Obama at the Bat

What I hear consistently from media outlets featuring black callers defending President Obama, is that his lack of success can all be blamed on his not having been “given a chance.” Basically, his failures to meet almost all of his promised goals during his first term can’t be counted against him; he needs at least eight years to accomplish what he campaigned on accomplishing in less than four. These comments are invariably followed up with a litany of grievances I can usually chant along with. Congress blocked him. Republicans can’t stand the idea of a black man in the White House. He was left a big mess by George Bush.

An hour ago I heard what sounded like an older black woman, excited about finally getting through on C-SPAN to deliver the message that she hasn’t heard anybody saying. She then proceeded to repeat what I have heard untold scores of black callers, most of them older women like her, say on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal for the past year, at least twice every ten minutes, every weekday morning, no matter what the topic of the program segment. And today the gist of the caller’s never-before-heard message was: How dare they criticize Obama’s failures in office when they did everything they could from the very beginning to force him to fail. She wanted everyone to know that the Republicans got together and did that just because they couldn’t stand to see Obama succeed, because he is a Black Man.

As many weeks as this lady’s been on hold trying to get on C-SPAN, you’d think she would have noticed the other 371 callers who’ve said exactly the same thing.

Now I know this message is nonsense, and most of you know this it’s nonsense, and I’m fairly certain that most of the American people, even those who are planning to vote for Obama, know it’s nonsense, too. But to anyone who happens to believe it’s not nonsense, that it’s all true, I would say this about President Obama not having been given a chance:

Granted he faced serious resistance from the opposing party when he took office. But every single one of his predecessors has faced the same, and the adversarial quality of our political system was well-known to Obama, seeing as he spent his entire career trying to advance in it.

That he would face political opposition was also something he knew perfectly well long before he asked for the job of president, as was the existence of a serious deficit, as well as a faltering economy, the wars, Guantanamo, all of it. Before he was elected Obama claimed he had mastered the details of every one of these things, and told voters that he would fix them all, and then failed to fix any of them. All the things Obama failed at were not things Republicans had just thrown across his path after he got into the Oval Office to deny him success: all the things Obama failed at were all the problems he’d promised to solve from the moment he announced his intention to run, and then didn’t solve.

Proposing a remedial second term for Obama so he has more time to fix what he couldn’t get fixed during his first term is not a serious political viewpoint: it’s affirmative-action thinking imposed on the presidency. The tragedy of it, like the tragedy of most affirmative action thinking, is that it reinforces the racist idea that black progress and success is conditioned upon whites not conspiring to keep blacks back. As Ann Coulter has put it in her latest book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, “The initial lie from which all other lies flow is the idea that black people’s condition in America depends on white people’s beneficence.” And when I say that’s racist thinking, it’s not whites who are being poisoned by it, but blacks.

Even if it the tired and slanderous myth of the racist Republicans weren’t nonsense, (which it is), what should it matter that Obama had opponents who wanted him to fail? Let’s assume that it’s all true, and that all Republicans really do oppose Obama for no other reason than revulsion at sharing Planet Earth with a Successful Black Man. How has Obama performed in the face of it?

There were plenty of Democratic rednecks who wanted Joe Louis to fail, there were plenty of Nazi Aryans who wanted Jesse Owens to fail, and plenty of cracker major-league players who wanted Jackie Robinson to fail. The very greatness of these guys is that they all succeeded in the very face of all that. Joe Louis retained his heavyweight title in 1938 not by arranging for his corrupt attorney general to declare his hanging onto it a civil right, but by beating Max Schmeling in less than two rounds. Robinson excelled on the Brooklyn Dodgers in spite of “racial taunts and slurs, on the field and off, death threats, character assassination, and about anything else a prejudiced person could think of to throw at him.” And in the process, “showed his enemies who was the better person.”

But Obama’s not great that way, and never has been. He fooled a lot of people to get elected (he does excel at that), but most of his supporters know his limits by now, the way lots of us could plainly see them then. A lot of Democrats, like the Clintons, knew he was just an empty suit in 2008, even before he played the race card on them. As late as January 2008 Hillary was still the favorite among black women. Obama wasn’t even lionized by most Democrats until well along into the election. Some criticized him as not really black enough. I can remember when Jesse Jackson talked about wanting “to cut his nuts off,” and then wept openly on Election Night knowing that from that day on the Secret Service would forever deny him the chance to do it.

The tragedy of Obama’s term in office was that America’s first black chief executive turned out to be one of its worst. His chance to prove he could succeed lay solely in succeeding, something he was manifestly not equipped to do. And now that he hasn’t succeeded, supporters whose minds are creased with affirmative-action thinking explain it to one another as just another case of a Black Man cheated of success by being denied a level playing field -- as if any President of the United States ever walked onto a level playing field! I can remember a great line from Fred Barnes to the effect that anything George Bush accomplished had to be done against 60% of the public and 100% of the press.

And when it’s come to treatment by the press, Obama never had to face the ordinary criticism every president before him has. Journalists from New York to LA willing to compromise their own integrity to run interference for him.

The president’s supporters like to talk about him as if he’s the Willie Mays of American politics, but then make excuses that the only reason he went down swinging is that, instead of the Tee-Ball he was prepared to smack, he found himself trying to hit pitches thrown by someone from another team actually trying to strike him out.

And there went my perfect record of six years of blogging without once employing a sports metaphor.

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Outlawed in Oregon: Tattoos Announcing, ‘I’m Sterile Now!’

Oregon is that surreal place where you aren't trusted to pump your own gas, but if you'd like to kill yourself, the State is there to assist you.

-- Carl E. Olson, “Welcome to Oregon, the State of Teenage Sterilization!"

Whatever else one might say for 15-year-olds, most people would agree it’s not typical of the class to completely think things through. It’s nothing for a 15-year-old to undergo an epiphany of some kind or other, after which she’ll dramatically inform parents and friends that from this day forward she’ll never again eat anything with a face, has realized that she has always been and will always be a lesbian, or has made up her mind that the best thing she can do for her personal appearance is to improve it with tattoos.

While there’s always room in the future to reconsider the first two of these decisions, the people of Oregon realized the sense in throwing up legal safeguards to protect impulsive teenagers marring themselves all over with injected ink. According to the Oregon Health Licensing Agency:

In Oregon, tattooing is prohibited on anyone under the age of 18-regardless of parental or legal guardian consent. In other words, even if you had given your daughter permission, the tattoo artist who gave her the tattoo would be in violation of state law and subject to disciplinary action.

Unfortunately, the wisdom  Oregonians showed in the case of teenage tattooing turned out to be a finite supply.  And combining that with the longstanding influence of Planned Parenthood in the state, supercharged most recently by Obamacare, a 15-year-old’s decision to deprive herself permanently of the capacity for bearing children is both legal, and can be undertaken (of course) without regard for the consent of parent or guardian:

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Forget the milestones of obtaining a driver's license at 16 and being able to legally drink at 21 - getting sterilized at 15 is now the first step in the social maturity process of an American youth. 

The "Required Health Plan Coverage Guidelines" set forth by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states: "Non-grandfathered plans and issuers are required to provide coverage without cost-sharing consistent with these guidelines in the first plan year that begins on or after August 1, 2012. All [FDA] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity." 

Under Oregon State Law, the state's revised statutes (ORS) defines "informed consent" for 15-year-olds independently pursuing reproductive sterilization as being "(a) Based upon a full understanding of the nature and consequences of sterilization pursuant to information requirements set forth in ORS 436.225(1); (b) Given by an individual competent to make such a decision; and (c) Wholly voluntary and free from coercion, express or implied." 

So you need parental consent to contract a state-sanctioned marriage under the age of 18 in the U.S., but you, all by yourself, can give full consent to the irreversibility of sterilization at 15? Chances are, you do not even know your future spouse, yet you're already determining his or her fate as well? 

Oregon's consent form, specific for the sterilizations of 15 to 20-year-olds, reads, "I understand that the sterilization must be considered permanent and not reversible. I have decided that I do not want to become pregnant, bear children or father children." In the case that the patient does not speak or read English, an interpreter is permitted to assist the patient "to the best of [his] knowledge and belief" in the signing away of the patient's reproductive capacity. (“Obamacare Begins Child Sterilization, Without Parental Consent”).

A 15-year-old may honestly mean it when she signs a statement that she understands a decision is permanent and not reversible.   That’s not the point.  But she still understands “permanent” within the confines of the limited experience of a teenager. How many young people commit suicide because they can’t gauge that an excruciating, but ultimately temporary, problem tormenting them will pass – if measured from the experience of one much older – by the passage of hardly much more time? For many 15-year-olds, the rest of one’s life simply can’t be brought into focus  much past the end of high school, and then a bit more into the foggy future beyond.

Even Oregon’s atrocious assisted suicide law forbids “death with dignity” to minors.   But then Oregonians probably aren’t as ideologically driven to terminate other Oregonians to the same degree they’re determined to prevent too many of them from being born.

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Sharmeka Moffitt: I’ll Say ‘There’s Something Wrong Here’

No sooner do I finish reading a thoroughly-researched recounting, by Ann Coulter in her latest book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, of years of hoax racial atrocities staged by black faux victims to exploit the racial guilt of white Americans than yet one more is being reported just this week.

From HuffPo:

UPDATE: 6:19 p.m. -- Tuesday afternoon police reported that they now believe Louisiana woman Sharmeka Moffitt's story about being lit on fire in a race-related attack was fabricated. Police now believe that she wrote "KKK" and "n---er" on her car and lit herself on fire.

The Franklin Sun reports that Moffitt's fingerprints were found on the cigarette lighter and lighter fluid recovered in the wooded area near the crime scene. The writings on the car, written in toothpaste, were linked to female DNA.  (“Sharmeka Moffitt, Louisiana Woman, May Have Set Herself On Fire In Dubious Race-Related Attack”).

During a press conference Winnsboro Police Chief Lester Thomas said, “‘All of the evidence is pointing back to the victim inflicting this upon herself,” Thomas added. “No evidence has shown any other person was involved.’”

On Tuesday Moffitt was still in critical condition and couldn’t be questioned by police.

HuffPo’s previous reporting on the story sounded like this: 

A Louisiana woman was the victim of a horrific attack during which she was reportedly set on fire and had her car defiled with the letters "KKK," police reported Monday.

Sharmeka Moffitt, a 20-year-old African-American woman, made an emergency call to police on Sunday night claiming three men wearing white hoods or hats attacked her, doused her with flammable liquid and set her on fire at a park in Winnsboro, La., CBS News reports. Moffitt, who said she was unable to identify the race of her attackers, was able to extinguish the fire with a water spigot before police arrived.

Was this just one more hoax (that turned out to be more dangerous than Moffitt intended), part of a current surge of “racial mau-mauing” Coulter unleashed by liberals in their desperate goal of winning Obama’s re-election? HuffPo reported that Moffitt’s mother denied initial reports that “her daughter was wearing an Obama T-shirt at the time of the attack.”

This part hasn’t been updated yet to read that Moffitt’s mother denied initial reports that “her daughter was wearing an Obama T-shirt at the time she staged a racial hate crime to get a lot of people really, really angry on false pretenses.” 

Who knows, maybe Sharmeka had somehow gotten hold of Ann’s book herself, and then simply misunderstood that it was a critique, not a how-to guide.  The response of the cops to what they themselves figured out was a complete racial hoax could have been droppedword-for-word  into Ann’s book and fit perfectly: 

Police Chief Lester Thomas said that regardless of the outcome, this tragic event is still a heavy burden, according to The Franklin Sun. Franklin Parish Sheriff Kevin Cobb added: "Although I think what she did was wrong and had major consequences not only for her, but throughout our community and our country, there's something wrong here, and we need to help individuals like this. In the same way our community came to support her as a victim, I still hope the community will support her emotional and physical recovery."

This time, unlike the cases of Tawana Brawley, Rodney King,  Crown Heights, and others, the hoax was exposed before anybody, white or black, had to get killed due to violent backlashes against an imaginary KKK attack on Sharmeka.   But that very well could have happened. And, all due deference  to Sharmeka’s current condition (and no more than what’s due) – a condition that is the sole result of her own self-inflicted injuries -- if there had been victims of racial retaliation as a result of this vicious hoax, it would have been insane to ask the community to “support her as a victim.”

[“A would be armed robber of a local convenience store was seriously injured last night when the cheap Saturday Night Special he tried to shoot the unarmed  clerk with blew up in his own hand. Police are appealing to the community that, whatever happened here, the injured man needs to be supported as a victim.”]

If her actions show that Sharmeka is a victim of anything, then she’s a victim of the exact same “racial mau-mauing” that Ann Coulter is talking about.   Whether she burned herself up while wearing an Obama t-shirt or not, it’s obvious enough to me that Sharmeka on some level viewed herself as a warrior doing her part in a non-existent national race war, a lie spoon-fed to her by liberals and race hustlers in her own community her entire life.

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The Sole (Choice) of Black Folks

Hollywood actress Stacey Dash recently became the target of some Twitter attacks, much of it racist, in retaliation for the racial treason of having tweeted her own endorsement of Mitt Romney. In retaliation for these incendiary words: “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future,” Dash was called, among other things, a “jigaboo,” a “dumb bitch,” and a “TYPICAL OREO .. Voting for a white devil.”  There was also a string of tweeters encouraging her to kill herself, including a Washington D.C. PhD who is also a Democratic activist. As a result, a lot of not-so-good attention was suddenly being paid to the rarely mentioned but perfectly open secret of black racism, along with the stifling groupthink that punishes blacks who dare to think or say anything that has not been previously approved as Authentically Black.

Deadline Detroit blogger Darrell Dawsey, speaking on behalf of what he calls “the majority of black people,” means to defend the hive from the scurrilous charge of not thinking for themselves. (“Blacks Have a Right to Wonder About Actress Stacey Dash's Endorsement of Romney”).  After churlishly dismissing Dash as a “fading actress,” (as if her rights to freedom of speech or thought were a function of her box-office draw), he then falsely accuses her of “twisting . . . Martin Luther King’s words” for saying she chose Romney “not for the color of his skin, but for the content of his character.”

For the record, Dash did indeed say about Romney on CNN that “I chose him not by the color of his skin but the content of his character.” And of course Dr. King did, in fact say, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” If Dawsey sees a twist in that, he didn’t say where.

As for all the racist vileness aimed at Dash, Dawsey doesn’t justify it outright -- just avoids it by substituting the euphemism “raising race” for what everyone else recognizes as “racist comments”:

Raising race crudely in a political critique of Dash may offend -- the question that seems to have garnered the most media attention is someone asking (not all that angrily if you ask me) how, as “an unemployed black woman,” Dash could support Romney. However, raising race this way doesn’t suggest racial animus. And it’s not an attempted conscription into a hive mind, but rather a very legitimate political query.

What Dawsey is referring to is this tweet to Dash: “You’re an unemployed black woman endorsing MittRomney. You’re voting against yourself thrice. You poor beautiful idiot.”

Seeing as Dawsey sees it “a very legitimate political query” to call Dash a “poor . . . idiot” for supporting someone other than Obama, I say: Fine, let the query be posed.

Query: If Dash is an unemployed black woman right now (I have no idea if she is unemployed), isn’t it significant that she’s an unemployed black woman under the Obama administration, in office nearly four years, and not the Romney administration?

And Query: Why do black voters ignore Obama’s terrible record on overcoming unemployment across the board, and his even worse record in failing to reverse unemployment among blacks, solely in order to support his re-election?

And Query: Why would women voters want to re-elect Obama, when under his presidency the unemployment rate for women has gone up, not down?

Dawsey’s malignant slander, that “Mitt Romney has no content to his character,” hardly takes up what ought to be the only issue of Dash’s endorsement, which is whether or not Romney has shown himself to be a credible alternative to Obama to lead the country? If Romney has done this, then what right has anyone, black, white, or any other classification, to condemn Dash for making an intelligent choice of her own?

None, really. But Dawsey means to knock down the suspect thesis that the hateful reactions to Dash were driven by groupthink or reverse racism. In the attempt all he manages is to re-deploy the identical thesis in different words.  Dawsey hates Romney for being all the things that, in fact, Romney is not, (but, curious enough, that Obama actually is): “an over-entitled phony and a smarmy liar” who will say anything to win the White House. He declares authoritatively that “a vast majority of black voters see this and, thus, are dismayed by anyone who appears to be duped by his act.”

But how exactly is Dawsey so positive that a vast majority of dismayed black voters see exactly what he sees wrong with Romney, things strangely similar to the slanderous caricatures flung up by David Axelrod’s “Kill Romney” campaign?  Sure, Dawsey made his career as a professional writer on the Urban Black Experience. But dies that really qualify him to pronounce what’s in the minds of the vast majority of black voters? As he himself points out, there are no weekly “black meetings” where these decisions are promulgated for the entire group.  And Dawsey sarcastically observes that “black folks in Denver who disagree with Dash aren’t taking their cues from blacks in New York City or Miami.”

Probably all true. And yet, somehow black folks in Denver and Miami and New York City all manage to see the same faults in Romney as Dawsey does, all manage to be dismayed (if not outraged) in the same way at fading-actress Dash being “duped,” and all share the opinion that -- Barack Obama’s record and all measurable evidence to the contrary -- he’s absolutely one of America’s Greatest Presidents.  I’ll take Dawsey at his word that there are no “black meetings.”  But you know what?  Forty-million-part harmony doesn’t just happen without everyone singing from the same hymnbook.

And this homogenized thinking remains steady even while, for the rest of the country, approval and admiration of Romney has been steadily rising for the past month – since Romney seized back control of his own identity from the fright-mask designers in the Obama campaign.  True enough, nearly half of voters still don’t like Romney, but that’s exactly the point. People have all kinds of reasons for what they like and don’t like.  In a population of free, independent, and self-directed individuals, it’s only normal to have differences.

A variety of opinion notably not in evidence among black voters. As also is absent the element of unpredictability.  In August an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported that Romney had zero percent support among African Americans, something US News referred to as “a little-noticed finding.”  The story vanished in a day or two. (I heard nothing about it).  So why did these particular poll results remain little-noticed, when the whole campaign so far has been a 24-hour pre-occupation with polls, polls, polls?  How often do we see 100% agreement about candidates for election? (Okay, I do recall that Saddam Hussein won 100% in his final election in 2002).

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll was little-noticed because a report that opinion in the black community is monolithic isn’t news. And the only reason the zero-percent story even rated the notice it got was because the liberal media got the giggles about Governor WhiteBoy being a complete wash among blacks and had to quote each other about it for a couple days.  (And then Stacey Dash had to go and ruin the shutout. No wonder everyone’s so mad!) With all the thousands of polls the campaigns pay for and all the various groups whose every mood change is of vital interest – women, Hispanics, upper income groups, retirees, college graduates, union members, unemployed mothers, illegal immigrants – do you wonder why there’s almost no discussion of polls of black voters?

Well, says Dawsey, don’t blame that on a “group-think dynamic.”  There’s no “hive mind,” no “reverse racism” (or, as we call it in English, “racism”).

To be sure, all that unexplained coincidence of opinion makes Dawsey’s defense of his proposition that “black people don’t vote for black people solely because they’re black” an uphill effort. Fortunately, he knows a short-cut through the hard part: let’s all just accept it as a given.

“It should be assumed,” he writes, “that black voters (and social media lurkers) have made up their own minds about Romney one way or the other based on their own experiences, access to information and other elements informing their world views. Most black people have concluded that he’s not good for the country and/or not good for their interests.”

But why should that be assumed? How can Dawsey tell us that “black voters have made up their own minds about Romney one way or the other,” when his whole point is that he knows “most black people” have made up their minds all one way?  That unanimity is what compelled Dawsey to take up the sword as champion of the majority’s “right to wonder about Dash” in the first place (i.e., the right to “raise race crudely” in attacks upon Stacey Dash) : just because Dash had the gall to make up her mind the other way.

Dawsey can’t seriously believe Dash has the right to go her own way -- not when he’s mocking her as “Clueless” for doing so, and then strikes the pose of Defender of the Tribe against the Traitor.

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Capital Punishment for Rape – Redirected

Democrats have been jumping for joy this over Indiana senate candidate Mike Mourdock’s ill-timed disclosure at a Tuesday debate that his pro-life belief that life is a gift from God extends even to children conceived through rape. “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," Mourdock said. (“Indiana GOP Senate candidate stands by rape comment”).

Relieved to have anything at all with which to slow the downward momentum of the Obama campaign, Democrats immediately set about editing Mourdock’s comments to say he believed God willed the rape, not the child. “DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz described Mourdock's comments as ‘outrageous and demeaning to women’ and called on Romney to take his pro-Mourdock ad off the air.”

So far we haven’t heard yet that Wasserman Schultz has condemned Mourdock’s words as also demeaning to God, or worse, were meant to “disempower and disenfranchise” Him, but there’s still time.

Now there’s absolutely nothing the least bit controversial in Mourdock’s belief that a child conceived by rape has as much a claim upon being God’s creation as a child conceived through more conventional circumstances. If that isn’t so, then the opposite logic is even more shocking still, at least to me: that such a child was not intended by God: if the poor kid survives the typical fate of unplanned pregnancies and starts to grow up, that will mean his very life is a contradiction of the plan of God, or at best a divine oversight. (Oh, wait -- there actually are people who believe that it’s “God’s work” to undo God’s mistakes of creation, and of course many of those people are readers of the New York Times).

But the blunt object liberals are now intending to clobber Mourdock (and Romney) with is the simplistic nonsense that the same good and merciful God who, obviously, would never intend a woman to be raped,  also obviously wouldn’t intend her to be saddled with the offspring of a rape (i.e., her baby). The rape baby – innocent but imputed with the guilt of its father’s crime -- falls well outside the ordinarily boundless embrace of the Liberal God.

You might think there’d be little room for arguing the moral insanity of holding babies responsible for the circumstances of their births. Liberals manage to apply this principle sometimes, in other, more questionable, areas. For instance, liberals, sensing all along that the actual erotic activities of homosexuals are never going to appear as ineffably beautiful to the majority of Americans as it does to residents of midtown Manhattan, San Francisco, and Royal Oak, have for years now anchored their defense of homosexuality elsewhere than in the fairly disgusting acts themselves: namely, in the idea “that all of us are born into our sexual orientation and identity.” In other words, “it was never a choice.”  In other words, “it’s not our fault.”   If homosexuals are born that way and have no choice, then anyone daring to criticize the lifestyle is a monster for zinging the poor souls, rather than celebrating with them during Gay Pride Week with open, rainbow-colored arms.

Which is one aspect of the liberal case for homosexuality.  This same “they were born this way” explanation also enables liberals to launch the religious defense that God made homosexuals that way.

It’s a true liberal dogma, or, as Joe Biden would put it, “de fide doctrine,” that God loves homosexuality so much that he specially created each and every member of the LGBTQ community, then blessed them and commanded that they be fruitful and mult—oh, or whatever.    As Minnesota State Representative Steve Simon (D) recently said in opposition to a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage:

“How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?”

Rev. Earl D. Beshears, an Episcopal pastor in Delaware, appeals to the “best science” in his tract written for his church’s website “On Our Treatment of Gay, Transgender and Questioning Youth”:

The best science tells us that sexual orientation and gender identity probably begin in utero and are in place as early as 2 and 3 years of age. (Confer studies by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.) What this science tells me is that our sexual orientation is a gift from God, not a choice. Our sexuality and gender identity are how God made us. A gay, lesbian, heterosexual or transgender teen is the way God made her or him.

Leaving out as they always do a link or two from their chain of logic, (and as Chesterton said, if a link is missing, then you don’t have a chain) liberals conclude that because Perez Hilton, the flaming homosexual, exists, therefore God, who obviously made Perez Hilton, also must have made him a flaming homosexual. Kind of a designer re-do of the old Cartesian syllogism: “I am, therefore God thinks I’m fabulous.”

But garden-variety homosexuality is so routine these days (not a single sit-com lacks at least a pair of them) as to dawdle dangerously close to being BOOORR-ING when the current fashion focus  is all about transgenderism.  According to the Gender Equity Resource Center at Berkeley, a “transgenderist” is a “person who lives either full time, or most of the time, in a gender role different than the role associated with their biological or chromosomal sex (a gender non-conformist).” In other words, the transgenderist believes he is a man trapped in a woman’s body, or vice versa.   Rev. Beshears notwithstanding, I think that qualifies not so much as a God’s birthday present of “sexual orientation” as a gag-gift of sexual disorientation.

While not detracting even a smidgen from the “Ts” (as in LGBTQ) equal claim to being even delightful to the Lord as engaged queer couples, not to mention the fruitful subject of untold numbers of high-school seminars, I do find a troubling contradiction in Rev. Beshear’s pronouncement that “a transgender teen is the way God made her or him.” (I’m also troubled by the phrase, “God made her or him.” Is he using that klutzy phrase just to protect against “sexist” language, or does he really not know if a given transgender teen he has in mind is a her or him?  But I digress).

What I’m getting at is that, if our sexual orientation is really a gift from God, what kind of gift is it to stick a sensitive, nurturing, vivacious, feminine, beauty queen love cupcake named Jenna inside the body of a testicled manchild named (in utero, apparently) Walter? (“’As soon as I was conscious,’” the disqualified beauty queen told Barbara Walters . . . “I thought that I was in the wrong body.”) (“Transgender Beauty Queen Knew She Was Different at Age 4”). We’re told that the surgery to turn this young man’s penis into his vagina – or, as Rev. Beshears might put it – to turn her or his penis into her or his vagina – anyhow, we’re told that the surgery on Jenna and Walter was “intense.”

“So, hey God,” Jenna may legitimately ask: “you call this a gift? You couldn’t just make me Jenna from the get-go? At least then I could have gotten free birth control pills with the rest of my 6^th grade girlfriends!”

But to ask that is to dare to question God’s supernal wisdom, and, even more blasphemous, to question gay theory. Of course God made Jenna, or Walter, that way.  Otherwise we’d have to admit there’s something wrong with homosexuality.  And we must never ever say – or even ever think --  that there is even one little thing wrong with homosexuality.  So logic forces us to conclude God made Walter that way.  And looking on Walter He saw that he was interesting.

I don’t happen to believe that God made Walter that way. Someone made the Titanic, too, but it would be nonsense to blame what happened to the Titanic on her having “been made that way”: the Titanic didn’t sink because she was made to sink – she sank because her captain made very bad decisions on how she should be sailed.

And in the same way I don’t believe God made Walter that way, any more than I believe He made me a depressive crank, Lance Armstrong a cheater, or Nancy Pelosi a daft harpie. But that He did make me, and all the rest of us, is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, both Catholic and Protestant. Obama may even have run across it somewhere in the grab-bag of his “faith tradition,” while without question it was at one time taught to Joe “I’ve been a practicing Catholic all my life” Biden.   As for Mike Mourdock’s comments, (which are a concrete example of Christ’s warning about not casting pearls before swine (“lest they turn and rend you”) they find their roots in the same teaching, as well. And not only that, but the same faith tells us that God made us purposefully, (as I memorized), “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.” That goes for me and for Walter, for Ted Kennedy, Mother Teresa, bin Laden, Lady GaGa, Obama, or any of the rest of the entirety of the race whose births were either planned or accidental – whether the result of selfishness, poor planning, jealousy, drunkenness, spite, military conquest, or rape. The Christian imperative that human life is sacred is not conditioned on proof of good will by either mother or father in conceiving it. We don’t place moral responsibility on infants for the circumstances of their births.

As God taught the Israelites at Sinai: You don’t put to death children for the sins of their fathers (Deuteronomy 24.16).

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**THIS VERSION HAS BEEN REVISED.  TRC.**

America Is Arming Jihadists

From Monday’s New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.

That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, casts into doubt whether the White House’s strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States.

“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.

The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists.

. . . . Moreover, the rebels often adapt their language and appearance in ways they hope will appeal to those distributing weapons. For instance, many rebels have grown the long, scraggly beards favored by hard-line Salafi Muslims after hearing that Qatar was more inclined to give weapons to Islamists.  (“Rebel Arms Flow Is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria).

Marc Thiessen, has been writing about this this week:

It is scandal enough that a gun-running program, in which American officials are helping to vet the recipients, is sending weapons to al Qaeda-linked terrorists. But the Times story completely ignores the deeper scandal here: In last week’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden lied about it — twice!  (“Obama’s Syrian ‘Fast and Furious’”).

Isn’t it comforting to know that, if things don’t go exactly right in the next three weeks, we may have this crew at the helm of state for four more years?

###

The Media Loses the Scent

On this year’s anniversary of 9/11, the American ambassador to Libya was brutally murdered in Benghazi, and three security personnel slain, during a well-planned attack by al Qaeda against the U.S. consulate. Reports indicate that the attack was launched following a web video by Ayman Al Zawahiri released only hours before, calling for revenge for the U.S. Predator strike killing one of al Qaeda’s top guys, Abu Yahya al-Libi, (“the Libyan”). In the immediate wake of the attack, and for more than two weeks after, the White House insisted in repeated public statements that the attack was a spontaneous eruption in response to an anti-Muslim video released on YouTube months before. Now, after more than a month, the actual circumstances of the ambassador’s death have still not been explained in any satisfactory detail.

The two big facts:

1. On the anniversary of 9/11 al Qaeda launched a successful attack on the United States and murdered our ambassador. Because of its powerful symbolism, and the fact that it successfully targeted a high U.S. official, and that it was a complete success from the standpoint of our enemies, it is the worst terrorist attack on us since September 11, 2001.

2. The Obama White House covered up what really happened for the sake of preserving Obama’s campaign talking point that al Qaeda has been driven into retreat under his leadership.

How can anyone seriously suggest that discussing the fact of a successful al Qaeda attack on 9/11 is an attempt to “politicize” the situation?

How can the media seriously continue to treat this either as a non-story, or as only a small story? Over the weekend Bob Woodward – of Woodward and Bernstein fame – was a panelist on Fox News Sunday, where Chris Wallace sought his expert opinion on media coverage of the Libya story – careful to point out he wasn’t comparing the Benghazi story to Watergate, all but implying Benghazi is not as significant.

It’s not? What American official was assassinated during Watergate? What enemies of the United States looked at Watergate and continued to plan future attacks us, convinced the scandal proved America was only a “paper tiger”?

Ombudsmen for both national newspapers of record, the New York Times (“Why Wasn’t Libya Hearing on Page A1 of The Times?”), and the Washington Post (“How The Post came up short on Libya”), have now published responses to disappointed readers about their weak reporting of the Benghazi stories. Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor at The Times agreed with readers dismayed that the paper was burying the story, quoting this from one reader email:

After a day of Congressional testimony where two public officials outlined the numerous times that their request for extra security for our diplomatic offices in Libya were ignored, time and time again, no doubt contributing to the slaughter of four Americans on 9/11/12, and when it was clear that the days of stories coming from the White House that the attack began after a nonexistent spontaneous demonstration outside of the U.S. Consulate …

The lead story in today’s paper is about Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong!

The Libya story isn’t even on Page 1. It’s on Page 3.

What does this say about The Times’s news judgment?

Ben Bradlee, the folk-hero editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era, had a dictate to reporters to “follow your nose.” Could that explain the serene indifference by most of the media to the undeniably smelly Benghazi account coming from the White House?

I mean, with their noses stuck that far up Obama’s backside, where else is there to follow?

###

It’s Not Easy Being Yellow, Either

(Reuters) - Plans to save Big Bird, the fuzzy yellow character on U.S. public television's "Sesame Street," from possible extinction are taking shape in the form of a puppet-based protest next month dubbed the "Million Muppet March."

The demonstration is planned for November 3 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., three days before the general election. (“"Million Muppet March" planned to defend U.S. backing for PBS”).

Enough, already.  I know how to settle this Big Bird thing once and for all.

Someone with minimal video skills, (I’d recommend Nakoula Baselley Nakoula, but he’s in federal custody), needs to produce a film – or even a trailer – featuring a film in which Big Bird says insulting things about the Prophet Mohammed. Don’t worry about copyright laws: we paid for him, so Big Bird belongs to the People.

Once released on YouTube, this video will result in the inevitable violent demonstrations breaking out across the Islamic Archipelago. Yes, the film’s producer will have to spend the rest of his life in hiding. But beyond that, all those demonstrations will include lots of footage of Big Bird being burned in effigy, Big Bird torn limb from limb, and people holding signs in poorly spelled English calling for Death to Big Bird. Islamic leaders will denounce the violence in response to a giant bird puppet as unIslamic, but each time they do so they’ll be reminding the American government of its obligation to purge Big Bird from its midst for hurting Muslim feelings.

The dhimmi press, in lockstep, will do an about-face from their current devotion to Big Bird. By the time they get done with him, Big Bird will be lucky if he gets off with just jail time for a probation violation. Sesame Street, in a show of submission to the Religion of Peace, will have to hand  Big Bird his walking papers. (And Miss Piggy, too, for obvious reasons of religious sensitivity). And I wouldn’t be surprised if  Sesame Street wasn’t soon welcoming a new Islamic Center,  too.

The plan is foolproof. Think about it: when faced with a choice between supporting public broadcasting or placating Islam, will most of these people really even think twice?

###

You’re Not Lying If You Believe It

Davy Crockett was said to have accidentally grinned the bark off a tree while trying to untree a coon.

I couldn’t say if Vice President Biden accomplished that much with the same trick Thursday night, although he apparently wore some bark off the TV audience.

I did notice, though, that there was one point in the debate during which he stopped grinning, and stopped laughing, too. That was when he was forced to wield a clumsy hammer in a hopeless attempt to pound the square peg of his depraved pro-abortion convictions into the round hole of the Catholic faith. He never came close, just made an awful racket, as have too many of his fellow Catholic co-partisans before him, like Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy, Sebelius, Granholm, Cuomo, and on and on.

Biden offered two nonsensical arguments for how he was “practicing” his Catholic faith by championing the butchery of the unborn: that the Catholic faith “has particularly informed my social doctrine,” and that he “refuses” to impose on others the personal judgment he accepts from the Church about when life begins.

Biden said Thursday that “Catholic social doctrine talks about care of those who — who can't take care of themselves, people who need help.” He’s right, it does. Which is why the Church champions the unborn. When it comes to those who can’t take care of themselves, even the poorest, most ignorant, and most overwhelmed of mothers – who is at least visible and may have any number of advocates fighting her corner -- is a virtual One-Percenter in comparison to the unborn child against whom the fortune wheel of “choice” has just pointed the wrong way. And as for people who need help -- with politicians like Obama, Biden, and Pelosi leading half the Catholics in America around by their noses -- boy, do the unborn need help.

Argument two is Biden’s high-minded refusal to “impose” his personal, private religious opinion -- which is never to be allowed outside the tightly-locked receptacle that is his conscience, oh so humbly submitted all these years to the judgment of his Mother Church – to which he meekly submits (of course he does! on Sundays in his secret, secret soul where it won’t bother anyone else!), and accepts on blind faith as “what we call de fide doctrine” (which of course it’s no such thing, Joe, it’s just the straight-up biology you learned at Archmere Academy) – accepts the pious religious legend that the human cycle of life commences at conception – his principled refusal to “impose” this bit of religious mumbo-jumbo on his fellow human beings might be among his noblest acts as a holder of high political office and “a practicing Catholic my whole life.”

Never mind that the protection of the unborn has been the single most unchanging and non-negotiable tenet of Catholic social doctrine in the past half-century. Biden proudly refuses to “impose” that on all those “equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews” whose own personal, private “religious traditions” might have other colorful multi-culti myths about human babies – maybe even that the stork brings them or that they can have their heads crushed with forceps at 26 weeks without feeling any pain. And really never mind that Biden and Pelosi and Sebelius and the rest never refused for a blessed second any opportunity to impose any other bit of what they misunderstand to be “Catholic social doctrine” on the rest of us – homosexual marriage, the welfare state, degraded national security, health insurance by imperial command -- and most pointedly imposed this past year on those same “equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews” the HHS mandate on contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs.

Biden replied to Ryan’s complaint that the contraception mandate was a direct assault on religious freedom by declaring:

No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic Social Services, Georgetown Hospital, Mercy — any hospital — none has to either refer contraception. None has to pay for contraception. None has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops promptly responded to Biden’s claim thusly: “This is not a fact.” (“Catholic Bishops Challenge Biden on Birth Control Rule”).

In a statement issued Friday, the USCCB asserted, “This is not a fact. The HHS mandate contains a narrow, four-part exemption for certain ‘religious employers.’ That exemption was made final in February and does not extend to ‘Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital,’ or any other religious charity that offers its services to all, regardless of the faith of those served.”

For those of us who’ve known no other Church leadership in America except the one too politic by half in their exquisite care to continue to deserve the endearment, “the Democratic party at prayer,” this blunt and direct contradiction of Obama’s vice president is near shocking.

The thing of it is, I don’t think Biden was lying when he said it.  I think he really doesn’t know. He doesn’t care enough to know. Talking points are enough for him, and he’s too partisan to be bothered with the idea that anything the critics of his team have to say could possibly be worth listening to.

How persuasive must it make you if you can declaim falsehoods and factual nonsense with the heartfelt conviction that every word you were uttering was the God’s honest truth?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Joe Biden.

###

Jones Takes on Dearborn Again

Wednesday’s rally by Terry Jones of Stand Up America! outside Edsel Ford High School came and went without dramatic event. Jones’s stated purpose for the rally was to call attention to bullying of nonMuslim students by Muslim students. Jones wanted to meet with the principal, who refused, and then wanted to meet with students while they were boarding buses after school got out, but he was forbidden to enter school property.

I expect most of that was school officials wanting to keep Muslim students away from Jones – not from fear of Jones, who has never been validly accused of any violence towards anyone – but to avoid a repeat of the Children’s Crusade of bottle and rock-throwing that broke out last summer when the “Bible Believers” at the Arab American Festival found themselves under attack.

Credit where it’s due, the Dearborn Press & Guide’s Joe Slezak has done a much more balanced job of covering yesterday’s event than other local media. (“Jones visit to Dearborn’s Edsel Ford High uneventful”).

For one thing, Slezak identifies at least two Dearborn parents who express support for Jones, citing their own experience of having children bullied by Muslim students, who apparently are treated with impunity in most schools. According to Jones, a third parent had emailed Jones “about an incident in May where their son, who is black, was suspended. She said that Arabic students called their son a racial slur several times and when he fought back, he was suspended but the Muslim students were not.” The presence of actual school parents supporting Jones lends credence to his stated reason for staging it, in spite of the popular notion that Jones is only doing this to get publicity.

Even if Jones is trying to get publicity for himself and his organization, (don’t most causes try to do the same? – look at the way BAMN shows up at EVERYTHING), that doesn’t mean that the problem he came to protest doesn’t exist.

Granted Jones that appealing  a champion.  But remember that he’s first and foremost a messenger. A distinction must be made between his message, and the wacky persona the media and Islamist leaders are trying to paint on him. His detractors call him a loon and a publicity hound to gain two objectives  by foul means: it makes it easier to disregard anything he says, and it scares away potential supporters who aren’t willing to face guilt by association with a person certified a lunatic by the liberal media and the Islamophile left.

But Jones’s message is not loony, nor crazy, nor, based on anything I’ve heard him say or that’s been quoted, is his message much different from our message or the message of many other anti-jihad sources. Nor is it a message of hate. It isn’t hate to be critical of a religion that’s in love with bloodshed and death.—and that maintains its religion-of-peace image behind a wall of lies.

Jones’s message at the rally, for instance, includes this (as reported in the Press & Guide and the Free Press:

• “Muslims need to obey and respect laws of communities.”
• “Islam is not a religion that tolerates any criticism.”
• (Explaining his support for “Innocence of Muslims”): "Criticism is part of Western society."
• Muslims have a difficult time integrating into communities.
• As a Muslim community grows, it [becomes] more demanding.
• There is a “radical” element of Islam that is violent and bans free speech.
• “The Quran does teach that the Muslims are the best of all people.”

As far as I’m concerned, every one of those statements is a testable fact. Every one of them can be supported with ample documentary and historical evidence. Take away Jones’s General Bullmoose mustache and his endorsement of that crummy movie and his overall hard-guy image, and his message shouldn’t be controversial at all. It’s only upsetting for those already pre-disposed to object to any criticism of Islam.

Which unfortunately includes the media and most Dearborn public officials.

###

Joint Chiefs Commencing ‘Operation Protect Islam’

As I’ve written elsewhere, the test for creeping Sharia isn’t how many radical imams are openly calling for the death of infidels, but rather “how hard nonMuslims work to silence offenders on the excuse that the insult will incite violence within the Muslim community.” (“Why We Need Terry Jones”).

It’s now being reported that the demand Muslims groups made to the federal government last year that successfully resulted in training materials regarding radical Islam be purged from government agencies has now reached the Department of Defense. As is being reported by the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor:

During a Pentagon press conference on May 10, 2012, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly excoriated Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Matthew Dooley, a 1994 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a highly decorated combat veteran. His reason: The course on Islamic Radicalism which LTC Dooley was teaching at the Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC) of the National Defense University was offensive to Muslims.

General Dempsey characterized LTC Dooley’s course as "totally objectionable," and ordered all material offensive to Islam scrubbed from military professional education within the JFSC and elsewhere. But that’s not all. LTC Dooley was fired from his instructor position and given an ordered negative Officer Evaluation Report (OER) — the death-knell for a military career.
The actions against LTC Dooley follow a letter to the Department of Defense dated October 19, 2011 signed by 57 Muslim organizations demanding that all training materials offensive to Islam and Muslims be purged and the trainers disciplined.

A year ago, we reported on how Muslim Brotherhood front groups like MPAC and ISNA mau-maued the FBI into purging any training material “that correlates extremist violence with Islam.”(“ Train in Vain”).  By this spring, the FBI had “pulled more than 700 documents and 300 presentations that stereotyped Islam or were factually inaccurate.” Stereotyped? According to the FBI spokesman, “Some of the materials say Islam promotes violence and extremism.” (“FBI’s Mueller to Brotherhood’s ISNA: ‘I’m Your Puppet’”).

It looks like the same Brotherhood broom is sweeping through our military training, as well.

Now JCS Chairman Dempsey has personally destroyed a brilliant officer’s career in service to the Joint Chiefs’ higher mission to protect and defend the feelings of Muslims.

You might remember Gen. Dempsey’s name from his recent efforts, also on behalf of the feelings of Muslims, personally calling Terry Jones during the latest round of 9/11 attacks, to ask him to withdraw his support for the trailer/film, “Innocence of Muslims.”

Dempsey’s spokesman, Col. David Lapan, told CNN that "Jones' support of the film risks causing more violence and death."

Odd, isn’t it, that Dempsey had no problem figuring out that Islam promotes violence and extremism when the Brothers are rioting outside our embassies in twenty countries?  I guess knowing that is okay so long as you don’t write it down  in a training manual.

The special ugliness of this appeasement policy is that the Islamists aren’t just managing to force us to self-censor when it comes to the subject of Islam and violence, but they’re also using us to punish anyone who has offended them. Last year’s letter calling for a purge of training materials also included the demand that government agencies “ensure that personnel reviews are conducted and all trainers and other government employees who promoted biased trainers and training materials are effectively disciplined.”

And I guess that what they did to Colonel Dooley.  When an officer as deserving of better treatment as LTC Dooley is publicly busted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at a Pentagon press briefing, you know it’s a message conveyed directly to the Brotherhood, a message saying “We have carried out your orders.”

During the recent rioting in Cairo over the “Innocence of Muslims” flap, Egyptian president and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi demanded the US “take legal action in the US against the film's producers,” and Morsi’s spokesman said “that the United States should do a better job of protecting Islam.” Protesters in places like Indonesia were doing the same thing, unfurling banners that said “Go to hell America,” and demanding “Washington punish the makers of the film.”

If you believe Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s midnight ride to the cop shop for “questioning,” and then his re-arrest days later on a “probation violation” had nothing to do with those jihadist demands, then I have a Bible and Christian Gift Shop in Riyadh I’d like to sell you.

Nakoula may not be the quality of man that Dooley is, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that the Muslim Brotherhood tells our highest officials to jump, and their only response is to ask “how high?”

But there’s no Sharia in America.

###

Submission Is Always having to Say You’re Sorry

Now that President Barack Obama has, yet again, placed the free world on our back foot towards Islam with his apologies for the blasphemies of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, it’s not surprising at all that Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now demanding that the Pope “apologize to Muslims for his lecture [in 2006 in Regensburg, Germany], his apostolic exhortation, and the slaughters committed by the Crusaders [against Muslims] in Andalusia, just as he apologized to the Jews." (“Muslims: Pope must apologize for Catholics freeing Spain from Islamic invaders.”)

But why should the American president’s squishy diplomacy lead Qaradawi to imagine his next soft target is the Catholic Church? Obama’s not a Catholic. And Lord knows, (and I mean that literally), Catholic teaching has little in common with the progressive hash that passes for religious thought in the Obama administration.

I think Qaradawi is taking this shot now because, in the mind of Islamists like him, all Western nonMuslims are “crusaders,” (except when their “Zionists”). Obviously the Crusades, that poorly understood series of long-ago wars that were the first, and, for that matter, the last effective counterpunch against Islam’s relentless efforts to invade and subjugate all of Christendom, were an undertaking of the Catholic Church. They were preached by Catholic popes, fought by Catholic knights, and they’re the perennial Exhibit A of anti-Catholics and secularists determined to prove the bottomless greed and barbarity of the Catholic Church, if not the inherent violence at the heart of all religions (except Islam, of course).

Yet from the vantage of an Islamist, all nonMuslim Westerners, except the Jews, are more or less Christians, and therefore more or less complicit in the real or imagined crimes of the Catholic faith -- because from his vantage, the Christian faith is the Catholic faith. The average suicide bomber couldn’t care less for the distinction between a Catholic reciting the Nicene Creed and an evangelical rejecting all creeds in favor of a literal reading of the King James Bible. In the jihadist’s long and angry memory, all those kuffir armies were sent by popes, and a few of them were actually led by popes. The Protestant Reformation notwithstanding, from the 7^th century until fairly recent times the Dar-al-Islam has known no other commander-in-chief dispatching those Red Cross knights than the Bishop of Rome.

A devoted Protestant reading this might become rankled that a shanty Irishman like me is presuming to claim universal spiritual jurisdiction for the Man of Perdition in Rome. But all I’m trying to do is bring into focus the undeniable perception within the Dar-al-Islam that the remnants of European Christianity all follow basically the same religion and all bear equal guilt for the Crusades.  As far as Qaradawi bothers to think about it, Benedict XVI speaks for all Christians. (And who else would fill that role? Rick Warren?)

And thanks to the fecklessness of political leader of the free world,  Qaradawi assumes he can leverage the West’s “misplaced sense of guilt” about crusaders mowing down helpless Andalusians to wring further concessions to Islamist demands.

In fact, it goes deeper than that. As Pope Benedict surely knows, and as all Christians ought to know, Islam’s jihad with us goes beyond the military or political,  and is also a spiritual warfare. 

Qaradawi’s demand for an apology from the Vatican betrays his conviction that subjugation of the spiritual leadership of Christianity in the West is within the Ikhwan’s grasp if only the Pope is forced to bow his head to Islam, just as subjugation of the political leadership in the West was, well, scooped up with no real effort at all when the American President’s whole body bowed to Islam – without even having to be forced.

But Pope Benedict XVI isn’t going to apologize for liberating Spain. Nor does he need to. 

For years now we’ve been fed the myth of “the great intellectual Islam of the Andalusian Moors, with its pan-confessional humanism,” and the way Andalusia was a refuge for people of all faiths from Europe’s medieval narrowness, welcoming spiritual variety and freethinking types of all sorts -- more or less an Iberian version of Ann Arbor -- until the mean old Spanish Catholics spoiled it by kicking the last Muslim king out of Granada in 1492. Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom have a more accurate summary of what happened:

Iberia (Spain) was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.

. . . . In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis - like elsewhere in other Islamic lands - and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing.

. . . . Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. (“Bat Ye'or: Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality”).

Nor does the celebrated Golden Age of Andalusian enlightenment turn out to be everything the academics relate:

The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.: "No...Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [expression], 'Peace be upon you'.

. . . . Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: "..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.."

The Reconquista, as the 500-year long campaign by the Spaniards to rid the Iberian peninsula of its Moorish tormenters is called, was a genuine liberation of a vast area of the European continent from an Islamic vanguard practicing “one of the most rigorous schools of Islamic jurisprudence.”  Without that liberation, eventually Muslims conquests would have launched across the continent from Spain.   We can thank the Crusaders in Andalusia that Mass is still celebrated at Notre-Dame in Paris, instead of its having been reduced to a mosque/museum like Turkey’s Hagia Sophia, or simply be allowed to crumble into a ruin according to the strict rules for dhimmis set out in the Pact of Umar.

Fortunately, the Pope is not going to be subjugated, thanks to a certain promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against the Church. Alas, there’s no such promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against our political system.  That explains in part why thousands of raving savages demanding that we arrest one of our own for blasphemy were answered with a photo of a gang of sworn officers hustling the offender into a sheriff’s paddywagon in the middle of the night.

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Why We Need Terry Jones

Beyond shameless self promotion, I fail to understand Jones' point in all of this. Unless he is actually foolish enough to believe there is such a thing as Sharia law anywhere in the US.

-- Comment on Detroit News article about visit of Terry Jones to Dearborn

Terry Jones is coming back to Dearborn next week. Described in the Detroit News as a “frequent visitor to Dearborn,” Jones is coming this time to demonstrate “outside Edsel Ford High School against what he says is bullying by ‘Muslim gangs.’” (“Dearborn Police 'prepared' for pastor's Muslim protest”).

We at DU were early defenders of Terry Jones – and especially his (and yours and our) free speech rights -- and even turned out for his original rally, the one transferred by city fiat from its intended site at public property near the Islamic Center of  America.

At the time I didn’t think Jones’s speech on the City Hall steps came close to the inspired eloquence he displayed in his argument in his own defense during his trial in Judge Somers’s kangaroo session a couple years back. Since that time, we’ve lost interest. (Mrs. Clancy and I did attempt to get close to his most recent rally at the Islamic Center of America, but found out that Dearborn police were arbitrarily restricting access outside a wide perimeter – a highly dubious denial of freedom of assembly). Ever since that first time when he was maliciously prosecuted to placate Imam Qazwini, Jones’s events always turn into non-events, excuses for local Muslim spokespersons to tell TV cameras how everything Jones says about Dearborn is crazy.

But everything Jones says about Dearborn isn’t crazy. And his original message, the one that has forever linked his name with that of our fair city -- that Sharia is being practiced in Dearborn –isn’t crazy at all.  It’s a hard and irreducible fact we have always treated as a kind of open secret here at Dearborn Underground.

Recent events underline this even on a national scale.  The craven response by the Cairo embassy, in the face of Muslim rioters, to condemn “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” and then the Obama administration’s equally disgraceful first response failing “to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” are one and the same issue as that of Jones in Dearborn. That issue is Sharia. And while that term may be defined more or less broadly as meaning one thing or the other in a different context, in this context Sharia means one thing: blasphemy in the form of criticism of Islam will not be tolerated.

That’s the rule in Saudi Arabia.

And that’s the rule in Dearborn.

The real test for the existence of Sharia in any American community, where Muslims are still a small minority, isn’t to count up all the outspoken imams denouncing blasphemy by infidels.   The test for the existence of Sharia is how hard nonMuslims work to silence offenders on the excuse that the insult will incite violence within the Muslim community.

Item: The charging instrument used by the prosecutor to hale Terry Jones into court last year for attempting to speak in front of the Islamic Center of America alleged that “Pastor Jones will jeopardize the safety of the public by committing an act against the person or property of another in the form[ ] of burning a Koran.” (“Yes, We Have No Sharia, or, So Darling, Save the Lap Dance for Me”). In fact, the chief of police lied and knew Jones had no intention of burning a Qu’ran. Regardless. Message: It is an “abominable crime” to burn a Qu’ran.  That’s true, it is -- under Sharia law.

Item: The same criminal complaint against Jones alleged the “likelihood of a riot ensuing, complete with discharge of firearms,” if Jones were allowed to speak. (“Wanted: Minority Report”). But Jones never threatened to incite a riot or cause any kind of violence at all. Everyone knew that any potential violence would have to originate from the Muslim community. Message: Riots and violence will result if an infidel were allowed to give a speech critical of Islam.

Item: A 2011 New York Daily News editorial said that Jones had “blood on his hands” because “Jones knew bloodshed was likely somewhere in the Muslim world after he burned a Koran on March 20 at his Gainesville church.” (“Pastor Terry Jones has blood on his hands after Afghan attack in response to Koran burning”):

In an ideal world, the faithful of all religions would respond to sacrilege with peaceful condemnation. This is not an ideal world. This a world in which some Muslims view violent revenge as the more fitting action.

That being the unfortunate reality, freedom of speech regarding Islam and the Koran must be exercised with due responsibility

Message: It’s a moral absolute that we exercise freedom of speech regarding the Qu’ran only in responsible ways that don’t offend the “Muslim world” – i.e., in compliance with Sharia.

Item: Obama used his speech at the UN two weeks ago to condemn “Innocence of Muslims” as “a crude and disgusting video [that] sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.” Message: Mocking Mohammed or questioning the origins of Islam is not protected speech, but must be rejected by all decent human beings, not least because it has sparked outrage in the Ummah.

Item: Hillary Clinton appeared in TV ads aired in Pakistan vowing that “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” and that the American government “absolutely reject its content and message.” Message: Though we’re hamstrung for now by this Bill of Rights thing, the official position of the United States is that we’re opposed to content and messages denigrating Islam, just like you are – in recognition of Sharia.

Item: Morning Joe commentator Mike Barnicle said of Jones, in response to the Benghazi attack, “Given this supposed minister's role in last year's riots in Afghanistan, where people died, and given his apparent or his alleged role in this film, where, not yet nailed down, but at least one American, perhaps the American ambassador is dead, it might be time for the Department of Justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact.” Jones’s only “role” in the film was to endorse it: which may be a crime against taste, art, and competent film technicians everywhere, but he committed no actual crime for which the DOJ has any business sticking its beak in.  Unless the DOJ is now enforcing Sharia.  Message: People who endorse films that mock the Prophet should be prosecuted for the murders that Muslims commit in response. 

Then on Friday, a Dearborn Press & Guide article about the Jones visit included this puzzling lead :

Mayor Jack O’Reilly said he’s a firm believer in the right of free speech guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

But, he’s uncomfortable with how some people — like Terry Jones — use that right. (“Mayor believes in free speech — but doesn’t support Terry Jones’ anti-Islam message”).

My foot.  How else can one use the right of free speech except by speaking?  O’Reilly isn’t uncomfortable with how people like Jones use the right of free speech: he’s uncomfortable that people like Jones use the right of free speech in Dearborn, where everybody knows we’re all on notice of what Sharia requires -- which is exactly why O’Reilly trampled the Bill of Rights last year to deny free-speech rights to Jones.

All Jones has ever done in Dearborn is talk.  All Nakoula did was make a movie trailer.  Yet look at all government has done to stop them.

And still people, like this blind person writing comments in the News, believe it’s “foolish . . . to believe there is such a thing as Sharia law anywhere in the US.”

It’s not foolish at all.  And until Dearborn can shake off its apathy and stand up for something on our own account, we’re still going to need Terry Jones.

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