RUTHFULLY YOURS

Friday Afternoon Roundup – And All the Talk is of Arizona

The municipality of Los Angeles will boycott Arizona. A girls high school basketball team will not be able to go to Arizona to play, because of “safety issues”, which naturally did not come up in China. But why sweat the small stuff?

Councilman Paul Koretz compared the environment in Arizona now to Germany in the 1930s.

“This is very frightening stuff,” he said. “If this was being proposed at the federal level, I would think we’re absolutely at the very beginnings of what went on in Nazi Germany.”

Since this exists already at the Federal level, we are already Nazi Germany. Clearly.

When the boycott issue first came up late last month, Councilwoman Janice Hahn criticized the Arizona law.

“When people are asked to show their papers, it brings back memories of Nazi Germany,” she said.

Or you know border crossings or airline travel or being stopped for speeding. But no, NAZIS!!!

And in a blog posting condemning the law soon after it was signed, Cardinal Roger Mahony questioned what effect the law would have on local police and communities.

“I can’t imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation,” he wrote.

Which employers are already required to do. But again Nazi comparisons are much easier.

The Simon Wiesenthal center has tried to insert some reason into the debate, asking people to stop comparing a policy they don’t like to Nazi Germany. Naturally absolutely nobody will listen to them. As usual.

Liberals have adapted Nazi to mean ‘anyone they disagree with’. The idea that their behavior is inappropriate in any way is of course incomprehensible to them.

But not about to let a bunch of liberal politicians steal their thunder, the President of the UN General Assembly declared that Israel closing the borders, partly, with Gaza was worse than Nazi death camps.

The President is of course an Arab Muslim from Libya, whose regime actually used to be a fan of Nazi Germany. Also very conveniently, the Palestinian Arab territories are sovereign states when their proponents want them to be, and helpless parts of Israel, when that’s more convenient.

Meanwhile we’re discovering that the poor persecuted Times Square bomber who was just angry over foreclosure and acted alone– was a radical Muslim with co-conspirators. Who would have guessed that one? Who could have?

And of course Sharia Finance is involved.

Police are investigating whether a funding system that dates from the 15th century in the Middle East helped the accused Times Square bombing suspect.

Three men arrested Thursday by the FBI are suspected of helping funnel money to pay for the explosives and car bomb that was defused by police in New York last week.

They face a first court appearance early next week. They are being held on immigration charges as the investigation continues.

They were identified as Pir Khan and Aftab Khan, both of whom were arrested in Massachusetts, and Mohamad Rahman, who was arrested in Maine. All three are natives of Pakistan.

Police are investigating whether they helped attempted bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad pay for the bomb and SUV that concealed it by using a “hawala” funding network of brokers who operate under a trust system.

The hawala system avoids traditional money transfers that could be traced by police.

The system is most commonly used by foreign workers to send remittances home or by parents to send money to their children studying abroad.

Law enforcement officials say hawala systems are used increasingly by terrorists to hide their activities.

“Hawala is a popular value transfer method that predates the Western financial system and remains less expensive, and at times more widely available, than modern banking for transmitting legitimate funds around the world,” wrote John Rollins, a terrorism expert for the Congressional Research Service, in a March report on crime that crosses international borders.

But once again an extensive article fails to mention the dreaded I word. Islam.

Glenn Beck however continues embarrassing himself by citing a wave of support for his opposition to treating Faisal Shahzad as a terrorist, instead demanding that he receive what Beck mistakenly thinks are his Constitutional rights. Unsurprisingly the support comes from the likes of Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. When your support is coming from the far left, maybe it’s time to reconsider.

Or not. Since Beck still keeps insisting that Miranda is a Constitutional right, rather than a decision by an activist judiciary which claimed that being interrogated by police is the equivalent of being forced to testify against yourself.

I already went into this in some detail in a previous article, The Constitution and the Times Square Car Bomber

The Miranda Warning that Beck insists is in the Constitution is based on a similarly spurious reading which made the leap to arguing that questioning a suspect without informing him of his rights, such as the aforementioned Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a serial rapist, was the equivalent of denying him those rights. The court’s argument in Miranda was that being taken into custody is so intimidating that it is essentially a form of compulsory self-incrimination.

For Beck to argue that a failure to Mirandize “shreds the Constitution” would mean that he seriously believes that the Constitution had been shredded all along until 1966 when Earl Warren fixed it by adding the requirement of a Miranda Warning. This is a belief widely held on the liberal side of the aisle, but I don’t think Beck believes that. He is simply following the widely held liberal indoctrination which treats the rulings made through Judicial Activism as equivalent to the actual text of the Constitution.

Someone who does not understand the difference between the authentic text of the Constitution and the decisions of the Warren Court needs to put away the blackboard and do some serious reading.

Meanwhile though we’ve got a mosque coming near Ground Zero. To open on the anniversary of September 11. The last time they bombed us. Now they’ll put up a monument to the triumph of Islam.

Steyn says it best

As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since Sept. 11, au contraire: Were the United States even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the past nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” United States might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society. Instead, President Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” – rather than the rights of the ever-lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized and murdered for not wanting to be covered. The U.S. is so un-Islamophobic that a 13-story mosque is being built at ground zero – on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning in 2001.

So, in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.

And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mr. Bloomberg a day or two before Mr. Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit “maybe” was “someone … that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” Even after Mr. Shahzad’s arrest, Associated Press, CNN and The Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to the United States than anything to do with certain words beginning with I and ending in slam.

Given the demographic advance of Islam in Europe, the de jure advance of Shariah in Europe (the Geert Wilders blasphemy trial) and de facto in America (Comedy Central’s and Yale University Press’ submission to Islamic proscriptions on representations of Muhammad), you wonder why excitable types like Faisal Shahzad are so eager to jump the gun. The Islamization of the West proceeds apace; why draw attention to it and risk a backlash?

Because the reactions of Bloomberg & Company are a useful glimpse into the decayed and corroded heart of a civilization. One day the bomb will explode. Dozens dead? Hundreds? Thousands? Would we then restrict immigration from certain parts of the world? Or at least subject would-be immigrants from those places to extra roadblocks on the fast track to citizenship? What do you think?

I see, as part of the new culturally sensitive warmongering, that the NATO commander in Afghanistan is considering giving out awards to soldiers for “courageous restraint.” Maybe we could hand them out at home, too. Hopefully not posthumously.

Naturally the revelations about Shahzad’s links have not discouraged more whitewashing of Islam.

D. London, a reader had the following reply to Wright’s Times piece that the paper of unrecord would not accept

And Multiplying From Within — The Making of a Terrorist.

Any self-aware person who examines the choices he has made will recognize that there is often a confluence of motives and reasons leading him to a decision. So, Robert Wright’s spelling this out for us is not so enlightening, nor does it undermine in any way Daniel Pipes’ sensible diagnosis of the terrorist problem. Sure, a Muslim terrorist will often have other things going on in his life, financial problems, sciatica, and any number of grievances, real or perceived. Everyone has grievances. But it is the Jihadi programming that leads so many individuals to express themselves in the form of killing entirely innocent and uninvolved people.

At least the operators of drones try to hit specific culprits.

If Wright wants to be the intellectual who sees infinite nuances and shades of gray and infinite reasons for people choosing terrorism, fine. If he prefers to address the minor and possible factors, rather than the major and obvious factor, well, it’s a free country. But let us recognize that there is some deception in this choice, and not a lot of courage. He is choosing to talk about social-alienation and bank-foreclosures (both safe topics of questionable pertinence) rather than talking about Islam and jihad (the rampaging elephant in the room).

Why doesn’t Mr. Wright ponder the hundreds of thousands of other people who lost their homes to foreclosure, but who did not plant bombs in public spaces? Why doesn’t he speculate on why Shahzad chose to park his bomb in Times Square rather than in front of the specific bank that foreclosed on him? The answers to such questions would point to the real and obvious motive.

Wright mentions social-alienation as a reason for Shahzad’s choice. Fine. But who has suffered more discrimination and alienation in this country than blacks and American Indians? And yet, where are their heavily loaded S.U.V.s?

Let me invite Mr. Wright to do a thought experiment similar to the one he invites Dr. Pipes to do.

Last May, four black men did indeed try to plant bombs in New York, hoping to kill hundreds of Jews coming out of two synagogues in Riverdale. Would Mr. Wright chalk this up to social-alienation of African-American males? Or would he be honest and recognize openly that these particular black men were converts to Islam who were acting out their jihadi programming?

Finally, Wright suggests that it is U.S. policies that invite such terror. He claims that “war-on-terror hawks” construct their own little universe where “‘jihadi intent’ is an uncaused cause . . .” This seems to mean that we caused it; we brought it on ourselves. How about Bali, Mr. Wright? Was that Australia’s fault? Was the Mumbai massacre India’s fault? How about London? Madrid? Buenos Aires? Has Mr. Wright forgotten the 15,282 deadly Islamic terrorist attacks around the world since 9/11? Has he forgotten the fourteen-hundred years in which Islam, whenever it had the wherewithal, made war on all other peoples that it encounters? By various historians’ tallies, Islam caused the death of 80 million Hindus (to take just one of its many victim groups). Is Mr. Wright going to tell us that Hindus and Buddhists did something to provoke such endless massacres?

As the historian Will Durant wrote . . .

“. . . the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate, complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.”

Another interesting piece comes from Robert Harris on Palestinian Muslim terrorism entitled, A Movement of Hate

Which indeed is what it is.