RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lockheed’s nuclear-fusion project sounds promising, but remember: It is the federal government’s largest contractor.

Lockheed Martin thinks it may just about have a handle on this nuclear-fusion thing, but the U.S. government cannot manage to keep Ebola patients off a flight to Cleveland. Sometimes, you simply must hate the 21st century.

Lockheed’s announcement about its ambitious fusion project, which if successful would represent a fundamental economic and technological shift for the entire world, is the sort of thing that makes one pause to consider the possibilities. The end product would be a relatively compact (small enough to haul on a semi) reactor that could with a few pounds of fuel and no emissions power aircraft and spacecraft that effectively never need refueling, transform and decentralize power grids, and do much more. The libertarian in me is tempted to say, “Aha! There’s your private sector in action!” and to prepare my soul to enjoy the spectacle of people who are terrified about carbon dioxide emissions prostrating themselves before Lockheed’s research team. But Lockheed Martin isn’t really the private sector; it is year in and year out the federal government’s largest contractor, and federal contracts account for about three-fourths of its revenue. It relies on a government-dominated enterprise, the universities, for its most important input, raw brainpower.

But if one is willing to let up on the ideological rigidity, the Lockheed outcome is a pretty good one: The firm is largely engaged in helping the federal government provide a legitimate public good — defense — and it does so in a competitive market, throwing off a raft of profits and some very cool innovation in the process. If everything that government had a hand in looked like MIT, DARPA, and Skunk Works shenanigans, it would not be a perfect outcome, by any measure, but it would be a pretty good one. For all of the waste and excess in defense appropriations and contracting, and despite the occasional outbreak of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper–ism in the commanding echelons, there is a sense that this represents government doing what it is intended to be doing, and doing it relatively well.

While much has been written and said of Islamic violence in recent months, the opposing views of professors Clive Kessler and Sahar Amer distill that debate to its erudite essence in this podcast. As a primer on the topic, their discussion is without equal

In late September, amid ASIO raids and media images of a small boy holding aloft a severed head, Quadrant Online contributor Clive Kessler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, addressed Islam’s penchant for violence and the stock-standard response of defenders and apologists that terrorism, beheadings and calls to wage bloody war on unbelievers do not represent the true spirit of “the religion of peace”.

Kessler wrote:

“The question is not, as the apologists offering this approach always suggest, “Who is behind this misappropriation of Islam?” It is not a matter of finding a puppet-master or evil operator who, by misrepresenting the faith, is constantly manipulating good and decent people within the local Muslim community or worldwide ummah.

One must ask, and be brave enough to ask, a different question: What is it, within formal, doctrinal Islam and then, on that (perhaps selective but still identifiable) basis within the Islamic tradition and in Islamic history from which that powerful tradition is “sedimented”, that underpins and drives—and perhaps, as some see it, validates—this kind of gruesome, barbaric action: by Muslims, acting as committed Muslims, and in the name and in the “defence” or “promotion” of Islam?

The interpretation of Islam that is provided by the militants is not the only possible construction of the Islamic inheritance and agenda. And it may not be the preferred version of the moderates and the liberals and of Islam’s well-meaning apologists. But it is a version, and one that can be constructed on grounds that are indisputably internal to Islam, not some external intrusion or imposition implanted by the ignorant or the ill-intentioned.

The militant and fundamentalist versions of Islam are forms or variants that can be “sourced” and derived directly—dare one even say “authentically”?—from Koranic writ, from early formative Islam as recorded in the traditions and practices (hadith and sunnah) of the Prophet in his own lifetime and worldly career, and within historical Islam as it developed on that foundation. The militant version is a reading or construction of direct intellectual lineage and identifiable descent within historical Islam. It has its foundations—genuine, not spurious or fictive or prejudicially confected foundations—in what, from the outset in the Prophet’s own time and career, Islam is and has been in its worldly history and evolution.”

Those thoughts and others prompted the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report to match Kessler with Professor Sahar Amer, chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Sydney University, in a discussion about the Koran’s advocacy of violence. Their debate went to air on October 15, but can be heard by clicking the link below.
Does Islam promote violence

While much has been written and said of Islamic violence in recent months, Kessler and Sahar in their opposing views distill that debate to its erudite essence.

Ebola is a nasty piece of work, no doubt about it. But if President Obama really wants to combat the disease, he should spend less time ringing global alarms and a lot more denouncing the ignorance and corruption that have made the virus Africa’s most notable export
I have given up on myself. Since everyone I know accepts that my views are to the right of Gengis Khan, I no longer have to make the pretense of drinking soy milk or eating tofu and pretending to enjoy it. I am what I am and happy to be that way, even if my children’s faces go red when I open my mouth in polite company. They look pleadingly at others present, trying telepathically, I think, to transmit the thought that every family has its own dotty uncle who, in their case, happens to be their own, beloved and sometimes moderately useful, but very barmy, two-cans-short-of-a six-pack dad.

I know that look of theirs very well indeed. It says, ‘What do you expect? Dad remembers those weird days when steam engines were used to pull trains, people were paid only for working, kids ran around playgrounds largely unsupervised, and men could grow older, and little more portly, without attracting universal ostracism.

Well, being portly and dotty has its compensations, let me tell you. Nobody is surprised when you ask stupid questions or say things that are sooo politically incorrect they would be beyond the pale for everyone except yours truly. This is fun – looking at the same pictures on the TV screen as everyone else and seeing things differently.

Here’s an example of how liberating it can be to embrace dottiness. Take as a given that a considerable body of ill-informed opinion regards President Obama as just the world’s most wonderful leader. But what I see is a middle aged man who seems tired, careworn, prematurely grey and, quite often these days, somewhat unsettled. To my eyes the revered Mr President brings to mind a precocious kid who has bitten off more than he can chew, created an awful mess and is now scared to tell his parents about it.

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a telephone press briefing Wednesday that you cannot get Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus, but that infected or exposed persons should not ride public transportation because they could transmit the disease to someone else.

Gotcha. You can’t get Ebola on a bus or a plane, you can only give it. Good to know. Thanks, Doc.

The Centers for Disease Control is one of those elite federal agencies that people hitherto assumed was, so to speak, immune to the pathologies of less glamorous government bureaucracies. It turns out it’s the DMV with test tubes – just the usual “Sorry? Did we say you need two copies of the green form? We meant you need three copies of the pink form” routine with extra lethality. The Protocols of the Elders of Druid Hills have proved to be boundlessly mutable and mostly honored in the breach:

~Don’t worry, the Protocols are in place – except that Thomas Duncan, the original Ebola patient, was left in an open area of the Dallas emergency room for hours and the medical staff treating him did not have protective clothing for the first two days.

~Don’t worry, they did eventually get fully sealed, protective clothing – well, except for their necks, which remained exposed.

~Don’t worry, exposed medical staff aren’t supposed to fly – except that Nurse Amber Vinson got on a flight to Cleveland with a fever.

~Well, okay, but that was totally in breach of the Protocols – except that Nurse Vinson called the CDC to check and they said, “Sure, get on the plane. What’s the worst that can happen? And make sure you share the bag of mini-pretzels…”

~Well, okay, but the next time Nurse Vinson got a flight, everyone followed the Protocols and wore hazmat suits – except for the guy with the clipboard, who works for the CDC and so can’t be expected to know all this Protocol stuff…

Which of us in childhood was not captivated by a print, or perhaps a portrait of the Flying Dutchman [1], ”a legendary ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. … If hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman will try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a portent of doom.” Which of us thought such a thing could actually happen … in the Caribbean?

If the public thought that allowing a nurse with Ebola symptoms to fly commercial air was the worst possible blunder the administration could make, think again. ABC News [2] reports that “a Dallas health care worker who handled clinical specimens from an Ebola-infected man from Liberia who later died is on a Caribbean cruise ship – where the worker has self-quarantined and is being monitored for any signs of infection, the State Department said in a statement.”

“The worker has voluntarily remained in the cabin and the State Department and Cruise line are working to bring the worker back to the U.S. out of an abundance of caution,” the Department of State said in the release.

An Ebola suspect on a cruise ship, that’s worse than letting the nurse fly by air. At least the government is trying to get him back.

But wait. There’s more. According to the Washington Post [3], the cruise ship has been denied entry into Belize. “News reports out of Belize said the Carnival Cruise ship “Magic” was being kept offshore because of a health worker who had contact with an Ebola patient and that passengers were not being permitted into the country.” They won’t even let the Dallas health care worker transfer to shore so he can be flown back to the U.S.

The reports quoted a statement from the government of Belize: The Government of Belize was contacted today by officers of the U.S. Government and made aware of a cruise ship passenger considered of very low risk for Ebola. The passenger had voluntarily entered quarantine on board the ship and remains free of any fever or other symptoms of illness. The Ebola virus may only be spread by patients who are experiencing fever and symptoms of illness and so the US Government had emphasized the very low risk category in this case. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, the Government of Belize decided not to facilitate a U.S. request for assistance in evacuating the passenger through the Phillip Goldson International Airport.

The party ship is now unwelcome. In a manner of speaking the Flying Dutchman sails the seas again. It won’t be long before pundits ask: ‘hey, if Belize can close its borders to a whole cruise ship, then why could not president Obama close the US borders to West Africa?’

I would have thought I was reading the New York Times. But no, it was the Washington Times, whose Andrea Noble gave a platform to notorious Islamists yesterday, enabling them to masquerade as moderates who condemn Islamic State jihadists for purportedly running afoul of sharia law in their rampage through Iraq and Syria.

Ms. Noble helped the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Omar Shahin along by airbrushing their backgrounds: CAIR is presented to the reader as a mainstream “Muslim organization” opposed to terrorism, with no mention of the fact that it is a Muslim Brotherhood creation conceived to promote Hamas — one with a long history as an apologist for terrorists (indeed, it has had terrorists in its ranks). Not a word is breathed about Mr. Shahin’s unsavory background: ringleader of the infamous “Flying Imams”; leader of an Islamic Center in Tucson well-known for its al-Qaeda and Hamas sympathies; denial of Muslim terrorist involvement in the 9/11 attacks; and his ties to Islamic “charities” shut down by the government for promoting jihad.

Ms. Noble similarly whitewashes sharia. It would of course be nice if, as she intimates, there were no mainstream interpretation of Islam that supported sex slavery and extortion in the form of jizya – the tax required of non-Muslims for the privilege of living under the protection of a sharia state. But it is simply a fact that these practices have firm roots in Islamic scripture. While we should applaud the work of authentic Muslim moderates to reform these concepts, it is a disservice to our national security to minimize the threat by pretending that the extremist construction of Islam is utterly false and followed by only a fringe.

It is literal, plausible, and has millions of adherents.

But it is not my purpose to rebut the Washington Times’s happy-face sharia; the estimable Robert Spencer has already done that here (see also here). My focus is the continuing practice by the government and the media — and not just the left-wing legacy media — of presenting Islamists as both “moderates” and a reliable source of information about Islam. Islamists promote sharia, which — as classically interpreted — is a most immoderate body of law. And they are incorrigibly Janus-faced, peddling “religion of peace” treacle for credulous Westerners while lionizing jihadists when they figure no one but other Islamists are listening.

In 2010, The Grand Jihad – my book about the Muslim Brotherhood and its sabotage of the West — was published. As it happens, I included a chapter that dealt specifically with CAIR, Mr. Shahin, and the “Flying Imams” episode.

I reproduce that chapter below, and encourage readers to ask: (a) Isn’t the sharia debate, as Mr. Spencer demonstrates, more complicated than the Washington Times suggests; and (b) shouldn’t the Times either make full disclosure about its sources or, dare I say it, find better ones?

Some stories you have to read 10 times before deciding: ’Yes: What I thought was too crazy is really true.’

This is one of those stories. Here goes, believe it or not:

A black Baltimore bus driver organized a mob of 20 black people to assault a white family of three on her bus, which they did with gusto and pepper spray. All the while, the other black passengers hooted and hollered in encouragement.

All while the bus driver waited for the beating to finish so the attackers could get back on the bus. With her thanks.

The bus company didn’t give a darnn. And it took Baltimore police two months before they even investigated it.

If you want to reread that another ten times, go ahead. I’ll wait.

More details from WBAL TV that somehow escaped the attention of the Baltimore Sun. (Which means either this happens all the time and is not newsworthy. Or the paper has an embargo on news about large scale black mob violence. Or both.)

It happened in June: A Baltimore couple was escorting their 9-year old son home from school on the city bus. The bus was crowded, so the driver asked the family to move to the back. They said they could not. There was no room. That is when the driver started yelling at them. From WBAL TV news:

Two chemical weapons-related stories this week should be considered separate, not necessarily interchangeable, parts of a whole.

The first was that ISIS had used chemical weapons against Kurdish forces in Kobani, raising the question of where ISIS would have acquired such weapons. The second, in the New York Times, detailed how U.S. forces in Iraq uncovered thousands of shells filled with chemical munitions from various areas of the country following the invasion, and how they were stored and guarded until 2011.

Those disinclined to support the Iraq War, including the Times, International Business Times, and Huffington Post, posit that the chemicals ISIS is said to have used in Kobani are from old Iraqi stocks now under ISIS control. That would make it “Bush’s fault.” The NYT story details how the Bush administration hid the finding of chemical munitions and suggests two motives:

First, neither the troops nor expert groups dispatched later found the active Iraqi chemical weapons production capability the administration said existed. Information about the age and condition of the shells, and the absence of newer munitions, would have confirmed that Saddam had no active program, further undermining already lagging support for the war.

What U.S. troops in Iraq found was old and leaky but still very, very dangerous. In fact, the most important part of the story is how American troops were exposed to chemical shells that had been turned into IEDs and found caches of chemical ordinance lying around in ditches. Their treatment by the U.S. military, including poor medical treatment, denial of Purple Heart medals, and later lack of medical follow-up should be seen as a precursor to the VA scandals of 2014.

Second, reporting would have indicted a number of Western countries for their role in providing Saddam with chemical capabilities in the first place. “Germans built the facilities…aviation bombs from a Spanish manufacturer, American-designed artillery shells from European companies, and Egyptian and Italian ground-to-ground rockets — to be filled in Iraq,” according to the NYT. This is not news. The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq by Kenneth Timmerman was published in 1991 with the details in spades.

So did ISIS really raid the leaky Iraqi stocks from a containment facility in territory now under its control? That could prove more toxic to ISIS than to the Kurds.

How about a more plausible scenario? ISIS got its supplies from Syria.

Quanta Ahmed, at the close of her latest standard fare apologetic on Islam versus “Islamism,” published today at NRO, writes that she “knew well” the following words of Islam’s prophet Muhammad:

Whoever sees a wrong and is able to put it right with his hand, let him do so; if he can’t, then with his tongue; if he can’t, then in his heart, and that is the bare minimum of faith.

Pace Ahmed’s contention that these words compel a Muslim to “expose injustice,” they actually sanction jihad war, a context made plain by both authoritative Islamic legists, and modern Islamologists.

Islam apologist, and revisionist Ahmed is invoking Sahih Muslim-Book 001, Number 0079, a canonical hadith which prioritizes the categories of jihad.

It is narrated on the authority of Tariq b. Shihab: It was Marwan who initiated (the practice) of delivering khutbah (address) before the prayer on the ‘Id day. A man stood up and said: Prayer should precede khutbah. He (Marwan) remarked, This (practice) has been done away with. Upon this Abu Sa’id remarked: This man has performed (his duty) laid on him. I heard the Messenger of Allah as saying: He who amongst you sees something abominable should modify it with the help of his hand (i.e., by force); and if he has not strength enough to do it, then he should do it with his tongue (i.e., by preaching or propaganda), and if he has not strength enough to do it, (even) then he should (abhor it) from his heart (i.e., soul), and that is the least of faith.

Princeton Islamologist John Ralph Willis’ 1967 essay (“Jihad fi sabil Allah- Its doctrinal basis in Islam and some aspects of its evolution in 19th century West Africa” The Journal of African History, 1967, Vol. 8 [No. 3], pp. 395-415) discusses this canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim-Book 001, Number 0079), in the following bellicose context (pp. 398-99), which establishes the priority of jihad by the sword:

The Islamic community…retained as part of its ideology the desire for world domination. According to the Sharia, the world was divided in two. That part which fell outside the abode of Islam was said to be the abode of war (dar al harb). Since the Sharia could not countenance the indefinite existence of this dichotomy, the Muslim community was under obligation to declare jihad upon those who refused to submit or pay the tax of humiliation, until all peoples were brought within the fold of Islam. The jihad came to be looked upon as the instrument by which the dar al-harb would be transformed into dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam)

The administration’s handling of the Ebola crisis continues to be marked by double talk, runaround and gobbledygook. And its logic is worse than its language. In many of its actions, especially its public pronouncements, the government is functioning not as a soother of public anxiety but the cause of it.

An example this week came in the dialogue between Megyn Kelly of Fox News and Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Their conversation focused largely on the government’s refusal to stop travel into the United States by citizens of plague nations. “Why not put a travel ban in place,” Ms. Kelly asked, while we shore up the U.S. public-health system?

Dr. Frieden replied that we now have screening at airports, and “we’ve already recommended that all nonessential travel to these countries be stopped for Americans.” He added: “We’re always looking at ways that we can better protect Americans.”

“But this is one,” Ms. Kelly responded.

Dr. Frieden implied a travel ban would be harmful: “If we do things that are going to make it harder to stop the epidemic there, it’s going to spread to other parts of—”

Ms. Kelly interjected, asking how keeping citizens from the affected regions out of America would make it harder to stop Ebola in Africa.

“Because you can’t get people in and out.”

“Why can’t we have charter flights?”

“You know, charter flights don’t do the same thing commercial airliners do.”