RUTHFULLY YOURS

Diana West’s seminal and exhaustive exposé of FDR’s betrayal of the U.S. deserves revisiting and re-reading by anyone who wants to grasp why the U.S. is now incrementally submitting to and allowing the invasion of this country by Islam.. This is the original Rule of Reason review, with some minor corrections, from June 8th, 2013.

Where to begin?

In American Betrayal *, Diana West begins in 1933.

In the name of establishing historical causo-connections, Iwould have begun in 1781, when Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, a brain-cracking treatise which relied on reality to prove that reality was unknowable. That is, by reading his book, a real thing in your real hands, you were expected to agree with Kant that real things were only rough reflections of things whose “essences” existed were beyond the evidence of our benighted, warping senses, in some other realm. Kant counted on everyone not noticing the contradiction and not seeing the ease with which his elaborately constructed mare’s nest could be exploded.

No contemporary, I gather, ever confronted Kant and said, “Herr Professor! If what you say is true, then this book is just a shadow, and the print in it, and all your words, too! What could they mean? How could they be true? Are your words noumena, or mere phenomena?”

In 1781, the year of America’s decisive victory over Britain at Yorktown, there appeared in Europe a book of philosophy called the Critique of Pure Reason. When he read it, a friend of the author wailed and called his colleague “the smasher of everything.”

But no one ever did confront Kant with his contradictions, fallacies, and cerebral legerdemain, except for some Hegelian hair-splitters – except for Arthur Schopenhauer in 1818 after Kant’s death in 1804 – and the Western world has been the worse for it.

1781. Just as the American Revolution, a product of the Enlightenm

This was an interesting, important read. It is getting a fair amount of attention on Twitter.

Former Pakistani parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani analyzes “Pakistan’s foundational dilemma—Muslim homeland or Islamic state” in her new book, Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities. Therein she provides an observant overview of how recurring drives for Islamic theocracy dashed any founding vision of Pakistan as a secular state, to the detriment alike of Pakistan’s Muslim-majority and non-Muslim minorities.

Ispahani begins her historical review with the 1947 partition of Britain’s Indian colony into the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. “Pakistan was carved out of British India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims—a majority enclave designed to protect against minority status in an undivided India” with its Hindu-majority. Given disparate ethnicities and new borders drawn along Hindu/Muslim sectarian lines, “Pakistan was not a territorial nation in the traditional sense. Its leaders had to explain its raison d’être, and most found it convenient to do so in religious terms.”

This faith-based identity appears in Pakistan’s name, the source of Ispahani’s book title. Pakistan arose amidst the 1930s Muslim India independence movement from an acronym encompassing the future country’s regions. Yet Pakistan also means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, a “meaning embraced by Islamist activists since the country’s founding.”

While Pakistan’s population today is only three percent non-Muslim, Ispahani notes that in 1947 Pakistan (then including modern Bangladesh) was almost 23 percent non-Muslim. This previously more pluralistic Pakistani population drew hope from Pakistan’s founding Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Days before Pakistan’s August 14 independence, his famous August 11, 1947, “speech advanced the case for a secular, albeit Muslim-majority, Pakistan.”

Several of Jinnah’s fellow Muslim League leaders tried to suppress his speech’s publication, indicating for Ispahani the controversy surrounding Westernized, secular Pakistani leaders like him. “As time went on, Pakistan’s religious parties ferociously attacked Pakistan’s elites for their un-Islamic lifestyle while demanding greater Islamization,” demands often receiving appeasement. “Each round of Islamization was followed by demands for an even greater role for religion in public life.”

Already in 1949, notes Ispahani, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, offered a “vision for Pakistan diametrically-opposed to the secular one Jinnah had offered” in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly. “Liaquat, an Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernized landowner not known for personal religiosity,” supported the Objectives Resolution declaring an Islamic state as the objective in the drafting of Pakistan’s constitution. Many believe that he thereby “intended to placate clerics and Islamists only in the most cosmetic sense.” Nonetheless, Pakistan’s 1956 constitution, with the Objectives Resolution as preamble and numerous Islamic references, proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ispahani examines a similar duality in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Pakistan’s 1970 elections. He “spoke of Islam as the personal religion of the majority” on the campaign trail but under his leadership Pakistan’s new “1973 constitution not only retained the Islamic provisions from earlier versions but also added new ones.” A 1974 constitutional amendment then began the ongoing persecution of the Ahmadi sect by declaring them non-Muslim. “Rejecting Bhutto’s hard-cultivated Islamic credentials,” his Islamist opposition in the 1977 elections emphasized his alcohol consumption.

Following the elections, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in a coup and had him executed on trumped-up charges. Many associate Pakistan’s Islamization with Zia, Ispahani notes, who “used the phrase ‘soldier of Islam’ to describe himself in his very first speech” in power. Until his death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, this dictator’s “Islamization of the nation was global in its scope and almost obsessive in its thoroughness,” as she documents in detail.

From “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” a forthcoming book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, excerpted at TheHill.com, April 12:

Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.

In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.

That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, Jim Margolis, John Anzalone, John Podesta, [Robby] Mook, Huma Abedin and Dan Schwerin were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning—both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures—Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.

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‘Lexicographer” is not a seductive word. Samuel Johnson famously defined it, more than 260 years ago, as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.” His own “Dictionary of the English Language” belied this impression of soulless passivity, but the image has stuck. There is a common assumption that dictionaries are put together by faceless dullards. In the judgmental world of online dating, saying that you’re a lexicographer has all the aphrodisiac potency of admitting that you enjoy reorganizing your sock drawer.

Yet the reputation of lexicography is starting to change, and the main reason is the emergence of a new generation of word mavens who brighten social media with linguistic curios and discussion points. Among these is Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster. That venerable firm of course takes half its name from Noah Webster, and one of Webster’s key statements was that “the business of a lexicographer is to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” As Ms. Stamper comments, modern practitioners shift the emphasis: Today the aspiration is “to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” After all, no dictionary can document everything.

Ms. Stamper’s responsibilities at Merriam-Webster include defining new words and revising out-of-date entries. She also appears in its “Ask the Editor” video series, where she holds forth on matters such as the correct plural of “octopus” and the question of whether Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” actually has anything to do with irony—two topics beloved of half-informed pedants. Meanwhile, on Twitter, where wholly uninformed pedants outnumber any other group, she is a voice of sassy realism, apt to celebrate “badass word-nerd women” or proffer golden nuggets of trivia, such as the fact that the German word for a lower-back tattoo is “Arschgeweih” (which literally means “ass antlers”).

In “Word by Word,” Ms. Stamper maintains this “nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty, worm’s-eye view.” We learn that her suitability for her chosen career revealed itself when she was a child. Growing up in Colorado, she devoured her parents’ hoarded catalogs. At age 9, having gorged on a medical dictionary, she alarmed her father by announcing, “I’m reading about scleroderma.” Though she doesn’t say so, learning about an ailment that causes hardening of the skin may have been useful preparation for a life of being teased by people who think that logophilia is itself an illness, not an endowment. CONTINUE AT SITE