http://www.melaniephillips.com/untitled-resource On one thing the British liberal class is certain – the hacking to death of a soldier in a Woolwich street yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with religion. The murderers screamed ‘Allahu akhbar’ as they tried to decapitate the soldier (a barbaric hallmark of Islamic terror), announced proudly that ‘We swear by almighty […]
Stiff competition for Most Fatuous Reaction award
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
There’s been some stiff competition over the past 24 hours for the coveted award of Most Fatuous Reaction to a Jihadi Atrocity.
I hooted at the commentator visiting from planet Zog, who had thus totally missed all the barbaric snuff-movie beheadings and eviscerations and human bomb attacks carried out by jihadists over the past two decades across the world and who wailed, poor dear, that ‘none of it made any sense’.
I enjoyed the pointed satire of the commentator who intoned that we were all guilty of causing the two jihadis to hack poor Drummer Rigby to death and tried to behead him, while claiming they were fulfilling the edicts of the Koran and waiting for the police to arrive in order to try to murder them too – but then I realised that it wasn’t satire at all.
I marvelled at the languidly superior commentator who drawled that the problem in Woolwich had been caused by ‘testosterone’ and that the real threat to all of us was actually from the collapsing EDL and the all-but collapsed BNP. And at the even more languidly superior commentator, who flicked barbs at Britain’s ‘hyperbole’ and ‘hysteria’ and implied that in Woolwich Britain kind of had it coming to it since it had been perceived as indifferent to ‘the appalling impact of a drone attack on a Pashtun village’.
Christianity: Good for the Jews? Examining the state of contemporary Christendom in an article first published January 5, 2012, Elliot Jager asks whether Jews have an interest in seeing Christianity thrive–and answers yes.—The Editors On a sun-drenched day during the week before Christmas, Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre was crowded with pilgrims from Nigeria. […]
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7321 Just when Bubba and the missus get an opportunity to dispense experience unique in American politics, and could tutor two old friends who need help, they retire to the companionable solitude of the family hearth to reflect on the Scriptures and to bask in the piety of each other. For a New York minute […]
Another Tack: Investigable and non-investigable Israel is the best country on earth for kibitzers (suppliers of unsolicited advice), for gloating critics who carp from the sidelines, for second-guessers and omniscient Monday-morning quarterbacks, whose hindsight is forever flawless. This might be just a local curio or cute cultural quaintness, were it not translated into legal monkey wrenches […]
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/05/thank-you-hafez-al-assad.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Thank+you+Hafez+al-Assad&utm_campaign=20130524_m116144623_Thank+you+Hafez+al-Assad&utm_term=Continue+reading___ The threats emanating from Syria have become downright frightening. For the past several days, Home Front Defense Minister Gilad Erdan has been warning repeatedly that it is certain that Israeli population centers will be hit by Syrian ballistic missiles and that we have to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios, including Scud missile-launched chemical […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-incontrovertible-dead-end-of-islam-revisited
At the moment, I would rather be writing about the smiley mask that is falling from President Barack Obama and his tyrannical administration regarding the fabricated Benghazi “talking points,” the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting conservative and Tea Party groups for special attention, and the government’s stealing the Associated Press’s phone records. There is also the matter of the federal government stealing millions of personal health records in order to screen who will and will not be beneficiaries of Obamacare.
On top of all that, I learned that the Obama administration and the Mainstream Media are “like that.” Imagine my index and second fingers crossed. For example, CNN vice president and deputy bureau chief Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary, Tom Nides. CBS president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, master’s degree holder in fiction-writing from NYU, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, whose editing of the Benghazi “talking points” qualifies as fiction-writing. ABC president Ben Sherwood is the brother of special Obama advisor Elizabeth Sherwood. And, NBC was co-opted because its parent company is General Electric, which got $150 billion in stimulus money. What an incestuous extended family!
That leaves Fox News as the only other major news outlet that hasn’t been co-opted or corrupted by the government. But there is one place Fox won’t go, either: criticizing the Saudis. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Group, which is about 10% owned by a Saudi royal prince.
The New York Times is completely liberal/left and shows no signs of wanting a reality check, so it can be written off. The same goes for the Washington Post, whose only saving grace is Charles Krauthammer’s weekly column. Whether or not he’s a neocon or merely a straight conservative, I’ve never been able to determine.
So, we don’t need a 50-story pyramid housing Minitru in the middle of a squalid London in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to have a compliant propaganda entity. We have glitzy studio news sets and groomed talking head fashion plates and razzle-dazzle special effects to accomplish the same end: falsehoods and news reportage that is so biased it verges on fantasy.
That being said, I move on to another subject that must be raised, even though it is tangential to the foregoing vis-à-vis our foreign and domestic policies.
The following is a revised and expanded version of “The Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam,” which first appeared on October 30th, 2010. The revision and expansion are prompted by a May 13th, 2013 article by Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, “Islam vs. Islamism,” which also appeared in the Washington Times on May 13th. His article reflects a troubling central premise of alleging a necessary distinction between Islam and “Islamists,” that is, between ordinary, non-violent Muslims and their violent, “extremist” or “radical” brethren.
Pipes opens with a reference to the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15thand the foiled attack on the Canadian rail link to the U.S.:
What motives lay behind last month’s Boston Marathon bombing and the would-be attack on a VIA Rail Canada train?
Leftists and establishmentarians variously offer imprecise and tired replies – such as “violent extremism” or anger at Western imperialism – unworthy of serious discussion. Conservatives, in contrast, engage in a lively and serious debate among themselves: some say Islam the religion provides motive, others say it’s a modern extremist variant of the religion, known as radical Islam or Islamism.
As a participant in the latter debate, here’s my argument for focusing on Islamism.
His argument proposes a false dichotomy between Islam and “Islamists,” that is, between Muslims who wage violent jihad on the West and even amongst themselves for sectarian reasons, and those who don’t.
Islam is the fourteen-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis. Muslims achieved remarkable military, economic, and cultural success between roughly 600 and 1200 C.E. Being a Muslim then meant belonging to a winning team, a fact that broadly inspired Muslims to associate their faith with mundane success. Those memories of medieval glory remain not just alive but central to believers’ confidence in Islam and in themselves as Muslims.
Major dissonance began around 1800, when Muslims unexpectedly lost wars, markets, and cultural leadership to Western Europeans. It continues today, as Muslims bunch toward the bottom of nearly ever index of achievement. This shift has caused massive confusion and anger. What went wrong, why did God seemingly abandon His faithful? The unbearable divergence between pre-modern accomplishment and modern failure brought about trauma.
Muslims have responded to this crisis in three main ways. Secularists want Muslims to ditch the Shari’a (Islamic law) and emulate the West. Apologists also emulate the West but pretend that in doing so they are following the Shari’a. Islamists reject the West in favor of a retrograde and full application of the Shari’a.
These paragraphs astounded me. The first one glosses over the conquest of the Middle East and North Africa which necessitated forced conversion, butchery, and slavery. Remarkable military successes, indeed. But for their defeat at the Battle of Tours, the “Islamists” would have carved out a huge empire in Europe. What economic accomplishments? The period he cites spans the economically stagnant Dark Ages and early Western Medieval periods. Cultural successes? Other than a certain architectural style, translating some Aristotle and other ancient thinkers – whose works Islam subsequently rejected – I can’t recall any great symphonies, artwork, or literature Islam produced in those six hundred years.
“Major dissonance” within Islam began over who was going to be Mohammad’s official successor in the 630’s. Thus the interminable conflicts between Sunnis and Shi’ites and other splintering sects of Islam. Islam never had any “cultural leadership.”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-london-beheading-is-straight-out-of-al-qaedas-terror-manual
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/concoughlin/100218238/the-woolwich-beheading-is-straight-out-of-al-qaedas-terror-manual/
The horrific killing in Woolwich, where a man believed to be a soldier based at the nearby Woolwich barracks was beheaded by two machete-wielding assailants, has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack.
At the time of writing we are still awaiting confirmation from security officials about the precise nature of the incident. But having just watched some ITV footage, which shows a man with bloodied hands who is carrying a machete saying directly into the camera “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you”, it seems pretty clear to me what has happened.
For years al-Qaeda activists such as Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who preached global jidad from his base in Yemen until he was killed by a U.S. drone strike two years ago, have been calling on their followers to launch their own home-grown attacks
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/a-jihadist-in-the-pulpit/ At Christmastime last year, I wrote about a vicar in a heavily Muslim part of Oslo who decided that the best way for a group of schoolchildren in her care to celebrate the holidays was to read aloud in church from the Koran. She’s not alone in her special understanding of her duty as […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/german-government-ramps-up-monitoring-of-conservatives/ The recent controversial decision by the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz) to monitor the popular conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI) has only subsequently become more questionable. Contrary comments by the director of Germany’s Federal Office of Constitutional Protection (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), public statements by local authorities in Munich, and suspicions of political […]
