RUTHFULLY YOURS

Friday Afternoon Roundup – There is No End to the Jihad

 It’s completely unsurprising that the mainstream media is trying to connect Joe Stack’s fatal flight into an IRS building with the Tea Party movement or some sort of nebulous right wing extremism. The problem is that Stack’s own publicly available manifesto is as much anti-corporate than anti-government, denouncing the Bush Administration and corporate cronyism. Stack also inveighs against health care reform delays and closes with praise for Communism and a condemnation of Capitalism.

Rather obviously not ideas typical of the Tea Party movement.

While the media has scrambled to try and make connections, using their usual cynical tactic of interviewing carefully selected “experts” who talk about right wing extremism and the need to tackle the problem of anti-government sentiments (there were no doubt experts giving King George III the same advice), there are no connections.

Joseph Andrew Stack was angry not over some broader political issue, but because he felt his life had been ruined by the government. But his death serves as a convenient foil for liberals seeking to denounce all anti-government critics as dangerous extremists and terrorists who must be clamped down on. This is not an unfamiliar cycle. But the appropriation of Stack’s deadly flight by the left is as cynical as the appropriation of Amy Bishop’s shotgun killing of three minority co-workers on the right.

The IRS is not a partisan organization. The particular law that Stack was angry about that disenfranchised engineers and computer experts working as consultants, had been proposed by the Democratic Senator Moynihan and was passed as part of tax reforms under Reagan. It has since remained law as congress has shifted from one party to another. In other words this is not a partisan issue, much as the media would like to transform it into one, in order to gain some leverage over a populist movement.

But in real right wing violence, a rapper named Sky Blu; is claiming that Mitt Romney assaulted him with a “Vulcan Grip ” It’s clear that Republicans are out of control if even harmless rappers are terrified of them and their brutal outer space assaults.

Hopefully the Federal government can step in and do something to protect the vulnerable hip hop community from further “Vulcan Grip” attacks by violent right wing extremists in the sky.

Over in Pennsylvania, the White House has made it clear how far they’re willing to go to tamper with elections, by offering congresscritter Joe Sestak a “high ranking” Federal job if he refrains from challenging Specter.

The White House is claiming that it never happened. Which means that either Sestak is lying or the White House is lying. The White House has an obvious motive for trying to protect Specter, not because they like him, but because they need to be able to present their party as a viable option for GOP defectors.

But if Sestak beats Specter in the primary, switching parties will stop being a good option for liberal Republicans, who can lose a primary just as well in their own party, without making the switch.

The question is how many more candidates never showed up because of cozy affairs like these? And just how deep does the White House’s tampering with the democratic process go?

But questions like that would require an objective media, which would require people willing to actually discover the truth. Which in the media can and will get you fired. As one reporter found out.

Atlanta Progressive News has parted ways with long-serving senior staff writer Jonathan Springston. Apparently, Springston’s affinity for fact-based reporting clashed with Cardinale’s vision.

In an e-mail statement, editor Matthew Cardinale says Springston was asked to leave APN last week “because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

And so the Atlanta Progressive has ushered in a new age of philosophy by declaring that there is no objective reality, only subjective activism. As the editor said;

At a very fundamental, core level, Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News. It just wasn’t the right fit.

In the meantime, here is some information from our Frequently Asked Questions page:
“Progressive news is news that brings us closer to universal health care, living wages, affordable housing, peace, a healthy environment, and voting systems we can trust.

We believe there is no such thing as objective news.

I actually welcome this statement and wish that more news organizations would come out of the objective closet and follow in the footsteps of the Atlanta Progressive by declaring that they don’t believe in an objective reality or objective news.

The only question though is why the Atlanta Progressive insists on confusing news with propaganda. In common usage, news assumes reporting, while the Atlanta Progressive is dedicated to propaganda.

Over in sunny Indonesia, which like just about every Muslim country is only becoming more extreme, the Sharia police are on the march.

The province, on the western tip of Sumatra island, home to about 4 million people, won the right to implement Islamic law in 2001, after being granted semi-autonomy as part of efforts to end a decades-long separatist war. Sharia has been enforced with increasing vigor since the 2004 Asian tsunami, which many people interpreted as a divine warning, and last September the provincial parliament approved a new penalty for adulterers: stoning to death.

Aceh is not alone. Across Indonesia, dozens of local governments – given wide scope to enact their own laws under a decentralized system – have adopted Islamic regulations on dress and behavior. In parts of Central Java and South Sulawesi provinces, female civil servants are now obliged to wear headscarves or risk losing their jobs.

In Aceh, many people say they abhor the stoning penalty – yet to be signed into law – although few will criticize it publicly for fear of being branded bad Muslims. But enforcers of a stricter approach to Islam appear to be gathering momentum. Public canings have been carried out, and earlier this month women were banned from wearing tight trousers in one district of Aceh.

Of course Islamic law always gains momentum, because opposing it makes you a heretic, which means you can be killed. Because Islam like the Atlanta Progressive does not believe in an objective reality, only the Islamic reality in which women’s hair rays corrupt men and turn them into zombies.

There are advantages to believing only in a subjective Islamic reality. For example when one of your top officials is caught soliciting sex, you can blame Israel for the whole thing… as this great piece by the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh

This is the kind of stuff that drives a young Palestinian man or woman to take a gun or a knife and kill the first Jew he or she meets on the street:

Blaming Israel and the Jews for everything that goes wrong has long been the accepted norm in the Arab and Islamic world. This is how Arab dictators divert attention from the real problems at home. If the economy in an Arab country is bad, then it’s because of Israel and the Jews. If there is no democracy and stability, then its Israel’s and the Jews’ fault, too.

Rafik Husseini was caught with his pants down in the bedroom of an Arab woman and, of course, it’s the Jews’ fault. Never mind that he was caught red-handed soliciting sex from the woman by members of his own security forces, who also filmed him while he was bad-mouthing Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. Instead of responding to the charges made by Shabaneh, the Palestinian Authority rushed to accuse him of “collaboration” with Israel. The official Palestinian version is that the Israeli government had recruited the whistle-blower to incriminate Abbas because of his refusal to return to the negotiating table with Israel.

Instead of coping with charges of corruption, Arab rulers and governments find it easier to direct a blaming finger at Israel. This anti-Israel incitement has resulted in the emergence of an entire generation or two of Arabs and Muslims who are convinced that Jews are behind all evils and should therefore be fought against or even eliminated.

When a young Palestinian man or woman hears that Israel has decided to “defame” and “discredit” the Palestinian leadership by exposing one of Abbas’s top aides, Rafik Husseini, while he’s lying naked in the bedroom of a Palestinian woman, he or she will start thinking how to strike back.

Since the scandal broke out in late January, several Palestinian leaders and Abbas aides have repeatedly gone public to condemn the purported Israeli conspiracy.

Shabaneh was a great Palestinian intelligence official until he decided to speak out against rampant corruption in the Palestinian Authority in general and Abbas’s bureau in particular. Shabaneh worked for the Palestinian security services for over 15 years, during which time his bosses praised him for his loyalty, charisma and outstanding work.

But now the same Shabaneh has become, in the eyes of Abbas and his spokesmen, an Israeli spy and traitor who deserves capital punishment. As long as Shabaneh kept his mouth shut, he was okay. He was so much appreciated that less than two years ago Abbas promoted him to the job of commander of the General Intelligence Service in the Hebron district, home to one-third of the West Bank Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority’s claim that the Israelis are behind the latest sex scandal in Ramallah should be seen in the context of the campaign of incitement that began under Yasser Arafat against Israel and Jews, and what dictators use to “change the subject” at home.

This of course is what happens when you let go of that pesky objective reality, and just stick to propaganda that claims the Jews, CIA or the Freemasons are behind everything that happens around you. Then you can become a staff member for the Atlanta Progressive or a loyal Muslim.

And who’s paying for all this loveliness. Why you are? Because the PA is a mostly US and EU funded entity, which exists so that its officials can steal money and kill Jews… in no particular order.

The latest developments in this scandal has Abbas issuing an arrest warrant for the head of the anti-corruption unit of his own Intelligence Service.

… for the crime of well, uncovering corruption in the wrong places. Rafik Husseini has been suspended for a few weeks until a three man commission of his buddies will review his case and decide he’s completely innocent.

Shabaneh also expressed fear that the members of the commission of inquiry – all Abbas loyalists – would try to “bury” the cases of corruption that he exposed in the interview with the Post.

He noted that one of the commission members, Ahmed, was himself involved in financial corruption. “Azzam al-Ahmed and his brother, Allam, are suspected of embezzlement of more than $2.5 million,” he said.

So this should work out really well. Washington is of course ignoring the entire situation. Just as three administrations have ignored the mindblowing corruption and abuses of power by the terrorists they put into power and insist on funding and supporting. And when Hamas marches in, they’ll wonder why.

The entire perverse situation only becomes more mixed up, when you consider that apparently the Obama Administration’s support for Abbas, is the only reason keeping Netanyahu from making a disastrous prisoner release deal that would put large numbers of Hamas terrorists back on the street.

By supporting the Fatah terrorists in this case, the Obama Administration is actually saving Israel from doing a disastrous deal with the devil. Of course anything that comes out of the mouth of Shalit’s increasingly repulsive father, Noam Shalit, who has long ago made it obvious that if he had to detonate an atomic bomb in the middle of Tel Aviv in order to obtain his son’s release, he would hop on a taxi and get it done… has to be taken with a grain of salt. But there’s a tragic irony in the degree to which this entire situation has become so tangled up, that we have to be grateful to the Obama Administration for keeping Netanyahu from putting Hamas terrorists on the street. And it also shows that the only way to deal with the situation is to cut the Gordian Knot and drive all the terrorists out of Israel once and for all.

But that would be the old Israel. The Israel that the Times’ Melanie Reid admires in her article.

Now I know we really, really shouldn’t joke about these things. I should be wearing black and have a long face and be uttering pieties about the disgraceful “extrajudicial” killing of the Hamas military chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, apparently by Israeli agents.

All nice people, quite rightly, are adopting the proper moral stance and expressing outrage and disgust at this affront to international law and justice. But the rest of us … well, we simply can’t wait until the movie comes out. Largely thanks to the blurry CCTV pictures, there is an element to the assassination in Dubai that is appallingly irresistible. What the secret agents did — and, critically, what we saw them do — was compelling and breathtaking in its cleverness.

…

It is an unfashionable thing to say, but I have a considerable admiration for the Israeli way of doing things. They want something, they get it. They perceive someone as their deadly enemy, they kill them. They get hit, they hit back. They don’t waste time explaining or justifying or agonising; nor do they allow their detractors to enter their country and then afford them generous welfare payments. They just act. No messing. No scruples. Not even a shrug and a denial, just a rather magnificent refusal to debate anything.

This absolutism, based on their history, carries its own moral weight; one that is rather electrifying in a Western world grown flabby with niceties. Clearly, the Israelis could defend their policies if they wanted to, but they quite simply can’t be bothered. It’s a waste of breath. One admires them for that, too.

I’ve felt this way ever since the Entebbe raid in 1976, an occasion when the Israelis showed Hollywood a thing or two. After two Palestinians and two Germans had hijacked an aircraft on a flight that had originated in Israel, the Israeli army simply swooped in, killed the hijackers and freed all but three of the hostages. It was decisive, bloody and clever. Lieutenant-Colonel “Yoni” Netanyahu, the older brother of the present Prime Minister, Binyamin, was the only commando killed in the fighting.

They also outdid fiction after the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, when they hunted down 11 Palestinians who were responsible and eliminated them wherever they were in the world. Aided by fake passports and disguises, Mossad agents employed methods including a booby-trapped telephone, a bomb planted in a bed and a raid in Beirut in which the present Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, dressed as a woman. Nobody caught it on CCTV, but on the ground that human nature can never resist this kind of stuff, Steven Spielberg made it into the Oscar-nominated 2005 movie Munich.

Maybe, as the West becomes increasingly gentle and polite, and pays those monthly direct debits to Amnesty International, we need the Israelis to remind us that the world is not made according to our template. Maybe that is why we are drawn towards tales of uncompromising, ruthless derring-do. How else to explain the veneration of the SAS, the worldwide glut of books and movies on covert operations?

One last point. Usually, in comedy heist movies, no one gets killed. Somewhere a family is weeping at the death of Mr al-Mabhouh and no one takes any pleasure from that. But the people who die in Mossad operations tend to be, like the Hamas leader, morally compromised. There’s a side to us that acknowledges that some assassins’ victims may have had it coming to them. So we’re appalled, but not so appalled that we don’t look forward with relish to the sequel. Ultimately, this is less about siding with the Israelis than loving winners.

And here’s the thing, we do like winners, even when we condemn them. Because winning demonstrates competence.

We’re not supposed to admire intelligence agents who take down the bad guys? No, we’re supposed to admire the bad guys. And the UK and all of Europe is awash in that sort of propaganda, pursuing CIA agents who forcibly extradited Al Queda terrorists from Italy, Mossad agents who took out a Hamas terrorist in Dubai. The good guys may be the bad guys, and the bad may be the good guys, to the left, which still wears its Che on its sleeve and its chest– but to the general public, taking out the bad guys is a good thing.

For its entire modern history, Israel has been conflicted, torn between taking the offensive and cutting diplomatic deals. Israel’s would be leaders accepted the UN compromise of 1947, but had to fight anyway when the Arabs refused it. Israel accepted the Oslo accords, but has to fight anyway because the Palestinian Arabs have never treated it as anything but a chance to destroy Israel from the inside. And so war is inevitable. Only the terms of the engagement are in doubt.

It’s not me talking. It’s Fatah leader after Fatah leader, who take money from America, from Europe and Israel– and call for Jihad anyway. Here’s a treat from earlier this month by the P.A. Minister of Religious Endowments on PA TV (which yes, you are funding)

“What is Jihad, and what is resistance? When people talk about Jihad, what do they mean? What is the meaning of Jihad in Islam? And what is the meaning of resistance in Islam? We must understand this.

“The literal meaning of ‘Jihad’ is the exertion of efforts – exerting your efforts and investing your energy. Jihad for the sake of Allah means exerting your efforts in order to elevate the word of Allah – whether these efforts are mental, physical, financial, or verbal.

“In this, the words of the Prophet Muhammad are true: ‘Wage Jihad against infidels or the polytheists with your money, your souls, and your tongues.’ Wage Jihad against the polytheists with money. When you use your money for the sake of Allah, in defense of the religion of Allah, of the Muslims, of their countries, and of all that is sacred to them – you are a mujahid for the sake of Allah.

“In Our Resistance to the Enemy, We Must Choose the Means and Methods that Will Grant Us Victory, Benefit Us, and Minimize Our Losses”

“Some people believe that Jihad means nothing but bearing arms and fighting the enemy. This is indeed Jihad, but it is not the only Jihad. There is the Jihad of the word, the Jihad of money, the Jihad of resistance, and the Jihad of defense. This is what we need to understand about the meaning of ‘resistance.’

“Resistance does not mean that we should bear arms, whether the time is right or not. It is wise to bear arms at a time when we should bear arms, and to lay down our weapons when we should lay down our weapons.

…

“Brothers, we must understand that resistance assumes many forms, and that Jihad assumes many and varied forms. We have no right to reduce this notion into a single form, or into several forms, without the others. All forms of resistance are honorable and necessary.

“Jihad continues to Judgment Day. Brothers, nobody – whoever he may be – can ever abolish Jihad or say that it has come to an end. Jihad continues to Judgment Day. Someone once said in a political debate: ‘I am ready to declare an end to Jihad.’ This concept is wrong. Nobody has the right to declare an end to Jihad.

There you have it folks, one of the best elucidations of what Jihad means to date. From the camel’s mouth. War of many kinds without end. Military warfare, economic warfare, reproductive warfare… all of it meant to insure the worldwide supremacy of Islam.

There is no end to the Jihad. Not now. Not ever. It’s a perpetual war being waged against us by every faithful Muslim, using whatever means and tactics are at his disposal, as decided on by his religious leaders.

The Muslim woman having babies on the dole in the UK is fighting her own Jihad. The CAIR official insinuating himself into our political structure is fighting his own Jihad. The Muslim interpreter who smiles and shakes hands and then poisons the food, is carrying out his own Jihad.

Where there are faithful Muslims, there is Jihad. And until we understand this, we cannot win.

And speaking of the various Jihads, the lawfare Jihad was defeated in Texas. But in California, Tom Campbell, the demon sheep of the Jihad, has his own ties to Islamic Jihad revealed.

But meanwhile Dem congressmen who signed a letter on behalf of Hamas, and who are tied up with anti-Israel lobbying group J Street, are outraged (very outraged) because Israel’s Foreign Minister showed no interest in rolling out the red carpet for them.

A group of US congressmen were unpleasantly surprised when Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon refused to meet with them this week.

US congressmen and other governmental representatives are generally treated as VIPs in the Holy Land. However, this particular group was organized by J Street, a lobby that pro-Israel activists say pressures Israel to implement leftist and pro-Arab policies.

Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt fumed Wednesday that “in our opinion, this is an inappropriate way to treat elected representatives of Israel’s closest ally who are visiting the country.”

Of course they’re not there as representatives of Israel’s “closest ally”. They’re there as representatives of J Street, which is partially funded by George Soros, who kinda wants to see the country burn.

And really, at a time when Delahunt needs to be explaining why he set Amy Bishop loose to kill again, should his priorities really be directed at demanding access to Israeli officials?

But maybe running away to Israel to bash that country is a convenient way for Delahunt to get away from that pesky investigation. And if the investigation goes wrong, maybe he can defect to Gaza.

As questions swirl around his role as Norfolk district attorney in the handling of Amy Bishop’s shooting case in 1986, US Representative William Delahunt is half a world away, on a fact-finding tour that’s finding controversy in the Middle East.

Delahunt, Democrat of Quincy, told an Associated Press reporter in Tel Aviv he has limited memory of the shooting death of Seth Bishop by his sister, Amy, a case that Braintree Police called accidental and that the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute. Delahunt said his first assistant, John Kivlan, was in charge of the case.

”I understand I haven’t had a real opportunity to get into the details of the case, but I suspect when I return I’ll have an opportunity to become debriefed and I know there have been statements but I’m not really in a position to see any records,” Delahunt said.

Sure, it’s not like he’s a prominent public official or anything.

Family Security Matters has an exclusive on the Muslim Poisoners at Fort Jackson. Of course this will soon be accompanied by calls for more tolerance and diversity. Which is how your food gets poisoned in the first place.

And on that cheerful note, enjoy the weekend.