Swiss Ban on Minarets

“Minarets are our bayonets.”
--Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan

Al Jazeera’s response to the Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets includes this opinion:

Imagine the furor that would certainly ensue should a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population be asked to vote on whether its small Christian community should be allowed to build their churches according to a particular design or method, or whether they would rather do without the church bells sounding from time to time. (“Minarets and Europe's crisis”).

Writer Anas Altikriti's invitation to “imagine” a Muslim population making it tough for religious minorities glides over the glaring history of that very thing. Take away the element of putting the proposal to a vote, (since Caliphs used to make the decisions) and what Altikriti's imagining is the very dhimmi status Islam subjected Islamized Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa to for centuries. And still does, in far too many places.

Bat Ye’or in her The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, described the limits placed on dhimmi Christians and Jews (Christians actually were the majority population), in the conquered lands of eastern Christendom:

In theory the laws concerning places of worship depended on the circumstances of the conquest and the terms of the treaties. Construction of new churches, convents, and synagogues was forbidden, but restoration of pre-Islamic places of worship was permitted, subject to certain restrictions and on condition that they were neither enlarged nor altered. (83)

According to Islamic tradition, the rule restricting ritual and forbidding the ringing of bells and the display of a cross, banners, icons, and other ritual objects date from the beginning of the conquest. (87)

Altikriti acknowledges that critics regularly decry Islam's record of religious freedom, engaging it only to warn that religious minorities' freedom in Muslim lands hangs by a slender thread.

One wonders where this leaves the throng of Western commentators who persistently remind their audiences that Christians are disallowed from practising their faith freely or building churches in certain Muslim countries. In fact one wonders whether the ramifications of the Swiss vote on Christians and other minorities living freely among Muslim societies were ever considered.

One doesn’t need to wonder. I’m certain threats of anti-Western, anti-Christian outbreaks in the Muslim world were promised to voters by Swiss authorities trying to dampen popular support for the ban. The threats didn't work.

The Swiss initiative doesn't impose reverse dhimmi status on Muslims in Switzerland. The ban doesn’t interfere with the building of new mosques, nor the practice of Islam. Nor does it impose personal restrictions of Muslims, least of all requiring them to wear humiliating clothing or armbands. It prohibits nothing but the construction of minarets, clearly seeing them as symbolic of Islamic domination that is not welcome to the majority of Swiss voters. One commentator I heard said the Swiss were trying to send a message to deaf political leadership: Stop ignoring our concerns about the immigration of unassimilated Muslims.

The Swiss are a prickly, not particularly welcoming nation. I spent a few weeks there one summer in the mountains high above Lake Geneva. Almost daily I could hear automatic fire from the incessant training of the military reservists in the valley down below. Swiss neutrality is not the product of pacifist indifference nor national timidity: it’s ferociously guarded with a willingness to make war to defend it. Swiss border roads and bridges have been mined since 1938. Invasion plans by The Third Reich were a constant concern for the Swiss, even though popular history of the war always implies Swiss neutrality was an absolute respected by all belligerents. Even allied airmen who landed crippled planes in Switzerland faced a tough time in Swiss internee camps.

Nor is Swiss defense-mindedness limited to universal marksmanship and military vigilance. Swiss resistance to subversion by malevolent outsiders is a centuries-old national trait. The Swiss were well aware of the designs on Switzerland Hitler described in Mein Kampf. When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, “the Swiss Federal Council prohibited the wearing of Hitlerite uniforms and insignia, and subjected violators to imprisonment or deportation. . . . On 18th February 1936, the Federal council ordered the immediate suppression of all Nazi organisations in Switzerland. In 1937, the Communist Party and all other parties affiliated with foreign organisations were outlawed.”

This situation seems basic enough. The Swiss are a border-loving people, faced with an influx of immigrants whose religion predicates a borderless Ummah, and preaches all infidel nations are doomed to be flattened into floor tiles in the grand, global mosque of the Prophet. The kind of obstinate disinterest in assimilation Muslim immigrants display in every European nation was bound to lead to friction in Switzerland. Considering this history, the ban on minarets seems mild.

But sure enough, and as Altikriti warned us, Al Jazeera reported yesterday that “Iran's foreign minister warned of unspecified ‘consequences’ if the ban were enforced.” (“IRAN: Outrage, and a warning, over Swiss vote to ban minarets”).

Well, then, it must be serious if Muslims are outraged, and threatening retaliation against “Western targets” (Christians in Muslim countries). When does that ever happen?

The Koran says, We can step on you, but you can’t step on us.

But the Swiss have that persistent national stubbornness going for them. And they’ve proved before this they’ll back it up.

Islamic, Islamist, Baloney

Three Islamic academics, Hayri Abaza, Soner Çağaptay, and Kayvan Chinichian, have written an article for a Turkish newspaper beseeching nonMuslims to “Please, Call us Islamic.”

“Substituting the term Islamic for Islamist incorrectly brands all Muslims as Islamists. In the name of political sanity, we ask you, please call us Islamic because Islamism is an ideology we do not share.”

It works this way: If we all stop referring to Islamists as Muslims, we will contribute to “separating Islam from Islamism so as to diminish the power of the latter.”

I might consider this, if I believed at all that what empowers jihadism and terror attacks has a single thing to do with what Western commentators say about Islam. (I note this exception: when we drop our guard and reassure one another that Islam is safe and peaceful, jihadist attacks increase). I believe the evidence shows jihadism is being driven by the mosques, by the imams, by the radical preachers and the spiritual advisers in the Muslim community, here and abroad. There is also a lot of evidence jihadism is being driven by the Koran and the nature of the Islamic religion itself. What we nonMuslims say has nothing to do with it.

I can appreciate that adherents of a religion don’t like being defined wrongly, or misnamed by outsiders. Especially by outsiders who have somewhat of a bone to pick with the insiders’ religion. But the approach of these writers leaves too much unaccounted for.

For instance, take that simple formula they offer that “Islam is a religion and Islamism is an ideology.”

This means, if we hew strictly to its stripped-down terms, that Islam and Islamism can and must be separated as two unlike things, even two unrelated things. The distinction requires us to stop referring to Islamists as Muslims.

But the statement, “Islamism is an ideology” leaves far too much unexplained. Most of the notroious ideologies of our age have been secular--communism, fascism, nationalism, environmentalism. There have been no religions associated with them, with the exception of environmentalism, which is reviving what it imagines to be ancient pantheism.

But Islamism is a religious ideology. It is dedicated to the imposition, by force, of a particular religion, Islam, on the entire world. Even the writers of this article admit that Islamism is “a modern anti-Western political ideology rooted in Islam.” The concept of Islam to Islamists is as necessary to its ideological fabric as the concept of the nation is to nationalists, or the concept of communal misery is to communists. And because Islamism is rooted in Islam, it's not such an easy matter to “separate” Islam from Islamism. The difficulty the Muslim community in Europe and North America has explaining the distinction to the rest of us is a major factor in nonMuslim mistrust toward global Islam.

But as Abaza, Çağaptay, and Chinichian see it, if we won’t sequester Islamists from Muslims by distinguishing “Islamic” from “Islamist,” then what we’re really saying is “that only Islamists are authentic Muslims and that non-Islamist Muslims cannot be real Muslims.”

No, really, we’re not saying either of those two other things. And they do not follow, either lby logic or syntax, that we are saying them, no matter how often this non sequitur is repeated.

(I don’t know why it is that, when it comes to Muslims as a set, people simply forget the meaning of human language. Wasn’t there a time in this country when someone could say, “the car that caused that accident was a Ford,” without having someone cluck their tongue and lecture us that not all Fords cause accidents, or that not all accidents are caused by Fords?)

While I recognize some value in defining the term, “Islamist,” calling a terrorist or terror groups “Islamic” is a valid description that’s either correct or not. The statement that a given attacker was Islamic says no more about who else is or isn’t a real Muslim than my calling Nancy Pelosi “Catholic” means only morally-compromised, pro-abortion political harpies are authentic Catholics. The acknowledgement that Pelosi’s a Catholic means only that, for good or ill, even if she’s a bad Catholic, she's got the credentials and the rest of the Catholics are stuck with her. And it follows that the deranged religious sensibilities of the likes of Pelosi and Kennedy and Kerry and Granholm and Cuomo, require that other better-grounded Catholics, like Bishop Tobin, have to work harder to explain to outsiders what the Church really stands for. That can't be helped. But that’s a job for Catholics to do, not outsiders.

Just so, Muslims are stuck with Nidal Hasan, Ahmadinejad, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Whatever else these guys are, no one’s ever going to buy it that they’re not Muslim. And it shouldn’t be put up to we infidels to sort out if they’re authentic, inauthentic, or “real Muslims.” That’s for Muslims to do, if they can.

And Muslims haven’t been willing to do it. Not really do it.

Frankly, I don’t have an opinion about who is or isn’t an authentic Muslim, or what authentic Islam is. Our job here isn’t to declare who’s a genuine Muslim, or to define what is or isn’t authentic Islam. Our job is to call attention to a threat we’re facing from a large, and very aggressive global army of enemies who define themselves as soldiers of Allah, embarked on a jihad to spread Islam over the whole world, including over my street and yours. If these self-described Muslims die in the act of telling us their bloodthirsty acts are done to punctuate the greatness of Allah, who am I to say they’re not authentic Muslims? They think they are, and they aim to kill me because I'm not. Close enough.

In my view, the problem isn’t too many nonMuslims unwittingly ascribing “the ideology and crimes of Islamists to all Muslims.” The problem is too few Muslims making a persuasive case that they really do despise Islamists as hijackers of their great and peaceful religion. In spite of a dearth of evidence of widespread Muslim contempt for jihadists, it's still too easy for Abaza, Çağaptay, and Chinichian here to say that, “A majority of Muslims are not Islamists and the violent crimes of Islamists would be enough for them to be considered un-Islamic.”

Why would be? If being considered un-Islamic by a majority of Muslims were enough, wouldn’t Islamism soon die out--in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Turkey, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, in Syria, in Gaza, in Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, in the caves of Kandahar, in the mosques of Londonistan, and in the no-go Muslim enclaves of Sweden, and on and on, and on?

The unwitting pundits that Abaza, Çağaptay, and Chinichian are complaining about are not ascribing the ideology and crimes of Islamists to all Muslims. What they/we are doing is ascribing the ideology and crimes of Islamists to Islam. If Islamism truly is not Islamic, then the case has yet to be made by the only people who can make it--Muslims. Please don’t ask us to make it for you.

'The War for 21st-Century Freedom'

Barbara Lerner has written a lengthy, hard-hitting overview for National Review Online about how “the Islamists are fighting for control of the world,” and “We need a president who knows it.” (“The War for 21st-Century Freedom”).

Here’s an excerpt, but you’ll probably want to read the rest:

Are you worried — like so many Americans after the Fort Hood massacre — about the growing threat of Islamist subversion and terror here at home? Worried, beyond that, about what we’re doing — or not doing — militarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq? Worried about the growing reach and power of Islamist movements in Europe and South America, as well as Asia, the Middle East, and Turkey? Worried about the military alliances Islamist governments are forging with their secular mirror images: socialist-god governments in places like North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela?

Then focus like a laser on Iran, now, because Islamists will score major victories in all those places and more if we fail to prevent the ruling mullahs from openly, triumphantly making Iran the world’s first Islamist nuclear power. The danger isn’t only Iran’s own catastrophic recklessness, once she gets the bomb, or the fact that all her Arab neighbors will respond by scrambling to go nuclear too. It’s also that Islamists everywhere — joined by growing masses of previously undecided Muslims — will see Iran’s success in achieving nuclear status the way Iran’s mullahs see it: as a historic defeat for the West, blasting open the gate to a 21st-century world where Islam rules and Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists are subservient or worse. Islamist ranks will swell, everywhere, as confidence grows that the Islamist side is the winning side, and victory is near.

THE WAR WE MUST WIN
Most Americans can scarcely imagine an Islamist-ruled world. Most Muslims can, and they respond in one of three ways. Moderate Muslims wholeheartedly reject the Islamist vision and the support for jihad that is inseparable from it; Muslim extremists embrace it, many with growing fervor; and a third group sits on the fence, waiting and watching. Constant politically correct reassurances that only a minority of the world’s Muslims support violence against us are based on the fantasy that only “Islamist extremists” do that; “moderate Islamists” don’t. In fact, there is no such thing as a “moderate Islamist.” All Islamists are extremists. It’s an extreme creed. Moderate Muslims do exist, millions of them, many bravely fighting against the rising Islamist tide, but they aren’t “moderate Islamists.” Moderate Muslims are anti-Islamist Muslims, who oppose the imposition of Sharia and all the oppressive baggage that comes with it. They are on our side — freedom’s side — and we should be on theirs. Instead, we mostly ignore them and fail to heed their warnings, reaching out to “moderate Islamists” instead, welcoming them into our critical institutions — as our military, aided by the FBI, welcomed Major Hasan.

MORE

Lost Child

Interesting comment from NRO:

Unanimous Supreme Court Recognizes Unborn Human Being to Be a “Child” [Ed Whelan]

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous per curiam opinion in Porter v. McCollum in favor of the habeas petition filed by a death-row inmate. Specifically, the Court ruled that the inmate was deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel when his counsel failed to discover significant mitigating evidence and to present that evidence at the sentencing phase of his trial.

By e-mail, Walter Weber of the American Center for Law and Justice highlights an interesting phrase in the Court’s opinion:

In the course of relating the criminal convict’s troubled childhood, the unanimous Court states, “Porter routinely witnessed his father beat his mother, one time so severely that she had to go to the hospital and lost a child.” Slip op. at 4. The unmistakable reference is to a miscarriage. The stage of gestation is not mentioned.

Outside the abortion context, every Justice knows that a pregnant woman carries “a child.”

(I’ve added the italics.)

#

Elves Brace for Backlash

'Elf' jailed over dynamite hoax on Ga. mall Santa

(AP)
MORROW, Ga. — A man in an elf suit is jailed after police in Georgia say he told a mall Santa that he was carrying dynamite.

Police say Southlake Mall in suburban Atlanta was evacuated but no explosives were found.

Morrow police arrested 45-year-old William C. Caldwell III, who was being held without bond Thursday in the Clayton County jail. He was not part of the mall's Christmas staff.

Police say Caldwell got in line Wednesday evening to have his picture taken with Santa Claus. Police say when Caldwell reached the front of the line, he told Santa he had dynamite in his bag. Santa called mall security and Caldwell was arrested.

Caldwell faces several charges, including having hoax devices and making terroristic threats.
#

Dress up like an elf and tell a mall Santa you’ve got dynamite in your bag and that’s clearly a terroristic threat. Shoot 13 soldiers to death and wound 32, and they’re still trying to decide.

'Take This Religion to New York!'

Damn those hijackers! From yesterday’s Time Magazine report on the absence of a backlash against Dearborn’s Muslims:

A week and a day after the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, there's a palpable sense of unease among the 400 men and women gathered for Friday prayers at the American Muslim Center in Dearborn, Mich., 1,350 miles away. In his sermon, lay preacher Hani Ayyad is careful not to mention Major Nidal Malik Hasan by name but repeatedly inveighs against "those who try to hijack our deen [faith], who distort, tarnish and darken it." Worshippers know exactly who he means. (“Postcard from Dearborn”).

Maybe worshippers do know exactly who he means. It’s the rest of us who don’t know exactly who he means.

Does he mean Imam Luqman Abdullah? Does he mean Anwar al-Alakwi? Does he mean al Zawahiri? Does he mean Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood? Does he mean Yusuf al-Qaradawi? For all that, does he even really mean Major Nidal Malik Hasan?

The writer doesn’t explain why Ayyad felt the need to be careful not to mention Hasan by name while inveighing against "hijackers" of the faith. If what Hasan did was so incontrovertibly outside of acceptable Islamic belief and practice, then why not say so? Is it because there are members of the community who wouldn’t agree?

This is exactly where the statements of Muslim leaders purporting to condemn terrorism fall short. They condemn terrorism generically without managing to condemn terrorists by name. Hasan is the exception that proves the rule. And because, as far as we know, he was a lone wolf unconnected to any bona fide international jihadist organization, imams can rip on him without fear of alienating supporters of international groups linked to terrorism.

For years CAIR, the puppet organization of the Muslim Brotherhood that openly supports both Hamas and Hezbollah, has been pretending to condemn terrorism while never exactly condemning terrorists, terror activities, or terrorist groups. CAIR’s leaders, like the Dearborn preacher, are also careful not to mention names, trusting that listeners will know exactly what they mean--or what they don’t mean.

Like CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper last year, when he was asked specifically by an NBC interviewer to answer whether or not CAIR supported Hamas and Hezbollah. “Hooper asserted that CAIR has always condemned acts of terrorism, but then ‘would not answer whether CAIR condemns those designated terrorist groups themselves.’” Then he cut the interviewer off. (“CAIR’s True Colors”).

Then there was this exchange on Fox News last year with CAIR national legislative affairs director Corey Saylor, refusing to say that CAIR condemns Hamas and Hezbollah:

Reporter David Lee Miller:

"Can you sit here now and in just one sentence tell me- CAIR condemns Hamas and CAIR condemns Hezbollah?"

Corey Saylor:

"I'm telling you in a very clear fashion – CAIR condemns terrorist acts, whoever commits them, wherever they commit them, whenever they commit them."

David Lee Miller:

"That's not the same thing as saying you condemn Hamas and you condemn Hezbollah."

Corey Saylor:

"Well I recognize that you don't like my answer to the question, but that's the answer to the question."

David Lee Miller:

"It's not no, it's not whether I like it or dislike it. I was asking whether or not you can sit here now and say- CAIR condemns Hamas or Hezbollah. If you don't want to, just say that. If that is a position your group doesn't take, I certainly accept that. I just want to understand what your answer is." [emphasis added]

Corey Saylor:

"The position that my group takes is that we condemn terrorism on a consistent, persistent basis, wherever it happens, whenever it happens."

That’s clear enough.

When the archbutcher George Tiller was, himself, murdered in Kansas, every pro-life group in America condemned it, specifically, as an act of arbitrary killing that can’t be reconciled with a belief in the sanctity of life.

In spite of the best efforts of the Left and the pro-abortion lobby to use Tiller’s murder to place pro-lifers in a false light as homicidal, theocratic extremists, it didn’t catch on.

That’s because the pro-life movement, for decades, has always presented a consistent witness to the value of life. Rather than part of a pattern, the murder of Tiller was an extremely rare example of an abortion opponent resorting to violence during America’s long, sad era of unlimited abortion.

I endorsed the pro-lifers’ position that taking the law into one’s own hands is wrong, although I stopped well short of joining some of these groups’ expressions of regret or sorrow for the end of Tiller’s genocidal life. But regardless of my reaction to it, the condemnation by the pro-life leaders, consistent as it was with the movement’s actions all these years, dispelled any confusion about whether or not pro-life leaders were truly unsympathetic with Tiller’s murderer.

Muslims in America are facing a nearly opposite problem. And by the "opposite problem" I'm not saying, though folks like me are constantly being accused of saying it, that all Muslims are terrorists. (I've never said that.) The problem is that Hasan’s jihadist massacre was not a rare, uncharacteristic outburst that critics will try to use to uncover the “hypocrisy” of Islam’s peaceful, benevolent message.

Americans are exposed to daily reports from around the world of Islam-inspired violence, threats of violence, and threats of armed conflict against a variety of bitterly hated enemies: against Jews, against Israel, against the United States, against the West, against the Kuffirs, against “crusaders.” Half-hearted declarations follow the most shocking attacks, claiming that they were the work of “hijackers” of one of the world’s greatest religions. But the declarations invariably shatter against the evidence of the attackers’ methodical pre-attack documentation of their jihadist motives, their religious devotion, and their confident self-image as Koran-loving, houri-lovin’ warriors of Allah. Now, who are we going to believe? Ibrahim Hooper, or that dead-jihadi-walking in the video with no reason to lie?

Since 9/11 the Muslim community has failed to present a clear, consistent, principled position towards Islamic terrorism, one by which an outsider can judge the community’s sincerity in responding to actions that shock and dismay the average American. Islam’s nonMuslim defenders aren’t helping, either. It isn’t just the way their obsequious public comments convince the rest of us just how deeply immersed in sand their own heads are on the subject of Islamic terrorism. It’s that the more reflexively insincere they sound while lecturing us how the likes of Hasan is really the exact opposite of a devout Muslim, the more they sound like Jon Lovitz.

A Nightmare Deferred

Does this mean we scooped Time Magazine?

As your intrepid DU blog never ceases to repeat, the fabled American backlash against Muslims is a worthy of Stephen King, or at least the Climate Research Center's Phil Jones.

Time writer Bobby Ghosh is now reporting on how Dearborn's Muslim advocates were stood up by the the post-Ft. Hood backlash that never showed up.

Mohamed Mardini, imam at the American Muslim Center on Outer Drive, had to admit to Ghosh “that there have been no reports of heinous attacks on Muslims anywhere in the U.S. ‘Our worst nightmare has not come true,’ he says.” (“Postcard from Dearborn”).

Ghosh still gives credence to explanations that this forestalled nightmare was thanks only to a frenzied response by local Muslim leaders, in coordination with CAIR and ISNA, to “condemn the massacre with no reservations, and offer support for the victims and their families.”

In view of the fact that in the hours and days after the massacre, every Army spokesman, politician, media commentator, expert, and local weatherman on television was condemning the massacre and offering support to the victims, it’s seems a stretch to say the only thing that pacified Dearborn’s mobs of pitchfork-wielding Islamophobes were rumors that local CAIR wasn’t saying the exact opposite.

There's a far more plausible theory that gets no credit. There are no mobs of pitchfork-wielding Islamophobes. And never were.

Nor is it accurate to say that Muslim leaders condemned Hasan’s actions “with no reservations.” Imam Elahi had plenty of reservations. Among them, he tried to lay off Hasan’s jihadist explosion as explainable by “Nidal's Palestinian background . . .[and] Israeli crimes in the occupied territories,” or as “side effects of these wars begun by a previous administration.” (i.e., the Bush-made-him-do-it reservation). CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper said that to call what Hasan did “an act of terror is to jump to conclusions, to rush to judgment.”

And while all this alleged inveighing was going on against “those who try to hijack . . . distort, tarnish and darken” Islam, the local Muslim community had a parallel frenzy throwing together the Imam Luqman Abdullah Martyr’s Appreciation Day in honor of the area’s own violent, self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah.” Abdullah is the violent radical mosque leader killed mid-felony in an FBI shootout. Although Abdullah’s plans for jihadist murders never got past the promises, promises stage, his stated goals were at least as bloody as Hasan’s were. And Abdullah’s jihadist principles even featured a preference for military targets.

Ghosh never explores whether or not there were any moderate local imams who inveighed against Abdullah as a faith-tarnishing hijacker. Maybe that's because the community’s official spokesmen already granted Abdullah holy martyr status weeks ago. Ghosh repeats instead local Muslim explanations that “the killing of a controversial Detroit imam during an FBI raid of his mosque [sic] last month,” is only proof that local law enforcement is not on their side.

Not on their side? Ghosh managed to overlook credible reports that local imams have to buy special lip balm-removing toilet paper to use after monthly BRIDGE meetings.

In spite of Ghosh’s thematic references to the Muslim community’s “palpable sense of unease,” and Muslim fears of how Hasan's attack increased “what they say is widespread hostility toward their community,” he shows no curiosity at all for whether or not those fears ever had any basis in any actual, documented backlash. This most recent backlash no-show is all the more hard to explain, as many are calling the Ft. Hood attack the worst domestic terrorist act since 9/11-- and yet the imams “worst nightmare” still has not come true—again. Just like it didn’t come true after 9/11.

Fear not. This will not be the end of regular forecasts of the coming backlash. In Dearborn we're used to the idea that just because there's no smoke, doesn't mean there's no fire.

Cheney for President

I would vote for Dick Cheney in a second:

Should Dick Cheney run in 2012?

Rick Moran

Short answer; no. His well known heart problems would kill any chances of success. I seriously doubt questions about his health could ever be put to rest no matter how many doctors swore he was fit. Beyond that, there is no doubt that Cheney would make a great president. He would be the "Anti-Obama," possessing qualities exactly the opposite of our current president while outshining him in wisdom and fortitude.Leaving the health issue aside, could he win the nomination? Jon Meacham of Newsweek takes a serious look at why Cheney would be a good candidate:

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting.

A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama's unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.

Three years out, the GOP field does not offer a putative nominee. When Gallup polled on the Republican race for 2012, it asked about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Haley Barbour (Huckabee won, with Romney and Palin tying for second among Republicans who were asked whom they would consider voting for). Cheney covers all the ground these folks do, and then some. (After Liz Cheney's remark on Fox News, a flood of subsequent e-mails asked her, "Where do I sign up?")

Meacham doesn't mention the health issue, and he makes some backhanded points about why Cheney should run. But there is little doubt that a Cheney trial balloon would set the GOP to talking and serious people would consider contributing time and money to his campaign.I don't think it likely at all. But who knows what condition the country will be in come 2012 and what kind of a president the American people will be looking for?You just never know in politics.
#

Where's There's Smoke, There's No Warming?

“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”
-- The great climate change science scandal

From today's American Thinker:

Climategate: 'The stones cry out'

Joseph Finlay

The extraordinary revelation of Climategate through the alternative media the world over raises provocative questions about the health of Western notions of truth, science, and intellectual freedom . Jonathan Leake, writing in the UK's Times Online, offers a balanced overview of the scandal and this fascinating point regarding the chronology of the "breaking" of the story:

It was a powerful and controversial mix - far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones's belief in man-made climate change.

Within hours the file had been stripped from the site.Several hours later, however, it reappeared - this time on an obscure Russian server. Soon it had been copied to a host of other servers, first in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and then Europe and America.

What's more, the anonymous poster was determined not to be stymied again. He or she posted comments on climate-sceptic blogs, detailing a dozen of the best emails and offering web links to the rest. Jones's statistical tricks were now public property.

Note carefully the fact that this modern shot heard round the world first found a point of entry through Russia, then Saudi Arabia, and then Turkey - next Europe, and lastly the United States. In other words, the traditionally supposed intellectual freedom and free speech climate of the West was "stoney ground" in comparison to the accessibility of outlets under the more repressive regimes of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Perhaps the greater story is the truth itself - and its indomitable will to reveal itself through even the most unlikely of conduits and efforts of even one individual arrayed against a worldwide apparatus of dishonesty. Jesus, in Luke 19:40, when admonished to silence the truth, made a startling claim about the geological record that collided with accepted scientific notions in His day:

And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.

It would appear that the repression of truth in the scientic community and the MSM in the west has indeed caused "the stones to cry out."

#

A Perfect Storm of Idiocy

Sure it’s just a coincidence.

Last August a report was issued by the Southern Policy Law Center, “Return of the Militias,” warning of an alarming resurgence of the militia groups of the 1990s. “All it's lacking is a spark,” reported one law enforcement agency. “I think it's only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.”

Back in August the SPLC supplemented its report with an article calling right-wing militias the number-one domestic threat. According to the SPLC, the militia movement “is steeped in paranoia and infused with a boiling rage against President Obama”:

“The Department of Homeland Security has recently warned that right-wing extremists such as these militias currently pose the No. 1 threat of domestic terrorism.” (“Right-Wing Militias Currently the #1 Domestic Terror Threat”).

Except there haven’t been any threats and violence from militia groups that I’ve heard, or nothing that’s big enough to surface to national attention. (Nothing, say, comparable to Fort Hood, or even comparable to the shootout with Imam Abdullah).

And Janet Napolitano ended up having to apologize to military veterans for the unfortunate wording in her Homeland Security report that the SPLC relied so much on.

Then last summer the media tried, tried hard, to portray millions of tea-party goers as unhinged homicidal mobs, except all that video of chipper church groups picking up their own litter kept clashing with the Jaws soundtrack.

And yet here it is late November and the AP is tossing the militia story out there again, with no additional material to explain what makes it news again. (“Militia movements rise up nationwide”).

Today's AP story repeats that, since Obama's election, there’s been a resurgence of militia activity by white guys who can’t process having a black man in charge.

At least 50 new right-wing militia groups have been identified by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

There is a violent edge to this movement. Lone wolves and small groups who are "embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center report.

And you know what shocking details we end up with to illustrate this? A where-is-he-now story about an over-the-hill Norm Olson, the former Michigan Militia guy who's now moved to Alaska, He doesn't come across sounding like the center of any "Perfect Storm" of militia violence. He gets along with his new neighbors. His property isn't a "compound." Olson says he's 63 and too old for grunting through the woods. "I'm a flag waver. That's really all I am today."

Is Olson supposed to scare us? If I lived in his town I'd call him up and see if he minded bringing in our mail while we're away.

I ask you: Is this story really being re-launched now, with all the recycled, discredited exaggerations abouting boiling-hot racist right-wing extremist gun nuts, just to divert readers from the real threat of domestic Islamic terrorism?

Do they think we're that stupid? Really?

When Terrorists Get Acquitted, Do We Still Win?

This morning’s Detroit Free Press features this the headline over Brian Dickerson’s column, “When terrorists get equal justice, we win”.

This captures perfectly the failure to tell any difference between jihadist terrorism as a war against us, or terrorism as a criminal act, like mortgage fraud or burglary or assault.

His headline is wrong. We don’t win when terrorists get equal justice--we win when they die, or give up. (And these guys don’t give up). We win when they lose. That’s how wars work.

Dickerson thinks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is entitled to Bill of Rights protections for criminal defendants just for being one of God’s children.

Except he isn’t entitled. KSM isn’t an American, for one thing, nor was he arrested on U.S. soil. And until a week ago Friday he was generally recognized as a foreign enemy combatant captured making war on us in violation of the laws of war. As far as the laws of war are concerned, we can detain him indefinitely until the war is over.

But Dickerson’s fighting the good fight, along with Obama and Holder, protecting our civil liberties from us, from the “masses,” especially from “critics, mostly on the right,” who would probably vote against the Bill of Rights if anyone was dumb enough to give us the chance.

Why is KSM coming to New York? For your own good.

Thus, Dickerson:

Take, for instance, the notion that any person, no matter how heinous the crime he or she is accused of, should enjoy certain fundamental legal protections, such as the right to a public trial by a jury of ordinary Americans, or the right to cross-examine hostile witnesses.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his boss, President Barack Obama, are currently under attack for defending this very proposition.

Is that why they’re under attack, for defending the proposition that “any person” is entitled to a public jury trial? And here I thought most of us were upset because Holder and Obama are trying to fight a war as if it's a criminal investigation.

As to those “fundamental legal protections,” I don't get why Dickerson isn’t defending that proposition on behalf of the other detainees, the ones who aren’t getting civil trials, but instead are being sent, by Holder, to military commissions, the same ones Dickerson sneers at as “secret military tribunals.” Don’t these terrorists qualify as “any person,” too?

Aren’t the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole entitled to their “fundamental legal protections,” too?

Didn’t Washington and his men freeze at Valley Forge to ensure all of our most deadly enemies get all of their rights, too?

Holder told the Senate hearing Wednesday that “those who attacked a civilian target on U.S. soil were being sent to a civilian federal court and those who attacked or plotted against military targets abroad were going before tribunals.”

Good luck making sense of that. Regardless, the fact of Holder and his boss endorsing the military tribunals for anyone ought to shut down for good the argument that, compared with criminal courtrooms, they’re little better than legal “black holes.” Dickerson recognizes only the false choice between KSM getting a jury trial in a civilian court, or being denied his Constitutional rights while America abandons her highest principles. The simple solution that he could stay, (or better yet, could have been allowed to complete his plea of guilty and gone off to execution), is never credited to us. Liberals prefer false choices. That way, if you don't support KSM’s “I’ll Take Manhattan” trial, you’re as good as saying you don’t want justice done at all.

Why can’t Dickerson recognize the contradicition of the other detainees going to military courts?

Because he doesn’t know there’s a war. In his mind KSM is a criminal. What has the armed forces got to do with it? Those military tribunals are just something Bush thought up to deprive criminal defendants of their rights.

Dickerson has no clue.

Dickerson is a smart guy who’s commented well on legal issues in the past. I almost never agree with him, but I used to be able to see his point. Lately, he’s drifted over the horizon. I wonder if this isn’t how “cognitive dissonance” affects your thinking after a while?

Justice Arrived

Speaking of the Blind Sheikh Rahman, his odious one-time lawyer, Lynne Stewart, is finally on her way to prison after losing an appeal of her criminal conviction. And she'll now likely face a heavier sentence than she originally was given.

You remember that she was convicted for acting as the Sheikh’s message-bearer to his jihadist colleagues in Egypt--a rather blatant violation of both the law, and her solemn oath as a lawyer that she would abide by the special measures that applied to her client on account of his high-security status.

You can read the background on it at (“When ‘Zealous Advocacy’ Crosses the Line”).

One of the judges on the three-judge Court of Appeals panel wrote an opinion concurring in part, and dissenting in part. Circuit Judge Walker disagreed with the majority for still being too easy on Stewart, even though they upheld her conviction and remanded her case for a sentence that actually reflects the seriousness of what she did. Walker's opinion includes this summary of her actions:

For two years, defendant Lynne Stewart, through artifice and deception, and despite sworn commitments to the contrary made to the government, carried out a criminal plan to transmit instructions from her imprisoned client, a terrorist leader, to his jihadist followers in the Middle East, including, ominously, his withdrawal of support for a fragile cease-fire in Egypt, an action that effectively sanctioned renewed terrorist attacks and indiscriminate loss of human life. The district court termed these deliberate and horrific crimes of terrorism, for which the Sentencing Guidelines recommended 30 years imprisonment, “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct.” And yet the district court imposed a breathtakingly low sentence of 2 1/3 years.

Needless to say, the fact that Stewart’s representation of Rahman forced into concrete action her own contempt for her country, her profession, and (I’ll wager) herself, doesn’t reflect on all lawyers. In particular, I’m sure it doesn’t reflect on all those high-minded lawyers even now making their way to New York to try out for the KSM dream team. All of them, I’m sure, motivated only by reverence for America’s “highest ideals.”

And all of them way too smart to be manipulated by as purely evil a critter as any of them has ever encountered.

I’ll bet KSM can’t wait to meet them.

Justice Denied

Speaking of Eric Holder, there's no one better qualified to discuss the administration's disastrous decision to bring KSM to New York than Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy was the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who put the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman in jail for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. McCarthy is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

He wrote the following for National Review Online. I enjoyed hearing Senator John Kyl read from it at length to AG Holder at the senate hearing on Wednesday.

Justice Delayed

Holder’s friends in the al-Qaeda bar caused the trial delays he now criticizes.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Of all the infuriating aspects of the decision to transfer five 9/11 war criminals to civilian federal court, the one that grates most is the contention that the Obama administration is finally moving forward after “eight years of delay” — as Attorney General Eric Holder put it at his Friday press conference — during which the Bush administration managed to complete only three military-commission trials.

This is chutzpah writ large. The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts. Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department. That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered its services to at least 18 of America’s enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people. (During 2007 alone, Covington contributed more than 3,000 hours of free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees.)

Almost from the moment President Bush authorized military commissions in 2001, this legion of litigators flooded the courts with habeas corpus petitions, contending that military detention and trials violated the Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Geneva Conventions. In 2004, the al-Qaeda bar induced the Supreme Court, in Rasul v. Bush, to grant enemies a statutory habeas corpus right to challenge their military detention in civilian court. Congress tried to stop them by amending the habeas statute to divest the lower federal courts of jurisdiction in these lawsuits, but the al-Qaeda bar later persuaded the liberal bloc on the Court to ignore that amendment.

In 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, our enemies’ lawyers persuaded the Court’s liberal bloc to invalidate the military commissions on the ground that they had been prescribed by the president rather than by Congress. This rationale was (a) disingenuous, because Congress had implicitly approved military tribunals in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, (b) legally untenable, inasmuch as presidentially authorized commissions have a long history in the United States, and (c) practically pointless: Since Congress already had implicitly approved the commissions, it was no surprise when it then explicitly approved the commissions in the 2006 Military Commissions Act. In terms of delay, however, the damage was done. The military commissions that had been convened up to that point — and delayed by continuous litigation — had to be started all over again under the new congressionally authorized system.

As night follows day, the al-Qaeda bar immediately went to work attacking the new commission system. Simultaneously, the terrorists’ volunteer lawyers worked to undermine Congress’s narrowing of their statutory habeas corpus rights by claiming the combatants had a constitutional right to seek civilian federal court review of their military detention. In the disastrous 2008 Boumediene v. Bush decision, the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc again went along with the leftist lawyers for the enemy. Armed with that victory, the lawyers redoubled their efforts, using the new Boumediene ruling (which only applied to detention, not to commission trials) as a basis to argue, again, that the military-commission system was invalid.

It was well into 2008 when the lower courts finally ruled that Boumediene did not invalidate the commissions. At that point, in the eleventh hour of its second term, the Bush administration was able to push ahead and get some commissions done. In the interim, however, Boumediene meant that more than 200 detainee cases were dumped on the lower federal courts with no guidance about how to proceed.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey pleaded with Congress to enact rules to make the process more orderly, but Democrats turned a deaf ear. Like the al-Qaeda bar, they wanted to maximize due-process rights for the enemy but didn’t want to be held politically responsible for doing so. What better way to thread that needle than to sit on their hands while federal judges — who are insulated from voters — made up procedural rules as they went along? At the urging of the enemies’ lawyers, those judges are treating combatant-detention hearings as if they were full-blown trials and ordering the release of trained terrorists who should be detained.

It is mind-boggling that the delay in completing commission trials would be derided by Eric Holder, a lawyer whose firm is among those responsible for the litigation-driven delay that became a lawfare triumph for al-Qaeda. Holder and his comrades did everything they could do to undermine the commission system, both in legal motions and in public appearances accusing the Bush administration of torture, war crimes, and disregard for the legal rights of terrorists.

And exactly when would Holder have had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be tried? We did not gain custody of him until his capture by the Pakstanis in 2003. After that, years were taken to break him in our attempt to extract the full breadth of his knowledge of al-Qaeda’s players and plans, and to exploit that intelligence to save lives. KSM was submitted to a military commission in 2006 — shortly after Holder’s colleagues in the al-Qaeda bar got the commission system invalidated in Hamdan.

Yet, within two years (i.e., in less time than most civilian terrorism cases), KSM and four fellow war criminals stood ready to plead guilty and proceed to execution. But then the Obama administration blew into Washington. Want to talk about delay? Obama shut down the commission despite the jihadists’ efforts to conclude it by pleading guilty. Obama’s team permitted no movement on the case for eleven months and now has torpedoed a perfectly valid commission case — despite keeping the commission system for other cases — so that we can instead endure an incredibly expensive and burdensome civilian trial that will take years to complete.

How many years? Terrorists bombed the U.S. embassies in 1998. It took three years to bring four of them to trial. (There would have been a fifth, but the civilian system failed to detain him securely: He maimed a prison guard during an escape attempt and was never brought to trial for the bombings.) The embassy-bombing trial took seven months to complete and failed to result in death sentences for the two capital defendants. Guess when the appeal was decided? Just a few months ago — eleven years after the attacks and eight years after the trial. The convictions were upheld by the appellate court, so now we move on to the Supreme Court. Once that’s done, they’ll have a couple of years to relitigate their trial and sentences by filing habeas corpus motions.

But it’s good to hear we’re finally ending all this unseemly delay.
#

2 + 2 = And Who Are We To Say?

I see that while I was playing hooky, Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi popped up in The Detroit News urging all of us not to “jump to conclusions” about Nidal Hasan. (“Faith and Policy: Don't jump to conclusions on Fort Hood shootings”).

Well, really he wants more than that we don’t jump to conclusions. He doesn’t want us to run, walk, Big Wheel, crawl, or glacially creep to conclusions, either. He doesn’t want us to reach any conclusion at all—especially the obvious one. When you get to the part of the problem where you’ve figured out 2 + 2 = X, you need to erase X, put down your chalk, go back to your seat and put your head down on your desk.

Elahi’s op-ed columns follow no traceable logic, just gurgling brooklike things running with non sequiturs and, frankly, bald-faced lies. This tactic makes counterargument impossible. For instance, things like this:

If reports about Hasan performing poorly, behaving strangely and doubting his interest in the job were true, then instead of blaming 1.5 billion Muslims and asking them all to apologize for what Hasan did, it is better to learn from this experience and give the right job to the right people and stop discriminating against the thousands of Muslim men and women in the military.

There simply is no response to a sentence like that, other than to put the paper down and go have a nice dinner.

Still, I can’t pass up remarking on a couple of his other nougaty observations.

Like when Elahi says that, proportional to Fort Hood’s total record of war deaths, Hasan’s jihad death-list is so small, it’s a wonder anyone even cares about it at all, let alone why Hasan killed them.

“Although 13 lives are a huge loss,” writes Elahi, “remember that the same base has already lost at least 545 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Okay, let’s all remember that, and we’ll even take his word for it on the number of Ft. Hood soldiers killed in battle. I don’t see how this puts us farther from the conclusion that Muslim violence is a deadly threat.

How many of the killers of those 545 Ft. Hood soldiers shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” while they were pulling the trigger or setting off the IED? Yelled it just like Hasan did, and for the same reasons.

You can’t minimize the tragic irony of how 13 soldiers were killed returning from a combat zone, to what should have been a safe, stateside army base. But they still died as soldiers killed in the same war we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the same enemy.

Elahi also thinks he can strip Hasan of his jihad good-conduct medal by tut-tutting his last-minute lapse into unchastity: “Obviously he couldn't be both a devout Muslim and a frequenter of a local strip joint. Just saying God is great is not enough to make someone a perfect Muslim or Christian.”

To which I can only say, first, I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly that, obviously, shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” does not make one a perfect Christian. Not that there aren't some perfectly silly ecumenical types who are going to try it, anyway.

But this is just more of Elahi’s unlogic. Does someone have to prove Hasan was a “perfect Muslim” before we’re allowed to conclude that Hasan’s massacre was an act of jihad?

The question of whether or not a devout Muslim can get lap dances I leave to Islamic experts, and to the strip-club owners in east Dearborn.

The better question is whether or not there are mediocre, underachieving Muslims being told by their spiritual leaders that they might still qualify for those 72 wide-eyed lap dancers in Paradise, or, in the alternative, escape “the torments of the grave” in punishment for their sins, if they will only commit a single sanctifying act of homicidal jihad?

No Number 1?

I was playing blog hooky earlier this week, watching the new version of The Prisoner produced for AMC, and then re-watching it.

I was one of the few who watched the original Patrick McGoohan series when it first aired in the US way back when, before I even knew I was joining a “cult.” I still consider it the best television series I ever saw. (And before you ask, no I haven’t seen season three of Dog, The Bounty Hunter, so that didn’t factor in).

I still don’t know what I think about the new version. It did have some outstanding moments. Some stories require sinking in. When I first watched Blade Runner I hated it, but it eventually became one of my favorite movies.

I was disappointed in the ending of the new The Prisoner, but less disappointed the second time through, as the script was extremely subtle and I missed a lot the first time. I was also disappointed in the ending of the original series, for that matter, though it did depict Number 6's triumph over the Village.

It’s too easy to say that the new Prisoner is symbolic of this or that, or the writer had this or that in mind. But there was a notable scene where Number 6 asks a classroom of Village youngsters who is Number 1? He gets this memorized reply from an earnest pupil:

“There is no number 1, there never has been, and there never will be. The concept of the number 2 is an act of humility. The title reminds us all that we are all public servants.”

I’m not saying that the writers of The Prisoner had our current events specifically in mind. Fiction doesn't work that way, or not good fiction. But if that answer doesn’t sound like President Obama all over.

'Look, Imam, No Hands!'

In a development only slightly less surprising than Miley Cyrus’s career choice to experiment with pole-dancing, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last night in Detroit promised CAIR and other Muslim leaders that under his direction federal anti-terrorism efforts will be even more feckless and see-no-evil than they’ve been since 9/11.

“We are committed to protecting the rights of all Americans, including Muslims,” Holder told a crowd of hundreds at the Detroit Marriot in the Renaissance Center. “This is not blind adherence to political correctness. It is devotion to our founding documents.” (“Holder: Protect rights of all Americans, including Muslims”).

Context wasn’t offered, but I assume that this was a reference to the Ft. Hood shootings, which were brought to you and 13 army families by blind PC, and which the government has been stalwartly refusing to recognize as being an Islamic initiative.

Because Holder couldn’t deny the role political correctness played in Hasan’s attack without getting laughed into oblivion by the national press, he instead sanctified it by giving “blind adherence to political correctness” the new baptismal name of “devotion to our founding documents.” The bottom line is, “Damn the critics! Full blind adherence to PC ahead!”

I haven’t got any inside info on whether or not Holder, before he had to dress up for the Big Ball, had a sit down with Special Agent in Charge Andrew Arena, or Arena’s bosses at the FBI, about the Abdullah take-down. Even though Arena has made some supremely stupid statements about Islam, he has consistently defended his agents for their actions in shooting down homicidal jihadist soldier Abdullah. We’ll keep our ears open for that unmistakable grinding sound of federal law-enforcement backpedaling, at least as it applies to the Abdullah case.

It’s patently obvious that Holder’s purpose last night was to re-assure Muslim leaders (CAIR included) that on his watch federal law enforcement is going to be as hands-off the Muslim community as he can manage to get away with. You see, as dictated by politics of Islamophobia and current race theory, the only way we can ever prove that we aren’t practicing anti-Muslim profiling is with statistics that show no Muslims anywhere in America are being “unfairly” charged, detained, arrested, or even questioned. And, as CAIR keeps telling us, the only statistic that will satisfy them is--0.

I’ll tell you what disgusts me about all this. It’s got to be Holder’s shameless lying about the record of the Bush Justice Department.

Holder describes the Obama age as a moment of moral enlightenment following a mythical post 9/11 era when Muslims in America were routinely deprived of their civil rights by executive decree. This is the undying lie that we at DU have to correct time and again. (Painfully correct, as it requires proving a negative—that there was no backlash). The DOJ under Bush tread SO carefully that many of us thought the federal footprint was too light. That’s why the six imams doing a recon mission on U.S. Air were not charged when they should have been: instead they were allowed to file and win a lucrative lawsuit for discrimination. More significant is when the squeamish DOJ blew up their own, and Dearborn’s, one-and-only significant terrorist prosecution.

After 9/11, Muslims in America were bequeathed additional civil rights, not officially, but by tacit lack of enforcement as dictated by politically correct guidelines. The result was that Muslims—especially young, Muslim males--were treated unequally by being less likely than nonMuslim counterparts to face secondary airport screening, deportation in the case of immigration violations, or interrogation by federal law enforcement.

During this awful period CAIR, the ADC, ACCESS, and the rest weren’t demanding equality, but special treatment. And they got it. Unsurprising, under the new and weaker Obama regime, the demands of CAIR and the rest have only increased.

Such is the way of bullies, and such the way of their terrified prey. Listen to Imad Hamad pronounce last night how the United States Department of Justice is on probation with the ADC until they say so:

Hamad said while Holder was "on target" with his speech, the real test of how the Justice Department will protect the civil liberties of Arab-Americans and Muslims is yet to come.

"He is setting the tone for the nation and all law enforcement, and that is very important," Hamad said. "He managed to define the line between the new administration and the Bush administration.
"The ultimate test ... is the future." (“Holder targets racial profiling in Detroit speech”).

DU has been unable to confirm reports that Holder bowed 95 degrees to the imams last night, facing either towards them, as some report, or presenting to them backwards, as better sources suggest.

As Ann Coulter wrote today, “In a liberal's reckoning, diversity is good when we have both Muslim jihadists and patriotic Americans serving in the U.S. military.”

Just so, federal antiterrorism efforts apparently require a healthy mix of both anti- and pro-terrorist viewpoints. Hence, CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas, are permanent members of the federal antiterrorism team.

Feel safer now?

Muslims Who Love America

There’s an interesting article by Niraj Warikoo in Sunday’s Free Press about patriotic Muslims in the U.S military. (“Muslim soldiers: We love America”).

I’m happy to say DU doesn’t have to eat any crow over this as we’ve always known there were patriotic Muslims serving. We even posted on this very thing last month. ("Soldier mom home from Iraq").

In spite of the widespread warnings from the usual folks that the Ft. Hood attack was going to result in unfair criticism from “right-wing bloggers” of Muslim soldiers who weren’t acting like Major Hasan, I never believed that kind of wide-brush criticism was going to happen, nor advocated it. Nor did it happen. The focus has been on Hasan, who was doing everything he could think of to communicate, “I’m getting ready to do some jihad.” This has nothing to do with profiling Muslim soldiers.

What I found most interesting in today’s article is that the real flak these Muslim soldiers face is from their own community. It also comes through that these servicemen view themselves as Americans, and they view America as “us,” while their detractors in the Muslim community view America as “them.”

Marine 1st Sgt. Jamal Baadani, originally from Dearborn, and who fought in Fallujah, says:

"We're getting so much criticism from our own community for serving," Baadani said. "The No. 1 question I used to get was, 'Why do you want to serve a government that's going to kill your own kind?' "

Baadani's response was:

"The U.S. military did not go over there to kill your kind. They went over there to attack a threat that came to this country to attack us."

Baadani also says many Muslim families are “reluctant to have their children serve in the U.S. armed forces, partly because they would have to fight fellow Muslims.” When Baadani was visiting home a few years ago and tried to play with his 5-year old nephew, the boy didn’t want to play as he always had before.

"What's the matter?" Baadani said he remembers asking him.

"You kill Arabs," replied the boy, apparently repeating what he heard adults around him utter.

Part of the problem with the Muslim community is a perceived unwillingness that Muslims don’t want to assimilate into our country. That combines with polls that indicate sizeable numbers of Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia law. Then there are those who are OK with Sharia replacing the U.S. Constitution, (like CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper, who told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”).

Warikoo makes an extremely obscure reference to some “director with a conservative Christian group [who] says Muslims should be banned from serving.” That’s a stretch, whoever said it.

After all, it was Nidal Hasan who said in his Powerpoint presentation that American Muslims shouldn’t serve in the military. And his chosen Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who says that “Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier.”

According to Warikoo’s article, the real dirty looks against Muslims in uniform seem to be coming from their fellow Muslims.

Can't Explain

There’s been no lack of opportunities for Detroit’s Muslim explainers lately. On Friday, Victor Ghalib Begg, Chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan, was at work on the Detroit News op-ed page trying to disconnect some dots in the wake of Ft. Hood:

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan took innocent lives in Fort Hood, Texas, last week, Muslim Americans, like most Americans, felt shock, hurt and outrage. But for most Muslims, there is an added dimension of pain. Muslims face the fear of backlash, embarrassment and the constant question of how to prevent future attacks.

Muslim-American leadership must go through a ritual of condemning these acts of violence while speaking out in defense of their faith. (“Muslims shouldn't let rogue gunman silence efforts to educate Americans about their faith”)

Begg was also present for a damage-control press conference the same day. He asked an interesting question:

"Muslims find themselves in a defensive position whenever a person related to the Muslim faith commits an act of violence.

"These sick people go out and shoot people down. When it happens and a Muslim is involved, the focus is on Islam. We have to defend our faith. Wouldn't you?" Begg said.

To which I would reply, yes, I would defend my faith. Which brings up the question for me to Begg and his colleagues, Why aren’t you doing that? To paraphrase Churchill, you’re not doing a very good job defending an indefensible position.

All we hear by way of defense are complaints that Muslims are backlash victims, and charges that negative remarks about Islam come only from from bigots and liars, and increasingly hollowed-out repetitions that Islam is a peaceful religion that nowhere teaches killing.

These are attacks, not defenses. They may win points in the mosques and “the community.” They certainly provide quotes to nonMuslim “Islam-means-peace” advocates who’ve had their head in the sand for years.

But these attacks avoid all the questions that troubled Americans have about Muslims and their religion. Questions that people know aren’t being answered by just being handed a lollipop with “Islam means peace” painted on it. Or watching “Muslim-American leadership...go through a ritual of condemning these acts of violence.” Or, hearing things like what ISNA’s Imam Steve Elturk told the press conference Friday morning, "Islam opposes such actions as committed by Maj. (Nidal Malik) Hasan. The Qur'an considers human life sacred."

Islam does oppose that? The Qur'an does say that about human life?

But why are we seeing so many people being killed in the name of Islam every single day? We can see for ourselves the intolerance of Muslims towards those they consider infidels. We can see that, in majority-Muslim regions, societies are savage and totalitarian; in countries where Muslims are a sizeable minority, their communities are violent, restive, and ungovernable. In many places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, Muslim women are little better than slaves. In some “Islamic Republics,” men, women, and children are slaves.

And here, in this country, we’ve seen for ourselves that there are many devout, mosque-attending, soldiers of Allah whose religion has them busy working out plans, well or poorly, to kill as many people as they can just because those people are Americans, or because they’re infidels, or because they’re Jews, or because they’re “too Westernized.”

They can’t all be hijackers of Islam, can they?

That’s what needs explaining, and none of these guys is trying to explain it. Instead, they call people like us names, or fret that anti-Muslim pogroms will result if we don’t just drop it about how devoted Hasan was to the Qur'an.

If my faith were under attack, (and it has been), I would answer historical fables with documented facts, and I'd correct misstatements of my beliefs by meticulous reference to my religion’s scriptures and its creeds. I would confound falsifiers who accuse my Church of teaching "X" that she in fact teaches, and has always taught "not X." Then I would sleep peacefully at night, secure that I know what I believe, and why, and its foundation. Then to hell with the bigots who don't want to know, anyway.

My own belief is that the Muslim leaders don’t explain these contradictions between the Islam of peace and the Islam of jihad because they can’t. They’ve gone too far speaking falsely about Islam and what beats at its heart.

You Drag, I Drag, Either Way, Jihad's a Drag

The going rationale amongst Dearborn’s Muslim spokesmen explaining why Nidal Hasan’s jihadist murder rampage is not related to Islam is that there are criminals in every religion.

CAIR’s Dawud Walid complained thus last week: “This (Fort Hood) crime was heinous,” said Walid, “but there are heinous crimes committed all the time and the assailants’ religions aren't brought into play. That seems to be the case for American Muslims.”

Not exactly. In Dearborn and southwest Detroit we see our share of Arab or Muslim characters involved in criminal activity that, once in a while, actually doesn’t manage to send a tithe of its proceeds to Hezbollah.

Take Khalil Chahine, the young gangster son of Hezbollah supporter and fugitive Talil Chahine, who was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting to death the fiancé of his former girlfriend.

More recently, there’s been the most odious Ihab Maslamani, the murdering, carjacking, bank-robbing, hostage-taking, kidnapping, Lebanese Arab illegal alien who is standing trial for murdering Matthew Landry, for nothing, after carjacking him at an Eastpointe Quiznos.

Here is Maslamani trying to take a hostage at a Flagstar Bank in Harrison Township the next day.

No one criticized Maslamani’s Muslim religion or his ethnicity for his evil actions. In fact, the press has completely ignored his religion. He appears to be a garden-variety (I’m sorry, Lord) low-life piece of shit. It’s true that every religion and culture has its share of these. Which proves exactly nothing as to the issue of Islamic jihadism.

Walid is all wet when he tries to tell us that American Muslims (Maslamani isn't an American anyway) who commit crimes routinely have their religion dragged into it. They don't.

Nidal Hasan dragged his religion into it himself when he identified himself as a “soldier of Allah,” and dedicated his murder spree to Allah’s greatness.

AP Explains Why Seizing Illegal Iranian Property Is a Bad Thing

The Associated Press is wasting no time reporting how the federal seizure of property owned by an Ayatollah-controlled front group is going to harm local Shia children.

Seized assets stifle Iranian group's work

Money to be cut off to mosques, schools in U.S. investigation

RACHEL ZOLL
Associated Press
New York -- The organization that federal investigators say is a front for the Iranian government has spent millions of dollars over the years on philanthropy: buying property for four U.S. mosques, funding religious schools and language classes, and translating books on Islam.

The move to seize assets held by the New York-based Alavi Foundation will cripple the charity's work and put the government in the awkward position of potentially shutting down the houses of worship, which occupy buildings and land that Alavi owns.

There are no claims of wrongdoing at the mosques. And they will stay open as prosecutors try to take hold of the hundreds of millions of dollars in Alavi money and property. The mosques were not mentioned by name, only listed by street address.

Still, the mosques and schools could be collateral damage in the case. On Friday, the government moved to cut off Alavi's direct access to its money, according to court records.

Sabukta Chowdhury, a parent at the Razi School, a K-12 school that is part of the Imam Ali Mosque in Queens, said her child would be upset if the school closed.

"The school is very good," Chowdhury said outside the building Friday. "My child very sad. They do not want to go to another school."

Abdulaziz Sachedina, a University of Virginia professor and expert on Shiite Islam, predicted the four Islamic centers in New York, Maryland, Texas and California would shut down without Alavi money.

Alavi was one of the few central sources of funding for American Shiite communities, which have far fewer resources than U.S. Sunnis. Often, the Islamic day schools the centers run are among the few available.

"Muslims aren't used to membership fees," said Sachedina, who has spoken several times at the mosque in Maryland. "In Muslim countries, most services are free, provided by rich people. Here, for the first time, Muslims are required to pay donations. It's very hard to collect money from the people."
#

As Michael Ledeen feels the need to keep reminding us, “Iran has been waging war on us since 1979.”

I haven't seen reports yet telling us if these mosques and schools were being used by Tehran to spread the same anti-American Shia jihadism spread every day by the Ayatollahs in Iran . It's almost impossible to believe they aren't. That aside, the foundation was a front group controlled by a nation that's been at war with us for thirty years. It was set up to avoid paying any taxes on multi-million dollars of annual rental incomes.

But the AP’s message is that we need to be ashamed of one of America's precious few domestic counter-terrorist successes since 9/11. That's because taking away the Ayatollah’s illegal foundation property will unfairly impact New York-area Shias. If the schools aren’t going to be funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran, then who will fund them? Shias in their native lands expect all that for free. “Here, for the first time, Muslims are required to pay donations. It's very hard to collect money from the people."

If you're a Catholic, or a Jew, or a Baptist who takes it for granted that you're going to have to cough up to support your church and your private schools, you're probably too small-minded to get this.

One solution that might redeem the federal government from making Sabukta Chowdhury's child sad, is for the U.S. taxpayers to just fund the Shia mosques ourselves. Or we could just give the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad their rent receipts back and apologize.