http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324637504578565530512048940.html At this writing, Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive National Security Agency contractor indicted on espionage charges, is in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman insists his government is powerless to detain him. “We have nothing to do with this story,” says Dmitri Peskov. “I don’t approve or disapprove plane tickets.” Funny how Mr. Putin always […]
Mosque-Building Rising in the U.S.A Mosque-Building Rising in the U.S.A: The opening this weekend of a new mosque in Rowland Heights, California is powerful evidence of a building boom of such facilities in Southern California and around the nation. Over the last several years, new mosques have risen in Mission Viejo, Irvine, Anaheim, Reseda, Rancho Cucamonga, Rosemead, […]
http://q4j-middle-east.com Back in the early 1930s, two Jewish high school students from Cleveland created Superman. Writer and artist, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sold their creation to what would later be known as DC Comics in 1938. I saw the latest Superman movie on Father’s Day in June this year. Sent by […]
Joining the Syrian Fray to Avoid Facing Iran Reported division between the United States President and his Secretary of State regarding American intervention on behalf of Syria’s Sunni opposition, will afford Obama deniability for the predictable horrific results. Most importantly, it diverts attention from the Administration’s deliberate failure to stop Iran from finalizing its nuclear weapons capabilities. The Administration’s pretense that the White House […]
http://letthemfight.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-are-president-and-members-of.html This is a good question and one that no one in the media seems willing to ask. Even Fox news seems ambivalent, rather skirting the issue in favor of more…”compassionate” questions. We have known for a long time that Al Qaida has been an integral influence within the Syrian Rebel forces in much […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/351880/print Even if I weren’t opposed to American intervention on the side of Sunni Islamic supremacists in Syria, I’d be inclined to agree with the bottom line of John O’Sullivan’s characteristically wise weekend column: the United States should not act unless we are willing to act decisively. There is clearly no public appetite for doing so. I believe […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/german-left-ramps-up-attacks-on-islam?f=puball
National parliamentarians from Die Linke, Germany’s post-communist Left Party, recently presented the federal German government with a Minor Inquiry (Kleine Anfrage or KA) concerning the government’s policy towards the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI). This is only the latest effort by left-wing multiculturalists to quash open discussion, and criticism on Islam by designating the discourse “anti-democratic”and “right-wing extremist.”
As the online rules of order for the German parliament or Bundestag explain, the KA in Section 104 allows the Bundestag’s president to receive questions for the federal government about “certain delineated areas.” Normally the president calls upon the government to answer the questions in writing within 14 days, although agreement with the KA authors can extend this time limit. As the German-language KA Wikipedia entry explains, this procedure serves as a means of parliamentary control over the government by calling upon it to give account of a given state of affairs.
Die Linke’s May 13, 2013, KA (document 17/13573, available in PDF format here) notes that “Islam-hostile internet portals” like PI with its “tens of thousands of visitors daily” and parties such as the Freedom Party (Die Freiheit) and Germany’s Pro movement (Pro NRW/Pro Deutschland) “warn against a supposed ‘Islamization of Europe.'” In PI reader comments, meanwhile, Muslims “are collectively humiliated and denigrated in a racist, xenophobic, insulting, hate-filled, and at times violence-glorifying manner.”
Referenced by the KA and previously reported by this author (see here and here), PI and Die Freiheit, with common members such as Michael Stürzenberger, have conducted a petition drive for a referendum to stop a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (Zentrum für Islams in Europa-München or ZIE-M). The KA references a story from the Munich-based German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung discussing how Stürzenberger commonly compares the Koran with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Die Freiheit rallies have featured signs stating “Christ is truth, Muhammad is a lie.” Previously reported by this author as well (see here and here), the KA also notes that the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz) has recently begun monitoring Bavarian chapters of PI/Die Freiheit due to “anti-constitutional” sentiments.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-anti-war-war-on-terror
Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
And a moment before, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania had been an ally of Eastasia, and at war with Eurasia.1. It would be deemed a thought crime to know and think otherwise.
And it’s a virtual thought crime today to say that we are at war with Islam, or even to suggest that Islam is at war with us. Two presidents said so. At the very most, we’re only making “War on Terror.” We are fearful of Islam’s “extremists,” not of the ideology of Islam itself. So, once we identify (playing an intelligence version of “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”), foil and stamp out the “extremists,” we’ll be okay and safe and able to get on with our lives.
Right.
When we engaged Japan and Nazi Germany in a life or death conflict, we did not call it the “War on Kamikazes” and the “War on Blitzkrieg.” The phrase “War on Terror” makes little sense and such a “war” will make little headway if we do not remove régimes that fund and endorse attacks on this country. We defeated the Shinto régime that sent the Kamikazes against us and we defeated the Nazis who perfected Blitzkrieg. And then the Kamikazes stopped coming and so did the V2 rockets and Tiger tanks and the whole Wehrmacht. If we hadn’t destroyed our enemies’ capacity to make war, and physically, militarily refuted the efficacy of their ideologies, we’d probably still be fighting Japan and Germany. Or sued for a negotiated peace on our enemies’ terms.
Which is what we are effectively doing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Suing for peace.
The weapons and tactics employed by the Japanese and Nazis were indeed intended to strike “terror” in soldiers facing them and in civilians. But to divorce those weapons from the régimes that employed them in war is a perilously futile and foolhardy exercise in evasion. And that is precisely what we have done with the “War on Terror.”
The “War on Terror,” on one hand, is an accurate term for the self-blinding policy the U.S. has engaged in for far too long. On the other hand, it is dishonest, cowardly, and evasive. We don’t blame the ideology. Heavens, no. Islam is a “religion,” and a “religion of peace.” Never mind the historical record that it has never been a “religion of peace” in its 1,400-year existence. At least, not the “peace” as the West understands it.
No, we blame the “extremists.” The term “extremist” is a smear term intended to vilify anyone who acts on fundamental principles. The American Revolutionaries were “extremists” who fought for freedom. Islamic jihadists are “extremist” “freedom-fighters” – that is, they fight against freedom, for Islamic ideology is anti-freedom. Anti-liberty. Anti-mind.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/if-you-cant-beat-em-join-em/print/
“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty –
Come and join the Nazi Party.”
– Mel Brooks, “Springtime for Hitler”
What to do? Late last Sunday night, a 23-year-old woman in Oscarshamn, a town of 17,000 people that’s about halfway between Mecca and Medina – sorry, I mean Stockholm and Malmö – was on her way home when she was stopped by three young men of foreign origin. “Are you Swedish?” they asked her. When she said yes, they hit her so hard that she fell to the ground. Then, looking down at her, lying there at their feet, they said: “Welcome to Sweden. It’s our country now, not yours.”
The brief account I read of this incident closes with the information that the police have labeled this a “hate crime.” Gee, ya think? Presumably there’s no place on their checklists for “soft jihad.” (Although I’m sure there was nothing soft about the punch that knocked that young woman to the pavement.)
One thing these “soft” jihadists have going for them is that what they’re engaged in is, quite simply, so audacious that – unless you’re prepared to open your mind up to the immense and terrible reality of it – it can seem almost farcical. “It’s our country now, not yours”? It has the absurd ring of a pathetic claim made by some schoolyard punk. Except that those three punks in Oscarshamn aren’t alone. They’re certainly far from the first of their kind in Europe to make such an arrogant pronouncement. And as the years go by, that bold assertion, echoed increasingly in the streets of a growing number of European towns and cities, comes ever closer to being the plain and simple truth.
It may be that that 22-year-old woman would’ve known better than to walk home alone late at night if she were living in certain parts of Stockholm or Malmö, but that she assumed it was still safe in Oscarshamn. Perhaps she figured: well, it won’t be safe here in five or ten years, but for now…?
This is the current European calculus. I’m reminded of a gay guy I met in a West Hollywood bar one night in the mid 1980s. He had, he told me, recently moved to L.A. from New York. “Why?” I asked. I was stunned by the fatuity, the deadly self-deception, of his reply. He had left New York, he said, to get away from AIDS: “It’s not so bad here yet.”
I’m also brought to mind of the Australian writer Nevil Shute’s haunting 1957 novel On the Beach, which became a 1959 film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. Fallout from a nuclear war has killed almost everybody on earth, leaving alive just a few million people in the southern hemisphere – in Australia, New Zealand, and at the southern tips of South America and Africa – who can do nothing but wait for the air currents to do the inevitable job of bringing the radiation their way, too. Over the course of the novel, one by one, from north to south, the cities of Australia die out. The film is splendid, but the novel paints an even more haunting portrait of the human race helplessly facing its own extinction.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/kerrys-push-to-release-palestinian-terrorists/print/ Two months ago I reported here that Secretary of State John Kerry was—in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror attack—pressuring Israel to release heinous terrorists from prison. The rationale: such a release was being demanded by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, and would get him to resume peace negotiations with Israel after […]
