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 […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/when-scandals-rocked-obamas-world-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by tv and movie star Morgan Brittany, provocateur Michael Chandler and the National Director of PolitiChicks, Ann-Marie Murrell.
The Gang discussed Dzhokhar’s Boat Manifesto. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on how a jihadist has explained that Allah made him do it — and how the media still can’t find a motive.
Part I focused on: When Scandals Rocked Obama’s World.
To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/afghanistan-comes-to-london/print/
NO IT IS NOT SIMPLY AFGHANISTAN… ANY MORE THAN IT WAS NOT CHECHNYA THAT CAME TO THE BOSTON MARATHON…. IT WAS JIHAD THAT CAME TO BOSTON AND LONDON…..RSK
After telling the story of Mohammed’s boast that he would make the mountain come to him, only to be forced to go to it, Francis Bacon observed, “If the mountains will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.”
Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead, Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain.
Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom.
In a decade, 600,000 white Londoners have fled the city. Those are the sorts of numbers you would expect from the Syrian civil war. Their place has been taken by the million Muslims occupying the city.
Woolwich Common, adjacent to the area where the attack took place, is described as an “inner-city multicultural neighborhood” which is to say that it is more ethnically diverse than the London average; it has more violent crimes than average and is among the 5% of poorest neighborhoods. Only 58% of its population was born in England and a quarter of its residents immigrated in that same dreadful decade.
Multiculturalism has enriched the area with the Woolwich Manz, a Somali Muslim gang whose antics have led residents to fear walking the streets at night. The Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Social Inclusion and Justice Division informs us that there are thousands of Somalis in the borough, most of whom live in Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside.
Gang wars over the lucrative drug business have broken out between the Woolwich Manz and other African gangs. Already in 2007, the London Evening Standard said that area residents were describing the Woolwich Common Estate as a “war zone” with stabbings and shootings and a new generation of child soldiers being recruited into the war. It was a little piece of Somalia in the United Kingdom.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578499293514955294.html?mod=trending_now_3 Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama’s re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578499280989584770.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion Of all the excuses, explanations and alibis pouring forth in the saga of the IRS kneecapping of conservative groups during the victorious Obama 2012 campaign, the one that deserves attention is this from David Axelrod: “Part of being president is that there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know, because the government is […]
