RUTHFULLY YOURS

At last, moderate Islam! The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Fiqh Council of North America held a press conference in Washington on Wednesday at which they announced with great fanfare that they had refuted the religious ideology of the Islamic State. They issued this lengthy “open letter” (not, interestingly enough, a fatwa) addressed to the Islamic State’s caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, explaining how he was misunderstanding Islam. The international media is, predictably, thrilled [2], but unfortunately, and not surprisingly, there is less to it than meets the eye [3]. In fact, the “moderates” who signed on to this open letter have ended up endorsing elements of Islam that most non-Muslim Westerners consider to be “extremist.”

The fact that this is not an Islamic case against the Islamic State’s jihad terror that will move Islamic State fighters to lay down their arms, but rather a deceptive piece designed to fool gullible non-Muslim Westerners into thinking that the case for “moderate Islam” has been made, but which will not change a single jihadi’s mind, is clear from the outset from the involvement not only of Hamas-linked CAIR, but also from some of the 126 signers.

These include Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, the integral professorial chair for the Study of Imam Ghazali’s Work, Jerusalem — and a Hamas activist [4]; Dr. Jamal Badawi, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case; Mustafa Ceric, former grand mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who has called for Sharia in Bosnia [5]; Professor Caner Dagli, a venomously hateful Islamic apologist at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, who traffics in Nazi imagery about “unclean” unbelievers [6]; Ali Gomaa, former grand mufti of Egypt, who endorses wife-beating, Hizballah, and the punishment of apostates from Islam [7]; Hamza Yusuf Hanson, founder and director of Zaytuna College, USA, who blamed the West for Muslim riots over a teddy bear named Muhammad [8]; Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle Eastern Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, who recently claimed [9] that seizing British jihadis’ passports so that they couldn’t return to the UK from the Islamic State would only create more jihadis; Muhammad Tahir Al-Qadri, founder of Minhaj-ul-Qur’an International, Pakistan, who drafted Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law and issued his own disingenuous and hypocritical Fatwa Against Terrorism [10]; and Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council and former head of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Hardly a group that inspires confidence in their “moderation.”

Republican chances to win control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, requiring a pickup of six seats, have taken a blow. Kansas, a state no one considered anything other than a safe hold for the party a few months ago, now appears to be slipping away.

After a contentious primary resulting in a victory for the 78-year incumbent Pat Roberts over tea party challenger Milton Wolf, things have gone steadily south for Roberts. Wolf refused to close ranks and endorse Roberts. A self-funded independent, 45-year-old Greg Orman, has now opened up a solid lead over Roberts after Chad Taylor, the Democrat, withdrew from the race, trailing badly in third place. As expected, polls that had shown [1] Roberts narrowly ahead in a three-man race, transformed into a 5-10-point Orman lead with Taylor no longer part of the polling survey .

The Kansas secretary of State attempted to prevent Taylor’s name from being removed from the ballot, since the law allows for this only when the candidate dies or has a physical disability preventing him from running, and Taylor fits neither profile. But this maneuver was challenged by Democrats and lost in court. Republicans are now trying to force Democrats to replace Taylor on the ballot, but that gesture will probably also prove unsuccessful, and worse, smacks of a near complete lack of confidence in Roberts’ chances to win straight up.

Roberts has come under attack for many of the same things as Mary Landrieu in Louisiana — for effectively becoming a Washington, D. C., senator, and not a senator of the state. There have been questions about Roberts’ legal residence and time spent in the state, just as with Landrieu. These issues, plus his age and long tenure in Congress (16 years in the House, and now 18 in the Senate), as well as accusations of being a big spending, go-along senator, were primary reasons why Roberts faced his first serious primary challenge in years.

Now the plot has thickened. Orman, who has largely escaped serious scrutiny so far, is feeling the first pushback from national Republicans, desperate to preserve the seat in the GOP column. His business relationship with a jailed Goldman Sachs banker and former board member, Rajat Gupta, is the first hit [2]. Roberts went on offense in similar fashion against Wolf in the primary fight, accusing his radiologist opponent of being dishonest and unethical.

The bitterness of the primary contest, combined with Roberts’ declining approval in the state, is the reason why many Republicans have so far not come back into the fold and appear to prefer the independent Orman. Mississippi had a similarly bitter Republican Senate primary this year, but the race there remains Republican versus Democrat,without a significant independent in the November field. In Mississippi, whites tend to vote Republican, and the state’s sizable black population always votes Democratic in even greater percentage numbers. With the current white/black split in the state, Republicans win.

In August, the world collectively held its breath as thousands of Yazidi Kurds — a minority most people had never even heard of — clung on for dear life atop the Sinjar mountains in northern Iraq.

Beneath them, violent Islamic State factions encircled the mountain, determined to starve out the people they considered infidels. Those who did not make it into the mountains in time were tortured, raped or beheaded.

In Israel, itself in the closing stages of a 50-day war with Hamas in Gaza, articles began appearing in newspapers urging the Israeli government to offer the Yazidis asylum. A 17-month-old Yazidi boy was recovering in a Tel Aviv hospital, his father at his bedside, after life-saving heart surgery, facilitated by an NGO. As he had left Iraq just before the massacre began, the father’s thoughts were with his wife and five other children, who had to fend for themselves. “They fled to the mountain with just the clothes on their backs,” he told me. He described how his four-year-old daughter had to climb the mountain on her own, because her mother was holding her three-month-old twins. The father’s relatives saw their neighbours slain and heard stories of local girls captured by IS make furtive calls to their parents, asking to be brought poison as they would rather commit suicide than be held by their notoriously brutal captors. “IS treats them like trash. The people are running away from death. IS treats [Yazidis] like Jews, so they want to come here,” he said. “Maybe Israeli soldiers will protect them and not leave them in IS’s hands.”

Casting Israeli soldiers in the role of protectors may have seemed strange to many in the West, particularly when Israel has been embroiled in a bitter war with Hamas in Gaza that has killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians and 68 Israelis.

Yet while Israel’s relations with its neighbours remain deeply problematic, its ties with the Kurds have for years helped nurture a military force that has proved itself more resilient than the US-funded Iraqi army. For years Israel’s relationship with the Kurds was kept secret, but gradually the issue has cropped up more and more in interviews in Israeli media and in academic reports.

The Kurds constitute the world’s largest stateless people. There are 30 million Kurds, mostly spread across Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. They have been seeking a state of their own for centuries.

Although the links between Jews and Kurds go back centuries, the substantive roots of the relationship go back to the 1930s, when a Jewish journalist stationed in the Kurdish part of Iraq and writing for the Palestine Bulletin began making contacts with local activists.

For centuries, Western classical music propelled listeners toward Christian salvation. Then Jewish music changed everything.

In his 1944 essay The Halakhic Mind, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik makes a striking assertion about the directionality of time:

The reversibility of time and of the causal order is fundamental in religion, for otherwise the principle of conversion would be sheer nonsense. The act of reconstructing past psychical life, of changing the arrow of time from a forward to a retrospective direction, is the main premise of penitence. One must admit with Kierkegaard that repetition is a basic religious category. The homo religiosus, oscillating between sin and remorse, flight from and return to God, frequently explores not only the traces of a bygone past retained in memory, but a living “past” which is consummated in his emergent time-consciousness. It is irrelevant whether reversibility is a transcendental act bordering on the miraculous, as Kierkegaard wants us to believe, or a natural phenomenon that has its roots in the unique structure of the religious act. The paradox of a directed yet reversible time concept remains.

R. Soloveitchik leaves open the issue of whether the reversibility of time is a “natural phenomenon” or not. The question is not as far-fetched as it sounds: Five years after R. Soloveitchik finished this essay, the great mathematician Kurt Gödel showed (in a contribution to Albert Einstein’s Festschrift) that General Relativity implies the reversibility of physical time under special conditions. In any case, physicists have not yet succeeded in making time run backwards.

Eastern European chazanim found means to reverse musical time, in the service of the religious requirement that R. Soloveitchik identified. This was not a “transcendental act bordering on the miraculous,” to be sure, but the next best thing. Chazanut in this view was one of the great Jewish religious innovations of the early modern period. It is not merely symbolic but evocative, turning an abstract point of theology into an artistic event.

The high musical culture of Eastern European chazanut is a uniquely Jewish art form, but it is not sealed off hermetically from the ambient Western musical culture. Nonetheless it is uniquely Jewish both in form and—decisively—in function. I shall argue that althoughchazanut draws on elements of Western musical culture, it employs them in an entirely original fashion for a uniquely Jewish religious purpose. Eastern European synagogue chant evokes the reversibility of time in its most characteristic gesture, namely the “Phrygian” or Freygisch descent from the flattened 2nd of the scale to the 1st degree, or tonic note. To hear this move in the Freygisch (Ahavah raba) mode as transformation of the directionality of time, we must hear it in the context of the tonality of Western music, with its clear sense of time’s forward motion. The Freygish flattened half-step, I will argue, functions as an ironic reversal of the most characteristic gesture in Western tonal music: the ascent of the sharpened 7th degree of the ordinary Western scale, or leading tone, to the tonic. This is the most characteristic pointer to the forward motion of time in Western music.

NEW GLAZOV GANG: Mark Tapson on “Fighting the Culture War”
Why Conservatives need more filmmakers, songwriters and novelists instead of political lecturers.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/mark-tapson-on-fighting-the-culture-war-on-the-glazov-gang/

Say that you get a tempting offer from a Nigerian prince and decide to invest some money in helping him transfer his vast fortune from Burkina Faso or Dubai over to the bank across the street. The seemingly simple task of bringing over the 18 million dollars left to him by his father hits some snags which require you to put in more and more of your own money.

Eventually you have invested more than you ever would have ever done up front just trying to protect the money that you already sank into Prince Hussein Ngobo’s scheme. And to protect your self-esteem, you go on believing that no matter what Prince Ngobo does, he is credible and sincere. Any failings in the interaction are either your fault or the fault of some third party. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a Ngobophobe.

Now imagine that Prince Ngobo’s real name is Islam.

That is where Western elites find themselves now. They invested heavily in the illusion of a compatible Islamic civilization. Those investments, whether in Islamic immigration, Islamic democracy or peace with Islam have turned toxic, but dropping those investments is as out of the question as writing off Prince Ngobo as a con artist and walking away feeling like a fool.

Western elites, who fancy themselves more intelligent and more enlightened than the wise men and prophets of every religion, and who base their entire right to rule on that intelligence and enlightenment, are not in the habit of admitting that they have been played for fools.

The Arab Springers who predicted that the Muslim uprisings would bring a new age of secularism, freedom and an end to the violence between Islam and the West; are busy writing up new checks.

It’s not insanity; it’s the term that rhymes with a certain river in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s victory discredited the Arab Spring, which discredits the bid for Arab Democracy, which discredits the compatibility of Islam and the folks on Fifth Avenue. Follow the river back along its course and suddenly the Clash of Civilizations becomes an undeniable fact. It’s easier to give up and let the river of denial carry you further along until, five years from now, you find yourself explaining why Al-Qaeda ruling Libya is actually a good thing for everyone.

In 1993, Israel cut a land-for-peace deal with a greasy Egyptian bloke named Yasser Arafat. The Cairo-born Arafat would turn his gang of terrorists into a government and police force, and rule over an autonomous territory, in exchange for ending the violence. Clinton smiled beatifically as hands were shaken and a new era of peace was upon us.

Pundits in mainstream media and politicians everywhere deplore the lack of ethics in banking, business and sports. They are right to think so. Corruption, cronyism and lobbying for special tax breaks and regulation, designed to limit competition, are not habits or characteristics that should be abetted, or even abided. The financial collapse in 2007-2008, like a receding tide, revealed the debris of fraud that had become all too common in the banking industry. Domestic violence has no place in sports or anywhere else; it should be unacceptable in any civilized society.

Unethical behavior has become commonplace from Hollywood to our schools. Moral relativism has substituted for the values instilled from our Christian-Judea heritage. Political correctness prevents such behavior from being condemned by most politicians and many in the media.

But it is in politics where the ethically-challenged nature of our society is most visible. Media and political “do-gooders,” always afraid of offending the intolerant, have remained silent when it has come to the practices of the ethically-challenged Obama Administration. Three flagrant examples are symptomatic: The “fast and furious” gun-running travesty early in Mr. Obama’s first Administration, which has not gone away (a judge’s recent decision may explain Attorney General Eric Holder’s sudden resignation); Benghazi, which has been a surfeit of lies and dissembling comments for over two years, from Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama to the sycophants who work for them; and the IRS scandal, which ranks among the most dastardly acts of any administration, as that federal bureaucracy, with the greatest access to our most sensitive information, became a tool for political gain.

Ethics are the moral principles that govern our behavior, as individuals and, collectively. They teach us an understanding of essential truths, to differentiate right from wrong. They are seen in the Golden Rule, the principles embedded in the 10 Commandments, in acts of kindness and in phrases like “thank you” and “excuse me.” If they seem old fashioned, it is because they are. Times and conditions change, but universal truths do not, and neither does honor nor displays of respect.

Ethical behavior should be automatic. It should be instinctive, ingrained in our character, taught by our parents and in schools, from our earliest years. It is more behavioral than intellectual. Unlike Ovid’s Medea, when we see the “right way,” we should follow it. Can it be taught in business schools? Should legislators be required to take remedial courses in ethical behavior? Perhaps, but I suspect the damage would already have been done. Business schools are basically trade schools, with an emphasis on marketing, investing and accounting. Students should already be grounded in the mechanics of ethical behavior. Legislators, I fear, would politicize any course – discussing their preferred definition of words such as “inequality,” rather than attempting to fathom moral truths.

Visit the unfashionable suburbs, far from the sinecured theorists of ‘otherness’ and main-chance lobbyists, and observe their reaction to the hollow catchphrases that are the multiculturallist’s stock in trade. It is there you will find the Australia that daily tastes the bitter fruits of their betters’ warm-and-fuzzy efforts to re-make the world

There has been much talk and news coverage of Islam lately, which is understandable in the light of recent and shocking events, but Islam and is not the nub of the problem. Rather, the ‘religion of peace’ and its more agitated adherents are symptoms pointing to the greater disease of non-selective immigration — a policy foisted upon a nation by an arrogant elite insulated by wealth and background from the consequences of its collective insanity. Viewed from the other-worldliness of university common rooms, the monoculture of politically correct newsrooms and the citadels of careerism that are our governments’ departments of ethnic affairs, multiculturalism is a raging success. Three cheers for the falafel and please pass the latest grants!

But journey to the unfashionable outer suburbs and ask those who live there what they think of ‘common humanity’ and the many other hollow other catchphrases that are the multiculturallist’s stock in trade. You will soon learn all about the culture shock that has been forced upon them. Their complaints will be uttered sotto voce for the most part, because who wants to be branded an intolerant Aussie bigot, an enemy of progress and tolerance, a simple racist or something even worse? But the subdued volume of their complaints and observations does not diminish their validity, nor the irony. Remember, until Al Grassby made a government-financed industry out of “difference”, the post-WWII transformation of Australia’s demographic profile was perhaps the world’s best example of successful mass immigration, integration and acceptance. It is those New Australians, as once they were called, along with and their children and grandchildren and Australians of longer lineage, who must now taste daily with the bitter fruits of the experts’ policies.

Islam’s mouthpieces are never slow to swear their creed is devoted to peace and universal amity. Their assertions would be far more credible if only they were advocating the reformation of their faith, but only a suicidal imam would dare to say as much

Someone who read some of my recent online articles about Islam took exception to my point of view and to the way I had expressed it. We are all entitled to our opinions. Let me say that I did not start out with any jaundiced view about Islam. I used to put it, without rancour, alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, paganism, agnosticism and atheism and the many other ‘theological’ isms that could be listed.

To my mind, as a Christian, they were and are all wayward, but error is common and forgivable in human affairs. And, by the way, I didn’t specifically mention Judaism in my list because I treat it a little differently from the rest. It gave rise to rise to Christianity – so I think it is half right.

I am happy with my faith and, at the same time, am happy for others to practice theirs. Why, therefore, do I take exception to Islam, particularly when numbers of political and religious leaders outside and inside the faith proclaim its peacefulness? The answer is that I am deeply sceptical of its universal peacefulness. That’s it; nothing else.

My view is not based on Islam’s scriptures. True I have read accounts of Islamic scripture which argue that it is not peaceful but then, as a layman, you get into this endless and fruitless debate about violent passages in the Bible. Moreover, I would be very surprised if most prominent faiths were totally bereft of violent scriptural passages. My view is evidence based. There are too many contemporary examples of Islamic clerics preaching hate to dismiss them as entirely aberrant. There are too many contemporary examples of barbarous acts committed in the name of Islam to dismiss them as entirely aberrant.

You will know them by their fruits (ravenous wolves in sheep’s clothing), Christ perceptively said. But, really, we don’t need Christ’s words; though it is nice to have them. In the end, we all judge those around us on the basis of their actions. Actions speak louder than words, as the old saying goes. If it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck it is a duck; to add another old saying.

Too many environmentalists are actually nuts. There’s an old joke that environmentalists are “watermelons” since they’re green on the outside and red on the inside. The real problem is that too many of them are actually nuts, especially on climate issues.

I believe that protecting the environment is both a good thing and a legitimate function of government. But I’m rational. So while I want limits on pollution, such policies should be determined by cost-benefit analysis.

Banning automobiles doubtlessly would reduce pollution, for instance, but the economic cost would be catastrophic.

On the other hand, it’s good to limit carcinogens from being dumped in the air and water. So long as there’s some unbiased science showing net benefits. But while I’m pro-environment, I’m anti-environmentalist. Simply stated, too many of these people are nuts.
• Environmentalists assert that you’re racist if you oppose their agenda.
• Some environmentalists don’t believe in bathing,
• How about the environmentalists who sterilize themselves to avoid carbon-producing children,
• Or consider the environmentalists who produce/use hand-cranked vibrators to reduce their carbon footprint.
• There are also environmentalist who claim that climate change causes AIDS.
• And environmentalists put together a ranking implying that Cuba is better than the United States.

Then there’s the super-nutty category.
• The environmentalists who choose death to lower their carbon footprints.