the regional status quo. Second and equally important, the insertion provided fuel to the ideological fires of Middle Eastern Islamists, who had already become a significant influence on developments and had acquired Afghanistan, Pakistan, and above all Iran as sponsors and safe havens. It didn’t matter that we withdrew our forces as soon as Saddam’s were expelled from Kuwait; the image of the U.S. as a quasi-colonial master to the Middle East, determined to maintain conditions favorable to a continuing supply of oil, stuck in many minds.
When George W. Bush resolved to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2002, he had a great deal of intelligence concerning the Ba’athists’ drive for weapons of mass destruction. Some of that intelligence was provably correct: there were indeed foundries for the manufacture of nerve gas and the delivery systems for it. The intel about Saddam’s quest for nuclear weapons has since come into question, but at the time it appeared as solid as anything we thought we knew about the Middle East.
Would President Bush (43) have refrained from the invasion had the abovementioned intelligence been shown to be dubious? Possibly, but not certainly. He believed that Iraq was “low-hanging fruit” whose liberation and democratization would create favorable ripples throughout the Middle East. If that supposition was incorrect, it can no longer be proved so, for our ineptitude in the period that followed large-scale combat operations cannot be separated from what has followed.
Middle Eastern societies, one and all, are legacy societies. Their fundamental legacy is the totalitarian creed that calls itself Islam, which is imposed willy-nilly on every infant practically from the day he speaks his first word. Thus, their people haven’t got the cultural foundation for freedom or democracy. The only way to impose those things on them is by the long-term application of irresistible force: an occupation period decades long, enforced by a large contingent of American troops and administrators similar to what we imposed on Japan after World War II.
All that having been said, there is simply no question that the policies and actions of the Obama Administration have multiply compounded the damage. Indeed, had it not been for Obama’s insane decisions to abandon Iraq, to support the Islamist uprising in Egypt, to involve itself in the upheavals in Syria, and to facilitate the destruction of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, the current condition of the region would be markedly better than it is today — not in the sense of a freer or “more democratic” Middle East, but in the more fundamental sense of less violence and privation for the millions who live there.
The United States has indeed been complicit in creating the conditions for the rise of ISIS. That we now dither over whether to “go back in” has no bearing on the soundness of the causal chains that led to the chaos of today.
Decisions are – and should be – based on knowledge and understanding. The former usually reduces to “the best information available at the time.” The latter requires a grasp of the fundamentals of a situation: the causal relations that predominate over it.
Some seventy percent of the nation favored the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A similar percentage favored it in 1990. At that time, we possessed both inadequate knowledge and inadequate understanding; in Donald Rumsfeld’s words, we were crippled by “things we did not know that we did not know.” The consequences are before us. It hardly matters that our intentions were the best in the world; the universe is utterly indifferent to intentions, good, bad, or neutral.
Reaction against some of those consequences fastened Barack Hussein Obama upon us in 2008 and 2012. That surely made matters worse than they would otherwise have been. Nevertheless, both sides of the aisle bear responsibility for the debacles that have followed. Indeed, the American people deserve a share of the odium as well, for their excessively dramatic reaction against the Bush Administration and its policies, which were potentially correctable with a sufficient degree of humility and resolve.
If Senator Paul has overstated his case, there is nevertheless a case to be made that the U.S. acted, if not in haste, at least with excessive confidence in inserting its military might into the Middle East. He is also correct that we followed up in ways that were about as likely to conduce to improvement as half-hearted half-measures usually are. No, no one intended the chaos we face today...but as a way of rectifying maladies brought about by one’s previous errors, protesting that “we didn’t know” has a very poor track record.
"You cannot free a slave; he has to do it himself. And you cannot enslave a free man; the most you can do is kill him." - Robert A. Heinlein.
ISIS’s titular leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has done us that service:
The leader of the Islamic State group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Thursday urged Muslims to emigrate to his self-proclaimed “caliphate,” in the jihadist supremo’s first audio recording in six months.“And we call upon every Muslim in every place to perform hijrah (emigration) to the Islamic State or fight in his land wherever that may be,” he said....
Echoing his previous exhortations, Baghdadi said moving to the caliphate he declared over parts of Iraq and Syria in June 2014 or waging jihad (holy war) at home was an obligation for Muslims.
“Has the time not come for you to know that there is no might nor honour nor safety nor rights for you except in the shade of the Caliphate?” he said in the speech, transcripts of which were released in five languages.
“O Muslims, Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war,” he said, calling for mass mobilisation on the battlefield.
Which lickspittle political posturer or media pretender will be the first to proclaim, ex cathedra from his bellybutton, that al-Baghdadi is not preaching “true Islam?”
Actually, that service has already been rendered us by Barack Hussein Obama, when he orated that the Islamic State “is not Islamic, and it is not a state.” Perhaps he received an advance transcript of al-Baghdadi’s speech and decide to “get out in front of it.” As Obama is the world’s supreme authority on everything – just ask him – I suppose we can all relax about it.
Myself, I’m waiting for ISIS allegiants to commit a terrorist act here in the United States. That’s when the really thunderous denunciations will begin...but given the character of our political class and its media annex, they won’t be denunciations of Islam.
Never go to a religious war without your religion – Tom Kratman
George W. Bush, 43rd president of these United States, was a good man. He was an indifferent president, good on a few subjects and somewhat aimless about others, but the Oval Office has been occupied by few individuals of better character. Unfortunately, he was hobbled by a failing that afflicts many men of good will: he ardently wanted to see the other guy’s character as a match to his own.
President Bush’s famous September 20, 2001 speech to the nation, in which he first proclaimed Islam to be “a religion of peace,” was probably the worst misstep of his presidential tenure. The historical record speaks clearly in the opposite direction. Ever since Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the actions of Muslims and Islam-dominated states have unambiguously shouted Islam-Uber-Alles. Indeed, Islam is the only recognized religion whose highest figures made common cause with the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.
(I’ve long suspected that the wholly unsubstantiated and unjustified odium poured upon Pope Pius XII was an attempt to deflect attention from the alliance between Hitler and Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, at that time the highest authority in Islam. A great many persons revile the Catholic Church, mainly because it preaches against things they’d like to feel free to do. More, they’ve noticed that Christians don’t go on a rampage when slandered.)
But there is no truth so starkly obvious that it cannot be denied by one resolutely determined to deny it. There is no fact so plain that it cannot be obscured with a mountain of distractions and irrelevancies. Perhaps most important of all, there are few who will speak openly and plainly against a moving force that:
The recent attack on Pamela Geller’s Draw Muhammad contest in Garland, Texas should have provided a wake-up call. Yet note how many persons, on either side of the political spectrum, leaped to condemn Geller for her “provocation.” Note how many commentators spoke and acted as if utterly indifferent to the rather simple proposition that cartoons cannot and do not provide a justification for murder. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ?” Chris Ofili’s dung-festooned caricature of the Blessed Virgin Mary? These things provoked complaints, even protests, from Christians, but no violence whatsoever. But don’t you dare satirize the intolerance of Islam and Muslims; why, that could get someone killed!
Such...persons are unlikely to acknowledge al-Baghdadi’s plain words, either.
“What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Among a Left that has enshrined tolerance as the supreme virtue, the irony of their passive acceptance of violently intolerant Islam stands as one of the marvels of our time. It could be cowardice, of course; many persons animated by fear will do anything not to admit to it. It could also be tactical, for what does the Left hate more than Christianity and Christian ethics? In either case, there is no better demonstration of the fatuity of Leftism than its celebration of homosexuality and abortion united to its angry defense of Islam on the grounds of “religious tolerance.”
The political class, the media, and the educational establishment – the three major bastions of the Left in American society – are setting us up for a terrible calamity. They’re complicit in the continuing importation of adherents to this seventh-century murder cult. If it’s out of ignorance, it’s inexcusable. If it’s willful blindness – an insistence upon seeing in Islam a benevolence that is not there and never has been – its ridiculous. If it’s tactical, it’s vile and wholly to be condemned.
The best service a President Cruz or President Perry could do for this nation is to reject President Bush’s “religion of peace” error and publicly recognize the facts as they are. Indeed, one of the criteria for selecting a Republican nominee should be the requirement that he announce his hostility to Islam and the immigration of Muslims to these shores, openly and without compromise despite any and all opposition. Americans – people who love this country – would love him for it.
Let’s close with an old favorite:
Have you noticed how many persons – how many supposed Americans – have come out against freedom of speech lately? The media are almost unanimous against it. The following example is typical:
Looks like Pamela Geller will get her wish: More dead Americans at the hands of radical Muslims. Hell, the hatemonger finally even got ISIS to pay attention to her.Last week Geller — whose repulsive anti-Muslim ad campaign caused the MTA to ban all religious, opinion and political ads — held a $10,000 contest in Texas. The aim? To draw caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which she knows is forbidden by most Muslims and frowned upon by the rest.
The result? Two violent radical Muslims opened fire on the group, and the shooters ended up dead at the hands of the police. Yesterday ISIS claimed credit and vowed to kill more Americans.
Violence and its ugly brother, violent protest, is the lowest form of human expression and runs counter to what most of the great religious and philosophical prophets, from Jesus to Muhammad to Martin Luther King to Mahatma Gandhi, preached.
But so is hate-filled propaganda against any one religion. Geller, like ISIS and al Qaeda, revel in hate and nothing would make any of them happier than to be the catalyst for the killing of hundreds of innocent Americans to prove a point. Geller would be a hero to the hateful. Damn the cost in innocent lives, damn the heartache.
So if Muslim savages run amok murdering innocent Americans, it will be Pamela Geller’s fault for offending them! Amazing! Does this principle apply to domestic violence? If she says something that offends him, and he strikes – or kills – her for it, is her injury or death “her fault?” Or is that different somehow?
But perhaps that’s a bridge we shouldn’t cross, being civilized and all. (I omit any Muslims that happen to be in the audience.) If memory serves, the First Amendment was enacted with a particular purpose: to protect the freedom of speech of the press. It looks to your humble commentator as if a lot of “journalists” feel they don’t need it any longer. (Let’s pass in silence over the inclusion of Muhammad, seventh-century fantasist, poseur, warlord, slaver, multiple adulterer, and pedophile, in the ranks of “great religious and philosophical prophets.”)
Even Fox News, supposedly a media bastion of American principles, is giving space to such sentiments:
Pseudo-conservative Bill O’Reilly opined as follows:
O’Reilly burnished his own anti-jihadist credentials as he said, “Insulting the entire Muslim world is stupid… It does not advance the cause of liberty or get us any closer to defeating the savage jihad.”In fact, O’Reilly argued that it actually “hurts the cause” to fight jihad, and Laura Ingraham agreed with him that it isn’t “beneficial.” Neither of them discounted the importance of the free speech, but as far as O’Reilly’s concerned, that’s “not in play” here.
Oh? Why isn’t freedom of speech “in play” here? Does O’Reilly even understand the concept?
(Apropos of nothing much, apparently holding a celebration of the death of a would-be murderer is quite all right. But then, the standards are lowered for camel-raping, goat-fellating savages.)
Pamela Geller has demonstrated her own dedication to freedom of expression, and has backed it with her personal safety. Let no one be in any doubt about what Muslims would do to her if they had the opportunity:
Sean [Hannity] had Pamela Geller on with the infamous Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary to discuss whether Geller should be put to death for organizing a cartoon contest.Yes, you read that correctly. ISIS has of course, vowed to slaughter Geller and “everyone who houses her events,” and “gives her a platform to spill her filth.” The New York Daily News reported Wednesday night that ISIS said in a posting on a message board that it was sending “all our Lions to achieve her slaughter.”
“Our aim was the khanzeer (swine) Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her,” it said.
Interestingly, Geller told Hannity, the FBI and Homeland Security have not been in touch with her in the wake of these threats.
Choudary, who has been on Hannity’s show many times before, was asked point-blank, “Do you support this death threat against Pam Geller because she ran a free speech contest?” Via Mediaite:
Choudary argued there’s a difference between cartoons of Mickey Mouse and cartoons of Muhammad, and said Geller went in “knowing full well” many Muslims consider blasphemy an issue worthy of the death penalty. Hannity went off and shouted, “You want her to die!”Choudary said Geller should be put before a court and tried, and she would end up punished. Geller shot back, “To blame me and say that my cartoons are controversial… murdering cartoonists is controversial.”
Not surprisingly, they ended up getting in a huge shouting match...
(Geller told him to stop interrupting and at one point said “I know you’re used to stepping over women”), and Choudary told her she “knew the consequences.”
I have no knowledge of whether anyone, in any public, recorded forum, has asked Choudary whether he regards HAMAS and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, whether Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs, or whether shari’a is the only correct law for Mankind (or whether he himself has ever raped a camel or fellated a goat). Such inquiries are generally considered “inappropriate”...meaning risky.
It is vital that Islam’s proponents be compelled to expose themselves and their beliefs. It takes both determination and skill; neither alone is sufficient. Consider how shifty were the Muslim participants in this interview:
Rod Dreher: Do you believe that homosexuals convicted in a sharia court should be killed, or otherwise punished physically?Mohamed Elmougy: I don’t condone homosexuality. I have a lot of friends, a lot of people who work for me, just so you know. I don’t go kill them. But, you know, I don’t condone what they do outside of work, so long as it’s something not in front of me. So do I condone the sharia? We don’t apologize for our religion. If that is what our religion says, we certainly accept it open-heartedly.
Rod Dreher: But what do you think *should* be the authority. That’s what I’m asking. In an ideal situation, would you like to see sharia law be the basis for law in this country, and how would you reconcile that –Tod Robberson: Or put it another way. In this country, the law of man takes precedence over the law of God. In your opinion, is that the way it should be?
[garbled answer by heavily accented man, saying something to effect that the law is flexible from country to country, but there are some things that we don’t have the authority to change.]
[Ghassan – did not get his last name]: President George Bush feels that he is inspired by God, and based on that he makes his policies. He made that known to us. [crosstalk] President Bush told us that law made by man is not good enough law, that we should be following God’s law.
Rod Dreher: Just describe to me your view, the Islamic view, of sharia. What role should sharia play in this society?Mohamed Elmougy: [garbled] I don’t sit up all night thinking what the role of sharia needs to be. All I can tell you is that we as American Muslims, living in a non-Muslim country, are ordered to follow the rules of the country that we live in, no matter how much we agree or disagree with. So do I go after you if you’re homosexual, to try to kill you today? No. We haven’t seen that.
So I think to go focus on that and to leave all the other good things that American Muslims are part of, and that the religion is talking about, and only focus on things that to you sound or feel strange is just not the correct approach. Forget paranoid, it’s just not the correct approach. And it does nothing, as I said, but alienate our children from the society that they’re going to be living in, and die in.
By contrast, consider the following exchange – posted once before – between a young Muslim college student and conservative speaker David Horowitz:
When compelled, whether incidentally or by their own foolishness, to expose themselves and their vile creed to the world, Muslims show us the true face of evil – and it has nothing to do with Pamela Geller or anyone else staging a “Draw Muhammad” contest. If Islam were not styled a “religion,” it would be regarded as no better than Nazism, with which it shares many specific tenets. (Nota Bene: This is also true of left-liberalism. As Jonah Goldberg once asked an audience of left-liberal college students, “Apart from the genocide, what don’t you like about Nazism?” Of course, many on the Left would endorse genocide on the basis of one’s political leanings. After all, “re-education” isn’t guaranteed to work.)
But media luminaries such as Bill O’Reilly proclaim that "Just because you can say it doesn't mean you should say it…It is stupid. It accomplishes nothing." His face decorates millions of television screens nightly. Surely we “should” defer to his wisdom, only say what he thinks we “should” say...or think.
There is a word in all discussions of this matter whose significance is critical: the word should.
Should is routinely used about consequences: If we do this, then this should happen, or inversely, this other thing should not happen. When we’re discussing a physical process – say, the operation of a machine – should expresses our confidence in our knowledge of the applicable physical laws.
Machines, of course, are non-sentient. They lack free will. But what of men? Men assumed to possess free will and a knowledge of the law? Men who, feeling that something of importance to them has been “insulted,” decide to take up weapons and commit murder? How does should apply to them?
Megyn Kelly has a few thoughts for you:
In discussions of individuals’ rights, including their right of free expression, there’s no naughtier word than should. It’s time to banish it from all discussions about Islam. Should never applies to whether speech is free. It never applies to any individual’s exercise of his rights, for the consequences, as long as they involve no violation of anyone’s rights, are irrelevant. I’ll allow should in one specific context: What should civilized people do to expunge this seventh-century madness from our societies before it spills still more blood?
By now everyone in the English-speaking world is aware that “our” Nobel Peace Prize winner of a president, having casually squandered the blood of thousands of Americans who gave their lives in the decade-long effort to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, wants Congress to authorize him to send American forces back into the Middle East. The questions of greatest immediate importance are:
Okay, okay. Given Congress’s behavior in recent years, he might have a basis of sorts for an affirmative answer to question #2. But given Obama’s demonstrated unwillingness even to mouth a word Muslims might deem offensive to them, coupled to his open hostility to America’s military, how could a rational man expect that an Obama Administration military action waged against an Islamic enemy could work out well? He doesn’t fight wars to win; he hates our armed forces; and he flinches at the very thought of offending a Muslim.
So his request might just meet with sufficient resistance to derail it:
President Obama’s request that Congress authorize military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was met with skepticism from both parties on Wednesday, raising questions about Capitol Hill’s ability to pass a war measure.The divide is largely centered on language prohibiting the use of “enduring offensive ground combat operations” against ISIS.
Democrats say this does too little to limit the White House from committing ground troops to the fight, while Republicans say the restrictions could handcuff the military.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Senator Rand Paul was recently quoted as saying that sending American ground troops to battle ISIS is a mistake – that ISIS can only be defeated by troops supplied by the regional states. For that statement he was roundly criticized by several figures on the Right. His statement was variously mischaracterized as isolationism, as moral indifference to the horrors ISIS has inflicted on its victims, and as a slur on America’s fighting forces. Yet when viewed in the proper context, he was quite correct.
Ours is not the fully roused, invincibly resolute United States of America that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Nor is ISIS the sort of terror that can raise Americans onto our hind legs. Worse yet, those we would go forth to rescue from ISIS are in fundamental agreement with ISIS’s premises and principles. Worst of all, we have been made all too aware that Obama simply won’t allow a war against an Islamic enemy to be fought effectively – that whatever gains American forces would achieve at the cost of further American blood and treasure would be fleeting at best, illusory at worst.
Obama might well have been pressured by his political advisors into requesting the AUMF. I could easily believe it – and that he opposed them to the extent of insisting that it be so sharply limited that it would be clear to all and sundry that he doesn’t really want to fight.
As submitted to Congress, the requested AUMF displeases both caucuses. The Democrats, ever the lily-livered, quail at the idea of further American casualties. More, they detest the thought of having to defend a new and foredoomed war against the criticisms of their hard-left base. The Republicans, a trifle more alert to the reasons the requested AUMF is shaped as it is, are unwilling to allow Obama another double-bind at their expense. For should the AUMF be approved as requested, Obama would not hesitate to blame the subsequent failures on the GOP. Should Congress modify the AUMF to provide an actual possibility of military victory, Obama and his allies would castigate the Republicans for letting more of our young men die in foreign lands.
Though our military men are inhibited against giving their opinions of such matters to the media, it would be difficult for me to believe that our commanders are at all enthusiastic about heading back to the Middle East while Obama is their Commander-In-Chief. They’ve worn his shackles long enough to know them – and him.
No, the war against ISIS, if it’s to be fought at all, must be fought by the locals. America must stay out of it, at least for now.
In straining to comprehend a geopolitical insanity such as contemporary Islamic militancy, it’s vital that we look beyond the superficial aspects to the foundations of the thing. Those foundations are on vivid display for anyone to see:
If ever there were a time for Islam to strike the West, this is it. We are divided, weakened by secularism, multiculturalism, moral relativism and a pervasive reluctance to judge others of “different standards.” The states of Europe have emasculated themselves militarily, while America has squandered her own power in a number of pointless, even pathological efforts. If more were needed, a resurgence of imperialism from Russia and looming threats from China have divided our geopolitical attentions.
This is not a time for another expeditionary war on our part. It’s a time for redressing our mistakes:
The war against world Islam – and make no mistake; ISIS is only the tip of the spear – is a world war. It can only be won by a fully mobilized, morally resolute, armed-to-the-teeth nation determined to obliterate the enemy completely and permanently, as we did in World War II. It’s madness to commit one’s forces to such a war in the hesitant, divided, unprepared state we’re in today.
Obama’s request for an AUMF should be defeated.
By now everyone in the world knows about ISIS’s immolation of captured Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh. Most persons will also know that ISIS killed Lt. Kaseasbeh on January 3, and thus had been negotiating with the Jordanian government in the quintessence of bad faith. As of this morning, world reaction is essentially “on the record,” with nothing more to be added.
Supposedly, all the recognized governments of the Islamic Middle East are denouncing the atrocity, but inasmuch as Muslims will say anything at all that they think will serve the cause of world Islam, I’m inclined to discount their “outrage” as mere posturing for geostrategic reasons.
Here at home, we have Barack Hussein Obama stridently pontificating about the need for “greater vigilance,” however that might apply to confronting and defeating an enemy openly at war with us but which he won’t even name. Actions? A plan of campaign? Please! This is Obama we’re talking about.
But the most significant response to the atrocity has come from the governments of Europe.
“What response was that?” you say. Exactly what you’re thinking, Gentle Reader: None at all.
NATO, the military consequence of the North Atlantic Treaty, became a growing burden on American power and finances. At its peak, in combination with our security commitments to Japan, Taiwan, and several other states, it employed roughly a third of American combat power and consumed approximately half of all American military expenditures. We told ourselves those deployments were the indispensable bulwark against Communist expansion, the sole force capable of deterring aggression from the Soviet Union and Red China. And we were quite correct to think so.Yet it was inevitable that those deployments would have a cumulative consequence for the priorities and behavior of the governments whose nations they shielded. Trusting that America would provide, they systematically underfunded and undermanned their own military establishments. The funds Europe would otherwise have put to military preparations went to expanding its welfare states: creating a culture of idlers and persons who disdained any responsibility for their own defense. Perhaps worst of all, the dynamic nourished political forces that blamed all international tensions on American militarism. In their view, the one and only enemy was the one whose sons stood ready to defend them.
The dynamic has produced a continent lousy with state-supported layabouts, and cultures to which things military are anathema. It no longer matters that they would refuse to defend their own nations, for they lack all power to do so. As for conflicts in other lands, they're inherently someone else's problem -- and probably America's fault.
Over the decades since the North Atlantic Treaty was ratified, the states of Europe have become addicted to American military protection. The desirability of creating and maintaining armed forces sufficient unto their own nations’ defense never enters the thoughts of the political masters of the Old World. It would mean transferring far too much money away from their welfare states and toward warlike things. It would elicit strident protests from their millions of layabouts and deafening outcries from the anti-military sectors of their electorates. But worst of all, it would deprive Europe’s political class of the ability to blame any and every ugly international incident on “American militarism.”
Europe’s silence toward the evils of world Islam, coupled to its reflexive blame-the-Americans response when confronted with Islam-powered tensions, has protected its access to Middle Eastern oil. That supply has become critical now that Vladimir Putin has demonstrated his willingness to use his control of the bulk of the continent’s natural gas supply for political leverage. Alongside that, the large Muslim sub-population of Europe is kept in a state the elite regard as tolerable, though Europeans whose cars and shops Muslims burn might disagree.
Europe’s addictions go beyond American guns, tanks, planes, and soldiers.
Any number of self-help gurus preach the beauty of “living in the present.” Inasmuch as there’s nowhere else one can live, it would seem a foregone conclusion that one should make oneself comfortable there. But like all maxims, “live in the present” comes with a limiting principle that must not be overlooked.
The great Mark Steyn has written about Europe’s descent into self-extinction. Europeans’ low birth rates aren’t biologically determined. a la mode de P. D. James. They stem from a disinclination to reproduce. It arises from a present-moment attitude driven beyond rationality by the continent’s political devolution.
When “live for the present” becomes so imperative that one utterly forsakes all thought of the future, so also does it eschew all thought of:
The implications for national policy are obvious:
Europe’s flaccidity in the face of the ongoing Islamic colonization of the continent is part and parcel of these attitudes and responses. The Old World has lost interest in the future. Its peoples regard their present moment as too comfortable to compromise with concerns for an era they will not see. Their political classes are aware of the upheaval that would result from any attempt to chivvy the continent back toward military self-sufficiency, economic dynamism, and cultural confidence. Though they never say so explicitly, they have ceded their continent’s future to the Muslim invader.
Today, Barack Hussein Obama, who favors European social-fascist policies for the United States, sits in the Oval Office. His presence there ought to have disturbed Europeans’ slumbers, for Obama is the least inclined president since Warren Harding toward the active opposition of evil – especially the Islamic evil now swelling worldwide.
Europe can no longer rely upon the military protection it has come to expect from America.
America’s Obama-induced economic stall has deprived Europe of both goods and export markets.
European indifference to its own culture and to American culture have left it culturally vacuous.
How, then, could it oppose, much less defeat, a culturally confident invader determined upon conquest?
Europe’s addiction to its seemingly comfortable present has occasioned an even stronger addiction to military, economic, and cultural supports upon which it can no longer rely. Any European awake to the realities of geopolitics and the dynamics of cultural morphology should be shuddering at the implications...but how many such Europeans are there? Indeed, how many such Americans are there?
Verbum sat sapienti.
Ever since he burst onto the national scene, there have been questions about Barack Hussein Obama’s religious affiliations. The revelations about his Islamic upbringing and the various documents that listed the young Obama as a Muslim were disturbing. Neither did it help Obama’s claims of devout Christianity that the only Christian church he ever attended was that of black racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-American “pastor” Jeremiah Wright, nor that Wright himself said that he’d put special effort into making the formerly Muslim Obama “comfortable” with his change of affiliation. And of course, we have Obama’s current non-attendance at Christian services, his dismissal of traditionally celebrated Christian holy days, his demonstrated antipathy toward Israel, and his pronounced favoritism toward the Islamic states of the Middle East.
Despite all that, it was difficult for me to see Obama as a Muslim for a single reason: it would require him to accept that there’s a Being superior to him. That’s a tough dictate for someone as narcissistic as Obama to swallow:
If you want to know why the Obama administration failed so spectacularly to defend Obamacare in the Supreme Court last week, look no further than a 2008 statement President Obama gave to author Richard Wolfe: "You know, I believe my own bulls--t."...Here is what Obama told aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008: "I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."...
When Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., told Obama that the political atmosphere in his state felt a lot like 1994, when Democrats lost the House for the first time in two generations, Obama replied, "Well the big difference between here and in '94 was you've got me." Upon hearing those words, Berry chose to retire rather than run again. Democrats lost a record 63 House seats -- including Berry's -- and control of the House....
But don't worry. Obama is the most talented politician of our time. Just ask him. In 2004, after his Democratic National Convention speech, Obama told David Mendell, "I'm LeBron, baby."
(Granted that his narcissism also undercuts his claim of Christian allegiance, but for me at least, that’s been a non-starter from the first.)
But they who make it their practice to delve into the backgrounds of the highly placed have not been idle:
For example, at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Secretary of State John Kerry made certain to avoid offending or disrespectingMuslim terrorists such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He told the attendees at the forum that the U.S. government will never rush to judgment regarding the nature of the Islamic State: “We have to keep our heads…the biggest error that we could make would be to blame Muslims collectively for crimes not committed by Muslims alone. Crimes that the overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose… Religions don’t require adherents to raze villages and blow up people, it’s individuals with a distorted and an even ignorant interpretation of religion who do that.”According to the Examiner's anonymous source, those were not the words of Kerry, but were the dictates of Valerie Jarrett, who had been born and raised in Iran, and has always shown sympathy for the fundamentalists in the Islamic religion. While a student at Stanford University, Jarrett admitted her loyalty to Islam and continues to object to any negative statements aimed at any part of her "religion of peace."
" Farsi-speaking Valerie Jarrett, the senior advisor to Obama, his right-hand woman was born in Iran. She also has ties with terrorist William Ayers, and her father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett is a card-carrying communist party member and associate of Frank Marshall Davis, the controversial Communist Party activist who was Obama’s childhood mentor. Davis is mentioned many times in Obama’s autobiography. Obama’s senior advisor/campaign manager David Axelrod also has family roots in the Communist party. His parents were Communists," according to former Saturday Night Live comedian and actress Victoria Jackson, who now hosts a conservative talk show and researched what she calls "the real Obama White House."
(Applause to CM Blake for the link.)
Given the indisputable behavioral patterns of the federal executive branch and essentially all its conspicuous members, perhaps the acknowledged religious attachments of Obama and Jarrett don’t really matter. But doesn’t it all make a consistent, hugely compelling picture?
Any Gentle Reader who hasn’t yet lapsed into a diabetic coma from regularly reading my treacly-sweet effusions will already be familiar with my opinions about Islam. That we have an executive administration resolved to kowtow to this totalitarian, inherently anti-American creed should appall anyone with three functioning brain cells. That with sufficient information it might have been predictable from the first makes the matter even more disturbing. It resurrects a set of familiar “whys:”
And why did the American electorate, which already had four years of experience with the duplicity of the Obamunist cabal, return him to the White House for a second term – if, indeed, it really did?
Food for thought.
Inasmuch as I’ll be having some extensive oral surgery in a few hours, I was planning simply to announce a day off from Liberty’s Torch. What actually happened was a powerful lesson about not reading Internet news sources this early in the morning:
President Barack Obama has a moral responsibility to push back on the nation’s journalism community when it is planning to publish anti-jihadi articles that might cause a jihadi attack against the nation’s defense forces, the White House’s press secretary said Jan. 12.“The president … will not now be shy about expressing a view or taking the steps that are necessary to try to advocate for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform” whenever journalists’ work may provoke jihadist attacks, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing.
Clearly, despite all my efforts I don’t catch every important development just as it develops. But wait: there’s more!
Obama’s willingness to pressure media outlets, to quit defending First Amendment rights and also to mollify jihadis, reflects Obama’s overall policy of minimizing conflict with militant Islam.Throughout his presidency, Obama has tried to shift the public’s focus away from the jihadi threat toward his domestic priorities.
He also repeatedly praised Islam and Muslims, and criticized criticism of Islam. “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” he told a worldwide TV audience during a September 2012 speech at the United Nations.
It’s always been clear that Obama favors Islam over American interests and the Western code of justice. What’s now all too apparent is that he’s resolved to destroy the right to free expression for that reason.
Why not? Freedom of expression is a thorn in Obama’s flesh. This isn’t just consistent with his pro-Islam personal views; it’s also a perfect entering wedge for politically motivated censorship and manipulation of the media. It will provide him with a rationale for taking control of the Internet, for putting government “advisors” – armed, no doubt – into the editorial departments of major media organs, and for demanding “equal time” from any such organ that dares to act other than in accordance with his wishes.
There can be only one answer to this, short of forcibly evicting this pretender from the White House and decorating a prominent District of Columbia lamppost with his remains. Every American with any public voice, no matter how small, must immediately raise it in the strongest possible act of defiance.
Let hell come to breakfast. It’s time and past time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I should let my blood pressure drop a bit before I go under the knife.
The esteemed Ace of Spades makes a striking observation this morning:
One problem with liberalism has always been that those promoting it are, and largely have been, cowards.The creed is not inherently cowardly; in fact, most of it is brave....But a lot of the people championing it are morally uncertain and physically weak types. This has caused liberalism to be associated in the world with vacillation, compromise, and cowardice.
I knew someone who once told me he despised liberals as cowards. So you're conservative? I asked.
"No," he replied. "Communist."
And that is the knock on liberalism. Other creeds are dark, stupid, and murderous, but they appeal to young men because they seem to be espoused by strong men, rough men, ready men.
And liberalism, meanwhile, is mostly a collection of pious platitudes mouthed by sissies.
There is some justice in this. Moreover, it helps to illuminate an important commonality between the two most important totalitarian creeds of our time: Islam and Left-liberalism.
It’s a common observation that left-liberals, for all their pieties about “helping the poor,” do very little of it personally. They prefer to vote for politicians who will then enact programs – preferably federal programs, so that no one can escape – which will result in armies of bureaucrats spending oceans of tax dollars, the greater part of which will pay the salaries of “compassionate” types like themselves and a piddling fraction of which will become benefits to the officially recognized “poor.” That’s left-liberal “charity:” the sort that declines to dirty the left-liberal’s own hands or distract him from his enjoyment of the Chardonnay and Brie.
As anyone with three functioning brain cells knows, in practice this resolves to a program of totalitarian control of just about everything in the name of “compassion,” “social justice,” or what-have-you. My term for this is social fascism: the drive toward a totalitarian State that has first claim on all things, and regulates everything down to the smallest detail, under a rationale of “good intentions.” (Jonah Goldberg calls it Liberal Fascism, which has more immediate political application.)
Left-liberalism / social-fascism is currently on the skids with Americans, owing to their disgust with the current regime. (What we can and will do about it remains uncertain.) However, the ironclad will that animates its allegiants cannot be denied. They are determined to have their way; they will stop at nothing. They regard no strategy and no tactic as out of bounds.
I can’t cite many overt expressions of such an unbounded, absolutely determined political will. However, I can cite one:
In the Nazi leadership’s view, Rauschning (a one-time friend of Hitler’s) reports, “the more inconsistent and irrational is their doctrine, the better….[E]verything that might have gone to the making up of a systematic, logically conceived doctrine is dismissed as a trifle, with sovereign contempt.” “To all doubts and questions,” writes Rosenberg, “the new man of the first German empire has only one answer: Nevertheless, I will!” [From Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels]
Are left-liberal policies inconsistent? Irrational? Left-liberals don’t care any more than the Nazis did. They know what’s best for us, and we’re damned well going to swallow it...at the point of a gun, if need be.
If Islam’s political culture isn’t yet plain to you, Gentle Reader, you must have skipped a few of the essays here. Islam is inseparable from its political program, and that program is totalitarian:
“Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! These are hundreds of other psalms and Hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.” – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
"The minarets are our bayonets; the domes are our helmets. Mosques are our barracks, the believers are soldiers. This holy army guards my religion. Almighty Our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom." -- Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey
The totalitarian mindset must be coupled to absolute will. People resist being ordered around, which is why the myrmidons of the State carry guns and forbid us to have them. (Note how many federal bureaucracies have armed themselves. Note how military hardware has been distributed to local police forces nationwide. And note how Obama’s Department of Justice has descended to the use of sub-legal means to throttle the supply of firearms and ammunition to private citizens. Do you really think that’s coincidence?) So to enforce a totalitarian program, the State must be willing to kill until the survivors have all submitted to its yoke: a program that requires the firmest will of all.
In that regard Islam is exactly the same:
The Qur’an contains detailed instructions and examples of how to meet unbelievers. The first instruction is that they should be called to Islam; in fact, the Qur’an says you cannot wage war against unbelievers until you have preached to them. The second instruction is that if they do not convert to Islam, then, they must be fought. The third instruction is that if they surrender, or convert, then you must stop waging war. The final instruction is that if they do not convert or surrender, then they must be killed. This is the optimum route for Islamist expansion: A tidal wave of war, subjugation and conversion.
While we were in the Mosque, the Prophet came out and said, "Let us go to the Jews" We went out till we reached Bait-ul-Midras. He said to them, "If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle, and I want to expel you from this land. So, if anyone amongst you owns some property, he is permitted to sell it, otherwise you should know that the Earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle." [ Sahih Bukhari, 53:392]
Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God's religion reigns supreme. [The Koran, Sura 2, verse 193]
The sole difference between the Islamic mindset and that of the Leftist lies in their professed intentions. Their absolute determination to rule in all things – to compel, prohibit, and expropriate without limit – is utterly the same.
If you need a grace note for this comparison of today’s two foremost totalitarian creeds, consider how utterly ruthless both of them are toward critics. Islam decrees death for those who dare even to differ with its dictates. Left-liberals, currently without the legal authority to silence dissenters by force, use extra-legal means: vandalism, extortion, intimidation, hackery, slander, and whatever other tools are ready to hand. That they do so under a cloak of self-righteousness doesn’t alter the totalitarian will that powers their tactics.
A Christian will reject Islamic theology reflexively, as Islam denies the divinity of Jesus. Yet that same Christian might find some of the policies of left-liberalism appealing entirely on the basis of their supposed intentions. Yet should he press a left-liberal espouser of such a policy for its record in practice, or ask what evidence would cause the left-liberal to doubt the soundness of his policy, he’ll be answered with a flood vituperation likely to exceed his expectations. Given the proliferation of such tactics, is it reasonable to doubt that the left-liberal would resort to force, were he able to get away with it?
And given all the above, why would any man of good will award one iota more respect to either of these totalitarian creeds than to the other?
First, a “joke:”
The CIA was screening candidates for a field-operative position that would require a delicate balance of commitment to the mission with sound moral standards. Three candidates – two men and a woman – had passed the entrance examinations and stood ready for the final test.When the first man arrived for the test, the screener handed him a .45 automatic and pointed to a closed door. “Inside that room are two things: a folding chair and your wife seated upon it. If you want the job, go in there and kill her.”
The candidate was dumbfounded. “You expect me to kill my wife for this job? Forget it!” He handed the gun back to the screener and left in a huff.
One down, thought the screener. When the second man arrived, the screener told him the same thing. Despite an expression of shock, that candidate took the gun and entered the room, but returned a couple of minutes later, said, “Sorry, I just couldn’t bring myself to kill my beloved,” handed back the gun and left.
That was a close one, thought the screener, but I think he’ll do. Still, it’s a good thing the gun is loaded with blanks.
When the woman candidate arrived, the screener handed her the .45 and pointed to the closed door. “Inside that room are two things: a folding chair and your husband seated upon it. If you want the job, go in there and kill him.”
Without a word, the woman accepted the gun and entered the room. Several minutes passed. The screener began to wonder what was going on, in the room and in the candidate’s head. Was it possible that two of the candidates might pass the final test?
Presently the woman emerged, looking exceedingly distressed. She flipped the .45 at the screener and said in a tone of high dudgeon, “This thing is useless! I had to beat him to death with the chair!”
Are you laughing or horrified? Do you get the point...and if so, what do you think it was? Ponder for a moment before continuing on.
“Jokes” of the above sort are not uncommon. My wife Beth (a.k.a. “the C.S.O.”) and I “enacted” a version of it this morning. I mentioned to her that a coworker and her husband, like Beth herself, are wildly enthusiastic New York Rangers fans, and go to as many games as they can afford. Beth immediately replied that “if they buy tickets they can’t use, I’ll be happy to take them.” The banter that followed concluded thus:
FWP: If someone were to ask you to murder me in exchange for a lifetime season pass to all the Rangers’ home games, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?
CSO: Well, if the seats were right behind the Rangers’ bench...
I assume that she was joshing. (I must. I do have enemies. Some of them have money. It’s why I work to keep my shooting skills sharp.) But as always after such an exchange, one must suppress a twinge of doubt.
The point, Gentle Reader, of both the original “joke” and our “reenactment,” is as follows:
It’s not cosmological physics. It’s human nature – how individuals make their decisions. Indeed, you cannot measure a thing’s value by any other standard than what you’re willing to pay for it.
What we value, why we value it, and how we come to value it are highly individualized studies. In many cases, the entire matter is closed within the vault of the individual’s skull, and impervious to all notions of “rational analysis.” But the values themselves, though personally chosen and pursued, are nonetheless real – and powerful.
Which returns us to the subject of the “Enough” screeds.
They who disdain and deride religious belief are frequently appalled by its power: its ability to motivate men to do things the disdainful ones could never imagine doing themselves. In that regard, religious convictions are akin to patriotic fervor, of the sort that gives meaning to the old phrase Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. What the disdainful ones fail to appreciate is the economic bargain that stands behind the world’s major religions...and its pseudo-religions as well.
The major religions all offer the allegiant eternal life in absolute bliss, but for a price the individual must pay. The bargain counterpoises an infinite reward against the finite, temporally bounded prescriptions and proscriptions of a moral-ethical code. Who could refuse such a bargain? Only one who disbelieves in the reliability of the offer, or the sincerity of the offerer.
For the thoroughly convinced believer, who harbors no doubts or qualms, there is no possibility of refusing – no imaginable way to reason one’s way to a refusal. Thanks, but I’d rather go to Hell? Not happenin’, gang. A believer might be tempted to “welsh” temporarily – i.e., to set the code aside in some instance with the thought that he can redeem himself later – but that constitutes a failure of belief, not some demerit of the original bargain.
Islam’s youngest adherents have all doubt flogged out of them early in life. They’re taught, by word, example, and severe negative feedback, that to speak or act other than in accordance with Islam’s decrees as they’re set down in the Koran, the Sunnah, and the ahadith is unacceptable. Indeed, any excursion into blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy would get them killed and damned.
Christopher Anvil made a compelling point about the power of religious commitment in his classic short story “Mission of Ignorance.” This brilliant story isn’t terribly long and deserves to be read in its entirety, but for those who lack the time:
"Just suppose," said the chairman, "that you were in charge of a great spaceship—perhaps belonging to a great Galactic organization (never mind about it being a benevolent organization) and let's just suppose your job was to subvert Earth and make it obedient to that great Galactic organization—what could be nicer than to get Earth totally dependent on certain technological developments that you could withdraw at will? At a mere snap of your fingers, Earth's whole technological civilization could collapse, to leave, for practical purposes, a planetful of ignorant savages with no relevant skills, whose reproduction rate could be altered at will, and, if you chose, whose main food supply could also be wiped out with a snap of your fingers. Think how cooperative such people would be once they saw what you could do. Suppose that, having delivered the necessaries to bring about this situation and having seen the fools rushing to their own destruction, you then went away to take care of other business and returned when your calculations showed the situation would be ripe.
"Then," said the chairman, "suppose you summoned to your ship the Earth representative, planning perhaps to give him the same little demonstration we have just given here, and suppose you discovered: first, that a mere second lieutenant had been sent to deal with you; next, that in your absence, instead of dependence on computerized voice typers, a new, completely nontechnological system of rapid writing had been developed; third, that a completely nontechnological uncomputerized system of identification had come into use; fourth, that one-quarter of the Earth's land surface was in the hands of a sect which, for religious motives, rejected the gifts, and in their place was developing Earth's own technology at a fever pitch; fifth, that the sect was armed to the teeth, dug in, stocked for a long fight, seasoned in battle, and so situated that you couldn't count on striking at the nonmembers without hitting the members of the sect, or vice versa, and, sixth, to top it all off, suppose you had no way to judge whether this was all the bad news, or whether this was just the tip of the iceberg showing above the water, with a lot more underneath? If you had been in that situation, would it have jarred you?"
Religious beliefs are neither verifiable (provable) nor falsifiable (disprovable). Therefore, they aren’t something you can argue against. And almost all their dictates are almost always absolute.
Religious wars are as bloody and horrible as they are because, as Larry Niven and Steven Barnes noted in The Descent of Anansi, religious warriors never admit defeat. They win or they die. Their beliefs will permit nothing else.
This is the situation the West, particularly America, faces with Islam.
Islam divides the world into dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and dar al-Harb (the House of War). It commands its adherents to wage war against all unbelievers until dar al-Harb has been wholly eliminated. That requires that every last person on Earth be:
To this end, Islam sanctifies every imaginable strategy, tactic, and practice, all the way from tactically useful deceit to the mass slaughter of “infidels.” It recognizes no agreement with an “infidel” or a non-Islamic power as binding. It counsels Muslims to withhold their efforts until a promising moment should arrive, when those efforts are likely to yield advantage to Islam. Until such a time, it prescribes strategies of infiltration and deception of those it seeks to conquer. Allah has commanded it all, using His Prophet as the herald...and to dissent from any of it is worth your life.
So much for “the religion of peace.”
Of course, much of the above is “previous work.” The core of this essay is the immutability of the religiously inculcated value scheme that drives the jihadist. The “peaceful, tolerant” Muslim majority holds to the very same set of beliefs and attendant commands, no matter what they say and do today. To believe otherwise is to ignore both the nature of religious conviction and the dynamic that has raised up and supports the “radical minority” that rages among us.
Think it over.
Never go to a religious war without your religion. -- Tom Kratman
The pseudo-debate over Islam and the proper attitude of civilized societies toward it could be ended in a trice, were all the parties to the discussion to accept certain postulates – dicta that apply to all Mankind – as beyond question:
Postulate #1 is an important tenet of judicial procedure. He who, in the course of testifying about a related event, makes a statement that indicts himself of a crime for which he could be prosecuted is presumed to have testified truthfully, on that subject at least. The underlying concept is that of compelling self-defense: the near to absolute refusal to place oneself in jeopardy unless something far more important is at stake. It’s proved a reliable guide in our courtrooms. Why do we not steer by it outside them?
Postulate #2 is a matter of common sense. A man is an iceberg: the greater part of his identity, including his moral code, is concealed at all times. Unless you make that new acquaintance under crisis conditions – e.g., you’re his paramedic, busily splinting the broken legs he got from diving in front of a bus to save an inattentive old woman – your basis for judging his character will be severely limited.
Postulate #3 is simply the nature of Man: what the great Ludwig von Mises called the axiom of action. We act upon our priorities in descending order, unless deflected from that order by unavoidable prices or penalties we deem unacceptable. Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is founded on that postulate.
Let us add to the above three axioms an observation that, while not as indisputable as the others, is nevertheless sound in the great majority of cases:
This is the basis of the behavior derided as stereotyping. It’s also one of Man’s principal survival mechanisms.
Some years ago, in a fit of candor he surely regretted immediately afterward, Jesse Jackson admitted that, when he’s walking down a street at night and hears footsteps behind him, it relieves him greatly to discover that they’re the footsteps of a white man. He was making a point about the disproportionate degree of criminality among American Negroes, especially young black men. It was an important point, too: one which is surely on the minds of many urbanites whose cities have recently hosted the knockout game.
Were the speaker a prominent Caucasian rather than one of the best known Negro racialists in America, he would have been crucified by the bien-pensants of the media. Instead, Jackson received mainly grudging assent...leavened with a few grumbles of “but did you have to say so?” Yet Jackson’s statement was undeniably a stereotype of commonplace conditions in urban environments.
Nearly all of us make a large fraction of our decisions on the basis of such stereotypes. Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “The Stranger:”
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
...expresses one of the imperative implications: We can only proportion our trust to an individual about whom we know little or nothing on the basis of stereotypes. Indeed, there are no alternatives.
The bien-pensants are unanimous in declaring this “unfair.” Yet they have nothing to offer in its place.
An individual must always be judged on his individual merits and demerits; no other course is just. However, that dictum has a precondition that can be exceedingly difficult to meet: learning enough about the individual in question to have confidence in your sense of his merits and demerits. Take it from one who’s done a sickening amount of interviewing of candidates for employment.
Law and public policy must ignore individual identities. Indeed, the phrase “justice is blind,” often misinterpreted by the thoughtless, means exactly that. When the policy under discussion is immigration law – i.e., what categories of persons shall be admitted to our shores – the importance of the matter is maximized.
Granted that our immigration policy is haphazard at best. Granted also that no matter how we might revise it, we would always want there to be some provision for special cases: persons whom the law would normally deny admission, but whose experiences and circumstances mandate an exception. Yet just about any statutory immigration policy will discriminate among categories of potential immigrants. The alternative is to open the borders to all who desire to come here, at most setting a limit for the number who may enter in a given calendar year.
The immigration statutes of the early Twentieth Century tried to proportion access to the United States to the ethnic balance of its current population. Though there was quibbling over the specific numbers, no one argued that the fundamental premise was unjust. It was conceded that no other approach would give America as good a chance of preserving the norms and culture it had developed. That was, of course, before the nonsense of multiculturalism had taken hold among us.
Contemporary immigration law is a joke: completely undiscriminating, as willing to admit the allegiants of hostile ideologies as persons of professed Christian faith and enthusiasm about American conceptions of freedom and justice. It awards the nation’s trust without reference to anything we know about the ideologies of those that request admission, the nations in which those ideologies hold sway, or the preponderant sources of social and political discord in other lands.
By now the picture should be clear.
We have already admitted millions of Muslims to the United States as if there were nothing to fear from their blood-drenched, wholly intolerant creed. About these, all we can do is be vigilant, and insist that they receive none of the special privileges and dispensations Muslims habitually demand from their host countries. But that’s no justification for leaving the nation’s gates open to still more Muslims. Are we unable to learn from the experiences of the states of Europe? From the upheavals in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines? From the utter savagery of North Africa and the Islamic Middle East?
On a personal level, it’s about how you should decide, as a matter of predetermined policy, whom to trust on the basis of scant knowledge. That nice Muslim family down the block might be an exception to the preponderant pattern of Islamic intolerance and hostility...but how wise is it to assume that? Let’s go further: How wise would it be to relocate your family, complete with preteen daughters, to a preponderantly Muslim locale? Would that nice Muslim family down the block feel the same fears and reservations about it?
Do these questions make you uncomfortable? Is it the questions themselves, or the truths that they press upon you?
Think it over.
